by Fan Wu
“Slow down, be gentle, you’re killing me.” I couldn’t stand the pain. The shoes were the pointy-toed type.
“Just one second, my sweetie. Now you can stand up.”
“I don’t think I can.” I almost lost my balance the moment I put all my weight on the high heels.
“Don’t hold my arm. Just open your legs a little wider. Yes, just like that.”
I tugged the dress upward, downward, then sideways, before I dared to look at myself in the mirror. The dress clung to my body like a surgical glove, revealing every curve. In the mirror I looked slim and tall. My neck, upper chest, arms and legs were pale in contrast to the black dress.
“Stick out your chest. Don’t look at your shoes. Stand up straight. Don’t shake your legs,” she demanded, sizing me up, then murmured, “Something isn’t right.”
She walked to her desk and came back with a comb.
She held my chin up with one hand and used the other to play with my hair. She looked very serious. I closed my eyes and decided to yield to her ministrations.
She combed through my chin-length hair a few times, redid the part to make it sit a little more to the left, plucked a few strands from behind my right ear onto my cheek, and flipped the fringe carefully so that one side covered part of my eye. She applied hair spray all over my head for the finishing touch.
“Done!” she pronounced.
I opened my eyes and at that instant the comb dropped from her hand, hitting my right breast, almost catching on the clingy material before landing on the floor.
“Damn it!” Miao Yan said, reaching out immediately to examine the dress where the comb had struck. Though she was only checking the fabric I was panicked by the sudden brush of her hands on my chest.
“Don’t step back. I can’t see properly.” She frowned.
“Let me do it myself.” I stepped even farther away from her.
“I won’t touch you. I ’m only checking the fabric.”
“I can do it.”
“You don’t know where the comb hit.” She moved closer.
“It’s fine. It didn’t hit hard. It didn’t hurt,” I said.
“That’s not what I’m worried about. This dress is expensive,” she said, still motioning toward my chest.
“I see,” I said, a little disappointed. “So it’s about your dress.”
“It didn’t do any damage.” She quickly raised her head and beamed a relieved smile, her hands now by her sides.
I straightened my back and sucked in my tummy, as I had been told. Even if I hadn’t been told, I might have done it anyway, since the dress was so tight.
I carefully examined my reflection in the mirror. The dress was suspended from my neck by two spaghetti straps covered with shiny silver sequins. A choker held the straps together behind my neck, the ends swinging over my naked back. The neckline of the dress plunged to just above my nipples. My breasts pushed the dress forward to form an arched bridge on my chest, my nipples hardening from the caress of the fabric. The dress fit me perfectly at the waist; below the waist, it wrapped around my hips in a pear shape and stopped halfway between my hips and my knees. Most of my thighs were exposed, the skin delicate and firm. The rear zipper started a little below my waist and extended to the bottom of the hem. My back was completely bare, save for the two hanging straps.
Speechless and motionless, I felt my heart pounding against my ribs. I was exultant, curious, bewildered, puzzled, all at the same time. I couldn’t believe I was the person in the mirror. The sudden change made me feel that I was completely naked and I wanted to cover myself with a blanket.
Miao Yan stood a step behind me in her beige silk skirt, her long hair hanging over her cheeks making her face look really small. She stared at me—or more precisely, stared at my reflection in the mirror—like a painter impressed by her own masterpiece. “At least 36B. So beautiful. This dress was made for you. Sexy…this is what’s called sexy.”
I often recall that afternoon, the instant when I stared at my reflection in the mirror with such wonder and bewilderment. It was at that moment I realized I could be somebody completely unknown to myself—a woman. I could become a woman. This discovery was both frustrating and devastating since all my confidence in controlling my destiny as a carefree young girl was abruptly challenged and shaken. A simple black dress could convert me into a woman, which seemed so strange. That very same evening, after I tried on the dress, for the first time I found myself pondering what “becoming a woman” meant.
