by Xiaolu Guo
‘Well, she certainly does sound like a bombshell.’ I am tempted to run outside myself to see if I can catch a glimpse of this woman. After all, we are going to be neighbours.
I pick up the rubbish bag on the way out, and walk to the main entrance of our building. The front gate is blocked by a large, rather decrepit removals van. Two removals men in filthy uniforms are busy lifting a large dining table from the van. The same group of old men who always seem to be squatting outside our building playing chess have stopped their game and turned to stare at the woman. They seem to be enjoying the peep show. As for the woman, she is exactly as Red described her. She has curly platinum blonde hair, bright red lipstick, a tight-fitting leopard-print dress and a wide leather belt slung around her hips. With her stiletto heels and silk stockings completing the ensemble, the effect is indeed overwhelming. Even more so is the way she carries herself. Hers is not the attitude of someone living on the first floor; it is the attitude of someone looking down upon the world from high atop the penthouse suite. She stands amongst the dirty rubbish bins, clutching a cat with fur the exact shade of her hair. She and the cat, watching the movers’ progress, seem to exude the very same air of indifference.
* * *
With the addition of this woman to our daily lives, Red and I find our range of conversational topics greatly enriched.
The noises begin at about noon. They start in her bathroom, when the sound of running water upstairs begins to reverberate through the pipes in our own bathroom. From that point, there is no silence to be had. We hear her footsteps on the floor above us, tap tap tapping to the sound of some percussion-heavy music such as rock or disco. We cannot tell whether she is dancing or doing exercises. Although we have seen her in person and know that she is not at all overweight, just extremely voluptuous, every time she jumps up and down, it sets the ceiling of our flat shaking. The impact causes the tassels on our hanging lamp to swing back and forth as if we are experiencing a minor earthquake. After she has finished with her aerobics or exercises, the music stops and her phone begins ringing. By late afternoon, we can hear the constant opening and closing of her front door, suggesting a steady stream of visitors. We are able to infer something about the nature of her guests by the sound of their laughter, their coughing, sneezing, heavy footsteps and the type of music playing on the stereo. Judging by these and by the volume and pitch of the guests’ voices, we deduce that her visitors are exclusively male. Having reached this interesting conclusion, Red and I sit in our flat quietly eating our dinner of frozen, pre-prepared foodstuffs: Auntie Su’s Frozen Wonton, Little Miss Zang Frozen Dumplings and Even-the-Dog-Won’t-Eat-’Em Savoury Buns. As my dinner settles in my stomach, I imagine a crowd of male guests crammed into that tiny flat, clustered around the curly-haired blonde in the tight leopard-print dress.
At night, I lie awake on our mattress, so close to the ground that I can hear the earth’s heartbeat, see the tiny ants crawling up the base of the bedside lamp. The sounds of the woman’s lovemaking seems to travel a direct line to our flat, carrying down through the ceiling and into our mundane lives. Sometimes it is the sound of a headboard banging up against the wall, steadily, rhythmically, as if a carpenter has taken up a hammer and is driving nails into the wall. Other times it is simply the sound of two bodies falling off the bed and onto the ground. As the bodies roll around the floor, I can distinguish sounds of an elbow being propped up, a knee banging on the ground, a complex change of position. The woman’s cries are occasionally muffled, as if a hand has been clamped over her mouth. Sometimes it is hard to tell whether I am listening to lovemaking or fighting.
During the day, our high-rise building is more powerful than our blonde neighbour. Her private life has to compete with the wholesome lives contained within these twenty-five storeys, lives filled with domestic trivia and household gossip, husbands telling wives about their day at work, children telling parents about their day at school and old women telling old men about their day spent playing mah-jong. The life of a woman whose sole agenda is her body seems to pale somewhat in the midst of this larger society.
But in the hours after midnight, the woman’s vitality bursts forth, as she makes love with amazing stamina. Sometimes she falls to giggling so hard that she can hardly catch her breath. Each night, I accompany her midnight song until at last, late at night, she falls into a deep and silent sleep.
