Katherine

by Anchee Min

  “Jim will be our leader,” said Katherine. “He lived there for seven years as a city youth in a reeducational program during the Cultural Revolution. Is he here yet?”

  After Lion Head said hello to Katherine, he turned to me. He was smiling at his own thoughts. I asked him why he was smiling.

  “You two look good together,” he said. “You and Katherine.”

  “I wish I wore something that wasn’t black,” I said.

  “No, don’t change anything,” said Lion Head. “I like the way you two dress. You complement each other.”

  “The harmony of our colors?” I asked.

  “I’m not sure,” he said, and went to give a cigarette to the bus driver.

  I noticed Jasmine staring at me. She was in love with her hatred. She was shredding her basket to pieces.

  When Jim arrived, everybody cheered. The bus driver closed the door. It was such an old bus that he had to kick it into gear. In thirty minutes we were out of Shanghai.

  Lion Head waved Katherine over to sit beside him. Before she had time to react, Jasmine took the seat. Katherine smiled and took the empty seat next to me. Lion Head leaned forward and asked Katherine if he could borrow her tape player. Katherine lent him the machine and a set of headphones.

  Lion Head never took the headphones off his ears the entire trip. He was punishing Jasmine for possessing him.

  Jasmine chose not to react. She looked out the window.

  * * *

  I asked Katherine her impression of Chinese women so far. She said the more she studied, the more she was confused.

  “They don’t seem to mind the interviews,” she said, “but they never tell the whole truth. They have this image of themselves and they want me to buy into it. It seems the only form of communication is speaking about the surface.”

  “No one tells the truth here,” I said. “You have to figure out where to find the truth.”

  “Where?” She was eager.

  “Have you read the novel Dream of the Red Chamber?” I asked.

  “You know, I tried, but to tell you the truth, I didn’t really like it. It dragged on too long. The characters spent their lives playing mind games.”

  “That’s exactly what China is about,” I said. “Fabrications. Mind games have been the essence of this culture since ancient times. The way to figure it out is to quit thinking about it. ‘A wise man makes provision for the stomach and not for the eye,’ which is to say that you can only feel the truth. Like how trees show the form of the wind, and waves give vital energy to the moon. You will never be able to physically locate the truth. You have to judge by the concrete content of your experience, and not by its conformity with purely theoretical standards. It is a skill that would be blocked if you tried to master it with western methods and techniques.”

  I recited an ancient poem to her.

  The centipede was happy, quite,

  Until a toad in fun

  Said, “Pray, which leg goes after which?”

  This worked his mind to such a pitch,

  He lay distracted in a ditch,

  Considering how to run.

  Katherine blinked her eyes with her unusually long eyelashes. I remembered then that I once had a dream about her eyelashes. They turned into bushes, the earth’s eyelashes.

  Katherine turned to me and said that she found conversations with me inspiring. She asked if we could talk more. I told her that I did not wish to be interviewed. She asked why and said that sometimes I confused her in a strange way.

  I suggested we learn from the centipede, let things take their natural course.

  * * *

  Persimmon Village was an extraordinary place in the mountains. Extraordinarily poor and extraordinarily beautiful. The villagers wore rags, and their houses were primitive-looking, mostly made of granite stones. The village was surrounded by persimmon trees and strange-looking plants the villagers called “soap trees.” Soap trees had brown leaves and bore half-moon-shaped, peapodlike fruits. When the fruit ripened in autumn, the children would shake them down, collect them, dry them, and put them in baskets to be used as soap. The villagers didn’t believe in the kinds of soap we used. They bathed their children with soap-tree fruit and washed clothes and dishes with it. The fruit had a wonderful smell, almost like lilac.

  The villagers were full of warmth. They made their living by growing tea trees and selling dry persimmons. They had hardly seen city people before. They sent their kids to bring us homemade sweet potato chips and dry persimmons, food they stored for the New Year celebration. In return, we gave the children gifts of fancy notebooks, pencils, and colorful nylon bags. The villagers let us use their elementary-school classroom as our base.

