Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  Rong put down a bowl of rice before Older Brother, who sat at the table waiting soberly. Then she placed a pair of chopsticks next to the bowl and said respectfully, “Older Brother, please enjoy your dinner.”

  It seemed the only thing the women in the Wang family didn’t have to do was place the food directly into the men’s mouths. While eating, I wondered if they also had to bring their men buckets of water to wash their feet in before bed, an old custom I had read about in books. Later, when Older Brother was ready for bed, Rong proved to me that indeed they did.

  I sat at the table and ate, careful not to make too much noise. Wang Hui was sitting next to me, and I could sense his nervous fidgeting. This was ridiculous. Why should I be so afraid of Older Brother? I asked myself angrily, but I remained respectful and quiet. It was my first day in the South, and this group of strangers was all I had.

  Older Brother cleared his throat and lifted his chin in my direction. “Ah-Juan, what’s your plan?”

  I realized that in the South people usually called each other Ah-something. I guessed that from then on I would be Ah-Juan.

  “I want to find a job, of course.” I paused and then gathered all my courage and asked, “Older Brother, could you please see if I can get a job at your company? I heard it’s a big company, and they may need people who can speak English.”

  He kept whisking rice into his mouth, and after a moment he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”

  I was relieved and gratified by his words. Now I had hope. Maybe this was why Older Brother was treated like a ruler in this apartment—because he got jobs for everyone: Wang Hui, Rong, and his girlfriend.

  Next came the endless and agonizing waiting. Every day at dusk when Older Brother came home, I fixed my eyes on him and hoped that he would mention a job opening, but every night I went to bed disappointed.

  I waited and waited for the entire month of July. The days became longer and more unbearable as I tore more pages off the calendar. While everybody else went to work, I stayed in the apartment alone and learned to cook better and wash everyone’s clothes so that Older Brother would like me more. I often sat in front of the window, lost in my thoughts with soap bubbles all over my hands. Sometimes I took a walk around the building.

  “It’s not easy for him to talk to his boss; he’s just a lowlevel manager. Believe me, he always helps family,” Wang Hui would explain to me as I stared sullenly out the window.

  I didn’t want to talk to him. I didn’t know what to do. I didn’t even know where to go to find a job. I wasn’t even sure Wang Hui was my boyfriend any more. The only time I could see him was in the evenings when everybody sat on the floor watching Hong Kong soap operas in Cantonese, which I could barely understand. He and I always sat stiff and still, holding our knees with our arms and avoiding touching each other in front of Older Brother and his girlfriend. Occasionally, when it became really unbearable, we would go out for a walk on the streets of Gao Ming. Only at those times would we talk freely.

  That was when I’d see the real South, where there seemed to be a galaxy of migrant workers from everywhere else in China. Along the streets, there were endless rows of factory buildings with awkward English names like “Gao Ming Grand CMOS Chips Joint Venture Co., Ltd” carved at the top of them. Flocks of migrant workers were always making a ruckus and chasing each other in front of them. The guys all wore tank tops, shorts, and slippers and had such messy hair that you would think they hadn’t combed it for at least a week. Some of them parked their grubby bikes against the curb and squatted on the seats like birds, whistling and yelling to the female workers passing by. The female workers all wore plain white shirts and loose darkcolored pants with their hair in two braids behind their ears.

  In such a place, where there seemed to be only factories sitting on dirt roads, there was not much for these young men and women to do. Their most popular gathering sites were just some crude pool tables sitting in disorder in the open air. There were a few small restaurants with television sets hung on their back walls, blasting Hong Kong soap operas. The air inside them smelled like cabbage with garlic and stir-fried snails, the cheapest and most popular dishes. Bored workers sat in knots on plastic chairs outside the restaurants, sucking snails like woodpeckers, glancing at the television, and whistling to girls. If there was really nothing left to do, they would sneak to the back rooms of restaurants, which had been secretly converted to small theaters, and goof the night away with some pornography movies.

