Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  My mother cried even louder. “You bastard, during these many years we’ve been married, have you ever bought me anything? Anything? Even a pair of socks? I have injuries and aches all over my body. Have you ever opened your mouth once and asked me, ‘Are you okay?’ O, Buddha, what wrong did I do in my last life that you put me in this lousy family, gave me to this lousy man?” I heard her storm into the bedroom, stuff some clothes into a cloth sack, and then go out the front door, crying. Spring and I sat up in our bed nervously. I knew she was stumbling to the bus station in Zhenze, hoping to get on a bus that would take her to a better place. She had done this before.

  “Don’t you know better?” my father roared at us. “Get up and follow her!” I got out of the bed, put on my shoes in a hurry, and charged out the door.

  I trailed my mother all the way to the old, shabby bus station where the lime walls were graffitied with chalk. It was closed, of course. A street lamp illuminated the big iron lock on the gate. I realized then that my mother wasn’t going anywhere; she sat on the cement block under the lamp outside the station and started to weep again.

  Gingerly, I moved closer to her and stood beside her. Her wailing made me want to cry too. I just couldn’t understand why life was always so hard. Exhausted, she finally stopped weeping. She turned to me and said weakly, “Let’s go home.”

  We dragged our feet back to the house. My father was lying on my parents’ bed, facing the wall, as still as a dead man. That night I dreamed of coming back to the hamlet one day with thousands of yuan in my pocket and making my parents cry with joy. Now we had enough money. Now they wouldn’t fight any more, and we’d have a happy family from then on. I smiled in my sleep.

  Around the time I started junior high, a visitor came and stirred the Shen Hamlet. His name was Honor, and he lived in the nearby Lao Hamlet. He had been a young man when he was discharged by the People’s Liberation Army, and it was said that when he arrived home, he found that his eccentric widow mother had already arranged a wife for him, a woman who was not quite right in the head, who meant to say “fuck your mother” but always ended up saying “fuck my mother.” Now they had a fourteen-year-old girl and a twelve-year-old boy, and this woman still hadn’t learned how to cook stir-fried cabbage or iron Honor’s pants.

  Honor had recently made a fortune buying tons of cheap raw cocoon silk from the poorer areas north of the Yangtze River and selling them to the textile factories near the Shen Hamlet. His newly built two-story house on the other side of the river had glazed tiles and was enclosed by a magnificent wall. The house faced Beiling’s villa almost directly.

  The people in the Shen Hamlet welcomed him with huge, sincere smiles. When Honor pulled a stack of dazzling new bills out of his wrinkled suit pocket and started to hand them out as if they were worth no more than toilet paper, the crowd cheered. Their eyes twinkled like the eyes of owls in the night as they chased after the flying bills.

  Eventually, Honor came to our door.

  My mother often worked the overnight shifts in the tiny textile factory the village had recently built, but she was home that night. Honor sat down next to me at the table in the central room and said hi. I gave him a polite smile and continued to do my homework. My mother put a cup of tea in front of him and sat beside him. He grasped the teacup with both hands.

  “My old comrade-in-arms, now a factory owner, is very generous and gives me as much raw silk as I want,” Honor said, beaming.

  “Wow,” my mother sighed. In the light of the kerosene lamp, I saw her blush.

  Honor then reached over to Spring, who was sitting on a small stool, and put her on his lap. He pulled out a ten-yuan bill from his pants pocket and squeezed it into her hand.

  Honor started to come almost every night when my mother was at home. He usually stayed for dinner. The big grass carps or bundles of lean pork he brought with him always made my mother smile. The expensive cigarettes he offered softened my father’s taut face. After dinner, my father, Spring, and I would go to bed and my mother would stay up with Honor in the central room. From the bedroom, I listened to their low laughter as the light from the kerosene lamp danced on the wall.

  One day a couple of months after Honor started to visit, I came home from school and my mother was gone. I didn’t see her the next day either. On the third day, I had to ask. “Dad, where is Mama?” I said.

