by Ge Fei
The next morning, he promptly abandoned the gang of girls he’d been hanging out with and latched on to me. Our friendship began with him bugging me to borrow my radio.
•
In August of 1976, talk of earthquakes began swirling through the hutong alleys. Aftershocks from the later officially recognized July 28th Tangshan earthquake had shaken the boiler-room smokestack of the factory workers’ compound off-center, its precipitous tilt alarming everyone who saw it and intensifying the fear in the hearts of local residents. An earthquake tent immediately appeared inside the compound, and soon everyone on Mahogany Street was making their own tent. Crude shelters multiplied among the trees next to the barbershop and on the open land along the old city moat. Some even made hammocks out of bed-sheets and twine, stringing them up between two trees.
Terror quietly spread throughout the neighborhood.
The summer months of July and August are Beijing’s rainiest season. One of the most surreal scenes I witnessed that year unfolded on a stormy night in mid-August. Under cover of darkness, my mother took my sister and me out to the old city moat to burn spirit money for my father. On the way home, we were suddenly caught in a torrential downpour. Midnight, the street completely empty, we got as far as the Sunward Photo Parlor when we discovered, right in the middle of the brick-lined road, an occupied, solitary army cot. On it lay a man well over six feet tall; he had wrapped himself up in plastic, and even held a propped-open umbrella in his hand. He slept, snoring loudly. Ma pointed at him and laughed, surprised that there were people in this world who feared death so much. Cui Lihua, whose teeth were chattering, chimed in, “You know, I think my brother’s a little . . . a little afraid too.”
•
My mother often assured us that even if an earthquake knocked the house down, there weren’t enough tiles left on our dilapidated roof to do us any harm. And besides, according to her, even if the damage were total and it flattened the whole city, it wouldn’t be a big deal. Those people with government jobs and lots of money had something to live for, but the lives of people like us weren’t really worth anything to begin with. If we died, we died. My sister and I found this ridiculous, and we resolved to address her pessimistic, confused thinking with barrage after barrage of complaints. Eventually, we drove her past her limit, and she hired someone to set up a small tent in the yard, with bunks made of stacked bricks. My sister and I slept in the tent, but my mother, determined as ever to tempt fate, continued to sleep in the house.
By then, Jiang Songping and I had become inseparable. His family lived on the fifth floor of an apartment building—earthquakes are no joke for those residents. It made perfect sense for him to ask to stay in our tent. My mother agreed to it without a second thought.
Although Jiang Songping was a solitary, pitiful-looking character, he was a natural politician. The things stuffed inside his head that he had seen and heard on his wanderings through the hutongs poured out spontaneously, making him quite likeable. He not only knew that Antonioni was posing as a movie director in order to infiltrate our country’s borders and assassinate the Great Leader, Chairman Mao, he also knew that every pomegranate contained the same number of seeds: no matter how many different pomegranates you opened up, the number would always come to three hundred and sixty-five.
While he lived with us, my mother used to joke that he might as well just move in permanently and call her “Ma.”
There was something else she used to say about him: “That kid is too smart. If there ever comes a day when capitalism really does return, I’m afraid the two of you will end up working for him.”
We didn’t pay attention to her; deep in our hearts, we were absolutely certain that, no matter what happened on this earth, capitalism would never return.
I never found out anything about Jiang Songping’s parents or extended family—even the dangers of more earthquakes never drove them out into the open. I asked my mother if she knew anything, but she wouldn’t say. She only quietly replied, “A horrible situation.”
Even as terror spread out of control, it also filled us with irrepressible excitement. Schools closed; children with nothing to do ran around outside all day. Jiang Songping used to take me out past the city limits to go swimming in the river. We’d walk south from the east end of our alley, continue around a coal briquette factory and a Ming-dynasty walled outpost overgrown with weeds, then pass under a railway line to the river’s edge. When we finished swimming, we’d lie in the peasants’ watermelon fields, eat watermelon to our hearts’ content, and take a nice, long nap. If we were hungry when we woke, there was always more watermelon.
