Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  A friend of a friend of someone eventually brought lunch for people in the room. After he finished eating, he stood up. “I have to go take lunch to my aunt working in the hospital too,” he said.

  Pan’s eyes glittered. He quickly took out a cigarette, handed it to the guy, and encouraged him to sit for a couple more minutes. Then he leaned toward the man and whispered, “Hey, Brother, you think you can introduce your acquaintance in the hospital to me? Little sister has some trouble here. . . . You know. We don’t have a marriage certificate.”

  I saw the friend smile with a knowing look. I hung my head, downcast, half-wishing I were trapped in a pigskin net being drowned. That was what they did to women like me in Old China.

  On the way to the hospital, I sat on the rear seat of Pan’s bike, which he pedaled with some difficulty. We didn’t talk to each other at all. The bike bumped over the stones in the road, making me feel sick to my stomach. Suddenly I was scared. I didn’t really want to end this small life inside of me. I held Pan’s waist tight with my arms, put my head against his back, and began begging him. “Let’s keep it, please. You always said you wanted a boy. Maybe this is a boy.”

  Continuing to pedal, he replied, “Little Shen, I want a boy, but I can’t. You know the One Child Policy, and my family, the factory. It’s too difficult.”

  His words poured over me like a bucket of ice water. I knew he was right. I didn’t blame him; I blamed myself. I was nineteen, and I had been ridiculously stupid to sleep with this smooth-tongued married man.

  Sitting on the waiting bench in the operating room, I stared at the over-washed white curtain in front of me, which separated the room into two sections. On the other side of this curtain, a woman was having an operation and screaming.

  It reminded me of when I was younger, when the pigs we had raised during the year were butchered for Spring Festival. The butcher always came very early, at three or four in the morning, hung the pig upside down from a tree, made a small cut in its neck, and then started to blow into it through a thin bamboo tube. When the pig became swollen like a balloon, the butcher started to skin it. Its squealing was so sad and shrill that I always blocked my ears.

  My mother and father would probably skin me alive if they knew I was here, waiting to abort the baby of a married man, I thought dryly. Maybe they wouldn’t have actually gone that far, but they definitely would have beaten me.

  “Shut up, will you? If you knew it was going to be so painful, why did you do it with your husband?” I heard the doctor say to the screaming woman.

  “Sorry, doctor,” the woman apologized weakly. “The birth control loop fell out. We didn’t want another child. Sorry.”

  I realized that anesthesia wasn’t used for abortions. I swore to myself that I would not let one scream slip out of my mouth while I was on that table. This would be my punishment for sleeping with Pan so recklessly. I deserved it.

  A middle-aged peasant woman limped out from behind the curtain, still groaning and grimacing. “Neeext!” a voice yelled.

  Sterilizing the tools in alcohol with her back to me, the nurse, a woman in her late twenties dressed in white overalls, bellowed, “Here for abortion?

  “Take off your pants!

  “Lie on the table!

  “Put your feet into the loops!

  “Move your butt a little down. Down. I told you down!” Now she was sitting next to the table, facing me.

  I heard a click and then I felt warm. A bright light shone down on me.

  A cool blade touched my skin, and before I realized what she was doing, the blade was sweeping quickly all over my most private area.

  “Jeez. You’re bleeding. Why didn’t you tell the doctor you were bleeding?”

  So it wasn’t normal to bleed for days during pregnancy. But how was I to know? Biology wasn’t taught in school, and I had never seen a gynecologist before in my life. And even if I had known, how could I have mentioned this to the doctors there? I had been smuggled into this operating room.

  “Stupid country girl!”

  I heard the sound of clothes rustling and someone pulling up a chair next to the nurse. It must be the doctor, I thought. A long iron rod was abruptly inserted into my body. The abortion had started.

  The rod, an ordinary iron rod, suddenly became the whip in Satan’s hand. It danced in my abdomen. My body felt like a piece of gum being chewed, twisted, split, and then blended back together, over and over again. The operating table under me kept sinking, pulling me into an enormous pitch-black hole, and I clutched the edges, wanting to yell out that the table was collapsing. I gnashed my teeth, pushing away the dizzy spells. Everything was darkening in front of my eyes. Every second seemed to stretch out forever.

