Skinner's Box (Fang Mu (Eastern Crimes))

by Lei Mi

  "Not to drum up hype," Fang Mu said sincerely. "For the children. If it's called an orphanage, then I'm afraid these kids will never be able to forget that they grew up in an orphanage."

  "Very true, very true!" Teacher Zhou was very excited. "Go on."

  "These kids are disabled or have been abandoned or both their parents are dead. I'm sure they all have very low self-esteem when it comes to thinking about their origins." Fang Mu paused. "If we want them to have happy memories of their life here after they've grown up, we have to name this place something that will give them a feeling of comfort and a sense of belonging."

  Teacher Zhou stood. "Ah, Little Fang, I never would have pegged you for someone so full of ideas." He cupped his hands around his mouth and began to shout. "Everyone come on out! We're having a meeting!"

  After a moment of silence, the little building began to roar into life.

  A few minutes later, groups of children were pouring out of the building. Sister Zhao and Liao Yafan followed behind them, wiping their hands on their skirts as they walked.

  Teacher Zhou stood on the edge of a flowerbed and signaled for everyone to gather around.

  "Just now Uncle Fang and I were having a chat." He pointed at Fang Mu. "We're going to give our home a name. What do you all think of that?"

  The children, suddenly excited, all shouted their approval at once. Sister Zhao's lips were pursed into a smile, too; apparently no matter what Teacher Zhou did, she would support him.

  "Okay, everyone, so, what should we name it?"

  The crowd quieted down as each child scrunched his or her eyebrows in concentration. Even the mentally handicapped children, copying the other kids, seemed to be racking their brains to think of something. After a few moments of silence, the group began to sing out a variety of names:

  "Compassion Primary School!"

  "Hope Orphanage!"

  "Tomorrow Will Be Better Welfare Institute!"

  "Grandpa Zhou's Charity Institute!"

  The children discussed and argued amongst themselves, each insisting that his or her idea was the best. Teacher Zhou laughed as he watched everyone, sometimes encouraging the more timid of the children to speak out, sometimes looking up into the night sky, deep in thought.

  "I think we should stop debating it. Old Zhou, you established this orphanage all by yourself; it should be named after you!" Sister Zhao made a sweeping gesture with her hands over the courtyard. "Let's call it the Zhou Guoqing Welfare Agency."

  The children clapped excitedly.

  "No." Teacher Zhou slowly withdrew his gaze from the night sky. His expression was solemn and gentle, but his mouth was still smiling. He said quietly, "Angel Hall."

  Within seconds everyone had quieted down, seeming suddenly bewitched by these two words. Sister Zhao's hands were still in front of her chest as if frozen in the middle of a clap.

  "Angel Hall..." she murmured, her face unexpectedly shading a bit pink. "Angel Hall…"

  One by one, from all around, the young voices began to echo her.

  "Angel Hall..."

  "Angel Hall..."

  It seemed that everyone was reflecting on these two words in earnest, thinking them over like an aftertaste, enjoying the pleasure they left on their lips and teeth, and enjoying even more the deeper meaning and beauty inherent in them.

  A little girl pulled on Teacher Zhou's pant leg. "Grandpa Zhou, you mean we're all angels?"

  He knelt down and embraced her. "Yes." He looked around at the faces full of hope and expectation. "Every one of you is an angel."

  To Fang Mu everyone in front of him suddenly appeared very luminous, as if he really were looking at dozens of cute little angels. They were opening their spotless white wings, tilting their heads, and revealing to him the purest smiles in the world.

  CHAPTER

  5

  Luo Jiahai's Story

  Shen Xiang and I went to university together. When I first met her, she didn't make much of an impression on me at all, because she was a very quiet sort of girl; in class she always sat in the back row and kept a lot of distance between herself and other people. It's really quite funny, when I think of it; through all of freshman year I never once took notice of her. Sometimes we'd bump into each other on the street, and I couldn't actually remember whether she was in any of my classes or not. The first time I came into contact with her was during our second semester in freshman year, during the final exam for my Principles of Economics class. I didn't have any interest at all in that class, so I hadn't studied much. Right while I was at my wits' end, Shen Xiang handed her test in early, walked in front of me, and put her hand on my desk in passing. When she lifted it she had left a little scrunched up wad of paper. I quickly covered it with my hand and slid it down into my lap so no one could see. When I opened it, I discovered that the answers to two of the essay questions had been written on it. I managed to scrape by and pass the test because of her help.

