by Anchee Min
We sat down and began eating smoked green beans and discussing whether Katherine was Chinese in her past life. Katherine was sure she was.
“So then you must have eaten those animals,” I said. “Why not do it again?”
“No! No one is going to make me eat meat!” she said, raising her voice.
“But you said you were Chinese!” I shouted. “Let’s prove it.”
Jim and Lion Head were laughing and saying, “Dog meat with soy sauce, deep-fried snake with fresh monkey brains, blowfish with pig eyes . . .”
“You’re making me sick!” she yelled, and ran away like a child who saw a dead rat on the street. We had fun torturing her, making her beautiful eyes widen. “Do you really eat monkey brains?” she would ask. “I know you’re fooling me. Tell me you’re fooling me. Teach me some more Chinese!” And I did. I taught her slang, dirty words with double meanings, like how “do an exercise” could also mean “go mate with a pig.” She would perform her newly learned phrases in class in an American accent. Everyone would have a wonderful time laughing. Her charm was indescribable. Sometimes she would accidentally forget the word order or tone and the sentence would become “Do exercise a mating pig.”
We ate the food she made in her yard. We began to ask her questions. First Lion Head asked a little awkwardly whether Katherine was married. We all strained our necks like ducks trying to hear the answer. Katherine did not seem uncomfortable at all. She said she had been married and divorced. No children. She said she wanted a child though, badly.
We all went quiet. We shot disapproving looks at Lion Head for asking the question. You don’t spread salt on someone’s wounds, our eyes said.
Katherine’s response to this surprised us. “Hey, what’s wrong with you guys? It’s all right to ask me questions. You don’t have to feel bad for me. Divorce is not such a terrible thing. I chose to get married, I chose to get divorced. This is how you learn in life. I’ve put my past behind me. What’s there to be sad about?” She told us to be happy for her, for the freedom she enjoys.
Still, we could not help feeling sorry for her. We had a hard time comprehending what she meant. In China nobody got divorced until a husband nearly murdered his wife or vice versa. We tried to comfort her because we believed she was suffering. We suggested that she try to work things out with her husband. We said, “Don’t worry. You can always forgive each other.”
Katherine laughed and shook her head. She confused us. “Let’s do something other than talking about my broken marriage, okay?” she said. “How about listening to some of my favorite songs?” We all nodded. She took out a tape recorder and stuck in a cassette. She treated the machine roughly. It jammed. She took the tape out and used her finger to clean the inside of the player. She reloaded the tape, patted the machine, and murmured, “Don’t you do that again.” She smiled as she turned to us. “Ready, class? It’s the Beatles!”
“What’s Beatles?” Little Bird, a girl with a pair of alarmed eyes, asked. I was glad that she asked because I didn’t know what Beatles were either. Jim stood up and gave us an introduction. He asked us if we remembered a story in the Party’s newspaper in the early seventies about a group of young western musicians called Beatles—pee-tou-shi, in Chinese—men-with-long-hair. The translation itself made the Beatles into a bunch of jerks. I remembered reading the story criticizing them. The newspaper said they were the leaders of “a generation of destruction.” I forgot about them because I never heard their music.
“Are they the same pee-tou-shi?” I asked Jim. He nodded. Katherine said she was glad to have Jim’s information. She said, “Now let’s let the music speak for itself.”
The sun was setting. The green paddies turned golden. The men-with-long-hair on the tape sang “I want to hold your hand” and the music touched us. Katherine translated the lyrics for us and I thought about my life at Elephant Fields. Tears began to well up in my eyes; I felt glad that I survived, lived to see this day when I could listen to such a song. I saw tears in Lion Head’s and Jim’s eyes too. What was on their minds? Lost youth or love? Or maybe what could have been? Jasmine was sitting next to Lion Head. She was sobbing silently. The tenderness of the lyrics was like the noontime rays of the summer sun—it touched our icy hearts. It was as if we could hear the sound of ice breaking inside our stiff bodies. Katherine could never understand this. She would never know the impact of this act. I looked at her. She smiled at me with gentleness in her eyes. My loneliness disappeared. We asked Katherine to play the tape over and over until she was bored.
