Granta 125: After the War

by John Freeman

  The man led Hui to an empty bed. Later she would remember those short stretches of dreamless sleep as the only time she had ever felt peace. Once in a while she woke up and wrapped herself more tightly with the blanket, and for a moment felt despondent at losing the peace.

  She was in a bed close to the door, which was kept open. The person in the other bed seemed to be constantly getting up to get a drink or to use the bathroom, and sometimes just to pace listlessly around the room, mumbling to herself. At what point had one’s life stopped belonging to one? Hui wondered. In and out of sleep she would think: now her life belonged to the man who kept watch by the door, now to the woman who took her vital signs, now to her room-mate who tried to wake her up without touching her. ‘They’re going to call breakfast any minute,’ said a throaty voice in the semi-darkness. ‘You don’t want to miss that.’

  There were many things not to be missed. Diamond, the owner of the voice, who wore a black lacy top and a pair of yellow skinny jeans that seemed too tight for her, invited Hui to the lounge after breakfast so she could give her a brief introduction to life on the ward. If she missed a meal, all she could get from the nursing station was a juice box. Participating in group activities would count as a show of positive attitude. While explaining these details, Diamond also gave a history of her own: she grew up in the Delta – which delta, Hui thought, but hated to ask; yup, a country girl through and through, Diamond said; she had two children, a son and a daughter; she had had a fight with her boyfriend, had drunk all night before going to his house with a rifle; no, nothing bad happened, nothing she would regret – she had passed out just in time, right after driving her car into his pickup. In the middle of describing the impact between her car and the pickup, Diamond’s voice trailed off. A man wearing a paper robe, as though he had just stepped out of a hot spring at a spa, was sauntering toward them. ‘Anyone care for a game of ping-pong?’ he asked, and Diamond jumped to her feet. Hui looked at the thick golden chain around the man’s neck, and he smiled, knowing he had captured the interest of a woman, however fleetingly.

  A few patients were watching a morning show on TV, making hooting sounds at inexplicable moments, and a few others were sunk into the couches, still as logs. In a corner, two men, both with messy beards, studied a chess game with intense concentration. Hui waited to see whose move it was next, but her patience ran out before either man lifted a finger.

  In the room Hui and Diamond shared, the window was barred on the inside. Outside was a high fence covered with dark ivy, and beyond that, a grove of eucalyptus grown so densely that the room was in perennial dusk. There was little to do in the room, unless one wanted to be reminded of the impossibilities of harming oneself here: paper bag in the trash can, dull metal mirror, curtainless window.

  Hui sat in the hallway, trying to fight off the medication. Above her was a skylight, grimy with pollen and dust and dried traces of last year’s rain; nevertheless, it was a skylight. No one asked her why she was sitting on the floor, which made her appreciate this place. Once in a while she dozed off and was awakened by a tap on her shoulder, and a patrolling staff member would ask her if she was OK, if she had any thoughts of hurting herself or others at that moment.

  The next time she woke up, there was a commotion nearby. Two giant African American security guards had cornered a young man in a black hooded sweatshirt and were telling him to return to his room.

  ‘What happened?’ asked an old woman with a head of cloudy white hair, sailing toward the noise.

  ‘Nothing, Colette. Go back to your show,’ said Maria, the Filipino staff who wore a lilac top and flats to match. When the old woman was out of hearing, Maria told a co-worker that she had been getting the laundry out of the dryer for the young man in the sweatshirt. ‘And he just squeezed in and humped me.’

  ‘What did you do?’

  ‘I elbowed him,’ Maria said. ‘Hard.’

  Later, Diamond woke Hui up and said it was time for fifteen minutes of walking in the yard. Hui shook her head and said that she did not have clothes and she did not want to go outside in her paper pants and robe. Who cares? Diamond said. I do, Hui replied, and she could sense Diamond shrug and make a face to Maria. Such stubbornness, Hui imagined the unvoiced exchange between the two women, as years ago her mother had swapped a meaningful look with her twin before telling Hui that the unwise dug graves for themselves.