When we were really bored, we’d sometimes go down to Horsewhip Xu’s repair shop. The shop had hired a new repairman to take over my father’s old workstation. It had also expanded its services, and now fixed tape recorders and black-and-white TVs, among other electronics. Horsewhip claimed that no man faced death as boldly as he did. He certainly wasn’t about to waste his time messing with an earthquake tent! Cholera? US-Soviet nuclear war? Fatal earthquake? None of these things scared him. His outlook on life proved to be exactly the same as my mother’s: “All men die only once. If somebody else dies, I can die, too. If they don’t die, I might as well die anyway.”
When the earthquake terror reached its zenith, and the old ladies from the local Residents Committee were patrolling the streets every day with their red bands tied to one arm, shouting through metal bullhorns at the locals to remind them that no matter what, they must not remove their socks before bed, Horsewhip Xu seemed to be the only man on Mahogany Street whose calm endured undisturbed. But Jiang Songping didn’t believe any of it. He thought Horsewhip was deceiving everyone, and said to me, “You’re crazy! Who doesn’t fear death?! Horsewhip Xu looks like he doesn’t care about an earthquake, like he’s not afraid of anything. Have you seen that spring in the corner next to his desk, with an upside-down soda bottle on top? That’s a homemade earthquake detector! If an earthquake hit, Horsewhip Xu would be the first one on the whole street to know. You don’t believe me, let’s do an experiment.”
Jiang Songping pulled his slingshot out of his pocket and aimed through the window. He pulled the pink inner tube as far back as he could and released it. We heard a sharp ting, and the bottle toppled to the floor with a shattering crash.
Horsewhip Xu, who was immersed in the repair of a broken radio, broke into a sudden fit of shivering, as if he’d been plugged into a socket. He looked confusedly around him, then bent down and inspected the broken glass on the floor. In a flash, he ripped off his old bifocals, threw them on the desk, and started to jump up and down, slapping his backside like a possessed man, and yelling, “Earthquake! Earthquake! Qiangui, Cabbage, let’s go! Get out, you two, quick! Hurry, good God, it’s an earthquake. . . . !”
Jiang Songping dragged me under the windowsill, succumbing to a burst of laughter. “You fucking geezer! If it were an earthquake, you should be running your ass outside, not jumping around!” he sniggered with derision.
Of course, the myth of Horsewhip’s fearlessness popped like a soap bubble. But I never laughed. I’m not sure why, but Songping’s joke felt a little too cruel to me. I’m the kind of person who likes to let my perceptions float on the surface of things. I felt bad for Horsewhip, because even at that young age I had come to a personal realization: the best attributes of anyone or anything usually reside on the surface, which is where, in fact, all of us live out our lives. Everyone has an inner life, but it’s best if we leave it alone. For as soon as you poke a hole through that paper window, most of what’s inside simply won’t stand up to scrutiny.
Even before the last ripples of the earthquake crisis had smoothed over, our lives had quietly changed. One day, Jiang Songping stopped showing up. He just vanished without giving me any explanation.
When I asked my mother, her face darkened and she snapped back, “What do you care? Someone like that. . . . I don’t want you around him any more. Pretend he’s de
ad. The quicker he dies, the quicker he’ll be reborn!”
I went to find my sister. Her eyes were red and she looked distracted. A long stretch of silence passed before she could say to me, sobbing, “Please don’t say his name in front of me again, all right?”
Like I said, I’m not the kind of guy who likes digging for answers, so I stopped bothering them. I didn’t know what had occurred between Jiang Songping and my sister, nor was I interested in knowing—it would only become another weight on my mind. Bumping into him on the street became awkward. Either he would sidestep quickly into the trees along the road, or he’d hug the wall, pretend not to see me, and keep on walking. I frequently felt like stopping him to ask what had happened. But in the end, I suppressed the squirming feeling in my chest. If I made up with him on my own, I felt like I’d be wronging my mother and sister. So I started to ignore him to save him from embarrassment.
