Candy

by Mian Mian

  The car started moving. I didn’t dare try to kill Saining. I realized that if I killed him, his goddamned friends would know it was me, and I wouldn’t be able to get away.

  I took the knife and started gouging holes in the car. Saining said, This isn’t my car. He glanced at the driver and added, And it’s not his car either! I made a cut in Saining’s arm. It was then that I realized there was blood on his face, and in his hair. I was crying, and then I was screaming and shouting. Saining yelled, Stop the car! He jumped out, pulled out my luggage, and then dragged me out of the car. He got back into the car, and as he was shutting the door, I said, Please don’t go! I’m still mad at you! But the car kept going.

  I finally calmed down. I thought that if I waited there long enough, he would come back, but I hailed a cab. I told the driver to take me to the airport. When we got there, the airport was completely dark. I said, Take me to the airport hotel.

  After checking into my hotel room, I drank every bottle of liquor in the minibar before going off to sleep in the bathroom.

  The next day I called up Sanmao’s girlfriend and asked her for Sanmao and Saining’s address in Beijing. I said, I want to kill Saining. Sanmao’s girlfriend asked me why I didn’t just call them up and ask for their address myself. I said, Because Saining knows I want to kill him, so I can’t let them know I’m coming. Sanmao’s girlfriend said that she didn’t know their address either, since she was just like me and never wrote letters but always phoned.

  I called Saining’s place. A stranger answered the phone. Nobody else was home. He said they’d all gone to do performance art. I asked, Where is it happening? He said, There’s one somewhere in Zhongguancun, one near Jianguo Gate, one in the Old City, and another one out near the airport. I said, Isn’t there another one at the Great Wall? That was yesterday, he said. Then he hung up.

  I set out from the airport, frantically searching for the performance. The immensity of Beijing made me reel, and as a woman, I wasn’t being treated with the respect I was used to.

  At nine-thirty that night I flew back south. The moment the plane became airborne, I stopped hating Saining and I remembered all the good things he’d done for me. His attraction for me was too strong to resist; loving him was a compulsion. I was just a pathetic and insecure little girl. The color of the nearing skies always blurred the colors that were right in front of me. I had nothing, I didn’t understand myself at all, and I was so pathetic. But how could I fight the desire I felt for this man? No matter how he treated me, I would stick by him; I would even die for him if it came to that.

  But where did that deranged woman I was the night before come from? What had happened? I really didn’t understand myself anymore.

  The airplane rose into the sky, and the more I thought, the more I worried. I realized that I had been in danger, that I had just had a very dangerous birthday.

  I went away for three weeks. While I was gone, a couple of girls from Nanjing named Cat and Kitten stayed at Saining’s and my apartment. I had met Kitten first. She and Cat had been friends since childhood. They both worked at the nightclub where I used to sing. Kitten was stubborn and haughty, and she had a quick temper. But when the two of us talked together, she came across as very gentle and sincere, naive even. I liked her a lot.

  Two days after I returned to the South, another friend of mine from Nanjing, Nanjing Noodles, came over to my place for dinner. She brought along her boyfriend, Luobu, who came from Chaozhou. Kitten and Cat were there too.

  After dinner, as I was carrying a huge pile of dishes to the kitchen, a pair of men barged in. They asked, Is Ah Jin here?

  Who’s Ah Jin? I asked.

  You know, Ah Jin. Ah Jin from Nanjing, they said.

  Kitten was watching the news, Cat was doing I don’t know what, and Nanjing Noodles and Luobu were in the bedroom listening to the radio.

  Kitten! Come here! I said. They’re looking for a guy from Nanjing named Ah Jin.

  No problem! Kitten said. I’ll take them to where he is.

  There was nothing in Kitten’s face to make me suspect that anything was wrong. I carried the dishes into the kitchen, but when I came back out I saw that there were now three strange men in my apartment, and they were all sitting on my sofa. Granted, none of them was older than twenty-one or twenty-two, they were all wearing clean T-shirts and black leather shoes that had been buffed and polished to a high shine, and each of them was carrying a black backpack, the kind that high school students use to carry their books.

