by Chongda Cai
The crowd parted to allow her mother to pass. She walked unsteadily forward and wailed up at her daughter, “You didn’t bring anything but bad luck! Why couldn’t you have just died instead? Why did you have to come back just to curse us?”
It seemed that it had been a long time since Zhang and her mother had seen each other. Zhang raised the megaphone and yelled down, “You have to believe me, Mama. I swear I never did anything I should be ashamed of. I really haven’t.”
Her mother looked on the verge of collapse. “You were a curse,” she said. “That’s all you were. I should have strangled you to death when I had the chance.”
Big Boy arrived on the roof and pulled Zhang back inside.
The shouts and curses kept up for a while and then slowly faded.
Things were quiet overnight, but when I got up the next morning, I learned that Zhang had gone to her family’s ancestral shrine. She knelt down and swore to heaven that she had never committed any unforgivable sins. “I was looking for someone to love me,” she sobbed. “I never sold my body and I never sold drugs. I did what I thought would make me happy, what I thought was right, and I built a business. But I never did anything unforgivable.”
When she had finished crying, she smashed her head into the stone wall of the hall.
The next day, the family patriarchs woke up to find her there. She was dead. The blood, already congealed in the dust, looked like ancient incense ash.
According to local custom, funeral ceremonies should take place at the home of the deceased or in the ancestral hall. After burial, a wooden plaque carved with the name of the deceased went up in the hall, marking their passage. It was said that without the plaque the soul of the deceased could not rest.
But neither Zhang’s family nor the Zhang ancestral hall was willing to take the body. There was no chance a plaque would be put up for her either. Her spirit would wander forever. That was the most extreme punishment anyone could have wished on her.
She would wander once again with nobody to claim her as their own.
In the end, Big Boy took care of the arrangements. He planned a solemn send-off for her, which her family and everyone else in town shunned. He sent for a band from a neighboring town, and they played the wailing funeral tunes for three days and three nights.
When the music had finished, Big Boy sent everyone away, and then he set fire to Seaside Entertainment City.
Nobody called for help. No fire engines came to put out the blaze. Everyone watched impassively as the place burned. When the fire had burned to coals, some people came out to set off firecrackers. That was the tradition in our town: if a family member who had been sick regained their health, the news was greeted with fireworks.
Six years after I graduated from university, one of my high school classmates who had done well for himself in business organized a ten-year reunion. He sent my invitation to Beijing. I opened the red envelope to find that the location was Seaside Entertainment City.
I hadn’t spent much time back home since going off to university, so I was completely unaware that the place had reopened.
This later iteration of Seaside Entertainment City was completely different. The villas had been rebuilt, but the central building had been replaced with a wide green lawn. The atmosphere was festive, with speakers pumping in music, everyone dressed up and greeting each other warmly.
I arrived late, and everyone had already assembled. I told myself not to, but I couldn’t help asking: “Why did they rebuild this place?”
The classmate who had organized the reunion laughed hollowly. “Where there is demand,” he said, “there will always be supply. The town has money now, and people need somewhere to spend it.”
I wanted to drop it, but he kept going.
“Business is fueled by desire,” he said. “Currency is king.”
Once we were a few rounds deep, a couple of classmates started to tease me for my childhood obsession with Zhang. “She was the girl of your dreams, wasn’t she?”
I blushed. I didn’t know what to say. Someone else hooted, “What are you blushing for? You weren’t the only one!”
Someone proposed a toast to her, and the classmate who had just given me the impromptu lesson on the business of desire cut in. “This was a hot-blooded generation, and we all owe a debt to the one who got our blood pumping in the first place, the founder of a new movement of aesthetic appreciation, a sexual revolution. . . .”
Everyone joined in enthusiastically: “To the great Bella Zhang!”
I couldn’t bring myself to join in. I went to stand alone for a while, looking out at the lawn. I thought about the old brick house and the pale face that had haunted my thoughts for days. “I guess she never could escape trying to be a good girl,” I said to myself. “That’s why she killed herself.”
