by Tie Ning
She hated these women, hated them for treating Quan as a plaything because they had no other distractions. If they hadn’t gathered there to sew The Selected Works of Chairman Mao, they wouldn’t have seen Quan. If they hadn’t seen Quan, who at the time was shovelling dirt under a tree, they wouldn’t have called to her, and Quan wouldn’t have walked into the manhole. “Who are you to have called to my daughter like that? Who are you? How irresponsible you are! Do you treat your own grandchildren so recklessly? You didn’t even warn her! You … you …” She was hysterical and even fainted once at one of the old women’s houses. The old woman pressed down on the pressure point under her nose and blew cold water onto her face to wake her up. The neighbours didn’t like to hear those words from her, words that got harder and harder to listen to, but they understood how she felt and didn’t take offence. Besides, those old women did feel guilty about the incident. They hadn’t seen the open manhole in the middle of the road; they saw only the angelic little Quan flap her arms, run toward them, and then disappear suddenly. Not until her sudden disappearance from the earth did they notice that the manhole in her path was open and the cover had been moved to the side. So one of the old women told Wu, “The key issue is not the manhole in the road—the manhole has always been there. The question is who opened the manhole and why the cover was not moved back.”
The old woman’s words echoed Wu’s thoughts. She also believed the key issue was who could have been so evil as to remove the manhole cover. No one in the Design Academy admitted to having opened the manhole. According to the Academy’s revolutionary committee, none of the plumbers had worked on anything involving the manhole or sewage on that Sunday. Maybe it was some bad kid trying to cause trouble. Every complex had them, like the boy who tried to make Fan lick soap. They were children, not even in middle school yet, bent on imitating older hooligans—bad little kids always wanted to be bad big ones. She resented them the way she resented those old women who sewed The Selected Works of Chairman Mao, but where was the proof? If their purpose in lifting the manhole cover was to sell it to the scrap-collecting station for cigarettes, then why hadn’t they taken the cover away? The cover had been left beside the manhole. There was no evidence and nobody came forward to supply any.
In the quiet depths of the night, Wu often wept in the wide, empty bed, hugging to her the unfinished outfit of Quan’s she’d been working on that day. She would think that perhaps she shouldn’t have given birth to Quan. Why would she have given birth to her? Had she done it as a sort of memento of her relationship with Dr. Tang? Before Quan was born, Dr. Tang didn’t even know the child was his. Wu didn’t tell him, but she was sure the baby was his and she was willing to keep such a child in her life. The child would be a constant reminder of her secrets. She didn’t tell Dr. Tang, because she was afraid he would force her to go to the hospital to have an abortion. She knew intuitively that Dr. Tang didn’t really love her, and that her longing for him outweighed his need for her. The roots of that longing were mysterious to her. It seemed to be longing that drove her sexual desire, but then again laziness brought about her longing in the first place. Laziness allowed her to avoid many responsibilities but also prevented her from planning for the future in her relationship with others. Maybe even her so-called memento came from her laziness—she was too lazy to use birth control. As a married woman, she had such freedom in these matters, unlike an unmarried girl like Fei. While Fei was miserably gagged with gauze in the operating room late at night, Wu could walk into the ob-gyn in broad daylight to give birth to a child who was not her husband’s. How legitimate and righteous marriage was! How secretive and filthy marriage was! She sobbed and thought this might be what people called karma. It was the punishment that God sent her for conducting her life so badly and shirking her responsibilities. She’d decided on her own, and audaciously, to give birth to Quan. She brought Quan into this world recklessly, and did she really think it had been for the child’s benefit? Everything was like a dream, starting with the sick leave and ending with Quan’s disappearance, which should put an end to her relationship with Dr. Tang. Only now did she truly dare to take a close look at her family, to consider her loved ones. She had been afraid of looking at her family, of thinking about them. And always she had been more afraid of her daughter Tiao than of her husband. She was certain that nothing escaped Tiao’s eyes. The child could turn the world upside down when she thought it necessary.
