Tiger's Heart (23 page)

I started a befuddled new life. I slept like a log in the daytime and then wandered around the city like a ghost at night. I learned not to bat an eye when paying for a Ports skirt or Chanel lipstick. I sat outside and smoked as if there were no tomorrow. The total in my bank account book kept growing, as did the number of foreigners I’d slept with, but I grew sadder every day.

I rarely refused to sleep with a Westerner. Like a sick person in need of his medicine, I longed for the moment when a foreigner asked me whether I wanted to go home with him. I was always nervous until it happened, clenching my muscles and holding my breath, as if my entire life depended on these moments and only if I got my dose could I breathe, eat, and sleep again.

I was a slut again. I cursed myself. It was bad to sleep around. But though I condemned myself, I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it and what was wrong with my head. It felt as if I was trapped in a bog, and no matter how I floundered, there was no way to get out.

“Next time I come to Xiamen, I’ll sleep with you,” John, one of our American suppliers, told me in a commanding tone, pointing his finger at me and smiling.

How old was he, sixty? He wanted to sleep with me, did he? Fine, I thought. I’ll sleep with you, but not for free. Your Japanese mistress could bear to sleep with you every night for big houses and a Mercedes-Benz. Why can’t I do the same?

The old millionaire came to Xiamen the next month, and I spent the night with him in the most luxurious suite in the Marco Polo Hotel. I was sitting on the couch, looking down at the artificial but beautiful lake. He walked up to me and gave me a Dior lipstick, some Guerlain powder, and a gold bracelet. Then I felt his cold, wet lips. His mouth moved down to my chest. I looked at this head covered with white hair and felt nothing. When he asked why my underwear didn’t match, I lied and said I didn’t have enough money to buy many pairs. In the morning, he handed me five hundred dollars and said, “This is not much, just for some underwear. Next time, I want to see them match.”

Next time? Would there be a next time? I chuckled to myself as I rode the elevator downstairs. I stopped at the Godiva counter in the lobby and bought myself some dark chocolate balls. I figured I should celebrate because I had finally pimped myself out successfully, and for a great price, five hundred dollars! I decided I should buy chocolate for myself from then on, since I didn’t think any man would buy me Godiva in this lifetime. Or roses, for that matter.

I walked out of the lobby of the Marco Polo Hotel smiling to the sun and crying inside to the devil that had taken over my soul again.

I started to read the classified page in the daily newspaper and circled the want ads for overseas jobs. The air in Xiamen was still so fresh; the sun was still so enchanting; but I couldn’t breathe freely there. I felt like all my organs were clogged up with filth. Weekly facials in beauty salons could only purify my skin, nothing more. I hung around in every club and bar in Xiamen with Jennifer, the bad girl, or with my other friend Ann, a good girl who had no idea that all the foreigners I had slept with could perhaps make up a miniUnited Nations. All the martinis and bottles of Corona that I drank couldn’t wash away the dust that had settled on me. I was backsliding. I was hypnotizing myself with alcohol and cigarettes.

Before I was completely eroded, I wanted to get myself out, out of this circle, out of Xiamen, and out of China.

One day, I read that a boat traveling between China and the Middle East was looking for wait staff. I rushed over to the office of the company. I followed the directions the captain had given me on the phone, and in a small lane I found the rundown building. I knocked on the filthy door.

In a stale conference room with a dusty navigation map on the wall, the captain told me to sit down and then handed me a piece of paper.

I held it up in the air and started to read. “‘May I help you? Would you like a drink? This way, please.’” When I finished, I saw the captain’s puzzled expression.

“Let me ask you something.” He shifted in his chair and looked at me sincerely. “Why are you applying for this job? You know that we’ll be on the sea all year around, right? And also, waitress is not the highest-level worker on the deck. It’s really hard work too, to be honest with you.”

“I know that. I don’t care. I can take it.” I shrugged.

“Your English is too good to be a waitress on our boat. You should be sitting in a fancy office building working for a foreign company making good money like all the girls out there—I mean, from your English and the way you dress.”

I looked at the captain’s aged face and gray temples and smiled wryly at him. He could tell there was something wrong with a girl with fine skin dressed in a silk suit and skirt who was willing to endure the harsh wind on the sea.

“Let me give you some honest advice. Go back to your work and enjoy life. So many girls must be jealous of you.”

I started to talk to people at all the agencies in the city that helped Chinese citizens go abroad, but every time I told them I was single, they quickly shook their heads, especially those who dealt with visas or immigration to America.

