by Lisa Ko
If you knew more about me, Deming, maybe you wouldn’t blame me so much, maybe you would understand me more. I can only be as honest as I know how to be, even if it might not be what you want to hear.
My mother died when I was six months old. Cancer. I didn’t remember her, never had a picture of her, nothing. In the two-room house where I lived with your grandfather, there were only two things that had belonged to her: a blue jacket and a gray comb. When Yi Ba was out on the river I would run the comb through my hair and put on the jacket, a cloth coat that smelled weakly of leaves and scalp, the threads unraveling more each time I wore it, until one day the bottom button, dark blue, four tiny holes, tumbled right off. I found it trying to escape the room but clamped my fingers down and kept it safe inside the bag where I stored the comb.
“Was she smart?” I asked Yi Ba. “Was she pretty? What was her favorite fish?”
He’d go, “Sure, sure.”
I decided my mother had been a short woman with wavy hair, because I was short and my hair was a little wavy. There was this mother in the village who had a voice like a chiming bell—“Come here, Bao Bao,” she’d say at the produce market, “don’t play in the dirt”—and whenever I was sad about not having a mother, which wasn’t that often, I’d replay this chiming voice, pretend the woman was saying my name (Peilan, I was Peilan then) instead of Bao Bao’s.
My father liked to say things like this: “When I was a boy, my family was so poor, my brother and I shared a single grain of rice. People croaked all the time, but nowadays people are soft and spoiled. You don’t know what it’s like to suffer.”
Minjiang was a poor village in a poor province, but compared to some of my primary-school classmates, we ate pretty well. The fish Yi Ba caught supplemented the vegetables that our assigned plot grudgingly produced, and when there wasn’t enough food, he’d push his portions on me. “See what Yi Ba does for you?” he would say. I’d try to pass the food back to him, but he would say I had to eat every bite. You couldn’t waste food when there were people starving.
On good days, my father took me out on his fishing boat. We got up at sunrise, long before the heat set in, so early that swirls of fog blocked our path. Yi Ba carried a container of tea as I padded beside him with a handful of beef jerky, the ground spongy beneath my feet. “It’s a lucky day,” he would say. “See the way the clouds are like cobwebs? That means the water will be friendly.” On the western edge of the riverbank, the water was only visible between the clusters of long boats, and even the smallest waves would set off a series of wooden knocks, one boat bobbing against the side of the next boat bobbing against the side of the next, a string of hollow, mirrored noises. Yi Ba’s boat was dark green; brown stripes exposed where the paint had peeled, a patched-over, fist-shaped dent at the helm, a punch from a hidden rock. I’d help him untie it and we’d push out into the current. “Lucky, lucky, lucky,” I chanted, watching the waves lap at the wood like hundreds of tiny tongues. Then the shoreline would grow dimmer and the blue would shoot in all directions, filling the frame around me, the sky so big it could swallow me, and I cracked open with happiness.
On a less good day, the mountains would hem and corner me, everywhere another unscalable hill, the frowning clouds wagging their tongues: bad girl, bad girl.
Back then, leaving the village made you suspect. You might leave to marry a boy in another village and come home on holidays—look how fat and happy my kids are!—but otherwise, you stayed put. It wasn’t as if Yi Ba had wanted to be a fisherman and remain stuck in Minjiang, but there weren’t other choices for rural people, and he’d never gotten beyond grade four, though his younger brother had gone to grade seven and moved to a nearby town. So Yi Ba stayed in the same house where his parents had raised him. He told me about the paved streets of the town where his brother lived, the pictures of Shanghai he’d glimpsed in a magazine. I asked if we could go there, and he said no. Then who lives there? I asked. He said, “Rich, lazy people.”
We had a chicken. It was my job to collect the eggs, scatter feed. I’d strut around the grass with my pigtails forming stiff horns, poking my head in and out. The neighbors’ son, Haifeng, would abandon his own chores and run out to join me. “Let’s be like horses,” I would say, and we would gallop around, neighing.
