一地鸡毛

by Liu Zhenyun

“Don’t bother about me. I’ve got another way.” He takes off his cap and produces a slip of paper. “I was afraid that I wouldn’t find you so I went to Section Chief Li of the County Education Bureau. A former classmate of his is head of department of a big work unit. Look! He has written a letter for me! This man is such a high-ranking cadre. I’m sure he’ll be able to help me!”

  On hearing this, Young Lin doesn’t insist. For if he tries, he can’t be sure of finding a good hospital, and he may only waste his teacher’s time. Better let them go and ask the head of department for help. So he sees his teacher off on a public bus and says goodbye. The bus drives away with his teacher still waving to him in the distance, all smiles, even when he is lurching backwards and forwards from the sudden stops and starts. Tears well up in Young Lin’s eyes. His teacher smiled at him just as he did when he was in the primary school. After the bus is out of sight, he walks back home alone. He now feels weighed down as if a mountain is resting on his back. With every step he is at a risk of being crushed.

  The next morning, Young Lin reads the newspaper in his office and sees a memorial article for a great leader who passed away many years ago. The article elaborates on how much this leader respected his teachers and concerned himself with education. He once sent for two of the teachers who had taught him in his early youth, the only two who were still alive, arranged for them to stay in the best place in Beijing and showed them around the whole city. Young Lin thinks highly of the late leader. But now when he reads the article, he can’t hold back his curses:

  “Who doesn’t want to respect one’s teachers and show concern for education! I would love to let my teachers stay in the best place and show them around Beijing, too. Do I have the power to do so?”

  He throws the newspaper into a dustbin.

  4

  The child falls ill. She has a running nose and a cough. The wife says: “Your teacher had pulmonary emphysema when he visited us. Perhaps he’s given it to our child.”

  Young Lin also worries a lot whenever the girl falls ill. Her illness makes a great difference to the family. When she is ill, one of them at least, either him or his wife, has to ask for leave to stay at home and look after her. The childminder alone is not good enough over such a period. But on hearing his wife wildly blaming his teacher, his indignation is greatly aroused. As a punishment after his teacher left, Young Lin didn’t talk to her for two days, because she had hurt his feelings by embarrassing him in his teacher’s presence. For that meal you prepared, my teacher paid two big tins of sesame oil weighing about five kilos. At the free market in Beijing sesame oil is sold at eight yuan per half kilo. Five kilo means over eighty yuan. Was your meal worth that much? When she uses the sesame oil his wife also looks ashamed for a few days. She too feels she went too far. Now that the child is sick, she wants to take it out on her husband and retaliate using his teacher as a pretext. Young Lin is not polite to her. He says:

  “Better check the child’s illness first. What if it’s not pulmonary emphysema? Isn’t it immoral to blame a person without any proof?”

  So the two of them ask for leave and take the child to hospital. It’s no simple matter to have a diagnosis done. Basically, one thing is needed: money. For a child to see a doctor these days, twenty to thirty yuan is the minimum cost, including unnecessary medical tests and prescriptions. Young Lin feels that life is bearable if people in other occupations become dishonest, but unbearable if doctors are dishonest, too. Once his child had a runny tummy, going to the hospital cost him seventy-five yuan. It’s true. Annoyed and amused at the same time, his wife asked him while shaking her both hands:

  “Is the excrement worth seventy-five yuan?”

  Each time they take the child to hospital, they feel they have been cheated.

  But there is no alternative, they have to go. Take the present situation for example. On their way to the hospital, the child’s temperature has gone up. The couple forget to accuse each other, forget that they are going to be cheated again. All their attention is on the child and they hurry to catch a bus to the hospital.

  A check shows that it is nothing but a cold. Yet they are informed at the cash desk of the hospital pharmacy that the charge for the prescription is 45.58 yuan. Shaking the prescription, his wife says:

  “Look. Got ripped off again. Shall we pay for the medicine or not?”

