by Lin Zhe
As I pushed the door open, three pairs of eyes all swiveled in my direction. The look on my face rendered them as subdued as cicadas on cold days.
After quite a while, Young He passed me a cup of hot tea and said, “Never mind, fragrant herbs and exotic plants are always somewhere out there on the horizon. How about going with me to Japan?”
Young Ma said, “Getting a visa to the U.S. from Japan would be much easier.”
I was thinking of Chaofan, imagining that at this moment how the snowflakes were floating in the skies on the other side of the ocean and of him and that violinist warming themselves by the stove. This was a scene straight out of Hollywood and I supposed that was life in America. No matter who, once people got to America they could lead a fine, upper-class life-style. I thought that if I could just get a visa I could chase the violinist away from the stove. A rubber stamp shattered that dream.
Young Wang was always the last one to make known her views. “You’ve got to ride a horse when you’re looking for a horse. First get a lover, and then all the other problems will slowly take care of themselves.”
She herself was one of those persons who practiced what she preached. When she discovered that her husband was being unfaithful to her, her first reaction was to reconnect with those men who had previously shown her their affection. Spreading and scattering her feelings all around, she got three “ABC” lovers.40 Whenever she felt bored, at least one of these three would have the time to keep her company, to make love to her. “Having tasted the bone’s marrow, its savor grows”—lovers became her narcotic. She didn’t seem too hard-pressed to leave China. When, after much rigmarole, an invitation letter finally arrived from Germany, she put it in a drawer and never did apply for her visa.
Soon afterward, my second round of Operation Visa got under way. I even got in line at three o’clock in the morning. Again that rubber “Visa Refused” stamp.
Walking out of the embassy gate, a man took hold of my hand. The night before, it had rained and a stranger behind me had taken off his windbreaker to shield me from the weather. He told me that his wife had been in the United States for three years now and that they had been together only half a year. As we spoke about our own experiences, suddenly he put his arms around me. “Why should we be wasting our youth like this? For you and me, wife and husband are only abstract concepts. And here we are suffering such physical and mental torment over this concept. It’s really crazy! Come with me—let’s go, right now!” he said. I said I was also thinking of trying my luck, though I clearly knew there would be no good luck for me.
We were called separately to the windows and almost at the very same time our applications were refused. This was the sixth time for him.
With great urgency he pulled me after him as he jumped on a bus and for more than half an hour we never uttered a single word. I followed him obediently without the slightest sense of needing to be on guard. I did feel a little aggrieved, but also a little gratified in some indescribable way. It was a small, dust-filled apartment. A wedding picture hung on the wall. The bride looked quite happy in all her wedding finery. He closed the door and, turning around, took me by the waist and threw me onto the bed. I closed my eyes and let my body be trampled and slaughtered by this man, this stranger. Chaofan’s image was what filled my head…my body, my head…lying in two different places…
This was how I had my first lover. We often met clandestinely, made wild love, and never spoke of the future.
One day he told me he still wanted to stand in the visa line at Xiushui Street. I wasn’t surprised. In fact, I was involved in some secret doings of my own. Chaofan had now obtained a green card and I would be going to America as his legal wife. I heard that the violinist had married a Taiwanese restaurant owner. Having already gone through all that mental anguish, I didn’t much care now. What I didn’t see couldn’t hurt me. I never verified with Chaofan whether she had really married anyone. But even if they were still snuggling up in front of the stove, so what?
3.
AS I GAZED out the window of this thumping old Ford at the thick fog blanketing the mountain tops, I thought, “So this is America. America, I’m here.” Out of the corner of my eye, I stole a glance at Chaofan, just then engrossed in his driving. Since leaving the airport, I still hadn’t looked him straight in the face. I was feeling guilty, as if I had stolen something and he had been its owner.
The tour-group members could not dispel my pain of separation. During the trip I thought of little Beibei and again and again tears would whirl and dance in my eyes. What would she think if Mama wasn’t there when she woke up? I also wondered about the man who had been my partner in support and comfort at the time we had needed these most. When he was refused a visa for the eighth time, his wife initiated divorce proceedings against him. Tearfully, she asked him to be humane. He accepted the reality of the divorce but made no effort to keep me with him as a result of it. When we parted, we embraced each other, sobbing bitterly like a loving husband and wife being forced apart. Would he soon have another sweetheart?
In order to find a parking space where he didn’t have to pay, Chaofan drove round and round the fog-shrouded streets. This wasn’t his style. He had always been free and easy with money, never giving a second thought to where it all went. He would look at me scornfully whenever I haggled with a peddler or stall owner. In those days the summer grasshopper attitude was normal with him. If he had no money at the end of the month, he would sell his wristwatch for ten or twelve dollars, and go on calling all his friends in to drink and pontificate for hours.
After stopping the car, we walked for about ten minutes to Chinatown.
“Things are cheap here,” said Chaofan.
I finally struck up the courage to look at him straight-on. I saw a pair of exhausted eyes devoid of all vitality. What kind of a place is America that could change this wild and intractable person into something so dejected and dispirited?
