Candy

by Mian Mian

  Ye Meili was shouting, And you call yourself my friend! Do you even know what a friend is?

  Just then, Ye Meili’s cell phone rang, and Little Xi’an tried his pitch out on her. Ye Meili said, I can’t go with you. Don’t bother me. But someone you know is over here right now. She likes money; why don’t you ask her?

  Little Xi’an told me what he’d told her. I said, If you have that much money, I’m sure you can find a girl who’s a lot more fun than either of us. Why are you asking us? Little Xi’an said, I wanted to find a woman who knew me before I had money. Ye Meili is the kind of woman who might walk out on you at a moment’s notice, but I’d be happy to be with her for as long as it lasted, and I wouldn’t be sad if she left. You’re the cultured type, plus you’re the only girl I still haven’t fucked, and now I’ve got all this cash, so what do you say you come with me? I can send you to the best rehab clinic.

  My refusal was blunt. No way! I said. And then I hung up on him.

  I asked Ye Meili, Why didn’t you take him up on it? He’s cute and he’s rich. Ye Meili said, Because I need my freedom. That’s why I’ll never commit myself to another man as long as I live, whether I love him or not. I don’t care who he is.

  With that, she left and went back to stand on the street again. It had really made her mad when I stole her friend away, because she never spoke to me again.

  A few months later, I got another call from Little Xi’an.

  He said, I’m flat broke. Will you come with me now?

  I laughed coldly and hung up.

  5.

  Little Dove, that was her name. Little Dove was a little beauty, short but voluptuous. She was the one who brought the news of Little Xi’an’s death. A child of the oil fields, Little Dove had come to this city to escape a life of poverty. She became a prostitute, but she was constantly reminding herself that Marx had said that the primitive accumulation of capital was evil. With a head full of such potent ideas, she quickly gave up prostitution.

  Little Xi’an had met her the same way he’d met Little Shanghai and Ye Meili—they’d met while “doing business.”

  Little Xi’an had approached her because she seemed like a bright girl to him, and what was more, she had the same humble origins he did. He told Little Dove, You can be my leader. We can struggle together against the power of the establishment.

  But he was in a truly precarious situation, and Little Dove saw this more clearly than he did.

  Little Dove was the one who had sold Little Xi’an the false papers he’d used when he fled to Macao. She had sold them for a high price.

  Little Dove and I had also met on that street, when she was looking for customers who might want to buy false papers from her.

  Little Dove asked me, What do you think Little Xi’an was thinking about at the moment he died? No one will ever know. His only mistake was that he forgot he was poor. He completely forgot. He didn’t realize how easily 400,000yuan could slip through his fingers and leave him with nothing.

  F

  In December of 1994 I found myself caught in the middle of a gang war. I’ll never know for sure what started all that bloody fighting, and there’s nothing I can say about it except that someone shaved off all of my hair before giving me a sharp kick in the face. Those are some pretty eyes you’ve got, little girl, he said.

  It was a horrible night. My eyes had been injured, and when I went to pay the nurse, she told me that all of my money was counterfeit. When I finally made it to the operating table, the anesthetic had no effect on me because of my tolerance, and I had to suffer through the entire operation anyway. After leaving the operating room, I wasn’t allowed to leave until someone came with real money. While I was sitting and waiting, a drug dealer from the Northeast called Blackie came limping in. He’d been stabbed, and I took him to the operating room. I’d been needing a fix for a while already, but Blackie had no heroin and no money, since he’d just been mugged. Blackie and I ended up sitting there together, waiting for someone to bring us some money, but the people who’d promised to bring the money took forever to show up. I was wheezing because I needed a fix, and I was fretting about not being able to leave the hospital until after daybreak. I was going to have to go outside with my messily shaved head. I was worrying about lots of other things too, and so I sat there, crossing and uncrossing my legs, not knowing what to do with myself.