  He does not reply. Just now he was anxious that for some unknown reason the child was running a high fever. He was not sure whether it was contracted from his teacher. Now the diagnosis reveals that it is just a cold. He feels relieved. At the same time he begins to feel indignant again with his wife. You said that it was because my teacher had an infectious disease. Hasn’t the diagnosis proved that it’s a cold? He wants to have the matter out with her before tackling the question of having been ripped off or not. Seeing the crowd of people queuing at the pharmacy and lots more coming and going, he feels this is not the right place to discuss things. That’s why he didn’t reply. Full of resentment he just says to her:

  “Don’t come if you are afraid of being ripped off. Who asked you to come and forced you to pay for the medicine?”

  His wife picks up the child at once: “If that’s what you think, I won’t take the medicine!” She starts to walk away.

  She acts rashly when she feels wronged and Young Lin is worried. He knows what his wife is like. If she heads in one direction, not even the most strenuous effort will be able to turn her around. How will they treat the child without medicine when they’re back home? So he hurries after her and blocks her way, saying:

  “Why? Come on! When it comes to such a matter, you can’t act this way. Give the prescription to me.”

  But this time his wife is not acting out of a grudge. She looks at him and declares:

  “We won’t buy the medicine. Isn’t it just a cold? There is still some leftover from the medicine I got from my work unit the last time I caught a cold. The child can take some of that. The prescription will probably just be Cefalexin tablets, Chinese medicine to be taken with boiling water, antipyretic pills and the like. That’s all you’ll get even though you spend more money.”

  Young Lin retorts: “Your medicine is for adults. For children there should be something different.”

  His wife assures him: “There’s nothing different. You give a child a smaller dose. Leave it to me. I can cure her within three days and save the forty-five yuan. When the medicine is finished, I’ll ask my unit for more.”

  Young Lin feels that what his wife has said is reasonable. He feels the child’s forehead and finds the temperature has dropped, but he doesn’t know whether it is because of the sleep she has just had or because of the hospital smell. Her eyes are bright again. She points at the Hami melons on a stall opposite the hospital and asks for some. Now that the case is less serious, Young Lin thinks it’s alright to give his wife’s idea a go. So they leave the hospital and buy the child a piece of Hami melon. After eating it, she is even more active and gets down to play with her father. She has even stopped coughing. He is happy, so is his wife.

  Now that they are happy, they relax. Young Lin won’t take his wife’s remark about his teacher’s disease seriously any more. It was just a thoughtless grumble when she was too worried to keep her temper. Now he has straightened out his thinking. The child’s illness is not serious and his wife’s bright idea has saved forty-five yuan on medicine. Isn’t that as good as earning forty-five yuan for nothing? The thought makes them even more cheerful. Young Lin feels like giving his wife a treat. As they pass through the street full of stalls selling snacks, he turns to her:

  “You like stir-fried liver, don’t you? Why not have a bowl?”

  His wife tut-tuts, saying: “One yuan fifty a bowl just for fun. It’s not worth it.”

  He immediately takes one yuan fifty out of his pocket and hands it over to the vendor: “A bowl of stir-fried liver, please.”

  His wife glances at him with embarrassment, then sits down to
eat it. The way she eats the stuff shows she really loves it. She even puts into her mouth the two pieces which the child spits out when she finds them too hard to chew. She insists that Young Lin has a taste of the soup. He isn’t too keen, to him it looks like a bowl of muck. But his wife keeps offering it in gentle, soft voices and with eyes full of tenderness as she had been before they got married, so he has to take a mouthful. In a hot, coriander-flavoured soup, it tastes delicious. When his wife asks him what he thinks, he answers that it is nice. She glances at him affectionately. He didn’t expect a bowl of fried liver could make them relive the tender feelings of the past. The feelings are kept till the evening. The child is not seriously ill so she plays by herself after her mother has given her some medicine. By the evening, she stops coughing and sleeps soundly. When the snoring of the childminder is heard from the outer room, Young Lin and his wife are both filled with passion. It is just as good as when they were newly married. Afterwards, caressing each other, they have a chat about the cause of their child’s illness. The wife freely admits in her anxiety she wronged his teacher today. He replies, “We are to blame for not having taken good care of the little thing so that the quilt was kicked aside and left off all night.” His wife says that it is not the points. There is only one person to blame. His heart misses a beat and asks who she is referring to. His wife points toward the hall, the outer room—she means the childminder. Then she recounts the childminder’s faults: She’s too concerned with what she can get out of us, she takes no initiative in doing the chores, and dawdles over her work, she’s always visiting the childminders’ dormitories and tells everyone our family secrets, she doesn’t even have any feelings toward the child. She lets her play alone with water while she takes a nap or watches TV when we are working. How can our daughter avoid catching a cold? His wife says she is determined to dismiss the childminder by September when the child can start going to nursery.