In the small hours of the morning I lie awake thinking about the day Boy Waiting’s younger sister was swept away.
After giving birth to Boy Waiting, her mother began to lose faith in her ability to produce a son, but her mother-in-law urged her to keep trying. Boy Waiting’s grandmother believed that the more sons and grandsons a family had, the more prosperous it would be. Then there was the matter of the family’s fishing boat. Without a son, who would take over the boat when the Captain grew too old to sail? Hoping for a son, however, continued to prove much easier than producing one. Even the most casual observer could see that the house was filled with women – seven daughters, their mother and grandmother. That added up to nine hungry mouths to feed, and not one of them was a sea scavenger. The family needed another fisherman if it hoped to feed all those girls. It was not enough to rely on the old Sea Captain, for nobody knew whether or when he might meet with an accident at sea. For a fisherman, each voyage could prove to be his last. To stave off this eventuality, Boy Waiting’s grandmother walked to the temple on the far side of the mountain every day to make offerings and burn incense. She managed to walk surprisingly fast for a woman with such small, bound feet. When she reached the temple, she offered incense to both Guanyin and the Sea Goddess, praying to the Sea Goddess for the Captain’s safe return and to Guanyin that her daughter-in-law might bear a grandson.
Though the Captain placed no blame on his wife, he must have felt entitled to at least one son, a boy to take his place on the fishing boat. I never saw the Captain worship anyone or anything, but when he drank, he drank like religion, tossing back one large bowl of wine after another in the manner of a man worshipping at the cups of the Buddhist patriarchs. I suspect that deep in his heart, the Captain still harboured hopes for a son. But when Boy Waiting’s youngest sister, his eighth consecutive daughter, came into this world, the Captain lost whatever remaining faith he had in temple offerings and incense burnings. His wife’s milk had finally dried up. She seemed to grow more shrivelled, as if the years of constant childbearing had left her as desiccated as a dried squid. In order to conserve her strength for work around the house and manual labour on the beach, she decided that she would have no more children.
After living with six older sisters for so many years, Boy Waiting was thrilled to have a little sister at last. The arrival of a baby sister meant that Boy Waiting was no longer the youngest child in the family, picked on by her older sisters and despised by her grandmother. It also meant that Boy Waiting finally had someone smaller than herself, someone she could push around.
Though the new baby was a girl, her parents named her Boy at Last and decided to raise her as a son. Her mother was kept busy running back and forth to the tailor’s shop to have clothes made for the baby. All were shirts and shoes and little hats embroidered with leopards and tigers, boy clothes meant to transform Boy at Last into a real son. Boy at Last was the only child in the family permitted to wear a tiger hat. None of the other seven daughters had ever had one. It would have been unthinkable, because tiger hats were reserved for boys. When Boy at Last began to grow a thick head of hair, her mother took her to the barber to be given a boy’s haircut. With her hair shaved on both sides and a little tuft in the middle, Boy at Last looked just like one of the cherubic little boys – often pictured riding a giant carp – on the Chinese New Year posters. From then on, Boy at Last looked and behaved just like all the other little boys in the village. She never played girls’ games, and her parents spoiled her terribly. Boy Waiting was forced to suffer the double indignity of being deprived of a younger sister she could p
ick on and being cast as a little nursemaid to the family’s eighth child, her ostensible ‘younger brother’. As Boy at Last grew older, she became even more of a tomboy, crude of features and possessed of an oddly grating voice. On windless nights, the sound of Boy at Last crying was loud enough to wake everyone in the village.
My grandmother said that Boy at Last had not been much blessed in this latest incarnation. By rights, she ought to have been born male, but now she was neither male nor female. Woe to her unlucky parents.
Regardless of my grandmother’s feelings on the subject, Boy at Last remained the apple of her parents’ eyes.
