by Tie Ning
Fei started to laugh, this time from her heart. “Go to hell with your fascists!” she said to Tiao. “I bought the marinated rabbits’ heads for their ears—crispy, tasty, and crunchy when you chew on them. Listen. Listen to it.”
Crispy, tasty, and crunchy.
“I have never eaten a rabbit’s head and I’m not going to eat one now.”
“Don’t you dare refuse,” said Fei.
Tiao looked at the rabbit’s head, bit off half of the ear, and chewed. It was true; it was indeed crispy, tasty, and crunchy. Many years later, when Fei was sick and really wanted to nibble on a rabbit’s head, Tiao searched all over Fuan in vain. The snack had gone out of fashion; its shape and surprisingly cheap price were like a dream. A rabbit’s head for three cents, the price of a popsicle; had such a thing really existed in this world? They both chewed on the crispy, tasty, and crunchy rabbit ears; Tiao’s mouth got extremely messy. She looked at Fei, whose lips were still so bright and clean. Anyone could see that she treated her mouth especially well and that she really knew how to eat. With anything that entered her mouth, she was very careful, but not with what came out, like what she had said about Tiao’s mum.
2
Before she met Fei, Tiao was often lonely at school. Fuan was a different place from Beijing. The teachers here asked the students to use Mandarin in class, but after class everyone spoke Fuan dialect, including the teachers. Tiao, as a newcomer, had been called on twice to read aloud; the teacher complimented her standard, clearly pronounced Mandarin and fluent reading, which made a lot of girls jealous. She wanted to participate in their activities: hopscotch, rubber-band jumping, jump rope, sandbag toss, and sheep-bone grab, but they didn’t let her. “What is that language that you’re talking?” they asked. “We don’t get it.” They said “thayat” instead of “that” and “doan” instead of “don’t.” And even the “o” in “don’t” sounded more like a combination of “ah” and “oh.” So “don’t” came out in a drawl. They talked to her in a thick provincial accent, pretending they didn’t understand her even though they knew perfectly well what she was saying, and then they accused her of playing high and mighty with them. Although she was disdainful of the strange Fuan dialect, she feared being left out and was desperate to join the group. She tried to change her pronunciation, but it was awkward and strange, making them laugh in her face and discouraged her from talking at all. She kept to herself quietly, waiting for the days to drag on and the bell to ring at the end of the last class.
But even her silence didn’t satisfy them. They saw it as a challenge that made them feel more uncomfortable than her begging to join their group. So they tried to provoke her. They often came up behind her suddenly when she was sitting at her desk staring into space and shouted, “Hey, do you have mung bean cake? Do you have mung bean cake?” She was confused and didn’t know how to respond. But their expressions were urgent, as if they were expecting to grab a mung bean cake from her hand immediately. So she would hurriedly answer, “No, I don’t have mung bean cake.”
“Oh, really, now, you don’t have mung bean cake!” they would exclaim.
“Do you have egg cake? Do you have egg cake?” they would ask immediately.
“No, I don’t have egg cake,” she would answer again sincerely.
“Oh, really now, after all this you don’t have egg cake!” they would exclaim.
They were so pleased with themselves for making her fall for their tricks that they broke into squeals of laughter. It was so much fun that they kept it up all day long, repeatedly asking her for mung bean cake or egg cake. Tiao finally caught on, but she didn’t really appreciate this kind of “cleverness” and didn’t think their antics were funny. She believed this sort of clowning was low-class and she looked down on them, although she herself didn’t have any highbrow jokes as a comeback.
