by Ha Jin
My business had grown too big for me to travel to the South frequently, so I contracted with a garment factory in Dan Yang County, near Shanghai: they would make stylish clothes for me and have them shipped to my company. I stopped retailing and started wholesaling. This was much easier for me, and my profits soon tripled. Five months ago I rented my own office and warehouse and hung a lacquered sign on the front door that says: NEW CLOTHING INC.
Then one day my former matchmaker came and asked if I was still interested in Manshan. Of course I was. This time Mrs. Pan begged the old woman to help her daughter, saying, “I always knew in my heart that Liu Feng is a very able man.” I felt overjoyed and confused at the same time. The girl used to treat me like a bedbug, why would she deliver herself this way? Just because I was rich now?
We agreed to meet on the Songhua River that Saturday. On Friday afternoon I took a hot bath in Three Springs Bathhouse and had a haircut in there. I didn’t sleep well that night, possessed by a sensation that knotted my chest and stomach, and I couldn’t help murmuring the girl’s name as if she were with me. Even the air I breathed felt like it was burning me inside.
The riverbank was full of people on Saturday morning, a whole school of children singing their school song and waiting for ferryboats there. I rented a dinghy before Manshan showed up.
She came, almost a different girl, in a black silk dress and a perm. She looked prettier. I was amazed that she didn’t seem afraid of me at all, as though we’d been dating for years. She smiled, whispering, “You look like a gentleman.”
Her words surprised me, because no one had ever called me that, and I didn’t know what to say, wondering if I’d really changed so much. I had on denim shorts, a topee, and a pair of sunglasses. How could I remind her of a gentleman?
We paddled across the main channel and moored at a small island in the middle of the river. I felt dizzy as the sun was blazing on us. Sitting on the white sand, I saw the city across the water appear smaller—the concrete buildings looked like toy houses, as smokestacks at the paper mill were spitting greenish fumes. Along the other shore, parasols were bobbing a little like clusters of mushrooms. The breeze was warm and fishy.
Manshan said timidly, “Do you still hate me?”
I didn’t know how to answer, puzzled by the question. My heart was racing. She was so pretty—elegant, I should say. A bang of hair curved on her smooth forehead, and her nose was so straight and so high that it looked like sculpture. Her buckteeth propped up her lip a little, but to me, her teeth were also beautiful. I stretched out my hand, stroking her cheek and small ear, wondering if this slender girl sitting beside me was the same person I’d followed so many times from the night college to the dark alley.
With her toes she pried her white sandals off and buried her feet in a small pile of sand. “Do you still hate me?” she asked again without raising her head.
“Stop that!” I snapped. Somehow the question troubled me. A wind passed by, throwing up waves on the river like endless tiles.
I hooked my arm around her shoulder; to my amazement, she didn’t turn away. Instead she was peering at me, her eyes moonstruck and her pointed chin so exquisite that I almost wanted to bite it. As my mouth moved to touch her lips, my heart began jumping and my hands grew bolder.
She didn’t resist me and merely said she was afraid of getting pregnant. That was what I wanted. I thought that if she got my baby, she’d never leave me. So I told her, “That will be good. I’ll take care of you and the baby. I love kids. Don’t be scared.”
So on our first date I secured our union, but I wasn’t very happy. The whole thing had been too easy, easier than swimming across the river. I was disappointed to some extent. Manshan seemed no longer like the girl who had always made me feel so humble and so unworthy.
A month later we got married. After the wedding the Pans sold their small house and moved into my apartment. I bought a lot of expensive things for my bride, like a ring, a diamond wristwatch, fourteen pairs of leather shoes and boots, a Flying Horse moped, six pairs of earrings, and a gold necklace. In fact, I got thirty gold necklaces, all twenty-four-karat, and put them into a porcelain jar, which I sealed and then buried under a linden in the small park behind our apartment building. I may lose everything at any time; the city can confiscate my business and savings just by issuing an order, so I’d better hide some wealth away. Because nobody is allowed to buy gold bars, which are under the state’s control, I bought those expensive necklaces and buried them away, even though I knew I might never be able to sell them if I need money. If I’m turned into a capitalist—a reactionary element of our society—who would dare to buy anything from me?
