Tiger's Heart

by Aisling Juanjuan Shen

  I was a slut again. I cursed myself. It was bad to sleep around. But though I condemned myself, I couldn’t figure out why I was doing it and what was wrong with my head. It felt as if I was trapped in a bog, and no matter how I floundered, there was no way to get out.

  “Next time I come to Xiamen, I’ll sleep with you,” John, one of our American suppliers, told me in a commanding tone, pointing his finger at me and smiling.

  How old was he, sixty? He wanted to sleep with me, did he? Fine, I thought. I’ll sleep with you, but not for free. Your Japanese mistress could bear to sleep with you every night for big houses and a Mercedes-Benz. Why can’t I do the same?

  The old millionaire came to Xiamen the next month, and I spent the night with him in the most luxurious suite in the Marco Polo Hotel. I was sitting on the couch, looking down at the artificial but beautiful lake. He walked up to me and gave me a Dior lipstick, some Guerlain powder, and a gold bracelet. Then I felt his cold, wet lips. His mouth moved down to my chest. I looked at this head covered with white hair and felt nothing. When he asked why my underwear didn’t match, I lied and said I didn’t have enough money to buy many pairs. In the morning, he handed me five hundred dollars and said, “This is not much, just for some underwear. Next time, I want to see them match.”

  Next time? Would there be a next time? I chuckled to myself as I rode the elevator downstairs. I stopped at the Godiva counter in the lobby and bought myself some dark chocolate balls. I figured I should celebrate because I had finally pimped myself out successfully, and for a great price, five hundred dollars! I decided I should buy chocolate for myself from then on, since I didn’t think any man would buy me Godiva in this lifetime. Or roses, for that matter.

  I walked out of the lobby of the Marco Polo Hotel smiling to the sun and crying inside to the devil that had taken over my soul again.

  I started to read the classified page in the daily newspaper and circled the want ads for overseas jobs. The air in Xiamen was still so fresh; the sun was still so enchanting; but I couldn’t breathe freely there. I felt like all my organs were clogged up with filth. Weekly facials in beauty salons could only purify my skin, nothing more. I hung around in every club and bar in Xiamen with Jennifer, the bad girl, or with my other friend Ann, a good girl who had no idea that all the foreigners I had slept with could perhaps make up a miniUnited Nations. All the martinis and bottles of Corona that I drank couldn’t wash away the dust that had settled on me. I was backsliding. I was hypnotizing myself with alcohol and cigarettes.

  Before I was completely eroded, I wanted to get myself out, out of this circle, out of Xiamen, and out of China.

  One day, I read that a boat traveling between China and the Middle East was looking for wait staff. I rushed over to the office of the company. I followed the directions the captain had given me on the phone, and in a small lane I found the rundown building. I knocked on the filthy door.

  In a stale conference room with a dusty navigation map on the wall, the captain told me to sit down and then handed me a piece of paper.

  I held it up in the air and started to read. “‘May I help you? Would you like a drink? This way, please.’” When I finished, I saw the captain’s puzzled expression.

  “Let me ask you something.” He shifted in his chair and looked at me sincerely. “Why are you applying for this job? You know that we’ll be on the sea all year around, right? And also, waitress is not the highest-level worker on the deck. It’s really hard work too, to be honest with you.”

  “I know that. I don’t care. I can take it.” I shrugged.

  “Your English is too good to be a waitress on our boat. You should be sitting in a fancy office building working for a foreign company making good money like all the girls out there—I mean, from your English and the way you dress.”

  I looked at the captain’s aged face and gray temples and smiled wryly at him. He could tell there was something wrong with a girl with fine skin dressed in a silk suit and skirt who was willing to endure the harsh wind on the sea.

  “Let me give you some honest advice. Go back to your work and enjoy life. So many girls must be jealous of you.”

  I started to talk to people at all the agencies in the city that helped Chinese citizens go abroad, but every time I told them I was single, they quickly shook their heads, especially those who dealt with visas or immigration to America.

