Three Sisters

by Bi Feiyu

  Fenghua insisted on leaving with her, but relented when Shanshan stood firm. Any more insistence would have seemed planned. The room abruptly quieted down when only the two of them were left.

  "I never realized how nice Zhao Shanshan can be," Fenghua said quietly.

  "Yes, Zhao Shanshan has been behaving nicely lately," the teacher commented after a brief silence.

  Not knowing what else to say, they sat quietly, trying to think of something to talk about. And that created an atmosphere of nervous tension. They weren't, of course, really nervous. These were unusual circumstances; they both felt a desire to do something, yet dared not take another step, for that would be crossing a line. Saying that a warm, tender feeling filled their hearts better describes the moment.

  Avoiding Fenghua's eyes, the teacher focused on the red hairclip. "I see you like red," he said with a smile. Fenghua lowered her head and concentrated on rubbing her hands.

  "Red really isn't a good color," he said.

  Without looking up, she batted her eyes and said, "And why is that? You have to take responsibility for what you say."

  His chest heaved with a silent laugh. "For something like that? What responsibility do you expect me to take?"

  "If the girls in my class say I'm not pretty, I'll come looking for you."

  Surprised that she had the nerve to say that, he had to laugh. "I meant red isn't a good color for you."

  "Why not?"

  "It just isn't."

  Fenghua looked up and glared at him, pointing with her chin. With her eyes fixed on his face, she blurted out harshly, "Bullshit."

  Panic-stricken at her outburst, she quickly covered her mouth, but was surprised to see that he was not offended. On the contrary, he appeared to like the way she talked; his smile seemed to indicate that he was glad to hear that kind of talk from her. She could tell that the word brought him unexpected happiness. People often forget themselves when they're happy, and the teacher was no exception.

  "What did you just say?" he asked softly. "Say it again."

  Emboldened by what he must be thinking, Fenghua leaned forward and replied in an even softer voice, "Bullshit. You're full of shit." Her voice was so soft that she seemed to be only mouthing the words.

  He reacted to the unique whisper by smiling and saying in a honeyed voice, "Be careful, or I might sew your mouth shut."

  Falling out of love is the same as falling ill, and Yuyang's illness was a serious one. She was weak and lethargic. Everyone in her class was elated over winning the singing contest, but their euphoria only made her more aware of her own insignificance and inferiority—yet another kind of humiliation. Preoccupied over her disappointment in love and the pain of that humiliation, she had completely forgotten an important task—she hadn't sent a written report to Teacher Wei for two weeks in a row. His displeasure and anger were clearly on display when he pulled the curtain shut after calling her into the duty office. He got right to the point by giving an accurate diagnosis of Yuyang's problem before asking her to talk about it: She was dispirited and her thinking must have been contaminated by something unhealthy.

  As she sat across from her teacher, she felt ashamed and terrified, aware that he'd seen through her, so she looked down at her feet and held her tongue. In fact, she had been watchful since the day she had met Chu Tian, and had cautioned and castigated herself, but to no avail. Unable to control herself, she'd fallen in love with a young hooligan. The results would have been devastating if Chu Tian hadn't destroyed himself in her eyes, if he hadn't exposed his hooligan nature.

  After being silent for as long as it took Wei to smoke half a cigarette, Yuyang finally shed tears of remorse and courageously looked up at the teacher. "I'll tell you everything," she said through her tears.

  Wei Xiangdong took swift and decisive action. Eleven minutes later, Gao Honghai, alias Chu Tian, was standing in Wei's duty office, where he was told to take the "three-against" position—pressing his nose, his belly, and his toes against the wall. While he was flattened up against the wall, he was told to trace the shameful course of his inner journey as a means of "exposing" his problems. Think, and think hard. The three-against punishment lasted forty-five minutes, which meant that Gao told on himself for three quarters of an hour, after which he was ordered to turn around. Wei then switched on all the lights in the office and brought over a desk lamp to shine in Gao's face; a round patch of lime on his nose made him look like a Peking Opera clown.

  "Have you thought through everything?" Wei asked. Gao kept quiet and began to wet himself, drenching his shoes and making a puddle on the floor.

  "Have you thought through everything?" Wei repeated.

  "Yes," Gao responded softly.

  "Then talk."

  So Gao talked, telling a shocking story. Stripped of the façade of a poet, he exposed his filthy and sordid inner world, for he was "in love" with eight girls at the same time: Wang Qin, Li Dongmei, Gao Zijuan, Cong Zhongxiao, Chan Xia, Tong Zhen, Lin Aifen, and Qu Meixi. Every night after lights-out, he confessed, he began to think about them one by one.

  He even had poetry as proof.

  Your long hair flying in the wind is the darkness in my heart

  Intoxicating me in a dream I savor while we're apart

  I want to touch in the distance only your back

  You're my little bird you're my butterfly

  Oh splashing rain my tears to start

  This one was dedicated to Li Dongmei. With his eyes fixed on Gao, Wei breathed hard, but that went unnoticed by Gao, who was drunk on his own poetry. His eyes grew misty as he worked himself up to give another example, a poem to Qu Meixi.

  I'm lost

  Oh I'm lost

  In the distant stream

  You are the bride of my dream

  I want to get closer and closer to you but you hide from me

  I can only scream

  Gao recited another poem and then another, clearly self-satisfied and completely unaware of the menacing look on Wei's face. With his eyes fixed on Gao, Wei felt his anger mount until he slammed his fist on the desk and shouted, "No more rhymes. Stop it. Just talk."

  Gao's recital came to an abrupt end as he hunched his shoulders. Then he slowly relaxed and wordlessly looked at Wei, as if in a daze.

  The following morning Gao did something utterly shocking in his classical essay class when the teacher was explicating Su Dongpo's "Red Cliff Lament." The teacher, a man in his fifties, spoke with a southern accent that made his "n" indistinguishable from his "l," and his "zh," "ch," and "sh" indistinguishable from his "z," "c," and "s."

  He had a high-pitched voice that tended to turn shrill when he was excited, giving it a soaring quality and himself a self-indulgent air. His eyes emitted searing heat from behind his glasses. In order to explicate the line "When he first married the younger sister Qiao, he showed a resounding air of gallantry," he began to cite allusions that would involve the phrase "If the east wind brought Zhou Yu no aid."

  He turned around to write "The two Qiao sisters would be locked up in Tongque Terrace in late spring" on the blackboard when Gao Honghai stood up and commanded in a severe voice, "No rhymes."

  The teacher spun around and asked cautiously, "What did you say?"

  To everyone's surprise, Gao slammed his fist on the desk and shouted in a voice that seemed to have the power to swallow the world, "No rhymes!"

  Taken by surprise, the teacher suppressed his anger and said patiently, "Comrade Chu Tian, you write free verse, so you don't have to rhyme, but classical poetry is different. This is not a question of whether you can or cannot; it's a matter of the formulaic structure and rules of classical prosody. Understand? You have to rhyme."

  Enraged, Gao Honghai insisted stubbornly, "No rhymes!"

  Unreasonable, disrespectful, disruptive. The aggrieved teacher froze. Fortunately, the bell rang, which gave him a chance to voice his anger in the way he announced "Class dismissed." He picked up his notes, but Gao would not give up. Growi
ng fixated on the teacher, Gao repeated the command over and over.

  "No rhymes!"

  His patience exhausted, the teacher grabbed Gao with his bony hand and dragged him to the student affairs office, where he screamed at the director, "It was Su Dongpo who rhymed, not me! How could I avoid it? This is ridiculous!" He was visibly agitated, but the student affairs director had no idea what had caused the teacher's outburst.

  "What happened?" the director asked calmly.

  The classics teacher was so hot under the collar his face had turned purple. "If I don't teach well and you're unhappy, just tell me. But you can't do it this way. It's Su Dongpo who rhymed. I repeat: it wasn't me!"

