Katherine (5 page)

I corrected her accent once when she pronounced
bi-zi
—nose—like
bie-zhu
—crippled pig. She asked if she could pay me to give her private Chinese lessons. I told her with great delight that I would teach her Chinese but would accept no money. She didn’t understand that I could be reported as a spy for taking her money. She told me I was being ridiculous. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “If you don’t want to accept money, no deal.” I said that I couldn’t explain any further, because I didn’t know her well. How could I know that she wouldn’t report me? I would be in trouble if she leaked our conversation to the school authority. I would be labeled as one who “sabotaged the great open image of New China by misinforming a foreign guest.”

I was confused when she said that she had to respect my choice. To me it had nothing to do with “choice.” It was about the reality of survival.

*   *   *

O
ne of the strangest things Katherine did in our eyes was to rent a peasant’s hut for herself. The place was surrounded by rice paddies and was about a half hour by bicycle from the school. It didn’t make sense to me that she turned down the offer to live in the university dormitory. Her hut looked primitive; she practically had
to shit in a pigpen. Katherine seemed very happy with the hut though. She called it “my home.”

Before the semester was over, Katherine said that she would like to invite the class to a party at her hut. The news excited us. We started to plan how we could get permission from the school authority to go. Lion Head suggested that Katherine inform the school authority that she was giving a lesson in American working-class cooking.

The request was granted without any problem. We arrived at her hut earlier than we were supposed to. The sun was still high but the heat wasn’t as strong. Katherine had borrowed some straw mats from her peasant neighbor, so we could sit outside. She prepared barbecued chicken with green peppers and onions. Jim and I made an “underground stove.” We told Katherine that this was how Mao and the Communist Red Army cooked during wartime. Lion Head went to pick tree branches, straw, and dry leaves, while Jasmine and others came in from the fields with fresh beans.

Katherine said she had a hard time watching the peasants kill live hens. She couldn’t eat meat anymore. We waved away her disgust. Jim told her that she would soon get over it. Lion Head said that he would show her how to kill a cat to prepare “sweet and sour cat receiving the worship of frogs.” He explained how when frogs were fried their legs extended as if in supplication to the cat meat roasting above. Jasmine said she had already caught a jar of frogs. Katherine said she was going to puke and I thought I heard the sound of her stomach churning.

To distract her I asked why she gave up the convenience of living in the dormitory. She said she liked the countryside and enjoyed the privacy. She said that the landscape and greenery were important to her.

I looked around, trying to see things from Katherine’s point of
view. There were rice paddies on every side. On the left there was a little pond covered with giant round green lotus leaves. Two big black trees grew out of the water. A bull was taking a mud bath in the pond. Three geese were knotting their heads together, chewing
gao-bai
—turnips. Ducks were chasing each other, fighting over an earthworm. Not far away, peasants were working in the fields. To the right of her hut there was a small path that led to the road to town. Thick swirling dust in the distance meant that a bus had just passed through.

I figured out that Katherine’s hut used to be a storehouse for crops. Katherine told us that she had been here for two months and loved every minute of it. She took me to her backyard, where I saw chicks, a goat, and two cats running freely. “This is my zoo,” she said proudly. She told me that she had built the fence herself. “I didn’t do a great job but it’s good enough to keep the animals in.” She laughed and told me she loved animals. It made no sense to me. Animals meant food. Why would she waste her feelings on those brainless things? I sneered. She noticed but made no reply.

We sat down and began eating smoked green beans and discussing whether Katherine was Chinese in her past life. Katherine was sure she was.

“So then you must have eaten those animals,” I said. “Why not do it again?”

“No! No one is going to make me eat meat!” she said, raising her voice.

“But you said you were Chinese!” I shouted. “Let’s prove it.”

Jim and Lion Head were laughing and saying, “Dog meat with soy sauce, deep-fried snake with fresh monkey brains, blowfish with pig eyes . . .”

“You’re making me sick!” she yelled, and ran away like a child who saw a dead rat on the street. We had fun torturing her, making
her beautiful eyes widen. “Do you really eat monkey brains?” she would ask. “I know you’re fooling me. Tell me you’re fooling me. Teach me some more Chinese!” And I did. I taught her slang, dirty words with double meanings, like how “do an exercise” could also mean “go mate with a pig.” She would perform her newly learned phrases in class in an American accent. Everyone would have a wonderful time laughing. Her charm was indescribable. Sometimes she would accidentally forget the word order or tone and the sentence would become “Do exercise a mating pig.”

We ate the food she made in her yard. We began to ask her questions. First Lion Head asked a little awkwardly whether Katherine was married. We all strained our necks like ducks trying to hear the answer. Katherine did not seem uncomfortable at all. She said she had been married and divorced. No children. She said she wanted a child though, badly.

We all went quiet. We shot disapproving looks at Lion Head for asking the question. You don’t spread salt on someone’s wounds, our eyes said.

Katherine’s response to this surprised us. “Hey, what’s wrong with you guys? It’s all right to ask me questions. You don’t have to feel bad for me. Divorce is not such a terrible thing. I chose to get married, I chose to get divorced. This is how you learn in life. I’ve put my past behind me. What’s there to be sad about?” She told us to be happy for her, for the freedom she enjoys.

Still, we could not help feeling sorry for her. We had a hard time comprehending what she meant. In China nobody got divorced until a husband nearly murdered his wife or vice versa. We tried to comfort her because we believed she was suffering. We suggested that she try to work things out with her husband. We said, “Don’t worry. You can always forgive each other.”

