February Flowers

by Fan Wu

  “Stop it, you dirty girl!” Donghua said. She drummed her feet against her bed so hard that it sounded as though the bed might collapse.

  “Don’t blame me. You asked me to tell you about it! I told you it wasn’t for kids,” Pingping protested.

  I said nothing. I was trying to imagine what “making love” was like. I pictured a few scenes in my mind, but they seemed weird to me. I laughed.

  “I can’t believe you’re laughing. Making love is nothing to be ashamed of. Sex has existed since the world began. Human beings, cats, dogs, birds, and every other animal in the world need to make love to have babies,” Pingping said.

  “I don’t want to get pregnant. I don’t want to have sex,” Donghua said.

  “Don’t want to have sex? I don’t believe you for a second. You aren’t a nun. Of course you’ll have sex someday,” Pingping said. Then she lowered her voice and said secretively, “You know what? You don’t need a man to get pleasure. You can make love with yourself. That ’s called masturbation. And you can even reach orgasm through it. Have you tried?”

  I remembered the night I’d seen Donghua touching herself on her bed. I had never tried but didn’t want to admit it. I suddenly felt ashamed that I knew so little.

  “I’ve tried. But I think it’s a dirty thing to do. Some girls in my village said you’d die early if you did it more than once a month,” Donghua said reluctantly. “Sometimes I enjoy it but I’m not sure if I’ve ever had an orgasm.”

  “I can always have an orgasm after reading porn magazines. I have something for you guys,” Pingping said. She walked to her bed and dragged a black suitcase from underneath the bed. The suitcase was locked. She shook out a key from a pen-holder on her desk and unlocked the suitcase. From under a pile of clothes she pulled out a few magazines, throwing one to me and one to Donghua. “It cost me a fortune to get them from the black market on Zhong Shan Fifth Road. I can take you there if you want to buy some. You two must keep your mouths shut. If our department finds out we’ll all be expelled. I’m not joking.”

  I switched on my torch and picked up the magazine. It didn’t have a front cover and its pages were thin and yellowish. The back cover was still there, half secured by a staple. There was a naked woman on it. She was bending over, her behind high in the air, her huge breasts dangling like two sandbags. Her hands were crossed over her pubic area. Seen from the space between her fingers, the area was shaved. She looked frightened; her eyes were wide open and her tongue was sticking out from between her red lips. There were numerous creases on the cover, some cutting through the woman’s body and face, creating a strange scarring effect. It was the first time I had ever seen a picture of a naked woman. The first word that popped into my mind was “prostitute.”

  I had often seen naked women as a child. The house where my parents lived, from the time I was in primary school to middle school, was in a neighborhood without a hot-water supply. In winter everyone would go to the local public bathhouse to take a shower. When it was too cold to take a cold-water shower at home, my mother would take me to the bathhouse every Wednesday and Saturday afternoon. Most people there were middle-aged women, many overweight. A few were so fat that their poorly shaped breasts would dangle over their potbellies, and the fat on their thighs would move up and down when they walked. The blue veins in their legs spread underneath their skin like earthworms. In the bathhouse, I would squint and try not to glance at them.

  It had never occurred to me that a woman’s naked body could be arousing. When I thought about naked women, I thought about those overweight middle-aged women in the bathhouse. But this time, holding the porn magazine, I felt different. At the first sight of the naked woman, I felt my body getting warm and my heart rate rising. There was an inexplicable tumult within my body.

  I looked at Donghua out of the corner of my eye. She sat on her bed motionless, holding the magazine with both hands. I couldn’t see her expression but I assumed that she must have been feeling as helpless as I was.

  Pingping sat at her desk, facing me, whistling. She shook her head periodically as if she was ridiculing something in the magazine in front of her. She must be laughing at Donghua and me, I thought.