Manshan has become a business partner of mine. Now that she works on the train to Shanghai, she directly brings back some expensive goods, which can be ruined by the postal service. Also, this saves time and expenses—we don’t have to pay for the shipping fee and the insurance. I give her thirty percent of the profits made from what she helps bring back. She seems happy and looks even younger, like a teenager. But her youthful face bothers me, because I want her to be the mother of my children. For some reason I can’t get her pregnant, no matter how hard I try. I don’t know what to do and dare not go to the hospital to check it out, afraid to lose her if it turns out to be my problem. In our neighborhood there used to be a college teacher whose sperm couldn’t crack his wife’s eggs, so she left him for a sailor. She desperately wanted to be a mother. Sometimes I can’t help wondering whether Manshan is on the pill, but so far I haven’t found any evidence.
I still hate my mother-in-law. Her pumpkin face often reminds me of a banker’s wife I saw in a movie about the old Shanghai. One night I got drunk and slapped her, but she didn’t tell her daughter about it. Since I became her son-in-law, she’s been so patient that she never loses her temper. In the morning, when Manshan is not home, I often light a few banknotes in her mother’s presence to kindle the kerosene stove, which has twelve wicks. But she’s never angry. I feel that her calmness means she despises me.
I read in Law and Democracy the other day that an entrepreneur in Henan Province had slept with both his wife and her mother in the same bed to revenge his humiliation—the mother had called him “hooligan” when he was a butcher, but later when he founded his own chicken farms and became a rich man, she had given him her daughter. I wish I could do the same to my old bitch of a mother-in-law, but for the time being I must work harder on giving Manshan a baby.
Flame
A letter was lying on Nimei’s desk. She was puzzled because the envelope did not give a return address. The postmark showed the letter came from Harbin, but she knew nobody in that city. She opened the envelope, and the squarish handwriting looked familiar to her. She turned to the end of the letter to see who the sender was. As she saw the name Hsu Peng, her heart began palpitating, and a surge of emotion overcame her. She had not heard from him for seventeen years.
He wrote that through an acquaintance of his he had learned that Nimei worked at the Central Hospital. How glad he was that he had at last found her. He was going to attend a conference at the headquarters of Muji Military Sub-Command at the end of September. “For old time’s sake,” he said, “I hope you will allow me to visit you and your family.” Without mentioning his wife, he told Nimei that he had three children now—two girls and one boy—and that he was the commissar of an armored division garrisoned in the suburbs of Harbin. In the bottom left-hand corner of the second page, he gave her the address of his office.
Nimei locked the letter away in the middle drawer of her desk. She glanced across the office and saw nobody, so she stretched up her arms. Again a pain tightened the small of her back, and she let out a moan.
It was already early September. If she would like to meet Hsu Peng, she should write him back soon, but she was unsure why he wanted to see her.
The door opened and Wanyan, a young nurse, came in. “Nimei,” she said, “the patient in Room 3 wants to see you.
”
“What happened?” she asked in alarm.
“I’ve no idea. He only wants to see the head nurse.”
The patient in Room 3 was the director of the Cadre Department at the Prefecture Administration; he had been operated on for gastric perforation two weeks ago. Although he no longer needed special care, he had to remain on a liquid diet for at least another week. Nimei got up and walked to the door while slipping on her white robe. She stopped to pat her bobbed hair, then went out.
When she arrived at Room 3, the patient was sitting in bed, his shoulders hunched over a magazine, a marking pencil between his fingers. “Director Liao, how are you today?” Nimei asked pleasantly.
“Fine.” He put the magazine and the pencil on the bedside cabinet, on which stood two scarlet thermoses and four white teacups with landscapes painted on their sides.
“Did you have a good nap?” she asked, resting her hand on the brass knob of a bedpost.
“Yes, I slept two hours after lunch.”
“How is your appetite?”
“My appetite is all right, but I’m tired of the liquid stuff.”
