by Liu Zhenyun
But first she needed a place to stay, and for that she turned to a classmate named Zhao Jingli, a boy who’d sat behind her for six years at school. Zhao had a big head with an indentation in the middle of his skull that gave it the appearance of a gourd. At school, everyone in class called him Big Head Zhao. That had replaced his name to such an extent that if someone called out Zhao Jingli, even he might not realize they were talking to him. For the first three years as classmates they never exchanged a word. But during the first year of high school, Li Xuelian could tell that he’d gotten interested in her. Big Head’s mother had died, his father was a tailor in town, and he had three younger brothers. Life was tough for a tailor with four sons, but every few days Big Head slipped her a “Big White Rabbit” nougat candy from the seat behind. Where the money had come from was a mystery. But in two years it never went beyond gifts of candy, until one day just before graduation, Zhao was waiting for her at the classroom door when she returned from the toilet during a study session.
“Li Xuelian,” he said as he looked around, “I have something to say to you.”
“Go ahead,” she said.
“Not here.”
“Where then?”
Zhao led her to a threshing ground behind the school. The night sky was black as ink.
“What do you want to say to me?” she asked him.
Without a word, he stepped up, wrapped his arms around her, and tried to kiss her. His movements were so abrupt and so unexpected she wasn’t sure what to do. So she shoved him back and tripped him with her leg; he thudded to the ground. Any other boy would have jumped up and tried again. He’d have groped her, even if she’d said “You’re getting me mad” or “I’m going to scream,” ripped off her clothes and done the deed. Big Head surprised her by getting up off the ground, looking at her, and, like an idiot, saying, “I thought we liked each other.” He added, “Don’t tell anyone.”
With that he ran off. Xuelian stood there, following his departure with angry laughter, not because he’d wrapped his arms around her and tried to kiss her, but because he’d run away. When they met the next day, Zhao kept his big head low and turned red. He couldn’t look Xuelian in the eye, and she knew that he was too naïve for his own good. Out of spite, she ignored him from then on. After high school, neither of them passed the college entrance exam, so Xuelian went back to her village, while Big Head went to the county seat to apprentice himself to an uncle who was a cook. When the uncle was transferred to the Beijing office of the provincial administration, Big Head went along, and when his uncle retired, he stayed behind.
Li Xuelian had no one in Beijing to turn to, no one but Big Head Zhao. But she was worried that after taking his nougats for two years and then frightening him on the threshing floor he’d bear a grudge. If he didn’t, she’d found a place to stay; if he did, she’d try somewhere else, and that somewhere else, she already knew, would be the train station. Though she’d never been to Beijing Station, she knew that train stations all over the country offered eaves under which people slept at night.
Xuelian arrived with the knowledge that Big Head worked in the Beijing branch of the province’s administrative office, but finding the place was not easy. She asked for directions time and again, took eight different buses, and wound up in the wrong place or down the wrong road more times than she could count. After arriving in Beijing in the early morning hours, it wasn’t until just before nightfall that she finally found the building she was looking for, the place where Big Head Zhao worked as a cook. It was a thirty-story high rise, and she was denied entrance. A courtyard with an arched gateway, sealed off with police tape, fronted the building, where half a dozen gate guards kept people from entering. A hundred or more provincial delegates to the Congress were housed in the building, she learned, and when she walked up, the guards at first thought she might be was one of them; but one look at her clothing left doubts. Nonetheless, she was greeted politely:
“You’ll have to find somewhere else to stay. This place is reserved for Congress delegates.”
For the second time, Xuelian felt the impact of the National People’s Congress. But she would not be deterred.
“I’m not looking for a place to stay, I’m here to see a relative.”
“You have a relative here for the Congress?” another guard asked.
She shook her head.
“No, not a delegate, he’s a cook. His name is Zhao Jingli.”
The man grew pensive.
“I know all the cooks here, and there’s no one named Zhao Jingli.”
“Everyone in the county knows he works here,” she said, starting to get anxious. “You must be wrong. I’ve traveled more than two thousand li to get here.”
Noting her distress, one of the other guards stepped up.
“We know everyone who works in the kitchen,” he assured her, “and take my word for it, there’s no one named Zhao Jingli.”
Then it hit her:
“I forgot, he’s got another name, we called him Big Head Zhao.”
They laughed when they heard that.
“Oh, Big Head. Why didn’t you say so?” one of them said. “Wait here, I’ll go get him.”
Five minutes later, Big Head Zhao walked out in his white uniform and chef’s hat. He hadn’t changed much since leaving school, except that he was a lot bigger around the middle. Skinny as a stalk of hemp supporting a big head back then, now he was just plain fat, which made his head seem smaller, especially under the chef’s hat. Xuelian would have passed him on the street without recognizing him. But after a brief, head-scratching pause, he knew who she was and clapped his hands excitedly.
“My word!” he exclaimed. “What are you doing here?”
Xuelian relaxed the moment she saw the broad smile on his face, confident that what had happened in school had been forgotten.
