by Bi Feiyu
On one particular Tuesday night, she did not show up, having come down with a cold. Xiao Ma could hear her cough off in the distance. Sitting on the edge of the bed, wide awake, all he could do was wait. He waited until nearly everyone in both dorms was asleep, and it was clear she wasn’t coming. He lay down fully dressed and tried to invent her smell. It was wasted effort, a disappointing failure. Nothing, there was nothing. Nothing that should have been there and nothing that should not have. In his despondency he began searching the bedsheet with his hand, hoping to find even a single strand of her hair. But there too he failed. Yet the absurd action reminded him of something: the mysterious contact between his arm and her breasts through the dry, soft knitted top she wore. At that moment, too wonderful for words, the thing between his legs had a spontaneous reaction. It grew bigger, thicker and harder. Wang Daifu took that moment to roll over and cough. Startled, Xiao Ma grew alert, interpreting Wang’s cough as a warning. He wanted that damned thing to stop getting hard, but no means of relief came to him; even worse, the desire intensified.
Chapter Four
Du Hong
DU HONG CAME to the Sha Zongqi tuina centre earlier than Wang Daifu and Xiao Kong, though not by much, just a few months; she’d been recommended by Ji Tingting. As a newcomer, she hung out with Ji all the time during her early days at the centre. Saying they hung out might be overstating the case somewhat, because the therapists held to a rigid daily routine that limited their activities to the centre and their dorm. In fact, over a dozen people hung out together all the time, yet even given the crowded conditions, some drew closer to one another than to others. She and she might be especially friendly, just as he would spend more time with him – such pairings were common occurrences. But Du Hong hung out with Ji for only a couple of months before switching to Gao Wei.
Gao, who was sighted, worked the front desk. If Du Hong had been favoured with normal vision, she’d have seen that Gao Wei was a girl given to laughing, with a tiny nose and small eyes that, when she smiled, nearly shut completely, revealing only a twinkle. Big eyes are charming, small eyes are alluring. When Gao smiled, and her eyes nearly shut, she did have an alluring look about her, but that was not what attracted Du Hong, since she could not see. In any case, they grew closer by the day, to the point that Gao Wei rode Du Hong to and from work on her three-wheeler. Blind people have trouble getting around, particularly out on the streets, and Gao Wei’s selfless act made Du Hong’s life much easier. Before she realised it, she had begun to neglect Ji Tingting. During meals, Du Hong sat shoulder to shoulder with Gao, chewing and swallowing in unison.
When Gao was hired, she hadn’t known how to ride a three-wheeler, though she was an expert cyclist. Sha had asked her to learn how to ride a three-wheeler on her first day at the centre.
‘Bicycles have two wheels and riding one is child’s play. How hard can it be to ride a three-wheeler?’
So Sha told her to go outside and give it a try. Which she did, and ended up making a fool of herself. She kept bumping into the wall and yelling, capturing the attention of the therapists inside with her helpless screams until, with a loud thud, the wall bounced her and her three-wheeler backwards. Hilarious.
After getting to her feet, she studied the contraption and saw what had happened. A bicycle has handlebars, but it uses the rider’s centre of gravity to make a turn, aided by the handlebars. A three-wheeler, owing to the additional wheel, always stays glued to the road surface, so when making a turn, shifting the rider’s centre of gravity has no effect. You just keep going in the same direction. How about applying the brakes? That won’t work, because you have to reach down to pull the brakes, which aren’t attached to the handlebars – a tricky manoeuvre that escapes you at a critical moment. You lose control of your vehicle. Gao was actually lucky she’d tried it out by a wall. If it had been by the Yangtze River, her three-wheeler would have simply rolled into the water, no matter how loud she screamed.
The main duties of a service industry receptionist are assigning clients and keeping therapist work charts. But at a tuina centre, there is the additional critical task of delivering towels and sheets. Sanitation department regulations stipulate that fresh towels and sheets are required for each client. The used towels and sheets will naturally have to be sent to a laundry and brought back the following morning, which requires manpower for dropping off and picking up. Sha Fuming, to make maximum use of his resources, gave that task to his receptionists, and would not hire anyone who could not ride a three-wheeler, no matter how charming or alluring her eyes might be.