The roadside food joints would remind you of the sidewalk food stalls in Guangdong from which the songs of Taiwan’s song prince, Ch’i Ch’in would blare: “I’m a wolf from the north, prowling the boundless wilderness.”
So this is America? The land of freedom worth abandoning family and career for?
There were no romantic, coldly beautiful snowflakes, no stoves with their dreamy warmth and fragrance. As we sat in the greasy restaurant, I just had to laugh at myself.
Chaofan bought a newspaper and sat there poring over it. From time to time, he circled something with his pen. I couldn’t imagine what news absorbed his attention so strongly.
The next thing I know, some real news almost knocked me off my chair—he’s looking for an apartment!
Where had he stayed last night? And how had he spent all those hundreds of nights before that? Suddenly at that instant I just lost all hope. I felt like I was being oxygen-deprived or poisoned. Right then and there, everything turned black before my eyes and I could feel cold sweat spreading across my back.
After walking streets, threading alleys, and looking at so many places, we finally put our feet down in a room we sublet from a Mexican guy. The only thing in it was a mattress. Totally dejected, I sat on the floor and started to cry my heart out. I longed for Chaofan to reach out and hold me to him, to tell me that everything would be getting better, that there was still bread to eat, milk to drink. When I had been in Beijing awaiting my visa, my “lover” often comforted me in this way, and I did the same for him.
Not Chaofan, though. Instead he got irritated and scolded me. “What are you crying about? You come to America. Someone meets you, finds a place for you, and gives you food to eat. Those people who come here without a soul to turn to, how do they make it?”
I stopped my sobbing and looked at him. If I had no one to turn to in America, why would I have come here in the first place?
The suitcases were still unpacked. I had already decided to fly back home as swift as an arrow. I didn’t utter another word.
/> Upstairs was our landlord’s bedroom. All of a sudden wild thumping sounds came from our ceiling, like someone was wrecking the place. The couple above us was making love, earthshaking and heaven-splitting love, totally unmindful of anything else. Their animal roars rent the stillness of the late night.
We were lying side by side on our improvised bed, each of us occupied with our own thoughts. We stared at the shaking ceiling whose collapse seemed imminent. Neither of us wanted to touch the other.
I don’t know what he’s thinking, and he doesn’t know what I am thinking.
Several days went by and our landlord’s earthquakes were occurring every night. Still feeling inhibited, we kept an arm’s length from each other. I was planning my return to China every minute of the day and night. Also, for “humane” reasons, I wanted a divorce.
The bed had to be placed against the wall. This was the only habit that remained from before. He would want to sleep on the inside, like a big kid all curled up in the corner of a room. I didn’t know if he still had those nightmares. These made him more touchingly feeble than a lamb. In his fright he would whisper into my ear what he would never be willing to say in the daytime. He’d make me believe that our lifelines were linked together, and no one, no matter who, could separate us.
As if I were afraid of this happening, I was always very careful to sleep glued to the far side of the mattress.
I had already contacted my good friend Xiaoli, and she was driving up this weekend from Lompoc to fetch me. I wanted to go there to get a job and earn enough to pay for my return fare to China. But before this plan could be carried out, I had no sooner escaped from this disaster when Chaofan dragged me back into the mire.
Early one morning, a damp and hot body awakened me. Breathing heavily, Chaofan had burrowed into my breast, both his hands tightly clasped around my shoulders. This sent me back into the past, to that old familiar feeling. I kissed his forehead, his neck, and his thick, hard ears. “Dearest, don’t be afraid. I love you, I’m here.” He was choked with sobs. “I love you too. Don’t leave me.” My body worked its own will, forgetting all resentment and grievances as it ecstatically went to greet him. We had been just like that in our younger years. In his fright and weakness began our first derailment.
As I stroked his sweaty back, I was as forgiving and tender as any mother, loving him until my heart ached. I knew that he would always live in the shadow of Pastor Chen’s suicide. That day a seven-year-old Chaofan stood by the side of the well, utterly terrified by the scene of the rebel faction hauling out his grandfather’s body. Iron hooks had pierced the pastor’s eye sockets and from these hung his two eyeballs. From then on nightmares like wronged ghosts have haunted him. Sometimes he would even walk in his sleep. That’s why he had to lie next to a wall. His granny would guard him. Every night he would pray, right up until when he was a grown man.
In grief and sorrow we made tearful love, again and again, as if to make up fully for the time lost during our separation. Of course, this didn’t mean that he didn’t have other women. Early in the morning of the very day he met me at the airport, he had left a woman’s bedroom. His sexy sad eyes were so good at getting women. But with the women of those duckweed meetings on flowing waters he has to put on helmet and armor and disguise himself as a bandit or knight. He cannot let the slightest weakness show through.
This man at my breast was another child of mine. Even though he was strong and big, even a bit bigger than me, he was just my child. How could I have forsaken him?
CHAPTER TWELVE – HUNGER IN OLD TOWN
1.
