by Bi Feiyu
She believed only in a wedding, that was all she needed. With a wedding you are no longer alone. At the very least there is one person with whom you share a life. That is worth believing. A wedding is a sort of magic. It turns the world into a home. It completes things.
Jin Yan happily discovered that developing a belief in her wedding transformed her into a marriage fanatic. Weddings were everywhere for her, they occupied every moment of her time. Take meals, for instance. In the past, she had always eaten with a spoon, for its obvious convenience. Now she stopped eating with a spoon and began using chopsticks. She notched the thick end of one chopstick and tied it to its mate with a string. Now they were married. She carried out a grand ceremony for them, imagining the sumptuous setting in the Austrian movie Sissi, a tale of royalty. The ceremony took place during lunch one day. Grand luxury was the mood of the hour, in which the sound of her chewing was like that of a symphonic orchestra.
Cupping jars can marry too. Cupping is one of the most popular supplemental treatments offered by tuina therapists. ‘Qi’, or energy, plays an important role in traditional Chinese medicine. The human body has both hot and cold qi. If you have cold qi, it needs to be drawn out of you, and that’s where cupping comes in. Jin Yan had a special way of cupping her clients. She did everything in pairs. Sometimes there were four pairs, at other times five or six, thereby turning the client’s back into a grand hall, the perfect site for a group wedding. Group weddings are not desirable, but they can be more fun, since the arrangements are satisfying. They embody the uniqueness of China, for even the most private matters brim with the spirit of collectivism.
Flavours can marry too. The two perfectly paired flavours are sweet and sour, and peppery and spicy. Sweet is a woman, with a manly side; sour is a man, with a feminine aspect. Their marriage is, without doubt, sweet and sour pork. Sour but sweet. Sour and sweet. This is a marriage for the poor and lowly born, who understand gratitude and contentment. They most easily embody the flavours of life. It is the poor but honest scholar marrying the pretty daughter of a humble family, the kindergarten teacher marrying a taxi driver. The couple don’t need an extravagant wedding to be happy, two hearts beating as one, passing the difficult days in homely familiarity.
The peppery flavour is an unreasonable man, while spicy is a difficult woman. They are ill-suited, rivals from a previous life, and reason dictates that they will not walk the path of life together. No one holds out any hope for them. But here is where the pleasure and richness of life intercede, as peppery and spicy are a predestined pair. They give not an inch to the other from the day their romance begins. I mock you. You bully me. They are feared by all, but bickering only draws them closer, fighting makes them stick together. Until one day, they are married. Even at their wedding they find it hard to believe there could ever be such a day. More bickering, mollified only by mediators. The wedding ending on bad terms, they go their own way to make preparations for the divorce. Which, strangely enough, never occurs. They grow old until, my goodness, a golden wedding anniversary. Fifty years of fighting and bickering, upsetting their neighbours, but not each other. The longer it goes on, the more delicious it gets. Though they do not know it, they are like most things in life, like lamb skewers at roadside stands, they stay together even after a lifetime of discontent. Regret sets in as life ebbs, when they realise they did not have a decent wedding. Late at night, when all is quiet, they wonder: Why could I not have treated you better back then? Have another skewer. What they want is a second chance. It’ll turn out the same, for that’s life, one lovely scene after another.
The most interesting wedding is that of a bicycle. Two wheels, one just like the other, thrown together. A man is thrown together with a woman, and vice versa. The bride and groom are equal, but only in appearance. One is always in front of the other, or one on the outside and the other inside, and it stays that way, even at the wedding; one moves and the other obediently goes along. They are forever separated by a distance, one leading and the other following, step for step, without protest. But take a closer look, and something’s wrong here. The one at the rear is the real motive force. It pushes, while the one in front is a mere puppet. The one in front willingly acknowledges that reality, since the one at the rear is so good to it. This kind of marriage is that most often seen on the streets, which is filled with pairs of bicycle tyres, one in front and one behind, neatly paired. They sometimes separate, and that’s when the one at the rear wants to be up front. Bad things happen then. The rear wheel pushes too hard, and disaster follows.
