by Chongda Cai
The legend of Zhang fell by the wayside. She was outshone by the neon glow, and her legend was replaced by stories of the “princesses” that filled the streets of our town. No longer was sobbing heard from the old brick house.
I was no exception. She had once been so vivid in my imagination that I felt as if I knew her face. But it seemed on the verge of disappearing completely.
My curiosity did not fade, though. I decided to recruit Piggie from down the street to go on a stakeout with me. We got together flashlights, slingshots, a stack of Daoist paper charms, and a peachwood sword that Piggie borrowed from his grandfather (he was a Daoist priest who specialized in dealing with departed souls who needed a push into the afterlife). When we were halfway to the old brick house, Piggie asked me why we were going to investigate. I didn’t have an answer for him. After a long pause, I finally said, “You want to see her, too, don’t you?”
“Of course I do,” Piggie said hesitantly, “but I’m scared.”
We started walking up the path.
As we got closer to the house, an inexplicable sensation rushed through me, rocketing through my body and settling somewhere around my crotch. I had finally figured out why exactly I wanted to investigate the house, and I could barely contain my excitement.
Piggie gave the door to the house a gentle nudge with the peachwood sword, and we immediately heard the sound of two women talking inside. I peered in through the crack in the door and saw a pale, thin face. It seemed to be staring directly at me. “It’s a ghost,” Piggie yelled as he ran down the path.
At that moment, I was sure it was a ghost, too. I ran home and locked the door behind me as soon as I got inside. My heart was thudding in my chest. I looked down and noticed another biological response poking up through my pants. I didn’t dare tell anyone at home what had happened on the stakeout. The pale face I had seen through the crack in the door would not go away. As time went by, it seemed to become more concrete. The face resolved itself, and a pair of eyes blinked back at me. It seemed like the expression the face wore was meant to put me at ease, as if it was encouraging me to gaze at it in my mind’s eye.
For the next few days, I wasn’t myself. When I spaced out and dropped my chopsticks for the third time at dinner, my mother gave me a rap on the skull and said, “Did you see a ghost or something?”
It was a casual remark—but that was exactly what I was worried about. Was it a ghost I had seen in that house?
I panicked whenever the face floated into my consciousness. Without telling my parents, I went to the temple to get another stack of paper charms, which I stuck all over myself. The face kept returning, though.
One day, the face turned toward me and smiled.
It was torture. I could barely sleep, and when I did, I would shudder awake from wet dreams. My body couldn’t hold out much longer. One afternoon, I finally worked up the courage to tell my mother what was happening, to admit to her that I was being haunted by a female ghost.
Before I got the chance to tell her, though, my mother came bounding into the room with a wedding invitation. “That Bella Zhang down the street is finally getting married,” she said happily.
“Isn’t she dead?” I asked.
“What are you talking about? I can’t forgive what she did, of course. I think everyone around here thought she’d be better off if she did die. But it seems like things worked out okay for her. That guy ended up going into business for himself, made out pretty good, and now he’s back to get her. Her parents might never recover from what she put them through. Just imagine having a daughter like that—but I guess things turned out okay.”
The wedding was extravagant for the time, but it was also unusually sloppy.
The wedding gifts were arranged according to local custom, and everything was more than covered. Bags of fancy candy were sent around the neighborhood, and the wedding banquet was in the finest hotel in town. But Zhang and the mysterious groom only appeared briefly, offering a perfunctory toast to the assembled guests before quickly retreating to the private room reserved for close family.
The next day, she left for her husband’s hometown in the northeast.
I didn’t know much about the northeast except that it was directly north of our town. I used to stand out on the main road looking north and imagine walking until I saw her.
I always thought I would meet her again. I didn’t want to fail to recognize her when that moment came, so I did my best to recall her face.
Memory is like water, though. The more I dipped in to retrieve her face, the cloudier the water became, until one day I realized it had disappeared completely.
There’s no sense trying to fight it, I told myself disconsolately. I decided to try memorializing those years in poetry.
The sad fact is that bookworms like me never truly experience or understand the full glory of youth.
Bella Zhang, on the other hand—she had lived.
Two years after the wedding, she arrived back in our town, wearing a qipao split up the thighs, her hair done in the latest fashion, her neck wrapped in gold necklaces, and her fingers full of rings.
I heard that she arrived in a luxury car, but I wasn’t there to experience her grand return, since I was stuck in class. I kept imagining the scene, picturing adoring crowds lining her route.
A few days after her return, rumors started to spread that she had divorced. That was the only reason she had come back.
What did that really mean, though? Divorce was virtually unknown where I came from, and most people only had the vaguest idea what it signified.
Shortly after that, a shop opened across from my school. There were streamers out front and a rotating red light. The neighbors said that Zhang had opened it.
Rumor had it that she was only home three days before her family kicked her out of the house. That was when she moved in at her new location. The only thing I was sure of was that the red light out front of the shop was on for three days before an announcement appeared, pasted up in the alley, bearing a message written with ink and brush: “From this day forward, our family and Bella Zhang have severed all ties. We take no responsibility for her, no matter what happens.”