  “She’s on a business trip,” he told me casually. “Her textile factory gave out bolts of cloth as salaries, so she’s gone with Honor north of the Yangtze River. The market for cloth is said to be better there.”

  I didn’t say anything, wondering how my father, who cared about his reputation more than his life, could be so calm when he told me that his wife was on a business trip with another man. This was unheard of in the countryside.

  My mother returned ten days later, looking radiant. She wore a new blue silk blouse decorated with small white patterns, like the clouds in the sky. We happily sucked at the litchi nuts she brought back, a precious fruit that was produced only in the South, which in ancient times had been shipped three thousand miles on horseback to Beijing to make the Tang Emperor’s most beautiful concubine smile. Later, Spring, still the apple of our mother’s eye, showed me a picture of our mother walking from a boat onto a small dock, carrying a briefcase and smiling like a real businesswoman. I looked at the picture for a while and felt confused about what was going on with my mother. I noticed a flashy silver watch on her wrist in the picture, but I didn’t ask Spring why she wasn’t wearing it now.

  My mother went on many trips with Honor. Whenever the villagers asked, “So, your mother is on a . . . business trip?” I would say “Uh-huh” and walk away.

  While she was not around, our house became light, as if it was made of paper. When my father and I had to talk, he would stutter and flush, and I would never waste one extra word. We secretly wished that my mother would come back soon.

  Finally, in October 1989, when I was fifteen, floor slabs and cement were purchased; the builders were contracted; and we were ready to build a two-story house in the front of the hamlet. Honor, infinitely resourceful, had obtained the many red stamps from the Villages Committee required for us to use a new piece of land.

  It was clear to everyone in the hamlet that we never could have paid for the house without Honor’s help. The villagers started to refer to my mother as a “pussy-seller” and my father a “wife-seller.” Whenever I walked by the Big Poplar Tree, people would give me strange smiles. Hearing their ear-piercing laughter, I would keep my head as low as possible and wish there was a hole in the ground where I could hide. There was no bigger shame in the whole world than having your mother called a whore.

  We moved into the house about a month after the building began. There were three rooms on each floor and a kitchen attached to the first floor in front of the building. It had cement floors and pure white lime walls. The stairs were wide and strong, just as we had always wished.

  The bedrooms were upstairs. Spring and I took the center room. My father moved my parents’ old bed into the east room, away from the stairs. My mother put a new bed in the west room, where the stairs led directly.

  My parents slept on separate beds in separate rooms for the next ten years.

  Nobody talked to each other in the new house for months. It was like a thousand-year-old tomb. Spring seemed to have changed overnight, becoming like me, sad and quiet.

  I lived my days and nights like a walking corpse, drifting silently from place to place. I sat in the classroom, listening to the sounds of my internal organs. The teacher’s voice became vague background noise wafting in from far away.

  One afternoon, my form teacher called me into her office with a stern expression on her thickly powdered face. I knew why. I had scored badly on the last mock college entrance examination.

  Sure enough, she struck her desk with her palm, pointed her finger at me, and began scolding, pausing dramatically between each sentence. “Did you see how you
scored on the exam? What the hell’s happened to you? Do you want to go back to the paddies and plant shoots? If you keep going like this, forget about college.”

  On the bike ride home, I started thinking seriously about my education, which I had been neglecting. Words like “career” and “ambition” rarely entered my mind. They were too abstract and modern. I was only a fifteen-year-old peasant girl; I had never had many extravagant wishes. Every morning when I woke up, my only desire was that it would be a peaceful day and that my mother and father wouldn’t fight. But at this moment I began to think about my future. I knew that I didn’t want to marry a peasant in one of the local villages and work in the rice paddies my whole life. More clearly still, I knew that I didn’t want to live in my family’s house even for one more day. I would do anything to get myself out of that endless hole of miseries. If going to college was the only way, then why was I letting the opportunity pass me by?