  “Americans rarely let single women enter their country on non-immigrant visas,” one person told me bluntly. “They’re afraid they would never leave. They guard their borders like dogs and don’t let any inferior humans like us in. The best shortcut to get to America is to marry an American, and he’ll be your ticket to America.”

  It seemed marriage might be my only bridge out of China. So I was supposed to just find a man and marry him? I wondered if it would be worth it to get married in exchange for a way out of the country.

  After pondering this idea for many days, I faxed a personal letter to Carl and Jacques, our two biggest suppliers, who had become my friends, and asked them for a favor—to find a good man to marry me and take me out of China.

  I was feeling desperate and suffocated, as if there was a cage around me: and this cage, in my eyes, was the entire country of China. All I could dream about was getting out of China and going to America, where it was said there was freedom and respect. There I could start my life all over again. Snakes could slough off their skin three times in a lifetime; why couldn’t I?

  Jacques and Carl promised me that they would do as I’d requested and find a good husband for me. My face burned with shame as I read their faxes. What kind of woman asked everybody she knew to find a man to marry her in exchange for taking her out of China? Only a woman with no morals or sense of shame would do that.

  The summer was almost gone, yet the heat was still boiling inside me. September came. Soon I would turn twenty-four, and I couldn’t sit around and wait for a man to drop from the sky to marry me any more. I was consumed by the idea of getting out of the country.

  A teasing line in an ad in the evening newspaper caught my eyes: Want to go to the UAE, a country where everyone is rich and dripping with oil?

  “We can easily get you out and send you to the UAE for twenty thousand yuan. You can get a job in a hotel. Many rich people go to the UAE, and you’ll meet a lot of them at the hotel. But you need a passport,” the lady at the front desk in the tiny, disordered office told me.

  “How do I get a passport?” Chinese citizens were only given identification cards by the government, not passports.

  “You need go back to where you come from, get approval from the unit you belong to, and then go to the local Public Security Office and apply for it. And the government will decide whether you are entitled to a passport,” she explained.

  Damn it, my identification still belonged to the middle school as far as the government was concerned. This stupid system with its ridiculous rules, I thought. Now I would have to go back to the middle school and beg the headmaster for his stamp on my passport application form. I had left the school two years ago, and I didn’t belong there any more. I didn’t want to belong to anybody, to any unit or any government. I wanted to belong to myself.

  No matter how mad it made me, I had no choice but to yield to the rules in order to obtain a passport. I put on my sky-blue wool suit and high heels, and, with utter loathing in my heart, I returned to the Hope Middle School, the place I had fled from two years earlier.

  I took a flight to Shanghai and then a taxi directly to Ba Jin. It was a shivery fall day there. Broken bricks and moss could still be seen everywhere in the town. The sparse bamboo bushes were still swaying listlessly around the school, and the teachers, whose faces I still remembered, were still running to the classrooms at the ringing of the bell with chalk dust all over their gray or black clothes.

  I sat in one of the offices while several teachers stood around smacking their lips at me. It had been only two years, yet it felt like so long, li
ke a lifetime.

  “That necklace must be real gold, mustn’t it? Is that sapphire too?” one of the female teachers asked admiringly. I nodded my head with a proud smile.

  “How much are you making every month now, Teacher Shen? Oh, I should call you Miss Shen now,” my former English team leader said.

  “Well, my boss pays me five thousand yuan a month, not to mention bonuses,” I replied briskly and shrugged my shoulders.

  “Wow, that’s how much we make in ten months.”

  I relished their envy. I smiled and kept quiet, remembering how they’d shaken their heads and admonished me when I’d quit.

  The bell buzzed in all the buildings, giving everyone a start.

  “Oh, I have to go to a class now.” One teacher sighed and stood up.

  “Yeah, I need to grab that little brat and give him a good beating on the palm,” another said, grabbing a box of chalk and a ruler. All at once, they rushed out the door.