As time passed, I gradually pushed his memory to the back of my mind.
In October of that year, I came home from school one day and walked straight into my sister’s room. We both jumped. I could see that she had been sitting at the edge of her bed, counting pomegranate seeds in a porcelain basin. She reflexively put a hand over the mouth of the basin, then her face turned red and she pushed it aside, muttering, “Liar. What a liar!” Finally she stood up, tossed her braids, and stomped out.
Perhaps out of boredom, I picked up the bowl after she left and counted the seeds twice. It came out to three hundred and seventy-one both times. Six more seeds than Jiang Songping’s eternal three hundred and sixty-five.
Four years later, in 1980, Jiang Songping and I started to hang out again. He had been taking remedial classes and was accepted into Beijing Communications College. After graduating from high school the year before, I had started to work at Red Capital Apparel to learn how to tailor. It turned out that his extended family really wasn’t large at all: upon his acceptance into college, he held a banquet at Crane Garden Restaurant on Marco Polo Road to thank his previous teachers, and only his aunt showed up. Riding my bike home through Dashilar Market after work one day, I randomly bumped into him. Neither of us knew what to say. Perhaps this awkwardness prompted Jiang Songping to ask if I wanted to come to the banquet.
I couldn’t think of any way to refuse, so I accepted.
As I didn’t have anything to bring to the celebration, I spent the following three weeks in Horsewhip Xu’s workshop building him a shortwave radio. By then, Horsewhip Xu, paralyzed from a stroke, lay on a ratty old sofa for most of the day. Still, he didn’t forget to remind me gently that it was illegal to listen to Deng Lijun or Voice of America on the radio.
Later on, Songping told me he had immediately thrown my gift into a runoff ditch by his school without ever listening to it once. Apparently, it brought back his nightmare from years ago, back in the earthquake tent. He said it would be impossible for him to forget what had happened, unless he went insane. Already, after so many years, his struggle with that memory had utterly exhausted him. He asked me not to be offended—he had no choice. It turned out that mysterious occurrence was even more serious than I had imagined. Not only did it weigh on his conscience, it remained an obstacle in our friendship. Every once in a while, he would cast a searching gaze toward me and the shadow of the unspeakable event would rise up and smother us both.
•
Jiang Songping majored in telecommunications. In order to keep our friendship on equal footing, I signed up for classes at Red Flag Night College without telling my family. Red Flag Night College didn’t have a telecommunications major, so I picked Marxist Economics at random. Out of ten classes, the only one I could barely tolerate was College Language Arts. I sweated it out for over a year, then gave up.
In his junior year Songping contracted hepatitis; the school put him in quarantine at the Temple of the Earth Hospital. I visited him every weekend, spending whole afternoons with him sitting in that gloomy corridor. One day before I left, I finally mustered the courage to say something I had been meaning to say for many years: “No matter what happened back then between you and my sister, no matter how awful or filthy it might have been, I would forgive you completely. It’s been ancient history for years now, so can you please just forget about it? Like . . . like it never existed. Okay?”
Songping must not have expected that I would strike right at his soft spot. His face, turned a waxy yellow from both hepatitis and stress, glowed faintly pink. He stared at me in shock for a long while. Then he leaped up, grabbed my wrist, and with his thick lips quivering and tears in his eyes, said, “Brother, what the hell kind of good does it do for you to forgive me? I can’t even forgive myself!”
•
My sister cooked dumplings for us that night, and Chang Baoguo and I got sloshed. My sister’s face, ravaged by time and covered with warts and liver spots, still retained enough composure to hide a measure of sunlit past along with a dark secret from her youth.
My brother-in-law toasted me again and again, slapping me unnecessarily on the shoulder. His unnatural affection made me nervous. He said that if it hadn’t been for the accident in Changping, if it hadn’t left him crippled and unable to look for work ever again, he’d never have been forced into such a hard decision as asking me to move. Then he said something that startled me: “Shit, society today even forces family members to go for each other’s throats.”