* * *
I liked when Katherine called my name in class. She made it sound exotic. “Shao-jun”—Zebra—she made an effort with her tongue. She said that she liked the fact that I was named after an animal even though it was not easy for her to pronounce. She said that it gave her hope that the Chinese were not such big animal haters after all. “Shao-jun, Shao-jun, Zebra.” She laughed as she tried to say it again and again. “Am I doing it right?” She made us laugh. We said, “You are doing it perfectly.”
After that Friday’s class Katherine asked if she could interview me. “About what?” I asked.
“About life as a Chinese woman,” she said. I did not answer her. I heard she had been conducting interviews on campus. I didn’t want to be one of those people who supplied her, a foreigner, with stories that would please the government.
“People around campus have been enthusiastic about me telling their life stories,” Katherine told me, showing me her notebook. The peacock is showing me the jewels on her feathers, I thought. The peacock thought that I cared about her beauty. I decided to pretend to be nearsighted.
“What’s wrong with you?” She smiled. Her neck was long and at this moment it seemed too long. I felt crowded by her.
“How much do you think you know about China?” I asked.
“Pretty much,” she replied. “I studied for six years and spent a lot of time in a lot of libraries before I ever set foot in China.”
I didn’t know what to say to her. I am Chinese, and I still don’t understand this country. How could she? Six years spent studying books? And she thought she knew China? How laughable!
“What’s the picture of China you have in your head?” I asked. She looked confused.
I shook my head, never mind. I said, “What do you want me to talk about?”
“Everything,” she said.
“You just don’t get it,” I said.
“Wait, wait, what did you say?”
I felt tired, but I pitched the ball back at her. “You want me to talk about myself, right? Let me tell you what ‘self’ means to me. The self, myself, the self as I see it, is composed mainly of selected memories from my history. I am not what I am doing now. I am what I have done, and the edited version of my past seems more real to me than what I am at this moment. I don’t know who or what I really am. The present is fleeting and intangible. No one in China wants to talk about his past, because nobody wants to paint his face black. Our past is not a flattering picture, and no one wants to look at it for long. Yet what we were is fixed and final. It is the basis for predictions of what we will be in the future. To tell you the truth, I identify with what no longer exists more than with what actually is. We have lied about what we actually are, and that, unfortunately, will be your book. So would you still like me to talk about myself?”
Katherine looked at me in amazement. She was silent.
I got up and walked away. I heard Katherine tapping her pen on her notebook.
“Hey, Zebra!” she yelled after me. “I thought you wanted me to play you more songs. Would you still like me to do that?”
* * *
I ran into Lion Head on my way home. We were both on our bicycles. Lion Head was in a washed, white traditional jacket with grape-shaped buttons, blue pants, and a pair of army shoes. I was in a similar kind of outfit. We rode along the street with willow trees toward the city. Waves of wheat made the early evening a sea of warmth. Just befo
re we joined the stream of bicycle riders entering the main road, a rider in red shot between us.
It was Katherine. She rode like an arrow. She was wearing a red jacket. Her bicycle was painted red. She was gone before we could find her in the crowd.
Lion Head invited me to his home to look at antiques he had recently collected. He lived on the west side in the Pu-Tuo District, known as the “lower corner” of the city. His house was located at the end of a long lane. We walked through a makeshift black market. People were selling clothes, rice, sesame oil, bamboo mats, and kitchenware from displays on the front of their bicycles. The merchants’ eyes darted as they made their deals, always on the lookout for a police raid. Lion Head told me that their customers kept watch too. Anyone who spotted a policeman or recognized an undercover cop would whisper to the nearest merchant, “The black bear is out of the cave.” In a few seconds the alley would be cleared. The entire market would disappear. When the policemen left, the market would restore itself in no time.