“Americans rarely let single women enter their country on non-immigrant visas,” one person told me bluntly. “They’re afraid they would never leave. They guard their borders like dogs and don’t let any inferior humans like us in. The best shortcut to get to America is to marry an American, and he’ll be your ticket to America.”

It seemed marriage might be my only bridge out of China. So I was supposed to just find a man and marry him? I wondered if it would be worth it to get married in exchange for a way out of the country.

After pondering this idea for many days, I faxed a personal letter to Carl and Jacques, our two biggest suppliers, who had become my friends, and asked them for a favor—to find a good man to marry me and take me out of China.

I was feeling desperate and suffocated, as if there was a cage around me: and this cage, in my eyes, was the entire country of China. All I could dream about was getting out of China and going to America, where it was said there was freedom and respect. There I could start my life all over again. Snakes could slough off their skin three times in a lifetime; why couldn’t I?

Jacques and Carl promised me that they would do as I’d requested and find a good husband for me. My face burned with shame as I read their faxes. What kind of woman asked everybody she knew to find a man to marry her in exchange for taking her out of China? Only a woman with no morals or sense of shame would do that.

The summer was almost gone, yet the heat was still boiling inside me. September came. Soon I would turn twenty-four, and I couldn’t sit around and wait for a man to drop from the sky to marry me any more. I was consumed by the idea of getting out of the country.

A teasing line in an ad in the evening newspaper caught my eyes:
Want to go to the UAE, a country where everyone is rich and
dripping with oil?

“We can easily get you out and send you to the UAE for twenty thousand yuan. You can get a job in a hotel. Many rich people go to the UAE, and you’ll meet a lot of them at the hotel. But you need a passport,” the lady at the front desk in the tiny, disordered office told me.

“How do I get a passport?” Chinese citizens were only given identification cards by the government, not passports.

“You need go back to where you come from, get approval from the unit you belong to, and then go to the local Public Security Office and apply for it. And the government will decide whether you are entitled to a passport,” she explained.

Damn it, my identification still belonged to the middle school as far as the government was concerned. This stupid system with its ridiculous rules, I thought. Now I would have to go back to the middle school and beg the headmaster for his stamp on my passport application form. I had left the school two years ago, and I didn’t belong there any more. I didn’t want to belong to anybody, to any unit or any government. I wanted to belong to myself.

No matter how mad it made me, I had no choice but to yield to the rules in order to obtain a passport. I put on my sky-blue wool suit and high heels, and, with utter loathing in my heart, I returned to the Hope Middle School, the place I had fled from two years earlier.

I took a flight to Shanghai and then a taxi directly to Ba Jin. It was a shivery fall day there. Broken bricks and moss could still be seen everywhere in the town. The sparse bamboo bushes were still swaying listlessly around the school, and the teachers, whose faces I still remembered, were still running to the classrooms at the ringing of the bell with chalk dust all over their gray or black clothes.

I sat in one of the offices while several teachers stood around smacking their lips at me. It had been only two years, yet it felt like so long, like a lifetime.

“That necklace must be real gold, mustn’t it? Is that sapphire too?” one of the female teachers asked admiringly. I nodded my head with a proud smile.

“How much are you making every month now, Teacher Shen? Oh, I should call you
Miss
Shen now,” my former English team leader said.

“Well, my boss pays me five thousand yuan a month, not to mention bonuses,” I replied briskly and shrugged my shoulders.

“Wow, that’s how much we make in ten months.”

I relished their envy. I smiled and kept quiet, remembering how they’d shaken their heads and admonished me when I’d quit.

The bell buzzed in all the buildings, giving everyone a start.

“Oh, I have to go to a class now.” One teacher sighed and stood up.

“Yeah, I need to grab that little brat and give him a good beating on the palm,” another said, grabbing a box of chalk and a ruler. All at once, they rushed out the door.

I went to the headmaster’s office on the third floor. Fifteen minutes later, I walked out with a blood-red stamp on my passport application form, but there were five thousand fewer Yuan in my purse. It was the price I had to pay for my first step toward freedom. I had been blackmailed by the headmaster, yet I’d had to swallow it because once again he was the one who held the power.

I took a last look at the school, vowed never to come back, and then shook the dust off my feet.

The next thing to do was submit the application form to the county Public Security Office, fifty miles away from the school.

“It will take sixty days,” the clerk behind the counter told me without showing any emotion on his face. “And I am not sure if you will be granted a passport. If the government thinks you shouldn’t leave the country, your application will be denied,” he warned me by rote while skimming through the application package.