But who could say that Yixun hadn’t picked up the scent of her infidelity? In the last two years, he rarely came home except on holidays and during the change of seasons in spring and autumn. If Tiao and Fan complained, he would just say the farm was busy and it was difficult to get leave. When Wu sent him a telegram informing him of Quan’s birth, he didn’t come back until a week later. Wu had spent a lot of time thinking about this telegram. Her original impulse was not to have Yixun around when she was in labour. It would be too difficult for Yixun and too disrespectful to him. Even though he probably did not know anything, she still didn’t want to take the risk. She would rather have no one close by and simply welcome the baby on her own. It would seem odd, though, to give birth all by herself, like an admission that there was ambiguity and deception involved in having the child, an admission that she lacked the courage to let the baby face the man whom she called husband. She wouldn’t let that happen. Muddling through, if at all possible, was the guiding principle of her life. So she had sent a telegram to the Reed River Farm. She sent the telegram, but he took his time in arriving. His delay was enough to make her wonder, but at the time she didn’t even have the courage to wonder. She just kept moving. When he arrived, she leaned back to the head of the bed and pulled up the quilt that covered her body, and then she picked up a glass from the nightstand and swallowed a few gulps of tea. Moving could relieve nervousness sometimes, so she kept moving. Finally, she reached under the covers for Quan and presented the baby to Yixun, who was standing beside the bed.
She never knew how Yixun reacted when he first saw Quan, because she’d kept her eyes cast down the whole time. She’d just lowered her eyes and, steadily, in her outstretched hands, held the baby for Yixun to see—she wanted him to accept her child. If only he had taken the child from her hands, then her heart would have been at peace. But he didn’t. On the contrary, he backed off a step. He withdrew his extended hands and slid them into his pockets—he was also fidgeting; he also needed to relieve his nerves by moving. Then he said without looking at her, “I’d better wash my hands. I was on the bus all day and dust got everywhere.”
He stayed at home only one night and returned to the farm.
So, who could say that Yixun didn’t know anything?
It was time to put an end to things.
This expression very much appealed to her now. One person’s death had made her understand that there were things in life that she needed to end. With this thought in mind, she went to People’s Hospital to see Dr. Tang. For once, arriving at those two first-floor rooms, she didn’t go directly to the inner room but took a seat in the waiting room, and Dr. Tang immediately knew why Wu had come.
They had never discussed Quan’s paternity. Dr. Tang hadn’t been to Wu’s home since Quan’s birth. But Quan didn’t stop growing and changing because Dr. Tang wasn’t around. Soon all those features that obviously belonged to the Tang family started to show in her. She had so quickly grown very different from Tiao and Fan. How little Quan looked like her surprised even Wu. The child’s appearance didn’t leave any room for doubt in the adults, the families, and the society in which she would have to live. So, when she was a year old, Wu brought her to People’s Hospital to meet Dr. Tang. It was a meeting that did not reveal anything new. Between Wu and Dr. Tang no curtain needed to be drawn back: Dr. Tang’s heart was as clear as glass when he looked at this baby with the curly brown hair who stared at him with little dark eyes. He seemed somewhat surprised and confused, taking Quan in his arms, slightly embarrassed and a little excited.
He must have wanted to kiss her but clearly didn’t dare put his lips close to her face. With a lump in his throat, he asked, “What is her name?”
“Her name is Quan.”
“Which character for Quan?”
“The character for grass on top, and the one for completion below—Quan, meaning heavenly grass.”
He paused, and then asked, “The character for grass above and completion underneath?”
She said, “Yes. Doesn’t the character for Fei also have the character for grass?”
It was already too obvious, so they both stopped talking. Besides, she didn’t want to discuss anything; she’d just wanted to bring Quan here for him to see.