She smiled. “Rice porridge and egg-drop soup don’t taste very good.”
“They’re not bad, but it’s hard to eat them every day. Can I have something else for a change?”
“What would you like?”
“Fish—a soup or a stew.”
Nimei looked at her wristwatch. “It’s almost four. It may be too late for today, but I’ll go and tell the kitchen manager.”
Director Liao thanked her, though he didn’t look happy, his thick-lidded eyes glinting as the muscle of his face suddenly hardened. Nimei noticed it, but she pretended she had seen nothing. Although one of the hospital leaders had informed her that the nurses should show special attention to Liao, she didn’t bother too much about him. There were too many other patients here. From the sickroom she went directly downstairs to the kitchen and told the manager to have a fish stew made for the patient the next day. Meanwhile, her mind couldn’t help thinking of Hsu Peng’s letter. She returned to the office, took it out of the drawer, and read it again before she left for home.
Walking along Peace Avenue, she was thinking of Hsu Peng. On the street, dozens of trucks and tractors traveled north or south, transporting lumber, cement, pupils, tomatoes, pumpkins. Even the vehicles’ blasting horns and the explosive snarls of their exhaust pipes couldn’t interrupt Nimei’s thoughts. Her mind had slipped into the quagmire of the past. She and Hsu Peng had been in love once. That was seventeen years ago, in her home village. After her father had died of tetanus, contracted in an accident at the village quarry, many matchmakers came to see her mother, intending to persuade her to marry off Nimei inexpensively. The widow, however, declined their offers, declaring that her daughter had already given her heart to a man. Most people believed her, because they often saw Jiang Bing, a young mess officer from the nearby barracks, visit her house on weekends. Each time, he’d arrive with a parcel under his arm, which the villagers knew must contain tasty stuff from the army’s kitchen. Behind dusty windowpanes numerous eyes would observe this small man appear at dusk, as though he were a deity of sorts, knowing the secret of abundance and harvest.
The villagers were hungry. Two years in a row, floods had drowned most of their crops. Dozens of people had died of dropsy in the village, where wails often burst out like cock-a-doodle-doos in broad daylight. So people thought Nimei a lucky girl, as she was going to marry an officer with infinite access to food.
Indeed, Nimei had lost her heart to a man, but he was not the mess officer. In secret she had been meeting Hsu Peng on the bank of Snake Mouth Reservoir on Tuesday afternoons, when she was off work from the commune’s clinic. He was a platoon leader and had graduated from high school—much better educated than most of the army men. Later, when her mother urged her to marry Jiang Bing, Nimei opposed her wish, saying she hardly knew him. She revealed to her that she loved another man, also an officer, but her mother was adamant and gruffed, “What’s love? You’ll learn how to love your man after you marry him. I never even met your father before our wedding.”
Nimei showed her mother a photograph of Hsu Peng and begged her to meet the platoon leader in person, hoping his good manners and manly looks might help dissuade her, but her mother refused. Meanwhile, the small mess officer came at least twice a week, as though he had become a part of the family. Every Saturday evening the widow expected to see him and find out what he had brought. Sometimes his parcel contained a braised pig’s foot, sometimes a bunch of dried mushrooms, sometimes a string of raw peanuts, sometimes two or three pounds of millet or sorghum. While most cauldrons in the village had rusted because there was little to cook, and while hundreds of people had faces bloated like white lanterns because they had eaten too many locust blossoms, Nimei and her mother never went without. Their chimney puffed out smoke on Sunday mornings, the fragrance of food drifting away from their yard, and children would gather along the high fence to sniff the delicious air.
Fully content, the widow was determined to give her daughter to Jiang Bing. One evening she wept, begging Nimei, “You must marry this man who can save us!” Out of pity and filial duty, the daughter finally yielded.
When she told Hsu Peng that she could not disobey her mother and had to marry the other man, he spat a willow leaf to the ground and said with a ferocious light in his eyes, “I hate you! I’ll get my revenge.”
She turned and ran away, tears stinging her cheeks in the autumn wind. Those were his last words for her.
