by Ma Jian
He shuffled back into the kitchen, humiliated and depressed. The guests roared with laughter. He hung his head low and arranged a few cabbage leaves around a plate of shredded tofu. He knew that if he had walked off towards the toilet instead of the kitchen, he would have made a more honourable exit, and exposed himself to less abuse from his wife once the guests had left.
He soon gave up all hope for a happy future and began to seek refuge in his daydreams. Whenever his wife rebuked him, he escaped into his fantasy world. After she entered the dictionary, it seemed to him that she had grown taller by half a head.
When she reached her forties, the female novelist’s face, which had depended on youth for its appeal, suddenly took on the long gourd-like shape of her father’s. Looking at it straight on, one could see through the make-up that the skin covering the more frequently-used facial muscles was now loose and wrinkled. But her body was still firm – a result of the confident posture she had adopted after being awarded Party membership at the age of eighteen. Her heavy bones and broad shoulders were clearly inherited from her military father.
Her temper grew worse with age. Whenever Old Hep did something to annoy her, she would twist his arm behind his back, flay her hand in the air like a kung-fu actress and kick him in the shins. His ignorance of cultural matters became the focus of her anger, and she was horrified when he finally admitted to being baffled by the new genre of ‘Misty Poetry’. At the dinner table, he would hear his wife and her young guests discuss ‘structuralism’, ‘low-flying aircraft narrative’ and ‘sickroom mentality’, terms he couldn’t find in the dictionary. Before he discovered that he was capable of taking mistresses, all he could do was listen respectfully and stare at his wife as she held forth.
When the beer and foreign nicotine reached her bloodstream, her speech and facial expressions became more animated. Feeling crushed by the vibrant tone of her voice, he would often seek comfort from a daydream. He could divide his dreams into separate parts like a string of sausages, cutting off in between one scene and the next to fetch a plate of radishes from the kitchen or to pour out more tea for the guests. As long as his wife didn’t shout for his attention, his dream could continue episode after episode.
As his status in the home sank lower and lower, he realised that only in the kitchen could he feel free and act as he pleased. He could hurl bottles of rice vinegar on the floor without having to ask for their permission; he could slam his cleaver onto the chopping board whether there was meat lying on it or not. He could even kill things on this board. Transforming living creatures into dead creatures became his favourite pastime. When he gazed down at a chicken he had just beheaded struggling feebly in his hands, the troubles that plagued him in the outside world vanished from his mind. The instant the living animal became a dead corpse, he would scream a torrent of obscenities. One day, he pressed a live carp onto his board, thrashed his cleaver down and shouted ‘Stinking hag!’ as the head fell onto the cement floor.
Before he knew he was capable of taking mistresses, the only way he could escape his wife’s control was to sink into a daydream. When he lay down in bed beside her, giving her one of the face massages outlined in her copy of A Learner’s Guide to Cosmetic Massage, he would calm his mind with a dream about purple dustbins. It was a dream he indulged in quite regularly, and that seemed to alter slightly each time he had it. To find the dustbin, he had to travel a hundred metres in space-time, turn four corners, skirt a wall caked in flaking white ash, weave down an alley dotted with heaps of charcoal briquettes, pass a beer stall, a children’s bookstore, two private restaurants, a shop selling burial clothes (a shiver always ran down his spine when he saw the mural showing dead corpses rising to heaven in a swoon), until he at last reached the purple dustbins at the back of the bicycle parking lot. Sometimes he would see his father pop out from one of the bins, remove his glasses, and peer at him with a sneaky look in his eyes. He knew that in thirty years’ time, he would look identical to this man, only without the glasses.
When he had this dream several years later, the dustbin ended up boarding a plane. He was standing on a bus at the time, having spent an afternoon of passion with his young mistress in a ruined factory by the sea. The bus was jolting from side to side. While his body was still weak from the ejaculation and his heart still beating fast, he pulled the purple dustbin out of the plane and dragged it down into the ocean. The dustbin then became a mass of white manuscript paper drifting through his head. ‘Like birds in flight,’ he murmured as he returned to his senses.
(‘I like being around unhappy people,’ the blood donor says.
The writer remembers that the man sitting beside him was once famed for his ability to pass wind. In the re-education camp, he once farted thirty-six times in one day. The writer also recalls how his friend bought a handful of lice off a villager for five yuan, then hid them under the quilt of Commander Li to punish him for snoring so loudly in his sleep.
He’s capable of anything, the writer thinks to himself. But he’s never had any success with women. He doesn’t know how to treat them. All our old friends from the camp are married with children now, but he’s still single. Surely he must get lonely! The writer’s mind returns to the female novelist. During the Cultural Revolution, she was sent to a camp only eight kilometres away from theirs. She fell in love with Huang Gang there. He was a handsome young activist, the son of an ambassador, apparently. She and Huang Gang were the first couple in the area brave enough to live together without getting married. When they heard that the camp’s leaders were about to send the militia to arrest them on charges of illegal cohabitation, she went directly to the headquarters and threatened to kill herself if any of them laid their hands on her. There was a Communist Party membership badge with a picture of Chairman Mao pinned to her lapel at the time, so no one in the camp dared take the matter any further.
