by Anchee Min
I was twenty-nine. I wasn’t happy, but I was at least leading a better life than I did at Elephant Fields.
Closing my eyes, I saw myself riding a piece of slippery watermelon rind—I would go wherever it took me.
* * *
Katherine was not a strict teacher by Chinese standards. She followed the textbook loosely. She spent half of the class time telling us stories about America. She said that our text bored her to death.
Mostly she spoke slowly in English, sometimes in Chinese that was a little off. She held our attention effortlessly with her absolute charm and her perfume.
None of us wore perfume. It was considered bourgeois. We became wary when Katherine’s body carried the smell to our nostrils. We knew we were not supposed to enjoy it, so we all pretended that there was no such smell. But secretly we breathed it in and it took us across the Pacific Ocean to the land of our fantasies. We started to envision smoky images we had never seen before in our lives: graceful, moving bodies of men and women, sometimes naked or maybe in costume, costumes like the ones we remembered seeing in old paintings—paintings the Red Guards destroyed as they looted houses during the Cultural Revolution. We started to hear unfamiliar western music that spoke of secret love affairs.
* * *
“Mirror. Class, please repeat after me. Mirror.” Katherine was teaching us the word “mirror.” “The glory of the morning is mirrored in the great lakes of our motherland.” We read along with her. “The exhibition mirrors the magnificent achievements made by the socialist revolution and—” She laughed suddenly, then apologized.
We didn’t see what was funny. We grew up with these quotations. We would remind ourselves that we were preparing for the revolution as we breathed Katherine’s perfume. We were well experienced in holding conflicting notions within the space of our minds. It was part of our tradition: Zuo-guan-yang-wen-zhang—Make the presentation magnificent. Decoration, elegance, and formality held the highest value since ancient times. Still, we were different from previous generations because we were aware of how our ancestors suffered for appearance’ sake—they were too worldly, too formal, so they lost tian-qiu—God-given pleasure and inspiration. Though we still practiced the virtue of the saying, we were aware that at its heart was a strong, utterly unsentimental disregard for one’s inner life.
We were born with our brains cleft. The Red Guard generation was told to forsake tradition, while our grandmothers secretly went to temples to burn incense and muttered prayers to Buddha in their sleep. In a war against honor we were soldiers who attacked traditions that were in our blood. As victors, we could bend them to our needs.
The essence of our belief resided in the concept of the Great Void—above, not a tile to cover one’s head; below, not an inch of ground to rest the foot. We were to accept our lives as a vast, ever-changing ocean. The Great Void promised eternal peace and great wisdom. Our grandmothers believed that in it one would feel no terror, only happiness. But tradition had turned my mind inside out and relieved no modern pain.
In the back of my mind I thought that tradition would dictate that I haven’t wued enough—I haven’t understood that one’s spiritual life was meant to be lived separately from one’s practical life on earth; I was to embrace not-knowing. Still, I had no faith in what the Great Void promised. I didn’t want to live the lives of my grandmother and mother. I wanted to think and act with one hand and one head.
* * *
I studied her eyes, her pencil-thin eyebrows and velvet eyelashes. We were like fish swimming around her, smelling her and imagining how delicious she would taste.
The men in the class were acting strange. They had a thousand questions, they were suddenly slow learners. They found excuses to ask for special attention from Katherine. Their faces turned red when they were called on to read with the teacher. They couldn’t pronounce “Mr. Brown.” They said, “Mr. Belong.” Katherine would come near and correct them. Smiling like an opening flower, she would say, “Mr. Big Lee, now watch how I move my mouth, it’s Brown, Brown, not Belong. Yes, that’s right. What about you, Mr. Little Lee, how come you’re having the same problem here? It’s Brown, not Balloon.”
