Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  After my last third-grade class, I ran home through the threshing ground and the fields. As Teacher Pang had instructed, I went to my father, who was sitting at the table in shorts, eating pickles with his congee, and handed him my report card. “Dad,” I said shyly but with pride, “I got my grade report today.”

  “Oh, grade report.” He picked it up and read it with difficulty.

  I pointed to it and said: “I got a hundred in both Chinese and math.”

  He nodded his head, dropped the report to the table, and resumed his chewing. My mother, who was sitting on a stool against the front door sewing the sole onto a shoe, cast a sidelong glance at us but didn’t say a word.

  They just didn’t care. I couldn’t believe it. I turned around and ran out the back door to the small river behind our house. I stood at the half-submerged, moss-covered washing rock and gazed at the murmuring water. The drooping willows stirred its surface. I started crying. They hadn’t even noticed my Certificate of Merit, one of only three given out in the class of forty. They had never come to the school since my mother had dropped me off on the first day, never met my teachers, never asked about my homework. They hadn’t bought an umbrella to keep me dry on rainy days like other parents did. I didn’t understand why they had given me life if they weren’t going to treasure it. I studied extremely hard but still couldn’t make my mother and father happy. I couldn’t figure out what was wrong with me.

  Then, the next evening, my parents suddenly started being nice to me. While they had been working in the fields, the villagers had told them about my Certificate of Merit. “How on earth did you parents raise such a smart kid?” they had asked.

  My parents were overwhelmed by this unexpected honor. After all, for peasants, nothing was more important than face and reputation. So after they got home, my father scrubbed the wall next to the back door clean and pasted my Certificate of Merit on it. “This wall will be left just for certificates. Let’s see if you can get one each semester and eventually cover the wall completely,” he said to me, a rare smile on his face. My mother boiled me the one egg that our hen laid every day for a month after that, for nutrition, until the hen was sold.

  I was immensely pleased and walked around with brisk steps, because, for the first time in my life, I had made my parents smile.

  As I learned more Chinese characters, I became addicted to books. I searched for anything readable—newspaper scattered on the ground, wrapping paper with characters on it, gunnysacks with advertisements. I traded all my pocket money to my classmates for storybooks. I read while eating and was always putting my chopsticks in Spring’s bowl by mistake, never realizing it until she yelped. I read while walking; I ran into walls and trees. I read while cooking and always overcooked the cabbage so it came out yellow. I was obsessed.

  One hot day early in the summer, when I was ten, my mother threw a roll of thin plastic strings next to my feet, handed me a straw hat, and said, “Even if you read all the books on the earth and you can rise into the sky, it still doesn’t matter. A girl is a girl, and the matchmaker will only care how fast you can plant rice shoots when she looks for a husband for you.”

  I reluctantly put my book down, picked up the roll, and followed her to the paddies, where my respected ancestors, perhaps as far back as eighteen generations ago, had dripped with sweat and died.

  The fields were bustling with activity. I looked around and saw many muddy and sad faces. Peony, my friend from school, and all of the other kids in the hamlet were there. After heaving a deep sigh, I kicked off my slippers, rolled up my pants legs, and stuck one foot into the watery earth. With a squish, the muddy water rose up to my knees and the mire covered my calf and filled the spaces between my toes. It was cold and slippery. I felt as if two hands had just pulled my leg deep into a huge dark hole in the center of the earth.

  My father taught me how to plant rice shoots. They had already been uprooted from another field, and now bundles of them were placed randomly across the paddy for you to grab as you worked. Plastic strings separated the paddy into many long rectangular sections. Each section consisted of six columns. Standing in a section with your back bent and your legs spread between the columns, holding a bundle in your left hand, you pulled several rice shoots out of the bundle with your right hand and then planted them in the earth one by one, from left to right. Two next to your left foot, two between your feet, and two next to your right foot. You had to keep walking backward in a straight line so that you never stopped planting.