It was a hot summer night in June, exactly three months after I had met Miao Yan. The room was quiet and dark. Ping -ping and Donghua were deeply asleep, Pingping snoring lightly. These days she seemed to be out a lot at night, not returning to the dorm until a few minutes before curfew.
As I lay awake I recalled the moment when I noticed that boys could pee standing, while I had to squat. I was a little girl at that time, but even then I knew I was different from boys, other than having longer hair. When boys stole looks at me in middle school, I panicked and was a bit disgusted—they must have been bad students. Good boys and girls studied hard and went to university while bad girls and boys ended up in factories doing menial work. That was what my teachers and parents had told me. They didn’t tell me anything about menstrual cycles and budding breasts. I had to learn about all those things for myself.
When I got my first period I thought it was shameful but accepted the fact that all girls had to go through the process to grow up. I wished I was a boy so I could be rid of this troublesome monthly thing. I don’t know when it started but I wanted to keep a distance from the boys. A few students had become couples in school, but they were disliked and condemned by the teachers and laughed at by their classmates. It was considered “dirty” to have a boyfriend or a girlfriend at that age. I didn’t want to be one of those “bad students.” Actually, I didn’t think about boys at all; I only wanted to get in to the university of my dreams.
This attitude continued even when I reached university. I wanted a simple student life, to focus on study. But now Miao Yan had led me to a door with a sign on it that invited me to “become a woman.” That was when I got lost. Nobody had taught me anything about it. I thought it had something to do with sex, which was even more unfamiliar. Then I learned that might have been true but psychologically it was really about how I viewed myself—when Miao Yan said that she had become a woman at thirteen, I believed her. Every time she said she was a woman she seemed proud of herself and the way she spoke the word “girl” it was as though she was referring to something small and weak.
“Women…girls…girls…women…” I whispered repeatedly. When I finally drifted off I dreamed that I was flying a kite, half asleep, eyes half closed. I was standing on the flat roof. I could see only the empty gray sky; there were no trees around. The roof was soft as well-chewed gum. I saw holes here and there—some as big and deep as a well—and they forced me to jump around like a frog. I didn’t have the spool in my hand but the kite was following my steps in the sky. Sometimes I would stop and look at the kite and it would stop as well. Obscured by fog, the kite had no shape or color. It started to rain, the raindrops fast and dense. My clothes were getting so wet and heavy that I couldn’t jump anymore; I had to move inch by inch in the space between the holes. The rain followed me wherever I went but there was no trace of water on the roof. I looked up at the sky. It was not raining. The raindrops that fell on me were the kite’s tears.
I asked in the dream, “Kite, why are you crying?” The kite didn’t answer. It was melting, dissolved by its own tears. When I looked up again, the kite had completely disappeared into the sky.
It was four in the morning when I awoke. As soon as I opened my eyes I discovered to my shame that my hands were somehow on my chest and positioned like an extra bra. I always slept with my bra on, something Miao Yan had laughed about when I told her. I quickly removed my hands and touched my forehead, where a layer of cold sweat had formed. Wide awake, th
e whole dream filling my mind, I began to wonder if the kite was Miao Yan. I asked myself why she cried and why she didn’t answer. For a moment I was so worried that I was tempted to get up and go knock on her door. It seemed like a sad dream but I could make no sense of it. The more I tried to analyze it the more confused I got.
Then I heard stirring from Donghua’s bed. She was not sleeping but was rearranging the bottom of her mosquito net to press it under the mat. In the moonlight I saw her hand sticking out from the opening of the net. I wondered if she was going to get up to knit but she softly closed the net with a pin. Then she lay down and began to touch herself. Even through the net I could see her hands move over her chest and down to her lower body. Then I heard her panting softly, on and off, for a few minutes. At last she released a long satisfied sigh. Then she was quiet, as if she was exhausted from touching herself.
I like to think that Miao Yan and I were always together during that summer of ’92. I clearly remember her tanned skin and a lot of her sexy outfits at that time. But in fact I barely saw her during those three months. Firstly there was a two-month summer break, then she had a one-month internship in Shenzhen—she was now in her last year.
