by Tie Ning
“What is your name?”
“My name is Tang Fei.”
“Maybe you’ll have a chance later,” he said.
“Later? How much later?” Fei pressed without giving him a break.
“Maybe next year. Maybe—”
“Next year won’t do. It’ll be too late,” Fei interrupted Master Qi. “As soon as I graduate in spring, I’ll definitely have to go to the countryside.” Now her tone became impatient, as if she were talking to an old acquaintance.
“Fei.” He said her name sharply. “Can’t your family—your parents—help you out?”
It was a blunt but sensible question, and Fei didn’t mind Master Qi asking. Actually, his question provided her the opportunity to open her heart to him, so she said both of her parents, who had been high-ranking journalists for the central government, had lost their lives in an aeroplane crash while on a mission abroad. She had no choice but to come to live with her uncle in Fuan, who was a blind man working as a masseur at a hospital for traditional medicine and couldn’t even take care of himself. Her aunt took out her anger on her, treating her to curses, if not actual beatings, every day. Ai, she, the orphan of the martyrs, couldn’t bear such a life under someone else’s roof, but she had no other relatives in this city, and to whom could she turn? Then she heard about the recruiting and saw Master Qi, whom she felt was her only hope. How she wanted to be able to make Master Qi family. She really wanted to call him “big brother.” Without siblings, orphaned, how she’d hoped to have an older brother. Now it looked like there was no hope for her—she was utterly unwanted in the world, and would rather throw herself into the river and drown than continue living.
Tearfully, she spoke these words into the harsh, chilly northern wind, running down to the riverbank as she spoke. It didn’t seem false when she said those false words and shed those false tears; it was self-mockery, delivered in a weary burst. Running down the slope, she heard him pursue her. He was touched by her words, by her tender, pitiful expression. When he dropped his bicycle, ran down the bank after her, and grabbed her waist from behind, she preferred to believe that he had no other thoughts, that he was intent only on saving a girl’s life. She knew she was securely in his grasp but still pretended to struggle. Naturally, he pulled her more tightly to his chest, so their bodies swayed and they stumbled, holding each other as they fell to the ground on the dark riverbank.
They lay on their sides on the slope. He felt her turn around to face him and burrow into his chest, melting her body into his. Woodenly, not daring to breathe, he held her, unsure how all this had happened. Never had he experienced anything like it, and never had he been less inclined to take advantage of a situation. But why had she pressed herself so tightly into him? He felt the heat of her breath in the dark, and smelled the faintly sour scent. Thinking about her full soft lips, he closed his eyes; he desperately wanted to kiss her, and that was all he wanted. He turned his head searching for her mouth, but she did all she could to avoid his kiss. This made him think that it wouldn’t work, that nothing was going to happen with her. Her melting into him was not seduction but … a subconscious desire for protection. As he considered this, he stopped trying for her lips and calmed down a little. What he ought to do now was pull her to her feet, climb up the bank, and send her home. He let go of her and stood, but she pulled him back down by her, so they rolled together again. Eagerly, almost sobbing, she said to him, “Let me take off my clothes for you. I’ll take them off now, now …”
Blood rushed to his head, and his body felt uncomfortable because of the pressure. The behaviour of this teenage high school girl was incomprehensible to him—why she didn’t want his kisses but was willing to … willing to … The vision of her as she stood in front of the bike shop came to him, such a contradiction to what she appeared to be now. Innocence and conspiracy, naïveté and debauchery, seemed to coexist in her. He really couldn’t think anymore, or control the overwhelming desire she had forced on him, and he didn’t want to lose this opportunity that seemed to arrive from outer space. He took off his coat and spread it on the slope, and then he picked Fei up and set her on the still-warm coat …
Two weeks later, Master Qi managed to get Fei a recruiting form. During the political background check, her story about her family turned out to be so much hot air. Master Qi didn’t despise her for this, but on the contrary felt more sympathetic towards her. Even though she’d lied to him about some matters, he still felt guilty about her. He often thought if what they had done on the river slope hadn’t happened, his helping her would have been innocent and simple, and therefore beautiful. Unfortunately, he hadn’t controlled himself. It wasn’t something that he regretted; he just felt a little sad when he thought about it. He did his best to help her, getting her, a girl with virtually no hope of staying in the city, a job at the famous state-run factory as a foundry worker. Unfortunately, it wasn’t a good job. His influence could only reach so far, and Fei was assigned to the dirtiest, most tiring workshop in the factory.