  Ah Jin lives here, they asserted. He’s brought us over here before. We’ll just wait here until he shows up.

  Kitten and Cat were standing off to the side. Neither of them said anything.

  The apartment had two bedrooms and a living room. One of the bedroom doors was wide open. There were a few things stacked inside: speakers, guitars, an effects box, a violin, and a mattress. I shared the other bedroom with Saining. The door was closed. The light was on, and the radio was turned up loud, tuned to Channel 2 out of Hong Kong. Since Nanjing Noodles was also from Nanjing, I thought that she might know who this Ah Jin was. I shouted her name several times. The bedroom door opened, and Nanjing Noodles and Luobu came out grinning.

  Before I could even open my mouth, three foot-long butcher knives came whistling out of the three backpacks. Those three boys with their sharp knives ordered us all into the bedroom, where a song by the Hong Kong pop star Liu Dehua was blaring. With two of the knives trained on us four women and one man, the other knife boy began turning the bedroom upside down.

  They were speaking among themselves in Hunanese, and I got the impression that they were having some kind of disagreement. But I couldn’t figure out what had brought them here, what their purpose was—was it robbery, tracking down an enemy, rape, mutilation, kidnapping? Maybe it was all a mistake. As the knife tip danced in front of my face, every possible scenario flashed through my mind. The boy who was going through our stuff found the place where we kept our cash, and he found all of my jewelry, both real and fake, but none of this appeared to interest him or his cohorts in the least. He pulled out our identification papers and rifled through them. He even checked under the rug. I really couldn’t tell what they were after. Let them do whatever they want, I thought, just don’t let them cut our faces! I prayed to all of the gods and spirits, Please, please don’t let them cut us!

  One of these boys with knives came across a new package of stockings. He tore open the plastic bag and came up to me, a big smirk on his tough but babyish face. He said, These are yours, right, miss? But you haven’t worn them yet, so they’re clean.

  With that he pulled a pair of hose out of the bag and stuffed them into my mouth. Gesturing at the photograph of Saining and me, he asked, So that’s your longhaired boyfriend, huh? I thought, Damn him! Damn Saining! This was his fault! He’d gotten into some kind of trouble, and now these guys were here to take their revenge!

  They took those clean, unworn stockings, and one by one, they stuffed them into our mouths. Then, one at a time, they stripped us of our watches and jewelry. They were rough; they shoved us around. I started to whimper when they took off the necklace that my mother had given me and a ring and watch that Saining had given me.

  They took out a roll of wide packing tape and taped our mouths shut. Then they bound our hands with it and put us together and wrapped us up in a big circle. They were hitting Luobu, demanding between blows, What are you looking at, huh? What are you looking at?

  The five of us sat passively, staring blankly ahead. None of our eyes met.

  Finally they stuck pillows in between us to separate our bodies and threw a quilt over our heads, the same quilt Saining and I slept under. They strutted off and didn’t close the door.

  Luobu was the first to work free of his bonds. He yanked off the quilt covering our heads and pulled the nylons from Kitten’s mouth.

  Don’t worry about us right now! she yelled. Go after them! Catch them!

  Luobu did not
dare. Kitten scrambled out the second-story window.

  Nanjing Noodles and I couldn’t stop spitting. We couldn’t see Kitten or the robbers. There was nothing but the usual noisy activity in the street below. The street I lived on was famous, and tonight it was filled with the usual assortment of prostitutes, pimps, beggars, little girls selling flowers, police, vendors, passersby, and drug dealers.

  I spotted Dalong sitting on the ground in front of a small shop.

  Dalong was younger than I. He was an orphan, and his friends had brought him down here from Shanghai to be a pimp, but he’d set up a stall and sold kebabs, grilled quail, and roasted corn. Every night, Dalong came out here along with the prostitutes, and they plied their respective trades until dawn. He became good friends with the girls who worked the street. There was some secret ingredient that Dalong put in his meat skewers that made them addictive. Once, he was caught in the supermarket shoplifting some condoms for one of the girls, but fortunately I happened to be walking by just then and I paid his fine. I helped him out because I felt that his shish kebabs had real soul and that anyone who could make such wonderful food had to be a good person.

