by Anchee Min
She had a new haircut. The jellyfish-tail hair that spread down her back was gone. She was in a beige sweater, black jeans, and a silver belt. She stood before the blackboard, looking out the window, her back to the door, as if deep in thought. She was alone in the room.
I stood as if frozen. The wind blew open the door. She turned and saw me. A little awkwardly, she smiled.
I made myself say hi.
“You look wonderful,” she said, like her old self. “I like your outfit a lot.”
I dressed up for you, I thought.
She looked at me as if studying my face.
I felt her fingertips running across my cheeks.
My classmates began to arrive. She was taken away. She glanced at me as she said hello to them.
I took a corner seat.
Lion Head showed up quietly. Jasmine followed, carrying his green army bag. Lion Head was in a high-collared brown cotton winter coat. He sat by himself in a seat off to the side without saying hello to anyone. Jasmine passed his bag to him and hesitated for a moment before finally sitting down one seat behind him.
Katherine got up in front of the lecture table. Her smile was just as beautiful as last year’s. “I got a lot done during the New Year break,” she began. “I was more alone than I’d ever been in my whole ta-ma-de American life.” A few giggled at her use of swear words. She looked at me. “But it was good. A good experience, a Chinese experience, for sure.” She began pacing. “I answered letters, worked on my dissertation, and finally finished reading Dream of the Red Chamber.” She turned away from me. “It made a lot of sense to me. A lot of sense. I must thank you for such an education. Now let’s begin our text on Virginia Woolf.”
She will forgive me if she understood the essence of the book, the essence of the Chinese way, I thought, and felt a little relieved.
* * *
Katherine told the class that she was glad to learn that the Central Bureau’s new policy sought to improve East-West communications, which meant she would have a little more freedom in choosing texts.
We showed her an expressionless face. To us this was not news. The Central Bureau could open the door at any time but that didn’t mean it would stay open.
Lion Head watched Katherine, his face twisted, his hair standing up from the roots. In an effort to get away from Katherine, he traveled to the North over the holiday. But he came back still unable to find his mind. He had never been this way with me or, I believed, with any other woman. He had never been in love with anyone but himself. I saw a flame of anger in his eyes. He was a wounded bull.
He’d always been lucky with women. Like the petals of peach flowers, they rained down on him, just fell on his face, and all he had to do was smell the fragrance. When he was no longer interested, he would brush the petals off, stamp them into the mud, let them turn brown, dry, and blow away in the wind. Then he would sigh, “Oh, what a beautiful day!” and with a smile he would look toward the new spring.
But the winter storm of 1983 made its appearance without warning. The chill zipped through Lion Head and froze him. He did not know if his heart would survive the new year.
Katherine looked at him with remoteness. Are you all right? her eyes asked him. Mirrors of a clear lake, her eyes, so clear that on their crystal surface his thoughts were reflected. He was exposed, inside out. He had gotten himself drunk on gasoline, and with the spark from her eyes he set himself on this burning journey.
He could not bear her polite, concerned looks. I could tell he was having a hard time just being near her. At the break he asked if she wanted to see some new antiques he’d collected. She said, “Thanks, maybe some other time.”
He said, “May I help you with your Chinese?”
She said, “That’s okay, no thanks.”
He said, “He-bi-ne?” Why are you giving me such a hard time?
She said, “I don’t get what you’re saying.”
He said, “Please stop doing this to me.”
She said, “What are you talking about?”
The class watched. And pitied Lion Head. After all, Lion Head was a Chinese. We could not help but be on his side. Whether I loved Lion Head or not was another issue. We secretly wished that Katherine would suffer a little. We needed to see her suffer, to balance things out. Lion Head had never lost himself over one of us. In this, Jasmine and I were comrades.