One man would always go speechless when asked a question. He sat two desks away from me. He was tall and thin, with shining black hair pasted onto his skull. A long face, a pair of slanting eyes that rode over a too-small nose, eagle shoulders, a little hunchbacked. His name was Jie-fang—Liberation. Liberation was also a borrowed worker-student. He was from the Hangchou Red Wheat Tractor Factory. Because he was an outstanding worker, the factory paid for him to go to school. I once asked Liberation whether he would go back to the factory after he finished school. “Never, never, never.” He spit the words out. I completely understood. He had paid too high a price to get out. “I have been a eunuch for too long. It’s time to be a man,” he whispered into my ear.
Liberation gave himself an English name, Jim. We all laughed because he made the word sound like “hen” in Chinese. Liberation did not mind. He said he changed his name for Katherine’s convenience. We all knew it was a lie. He did it to get Katherine’s attention. In a way, we all wanted to do the same thing—change our names. But really what we wanted was to change our lives by changing our names.
There were no good English names that suited the original meaning of my name, Zebra. In Chinese, “zebra” meant “a wild character, a unique spirit.” I wondered what Katherine’s name meant in English. One of my classmates asked her. She said that it had no meaning, it was just a name. I didn’t believe her. How could a name carry no meaning? It was too important a matter to be neglected. Maybe she just didn’t want to tell us. Maybe she didn’t feel she knew us well enough to explain. I watched her more carefully still.
* * *
Jim was a timid mouse in Katherine’s presence, but out of her sight he was a bold cat. He told everyone that in his last life he was an English comedian. He told us English jokes. He would explain the jokes and laugh even when we didn’t get them. We admired his knowledge anyway. One day he told us that he had learned what Katherine’s name truly meant. He said that there were two ways to spell it, either with a K or with a C, but they meant the same thing. “Catherine” was a philosophical concept meaning “the process of purifying emotion through art.” Jim also found in the dictionary a clue as to what had brought Katherine to China. Cathay, a form of her name, he said, meant “ancient Chinese poetry.” Jim believed that at some point in the future we would better understand the significance of this discovery.
Jim aroused our curiosity. We all ran to look up “Catherine” in our English-Chinese dictionaries to see if what he said was true. We were not disappointed: “The process of purifying emotion through art.” I carefully recorded the phrase in my notebook.
At the same time, though, Jim was having trouble with the teacher. Katherine wouldn’t let his problems with pronunciation pass. “Jim, what’s happened to your tongue? It’s Mr. Brown. Say it.” Jim rubbed his nose and scratched his head in embarrassment. Katherine waited for his reply. She couldn’t understand why he had such a hard time with this no-problem problem. She could never have imagined that the problem was her perfume and her nearness.
* * *
After two weeks of class a new student joined us. He came through the door as we were bowing good morning to Katherine. Katherine didn’t say anything for a long while; she took a long, hard look at him. Then she said, “Be seated.” We all sat down slowly. Her eyes were still on him. She never paid any of us such close attention.
The man was short and badly dressed in a washed-out blue Mao jacket. He carried a green army bag. His hair was a mess. I could barely see his eyes. He introduced himself as “Tian-shi”—Lion Head. He pulled up his hair and smiled. “Sorry, but I was born this way,” he said in response to Katherine’s stare. “I have this crazy hair, it bursts out like a fire. You see, it’s as thick as steel wires. It won’t bend. No hairdresser can tame it. My mother says that I must
have found my way to the wrong womb.”
Strangely, Katherine didn’t respond to his smooth English. She said that she had been notified by the school authorities of his arrival. She directed him to an empty chair in the back and said, “We are on page sixteen.”
Lion Head went to sit down. He took off his Mao jacket and revealed a red T-shirt. He had strong muscles and a thick neck. He was so ugly, so male. He had a pair of thick, dirty peasant’s hands. His huge hands were out of proportion to his body size. He reminded me of sunflowers that grew in the salty land—huge leaves and a little dark-faced flower. His eyes were small—two black buttons in a meatball. His hair fell in his face.
Katherine continued with the lesson but my eyes remained on Lion Head. I read what was written across his T-shirt in white ink: I CLIMBED THE GREAT WALL. He wore dirt-colored trousers and a pair of green army shoes.