Lion Head’s place was on the second floor. His room was narrow and dark, about ten by fifteen feet. No windows. There was a tiny porch in front where he cooked and tended a little garden. He lived with his eighty-year-old grandmother, who slept in an attic cupboard at night. During the day she practiced tai chi and volunteered along with other old ladies collecting tickets at the entrance of public parks.
Lion Head called his place Treasure Island. His neighbors thought he must be crazy to collect old garbage like “lotus-foot shoes,” triangle-shaped, delicately embroidered shoes women wore at weddings during the Ching Dynasty in 1600 A.D.; ceramic tiger-patterned “cooling pillows” that old men used to sleep on in hot summer months; a “kettle of one hundred roses,” a man’s chamberpot, made from fine ceramic, with extremely detailed carvings and white and blue drawings inside and out. Colorful red wooden masks of Chinese gods and goddesses hung on the walls and dangled from ceiling beams. If not for the noise from the street, I could imagine I had stepped into an ancient time.
Lion Head’s ceramic pots belonged to his ancestors in the last century. The only reason these objects survived the Cultural Revolution was because of the political reliability of his working-class family. Not only was his home never looted by the Red Guards, he was able to trade cigarettes for antiques with former Red Guard officers. The pots were so delicate it looked as if they would dissolve into dust at any moment. Lion Head was careful when laying them out. He said his room was too damp. He was afraid that the pots were deteriorating. I helped him lay the pots out on the porch piece by piece to dry in the sun.
He said that he was a self-taught history lover because his hero, Chairman Mao, was a lover of history too. Mao had only an elementary-school education, but he learned everything he needed to be a modern emperor from history and tradition. He studied The Art of War by Sun-Tzu. To Mao, people were chess pieces and he was the greatest player. “I admire him,” said Lion Head. “He was such a brilliant tactician. He was a free man. He didn’t spurn convention, but wasn’t going to be deceived by it. This was precisely what made him a hero. He was able to use the dynasty as an instrument instead of being used by it.”
When Lion Head talked, it seemed he was talking more to himself than to his guest. He indulged himself and demonstrated his elaborate knowledge of history. He must have felt like Mao at those moments, I thought.
Gently wiping the dust off the antiques, I told Lion Head that I liked to paint and asked him about the ancient way of making paints. He said that they would mix color with egg yolks. It was expensive but good, he said. He painted too, but he preferred photography. He handed me a new jar of paint as a gift and asked me what I liked to paint. I told him I mostly painted symbols, a white mask on a black background, for example, or a giant watch without numbers, a candle burning on both ends, a faceless face. He said that had always been his idea of a self-portrait—a faceless face. He had been trying to capture that image with his camera but hadn’t been successful. We sat quietly for a long time.
I told Lion Head about Katherine’s efforts at understanding China. He asked if she had seen my paintings. Yes, I told him, I showed her some. He asked what her comments had been. “She said that she saw anger in the paintings,” I told him. Lion Head shook his head and laughed.
We talked about Katherine’s expectations and whether they were realistic. I told him that Katherine now seemed to understand that she couldn’t swallow the Pacific Ocean in one gulp, but she was thinking about taking it one cup at a time, downing it bit by bit. I told him that she intended to capture her experience in the book in units simple enough for her readers to comprehend. She believed she could break it down, like measuring curves by reducing them to a sequence of tiny straight lines.
“That’s the thinking of a typical western mind,” Lion Head said. “You see, Chairman Mao ruled China by not ruling it. Mao swam in the Yangtze River in the summer, traveled around his kingdom in the autumn and spring, and wrote poems in the Forbidden City in the winter. The basic difference in our beliefs lay in our concept of the Great Void and the westerner’s idea of God. They think God exists in the world by wei—making—while we believe in the power of wu-wei—not-making—which is the true creative power.”