  I opened the magazine to a new page and saw a photo spread of white men and women. Though the torchlight was weak and the print quality poor, I could still make out all the naked bodies in different positions. In one picture, a man was lying beside a woman, one of his hands holding his penis while the other rested on the woman’s pubic area. The woman seemed intoxicated; her eyes were closed and her hands touching her balloon-like breasts. If Miao Yan had seen this picture, she would have yelled admiringly, “At least 40D!” I frowned at this page. How disgusting!

  I flipped quickly to the next page. It was a full-page picture: two naked Asian women were kissing, one touching the other’s breast.

  I wanted to turn the page, but I couldn’t—my hands weren’t following my mind. My breathing was getting heavier and I was becoming agitated. My bra and underwear seemed tight, which made me want to go to the bathroom. I took a deep breath, trying to force myself to calm down, but my hands were trembling helplessly and the magazine slipped from my hands onto the bed, then landed on the floor with a thud.

  Both Donghua and Pingping raised their heads, looking at me. For a few seconds I heard only my own breathing.

  “You’re frightened by a few pictures!” Pingping laughed aloud. “You’re a little kid!”

  Donghua laughed as well, but her laughs were short and dry.

  “That’s not true.” I was struggling to find an explanation. “The pictures don’t frighten me at all. I wasn’t holding the magazine properly, so it slipped from my hand. I—”

  “It’s just sex. I think it can be fun. Actually…” She hesitated. “What the hell, I’ll just tell you guys. When he kissed me, I felt his erection through his pants. You know what I mean? It was big and hard. I was so aroused that I wanted to touch it. I wanted him to be inside me.”

  “Oh my goodness!” Donghua exclaimed.

  Pingping picked up the magazine from the floor—unfortunately it was open at the page of the two women kissing.

  “I see,” she said, holding the magazine closer. “They’re homosexuals.”

  “Homosexuals? I’ve heard about them. They have a mental illness,” Donghua said. “They must be Americans. I heard there are a lot of them in the U.S.”

  “These two women are Asians,” Pingping said disapprovingly.

  “Women? Disgusting! They must be Japanese then. Only capitalist countries have homosexuals and AIDS. China doesn’t.”

  “How do you know?”

  “I read it in the newspaper.”

  “That’s propaganda. I don’t believe that’s the case. China ’s so big. There must be homosexuals around. You never know.”

  “But why does a girl want to make love with another girl? It doesn’t make sense. Can’t she just touch herself?” Donghua said.

  “Don’t ask me. How do I know? I’m not a homosexual.” Pingping giggled. “I have a boyfriend.”

  “Don’t show off.” Donghua threw her magazine back to Pingping. “I think sex is dirty and men are dirty. I don’t want to have sex with a man.”

  “If your ma thought the same way, you wouldn’t have come into this world. I don’t want to become an old maid. I like having a boyfriend, maybe even more than one. I want to get married and have babies. If China allowed a couple to have more than one child, I’d have at least three.” Pingping tucked the magazines back into the bottom of her suitcase, locked it, and pushed it underneath the bed.

  “Three kids? My! You really have to make love with your husband every day to have three kids,” Donghua said.

  “You’re jealous, aren’t you? It’s none of your business how many times I’ll make love to my husband.” Pingping threw a pillow at Donghua. Donghua caught it on her bed and threw it at me. The pillow hit me right on the head and fell on the floor.

  “Mi
ng, are you okay?” Pingping stopped laughing and walked over to pick up the pillow.

  “I’m all right. I ’m okay. I ’m just a little sleepy.” I managed a big yawn.

  “Are you sure?” Donghua asked.

  “Don’t take those magazines seriously,” Pingping said. “The models are prostitutes. They do it for money. If I’d known you’d be upset I wouldn’t have showed them to you.”

  “I’m sleepy. I ’m going to sleep now,” I said. I put down the mosquito net and covered myself from head to toe with a blanket.