Jin Yan has a fondness for peanuts. Nearly every shell encloses two peanuts. They are close neighbours, quiet, but happy to keep their distance. Yet that will never do. So Jin Yan removes the shell, revealing a Golden Youth and Jade Maiden. ‘How can you stand being apart?’ she asks. She brings them together by holding a secret wedding ceremony in the palm of her hand. They are a natural couple, a good match in virtually every way. But they are shy. Jin Yan sends them into the bridal chamber, where she removes their clothes. A brand new couple, naked, sleek, incredibly sexy. And completely in love. A marriage made to be consummated. Jin Yan once invited Xu Tailai to participate by taking his hand and placing this new couple in his palm.
‘You eat them,’ he said.
Dense! Dense! A fool!
She thought long and hard, of course, and realised that she could not be arranging weddings for others. Mostly she thought about her own wedding. No, she wasn’t thinking, she was wavering, comparing, weighing. Which was better, a Chinese or a Western-style wedding? She couldn’t make up her mind. But so what? Seized by folly, she wanted them both. Who says a couple can only have one wedding? That’s not national policy. She decided she would get married in a white wedding dress first and then Tailai would marry her amid charming, romantic candlelight. What’s the big deal with two weddings? All that requires is money. She is willing to part with it; she wants to spend the money. Why do we say ‘spend money’? Why ‘spend’? That’s obvious. You spend money in order to buy a good time, and every penny brings a minute of happiness, like a sudden spring breeze, with blossoms opening on thousands of pear trees.
Chapter Twelve
Gao Wei
DU HONG FOUND it hard to believe that she could so quickly establish herself at the tuina centre. Fortunately, she had enough self-awareness to realise that her skills alone were insufficient to attract many return clients; the key, already revealed, was her looks. As this was her first job, she had yet to accurately comprehend the importance of a woman’s looks. But she knew that appearance was linked to productivity.
One fact closely related to her looks was that all her return clients were male, mostly in the age group of thirty-five to forty-five. She was happy and proud of her appearance, and, naturally, found it strange, a new experience for her, one that made her happy, the natural delight for women. If she’d stayed home, she’d never have known how pretty she was. She’d known she was good-looking, but not that she was pretty. They are not the same; they embody different qualities. That is what made her proud. Then another fundamental fact occurred to her; young, single men rarely came to her, and that gave her an indescribable sense of loss until she found a convincing explanation: young men are usually in good health, and so hardly any of them showed up for tuina therapy. It wasn’t that they did not find her attractive, but that she never had a chance to encounter them. If they showed up – a big if – who knew what would happen?
It was good to know she was pretty, but there were times when it wasn’t. She sensed that she was becoming ‘complicated’, which is common among girls, whose worries all seem to stem from knowing how they look. Du Hong actually sort of wished she didn’t know about her looks.
The busier she was, the more contacts she made with people, which complicated matters. People truly are strange creatures, and there are all kinds. How can the differences be so huge? It is no exaggeration to say that no two people are alike. She could not see them, but their d
ifferences were clear to her as she worked on their bodies and talked to them. Some were heavy, some skinny; some strong, some frail; some genteel, some rude; some laughed a lot, some were quiet; some stank of alcohol, some of cigarettes. But no matter how different, they had one thing in common: they all carried mobile phones, which came equipped with the owners’ favourite jokes. The first one she heard went like this: When a farmer went out into the field, his wife’s lover showed up. But before they could get anything on, the farmer came home for his hoe. The panicked wife had an idea: she told her lover to hide in a hemp sack behind the door. Picking up his hoe, the husband spotted the sack as he was walking out the door. It looked full, so he gave it a kick. ‘Hey, what’s in there?’ he wondered out loud. ‘Corn!’ the wife’s lover yelled out.