  That night, I had a sudden realization of this very simple truth: heroin was a drug that brought nothing but bad luck. It was true for anybody; all you had to do was cross paths with heroin, and sooner or later you would find yourself up to your neck in bad luck, with no way out. In this respect, heroin was no fun at all.

  My father came to town. Once again he sent me to a rehab clinic in Shanghai. It seemed that this gang war had been a stroke of good luck after all, because otherwise I’m sure I would have died in the South. It must have been fate.

  Before I went back to Shanghai, Sanmao and his old lady gave me a whole load of hats, hats of all shapes and sizes, and Sanmao told me that he was going to go back into rehab himself. He said, I have a feeling that you’re going to get better, that we’re both going to get better. Y’know, you look great in hats!

  Completely bald, with a gauze patch over one eye, and lugging seven big suitcases, I arrived at the airport with my father. I had hidden some heroin in my underwear because I knew the craving could hit me at any time. This was something my father didn’t understand at all.

  As we went through airport security, I kept looking at my father anxiously and thinking, He’s such a good person, and I’m so bad.

  The moment the plane left the ground, I fucking burst into tears. I swore I would never come back to this town in the South ever again. This weird, plastic, bullshit Special Economic Zone, with all that pain and sadness, and the face of love, and the whole totally fucked-up world of heroin, and the late-1980s gold rush mentality, and all that pop music from Taiwan and Hong Kong. This place had all of the best and all of the worst. It had become my eternal nightmare.

  G

  My nurse’s aide came in and asked me what I wanted to eat that night. She said, Here are some New Year’s sesame-and-rice dumplings in syrup and some Master Kang’s instant noodles. Then she said, Do you want to wash your face? Do you need me to get you some hot water? I opened my eyes wide and looked at this person at my bedside, a woman in her forties, with prominent cheekbones and a ruddy complexion. Dressed in a maroon cotton blouse and pants, she looked like a factory worker, and I said, Why are you my nurse? And how come everyone here except me is wearing the same clothes? She said, Because I’m a patient too. I said, You’re in rehab too? Her lips slowly parted to form a grin, and she said, You don’t know what kind of hospital this is? I said, What do you mean? This is a rehab clinic, isn’t it? She started to rock from side to side, and then she leaned forward and said in a confidential tone, We’re all mental patients who have done something wrong. I said, What? Mental patients? What did you do? She looked me in the eye and said, I killed my old man’s father. I said, You killed someone? Why did you kill him? Because he was always yelling at me, she said, so I put insecticide in his soup.

  My crime was that I was dependent on drugs, and I was my father’s nightmare. First I’d spent all my energy trying to get love and alcohol, and then I’d laid my body down on the altar of heroin, and I had always known that this meant I was lonely and crazy. My father had brought me here only this afternoon, but my reactions were noticeably slow because I was already on medications, and I suspected that my mind was not very clear, but I was still capable of being frightened by what I saw. I thought that the Communist Party (and that included my father) was pretty intense, putting drug addicts who were trying to clean up in here along with homicidal maniacs so that we could all be cured together. Anyone who could overcome her habit in a situation like this wasn’t likely to want to start using again. When I compared myself to the other patients, I felt ashamed of what I’d done, because I had already b
egun to feel a sense of shame. Heroin had made me stupid. When I’d checked in that afternoon, I had wondered why I was the only person in my tiny room and why there were so many people in the big room outside. I’d wondered why all the drug addicts in Shanghai were so old.

  During the most unbearable seventy-two hours, the doctors didn’t try to use shock treatment on me, because of my serious asthma. They put me on some kind of drip, which made me really high, and every now and then, when no one was looking, I managed to speed up the drip. Every day my nurse’s aide helped me use the bathroom, wash my face, and brush my teeth. She also swept the floor of my room.

  Once, when she was helping me to the bathroom, one of the other patients said to me, Look at yourself! Look at the mess you’re in. When you get out of here, you’re not going to start using drugs again, are you?

