by Geling Yan
The email finally came on the eighth day, resolutely refusing to mention Hongmei’s last message about the girl who had ruined her father. She said that when Hongmei had walked down the long supermarket aisle, she almost hadn’t noticed her. Dressed in white shorts and a red tank top, Hongmei had looked tall and limber, her every movement full of life. She had looked like an officer from the People’s Liberation Army, someone you’d be careful not to provoke. The secret talker had looked at this former lieutenant’s profile for a couple of minutes, trying to adjust her mystical, wafting image.
Compared to your husband, you’re much more vigorous. Your hairstyle was surprising too—you’re a woman of many transformations.
She’d watched Hongmei leave Glen’s side, turning back to read a flyer on the floor. It was for subletting a house, the cheap rent scrawled across the front in Sharpie, circled in scarlet. Hongmei’s white tennis shoe had landed on the flyer and twisted it so the words faced her, then she’d reached for a bottle of peanut oil, revealing the BCG vaccine scar on her arm. The secret talker said this scar had made her feel confused. Or let’s be honest: it had filled her with desire.
Sounding unashamed, the secret talker revealed that she’d stood there for a long time, trying to hide her useless appearance.
She watched Glen’s arm go around Hongmei’s body, his fingers sliding numbly across the scar. She imagined Hongmei at age six or seven, standing among the other children, one sleeve rolled up. The secret talker had followed behind Hongmei, watching Glen with his arm still around her walking toward a food sample stand. She thought of a village girl at the age of seven, her hair pulled into thin pigtails as dry as withered grass, slowly moving her bare little feet to keep up with the rest of the kids, her face as unknowing as those around her, ready for the slaughter. She said she’d had a strong emotional response, wanting to touch that scar—from childhood to adulthood, the only thing that didn’t change, preserving its unusual sensitivity.
She said she was sure Hongmei had actually memorized the price mentioned on the flyer. She’d stumbled upon a secret longing.
Or maybe in that instant you had a sudden urge to have a nest of your own. Who knows? No one can ever be fully aware of how many plans are sprouting in the darkness at the bottom of their heart. Then some outside event suddenly happens, abruptly illuminating those pitch-dark schemes. As for exactly what it is—separation, divorce, or an affair—you aren’t sure. But the scheme has a beginning. Then you walked back to your husband, nestling against him like a baby bird.
She said at the sample counter Glen had been joking loudly. Like many Americans, he often used humor to alleviate the pressure that silence brings, averting a conversational crisis. Hongmei had laughed, but it had been apparent that inside it was all Hongmei could do to endure this. Even she had seen it, the cold reprimand in Hongmei’s mouth.
Your intimacy makes me anxious, but you did well, successfully putting up with that discordant joke. Then you watched your husband pick up a second piece of pastry, and it felt like you’d never noticed before that his entire scalp moves when he chews. There he was, mouth working away, picking up a third piece for you. You smiled and declined. He let out a satisfied sigh, and you turned your face aside to avoid that burst of hot, sweet breath. You looked around you. Fat bodies pushing overweight carts, double chins and huge red faces. So much food, enough to drown these fortunate people. Yet it all tastes alarmingly bland. These plump chickens—it only takes them as little as a month to go from hatching to becoming a pile of meat, no longer than the life span of a mushroom, and tasting about the same. You rummaged around the chicken shelf, looking for a half dozen leaner drumsticks, but you failed. In their short, untroubled lives, these chickens’ feet never touch the ground, so their legs can grow till they reach a planned weight. Rows and stacks of plump bodies like in a group exercise class, whether male or female, weak or strong, their minds completely blank. How could they possibly taste of anything? The battle for survival, the urge to find a mate, the fear of natural enemies, the circulating blood and burgeoning flesh—all of that forms, fills each chicken’s life with possibilities. It’s precisely these possibilities that make a chicken what it is, rather than a mushroom. Finally, you picked up a pack of breast meat, because it was fifty percent off. You put it in the shopping cart, or rather tossed it in. I saw all the weariness, discontent, and helplessness in that moment. Your body language might be restrained, but it’s never monotonous.
Hongmei heard Glen making a call in the living room, his voice sounding youthful. He was discussing the candlelight vigil taking place in San Francisco’s Union Square the following night. More than two thousand people had registered online. Soon after that, she heard his excited footsteps charging over, pausing outside her door for two seconds, and then hurrying on to his own study.
She heard him get online, his fingers tapping smoothly away at the keyboard.
She read the secret talker’s email three times, all the while running through the faces she’d seen that day in the supermarket. She’d let this person get away again.
She asked her to please stop playing this spying game.
The reply came right away, asking if she was really interested in subletting that cheap house.
Hongmei felt a wave of revulsion and banged out the words: My husband’s next door, I could ask him how to deal with a pervert like you. He’s already suspicious because of my strange behavior recently.
That can’t be. From my observation, your husband believes you’ve entered into a period of absolute stability in your marriage. So stable you don’t even need to share what’s in your hearts. Not even those meaningful glances—those were gone long ago. Like most Americans, you fill the silence with chitchat and laughter, killing off the countless possibilities that lurk within quietness. Isn’t silence its own form of understanding? Be boldly silent, and understanding will grow. Your husband’s already lost the courage to say nothing. How many people lose this courage? Soon you will too.