  One dug one’s own grave, but sometimes someone else would be buried in it: the year Hui turned ten, she had ended her twin’s life. The simplicity of the action, with little violence needed, took her by surprise: by simply turning her eyes away Hui had made the twin evaporate. Or perhaps she still existed for Hui’s mother, but Hui let them go on belonging to each other, comforting each other and gossiping about Hui behind her back. Hui had herself, and she needed no one but herself.

  People can live and prosper only in communities, her mother, the headmistress of Elementary School 93, liked to say; the collective interests of a community trump those of each member. At the school assembly on Tuesdays, after each class monitor reported the top ten good deeds performed by the class members in the previous week, Hui’s mother would take the stage and talk about community values. She was short, barely five feet tall; nevertheless, she towered over the whole school. She never needed a microphone to give a speech.

  Individualism and egotism are worms that eat a person’s soul alive, her mother said; love of oneself is only a speck of dust. In those moments Hui felt like a piece of fabric hanged onstage, because she was the specimen of selfishness in her mother’s speech.

  The woman at the podium, with her love for community as wide and deep as an ocean, was a masterful orator, who sometimes turned Hui’s eyes misty. But this woman was not the one to whom Hui returned after school. At home, the community had once comprised the three of them – her mother, her twin and herself. By turning away from the other two, Hui had destroyed that community. Nothing was said of the dead twin afterward; she merely vanished from their life, but her mother’s rage, no longer icy cold but seething, allowed Hui to see, for the first time, that her invincible mother could lose, too. She found the slightest excuse to beat Hui – with a metal pencil box or a broomstick, always on the shoulders and back because nothing would show. When she went out into the world Hui would still be a presentable child: the conductor of the school band, the class captain of the Communist Young Pioneers, one of the two leading soloists in the school chorus.

  When Hui visited her father, she wondered if he knew about the twin or her death, or about her mother’s rage when she could not make Hui cry. He must have known her mother in a way that she did not, or else he would not have married her, and stayed married to her from afar. He was a general clerk in a post office in a provincial town, without much of a career to his name, as Hui’s mother reminded her every time she made the journey.

  At her father’s place – a small unit on the second floor of a grey apartment block – it embarrassed Hui to talk about her life in Beijing, but her father insisted that she show him her school reports with the perfect grades; the photo of her onstage, representing her school in a district oration contest; her essays, which were always used the next year as samples for the grade following hers.

  He was not really interested in her achievements, Hui knew, just as she herself was not. Rather, he had been waiting for her to come so that they could carry out another project. Early on, the projects had included model boats made out of balsa wood, rock collecting, cardboard mazes for ants and beetles, albums of local leaves and butterflies – things that could be done within the time frame of her visits, things that she would leave behind when she went back to Beijing.

  As Hui grew older, the projects became more complex. One year, he had studied extrasensory perception – it was the around the time a nine-year-old in Sichuan province was proved to be able to read with his ears and a pair of sisters in Beijing were found to be able to communicate through telepathy – and when Hui came, h
er father carried out experiments with her: twisting a Rubik’s cube and asking her to name the colour of each square on one side without looking, or randomly picking from a pile of go pieces and asking her whether the piece he’d chosen was black or white. Sometimes these experiments went on for an hour or two. Hui would concentrate intensely before giving an answer, and her father would record the statistics in a notebook, which he showed her as proof that everyone possessed a certain level of ESP.

  The next year, when he was deep in the study of the literature of Taoism and Buddhism, he taught her the basics of meditation. ‘Feet apart,’ he said, and showed her how to plant her legs solidly on the floor, as though she were a pine tree that would not bend, even in the fiercest storm; and then he’d rounded his arms as if he were holding a giant wooden bucket. ‘Imagine a bucket bigger than the universe,’ he said. ‘And imagine that the bucket starts as an empty container. Now close your eyes, and feel water drip into it, drip drop, drip drop.’