Fortunately, three-wheelers are not aeroplanes. After a few tries, Gao Wei got the hang of turning the vehicle, and even learned to reach under the seat to apply the brake, with flair. Compared with the tuina therapists and the other staff, the receptionist had a cushy job, mainly because she could take every other day off. But Gao did not take advantage of that system; she came to work every day so she could serve as Du Hong’s early-morning and late-night transportation. Because of that ride, Du Hong’s relationship with Ji Tingting cooled, until Gao Wei became her best friend. They engaged in whispered conversations, never speaking loudly enough for people to hear them. If she was asked what they talked about, Du Hong would answer, ‘We’re gossiping about you.’
Ji Tingting saw all this and was understandably upset. But Du Hong was a clever girl who knew how to smooth things over; she often brought Tingting things to eat, like three or four orange slices, or half a dozen peanuts, or four or five chestnuts. Every time, just that little bit, but she was so warm, so friendly, it was as if she’d saved a special something specifically for Sister Tingting, turning the gift of a pathetic amount of food into an act of human kindness. Typically among women, the less you have, the better it tastes. Du Hong also brushed Tingting’s hair from time to time. Being a few years older than Du Hong and more broad-minded, Tingting didn’t let that bother her, especially since she was happy with Du Hong’s attitude. The girl did mean to please her, and that was good enough for Tingting. Being blind herself, she was keenly aware of the convenience that a good relationship with the three-wheeler rider provided.
Du Hong had taken up the study of tuina therapy later than most, and not as a major career path, not at first. Most of her time and energy at the Qingdao School for the Blind had been spent on music. If she’d listened to her teachers, she might have had a career on the stage. They all told her she was a talented musician, particularly where committing music to memory was concerned. Most of the time, you don’t start out knowing you have talent in a particular area; that knowledge comes when the talent is on display and you realise how easy it was to do.
That’s how it was with Du Hong and music. How had she started? That’s a long story that must begin when she was in the fifth grade. One day, the school reserved a cinema for the students to see a Hollywood movie. It was a film set in the future, and what they heard were all sorts of shrill sounds. The cacophonous music was the worst – vapid and grating on the ears. This must be what ‘space’ music is like, they thought. A week later, Du Hong’s music teacher was in the toilet when she heard someone humming a familiar tune. Not sure what it was, it then dawned on her that it was the space music from the Hollywood movie. After washing her hands, she waited to see who it was. It turned out to be Du Hong.
‘How did you manage to remember that noisy, jumbled tune?’ the teacher asked.
Du Hong was puzzled by the question. With a smile, she asked why anyone needed to remember music, since it wasn’t something in a textbook. That high-flown comment would have been a boast had it come from a sighted person. No blind person can be that self-confident, nor would they express themselves even if they were. So what might have been a boast was, from Du Hong, quite genuine.
The teacher took her to the staff office, where she played some Brahms on the piano in front of all the teachers, then, with her hands on her knees, asked the girl to hum the four bars she’d played. Standing by the piano with her arm
s at her sides, Du Hong refused to make a sound, which the teacher knew was a sign of shyness. She signalled for the other teachers to leave the office. But still Du Hong remained stubbornly quiet. Finally, their patience exhausted, the teachers, who had remained just beyond the window, left, and Du Hong began humming the right-hand melody, with perfect pitch and precise intervals. But before the teacher could offer praise, the girl astonished her by next humming the left-hand accompaniment. Something like that was so difficult that only the rare genius could manage it. Her surprised music teacher laid her hands on the girl’s shoulder and turned her this way and that way to scrutinise her. Was this girl really Du Hong, the student who seldom scored more than forty points on her maths tests?
