by Keyi Sheng
About the Book
At first glance, the Li family looks quite ordinary: one tyrannical grandfather, two overworked parents, four siblings, and one small house for them all to live in. Yet, with a journalist in the mix, its members can hardly hide their countless misfortunes.
Xiaohan, the youngest daughter, shares her family’s unconventional history and exposes the depth of what it means to live in contemporary China today. Through the intertwined stories of each member of the Li clan, she shows how those close to her are forced to find new ways to survive.
Contents
Cover
About the Book
Title Page
A Note on Chinese Usage and Names
Part 1
Chapter 1: Li Xinhai, Grandfather
Chapter 2: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 3: Li Jiaxu, Father
Chapter 4: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 5: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 6: Li Xinhai, Grandfather
Chapter 7: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 8: Li Xiazhi, Middle Brother
Chapter 9: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 10: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 11: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 12: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 13: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 14: Li Xinhai, Grandfather
Chapter 15: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 16: Xiao Shui Qin, Sister-in-law
Chapter 17: Liu Zhima, Brother-in-law
Chapter 18: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 19: Xiao Shui Qin, Sister-in-law
Chapter 20: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Part 2
Chapter 21: Li Xiaohan
Chapter 22: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 23: Xiao Shui Qin, Sister-in-law
Chapter 24: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 25: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 26: Li Xiaohan
Chapter 27: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 28: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 29: Liu Zhima, Brother-in-law
Chapter 30: Li Xiaohan
Chapter 31: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 32: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 33: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 34: Xie Yinyue, Mother
Chapter 35: Li Xinhai, Grandfather
Chapter 36: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 37: Li Xiaohan
Chapter 38: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 39: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Part 3
Chapter 40: Li Xiaohan
Chapter 41: Xiao Shui Qin, Sister-in-law
Chapter 42: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 43: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 44: Li Xiaohan
Chapter 45: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 46: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 47: Liu Zhima, Brother-in-law
Chapter 48: Li Xiaohan
Chapter 49: Xiao Shui Qin, Sister-in-law
Chapter 50: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 51: Xiao Shui Qin, Sister-in-law
Chapter 52: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 53: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 54: Xiao Shui Qin, Sister-in-law
Chapter 55: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 56: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 57: Liu Yihua, Niece
Chapter 58: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 59: Li Chuntian, Elder Sister
Chapter 60: Li Shunqiu, Eldest Brother
Chapter 61: Li Xinhai, Grandfather
Sneak Peek from Northern Girls
About the Author
By the Same Author: Northern Girls
By the Same Author: Fields of White
More from Penguin: Goodnight, Rose
Imprint Page
Read more at Penguin Books Australia
‘The four of us were like wild fruit falling from a tree.’
In Chinese, a person’s given name always follows their surname. Therefore, the protagonist of Wild Fruit, Li Xiaohan, has the surname Li and the given name Xiaohan. Depending on the occasion and the familiarity between people, given names can be shortened to a repetition of the final syllable, such as Hanhan for Xiaohan.
As far back as I could remember, the ancestral photo of a beauty was hanging high up in the main hall, mouldy and spotty, her face covered with fly faeces under the glass frame. She was a pale, frail woman, looking a little disheartened. Under scrutiny, her features looked as if they had been chiselled with a knife, with the coldness of late spring in her eyes. When the first shots of the Xinhai Revolution were fired and her life was lost in a pool of blood, she was just eighteen. Please do not misunderstand – I do not mean to imply that this woman, the matriarch of our family, lost her life in some heroic revolutionary sacrifice. She died in childbirth. It was my grandfather who tortured her to the point of death.
My grandfather was called Li Xinhai. Unlike most Southerners, he was lanky, pale, and beardless. He was refined, without the dullness of most country folk, and always elegantly dressed. He was widowed when he was around thirty years old and did not remarry, remaining a bachelor. Only two things mattered to him: reading and gambling. He would occasionally pen the calligraphy for funeral or wedding scrolls or make offerings for his neighbours, as a way of making a bit of pocket money. He had a mysterious distant relative who none of us ever met. We only knew it was a woman who occasionally sent something over, like the brown beret that once came in the post. My grandfather always wore that strange hat wherever he went, whipping around as if on wings, making the willow sway and the surface of the river ripple when he passed. Some said the mysterious woman was the result of the wild oats my grandfather had sown in his early years.
It was said that my grandfather and my father had some entanglements. For lack of anything better to do, my grandfather had his way with my father’s first wife. My father did not care if my grandfather disturbed other men’s wives, as long as his was left alone. This was a matter of family tradition. Not long after my father sent his first wife away, her body was found floating in the river. Some people fished the body out and returned it to my father, who dug a hole in some forsaken field and buried her there. From then on, father and son were bitter rivals, like two old oxen used to grazing on their own, having nothing to do with each other. If they were forced to talk, they ended up butting heads and fighting, their horns crashing like pebbles knocking against each other. My father was strong and had a loud voice. Because my grandfather was dependent on my father for his livelihood, he was somewhat restrained. Not wanting to have his food source cut off, he usually just returned silently to his own room, took a deck of cards from his box, and picked a good hand to suppress the resentment in his heart.