All I could do was look at him helplessly, listen carefully, and pray that he happened to be in good mood and wouldn’t tell me that I needed one more stamp here and another there. Getting out of China seemed to be tougher than climbing to the sky.

Nonetheless, I was still full of hope for going to the UAE. After I went back to Xiamen, I started to say good-bye to my few friends in the city.

One of them opened her eyes wide upon hearing my decision. “Are you crazy, Caroline? Do you know that the UAE is in the desert? You go out the door, and all you can see is sand and more sand.”

“I’m not going there for fun. I just want to get out of here.”

“The women there are all wrapped up in black cloth all year around, only showing their eyes. Are you going to live like that?” she pressed on.

I bit my lips. I could hardly imagine myself in a robe looking like a nun every day, yet all I could do was to pray that this would not be the case. You couldn’t work in a hotel if you were all wrapped up, I told myself.

22

WHILE I WAS
still waiting to hear about the passport, Song told me that he wanted Old Two and me to accompany him to the city of Harbin for a business trip. Although I was worried that I might miss some news about my passport application, I agreed to go since I knew my nerves would break down just like an overwound clock if I allowed myself to sit around immersed in my UAE dream for one more day.

So at the end of September, the three of us boarded an early morning plane to Beijing and then changed to another one for Harbin. A few hours later, we arrived in that dirty and disorderly city in the northernmost part of China. Black smoke came out of the many chimneys of the industrial compounds surrounding the city. People in heavy coats and ski masks biked around hurriedly, fighting with the harsh wind. We hopped in a taxi. After a couple of hours’ ride, we finally reached our destination—a bankrupt warp-knitting factory in a small town somewhere close to the border of Russia. We looked around. It felt as if this town had been deserted years ago. The streets were empty, decorated sparsely with bare trees. The sun felt cold. The landscape looked like something from a dark oil painting by a depressed artist.

The head of the factory showed us the machines that were for sale, walking with hunched shoulders and arms folded inside the sleeves of his wadded jacket. Although it wasn’t yet October, in this part of China it was already chilly like deep winter, and I could hear the sound of my teeth chattering.

We rushed back to Harbin that evening and checked into what was supposedly the best hotel in the city. In a lifeless restaurant, we had a much-too-salty and spicy dinner and then headed back to the hotel right away. The steam heaters hissed in the hotel room, but it seemed like they weren’t putting out any heat at all. I crawled under the freezing quilt and felt my throat itching from the extremely polluted air.

Suddenly I missed Xiamen so much, missed the growing grass and the nightingales in the air, missed the gorgeous sunshine and the palm trees on the beaches, missed my small but warm room. I realized that everything is relative, and without comparison you could never tell what’s good or bad. Why did I want to leave Xiamen so badly? I started to ask myself in the dark.

Three days later, the bargaining between Song and the head of the factory was finally done, and we didn’t waste one minute getting on a plane back to Beijing.

We wandered in the shopping area of the Beijing airport to kill time during the two-hour layover. I saw boxes of moon cakes all over the counters, and suddenly I realized that the next day was the Moon Festival, a traditional Chinese festival when families gather together under what is supposedly the roundest moon of the year and enjoy these moon-shaped cakes.

I strolled along the counters looking at the rows of moon cakes in fancy packaging and marveling at the variety of cakes made these days. I remembered that when I was young, the only moon cakes available were filled with sweetened bean paste, but now I saw moon cakes with egg yolk, lotus bud, sesame, coffee, and even chocolate filling.

I stopped at a ruby-red tray with six cakes on it that was installed on top of a music box. Every time you turned the tray, euphonic music played. I immediately liked it and decided to buy it for my mother and mail it to her. Though the Moon Festival, with its expensive cakes, had rarely been celebrated in my family, a peasant family where everyone hated each other, I wanted to let my mother know that now everything was different, and the Moon Festival didn’t just belong to city people any more but also to an ordinary family like ours.

Just after I handed the money to the saleswoman, my cell rang.

My mother’s sobbing voice burst through the phone. Something was wrong again. I had thought that my family wouldn’t bring me tears any more, now that I was making money and making them happy, but apparently I had been wrong.

“Your sister is pregnant,” she cried.

A sick feeling started to spread through my chest. Spring was barely twenty.

“Whose baby?” I asked. I had never heard that she had a boyfriend.

