by Geling Yan
She wrote, That’s enough for tonight. My husband’s waiting. I have to go to bed.
He said, All right. So you’re generous with your body—very pure of you. I wish you pleasure.
What right does he have to be jealous? Hongmei laughed to herself.
He asked when their next date could be.
She said there wouldn’t be a next date, online or otherwise. That was a snap decision. Not giving him a chance to respond, she typed quickly, saying her husband loved her very much, and they’d destroyed their reputations to be together. This was what the Chinese called nine deaths, one life—a narrow escape. She couldn’t have this sort of liaison behind his back.
She said, Thank you for your concern, and thank you for making the effort to understand me.
Then she swiftly logged off and shut down the computer. For a while, she couldn’t muster the energy to stand up, and even raising her hand to the light switch was difficult. In the instant between light and dark, she glimpsed a woman’s silhouette and almost let out a scream of terror. Turning the lamp on again, she realized it was her own reflection in the mirror. It was her own fault for having a mirror in the study. She’d never been so unfamiliar to herself—face red and greasy, eyes moist, looking dazed. And her lips, and her breasts—this was probably how women always looked when their flesh was transgressing. It was preemptively showing on her face and body. Her body had moved ahead of her—how unthinkable. She had to uproot whatever stray tendril had allowed this secret talker to creep his way in.
She sat heavily back in the swivel chair, planting her feet on the floor and pulling herself back to the desk to turn on her computer again. When she opened her inbox, his reply was waiting. What kind of response would this be? She decided not to read it. Surely it would just be even more persuasive language to demonstrate how much he understood her. Or else he’d try to nag her (saying she wasn’t pretty or something like that, to make her want him), and then say, Hey, what are you thinking? I don’t want to be your lover; I didn’t ask you to betray your husband. I don’t even like mixed-race girls, let alone a fully Asian woman like you.
Whatever he said, she wasn’t going to fall into his trap.
One second later, she was staring at his reply. It contained only one word, in English: Fine.
So that was that. A crisp, clear response: Fine. And with that, he would stop pestering her. She glared at the word. Had he really given up? He hadn’t lost any dignity, probably even delivered this with a cold, proud smile: Fine. Maybe sorrow in his eyes. Or maybe not; maybe he thought this was funny—amused by women who make a big deal out of nothing. Just a shrug, Fine, and he walked away, perhaps with some regret, but his self-control was absolute, not to mention his manners. Hands stuck in his pockets, the wind ruffling his full head of dark hair, walking away with forceful, measured steps. A slowly receding silhouette.
Hongmei hadn’t expected such a quick retreat. She was being a killjoy. She didn’t know what she was afraid of. A playboy had walked away and would surely be moving right on to his next conquest, leaving her in peace and quiet.
* * *
After three days of quiet, his messages started coming again. She read them, line by line. He mainly wrote about his daughter and their three days together. There was true fatherliness in those simple words. For three days he’d studied his quiet daughter with unbelieving eyes, saying he felt sorry for her, then suddenly realizing from her silent smile that he’d already said this to her, perhaps more than once. When she was just an infant, he used to hold her in the night and carry her up and down, from the first floor up to the fourth, so as not to wake her mother and the neighbors. He had known her so well back then, when she needed food, a hug, or her diaper changed. Now the girl looked at him with a mysterious expression, hiding her true feelings. She was unreadable, suddenly bursting into giggles. Laughing at how pathetic he was—every father has such riveting memories. Or perhaps she was remembering her mother’s words, that her father’s only investment in her was a single sperm. He took his daughter to see some famous landmarks, taking endless photos, buying her jewelry and handicrafts from Fisherman’s Wharf, bringing her to a Napa spa for a massage, getting her an expensive outfit that her gaze had lingered over merely a moment. And still he could see in his daughter’s smile that he was thoroughly pitiful, no more than a single sperm, a groveling, free-spending giant sperm.
Hongmei imagined his daughter as a child of fourteen. She saw this long-limbed girl vanishing into the dimness of the boarding gate, and the man abruptly realizing what sort of creature he was, someone who hassled strange women over email, someone who sat alone in restaurants or coffee shops, quietly waiting for prey like Hongmei. Perhaps as he’d driven home from the airport, he’d had a change of heart, all because of his daughter.
* * *
Late that night, she and Glen made love. It was better than it had been in a long time. As if she was using Glen to express her passion for someone else, or perhaps Glen had somehow become unfamiliar, a stranger. Then she rolled over and went to sleep, though of course she was only pretending. She was afraid Glen would speak, breaking the spell.
For the next week, Hongmei didn’t check her email. The man had vanished just like that. Her bad habit of biting her nails came back. She discovered that she wasn’t doing this out of anxiety but the opposite: the calm of having nothing to hope for.
On the eighth day, she sent him a message asking him to suggest a few recent books on psychology. She avoided mentioning the unfortunate ending of their last conversation and the yearning she’d felt these last few days.
No reply.
Three days later, she sent the same message again, adding a line to explain that she was afraid the last email had gone astray and never reached him.
Still no reply. She abandoned her pride and bombarded him with messages.