The secret talker was growing cryptic, even mysterious.
8
Hongmei talked about the weeks leading to her departure from Beijing. A storm had swept over the city, and like the prince in “Cinderella,” Professor Glen had found his bride. He returned to America before her but made sure to mail money for a plane ticket and two beautiful dresses. Half a year and mountains of paperwork later, she was preparing to leave the country.
It was early November, a night not too different from the night of her interrogation two years previously. She cycled back to the courtyard she’d once left each day to go to work, where she’d engaged in political study, taken part in the spring-cleaning, and distributed New Year’s goods. A classic Beijing northern wind was blowing, catching fallen leaves and garbage. She knew her ex-husband had a girlfriend. She’d said to him on the phone, “Congratulations on finding a good woman, Jianjun.” That was when he’d told her to come fetch her clothes and books.
Now she told the secret talker that after that phone call, the guilt she felt toward Jianjun stopped rearing up. He was very calm, telling her to bring someone to help when she came for her things, as it might be hard for a lone woman to run up and down the stairs so much—hinting that he wouldn’t be lending a hand. He also told her that his girlfriend would be there.
She rode past the canteen, bathrooms, and convenience store, and then abruptly remembered that the latter made their own ice creams in the summer. These melted easily because they contained a lot of milk. Jianjun would buy a dozen at a time, tying them together with a hankie, then would sprint the hundred yards to her sixth-floor office. They’d be half melted by the time he got there, and Jianjun would be too, smiling as he dripped with sweat. Next was a clinic, the light in the shift room as dim and grubby as it had been two years ago. The ambulance driver was still playing cards with Old Wang from the boiler room.
She locked up her bike and went into the clinic, where she made a phone call. She heard the person who an
swered shouting two stories above her. After a while, she heard a door open. The door to what used to be her home. She heard Jianjun’s footsteps coming down the stairs to the phone and could tell he was still wearing the fake leather slippers she’d given him. He said, “Hello, who is this?”
She said nothing. He could already hear it.
Five minutes later, he had entered the clinic. He’d changed into an almost-new shirt, and his hair was styled the way she liked it. He said, “Let’s go.” Not even thinking about it, she followed him out the clinic’s front door and up the stairs. Along the way, he asked her when she was leaving for America and if her parents were coming to see her off. She answered his questions one by one. As for the hurt and humiliation she’d brought him, she pretended it had nothing to do with her; as for the revenge and punishment he owed her, he’d let it go.
His girlfriend wasn’t home. Hongmei didn’t ask why, and he didn’t explain. She noticed the set of imported furniture she’d chosen had finally arrived—three years from ordering to delivery. The pale yellow couch with a print that made it look embossed, the four-door wardrobe—a break from the uniformity of local products—the stainless-steel desk lamp. Even the dust cover for the TV set was exactly what she had wanted. While she’d been mired in detention, unemployment, and homelessness, the home she’d designed had been completed as planned. Everything was good, so good it felt like a scam. She thought grimly that Jianjun had enlarged and completed the trap she’d set for him.
He asked if she’d eaten and, without waiting for a reply, went into the kitchen and turned on the stove. He said it was only canteen food, but luckily they had been serving her favorite lion’s head meatballs. They sat at the small table. He kept her company as she ate, not saying much but touching on all the painful or sensitive points. There was laughter, and also tears. So Jianjun could be this gentle too, no longer the imposing, coarsely bellowing, mid-ranking army officer.
They talked about when they first met. He had been president of their senior class. He’d sent her love notes back to her but secretly bought her a pair of gloves and a set of Lu Xun: Selected Works in English translation. He admitted that he had wanted to possess her. When they went out together, if their hands happened to touch, it had felt like torture. She asked if he remembered their first time. He blushed and said, “How could I not remember? Didn’t you write it all out in your self-criticism?”
At the time, he’d challenged everyone, “Punish me. I was the one who seduced her.” They said nothing more, just exchanged a deep smile.
It wasn’t clear who began it, but then they were hugging. Perhaps she was the instigator. She told the secret talker, It felt like I was the only guilty party. Jianjun carried her into the bedroom but seemed to lose his strength as he shut the door. She had her back to the door, and he was already kissing her. His lips had a trace of distant smoke. He felt so much younger as he kissed her eyebrows, her eyes, her lips. She returned this with ten times the frenzy. He reached out and traced her features, across her brows and down to her nose, along the bridge and slowly farther down, outlining her lips, stopping on her lower one, the moist inside, sketching it over and over. This provocative, seductive, maybe even destructive finger, made her whole body clench. It was Jianjun’s finger. She felt like she’d found something she’d lost. Jianjun continued his tracing, his finger going everywhere, a line of sparks along her skin. There were tears in his eyes, and hers too. He didn’t recognize this woman’s body—another man’s incursion had made it unfamiliar and mysterious again. How could it take pleasure in the embrace of a foreign man? Jianjun couldn’t imagine it. The earliest jealousy and rage had passed, and now he just found the whole affair inconceivable.
