You need to stop this, I thought. You need to cure the lice. You need to go home. I recalled the house in the Shen Hamlet. I tried to picture my mother and father, but after the rollercoaster of life in the South, their faces seemed strangely hazy. I longed for a home like never before, and the Shen Hamlet suddenly appeared to be more of a home than anywhere in the South.
Brother Yong was displeased when I asked if he would lend me some money for a train ticket home. I knew borrowing money was taboo among Amway brothers and sisters. “I promise I’ll pay you back very soon,” I assured him. “I’m going to my home town to build a new Amway career there. I promise you I will have a network there soon.”
“I’ll see what I can do,” he said unenthusiastically.
Feeling uncomfortable and hurt by his reaction, I decided not to bother him any further. Though I was poor, I still had my dignity. So the next day I made a quick trip to Long Jiang and borrowed some money from Huang. I left town right away, before he had a chance to persuade me stay in the South.
Before I boarded the train, I called Brother Yong and told him that there was no need for him to lend me money and that he should wait for good news from me.
So, in July 1997, I returned to the Shen Hamlet all covered with lice. As I walked along the ditch between the blossoming safflower fields, I wondered if I was in a dream, if I was a ghost drifting in this world of golden yellow flowers. The familiar smell of the soil, the sweet smell of the safflowers, and the humming of the bees brought tears to my eyes. It had been barely a year since I had last left the hamlet, but it felt like much, much longer.
The door to the central room of my parents’ house was ajar. The sound of silkworms nibbling mulberry leaves came to my ears, a sound that had accompanied my entire childhood. Oh, home! I stood on the threshold observing the room. A layer of white silkworms wiggled on the dark green mulberry bush leaves that rested on top of straw beds spread on the floor. In the space between the beds, I saw my mother squatting on her heels, her back to me and her dark green scarf wrapped around her head. She was taking leaves out of the bamboo basket next to her feet.
“Mama,” I said.
She turned. I couldn’t believe what I saw. My mother, whose pretty, well-proportioned face used to make me feel secretly proud and jealous, looked like a different woman. Her face was twisted and pulled to the left; her lips were slanted; and her cheeks were swollen like two loafs of bread.
She just looked at me and turned back to her chore. I felt like I’d been stabbed with a needle. Her eyes, jammed in their swollen sockets, had been cold, as if she was looking at her worst enemy.
I stood where I was for a good while, shocked at what I had seen and hurt by my mother’s reaction to my return. Then I went into the kitchen. I poured myself a big bucket of water and grabbed a towel.
In the dark storage room to the side of the house, with the blue plastic curtains drawn as usual, I sat in the big plastic tub, soaked the towel with clean water, and slowly rubbed myself. I saw the rotten spots from the lice on my body, the dirt under my long fingernails, and my ugly feet, swollen from the days of walking. My face was wet, but I couldn’t tell whether it was water or tears.
Guilt attacked me. I had been such a bad daughter. I hadn’t been here when my mother’s face got damaged. I had been thousands of miles away, trying to forget her. I hated myself. I had only written once and had pretended to myself that my family was dead. And what had I done while I was in the South? What had I achieved?
When my father came home that night, he didn’t say anything to me, as usual. When Spring discovered my presence, she responded with neither surprise nor happiness. “Oh, you’re back,” she said as she parked her bike in the front yard, and then she went straight upstairs to her room. I felt like a piece of furniture.
Like everyone else in the house, I stayed quiet. I ate and slept and spent the rest of my time helping my mother with the housework. For the first time in my life, I tried to be a good daughter to her.
A week later, after rubbing my body with soap and water every day, the lice were finally gone, and my mother started to talk to me. The swelling was leaving her face little by little, and when she was in a good mood—still rare—she explained that she’d had a stroke of apoplexy.
“Why?”
She puckered her still-slanted lips. “You know. Just life. Nobody listens to me. Nothing is ever good.”
“Did you go and see a doctor?”
“I went there once, alone. Who cares about me in this family, anyway?”
I wished I knew how to comfort her. Until then, I’d never realized the effect of my behavior on my mother, how truly devastated she had been when I’d quit the teaching job and gone to the South. Spring wasn’t the ideal daughter either. She’d rented a store in town and was barely scraping by selling clothes. Plus, she was hanging out with some bad guys, according to my mother. My father, who was busy working in the rice fields, still wouldn’t talk much to my mother. What a poor woman she was and what a lonely life she led.
For two weeks I stayed at home, trying my best to help my ailing mother. At night I tossed and turned until daybreak, analyzing my failure with Amway. When the swellings and twists on my mother’s face were almost gone, I took out my Amway bag, got on a bike, and rode toward the surrounding villages. One of the many principles Amway had taught me was that you could do Amway anywhere, because Amway was good for everyone. After my merciless failure in Guangzhou, I decided to conquer the countryside.
It was close to the height of the summer. With the scorching sun above my head, I zigzagged over the dirt paths in the neighboring villages and visited a few of my high school classmates. I had high hopes. People in the countryside needed great opportunities like Amway more than the people living the city.