  I refocused all my attention on schoolwork. Every day, I stayed in the classroom as late as possible. When the power in the town went out and my classmates whispered to each other in pairs in the flickering candlelight, I sat in the corner alone memorizing English words. The girls giggled continuously about the new wool coats they had bought, about the movie tickets some boy had just tucked into their notebooks, and about how many looks the handsome geography teacher had given them during the last class. I covered my ears. My world was too narrow for any of these luxuries. I was sure no man would ever want me. I was short, ugly, and quiet, I thought. My own parents didn’t even like me. Whenever jealousy or sadness crept up in my heart, I pushed them down immediately and told myself that I wasn’t born lucky or pretty like those girls. I came into this world with unfairness. But I was going to prove that I was different, and some day I would shock everybody and become the brightest star in the sky.

  When he wasn’t out on business trips, Honor still came to our house almost every day, despite the sneers he got from my sister and me. He always had a smile on his face and talked softly to everybody, and he started to do more and more for us. He brought food from the market every day, bought us coal and gas, did house repairs, asked me about school, gave us money for clothes, and got medicine for my mother’s various ailments, snacks for Spring, and books for me. Gradually we became friendlier to him and started to expect him every evening. After dinner, sometimes I would stay at the table and listen to my mother, Honor, and Spring chat idly. I seldom looked straight into Honor’s eyes. He was still the man who was ruining my family—while simultaneously supporting it—but I was growing more accustomed to the situation and sometimes I almost believed that this strange family, which had two men and one woman, was normal.

  At the end of May 1991, two months before “Black July,” when all the high-school seniors would take the national college entrance exam but only a half percent of us would squeeze across the narrow bridge to colleges and universities, my form teacher was kind enough to pay us a visit.

  She told my mother that a student like me, one from a poor family and a mediocre high school, should make a teachers college my top pick. She recommended Changshu Senior Specialized College, which she said not only would waive tuition but would also give free housing and food coupons. In her cheerful description, this school sounded like cake falling from the sky. My mother nodded her head like a chicken pecking at rice. She was overwhelmed by the unexpected favor that this flashy city woman was showing to her ugly daughter.

  Finally I spoke up. “Maybe I can try another teachers college a little further away too?” Changshu College was in the city of Suzhou, only an hour and half’s bus ride away. I wanted to go much farther from home.

  Displeasure flickered in my form teacher’s heavily lined eyes. She looked like a panda. My mother gave me an angry look. “What do you know? Of course Teacher Chen knows what the best school is for you.”

  Just like that, my teacher and my mother decided my future. Not until years later did I learn that teachers colleges like the one they picked for me were still vocational schools. They were usually the best choice for kids from poor families because no one else was willing to be a teacher, the lowest-paid civil servant. Even worse, most teachers trained in vocational schools like mine were assigned to remote areas after graduation.

  After my form teacher left, I was weighed down by anxiety. I knew that there would still be some living expenses to pay, even in a not-so-elite college, and I wasn’t in the habit of discussing such things with my mother. The next evening, though, Honor told me that he would be delighted if I went to college and that there was no need to worry about anything else. I wanted to say something to him, but I couldn’t bring myself to respond, not even to say thank you. He must be a noble person God has sent to help me, I thought, and I didn’t understand why I was too stubborn to accept him.

  Honor told me he had bought a condo right in front of my school, which I could use to study for my exams. He spoke to me very softly, as if I were a doll made of glass. I took the key from him silently.

  I shut myself in the condo during the one-week study period before the exams, not caring about the classmates knocking on the windows, not caring about their laughing eyes and questions about the owner of the condo. July 1991 was unusually hot. I couldn’t eat or sleep. I was restless and agitated, like a small animal before an earthquake. I stripped off all my clothes, held a book in my hand, and paced the room for the entire night, thinking of my father’s sad face, my mother’s sharp voice, Honor’s sallow fingertips, my classmates’ sly smiles, and the handsome geography teacher’s eyes. Everything I could think of, I thought over twenty times. By the time I was sitting in the exam room, I had banished all my anxiety. I felt as calm as if I had just taken a tranquilizer.