  “These people are the real migrant workers. They have very little education. Left home and the fields to work their asses off here for the big bosses and still only make a few hundred yuan a month.” Wang Hui sighed with sympathy as we walked hurriedly to dodge the groups of workers on the street.

  “Still better than starving at home, though,” he continued. “I’m pretty lucky. Got a job not long after I came here, and a good job too, not on the assembly lines.”

  I felt uncomfortable with Wang’s self-satisfaction. After traveling hundreds of miles to the South, how could he be content being only a little better off than the “real” migrant workers, who were fresh from the fields? It was becoming clear to me that Wang had no ambition. I looked at him and wondered whether I had really found the right man for myself. Maybe I was just asking for too much.

  Disappointed, I stayed silent and kept walking. A crowd of migrant girls passed by, laughing and joking and pretending to hit each other on the shoulder with their fists. They were so young. Their lily-white faces were babyish and innocent, yet they looked content, as if they had found what they had been searching for their entire lives. Looking at their identical backs, I asked myself whether I could possibly become one of them. No. I wanted to be different, because I felt I had a bigger dream. What was that dream, exactly? I wasn’t sure. I only knew that I wanted to make more than eight hundred yuan a month. I felt like a rocket just out of its launcher, full of energy. I wanted more. I wanted a lot.

  12

  A MONTH AFTER I had arrived in the South, Wang Hui finally rented a place of our own, as I had secretly urged him to do many times. I was ecstatic. The rental house was cheap and small, but it was clean and made of concrete with two big iron front doors. It was completely empty inside. Except for a bamboo mat and some clothes, we had no possessions of our own, but we were young and cheerful. On our first night there, we spread the mat on the cement floor and cuddled together in the dark. There was a Chinese rose plant outside the window waving in the night breeze. I watched the dark shadows of the leaves moving on the wall while Wang Hui made love to me like crazy. That night in an alien land felt so serene.

  The second day, Wang and I sat on the floor and drew up a list of things we needed for our new home, such as a bed, a mosquito net, a few chairs, a table, a stove, dishes, pots, and so forth. The more we wrote down, the quieter we became. Everything cost money, the very thing we needed the most.

  We stepped out the door with the complete list. I locked up and turned around, and I saw Wang Hui looking at me oddly. “I don’t have any money,” he said, clearly embarrassed.

  “Didn’t you save any after you came here?” I asked, incredulous.

  He shook his head. “No.”

  “You made three times more than I did, and you knew I was coming.” I found it hard to believe him, so I pressed on. I thought we had planned our future together, but once more it seemed that he had never believed I would really come.

  “I spent it all here and there. I don’t know.” With free rent and food from his cousin, what other expenses had he had? All sorts of questions flew into my mind, but I swallowed them all and unlocked the door. Out of my duffel bag, I took the bonus I had received from the school before I left. I locked the door again and followed him to the market.

  After Wang Hui left for work the next morning, I sat on our new small plastic stool and looked around the house. Even with all the furniture we had just bought, it still looked almost empty. We’d picked the cheapest st
uff, yet it had cost all my savings—fifteen hundred yuan. I told myself that I now had a home, but strangely I didn’t feel any joy. I felt as empty as the house. Not only did I have no job, I now had no money either, and as soon as I let this reality creep into my mind, it burned me like a match. I heard my mother’s voice in my head: don’t date a poor man like your father. I smiled to myself bitterly. My mother may have been illiterate, but she had taught me a lesson with her own life. For some reason, fate had arranged for me to run into Wang Hui, a man who was poorer than I was. But I wouldn’t give in to fate, I told myself. I would not allow us to be poor all our lives.

  Every day, Wang Hui left for work in the morning and got back as the six o’clock news was starting on the Hong Kong Pearl TV station on a neighbor’s television. We would put the table and chairs under the eaves and start dinner. As the warm evening breeze blew into his relaxed, content face, I wanted to ask him whether the rice was too dry or moist or whether the chicken soup was too salty or just right, but the questions never made their way out of my mouth. It felt as if there was a gulf between us and it was growing by the day. After dinner, he would sit on the threshold, facing the mulberry bush, and read some junk magazines until it got dark. At night he always slept peacefully after he had used up all his energy on me. He never snored.