“This is what you are doing now? Selling American detergent? What happened? You were the only one in our class who went to college,” one former classmate said, throwing the brochure back at me.
I was undaunted by this negative reaction. After all, I’d experienced worse in Guangzhou. The second day, I biked for an hour to visit another classmate, who shook his head and said that he was too busy for this kind of childish thing.
I kept shuttling back and forth between villages and was turned down by everyone. One classmate smiled modestly, saying he was too stupid to undertake such a complicated career. Another one told me sincerely that this Amway thing was just not good for the countryside folk. I wouldn’t give up. I kept hopping on my bike every day, until I was thrown out by the mother of Peony, my old school friend. “You’re a college graduate!” she yelled. “Whatever you’re doing is not good for our Peony. She’s just a country girl. Why don’t you go somewhere else to put on your hoaxes?”
I stood in their courtyard, humiliated. It was the busy farming season, and everyone had just come back from the fields in straw hats, with sickles in their hands and cuts on their faces from the rice-shoot edges. I looked at Peony. She was dirty and dusty and busy soothing her wailing child, and I realized I was in the wrong place to preach Amway. I had forgotten that people in the countryside tended to stay where they were and never wanted much in life.
I hopped back on my bicycle. Pedaling listlessly in the high noon sun, I felt a new sense of despair. For the first time, I started to question: Did Amway really work? That day, my belief in Amway began to waver, and I considered that it might be the scam everyone said it was.
“You are completely out of your mind, going around the countryside like that,” my mother nagged. “Look at you, as dark as a black monkey. Go back to the middle school, okay? It’s not too late. I’ll go with you and beg the principal to take you back. He won’t cancel the contract you signed with the school, but I’ll beg him to give you some time to pay them back.” She coaxed and cajoled me as if I were a little girl.
I spoke to her as earnestly as I could. “Mama, I really hate teaching. Please understand. There’s no future in teaching. I’ll always be poor. O
ur family has always been so poor, and I don’t want to be poor any more.”
“I know teachers don’t make much money, but even teaching is such an honor for our family. All the generations of our family have been bare-footed peasants. We eat and breathe dirt every day. Finally you become a teacher, but then you throw it away,” my mother said bitterly.
I didn’t know how to make her understand that there were many opportunities out there, many different occupations, and that not teaching wasn’t the end of the world. I tried to imagine myself going back to Ba Jin, to the middle school, taking the pointer, and standing in front of the blackboard every day. The image frightened me. Though I had tried very hard to keep my teaching post open when I first left the school, now that I had seen the much bigger sky outside that town, I didn’t ever want to go back to it.
“There’s no need to talk about this any longer. I am not going back to that school,” I said with curt finality, despite my mother’s angry glare. I wished her face would heal completely soon so that I could carry on with my life, the destiny I had chosen for myself, free of worries and guilt.
I continued preaching Amway. Often next to a manure pit or in a ditch in the rice fields, I explained the Amway career to somebody with a carrying pole on his shoulder or with pants rolled up to his knees and feet soaked in mud. Knowing how ridiculous I looked in people’s eyes, I had to tell myself to forget my self-consciousness and concentrate on the extraordinary opportunities Amway was offering.
Yet a rock never blossoms, no matter how often you water it. By the end of July, I had given up all hope of succeeding with Amway. Sadly but calmly, I accepted the fact that, despite all the blood and tears, I had failed completely. But for the first time in my life, I didn’t blame myself for this failure, because I knew I had tried my very best to make it work. The fact that it didn’t must have been Amway’s fault, not mine.
I put away all my Amway products and tore all the Amway posters off my wall. I took a deep breath and told myself, I am free of Amway. A huge weight was off my back. I could see through Amway and Brother Yong now. He was just a clown, good at manipulating people, and Amway was just a scheme played on thousands of Chinese who had ambitions but few opportunities to succeed.
The day after I quit Amway, I called Huang.
“Come back here, you silly girl. What are you doing in the countryside?” he shouted at me over the phone. “I just heard that a knitting company here is looking for an English translator. A good friend of mine knows the boss. You can go work there. They pay eighteen hundred yuan a month.”
Eighteen hundred yuan a month, more than I had made in LongJiang as Director Yip’s secretary!
I hung up the phone and went out to the asphalt road in front of the house for a walk. As I listened to the honking of the boats on the canal, I felt the high aspirations I’d had a year ago growing in my mind again. I had thought that I had been completely defeated, but as it turned out, the ambition was still there. I hadn’t had enough sufferings in the South yet. Now after the weeks at home eating well and returning to health, I was reinvigorated, ready to go again.
The night before my departure, I packed two bags, left them downstairs, and then went upstairs to inform my mother of my decision to return to the South. She sat on the bed in her room and couldn’t do or say anything except sob. Honor was sitting next to her, sighing. His face was yellower and skinnier. I had heard that his business was not doing well and he was now short of money himself. I prayed that he would continue to take care of my mother as he had done for the past ten years.
At my mother’s temples I saw streaks of gray. She was growing old. Time had erased the hatred I had had for her. I didn’t know when I had decided to forget the way she had treated me as a child, but at that moment I only wished she could get some love and care in her life, which had been so full of misery.