Katherine laughed and shook her head. She confused us. “Let’s
do something other than talking about my broken marriage, okay?” she said. “How about listening to some of my favorite songs?” We all nodded. She took out a tape recorder and stuck in a cassette. She treated the machine roughly. It jammed. She took the tape out and used her finger to clean the inside of the player. She reloaded the tape, patted the machine, and murmured, “Don’t you do that again.” She smiled as she turned to us. “Ready, class? It’s the Beatles!”

“What’s Beatles?” Little Bird, a girl with a pair of alarmed eyes, asked. I was glad that she asked because I didn’t know what Beatles were either. Jim stood up and gave us an introduction. He asked us if we remembered a story in the Party’s newspaper in the early seventies about a group of young western musicians called Beatles—
pee-tou-shi
, in Chinese—men-with-long-hair. The translation itself made the Beatles into a bunch of jerks. I remembered reading the story criticizing them. The newspaper said they were the leaders of “a generation of destruction.” I forgot about them because I never heard their music.

“Are they the same
pee-tou-shi?
” I asked Jim. He nodded. Katherine said she was glad to have Jim’s information. She said, “Now let’s let the music speak for itself.”

The sun was setting. The green paddies turned golden. The men-with-long-hair on the tape sang “I want to hold your hand” and the music touched us. Katherine translated the lyrics for us and I thought about my life at Elephant Fields. Tears began to well up in my eyes; I felt glad that I survived, lived to see this day when I could listen to such a song. I saw tears in Lion Head’s and Jim’s eyes too. What was on their minds? Lost youth or love? Or maybe what could have been? Jasmine was sitting next to Lion Head. She was sobbing silently. The tenderness of the lyrics was like the noontime rays of the summer sun—it touched our icy
hearts. It was as if we could hear the sound of ice breaking inside our stiff bodies. Katherine could never understand this. She would never know the impact of this act. I looked at her. She smiled at me with gentleness in her eyes. My loneliness disappeared. We asked Katherine to play the tape over and over until she was bored.

*   *   *

I
liked when Katherine called my name in class. She made it sound exotic. “Shao-jun”—Zebra—she made an effort with her tongue. She said that she liked the fact that I was named after an animal even though it was not easy for her to pronounce. She said that it gave her hope that the Chinese were not such big animal haters after all. “Shao-jun, Shao-jun, Zebra.” She laughed as she tried to say it again and again. “Am I doing it right?” She made us laugh. We said, “You are doing it perfectly.”

After that Friday’s class Katherine asked if she could interview me. “About what?” I asked.

“About life as a Chinese woman,” she said. I did not answer her. I heard she had been conducting interviews on campus. I didn’t want to be one of those people who supplied her, a foreigner, with stories that would please the government.

“People around campus have been enthusiastic about me telling their life stories,” Katherine told me, showing me her notebook. The peacock is showing me the jewels on her feathers, I thought. The peacock thought that I cared about her beauty. I decided to pretend to be nearsighted.

“What’s wrong with you?” She smiled. Her neck was long and at this moment it seemed too long. I felt crowded by her.

“How much do you think you know about China?” I asked.

“Pretty much,” she replied. “I studied for six years and spent a lot of time in a lot of libraries before I ever set foot in China.”

I didn’t know what to say to her. I am Chinese, and I still don’t understand this country. How could she? Six years spent studying books? And she thought she knew China? How laughable!

“What’s the picture of China you have in your head?” I asked. She looked confused.

I shook my head, never mind. I said, “What do you want me to talk about?”

“Everything,” she said.

“You just don’t get it,” I said.

“Wait, wait, what did you say?”

I felt tired, but I pitched the ball back at her. “You want me to talk about myself, right? Let me tell you what ‘self’ means to me. The self, myself, the self as I see it, is composed mainly of selected memories from my history. I am not what I am doing now. I am what I have done, and the edited version of my past seems more real to me than what I am at this moment. I don’t know who or what I really am. The present is fleeting and intangible. No one in China wants to talk about his past, because nobody wants to paint his face black. Our past is not a flattering picture, and no one wants to look at it for long. Yet what we were is fixed and final. It is the basis for predictions of what we will be in the future. To tell you the truth, I identify with what no longer exists more than with what actually is. We have lied about what we actually are, and that, unfortunately, will be your book. So would you still like me to talk about myself?”

Katherine looked at me in amazement. She was silent.

I got up and walked away. I heard Katherine tapping her pen on her notebook.

“Hey, Zebra!” she yelled after me. “I thought you wanted me to play you more songs. Would you still like me to do that?”

*   *   *

I
ran into Lion Head on my way home. We were both on our bicycles. Lion Head was in a washed, white traditional jacket with grape-shaped buttons, blue pants, and a pair of army shoes. I was in a similar kind of outfit. We rode along the street with willow trees toward the city. Waves of wheat made the early evening a sea of warmth. Just before we joined the stream of bicycle riders entering the main road, a rider in red shot between us.

It was Katherine. She rode like an arrow. She was wearing a red jacket. Her bicycle was painted red. She was gone before we could find her in the crowd.

L
ion Head invited me to his home to look at antiques he had recently collected. He lived on the west side in the Pu-Tuo District, known as the “lower corner” of the city. His house was located at the end of a long lane. We walked through a makeshift black market. People were selling clothes, rice, sesame oil, bamboo mats, and kitchenware from displays on the front of their bicycles. The merchants’ eyes darted as they made their deals, always on the lookout for a police raid. Lion Head told me that their customers kept watch too. Anyone who spotted a policeman or recognized an undercover cop would whisper to the nearest merchant, “The black bear is out of the cave.” In a few seconds the alley would be cleared. The entire market would disappear. When the policemen left, the market would restore itself in no time.