* * *
Late Thursday afternoon I was making light switches. The molding machine had been on all day. It sounded like a helicopter. I had done four loads of switches since morning. I could not help feeling scared wondering what would happen after the term ended, where I would be, what I would be assigned to do. The factory boss who had been so interested in having me translate his product catalogue had been charged with corruption and transferred. He was caught using factory funds to entertain his relatives. I was once again a worker borrowed from Elephant Fields. I lost sleep at night. I set my sights on being the best student in the class; if a good opportunity arose, I would be the one best equipped to grasp it.
I spent even less time with my family. My brother finally got married and had taken over my room. His thirty-nine-year-old bride just couldn’t wait any longer. I had to sleep with my parents. At night, when I came home, I wouldn’t turn on a light so as not to wake my parents. I did everything in the dark: eat, wash, and change clothes. It made me angry. The anger was nameless. I conducted my life like a prisoner making his escape, waiting, as I ran, for the bullet to hit me in the head or maybe miss.
Lion Head came to the factory to look for me. He waved at me from the window, but I could not hear what he was saying.
I turned off the machine and took off my cotton gloves. I asked why he had come. He didn’t answer my question but said that he had to talk to me and did not mind waiting. He went to sit in a corner and lit a cigarette.
I went up to him and said, “I have ten minutes.”
He said that he needed more than ten minutes.
* * *
Lion Head and I went to a noodle shop after I got off work. He ordered two bowls of noodles with weed-hearts. I shoved the stuff down. The yellow-white weed-hearts were tender. I waited for Lion Head to speak.
“I’d like to get serious,” he said. He wanted to have a relationship, a family, a future with me.
“This is stupid,” I said in a sarcastic voice. “What about your foreign object?”
“She’s a bitch,” he said. “She seduced me. It was a good lesson. It made me understand how much I love you. I can’t live without you.”
I wanted to laugh but I managed not to insult him. Who was this man? I couldn’t believe that I had once desired him so much. He was trying to use me to get back at Katherine.
“But you love her,” I said, catching his eyes. “How can you deny that? You’re fooling yourself.”
“No, I never loved her. It was curiosity. I’ll confess that I was after her meat. It’s a weakness all men unfortunately possess. But . . . but I need to share a soul with someone, a Chinese soul.”
* * *
Lion Head insisted on having tea with me that night. He said he was going through a tough time and needed company. He begged me to stay with him. About eight o’clock in the evening I went with him to his little room. He did not turn on the light. He locked the door, turned around, stood face-to-face with me for a moment, then he pulled me down, his arms around my shoulders, pushed me down on his bed, and threw himself on top of me. I thought, Oh, how awful. I lay there. I heard my stomach groan. He began to do the same things he did with me at Wolf Teeth. But there was no magic. My body was numb. Cold. I felt no blood running in my veins. He stopped, and after a while he began to sob. He said that God must be punishing him.
We sat up, in the dark, each facing the wall.
He began to talk about our past. How beautiful it all was. He talked about the time of the Cultural Revolution, the heroes and the glory, our culture a thick wall no foreigner could break through. Our straight b
lack hair, our yellow-brown skin, the beauty of our race, our five-thousand-year-old history, the styles of calligraphy, the artistry of the brush stroke, the colors, the ink, Chineseness.
* * *
Katherine was honored as the year’s teacher of merit by the school authorities. She was given a three-day vacation. She told me that she had contacted several orphanages and had one in mind to visit. She asked me whether I would like to accompany her. Immediately I said yes.
I went to get a permit to leave my job for three days. The unit head would not grant me permission unless someone was dying in the family.
I lied. I said that my grandmother was dying and she needed to see me to let go. The unit head made me promise that when I returned I would catch up on all the switches I left behind.
* * *
Katherine and I took separate routes. We took different buses in order to cover my lie. We snuck out of Shanghai without being seen together. She was very excited. She told me that it was like a James Bond movie. When I asked what that meant, she explained that it had something to do with being adventurous. She then asked how I felt about the adoption. I said that I didn’t feel much; I felt normal. She shrugged her shoulders.