Katherine began reading Mao’s poem “A Tribute to Female Soldiers”:
A bright and brave look,
A gun five feet long,
In the first flush of dawn
They appear marching toward the soldiers’ field,
The ambitious new Chinese daughters
Who prefer guns to makeup.
“This is quite a wonderful poem, but is it true that women in this country prefer guns over makeup?” Katherine raised her head from the text and looked at the class. When her eyes met mine, I didn’t lower my head like the rest of them. But I didn’t answer her either. I couldn’t. No one dared make any negative remark about Mao’s words. I had only one head on my shoulders and I wanted to keep it. But I liked the fact that she was challenging Mao. I wanted to see how far she would take it.
I heard Lion Head’s weird laugh.
Katherine and I turned to look at him. His eyes disappeared, they became two caterpillars. “Of course it’s true,” he said. “But if you want to learn more about my female classmates, you have to talk to them in their bedrooms.” He laughed again. This time we heard a small birdlike sound come from the other corner of the classroom. It was from Jasmine, the daughter of the school’s president. Jasmine was dressed like a turkey, in a bright red polyester jacket, tight yellow pants, high-heeled orange-brown fake leather shoes and purple socks with a lotus-leaf ruffled cuff. She always wore fancy socks; it was her trademark style. Jasmine had a small pale face with long permed hair. Her mouth was always in an O shape. No chin. She liked to look at people sideways, as if she were shy. She had Z-shaped eyebrows. She loved it when people told her, “Oh, you look like a foreign doll.” None of us had ever seen a foreign doll, but we referred to anything exotic that way. She caught everyone’s attention but Lion Head’s. Jasmine looked at Lion Head with a pitiful expression. She was staring at him so hard that her O-shaped mouth looked like the spout of a teapot.
Jasmine looked timid but she had the heart of a scorpion. She was “retired” from the military. She was supposed to be a radio engineer but she knew nothing about radios. I tried to befriend her until I learned what happened to a fellow student. A male classmate once was joking with her and called her “Bird Brain.” The next day she had her father send this man to a remote rehabilitation camp on the charge that he had “humiliated and attacked a Party member.” I was afraid of people like Jasmine. Others said that Jasmine was really as soft as she claimed to be. Today she was soft because Lion Head was nearby. How could you forget someone was capable of such cruelty? You don’t send a person to die just because he stepped on your toes.
Jasmine buried her head in her text before Katherine could ask her her opinion. Katherine sighed and said, “Well, I suppose, I have a lot to learn about the inner workings of the Chinese mind.”
* * *
Lion Head made a big fake nose from flour and put it on during the class break to imitate a western weatherman giving the weather report. He had us rolling on the floor with laughter. Katherine was watching him too. She seemed amazed. Lion Head had always been a fast learner. He told us that when he was ten years old he was sent to a special school to study Russian, French, German, and English because he had a “red” background—three generations of pure proletarians. He grew up by the sea. He loved water and the open air. He ate live lobsters and crabs and never got sick.
Lion Head made everyone in the class uncomfortable. His mind was too slippery to grasp. Except Katherine. She adored him. Smiling, she told him that his English was too good for the class. He said he didn’t mind; he just wanted Katherine’s permission to sit in. He worked for the government’s foreign policy office. He was the district Party secretary’s number-four assistant. It was a xian-zhi position—a no-job job—like many in the government. He couldn’t care less about it as long they paid him his salary. He was even paid to go to school. He came because he liked to chat with foreigners whenever he could to improve his English.
Lion Head and Katherine always had energetic conversations going at break time. The class would surround them while they talked to practice listening comprehension. We grew jealous of Lion Head. He stroked Katherine with his wit. He made her laugh. Most of the time we didn’t understand what they were laughing about, but we laughed with them so as not to appear stupid. Somehow they knew that and it made them laugh even more.