Behind me the party continued, and people began swapping stories about Seaside Entertainment City and its founder.
I couldn’t take it. I smashed my glass on the ground and stormed out. I kept going until I couldn’t see that disgusting place anymore.
7
Tiny and Tiny
There were two Tinys, but until fifth grade, I only knew one of them. His house was across from mine.
It was a standard Hokkien house: two central buildings arranged on either side of a worship hall. The hall was for praying to gods and making offerings to the spirits of ancestors, and it was quite normal in our part of southern Fujian, where there are so many gods and so many festivals that it felt like keeping up with spiritual affairs was a full-time job.
In most traditional houses in southern Fujian, there were two separate wings as well, with a courtyard in the middle. But Tiny’s family had not had the resources to complete the project, so instead of that, there was a small yard surrounded by palm trees, and then a larger backyard, overgrown with tall grass, where the family kept a large black dog.
Tiny’s was a typical fisherman’s family. His father had been making a living from the sea since he was a boy, and Tiny’s two older brothers both went to work with him as soon as they finished elementary school. His mother was in charge of mending nets and taking the catch to the market to sell. It looked like Tiny would follow the same path as his brothers, but before finishing elementary school, he often vowed, “I’m never going to be a fisherman.”
Tiny’s mother was named Wuxi. I was quite fond of her. Every time my mother and I went over for a visit, we were guaranteed a seafood dinner. Wuxi laughed as if she had known no emotion in her life but unbridled joy. Whenever she saw me, she would find some treat to press on me, and when she stopped by to see us, she always brought some fish or shrimp. Tiny’s father and older brothers always called out to me when I passed and joked around with me, and even the family’s dog wagged his tail when he saw me coming down the alley.
But Tiny always seemed to keep to himself, usually hiding away in a quiet corner of the house when we stopped by. Our two families might have been close, but Tiny wanted nothing to do with us. He was a quiet boy, and it seemed that there was something profound in his silence, as if he were absorbed in thought, a million miles away from what was going on around him. The only time he ever really talked to me was when he overheard my mother telling Wuxi that I had finished at the top of the class. He called me over and said, “Keep it up, Blackie. Study hard and get out of this little town.”
I never thought of my hometown as little, and I had never felt the urge to escape. But I admired him: someone who looked down on our little town must have his eyes set on the horizon. But he wasn’t a very good student, so I decided his arrogant silence was probably just some kind of loneliness.
Tiny the Weirdo—that’s what our neighbors called him.
That was when the next Tiny was chauffeured into my life in the backseat of a luxury sedan.
He arrived one afternoon at the entrance to the alley, in a type of car I had only ever seen on TV. There was no way that car could fit down the narrow lane, and as the driver trie
d to back out again, he ended up spraying the onlookers with clouds of dust.
I was watching, too, standing barefoot in the crowd. Back then, white sneakers and sailor suit school uniforms were popular, but I hated encasing my feet in a pair of sticky, sweaty sneakers. But our teacher had warned us that we only had two choices: sneakers or nothing, so I chose to go barefoot. I would toss my sneakers in my bag and walk around shoeless. It didn’t matter if it was a hot summer day or pouring down rain. I grew thick calluses on my soles, so I could walk across broken glass without getting cut. My classmates nicknamed me the Barefoot Immortal, after a Daoist god who went everywhere without shoes.
There were no white sneakers for the Tiny who stepped out of the back of that luxury sedan, and you would never catch him going barefoot. He had on sharp dress shoes, like you would imagine a kid on TV wearing—and it wasn’t just the shoes! He had suspenders and pressed pants, a tidy haircut to match, and a shirt that gleamed as white as his cheeks.
He looked like the stereotypical son of a rich family. He shone so bright that the rest of us looked gray in comparison.
He was the nephew of Auntie Yue, who lived to the east of us. Auntie Yue’s older brother and his wife had headed to Hong Kong to work on a construction project. They had already completed the immigration procedures for themselves and their eldest son, but it would take a couple of years before they could finally send for Tiny.