In her mind, Huang Gang was a modern-day Marx, and she was his Jenny, his political aid and lover. Had Huang Gang not been committed to a mental hospital a few years later, perhaps they would have married eventually, and she wouldn’t have ended up with the wretched editor. The only purpose the editor served her now was to act as a contrast to her own success. What she longed for, though, was a man of steel, a hero or Jesus figure, so that she could take on the role of a protective tigress, or of a spoilt, attention-seeking child. When the Marx she was infatuated with was toppled from his position by a rival clique, she immediately fell from grace. With no man in her life to order her about, she became embittered and arrogant.
Then she met the editor and fell in love. But soon after she married him, she discovered, to her dismay, that he was a weak and feeble character, and she longed all the more for a man who could strike her with a whip, then gently wipe away her tears. Her drive to find a new man propelled her out of the flat and into the arms of her admirers. She looked for things in other men that the editor couldn’t give her. One night, after one too many drinks, she visited the professional writer’s flat with a look of despair in her eyes. The writer understood that, having been raised by a strict Communist cadre, she was ill equipped to deal with the torments of love. He knew that despite her flamboyant exterior, her heart was empty.
‘We’re beyond salvation. There’s nothing any of us can do to help,’ the writer mumbles to himself in the dark.
‘I like to be with unhappy people,’ the blood donor repeats.
‘No one in this world is truly happy.’ The writer is still thinking about the female novelist and the editor.)
When winter was setting in, Old Hep would start dreaming about apples. He would burrow through the sweet juicy fruit like a worm, gorging himself on the ripe flesh, carving out paths in all directions, then smearing his excreta onto the walls with the tip of his tail, leaving dark brown tunnels behind. All he wanted was to eat, then lie down quietly to digest. Nobody could interfere with him inside the fruit, and since apples are meant to be eaten, they raised no objections either. He moved in wide
circles around the core, occasionally breaking through the peel. For some reason, he was convinced that the capital lay at the core, and he was afraid to approach it. He suspected that Chairman Mao and the senior cadres of the Central Committee lived there. As long as he kept clear of the core, he felt free to eat and wander at his will. In the world of the juicy apple, he at last found some peace and contentment.
‘Is this not Communism?’ he often chuckled to himself, as he lay in bed next to his wife who was unaware of the dream he was having. His dreams were not always so enjoyable, though. Every year on National Day, he would dream he was climbing a silk-cotton tree that was circled by loaves of golden bread. He knew that if he didn’t control himself, he would end up scaling the trunk for ever. One night, as he reached for the highest branch, his wife shouted, ‘Get off me, you bastard!’ He woke to find himself clutching her hair. He quickly smoothed it back in place and fell asleep again, although he was too afraid to continue his dream.
It wasn’t until he had served eleven years as editor that Old Hep discovered the true worth of his position. By the end of the summer, he was neglecting his professional duties and focusing all his attention on finding women. Before his visit to a Beijing literary conference held by the Ministry of Culture that spring, he could never have contemplated the possibility that he might one day take a mistress. But at the conference, he met a poetess from Shijiazhuang who, just like his wife, smoked cigarettes and painted her nails red, and was even a Party member too. She was shorter than his wife, however, and had finer bones. During the official speeches, he kept glancing in her direction to check the expression on her face. On the first night, when he was walking along the hotel corridor on his way to the men’s bathroom, the poetess stuck her head around her door and called out to him. Her lights were on, but when he stepped inside her room, she switched them off and wrapped her arms around him. Her tender kisses soothed his nerves, and in less than a minute, his legs stopped shaking.
Two years later, he realised that ever since that night, he had tried to find in other women the sour, sooty smell that infused her hair and the inside of her cotton knickers. That night in Beijing, he learned that he too was capable of committing sinful acts. He said to himself, If a woman is willing to give her body to me, who am I to turn her down?
The following morning, the delegates convened in the conference room and continued their analysis of articles on the political rectification of cultural and artistic troupes. As Old Hep sat in his seat, he felt himself grow bigger and taller. He was wallowing in the joy of entering the sweet apple of Communism. His voice became fluid and natural. As he rose to deliver his speech, the poetess’s naked bottom flashed through his mind. He slowly removed the flowery knickers. Two plump, white buttocks …
‘There are no words to express the greatness of Chairman Mao’s thoughts on literature and art,’ he summed up at the end of his speech. ‘They are simply amazing!’
He returned home a different person. He was now a man of courage, a man who could possess other women.