I had two girl friends, Fang and Liling. We liked to play by the river after school and I would point at a speck and say, “That’s my father’s boat,” even if I didn’t know if it was his or someone else’s or a big rock. We held our arms up as we ran beneath the tree in the village square, letting the leaves kiss our fingertips.
I ALWAYS TOLD YOU not to be like me. I quit school in grade eight. Stupid. I’d asked a boy who was an even worse student than I was, but whose parents were cadre members, to give me a cigarette. (“Girls don’t smoke,” I heard him say, and that was a dare I couldn’t resist.) The inhale made my lungs burn, but I held it in and forced down the coughs and exhaled so smooth and neat, letting the smoke exit my lips in a perfect curl. Teacher Wu paddled me but not the boy. I leaned over his desk as he whacked my butt with his wooden board, and as I faced my classmates’ stunned faces, I laughed. I had seen boys cry when they got the paddle, but this smacking was no big deal.
I didn’t go back after that, and the summer passed in the slowest ooze. My hair grew longer, my face sharper, and I swept the rooms until the floors were clean enough to lick. The whole village was sleepy that summer, a still pond on a humid day. The striped plastic tarps strung across the alleyway were faded and torn, and the vendors with their flip-flops, batteries, and scratchy panties in individually sealed plastic bags looked resigned to never selling anything. Our chicken’s eggs were smaller, like she’d struggled to push them out.
For weeks it didn’t rain. The grass got patchy and brown, Yi Ba complaining about the commercial fishing boats coming down the river from Fuzhou, with industrial-sized nets that could snatch up all the fish. He’d leased his boat to a younger fisherman and had gotten a job canning fish at a new factory, but the factory shut down and moved to the city and he had to refund the rest of the fisherman’s lease to get his boat again. During the three months he’d worked at the factory there had been beef for dinner twice a week and even dried tofu to snack on and a new orange shirt for me, though I was clumsy and ripped the sleeve while climbing a tree with Liling and Fang. I missed the chewiness of the tofu—I’d marinate the chunks against the side of my mouth and be rewarded with a stream of salt.
Fang moved to town to live with an aunt. At Liling’s, I’d ask her to let me look at this old book with pictures of national sites, black-and-white photos of waterfalls clouded in mist, giant sand dunes, Beijing’s temples, the Great Wall. All the places I wanted to go. “Turn the pages slowly,” she would say, watching me. After Liling passed the high school entrance test, she said I could have the book, she didn’t need it anymore. But when I looked at the pictures at home they no longer inspired me.
One afternoon at the end of the summer, when I was fifteen, I was doing the laundry. Couldn’t wait any longer for the weather to cool, and the clothes needed washing, though it was almost pointless to wash them in such humidity. I filled the plastic basins, wrung out the clothes and strung them, one by one, from the line, Yi Ba’s underpants and my T-shirts, flapping squares of gray, red, and white. I heard a small squeak and looked up, and there was the neighbor boy, Haifeng, taller than when I’d seen him last, staring at me from atop a bicycle.
“Peilan,” he said. “Want a ride?”
Yi Ba called him the Wimpy Li Boy. “Soft like a pillow, that one,” he said, when we overheard Haifeng’s parents ripping him a new one for failing the high school entrance test. I kind of felt bad for Haifeng. Plenty of kids in Minjiang wouldn’t make it to grade nine. We all had as much of a chance of going to college and transferring out of peasant class as flying to the goddamn moon.
Haifeng’s dark hair stuck to his face in the summer heat. He had a widow’s peak that made him look
older than he was. His limbs were gangly, but there were ropy muscles on his calves and forearms, tightly balled and hidden. Surprise!
It wasn’t like I had anything important to do. I climbed on the bike’s rack, balancing sideways, batting mosquitoes from my face, the tall grass tickling my feet. Haifeng pedaled, the sky gaping and bright, the wheels squeaking as we rolled through the fields. I sniffed him; he smelled like salt.
“Let’s go to the river,” I said. We were already on our way.
The first and second days we went to the river, we talked about our families. I told Haifeng my father was pissed I hadn’t bothered with the high school entrance test, though Yi Ba wouldn’t say so. Haifeng said his parents were angry, but he had been relieved.
“I hate school.” It felt great to say it aloud.