  Still confused, the student affairs director shifted his questioning eyes from the classics teacher to Chu Tian just as the principal walked by. The classics teacher pulled the principal over and continued even more shrilly, "He can complain if I'm not doing a good job teaching the class, but not like this!"

  By now a crowd of students and teachers had gathered. The principal raised his chin.

  "Calm down and tell me what happened," he said.

  The teacher dragged Gao over and pushed him up to the principal. "Let him tell you."

  The steam had left Gao by then, but he refused to give his mouth a rest.

  "Ridiculous!" the teacher mumbled to himself.

  "No rhymes!" Gao said, catching his second wind.

  "Ridiculous!"

  "No rhymes!"

  "Ridiculous!"

  "No rhymes!"

  The teacher sputtered and began to tremble. "You ... you ... cra ... zy ... lu ... na ... tic." With that, he spun around and stormed off.

  The teacher's outburst had given the principal a sense of what had happened, so he leaned over and, with one hand behind his back, reached out to touch Gao's forehead.

  With astonishing arrogance, Gao knocked the principal's hand away and intoned a poem with a sad and gloomy look.

  Five fingers

  A hand the man had

  When you balled your fist

  I was so very sad

  The principal smiled, intending to smooth things over. "Didn't you just rhyme?" he asked.

  "No rhymes!" Gao said.

  The principal turned and whispered in the director's ear, "Call for an ambulance."

  Gao tried to escape when the ambulance arrived, but five male students from the school security team pounced on him. Shouting angrily, he fought to break free, but the team wrestled him to the ground and restrained him. A doctor in a white smock came up and promptly gave Gao an injection, a wonderfully useful shot; this created a lively, comical scene that was witnessed by everyone in sight. The hardworking crystal liquid quietly did its job, and Gao slowly crumpled before their eyes. His belly heaved a few times with increasingly less force each time, and that was his body's last attempt to struggle. His eyes glazed over as if he were blind, and his mouth hung slack like a beached fish's; a long stream of drool oozed from it. The students were convinced that Chu Tian would never again be Chu Tian; he could only go on as Gao Honghai.

  Yuyang stole the first thing in her life on the evening Gao Honghai was carted away in the ambulance. At nine-twenty-eight, shortly before lights-out, she slipped into the dining hall unnoticed. She'd made a meticulous calculation, knowing that her timing had to be perfect—not a second too early nor a second too late. She walked bent at the waist, feeling her thumping heart ready to burst from her chest, but she managed to control herself and tiptoe over to the rack with the boys' bowls. She looked and listened carefully to make sure no one saw her before turning on her flashlight to begin searching the rows of bowls. Finally she located Chu Tian's enamel rice bowl, which was stenciled with the dark red English letters CHT; she had stolen so many glances at the bowl that the three letters were seared on her heart. Now for the first time it was inches away.

  She grabbed Chu Tian's stainless steel spoon and put it in her pocket, then she killed the light and ran off. When she was almost out the door, she bumped into a dining table and felt a piercing pain in her knee. But she fled the room, not daring to check her injury, and made it back to Room 412 in the girls' dormitory just as the lights went out. All conversation stopped as soon as she walked in. Without washing up, she climbed into bed and pulled down the mosquito net before taking the spoon out of her pocket. After a momentary hesitation, she put it in her mouth and tasted the coldness of the stainless steel, which seemed to reach all the way down to the deepest recess of her body. She felt the hard steel and its smooth, curved surface, and hot tears welled up in her eyes. Her knee was also hot and burning, and was probably bleeding by now. Pulling the blanket up to cover her head, Yuyang buried her face in the pillow and sobbed so hard that the bed frame began to quake.

  "What's so funny, Yuyang?" Kong Zhaodi asked from the upper bunk. "Aren't you going to share it with us?"

  When he wasn't busy working, Teacher Wei Xiangdong's favorite activity was chatting up the female teachers. You might say that flirting with the female faculty had become his hobby. No one could have anticipated the trouble that would ultimately emerge from his mouth. As the saying goes, "Mistakes inevitably arise when one talks too much." Qi Lianjuan, a chemistry teacher who had been married for two years, had never come to Wei for the "item." But her belly remained stubbornly flat.