MY GRANDMOTHER WAS an attractive woman and she kept her looks throughout the various stages of her life: an attractive young woman, an attractive wife, and after she reached old age, an attractive old lady. Only a wall separated Old Town’s first photo studio and the Guo Family Cloth Shop. The studio owner would take Second Miss Guo’s pictures for free, provided that she let him display them in the studio. That antique camera kept taking pictures of my grandma for thirty years, right up to when the camera and its owner retired.
In the autumn of 1948, the photo studio owner heard that Dr. Lin’s clinic was now open for business, and so, equipment on his shoulder, he went to add his congratulations and lend his support to the opening. The so-called clinic was merely that room in our home facing the street to which had been added a door, a coat of white paint, and a counter and table. That was all. The photo studio owner set up his camera, and took a picture of Dr. Lin sitting in the clinic with his stethoscope hanging from his neck. He also had my grandmother stand by the gate under the oleander tree for her picture. His head was burrowed under the dark cloth as he looked through the lens. But no matter how he looked, the person in front of him just didn’t seem like Second Miss Guo. Even though she had a bit of makeup on, it couldn’t disguise her pallid and haggard appearance. He wanted to ask, “Are you sick?” Then, on second thought, he realized she was probably just famished. In this time of hunger, it was difficult to keep body and soul together, even in a doctor’s family. Somewhat hesitantly he clicked the shutter. Afterward he told Second Miss Guo that the photo had been overexposed. By the next time he arrived at the doctor’s home to take pictures, Old Town had come back to life again and everybody had things to eat. He gave the photo to Second Miss. The doctor’s wife scrutinized it and breathed a deep sigh: The Communists had come just in time. No one could have then imagined how Old Town might again starve for two years.
When Second Sister stood under the oleander to be photographed, she had gone hungry for quite a few days already. During all that time she had only a bit of thin rice gruel. She didn’t dare tell her husband that the bottom of the rice jar was now showing. After the photo studio owner left, that normally would have been when she lit the fire and started to cook. The three children, their stomachs churning with hunger, were coming home soon.
She sat in front of the stove, her chin cupped in her hands, worried and wondering whose house she could go to for a bit of rice. She thought of all the relatives and close friends, but who of them had extra rice left in their own rice jars? Almost every day now, Pastor and Mrs. Chen’s meals consisted of only a few glasses of water. Her own old mother living at Drum Tower was already so starved that her whole body was bloated with edema. Of all her relatives, only Elder Sister’s home still enjoyed “tasty food and strong drink,” but she had no wish to see that utter scoundrel of a brother-in-law. A few days back, Elder Sister had made off with a few jin of hulled rice from her mother-in-law’s home (where she lived) to give to her own mother’s family. Her husband then beat her so badly that her nose was bruised and her face all swollen.
Second Sister said to her angel, “O Angel, please tell the Heavenly Father that Second Sister has no rice to cook for her husband and children.”
The rickshaw man, Shuiguan, carried his wife on his back to the clinic. She had been washing clothes when she just suddenly keeled over in a faint. The doctor bandaged the wound on her head, and, going into the house, asked Second Sister to fill up a bowl of some rice gruel for Shuiguan’s wife. Second Sister shook her head uneasily. The doctor thought she was holding back and his face reflected a faint displeasure. Even if the last bowl of rice gruel was all that was left in the house, she should give it to his patient unstintingly. He reached out and lifted the cover off the cooking pan. It was totally empty. Then he bent over and opened the rice jar. That too was totally empty. “The Complete Man keeps his distance from the kitchen,” Mencius once said.41 For many years the doctor had not entered the kitchen and he never thought supplies would run so low. He glanced apologetically at his wife.
Second Sister felt rather hurt. After Ninth Brother had become unemployed they depended on her sewing to somehow or other survive. But Ninth Brother’s reputation had spread far and wide. Well before the clinic opened for business, their home had become a real clinic, with patients sitting right down on the dining table seeking treatment, like students lining up before the i
nner halls of knowledge. The little bit of hard-earned money from her needlework mostly went to buy medicine. Since these were all poor people from the neighborhood, the clinic didn’t collect a single fen. Dr. Lin even often sent food and clothing to the patients’ homes. A Christian should love his neighbor like himself. She didn’t dare dissuade him from doing this.
O Angel, you’ve seen how the rice jar hasn’t even one grain left in it. Could you turn it into a pot of fragrantly steaming rice for me?
As she prayed, she fell into a confused sleep in which she dreamed she saw herself at someone’s wedding banquet. She was eating her favorite “eight joys” meatballs, and even taro paste and sticky rice cakes. She took a bit of something from each course with her chopsticks and placed it in the bowl next to her hand. She was thinking of wrapping it all up and taking it home to her children.
“Second Sister, Second Sister…” Elder Sister barged most inopportunely into her dreamworld, calling and calling her name.
Second Sister realized that she was dreaming. Even when I’m dreaming I can’t get a full meal. Reluctantly, she opened her eyes and suddenly discovered Elder Sister standing by the side of the stove, her face wreathed in a smile. This made Second Sister feel a certain unreality. For how many years now had Elder Sister come running to her from some terrible thing, crying to the heavens and wiping away her tears? What was she up to today? Can I be just fainting from hunger?