It was, of course, Du Hong, a girl who was no good at maths, or language, or PE, but had the remarkable talent of being able to repeat a musical offering after hearing it only once. Why had it taken the teacher so long to discover that? But it wasn’t too late, since she was only in the fifth grade. The teacher decided on the spot to teach her to play the piano. Du Hong was not interested.
‘What does interest you?’ the teacher asked.
‘Singing,’ Duhong said, ‘I like to sing.’ As she sat on the piano bench, the teacher slapped her thighs anxiously, to the rhythm of a march.
‘You don’t understand, Du Hong. You really don’t. You’re blind, so what do you expect to achieve with your voice? You’re not deaf or a mute, so what good will it do you to be a singer? Do you know what special education means? You won’t understand even if I explain it to you, but, in any case, special education means to go through the trouble of teaching you how to do something beyond you. For example, teaching deaf mutes to sing, the lame to dance, and the mentally challenged to invent something. That’s how the magic of special schools and education is manifested. In a word, disabled people must endure tremendous hardships, like climbing a mountain of knives or stepping into a sea of fire, to do – and do well – something they could not have done before. Only then do they have the power to stir people’s emotions, to be an inspiration for their age, and to shake up society. What’s so great about a blind girl singing? All you need to do is open your mouth and sing, but playing the piano is hard. The most difficult challenge for the blind is to play the piano. Do you understand? You have such an edge, why don’t you treasure it? You’re just lazy! Go home and tell your parents to come talk to me.’
But Du Hong did not tell her parents to come; she gave in. Like a carpenter, the teacher turned Du Hong into a bench that she placed at the piano. The girl made phenomenal progress. Within three years, she tested at the eighth grade, which was nothing short of miraculous.
The miracle came to a sudden halt when she was in her second year of middle school. She put a stop to playing and, no matter what anyone said, stubbornly refused to return to the piano.
It was all the result of a performance, a large-scale charity concert to ‘show love’ to the disabled. Many important figures were in attendance, mostly movie and TV stars past their prime, plus some current pop stars. As a special guest performer, Du Hong went to the concert in a floor-length A-line skirt, to play one of Bach’s contrapuntal Three-part Inventions, whose difficulty lay in the crossing of the left and right hands. She had a better grasp of the Two-part Inventions, but the teacher had encouraged her to go all out with the more difficult piece. As it was her first public performance, she was understandably nervous, which showed mostly in her fingers the moment she got on stage. Her fingers, particularly the ring fingers, turned stiff and behaved badly, and, devoid of their usual deft autonomy, ensured that she would fail to put on a good show. A closer examination would have shown that this had been a problem all along – weak ring fingers. She had worked hard to eliminate that imperfection, and thought she’d been successful. But it resurfaced at this special occasion, and she sought to overcome it by calling upon the strength in her wrist to pound her fingers on the keys. That had the unfortunate effect of upsetting the rhythm. She couldn’t bear to listen to what she was playing. Bach? How could this be described as Bach?
A perfectionist, all Du Hong wanted to do was stop and start over, but that was not a practice session, it was a public performance. She had to continue, no matter how lifeless it sounded. Her mood abruptly soured. She was not willing to take this without a fight. She felt as if she’d swallowed flies. And the mistakes mounted. This was worse, far worse than any practice session, and she felt an urge to play as badly as she could. An unspeakable dejection came over her.
At several moments Du Hong felt like crying. To her credit, she didn’t. How she finished the performance she did not know, but as the ending notes approached, and powerful resentment rose up inside her, Du Hong raised her arms, wrists down, and spread the fingers of both hands. Her mind seemingly settled, she held her breath and banged her fingers down on the keys. She was waiting. Waiting to play the last few notes. She took a deep breath, lifted her hands, bent at the wrist, struck a pose, and it was over. A hideous Three-part Invention. Total embarrassment, a complete failure. Now she really felt like crying, but the applause was deafening, absolutely fervent, and seemingly unending. An emotional wreck, Du Hong stood up and bowed and then bowed again. The mistress of ceremonies appeared next to her and praised her performance with half a dozen adjectives, capped by a rash of comparisons. In a word, Du Hong’s performance had been nearly flawless. Her need to cry had vanished, replaced by a cooling inside. A sense of desolation. Du Hong knew that she was a blind person, and that she would always be just that, a blind person. Someone like her had been placed on earth for one purpose, to foster tolerance in the sighted, a girl to feel sorry for. For someone like her to even produce sounds from a piano was, by itself, remarkable.