  Two weeks flashed by. One day after Wang Hui left for work at eight o’clock, I picked up a magazine and sat under the eaves as usual. The sound of the neighbor’s television became distant. Soon I found myself staring blankly into the air, the magazine lying at my feet. I was becoming a zombie. Suddenly, I felt the impulse to go somewhere. I stood up and locked the door hurriedly. I went to the bus station and soon found myself on a bus to Guangzhou.

  Back in Guangzhou—a forest of steel and an ocean of noise—I started to walk aimlessly, just as I had in Shanghai a year earlier. Every face passing by was a stranger’s. Every word I heard was in loud Cantonese. The sun in the South was relentless, so that every girl had a few zits on her flat face and every man had swarthy skin. The southerners loved durian and made the whole city smell like spoiled food. There were many old square cement buildings with air conditioners sticking out of every window, blasting heat into the streets. The air tasted like metal. There were no plants in sight. Girls in shorts and heavy makeup stood on the sidewalks, which were scattered with vegetable leaves and melon peels, pulling the sleeves of passing men boldly. Popular Cantonese music was playing at the maximum volume in every store.

  For hours I walked in this strange city, thinking about how different it was from Shanghai. They were similar in size, but if Shanghai was a sophisticated Japanese geisha, Guangzhou made me think of the Times Square strippers I’d read about in magazines.

  My mother used to yell at me when I hadn’t opened my mouth for days. “What’s that thing under your nose?” she would say. “You don’t just use it to eat!” I had never been bold enough to just stop a stranger on the street and ask for directions. I would end up standing still with my face red, letting everyone walk by me, and then get lost for hours. But that day I knew I had to toughen up, because nobody was going to stop and help me if I didn’t ask. So with some new force inside me, I approached a middle-aged man in a suit and asked him where the labor market was. I kept asking, changing buses, and walking, and eventually I was standing in front of the Guangzhou Labor and Talent Intercommunication Center.

  I froze on the stone steps leading to the door, panicked. I just couldn’t make my feet take me inside. I saw people walking quickly in and out of the revolving glass door in suits or skirts, carrying briefcases and looking confident, and I wondered if I should go inside at all. I only had an associate degree, and I was an ugly girl who smelled like the countryside. I had no charm and always blushed and stuttered when I was nervous.

  I paced in front of the entrance, feeling cowardly. My knees were weak and my mind was like mush. It looked so easy for everyone else to go through the glass door without thinking, but I felt like there was a thick invisible wall blocking my way.

  After struggling with myself for a while, I looked at the clock on a church tower not far away and realized it was time for me to get back to Gao Ming. I started to walk toward the bus station. I’ll come back; I’ll give myself more time, I told myself.

  A few blocks away, I spotted a small tailor shop. I would need some decent clothes for myself if I was going to look for a job, so I walked in. I chose some white cloth and told the needlewoman there that I wanted to have a blazer and a pair of pants made and that I would pick them up a few days later. I had never dared to wear white before, afraid that it would expose all my flaws. But in this foreign land, I didn’t have a mother who would yell that white made me looked fatter. I didn’t have any school leaders to warn me that, for the sake of our future generations’ mental health, I had better not dress so flashily. Nobody at the school wore white, but those people were out of my life now.

  I got home in time to make dinner for Wang Hui, and I didn’t mention anything about my trip to Guangzhou. I wasn’t sure what I was doing or whether I should let him know that I was looking for jobs on my own instead of waiting for one to fall into my lap. Though we were in the South, he was still a conservative man from Inner China who would get upset if he knew I had gone to Guangzhou without discussing it with him first. He didn’t want his woman acting in such an independent way. Trust Older Brother, he had told me all along.