The Yi-lian train station was located in a northern suburb of the city. There was a big crowd. The locals wore dark brown clothes. We were squeezed into a big waiting room. The peasants sat on the concrete floor. Everyone had the same sagging expression, like prisoners waiting to be released.
I wore an old scarf on my head that covered half my face. Katherine said that she could hardly tell me apart from the locals. I told her that she didn’t look too good either. She had on no makeup and was wearing a worn-out deep blue jacket with big buttons from her chin to her knees. A pair of black lantern pants tied at the ankles. Black cotton shoes with rubber soles. Her feet looked huge. She also had a bright red-and-green-flowered scarf wrapped around her head. She looked like a man in a scarf from behind. She stood like a horse among goats. One woman passenger called her “Da-shu”—Big Uncle—when she asked Katherine to make space so she and her baskets with two babies in each could get by. The woman made the babies say, “Shie-shie Da-shu”—Thank you, Big Uncle. I could not help laughing and started to call her Da-shu.
The train smelled like an animal cage. There were hens and ducks in nylon fishnets under the seats by our feet. The locals brushed the leftovers from their bowls onto the floor for the animals. No one bothered to clean up the animal shit. People smoked and chatted loudly. Katherine and I sat facing each other. She was reading The Three Kingdoms, a book about the strategies of Han Dynasty warlords that Mao prized. I was impressed with her endurance.
I turned to watch the landscape out the window. “Great China, my motherland . . .” I thought of the song I used to sing when I grew up. “Beautiful China, pearl of the sea, star of the East.” Now the words sounded empty. They bored me. I thought about the way Katherine talked about her country, her ideas about art, men, and life.
To Katherine it was everyday talk. To me it was enlightenment. People in China never talked this way, never spoke about personal feelings. They would talk about the Chen family’s son marrying the Li family’s daughter, hopefully getting a grandson soon; about what herb soups to drink to make sons; about families who had dai-jia-nu—daughters-available-for-marriage-but-need-the-male-to-provide-a-room; about how to get a city residency number through a back-door connection; about how to make deals to get a child out of a labor camp; about useful gifts for government officers—cartons of cigarettes, mai tai wines, foreign-made watches; about how to get out of jail if caught corrupting the Party’s workers.
People in China did not talk about dreams or pleasure. Lion Head was an exception, but he only talked about his own interests, the revenge he’d take, the unfairness he’d experienced in his youth, about how much society owed him. Of course, Jasmine too was an exception, talking about her forever unsatisfactory life, her eternal disappointment, her hatred, and her powerful but useless father.
I liked to listen to Katherine’s beautiful silly dream talk. She would say, “I would like to learn Chinese painting. I would like to be a filmmaker. I would like to grow Chinese herbs in my backyard.” I tried hard to understand who she wanted to be.
* * *
The closer we got to our destination, the poorer people looked. Children’s arms were like bamboo sticks; animals looked like bones wrapped in skin.
Katherine was composing a letter to the director of the orphanage that stated her intention to adopt a child. When she finished, she read it to me and asked for comments. I told her that she would never be allowed to adopt with a letter like that.
She looked confused. She asked me to explain. I said: “You cannot say you would like to adopt a Chinese girl because female infants are disfavored in this country. Our government would never swallow that kind of insult.”
“So how should I put it?” Katherine scratched out what she’d written.
“Say you will learn so much of the great Chinese culture from this child. The child will help educate you.”
“That’s ridiculous! I’m going to be educated by . . . we’re talking about a baby!”
“It doesn’t matter,” I said. “The point is that the authorities only want to hear things that will soothe their ears.”
“But I have to be honest,” she said.
“You want the child or not?” I said impatiently.
“Oh, the games we play . . . ,” Katherine sighed and began to rewrite the letter.