  I went to the headmaster’s office on the third floor. Fifteen minutes later, I walked out with a blood-red stamp on my passport application form, but there were five thousand fewer Yuan in my purse. It was the price I had to pay for my first step toward freedom. I had been blackmailed by the headmaster, yet I’d had to swallow it because once again he was the one who held the power.

  I took a last look at the school, vowed never to come back, and then shook the dust off my feet.

  The next thing to do was submit the application form to the county Public Security Office, fifty miles away from the school.

  “It will take sixty days,” the clerk behind the counter told me without showing any emotion on his face. “And I am not sure if you will be granted a passport. If the government thinks you shouldn’t leave the country, your application will be denied,” he warned me by rote while skimming through the application package.

  All I could do was look at him helplessly, listen carefully, and pray that he happened to be in good mood and wouldn’t tell me that I needed one more stamp here and another there. Getting out of China seemed to be tougher than climbing to the sky.

  Nonetheless, I was still full of hope for going to the UAE. After I went back to Xiamen, I started to say good-bye to my few friends in the city.

  One of them opened her eyes wide upon hearing my decision. “Are you crazy, Caroline? Do you know that the UAE is in the desert? You go out the door, and all you can see is sand and more sand.”

  “I’m not going there for fun. I just want to get out of here.”

  “The women there are all wrapped up in black cloth all year around, only showing their eyes. Are you going to live like that?” she pressed on.

  I bit my lips. I could hardly imagine myself in a robe looking like a nun every day, yet all I could do was to pray that this would not be the case. You couldn’t work in a hotel if you were all wrapped up, I told myself.

  22

  WHILE I WAS still waiting to hear about the passport, Song told me that he wanted Old Two and me to accompany him to the city of Harbin for a business trip. Although I was worried that I might miss some news about my passport application, I agreed to go since I knew my nerves would break down just like an overwound clock if I allowed myself to sit around immersed in my UAE dream for one more day.

  So at the end of September, the three of us boarded an early morning plane to Beijing and then changed to another one for Harbin. A few hours later, we arrived in that dirty and disorderly city in the northernmost part of China. Black smoke came out of the many chimneys of the industrial compounds surrounding the city. People in heavy coats and ski masks biked around hurriedly, fighting with the harsh wind. We hopped in a taxi. After a couple of hours’ ride, we finally reached our destination—a bankrupt warp-knitting factory in a small town somewhere close to the border of Russia. We looked around. It felt as if this town had been deserted years ago. The streets were empty, decorated sparsely with bare trees. The sun felt cold. The landscape looked like something from a dark oil painting by a depressed artist.

  The head of the factory showed us the machines that were for sale, walking with hunched shoulders and arms folded inside the sleeves of his wadded jacket. Although it wasn’t yet October, in this part of China it was already chilly like deep winter, and I could hear the sound of my teeth chattering.

  We rushed back to Harbin that evening and checked into what was supposedly the best hotel in the city. In a lifeless restaurant, we had a much-too-salty and spicy dinner and then headed back to the hotel right away. The steam heaters hissed in the hotel room, but it seemed like they weren’t putting out any heat at all. I crawled under the freezing quilt and felt my throat itching from the extremely polluted air.

  Suddenly I missed Xiamen so much, missed the growing grass and the nightingales in the air, missed the gorgeous sunshine and the palm trees on the beaches, missed my small but warm room. I realized that everything is relative, and without comparison you could never tell what’s good or bad. Why did I want to leave Xiamen so badly? I started to ask myself in the dark.

  Three days later, the bargaining between Song and the head of the factory was finally done, and we didn’t waste one minute getting on a plane back to Beijing.

  We wandered in the shopping area of the Beijing airport to kill time during the two-hour layover. I saw boxes of moon cakes all over the counters, and suddenly I realized that the next day was the Moon Festival, a traditional Chinese festival when families gather together under what is supposedly the roundest moon of the year and enjoy these moon-shaped cakes.