  The picture filled my mind. It was unacceptable and obscene for two women to touch each other like that, I thought. Though I had read about homosexuals I had never thought such people really existed. Like Donghua, I had also read that they didn’t exist in China. I retraced in my mind all the books I had read and tried to recall if any had ever mentioned a sexual relationship between two women. Nothing came to mind. Then I assured myself that Miao Yan and I were close and intimate because we cared about each other and wanted to help each other out. I hadn’t the slightest desire to see her naked or touch her naked body. But then I asked myself why, if that was true, I sometimes wanted to touch her or even kiss her. Since I’d met Miao Yan I hadn’t been interested in having a boyfriend. Though it hadn’t seemed to me a problem before, I now thought it a little puzzling. I wrapped myself tightly in the blanket and forced myself not to think for a while by counting sheep. That somehow helped. At the end I was so exhausted that I fell asleep.

  When I woke next morning, the first thing I said to myself was that I would have a boyfriend by the end of the semester. This resolution relaxed me magically.

  “That company in Shenzhen won’t hire me.” Miao Yan came to my room the following afternoon with the news. “True or not, they said they couldn’t get my dossier from the university.” She shrugged. “I knew all this from the beginning.”

  “Don’t give up. There are a lot more opportunities,” I said, consoling her.

  “Yeah, we’ll see.”

  After that day she began to skip classes again and was off campus most evenings. She told me that she had found two part-time jobs. One was teaching a fifth-grade girl composition and English, which paid twelve yuan an hour; the other was doing odd jobs at a jewelry store owned by someone from her hometown. I didn’t know how much she got paid for the latter, but I doubted she would get much, for it was such an easy job—all she had to do was put price tags on newly arrived merchandise.

  I disliked the jewelry store owner at first sight. He was at least forty years old, coarse-voiced, bald, heavy-set, short—I was taller than he was—with a Japanese-style beard beneath his big, flat nose. The gold necklace he wore was as thick as a dog collar. He had three gold rings on each hand—the rings were so big that they made his fingers spread out. When he walked, his feet pointed outward in opposite directions, forming nearly a ninety-degree angle. Whatever the angle, he matched exactly the despicable image of a nouveau riche in my mind. I tried to persuade Miao Yan to quit the job but she kept saying he was much better than most of the men she knew.

  The man often invited Miao Yan to dinner at upmarket restaurants and would drive his red BMW to pick her up at the university’s main entrance. Miao Yan never turned down his invitations. In fact she would spend hours putting on makeup and choosing a dress. Sometimes she would ask me to walk her to the entrance. By the time we got there the man would be waiting in his car. On seeing us, he would smile a toothy grin, get out, and open the door for her. Then Miao Yan would step into the car like a celebrity, full of pride, pretentiousness, and privilege. How I hated it!

  Whenever the man invited Miao Yan he would also invite me, but I turned down his invitations without bothering to offer an excuse. Miao Yan knew that I disliked her hanging out with him but she laughed it off and never wanted to discuss it. “Don’t act like a jealous lover,” she would tease me. “I just like sitting in a BMW. What’s wrong with that? Tell me, do you know any other girls who go riding in a BMW?”

  One Thursday night in early fall, not long after school started, MiaoYan asked me to go shopping with her at the Guangzhou Department Store on Beijing Road, one of the most expensive malls. Normally she wouldn’t have wanted my company because, she said, I had no patience, style, or taste. “It’s no fun shopping with you. You don’t know good stuff and never buy anything. You’re so frugal,” she once remarked.

  These days, whenever she showed me an expensive purchase, she would say that the jewelry-store owner had just given her a good bonus for her work, or the family of the girl she was teaching had just handed her a red envelope because the girl had passed a major exam. I didn’t believe her but kept my mouth shut, trying not to be bothered by my own speculations, though my doubts and concerns were growing. At one point Miao Yan even made me promise that I wouldn’t ask her where her money came from. Though I obeyed her, naturally, I knew we would have to talk about it sooner or later.

  “Yan, where did you get so much money?” I asked finally, inside the store.