Right before the summer break she had asked me to write her dissertation for her. When I walked into my room that day I saw her reading at my desk. Pingping and Donghua must have gone to the canteen to buy lunch. Miao Yan visited me so often that both Pingping and Donghua knew she was my best friend and would let her in if I wasn’t at home. Miao Yan never bothered to introduce herself to them, nor did she let me introduce her. “Having one girlfriend is more than enough,” she once said. Whenever she mentioned my roommates she would say, for instance, “I went to your room this morning, but you weren’t in. The skinny girl said you went to the library.” She always referred to Pingping as “the skinny girl” and Donghua as “the black knitting girl.” But she used “that mysterious woman” to describe Yishu, though she only saw a picture of her. I asked her why Pingping and Donghua were “girls” while Yishu was a “woman.”
“I like the way she smiles. A seductive smile. She ’s a woman like me,” she answered.
Occasionally, as I lay on my bed, I held my palm-size mirror and examined myself, mimicking Yishu’s smiles. It was a difficult exercise. I never quite understood what kind of smiles were “seductive.”
I put down my bag and stood beside Miao Yan. She didn’t notice me. She looked completely absorbed, her head bowed so low that it almost touched the book in her lap. She was myopic but rarely wore glasses because, as she said, they didn’t look good on her. When she went to classes or watched a movie, she wore contact lenses, but at other times she was too lazy to put them in.
I was surprised to see Miao Yan engrossed in reading. She didn’t read books unless she had to. She abhorred textbooks, calling them nonsense, and wouldn’t open them except when she had to pass exams. Whenever she came to the library to find me she would complain about its strict environment and said she couldn’t stand seeing several hundred people in a room quiet as a morgue. In fact, most of her textbooks looked almost new. They were piling up, overflowing on her desk because she had no bookshelf. When she went to bookstores she would buy music tapes, postcards, but never books. Ironically, she liked to know what I was reading and was always interested in my book collection. She would hover before my bookshelf, which almost hit the ceiling, and check out my latest purchases. If I was busy, she would sit down, select several books, and leaf through them quickly without stopping at any page for more than a few seconds, as though she was just checking to see if any pages might have defects or marks.
“What are you reading?” I extended my hand toward the book.
“Qian Zhongshu’s Fortress Besieged. Quite interesting.” She raised her head alertly, putting the book behind her back.
My face turned pale. I had written a lot of comments and notes in the book’s margins. It was almost like my diary.
“What do you mean by ‘there is an invisible wall between people, which prevents them from—’”
“Don’t read my notes!”
“You know what? One of my friends just said the exact same thing. He told me about this book. I thought you were bound to have it, so I came over.”
I wondered who the “he” was. She had never mentioned any of her male friends to me—at least not anyone who would read this kind of serious book.
“Who’s this friend?” I asked.
“Don’t assume I only have shallow friends.”
“I didn’t. But who is he?”
“You’ll meet him someday.”
“When?”
“I don’t know. Someday, as I said.” She shrugged.
Desperately wanting to get my book back, I said, “You won’t be interested in such books. If you really want to read it, you can get a copy from the library.”
“I couldn’t find my library card. Also, the old man guarding the door doesn’t like the sound my high-heeled shoes make on the floor. He once asked me to take off my shoes.”
“I can get you a copy.”
“But I only like your copy.” She laughed, pulling away from me, holding the book behind her back.
“You can borrow other books.” I took a book by Taiwanese writer San Mao from the bookshelf and handed it to her. I knew she liked San Mao and had always wanted to travel around the world like her.
“No. I only want this book. I won’t return it unless…” She picked up her bag from the floor and, like a magician, took out a stack of books, a box of ballpoint pens, and a pad of white paper, “…unless you agree to write my dissertation for me.”
I agreed, both because I wanted my book back and because I figured that if I didn’t help her she wouldn’t be able to write the dissertation herself.
