by Bi Feiyu
They had been together long enough for Jin Yan to know what was on Tingting’s mind and what Du Hong was thinking; she was aware that the two women were at an impasse and that they could not go on like that. She decided to take matters into her own hands, an ideal opportunity to show what she could do. Without a word, she returned to the centre, where she took care of Ji’s pay with Sha Fuming and asked Gao Wei to buy a train ticket while having Tailai pack up Ji’s things. The next evening, she ordered a taxi and left with Tailai for the hospital, where they tricked Ji out of Du Hong’s room and dragged her into the taxi to put her on the train. Just like that, one, two, three, and Ji was on her way home. When Jin Yan returned to the hospital, she called Ji on her mobile phone, and when Ji answered she handed the phone to Du Hong, who did not know what it was all about. She hesitantly held the phone to her ear and heard Tingting say to her, ‘Little Sister.’ That was followed by the rumbling sound of a moving train, which told Du Hong everything she needed to know. She understood. ‘Ji da-jie,’ she said into the mouthpiece. The utterance had a powerful effect on the two women, who said nothing more. Now the only sound in the phone was the rhythmic rumble of train wheels. Clank-clang, clank-clang. The train was racing towards an unknown destination, farther and farther away, emptying Du Hong’s heart bit by bit as it moved away. Unable to take it any longer, she flipped the phone shut and collapsed into Jin Yan’s arms.
‘Hold me, Jin Yan, hold me.’
Chapter Twenty
Sha Fuming
THE TUINA CENTRE was palpably emptier, with three people gone – Xiao Ma and Ji Tingting had left for good and Du Hong was hospitalised. Emptiness can be so physical that everyone senses its presence.
After things calmed down a bit, Sha Fuming hired a repairman to install a stopper on the lounge door; now the therapists would hear a loud, reassuring click when the door was pushed all the way open. Though reassuring, it was also malicious, for it was a constant reminder of Du Hong’s thumb, each click creating a moment of unease.
There was a thumb on everyone’s mind, and it was Du Hong’s thumb. It had been broken, and it now supplanted everything in their hearts, in which it stubbornly took up residence. They became exceptionally cautious, afraid to make a noise, further stripping the centre of signs of life.
Abandoning his usual habit, Sha kept walking over to the lounge entrance, where he stood and played with the door for a long, long time. He pulled it off the magnetic stopper, and then pushed it back, over and over, animating the deathly quiet centre with an endless string of click, click, click.
People were increasingly annoyed by Sha Fuming’s clicking sounds, but no one dared say a word. They felt sorry for him. His crush on Du Hong was no longer a secret. He must have been consumed by remorse. They had asked him to install a stopper on the lounge door long before, yet while he had agreed to do so, he hadn’t taken the request seriously. Viewed from one angle, he was responsible for what had happened. No one would blame him, but that didn’t mean that he would not blame himself. All he could do was obsessively open and shut the door, over and over, click, click, click.
He was racked by remorse, to the extent that he felt the pain in his gut. His regret ate at him, not because of the doorstopper, but something greater than that. He should have signed a contract with his employees, but he hadn’t, not a single one.
Strictly speaking, blind people do not count as persons, not in the full sense anyway, as even when they join society and work to support themselves, they do not have an organisation or a club, no insurance and no contract. In a word, they never form real and effective communal relations with society; they end up with another blind person when they get married, and that amounts to an accumulation of quantity, not a change in quality. Do they really lack all bonds with the rest of society? Not quite. For instance, every month they receive a one hundred yuan subsidy from a civil administrative office. One hundred yuan, a symbolic act by society intended to help themselves sleep better, is calculated not to aid the blind but to provide society with the justification to forget them altogether. In the end, the blind, or all disabled, for that matter, can be ignored and neglected. But life is not a symbol; it is real, constructed of years, months and days, of hours, minutes and seconds, and not a single second can be ignored. A person lives in a collective every second of the day, and no one can get by solely on the fruit of one’s own labours.