  Dalong! I shouted across the road. I’ve been robbed! Can you spot me twenty yuan right now? I need to go get a loan.

  Despite what I’d just been through, I felt great. I borrowed some more money from Sanmao’s girlfriend and went to the supermarket and bought a bunch of food. I didn’t think I’d be able to sleep much that night. I got home and found, for the second time that evening, several strange men sitting in my apartment. None of the lights were on, and nobody greeted me. Cat, Kitten, Nanjing Noodles, and Luobu were all still there.

  I heard someone say in Nanjing dialect, Shit, Nanjing people do the stupidest things! And then all of us lose face!

  I started sifting through our things. One of Saining’s acoustic guitars was gone. That guitar had been with Saining longer than any of his others, and I wasn’t sure how he would react when he found out it was missing. I started to feel upset.

  I made a call to Beijing. The phone rang and rang for a long time, but no one answered it. I hung up and called again. Still no one answered. I hung up again, then called right back. This time, after two rings, a woman with a lazy drawl picked up the line. Is Saining there? I asked. Who’s Saining? she said. He’s my boyfriend, I said. Who’s your boyfriend? she said. Who are you? I said. You have a lot of nerve! Don’t you have any manners? she countered. Listen, I said, just because I ask you who you are doesn’t mean that I don’t have any manners. She said, What’s it to you who I am? I said, Nothing, I hope. Otherwise, we have a problem.

  I hung up on her and sat on the bed sobbing and eating chocolate.

  Someone knocked on my bedroom door, and in walked a refined-looking young man in a ridiculous suit and white shoes. His hair was slicked back, his skin very pale.

  I’m Ah Jin, he said. Honestly, I didn’t have anything to do with what happened here earlier. I’m just as confused as you are.

  Get out, all of you! I said. This noise is killing me.

  They all left, and I got to work cleaning the place up.

  An hour or so later, Cat, Kitten, Nanjing Noodles, and Luobu came back. The moment she stepped inside, Kitten dropped down on her knees before me with a loud thud.

  I’m so, so sorry, she said. When you were gone, I brought some people over here, and there was obviously some kind of trouble among them. But they clearly knew our habits, the way they came and robbed us at seven o’clock at night. It’s all my fault.

  Don’t say that, I said soothingly. You were robbed too. I can’t blame you. Just forget about it, OK? Now, stand up!

  And the four of us women had a good cry together.

  There was something naggingly weird about the whole incident. Who was this Ah Jin, anyway?

  Ah Jin, it turned out, was a pimp, and the previous week at the New Capital Restaurant one of his girls had ripped off a client to the tune of more than 100,000yuan.

  No way! Some guy was walking around with 100,000yuan in his pockets? Why didn’t he drop it off at home first?

  Really, it’s the truth. The whole Nanjing crowd knows about it.

  Kitten and Cat started arguing loudly. When they got into arguments, they usually switched to Nanjing dialect, which drove me crazy.

  Forget it! I said. Let’s just forget about this whole mess. I don’t want to call the police, and neither of you has any proof, so what’s the point in reporting it? The truth is, I’m the one who screwed up. I didn’t realize what they were up to, and if I hadn’t called Nanjing Noodles out of the bedroom, and if the door to the bedroom had stayed shut the whole time, things could have been very different. From the moment they walked in the door, all those guys really wanted was to see who was inside that room, to see if there wasn’t some other thug in there.

  Kitten said, Actually, the moment they said they were looking for Ah Jin, I panicked. I just wanted to get them out of here. If I could lure them away, I wouldn’t have to be afraid of them anymore, because I knew there was a gang from Nanjing hanging out in the food stall downstairs.

  Things are pretty mixed up between me and Saining right now, I said. The last thing I want is for him to come back and find everything in such a mess. You two are going to have to stay out of trouble from now on.

  I’ve been wanting to go back to Nanjing for a long time, Cat said. But I was waiting until I’d made enough money.

  I don’t want to go home! put in Kitten. I just want to make lots of money!

  Oh, so that’s how you go about making money, is it? countered Cat. By stirring everything up. And to top it all off, you rip off your clients too.

  He insulted me, Kitten protested.

