by Lucy Tan
Rose dropped Sunny’s hands. Then she screwed the lid on her thermos and pulled the plastic bag back up around it. Even though Sunny suspected that Rose had already come to terms with the potential loss of her job, there was something indecent about the way she packed her lunch—like someone getting dressed after failing to seduce. Sunny heard her leave but did not turn. She stayed by the river for another half an hour, finishing her lunch and watching the ferries go by.
8
Three weeks had passed; the exams were over. Soon, the students at Suzhou No. 5 High School would find out where they were going to university, or if they were going to university at all. Lina and her friends sat around the kitchen listening to American music on the shortwave radio. Chixi had just returned from Shanghai, and she taught everyone how to dance disco. They cut slits in their pants legs, stole fabric from their mothers’ scrap piles, and sewed flares into the bottoms of the denim. They were ready for disco dances, for college, ready to meet their husbands and start imagining homes of their own. They would have television sets, all of them. They would have tasseled lampshades and jewelry fit for film stars. And they would never forget their parents! Never! They would bring home luxuries from the city, intricate doilies to drape over the side tables.
It was possible that Qiang had come during those three weeks. He might have seen the shadows of the dancing girls and turned back. Not that Lina had been looking for him. She thought he was funny and couldn’t help pitying him a little. He had sat there staring so intently at her that she thought his eyes might pop out of their sockets. Before they started talking on the steps, he’d been so still and silent—as if scared—and that was how she knew he liked her.
She enjoyed having an admirer. Other boys had admired her before, but the fact that Qiang was the brother of the boy who would eventually become her husband made the attention feel different. She had often imagined Wei observing her as she grew into the ideal woman. When, for example, she convinced the neighbor boys to spend an afternoon cooking Lao Cong’s dinner and stringing his laundry the week his daughter-in-law was sick or when her teachers sometimes stopped her mother at the market to say a few words of praise about Lina, the imaginary Wei was an audience to these achievements.
When she thought of Qiang, Lina wanted to show off too, but in a different way. She wanted him to watch her swim from one end of the creek to the other, as no other girls could do. She wanted him to see the way Chixi had taught her to dance, hips swinging and legs ending in kicks. She wanted him to know that she could get in trouble too. Because she had heard from friends who knew Qiang that he was not merely a troublemaker who skipped class. He was a permanent idler, or worse. Heard he’s dumped his friends. He’s part of a gang of older guys now. Who knows where he goes during the day.
One afternoon, Lina’s mother sent her off to the factory with her father’s lunch. Lina had barely reached the main road when she heard her name being called. Qiang was coming toward her, his gait more wolf-like than ever.
“Zhen Zhiqiang,” she greeted him. “All the other rising seniors are studying for the Gaokao already. What are you up to?”
“I’m sure you’ve heard I dropped out,” he said darkly. Lina blushed. She had heard, but she’d expected him to evade the question.
“Are you working, then?”
“I work at the factory sometimes, delivering textiles. I drive them all the way to the city and once in a while to Shanghai. Have you been to Shanghai?”
She shook her head.
“Oh, you should see it. Everyone’s dressed nice.”
“Do they wear our silk?”
“The clothing is nicer than what we get around here. You should see Shanghai if you get a chance.” He took a cigarette out of his pocket and lit it.
“I have to go now,” she said.
“Where?”
“To the factory. Ba forgot his lunch.”
“I’ll walk with you,” he said, and before she could answer, he started off down the street. She stood where she was for a moment, and when he sensed she was not behind him, he stopped. Glanced down at his cigarette. He dropped to a crouch, extinguished the cigarette, returned it to his pocket, and then turned his face up at Lina as if to say, Now are you coming?
As they walked, he told her about what it was like inside the upper floors of the factory, where the silkworms were kept on narrow shelves. “Trays and trays of them, with little black bodies that then slowly turn to white,” he said. “And they’re eating all the time. You can hear them just munching when you walk into that room.”
“I don’t believe you,” she said.
“I guess they don’t teach you everything in school.”
The road led to a lake on their right and the factory on a hill to their left. Years ago, a few of the factory workers had taken it upon themselves to pave the entrance with stones. The project had been attempted rather halfheartedly and then abandoned, making the climb more difficult than it had been before. The steps were winding, and a few of the stones wobbled beneath their weight. But Lina and Qiang both ascended with a practiced dash; they’d each taken this route so many times that neither needed to think about which stones to avoid. When they reached the top, Qiang hung back.
“I’ll come meet you when you’re done,” he said, squinting against the wind. “I want to show you something.”
“Hao ba,” Lina agreed and turned to enter the building.
The silk factory had a large, central room on the ground floor where silk was spun into reels. With high ceilings and narrow, paneless windows, the central room was solemn and templelike. Its walls were covered in peeling green paint, but the space was clean, cool even at the height of summer. Workers stood in rows facing the machines, whose familiar hum Lina could hear before the room came into view. Time seemed marked by the clicking of the spinning reels. The men and women standing before their trays were deep in concentration, doing their best to keep up with the silkworm cocoons that shot along the belt every few minutes. At the doorway, a man stopped Lina and asked who she wanted to see. She gave her father’s name.