“Me, too,” he said. “I’m helping my father out with the crop planting. That’ll be my land someday.”
Haifeng said he admired me for standing up to Teacher Wu. “You were so brave. You didn’t even cry when you got paddled.”
“It didn’t hurt.” I couldn’t remember Haifeng being paddled at school. He hadn’t been a troublemaker, but he hadn’t been a good student either. Actually, I could barely remember him in class. “Aren’t you friends with Ru?” I asked, though I had no memory of seeing them together. “What’s he doing this summer?”
“I don’t know.”
“Who are your friends, then?”
“I was friends with Guang in grade four, but his family moved away.”
The third day he came by, I said, “Let’s do something different.”
I leaned over and kissed him. He didn’t say anything.
“Did you like it?” I wasn’t sure if I did. His lips had been a little sweaty, and I’d been hoping a kiss would spark a more significant feeling, like the frenzied mouth mushing I had seen on the shows I’d watched on Liling’s parents’ TV.
We tried again. Haifeng’s face loomed over me, his features taking on a cartoonish quality. I closed my eyes and tried to channel the excitement of the TV actors. Still, no frenzy.
We pressed closer and I began to feel something. His mouth moved against mine; strands of my hair slipped between his lips. Now he was the one who seemed frenzied, and I had to break away, wipe the spit from my face.
He ran to my house each day after he finished work with his father. I liked the attention, but didn’t have the same excitement about him. Haifeng had nice muscles, but he was too obvious and appreciative. There were days I turned him away, but by the time I finished my chores, the afternoon had barely started and I wanted someone to talk to. When Haifeng returned the next day, I’d hop on his bicycle without a word.
Lying by the river, I watched the sky, the drifting clouds, and saw myself launching into the sun. No other girls would do this; I was unlike all other girls. “You’re so pretty,” Haifeng said. He told me how much me liked my mouth, how my lips were shaped like the tops of two halved hearts. He even liked the mole on the side of my neck.
One morning, Haifeng’s mother cornered me in the alley and grabbed me by the wrist. “Stay away from my son,” she said.
I pictured Mrs. Li squatting over a pit toilet and laughed. She took my earlobe and twisted it, and tears, sudden and humiliating, sprang into my eyes.
When he found out his mother had spoken to me, Haifeng was livid. “She had no right. No right!” He paced the riverbank and stomped on the weeds. He’d gotten a haircut, which made it clear how much his ears stuck out from his face.
“It’s okay.” I missed being able to go to the river by myself, but the one time I told Haifeng I wanted to do that, just for one day, he had stalked away with a hurt look on his face, and I hadn’t even enjoyed being alone.
“I’ll see you whenever I want. She can’t tell us what to do. One day, you could be her daughter-in-law, and then what will she say?”
I sat up and straightened my clothes. “I need to get home.” He kissed me again, attempted to pry my mouth open with his tongue, but I broke away.
I was always home before Yi Ba returned from the boat, made sure Haifeng and I went to the part of the riverbank that was hidden behind trees and grass. But if my father caught us, or if Haifeng’s mother told him that his daughter was messing around with her son, he might put a stop to it, or even send me away.
IT STARTED AS A rumor: the city had stopped deporting rural migrants. Villagers couldn’t get permanent urban hukou, but they could buy temporary resident permits and find better jobs than fishing and farming. Two older boys on 5 Alley left for Fuzhou, the provincial capital, and came home bragging about six-story buildings and women in hot pants. Then more boys left, finding jobs in the factories there. No girls from the village had yet to go to the city, but I knew that leaving in order to make money was less suspect than leaving to become a new person. I’d never been to Fuzhou, even if it was only a few hours away, and I wasn’t sure what working in a factory would be like, only that I would make money, and I wouldn’t have to sit through silent dinners with Yi Ba, watching his mouth as it grimly worked on his food.
When I asked Haifeng if he ever wanted to move to the city, he looked confused, then alarmed. “No, I like it here.”
I told him I was thinking of going.
“To Fuzhou? Only boys can go.”
