Two Lives

by A. Yi

  “‘Is it real? Is your mirror real?’ she’d ask every time. After getting an affirmative answer, she bit her lower lip, trying to contain her glee. But she couldn’t contain it. So she just let herself go and broke into rude laughter. Then she made for the cloakroom, put on the girly garments that were waiting as she made phone calls, and left in a rush. She wanted to get back to her circle of celebrities – their events, parties, and TV appearances.

  “Before leaving, she’d glance at me sideways with the vanity and pride of a beautiful woman. Usually that same evening I’d see her on TV, talking with that ageless male host with a two-character name. He’d hold her hand like he was her best friend and say politely, ‘Miss Mary, you look younger again. Where has Miss Mary been on vacation all this time we haven’t seen her?’” Zhaoyu said.

  “Really, because her beauty was fading, she was hiding again. Usually she hid here,” Zhaoyu went on. “Each time, the aging came sooner and sooner, faster and faster, more and more fully. At first a surgery could keep her young for two months, then a month and half, then one month, then 20 days, then 10 days. And she was even older than she was before the surgery. And gave off a stench like a corpse. Lots of times I heard her sighing in a dark corner. She didn’t eat or drink. Sometimes when she had to pass me to use the toilet I could see in the light leaking from the open door, her messy hair and the tears trickling down her rough, bumpy face.

  “Sometimes she’d scream and vent her anger at me. I figured she was blaming me for giving her less and less pure vitality. But was it really my fault? I did what I could. I gave all I had. I couldn’t give any more, couldn’t constantly give her the vitality of a young nineteen-year-old. I was already totally drained. Not my fault. Then it would all start again. She’d come back and beg me. Sometimes she’d beg me right after she’d vented at me. First she’d be kicking me with her high heels, next she’d be holding me and begging me to help her again. Obviously she thought she’d get me no matter what. And she did. As soon as I agreed, a car outside would start up. We’d go right to that hospital.”

  “How did you meet?” I asked.

  “We met online, then met at a bar the same day. I’d never seen such a beautiful woman, such a well-dressed woman. My heart kept pounding. When she started to talk, I gave myself over to her completely like a dog,” he said.

  I went to that plastic surgery hospital after Zhaoyu had been cremated. His corpse reminded me of the human food in ancient books. Not long after his death, ‘self-media’ reported the discovery of several desiccated male corpses in an abandoned warehouse on the outskirts of Beijing ‘scattered about like mannequins’, which are suspected to be related to anti-aging surgery. But we all know you can’t believe all self-media. In response to my question Dr. Wu said multiple surgeries between the same recipient and donor would certainly lead to the surgery’s diminished effectiveness. He joked that aging – humanity’s most dogged enemy – may have developed a resistance to it.

  Fat Duck

  for Cai Bojing

  Anyone who’d been along the river came away with an impression of Little Big Zhang – when giving out his business card he’d say, “Call me Manager Zhang Liuling please” – and his overly serious demeanor. His complexion was pale when he was young (he must have been very proud of it at the time), but now it was sallow and nearly transparent. His face was narrow and long and flanked by a pair of long, easily pullable ears. Because his upper lip covered by a brown mustache was always downturned and shut (the teeth inside seemed to be grinding a sesame seed), and he had the hooked nose of a Caucasian and a bald head, his face appeared even longer. Under his prominent brow bones hid a pair of eagle eyes. They always fixed on you unblinking, unwavering, and made you nervous. Even in summer, he wore two tops. Inside was a shirt, white-collar, buttoned-up, stuffy. Outside was a knee-length trench coat. He reminded people of a monk, a judge, or an undercover policeman. The grim air he exuded gave people chills.

  Being around him was like being around a dark forest that blotted out the sun.

  Some kids who were typically unruly and reckless shut up around him and gripped their parents’ hands or the hems of their clothes. Really anyone who knew him a little knew he was useless. He was born to a peasant family with 10 brothers. Of the 10 he was the only one who was taught at a private school, then studied at a teacher training school, and managed to live in the city. Later he started a wholesale office paper business that worked with several schools. Despite his wisdom, he couldn’t figure out what allowed him to surpass his own brothers, so he kept all of his past temperaments and allowed certain elements to flourish. He was like a man who had accidentally made a full recovery with no idea which medicine had cured him, so he used all the ones he’d taken indiscriminately. Reticence was one of those medicines. And by observing others he found that taking on a posture of not speaking created an inscrutable self. People were intimidated by him. Sometimes he shoved his hands into his trench coat pockets and got the false sense he was a powerful man who could arbitrarily dictate the actions of others.

  * * *

  Really the only people he could control were his family members (he didn’t control them exactly but coordinated them according to the circumstances and their characters – like never having two roosters in the same cage to peck each other bald, he kept his mother and wife apart most of the time, so the two could treat each other respectfully for a few days).