I recalled Jiang Songping’s warning from a few days ago. Though I knew it wouldn’t matter either way, I couldn’t help peeking under the table. My brother-in-law wore a pair of beaten-up old walking shoes.
As we got drunker, I let the impulse to reciprocate my brother-in-law’s earnestness get the best of me, and swore that I would immediately move out. I felt a profound regret the instant the words left my mouth, as if I actually had another place to go to after moving out of their hole-cursed home. I would never have thought that even Jiang Songping’s factory would be closed to me.
Throughout the evening, my sister interrupted our banter with her words of counsel, annoying me to no end. She repeatedly pushed me to meet this lisping co-worker of hers. How did she put it? That if I never got married and had a family, if I ended up floating through the world like a wandering ghost, I wouldn’t only be ignoring our mother’s last words, but father’s spirit would somehow know and he’d never find any peace. She went on and on, unable to control herself, and soon the waterworks erupted.
In my half-inebriated condition, I agreed to a date. We settled on next Saturday. A venomous flame instantly consumed my heart, spreading an incredible feeling of self-loathing.
Quietly I accelerated the pace of my drinking in order to pass out sooner.
5. ROAD TO HEAVEN
IF YOU live in Beijing and like fine teas, you’ve no doubt heard about Malian Avenue. It’s not far from our place on Mahogany Street, in the south part of the city just outside of Guang’an Gate in the Xuanwu District. When I was little, that area was still considered the suburbs; my sister and I used to sneak into the orchards there to steal apricots. Now it’s the largest tea market in Beijing, the sidewalks packed with one-room storefronts run by tea sellers from Fujian and Zhejiang.
The woman my sister set me up with, Hou Meizhu, lived in Little Red Temple, a neighborhood right next to Malian Avenue.
That Saturday afternoon, I drove to the house to pick up my sister, then the two of us headed over to Little Red Temple to meet her.
Whenever you’re set up on a blind date, you inevitably try to picture what she looks like based on her name. Everybody does it. Mei-zhu, or “beautiful pearl”—you can imagine how eagerly I looked forward to meeting her. You can also imagine how much sharper the disappointment felt when faced with the actual person.
Dinner took place at a Wild Swans Dumpling House on the second floor of a second-rate supermarket. The restaurant was greasy and loud; making conversation required that we raise our voices and practically yell at each other across the table. This quickly became
not only awkward but unsettling.
As far as looks go, while I wouldn’t go so far as to call her unattractive, she was still a ways off from the “pretty and well-proportioned” Lihua had promised. Her short hair parted in the middle made her seem younger, perhaps, but her square face made her look almost androgynous. If you saw her on the street, you couldn’t be sure of her gender at first glance. My sister constantly warned me not to expect every woman in creation to be dangerously sexy like Yufen. I guess I just preferred Yufen’s type. Plus the sharp smell of cheap perfume turned me off.
Still, the very moment I met Meizhu I could see she was an upstanding, compassionate person. Even if I didn’t want to date her, it wouldn’t be right to deliberately offend her. She had brought along her eighth-grade son. The boy, who had a head as round as a basketball, clearly realized that this situation could affect him in some way. He wasn’t very friendly to me, which was understandable. Hunched over his game console, he peered up at me every now and then with a hostile glint in his eyes.
My sister, seeing my lack of interest, kept signaling Meizhu to be more engaging with looks and tugs on her sleeve. Lihua didn’t really know how to deal with the unfolding disaster, so she kept repeating the same sentence, which caused my insides to squirm: “Well, we’ll all be family soon enough.”
The more she said it, the more anxious I grew. I could tell it was making Hou Meizhu uncomfortable, too. But she couldn’t stand up to my sister’s pushiness the way I could, and so with a perfunctory smile she picked up a dumpling with her chopsticks and dropped it into my bowl. This seemingly inconsequential gesture touched me in an astonishing way—no one besides my mother had ever helped me to food like that. My heart warmed half a degree; I actually started to consider what it would be like to marry her.