  A real man always repays his debts, naturally. So I went to ask her out; I wanted to take her out to dinner. I asked her out twice, but she turned me down both times. One time, on my way back to the university, I saw her walking along the street by herself, carrying a big, heavy-looking plastic bag. I approached her to lend a hand, thinking I owed her a favor. But when I took the bag from her she looked extremely nervous and nearly jumped a step backward, as if she wanted to get away from me. I thought it was a bit weird, but I didn't ask her why; I just chatted with her while I walked her over to the female students' dormitory.

  Shen Xiang didn't want to walk side by side with me; she followed two paces behind me—you can imagine how awkward that looked. I wanted to get her to her dorm sooner, so I picked up my pace. It turned out that plastic bag wasn't very sturdy; it split right open, and out tumbled at least fifty bars of soap and dozens of bottles of body wash of all different sizes. I was totally shocked, so I asked her if she was planning on opening a shop. Shen Xiang didn't say a word, but I could see tears welling up in her eyes. The look on her face was so anxious, as if I'd just destroyed something really precious to her. She knelt down on the ground and gathered up all that soap and body washes and so on and clasped them to her chest. Just think; such a skinny girl as she… How many bottles could she hope to carry? So I pulled everything out of my backpack and somehow was able to cram most of the stuff in; the rest I wrapped up and carried with the torn plastic bag, and finally got her to her dorm room.

  The next day Shen Xiang returned my backpack to me after having washed it nice and clean; it even still had a faint lavender aroma on it. As I carried the newly fragrant backpack, I suddenly thought to myself, this girl sure is unique. From that day on I started paying attention to her. And I know she was paying attention to me, too. Sometimes I'd walk past her and see her eyes dart away from mine. Gradually, I started to learn a few things about her. Shen Xiang was a girl who didn't like to associate with other people. She had no friends on campus; every day she went around by herself. Her physical appearance was average, and she didn't like drawing attention to herself. So in school she was the type you wouldn't really notice. The only thing that set her apart from everybody was that she really loved taking showers. She'd take a shower at least once a day; even if the university's hot water heater was broken, she'd still take one in cold water. Also, apart from necessary daily expenses, she used all her allowance to buy soap and other bathing products. All the other female students said she was a clean-freak.

  My curiosity was naturally aroused by a girl like that. Not to mention, I couldn't forget how she'd looked that day with the tears welling up in her eyes. I concluded she was a lonely girl in need of someone to care for her. And so I decided to pursue her. You might be thinking all she did was help me cheat that once, and my repaying her with love was just stupid. But that's exactly how I was feeling at the time, and I have to admit, she really did catch my eye. Even if this sort of love was made up in part from sympathy and curiosity, I didn't regret it; even now, I still have n
ever had a single regret.

  One day I was deliberately late for class. When I walked into the lecture hall, I walked straight to the back. Sure enough, she was sitting in the back row, with no one next to her. I will never forget how she looked; she was so anxious she looked like she might jump up and run away at any moment. I nodded at her and I think I even smiled, and then I sat down. But Shen Xiang looked like someone who'd been hit on a pressure point; she sat there completely rigid, not moving a hair. Actually, I was nervous, too, so I took out my book and pretended to listen to the lecture. But still, there was this indistinct fragrance boring into my nostrils, so I looked at her and sniffed. All of a sudden, Shen Xiang's face turned ash gray. Really; I'm not exaggerating at all. It was a sort of greenish gray. I was so shocked all I could do was blurt out something like 'You smell so good.' But as soon as she heard me say that, her deathly ashen face lit up immediately. She turned her head to eye me suspiciously, but as soon as she met my gaze she lowered her head again. After a while her face actually started turning red. That gave me courage, so I tried to strike up a conversation with, 'What sort of perfume do you use? How come it smells so great?' Shen Xiang didn't answer; she simply wrote a few words down in her notebook for me to see. 'Does it really smell good?' When I nodded enthusiastically, she stared at me for a few seconds and then smiled.