  The room was huge, and it had another very large room within it, which was the dormitory where the psychiatric patients and forcibly committed drug addicts slept. There was a sea of beds, each one covered with a snowy white blanket. The rows of blankets looked like racks of magazines, and they reminded me of the plain white covers of the underground art magazines in Beijing. The sinks and toilets were in another room, where it was always dark except for a filament of moonlight. Even sunrays looked like moonlight there, and it was as cold as a refrigerator. I was in the smallest room, equipped with two sets of bunk beds. This was the room for drug addicts who had come voluntarily.

  The pale winter light was sometimes shot with lemon yellow, and the patients played cards or sat in the sun and picked apart rags. They passed the time of day, occasionally chatting with the doctors, their voices like those of little birds. I watched them from my room, and it all looked so peaceful. After lunch they would sing songs together, in a chorus, since this was a required class. They sang old songs like “The Light of Beijing’s Golden Mountains Shines Everywhere.” They also sang popular songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, like “Grace in Motion” and “Thank You for Your Love,” which came in with the steady stream of new drug addicts entering the clinic. They wrote them down on the little blackboard so that the other patients could learn them. After singing practice, they lined up for their medications, and then they took their midday naps.

  I sat like an idiot, pumped full of medications, and the patients were there playing cards in the sunlight, and the big doors were bolted shut. Losing control of your life was this simple, and here it was, laid out plain and clear, like winter in the city, icily harboring its murderous intentions. My mind was empty, and I don’t think that it was just the drugs. After I’d given up my habit of using heroin many times every day, I honestly didn’t know how I was going to fill up my life. After they took out my drip, I ventured into the main room and sat in the sun. Just then, another patient came up close beside me and bumped into me, saying, Give me a cookie, OK? Her gaze was focused on some other place, but from time to time her eyes darted back to me, looking for a sweet. A lot of patients watched as I handed her a cookie, but they quickly looked away. Suddenly I became aware that all of the patients shared a habit of rocking their bodies back and forth, rocking back and forth and constantly shifting their weight from one foot to the other.

  I was given permission to call my father. I said, Daddy, I’m doing fine, but I want a mirror. They took my mirror away, and I want them to give it back.

  My doctor called me into her office, and she said, We don’t let you have mirrors, because we don’t want you to hurt yourselves or make trouble for the other patients, but you can have yours back now.

  That night a patient approached me in the bathroom and timidly asked, Can you lend us your mirror for a little while? Just for a moment, and we’ll give it right back. I looked at her, and I said, You can have it for five minutes, OK? I took out my palm-size mirror, and everybody was taking turns looking at themselves, and that night I didn’t feel lonely at all. The one who’d asked to borrow it spent the longest time looking at herself. Another patient told me that the woman who was looking at her reflection was a virgin, that she’d already been here fifteen years. You’re a virgin? I asked her. No wonder you look so young. She said, I’m not so young anymore. I’m old, very old. And hearing her say “old, very old” made me start to cry, because when you’re in withdrawal, you cry easily, sometimes for no reason at all. I felt a little embarrassed about my tears, but nobody paid any attention. Trying to cover my sense of discomfort, I rushed to ask, Why are you in here? She didn’t respond, but another patient told me that this woman had done something evil: she had killed all of her older sister’s children. My God! I exclaimed. But the woman appeared not to have heard us and went on as before, stroking her face in front of the mirror. Someone said, She thought that they were demons, so she killed them. But someone else said, She did it because her sister didn’t treat her very well.

  I took back my mirror. I spent the whole night thinking, wondering why some people went crazy, crazy enough to commit murder, and why they hadn’t been taken to the hospital and treated before things got out of hand. Lying under the moonlight, I felt extremely lucky. I wasn’t insane; I was just a gutless little mouse, or maybe, as my father had said, I was just a good girl who had lost her way.