  Another example: his wife and son, being his primary kin, lived with him in a two-bedroom apartment with a mortgage by the river in the Shuimu Development. His son studied in Jiujiang Foreign Language School 37 kilometers away and came back to Ruichang on the weekends. His wife was a rural resident and illiterate. This made her see herself as a sinner and not dare to voice her opinions (especially when she thought that, because of her, her two children were born rural residents and laughed at by their classmates. . .Little Big Zhang bought them urban residency later). She willingly served her husband. Apart from household chores, she was responsible for transporting goods on a rickshaw from the warehouse to where clients designated. Sometimes she used a pushcart with two wheels.

  His mother and daughter, like his secondary kin, lived in Jigong Ridge north of the city in a condo, which Little Big Zhang bought with the money he borrowed when he first came to the city and which still had no running water. About two thirds of the houses there were vacant, so untiled blood-red bricks were exposed (the yellow mud that filled the gaps between the bricks had long since cracked) like a body that had been skinned. The facades of some houses weren’t fitted with window frames let alone windows, some randomly covered by bright striped polyethylene. Some just let their insides be exposed, rusty steel bars like weeds coming from the ground and through the walls, while the inner walls were pitch-black from squatters cooking. After night fell, those who took the shortcut to or from the train station got an eerie feeling when facing those buildings as if they were facing buildings abandoned after a bombardment.

  People called Little Big Zhang’s mother Grandma Zhang, though back in the countryside, she was called Aunt Huojin. Since she came to the city she had to be called the city way. People called her daughter-in-law Aunt Zhang, so they called her Grandma Zhang. Grandma Zhang had given birth to 10 sons in total. In that sense her constitution was exceptional. Ever since she became widowed, she had lots of time she didn’t know what to do with, so she came to her seventh son, Little Big Zhang, to the city (those in the family who came after the sixth were called Little Big Zhang; it required some familiarity to distinguish them, which I won’t explain now) to lead the city life her ancestors never had. She acted first and reported afterward. After she came to Jigong Ridge, she sat waiting outside the locked house, dripping with sweat, until her son came and let out a long sigh. “Fine, you live here with Ruijuan and cook for her,” her son said.

  So Little Big Zhang sent his daughter Ruijuan who had been living with him to live wit
h her grandma. Afterward, once or twice a month, in order to pick up boxes of printer and copy paper he went to the condo, which doubled as a warehouse, and gave his mother and daughter some money. Ruijuan was always restless and shy in front of him. Sometimes, though he said nothing, she’d hurry off, squat down at some distance, back to him, sobbing. Little Big Zhang had sloped shoulders (why else would he wear a trench coat with shoulder pads?), but back then his daughter was broad-backed and thick-waisted. When she started to cry it was like a big loaf of bread was crying. A few times Little Big Zhang felt sympathy for this strange, distant blood relation of his and wanted to go over and encourage her, for example by patting her shoulder and saying: “Who’s this beautiful little girl?” But some deeply ingrained thing held him back. I guess even if his daughter fell off a bottomless cliff in a runaway carriage he wouldn’t move an inch, just painfully and silently gape. Every time he jumped off his Jinbei pickup, his sturdy mother would totter over and, right in front of the girl, tell on her. Hearing all the exaggeration, he couldn’t help but despise her. He would teach his daughter – her face red, seemingly about to cry – a lesson, unaware that as soon as he left, she would beam with joy, bouncing up and down like a pony to meet her friends who had been waiting a long time. One day his daughter’s main teacher at the Number Two Primary School came to him and revealed the shocking secret that his daughter was a problem student with a less than 50 per cent attendance rate, and she had been absent again that day. They found her around Railway Dam. She was standing on a railway track, holding hands with Liang Lianda from the class next door. Facing a coal train approaching in the distance, they sang loudly.

  The green grass on the riverbanks,

  stretches to where the sea begins.

  The road to the sea never ends,

  Nor does my love for you.

  They ran in opposite directions. As a result, Little Big Zhang handed over full custody of his daughter to his mother: that country shrew seemed to have been waiting a long time. That’s right, she thought. It’s right to give her to me. There’s no one I can’t tame. The old woman gazed down at her son, fully confident.

  * * *

  Time flew. After that horrible thing happened, and the deceased Zhang Ruijuan had long been cremated (rumor had it that she remained prone when being pushed into the incinerator; the worker skillfully pierced her corpse with a sharp knife, then lifted up the diesel barrel and shook diesel out over the body), people still remembered her as the little girl chased home by her grandma: the latter holding a tailless whip like a cattle salesman, whipping the former’s bottom every few steps. After each whipping, the former would shudder and straighten up, face contorted in agony. The whippings didn’t ease as the girl showed greater compliance. For at least four years residents of Jigong Ridge were used to hearing the reoccurring whippings at noon or dusk near and far. By its sound, they could conjure up the arc the whip made in the air. Whipping wasn’t easy for the old woman. I mean there were times she almost let herself succumb to laziness and fatigue and give it up. But the sense of responsibility to discipline the vile child for her son made her steel herself once more. Sometimes people could hear that the whipping really came from the old woman’s vicious desire or sometimes from her intention to get revenge for the girl’s past offenses (before Little Big Zhang clarified her custody situation, the granddaughter always saw herself as city-born and scorned the country folk who stubbornly argued with her). But sometimes they could hear nothing more than the whipping itself like it was an old custom people had to follow (such as human beings whipping animals or landlords whipping serfs working in the fields). Like rain. When the rainy season came, the rain would go on for 10 days or so. People had no idea why it rained or why it stopped raining. So when the sound of whipping suddenly stopped, people panicked (of course it was a rather unimportant type of panic). Some walked out to see why the whip stopped falling on the girl. “I need some water,” the old woman said. She wasn’t answering their question, just being an illiterate peasant living in the city, explaining her actions to the locals. When she’d drunk enough she capped the plastic bottle, slung its strap over her shoulder, and started to chase her granddaughter home. Sometimes being the grandma, she pulled the girl’s ear – that pullable ear the girl inherited from her father – all the way home. Blood dripped on the ground. The girl titled her head, gripped the old woman’s arm, and let out a heartbreaking scream: “Aunt, Aunt, my aunt.” (That was the only time she used dialect to call her mom Aunt. Most of the time she was reserved with her. She couldn’t bring herself to call her Mom in Mandarin, or Aunt in dialect because doing this amounted to revealing her ugly and shocking origins to the public.)“You’re going to rip your granddaughter’s ear off,” people would sometimes stop their knitting, concerned, and warn her.