The neighborhood decided that the perfect nickname for this Tiny was Hong Kong Tiny, which made it sound like Hong Kong was his last name, or Tiny the Hong Konger.
Tiny the Hong Konger gave us wild neighborhood kids a feeling like what I imagine the Native Americans felt when the Europeans arrived on their shores.
The boy and his foster family were surrounded by a group of voyeuristic children as soon as he arrived. They were curious about everything that Tiny did. They noticed that when he spoke, he liked to raise his eyebrows to punctuate points. They marveled at his haircut, modeled on the floppy style of Hong Kong singer Aaron Kwok. He liked to whistle, too, and he took several baths a day. It wasn’t long before the wild kids of the neighborhood were going around whistling and parting their hair off-center like Aaron Kwok. Some of the kids even peeked at him taking a bath, so they could study for themselves how sophisticated boys bathed.
Tiny’s family was a little better off than most in the neighborhood. At the time, it was the only family with a two-story house. Whenever his aunt washed his T-shirts and underwear, she hung them up to dry on the roof. Their dazzling white was like a banner of civilization waving arrogantly over our small town. For us kids, these clothes had another meaning, too, signaling something that stirred us hormonally. Within a matter of days after Tiny had arrived, a boy in the neighborhood clambered up an electrical pole hoping to catch sight of secrets that he kept even closer to his skin. The boy ended up slipping off the pole, but fortunately, he fell on turf rather than the cruel concrete that covers everything now. He escaped with nothing more serious than a scar.
Nobody in our town wanted rumors like that to spread, and the adults made like nothing out of the ordinary was going on. If something did happen, they pretended not to see it, or they pretended not to understand it. They stuck by their own uncomplicated ways of life no matter what happened.
Even before I met him, I came to the conclusion that I probably wouldn’t like Tiny the Hong Konger. In the battalion of neighborhood kids who raced around the neighborhood in our flip-flops, I was known as the best student, and I was worried that Tiny might end up stealing away some of the attention I received from the neighbors. I wasn’t ready to step out of the limelight.
I pretended not to pay any mind to Tiny and his devoted fans and voyeurs, but one day Auntie Yue came by and decided to throw us together. “You’re a good student,” she said, “so I want you to look after him. I don’t want him being led astray by those wild boys.”
Our first meeting was a bit awkward. My palms were sweaty, and I could barely get a word out without stuttering. Tiny, though, was the picture of cool.
He was wearing a shirt that seemed as white as snow, and he smelled like cologne. “My name is Tiny,” he said, smiling to reveal gleaming white teeth. “I heard you finished top of your class.”
I nodded.
“You’re two years older than me, right?”
I nodded.
“It’s a pleasure to meet you, Brother Blackie,” he said, putting a formal address ahead of my nickname.
When I got back home, the Flip-Flop Army was waiting for me. They swarmed around me like flies buzzing in my ears. They wanted to know what Tiny was like, but I only answered, with fake solemnity, “He’s a fine fellow and a complicated man.” He had made a deep impression on me; he seemed to be a good person.
Tiny’s family had contracted two bodyguards—both his cousins—for the boy, and they were charged with keeping him company and protecting him from negative influences. One of the cousins was tall and skinny, the other short and fat. Tiny only spoke to them to give orders, commands to get this or that for him. I’m not sure exactly what Tiny saw in me, but after our first meeting, his cousins often summoned me for an audience with him. They would arrive with invitations: “Do you want to come over and play marbles?” “Tiny wants to play hide-and-seek with you—you up for it?” “Tiny wants to know if you want to come over to play checkers.”
The Flip-Flop Army was scared they would lose me. Whenever Tiny’s cousins came with an invitation, they presented a counteroffer. I was caught in the middle and forced to choose a side.
At first, I wasn’t ready to make a permanent choice. One day Tiny’s cousin stopped by to say, “Tiny wants to know if you could come by to read some comic books he just got from Hong Kong, or play Nintendo. . . .”