She also didn’t like the hairdo popular in Fuan then: two plaits, tight and low, starting at the earlobe, and so short that, seen from the front, they seemed to stick out of the cheeks like the two legs of an alarm clock, which was why the style was called Little Alarm Clock. She wore the Little Alarm Clock style for a few days, so that she could look like her classmates, though her mother said this provincial hairstyle did nothing for her; it didn’t make her look younger or older, nor did it make her look more like a country girl or a city girl. Wu hauled her in front of the mirror and said, “Look at yourself.” She told Tiao to change her hair immediately, even if it meant wearing common pigtails, tied with rubber bands. Tiao shared her mother’s opinion on the subject, puzzled at why such an ugly style would become popular in Fuan. She changed her hair from Little Alarm Clock to pigtails as if to announce her determination to be different, to stand on her own. Then Fei entered her life. Fei didn’t wear the Little Alarm Clock hairstyle and didn’t drawl. On the contrary, she grew her hair to the maximum length allowed back then—shoulder-length. She wore her plaits loosely, and had her fringe curling wildly on her forehead, giving her the look of a revolutionary fighter, a combination of languor and high spirits. She taught Tiao the trick of curling her fringe—wetting the hair before bedtime, and then rolling it on black steel clips, round and round, one after another. When the clips came off the next morning, the fringe would be curled like a perm and last the whole day.
Tiao performed the experiment with her fringe and they did curl, and she looked at herself in the mirror and felt she resembled a doll she’d had in childhood, so cute and lively. She was afraid to go to school with a curled fringe, so she could only demonstrate at home in front of Fan. Fan said happily, “Show off, new bride, / shake your butt from side to side. / Show off, foreign shrew, / hands on hips, strutting through.” She said this children’s rhyme in Fuan dialect, which was usually the way children shouted it at women who wore unusual clothes, something that people like Fei would often hear. In the middle school Fei attended, she heard worse words than these. Had such words been applied to Tiao, she would have killed herself, but Fei could scoff at words. She poked at her face and said to Tiao, “My skin is thicker than a city wall. Hmm, I would like to see them try that stuff on me.” A loner with no friends, Fei played things light and loose, but she had a strength of her own, which attracted and inspired Tiao, making her feel there was something she could rely on. When she thought about the rejection of her classmates and their stupid pranks, she was glad to be left alone to drift around with Fei. When Tiao graduated from elementary school, she and Fei happened to be in the same middle school. They grew closer and saw each other more frequently.
The families who lived in the Architectural Design Academy were doing a side job now, binding The Selected Works of Chairman Mao. The book was eight-by-ten and used high-quality, extra-white dictionary paper, and fine strong nylon thread. The families stitched the pages into covers with the nylon thread, and they were paid five cents per volume. The binding had originally been done at the printing factory, but since the book was in great demand at the time and the workload kept increasing, the factory outsourced part of the process, just as the foreign export trading units did in the nineties, giving embroidery and knitting to housewives. A woman in their complex worked in the factory, which was how the families got the job. They liked it very much; binding The Selected Works of Chairman Mao was a sacred task to begin with, not to mention the money they made. What’s more, the sewing also enriched their drab lives. When the job came in summer, groups of sewing women were all over the place, in front of the buildings and under the shade of trees. Old women with poor eyesight kept trying to get their grandchildren, just back from school, to help them thread needles and mark places in the books’ spines with the teeth of special small steel saws to make it easy to push the needles through. The scene was very peaceful, viewed from afar, a courtyard of women, old and young alike, burying their heads in sewing.
Women must embroider and sew, they must, to make a living, for their families, and even more, to suppress their wild natures. It served to kill spare time as well
as to add colour to their pale lives. So when the flatbed tricycle pulled the unprocessed books into the complex, the adults and the children would cheer. Even Fan would use the ugly Fuan dialect to shout at the top of her lungs in front of the building, “The job’s here. The job’s here.” Really, what did the “job” have to do with her? Why was she always so enthusiastic about everything in the world? Was it because she was so enthusiastic as a child that she would become so angry as an adult, after she had gone to America?
Wu didn’t take on work like this herself, nor did she allow Tiao to participate. She had contempt for this kind of thing, and she didn’t plan to let her own children do child labour, which meant that Tiao had more free time. Whenever she passed the sewing crowds in the complex as she went to look for Fei, girls her own age or older were holding The Selected Works of Chairman Mao and attentively wrestling with needle and thread, along with their grandmothers, making asterisks of crisscrossed threads on the thick spines.