The characters on the proclamation were beautiful, written with force and vigor. They were clearly written by a family elder with some talent for calligraphy. They were evidence of the refined, scholarly family that had produced Zhang. But their beauty was lost on the crowd that formed to gawk at the proclamation with barely concealed glee.
I had to go by the shop every day on my way to school, but when I passed around seven in the morning, the door was tightly shut. I noticed a few notes pasted up on the storefront and wanted to go over to look, but I could never work up the nerve. A week later, I got up at five thirty and rode my bike over. The notes, covered in messy scrawl, had been pasted up crookedly across the door of the shop. “Filthy bitch,” one read, another, “Whore,” and a third, “Kill yourself, slut.”
I read the notes while constantly glancing over my shoulder to see if anyone was coming. When someone finally appeared in the alley, I fled, pedaling into the school yard.
What kind of shop did she open? The attempts to answer that question only added to her legend.
Debauchery on a grand scale, someone said. Don’t judge the place by the storefront—open that door and you can go down two more floors, pretty girls just waiting to satisfy any desires.
Another theory was that it was a luxury massage parlor. There were imported massage tables, they said, and the therapists could work you over until you were too limp to get up.
Every night, the boys in the dormitory batted around theories and rumors, getting more and more worked up, until suddenly everyone found an excuse for privacy.
Around that time, Big Boy—that was our nickname for Zhang’s ex-husband—showed up in town.
It was just a rumor at first, and most people found it incredible, but Big Boy started to appear in front of the shop every evening, leaning b
ack in a chair, enjoying the cool night air.
We started to hear fighting and dishes breaking in the middle of the night. But the next day at dusk, Big Boy would appear again, dragging his chair out in front of the shop as if nothing had happened.
Nobody knew what was happening inside; maybe even Zhang and Big Boy couldn’t have explained it. But finally, one day the doors swung open. The streamers and the red light had been taken down. A sign replaced them: Bella’s Seafood Restaurant.
The sign signaled the debut of a new Bella Zhang who went around with her head held high, smiling warmly as she greeted customers at the front counter of her restaurant. Locals vowed never to step foot in Bella’s Seafood Restaurant, but she had plenty of business from the out-of-town folks who worked on the freighters and came to do business in town.
Inspecting the shop from across the street, I could see it really was her restaurant: just like her, it seemed completely out of place in our little town. There was gold-trimmed furniture, glittering curtains of glass beads, and leather chairs, and all the waitresses were tall, pretty out-of-town girls. It was brimming with what our neighbors disapprovingly termed a “seductive atmosphere.”
Zhang’s restaurant and our town seemed to stand in opposition to each other. She was symbolic of a corrosive element that was wearing away the character of the town.
If there was a war between her and the town, she won without ever firing a shot. Her restaurant was successful enough that it began to expand and take over neighboring storefronts, and gradually, local businessmen found themselves “unable to resist” Bella’s Seafood Restaurant.
“What’re you gonna do?” the businessmen would say, by way of explanation, after giving a vivid description of the dining room. “When my clients come to town, they want me to take them there.”
Not long after that, there was another victory for her: a local big shot was planning his son’s wedding and decided to book the dining room of Bella’s Seafood Restaurant.
My father had gotten an invitation to the wedding, and when the big day came, I paced nervously around the house. When he received the invitation, the point was made to him that this restaurant was the best place in town to make connections with non-local businessmen.
I volunteered to go with him, but my mother intervened with a fierce refusal. I watched from the window, tracing my father’s path up to the restaurant. He hesitated for a moment before going inside.
“Amazing food.” That was the only assessment my father offered upon returning from the wedding. That was all he—and everyone else in town—felt comfortable commenting on. It was the quality of the food that finally got everyone to put aside their jealousy and forget about town politics. Finally our town was seemingly embracing Bella Zhang.
When it came time to renovate some buildings at the school, local patriarchs went around for donations. They visited Old John, who had opened a shop in town, but he hesitated to contribute, and Old Tom, who owned an electrical appliance store, wouldn’t commit either. Zhang was happy to pitch in. She marched right over to the school, invited herself into the principal’s office, and said, “Put me down for fifty thousand.”
At the time, fifty thousand yuan was a considerable sum. It was enough to build a house in town.
The principal was hesitant, though. “I’ll have to think it over,” he said.
When the list of donors was released, her name was nowhere to be found.
Not long after that, the local patriarchs were raising money to renovate an ancestral hall, and she stepped up again. However, when the list of donors was published, her name had been left off again.
As the New Year approached, the Mazu temple announced a project to expand its courtyard. Finally she found someone to take her money.
Carved on a wall inside the temple was the entry “From devout woman Bella Zhang: fifty thousand yuan.” It was the largest donation the temple had received, but her name appeared at the bottom of the list. She wasn’t discouraged by the placement, though. After that, she went often to the temple to stroll in the newly expanded square and then bend down to admire the carved entry.