“This bastard called Ming. He is married, thirty years old, with a kid,” my mother bawled.

I couldn’t believe it. My sister, my only sister, was pregnant with the child of a married man, just like five years ago when I had gotten pregnant by Pan.

“What are we going to do now?” I asked feebly.

“The little bitch thinks he will get divorced and marry her. Stupid bitch. Even if he is willing to, we will never let her marry him,” she swore.

“Can I talk to her?”

“She won’t talk to anybody! She thinks we’re all her enemies. First she ran to the road and wanted to get herself killed by a truck. Luckily we pulled her back just in time. And now she’s locked herself in her room and won’t come out.”

“How did this all happen? Did you have any idea about this guy before this happened?”

“How could we know what your sister was doing? She keeps everything a secret. The guy told her he wasn’t married, and one day he sent his wife and daughter away and had your sister visit the house, and when she wanted to leave he locked the door. I gave him a good slap on the face when your father and I grabbed him yesterday. He cried and promised to solve the problem in a week. Now he’s just disappeared. Nobody can find him.

“Oh, God.” My mother sobbed for a few seconds and then cried out, “Little bitch, how could she ruin our lives like this? She will never find a decent husband now. She’s a broken shoe. What are your father and I going to do now? We’ll never have a good family. We are doomed.”

“Just calm down, Mama. I’ll fly back right now. You need to take care of yourself.”

“How can I care about myself in a situation like this? Our family is ruined. I was so upset that I fell from the top of the stairs, all because of this little bitch. I cannot move at all. I’ve just been lying on the bed!”

Her voice made my head ache. I leaned my forehead on my palm. Tragedy was never tired of visiting our family.

“Son of a bitch,” she continued. “We will take him to the arbitration court and have him compensate us for our loss!” She ground her teeth with hatred.

“I’ll catch the earliest flight today.”

My words seemed to comfort her a little and she fell into quiet sobs. After a moment, she said, “If anybody asks you why you came back, don’t mention anything about your sister. If the villagers know this, they’ll laugh at us until the day I go to the grave. Your sister will never be able to find a husband if word gets out.”

So instead of returning to Xiamen, I boarded the next plane to Shanghai. With a heavy mind and the music box with the tray of moon cakes in my hands, I arrived home early in the evening, when the lamps in the Shen Hamlet had just started to go on.

I stepped over the threshold into our house and went straight upstairs. Seeing my sighing mother on the bed and my distressed father sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his head, tears came to my eyes. I felt the familiar, tense air that had accompanied me throughout my childhood and youth. I told myself to be strong, because right then I was the only string that was holding my family together.

I cleared my throat. “Could it be possible that they really do love each other and Ming will divorce his wife for Spring?” I asked my parents calmly.

“Never. Don’t even think about it. I will never allow it to happen.” My father raised his head and bellowed at me with a stiffened neck and red face. “The man is thirty. Instead of the thousands of single young men out there, why did she have to mess herself up with all these old married men? I would rather disown her than allow her to marry some divorced guy.”

Suddenly I couldn’t control myself any more. I glared at him. “Don’t blame Spring only, Dad. Ask yourself, have you ever been a father to her? She wants old men, yes. Why? Have you thought about why? Maybe it is because you, her father, have never been there for her.”

He put his arms down and looked at me, startled. “Are you saying—she misbehaves, she ruins herself with married men, all because of
me
?”

He was hurt. He didn’t have the slightest idea of how much Spring and I had been wounded by my mother’s affair and his retreat from our lives, how much damage they had done to us. He would never fully understand.

I left the room. I knocked on Spring’s door gently, wanting to say something to her. There was no response. I stood there for a while. My sister was just on the other side of the door, yet I felt like she was so far away from me. I imagined her sitting in the dark in pain alone, and I wished that she and I knew each other better.

After a fruitless two-day search for Ming, who seemed to have vanished from the earth, we finally decided to take the matter to the arbitration court in the hopes that a summons from the government to his family would be sufficient to bring him out of whatever hole he was hiding in.

The next day, in the town’s arbitration house, we waited a long time for Ming to show up. It was almost noon. Small Uncle was sitting on the long wooden bench along the wall with his arms crossed, his face boiling with anger toward Spring, who had brought such shame to the entire family. Our Aunt Jasmine, who had traveled here from her village two hours away, arriving early that morning, sat on the bench next to him, staring at the floor with tears on her face. Our mother’s older brother, Big Uncle, who had left his fish stand unattended in the market, leaned against the wall smoking silently, still wearing his fishing boots. For a country family, a young girl pregnant with a married man’s baby was humiliating and serious enough to gather together all the family members to try to come up with a solution. My parents were notably absent, though. My mother was too weak to come, and my father simply refused to be in such an official and serious place.