“I knew you’d say yes.” She jumped up.
“How did you know?”
“I can tell just by looking at you.” Then she patted my shoulder, grinning. “Don’t work too hard. No need to be creative. Just copy an idea from one of those reference books. Any idea is fine. No one will read my dissertation anyway. It’s just part of the stupid graduation requirement.”
Before I had a chance to say anything she tucked my Fortress Besieged under her arm and ran out the door. I could hear her bell-like laughter echoing in the hallway.
She kept her promise and returned the book a few days later. It was now dog-eared with a wrinkled cover. But I was glad to have it back.
“You aren’t reading books, you’re eating them.” I tried to flatten the curled page corners. “I’ll never lend you books again.”
“Cheer up! You should feel happy that I liked your book. Now you can talk about books with me. I liked your notes too, but they seemed…hmm…too abstract. See, I don’t remember any of them now. Were you really thinking that way when you read the book?”
“I don’t know. It ’s good that you don’t remember them.”
She studied my face for a minute. “You’re a bookworm, the biggest dreamer I’ve seen.” She suddenly burst out laughing.
I knew she was referring to my notes. I crossed my arms, pretending to be angry.
“Okay, I won’t tease you anymore.” She put on a serious face. “You know what? After reading the book I began to think that I’m living in a besieged fortress.”
“Everyone lives in a besieged fortress, more or less,” I replied.
“I live inside and you live outside. Or the other way around. We can never live on the same side.” She sighed deeply, as though she had discovered the most profound truth on earth.
Summer break arrived in early July and after a few days’ cleaning and packing, Donghua and Pingping had gone back to their hometowns and wouldn’t return for the next semester until late August. Between the day finals ended and the day she was due to leave, Donghua knitted day and night to catch up with her assignment—one sweater for her brother and one scarf for her aunt. Whenever I saw her during that one week, she was either sitting o
n her bed knitting with her mosquito net up or sleeping with the mosquito net down. When she was up she would lean against two or three stacked pillows and remain in the same position for hours, a solemn look on her face, knitting.
I didn’t return to my hometown to visit my parents over the summer break as I had planned. I wrote and told them I was participating in a research project in my department and had to stay on campus to help out. That was a lie. In fact I found a summer job teaching English to a middle-school student three times a week for three hours each session. The pay was ten yuan an hour. If I didn’t miss any classes, I would make five hundred and forty yuan—enough to fund my trip to Miao Yan’s hometown during the winter break, my secret plan. I was happy whenever I thought about what a surprise it would be to her.
Miao Yan never told me much about Yunnan and the Miao people. Whenever I asked she would say that the Miaos in her area were just like the Hans. “Don’t you see me eating rice and speaking Mandarin every day?” she would say. After a while I stopped asking her and did my own research instead. Once I read in a travel book that Miaos had a custom of “kidnapping brides” and one of their festivals was called “Stepping Over Flower Mountains.”
Another reason I decided to stay on campus was that I had to write Miao Yan’s dissertation. Though I regretted that I had agreed to the minimum 100-page project without hesitation, I felt obliged to help her—without the dissertation she simply wouldn’t be able to graduate.
She left the university the week after she returned my book. When I asked her what she would do during the summer break, she said she would stay off campus. I asked where she would be living but she wouldn’t tell me. “I do what I need to do and I stay where I should stay,” she said, smirking.
Then she said she had to run for an appointment. Before I could respond, she was gone.
It was the first time I had stayed in the dorm during a break. Most students had gone home and those who had stayed were either working or preparing for some kind of test. I was the only one on my floor but there were quite a few girls on other floors—I could tell how many rooms were occupied by the laundry hanging on the clotheslines in the hallways. The canteen opened for only half an hour, with two windows serving takeout food. The chefs looked sleepy and yawned often. Spiderwebs had grown in the corners of the cafeteria’s locked door. Through the dusty windows, I could see chairs stacked upside down on the tables.
