Uncle passed me a handkerchief. “I know life has not been easy for you. But I want you to know how lucky you are. You are in college. You should appreciate what you’ve got.” He paused, embracing my shoulders with his arm. “I used to dream of going to college. But I never got the chance to.”
Uncle’s father was a banker before the Communists took over. He was in high school when the Cultural Revolution came along. After wandering for a few years without a job or home, he was assigned to work in “Beijing Automobile Parts factory”, which was a good luck compared with thousands of high school graduates who were forced to spend their lives working in the countryside.
He sighed and continued. “Now it’s too late for me to go to college. I’m old and have forgotten most of the things I learned in school.” He gazed out the subway window. His tone implied some kind of grief and repentance that I had never heard from him before. In my memories, he had always been a young and happy person.
By the time we left the subway station, it was already dark downtown. In the lighted streets, people rushed back and forth, bicycle bells ringing around us, stores closing.
Uncle walked me to the bus stop. As we were waiting, the question finally burst out. “Are you going to take Mingming away?”
A gust of wind blew my question past his ears. He did not respond.
“I know I shouldn’t get into this. Please take her away, please!” I snatched his coat, pulling and shaking violently. “She’s twelve years old and has already got into drinking and smoking.” I cried.
“Meihua, your bus is here.” He pushed me through the door. “Goodbye, college student! Write to me!”
The bus lunged. I did not answer him and cried all the way home.
I went back to school after winter vacation was over. My college life had been very quiet. Nothing went on except for studying. Students had become very diligent after ten years wasted during the “Cultural Revolution”. We did not have a choice anyway. No dates or parties were permitted on campus except for special occasions. We had to be in our dormitories before eleven O’clock at night. Therefore, I had plenty of time to satisfy Uncle’s expectations – studying hard. But things did not progress wholly that way. It was impossible to keep my mind working on physics and mathematics 12 hours a day. Although I made myself sit in the library after classes, my mind was often miles away, fantasizing romantic relationships.
I kept writing to Uncle from time to time. His answers were usually short and matter of fact, mostly about his work and his new job in the purchasing department. He rarely mentioned his family. I was not eager to see him again. He had acquired a different image after I had met him. It was hard connecting the Uncle of reality with the Uncle of my memories. First of all, he seemed not as handsome as earlier. After many years of cultivation, he had changed into an ordinary workingman from a rich playboy. Somehow, I had felt responsible for finding Mingming’s real father, although his disinterest toward her had surprised me. In the back of my mind, I probably needed him too. But I had not figured out how. I did not confide in mother until I received a letter from Uncle one day.
It was Sunday afternoon. After taking the mail out the mailbox, I found Uncle’s letter and tore it open.
Dear Meihua,
I have not heard from you in a while. My new job in the purchasing department is very challenging. I realize how much I have to learn. Last Sunday, I visited the area where your family lived. I rode my bicycle down the street, hoping to encounter you. But I was disappointed. Then I went to the apartment building. I saw your shadow, outlined on the curtain. I tried to imagine you laughing, joking. I stood there for two hours until my hands were frozen, my legs numb……
Fondly, Weiming
The letter made me realize that he was still the old romantic of eight years ago. Since I was so lonely and unhappy, I thought he was the one who truly liked me and needed me. I folded his letter, went to the bathroom, and read it over and over, until mother knocked on the door, to see whether I was all right. I came out, red-eyed and face full of tears.
“What happened?” Mother asked. “Are you all right?” Then she spotted the letter in my hand and snatched it away. After reading the letter, mother sighed and took me into her bedroom. “What’s all these about?”
“I went to see Uncle Weiming, and then…” I told mother the whole story.
“Jesus, why do you do that for? He is history. He is gone!”
“Mother, I’m sorry.”
“No, I just don’t want you to make the same mistake your mother have made. He is very good at flattering girls. If you believe it, you are in trouble.” Taking a deep drag of the cigarette, mother sank into deep thought. The cigarette almost burned to the end. Ashes fell on the floor.