“Fang Lijian!”
From their ranks, one man broke free and hurried over. Although Fang Lijian had been a silk spinner most of Lina’s life, Lina still thought of him the way her mother did. He was a university professor displaced during the Cultural Revolution, a man unsuited and overqualified for his current work. Silk spinning had made Fang Lijian more sure-handed, but he still retained the distant, unsteady gaze of an academic. When he reached Lina, he returned her smile, took the lunch box from her, and nodded his thanks to the guard. Within seconds, he was back at his station. He’d have to increase his speed to keep up with the others before the belt moved again.
On this summer afternoon after her exams, Lina was in less of a hurry than her father. She watched the graceful movements of his hands swirling in water, picking up a cocoon, and feeling for the end of its silk thread. At night, when he came home and held his hands against her face, his skin would feel as dry as a walnut. But now, as he held the cocoon up to his eyes, his fingers glimmered with moisture and moved with practiced deftness. Lina raised her face to the slight breeze coming from above. The overhead fans swirled slowly, as if powered by the mood of the room. For the first time, she thought about the fact that she would be away at school for four years and that soon, home—and the village, and the factory—would be places she could access only through memory. She let out the breath she didn’t know she’d been holding. Then she turned from the doorway and made her way back down the corridor.
“Lina. Over here.”
Lina stopped and looked around at the concrete walls, darker here in the unlit corridor. To her left was a steep stairwell, and Qiang was crouched on one of its steps just higher than her head. He motioned for her to follow. Wordlessly, she mounted the first stair, but as soon as she did, he disappeared to the second floor. She listened to his footsteps and followed them. Higher and higher they went, Lina just barely able t
o keep up with Qiang’s light bounding.
Finally, after what must have been more than ten floors, he stopped. Lina came upon him suddenly—a hard bundle of flesh that almost sent her bouncing backward—and took a moment to get her bearings. Her vision was pulsing from the effort of the climb. When it cleared, there was only darkness. This landing didn’t have a window like the others. She couldn’t see where Qiang was, though she knew he was near, and suddenly she felt scared of their proximity and the fact that they were alone. Qiang might be her future brother-in-law, but he was still a teenage boy who had dropped out of school. He was still a boy who was rumored to spend his days behind closed doors, in dark places like this one.
“I’m over here,” he called, and only then did she realize that he wasn’t standing next to her anymore.
Suddenly, light swept into the hall; a door had been opened to her left. Qiang’s silhouette moving back and forth made the sun rays dance, and Lina had to hold a hand up to shield her eyes.
“Hurry up,” he said. “They feed every hour and a half. I don’t know when the workers will get back.”
Lina took a breath and walked toward him. Inside the room, it was humid and bright. The sun made it hotter here than it had been in the hallway. Bamboo shelves rose from floor to ceiling, extending almost the entire length of the room. Each shelf space was so narrow—just horizontal slivers of darkness wedged between the latticework side panels—that it was difficult to see what they contained. Qiang walked over to the closest shelf and drew out a large woven tray.
Inside were hundreds of silkworms wriggling on a bed of green leaves. They ranged in size. Some were tiny black specks, some were larger and gray, some so translucent that their bodies appeared to have been tinted green from the leaves. Qiang carried the entire tray out into the aisle and set it on the floor. The two of them got down on their knees to look.
“I told you you could hear them eating,” he whispered.
“I don’t hear anything.” She bent her head to get closer.
“You don’t have to do that. It’s coming from the entire room. Listen.”
That’s when Lina realized that what she had mistaken for the sound of a generator was really hundreds of thousands of silkworms nibbling on mulberry leaves.
“Tian a…you really can hear it!”
Qiang grinned. He picked up one of the larger silkworms and held it to eye level. Then he handed a mulberry leaf to Lina.
She scooted closer to where he was kneeling. Peering at the insect, she couldn’t tell which end of the silkworm was its head, but soon a little brown mouth showed itself. She held the mulberry leaf up to it and the silkworm ate from one side to the other, as far as it could reach. Then it came back around to eat in the opposite direction. Soon, a quarter of the leaf was gone and its bottom edge scalloped with bites.
“It doesn’t stop!” Lina said. “Where does all the food go?”
“Where do you think it goes?” Qiang turned the silkworm over in his hand and pointed to its belly, where a dark line showed underneath the flesh, fading as it disappeared into the midsection.
“It already went a little on my hand. Look, there it goes again.” The silkworm hung from the edge of Qiang’s palm, its body curling and uncurling. Slowly, a drop of liquid ballooned from its rear end. Qiang set the silkworm back down into the tray, where it paused and raised its upper body in search of the mulberry leaf that had been hovering above its head just a moment before. Finding it gone, it settled down and began searching for a new leaf.
The tray was littered with worms working delicate holes into the greenery. “See those little black spots along the body?” said Qiang. “Those are their nostrils.”
Lina laughed. “What do you mean, nostrils?”
“They breathe through them.”