  I thought if the pain didn’t die soon, I would die from it.

  Suddenly, the rod was yanked out of my body, and the roaring beast inside me calmed down. I inhaled sharply.

  I heard the doctor click her tongue and then murmur with frustration, “Hmm. . . . It’s not clean yet. Still something there.”

  Without the slightest hesitation, the rod invaded my uterus again, scratching aimlessly and then scraping its edges and turning it over and over like food in a wok.

  It was going to stop very soon, maybe the next second, so—just hold it; hold it, and hold it, I told myself.

  “This girl is quite strong. She hasn’t screamed yet,” I heard the doctor saying to the nurse, sounding a little surprised.

  “Jeez, it’s not very clean yet. . . . Hmmm. . . . Should be okay.” The doctor pulled the rod out of me, and then I heard her pushing away the chair and standing up.

  “Done!” the nurse cried.

  I pulled my pants up, crawled down from the table, fished out my shoes from under it, and left the room on trembling legs. Pan, who had waited on the bench outside, came to me and held my arm. We moved toward the hospital gate together. I saw the blurred reflection of my yellow face in the window glass, looking like a jaundice patient’s, with sweat drops as big as soybeans dripping down my forehead.

  Pan squeezed three thin boxes wrapped in red paper into my hands. “Here are some nourishment drinks. The doctor says they’re good for you. It’s supposed to make up for the blood you lost.”

  It was chilly. Looking out at the traffic on the street, he took sixty yuan out of his jacket pocket and squeezed the cash into my hand.

  “Little Shen, I gotta go back to the factory now. You go back to the school on your own, okay?” And then he was gone.

  I stood on the corner of the street alone, looking at the poplar trees with naked branches, the buses passing by with speakers blasting, people walking with their necks drawn into their coats, and I didn’t know where to go. I got onto the first bus that stopped in front of me. I felt numb.

  The next day I appeared in the classroom in my usual light green coat with my usual faint smiles, a diligent People’s Teacher, a moral model for my students. But I knew I had changed forever.

  I never told anyone that I’d had an abortion when I was nineteen, not my mother, my father, my college friends, or my colleagues, nobody. If I had told anyone, the rest of my life would have been ruined. I would be a broken shoe who would never find a husband, who would be spit at by people forever. I would have brought disgrace and sorrow to my parents, who would have cursed me and beat me. I swallowed all my pain and told myself that it had never happened, and I didn’t allow myself to think about it even for one minute. Eventually, I thought, it would just blow away like flying ashes and smoldering smoke.

  7

  I WAS LIKE a hibernating animal that winter, shrinking into myself in my room and secretly licking my wounds. I rarely stepped out into the backward town, and in the middle school, where every teacher was living the same mundane life, I couldn’t find anyone I could confide in. No one ever visited me. After work, I would shut my plank door and then spend most of my evening lying in bed, staring at the window and watching it getting darker and darker outside. My books were tossed
all over the cement floor. Students’ papers and exams were scattered about on the table. I had lost all interest in life.

  I didn’t understand how Boss Pan could just walk into my life and then walk away with my innocence. I had had hopes that he would love me, marry me even, and I had given him the most precious thing I had.

  I often touched my abdomen and could hardly believe there had once been a life inside. It was gone so quickly, just like Pan. I felt devastated yet relieved. I knew I had never loved either of them. I didn’t miss them, but I felt as if they had taken a big chunk out of me.

  In the poisonous silence of those lonely nights, I saw that I was splitting into two people. By day, I was an elevated and upright teacher; but when the sun went down, I became an anguished, angry girl who just wanted to destroy everything, including herself.

  The New Year came. I returned to the Shen Hamlet. My mother insisted that I go to the barbershop in Zhenze and get my hair done. You are an honored teacher now, and you should make yourself look decent and different from us country folks, she told me. I sat in the chair and let the barber put a ridiculous amount of styling gel on my hair so that it stood up on top of my head like the Eiffel Tower. I looked at myself in the mirror and then turned away.