The blind constitute an undocumented population, all of them, including Sha Fuming himself; and they have lives that are like those on the Internet. When a sighted person needs one of them, a metaphorical click will make them appear, while a second click relegates them to virtual space. In any case, the blind exist and yet they are never fully real, they live in a sort of limbo. When dealing with the blind, society itself is virtually blind. The blind are forever confined to their blind realm, which makes their life a gamble; it can be nothing but that, and a blind individual can lose everything as a result of a minor accident.
Sha Fuming left the lounge and stood at the entrance to the centre, where he blinked desperately. He looked up towards the sky and looked down towards the ground, but saw nothing. The blind have neither heaven nor earth, so they cannot ask for help from either.
As a boss, Sha Fuming could have created a small community in the tuina centre; he had the ability, maybe even the obligation, to do that. He could have signed hiring contracts that would have made it possible for the employees to buy insurance and thus remove them from the legions of the undocumented; they would have been connected to society. They would have become ‘real people’.
He had given thought to contracts, starting back when he was in Shanghai, where he’d longed to have a contract with his boss. He and the other therapists had talked about it back in the dorm, but no one had been willing to bring it up with the boss, and so nothing had been done. Chinese people typically are reluctant to act on behalf of a collective, and that characteristic is even more pronounced among the blind. The tendency leads to their golden rule: why me? There is another Chinese characteristic, and that is a heavy reliance on chance, which is also more noticeable among the blind, and which gives rise to yet another golden rule: no disaster will ever befall me. No way. Why would it be me?
Sha had not been unaware of the importance of a contract; it would be his safety net. Put crudely, without one he would be a mutt, someone who had no control over his own life. He did not know what fate was. The only thing he knew about it was that it was lethal, that it had frightening magical powers. In the end he had got angry over the contract issue. His anger was directed at his co-workers, who got together to say how smart and competent he was, but in fact treated him as a fool. He did not want to be the fool; why should he be the sucker who talked to the boss if no one else would? So they never got a contract. Being blind, Sha Fuming trusted to luck as much as the next man: the others got along fine without a contract, so why couldn’t he? He had even quietly asked around and learned that no contract was offered at any tuina centre; now he knew it was more or less an unspoken rule at all tuina centres not to sign contracts with the therapists.
During the planning stage of the opening of the Sha Zongqi tuina centre, Sha Fuming ambitiously decided to break the vile hidden rule; no matter what, he would dutifully sign a contract with each employee. The centre might be small, but he would make it a modern business whose humanistic character would be manifested in him. While strict management was essential, the basic interests of the employees must be guaranteed.
Yet something strange occurred after Sha became the boss; it just happened naturally, not on any particular day. Not one of the prospective employees raised the issue of a contract during the interview; they didn’t ask and he didn’t offer, the logic being that it was already a huge favour for the boss to give them a job, so why talk about a contract? After giving the lack of inquiry some thought, Sha came up with three reasons: the blind are naturally timid, they are too proud and they feel gratitude too easily. They thanked
the heavens for being given a job by the boss, so how could they ask him for a contract? It takes little for the blind to be grateful. They get so little in life that, once sight is lost, a person quickly learns how to be grateful. While lustre is absent from their eyes, tears are not.
So, no contract. None of the therapists brought up the matter of a contract, and none was ever signed. By contrast, Sha was exhaustive in formulating rules and regulations for the centre in order to simplify matters. These rules and regulations became the sole binding relationship between the employees and the centre. In accordance with these rules and regulations, the employees had only obligations and responsibilities, which were all perfectly justified; they had no rights, which was all right with them. The blind are truly special people, who, no matter how much the times have changed, remain, at bottom, ancient, primitive, primal and eternally changeless. Society does not provide them with an organisation or mechanism to protect or assist them, so they turn around to embrace one thing with unwavering conviction – fate. Fate is invisible and only the invisible exists for them, an enormous, encompassing, manipulative, determining, even omnipresent existence. It is like the lovely danger they will bump into if they are not careful. How should they deal with fate? The most positive, true and tried approach is acceptance. Hey! – accept it, just accept it.