Before the summer was over, he asked a girl from the local textile factory who was drawing some illustrations for his magazine whether she would like to go out on a date with him, and she accepted. So he took her to the woods behind Red Scarf Park. They sat on a bench and she sketched the golden sunset reflected on the surface of the lake. The water was calm and the air was filled with buzzing insects. The editor, who was now in his late forties, stood behind the girl and breathlessly stared at her delicate ear, and the small hand that was continually hooking a lock of hair behind it. He knew that every young woman in town dreamed of finding a permanent job in his editorial department, and that they regarded him as a successful and influential man. The textile worker had looked deeply flattered when he asked her out on this date. Indeed, he was everything she was looking for in a man. Fired with confidence, he rested his hand on the girl’s shoulder and commented on the branches she was drawing. A blush rose to the girl’s cheeks. Noticing the pencil start to shake in her hand, he moved in closer and wrapped his other arm around her. His balance was not good though, and as he leaned forward, his foot slipped, and he toppled awkwardly to the ground, bringing the girl down with him. He edged over, and without a word, climbed on top of her. She kept her eyes closed throughout, except at the moment of deepest pain, when she opened them briefly and looked into the sky, and saw the clouds turn from red to purple.
Following that successful tryst, he invited her to his office after work on several occasions, hoping to have his way with her again. She accepted every time, and before long became his first official mistress. The joy of possessing a woman, of possessing a virgin, gave him a new lease of life.
‘Before you, I had only ever made love to my wife,’ he told her, as he lay flat across her body.
‘And before I met you, I was a virgin,’ she replied, looking up with a smile.
‘You have turned my life around,’ the editor said, stroking her smooth forehead. ‘I don’t think of myself as middle-aged in the least. I’m only thirty-one years older than you, after all.’
The textile worker boosted the editor’s confidence, and when this confidence spread to his professional life, women began to land on his desk like the manuscripts he received every day. As long as he agreed to publish their works, these women were ready to lay themselves down below his wrinkled body. All he had to do was choose his prey and drop a few subtle hints. He seldom had time to daydream, he was too busy dealing with the growing list of women with whom he was conducting illicit affairs. His secret happiness lent his expression an air of maturity. Nobody knew that when he was chairing the political education meetings at work, or doing the washing-up at home, he was, in his mind, climbing onto a woman, thrusting her legs in the air and subjugating her to his will.
He began to notice the differing ways women behaved during their moments of greatest pleasure. The textile worker paled in comparison with the women who succeeded her. At the peak of her excitement, all she did was let out a soft croak. She never groaned or moaned, or moved her legs about like the more mature women. One woman who stuck most in his mind was a short-story writer from Sichuan. He could never forget the sight of her long dancer’s legs coiled around his elderly body. Unfortunately, once he had published her work, she dropped him like a brick. She proved to be, however, the most memorable woman of all the twenty-one he slept with. In his treasured pink notebook he labelled ‘Compendium of Beauties’, he made a careful record of her birthday, her shoe size and address.
At home, Old Hep became more relaxed, and started to pay more attention to his wife, who had recently brought out her sixth book. (When the professional writer remembers the story of ‘Marx’ and ‘Jenny’ in the novel that made her famous, he is overcome with nausea. Her thinly-veiled autobiographies reek of the fetid regurgitations of her past.) The pockets of Old Hep’s suit were filled with name cards emblazoned with his professional titles of ‘editor-in-chief and ‘Director of the Writers’ Association’. Whenever he met someone for the first time, he would ceremoniously present a card to them with a serious, yet approachable, look on his face. His small stocky build gave people the impression that he was a reliable, hardworking man. After all these years of waiting, he had at last boarded the express train of the Open Door Policy.
After he published the first novel of a local young writer he had discovered (a book the critics later declared to be China’s most avant-garde work of fiction), he gained the respect and admiration of the town’s young literati. They praised his astute eye for talent, and delivered urgent requests to make his acquaintance. To prepare himself for his meetings with them, Old Hep spent many hours trying to learn the phraseology and tone of voice that his wife employed during her literary discussions. Soon he too was able to pepper his speech with terms like ‘the collective subconscious’, ‘twilight mentality’, ‘the absurd’ and ‘pseudo-realism’.
For a while, the female novelist felt left out, and sank into a mild
depression. She seemed to have lost the upper hand. When they received visits from women writers who were just like she was twenty years before, she appeared sallow and lacklustre in comparison. Although the new generation of women painted their nails the same shade as hers, they chose to wear not red, but mauve or fluorescent pink lipstick. The fact that she had dared to wear tight jeans a decade before, and had even been prepared to write a self-criticism about it, meant very little to these young women who now preferred to dress in baggy jeans and imported trainers. The most forward-thinking women had already visited Shenzhen and returned with tight, wiry perms. When Old Hep’s wife started sounding off about Hemingway’s The Old Man and the Sea, the young women drifted to the corner of the room to discuss Heidegger and Robbe-Grillet. Her favourite topic of conversation – her memories of the Cultural Revolution and life in the re-education camp – meant nothing to them. They treated her with the detached indifference with which they would treat anyone else from their parents’ generation.
(‘We’re finished,’ she told the professional writer when she visited his room one night, half drunk. ‘This generation knows nothing about suffering, or isolation. Their hearts are numb.’
‘And what good does isolation bring?’ the writer asked.
‘They just don’t take life seriously.’
‘Neither did you, at their age.’
‘Writing demands complete sacrifice. You must pour your soul into the work. Every word has to be paid for in sweat and blood.’