Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  As old as China itself, Suzhou was located on the south side of the Yangtze River, a place where fish and rice were abundant. Ornately carved stone bridges spanned the many narrow rivers that crisscrossed the entire city. Low houses built on the water and surrounded by gardens were hidden at the ends of small zigzagging lanes. But what the city was really famous for was its girls, who were known for their slender figures, their large liquid eyes, and for speaking the softest dialect in the country. Even my mother, who didn’t even know who our president was, was telling the fat woman who was resting half her hip on my mother’s small shoulder, “Yeah, Suzhou is famous for its pretty girls.”

  I knew she must be in a good mood, since she was striking up a conversation instead of rolling her eyes and elbowing the fat woman away.

  I turned toward the dusty window and caught sight of my reflection—a chubby bucket-shaped body in a taut plain white shirt, a short neck, a rustic ponytail and bangs, and a pair of round glasses with brown frames that almost covered my entire face. I looked away, depressed.

  The bus bumped over a crack in the asphalt road, and my mother’s bare arm touched mine. Even in the scorching heat, her skin was cool and slippery, like a snake hidden in green leaves. I writhed on my seat.

  She turned to me and asked softly, “What’s wrong? Is the skirt too tight?”

  “Nothing,” I mumbled and stared resolutely out the window. It was true that the denim skirt Honor had bought me was a little too tight, but that wasn’t why I had turned away. I still wasn’t used to how my mother had been treating me since I had gotten into college, as if I were an ancient vase that had been buried for centuries and had suddenly been dug up by accident and found to be priceless.

  An hour later, we arrived in the clamorous city of Suzhou. I looked around curiously. It was my first time in a city. Ancient buildings with ornate eaves and tiled roofs stood next to tall modern buildings with shiny windows. Poplar trees lining both sides of the cobblestone street cast leafy shadows on the rows of parked bicycles on the sidewalks and on people’s faces. I followed closely behind Honor as we walked through the crowd. Dodging the endless stream of traffic, I sweated nervously.

  We hopped in a rickshaw, and Honor gave the driver the college’s address. After speeding through a maze of alleys, the rickshaw finally dropped us in a stone slab lane, at the end of which lay my new school.

  Through the arched stone entrance, I examined my college, my home for the next two years. There was a circular yard so small that a soccer ball kicked lightly at one end would easily reach the other. Around the yard were three cement buildings and one red brick one and three trees—two poplar and one jasmine. A person carrying a thermos in each hand was walking by the bicycle shed in front of one of the cement buildings, his head lowered. At the center of the circle was a shabby playground painted a faded yellow. This was very different from the college I had imagined. I had pictured a big green park filled with lively young students holding books in their hands, walking and chatting.

  “Let’s go find the dorm. Hurry!” my mother barked.

  Pull back the disappointment right now, I ordered myself, and I hastened behind my mother. After all, this was my dream come true. I shouldn’t be wallowing in self-pity.

  At the end of a long corridor on the second floor of the dorm, we found my assigned room, number 207. It was quiet and empty, except for the four iron bunk beds standing on the mottled wooden floor and the big spiders hanging from webs in the corners.

  My mother, who had the cotton padding for my bed folded into a square block on her shoulder, pushed me through the door. “Go,” she said. “Grab the bed next to the window in the corner. It’s the best one. Go!”

  I hesitated. We were the first to arrive. Was it necessary for us to fight for a bed? It was just a bed, after all. I walked in, feeling embarrassed. I saw my name on a paper strip pasted on the iron pole of the bed my mother had pointed to. The beds were preassigned. I put my plastic bags on the bed and didn’t say anything.

  While we were busy making up the bed, two of my roommates arrived one after the other. A small girl with freckles all over her tiny face took the bed above me. She extended her hand to me and spoke in a resounding voice. “Hi, I am Chen Xin. Call me Jenny. It’s my English name.”

  I liked her instantly. I shook her hand a little shyly. “I am Juanjuan. I don’t have an English name yet.”