At the produce market, the parents of my former classmates talked about how their sons were sending home two hundred fifty yuan a month. One woman, whose son was still in school, said to the others, “Aren’t you worried with your sons alone in a big city? There are all sorts of girls living in the dormitories and no supervision.”
I ran home and rushed through the rest of my chores. At dinner, I announced, “I’m going to the city to work in a factory.”
“Only boys work in factories,” Yi Ba said.
“They’re hiring girls, too. At the factory where Mrs. Jia’s son works. They have separate dormitories full of girls and they make three hundred yuan a month.”
INSIDE THE FUZHOU GARMENT Export Corporation, the rooms hummed with the motors of hundreds of sewing machines and the windows steamed with the blistering heat of flatbed irons. I was a snipper. On the south side of the fourth floor, I sat at a long table and snipped threads all day from piles of blue jeans. My hands cramped, but I worked hard, even if it was so hot I felt like vegetables frying in a pan. Sweat dripped into the fabric, no time to wipe it off. I couldn’t put my scissors down for a second, to notice the way the sun streamed in through the windows, or marvel at how there were so many different shades of blue in a single square of denim. Those jeans kept on coming and if I was a second late, the girls down the line would curse at me and Foreman Tung would dock my pay.
The city was filled with girls like me, girls who swore we’d never go home again. I wanted to work my way up to a better factory, a bigger dormitory, and eventually, my own apartment, like my friend Qing’s cousin.
Fuzhou didn’t look like the pictures of Beijing in Liling’s old book. The alleys split into streets clouded by moped exhaust, the highways were punctured with sinkholes, and the air was all chainsaws and hammering. We slept sixteen to a room, two rows of eight bunks each, decorating the walls with pictures ripped from magazines, actors and singers and landscapes of mountains and lakes. Stuffed animals dangled from the bed poles, teddy bears in shades of greens and pinks. On line for the bathroom at five thirty in the morning, we complained about our thirteen-hour shifts as if we were much older women, discussing aching shoulders and imitating Foreman Tung. I did good imitations. I would lean into the bunks and yell, “Go, slowpokes, go, you turtles!” and emit a low snort my bunkmates agreed was exactly like his. “Not fast enough! You missed a thread!” The other girls would double over with laughter.
I sent home two hundred seventy yuan one month, two hundred forty the next. “You only made this much?” Yi Ba said on the phone. I said I’d try to send more, though the money I wired was twice what Yi Ba made on the boat. When I called to tell hi
m that I’d made two hundred yuan in three weeks, he said, “Guess I taught you well.” Later, the neighbors would tell me he bragged about me, said I was more hard working than any boy. When they found out how much I was earning, they no longer said it was improper for girls to be living alone in the city. They let their own daughters go; they made their daughters go.
Soon Yi Ba had a television, the biggest one on 3 Alley, and when he came home from another crap day at the sea there would be four or five children lying gape-mouthed in front of the screen, drooling at a fuzzy historical drama, and by nightfall this crowd would swell to nine or ten or eleven or fourteen children, splitting peanuts between their teeth and tossing the shells across the room. When Yi Ba walked to the outhouse the shells would crunch and poke at his feet. “Go home,” I pictured him saying, but not really meaning it, and he would be sad when other parents purchased televisions with money their older kids sent from the city and his nights were quiet again.
Two months after I left Minjiang, Haifeng’s parents sent him to the city. As I snipped threads, he fit plastic spools into cassette tapes at an electronics factory on the other side of the highway, and we seldom had the same days off. When he first arrived he called the communal phone in my dormitory every week, though he rarely got through to me. I didn’t think of him often, only missed him during the few times I was by myself, when I’d worry I wasn’t doing enough for Yi Ba.
Mostly, I spent my free time with Xuan and Qing. The three of us had matching jeans, tight blue with a silver star on each butt cheek, and on afternoons off we paraded down the street arm in arm, moving in sync like the world existed only to watch us. We danced to cassette tapes Qing played on her Walkman, pop songs about true love and heartbreak. I memorized the words to the songs; I wrote them down in a hot pink notebook. There was a store that blared music from big speakers, with racks of colorful cassettes. My favorite songs were about girls who’d been treated badly by boys but were now happy on their own.