That was how Tiny won me over. On that day, the Flip-Flop Army gave me a dishonorable discharge.
Tiny was a great playmate. He had all the latest things a kid could want—manga, computer games, puzzles, blocks—and he had two bodyguards to assist us. When we were thirsty, we could send them for cold drinks (brought from Hong Kong), and when we were hot, we could have them put on the electric fan (also brought from Hong Kong).
When it came to his cousins, Tiny was like a tyrannical landlord’s son. He only needed to shoot them a glance to send them scurrying away. He didn’t mind when I beat him at our games, but whenever his cousins didn’t lose on purpose, he would scold them into submission.
The Flip-Flop Army watched from a short distance away. They would take paper tubes and yell at me, “Traitor, flunky . . .” I took it in stride and didn’t bother answering them, but Tiny would march over to yell at them, “What are you wild boys yelling about?”
I realized that hostilities had commenced.
The Flip-Flop Army had a powerful weapon at its disposal. Their manure time bomb was advanced technology. The firecracker that provided the charge had a long fuse that took a minute to burn down. The trick was putting the firecracker in a lump of cow manure, then timing the explosion to go off just as Tiny and I arrived within range—and then cover us with manure.
I was familiar with their tricks, and it only took a few manure-time-bomb attacks before we learned to avoid them. However, the Flip-Flop Army was not prepared to admit defeat. Instead of planting firecrackers in manure for guerrilla attacks, they decided it would be easier to simply toss them at us. Tiny was furious. He ran inside and emerged with the shotgun the family kept to hunt birds. He pointed it at the sky and let off a shot.
Bang! The sound was like a wave crashing. It echoed in the ears of the Flip-Flop Army. They looked at Tiny in stunned silence. I was taken aback, too.
“I scared you, didn’t I, you little beggars?” His gleaming white teeth flashed as he roared at them. It gave me chills.
Maybe I was scared to lose my ties to the Flip-Flop Army or maybe I wasn’t comfortable with Tiny’s arrogance, but after the shooting incident, I decided it was time to find some balance. Tiny and I
had been joined at the hip, and I knew it was time to start splitting myself between the two cliques.
Tiny realized that my loyalties were divided, so he took out all his Hong Kong treasures to entice me back—his Hong Kong CDs, his Hong Kong remote-controlled plane. . . . But he knew that a gulf had opened up between us. “If you want to come over,” he said finally, “go ahead, but it’s fine if you don’t want to.”
I knew that he wanted to end our friendship before he was forced to admit that he had lost me.
I started to feel sorry for him. When I got to know him, I realized how lonely he was. It was his parents’ fault. They were keeping him in perpetual limbo. He was always “preparing to go to Hong Kong.” With everything in constant flux, there was no way for him to live in the moment or to have friendships.
Back then, Hong Kong seemed like a different, better world. That was Tiny’s eventual destination, so maybe he thought he could look down on our small town.
He was still a kid, though, and a kid needs friends.
I decided he must have chosen me to be his friend because I was the best student. He couldn’t look down on me in that regard. I was above him. And maybe winning me over would represent a conquest.
In the days after our friendship cooled, he often took out pictures of his older brother to show me.
Pictures were about the only way he could see his brother. Tiny was spoiled by his mother, and she couldn’t stand the thought of him accompanying her to Hong Kong, where times for the family were tough. She sent Tiny to family in her hometown and mailed a thick stack of bills to them each month to look after him. But Tiny’s older brother went along to Hong Kong to work on the jobsite.
Tiny’s older brother grew up in Hong Kong; he became a Hong Konger, and he looked like a Hong Konger, with long hair and an earring, shorts and loafers, and sometimes even a silk scarf.
Of course, Tiny worshipped his brother, just like we all worshipped the fancy people we watched running between skyscrapers on our black-and-white TVs. Maybe both of us were simply worshipping our imaginary Hong Kongs.