by Lucy Tan
What did it mean to be an adult anyway? An adult was someone who took responsibility for her parents by sending money home. But not only that, it was someone who made her own decisions, who had come into her own self. Ziji. At home, the concept of “self” was not one she had really considered. But in the city, when a stranger’s eyes landed on her, she knew that to this person, she could be anyone—and the possibilities of it excited her. If she often felt lonely around strangers, she also sometimes thought that her “self”—that unformed possibility—might be the best company she’d ever had.
Sunny could no longer be made happy by the things that made her sister happy, like telling stories and playing dice games when the kids were down for a nap. Earning a salary did something to you—it spun your whole world into sharper focus. She had grown up feeling sorry for the men in her family who went away to cities to work. But now that she knew what it felt like to hold those notes in her hand, to add them up at the end of the week, she understood that these men had taken the best jobs for themselves. She saw how work, if you had a salaried position, could become an addiction. It had led her uncles to labor on sore shins and miss coming home for New Year’s to conserve cash. Working was a pleasure she couldn’t imagine giving up now that she’d had a taste of it. And like any addiction, the pleasure of it seemed always on the move, always one step ahead of her. Who could say which she liked better, earning the money or bringing it home to her family? At times, Sunny felt that the only moments she was truly happy were when she was on the train rushing toward either Shanghai or Hefei. Her happiness could exist only in motion, in the thought of what lay ahead.
Back in Sunny’s bedroom, the lights had already been turned off, and she used her cell phone to illuminate the few steps to her bottom bunk. Not that she had to bother—her roommates slept through everything. Their own phones chimed all night as they received messages from their friends. Occasionally, when these sounds woke Sunny, she liked to pretend they were coming from her sister’s phone—that they were both back home for a visit, and if she were only to roll over, she’d feel human warmth.
Here’s the calculation she had not done earlier on her phone, wanting to savor it by computing in her head: five thousand RMB meant three thousand extra a month; three thousand divided by two hundred RMB per train ticket came to fifteen round trips home. But if she were to become an ayi by trade, she would be working seven days a week. There would be no guarantee that she would have time for trips home.
And then there was the issue of Rose.
It was not something she could decide now. Sunny rolled over onto her stomach, which helped to quiet her mind. Before falling asleep, she always pictured the same scene from home. She was standing at the window of their house and could see the rape flowers leaning into the autumn air and the cornstalks reaching up into the sky. She could hear behind her, in the living room, the bright plastic footstools that cracked a little more each time a grandmother sat on one to get to toddler height. Domestic quarrels of aunts and uncles came from upper floors, and below them, there was the raucousness of ten people in front of the same TV set. Soon, this noise of home was enough to drown out all the other sounds in her head. Zhen Taitai’s offer was reduced to the size of a fly, nothing more than a tiny distraction dodging in and out of Sunny’s mind.
5
Lina had never minded being promised to a stranger, but her friends couldn’t understand it. Wake up, xiao jie, it’s 1985! Do you know how backward arranged marriage is? You don’t even know him. He could want sex every hour—did you hear about the guy Li Hua married? Well, if you did, you would rethink this plan.
It was true. She didn’t know Zhen Zhiwei, even though she had grown up an hour’s walk from his home. Lina had seen Wei only twice in her life. The first time was when she was seven and went with her father to the Zhens’ to drop off a set of water pails they had borrowed. She didn’t remember anything beyond the vague outline of a tan-skinned boy standing in the yard, whittling away at a tree branch. What she remembered more clearly was her father asking her about him on their way home. What did you think of him? She wasn’t sure how to respond. Somebody needs to give him a haircut, she finally said. Her father laughed. You’ll make a natural wife.
The second time she saw him was at the silk factory one afternoon when she was thirteen. Playing at the edge of the woods, she glimpsed Zhen Hong coming outside with his two sons. One of them was the younger brother, Qiang, sent over to their house every so often on an errand for his father. She couldn’t get a good look at the taller one. He’d turned from her as soon as she’d caught sight of him. Then he’d pulled Qiang’s arm and the two took off down the street. It wasn’t until the back of his head disappeared from view that Lina realized the other boy must have been Wei.
She would have liked to meet her future husband, but her mother, Jiajia, had forbidden it. Lina’s father had made the marriage agreement without her consent, and throughout Lina’s preadolescence the issue was a point of tension between the parents, surfacing whenever their own marriage wore thin. Jiajia accused her husband of being too reckless with their daughter’s future. She was opposed to limiting Lina’s marriage options at so young an age. But as Lina grew older, she sensed that an equal if not greater part of her mother’s concern was that she did not like the Zhens. The family was too liberal for her tastes. She didn’t trust them.
Jiajia’s father had once owned a successful business selling linens, but when the Three-Anti/Five-Anti Campaigns were instituted in the 1950s to punish the financially elite, the company had been taken away from him. The government labeled him a youpai—the worst kind of conservative there was—at a time when conservatism and capitalism were one and the same. Jiajia and her father burned all their Western books and records, packed two suitcases full of clothing, bade good-bye to Jiajia’s mother’s grave, and moved to their new government-assigned home. They’d lost everything, and now they would live like commoners in one dirty room that didn’t even have its own kitchen. Jiajia thought her father had gotten off easy in the grand scheme of things. He hadn’t been sent to a labor camp like some of his associates, hadn’t been beaten in the streets. But the youpai label still killed him in the end. The constant taunting from the neighbors and the Red Guard drove him to depression and eventual suicide.
When Jiajia married Fang Lijian, she’d done her best to put her family’s past behind her but found it wasn’t possible. Her father’s youpai label followed her to her new husband’s post as an associate professor at a small Suzhou university. One day, two years after Lijian had been hired, he was called into the department chair’s office, where two of his colleagues were already seated. In the interrogation that followed, they accused him of promoting conservative ideas in his classroom. “What kind of ideas?” Fang Lijian asked. He’d spent his life studying molecular structures. He wouldn’t know how to begin talking politics, not even to defend himself against these men. The university’s Communist Party representatives scheduled staff meetings where they encouraged colleagues to accuse one another of counterrevolutionary ideas. Better to wrongly accuse someone than to risk the spread of right-wing ideology, especially when it came to dealing with academics, whose positions afforded them intellectual power. Fang Lijian sat through weeks of meetings until it was agreed that his colleagues lacked the evidence to convict him. Instead of being jailed, he was sent to the countryside to be reeducated at a cadre school.
And so Jiajia had a second man in her life taken away from her. She spent the time her husband was gone raising her daughter alone and studying his letters for signs of mental collapse. There were rumors of brainwashing and psychic bullying in camps like the one to which Fang Lijian had been sent. Who knew what else went on in such remote places, far from the public eye? Who knew how long it would be before he was released? She waited and waited. But finally, after the longest year of her life, her husband came back, and to her relief, he was mentally sound. He’d changed, of course. Among other things, h
e’d made a friend—a Communist Party friend—by the name of Zhen Hong.
At first glance, Zhen Hong was different from Fang Lijian in every way two men could be different. Whereas Fang Lijian was slight and serious, Zhen Hong was built for fieldwork. He had strong, sturdy legs, a commanding voice, and a gregariousness that made him loved by all who knew him. Unlike Lina’s father, Zhen Hong hadn’t been sent down by the government as punishment for right-wing leanings. He was an unofficial director of the commune, a local farmer who had been identified by the CCP as someone with a knack for managing people. The two men had become close over the months, and when Fang Lijian finished his countryside stint, they both applied to work in Suzhou. A silk factory in their village was hiring, and the two were reassigned to work alongside each other.
If it had just been a typical friendship, Jiajia might have eventually found a way to overlook her political prejudices. But when she discovered that Fang Lijian had promised their child to Zhen Hong’s family, any chance of her accepting the Zhens into their lives was gone.
“They’re common,” Jiajia once said in the heat of an argument. “We send them meat every winter. Isn’t that payment enough for your debt? We have to send them our own flesh and blood too?”
“Zhen Hong is as good as my brother,” Lijian countered. “And as much as you don’t want to admit it, we are postrevolution. Who isn’t common now?”
“Postrevolution, shi ba? You’re the only liberal I know who goes around arranging marriages.”
Every once in a while, Jiajia would bring up the topic of a “debt,” and Lijian’s mood would darken in a way that was unnatural to his temperament. The few times Lina had asked to hear more, both her parents became close-lipped. For Jiajia, the topic seemed to be something she brought up only for provocation’s sake; for Lina’s father, it seemed to be a point of shame. Though they would stop arguing when pressed for information, the tension between them took days to completely melt away.
It was never worth prolonging these moments of discomfort, so Lina stopped asking and began piecing together what information she could. From the bits her mother had let slip during their conversations alone, it was clear that her father and Zhen Hong’s friendship wasn’t the only basis for the arranged marriage. Jiajia told Lina that when she was a baby, life had been hard. Her father had been sent to a labor camp, and for a couple years, their future as a family was uncertain. It was around this time that Zhen Hong had done her father a service that pulled them out of a difficult situation. Although, if you asked her, there was such a thing as too much gratitude for a kind deed done. Sometimes you had to take kind deeds for what they were—acts of service that carried no obligation. True kindness demanded no repayment, and in fact the idea of repayment diminished the goodwill in such a gesture. Didn’t Lina agree?
Jiajia often revealed more than she realized when preparing dinner, the rhythm of the knife work lulling her into a meditative state suited to honesty. Lina, sitting nearby, shelling peas at seven years old, at twelve, at seventeen, didn’t have an answer for her, but she did have the impressionability to remember the things her mother said, word for word. She knew that her mother felt guilty for her own bourgeois pedigree and blamed herself for her husband’s time at a labor camp. Zhen Hong, however, had the right kind of background. He came from a long line of farmers and had always had pull with the government officials. After the Cultural Revolution ended, he even joined the Communist Party. It was likely that at some point during their friendship, Zhen Hong had put in a good word for her father. He might even have been the reason Fang Lijian was allowed to come home after just one year of toiling in the fields. Whatever kindness Zhen Hong had done for Fang Lijian was significant enough to turn Fang’s cheeks red every time Jiajia brought it up. Lina’s heart went out to her father. She knew, even if her mother didn’t, that he would never sacrifice her happiness just to repay some debt. But if marrying Wei had the added benefit of absolving Fang Lijian of some shame from his past, that was even more reason for her to do it.