The mistress of ceremonies took Du Hong’s hand and dragged her to the front of the stage, where she called out, ‘Camera. Over here, camera.’
It only now dawned on Du Hong that she was on TV, and that people throughout the province, even the whole country, were watching her. She didn’t know what to do.
‘Tell everyone your name.’
‘Du Hong.’
‘Louder, please.’
‘Du – Hong.’ She raised her voice.
‘Are you happy?’
‘Yes,’ she said after a moment’s thought.
‘Louder.’
‘Hap – py!’ she shouted, stretching her neck out.
‘Why are you happy?’
Why? What kind of question was that? Just what kind of question was that? Du Hong was stuck for an answer.
‘Let’s try something else. What would you like to say at this moment?’
Du Hong moved her lips, as thoughts of various phrases flashed through her mind – ‘constantly striving to improve oneself ’, ‘throttling fate’s throat’ – all clichés and idioms she’d learned, but she could not string them together to form a coherent expression. Lucky for her, the music started up, a violin that gradually came closer and grew louder, so lyrical, so wrenchingly plaintive. Without waiting for Du Hong to find the words, the mistress of ceremonies herself, accompanied by the violin music, began to narrate Du Hong’s story. With a tone normally used for a poetry recitation with musical accompaniment, she informed the audience that ‘poor Du Hong’ could not see a thing from the moment she was born, that ‘poor Du Hong’ had to find the courage to go on living. That really upset Du Hong, who hated nothing more than hearing people say ‘poor Du Hong’ and that she couldn’t see a thing. She stood there with a long face, but the woman had worked up an emotional whirlwind, and was ready to reap the reward of her own performance. She stopped to ask a leading question in a tender, emotional voice. ‘Why did Du Hong play for us today?’
Yes, why? Du Hong herself wanted to hear the answer. The audience was stilled as the mistress of ceremonies provided an answer to her own question, bound to draw tears. ‘Poor Du Hong played today to repay the love given to her by society, from every grannie and grandpa, from every uncle and aun
t, from every older brother and sister, and from every kid brother and sister.’ The violin music, which had served as background, now formed a duet with the woman’s voice, echoing in the concert hall and in every corner of society. It was a heart-rending, sad tune, funereal even, boring into the most vulnerable spot in a listener’s heart. Suddenly choking on her own words, the mistress of ceremonies seemed about to break down and sob.
It had never occurred to Du Hong to ‘repay’ anything. She had simply played a piano piece by Bach. She’d wanted to play it well, but hadn’t. How did that count as repayment? Repayment to whom? When had she incurred a debt? And to all of society. Blood rushed to her face as she blurted out a few words. She knew she had said something, but that something amounted to nothing, since she did not have a microphone. The violin music reached a crescendo before coming to a sudden stop, coinciding with the end of the woman’s narration. With an arm around Du Hong’s shoulder, she haltingly, cautiously led her off the stage. Du Hong hated to be led anywhere; that was an extreme vanity on her part. She could walk unaided. Even though she couldn’t see a thing, she was sure she could get backstage on her own. All of society was watching. She would have liked to push the mistress of ceremonies’ arm away, but the power of her love was irrepressible, and the woman’s arm stayed put. So Du Hong let herself be carefully helped down off the stage. Only then did she realise that she had been invited not for the music, but to highlight people’s love, to repay a debt, one she could never pay back in full. So the rousing violin music helped to plead her case. People would cry, and their tears would cancel her debt. Be merciful, come, take pity on me. Du Hong’s hands began to shake. The mistress of ceremonies disgusted her, so did music. She raised her head and proudly thrust out her chin. So this is what music is all about. It’s despicable.