Shenzheners

by Xue Yiwei

  I felt powerfully ashamed.

  That day, I rushed home, wanting to tell my mother immediately about the weird things that the devil had done. But the instant I got home, I felt so overcome with shame that I changed my mind. I feared my mother would criticize me or laugh at me. I was even more afraid that she would not believe me. I decided not to let my mother know what had happened, not ever.

  My mother agreed to sit with me through the next class, but the day before the lesson I told her she did not have to come anymore, that I wanted to go by myself.

  To this day I’m not sure why I did that. Maybe I was afraid that she would find out about the secret the devil and I were keeping. But that was a big mistake, for the devil now perceived my weakness. He saw that I did not have the courage or ability to resist.

  From then on, he was even more depraved. As long as my mother didn’t sit in, he was sure to use his “special method,” over and over again.

  One day, his fingers got closer and closer to my groin. I didn’t know what to do, so I just kept on playing.

  Finally, he thrust his fingers into my pants.

  My body responded swiftly and violently out of a mixture of shame and fear.

  “Look, it understands music!” the devil said in an inspirational voice. “Music has made it strong, peerlessly strong.”

  I did not dare to look down. Staring stubbornly ahead at the sheet music, I did not stop playing. But I did not know what I was playing. My cousin’s wet body, with its shifting postures, appeared before my eyes. I seemed to be back with my face pressed against the frosted glass of the bathroom door.

  I suspected that the devil already knew my secret. I had nowhere to hide.

  My body was again on the verge of collapse. I pressed my legs close together, trying to prevent it, but it was already too late. That hot wave that had left me so red-faced once again spurted out of my body.

  A smirk I’d never seen before appeared on the devil’s face. Before I knew what was happening, the devil did something that left me feeling even more ashamed. He lowered his head and kissed the wet patch that had appeared on the crotch of my pants.

  Impulsively, I stood up, grabbed my music, and rushed out of hell.

  When I arrived home, I told my parents I wanted to study with my original teacher.

  My parents asked me why.

  I said I preferred to study with a lady.

  “What difference does it make? At your age!” my mother said.

  My father reprimanded me for not knowing what was good for me, and for disappointing my mentor, who had such high hopes for me.

  They did not agree to let me switch teachers. They said that the big competition was approaching, the greatest challenge I had ever faced in my life. No matter what the reason, I should not change teachers at a time like this. My mother urged me to stick it out. My father said that sticking it out was the only way to defend my dignity as a piano prodigy.

  That evening, the overwhelming sense of shame I felt left me completely unable to sleep. Strange visions ricocheted around in my head. I imagined that my little birdie had become a crawling caterpillar that got bigger and longer until it had become a boa constrictor. The boa constrictor wrapped itself around my feeble body. Every time I went somewhere I would see people pointing at me and gesturing. In a corner of the city square, a devil was holding up a torch, closing in on me. The boa constrictor released me abruptly and started to grapple with the devil. After several rounds, a white flame flicked out of the mouth of the snake, turning the devil into air. My strange fantasy left my mind and body even more exhausted.

  I even thought about killing myself, for the first time in my life. I thought that only death could wash away the intolerable shame that I felt. It was my cousin who brought me back from the edge. In my worst desperation, I suddenly thought of her. I thought of going to find her, of telling her what I could not tell anyone. Before dawn, I reached under my bed to retrieve the envelope with my yearly allowance, which Chinese children receive every Chinese New Year. Then I quietly snuck out the front door.

  At the entrance of our community was a taxi. I got in and told the exhausted driver to take me to the train station. There I bought a ticket to Shilong.

  As soon as I got on the train, I felt sleep instantly overtake me, and I passed out, with my head resting against the window.

  By the time I woke up, or was woken up by the conductor, the train had already reached its destination in Guangzhou. The lady conductor immediately discovered that I had run away from home, and took me to the on-board policeman, who turned me over to the railway police in the station.

  My mother got the call, and rushed over right away to take me home.

  On the highway bus home, my mother peppered me with questions, but I did not reply to any of them. I just rested my head against the window, my right hand mechanically playing the first few bars of the Goldberg Variations on the window, over and over. Then suddenly, a strange thought occurred to me. I decided to practice relentlessly and win a prize in the upcoming national piano competition. I knew that if I did our city would hold an award ceremony for me; I would stand on the podium with the devil. This was my chance. I would point at his bald head and tell everybody, “It’s him!” The thought galvanized me. I told my mother that I no longer planned to switch teachers, but that I hoped she would still sit with me through every lesson. “We’re covering too much ground now,” I said. “I can’t remember it all on my own.”

  Later on many things happened that everybody knows about. The opportunity I had created for myself arrived after I won the prize, but I did not have the courage to publicize my humiliation. My parents did not understand, and so all I could do was avoid it by going AWOL. As I hid in the power room, doubly ashamed now because of my withdrawal, I decided never to touch a piano again. I had to get away and stay away. I had to forget I had ever dreamed of becoming a pianist.

