Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  I looked at her in disbelief. It was, in fact, her day.

  Upon hearing her words, Yip glared at me and exploded, “What the fuck do you think you are doing lately? You can’t even do this one little thing?”

  I felt a mixture of anger and disgust toward both of them—toward Chen for pushing her blame off on me, and toward Director Yip for scolding me before bothering to hear my side of the story. As soon as he finished his diatribe and returned to his office, I sat down at my desk and started writing my resignation letter. I knew Yip would never like me, and I would never be calculating enough to compete with Chen, so it was time for me to leave, to march on toward my bright and promising Amway future.

  Later that afternoon, as I was packing up my things in my room, Huang came in with a sad look on his face.

  “I heard what happened and that you wrote a letter.” He sat on the edge of the bed and sighed. I kept throwing things into my duffel bag and didn’t say anything.

  “Yip told me that in the letter, you said that he heeded and trusted only one side. You shouldn’t have said that. After all, he is the big boss,” Huang said.

  “I hate people not believing me,” I told him angrily.

  “Come on, you shouldn’t have made such a big deal of it. Everybody, including Yip, knows that you’re very honest, and he’s realized now that perhaps he shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.”

  “Too bad honest people aren’t popular.” I chuckled. Nothing could change my mind. Amway was calling me.

  “Well, it happened, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Yip is the big boss. He can’t apologize to you. But guess what. I just talked to him. He says if you don’t leave, he’ll consider promoting you to the position of departmental manager.” His tone had turned cheerful, and he looked at me expectantly.

  A little surprised, I raised my head and stopped packing. I felt so sad at that moment, seeing Huang’s efforts to keep me there. I didn’t understand why Yip had treated me like a slave if he had expected to promote me one day.

  “Too late. My heart is not here any more,” I said. I cringed at the look of disappointment in his eyes.

  “Are you going to your Amway friends?” he asked me carefully.

  I nodded.

  “I knew you would leave me some day,” he murmured.

  His distressed tone affected me, but it was time for me to move on to the next phase in my life, and he didn’t belong in it. It was heartbreaking to leave him, but I knew I had to.

  I forced a smile. “I’ll come back and see you as long as I am in Guangzhou.”

  “Be really careful out there,” he counseled.

  I called Brother Yong and told him that I had quit my job and that I would come to the meeting that night in Guangzhou.

  “Brother Yong, do you know any place I can stay for tonight?” I asked.

  “Let me see what I can do.”

  I had my long hair cut to my ears, bought a new dress for myself, and left for Guangzhou that evening. I wanted a new start, to appear as a new person in front of Brother Yong.

  “Wow, you look even prettier now!” Brother Yong exclaimed as soon as I came up to him after the Amway meeting.

  “Everyone!” He clapped his hands. “Ah-Juan followed in Sister Grace’s footsteps and had her hair cut short. And what is even more exciting is that she has quit her job to do Amway. Now she is a full-time Amway doer. Congratulations!”

  People applauded my devotion to Amway. I stood in the middle of the circle with my hands clutched together, turning red and glancing bashfully at Brother Yong. Now that I had cut my hair for him, now that I had given up my job for Amway, now that I was willing to follow him everywhere, would he want me, a country girl?

  After the meeting, we went to his motorcycle together. Quietly I glanced at him walking steadily next to me, hands deep in his pockets.

  We had been alone many times this late at night, but I had never felt so romantic before. Stars were shining in the sky; my dress rippled gently in the wind; and I had quit everything to come to Brother Yong, a city man I desperately admired.

  I stopped and clasped his sleeve. “Brother Yong, I have left everything for Amway. Now I can follow you everywhere.”

  “Good!” he said.

  I looked up at him. “Brother Yong,” I said timidly. “You know I like you, don’t you?”

  “I know,” he answered, cracking a thin smile.

  Ah, he knew. I smiled happily. I dared not ask if he liked me too, afraid of breaking my big dream. I blindly followed him.