  From that day on, Shen Xiang was my girlfriend. I soon discovered she really did love to take showers. And after we started going out, she would often ask me to bathe with her. But every time we went to the shower room, she would always be glancing around with a distraught look on her face. I asked her about it a few times before she finally told me that every time she showered or went shopping, she always felt like someone was following her. I observed carefully several times, but I never saw anyone suspicious around. But because I was her boyfriend, I was bound by duty to protect her. So while other lovers might be courting and speaking affectionately with one another, I on the other hand was bored stiff, sitting at the doorway to the public bath waiting for her. And every time she came out wiping her dripping wet hair, she would always ask me the same question: 'How do I smell?'

  She seemed to have an uncontrollable fascination with that question; she asked me the same thing several times a day. One time I got annoyed and made a joke: 'You don't smell good; you stink.' That made her face turn white as a piece of paper, and without a word, she turned and went back to her dorm. Then, in the middle of the night, I got a phone call from her roommate saying that Shen Xiang had a bad fever. I hurried her over to the hospital. On the way, her roommate told me that as soon as Shen Xiang had gotten home that night, she had headed strait to the bathroom to take a shower. By then there wasn't any more hot water, so she would have had to rinse off in cold water. This was in November; as a result, she had tossed and turned until the middle of the night when she broke out with a high fever.

  After that incident, I never again dared to say the word stink or anything at all related to it. Whenever she asked me that question, I told her she smelled good. But truthfully, she really did tend to smell good.

  You know as well as I do that university students these days, when they date they usually go to bed together after just a few days. Shen Xiang and I had sexual relations, too, but that only happened a year after we started dating. You might think that strange; indeed, from our first kiss to when we had actual intercourse, we went through a long-term and even arduous tug-of-war. What other people might consider a logical path to intimacy was, for us, more like a life and death struggle. To this day I still remember clearly the first time I reached my hand up under Shen Xiang's shirt; she practically fainted. She leaned her head backward with all her might, but I still heard her distinctly as she ground her teeth. I was very stupid at the time; I thought this was how a girl must display her lustful passion. The first time we made love was on my birthday, in an apartment one of my classmates was renting. We'd drunk a lot of red wine and eaten a piece of birthday cake. By nightfall, we both had a tacit mutual understanding of what was about to happen. I went ahead and took my shower first. When it was her turn to use the bathroom, her face was a bit pale as we passed each other. I waited completely naked on the bed for her for a very long time, but still she didn't come out. I started worrying that she'd been poisoned by the coal gas fumes, so I hastily yanked the bathroom door open. There I found her squatting in the shower beneath the dripping water, sobbing. Quickly, I carried her out.

  She practically cried herself into a coma and completely didn't care that she wasn't wearing a stitch. She just curled into a ball beneath the covers and bawled. I thought she didn't want to do it, so I started coaxing her to let me help her put her clothes on. Suddenly she took the underwear I was handing her and threw it away, rolled over, and held on to me tightly, kissing me as if her life depended on it. What was I to think? Breathing heavily, I pinned her beneath my body. When I was about to enter her, she suddenly opened her tearful eyes and said, 'I want to tell you something.'

  It was a story about smell.

  When Shen Xiang was in high school, she was always very cute and lively. She was like a blooming little flower; growing up proud and healthy, full of dreams about the future, full of longing for romance and true love—until one day a catastrophe destroyed all of this. That day, Shen Xiang's homeroom teacher, Teacher Qin, had Shen Xiang stay late after class to help her put the students' report cards in order. It was very late by the time she went home. So that she could take care of her newborn daughter, Teacher Qin did not walk Shen Xiang home. As a result, on her way home, Shen Xiang encountered a bad man. That person beat her and forced her to kiss his genitals. In the end he raped Shen Xiang, but the most perverse part was that while devastating her, he whispered into Shen Xiang's ear, 'I've left my stuff inside you, and you'll carry the smell of it for the rest of your life.'