  “It won’t come off,” Grandma Zhang would say.

  “See. She’s clinging to me like a monkey.”

  Once Ruijuan was home Grandma Zhang would go in and latch the door. Sometimes people saw her leave alone and pull the black bolt outside then go play mahjong (she only played poker in the countryside but learned to play mahjong in the city by watching only two rounds). From inside the house came the girl’s desperate shrills. Grandma Zhang was an eccentric and meticulous disciplinarian. To show her determination, she went to the parking lot just to ask the driver to fetch the stiff broom tainted by the blood of her 10 children from the countryside. Before it was used to wash pots, clean the stove, and sweep dust. Some summer days, on the dining table lay a green mesh cover to keep flies away and beside it the tightly woven broom. It had given her 10 sons, and later her granddaughter, lashes all over their bodies, streaks and streaks of lashes like they’d been raked. Sometimes she used a club to strike the girl’s shin again and again. People often heard the old woman’s eager, irritable teaching:

  “You have to admit you were wrong today – if you don’t admit you were wrong, you can’t eat – can’t leave this spot – just keep standing – stand till tomorrow morning – you hear – you hear, long ears – I’m telling you to admit you were wrong – don’t act pathetic – don’t call your aunt – you and your aunt are the same – hurry and say you were wrong – you hear – don’t trick me with that language I can’t understand – speak the language I know – okay – don’t talk like a mosquito – don’t try to get away with mumbling – what are you saying – louder – I can’t hear – you damn kid, I can’t hear, I can’t. . .”After being punished, sometimes Ruijuan was furious and threw herself on the bed (and slept), sometimes she was forced to pump water. Ashamed and resentful, she pumped the handle five or six times then realized she had done it wrong and she took a big scoop of water from the tank and poured it on the mossy pump walls. When the water got through the rubber cap she immediately pumped the handle. That way, the water would be pumped up from deep underground. Completing this process required mental focus, so only after Ruijuan finished this work, and saw the glistening water splashing down the water tank, would she go on with her crying. Other times the girl seemed possessed, madly running and finding her grandma as if she hadn’t seen her for a long time, lying prone on the ground, and shouting sorrowfully:

  “Grandma, I was wrong. I know I was wrong.”

  She gripped her grandma’s calves with both hands, lips trembling, mouth wide open, panting. Sometimes she’d start coughing and so have to pound her chest fast. Shamelessly, she let herself roll on the ground until she was covered in dust. Thus was her horrifying repentance. Then as if receiving a voucher, she left the house, looked herself over in the shiny window of the parked car on the side of the road, shook off the traces of humiliation, found good friends standing by the manmade lake, and began chatting. In front of her parents and grandma, she was cautious, didn’t talk much. Often you couldn’t make out half of what she said. But around classmates her age she was surprisingly loud. Vulgar sayings and swear words only the boys used to ridicule the female s
ex poured out of her mouth. Fat Duck always said, Your mom’s cunt, those classmates would later remember her. Or fuck your aunt’s old cunt. They always gathered around, three or four of them, scrupulously gossiping about the affairs of people around them like hyenas in a cult ritual. This always made me feel bad. I remember in Ruichang City (a county-level city, which I called Ruichang County in my previous novels but readers from my hometown sent me letters requesting me to correct the mistake: please keep in mind that Ruichang is a city, don’t degrade us) when I was living there I always came across such throngs of people. Sometimes they even brought their babies with them. For three or four hours, they’d huddle around, cover their mouths, talk without restraint. Day after day, still there. Year after year, still there. Decade after decade, their hair turning gray, still there. That was their daily ritual, a way to defend themselves against the desolation of life.

  * * *

  One day Zhang Ruijuan graduated from middle school. The other students were 16, she was 17. She didn’t go to school to check her scores, and Little Big Zhang couldn’t be bothered to ask (wasn’t it already decided, how good could it be), but her head teacher was restless (like a naughty child who can’t leave an unlit firecracker on the ground). She called Little Big Zhang: “Your daughter scored 126.”