  My decision did not surprise my parents. They did not colour or blanch. The last time I’d left home was still fresh in their memories, and they had a lingering fear I might do it again. After they found me back in my room, they went back to their own bedroom and had a heated argument.

  My mother came out alone, walked over, rested her hand on my shoulder, and reminded me tenderly that I should not waste time, that I should use every moment to review my schoolwork. She reminded me that the midterms were coming. From her exhortation, which had nothing to do with my decision to abandon piano, I knew the result of their argument: they would compromise. And that was the first time they had ever compromised with me.

  Thirteen years have passed, and it’s as if this all happened yesterday.

  It was the death of the devil that reminded me of all of this.

  I never again touched the piano after the night of the ceremony. I also gave up reading and chess and all my other hobbies. I became a kid that lacked interest in everything. My grades suffered, plummeted actually. Although I managed to do well enough to make it into the best high school in the city, once there my performance kept sliding. In the end I only managed to qualify for an average university located in the town of Shantou, majoring in secretarial work. In the first term of my third year, I became disgusted with my studies, and for a time felt like dropping out. But my parents’ marriage was on the rocks, and I did not dare to make trouble for them. I knew that on the day when they had compromised with me regarding my decision, they’d opened up a rift between them, a rift which presaged the ultimate rupture in their relationship.

  I managed to finish my studies. And after graduation my father got me a job in a little agency in the municipal government. I worked there for over four years before transferring to a well-known real estate company where one of my mother’s classmates from university worked as office manager. I have worked for her ever since.

  Thirteen years. A pretty ordinary, uneventful thirteen years. In the
end my parents got a divorce. Since then, no major events have occurred in my life. Of course sometimes people recognize me. And I’ve heard people discussing me behind my back or to my face. The most frequently heard expression is “What a pity.” But it doesn’t bother me at all when they judge me or when they sigh. They don’t know the hellish darkness that I endured. They do not know the distress or desperation or despair I suffered on account of the angel, and then the devil. Nor do they know that I don’t find it a pity at all. I don’t care in the least that I was once a prodigy that everybody in the city knew. I don’t care that now I am nobody.

  Perhaps the psychological, or should I say physiological, change brought on by my “initiation”—which I found unfathomable at the time—was a major event in my life. In the past few years, people have often tried to set me up. But I’ve discovered that I no longer am interested in the opposite sex, I even feel a deep distaste. To me, girls are filthy and boring. I feel like they will sully me and disturb my daily routine. I even vaguely sense that this kind of psychological, or perhaps physiological, reaction is a kind of trauma or scar, the result of those two painful experiences thirteen years ago. But whether the angel or the devil was to blame, I’m not too sure.

  Now the devil is dead. His death surely counts as a major event in my life. He took an overdose of antidepressants and died on the sofa where I had often sat: the site of many painful memories. I knew that after I stopped playing the piano, a major change occurred in the devil’s life. He stopped accepting students. And he stopped serving as a judge. He stopped going out, or even taking calls. My mother would go to visit him twice a year, and she said his home was a smelly mess. She said many people had tried to help him find a woman to take care of him, but he refused all offers. She said in the past few years, he’d smoked and drunk a lot. He was suffering from a serious depression.

  It was my mother who told me about the devil’s death. She didn’t expect that I would want to attend his funeral. She looked at me uncomprehendingly. In the past thirteen years I had never expressed any interest in the devil’s situation. “Don’t you know what kind of impact your decision to stop studying piano had on him?” my mother asked. “All this time I’ve felt guilty. He had such high hopes for you.”

  It would’ve been easy for me to turn my mother’s guilt into hate. But I didn’t feel like doing so. I did not feel like letting her know what the devil had done to me thirteen years ago, polluting and traumatizing me. The pollution was easily washed away when I got home, but the emotional scars I bear can never heal.

  I’ve lived with these scars ever since. A very plain thirteen years it has been, and after all this time, I no longer hate him, not even a little. I’m even a little bit grateful to him. This was why I wanted to attend his funeral.

  How could I be grateful? Had it not been for his fat fingers sending music into my pants—his own uniquely heuristic approach to pedagogy, as he described it—I would still be a prodigy today. I would still think of myself as a prodigy. And I would certainly still be dreaming the dream of a wunderkind.

  But that was a dream my parents made me dream. It was a dream that our manic society made me dream. Truly, I’m now somewhat grateful to my mentor. His devilish conduct changed a prodigy everybody knew into a mediocre man. And that’s all I am now. A mediocrity.

  The Mother

  I decided not to see him off. He had not responded to my decision in any particular way. I just said I was tired. He seemed to want to say something, but in the end did not. He just got his bag ready.

  The bag had been a birthday present from me, five years before. He had been using it ever since he tore off the wrapping paper, but he never said whether he liked it or not. He never said much about anything. He never said whether he liked anything I bought for him. Just as he had never said whether he liked me or not. He stuck a stack of crumpled documents into the bag. Then he patted his pockets to make sure he had not forgotten his wallet or his ID. This was his characteristic gesture of departure.

  “Don’t slack off on your homework!” he yelled in the direction of our son’s room.

