I left the living room and gently pushed open the bedroom door. In the dim light, I saw my mother curled up under the covers like a shrimp. I saw her gray-haired head on the pillow. She was barely fifty, but the beautiful, tempestuous woman of my memory was gone. Now she was just an old, frail mother who needed love and caring.
She sat up when I entered the room and looked at me, concerned. “You’re back?”
“Yes, Mama. Don’t worry. Everything is fine. Go back to sleep. When you wake up, I’ll bring you congee again,” I told her gently and then closed the door.
EPILOGUE
EVENTUALLY I GOT my passport, but I didn’t go the UAE. The agency returned my money after months of trying to obtain a visa for me. I was spared a life in a robe. I was actually relieved.
My mother returned to the hamlet with two big suitcases of gifts and souvenirs. She had told me that she hardly ever saw Honor any more, but, nonetheless, I put two cases of cigarettes in the suitcase for him, something I knew he would like. I will never forget what that man did to my family, and for my family.
Spring visited me subsequently. I sent her to a beauty school, where she could learn all the advanced techniques of hairdressing that she wished. A month later, after she had finished the lessons, she decided to go back to the hamlet. City life was not for her, she said. Soon my mother called and said that Spring had opened a small barbershop in Zhenze, and my mother was very worried about several male customers who frequented it. Sure enough, the next time she called, she told me that Spring was seeing a divorced man in his forties.
My life continued in Xiamen, a life filled by shopping in the daytime and barhopping at night. I consumed cigarettes and alcohol every day, but not strange Westerners any more. That was not the right way to find love, I told myself. Through the Internet, I had become incredibly close to Ethan, the Saab mechanic who might have had grease under his fingernails but who seemed to be the person who was born to understand me. For months, we chatted for five or six hours a day. One day he told me that he had bought a ticket to China to come see me, but a week before his scheduled departure he suddenly told me that he couldn’t talk to me any more and then cut off all contact.
It was surprisingly painful to get the message. I had fallen in love with Ethan without knowing it. I dealt with this blow by drinking and sleeping around again. At this point, I was willing to marry anyone in order to get out of China. I even considered a sixty-year-old man from California who knew me through the Internet, but he eventually disappeared just like the men before him.
Six months later, just when I thought I would rot in Xiamen, Ethan started talking to me online again. I forgave him instantly. He flew to China, and we finally met face to face at Xiamen airport. This time I knew I had found my love.
In 2000, a year after our lavish wedding in the hamlet, which would remain a legend for a long time, Ethan took me to America, the land of freedom that I had dreamed of for years.
Before we left, I gave some of my money to my parents and put the rest into a condo on an island close to Xiamen. This proved to be a disastrous investment, and there is very little hope of its being recovered.
In America, reality soon settled in. Ethan had closed his garage. Neither of us had a job with a steady income. The struggle to live an American life began.
I realized that the first thing I needed was a formal college education. Fortunately, the inexpensive University of Massachusetts at Boston accepted me. For two years, I traveled from one end of Boston to another to attend classes while adapting to life in America. With Ethan’s love and nurturing, I gradually developed self-respect and learned to think of myself as a human being just like everyone else.
In 2002, Ethan got an entrepreneurial opportunity in Shanghai that he couldn’t pass up. I didn’t want to go back to China, a place of nightmares for me, so I remained in Boston and learned how to survive alone in America, how to call the phone company, how to go grocery-shopping, and how to deal with life without my husband.
I never felt settled at UMass. Living in Boston, I saw Harvard with my own eyes. If I could go to Harvard, then I could finally prove to the world that I was the best, I thought, still like a competitive child. So I applied to transfer to Harvard and also to a school called Wellesley College that my English professor strongly recommended as a backup.
Wellesley quickly sent me a package offering the warmest welcome and generous financial aid. I visited the school, and the gorgeous campus and the friendly people I talked to all appealed to me strongly. Two months later, the rejection letter from Harvard made my choice easy. I went to Wellesley, and my life was forever changed.
I put my hair up in a ponytail and joined all the eighteenyear-old girls around me in receiving the greatest education a woman can get. Only after so much suffering and so little guidance in life could I truly appreciate a place like Wellesley. I felt like a fish put back into water, as I told people. I absorbed everything like a sponge, the knowledge, the atmosphere, the sisterhood, and the self-empowering air floating around the campus. In my second semester at Wellesley, I started to write this memoir in an attempt to come to terms with my past.
But peeling off the layers around the wound was so painful that it immediately threw me into a depression. I often wrote with tears and ended up drinking a lot of hard liquor and then sobbing like a baby. I suffered through many nights of insomnia. At this time, my long-distance marriage with Ethan was floundering. We were still best friends to each other. However, all these chaotic and unstable elements in my life and the enormous fear of not being able to make ends meet every month only added to my depression. During our numerous fights, Ethan and I often screamed at our computers on opposite sides of the world that we wanted a divorce. I thought of ramming my car into a cliff many times, and finally I walked into the counseling office at Wellesley.
By then, Spring had chosen to marry an uneducated and stupid young man. He hit my mother during a minor fight, but, after begging on his knees, he was let back in the house. My mother was extremely distraught. As usual, my father was not protective of her. Spring, who had found herself pregnant, decided to continue with her rushed and unhappy marriage. She had suffered three miscarriages already. There was little I could do from such a distance except comfort my mother on the phone. I could only tell her that I would work really hard to finally bring her to America one day. “I want you to come back to China,” she said. I couldn’t possibly say yes to her. I had no intention of going back to China, the land of constant struggle. I asked her angrily why she and my father had let this man back into the house. “I don’t want the villagers to say I broke up their marriage,” she told me. It still amazes me how backward the Shen Hamlet is. As I move farther away from it, the distance between my family and me grows too, both physically and mentally. No matter how much education I receive, I will never learn to truly communicate with my family.
In 2004, things finally turned around. I became a U.S. citizen and graduated magna cum laude from Wellesley, and I was offered a research job by one of the best economics consulting firms in the country. In January 2005, I started my career of being a professional woman in America. It might not have been a big deal to most people, but for me it was momentous enough to bring tears to my eyes.
Later that year, Ethan finally decided to end his fruitless business in Shanghai and come back to America. In the summer we purchased a small but beautiful house in a suburb of Boston. Finally I had a home in America.
I went back to the Shen Hamlet in early 2006 to see my little nephew Tiantian. He is a healthy and naughty boy who finally brings smiles to the family. He has become the focus of everyone’s attention, especially my mother’s. I love him with all my heart. In my eyes he is innocent and pure, with no history or flaws, someone I can love completely. I hope his fate will be different from everyone else’s in the family, that it will include less suffering and struggle. Spring is clearly not happy with her incompetent and sometimes even feebleminded husband, ye
t she stays with him because of societal pressure and out of concern for Tiantian’s happiness. No matter how much I try to encourage her, she won’t leave him. But I know it will not last forever. China is changing so rapidly, and one day my sister will be brave enough to stand on her own. After all, we were born into the same peasant family in the same tiny village in rural China, and if I can change my own fate, so can she.
Tiger's Heart Page 28