“He was always interested in you, you know? He didn’t want to be stuck with an old married lady like me. But you were still too young.” She blew out smoke slowly, as though she wanted to breath out a painful memory. Then she stubbed the cigarette butt into the ashtray, twisting it hard as if to kill it.
“Stop writing to him! Stop the whole thing! Ok? I beg you. I beg youuuuu…” She grabbed my hands, bursting into tears.
“Look at your mother. Look at your mother. Am I beautiful? Am I smart? Yes. But I was much prettier, and I was smart. Please don’t waste your time on someone like him. You have much more important things to do. Study, study hard!”
“Dammit! What are you guys yelling about?” Father sauntered over and pounded his fists on mother’s half opened bedroom door.
“We’re not talking about you.”
“Then don’t screaming and shouting. You’re going to wake up the whole neighborhood! You don’t care about your face. I do.” He turned and added, “I know you guys are always plotting about murdering me. Hey, I’m going to live longer than any of you!” He wobbled away.
Mother had never revealed to me that Uncle actually had been interested in me many years ago. I was shocked. I also felt sorry for myself. If only I had known, if only I had known…… It was too late now. He was married. But still he could be my friend, maybe boyfriend. Why not, mother had done it. Having a boyfriend might solve my problems. Lately I often dreamed to be hugged and kissed by someone. I longed for someone who would care about me and listen to my complaints. But I did not like those young men in college. They might be good looking and good students. But they were too simple minded. Could they understand I had acted like a mother for my brother and sister when I was fifteen? Could they understand my mother’s boyfriend and my father had lived under the same roof for many years? I was not normal. It was not easy to find someone to understand me.
Without telling mother, I had accepted an invitation from Uncle to visit his home.
On Saturday morning, I took the bus according to the directions he gave me in his letter.
It was a newly developed area. Several grey concrete apartment buildings lined the road. Others were under construction, and their naked skeletons and innards were exposed, bare and ugly.
I walked into a side street, which was the only old-fashioned alley left in the area. The third door on the left was Uncle’s. I went though the squeaky wooden gate between two stone-lion sentinels. It was a traditional Chinese house, with a square “four-corner” courtyard in the middle and rooms surrounding it on all sides. An old gray-haired man with darting eyes brushed his teeth in front of the shared outdoor sink. He smiled at me while letting the toothpaste drip from his mouth. I gave him a smirk.
I knocked at the door I thought was Uncle’s. A middle-aged lady appeared.
“I am Meihua. I have come to visit Uncle Weiming.”
“I am Wuhua, Weiming’s wife.” She took my hands, “Come on in.” I followed her.
“It’s nice to see you. I remember you when you were a little girl.” Wuhua glanced at me, and smiled.
Good! I thought. She did not mention my mother.
Their daughter Qinmei was just getting up. Uncle was braiding her pigtail, which reminded me
of the past.
“Could you fix your own pigtails now? Oh!” Uncle looked at my freshly trimmed short haircut, shook his head. “Do you still remember what I told you? Girls should have pigtails, boys have short hair.”
I smiled quietly. Wuhua handed me a basket full of delicious “Big Rabbit” candies from Shanghai. After dressing Qinmei, we left for the subway station. We were going to take a ride around the new subway system.
Uncle’s wife, Wuhua, was a typical workingwoman. She had short straight hair and dark skin. She wore an old semi-transparent polyester blouse, a pair of faded pants, and a pair of not-so-clean, soft walking shoes. Uncle carried Qinmei on his shoulders. She spun her head.
“See, Mommy, I am taller than you are!” She shouted proudly.
Wuhua and I followed quietly. I stared at the ground, counting my steps. I did not know what to say to her. She also worked in the same factory and knew a lot about mother and Uncle. To my surprise, she was very nice to me. I asked myself, “O.K., what am I doing here?” Uncle had finally given up his crazy oath to “never marry in his life”. He had found a wife, had a daughter, and lived like everyone else. Why should I not leave him alone?