  After managing to finish one section, I looked up. I saw the vast expanse of muddy water around me, waiting to be planted by hand, one shoot at a time. I felt helpless.

  The sun was fiery hot. After finishing a couple of sections, I straightened up. I felt dizzy. My mouth was burning, and my back seemed like it was about to break in two. I dragged my feet out of the muddy water and went to the ditch nearby. I kneeled at its side and gulped down some dirty water. Then I saw Peony a few feet away, exhausted and filthy just like me.

  We sat by the ditch and put our muddy feet in the water. “This is too hard. I don’t like it,” I complained.

  “Yes, but everybody has to learn it. It’s a peasant’s fate,” Peony said. “If you plant fast, you become famous. You know that girl Xiao Fang in the next village? She’s only twelve, but she plants rice really fast. Everybody knows her, and her parents are so proud!”

  Yes, I thought. I should learn to plant rice fast so that my parents will be proud of me too. I left the ditch and went back to the fields.

  For the next two weeks, after getting home from school and finishing my homework, I went to the fields and joined my parents to plant rice until dusk. Spring was too young to go to the fields, so she ran around the hamlet all day like a homeless kid. Gradually I learned to plant rice fast; by the time all the planting was done, I could go almost as fast as my mother. I was proud of my performance. My parents must be happy with me, I thought. Their eyes seemed softer when they looked at me.

  The week after the planting was done, my father went to the fields with the insecticide sprayer on his back. The rice shoots needed to be sprayed with pesticide regularly while they were growing. In the evening, he came back wrapped in the stifling smell of pesticide and wearing a gloomy face.

  He stared at me with anger and told my mother that the rice shoots in the sections I had planted were either dead or had hyperplasia because I had plunged them too deep into the earth.

  My mother glared at me. “What a useless thing.”

  I lowered my head. I couldn’t believe that my hard work had been for nothing. I had planted them so deep because I wanted to be sure they’d stay in the earth and not float in the water and so that I could speed up the planting, as my parents wished. Scared and ashamed, I buried my head in my book to hide my tears.

  Two months later, the harvest season came. My father gave me a sickle and took me to the paddies again to cut the ripened rice shoots. Most of the water was gone from the paddies, but the dirt was scattered with puddles everywhere. The tall rice shoots were densely packed, and the fields were hot and humid like a food steamer. The rice leaves had sharp edges, and soon my hands were full of bloody cuts. With the scorching sun above my bent back, everything was dark in front of my eyes. I was certain I was going to faint, but I gritted my teeth and told myself that I would not lag behind. Using all my strength, I stayed in the fields cutting like a robot. But the next day I got a fever, and the local doctor had to come to our house and put me on a glucose drip in order to help me regain my strength.

  After the drips were done, my mother thanked the doctor, saw him off, and then came to my bed. She shook her head and sighed.

  “She isn’t good at anything,” I later heard her telling my father in the kitchen. “What’s she going to do with her life?”

  I lay in bed quietly, trying not to make any noise. I didn’t understand why I was born so useless. Why couldn’t I do any decent fieldwork to help my parents? I condemned m
yself despairingly.

  This time, my father was extremely disappointed. He didn’t talk to me for days. My mother started to call me a “soft-shell crab.” Whenever she saw me, she grumbled and swore. “You can’t plant rice shoots; you can’t wash clothes; you can’t cook cabbage,” she complained. “What man would want a weakling like you?”

  The hardest part of the harvest came after cutting the shoots. They were bundled, transported to the threshing ground, and piled up, waiting to be threshed. With the bamboo carrying pole on their shoulders, my parents shuttled between the fields and the threshing ground. There was only one threshing machine for every four hamlets, so once our turn came, my parents had to work all through the night. When the sky turned bright in the east, my father would put the unpolished rice grains into big wicker baskets and carry them home.