But acceptance has a prerequisite – a valiant and steadfast faith in luck. You must learn how to use luck in dealing with everything in life, going so far as to liquefy the heart and infuse it into the marrow of your bones. Dong – dong, dong – dong, sonorous and powerful. A person who cannot see clouds will never have to worry about which one carries rain. If it rains, fine; if not, that’s fine too. Accept. I accept that.
What happened later followed a logical course. Back when Sha Fuming and Zhang Zongqi were best friends, they could sit on a bed cross-legged and talk about everything. The two young bosses enjoyed their conversations, cheerful and pleasant as if bathed in a spring breeze, but the topic of contracts with their employees never arose. On several occasions, Sha was about to bring it up, but something unexpected always made him swallow the words. As for Zhang, a shrewd businessman, he could not possibly have been unaware of the importance of a contract, which could only mean that he too swallowed the words. That is a natural gift of the blind. A boss can swallow a lot, and so can his employees. No one can better them in this, for they have an unmatched tolerance for everything.
Subsequent developments in the situation were both intriguing and strange. No one mentioned the contract, yet it became a well facing everyone, employees and employers alike, who consciously skirted the issue as if by command. Sha Fuming was neither happy nor disappointed, for, at the end of the day, no boss would care to sign a contract with his staff. Its absence simplified everything; the boss solved all problems with a simple yes or no. He had the power, and that was that. How easy this made the boss’s life, which can be described only as sweet.
Then fate struck, revealing its barbed figure, spreading terror the moment it appeared. It touched everyone at the centre like an invisible hand, and then, with a sneer, settled on Du Hong, laying both hands on her back and pressing her down into the well.
Du Hong was in the well, which was just big enough to contain her body. Sha heard no sound from the well, no sign of any struggle. In fact, no one chosen by fate can struggle out of its control. Sha felt that he was suffocating, feeling far worse than if he could hear splashing from below. The well water concealed everything, its depth determining the degree of gloom. Poor Du Hong. Baby. My little sister. He would be happy to dig up the well if that would save her, but how would he do that? How?
One-sided love is a torment, persistent and excruciating, but in fact, not always. Before she was injured, it was simply persistent, not tormenting, every time Sha Fuming thought about her. He could sense his own softness and unforeseen gentleness, which made him feel good. So who could say it wasn’t love? His heart felt as if it had been sunning itself, warm and languid in the sun’s rays. Once he even took her name apart and considered the meaning of each character: Du could be read as dou, which is all inclusive, and hong, red, is the colour of the sun, he was told. Taken together, Du Hong’s name referred to an all-encompassing red. She was the sun, distant and yet nearby. Sha had never seen the sun, but was sensitive to it, and in the winter, he loved nothing better than sunning himself. The half of him under the sun was warm and languid.
But the sun had set and fallen into a well. He did not know if his sun would rise again. He knew he was now in shadows, in the path of wind coming off a high rise, mussing his hair and presenting a dishevelled sight to anyone who could see.
If not for the mutton incident, if he and Zhang had not discussed splitting up, Sha might have been able to put the Du Hong issue on the table and retroactively given her a contract and compensation. It might have worked.
Even with the mutton incident and the split, Sha could have done that if not for his one-sided love for Du Hong.
But not now. With the deterioration of the relationship between Sha and Zhang, and the ambiguous relationship between him and Du Hong, to try that would be seen by all as favouritism. He could not allow himself to propose it. Nor would it work if he did.
Sha asked himself why he loved her. Why have you got into this one-sided affair? Why are you so infatuated with the accursed notion of beauty? Why couldn’t your heart let go of that hand? In a certain context, love can be immoral.
Sha felt that he had let Du Hong down, for, as a man and a boss, he could do nothing for her, not even this one last thing. He had wanted only one thing – to be a boss, and he had succeeded. But so what? He descended into a state of untold agony.
What if the injured person had not been Du Hong? What if she had not been a beauty? What if she had not been blessed with pretty hands? Would Sha be spared the agony? With this thought, he felt the threads of his soul threatening to exit through holes in his scalp.