From the time she was very small, Boy at Last accompanied us to play on the beach. She had no fear of the surf, and loved to clamber over the rocks by the seashore. She preferred to play with the boys, joining happily in their fights, spitting contests and dares to see who was brave enough to pick up a crab by its pincers. Everyone regarded her as a boy. While this tomboy sister was rough-housing on the shore with the other boys, Boy Waiting and I stood apart from them, gazing out at the ocean. It was as if their antics on the seashore had no connection with us, as if their ocean and our ocean were completely separate entities, two different facets of the Village of Stone.
There were more typhoons in the Village of Stone during the seventh moon than at any other time of year. For weeks on end, the village was struck by one typhoon after another. Typhoon rains flooded the lanes and Pirate’s Alley, the longest and most winding alleyway in the village, was transformed into a raging river. When the ground floor of the houses flooded, the residents moved upstairs, lugging with them their stores of rice and flour, furniture and other belongings, even the pigs from their backyards. They set up ladders so that they could pile stones upon the tiled rooftops to keep them from being ripped off by the typhoons. Because there were frequent power cuts at night, the village headman’s office issued candles to all the villagers, two packets per household. During the day, the village children went out to the flooded streets to play in the water. They fished out errant sandals, plastic bottles, rotting pieces of Tangjiu toffee, waterlogged crabs and other debris washed in from who knows where. When the children returned home, they found the adults busy making lanterns for the Festival of the Dead.
Despite the bad weather, the fishing boats in the harbour were never idle at this time of year. There was an abundance of yellow croaker, crabs, eels and butterfish to be found in the waters. Other than the early winter fishing season, it was the best catch of the year, thanks to the tropical current that flowed in from the South Pacific and mingled with another current from the north. The combined currents, one warm and one cool, brought with them an abundance of sea life. Schools of fish gathered near the shore as if for some important undersea conference. For this reason, the true fishermen of the village were more than willing to brave the risks of setting out to sea. Every year at this time, Boy Waiting’s father, the Sea Captain, led a group of four or five other fishing boats out to sea for the catch.
In the early part of the seventh moon, the Village of Stone entered into an extended period of humidity caused by typhoon rains. The damp seeped in everywhere. Rain surged down the flight of stone steps leading up to the mountain, transforming it into a white waterfall. That year, as the Captain prepared to set sail, there was neither wind nor rain. Boy Waiting’s mother spent her days in the kitchen cooking ten days’ worth of food for her husband to take along on his voyage. She sealed the rations in waterproof containers with an ample supply of condiments such as shrimp paste and fermented tofu. As the captain busied himself laying in a supply of matches, plastic tarpaulins, raincoats and cigarettes for his journey, he could not have imagined the implications that this trip would have for his beloved tomboy, Boy at Last. I remember standing in the courtyard that day with Boy Waiting, Boy at Last and their older sisters, watching the Captain pack the equipment he would use on his boat. When he was finished, a crowd of women including Boy Waiting’s mother, her daughters and myself went down to the beach to see him off. Even my grandmother came to the beach that day. I remember her muttering that this was the Festival of the Dead, the day that the Sea Demon dragged the living down to the underworld. The fishermen were too greedy for the catch, she grumbled. They were certain to come to a bad end.
I believed my grandmother. Though she was a woman of few words, she had witnessed more than her share of deaths in the Village of Stone. The deaths that she had seen in that time probably outnumbered the sentences she had spoken.
The skies were clear for the first few days after the Captain set sail, but on the third day, a typhoon moved in. As the storms intensified, a steady stream of fishing boats began returning to port. Some had been damaged in the storms and forced to turn back before they had even reached international fishing waters; others returned with nets full of yellow croaker, butterfish and crabs. On the fourth day, a fishing boat with a torn sail returned to port bearing news of Boy Waiting’s father. His boat had sailed out very far, well into international waters. The other boat had maintained voice contact with the Captain’s boat for a while, but at last was forced to turn back and lost contact with him. Soon all the other boats in the village had returned to shore, but none of them brought Boy Waiting’s mother any news of her Captain. She went to the beach every day at dusk to watch for her husband’s boat. Sometimes she even went up to the mountaintop, but the sea was covered with an impenetrable haze, obscured by mist and driving rain. Even if there were a boat out on those waves, nobody would be able to see it.
