Shanghai Girl

by Vivian Yang

  Stepfather extinguishes his butt on a section of the banana skin and hits the front of his leg with excitement. "You’re mother-fucking lucky. You’ll be graduating from the Political Science Department at just the right time. Trade with the West is booming. Our motherland needs young people like you who know how to build up our socialist economy with Chinese characteristics. Chairman Mao said that we should critically assimilate foreign practices to serve China." He pats me heavily on the shoulder as he speaks, our first physical contact ever. I stiffen but do not move.

  "How’s my old subordinate doing?" Stepfather continues, referring to Mr. Chen, the number one man at the University. To Stepfather, Chen is just a small potato.

  "I haven’t seen him on campus for a while. I imagine he’s fine."

  "Good, Sha-fei. Now you study hard. Come graduation time, I’ll give that dog a call, get you a decent job assignment, and make your mother happy. How’s that?"

  "Thank you very much. I’d certainly appreciate it."

  My objection to Mother’s marrying Stepfather notwithstanding, I’m fully aware of the benefits he’s brought me. He supports me financially, since Father left almost nothing. One reason I believe Mother agreed to marry Stepfather is that she was sick and tired of living on a meager income and with ample fear. She hated being powerless. In a different way, I hate being powerless, too.

  I knew I would not be staying in this dormitory had it not been for Stepfather’s intervention. The property belongs to the University, which assigned the unit to Father as a professor. When he died and Mother moved away, the apartment technically should have been returned to the school, since I was beyond the legal age of eighteen. Our neighbor the Chengs had been coveting our unit for years. Their family of four -- the couple and a grown son and a daughter -- only has one room, so the son sleeps on the floor of the narrow corridor. The daughter has registered for marriage for over a year now but still lives at home because her husband’s home is equally small and they are on the waiting list for their work unit to assign them a room. Mrs. Cheng, whom I respectfully address as Aunt Cheng, has the benefit of being a secretary at Mr. Chen’s office. She begged Mr. Chen to assign our apartment to her family. It was only after Stepfather mentioned the case to his old comrade-in-arms, Mr. Chen, that the apartment was salvaged for me.

  In a rare instance when Mother mentioned Father and Stepfather in the same sentence, she said, "He is a very different man from your father. Your father was an honest man who didn’t know how to play the game of life, a pampered son of the wealthy who was naïve and vulnerable. But your stepfather has been a revolutionary all his life. He is a success despite the fact that he remains a rough and ready type of man, a Da Lao Cu,” (literally: Big Old Thick.) Mother added, "With all our sufferings brought on by your father, you should really be grateful to your stepfather for who he is."

  Stepfather rises from my bed and stands in front of me. He puts his hands on his belt and searches around as if looking for the bathroom. I’m glad he’s finally ready to leave.

  "The men’s room is outside the apartment, down the hallway," I tell him. Our building only has two communal bathrooms, one for each gender.

  Stepfather laughs in a way that betrays his peasant origins, his gleaming teeth reflecting the rays from the setting wintry sun. Suddenly, he drops his navy khaki pants before my eyes. "No!" I cringe and turn my head away -- he has no underwear on! His appendage hangs out like the neck of a Peking duck on display in a deli window. A pile of flesh shaped like two used green tea bags sag under the duck neck, dangling.

  A falcon snatching a chick, he grabs me and thrusts me down on my knees. Towering over me, his voice turns uncharacteristically soft. "Show me how much you appreciate, Sha-fei."

  "No! Let go of me or I’ll scream!"

  "No, you won’t. You don’t want to disturb the neighbors, do you?"

  No, I don’t. Only a thin board separates our apartment from our neighbors, all of whom, like my late Father, have family members associated with the university. Growing up here, I’ve learned to ignore the sounds of the neighbors’ kids screaming, spouses and in-laws fighting, neighbors quarreling, and pans and jars clanging together. I’ve learned to survive and study in an atmosphere of symphonic chaos. But no, I certainly don’t want to let them hear this.

  "Come," Stepfather coaxes, leading my left hand onto him. The covering skin is moved up and I see the tip of the meat, as red as the leanest part of pork Mother would have loved back in the days when meats were rationed. I shut my eyes and continue to struggle. The next thing I know, the "Big Old Thick" gags me.