  In the evening, with a cup of fresh tea in hand, we went to sit on a mountaintop that overlooked the village. It looked like an ancient Chinese painting, with streaks of gray smoke coming out of the chimneys. We smelled the soap-tree fruit and watched the villagers being greeted by their children as they returned from the day’s work with hoes and other farming tools on their shoulders. Laughter and singing filled the air.

  It was here we learned more about Katherine, the girl from Michigan, America. We walked back to the playground of Persimmon Village Elementary School and Katherine showed us her cartwheels.

  We watched her with fascination. It was not the way she did the cartwheels that surprised us, it was our own lack of imagination: none of us had expected her to have the movements of a deer, and to turn cartwheels like a professional gymnast. Katherine finished before memory’s claw had a chance to grasp the image. We dared not ask her to do it again. We were afraid she would say that she hadn’t done a thing, that it had all been our imagination.

  “Hey, what’s wrong with you?” Katherine shouted. “It wasn’t that bad, was it?”

  Our curiosity soared. We asked, in broken English, where she grew up, how long it took her to learn to do cartwheels, and who was her master.

  She laughed, then she told us about how her hometown was “surrounded by oak trees.” “We sold our old house and bought a new one with a big backyard in the sixties. My parents preferred the suburbs to the city . . .” The lake, she said, was called Lake Michigan. “The lake was the real reason our family chose to move there. I love to smell the air and listen to the sound of waves at night . . .”

  Her words were incomprehensible to us. We had no notion of such phrases as “preferred,” “chose,” or “bought a house.” We believed that we were wild seeds; we grew and died where the wind dropped us. It never occurred to us that we had a choice in life, that one could do what one “loved” to do. We were never asked what we “preferred” or what we would like to “choose.” We never thought that a house could be “sold” and “bought.” We began to see what we had missed in our lives and understand what it meant to sacrifice individualism to serve the ideals of the group.

  As we learned about Katherine’s life in Michigan, America, we began to taste something that had a sweet-sad taste.

  * * *

  She said that she did not know her biological father, had never seen him. Her mother was born blind and deaf. When Katherine was six weeks old, her mother was told by a neighbor that the child had been crying for hours; the mother could not hear a thing. The mother was afraid that the baby might fall ill at night and she would be helpless. She made the decision to give her up for adoption.

  Katherine was two months old. No one could be sure whether she would turn out to be deaf in the future. But she was a healthy baby, strong-limbed, with a pair of clear, dark brown eyes. She would raise her little hand and watch it with fascination. She turned when the nurse clapped her hands. She seemed to have perfect senses.

  A Jewish family adopted her. The family already had a handicapped child. If Katherine turned out to be blind or deaf, she would not feel too isolated. Her adopted father was an auto-factory worker and her mother was a grocery-shop clerk. With both parents working, she spent most of her spare time in the backy
ard garden rocking her dolls, observing the growth of flowers, and chasing lightning bugs, forever waiting for her parents to come home.

  A little girl, playing with her dolls in a garden. I began to see the picture. I could also picture myself, wearing shoes with the soles falling off, walking the streets on a rainy day, collecting pennies for starving American children. I could see the young Katherine singing songs, visiting an imaginary zoo in her backyard, and I remembered how I had to kill my only pet—a hen with the reddest crown—to heed Mao’s call to abolish disease in the city and prove one’s loyalty. I listened to Katherine talk about her loneliness as a child, and I thought of how many nights I was left waiting at the gate of my daycare school, the last one to be picked up, waiting for my parents to finish their shifts, and the times they never showed. The images mixed, superimposed themselves on each other, and her tears became mine, and mine hers.

  * * *

  Katherine spoke about forbidden subjects, about Christmas, and the American tradition of family gathering; about her idealistic dreams of a peaceful world—she once filed an application to join the humanitarian Peace Corps; about desire, love, and passion—her fascination with a neighborhood boy when she was sixteen, he seventeen.