  The way we earn money is an insult to us all by itself, do you understand? Why can’t you just accept that you’re being paid to be humiliated?

  Kitten said, Fuck you! That bastard couldn’t pay me enough for that.

  The phone rang, and when I picked it up, the person on the other end of the line asked if she had reached such and such a number. A familiar voice and a familiar question. If some woman was always calling my house and saying she had the wrong number, I’d have to suspect that it wasn’t a wrong number at all, just the wrong person answering the phone: me. So this time I didn’t want to let her go so easily. I waited a moment before speaking and then I asked, So tell me, who are you? Maybe there was something menacing in my voice, because I sensed fear in the way she hurriedly hung up on me.

  After I’d hung up, I turned to Kitten and Cat.

  Would you two stop bickering! Tomorrow I’ll take you to a place where you can get jobs as salesgirls. You’ll be on commission. Try it out for a while. If they make you this bitchy, you should quit your hostess jobs. The worst mistake you can make is to think that you’re not qualified for anything except being a bargirl.

  The next day, I took Kitten and Cat to meet a man I knew, a man that I knew liked me. His name was Ji, and I figured that he could help me with this. We all had dinner together, and afterward I went home to get some sleep. Ji said he wanted to take the other girls to the seashore.

  Later that night I saw Kitten return home alone. She said that Cat had gone over to a friend’s house.

  First thing the next morning I got a phone call: my friend Ji had been robbed by my friend Cat.

  Cat had lured Ji into bed the same way she did her clients, and she had not only taken more than ten thousand yuan in cash, plus Ji’s watch and gold jewelry, but worse yet, she had stolen his good-luck charm. Ji said that a man only takes off his amulet at one time—when he’s having sex. Now he couldn’t go home and face his old lady, and he was going to have to spend his nights in a hotel. This was the first time I’d heard anything about Ji’s having a wife. But I felt responsible for getting him into this trouble. By and large, I only went to see Ji when I needed something from him, so I felt a little guilty toward him to begin with. Now I felt even more guilty. Finally, Ji tossed me two th
ousand Hong Kong dollars, saying, Fly up to Nanjing and see if you can find Cat and straighten things out!

  Once more, Kitten was begging me to forgive her. This time you can grovel all you want, I told her, but it won’t do you any good. There’s nothing I hate more than being lied to.

  I asked Kitten if she knew where Cat’s house was in Nanjing, and Kitten said she did.

  Then in that case she won’t go home, I said. Does she have a boyfriend in Nanjing?

  Yes, and she’s crazy about him. She only came down here to make some money for him.

  Does he ever go out? I asked.

  Sure.

  Does he have a favorite hangout?

  Yes. And I know where it is.

  Good. We’re going to Nanjing!

  I decided to go to Nanjing to find Cat, with Kitten guiding the way. After some thought, I concluded that it would be wise for us to bring a man along. Dalong said he’d go. We should settle this business, he said. We have to get Ji’s charm back. Let’s go tomorrow!

  As soon as we reached Nanjing, Dalong went to buy a knife. He said that we couldn’t be halfhearted about this; we had to show people we meant business, because if we didn’t, people wouldn’t take things seriously. Kitten said, You don’t need to buy a knife. She said there were plenty of knives at her place. But Dalong went for a walk and bought me a very nice charcoal-colored toy gun.

  I said, The girl has to be punished for what she did, and we’re going to do everything we can to get justice, but we can’t kill anyone. That scares me.

  It took us only a short time to find the restaurant, where an older guy in his thirties was having drinks. Kitten said that he was Cat’s boyfriend. I walked over to him.

  Where’s your girlfriend? I asked.

  The man didn’t answer.

  Dalong brought me a stool, and I sat down. I repeated my question, but the man still didn’t respond.

  Dalong was wearing some new clothes I’d just given him, but on Dalong even new clothes got filthy in no time. He had big eyes and thick eyebrows, but he was very skinny, emaciated even, and extremely soft-spoken. You could describe Dalong as sensitive and entirely lacking in self-confidence. From time to time, the man would cast a disdainful look in Dalong’s direction. Dalong was stung. I was furious.