  He moves my head back and forth like someone doing tai chi holding an imaginary ball. For a split second, Father’s photo enters my blurring vision before fading out, resembling the ripple-like circles on Father’s lenses. Ethereal blindness.

  Stepfather is slow and rhythmic, making my cheeks suck in and out like a toilet plunger. Then he becomes sporadic and jerky, sending my ponytail bouncing. Abruptly, his palms squeeze my head like a nutcracker. I cough. I choke. Stepfather lets go and cries out. I smell rotten fish, slimy and raw.

  I now sit at the edge of my bed, head bent, tears streaking my cheeks. Stepfather moves closer to me and picks up his army coat. From its inside pocket he takes out forty yuan and stuffs the bills into my hand.

  I look up at him and shake my head. The band on my ponytail falls off and my black hair, down. Stepfather lifts my chin and sweeps away the hair covering my eyes. "Take it, Sha-fei. As long as you’re obedient, everything’s going to be okay for you, understand?"

  I take the money and look down again.

  Stepfather lights another "Panda" and inhales deeply. He puts one foot on the edge of my bed and says, "Let me tell you, Sha-fei Hong. If you’re a smart girl like I hope you are, you won’t breathe a word to anyone, understand?"

  I look up at him, sobbing, "Mother will kill me if she finds out."

  "How can she find out if you shut the fuck up? Besides, she won’t dare kill you if you’re good to me."

  He puts on his coat. "So be good, Sha-fei. Don’t let your mother . . . and me worry. Next time we see you, you’ll have a baby brother. By the way, don’t forget to send my greetings to Old Chen."

  Stepfather closes my apartment door, leaving behind a trail of smoke, a bunch of bananas with one missing, and me.

  In the days following Stepfather’s visit, I develop an urge to spit. I rinse my mouth all day long. Then I spit. I spit until my throat hurts.

  There is no sink within the apartment. Running water is only available from the two taps in our building’s communal kitchen. One pail at a time, I go to fetch water and bring it into my apartment, where I rinse my mouth and spit into a spittoon. The spittoon is usually for the night soil, which I dump each morning in the female communal bathroom.

  The Sunday after, I drag my feet to the tiny kitchen shared by six families, empty pail in hand. Aunt Cheng and Teacher Gao are already there preparing lunch, but I am relieved to find that Mrs. Wu is not among them. Her husband, Master Worker Wu, is neither a faculty member nor a school administrator. He is the Party branch secretary of all the janitors. Because of his proletarian background, he has been appointed the Building Representative, with his homemaker wife serving on the Neighborhood Revolutionary Committee. When we first moved here, the Wus were put in charge of supervising us as a family "to be reformed under surveillance."

  The shared kitchen has only one window directly above a large, cold-water-only communal sink for washing produce, clothes, dishes, human body parts, anything and everything. It is not uncommon for people to wait their turn for the sink, which is flanked by three gas stoves on each adjacent wall. Over each stove hangs a 15-watt bulb, which has to be turned on even during the day due to the dimness of the kitchen. Right below the yellow, grease-coated ceiling hangs a cobweb of electrical wires, as each family uses its own power meters extended from the various apartments.

  I try to avoid eye contact with the tw
o ladies, but Aunt Cheng calls out to me. "Sha-fei, you seem to be getting an awful lot of water in the past week. You shouldn’t cheat us all on your share of the water bill come month’s end!"

  I lower my head and say nothing. Teacher Gao comes to my rescue. "Say, Sister Cheng, how much water can she use? She doesn’t have sink after sink of diapers to wash, like some people. She always pays her own share."

  Aunt Cheng gives Teacher Gao a sideways glance and says, "That’s exactly my point, Teacher Gao. She pays one person’s share, but she is using more water than usual. That’s taking advantage of all of us neighbors."

  "If you think I use too much, I’ll pay one and a half persons this month, then. Okay?" I say, turning on the tap to make the water splash, drowning her voice.

  Pointing a frostbitten index finger in my direction, Aunt Cheng says gleefully, "One and a half persons this month, Sha-fei. I have your word for it. Teacher Gao can be my witness."

  "Okay, okay," says Teacher Gao.