Chewing her nails, Hongmei thought he must be a gentleman after all, to keep his word like this. Perhaps the soul he was so against mentioning was no longer empty, now that his long-lost daughter had resurfaced to fill it. For whatever reason, he was determined to ignore her, which left Hongmei at a loss. What was he doing now? Sitting at his computer, mockingly watching her sink into despair and disappointment. Her hair a mess and her nails ruined as she took up the banner of studying again in a bid to wrest back his attention and cling on to it. Her fake respectability and reluctance to be alone must’ve been hugely amusing to him. That’s how he wanted to write her—an easily seduced woman had to be considered on such harsh terms.
After another two days of waiting, Hongmei calmed down and felt a little ashamed of herself. She started catching up on the schoolwork she’d missed and paid close attention when Glen was talking.
Listening carefully to Glen paid dividends. He mentioned that in class he was always asking his students to pay attention to Kafka’s use of the first person. “The Metamorphosis appears to be written in the third person, but actually it’s the first, apart from the final section, after Gregor-the-insect has died.” He said choosing the right perspective was the biggest factor in a novel’s success. “If The Catcher in the Rye hadn’t been in the first person, it would have failed utterly. If Michel Butor hadn’t written in the second person, his would have been an entirely third-rate work.”
Hongmei noticed a crumb of bread in the corner of his mouth. The first sign of aging was how it took such a long time to eat anything. She responded, “Emails are always in the second person.”
Glen said, “We generally use the third person when we’re talking to ourselves, discussing something. So if someone’s having a long conversation with you online, that’s the same as you speaking to yourself.”
Hongmei thought, Glen’s clever after all, as if she’d just noticed.
After the emails had stopped, the image of the secret talker had grown clearer. Black hair, black eyes, the sort of smile that was always mocking his own romantic tendencies. She would forget him. How many encounters of this sort does
a woman have in her life? Everyone’s been through these short-lived infatuations.
3
On the twenty-fifth day after he’d said fine, Hongmei got another email. He said she’d walked into the library looking like a lost child. His guess was that her eyes had been adjusting to the indoor gloom, or else she had been searching for a better place to sit and read. He said she’d stood there, lost, for quite a while. There was an instant when he’d almost surrendered, certain that she’d recognized him, her vague impression from the restaurant suddenly clicking with a face in the library. He’d been about to stand up from his carrel, but she was already moving toward the desks, the tassels on her homemade cloth bag swaying vivaciously. He said that of the five bags he’d seen her carry this was the prettiest.
She was startled. So this man had never left her, not for a single day. He wasn’t as tragic as he’d presented himself, riding off alone like a classical knight. Rather, he was like a ghost, secretly taking part in her life, undetected.
He’d seen her walk along a row of desks, and as she’d squeezed into the innermost seat, her right knee had bumped against the table. He’d heard the thud. A bruise larger than the palm of a year-old child, he guessed. At these words, Hongmei stood and shut the study door, then raised her nightgown inch by inch. Sure enough, there was a dark purple patch above her right knee. She stared at it, thinking back to that afternoon in the library. She’d arrived at a downtime, when most of the students were yawning away, the older ones not even lifting their heads from the desks.
How had this person inserted himself among them?
He said he’d spent much of his childhood, adolescence, and adulthood in libraries, like Borges, except he didn’t write stories. He said he’d thought he was strong enough to break it off. He didn’t want to disturb Hongmei or himself. It was unfortunate that people had desires—he hoped Hongmei agreed with this point. She could prevent him from writing, but she couldn’t stop his obsession.
Waves of hot and cold spread over Hongmei’s body. Twenty-odd days of silence made him seem haggard when he reappeared, eyes dark with passion, but still as collected as ever, she dumbly imagined. She took her image of the ideal man and laid it on top of him.
He said, Please don’t reply—anything you say would only hurt me.
She wrote back right away, saying she was very happy to be talking with him again. Before she could press SEND, she felt uneasy and changed it to: Very glad to hear all’s well with you.
Five minutes later, he responded to say Hongmei was exactly the same as his daughter, always so careful not to reveal her true feelings, forcing him to sift through the haystack of her emotions. His daughter had departed so many days ago, and the only thing she’d written him since then was: Very glad to hear all’s well with you. He said, The pair of you seem to know better how well I am than I do myself.
Hongmei said, You seem disappointed.
The man said, Disppointment is my usual state.
She abruptly noticed that he’d spelled “disappointment” incorrectly—missing an a. Could it be that he was a foreigner? Say, Italian, Greek, or even Russian?
He asked where she’d bought that long blue dress with the white pattern; it looked utterly foreign.
She told him this was called pattern-print cloth, a handicraft from the village she’d grown up in. Every woman in this place used to know how to weave this fabric, and on rainy days if you walked down the paved road between the rural dwellings, you’d hear shuttles clacking as the looms worked away. She didn’t realize she was already starting to disclose her origins, her history, to this man. In the picture she presented him, the Jiangnan village she’d once despised became beautiful. She showed it to him in its entirety, the black tiles and whitewashed walls, the covered boats, the endless yellow fields of rapeseed blossom. Then zooming in to a medium shot: a stone bridge with children walking across it, young cowherds on their way to work. Among them was a girl of six or seven—that was her. She’d been born in the year of the Cultural Revolution, and her illiterate parents had given her a name that was trendy at the time: 红梅, Hongmei, red plum blossom. She’d wanted to change this country-bumpkin-sounding name on a few occasions but couldn’t bring herself to do it. After all, her parents had raised her only once, named her only once.