By the fifteenth day of the seventh moon, there was still no news of the Captain. It had been over a week since he set sail, but there was no sign of his boat or of any signal lights on the water. Boy Waiting and Boy at Last accompanied their mother to the shore every day to watch for their Captain’s boat. Every evening at dusk, they returned home disappointed.
At this time of the year, the beach was deserted. Because I had neither a mother nor a father waiting for me at home, I sat on the beach every day, among the unfinished piles of fishing nets, and watched Boy Waiting and her family waiting for their Captain to return. The thundering surf and ocean winds were deafening. Every now and then, in the silences between gusts of wind, I could hear the metallic jangling of the amulet Boy at Last wore around her neck, but the sound was soon carried away on the wind.
By the morning of the fifteenth day of the seventh moon, the typhoon winds had reached a crescendo, but Boy Waiting’s mother told the other villagers that she was certain the Captain would be coming back soon. No matter how far he sailed, she reminded them, he always managed to return in time for the Festival of the Dead. And besides, the Captain would never allow the Sea Demon to steal his hard-won catch.
Boy Waiting’s mother and her daughters spent the day of the festival making fish balls for the evening meal. By afternoon, a driving rain was falling outside, and the winds had whipped the surface of the ocean into churning waves. Boy Waiting’s mother picked up some umbrellas and oilskins and told her eldest daughter, Golden Phoenix, to watch the house while she went to the beach. As she was heading out with Boy Waiting in tow, Boy at Last pleaded and whined to be allowed to go with them. In the end, her mother gave in and allowed her youngest to come along.
Struggling to keep a grip on their umbrellas, the three made their way down the windswept length of Pirate’s Alley. When they reached the end, they could see nothing, for the sea was cloaked in an impenetrable haze of mist and rain. They decided to climb to the mountaintop for a better view. Boy Waiting’s mother stood on the mountaintop for a very long time, holding her umbrella and gazing out to sea. The villagers who lived near the mountain said that she looked like a statue, so intense was her concentration on that grey expanse of sea. It was as if she could see all the way across the Taiwan Straits to Chinmen harbour on the opposite shore, where the mainland fishing boats sometimes took shelter from the typhoons. All the time she stood on the mountaintop, her two young children stayed by her side. Like
their mother, Boy Waiting and Boy at Last were steadfast in their hope that their father would return. A person who knows hope is a person who knows happiness. I know this because from the age of seven, I lived without hope. I had no returning father upon that vast stretch of ocean. I lived each and every day beside that ocean, but to me it was nothing more than a neighbour. I lived next door to it, just as I lived next door to Boy Waiting’s family. I had always known them, always understood them, but I could never be one of them. The ocean, like Boy Waiting’s family, was a door through which I could never enter.
The sea was my neighbour, but it belonged to my next-door neighbour.
An hour after her ascent, Boy Waiting’s mother managed to glimpse a sail on the water. It disappeared behind the waves, reappeared and then disappeared again. The sky had long since grown dark, and the rain was coming down in sheets. Between the rain falling from the sky and the surf pounding the shore, it seemed that there was nothing left in this world but water, water, and more water. Boy Waiting’s mother made her way down the mountain. To her children she said, ‘You see? Didn’t I say that your father would be back before the festival? He wasn’t going to let that Sea Demon have his catch!’ She led the two girls down to the sand, where they huddled beneath an oilcloth. Though she did her best to shield Boy Waiting and her sister from the rain with her umbrella, soon both girls were shivering and Boy at Last seemed to be in danger of being swept away by the gusting winds. Their mother regretted bringing the children to the beach, but it was too late to take them back home now. Her only choice was to take them to the marshy area near the shore, where the villagers raised seaweed. It had a small storage shed that she hoped would shelter them from the wind and rain. When they reached the shed, they found the door locked and the place deserted. Boy Waiting and Boy at Last huddled outside the shed, which was filled with fishing nets, tools and blades used to cut seaweed.