  When I turn off the tap, I hear someone outside yelling, "Tao Hong! Comrade Tao Hong! Bring down your chop for special delivery!"

  The three pairs of eyes in the kitchen stare at each other. Tao Hong was my late father. Without thinking further, I answer the postman, "Coming! Coming!" I run back to my apartment to fetch Father’s seal, an individual’s essential identification.

  Dashing down to our building’s entrance, I see Aunt Cheng and Teacher Gao chatting with the green-uniformed postman leaning against his matching mail bicycle. "There she is," Aunt Cheng shouts. "That’s Tao Hong’s daughter."

  "What is it?" I ask the postman.

  "Give me Tao Hong’s seal and you’ll know in a minute."

  He checks Father’s name on the chop before stamping it on an aerogramme that looks tattered. It was forwarded from our old French Concession address and has American-flag stamps on it.

  "Meiguo! Meiguo! Letter from the U.S. for your father!" Aunt Cheng announces, her voice’s pitch an octave higher. "Open it right away, Sha-fei!"

  My hands start to tremble. I see Father’s face in front of me. For a split second, I think the letter could be from Marlene Koo.

  "No," I resist. "I can’t open Father’s mail."

  "What a silly girl you are. Your father’s dead and your mother has remarried. You’re the only Hong here. Open it, Sha-fei. See what America has to say to you," urges Aunt Cheng.

  "That’s right. That’s right. You’re the only legitimate Hong here, Sha-fei," says, Teacher Gao, smiling. Her bespectacled head hovers over the mail in my hands.

  "Sorry, I have to go. I may have forgotten to lock my apartment door when I got the chop."

  I run to the apartment and lock the door behind me. Holding my breath, I tear the aerogramme open.

  Dear old pal Tao,

  Yes, this is your good old Gordon Lou from Columbia -- long time no see. Three decades have passed in the blink of an eye. Believe it or not, I have a last-minute arrangement to visit Shanghai the 2nd week of January ‘85 for some business. Will stay at the Shanghai Plaza. I’d be happy to see you during my one-week’s stay.

  Hope all is well.

  Gordon

  "Gordon," I repeat the name under my breath, not Marlene. Mr. Gordon Lou apparently doesn’t know that Father has died five years ago. His scheduled arrival is just is a week from now, at the beginning of my winter break. Father’s old friend from America is coming to visit Shanghai! What should I do? Contact Mother? But her stomach is like a watermelon right now. A male watermelon Stepfather’s likeness, an orangutan in the flesh, suddenly appears before my eyes. I choke on the thought, my throat again a drought-devastated land. I am hit by the urge to get the pail of water still in the kitchen.

  Ignoring my neighbors in the kitchen as I carry the pail out proves difficult. Aunt Cheng puts down her cooking spatula and blocks my way. "What does the American letter say, Sha-fei?"

  I want to say I didn’t read it, but the words come out differently. "Nothing. Someone’s looking for Father, but you all know it’s impossible now," I say coldly, trying to leave.

  Aunt Cheng snatches the pail in my hand and drops it on the concrete floor near our feet, sending cold water spattering. "Who is he? An American?" she demands.

  "No. I don’t know who he is. Someone who knew Father."

  Aunt Cheng’s eyes become two surprised ping-pong balls. "Wonderful, Sha-fei! Your rich relative from America is here. Now you can finally go abroad. Don’t forget us poor folks here, Sha-fei girl!"

  "What are you talking about?"

  Aunt Cheng puts her arm around my neck and presses my shoulder. "Just think, Sha-fei, your father suffered so much since you people moved here from the Upper Corner. It’s all because of his overseas connections. At least now you can benefit from his past."

  Father’s past. A past once considered disgraceful and suddenly so desirable in the eyes of these same neighbors. They were eyewitnesses to his arrest on that autumn day. I was barely seven.

  Father was preparing lessons at his desk while I folded origami dolls on the floor by his feet. An approaching siren pierced my ears. I clasped my hands on the windowsill and looked down. Struck by the rare sight of an army-green jeep parking in front of our building’s common entrance, I called out, "Father, look! There’s a jeep downstairs."

  Rising, Father frowned, his face turning grim. I sensed something wrong. Before I could ask, our door was kicked open. Three ferocious-looking men in navy-blue uniforms stormed in. The man in the lead shouted, "Is Tao Hong home?"