My grandfather was playing cards when my grandmother died. When someone came to give him the news of her death, he was reluctant to put his cards away. Furious over this, my father sought every opportunity to reprove my grandfather for it. He criticised him for having no regard for the propriety, wisdom, sense of right, wrong, shame, and compassion of card playing culture, despite his many decades of gaming. My grandfather, who was actually very alert, feigned deafness, putting on a calm expression and a manner that indicated that at the end of the day, he was still my father’s father.
My father loved to tell people off, cursing animals, trees, crops, and his busy manual workers in colourful terms. My grandfather squandered the family fortunes, losing the land and the ancestral home early on. When he was old and no longer of agile mind, he made many ill-fated, confused decisions in his gambling, giving away all sorts of advantages, losing even his old ivory ca
rds and his ten-volume commentary set from Japan, Book of Songs: A Textual Exposition. My grandfather said the cards had been stolen, and he had used the pages of that sacred book to wipe his arse. My father knew they had been sold and the money gambled away, disappearing altogether in the space of two nights. News of these things got around, causing my father great mental anguish. If my grandfather had not made a mess of things, the money would have been sufficient to pay half the cost for the building of a house. But those treasures belonged to my grandfather, so if he did not leave them for his son or grandson, who could blame him? My father could only turn his back on my grandfather, caning the pig that had left its shit everywhere, scolding it for being a spendthrift and a selfish ghost, and asking if it would need someone to take care of its burial when it died.
My grandfather was not only empty-handed throughout life; his heart was also devoid of all feeling. He had long ago cast everything aside. His face and chin were tilted slightly upwards, giving him a look of arrogance, as if those before him were his subjects and he could utter a divine edict that they would have to kneel and receive. When he was, on occasion, invited to speak about poetry, he would drop his pretence and turn eloquent, sometimes creating suspense while he explained in lively detail the context of a literary quotation. It was in those instances that a rare smile would appear on his face and you would witness a moment of simple joy. Perhaps he was too lonely, so even when people had had enough of his performance, he refused to let them go. He would take treats or his other prized toys from his treasure chest, just to detain them. Later, only small children would listen to his poetry, coaxing a snack from him. Eventually, though, even they grew bored and started to ignore him.
My elder sister often went to the temple of the God of Earth to pray for my father’s sudden death.
Before my sister grew up, she was not considered attractive. On reaching puberty, she suddenly acquired some beauty and, throughout the Lanxi River area, she was considered quite good-looking. She was 1.68 metres tall, large-framed and fair-skinned, like a Northerner. Her face was not small but, since it came to a point at the chin, she was saved from being called barbaric or stupid. Her short, black, shiny hair was cut to show her beautiful temples at their best advantage, highlighting her thin ears. Her arched eyebrows added to the intelligence of her face and, coupled with dark, narrow eyes, it was all quite lovely. Unfortunately, her lips were on the thick side and had a black lustre. When she was angry, they puckered up like a chicken’s arse. Even so, it was those thick lips that made others believe her to be honest. Someone as honest as that could only look life squarely in the face, bite the bullet, and embrace the disadvantages it sent her way, not cutting herself any slack for what fate had dealt her. It was fortunate she had no religion to serve as an additional burden on her.
There were many God of Earth temples in the countryside, some very simply built, piled stones forming the walls and standing lazily under a tree or along the roadside. The one my sister often went to in the rice paddy was properly built. It was small and square but completely whitewashed with flying eaves at the corners. Inside was an altar dedicated to the God of Earth. There my sister knelt, clasping her hands together and calling down curses on my father, asking for him to drown or be gored to death by a buffalo, or perhaps attacked by a mad dog or run over by a car. She did not care how he died, as long as it happened, one way or another. But apparently, this lowly little emissary of the God of Earth did not watch over who lived or died, because my father was still alive and swearing, not even getting the sniffles.
Discovering that the God of Earth was just a big fraud, my sister tossed several clods of mud at his temple. Sometimes she sat in the fields chewing on grass roots, feeling helpless and waving birds away. Other times she caught frogs, then started flaying them from the legs, the frog croaking miserably as she peeled away layers of skin. Before long, the creature lay splayed in the water, dead. My sister would lie down, expressionless, listening to the insects rustle in the grass. Eyes turned to the sky, she smiled, as if she were carried off into the distance with the clouds. She said that if she had wings, she would fly hundreds of thousands of miles away and never come back.
*
In the spring of 1965, when the flowers were in full bloom and the river high, my sister uttered a few feeble sounds as she reported for duty on this earth. My father’s expression was dark. He wanted a son who crowed as loud as a cock, with the ability to rise like the sun and bring joy to the world; he did not want a ‘useless’ girl with her mouse-like whining. My father never hid anything, wearing his emotions on his face. He wanted others to keep their heads down, waiting to read his decrees or his pleasures in the godlike image of his face.