Foundry apprentice Fei bought Dr. Tang a pair of fashionable nylon gloves with her first paycheck. She also gave Tiao and Youyou a factory tour, and got them some treats at her bachelor’s dormitory. She got them fried sugar dough, and two jin of them were polished off in a blink of the eye. “No big deal,” she bragged, “I’ll get some more in a minute. I have money. I’m a person with a salary.” She took out a small purse, woven out of light purple glass strands. As she flourished the purse, Tiao saw the tears that stood in her beautiful eyes.
5
It was in Chen Zai’s study that Tiao got to know Balthus. When Tiao discovered an album of paintings by Balthus, she and Chen Zai had already been close friends for a long time. She could see that Balthus was an important painter to Chen Zai, but it was just like Chen Zai never to impose his opinions on Tiao. He was usually modest, even shy, when he spoke about the things that meant a lot to him. This was one way he expressed his respect for his beloved.
Tiao happened on the album of Balthus’s paintings and opened it. Immediately she was taken by him. His subjects were actually very mundane: several groups of passersby walking an old commercial street in Paris; some children playing cards and strategizing in a living room, and girls reading books or in a sound sleep; a band of hikers with blank expressions and dull eyes, who’d originally come to savour the boundless vista from the mountain peak, but after the ascent became lethargic, swaying and unable to stand, none of them appreciating the scenery, and one even collapsing into sleep. He especially liked to paint young girls. The girls in his paintings—he seemed very particular about their age—are all around fourteen. Balthus rendered their skin with luster and remarkable softness. They are innocent and clean, their bodies blossoming with a mixture of some desire, a bit of fantasy, a little portion of serenity, along with a small measure of unpredictability.
Tiao had never seen work by a painter like him: his characters seemed completely three-dimensional, but the backgrounds—sofa, street, bed, and desk—were often flat. It was through this combination that he created paintings as thick as a wall. In a painting that seemed solid and stable, those images—either flat and straight or slanted, curled, or stretched—created different rhythms and moods, which echoed the painter’s internal rhythms. There was risk in the stability, restraint in the flow, closure in the openness, strangeness and the eternal in the dailiness, and a stillness that also harboured anxiety. The viewer felt both at peace and uneasy, a vague tenderness along with panic, even when faced with the girls asleep on the sofa—because Balthus made people feel there was conspiracy lurking around the girls. And there was indeed always the hint of it—a tiny skinny black cat, or a midget twisting his neck and pulling open the window curtain—but viewers were spared panic by Balthus’s graceful sense of restraint, which eventually helped the audience find a true balance—a lovely balance—between art and the zeitgeist and a strangeness that was completely convincing.
Balthus used traditionally
concrete visual language, and the objects he chose to work with couldn’t have been more ordinary. He didn’t want to find his materials in the surreal, and he made use of reality in an honest, straightforward, but extraordinary way. His reality seemed superficial but was actually profound, seemed like one thing but was actually another, had the appearance of being ordinary but laid snares everywhere. He had probably long understood that there was no such thing as “right” and “wrong” in art and that an artist should never presume to become an “inventor.” In art, “invention” is fairly suspect, a nonsense word. Rodin says, “Originality—in the most positive meaning—is not about making up new words that contradict common sense; it’s about using the old words cleverly. Old words are sufficient to express everything; to a genius, the old words are more than enough.”