Tiao didn’t sew this “treasured red book,” nor did Fei. They were intent on other things, such as calling on pretty women. One day Fei said, “I want to take you to see the head nurse of internal medicine at People’s Hospital. I bet you’ve never seen anyone as good-looking as she is.” They went to the hospital and Fei pointed her out in the hallway of the internal medicine ward. She was probably about fifty years old then. A nun from the old society before 1949 who had worked in the church hospital, she had been suspected of being a spy and was no longer the head nurse. Her daily job now was to clean the hallway and the bathrooms of the ward. She wore old light blue clothes and was squatting by a wall to scrape saliva stains and spots of filth off it. When she sensed Tiao and Fei standing behind her, she turned her head to them.
What a beautiful face, Tiao thought, beauty from a bygone age. But what left a deep impression on Tiao was not the woman’s beauty, but her unusually serene expression. In the noisy, messy hallway of the internal medicine ward, she assumed a humble squatting position and faced a wall full of saliva stains. Grey hair clustered around her face, but she didn’t seem sad or worried. What made her treat spit stains with such care? Really such a beautiful face, looking up from the foot of a dirty wall, so serene and detached. Tiao never forgot that face.
They left the internal medicine ward and went out to walk in the courtyard. Besides having to work as a janitor, the woman often underwent denouncement. “But she doesn’t look like a spy at all,” Tiao observed.
“I don’t want to believe she is a spy, either,” said Fei, “but she confessed the passwords. They had passwords. My uncle told me that.”
“What are their passwords?” Tiao asked nervously.
Fei said, “When someone came to contact her, the head nurse would ask, ‘Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?’ The other one would answer, ‘From the ocean.’”
Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from? That was it; that was exactly the sort of thing spies would say. Although neither Tiao nor Fei knew what a spy’s passwords would be, they both felt the head nurse’s passwords fit. The words were so mysterious and romantic, yet shadowy and frightening at the same time, so erotic and tender, but also having the scent of death about them. They couldn’t help repeating them a few times. Fei lowered her voice and said to Tiao, “Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”
“From the ocean,” Tiao answered immediately, also lowering her voice.
“Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”
“From the ocean.”
They said the passwords back and forth several times, spellbound. Then they looked at each other and were suddenly frightened, as if they had turned into spies in the blink of an eye and would be drowned in the ocean of the people’s war. They looked around—there was no one nearby, but they took to their legs and ran as fast as they could, as if saying a spy’s passwords in a deserted place made them look suspicious and dangerous. They ran to the hospital’s outpatient department, which was dense with people. They manoeuvered through the crowd, but Tiao was not ready to leave yet; she wanted Fei to take her to see the head nurse one more time.
They came to the internal medicine ward again and the head nurse was still squatting by the wall, scraping with a small knife. Though this time Tiao’s desire to see her was even stronger than before, she didn’t dare get too near. The passwords proved the woman was an actual spy, and Tiao was a little panicked. She suddenly felt that the reason for them to keep coming to see her was to respond to the password. The head nurse would take them by surprise by turning that seemingly serene face to them and say, “Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”
They would answer: “From the ocean.”
They eventually left before the head nurse turned around. Tiao sighed, saying she didn’t believe the serene expression on the head nurse’s face was fake. What she didn’t know was that the head nurse had actually made up the passwords when the torture became unbearable, and she was willing to confess to anything to make her confession convincing. The passwords she made up were so poetic; she satisfied people’s curiosity with these poetic fantasies and was regarded as a spy forever.
3
Then Youyou came into their lives. Youyou was not the mermaid’s fishing net, and she didn’t come from the ocean; she was in the same class as Tiao.