  I got the same food as everyone else, a bunch of stuff I couldn’t even begin to choke down, but I was permitted to ask the doctors to help me out. They would pick up a few packaged foods in the little hospital shop for me. Every day, my nurse would boil up some things for me to eat, and I always tried to get her to have some too, but she never accepted except when the doctors said, Eat. She won’t eat until you do. Someone else told me, She killed her father-in-law, so none of her family has ever come to see her, and they won’t pay her hospital bills either. So aside from working as an aide, she also has to put on a pair of galoshes and work in the dining hall. It seemed to me that she enjoyed working. She looked happy as she went about her labors. Another patient snickered, Working is the only way she can get enough money to meet her expenses; she can’t even afford soap or toilet paper. She always takes a square of paper to the toilet with her, but the second she squats down, she hides the paper in her pocket.

  I saw a patient standing with her face to the wall, and I realized that it was the virgin patient. I went and stood beside her. She was looking at her feet, and she didn’t turn to look at me. Someone said, She’s being punished again because she’s crazy and because she keeps saying the chief of staff is her husband.

  One of the women was called into the office, and I heard the supervisor questioning her: You stole something from one of the rehab patients. What was it? After a while I heard her start to repeat, over and over, Pickles, apples, bananas, bananas, apples, pickles.

  My release date finally arrived, and after I had thanked everyone, I had my father give the doctors a hundred yuan. I said, Use this money to buy my nurse’s aide the things she needs, to thank her for helping me.

  The second time my father brought me to the clinic, I was bald, one of my eyes was messed up, and I was so thin it was disgusting. I barely recognized myself. So who would have thought that when I approached the big locked door to the ward, one of the women would shout my name and cry out, She’s back! She’s back! And this time she’s lost all of her hair.

  And once again my father told the doctors, My daughter really is a good girl; it’s just that she’s too willful. But we’re to blame for that, and we’re willing to pay the price. The doctor told me, We were all moved by what your father said. I want you to ponder what he said. Later I was sent for HIV and syphilis testing. Then the doctors gave me some medicine, and this time they didn’t use the same drugs they had the first time. They were going to try a different course of treatment. They said, This time we’re going to have to let you suffer a little; otherwise you’re not going to change.

  Every day I took a bunch of little yellow, pink, or white pills. These drugs kept me from sleeping, and they made me feel hot all over, and I paced back and forth in my room, sometimes talki
ng to myself nonstop, heavy-headed, dizzy, and staggering. One night, another patient slipped into my room. She said, If you want to get out sooner, don’t take any more of those yellow pills. By the time I’d raised my head, she was gone, but she’d given me a scare. After a good cry, I decided to stop taking those yellow pills. I said to the doctor, I don’t want to take the yellow ones.

  After asthma, nightmares, and excreting every kind of fluid, I began gradually to improve once again. This time I went to work with the others, and one of the patients taught me how to play cards. I started to miss my mother. I missed her cooking, missed everything about her. Every day, I sang the songs on the blackboard with all of the other patients. Except that I still couldn’t stand the food. Oil-free and boiled to a pulp, it reminded me of the food I’d been given in that prison in the Northwest when I was younger.

  Once a month we got to have cooked red meat, an event that was a high point for all of the patients. But I couldn’t eat it. Someone asked me, How come you don’t eat meat? How come? and my doctor overheard. My doctor was a Shanghainese woman, very beautiful, a fashionably dressed intellectual. She said, Why aren’t you eating this meat? I said, I feel sick to my stomach, nauseous. Really. She said, Who do you think you are? Today I want you to eat it. I said, Honestly, I don’t think I can force it down. She said, Do you want to get out early or not? I said, I do. Then eat it, she said. You’re no different from any of the other patients here, and don’t you forget it. I said, I’m not eating it. She said, Fine, I’ll have your father come down. We’ll see if you’ll eat it then. She watched me eat a piece of meat and then looked on as I began to throw up, a bit at a time, vomiting and crying. She said, You’re no different from anyone else, and don’t let me catch you wasting food again. Remember the money you gave your nurse’s aide the last time you were here? It was confiscated. You’re no better than anyone else, and what you did actually hurt her because now she can’t be a nurse’s aide anymore. We can’t be certain that she didn’t do something for you that she shouldn’t have. Be mindful of this.