His thoughts reached an impasse, so he began chain smoking. He inhaled and he exhaled, but somehow it felt as if the smoke he had inhaled never emerged. He could not blow it out. The smoke from all those cigarettes seemed to stick in his chest and gut, where it swirled itself into a blockage the size of a large stone. His stomach ached. All the pain in his body was concentrated firmly there. For the first time ever, he felt too weak to stand. He sat down. He needed to go to the hospital. No matter what, he’d go as soon as things quieted down.
A hospital was another sore spot for Sha Fuming. How could it trigger such anxiety? Then again, who could be immune to that apprehension? It was expensive, with a visit over a sneeze starting at three or four hundred yuan. But money was only secondary. What he feared most was the trouble he had to go through, particularly at big hospitals, where, appointments for exams aside, he had to queue up to register, queue to see a doctor, queue to pay for the visit, queue for the examination, queue to see the doctor a second time, queue to pay again and, finally, queue to pick up his medicine. You need to plan on spending the better part of a day there. Every time Sha Fuming went to the hospital he was reminded of the idiom about a blind man feeling an elephant. That’s what a hospital was, an elephant, its body a virtual labyrinth. Find your way around it if you can. To Sha, a hospital was more than an elephant or a labyrinth; it was solid geometry. He never could get his head around the points, lines, surfaces or angles of the geometric figure. They were complex and intricate, appropriate for exploration but not medical treatments.
Sha vowed to go to the hospital one day soon. He curled his lip into what looked like a smile. Where seeing a doctor was concerned, he had mastered the art of vowing. And yet not one of his vows had led to action. He made his vows not because he was strong-willed, but because he was in pain. Whenever pain surfaced, out came the vows. If he was not in pain, then taking a vow would be like farting. What can a person expect from that? Absolutely nothing.
With a cough, Wang Daifu pushed the door open and walked outside. Obvi
ously sensing Sha’s presence, Wang stood next to him and wordlessly cracked his knuckles. From the meaningful sounds, Sha knew that Wang had something to say, but could not get it out.
Sha also coughed. What did he want to convey? Even he wasn’t sure; he just wanted to make a sound, as a beginning or as an end to their encounter. Either would work.
Wang detected an unpleasant odour on Sha, which could only mean that he had not showered for days. He guessed right, and the substandard bathroom situation at the dorm was to blame. With only one water heater, the dozen or more therapists had to line up and take turns to shower. A stomach ache drained a person’s energy, and Sha was fatigued all day long. He went straight to bed the minute he returned to the dorm, and once he was lying down, he did not feel like getting up again. He knew he smelled bad, but he was simply too tired to take a shower.
‘Fuming,’ Wang said. ‘Is everything all right?’ It was such a meaningless question he might as well have not asked it. But Sha noticed that for the first time since Wang began working at the tuina centre he did not call him Boss. Wang had called him by his name.
‘I’m fine,’ Sha said. ‘And you?’ An equally meaningless reply, like an echo.
Wang Daifu clammed up after he too said ‘I’m fine.’ He thrust his hand under his shirt to rub his chest. The wounds had healed, but itched badly. He didn’t dare scratch them with his nails, so he lightly brushed the scars with his fingertips. Sha also held his tongue, but he still felt that Wang had something important to say, though it remained on the tip of his tongue.
‘Fuming,’ Wang finally worked up the courage to say, ‘take my advice and stop brooding. It’s pointless, so don’t think about it.’
That too was a meaningless statement. Don’t brood over what? Stop thinking about what? What is pointless? Sha wondered. But a second later it was clear to him that Wang was referring to Du Hong. He hadn’t anticipated that Wang would be so direct; only close friends can be that direct. Needless to say, Sha knew it was pointless, but knowing it was one thing and hearing it from someone else was another. He wordlessly stewed in the anger caused by the embarrassment, feeling that his heart had been ripped open. After a prolonged silence, he calmed down and, unwilling to feign ignorance with an old friend, he asked, ‘I assume everyone knows about it?’