I often hung around the grocery store next to the Mazu temple, watching her smile open like a flower blossoming.
By the time I went off to high school, she had become the vice president of the town’s Entrepreneurs Association. Her seafood restaurant had relocated to a five-story building near the estuary.
That year, the banquet for outstanding students at our high school was sponsored by her and held at her restaurant. She made a speech afterward, hitting all the talking points about giving service to the motherland and building the nation.
By that time, she was no longer a young woman. She had a double chin, and a thick layer of foundation could not cover the wrinkles that had begun to creep upward across her face. She was still beautiful, though.
The local patriarchs were not pleased with the school’s decision to accept her support. At that point, she had diversified her business and opened up Seaside Entertainment City next to the restaurant.
Word of the leisure complex had spread up and down the coast. I wasn’t sure exactly what went on there, but I heard there was a concert hall, a ballroom, a café, and private rooms for karaoke. There were also rumors of some “less than legitimate” businesses operating out of Seaside Entertainment City—the most popular of those rumors, at least at my high school, was that drugs were being sold there. When a classmate abruptly left school that year, some speculated that he had gotten an STD from a visit to the entertainment complex.
We received repeated admonitions from principals and senior teachers to stay away; parents informed their children in hushed tones about the disgusting goings-on at the complex; and I realized that the town’s latest crusade against Zhang was just beginning.
On the day of the student banquet, my gaze followed the wall that separated the restaurant from Seaside Entertainment City. I couldn’t stop myself from wandering over to the window again and again, hoping to catch a glimpse of what was happening on the other side.
It was a massive complex. I guessed the big building in the center must be the ballroom. It was surrounded by European-style villas. I had heard that each villa had a different theme: in one was a bar to hear slow jams and ballads, another was a disco, and another was a fancy café.
After the dinner, I was chosen as the student journalist who would interview Outstanding Entrepreneur Bella Zhang.
I was going to interview her in her office.
She was wearing black stockings and a business dress. I couldn’t manage to get a word out. I was sweating bullets. It was my first time talking to her.
The teacher that accompanied me reminded me that I didn’t need to take notes. It was simply a formality.
I knew she was used to this kind of ceremonial gesture. But it was in such ceremonies that she was finally being recognized for what she had done. I mumbled my way through my dull questions, asking her things like “What advice would you like to give to students?” She did her best to say all the things she imagined a woman in her position would say.
She seemed satisfied with how the interview was going. Halfway through, out of nowhere, she pledged some funds to support school journalists. She and the teacher shook hands. It was a success.
As I was leaving the office, I shut the door behind me, but I couldn’t resist one last look. I caught her as she deflated, her head leaned back, slouched in her massive office chair. Her expression betrayed an indescribable fatigue.
The more we were pressured to stay away from Seaside Entertainment City, the more we wanted to get inside. One of my classmates couldn’t wait any longer. He secretly slipped inside and came back to tell us about all the “awesome” things he had seen.
In my group at school, if you had the guts to sneak inside, it was a mark of pride. And outside school, if your parents found out about a trip to the complex, it was a mark of shame.
More rumors began to spread: we heard t
hat the complex was overseen by four gangsters, each with his own horrible specialty, and they were planning to begin recruiting at our school.
I never really believed that story. Even if there were gangs operating there, getting involved with the school would only bring unwanted scrutiny. I suspected that some people who worked at the complex had big mouths, and maybe they had organized their own little groups, too. But whatever rumors were spreading in town, they all seemed to be about Seaside Entertainment City.
There was growing anger. It started with the town patriarchs and spread to the women’s auxiliaries, and they started to visit every household in town and press them to sign petitions against the complex. Zhang did not admit defeat, though, and launched her own counterstrike. When the town government announced that they were starting renovations on their offices, she showed up with a donation of two hundred thousand yuan.
It was right back to the cold war between the town’s residents and Zhang. The situation was a tinderbox, and everyone was waiting for a stray spark to set the whole thing alight.
The spark came during summer vacation in my third year of high school. A fight broke out at Seaside Entertainment City. A man was beaten to death. He was the son of a powerful local patriarch.
A gang of locals showed up at the front gate and started shouting abuse and hurling stones. They demanded that Seaside Entertainment City be immediately shut down.
I took advantage of my student reporter credentials and rushed to the scene.
The crowd had grown to include young and old, people directly involved in the fight and the protest as well as curious onlookers. They were shouting the same words I had read on those notes: “Filthy bitch,” “Whore,” “Kill yourself, slut.” Zhang appeared on the roof of the main building. She raised a megaphone and yelled down to the crowd: “It was an accident. This is my town, too. Please, you have to know that I want to make it right.”
She didn’t make it through the speech before people began pelting her with stones.
She was too high up to be in any danger, and the rocks thudded against the building.