  On a full-moon night, under a big oak tree, the young man and woman found their passion unstoppable. They fell in love. The young hearts cared not about money, class, boundaries. Be together or die, this was their only thought. The boy secretly climbed into Katherine’s room and they took each other in their arms and their bodies became inseparable. “He was so tender and so gentle. We kissed and kissed, held each other all night. We fell asleep with tears of joy on our faces. God, I can’t believe it was so long ago . . . It was like a song, a movie, a poem, it always stays with me, reminding me that there are beautiful things in life.”

  Our cheeks became feverish as Katherine’s voice grew soft. We dipped our hearts in its sweetness. Our class began a love affair with her, a love affair that would seek to reclaim the land of our hearts.

  In many ways my relationship with Lion Head began on our way back from the mountains. We spent three days in Persimmon Village living with peasants and learning to love the Chinese landscape. We bathed with soap-tree fruits that made everyone smell like lilac through and through.

  The trip with Katherine lightened our spirit. On our way back on the bus, I couldn’t help talking to her. My mouth was like an open dam, thoughts rushed out. I asked her many questions, including questions I would never ask a Chinese: about men, about what kind of men she found attractive. It surprised me when Katherine said that she considered Lion Head attractive. From that moment on, Lion Head was a different man in my eyes.

  Katherine said that an attractive man was someone who was sure of himself, acted on his own will, and had style. I looked at the men around me and I figured that Lion Head was the one who most closely fit the description. He did have a certain weird style.

  Katherine said that she had had a dream about Lion Head in which she had slipped into Jasmine’s role. She said it was a “hot dream.” I asked her to explain. She said, “Hot. A sexy dream.” She laughed.

  I looked at her and began to wonder, Did she mean that she felt desire for Lion Head? I turned to look at Lion Head, who was lying in the back of the bus, sleeping like a baby. His expression was peaceful. The face reminded me of the angel Katherine described in her Christmas stories.

  * * *

  Through Katherine’s imagination I found Lion Head irresistible. I began to think his eccentric laughter charming, his talk enlightening. I began to think of this boy-man as the Son of Light; wherever he went, the place shined, flowers bloomed. His arrogance nurtured my desire. I started to see why Jasmine refused to let him go.

  * * *

  I got Lion Head more old urine-colored traditional paintings from my neighbors. He was very pleased with my “sharpening taste.” In return, he gave me all the dry soap-tree fruits he brought back from Persimmon Village. He said he loved the smell. Every time I visited him, he insisted on smelling my neck. He said he had become a “soap-tree man.” “Jasmine ran out of soap-tree fruit, and her father was mad at me for not providing it for his daughter.” One day Lion Head told me that Mr. Han had had a serious talk with him. He made sure Lion Head understood the power Jasmine held over his future. Mr. Han painted a picture of what might happen if Lion Head continued to neglect his daughter.

  Lion Head told me that he considered himself a free spirit. To imprison him was to bury him. He tried to dance around the president’s “mousetrap.” But Mr. Han was no fool. He had warned Lion Head that there were rules that could not be broken and boundaries that must not be crossed. “I might break Jasmine’s neck if that old fart pushes me one more inch,” Lion Head said.

  Lion Head made up his mind as he talked to me. He decided to surrender to the president’s power, but not live in misery. He said that he would enter a spiritual realm, where he would be his own master. He believed that the path of liberation was a progressive disentanglement of one’s self from every form of identification, to realize that one was not this body, these sensations, these feelings, these thoughts, this consciousness. He explained that the basic reality of life could thus be altered.

  “In order to grow,” he said, “I must cease knowing. I am the Possessor of Knowledge, and the Possessor of Knowledge can know other things, but cannot make himself an object of his own knowledge, in the same way that fire can burn other things, but cannot burn itself.”