He replied that he could see this remote riverside village. It sounds like you love it a lot, don’t you? That’s the only way you would describe it in those terms.
She was startled. She’d never thought she loved it; in fact she’d wanted above all to get away from it. When meeting new people, she lied about it, trying to keep it hidden. She’d once thought anywhere was better than her village, that back-of-beyond place, as out of touch as a frog at the bottom of a well. As a young child, she’d encountered a group of people known as “educated youths,” city kids sent to the countryside under the Red Guards’ watchful eyes, who had confirmed her instincts—they had done nothing but criticize the place. Just like her, they had thought nowhere on this Earth could be so hideous. How could she love it?
Hongmei said, You’re probably going to be disappointed again—I’ve worked hard all my life to get as far from that village as possible. I left that place for the last time nine years ago and made up my mind never to go back. The day I left, when I walked past the commemorative plaque by the entrance, for some reason I stopped and read it. Two hundred thirteen girls died in a single night. I’d never looked at their names properly. The year after they passed away, my mother came into this world. That winter only female babies were born, as if to make up for the dead ones. I said those names out loud, each as unsophisticated as my own. My aunt was the sixth one, and my great-aunts were numbers eighty and eighty-one. All the girls, with only three surnames between them, aged between six and eighteen, had died on one night.
Those young women, who were called “dead losses” while they were alive, were all murdered on a rainy night in November 1937. Even the Japanese troops were stunned into silence. They entered the village that evening, searching every home for Chinese soldiers, food, and young women. Only old people and young boys were left. One of the men lost his temper and stabbed his bayonet into a haystack—Hang on, have I told you about our village haystacks? Many good things, bad things, terrifying things took place beneath those haystacks. They stood there all year round and knew many secrets: shameful relationships, family rivalries, unavoidable abortions. The blade came out, and everything changed. There was fresh blood on it, faintly emitting steam in the early winter night. He stabbed again, and this time the blood dripped off the silver blade. Yet the haystack didn’t so much as quiver, didn’t let out a single sound.
Ten minutes later, the Japanese soldiers had surrounded all twenty-odd haystacks and were plunging their bayonets in on all sides. All came out bloodied, yet the piles of hay remained quiet, without even a single straw shaking. The interpreter started yelling, saying, “Come out quick if you want to live; we’re setting these on fire.” No movement, no words. The haystacks could swallow any number of secrets and wouldn’t let anything back out. Gasoline was splashed onto them, and the flames roared like lions and tigers. The Japanese troops leaned on their rifles, watching as the hay turned gold, then red, and finally black, wisps of gray ash quivering in the remains, dancing in an icy gale. The air smelled of burned flesh. The soldiers, starved for many days, bent over and threw up bile. They didn’t have to look any closer to understand the results of this massacre. They weren’t pleased with themselves at all but for some reason felt angry, distressed, frightened. In the end, they weren’t even brave enough to tear open the smoking mounds but quietly wiped the still-wet blood off their bayonets. All the girls in the village had been exterminated. They had been prepared for that, but the resignation and silence with which these girls had accepted death stunned the Japanese out of their wits. They gave up their plans to pillage and torture the rest of the villagers, and simply departed. This was the most bizarre act of resistance they encountered
during the entire invasion.
At this point, Hongmei found her eyes too swollen with tears to see the words clearly. She’d never imagined she could be so proud of her village. These more than two hundred young women who’d given up their lives had not affected her so much till this moment, nor had she found their sacrifice this meaningful. Was she endowing them with significance? Or had this already been present but she’d only just discovered it?
The man’s only response was: I have no words in the face of such a story.
She wanted to tell him that she’d never shared this history with anyone, not even her husband. No idea why. Perhaps until she’d understood its meaning, it had been only one of many stories about the Chinese resistance. She’d never told Glen because she’d lied to him, as she had to so many others. She always invented a birthplace—Inner Mongolia or Tibet, far better than this ignorant, closed-off village. She’d told Glen she was from the Yellow Mountains, hoping that imposing landscape would erase the pettiness of her little village.
Yet now she had stopped lying and told this man everything about her village. After all the girls had been killed, the attitude toward female children changed completely, and they were no longer known as “dead losses.” The two hundred thirteen sacrificial victims became the villagers’ spirit guardians. Women were then revered over men, so girls were sent away to the city for school, while boys were exploited for their physical strength—once again demonstrating the narrow-minded foolishness of these people. Gradually, the women drifted away, moving on to bigger and better things. Girls who studied in the city rarely came back to marry village boys. Hongmei had been one of those girls. Her mother’s family had been too poor to send her away, and so her mother’s one wish had been to give her daughter the education she’d missed out on.