  The next day Shen Xiang, her body covered in cuts and bruises, did not show up at school. When Teacher Qin went to pay her parents a visit, she learned what had happened. She tried to dissuade Shen Xiang's parents from going to the police, saying that Shen Xiang's reputation was at stake. Initially wavering, they eventually heeded Teacher Qin's suggestion. Actually, her suggestion had not been for Shen Xiang's benefit at all; she had been worried that the incident could have an adverse effect on her being chosen as Teacher of the Year that year. Just like that, the incident was kept secret and tucked neatly out of sight. However, the wounds of the body might heal, but psychological wounds take more than just a short time to mend. Ever since it happened, Shen Xiang began to frequently smell a certain odor on her body; a stench like that of a man's genitals. She began to bathe as often as she could and to avoid everyone around her, terrified that someone would smell the strange odor on her. Later her family moved away, thinking that a change of environment would free her from this smell. But it did not work; that strange odor continued to follow her and stick to her like a shadow. For a girl, this is the most agonizing sort of thing. And that's how it was for her, right up until a boy whom she secretly liked sat down next to her and said to her, 'You smell so good…'

  By the time her story was finished my face was completely wet with tears. We held each other and wept bitterly. Later, she let me in; it was a bit panicked, a bit painful, but more than that, it was sweet. Afterward, I kissed her body up and down and told her that it did not have the slightest abnormal odor at all, and that on the contrary it smelled faintly fragrant. The look on her face remained skeptical, but I could tell that she didn't care as much about the so-called smell anymore.

  From then on, Shen Xiang was like a different person. She no longer forced herself to shower all the time, and she gradually began to form friendships with people. Soon, she was just as happy as all the other girls at the university; cheerful, lively. Her classmates joked that it was all because of the power of love. Back then things were so good between us; we planned our futures together and longed for an ordinary but happy life together. Until that person came on the scen
e.

  That person was Sang Nannan. The first time I saw her was at a party welcoming first-year students from the same hometown. Everyone took turns introducing themselves, and when it was Shen Xiang's turn, we heard a girl exclaim something in a loud whisper; at the time, however, we didn't really notice. Later on, over the course of the evening, we noticed that that girl kept giving Shen Xiang a strange look; it was somewhat contemptuous, somewhat sympathetic. But very quickly her gaze shifted to me. I could tell this girl named Sang Nannan liked me. Shen Xiang sensed it, too, but she said nothing. After that, every time Sang Nannan bumped into me on the street and pestered me with her non-stop chitchat, Shen Xiang would just stand there very quietly, off to the side. One time our department was holding a basketball tourney with the other departments; I was one of the members of our basketball team and Sang Nannan was a cheerleader. At halftime, she ran up to me with a towel and forced me to let her wipe the sweat off me.

  This time Shen Xiang lost her cool; she took the towel and threw it at her. Sang Nannan made an ugly face, tossed the towel onto the floor, and said in a very loud voice, "You think you're something special, but all you are is damaged goods!"

  Not long after that, rumors of Shen Xiang's rape got spread around, and she and I became the most-talked about couple on campus. Wherever we went, we were surrounded by people who gave us all kinds of judgmental looks. Shen Xiang lost her mind; at random intervals she would suddenly start sniffing herself obsessively and ask me over and over if her body stank or not. I told her repeatedly, 'No, no; not at all.' But she wouldn't believe me, so she started taking overly frequent showers again. The most terrifying time was when she stayed in the shower a full six hours straight. When she finally came out, there were clear markings on her neck and arms where she had scrubbed herself until the skin was rubbed raw. Later I found out it was Sang Nannan who had spread all the rumors. When we went to confront her, she said nonchalantly that she hadn't said anything that wasn't factually true. Shen Xiang asked her how she knew about it; Sang Nannan told her that she used to attend the same high school, and that Teacher Qin had been homeroom teacher, too. After Sang Nannan succeeded in testing into the university, she went back to visit and thank her high school teachers; it was then that Teacher Qin had told Sang Nannan of Shen Xiang, the girl who had graduated from the same school in a previous year and who had gone to the same university.