A gust of cool air swept my face as we walked down the stairs in the subway station. The guards, wearing winter down-coats in the late spring, with their hands in the coat pockets, walked back and forth. Their faces were shadowed, backs slightly hunched.
“Dad, tell me a story.” Qinmei whispered into his ear, while we all sat together in the train.
“Which story do you want to hear?”
“I want to know what happened after the ‘little cloth boy’ got lost from Linlin’s pocket.” She stared at Uncle with two wistful eyes.
“Ok. After the ‘little cloth boy’ slipped out of Linlin’s pocket during her primary school graduation party…”
While Uncle was talking, the window on the other side of the train turned into a mirror against the dark. The mirror reflected Uncle with his child, and his wife watching them.
Then the scene changed to one that had happened fifteen years earlier when I was seven years old. Sitting on Uncle’s lap, I listened to him tell the same story. Mother sat next to us, holding a cigarette. The clanging of drums outside the window during those noisy “Cultural Revolution” demonstrations still rang in my ears.
Gradually, the scene shifted to my home when I was fourteen. Mother and I sat around the pot-bellied coal stove, listening to Uncle narrating a banned story about Mrs. Mao’s illegal activities right before the fall of the “Gang of Four”.
Then the scene switched to another that had occurred in the same room.
After staring at me for quite a while, Uncle said, “Meihua, do you know you have a pair of very beautiful eyes?”
“Thank you, Uncle.” I put down my head and nodded shyly. Mother sat next to me, smiling. “Just like mother’s.” I added. I honestly thought mother was prettier than me.
“No, you mother’s eyes are round like peanuts while yours are long like almonds.” Uncle squinted as though he was measuring the size of my eyes.
From then on, I would look at myself in the mirror every day, trying to comprehend Uncle’s comments: you have a pair of very beautiful eyes. Although I always thought my nose was too flat, my mouth too big and my face too wide, Uncle’s comments were certainly encouraging. After all, my eyes were beautiful, even more beautiful than mother’s. After Uncle had left, I became so unhappy that I messed up my eyesight and put on a pair of ugly glasses.
With the sad memory still floating in my mind, the scenes faded. Our trip finally came to an end. I jumped out of the train and walked forward quietly.
“I hope you didn’t feel too cold in the train,” said Wuhua.
“No. It’s the darkness that bothers me.” I answered.
She nodded. I was not sure that she understood what I was talking about. No one could imagine life with a mother who had both a husband and a boyfriend. It was a slow torture of the heart. It was like the subway system, an existence without sunlight.
It was noon. The sun struck my face. I had difficulty opening my eyes. They kept blinking for a while.
In his house, Uncle tied an apron around his waist and became the cook. Back in the past, one of the biggest joys of Uncle’s visits was his cooking. I still remembered vividly how much I had liked his deep fried pork, chicken and meatballs, varieties of stir-fried dishes, and steamed fish. He sat in front of our coal stove, waiting hours for the oil to get hot. Fortunately, the gas stove he had now was much faster. As I hoped, everything arrived on the little table in the courtyard in about an hour. We sat around it on little stools. Uncle served everyone a bowl of rice. In five minutes, three pairs of chopsticks swam in the dishes of sweet and sour pork, stir-fried green beans, hot and spicy bean curd, and chicken turnip soup.
Wuhua fed Qinmei. Busy with eating, Qinmei was unusually quiet, except when she asked for what she wanted.
“No, I don’t want pork, I want bean curd.” She pointed her fat little finger toward the table, while trying to spit out the pork in her mouth. She had a hard time doing so because the meat had stuck between her teeth.
The neighbors were cooking and doing laundry in the yard. The stir-fry smoke and the melodies of the Peking Opera on the radio lingered in the air, like an invisible roof over the courtyard.
Uncle sat quietly through dinnertime. Unlike the others, he did not have any rice. Instead, he drank white wine. Under the shade of trees around the house, his face was like a bronze statue, solemn and motionless. Along with eating roasted peanuts, he drank slowly.