  We traveled on his motorcycle to the northern edge of the city. He led me down a dark lane and into a small room through a back door. The rolling steel front door was shut and the room was crude and dusty, containing only a desk and a chair. “A friend is going to open a store here,” he explained. “He let me use it tonight.”

  We stood in the middle of the room in the dark, listening to the sound of rats running around and feeling awkward.

  “I guess this is my bed tonight.” I walked over to the desk and lay down on it. “Brother Yong, do you want to lie down too?”

  “No, I just want to look at you.” He chuckled nervously.

  “‘Look at me’? What do you mean?”

  “You know, just look at you. I have never looked at a woman so closely before.”

  I sat up. “You mean . . . you’ve never slept with a woman before?”

  “Yes.”

  I was astonished. He was a thirty-three-year-old goodlooking city man who rode a Harley and yet still a virgin. I felt more tenderly toward him, having discovered this secret.

  “Brother Yong, I’ll let you look if you want.”

  I took off my clothes and lay down in the dark. I heard him approaching the desk carefully and then felt him putting his hands on my knees. He touched and examined me cautiously, like a curious child with a glass ball. The Diamond Bachelor everyone looked up to, the man who gave such stimulating speeches in front of everybody, was a virgin. I wasn’t sure if I felt closer to him now or if I was even further away from him since I was not a virgin.

  “Do you want to try it, Brother Yong?” His touch aroused my desire. I closed my eyes. I could hear him taking off his pants. He moved closer to me and then knelt on the desk, and I felt the warmth of his legs as they touched mine. He felt so soft.

  After a while, I heard him getting off the desk and getting dressed. I opened my eyes and sat up. “I don’t think I can do it,” he said softly. And then the confident, sunny look reappeared on his face, as if nothing had just happened. I tried to hide my disappointment. He liked me, otherwise he wouldn’t have touched me, I told myself. Some day he would be moved by my persistence.

  The next day I moved into an apartment that Brother Yong helped me find. It was hidden in an alley deep in a dirty neighborhood. Butchers, street cleaners, hookers, and Guangzhou’s poorest working classes lived there. The alley was littered with beer cans, coal cinders, and vegetable leaves and was seldom swept. The smell of rotten meat and urine was ever-present.

  I shared a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen with eleven other penniless and frustrated Amway adherents. Six females shared the bed in the bedroom, and the men just crashed in the living room, like dogs that could lie down and fall asleep anywhere. The apartment was moist and humid and smelled like a rat house. The bathroom, which was merely a squat toilet and a showerhead above, was covered with layers and layers of filth. I pinched my nose in the kitchen and the bathroom, telling myself that there were people in this world living in worse conditions and that I could take this.

  Brother Yong never talked about what had happened that night. I still looked at him admiringly and believed that some day he would look into my eyes and tell me that he liked me.

  A few weeks later, I followed Brother Yong on a trip to Guangxi Province, where one of his subordinates needed help developing his local network. You are a seed; you can take root and blossom anywhere and grow into a towering big tree,
Amway taught. Everyone in Amway is your brother or sister, your arm; you should never hesitate to help, Brother Yong told me. So I grabbed all the money I had left, put on my jacket, picked up my backpack, and hopped on the train.

  We arrived at a small city called Bingyang, and when Brother Yong told me that we were right next to the border between China and Vietnam, I was surprised that somehow I had gotten myself all the way to the border of my country. I knew little about Vietnam except that my country had helped the Northern Vietnamese fight off the Americans in the 1960s.

  “This is what’s so cool about doing Amway: you get to travel to so many places,” he told me as we dodged the locals squatting on the sidewalks. They stared at us strangely, as if we were aliens. All the stories that I had ever heard about drug dealers came to mind. Brother Yong had told me that this region was close to the Golden Triangle, the notorious area where the borders of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand converge, where opium is grown, turned into heroin, and smuggled out. The Golden Triangle was the source of half the world’s heroin. Heroin was the only illegal drug people could get in China and was considered a great scourge, and anyone who touched one drop of it was seen as a dead person or destined to become a life prisoner in a rehab center. I had never heard of anyone using drugs except in vague stories, let alone met an addict.