  As Jenny and I were getting to know each other, a gaunt girl with a loose ponytail came in and took the bunk bed across from me. She smiled and introduced herself as Kate. From the innocent smile on her flat face, I could tell right away that she was an easygoing person, someone who didn’t always think before speaking. Blinking her long eyelashes, she asked me curiously, “Is that your father? You two don’t look alike.”

  I knew she meant Honor, who was busy putting my belongings away: thermos behind the door, toothbrush on the table, slippers under the bed. Pretending that I hadn’t heard her question, I quickly looked away from her and turned my back to her, because I didn’t know how to answer. For a moment, I wished that this man in a tidy, dark gray suit, who now, with one knee on the bed, was hammering a small nail into the wall for me to hang my clothes on, was my father. For years, my real father hadn’t moved a finger for me. My heart twisted when I forced myself to admit it, but Honor, a man whose face I had imagined punching to bits millions of times, had been taking care of me like a father. At this thought, guilt leapt up in my chest. No, he is not your father! a sharp voice inside admonished me. Not only is he not your father; he ruined your family. Don’t ever forget it.

  Without straightening her arched back, my mother casually answered Kate while making the bed. “Oh, he’s her uncle.”

  I stood there, relieved, but also feeling a little disconsolate.

  After putting a string bag of apples next to my pillow and squeezing a hundred-yuan bill into my hand, Honor urged me to be a good student and then left to catch a train north for a business trip. As usual, staring at his slightly bent back moving toward the door, I bit my lips, wanting to say something nice but remaining silent. After he left, my mother finished unpacking my luggage and straightening up while I stood around curiously checking out my roommates. She wanted to take the bus home as soon as she was finished. I agreed to accompany her to the station.

  I watched her standing in line at the bus terminal. She turned her head and looked at me as she shoved the tall middle-aged man who was pressed up behind her. I heard her worried voice yelling for me to be careful.

  I clutched the rusty railing and cried out, “Mama!”

  She turned around again. I saw that her eyes were filled with tears. She glowered at me as if she were angry that I had made her cry, and then she disappeared into the vast space behind the wooden gate where the buses waited. It felt like I would never see her again. I started to cry.

  The jasmine tree outside the classroom on the second floor of the red brick building was blossoming that autumn as I started my college life. The sweet, refreshing smell filled me with hope for the future. I had become one of God’s superior children—a college student. The government now guaranteed me a job for the rest of my life.

  But the education we received was far worse than I had expected. We didn’t have the freedom to choose our subjects. Instead they were imposed upon us: English Reading, Listening Ability, Oral English, Chinese Literature, History of the Chinese Communist Party, Moral Principles, and Methods of Teaching. We went to the same classes every day in the same classroom, and two years later we would be assigned by the government to remote locations in all different counties as junior high school English teachers.

  Still, I never felt like joining in when the other students complained about having wound up there instead of at a normal four-year college. I told myself that since I was there already, I should accept it and try to do as well as I could. In fact, grades were the only thing I cared about, the only way I had of distinguishing myself from others. Here the teach
ers didn’t announce the students’ grades out loud in class as they had in my old school, but you always heard about other people’s scores through the grapevine. I was only happy if I was one of the top three in the class and was secretly jealous of the students who got better grades. I was perhaps the only person in the class who was so competitive. Most students stopped studying as soon as they entered college, because they would have jobs no matter how poor their grades were, but I was used to competing with others. Life was a war to me.

  The seven girls in Room 207 got along well. Coincidentally, we were all from poor peasant families in the surrounding counties. We elected the conscientious and perpetually energetic Jenny as class monitor. We joked that she was what Chairman Mao had described as the sun around eight or nine o’clock in the morning—the hope of China. Fish, a tall girl with a fleshy body and a freewheeling personality, became my closest friend. She called me Tiger, my birth animal, and soon everyone else did too. Though I wasn’t sure whether deep down I was really ferocious like a tiger, I accepted it happily.