  I strolled along the counters looking at the rows of moon cakes in fancy packaging and marveling at the variety of cakes made these days. I remembered that when I was young, the only moon cakes available were filled with sweetened bean paste, but now I saw moon cakes with egg yolk, lotus bud, sesame, coffee, and even chocolate filling.

  I stopped at a ruby-red tray with six cakes on it that was installed on top of a music box. Every time you turned the tray, euphonic music played. I immediately liked it and decided to buy it for my mother and mail it to her. Though the Moon Festival, with its expensive cakes, had rarely been celebrated in my family, a peasant family where everyone hated each other, I wanted to let my mother know that now everything was different, and the Moon Festival didn’t just belong to city people any more but also to an ordinary family like ours.

  Just after I handed the money to the saleswoman, my cell rang.

  My mother’s sobbing voice burst through the phone. Something was wrong again. I had thought that my family wouldn’t bring me tears any more, now that I was making money and making them happy, but apparently I had been wrong.

  “Your sister is pregnant,” she cried.

  A sick feeling started to spread through my chest. Spring was barely twenty.

  “Whose baby?” I asked. I had never heard that she had a boyfriend.

  “This bastard called Ming. He is married, thirty years old, with a kid,” my mother bawled.

  I couldn’t believe it. My sister, my only sister, was pregnant with the child of a married man, just like five years ago when I had gotten pregnant by Pan.

  “What are we going to do now?” I asked feebly.

  “The little bitch thinks he will get divorced and marry her. Stupid bitch. Even if he is willing to, we will never let her marry him,” she swore.

  “Can I talk to her?”

  “She won’t talk to anybody! She thinks we’re all her enemies. First she ran to the road and wanted to get herself killed by a truck. Luckily we pulled her back just in time. And now she’s locked herself in her room and won’t come out.”

  “How did this all happen? Did you have any idea about this guy before this happened?”

  “How could we know what your sister was doing? She keeps everything a secret. The guy told her he wasn’t married, and one day he sent his wife and daughter away and had your sister visit the house, and when she wanted to leave he locked the door. I gave him a good slap on the face when your father
and I grabbed him yesterday. He cried and promised to solve the problem in a week. Now he’s just disappeared. Nobody can find him.

  “Oh, God.” My mother sobbed for a few seconds and then cried out, “Little bitch, how could she ruin our lives like this? She will never find a decent husband now. She’s a broken shoe. What are your father and I going to do now? We’ll never have a good family. We are doomed.”

  “Just calm down, Mama. I’ll fly back right now. You need to take care of yourself.”

  “How can I care about myself in a situation like this? Our family is ruined. I was so upset that I fell from the top of the stairs, all because of this little bitch. I cannot move at all. I’ve just been lying on the bed!”

  Her voice made my head ache. I leaned my forehead on my palm. Tragedy was never tired of visiting our family.

  “Son of a bitch,” she continued. “We will take him to the arbitration court and have him compensate us for our loss!” She ground her teeth with hatred.

  “I’ll catch the earliest flight today.”

  My words seemed to comfort her a little and she fell into quiet sobs. After a moment, she said, “If anybody asks you why you came back, don’t mention anything about your sister. If the villagers know this, they’ll laugh at us until the day I go to the grave. Your sister will never be able to find a husband if word gets out.”

  So instead of returning to Xiamen, I boarded the next plane to Shanghai. With a heavy mind and the music box with the tray of moon cakes in my hands, I arrived home early in the evening, when the lamps in the Shen Hamlet had just started to go on.

  I stepped over the threshold into our house and went straight upstairs. Seeing my sighing mother on the bed and my distressed father sitting on the floor with his arms wrapped around his head, tears came to my eyes. I felt the familiar, tense air that had accompanied me throughout my childhood and youth. I told myself to be strong, because right then I was the only string that was holding my family together.

  I cleared my throat. “Could it be possible that they really do love each other and Ming will divorce his wife for Spring?” I asked my parents calmly.