* * *
Through Lion Head we learned more about Katherine’s purpose for visiting China. Katherine was here to teach English, but she was working on a book as well—a research study on Chinese women in the eighties. She explained to us that it was part of her dissertation for her Ph.D. degree in America. She was “playing piano for the cows”—we had no idea what a Ph.D. degree was, not to mention a “dissertation.” She said that it didn’t matter whether we understood the American educational system. She just needed to talk to people.
She loved to talk to strangers on the street. She was open and trusting. She was foolish. I predicted that she would get hurt by saying the wrong things to people and then she’d get reported. She didn’t seem to care. Her Chinese was getting better every day. Every Chinese word she pronounced sounded funny to me, the music off. Still, I liked her confidence, the confidence to confront, to learn, to tackle, and to get her way.
I corrected her accent once when she pronounced bi-zi—nose—like bie-zhu—crippled pig. She asked if she could pay me to give her private Chinese lessons. I told her with great delight that I would teach her Chinese but would accept no money. She didn’t understand that I could be reported as a spy for taking her money. She told me I was being ridiculous. “What are you talking about?” she asked. “If you don’t want to accept money, no deal.” I said that I couldn’t explain any further, because I didn’t know her well. How could I know that she wouldn’t report me? I would be in trouble if she leaked our conversation to the school authority. I would be labeled as one who “sabotaged the great open image of New China by misinforming a foreign guest.”
I was confused when she said that she had to respect my choice. To me it had nothing to do with “choice.” It was about the reality of survival.
* * *
One of the strangest things Katherine did in our eyes was to rent a peasant’s hut for herself. The place was surrounded by rice paddies and was about a half hour by bicycle from the school. It didn’t make sense to me that she turned down the offer to live in the university dormitory. Her hut looked primitive; she practically had to shit in a pigpen. Katherine seemed very happy with the hut though. She called it “my home.”
Before the semester was over, Katherine said that she would like to invite the class to a party at her hut. The news excited us. We started to plan how we could get permission from the school authority to go. Lion Head suggested that Katherine inform the school authority that she was giving a lesson in American working-class cooking.
The request was granted without any problem. We arrived at her hut earlier than we were supposed to. The sun was still high but the heat wasn’t as strong. Katherine had borrowed some straw mats from her peasant neighbor, so we could sit outside. She pr
epared barbecued chicken with green peppers and onions. Jim and I made an “underground stove.” We told Katherine that this was how Mao and the Communist Red Army cooked during wartime. Lion Head went to pick tree branches, straw, and dry leaves, while Jasmine and others came in from the fields with fresh beans.
Katherine said she had a hard time watching the peasants kill live hens. She couldn’t eat meat anymore. We waved away her disgust. Jim told her that she would soon get over it. Lion Head said that he would show her how to kill a cat to prepare “sweet and sour cat receiving the worship of frogs.” He explained how when frogs were fried their legs extended as if in supplication to the cat meat roasting above. Jasmine said she had already caught a jar of frogs. Katherine said she was going to puke and I thought I heard the sound of her stomach churning.
To distract her I asked why she gave up the convenience of living in the dormitory. She said she liked the countryside and enjoyed the privacy. She said that the landscape and greenery were important to her.
I looked around, trying to see things from Katherine’s point of view. There were rice paddies on every side. On the left there was a little pond covered with giant round green lotus leaves. Two big black trees grew out of the water. A bull was taking a mud bath in the pond. Three geese were knotting their heads together, chewing gao-bai—turnips. Ducks were chasing each other, fighting over an earthworm. Not far away, peasants were working in the fields. To the right of her hut there was a small path that led to the road to town. Thick swirling dust in the distance meant that a bus had just passed through.
I figured out that Katherine’s hut used to be a storehouse for crops. Katherine told us that she had been here for two months and loved every minute of it. She took me to her backyard, where I saw chicks, a goat, and two cats running freely. “This is my zoo,” she said proudly. She told me that she had built the fence herself. “I didn’t do a great job but it’s good enough to keep the animals in.” She laughed and told me she loved animals. It made no sense to me. Animals meant food. Why would she waste her feelings on those brainless things? I sneered. She noticed but made no reply.