While polishing and rearranging his antiques, Lion Head continued: “In order to comprehend China, or in fact anything, Katherine must understand that things are not made of separate parts put together, like machines. The Chinese mind doesn’t ask how things were made, which to Katherine must sound odd. If the universe were ‘made,’ there would be someone who knows how it is made—who could explain how it was put together as a technician can explain, one word at a time, how to assemble a machine. But the universe simply grows, and the shortcomings of language, for one thing, exclude the possibility of ever explaining how it grows. Katherine must understand that the universe does not operate according to a plan. Katherine is misguided by her western view. She should learn how to open herself to the unknown in order to gain knowledge.”
Lion Head’s grandmother appeared like a ghost. She leaned on the doorframe. Lion Head introduced me. She smiled, showing the one tooth left in her mouth. She said, “Are you the girl who came last week?”
Her question embarrassed Lion Head.
“No girl came last week,” he interrupted her. “That was Jim.”
“I am not that old,” said the old woman. “My sight is still good. She had long hair. Don’t you fool me.”
“It’s he, not she,” Lion Head corrected her.
“No, no, no, I am sure it’s she. No boy would wear his hair that long.”
Lion Head wrapped up his pots and said to me, “Jim’s been influenced by the Beatles, the long-hair-men.”
I laughed, thinking how people reacted with shock to Jim’s long hair. I thought of Katherine. The Beatles. “I Want to Hold Your Hand.” Katherine, the foreigner, the magician.
Lion Head and I ate noodles with eggplant his grandmother cooked on the porch. We looked down at the “mobile market” below. Thousands of heads were moving like ants.
“Do you know why Katherine rides her bicycle in red?” I asked Lion Head as he served me tea. “Is it for fashion?”
“No,” replied Lion Head. “She doesn’t want to be hit by a bus. Bus drivers in this country are vindictive, like your own brother; there’s never a day when they’re in a good mood. Katherine is a foreigner. She doesn’t care whether people think she’s crazy for wearing a loud jacket. She cares about her safety!”
I remember someone in class once scared Katherine by telling her that if she got hit she would be left on the street to die without any help, because life was not worth much in China. She didn’t know how to take Chinese jokes. She believed that she would be slipped snake or blowfish if she went to a Shanghai restaurant.
“You just can’t convince her that people are just joking with her,” I told Lion Head. “She’s got a strange mind.”
“I wonder what makes an American mind,” said Li
on Head. “From what I know, they eat cheese as their main meal, and that stuff stinks—it clots the brain tubes you know.”
“What exactly did she do, I mean, to her bicycle?” I asked.
“First she painted it red to warn other drivers. Then she had her friends ship a jacket with shiny red strips from America. It looks a lot like the uniform patients wear at the Shanghai Mental Hospital. She’s so identifiable when she passes you. She zips here and there like a red dragonfly. Now all she has to do is dye her skin red.”
I laughed.
“Her hair color is quite interesting,” Lion Head continued. “I would like to touch her hair someday. I doubt if her hair is real. I mean, in America they do all kinds of odd things. I am sure they would mate with animals for money.”
We heard the sound of light footsteps on the staircase. Lion Head went out and did not come back for a long while.
I went to check what was going on and saw Jasmine standing downstairs talking to Lion Head. Just by looking at her eyes I knew she was angry at him.
Jasmine did not say hello to me. She stared at Lion Head. In an instant I noticed that her eyebrows looked unnaturally long, as if painted on. I was sure that she had carefully done something to them. These flying eyebrows did not suit her tiny face. Her cheeks receded because of the strong emphasis of the eyebrows. The O-shaped mouth was knotted into a Q.
I dared not say a word.
Lion Head carefully selected his words. He said: “You should be resting. You are too tired. Bad temper produces poisonous chemicals which can harm your body. You must not get upset.” With his arm he made a big-brother gesture, patting her on the shoulder. With great tenderness, he said, “Come on, be a good girl.”
Lion Head’s words did not help Jasmine; on the contrary, they made her even more desperate. She fixed her eyes on me, and I knew she was seeking an enemy. I could tell she was suspicious of me. The little lips shrank and wrinkled. She began to weep but her anger was strong. Her eyes were saying “He is mine—don’t you touch him” with such pitifulness. She made me nervous.