Nimei had been married to Jiang Bing for sixteen years, and had left the countryside when he was demobilized, but she had never forgotten Hsu Peng’s angry words and his maddened, lozenged eyes. At night, awake and lonesome, she’d wonder where Hsu Peng was and what he was like. Was his wife kind-hearted and pretty? Did he still serve in the army? Had he forgotten her?
Despite thinking of him often, she had dreamed of him only twice. Once he appeared in her dream as a farmer raising hundreds of white rabbits; he looked robust and owned a five-room house with a red tiled roof. In her other dream he was gray-mustached and bald, teaching geography in an elementary school, spinning a huge globe. Afterward she was a little saddened by his aged appearance. But who wouldn’t change in seventeen years? Her own body was thick and roundish now, the shape of a giant date stone. There was no trace of her slender waist, admired so much by the girls in her home village. Her chin had grown almost double, and she wore glasses. What hadn’t changed was her sighing and murmuring in the small hours when her husband wheezed softly on the other bed in their room. What remained with her were Hsu Peng’s last words, which had somehow grown more resonant in her mind each year.
“Want some tea?” Jiang Bing asked Nimei.
“Yes.” She was lying on her bed with both hands under her neck. The room still smelled musty, though the windows had been open since she came home two hours ago.
“Here you are.” He put a cup of tea on the glass tabletop and walked out with a stoop. He went back to their daughter’s room to help her prepare for language and chemistry exams. The girl had not passed the admission test for business school the previous year, so this fall she would take exams for nursing school. In the living room, Nimei’s mother and her eleven-year-old son, Songshan, were watching TV, which was showing a kung fu movie made in Hong Kong. Their hearty laughter and the bleating music echoed through the house. Outside, a pair of caged grasshoppers were chirping languidly under the eaves, and the night air smelled of boiled corn and potato.
Why does Hsu Peng want to see me? Nimei wondered. Didn’t he hate me? Even if he no longer hates me, surely he must hate my mother and Jiang Bing. It’s good that they have never met. Why is he eager to visit me and my family after so many years? Does this mean he still has feelings for me? Eager to fan the old flame? If he knew what I look like now . . .
She turned from side to side, wondering about Hsu Peng’s motivation but unable to g
uess. Then a thought, which had lurked at the back of her mind, came to the fore. Hadn’t he said he was a divisional commissar? He must be a general, a VIP. Did this mean he was going to flaunt his high rank in her face? Always so imposing, he hadn’t changed.
The image of such an important officer’s presence in her shabby house troubled her. In her mind’s eye she saw a brand-new jeep parked by their front gate. While the commissar sat inside the house, his chauffeur and bodyguards chatted noisily with the men and children from the neighborhood who gathered around the vehicle. This was awful, too shameful for her to stand. Her own husband was merely a senior clerk in the General Service Section of the hospital, his civilian rank equal at most to a battalion commander’s. If only Jiang Bing had held a position one or two ranks higher. Such a useless man.
On the other hand, Hsu Peng’s presence in her house could produce a positive effect. After he left, she would reveal to her mother who this general was. His visit would impress the old woman and make her understand what an unforgivable mistake she had made in forcing Nimei to marry Jiang Bing. It was time to teach the crone a lesson, so as to restrain her from nagging incessantly.
Without telling anybody, Nimei wrote Hsu Peng back the next day, saying she and her family would be glad to receive him. She gave him her home address, including the directions, and proposed a tentative date. She even wrote, “For old time’s sake, please come to see me. I miss you.” On the lavender envelope she pasted a special stamp, issued to celebrate Youth Day, on which a young man tapped a tambourine and kicked the heels of his boots while a girl whirled around, her head thrown back, her numerous braids flying.
At noon, Nimei observed her face in the bathroom mirror on the third floor of the medical building. Gazing at her dim, myopic eyes, she sighed, wiping her glasses with a piece of tissue. Somebody flushed a toilet in a stall, the throaty noise drowning out the mechanic hum of the ventilators. You have to do something about yourself, she thought. Remember to dye your hair. Also, you must lose some weight. You look puffy.