  At the end of August, the mailman finally handed me a letter from Changshu Senior Specialized College. My hands were shaking a little bit as I tore it open. On a small paper strip, in Song style, the most common Chinese character style, it read:

  Dear Comrade Shen Juanjuan,

  You have been admitted to Changshu Senior Specialized College in the English class of 1991. Please report to the school in the city of Suzhou on August 29.

  Yours truly,

  School Admission Office

  Enormous happiness shot through my chest. For a few seconds I could barely breathe. My mother and father would finally see my worth.

  I walked into the kitchen. “I got in!” I announced.

  Spring jumped up from the small stool she was sitting on and rushed toward me, pleasantly surprised. “Really, Jiejie?” she shouted, using the term for older sister. My mother turned from the stove, a big smile on her sweaty face. My father remained expressionless at the table. Over the next few days, he only pulled up one corner of his mouth to show his good mood when people came to congratulate us.

  The villagers seemed to have forgotten the scorn they had heaped on us in the past. They scattered around our kitchen, sitting or squatting, all talking at once about how truly amazing it was that two illiterate parents had produced a college daughter, how lucky I was to be the only one out of almost a hundred students to go to college, how long ago they had realized that this girl was a smart kid with a grand future. My mother nodded her head to everyone, proud and elated. She seemed to have forgotten that for the past several years she had been hiding herself in the house to get away from these people.

  “I was so worried before, because she couldn’t plant rice shoots,” she chirped. “Now it turns out that it wasn’t necessary, because she’ll never have to go near the paddies.” Everyone laughed and kept saying yes.

  I cared about none of these things—my parents’ faces, my grand future, my reputation for intelligence. The only thing I cared about was that I could finally leave the hamlet, leave this home, after nearly seventeen years of nothing but nightmares.

  PART

  II

  3

  ON AUGUST 29, 1991, shortly before my seventeenth birthday, I became the first person ever
to leave the hamlet for college. When I got up that dawn, I didn’t feel the slightest bit nostalgic. All I wanted was to get out as soon as possible.

  After a fierce fight with the other passengers to get through the door, my mother and I, soaked with sweat, finally made it onto the bus. There was only one bus trip daily from Zhenze to Suzhou. It was always so crowded that some people practically hung in the air the whole trip, but my mother had thrown our luggage through a broken window to claim a spot, so now we sat on those sticky seats, awaiting departure.

  At 5:59, one minute before the bus was scheduled to leave, Honor’s tall, skinny figure appeared outside the window, the chubby bus driver walking contentedly behind him, a Grand Gate cigarette dangling from his lips. Under everybody’s admiring eyes, Honor got in and took the passenger seat next to the driver. This spot was usually reserved by the driver for his acquaintances. He would throw you off the bus if you sat there without permission. Honor coughed once and then turned toward the back of the bus for a quick glance at us. I shrank back to avoid his eyes.

  Panting heavily, the bus made its way slowly onto the asphalt road. Outside the window, rows of two-story houses surrounded by rice paddies and mulberry trees skimmed past my eyes. Everything looked so familiar. Everything I had always wished to forget was now disappearing behind me. I had thought I would be rapturous at this moment, but I felt a pang of sadness. I lowered my head, blinking back tears. Then a strong smell of industrial chemicals mixed with dried urine drifted under my nose. I reminded myself that I should be happy to say good-bye to this place, my so-called home, a place where people peed anywhere they wanted and made the earth smell like a giant latrine at the height of the summer. So what if my mother said there were a lot of bad people in the cities? I didn’t see how they could be worse than the Shen Hamlet. I was excited to be going to Suzhou, a sophisticated city that people called “heaven on earth” or the “Venice of the East.”