For an artist to add a little something new of his own to the tradition would be a very great achievement. Such deep reflection only comes from those masters who are most deeply immersed in the zeitgeist and artistic expression. They are the true sages, not the “inventors” impelled by the “irresistible urge” to make history by innovation. Art is not about invention; art is honest, quiet labour. Balthus’s modesty and his meticulous pursuit of perfection in craft, his sensitivity to the zeitgeist and the perfect form in which he responded to it—his particular inheritance of the excellent tradition of creative rendering—advanced the cause of representational art, constantly under siege in the twentieth century and always endangered, to a level that few others achieved. The intimate distance and familiar strangeness that his paintings communicated were his contribution to art.
She looked at Cathy Dressing, a painting inspired by Wuthering Heights. It’s clear at a glance that the three people in the painting are Balthus’s version of the novel’s unforgettable characters: Cathy, the blonde, nude and holding a mirror, immediately recalls Catherine; the dark-skinned, melancholy young man who sits in a chair is obviously a re-creation of Heathcliff; the solemn elderly maidservant who stands behind her and combs Cathy’s hair seems to work to separate their love from the powerful antagonism between them. Temporarily, she balances the painting as well as their hearts, which alternate between love and hate throughout their lifelong relationship. It’s a straightforward painting of three people. The brushstrokes are economical and the use of colour is the height of plainness and simplicity, but as you look at it again and again, you sense a poignancy along with a sharpness—it is uninhibited and restrained at once. Cathy’s body, nude and facing the viewers, is overpowering at first sight, the brightest, the most dazzling part of the painting; her head tilts to one side slightly, and the grey-brown eyes, directed slightly upward, and compressed lips make her look proud and domineering. Disregarding others’ advice, she seems to have made up her mind about her future and thinks herself mature enough to do so, therefore she ignores the young man beside her, who is deeply in love with her and appears on the point of collapse; or else perhaps she despises his miserable look. Her body assists her expression, with the small jutting breasts, the nonchalant stance … all brimming with a kind of empty challenge.
But this tall, slender beauty’s pubic area is not fully developed—her narrow, thin pelvis, flat belly, and the immature wisps of hair contend with the imperious head and proud breasts, which makes her look demanding and helpless, confident and desperate, indifferent and passionate, cunning and innocent all at the same time. Her inner world is chaotic. She is her own contradiction. She needs to be saved and the young man in the chair beside her is hoping to be saved by her. But she and the gloomy young man can’t save each other. He stares at her, her entire body shining, the love of his life, the girl who eventually will belong to another man, but he can’t win her back. Through him Tiao is brought to that moment in Wuthering Heights when Catherine returns from Linton’s home, and Heathcliff questions her desperately, out of his own sense of inferiority. “Why did you have to wear this silk dress? Why did you have to wear this silk dress?” when it’s just the stubborn memory of their childhood love that remains, and perhaps only parting forever can free them from that mad and frightening recollection. Tiao felt overwhelmed by an insight into an obsessive fantasy: how people exhaust themselves—or would, if they had the chance—to return to innocent beginnings, to a world of original joy.
A return to joy.
A return to joy.
Tiao continued by examining Cat in the Mirror. There were a series of three variations on the same theme, in the same setting, that spanned the sixteen years from 1977 to 1993.
The first is a nude girl, who has just awakened and leans against her bed, combing her hair, comb in one hand and mirror in the other. On finding that the cat squatting at the end of the bed is staring at her, she turns the mirror around to invite the cat to examine itself. In that moment, the girl’s expression and body both appear natural and relaxed, fresh and soft. Her invitation to the cat has an element of playfulness.
The second one: The girl has been leaning against the head of the bed, viewing herself in the mirror, with a little book in her other hand. On finding the cat, hiding at the foot of the bed, staring at her, she turns the mirror around and forces the cat to examine itself. In this painting, the girl has grown older and there is more of both reserve and wantonness in her expression, though she is clothed in a thin blouse and a pair of long pants. Fully dressed, she holds the mirror and makes the cat, who hunches at the end of the bed, see itself, as if saying, Do you want to watch me? You’d better have a look at yourself.