The next morning, I came downstairs feeling refreshed but a little reluctant to part from home. My mother was on the stool behind the stove, weeping just as she had when I had left the house a year earlier. I hardened my heart and turned to fetch my bags, but when I entered the side room I saw only one bag lying on the cement ground. The big bag with all the vital items such as clothes, shoes, toothbrush, and comb was missing.
I ran back to the kitchen. “Where’s my other bag?”
“I don’t know. Go ask your father,” my mother replied.
I looked at her suspiciously. My father had been as cold as ice to me ever since I had come back. I didn’t think he would bother to hide my bag.
I searched everywhere in the house, flustered and dismayed, but couldn’t find it. “Where is he?” I said, returning to the kitchen, really annoyed.
“He’s gone to the fields.” She stared at the fire in the stove.
Fuming with anger, I stamped the floor with my foot, grabbed the small bag, and ran out of the house. Nothing would stop me. I would have to do without my other bag.
On the way to Shanghai, I visited Wu’s town. Though the guilt of dragging her into joining Amway tormented me, I faced her and admitted that I had given it up and assured her that soon I would compensate her for the money she had lost, no matter what. Her face relaxed, and she took out the two thousand yuan I’d asked to borrow for my plane ticket. I promised her earnestly that I would soon pay her back.
She was the only person I could think of to ask for help. The idea of asking my parents never even occurred to me. Borrowing money from my parents and admitting my financial failure to them was the last thing I wanted to do.
Later that day, I boarded a plane from Shanghai to Guangzhou. Sitting on the plane, I felt a sense of déjà vu. It was July again, the same month I had flown to the South a year earlier. I had many new scars, and I was even poorer than I had been then, indebted to almost everyone I knew. But this time it was going to be different, I promised myself solemnly. This time I was going to find my piece of sky.
PART
IV
17
“THIS IS XIAO Yi. She’s a translator here too. She’ll teach you what to do.” My new boss, Zhou, a bald man with an eggshaped face and a round stomach spilling over his belt, pointed to the girl feeding a piece of paper into the fax machine.
She turned her head. I smiled. Her thin lips moved slightly sideways and a faint smile floated over her waxy face. She had dark circles under her eyes and a big head that looked disproportionate to her skinny body. This is a wary girl who trusts no one, I thought. Hopefully she would relax her vigilance when she realized that I was just in the South to make a living.
It was a spacious office. Two oak boss desks occupied the east side of the room. They faced a big television that sat on a shelf against the west wall. Against the south wall, a long leather couch stretched across the room. Xiao Yi’s desk and her fax machine took up the north side of the rectangle, facing the window. After being told I would share Xiao Yi’s desk, I sat down in the chair next to her.
“Hi, Xiao Yi, could you give me something to read?” I asked politely after sitting awkwardly in silence for a while.
She took out a blue folder from a desk drawer and handed it to me. I opened it curiously. It was jammed with faxes, all of which had Xiao Yi’s delicate, hasty handwriting on them in blue ballpoint pen. I read through the pages quickly, eager to learn more about my new job.
The first stack of faxes was a series of negotiations between Zhou and a couple of foreign suppliers.
03/12/97 8:58pm From: Paris To: GrandKnit China
Dear Mr. Zhou,
My lowest price for the 45 sets of 1982 KOKETT machines is $17,000 each.
Best Regards,
Jacques :o)
* * *
03/12/97 9:00pm From: GrandKnit China To: South Carolina
Dear Carl,
Your KOKETT are too expensive. Jacques offered $15,000 each. Please give us your rock bottom price.
Best, Zhou
* * *
03/13/97 9:30pm From: South Carolina To: GrandK
nit China
Dear Mr. Zhou,
The best price I can offer is $15,000 each. They are in perfect condition, still running in Russia. I can give you accessories with them, beams and needles. I cannot do it any lower.
Best wishes,
Carl
* * *
03/13/97 9:40pm From: GrandKnit China To: Paris
Dear Jacques,
Carl’s price is much cheaper than yours, $12,000 each.
But we prefer to buy them from you.
Best, Zhou
* * *
03/13/97 9:55pm From: Paris To: GrandKnit China
Dear Mr. Zhou,
OK. I’ll sell them at $12,000 each. :o(
Best regards,
Jacques
* * *
03/13/97 10:04pm From: GrandKnit China To: Paris
Dear Jacques,
We’ll buy the 30 KOKETT from you. 40’ containers to Guangzhou Port. Deposit will be wired from HK tomorrow. Thanks. You are always our best partner!
Best,
Zhou
* * *
03/14/97 5:37pm From: GrandKnit China To: South Carolina
Dear Carl,
The KOKETT are not popular lately. We decide not to buy them.
Best, Zhou
* * *
03/15/97 11:35pm From: South Carolina To: GrandKnit China
Dear Mr. Zhou,
I heard you bought the 45 KOKETT from Jacques. Why not from me? I can be cheaper.
Best wishes,
Carl
* * *
Tiger's Heart Page 19