For this, Dr. Tang was grateful to Wu. He had always been grateful that she let him avoid responsibility towards her and now was even more grateful to be relieved of responsibility towards this child of theirs. Because she’d permitted him this escape, he didn’t have to feel nervous and could just relax, which had allowed him to enjoy sex with her. This was the real reason he needed her. In such repressive times, a woman like Wu could provide someone of his family and social background a warm bed in secret to soothe his anxiety and despair. By this stroke of sheer luck, she helped him maintain a relatively healthy balance between body and mind. They both knew the good days wouldn’t last, which didn’t mean they could have predicted Quan’s death. Unlike Wu, Dr. Tang was not shocked that Quan lived for only two years, and he didn’t mourn deep or long, either. He had been involved with a shorter life than Quan’s—in his niece Fei’s abortion. He didn’t consider his pessimism about the lives in the Tang family as cruel. In fact, he had predicted long ago that they would live to suffer, just as with his sister Jingjing’s miserable death, or his niece Fei’s plight, or the awkward life he was living himself. No one had ever understood what was in his heart, and this woman named Wu in particular didn’t understand.
Now as he looked at Wu in the chair, her face bloated by grief at Quan’s death, the creases at the corners of her mouth, and the strands of grey showing in her dark hair, he couldn’t help feeling a surge of compassion. He heard what she said about not seeing each other anymore, and he agreed that they should stop. So filled with compassion was he for her that he felt he had to embrace her and remove all her clothes. Compassion can excite a man sometimes. At that moment it wasn’t that he wanted to have her, but rather that he wanted her to have him, to have him one more, final time.
But she didn’t cooperate, and it was no show of refusal but genuine rejection. Here was a situation unfamiliar to Dr. Tang; he was accustomed to her eagerness to please, to her taking the initiative, to her undisguised sexual desire, and to her body’s consummate ripeness. Her current passive resistance gave Dr. Tang a powerful erection. He held her, trying to pull her into the inner room, and she grabbed hold of the door frame, stubbornly refusing to enter. He then shifted direction, dragging her to the bathroom. He dragged her in and locked the door. She struggled in his arms and begged him with her sad eyes, Don’t do this. Please don’t. Her sad eyes touched him and also stimulated him. The more he felt compassion for her, the more he wanted to bully her. He couldn’t stop. While holding her stiff body, he stood in the bathroom and began to masturbate, jerking himself off so violently that it all ended quickly. His violent motion, his strange, low, husky moaning, and his ejaculation had no effect on Wu at all. She just wanted to go home as soon as she could.
3
One day in autumn, late autumn, when Quan was only a year old, Yixun came home from the Reed River Farm for the change of season. He got off the bus and ran into Tiao and Fan, just back from grocery shopping, at the entrance of the Design Academy. He hardly noticed what Tiao carried in her hand but immediately fixed on a string of garlic that hung around Fan’s neck. It was fairly long, circling Fan’s neck like a boa or a scarf, with two ends dangling over her knees. Her little neck leaned forward, weighed down by the garlic, but she was all happy and smiling. Yixun thought she must have asked to have the garlic on her neck herself because she’d seen the photograph of the former first lady Wang Guangmei being denounced. In the picture, Wang Guangmei is forced to wear a necklace of ping-pong balls, so long that it almost drags on the ground. You love to wear necklaces? Then let’s put one on you. Fan’s garlic necklace instantly reminded Yixun of the photo of Wang Guangmei in the huge necklace, and maybe something else as well. In any case, he was very sad, and felt a sharp pain, as if glass had suddenly shattered into pieces that flew into his heart, violently slicing it apart. He could think of nothing in the world more embarrassing than his daughter having a string of garlic around her neck. Her happy face in the autumn wind just added more to his distress at the embarrassing image, the echo of the humiliation of the former first lady.
Fan caught sight of Yixun first. “Dad,” she cried out, and ran right to him, the garlic necklace bouncing on her chest. She ran up to Yixun and dove into his arms, and he immediately took the garlic from her neck. Then Tiao ran over. She said, “Dad, why have you only come back now?”