The third: The girl still leans against the bed; judging from her face she is again older. She wears elaborate, conservative clothing and her face reveals a forcefully controlled anger and willfulness. She thrusts the mirror directly at the cat on the end of the bed, whose entire body is visible, as if saying, Why look at me? Why observe me, you seductive, sinister thing! No longer the naked girl, relaxing, briskly combing her hair, she obviously dominates the scene, in the tight clothing she’d prepared in advance—nervous, combative.
How people fear being watched—spied on—particularly by their own kind who hide in the dark. When humans are subject to the cold scrutiny of a cat, who knows all, is ever-present and often pleased with itself, what an unsettling feeling it must be. People love to gaze at themselves in the mirror, but who ever sees the true self in the mirror? All of us expect to see a beautiful face on that self in the mirror. So, to watch others is to shield the self.
To watch is to shield.
When people are annoyed and shove the mirror into the cat’s face, they want to watch the cat make a fool of itself—and to shield themselves. The coquettishness of the nervous cat, and the insidious psychology that has it always waiting for the chance to rebel, people fear these things, so they thrust the mirror at the cat. To spy, to embarrass others, is the most basic human instinct.
The cat has no mirror to turn on a person; to a person the cat is a mirror. Squinting its seemingly tired eyes in the dark, it quietly snuggles up to people, in surface harmony, but spiritually distant.
Balthus’s work, his relationship with his subjects, which became more chaotic the more he tried to put it in order, his high taste, his emotional but controlled style, all fascinated Tiao. Sometimes she felt she was the cat curling at the end of the bed; sometimes she believed she was the naked, playful young girl, who eventually grew into the fully armed, smouldering young woman: Why do you look at me and why do you observe me? You coquettish, sinister little thing!
All our watching is done to shield ourselves. When will we inspect our own hearts? Almost no one can bear to look closely within. Self-scrutiny leads us into stumbling vertigo, but we must deal with others and have no escape. Others are always our mirrors. The more we fear to look closely at ourselves, the more eager we are to scrutinize them. We comfort our heart’s core with this scrutiny of other people’s flaws.
Chapter 5
The Ring is Caught in the Tree
1
Like many women in love
, Tiao was fearful, bold, and incapable of rational thought. Her emotional entanglement with Fang Jing prevented her from seeing herself—or others—clearly. His surprisingly frank “love letters” not only didn’t drive Tiao away but, on the contrary, drew her closer. His repeated tales of dalliances with other women only served to convince her that she was the only woman Fang Jing could trust and that only she had the power to save him. So the mix of Fang Jing’s personality, sincerity plus hooliganism, drove Tiao to distraction. After hearing his story of the tenth woman, she became reckless and crazy, demanding that he have her, as if that would help him cleanse his previous impurity. She was no longer the Tiao of before, who couldn’t even find his lips, whose heart was excited and whose eyes were opened by his love letters. Not wanting things to have the least suggestion of barter, she didn’t even think about marriage. Marriage. That would be his request of her later.
After knowing her for two years, he finally had her.
Her body felt no pleasure but her heart was content, some part of which was vanity, as well as a young woman’s primitive instinct for love, simple and unaffected to the point of silliness.
He finally had her. He was, in every way, satisfied, happy, even delightfully surprised, the biggest surprise of all being something he wouldn’t confide to anyone—he had never told Tiao, either—that she had restored his manhood.
For years Fang Jing had been impotent, which he attributed to the enormous mental and physical suffering he’d endured in the decade of the Cultural Revolution. When he regained freedom and his talents began to be recognized, the most important thing in his life was to find a cure. Big hospitals and small hospitals, folk remedies and secret family potions—he stooped to anything, even visiting those shady little clinics with ambiguous names and clear theme located in backstreets and tucked away in alleys. But none of the treatments worked on Fang Jing. He didn’t understand why life would play such an ironic joke on him, which filled him with hostility and made him curse the overwhelming temptation that came his way.