  Father came forward, "I’m Tao Hong. What do you-?"

  Two men grabbed his arms and pinned them behind his back. The third man pulled out a dirty white towel and shoved it into Father’s mouth. He then took out a rope and tied Father’s hands.

  "We’re from the Public Security Bureau," the man in the lead announced. "You are under arrest, Tao Hong!"

  The men pushed Father against his desk, where his class notes lay. Trailing them silently into my parents’ bedroom that also served as Father’s study, I was too frightened to know what to do. Mother was at work in the factory. We didn’t have a telephone.

  As the men searched and ransacked our place, one of them threw an English engineering textbook on the floor as if smashing a rice bowl, shouting, “Imperialist trash!”

  "Careful! These materials in stinking foreign languages are evidence of his crimes against the people," the older man warned.

  After the men bundled up Father’s books and handwritten notes with my parents’ bed sheets, they shoved Father toward our apartment door. "Father! Father! No! No!" I screamed. He could not speak, but his eyes looked painfully wronged.

  As if a circus had arrived, the entire neighborhood rushed out to watch my father being whisked away in the unmarked jeep. Out of the crowd of agitated and gossiping onlookers, a deep voice yelled, "Everybody go home. Let’s all go home, comrades. What’s there to see? It’s a good thing that our community is cleared of a class enemy!" It was Master Worker Wu.

  With stiff faces, the neighbors stopped talking and dispersed. There were a few minutes of frightening silence before life in our building resumed its usual chaos. I was left scrunched up under the building’s staircase, where I sobbed uncontrollably for a couple of hours. With the Wus in proximity, nobody dared to come near me. It was as if I had suddenly contracted leprosy . . .

  Some of the same people are so interested in today’s letter to Father from abroad. How things have changed since the days of the Cultural Revolution. Stepfather’s words resound in my ears: "It’s the 80’s now. China is opening up to the world." If Father were alive today, he would never be accused of being a spy for the U.S. but instead be eagerly courted. A connection with America is seen as a godsend to most people now.

  "The past is history, Aunt Cheng," I say. "What’s there to benefit from?"

  "What kind of attitude is that, Sha-fei girl?” Aunt Cheng exclaims. “We saw you moving in here, a chit of a girl in that lacy pink fairy dr
ess. We remember how you had to be stripped down and change into those split-crotch pants to look more like the kids who lived in this area. We all shared your family’s happiness and sorrow. Now that you have some good news, you think you can hide it from us?" She swallows with effort and comes up with a little saliva, which she promptly spits into the sink. "Pooh!"

  Teacher Gao puts on a mediating smile. "Come on, Comrade Cheng. We’re all happy for Sha-fei. Let Sha-fei tell us the details of the news from America." She motions to Aunt Cheng, and then grins at me.

  "You both seem to know more than I do. All I know is that Father’s long-lost friend might be visiting Shanghai. I don’t even know what to do yet."

  Aunt Cheng’s face lights up, revealing her tea-stained teeth with years of lack of toothpaste. "Ai-ya!" she shrieks with delight. "Our Sha-fei will go to America and become Mrs. Americana. Once you’re there, you mustn’t forget all of us here, Sha-fei girl!"

  I reply with a forced smile. "Aunt Cheng, what you’ve said is all in your imagination. I don’t have any idea what’s going to happen. And I don’t know where this notion about a rich American husband comes from."

  With the chopsticks she used for cooking hanging out of her mouth like two long cigarettes, Aunt Cheng retorts, "Come, come, Sha-fei. Nowadays, who doesn’t want to marry an American? Look at my husband’s cousin twice removed. To go abroad, the girl even married a Chinese-American in his late sixties with grown children older than herself. But her letter home says that Meiguo is paradise, just as the written characters themselves promise – ‘Beautiful Country.’ Everyone drives a car. Nobody uses bicycles. Their garages are larger than our apartments!"

  "I’m not surprised," says Teacher Gao. "Some of my former students write to me from America saying the same thing. Over there, warm water flows from the tap. American women don’t have needles pinching their fingers while doing dishes and laundry in bone-chilling water, as we do here." She emphasizes her point by wiggling her freezing, carrot-like fingers in front of me.