  Every night at nine o’clock, after everyone came back from the required evening solo study sessions, the lights in the dorms were shut off. In the dark, the girls in Room 207 didn’t talk much. Instead, we lay inside our mosquito nets and listened to the girls in Room 208 across the hall chatter loudly about the boys in our class. Being an English teacher was widely thought to be too feminine for men, so there were only seven boys in our class of thirty. They all shared a room downstairs. Thus these guys, whether handsome or ugly, became the pandas in the zoo, seven national treasures for the girls in the class to scramble for. The girls in Room 208 were way ahead of us in getting their attention. They came from small towns instead of peasant hamlets like us. They wore lipstick and high heels and walked like willows swaying in the breeze. Bubbling with enthusiasm, they quickly became friends with the boys and fiercely guarded them from other girls. We sneered at the vapid 208 girls and seldom talked to any of the guys.

  Never thinking a man would fall for me, I came and went from the classroom like a quiet cat, sitting in my seat with a stiff back and listening to the jarring flirting and laughter of the other boys and girls.

  But one day when I walked into the classroom, a boy named Chi gave me a friendly smile from his seat. I quickly avoided his eyes. Not until I had walked to my chair and sat down did I realize that my heart was beating like a drum. Why would he look at me? Standing six feet tall with two bushy brows over a pair of big eyes and a dashing long nose, he had been voted the most handsome guy in school by the 208 girls. It seemed impossible that he would deliberately pay attention to me.

  I thought about Chi all through the class, not coming to my senses until Professor Fan gave me an unsatisfied look. I was usually the one who timidly gave him the correct Chinese meaning every time he threw out an English word, a skill for which my classmates hated me. During breaks, much to my embarrassment, fat Professor Fan would sit next to me and show me the Time magazine his broadcaster daughter had sent him from the United States. He told me I should go study in America, because it was so much nicer there that even the moon was rounder and brighter than the one in China. I would nod my head to him cordially, but deep down I would laugh to myself. Professor Fan was so naïve. America, the real heaven on earth, was impossible for a peasant girl like me to even dream about.

  After class, I walked outside to the corridor, leaned over the cement railing, and tried to cool down. I needed to stop thinking about Chi. Probably the look had meant nothing. Snowflakes were falling thickly. It had been a long time since we had had such a heavy snow. The first red blossom of the newly planted winter plum was gorgeous against the white. There was an old Chinese saying: a snow year, a rich year. My father will be happy with the good harvest, I thought.

  Chi came outside too, followed by two girls from Room 208. The girls grabbed the snow piled up on the railing and started to throw snowballs at each other, laughing hysterically. I walked farther away from them. I was trying to push away the unexpected homesickness that was engulfing me.

  A hand appeared under my nose, a candy wrapped in colorful plastic lying in the palm. “Want one?” I raised my head and saw Chi’s smiling eyes under very long lashes. I took his offering and ran back to my seat without saying anything. I felt the heat of his palm on the candy.

  The next day was a Saturday. One of my roommates, Jean, told me that a guy from the same county as her, Gu, and Chi had invited us to see the snow-covered Tiger Hill. I put on my best khaki coat, brought a pair of black gloves, and headed out with her.

  Though usually a popular tourist destination, Tiger Hill was deserted that day. We seemed to be the only four people in that world of ice and snow. Gu and Jean wandered off. Under the black umbrella Chi was holding, we walked silently with some distance between us. I dared not look at his handsome face and his soft eyes. On the top of the hill, he reached out his hand to me. My fingers touched his. The dancing snowflakes caressed my face, and I felt like I could barely breathe.

  “Why didn’t you ask me out directly?” I said.

  He looked at me and smiled shyly. “I don’t know. I was scared. It’s my first time asking a girl out.”

  My heart was melted by this incredibly good-looking yet bashful man. I fell in love with him. Nobody had ever looked at me so gently or spoken so sweetly to me before.