He lit a cigarette, his frown as thick and dark as night. Even the weak light in the house was swallowed up by this darkness.
Now two in the morning, it was a muggy night. It was unusual, but three kerosene lamps were lit in the house. The lit glass lampshade was like a giant stalk of golden barley. It was shaded by dirty black rings that had not been cleaned from the lamp’s glass. Wisps of black smoke rose from the aperture in its cover. The column of flame was quiet and sober, giving out a golden light which lulled one to sleep.
My father finished his cigarette and went over to snatch the baby girl up in one swoop. Feeling the roughness of the external world, she opened her mouth to cry, but no sound came forth. Smothered, her little face turned red. My father held her upside down by her feet, took a torchlight, and walked silently to the water’s edge. He was going to drown her in the Lanxi River behind the house before she could become a burden. The last thing he wanted was something this unlucky. The midwife, who was cleaning up after the delivery, caught up with him and stopped him. She rescued my sister and put the newborn back in her swaddling clothes. The midwife spread this story around with great interest, treating it as a joke. Eventually, many years later, it made its way to my sister’s ears.
My father put great effort into arranging hard labour for his daughter. Only when she was toiling did he have peace of mind. He secured a mud pond a great distance from the house. Fearing it would not be fertile, he covered it with straw and ordered my sister to tread over it until the straw was buried in the mud. She laboured for two days. When I took food to her, I saw that her feet were raw and bleeding. She sat in the field, weeping.
Several years later, my sister said she always felt she was being held upside down by her feet. She almost tried to go back in time to save herself, but actually, she rather wished she had never been saved from drowning all those years ago. She often wept at night. Sometimes there were crunching sounds as if she were eating something, and a strange odour would come from inside the mosquito net. The headless matchsticks I found the next day were evidence that my sister had chewed them off in the night.
My sister only employed methods that did not guarantee death to attempt suicide. It seemed she loved to loathe herself.
In 1934, Hunan suffered a drought that was called ‘the great drought of the eleventh year’ in the local literature. The ground dried and cracked, killing many people. My grandfather was still playing cards in Shatou Village, hoping to win back what he had lost. He played fair, never cheating. Generally, he won small and lost big, and when he went to other people’s turf, he lost so badly he did not even have money left to pay for the ferry ticket home. At such times, his true nature – that of a poet – was revealed as he stood on the riverbank watching the enveloping mist, composing an impromptu poem for the dark maiden in charge of checking tickets, waiting for her to bow her head to hide her flushed face. Then he would turn nimbly and step aboard the ferry. My grandfather often sought to bribe the dark maiden with a New Year picture or a sweet but in the end, it was his scholarly looks that fascinated her. After my grandmother had departed this world, my grandfather continued to go to Shatou Village to gamble but by that time, the dark maiden was already a mother of two children.
One particular day, my grandfather los
t everything in his pockets. By the time he had finished joking with the dark maiden, taken a ferry to the opposite bank, and walked ten miles along the Lanxi River to reach home, it was already dark. As soon as he came in the door, he heard the baby crying and smelled the fresh odour of blood. The midwife gleefully pushed my grandfather to have a look at the baby. His mind still on the poker table, he could not quite adapt to his new role. He walked indifferently into the room and found the baby’s face among a heap of blankets. My grandfather glanced at it, then turned to go. The midwife quickly picked my father up and peeled back the swaddling clothes, exposing the little penis before my grandfather’s eyes. My grandfather said, ‘Oh,’ and my father cried loudly.
From then on, my father started crying every night at that exact same time, and he cried all night, torturing my grandmother until both her eyes were sunken. My father cried for a full hundred nights, and my grandfather did not come home to sleep. My grandmother got used to this. People who saw my grandfather emerging from the house of one girl or another kindly hid it from my grandmother.
Two years later, my grandfather had another son. The child died on his first birthday, sending my grandmother into a deep depression. She came down with breast cancer not long after and did not survive it. Later, we could not even find her grave anymore, it was so heavily covered in grass. When my father and grandfather quarrelled, this issue always came up. My father did not miss his mother, and he was not bothered by his father’s heartlessness. He really just wanted to frustrate my grandfather on many different fronts, hoping thereby to prevail and prove that he was the true boss at home.
My grandfather’s childhood could be considered ostentatious, and his family had large tracts of land. He had a nanny, he went to a private school, and he never went hungry. My father would starve for one meal and glut himself for the next. He dabbled with school for a few years and then at the age of twelve, he ran away to the city and got a taste of true hardship. Later he served for a while as an unregistered soldier, marching with the troops and helping to carry arms and food. Fifteen years later, he suddenly returned home, now as a man earning state wages for urban workers. He joined a shipping company and started a floating life on the waters. The Xiangjiang, Zijiang, Yuanjiang, Liuyang, and Laodao were all rivers he traversed, learning well which sections were wide and which narrow, and where the bends and the rapids were. He also took advantage of the chaos in the country to make a catch or two – including his beautiful first wife, who later drowned herself.