  Hui closed her eyes, and right away her body had started to waver, and her mind wandered, filling with dread at the thought of the return trip. On the way out to visit her father, she had a seat on the train, and the other passengers treated her nicely because she was such a pleasant girl; on the return trips, people treated her nicely, too, but – the provincial station being too small to buy a seating ticket – she would spend most of the journey standing and have to feel obliged to whomever let her rest in his or her seat for ten or twenty minutes at a time.

  ‘Hold steady,’ her father said gently. ‘Don’t lose heart. Soon you will build up your strength.’

  Even without imagining the weight of the water accumulating in her bucket, her arms and legs were already sore, so Hui distracted herself by listening to the sounds of the town, where life seemed to be going on with a slow ease. A knife sharpener sang in a drawn-out voice, and a popcorn maker joined in, singing about puffed rice and popped corn. A peddler, who must have been carrying hundreds of katydids, each in a small, octagonal bamboo cage, did not need any broadcast: the chirping moved from one alley to another, and you could tell when he was stopped by a few children eager to buy the katydids, as afterward you could hear some stray chirpings.

  A few years earlier, Hui’s father had bought a katydid for her to take back to Beijing; on the morning of her departure he had picked two fresh pumpkin flowers for the cage – half bedding, half food – for the katydid. She had hidden the cage in her school satchel, which she held close to her chest on the journey. Ever so faintly, the bug’s chirping could be heard above the clicking and clacking of the train track, and Hui had to keep a busily happy face for fear a sob would escape from a place so deep in her that she had not known to exist before.

  ‘Keep breathing evenly,’ Hui’s father encouraged her, and after a while, he said that it was time to imagine the water dripping out of a tiny hole at the bottom of the bucket, drip drop, drip drop. ‘From empty to full, and from full to empty,’ he explained. ‘Life before birth is a dream, life after death is another dream. What comes between is only a mirage of the dreams.’

  There was no mention of Hui’s mother in their conversations about this or other projects, and only after her father passed away did Hui realize that he had offered as much love and protection as he could: he had wanted her to see the world as neither a friendly nor a hostile place, a place one could explore with curiosity, where one could rely on one’s intuitions but only to an extent, where happiness and suffering, equally unreal, would always come to an end. Nothing matters: she imagined the words he’d felt too shy to say to her; people are assigned a fate, some to inflict pain, others to endure, so why not accept one’s lot gracefully? Nothing, my child, nothing matters in the end.

  The psychiatrist said that he was confused by the report from the ER, which had recorded conflicting statements. ‘Did you,’ asked the doctor, ‘or did you not attempt to commit suicide?’

  ‘I did.’

  The doctor, for whom it must have been a draining business to forgo a beautiful Saturday in May, scowled. ‘Why?’

  Hui had given this some thought before being summoned to the doctor’s office. The easiest explanation was that her marriage was falling apart, which was what she told the doctor now. He confirmed that that had been written in the report, along with the fact that there was a daughter. Three and a half, Hui said when he questioned further; at the moment the child was in China with her father, visiting relatives.

  ‘So you wanted to kill yourself out of heartbreak? And the next thing you know, your daughter comes home to find that she doesn’t have a mother any more?’

  Why not? Hui thought; if one has to remove oneself from other people’s lives, one does not seek the optimal moment but, rather, the least inconvenient one. The truth was, if she wanted, she could have gotten custody of Sophie, but she had yielded when her husband and her in-laws had asked for the child. The ease with which she had agreed to the decision confirmed everyone’s belief that she was an extremely callous woman.

  ‘Your father and I lived apart most of our marriage. And never have we been unfaithful to each other,’ Hui’s mother, who had sided with the world, had said on the phone. Typical of her to suggest that Hui’s affair had been an outcome of unfulfilled desire – but that must have been what others thought, too, that only a restless woman could sleep with a man whose daughter had been playmates with her own child since infanthood.

  The indiscretion had begun when Hui’s husband left for a business trip to China, but perhaps the seed of the affair had long been there. Hui had married not out of love but because one must get married; Wu and she – both established in their professions, both realistic enough not to aspire to great love – were good matches in people’s eyes. She had given birth to a child because that was what should come of a marriage, and she treated Sophie with tender attention as she imagined a mother should do, indulging and disciplining the child when she saw fit.