She’d got into trouble almost as soon as she entered middle school. She was called on by her language arts teacher to recite Chairman Mao’s quotations by heart. Memorizing and copying Chairman Mao’s quotations was a part of the language arts classes then. She had to memorize the part about revolution: “A revolution is not inviting friends to dinner, not writing an essay …” She stood up and recited by heart: “A revolution is inviting friends to dinner, is …” “Stop! Stop!” said the teacher. Youyou stopped and found her classmates were all covering their mouths and laughing. The teacher knocked on the desk with a bamboo pointer and said, “What are you laughing at? Meng Youyou, do you know you recited Chairman Mao’s quotation wrong?” Youyou nodded her head and said she knew, but when the teacher asked her to start again she just couldn’t open her mouth anymore. She was so afraid she might get it wrong again. Because she refused to open her mouth, the teacher had no choice but to let her sit down. What if she had got it wrong again? Who would be held responsible for such an incident? Probably not Meng Youyou; she was only thirteen. The teacher would have to take responsibility. From then on, the teacher never called on Youyou in class again; she believed the child was either stupid or actually retarded.
Tiao and Youyou took the same route home from school. Soon Tiao discovered that Youyou lived in the same complex as she did. They hadn’t met before because they had not been in the same elementary school, and now that she found that they were in the same class and complex, Tiao wanted to make an effort to get to know her. She didn’t look down on her at all, believing that even though reciting Chairman Mao’s quotations wrong was dishonourable, Youyou hadn’t done it on purpose. She was just a little careless. She also wanted to talk to her because Youyou spoke Beijing dialect, not Fuan. Tiao hurried after Youyou and called to her, “Hey, Youyou, wait a second.”
Her greeting sounded like an old friend’s, but the two hadn’t spoken before. Youyou, who was walking ahead of Tiao, stopped after she heard the greeting, waiting for Tiao as if she were an old friend. Youyou stood there, a thirteen-year-old with a tendency to put on weight, or, one could say, she was already a fat young girl. She had skin as smooth and pale as butter, short hair, and large breasts. Yet nothing about her seemed sexual, perhaps because of her innocent, cheerful face.
From the very beginning, they communicated with ease and needed no small talk because they instinctively liked the look of each other. They started from “Revolution is not inviting friends over for dinner.” Youyou said, “I’m actually not as stupid as the teacher thinks. Yes, I recited the quotation wrong, but think about it carefully: If revolution is not inviting friends over for dinne
r, what is revolution for?”
What is revolution for? This was a question that Tiao had never considered before. Now this Youyou who looked so carefree on the surface got her thinking. “Revolution …” Youyou said, “revolution at the very least ought to allow people to invite friends over for dinner.”
“But Chairman Mao said revolution was an uprising,” Tiao said.
“Exactly. If the people uprising don’t have food, how will they have strength to rise up?” Youyou said. “I’m afraid of being hungry—it scares me more than anything. If someone gives me a mouthful of food, I call him Grandpa.”
Tiao couldn’t help smiling, because of Youyou’s big heart, and because of her strange talk about revolution. Youyou pleased and surprised her. As they walked side by side, arriving at Building Number 6, Youyou had already put her cool, plump arm around Tiao’s shoulder. She whispered to Tiao, intimately and naturally, “Tiao, I really want you to know that I don’t blame our classmates for avoiding me. I’m a backward person. I just think the best thing to do is to sleep when your eyes are closed, and to eat when your eyes are open. So, guess what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a chef. How much good stuff is there for a chef to do? A chef spends the day either treating people to food or eating it. Have you seen the movie called Satisfied or Not Satisfied? It’s about a chef. Someday I’ll put on the tall white cap that the chefs wear! Don’t tell anybody. I know you won’t.”
How clever and lovely you are, Youyou! Tiao thought. Although Tiao had never thought about becoming a chef when she grew up, her passion for food wasn’t any less than Youyou’s. She and Youyou shared the same dangerous tastes, but she could never express herself so thoroughly, so bluntly and truthfully, so … so corruptly and decadently. Right in the middle of a revolution that was an uprising: here they were, talking about giving a dinner party and wearing a chef’s white cap. This was the pursuit of the corrupt and decadent lifestyle of the bourgeois; this was corruption and decadence itself. Tiao couldn’t help agreeing with Youyou’s philosophy while at the same time criticizing herself in her heart. She very much wanted to enjoy corruption with Youyou secretly, to experience decadence secretly.