  I had trouble understanding Lion Head. One minute he was a driven man in pursuit of his goals; the next, he was an aimless wanderer. While he flooded me with his philosophy, he made complete sense. But when I went home and thought about it, his words contradicted his actions. On the one hand, he presented himself as a helpless puppet of circumstance; on the other, he proclaimed he was in an ideal stage of his life, where he was free of all boundaries, like the Zen image of the moon in the water, a phenomenon likened to human experience. The water was the subject, the moon was the object. Without water, there was no moon in the water, likewise when there was no moon. When the moon rose, the water did not wait to receive its image, and when even the tiniest drop of water was poured out, the moon did not wait to cast its reflection, for the moon did not intend to cast its reflection, and the water did not intentionally receive its image.

  Lion Head spoke so freely about concepts like the moon in the water. He said he was a man who “begins with ease, was never not at ease, was unconscious of the ease of ease.”

  * * *

  Lion Head would bring Jasmine flowers during the day and invite me to his place at night. He’d take me to the park and we would walk around in the dark for hours. He’d speak about Jasmine and her vicious father. He’d calmly talk about survival and his ambition of becoming a hero of his time. He said that Jasmine used her pitifulness to get what she wanted. The truth was that she never gave in. She always won. She made the others feel guilty and eventually they surrendered to her. She had gotten her way ever since she was a little girl. There was poison in her tears.

  “But she will never have me to keep,” Lion Head said firmly. “I am nobody’s concubine.”

  I admired him. In his unswerving spirit I discovered a desire to share his risk and offered him my protection.

  One evening Lion Head had liquor in his room. He put the antiques in the corner and sat on his bamboo bed. He lay down and had me sit on a wooden chair next to him. There was a square table alongside the chair with a dim lamp on it. Books filled the shelves and were piled on the floor; his clothes hung on the back of the door.

  We faced each other, two feet apart. I could smell soap-tree fruit. His eyes were shining. He asked me if I knew what today was. I suddenly remembered that it was the day of the mid-moon. He poured me a cup of liquor. I said I didn’t drink. He said just a sip. We toasted.

  The antique clock was noisy. It sounded like a dying windup toy. The liquor felt good. My cheeks burned. Nothing matte
red. Lion Head said he had made sweet-and-sour vegetables and pickles. It took him three days to prepare. “On the first day, you salt the chopped vegetables,” he said. “Second day, you wash off the salt and dump the vegetables into a jar filled with vinegar and sugar, and close the lid tightly. Third day, you add more vinegar, stir the vegetables, press them tightly against each other, and let it sit. When it’s ready, it should taste sour-sweet and crispy.”

  I chewed the vegetables. I heard the crispy sound. I sipped more liquor. My head felt light, my blood running fast. He reached out and his finger touched my cheek. “You are an ancient goddess tonight,” he said. He asked if I cared to hear him recite an ancient poem by Li Ching-chao. I told him that I knew all about Li Ching-chao. “I love her poems.”

  “That’s very good,” he said. “Let’s recite one together.”

  The fragrance of the red lotus fades,

  And the bamboo mat is touched by autumn chill.

  I loosen my thin robe

  And board the orchid boat alone.

  Who sends this elegant letter through the clouds?

  As the wild geese return in formation,

  Moonlight fills the western chamber.

  Petals are falling, waters flow.

  One image of love,

  Two places of separate sorrow.

  There is no way to banish this feeling.

  As it leaves the eyebrows,

  It enters the heart.

  Lion Head suggested that we go to Wolf Teeth to celebrate the mid-moon. It was four hours by bus from the city. There was an ancient altar down by a cliff. Superstitious people went to Wolf Teeth to pray for deliverance.

  We arrived at Wolf Teeth just before midnight. We brought a flashlight but did not use it—the moon was bright enough to see the road. Long wild bushes had grown over the altar. We sat by it and felt like we were sitting in a womb. I looked up and saw the wolf-teeth-shaped cliff outlined in the moonlight. The thick mountain plants dangled down like God’s beard. We heard the sound of a waterfall beyond the cliff, as if God were emptying his bladder.