  Soon after Sophie’s birth, Hui had been found on Facebook by an old schoolmate. Xinyan and Hui had been friends in middle school in Beijing but had gone to different high schools. Now both of their families lived in the Bay Area, and their daughters were only two months apart, so it was only natural for the friendship to resume, and to become a friendship between families. When Xinyan started making multiple trips to UPenn for a part-time MBA, while also working full-time for a start-up, Hui and Wu had begun to invite her husband Yang and his daughter Valerie over for weekend play-dates or dinners. There had seemed little for Wu to be alarmed about when he had taken a new job that required frequent travelling to Shanghai.

  The doctor flipped through the pages and said that he could see she had achieved a lot. Hui wondered if, in her half-sedated state at the ER, she had also babbled about her résumé. Hui had a PhD in pharmacology and a JD, and worked as a patent lawyer for a San Francisco firm.

  ‘When is your husband coming back to the States?’ asked the doctor.

  ‘We’re separated,’ Hui said. The plan was for her in-laws to take Sophie in for some time; they would bring her back to the States once Hui was out of the picture. ‘And I don’t know his itinerary.’

  ‘Is there anyone else I can talk to? Another family member?’

  ‘Not in America.’

  ‘Any suicidal thoughts right now?’

  ‘Not now,’ Hui said. ‘Not here.’

  The doctor scowled again. ‘You’re right. It’s going to be hard for you to kill yourself here. Nearly impossible.’

  Hui returned to the spot under the skylight. There was something demeaning yet comforting about sitting in such an unlikely spot. A young woman, pale and skinny, walked back and forth in the hallway, sniffing the sleeve of an oversized shirt. ‘It’s my father’s smell,’ she said, offering the sleeve to whomever watched her. ‘I don’t know why, but it calms me down.’

  ‘God’s blessings to you and your father,’ said Colette, the old woman with white hair. ‘Can you tell the nurse that there’s no hot water
today? Feel my hands, darling. I just had a cold shower.’

  Daughters they all were, at one time or another – the girl whose body seemed so flimsy as to be immaterial under her father’s shirt; Colette, who was on the verge of disappearing from everyone but herself; Sophie and Valerie; Hui; even her mother.

  When Hui had turned twelve and started middle school, her mother grilled her often about the men on the number 365 bus, which Hui took to school. Did any man touch her inappropriately? her mother wanted to know. The same question was put to Hui when she came back from her father’s place, not only about the men on the trains but about her father, too.

  It would have been a solace for her mother that Hui’s twin – had that invisible girl lived on – would retain her virginal freedom forever. I wonder what point you see in getting married, her mother had said on the phone after Hui and Wu had taken their vows at City Hall; at least there is always a divorce to hope for.

  ‘Can I sit with you?’ asked a young girl, and before Hui could reply, she sat down cross-legged next to Hui. ‘I dreamed about my ex-boyfriend last night. It was a sad dream.’

  ‘It must be hard to dream about someone from the past.’

  ‘I loved him very much, but he said he only loved me like one of his family members.’

  ‘He said that in your dream?’

  ‘No, in real life,’ the girl said. ‘We only had sex three times – in real life.’

  ‘Is that too many?’ Hui asked. Three times were about what she and Yang had erred: stolen moments when Sophie and Valerie watched Dora the Explorer on the sofa, and once when they had been dropped off for group activities at a local play cafe.

  ‘Too many? If you knew my history, you wouldn’t say that. I have Bipolar I, and my symptoms include hyper-sexuality,’ the girl said. ‘What do you have?’

  ‘I don’t know. How old are you?’

  ‘Seventeen.’

  An affair that had broken one marriage and spared another was not the worst affair; even if intactness was too much to hope for the surviving marriage, as time moved forward, the cracks would be caulked by forgiveness – or, more likely, by mutual agreement between the spouses to forget, so as not to embarrass each other. Hui imagined Yang taken back into a familiar life; Xinyan was the kind of wife who would make everything good, or good enough, again.