She’d never expected it would end up this way. They were making this perfect. So it turned out Jianjun could be this sensitive, this responsive to her needs. Tears covered her face, and she asked herself, Why did you leave him? So you still have feelings for Jianjun. So you still love him.
They lay in the same positions as before. His tears plopped onto her forehead, while hers dampened the hollows of his collarbones and shoulders. After a bout of weeping, they grew passionate again. In the small hours of the night, they grew exhausted. At dawn, she said she should be going. Then she said she wasn’t leaving, she would never leave. She said, “Jianjun, if I stayed, if I didn’t go, would you be happy?”
He sighed heavily and asked why she wouldn’t go.
She said, “Because I’ve only just understood you. Isn’t that terrible, Jianjun? I had to make such an awful mess and hurt us both so badly before I could understand you.”
Jianjun asked what she understood. She said she understood how loving he could be. He laughed bitterly and said hadn’t he always been like this?
She said, “No, not like this.” He’d never spoken to her the way he had this night, nor had he ever looked at her this way, though how would he know that—he couldn’t see his own expression. Then she added that he’d never kissed her and caressed her the way he had this day. She knew he might misunderstand, might think she was trying to shrug off responsibility.
He held her tighter, until she was gone. She wondered what kind of wretch she was. When newly engaged to Glen, her passion for her ex-husband had flared. Could she only find satisfaction within the wreckage of a ruined relationship? Why was it only at this moment she saw clearly that she’d never stopped loving Jianjun? One man wasn’t enough for her, would never be enough. She’d always need to weave tangled, complex webs of emotion, jumbling the respectable and the unseemly, the open and the secret. Jianjun had swapped places with Glen, becoming the lover to be occasionally enjoyed. This thought alone was bizarre enough to set all her senses tingling. The feeling was amazing, flowing smoothly to the tip of every hair.
She started pulling on her clothes. Jianjun got up to help her with the zipper on her sweater. She turned back to look at him, tears flowing. This Jianjun was no longer the Jianjun of the past but a lover she’d newly acquired, one she loved madly but would shortly have to leave. She felt as if her mind was divided into several secret compartments, storing various types of love or emotion, and she had to distribute them among different men.
She wasn’t a good woman, Hongmei frankly admitted to the secret talker. She was holding a bright red cosmopolitan, a cherry stuck on the thin rim of her glass. She’d mixed it herself, changing the proportions so this one had more vodka than usual. As she read through the message she’d just finished writing, she found that the late hour and the alcohol had made her honest. Before her was a gentle soul. Whether male or female, they were kind, not easily offended, and kept their feelings to themselves, like all great priests or psychiatrists. She could pour her heart out to this unseen figure and feel she wouldn’t be judged, only accepted. For a moment, she forgot that she was the one repenting, and the person accepting her repentance was the secret talker in the depths of the computer. Only she felt that the two of them got on well, one standing, one kneeling. Whatever roles human beings played by day, if they didn’t have a moment like this when they could reveal themselves, they’d surely be driven mad.
She continued unburdening herself. All those years ago, a week before leaving China, she hid herself in her new lover’s chamber. This new lover was the husband she’d abandoned. For two days she stopped making love to him, just clung to him tightly from nightfall till dawn. Without transgression, happiness wasn’t real. She then carefully put aside her passionate romance with Jianjun. When she got off the plane, walking into the dazzling California sunshine and Glen’s embrace, her smile was a little crooked. She told Glen how much she loved him, and that was the truth—it felt as if her unfaithfulness had made her love him even more. Every woman finds that a secret passion increases her ardor and warmth for her husband, and every lucky husband should thank his shadowy rival, whether real or imagined. The security of a household stems from feelings constantly going their own way, conscience and falsehood adjusting each other, the third poin
t of a triangle forever shrouded in darkness.
Finishing her drink, Hongmei found herself in an excellent state of drunkenness.
She told the secret talker there were moments when she’d discover with a shock how much she didn’t love Glen. These often had happened when she had been living with Jianjun too. That’s when she’d most longed for an affair.
9
At half past one in the morning, she shut down her computer and lurched into the bathroom to wash up. As she picked up her toothbrush, she suddenly felt she needed a bath. She had to own up to it, the shame and filth she felt within herself. Yet she had a pure heart too. Looking at the wavering lines in the mirror, she thought she was still beautiful and could be forgiven a little indiscretion.
In the morning, Glen insisted on dragging her to the square to see the university’s new flagpole gadget. A little black box, halfway up. If anyone tried to bring the flag down, the box would turn into a vacuum and suck up the fabric. This was meant to deter anyone thinking of burning the Stars and Stripes.
Two people were up a ladder testing this device—just like magic, the waving flag got pulled into the little box, and the spectators clapped and cheered. A sea of pinkish faces beneath the blue sky, unblinking eyes—blue, gray, brown, black . . .
“Isn’t this great?” Glen, thinking it was a nice invention, asked Hongmei.
Her palms were tapping together too. She nodded at Glen, wondering which pair of eyes belonged to her, the secret talker, who managed to be everywhere at once.