  Outside the window, garbage blew in the wind. I watched a man in a beat-up leather jacket come into the shop, bringing a gust of cold air with him. He sat down, and soon the barber’s apprentice started to blow-dry his hair. The stranger prattled in a loud voice over the noise of the dryer about how he was going to motorcycle to Wujiang in the afternoon. That was thirty kilometers away, and it was freezing out. Everyone in the shop thought the idea was ridiculous, but he shrugged them off.

  The stranger caught my eye a couple of times. I kept my head low and ignored him. He was not bad-looking, I noted. Suddenly a desire for revenge overtook me. Before I even realized what I was doing, I turned to him and asked, “Hey, Big Brother, mind giving me a ride? I’m going back to Ba Jin this afternoon, and I can catch a transfer bus in Wujiang.”

  An hour later, I was sitting on the back seat of his motorcycle, and we were speeding down the asphalt road. Nobody wanted to be on a motorcycle in January when the sharp wind cut your face. Certainly nobody wanted to be on a motorcycle driven by a stranger. But I didn’t care. I moved closer to him and put my hands in his jacket pockets. The leather was cold as ice when it touched my skin, but strangely it made me smile. I didn’t know what exactly I wanted. It just felt like there had been a small flame toying with my heart and nobody in the whole world cared. I was alone now, so I decided to play with it.

  I took the stranger to the karaoke club where Boss Pan and I used to go. We snuggled together on the same leather couch where I had sat on many other nights, and we sang “Loving Birds Going Home Together.” The thought of Pan’s friend who worked at the club telling him that I was with another man made me feel triumphant. I was just a People’s Teacher who couldn’t risk going to Pan’s factory to cry and scream. But I had my own body, the only thing that belonged to me, so why not wreck it, I told myself. I was already a broken shoe anyway.

  I didn’t plan the night out, but I ended up taking him to my dorm room and offering him the bunk bed above mine. There were a couple of minutes of silence after I turned off the light, and then I heard his voice wavering in the darkness: “I want to come down.”

  When he crawled into my bed and climbed on top of me, I didn’t feel anything. He started to take off my clothes. I didn’t refuse. He moved his hand around gently and slowly touched off the desire in my body. It was still painful when he penetrated me, though, and the pain didn’t have time to go away before he finished off on my stomach. I frowned at the slimy fluid and wiped it away. Then I hugged him. I hadn’t enjoyed myself, but I realized that this was what I needed—to be close to someone, to lie in someone’s arms, even if I didn’t know the person.

  Yet in the morning, I felt ashamed. Thankfully, he left at dawn, telling me he’d come back that night. As I biked to the school, I saw the bad me—the slut—scampering off the street like a frightened rat. As soon as I finished giving my lesson, I hopped back on my bike and pedaled to the local post office. I grabbed the public phone and dialed the number he had left. A clear and soft voice answered at the pager station. I told the lady hastily, “Please send ‘Don’t come tonight, or ever.’”

  That night, I returned to my empty dorm room. I stood in the middle of the floor and couldn’t stand the sight of the bed where my bad side had taken control of me. I knew I couldn’t live here any more. Sooner or later, something, whether it was the deadly lonely quiet nights or my troubled thoughts, was going to drive me crazy.

  The next day, I requested that the school move me to one of the brick rooms behind the abandoned classroom building, even closer to the water’s edge. These rooms were so rundown and sunken into the riverbank that nobody wanted to live there except for the acidic female Teacher Wang. The school approved my request immediately.

  After pulling all the weeds from the bottom of the walls and the gaps between the bricks, I stood a thin bamboo board upright in the middle of the room, separating it into two sections. My tottering desk went in the front section, and I purchased a petroleum gas stove to go with it. The rear section became my bedroom. I was happy with my new home, even though the floor was so uneven on top of the muddy ground that I could barely make my bed stable. I had to be extremely careful, walking around, to avoid turning my ankles.

  Though the honking boats seemed to be sailing only an inch from my head, I slept soundly that first night, something I hadn’t been able to do for a long time. In my new room, hidden from the world, I was able to breathe freely again. Nobody, neither Boss Pan nor the stranger, could find me here, and I could just hide in my cave and fight the bad me—the slut.