“You are at Beijing University. It must be an exciting place.” Wuhua started a conversation.
“Not really. It’s a very boring place.” I answered.
“Boring? Why? I thought Beijing University was the number-one university in the whole country.”
“Yes. But it’s also very boring. Nothing happens. We spend our days in the library, studying, studying and studying.”
“Is that right?” She looked lost.
“But recently it has been fun. Local free elections had turned the campus up-side-down.” I thought I should tell her about another aspect of my school. “Big-letter posters about reforming our country had covered the campus like a snow storm. Candidates gave public speeches on the street corners and in the cafeterias, from morning till night. I had been to public debates every night. Sometimes the meeting hall was so crowded that we had to stand outside to listen. We discussed everything from the pros and cons of Communism and Capitalism to the Feminist movement. For the first time in three years, I discovered friendly, interesting students at my university. Finally, the citizens of Beijing West District elected one of our brightest graduate students to represent them.”
Uncle and Wuhua listened quietly. Maybe it was hard for those who had wasted their youth in political movements to share my enthusiasm for the demonstrations, and to comment on the college life they had never experienced.
In a while, Uncle stood up, the shade of nearby trees scattered on his face. His eyelids glistened under the spots of sunlight. He put his hand on my shoulder, looked into my eyes and said to me, “I am going to lie down for a while. I’m tired. You and Wuhua can talk. Ok?”
He left quickly. Wuhua was about to help him into the bedroom. He pushed her back and said, “I can take care of myself.”
Wuhua came back and sighed, “I am sorry. He is like that once in a while.”
Seeing Uncle in such a bad mood, I began to ask myself again what I was doing here.
“Do you have to clean dishes?” Wuhua asked me, trying to put aside her worries.
“Only during weekends at home.” I said, beginning to admire her.
“How lucky you are! But you’d better be prepared for it. After you get married and have children, you have to do it every day.”
“I’m not sure I want to get married.” I said uncertainly. In my mind the idea of “marriage” still seemed far, far away. Love
was yet to come, let alone marriage.
“Why? It’s nice to be married and have children.” She was really surprised.
As I washed dishes at the sink, the old man I met earlier came up to me and asked, “Are you Wuhua’s……”
“No, Weiming’s niece.”
“Oh, his brother’s daughter?”
Nodding my head, I lied. During the years I grew up while mother enjoyed her modern life style, I had learned how terrible gossip could be. Gossips could chop you into pieces. Wuhua handed me more dishes and turned around, facing down the old man.
“Hey, what are you doing here? Does she bother you? Let me tell you it’s none of your business who she is! You’d better piss on the ground, and admire yourself in it!” Then she grabbed the dishpan from my hands, and walked back into her home.
Wuhua hung some winter jackets and blankets outside to make use of the bright summer sunshine.
Walking through the house alone, I noticed two books lying on top of the dresser. One was high school algebra; the other was a book about international trade. I opened the second one, started reading. The clock struck 3. I wondered about my being here. It had been an hour and half since Uncle had gone to sleep.
I tiptoed into the bedroom. Uncle snored heavily. With his eyes half open, his rough, freckled face was red and twisted. His chest bulged. His hands were clenched into fists. It seemed he was ready to fight someone in his dream. The longer I stayed, the louder his snoring became. It resonated in my head like the humming of a primitive song, like a desperate cry, like the rumbling of thunder. Then it stopped. Uncle was awake.
He stared at me with red, sleepy eyes. I rushed toward him. He grabbed my arms and murmured, “Meihua, Meihua, is that you?” His dry cracked lips trembled.
“Yes, Uncle.” I moved closer to him. He opened his mouth again, and struggled to say something. But he sighed and dropped his head instead. “Meihua, would you leave here, please?” My heart, which had risen up in my throat, now plunged down like an anchor deep into the sea. I quietly stood up and walked toward the door.
Last Kiss in Tiananmen Square Page 27