  The next morning Young Lin feels their feelings about the childminder were right. As usual, his wife goes off early to work while he goes to queue for bean curd. He should have gone to work after that but because it is drizzling and not so many people came to buy bean curd, it doesn’t take as long today. Glancing at his watch, he finds that he still has some time to spare. Concerned about the child’s illness, he goes back home again to have a look but discovers that childminder is busy cooking for herself. The bed hasn’t been made, the child’s breakfast hasn’t been prepared and she hasn’t had her medicine. The nanny has let the child play with a basin of water with which she washed her face. Early that morning, Young Lin and his wife just ate some food leftover from the day before. They added some hot water and washed it down with pickled vegetable. It is all right for the childminder to cook porridge since she doesn’t eat leftovers. But instead, she is cooking fine noodles in the small wok which is meant for cooking the child’s meals. A delicious smell greets him as he enters the room. She has put coriander, dried bean curd and an egg in the noodle soup. Seeing Young Lin return unexpectedly, she hurriedly tries to hide the egg under the noodles with her chopsticks. However, he has already seen it. He feels himself bristling with anger. Isn’t she trying to fool us by secretly cooking nice meals for herself while neglecting the child? Things are not easy for you, neither are they for us. We are wrong to blame you for everything, that’s true, but you don’t merit the slightest respect, understanding or sympathy if you yourself are not in the least conscientious. But he does not censure the childminder. Usually, catching her red-handed would be a handy opportunity to criticize her to her face. It would give him the great satisfaction of revenge. But the childminder is just like that. You cannot be sure that she won’t take it out on the child after you go. How could he bear to let the child suffer because of his action? So he just furiously seizes the basin of water which the child is playing with and pours it into the lavatory bowl. The child’s nose is running again. Because the water has been taken away, she rocks herself on the floor and cries. He doesn’t take any notice of that. He goes off to work, slamming the door behind him. As he hurries down the stairs, he curses to himself: “Damn you! I’ll make sure you’re gone by September!”

  Back home from work that evening, he finds the child’s cold seems to have worsened. Her nose is blocked and she keeps coughing. Her temperature has also risen. He knows that it all has to do with the childminder’s mischief today. But he doesn’t dare to tell his wife. If he does, a mighty uproar will be inevitable. His wife, however, looks happy. She doesn’t even care that the child’s illness has worsened. He doesn’t know why. She is sitting on the edge of the bed, deep in thought. There must be some good news for her to have such an expression. Peering into the kitchen, he is not surprised to see his wife has brought home some sausage. That is not all, either. There is a bottle of “Yanjing” brand beer, no doubt for him. He loved beer when he was single. After they got married, he gradually stopped. Why drink it at the cost of over one yuan a bottle? Granted that money is not to be worried about, but who would be in the mood to drink it? Ignorant of his wife’s thoughts today, Young Lin goes into the inner room and asks: “Hey, what’s happened to you today?”

  His wife just chuckles at him.

  “What are you giggling for? Tell me.”

  His wife answers: “Well, Young Lin, let me tell you.

  The problem about my work is solved!”

  He is taken aback. “What? Solved? Did you go to the unit in Qiansanmen again? Has the head of personnel agreed?”

  His wife shakes her head.

  He asks again: “Have you found another unit to go to?”

  His wife shakes her head again.

  He can’t help feeling disappointed: “Then what’s been solved?”

  His wife replies: “I’ll stay in this unit.”

  Young Lin asks: “Why? Have you developed some feelings towards the unit? Aren’t you worried about the overcrowded buses any more?”