  While my parents were threshing, I was on summer break from school and was left at home to cook, look after Spring, and feed the ducks in the pen. The rice grains were spread all over the ground in front of the house. They needed to be in direct sunlight for a couple of days before being bagged so that the moisture from the fields wouldn’t destroy them later. Every hour, I went out into the blistering sun and turned over the grains with a wooden spatula so that they got an even amount of sun. In between times, I read my books while Spring played alone.

  One afternoon at three o’clock, when the speaker on the wall started to broadcast the second round of the day, telling me it was time to start cooking dinner, I reluctantly put down the book I was reading and walked to the lime stove. I knew that at this time of year my parents were like two packs of dynamite and the slightest mistake would detonate them. I really didn’t want to land myself in trouble.

  I filtered the polished rice grains and poured them into the wok on the stove. Sitting on the stool behind the stove, where hay was piled up against the wall, I lit the fire and pushed some hay into the chamber. Soon steam began to rise from the cracks in the wok cover. My mind wandered back to my book. I couldn’t stop speculating about what would happen to the characters next. Finally I grabbed the book, returned to the stool, and started reading.

  Before I realized anything had gone wrong, a flame leaped up from the chamber of the stove to the hay against the wall. Spring, who had been playing with rice grains next to the stove, started to cry in fear. I looked up and saw the flames rushing at me. All I could think to do was to yell to Spring, “Go get Peony!”

  Peony rushed in, lifted a bucket of water, and threw it on the fire. She kept refilling the bucket with water from the vat we kept in the kitchen until at last the fire was put out. Spring stood to the side, too shocked to say anything. Peony looked at me and panted, “Don’t worry. It’s an accident, and it didn’t burn anything. Your parents won’t blame you.” Then she left.

  I stood next to the front door, covered with ashes, and waited for my parents’ arrival. I didn’t believe Peony. Her parents were different from mine. They never scolded her for anything. I knew I had gotten myself into big trouble and my parents wouldn’t let me off the hook so easily. I felt like a criminal about to be executed.

  Soon my father walked in with two baskets full of rice grains wobbling on his carrying pole. When he saw the stretch of burnt rice on the ground and my ashy face, he dropped the baskets and shouted, “Why don’t you just burn the entire house down, you good-for-nothing?”

  He grabbed his carrying pole, held my arm firmly, and began to strike me heavily on the hip, ranting angrily the whole time.

  My mother, returning from checking the ducks, roared at me with rage:

  “Why are the ducklings dead?”

  I suddenly realized that I had been so wrapped up in the book I’d been reading these past two days that I had forgotten to feed cabbage leaves to the baby ducks. Panic-stricken, I burst into tears. I moved my lips to say something to defend myself, but I realized that I had no excuses.

  “She can’t do anything,” my mother told my father. “Even a dog knows to watch the door. What good is it to raise her? It’s better to just beat her to death!”

  Harder and faster the pole hit me on my hip. I saw Spring leaning against the door and watching quietly, looking a little scared. A couple of nosy neighbors stuck their heads out of their windows. Gradually my fear turned into anger and shame, and I threw off the hand on my arm and charged to the back door, howling, “I don’t want to live any more.”

  I ran without stopping until I was standing on the mosscovered tip of the washing rock. I wondered if I should just jump into the river and kill myself. My life was a tragedy. Perhaps only a solemn death would end my miseries. My parents would live with the guilt for the rest of their lives.

  My mother had followed me to the river. She saw the tears in my eyes and my angry stare. Standing on the bank a few feet away from me, she pointed at the water and said, “Why don’t you jump? Why don’t you just jump, if you’re that brave?”

  The storm in my mind came to a standstill. I calmed myself. I would never do anything that would make her happy. If she wanted me dead, I wouldn’t give her the satisfaction. She went away when I didn’t respond.

  I stood on the rock until darkness surrounded me, until all the lamps in the nearby houses were off and all the laughter and conversation had faded away. Then I made my way back to the house and slipped into my bed. The wounds on my hip burned like fire. For the first time, I felt hatred. It was running through my body, cold and clear.