It was quiet, except for the drops leaking from the corner of the ceiling in the old cement room and the sound of the arbitrator, Old Yao, taking long, loud sips from his clay teacup. If my family hadn’t begged him to solve the matter quietly inside the arbitration house, Old Yao would have been on his bicycle riding all over the countryside searching for the “dirty little shit” Ming.

Spring was sitting motionless on one of the square wooden stools at Old Yao’s desk with her back straight, staring vacantly at the Chinese rose swaying in the breeze outside the window. It was the first time I’d seen her since I’d flown back. Her eyelids were swollen, her face wan and sallow. One corner of her mouth was curled upward, the way it always used to be when she stood aside, watching our father beating me with the bamboo broom.

I wondered what she was thinking and feeling. I knew she must have been feeling scared, otherwise she wouldn’t have told our parents about her pregnancy. But did she still hate our mother for forbidding her affair? Did she blame our father for threatening Ming and therefore scaring him away? Did she still believe Ming’s promises? Did she expect him to prove he loved her today? I knew she hated me for flying home, hated Aunt Jasmine for coming all the way from her village, hated Small Uncle and Big Uncle for dropping all their business for her. I knew that she hated herself, hated everyone. But did she have any idea what her family was feeling, how much shame she had brought to them?

Gazing at her familiar thin eyebrows and flat nose, I suddenly had the impulse to clutch her shoulders and shake her until she came back to life.

The day before, while she was locked up in her room, I had bicycled down the coal-ash road for an hour to Ming’s work unit in the hope of finding him. In the remote coal factory run by Ming’s family, I had sat on a red bench for hours, waiting for his haughty uncle, the owner, to show up. The women outside the window had whispered loudly about what a bad, loose woman my sister was to have enticed the poor man, saying that our family, back to the eighteenth generation of ancestors, should jump out of their tombs for what Spring had done. I kept quiet with my head lowered. The owner never showed up.

The sound of a roaring motorcycle broke into my thoughts. Everyone straightened their backs and turned toward the door, except for Spring, who sat still. The round belly of Ming’s uncle appeared, wrapped in a suit. He passed the steel security bars, followed by a short square-faced man with a hanging head and his hands in the pockets of a suit full of creases. From everyone’s angry eyes, I knew that he must be Ming. I wanted to break his face and watch it crumble to bits.

Old Yao pointed Ming to a stool next to Spring’s. Ming started to talk in a low, withered voice: “I told her from the very first day that I was married and had a lovely daughter. She might have told you that I held the wooden bar to the door, not letting her go. Well, she was lying. She slept with me of her own will. I can’t get a divorce for her. This is ridiculous.”

I was gratified to see Spring shaking, finally coming to life a little. Old Yao frowned as Ming continued with his story.

A woman with a stupefied grayish face walked into the room and stood behind Ming. She was so tall and thin that she reminded me of the compasses I had used in my geometry classes. I wondered if she was Ming’s wife. Perhaps it was she who had cooked up this story, to humiliate that little bitch, Spring.

Ming finished talking and was now staring at the ends of his shoes. It was Spring’s turn. She gazed at the floating green leaves in the tea glass in front of her. It looked like she was gathering her thoughts, while those of us who knew her were all worried that she might collapse. Abruptly, she grabbed the glass and splashed the tea in Ming’s face.

Before anybody could react, the thin woman, Ming’s wife, lunged at Spring and started to strangle her, her teeth bared and hatred all over her face. Standing closest to Spring, without thinking I pounced on the woman, grabbing the back of her striped coat and trying to pull her claws away from Spring’s neck. Like a mad lioness, the woman turned around and attacked me. I had never even been able to kill a chicken, and soon my glasses were on the ground and the woman was pulling my hair hard. Small Uncle ran over and forced her arms down. Her body was still twisting, and her mouth was pouring out the most malicious curses I had ever heard. Before I had the chance to catch my breath, Aunt Jasmine was clutching at Ming’s face while he was trying to knock Small Uncle’s legs out from under him to help his wife, and Ming’s uncle was wrestling with Big Uncle on the floor. Old Yao and Xiao Chen, a young mediator, were jumping up and down, flustered and exasperated, yelling at everyone to stop.