Du Hong was in stitches when she first heard the joke, but things got complicated after listening to a few more. Not every joke was as clean as ‘corn’. Being a young woman, she did not understand many of the jokes, so, with a bemused look, she’d ask a client what the punchline meant; but she usually got it before she even finished asking. And that was terrible. She felt dirty, sordid and obscene. Blood rushed to her face and she was overwhelmed by dejection, upset that she had become part of a dirty joke. But there were many jokes, and as time went by, she actually got used to them; for one thing, she could not possibly stop her clients from talking, and she early on discovered that men of this type were especially fond of telling jokes to girls, and telling them in such a way as to imply that the joke was really about them. Those men earned Du Hong’s secret contempt, and she pretended either that she wasn’t listening or did not understand the joke. The problem was, she did understand some of them and it was hard to keep from laughing. She didn’t want to laugh at their jokes, but it was hard to hold back, and so she laughed. That always made her feel as if she’d swallowed a fly.
Since Du Hong’s clients all carried mobile phones, and each phone arrived with a joke, she came to know that the world was one big mobile phone, and that the true colour of life is a joke.
The jokes all shared one thing in common: hun, a term both for meat and things carnal. Du Hong knew all about the dietary use of hun, as opposed to su, or vegetarian. What lay behind hun could only be meat and all things carnal. As a term for the flesh, it frightened her, made her uneasy. After listening to many jokes from her clients, she reached a conclusion that formed her general impression, or appraisal, of the world; that is, she lived in a carnal world. That thing that had carried her away – society – was hun; all men were hun, and so were all women. Everyone was busily engaged in their bodily affairs: unbridled sexual intercourse, disorder, insanity and infatuation. Unbridled. Du Hong congratulated herself for being blind; it was better not to be able to see. If she could see, where would she look? Everyone was the embodiment of flesh. Flesh with raging desire.
She recalled how terrified she’d been when she first left home, worried that she would not find a place in society. But she had to admit that in addition to fear, she’d also felt a sense of longing. She’d longed for the world; she’d longed to meet strangers and see unusual things; she’d longed for days that were different. Eager for action, she’d hoped to be recognised and accepted by the world and become part of it as soon as possible. Life meant something to her, for it contained all her dreams; but its true face was now revealed through the jokes from all those mobile phones. The world was depraved, lewd, filthy, tiring and vulgar. There was nothing for her to long for. From emperor to beggar, from CEO to secretary, from pilot to flight attendant, and from village chief to village elder, there was no difference at all. She went through daily life feeling as if she were standing on a pile of dog shit, and if she left it, she could not be self-sufficient. Sooner or later she too would be just like them, flesh with raging desire.
Truth was, Sha Fuming had already begun to let his desire rage towards Du Hong by touching her face. And he would surely want to let loose his desire in more secretive ways, closing in on her. Tension gripped her at that thought; she was in danger. At any moment, she could become the corn that was stuffed naked into a hemp sack, and from there be transformed into material for jokes in mobile phones.
Du Hong was guarded, but did not want to offend him. He was, after all, the boss. She would have to leave if he told her to; walking out would be easy, but where could she go? Sure, she could go to another place, but nothing would change; wherever she went, there would be men, women, jokes, mobile phones and hemp sacks filled with corn. In fact, all people were corn stuffed in hemp sacks.
She decided on a strategy of ignorance and keeping a polite distance, acceptably polite to Sha Fuming, not too close but not too distant, neither responding nor rejecting. He could let his desire rage; the key was how to use it to her advantage. Ignorance was her best weapon, a girl’s nuclear weapon, invincible. No matter how his desire raged, she would simply feign ignorance. Feigned ignorance is true ignorance, like people pretending to be asleep who will not awaken regardless of how others try to rouse them.