  We stayed in a mountain village. Life was simple there. Brother Yong and I worked well as a team; when he gave me looks of approval, I felt content and happy. Our audience shook our hands after lectures, thanking us for bringing such a great opportunity to such a backward place; at moments like that, I felt fulfilled. I imagined that this was how Chairman Mao had felt after liberating the peasants from the oppression of the capitalists in the olden days. How simple and frank the people here were!

  I slept on a wooden bed in a small room; and every night after the village went dark at around eight o’clock, I thought of Brother Yong’s daytime praises, recited Amway’s mission statement once, and fell asleep peacefully. I stopped worrying about my future, for the first time since I had come to the South.

  Before we returned to Guangzhou, Brother Yong suggested visiting the checkpoint where General Chen Yi had fought off the Southern Vietnamese in the Vietnam War.

  We strolled through the fruit stands along the path leading to the gun turret. In every fruit stand, golden mangos were spread on the square bottoms of the hand-woven wicker baskets.

  “The best thing about this place is the local mango, so sweet and soft. Oh, I can never resist it.” Brother Yong sighed with contentment.

  Rays of afternoon sunlight shone on his face, making it look extra bold and vigorous. I smiled leisurely and nodded my head.

  “There is something I’ve been meaning to tell you,” he said to me slowly.

  I heard my heart thumping heavily. It felt like it was being hit by a hammer. The moment I had been waiting for had finally arrived.

  “I hope you are not going to be offended. I want to tell you because, as your superior, I think it is important for you to do Amway well,” he continued.

  I held my breath, waiting, a wait of a thousand years.

  “You have this smell that comes from your body. I think you should find a way to get rid of it.”

  I froze where I was, mortified, and watched him continuing to stroll ahead. I wished I could find a place to bury myself right then. I gazed at his back and wanted to run and tell him: I don’t have body odor. In this rural village, I can only clean myself with a towel and a bucket of water every couple of days, and I couldn’t even find any sanitary napkins. It’s not my fault. It’s these conditions.

  But all I could do was run after him, force an awkward smile, and say, “I’m sorry.”

  “That’s okay!” he answered cheerfully, and then he ran ahead to his other subordinate, who had spotted us and was waving from the foot of the turret.

  I walked slowly up the steps to the top of the turret. I sat down on the stone surface and crossed my legs. It was secluded and quiet, except for the trees of the woods surrounding the turret murmuring in the breeze. Through the leaves I saw the checkpoint below, where women dressed in robes holding flat bamboo baskets on the tops of their heads walked stiffly in the clouds of dust and men whipped their oxen through the gate.

  I looked around myself, almost in a trance, and suddenly wondered why I was here. Brother Yong had never liked me. Everything he did for me was because of Amway. I had left Huang and my job and chased him all the way to the end of the world only to find I was just chasing my own dream.

  16

  WHEN WE RETURNED to Guangzhou, I found that the halo around Brother Yong’s head had vanished, and I was no longer intoxicated by his presence. I told myself to look at him strictly as my superior. After all, except at Amway meetings and seminars when everyone shared equally in the Amway dream, Brother Yong and I lived in two different worlds. After the gatherings, he got on his Harley and roared away to his apartment in downtown Guangzhou while I walked through the alleys, stepped over the puddles and the cabbage leaves, opened the rusty iron gate to the hallway, climbed the urinestinking stairs to the seventh floor, and fell onto my bed in my slum home.

  As the days went by, my mind came to have just one focus—Amway. Forget men; forget love; and forget the idea of a home, I told myself. In this turbulent world, I had to stand on my own two feet, and nobody could build a future for me except myself. Men were untrustworthy, and I didn’t need them to make me feel safe, to make me not worry, because I could do that on my own.