  As someone given to vulgarity, Wei betrayed himself with his mouth one day when he cracked a joke regarding Qi. Most of the time Qi was one of the more open-minded, easygoing teachers on the faculty, but what Wei said that day upset her. His attempt at humor occurred when there were several other teachers around.

  "Teacher Qi," he said during the conversation, "it's time for you to have a baby, don't you think?"

  He continued, "If your husband is lazy, there's always me to help out. If not you, who else would I help?" He smiled.

  If it had been one of the other teachers, she'd have punched and pinched him, but that would have only enhanced their friendship. They would be closer than ever.

  But not Teacher Qi, whose face reddened slowly, culminating in a deep purple. Unable to bear the loss of face, she turned and walked off after tossing a comment at Wei. "Who do you think you are, you shameless ass?"

  It was an awkward moment for everyone, especially Wei, who made a few lame excuses as the gathering broke up. Qi's husband, the son of a ranking cadre, had stayed on at the school after graduation. He was socially inept, like a stick of chalk, a man who could manage a few words only if you pushed him; if not, nothing emerged. A lab worker with mediocre talents, he was lucky enough to marry a smart woman with a sharp tongue. After losing the verbal battle, Wei returned to his office in the student union, out of sorts.

  He lit a cigarette in the duty office, but the knot in his heart still remained as Qi's comment played itself over and over in his mind.

  "Who do you think you are?"

  A harmless comment, but hurtful to him, for he knew who he was. Or, more accurately, he knew who he wasn't; he wasn't a man or a woman. He was the conventional "third sex," for he had been impotent for years, a fact known only to him and his wife. In a clinical sense, the affliction could be traced back to the summer of 1979. Before that, he had performed well in bed.

  In fact, the bed had been his revolutionary domain, a place where he could "start a campaign" anytime he pleased, and his wife, Tan Meihua, was the target. The pained look on her face spoke volumes. All he had to do was say "Hey," and she would spread herself on the bed, an event that was repeated every two or three days. All she asked of him was to drink less and to be gentler when he was drunk.

  But for him even that little bit was too much to ask. Sex isn't throwing a party, or writing an essay, or painting a picture, or embroidering flowers; the last thing you want is refinement, restraint, timidity, or politeness. No, sex is an insurrection, with one side triumphing over the other. Though understandably unhappy, his wife did not dare let her feelings be known. How could she talk about it with anyone? People would
have called her stupid and smutty. Lucky for her the heavens were just and Wei lost his virility. He was a changed man, and she, it seemed, was a different woman, since now she could boldly say no.

  Although one's post may be little more than an empty title, it can have real consequences. As his status at school changed, so did his status at home, but the change was subtle and occurred slowly over time. In any case, his wife felt that she could now be a different person, feeling a sense of liberation that propelled her to rise above him. In turn, the subtle change in their relationship returned to take root in their bedroom dynamics. This is common among couples; what starts out in bed often ends up in bed.

  The ill-fated moment came in the summer of 1979 when Wei experienced a failure, a rare occurrence. It was an alarm signal, and yet he paid little heed. That failure was the beginning of a terrible situation, for over the ensuing months his appendage rebelled and failed, and rebelled again only to fail one more time until it met with total destruction and never rose again.

  It was during a winter snowfall when he comprehended the severity of the situation as that thing between his legs turned into a gentle little bird. On the outside, nothing out of the ordinary had happened in the previous two years; life wasn't all that bad even after he had lost his official position.

  In reality, however, everything changed, especially in bed. Wei was worried and puzzled. Don't they say that one feels free with no official duties? Then why was it soft for him without those duties? Energy wasn't the problem, and he could not figure out what had happened to him. He was, after all, someone who had seen the world and weathered many storms, so on another snowy evening he laid his cards on the table. "Why don't we get a divorce?" he said to his wife.