And that was precisely what hurt Sha Fuming the most. His intentions were pure. He had already given up his faith for her, for he had ceased wishing that he could see. No longer did he seek to be part of mainstream society; he would rather live the life allotted to him, through the darkness with the unsighted Du Hong. So he began his pursuit. Du Hong cleverly neither accommodated nor refused him. Feigned ignorance was her weapon of choice. She pretended to be clueless. Nothing he did or said broke through her unenlightened veneer. She never veered from a simple and cheerful tone, like a child consumed by the act of eating a piece of candy. Sha Fuming went at it in a roundabout way, hinted to her, begged her with an increasing sense of urgency and openness. She treated all that with incomprehension. What was he to do? He had to tell her, plead with her, ‘I love you, Du Hong.’
Pitiful young Du Hong. ‘I’m too young.’
Now what could he say? The more pitiful she sounded, the more besotted he became and the more he longed to be her protector, to watch over her. He was possessed, and could not extricate himself from that state. All right, then, he was not only possessed, he was also stubborn. Too young? Then I’ll wait. If not this year, then next year, or the year after that, and on and on. You’ll be old enough one day. Sha Fuming was convinced he could wait for that day, as long as he was patient and, more importantly, in love with her.
He kept his vigil confidential, a closely held secret, something that existed only in his heart. He cautioned himself to be prudent, for he was, after all, the boss, and he mustn’t let his employees get the dreadful impression that he was guilty of abusing his power. And there was more to it than that: in a word, Sha Fuming’s vanity. If he were too open in his intentions, it could easily be misinterpreted as taking advantage of his position to win her over. That would make him appear dishonourable. So, before everything was out in the open, better not to let anyone know what he was up to.
But Sha Fuming was wrong. Someone did know. Who? Gao Wei, the receptionist. She saw through him the moment he fell for Du Hong. One thing the blind tend to forget is their eyes – dead eyes that cannot be the windows to their souls – can truly be the doors through which their hearts are revealed. When something interests them, they don’t know what it means to hide what is behind their eyes; they will begin twisting their necks, sometimes even their whole upper bodies. Mired in a depressed mood, Sha Fuming perked up whenever Du Hong was around, and his neck and torso began to twist. In Gao Wei’s view, Du Hong was the sun and Sha Fuming was a sunflower. He might appear motionless but there were subtle movements, for he was listening, yet he didn’t know that the expression on his face had made him part of Du Hong’s movements. His lips twitched in a special way, slight yet hurried, followed by the abrupt hint of a smile that quickly disappeared. He was losing self-control. He was hopelessly immersed in feelings of love.
Gao Wei could stare at her boss without worrying that he would know.
What she had never f
igured out was how Sha Fuming, whose neck twisted in Du Hong’s direction whenever she started to move, knew that it was her. Intrigued, Gao Wei closely observed Du Hong’s legs and there was her answer. Both Du Hong and Xiao Kong stepped more heavily with the left foot than with the right, though the difference was subtle. Xiao Kong’s heels touched the floor first, while for Du Hong it was the balls of her feet. Du Hong was more timid than Xiao Kong, so each step was a sort of probe. When Gao Wei shut her eyes, she could clearly distinguish Du Hong’s footsteps.
Gao Wei and Du Hong became friends that night. When they got off work, Gao took Du Hong’s hand and led her over to the three-wheeler. Du Hong hesitated, but Gao helped her up before taking off Du Hong’s shoes for her to sit comfortably on the soft mound of bedsheets. It is easy to imagine how that touched Du Hong: Gao Wei is a good person, so warm-hearted. I have nothing to offer, and yet she treats me with kindness. Fate had favoured Du Hong by letting her encounter such a good person.
And so they became friends. Close friends. Distance is a constant; as the distance between Du Hong and Gao Wei shrank, that between Du Hong and Tingting lengthened. She felt somewhat guilty about that; she was, in the end, a bit of an opportunist. That manifested itself not in relation to a three-wheeler, but to sight. Say what you will, Gao Wei was sighted, and Du Hong was in need of a friendly pair of eyes.