  A few days later, I left for Guangzhou again. In a small copy shop near the Labor and Talent Center, I made thirty copies of my résumé. Then I picked up my new clothes and changed in a public bathroom. Armed with a sudden confidence, I strode into the center, the plastic folder that contained my résumés held tightly in my arms.

  People who were hiring sat leisurely behind rows of tables, examining every person walking by. Behind them stood large boards with big posters glued on them containing brush-painted descriptions and requirements for the open positions. As my eyes scanned the posters, I grew discouraged. Phrases like “bachelor’s degree” and “well-proportioned features” appeared on almost every poster. After circling around the tables a few times, I found myself back at one whose poster read “Secretary for Director wanted. Associate degree and regular features required.” I stood sideways far away from the table and looked at the poster again and again, debating whether I should step forward.

  Behind the table sat a tall man in a blue suit. He looked like he was in his early thirties, and he seemed to be in charge of the booth. Casually leaning back in his chair, he was looking at me, a thin smile on his fine-featured face. He seemed interested—playful, even—and suddenly I wanted to run away. It was like he saw the fear inside me as clearly as a blazing fire.

  “Miss.” His voice rang out before I could turn around. “Please come here.”

  I forced myself to walk up to him.

  “Are you looking for a job?” He was obviously Cantonese, and his Mandarin was so bad that it hurt my teeth, but I understood him.

  I nodded and slid a copy of my résumé out of the folder and put it on the table in front of him. He read it carefully.

  “Are you interested in any of the positions we offer?” His eyes locked on mine. Something in them rattled me. I shifted my eyes away from him to the poster.

  “Yes,” I said with a smile. “I want to apply for the secretary job.” After a moment I added hastily, “I think I can do it.”

  I waited tensely while he and his companions looked over my résumé and my college diploma and whispered in each other’s ears. Then he handed everything back to me and said, “Come to our company next week for an interview. I am Manager Huang, head of Human Resources. Find me when you come.”

  I thanked him, grabbed the documents, and rushed out of the center. I stood outside on the steps and took a deep breath. The hot air tasted sweet in my mouth. I couldn’t believe that I had just gotten an interview.

  Back home, I decided to tell Wang Hui everything. He stood with his hands
on his hips and listened to me quietly.

  “Where is this company?”

  “In the town of Long Jiang, about an hour and half’s bus ride away,” I said carefully.

  “If you get the job, what are we going to do with this apartment and all the furniture we just bought?”

  I didn’t know how to answer. And what would happen between him and me? That was the bigger question hovering in the air. I didn’t want to think about it further, though, so I just changed the subject.

  The following week, I left for Long Jiang for the interview. I got off the bus at the main road. Through the heavy dust, I saw lots of furniture shops and office parks with low buildings behind them. Furniture manufacturing was the town’s main industry. In the distance I saw several buildings with signs reading LongJiang Enterprises Group on the top, the name of the company I was looking for. I strolled down one of the paved walkways lined with trees and flowers for a few minutes. Before I could find the entrance to the company, I caught sight of Manager Huang approaching me, his leather bag tucked under one arm while the other swung back and forth like a pendulum. I narrowed my eyes and took a good look at him. He was very tall, over six feet. He had a noticeably small head, a straight stature, exquisite facial features, and dark but smooth skin. In my eyes, he shone in the sun like Apollo.

  “Manager Huang!” I called out respectfully. A faint smile floated to his face.

  He began filling me in on the company as we walked. “LongJiang is a very large entity. We have thirty subsidiary companies all over town. You can imagine how important the secretary to the director is.”

  I followed him closely. His long legs took big steps.

  An hour later, I met Director Yip, the head of LongJiang Enterprises, in his large, empty office. Tall and well-built, but with a beer belly, Director Yip sat behind a huge oak table and glared at me with round dark angry eyes. He looked like a ferocious leopard, ready to bite at any minute. It was as if he was trying his hardest to appear terrifying. I understood now why it had seemed like everyone within a ten-foot range of his office was on tiptoes.