  She was trying on a dark blue suit. She turned back and forth before a full-length mirror on the wall, her eyebrows knotted into a frown. The suit was priced at six hundred and forty yuan—more than twice my monthly allowance. I knew she had expensive clothes but I never thought they were as expensive as this.

  “Silly girl, what do you think? I work hard to pay for everything. Money doesn’t fall from the sky,” she said, not looking away from the mirror. She stretched the suit at her waist with both hands, looking for creases. Her red fingernails flashed with each movement.

  “Don’t try to fool me. No part-time job can pay you that much. I don’t know of any other students who spend as much as you do. I think there’s something you haven’t told me.”

  “Lower your voice!” she said. She walked to a corner near the emergency exit. There was no one else around.

  “Can we talk about it after shopping? If I’d thought you’d make a scene I wouldn’t have asked you to come with me.” She crossed her hands behind her head and leaned back.

  “I know it’s fashionable for girls to find themselves a ‘sugar daddy.’”

  “What do you mean, ‘a sugar daddy’?” She laughed, poking my head with the index finger of her right hand. “When did our innocent Ming start to know about this kind of thing?”

  I didn’t laugh with her. “I don’t care if you only flirt with guys. But I don’t want to see you do anything improper with them.”

  “Like what?”

  “Like…like…” I bit my lower lip until it hurt. “Like going to bed with them.”

  “Is this all you’ve been worried about?” Her voice turned cold and hard.

  “Don’t act like you don’t care.”

  “Why should I care? I told you I became a woman at thirteen. I know how to take care of myself.”

  “Why do you think you know how to take care of yourself? I don’t think you do.” There was a lot I wanted to say, like telling her to quit smoking and drinking alcohol, telling her to spend time in the library and stop seeing the jewelry-store owner. But instead I said something else: “The teacher kissing you on the forehead doesn’t make you a woman and it wasn’t your fault to begin with.”

  “What wasn’t my fault? What do you know?”

  “You didn’t know what you were doing. You were too young. Your baba shouldn’t—”

  “Shut up! I don’t want to hear!”

  But I couldn’t stop. “It wasn’t your fault to begin with. You didn’t know—”

  “I said shut up!”

  Silence fell between us.

  “You’ve never gone to bed with the short fat man, right? Tell me you’ve never gone to bed with him,” I whispered, almost begging.

  “For God’s sake, I’m twenty-four years old! I don’t need another ma. You don’t have the right to interrogate me. You know so little about me.”

  “I only want you to say that you don’t sleep with him. I know you’re a good
girl.”

  “If you think I’m a good girl like you, you’re wrong. I can never be like you and never want to be like you. Just as you can never be like me, even if you wanted.”

  “Just answer my question.”

  “Why do you care?”

  “Of course I care. If you sleep with him for money, you are…a whore!” I realized too late what I had just said.

  “How dare you!” She took a step toward me, staring, then grabbed my throat with one hand and my arm with the other, shoving me against the wall.

  I had wanted to apologize for using the word “whore,” for reminding her of the horrible incident eleven years ago, but when she grabbed my throat and pushed me I felt sorry for myself, for how she treated me in return for all my affection for her.

  When she finally loosened her grip I backed away. I avoided eye contact, looking at the rows of clothes hanging nearby. I suddenly missed sitting in the library, where it was always so quiet and peaceful.

  “Have you ever loved somebody? Have you ever tasted the bitterness of love? Do you know what love means? You know nothing! You’re a snail hiding in your shell of fantasies. What do you know about the world other than what you have read in your books? You haven’t even been in a relationship. You don’t have the right to tell me what to do or not do.” Her voice was low but trembling with anger. While speaking, she turned her head and touched her back pocket with one hand—she was looking for a cigarette. When she realized that she was not wearing her own clothes she licked her lips with her tongue.

  “I can say whatever I want to say to you. I care about you. That’s why.” I tried my best to soften my tone. I even managed a light smile. But my heart was burning with anger and resentment. The light smile on my face was nothing more than a stiff grin.