  I threw myself into Amway and worked as if there was no tomorrow. It had completely taken over my mind and soul. I examined the carpets wherever I went and would frequently take out Amway detergent and demonstrate to everyone in the office how efficiently it removed stains and gum, ignoring the rolled eyes and mocking laughter. On the street, I would observe every person walking by me, then approach the street cleaner in her mask and ask if she wanted to do something better in life, though I knew that in the end she would probably brandish her broom and threaten to scream if I didn’t leave her alone. In the hotels where I stayed for Amway seminars, I would knock on the next room’s door; persuade the guests, who were busy playing mah-jongg, to take a look at my brochure; and eagerly tell them how the boss of a major bank had joined us. I wouldn’t give up until I was pushed out of the room and the door was banged in my face. Then I would stand in the corridor, stare at the door for a long while, and finally tell myself to gather up my strength and move my feet because there were many people out there who were unaware of Amway and many people who were successful because of Amway.

  Whenever I felt like I was at the end of my rope, when I despaired so much that I couldn’t get myself out of the bed in the morning, I would go to Amway seminars to recharge. After rounds of inspiring speeches, I would be back to feeling ready to conquer the world.

  In May 1997, I left the communal Amway apartment and lived a life of homelessness for weeks, following Sister Grace on a multi-city seminar tour. I usually couldn’t afford a seat on the extremely crowded trains, so I would sleep on layers of newspaper on the floor under the seats at night as I rode between cities along the east coast. Daytime always went by quickly in seminars where thousands of Amway fanatics spoke and sang. When night fell, if I wasn’t getting on a train, I would squeeze into any bed offered to me, usually with five or six Amway sisters. When I wasn’t so lucky, I would spend the night curled up in a corner at the local train station.

  My belief in Amway never wavered. Even when I hadn’t eaten for the entire day, even when I was exhausted and collapsed on the street, I never questioned the philosophy of the Amway career. It was not Amway’s fault; it was mine, I told myself every time I had doubts. It was because I didn’t work hard enough or wasn’t competent enough that I didn’t succeed.

  In June, I returned to hot and rainy Guangzhou. New transients occupied the apartment in the alley, but there was always space for one more. I moved back in. It was moldy and humid and f
elt like an oven. The bathroom reeked of mildew and looked so disgusting that I couldn’t even bring myself to set foot in it. The air in the apartment felt rotten. On the days I wasn’t out on the street doing Amway, I stayed in the only livable place—the bed. I would cover my head with the quilt and sleep like a log while the other Amway fanatics debated hotly with a Pacific Insurance salesman who had just moved into the apartment about which career was better and chalk made squeaking sounds on the tiny blackboard in the living room.

  I didn’t have much money left, and my strength was gone. I wasn’t able to sell many Amway products and couldn’t develop any more subordinates. There was a time when I had regularly called my two subordinates, Wu and Fish, my former classmates, and pretended to be optimistic, shouting that they should keep trying because they would be successful soon, but now I had no energy left even to lift the phone when someone called me. Phone calls used to get me so excited, because it could be someone interested in Amway who would become my next subordinate.

  Even worse, I had lice all over my body. I wondered if everybody in the apartment had them, but I didn’t even feel like investigating. I sat on the bed and madly scratched my skin with both hands until blood oozed out of the bites, but still the itch didn’t stop. I fell back down on the bed, wrapped the quilt around myself tightly, and retreated into my cocoon. But the itching didn’t stop, so I kept scratching, and seeing bloody spots constantly being added to my body, I eventually panicked: it struck me forcefully and clearly that I needed to get rid of the lice.

  So one day when all the brothers and sisters were loudly singing the ‘Song of Success’ at a seminar, I let go of their hands and left. I didn’t feel much. I crossed the lobby like a walking corpse and went out of the hotel door, past the fountain in the yard, and onto the sidewalk leading away from the hotel.

  My hand reached into my pocket and took out the Bank of China checkbook Brother Yong had given me the day I joined Amway. I remembered how excited I’d been that the password Brother Yong had chosen for me was the same as my regular password. I had kept mentioning this to him until one day he impatiently told me that it was just a password. I had once ardently believed that Amway would be wiring lots of money to this account, but now in the wire column, the only number I saw was RMB310, and the account balance was 0. After all my effort and pain, I’d made only 310 yuan from my Amway career. Now not only was I penniless, I also had lice crawling all over my body.