  From then on, we searched for each other’s shadows everywhere, in the cafeteria, the classroom, and the playground, and then we would blush and turn our heads when we found each other. In the evenings we stayed in our seats patiently in the classroom until we were the last two remaining in the candlelight. Then we sat in the dark and just gazed at each other. Sometimes he would light a cigarette and I would watch his face in the misty moonlight. We dared not stay in the classroom too late, since the school forbade dating, so we would wander together into the sleeping city night after night.

  We just walked and walked, never tiring. Neither of us needed to talk. In the harsh winter wind, he wrapped the long white mohair scarf I had knitted for him around both of our necks and held me tightly. I wanted to be with him every second of every day.

  Fish wasn’t happy that I spent so much less time with her now.

  “Tiger, now I see that you’re one of those people who care about love more than friendship,” she complained to me half jokingly one day while braiding my hair. I had let my hair grow, and instead of wearing a ponytail, I had Fish make small braids on the sides and wore them like a headband. I was trying my best to look decent for Chi.

  “I’m sorry, Fish. But you don’t know. . . .” I covered my face with my hands and moaned, “I love him so much that my heart hurts. He’s my first love.”

  Fish rolled her eyes. “I just don’t know why you love him. He’s not that special. He’s so quiet and introverted. Does he have good grades? No, he has the worst. Does he play basketball well? No, he doesn’t even play.”

  “Can’t you see how handsome he is and how ordinary I am?” I said earnestly.

  Fish shrugged. “Frankly, I don’t think he is that good-looking. And, Tiger, you are not that ordinary-looking.”

  The Spring Festival of 1992 was approaching. Chi and I were a little worried because it meant that we would be apart for a month while we were on vacation. We were also anxious about being separated after graduation. One night we sat quietly against a tree trunk by a river in the city, thinking about these tough times ahead. He caressed my shoulders for a while and then finally spoke. “Don’t worry,” he told me. “I’ll speak with my uncle. He’s a powerful man, and he’ll have both of us assigned to my county so we can stay together.” His county was Taichang, very far away from my home county, Wujiang. According to official policy, we would be assigned to our counties of origin.

  His voice sounded uncertain but soothing. I pictured my future in that strange county with him, a man I was crazy about, and I found it a little difficult to believe. It seemed unreal, like the incredibly round, b
right moon hanging in the corner of the sky. But I nodded my head.

  That Spring Festival was the longest but easiest one I had ever experienced. My parents’ bickering became senseless noise to my ears, like the cooing of the chickens and the oinking of the pigs. The awkward dinners with Honor were easier to take. It was just like watching a ridiculous play on stage. I was calm and peaceful, although I missed Chi terribly. Spring was in junior high school by then and had grown taller than me almost overnight. She was quieter and nicer to me than she had been as a child, and she didn’t mind at all when I borrowed her new coat to wear at college.

  The first night of the spring semester, Chi and I spent a large portion of our monthly allowances and bought two movie tickets. We hid ourselves in the last row and kissed each other frantically for the entire movie. I had never thought that I could love someone so deeply and completely.

  4

  ENGROSSED IN MY love with Chi, that spring semester was the happiest time of my life. Soon it was April and starting to get warm. On his way home from a business trip, Honor visited me at college. As usual, he brought me fruits and snacks, and then he asked if I needed clothes for the warm weather. In the department store, I boldly picked a tight wool dress and some black stockings, two expensive and fashionable items I would never have thought of wearing before.

  On a pleasant day the following week, I put on the dress and stockings. “Tiger, you look so pretty,” my roommates said. “Did your uncle buy it for you?”

  “No, I bought it myself,” I said.

  They had noticed the awkwardness between Honor and me long ago, and I always avoided talking about him.

  A couple of guys from other classes whistled from the second floor as I walked briskly to the classroom in the spring breeze. My face flushed red instantly. I had never garnered this kind of attention before. I gathered my courage, raised my head, and looked up. I saw many faces looking down, and in the corner I saw Chi’s gloomy one. My smile faded. He looked angry.