At two in the afternoon Katherine and I were having lunch in one of the carriages. The noodles tasted like rubber bands. Katherine ate one spoonful and pushed her plate aside. I was eating slowly, sinking in my thoughts. Suddenly a pair of chopsticks came from behind and picked some noodles from my plate. I turned and saw the face of a five-year-old boy, dirty, thin, pitiful. He was with no adult. When I turned back, Katherine’s plate was gone. I couldn’t eat anymore. I gave the boy my plate. Katherine and I went back to our seats. The conductor announced that we were nearing Ningsia Hui Province. Katherine and I got off at Lucky Village in the early evening.
Katherine had a letter from a Shanghai city official which indicated who she was and what kind of help she sought from the village leaders. The next day we asked around about the location of the orphanage. A boy took us to the orphanage and Katherine gave him a piece of chocolate candy. He was thrilled.
Katherine suddenly asked me if she was doing the “right thing.” I couldn’t answer her. I was more nervous than she was. I had recently learned from a relative who worked in the medical field that China had over one hundred thousand orphans, sixty percent of whom were handicapped or mentally retarded. I thought about how I poisoned my fetus and became very scared for Katherine.
“What’s wrong?” she asked.
“Why? Why do you want to adopt?”
She looked at me and said slowly, “I have a lot to give, and I feel rewarded when I do. I always wanted a child of my own and I’ve been thinking about adopting a baby for years. I know how it feels to be abandoned, I know how to help . . .”
I took Katherine’s hand and at that moment felt that we were connected in a deep, God-made way. I felt that we were adopting the child together.
* * *
The headmistress of the orphanage did not speak much. She was an old lady of about sixty. Tired-looking. She carefully read through Katherine’s documents and took us inside a courtyard. The place looked like an abandoned temple. We looked around and heard babies crying. The woman seemed used to the cries. She concentrated on reading the letters. After she finished, she waved us to follow her through the yard.
“The girls are at lunch,” she said. She took us to the dining room. It was dimly lit. There were stoves with huge bamboo steamers on top. A smoke-darkened chimney on the wall. About thirty children sat around rows of long wooden tables, burying their heads in bowls, eating sweet potatoes and porridge. All girls. According to the headmistre
ss, they were between two and twelve years old. They turned to stare at us, like squirrels, holding their bowls by their mouths. They looked afraid, especially of Katherine. Katherine smiled and waved hello with her hand. No one moved or blinked an eye.
We were led to the orphanage’s tiny office. Katherine described the type of girl she would like to adopt. I translated for her. I had advised Katherine not to speak any Chinese in order to avoid any miscommunication. She might mean to say “I respect you,” but instead it could come out as “I am scared of you.”
The headmistress was taking notes. She flipped through the papers and pointed to a name. “This girl will suit you,” she said. “Five years old, healthy, good personality.”
Katherine said, “May I please see the girl first?” She forgot that she was not supposed to speak Chinese.
“You can only reject after the viewing,” the woman said.
Katherine asked, “What does that mean?”
“It means that you cannot choose from a selection.”
“Why not?”
“Because we are not selling the children.”
“And I am not buying the children,” Katherine said emphatically.
“I did not make this policy. I have to go upstairs, please.”
Katherine looked upset and frustrated. I suggested that we take a look at that girl anyway. The headmistress told us we could go to the playroom where the children were, and she would be right down.
When we arrived in the playroom, we saw a fierce fight between a girl about six years old who looked like a bully and a younger, thin girl of about four. The bully’s ruthlessness shocked us. She cornered the younger girl and kicked her. The small girl screamed without a voice. I heard Katherine say, “Oh my God.” And I kicked her to shut her up.
The bully girl pulled the younger girl’s hair. She ordered the other girls in the room to join in. The attack was completely animal-like. The younger girl was struggling, fighting silently as she was thrown over tables and against the wall. The girls were giggling as they took turns kicking her. The bully girl grabbed a broom and began to hit the little girl with it. She wrapped her arms around her head and called for help, but no voice came out. “Oh my God, she’s mute,” Katherine choked out.