“I was visiting my aunt in the northeast and stopped to say hello on my way home.”
Zhao stepped up and took her travel bag.
“Come on in, I’ll get you a glass of water.”
One of the guards surprised them both by blocking their way.
“Big Head,” he said, “you can talk out here. With the Congress in session, strangers aren’t allowed inside.”
Big Head was stumped; so was Xuelian. But only for a moment.
“Fuck off!” Big Head said as he pushed the guard out of his way. “She’s my sister and that makes her no stranger.”
“We have our orders,” the man said.
Big Head spat on the ground.
“Are you a guard dog, treating advice like an order, a mere token of authority? Or is your old man inside? Has he just had a baby and is afraid of catching cold?”
The guard’s face reddened. He was on the verge of losing his cool.
“Why do you have to talk to me like that, Big Head?”
“Not because you won’t let my sister in, but because of your ingratitude. You never miss a day coming to the kitchen to enjoy freebies. Just yesterday I cut off a chunk of beef tendon for you. Talk to you like that? I ought to slug you, you bastard!”
He raised his fist. The red on the man’s face deepened.
“You just wait,” he said. “I’ll report you for this.”
With his hands over his head, the man ran to hide behind a stone lion in front of the gate. The others had a good laugh over that. Xuelian saw that Big Head Zhao, a wimp in school, was one no longer.
He led her past the police tape into the compound, but instead of going to the front entrance, he took a path around to the rear, up to a two-story building where a sign proclaimed: Kitchen Staff. She followed him into a storeroom with a bed. This, obviously, was where Big Head Zhao slept.
“I watch the storeroom, and they let me bed down here.”
After she washed up, Zhao poured her a cup of tea and then went to the kitchen, returning with a bowl of steaming noodles in thick sauce. By the time she’d finished, it was nine o’clock.
“So what
are you doing in Beijing?” Big Head asked.
Afraid to tell him the truth, she said:
“Like I said, I stopped to say hello on my way home from visiting my aunt in the northeast. I thought I’d see the sights of Beijing.”
“Good idea, enjoy some sightseeing. You can sleep here tonight.”
“Me? What about you?”
“Don’t worry, I know a dozen places around here where I can bed down.”
Before leaving, he said:
“Get some sleep. I have to prepare midnight snacks for the delegates.”
So Xuelian slept in Big Head Zhao’s bed that night; where he slept she did not know. Early the next morning, before she was up, there was a knock at the door. She draped something over her shoulders and opened the door. It was Big Head, looking anxious.
“Hurry,” he said, “hurry.”
“What is it?” She thought they were found out and she had to leave.
“Didn’t you say you wanted to see Beijing? Well, I have a day off to take you to the Great Wall. We need to get a head start to catch a bus at Front Gate.”
Xuelian breathed a sigh of relief, but then she paused. She’d come to Beijing to protest, not see the sights, but that is what she’d said the night before, and Big Head had taken it to heart. She did not want to seem ungrateful, nor was she willing to change her story about why she’d come to the city; she mustn’t let him know the story behind her protest. She surely could not finish what she’d come to do in one day, not when the National People’s Congress would be in session for two weeks, and a day would not be enough to get things done, nor would losing one day make any difference. So she brushed her teeth, washed her face, and went with Big Head Zhao to Front Gate, where they boarded a sightseeing bus to the Great Wall. It was a day filled with sights, but for Xuelian one filled with so many worries she could not enjoy the outing. Big Head, on the other hand, had a raring good time. The next day he took her to the Forbidden City and the Temple of Heaven. He even accompanied her to a beauty salon near the Temple of Heaven to get a permanent wave. That done, he looked her over.
“Much better,” he said. “Now you look like a local. A woman’s hairstyle tells people where she’s from.”
He chuckled, and she had to smile when she looked in the mirror.
Now that she was spruced up, it was time to try Beijing’s famous lamb hot pot. As they sat in front of the steaming pot, she tried to express her gratitude.
“Big Head,” she said, her words carrying through the steam that separated them, “you’ve wasted two whole days and spent a lot of money showing me around the city.”
Big Head did not like hearing that.
“What does that mean? Am I a stranger?”
“No. I’m just saying …”
Happy again, he slapped the tabletop.
“We’re not finished.”
“How’s that?”
“Tomorrow it’s the Summer Palace, where we can go rowing.”
That night, as she lay on Big Head Zhao’s bed, Xuelian had trouble falling asleep, unlike the previous two nights, when sleep had come easily. All the changes that had occurred in her life over the past year and the legal experiences crowded her mind. She never thought it would be so hard, nor had she imagined the difficulty in convincing people of the truth in a truthful comment. Conversely, she had not been able to convince them that her divorce from Qin Yuhe had been a sham. Most disturbing of all was how she had been branded a Pan Jinlian over something she had said; all this had brought her to Beijing to lodge her protest. Stumped by questions of how to go about doing that, she’d settled on a sit-in in Tiananmen Square, but to what effect she could not hazard a guess.