“Qie! Those aren’t nostrils. You have to have a nose to have nostrils—”
Qiang suddenly turned his head in a way that made Lina stop talking. In one quick move, he lifted the tray and slid it back into the shelf. Voices were coming from the opposite end of the room.
“Let’s go,” he whispered.
Back in the corridor, Qiang pulled the door shut behind him. They walked toward the half-lit staircase and descended the steps. This time, Lina counted each landing they reached; there were seven floors in all. When they neared the bottom, Qiang’s movements slowed and quieted, and Lina followed his lead. They walked out of the building without seeing anyone.
That night, Lina could barely sleep. If she listened hard enough, she thought she could hear the silkworms eating and, outside her window, Qiang’s footsteps moving through the trees. She pictured the silk-spinning room, the fans making their lazy revolutions. She never would have guessed that silkworms lived in the floors above that ceiling! The factory was a place she thought she knew intimately, but really, she had known only that one room where her father worked. How had she never wondered about the rest of it? What else was she missing out on, what forbidden corridors and hidden rooms existed in the places she knew so well?
Now that the entrance exam was over and school was out, her time was her own again. She could explore her hometown as she never had before, and Qiang would be her guide. She’d have to be careful about it, of course. She was sure her parents would disapprove of her spending time with him. But they were gone to work during the day, and there were so many hours to fill before they came home.
Lina looked for Qiang the next day and the day after, but he didn’t come by her house. A week passed before they met again. Lina was outside hanging the wash when she noticed him coming down the road. He had that same slow prowl that made it seem as if he were sneaking up on her.
“Hi,” she called to him when it was clear he was headed for her house. “What are you doing?”
“I’m making sure you’re not getting into trouble,” he said, smiling. There was no mistaking it: he was flirting.
“Look who’s talking,” Lina muttered and went inside, thinking that ignoring him would teach him a lesson. He couldn’t talk to her like that. She wasn’t a loose girl or one of the miscreant wanderers that he hung out with during the day. And she wasn’t somebody who was just waiting for him to come by her house either. In fact, she would say to him if asked, the only reason I’m at home this morning is that Ma had business to attend to this weekend and I’ve been left in charge of the chores.
She continued on with her work—the laundry, the cleaning, and then the washing of vegetables so that they would be ready to cook when her mother came home. Through it all, Qiang circled the front and backyard. Finally, Lina gave up ignoring him and went outside to where he was sitting at the edge of the road.
In front of him was a stack of playing cards that he shuffled and separated into piles. She stood over him and waited until he looked up.
“Don’t you have any friends?” she asked.
The second Lina said it, she worried that Qiang would think she was flirting back—but instead, he looked very serious.
“My friends are older. They’re all working.”
What kind of work? Lina wanted to ask but didn’t. If he admitted to being associated with a gang, as her friends said he was, she would have to stop talking to him—and she didn’t want to stop talking to him.
“Okay, so why don’t you work? Aren’t you supposed to be delivering materials for the silk factory?”
He motioned to the cards in front of him. “This is me working. I’m practicing. Come here. I’ll teach you how to play.”
Lina sat down beneath the phoenix tree and watched him split two decks into six stacks, two rows of three.
“These,” he said, pointing to two of the stacks in front of her, “and this one,” he added, pointing to one of the stacks in front of him, “are yours. The others are mine. The rules are the same as Zheng Shang You, except we go in a circle and control three hands at once. You know how to play Zheng Shang You, right?” She nodded. “Okay, we’ll look at our cards first and then you start with
the stack to your right.”
Lina picked up each hand and organized them by suit. She played her first card, then waited for Qiang, who took his time. He held one fist to his mouth in concentration. Finally, he set all three hands facedown in their starting positions, fanned ever so slightly apart. Whenever it was his turn, he plucked a card from the pile without consulting any of his other hands. After four or five rounds, he stopped the game.
“Hao, I’ve got it. In this pile,” he said, pointing to the one directly in front of Lina, “you’ve got a joker, a king of hearts, and a couple of useless cards you’re trying to get rid of. In this one, a pair of jacks of clubs and a queen of spades. And that last hand has no face cards at all. Just a string of telephone digits. That’s the hand that’s making you nervous.”
She stared at him, astounded.
“You’re wrong about the double jacks. One of the jacks is in this hand. How did you do that?”
A grin spread across Qiang’s face. “It’s partly memorization. Partly reading your responses. I’ll get better as we keep playing. Let’s go again.”
With the cards spread out in piles like this, she recognized the game as one her father and his friends played some nights at their house after dinner. They drank, smoked, and talked as they played, and although they gambled on it, none of them had ever seemed as focused on winning as Qiang was now. He began to stop her fewer and fewer rounds into each game. Every time he stopped her, he correctly named the cards in each of her piles. The way he said, “Hao, ting,” once he had everything worked out in his mind was fascinating to watch. All the wild energy went out of his body when he stared at the backs of those cards, trying to decipher what they were. This focus made him seem more mature than he had that day at the silk factory, bounding down those unlit concrete steps.