  2

  THE YEAR I turned thirteen, China was like a giant dragon awakening from a long sleep. Three years earlier, Deng Xiaoping, the paramount leader of the country, had called for the reform of the Chinese economic system and the opening of Chinese markets to the West. A small portion of the Chinese people along the east coast was encouraged to get rich first, in order to bring along the rest of the country. The wind of reform blew all over this ancient country, where for thousands of years businessmen had been condemned as villains. Now businesses of all kinds sprang up like bamboo shoots after a spring rain.

  Located just a hundred miles from where the Yangtze River empties into the East China Sea, the county of Wujiang, which contained hundreds of hamlets including the Shen Hamlet, was changing. Just the previous year, electricity had come to the village. Suddenly, the peasants seemed to have woken from a deep sleep and turned into restless animals locked up in cages. Everybody was trying to find their way out, looking for opportunities to make money. Township enterprise and specialized households emerged overnight.

  The Villages Committee set up a big textile factory next to the Shen Hamlet, and the party secretary, Beiling, maneuvered his way into the job of director. He could hire anyone he liked, and right away everyone in the Shen Hamlet fought to lick his family’s boots to get a job. They did it in secret, of course. No one wanted to be thought of as a shameless toady.

  As the villagers made more money, two-story cement houses started to go up all around the hamlet. Crammed between them, our small one-story house became a place where the sun didn’t shine. Spring and I were told to stay at home because we didn’t have the face—the status, the prestige—to go out and see people. Our mother was embarrassed because we couldn’t afford a two-story house.

  But the door couldn’t shut out the world. Once or twice every summer, my mother would go to the nearby canal and trade a little rice to the men on the boats for some watermelon, one of our few luxury goods. One day an old woman from the village peeked through a crack in our door and saw Spring gnawing a watermelon almost to its rind. Immediately, the entire hamlet knew—our family was so dirt-poor that the kids ate melon rinds!

  “Why is that old woman with one foot in the grave so nosy?” my mother shouted, angry and ashamed. “But we aren’t going to go and beg that son of a bitch Beiling. That bastard is nothing but trash,” she told my father.

  Overhearing this, for the first time in my life I looked at my mother with admiration. Yes, we were poor, but it was still beneath our dignity to beg Beili
ng to take care of us.

  Since I was little, I had stayed away from Beiling and his family because we belonged to two different worlds. They threw out rotten meat every day while we survived on soy sauce and rice for months; they waved their hands and hundreds responded, but nobody would care if we starved to death. Beiling was said to have slept with every woman under his power, and his illegitimate children were as many as the stars on a clear night. No woman had ever stood up to Beiling. Instead they swallowed their knocked-out teeth because if Beiling was pleased, he could help your family to rise up to the heavens. If he wasn’t, he’d knock you down to hell.

  It seemed that Beiling liked me when I was a little girl. In the evenings when he strolled through the hamlet with his hands behind his back, he would peek through our half-open back door and give me a glance before quickly walking on. Immediately I would move away and hide myself in the bedroom, as if he were the god of plague. If he ran into me on the asphalt road in front of the hamlet and nobody was around, he would stop me and try to strike up a conversation. His triangular eyes would smile at me, and I would feel scared and sick, my clenched fists shaking slightly at my sides. I would lower my head and run away as fast as I could.

  Inside our small, moldy house, my mother kept grumbling to my father, her punching bag, about not being able to afford a two-story house. My father responded with silence, his head and shoulders drooped. My mother’s desperation escalated day by day, until she couldn’t do anything else but wail and weep.

  “Why can’t you do some business or do anything? Why are you so useless?” I heard her moaning to my father one night after Spring and I had gone to bed. She banged the table occasionally with her fist.

  My father’s muffled voice eventually emerged. “I don’t know how to do business. I just can’t. I only know how to care for the rice fields, and we don’t know anybody who would help us.” He paused for a moment and then spoke more forcefully. “Even if you hound me to death, it’s no use.”