  But I underestimated her strength. I couldn’t forget the sound of karaoke, the smell of rice wine, and the flashing disco ball that Boss Pan had gotten me used to. They became especially alluring in the evenings in my dark, damp brick room by the water. Loneliness was swallowing me up like a beast. Finally one night I wandered to the only club in town. As a young unmarried teacher, I was welcomed by people and invited to sing a song for free. The applause at the end of the song intoxicated me.

  I started going to the club almost every night. Though I couldn’t always afford to pay for songs to sing, time flew by for me in the smoke and clamor. Boss Pan began to fade from my mind. I became familiar with the local businessmen, as well as the hoodlums who hung out in the club. I smiled to the businessmen and ignored the hoodlums, but my eyes couldn’t stop chasing after them secretly, even though I knew I should have been looking for a good man, someone with whom I’d be proud to be seen in broad daylight.

  A man soon caught my attention, a strange man who only appeared in the night, walking soundlessly on his heels. He had bangs that covered his temples, and he had longer fingernails than any woman I knew. His oddness entranced me. I’d hear him singing Leslie Chueng songs, all of which I knew by heart, in his rich, deep voice, and my body would tingle. No one else at the club could ever sing Chueng’s songs as well or pronounce Cantonese as clearly as he did. His name was Hao. He was the son of a rich businessman, and he was known as a bad seed.

  I hid in the club’s shadows and watched him singing. He stood in the spotlight, with one hand clutching the microphone and another holding a burning cigarette. Once in a while, he’d turn his pudgy body and run his eyes over the audience.

  I wondered if he had ever noticed me, with my short frame and massive glasses. But maybe it would be better if he didn’t. After all, what could he—a man who idled away his time, paid no attention to his wife, and was sleeping with the daughter of the club owner—bring me except blue ruin and tears?

  But then one night he followed me home from the club. I wasn’t surprised when he came into my room, and I did nothing to stop him. He started to strip my clothes off before my fingers could touch the linen string to tur
n on the light. He pinned me down on the bed. My body stiffened as soon as he entered me. As he moved his hips, the bed and the four bamboo posts holding the mosquito net wobbled. He was too big for me, and his thrusts were too forceful. I felt like there was a baseball bat inside me. I clenched my fists and hissed through my teeth, wishing every pounding were the last.

  “You’re like a dead fish,” he mumbled to me, frowning.

  I forced a sorry smile. He wasn’t happy with me, and I didn’t want to spoil his mood. I was glad to have someone who wanted to be with me.

  The bamboo creaked and he moaned loudly. Ms. Wang, the eccentric teacher who lived on the other side of the brick wall, must have heard, I thought, panicking. Tomorrow the entire town would know that I had slept with a hooligan. I would be a broken shoe forever. Finally the bed came to a standstill. The night regained its tranquility. I listened carefully, but I didn’t hear a peep from next door.

  Hao collapsed next to me with his mouth open, panting. I moved over and put my head on his chest. We didn’t say anything for a while. Soon I began to sob. I started to tell him everything about me, the hamlet, my emotionless father, my loveless mother. I forgot that I barely knew this man, forgot my worries about being overheard, and wailed stridently. He covered my mouth with his hand, hushing me. He wrapped his arm around my shoulder and caressed me.

  Gladly I became his secret mistress, or more precisely, one of his secret mistresses. He came to see me once in a while from then on, but only after dark. When I heard someone tapping on my window in the deep of the night, I would leave the bed and open the front door for him.

  I tried my best to be a good mistress to him. I never asked about his whereabouts. When he visited, I lay mute in the darkness and endured the painful rituals and his complaints. I didn’t mind, as long as I could sleep in his arms for the rest of the night. In the club, we pretended to be strangers. At the ends of many nights, I saw him zoom away with other girls on his motorcycle, girls who all had figures more slender and skin whiter than mine. I would walk home alone those nights, upset, but I always ordered myself to cool down and be happy that I was lucky enough just to be one of his concubines. I wasn’t really sure why I was attracted to him. Maybe it was his haughty-yet-noble manner, or the way he sang like Leslie Chueng, or perhaps it was just that he was the only one in that deathly still town who was willing to listen to me.