  The wife says, “Feelings are out of the question but soon I won’t have to catch the public bus. The head of our unit announced that a shuttle bus will run past here from September onwards. So you see, I can get to the unit by the shuttle bus in forty minutes, and it won’t be necessary to catch the overcrowded public buses. It will be the unit’s special bus with seats available during the trip. Isn’t it even better than going to Qiansanmen on the crowded underground? Young Lin, I have sorted myself out. If the shuttle bus runs this route in September, I won’t try to get a transfer. It is true that my present unit is not good, with lots of complicated relationships; but who can be sure that relations at Qiansanmen are good? Just look at the head of personnel there! You’ve convinced me: ‘All crows are black.’ I will stick to my unit as long as the shuttle bus runs. I’ll just drift along, turning a blind eye to things. So I can say that my work problem is solved, can’t I?”

  At his wife’s explanation, Young Lin is also happy. It has been a major family issue which they have constantly worried about and often been at odds. Now at long last it is settled. Although the solution is actually based on a lack of solution, his wife’s mind will be set at rest and she’ll no longer worry about it. The causes of her agitation will be removed, which in turn will ensure there are no more conflicts about it at home. The problem has been solved so easily in such a simple way, it seems. Relying on themselves, Young Lin and his wife have asked for favours and presented gifts only to find themselves repeatedly being foiled at every turn. In the end, a shuttle bus dispatched by the unit solves everything easily. Young Lin, like his wife, is cheerful:

  “That’s great. Since the problem no longer exists you won’t stir up trouble for me in the future, will you?”

  His wife replies: “Yes, it no longer exists.” Then she pretends to rebuke him: “Who has been stirring up trouble but you? How can you blame me when you can’t even find a solution yourself? Didn’t I solve it all by myself in the end? Let’s just wait for September.”

  Young Lin agrees: “That’s right. You’ve s
olved it yourself.

  Let’s just look forward to September.”

  They are all in a good mood. The child’s illness is under control. They have beer at dinner. After the child and the childminder have gone to sleep, they enjoy themselves once more, again full of passion. Afterwards, they both feel embarrassed. They did it yesterday and today too. It’s been a long time since they did it so frequently. Then, caressing each other they chat again about September. September is really a lucky month, the wife’s work problem will be solved, and the child will be able to go to a nursery, so the childminder can go saving the family a large sum of money. They look forward to the future, to the happy days September will bring them, and they discuss what they’ll spend the money they save on. Then the wife raises doubts as to whether they should let the child stay at home another year before going to nursery because she’ll still be too young. In this case they should keep the childminder on till next year. Recalling the childminder’s ill-doing this morning, Young Lin exclaims: “No! It must be this year, for the child’s sake. Get rid of her as soon as possible.”

  The wife has not been on good terms with the nanny. Hearing Young Lin’s words, the wife is quite glad and gives Young Lin a kiss. Then she falls asleep soon.

  5

  It is September now. Two events are expected to take place in September. First, the shuttle bus starts running, and second, the child will begin nursery and so the childminder will be dismissed. The first is smoothly realized. On September 1, the route is served with a regular bus from the unit. At once, Young Lin’s wife is much more relaxed. She no longer needs to go to work so early in the morning. In the past, she had to get up at six, otherwise she would be late for work. Now, she can sleep an extra hour and get up at seven. By 7:20 she is washed and dressed and can get on the shuttle bus at the gate without hurrying. There are seats on the bus, so she is not so tired. She can also get home earlier. Before, she came back by the light of the moon. But now, she finishes at five in the afternoon and is home by 5:40. She can have a rest before preparing dinner. At first she had been happy about the shuttle bus because she thought it showed the concern of her work unit’s head for his staff, but later she found out this was not the case. Rather than kind concern, the reason was that a sister-in-law of the head had recently moved to the district and he had been pressurized by his wife to arrange a shuttle bus for her sister’s convenience. When she heard this, Young Lin’s wife was disheartened. She felt the value of the shuttle bus service had fallen and her happiness had been based on wrong assumptions. Returning home, she told her husband about it. He also felt awkward and rather humiliated—but not as humiliated as he had felt by the refusal of the personnel department head at Qiansanmen. So he tries to soothe his wife: “At all events, you can enjoy the shuttle bus, which is good. Don’t worry about the cause of it, be it good or bad.”