The Zhens seemed to sense Jiajia’s condescension and, strangely enough, to accept it. Occasionally, they sent the younger brother over with coal or a bag of fruit, meant as a modest gift. When he showed up at the front door, Lina’s mother let him inside without a word. Qiang would set the bag down on the kitchen floor and peer around the room just long enough for Jiajia to grow impatient. Then he would leave through the side door. The entire interaction took less than thirty seconds. Out of respect for Jiajia, the Zhens never sent the betrothed Zhen brother over with packages, and they themselves never stopped by the Fangs’ home. But sometimes, if Lina was by herself when she visited the silk factory where her father worked, Zhen Hong would call out to her. Years of sedentary labor had rounded out his shoulders, softened him into a balding, bear-shaped man with crescent eyes. When she came toward him, he’d reach into his pocket and pull out a few peanuts to offer her, still warm from being close to his body.
Lina liked the thought of having Zhen Hong as a father-in-law, and she liked having the security of a future designed just for her. Since her father had begun telling her about Wei when she was a little girl, the idea of him as her husband had grown like the sapling planted outside their home the year she was born. Glimpsed every time she went in and out of the house, it became essential to her concept of self. “Love,” her father had once told her, “is not some mysterious force that comes from nowhere. It requires time and commitment, both of which are in your control. See that tree over there? All it needs is light and water. Don’t you know the simplest things can be the most magical? Remember: Time and commitment. If you have these two things, you can have any manner of love.”
Fang Lijian’s perspective on love was different from any she’d heard before. Lina’s friends had watched too many American movies and to them, love was a classic car that would come roaring in from nowhere when the time was right, pick you up, and peel away. For all their warnings to her about relinquishing control by marrying a man she didn’t know, they seemed to crave the kind of love that made you lose control. They wanted to “fall” in love—that was the American way—whereas the idea of falling anywhere, with anyone, had never once appealed to Lina.
Adults, however, treated marriage as a rite of passage or a way to increase a family’s social standing. The men with whom her father played cards were alternately bored and exasperated by their wives. They referred to them as “old hens” and complained about the shrillness of their voices and their loosening skin. But Lina’s father was different. When Fang Lijian spoke to Jiajia, it was with respect that bordered on deference. And while Jiajia could be sharp with him at times, her love and respect for Fang Lijian were evident in the way she repeated his thoughts to the other mothers in the neighborhood when he was not around. Lijian thinks we’ll have more rain this season. Lijian thinks we’ll come back from the famine in a couple years, not because of the harvest but because of the production in the cities. Lijian’s going to town tomorrow to ask around—we’ll see what he thinks. Lina wanted the marital relationship her parents had, and she believed that her father knew best how to attain it.
“How do you know Zhen Zhiwei is the one for me, Baba?” Lina asked him once. It was not that she did not trust his judgment; it was that she was hoping he would admit to having powers of divination. She was fascinated by the idea of fate, that every moment in your life could be planned for you, was just awaiting your arrival.
Jiajia snorted when she heard this. “Indeed. How, Baba?”
Fang Lijian’s mouth hardened, but he did not otherwise acknowledge his wife. Instead, he turned toward Lina at the table and placed both of his hands on her knees. “Zhen Zhiwei is a bright boy with a good soul,” he said. “And the Zhens are a warmhearted family who have raised him well.”
While he did not answer Lina’s question, she was appeased by his certainty. Fang Lijian rarely insisted on anything that went against Jiajia’s wishes, and his stubbornness in this one respec
t meant that he was sure of the best plan for Lina’s future. In her mind, she filled in the details of the rest of her life. She’d marry Wei, move in with the Zhens, and walk across the village to see her parents every day. She’d have many children for her parents to play with to make up for her being an only child.
As the Zhen brothers grew up, they began to develop reputations in the community. Wei was smart, dutiful, and a little bit proud; Qiang was wily, charismatic, and wild. Each was a leader in his own right—Wei of a group of boys who took academics seriously but who were not above skipping school when it was clear that the instructor could not teach them anything new; Qiang of a group of boys who rarely went to school and spent most of their days climbing trees outside the classroom and dropping well-aimed shoes onto the heads of the students beneath them. Every now and then, Lina met girls who went to school with the Zhen brothers, and when she mentioned her arranged marriage, they said, Zhen Zhiwei? Not bad, you lucky thing. And she watched their eyes wander away from her to picture him in some light she hadn’t yet seen.
When she thought of Wei, she could not come up with anything physically descriptive. She couldn’t imagine the way he walked or laughed. But she associated the idea of him with a distinct sense of comfort she’d formed on the long, bored days outside the silk factory, staring at the water. The view from that bank had led her to picture the span of her life stretched out ahead of her, steady as the sea. And while this wasn’t an accurate memory of Wei, it was maybe the most accurate memory of who she was as a thirteen-year-old: a girl so sure of her prospects that she wanted them to happen slowly. She wanted to savor it all, piece by piece.