  Our son had just asked me quietly whether he could come with us to the border inspection station. When I told him I wasn’t going, he looked surprised. Then I reminded him that he had not finished his mathematics homework.

  He found my reminder frustrating. He went back to his room, head down. The day before, his tutor had told me that despite a lot of practice, he had still not mastered the steps for converting repeating decimals into fractions.

  My husband always slammed the antitheft door. For many years, I hadn’t minded. That clanking sound, just like his taciturn character, had never bothered me. But the previous week when he left, I seemed to hear it for the first time, the intense impact. A sound to which I’d grown accustomed over many years suddenly became difficult, or impossible, for me to bear. On the way to the border, I did not say a thing. I did not even say, “Have a safe trip!” or “Watch your wallet!”—which was always the last thing I said before he went on his way. But the slam of the door last week still echoed in my ears, and my sudden distaste for it suppressed all other emotions. I did not want to say anything. I did not say anything.

  At the gate, as usual, he said, “You go on home.”

  Which relieved me. I turned and walked away. Without saying a thing. I remember in the past whenever we parted, I would always walk away with a backward glance. He wasn’t tall, and would be quickly submerged in the buzzing crowd. But I would look back anyway, believing I would somehow be able to see him, that he would be able to see me looking back at him.

  I remember very clearly the way it used to be. But the past couple of times, I had not been looking back at him anymore. I didn’t remember when I stopped. It seemed very natural, very ordinary. And at first I didn’t even notice. The last couple of times when we parted, I just walked away. In the crowded hall, I would occasionally look around at people coming my way, like curious foreigners or idle merchants. But I hadn’t been looking back to see him off with my eyes. I’d been uneasy, in a hurry to get home to supervise our son, not wanting him to sit too long in front of the TV, hoping he’d work hard on his homework.

  He did not react to the change in any particular way. This time, we parted outside the elevator. Like the week before, I did not say what I had always said in the past. He had lost his wallet once at the border crossing, and so I always used to remind him to watch his wallet. It had taken him nearly half a year to come to terms with that loss. He took it hard, not because he had lost the ID and bank cards it held, but because the wallet contained a picture of our son taken when he turned three. It was his favourite photograph. He worried that the person who had gotten his hands on the wallet would treat the photograph roughly, laugh coldly at it, or tear it up and toss it away. In his view, that would be a form of abuse of our son. It took him all that time to free himself from this fantasy.

  Any time he mentioned our son, he would talk about what he was like when he was little, or how good he used to be. Usually not to praise our son’s past, but to express dissatisfaction with the present. I didn’t know whether this stubborn nostalgia of his meant that he didn’t care about the child’s development or that he cared too much. They hadn’t really talked, had a real exchange, since the boy hit puberty.

  I wondered why our son suddenly proposed that we see him off together. He was already twelve years old, and he had never made such a suggestion before. In all these years, the child would usually only see him on weekends.

  His father was more a regular guest in his life than the father that fate had arranged for him. When they saw each other, he would ask our son whether he had had tests recently, and if so how he had done. But he apparently never looked forward to our son’s answer. His questions were like small talk at a public gathering. Our son did not fear his father or hold him in awe, because his father didn’t take responsibility for him or require a
nything of him. Relatives and friends all said that he was a good father—they also said he was a good husband—because he would always come back across the border every Friday night and take us to a fancy restaurant. Our son would always sit next to me. Sometimes I would take this opportunity to complain about him. He had not studied hard enough over the previous week or had watched too much TV. His father’s reaction was always the same. He would stare at our son, then criticize him absentmindedly. “How could you?” or “That’s unacceptable!” It was like he was staring at a subordinate and not his own son.

  Often our son wouldn’t say anything. But at times he complained, for instance about restaurant food not tasting as good as a home-cooked meal. He never wanted to go out to a restaurant, I knew. He didn’t want to miss a certain television program he was obsessed with.

  The clank of the metal door slamming had oppressed me all week long. It exacerbated my weariness with life. On the way back from the elevator, I walked right to the window in the family room and looked downwards in a daze. The square enclosed by the building complex was always occupied by pedestrians coming and going, by cars exiting or entering. I watched him walk quickly towards a waiting taxi.

  For many years he, too, had been coming and going, in a monotonous, cold rhythm. I had no feeling at all anymore. But just now, I had suddenly decided not to send him off. I just said I was a bit tired. Actually I wasn’t tired. I simply didn’t feel like sitting with him in the taxi. Or more accurately, I didn’t feel like sitting with him in silence, without even wanting to say a thing. So I decided not to send him off. I felt a bit lost and empty. In a way, I had moved the border closer to home; I had parted with him at the elevator. He had as usual slammed the door. And I had felt an extreme antipathy for the vicious metal clank, which sent my disgust with life to a new high. I never thought I would be so weary of life.

  Our son’s yell startled me. He shouted that his father had gotten into a taxi. I never thought that our son would be looking down from his room right then. A palpitation of self-remonstration rose through my brain, as I wondered why he had suddenly wanted to see his father off. Maybe I should have let him. Maybe I should have gone with him.