“Why have you only come back now?” In the sentence Yixun heard complaint and anticipation, and maybe other things. But she had never talked about other things, or Yixun didn’t want to hear her talk about them. In a family with dignity, there was no room for “other things,” no matter how profoundly someone in this family was shamed, or how deeply the person suffered.
After Quan’s birth, Yixun became painfully aware of Wu and Dr. Tang’s relationship. He had tried to convince himself, trusting to his luck, that what he sensed and suspected might not be happening, but Quan’s birth completely destroyed his illusion. He spent a lot of lonely time thinking hard as he attended the tedious study group meetings, hauled bricks on the big cart, or walked in the solemnity of the boundless reeds outside the farm. The humiliation that was most difficult for a man, he swallowed, tolerating the ugly things that Wu did with extraordinary willpower and without once directly confronting her. Not all of this could be attributed to Yixun’s desire to save face, nor was it simply a mark of the low social status of his whole generation. Love for appearances makes someone more intolerant of being shamed, and low status makes it even more likely to have resentful anger flare. Maybe Yixun’s upbringing didn’t instruct him in beating a woman, and his anthropologist father and his mother, who had studied oil painting with the famous Liu Haili, respected each other all their lives. Maybe there was also his pride, which earned him some reputation in the Beijing Architectural Design Academy. One year, Yixun was nominated for the model worker award, but he turned down the honour because he thought the other two nominees were unqualified. He refused to set foot in the same river with them. Time could dim his pride but not extinguish it. Was it because he was so proud that he refused to lower himself by reasoning with Wu? Things might not be that simple. For now, faced with this troubled family of his, or the troubles in his family, he would bide his time. His avoidance might have had something to do with his pride, but it didn’t mean that he would simply let everything go. A shadow had already crept into his heart and things wouldn’t be easily remedied. His brain didn’t stay idle for a minute, which caused his stubborn insomnia. Still, he insisted on not confronting Wu. As he understood her, he was certain if he asked directly, she would confess everything. Maybe she had prepared long ago to be interrogated by him, and maybe she was looking forward to it day and night. Interrogation would be more acutely painful than the silence between them: Come on, Yixun, scold me all you want or beat me as hard as you can. Why are you such a coward? Dealing with reticence requires strong nerves, which Wu didn’t have. She was about to lose her mind because of Yixun’s silent treatment. So Yixun refused to ask. As long as he persisted, he would have the upper hand; never asking meant he would have the upper hand forever. He didn’t want her to talk, and he was not ready to listen—what husband would want to listen to his wife talk about things like that?
Then Quan died.
Quan’s death suddenly freed his tightly-
bound heart. Sometimes he felt guilty that his heart could be eased at such a moment. If his soul ever had to answer to God, he would rather he had never had this release, but he couldn’t fool himself.
This time he came home quickly, rushing back overnight. When he saw Wu, he found her with eyes swollen from weeping, yet she wouldn’t risk showing too much grief. Guilt and shame made her hold back her tears in front of him. Right then, he discovered the perfect way to express his feelings. He would exhibit the sadness that Wu was afraid to show, display the sorrow that Wu worked hard to suppress. Why shouldn’t he grieve as if he were Quan’s real father? So he asked Tiao to describe Quan’s death in Wu’s presence, over and over again, and asked questions afterwards.
“Tiao, you said you had been sitting in front of the building reading the whole time. Was your main responsibility that day to watch Quan or read a book?”
“It was to watch Quan.”
“Then why did you only tend to your reading?”
“I didn’t expect she would walk so far away.”
“Why didn’t you expect her to walk so far? She had the use of her legs.”
“I meant she usually didn’t walk that far.”
“How far did she usually walk?”
“She just stayed around the building.”
“How far is ‘around’?”
“I have never measured. I don’t know.”
“Who should know these things—does your mother know?” He brought Wu into it.
“My mother wasn’t there.”