Big Head was a good man; he knew Beijing far better than she, and was someone with whom she could talk about anything, anything but this. She sighed. Then thoughts of her daughter, who had been cared for by her classmate since the quest for justice began, entered her head. Two months old when she’d been handed over, she was now more than three months old, and it was hard for her mother to imagine what she looked like now. Almost from the day the baby was born, Xuelian had been caught up in dealing with Qin Yuhe and making her appeal for justice, so busy the child didn’t yet have a name. She’d come to Beijing to seek justice, not to see the sights, and she could no longer take time away from what she’d come to do by traveling around the city with Big Head. Though she had no idea about how to lodge her protest, she knew that, like anything else, getting an early start was much better than being late. Just then she heard the heart-stopping sound of a key in the lock. A bit of light filtered into the darkness through a door that opened to admit a rotund figure. Big Head Zhao. Xuelian knew that the time to pay for the guided tour had arrived. She closed her eyes and lay perfectly still as Big Head tiptoed up to her bed and bent over until his face was nearly touching hers. Nothing moved for several minutes, until her eyes snapped open and she said:
“You don’t have to look, Big Head. Just do what you came to do.”
Blurting that out in the darkness threw a fright into him. She reached over and switched on the lamp. Zhao was standing there, looking awkward, wearing a tank top and a pair of underpants, over which his big belly flopped. When Xuelian said for him to “do what you came to do,” he suddenly didn’t know what to do. Maybe it was how she said it that made him feel so awkward. His face turned beet red.
“The way you said that,” he said as he wrung his hands, “I wonder what kind of man you take me for.”
He turned and began a search for something in the pantry.
“All I came in for was some yeast. I need to start the dough at night so I can steam crullers in the morning. I tell you, our governor loves the things.”
Xuelian draped a jacket over her shoulders and sat up.
“I said you could do it. Don’t blame me if you don’t.”
Big Head stood there tongue-tied.
“You’d have wasted two days otherwise.”
That embarrassed him further.
“Li Xuelian,” he said, gesturing wildly, “what do you mean by that? It was just sightseeing. We were classmates for six years.”
“Big Head, I don’t want to go to the Summer Palace tomorrow.”
“Where do you want to go?”
Unwilling to tell him she wanted to stage a sit-in in Tiananmen Square, she said, “I want to go shopping for my baby.”
“That sounds good, I’ll go with you.” He perked up.
“I don’t want to waste any more of your time.”
“I told you, I asked for time off. While you’re in Beijing, where you go, I go.”
Xuelian took her jacket off.
“Big Head, forget about the yeast. It’s not too late to do what you want.”
He stared at her, and stared some more, before crouching down next to her bed and lighting a cigarette.
“Listen to you! If I want to do it, well, you need to give me time.”
That made Xuelian laugh. Ten years had changed Big Head’s appearance, but he was still the same innocent kid.
“Big Head,” she said, “I want to go out on my own tomorrow, just me, how’s that? As they like to say these days, I need my space.”
He didn’t put up a fight. He laughed too.
“If you want to be alone, then that’s what you should do. To be honest, the senior chef has been hinting that two days to show you around is enough.”
Xuelian laughed again. She planted a kiss on the top of his head.
Early the next morning, Li Xuelian put on her new clothes, walked out of Big Head Zhao’s room and left the Kitchen Staff storeroom, heading for Tiananmen Square to stage a sit-in. The clothes were a nod to the square itself. If she had the slovenly appearance of a petitioner, she might be stopped by guards from even making it onto the square. A month earlier, after deciding to make a formal complaint, she’d bought a set of new clothes. A month had passed without putting them on; now was their time. What she had not been able to do back home
she was going to do in the capital. But she had barely made it around the building and reached the flower pond when she was called to a halt:
“Where do you think you’re going?”
She almost jumped out of her skin. She turned and saw a thickset, middle-aged man in a suit and tie, with a brass official badge pinned to his coat. He looked like an office bigwig, and Xuelian thought she was being stopped for sneaking into Big Head Zhao’s room and spending the night there. But he’d asked her where she was going, not where she’d been, and she relaxed a bit. What should she say? She couldn’t tell him the truth. Her mind was a blank. All she could come up with was:
“Just out to take a walk.”
“No you’re not,” he said angrily. “Get that stuff loaded right now.”
“What stuff?”
The man pointed to some cardboard boxes on the steps, then to the gate.
“Those boxes. Load them onto the bus. Have you forgotten that we have to make our Government Work Report today? Hurry up, the delegates will be leaving for the Great Hall in a minute.”
Xuelian looked from the stacked boxes to the gate, where seven or eight large sedans were parked, their engines running, filled with passengers who were talking and laughing among themselves. Seeing Xuelian walk out in neat clothes, with her hair done in the latest Beijing style, the man must have assumed that she worked in the building. Knowing what he was thinking, she didn’t dare ignore his instruction to load the boxes for fear of being found out for spending the night there without permission. Besides, how hard could moving a few boxes be? She picked them up; they hadn’t looked heavy, but they were. She carried them to the bus at the rear, where someone inside said: