What had Cai told him about our sex life? That we didn’t use birth control and Cai had a wait-and-see attitude even though we didn’t have jobs or know where we’d live after graduation? Was that why Yoshimoto told Cai to hold off? I couldn’t wait until Japanese Father went home to his real family, or to those in Japan who were still speaking to him.
• • •
I led my family around the old city of Hankou, now part of Wuhan, to see the colonial architecture along the water. We found lunch at a small, out-of-the-way restaurant near the Han River and shopped at a Friendship Store, the government-run department store where foreigners were encouraged to spend their money. I enjoyed this time alone with them, not having to worry about Yoshimoto or even Cai.
Since my family had arrived in China, Cai’s outbursts in Shanghai and Suzhou seemed like aberrations. But I had to admit it was sometimes more relaxing to speak at a normal pace, telling my family about my life in Hong Kong and listening to them relay news about relatives back in the United States. We shopped leisurely and spontaneously stopped for a cold drink, taking our time. When Cai took us around, he was a perfect tour guide, but we were always in a rush with predetermined time slots for meals and sightseeing.
That evening when my family and I entered the hotel restaurant at six, Cai and Yoshimoto were just standing up from their cluttered table.
“You’re leaving?” I asked. Had I mistaken our meeting time?
“Sorry. We just finished. Japanese Father likes to eat early and to go to sleep early. We’ve been up since six this morning.”
I didn’t know what to say. Japanese Father obviously didn’t get to bed early the night before. And why tell me to meet at six when they were leaving at six? Although I figured it was beyond Cai’s control, I was beginning to feel like I was the only one who thought the situation bizarre.
The next day, we left Wuhan for Shanghai to spend a couple days in the city before Jonathan flew back to the United States and Yoshimoto returned to Japan. Our flight to Shanghai was to leave at four in the afternoon, so we arrived at the new Wuhan airport an hour early. Once we took seats at the gate, Cai looked into the distance to listen to a muffled overhead announcement.
“The flight is delayed.” Cai strained his voice to stay upbeat. “It should only be an hour late.”
With the drooping shoulders of a lost puppy, Yoshimoto leaned over, speaking to Cai so softly I couldn’t make out a word. Sitting across from Cai and Yoshimoto, my parents took out their books, while Budgie, Jonathan, and I rehashed the details of the many wedding banquet dishes. Out of the corner of my eye, I saw Yoshimoto lower his head until it rested on Cai’s shoulder. Japanese Father gently closed his eyes. Cai didn’t flinch.
Budgie opened his eyes wide, catching my attention. “Huh?” he mouthed, so as not to disturb the resting pair.
I shrugged my shoulders. Why in the world was Yoshimoto resting his head on Cai’s shoulder? Up until now, everything between them had seemed like everyday Confucian teacher-student interactions. But this was different. Again, with my family present, I felt like I had to be strong for everyone. If I spoke up now or in private, I knew Cai would either give me the silent treatment as he had on the train to Suzhou or would chastise me as he had in the pedicab. Although Jonathan would fly back to Washington, DC, in a couple days, my parents and Budgie still had another week in China. I couldn’t let them think that I wasn’t in control of my life, that inside I was barely hanging on.
Chapter 15
Women Are Dirty
Like most Americans, I liked to start the day off fresh with a hot shower. During my first trip to Hidden River at Chinese New Year, I went without a shower all week because that was what Cai and his family did. I wasn’t used to waiting for so long between showers, but I also knew nothing awful would happen besides my hair tangling in knots. That was something I could fix when we returned to Hong Kong.
But summers in Hidden River sweltered. A cool shower felt refreshing, a chance to wash away the grime and sweat from days of hundred-degree heat. Just as in Hong Kong, I had enjoyed a daily shower that summer: at Mama and Baba’s, at the guesthouse in Suzhou, and at the dorm and hotel in Shanghai and Wuhan. Some days I even bathed twice.
It was early September and we needed to collect official papers in Wuhan for Cai’s green card application before returning to Hong Kong for our final year of grad school. Since Cai was still employed by the Conservatory and on leave while he studied in Hong Kong, he was able to keep the apartment where he’d lived with Wei Ling and Ting-Ting on the Conservatory’s campus. So we stayed there.
I found it difficult to sleep well in the bedroom with roaches peeping out of the cracks at all hours, but the rustic bathroom scared me even more. It wasn’t just the squatter toilet, resembling an old urinal that had fallen flat on the floor, or the outhouse décor: naked cement and spiderwebs dotted with gray egg sacks. Or even the large red plastic basin, turned upside down and kept over the toilet.
“What’s that for?” I asked Cai.
“To keep the rats out.”
I cringed, imagining diseased rodents poking their pointed snouts out of the squatter toilet. But when I looked up at the showerhead that hung loosely from a crumbling cement wall in the narrow stall, I realized that to take a shower I would need to uproot the red basin and straddle the toilet, trying to balance so as not to step in the hole, one stratum from the rats’ underground nest.
The overwhelming sewer stench made me want to gag each time I opened the flimsy wooden bathroom door. I could wait a few days until we returned to Hidden River before taking another shower. Luckily I’d brought enough deodorant for the summer, a product I had yet to find in a Chinese store outside of Shanghai.
One afternoon, Cai and I returned to his apartment after lunch. The excruciating heat had left me worn and sluggish. “Wo lèi sile.” Collapsing onto Cai’s platform bed, I wasn’t actually tired to death, but I liked this Chinese expression and thought it a good prelude to wujiào, or afternoon nap. Much to my delight, my brother Jonathan had brought me a few paperbacks. I looked forward to reading for a bit after my nap.
Instead of joining me on the bed, Cai stood firm, peering down at me. “You haven’t taken a shower in a while.”
Huh? “You haven’t taken one either,” I replied.
The skin between Cai’s nose and upper lip inflated like a balloon. “Women are dirty.” He eyed me carefully. “Especially in the summer.”
What? For the first time in weeks, we could finally enjoy some time alone away from his family and professors, and this is what he chose to emphasize? His tirade took me by such surprise that I was left speechless and could only look down at the naked cement floor in shame. Did he really think I was dirty?
“You should take a bath now,” he ordered.
Cai walked around me, as if I were a filthy street urchin he would avoid in the congested Wuhan streets. He stepped into the bathroom and uncovered the toilet, tossing the red basin right side up on the cement floor. It landed with a thud in the small space between the bathroom and his bedroom. The sound of the plastic colliding with the floor broke the silence in the room.
Cai marched into the kitchen and filled a kettle with water from the sink, which resembled the washbasin in my parents’ unfinished basement. While the water boiled, Cai used a cooking pot to transport tap water to the basin. He dumped several pots of water into the basin, mixing it with boiling water so my bath wouldn’t be cold to the touch. I looked on in disbelief; none of this made sense. Cai stepped into the bedroom and sat on his bed, watching over me like a prison warden.
“It’s ready now.”
Although I knew that I should stand up to his misogynist behavior, I felt so embarrassed that he was insisting I bathe that I could barely look at him. Though Cai had never spoken of this before, I suddenly wondered if he was right. Why else would he say it? So I did as I was
told.
The apartment had no interior doors except for in the bathroom, and that was a thin piece of wood hung by a couple of rusted hinges. He had placed the basin outside the bathroom, so that one door did me no good. If I wanted to move the basin back a few feet for privacy, it wouldn’t be able to rest on a flat surface since the squatter toilet took up most of the tiny floor space.
Numb, I continued to stand there and wonder if our cultural differences were greater than I could handle. Somehow this summer had gone all wrong: the Shanghai Railway Station, the train to Suzhou, Cai’s interactions with his Wuhan professors, Yoshimoto’s bizarre behavior, and Cai’s phone conversation with the prostitute.
Was it China, or was I was the one at fault? Plenty of foreigners had braved the rough conditions in China, but I had opted for the comforts of Hong Kong. Was I just not cut out for the mainland? Maybe I was nothing but a spoiled American. If my own husband could see it, wasn’t that proof? It was hard to know what to believe without the support network of my friends in Hong Kong or those back in the United States.
I had no one to talk to in China that summer besides my family, although even they were now out of reach and I hadn’t spoken to them about my problems. Still, I wasn’t sorry I had kept these worries from them. If they had known the truth, I knew they would have insisted that I return with them to the United States. But I had only been married a few months and couldn’t give up so soon.
“Ay yo,” Cai exhaled as he stood up in haste and walked back over to the basin—and to me. “Don’t you know how to take a bath?” His words sounded like a reprimand.
“Actually, no. We don’t use this in America.” I stared at the dirty basin, imagining the thousands of rats that had made contact with it in their many attempts to break free from the sludgy sewer.
Cai squatted next to the basin and pantomimed splashing water upward onto his crotch. “Like this.” He glared at me while he continued his miming. “Chinese peasant women take baths like this.” And then he repeated, with a snarl, how women were dirty, especially in the summer. He returned to the kitchen and reached for something. On his way back to the bedroom, he tossed me a worn bar of hand soap, black stains ingrained in its ridges.
Bent over and defeated, I undressed and stepped into the warm water as a flush of shame crept over my skin like a fresh layer of sunburn. I no longer felt like his wife; I was a filthy vagrant, crouching in disgrace as I tried to mimic the way he splashed water in his pantomime. As I squatted in that red basin, I knew I wouldn’t be able to keep it together without one central prerequisite: I cannot live in China with this man. I could not wait to return to Hong Kong.
• • •
Back in Hong Kong, Cai and I moved into a double room reserved for married couples or foreign students. Identical to the one I’d shared with Na Wei the previous academic year, our room stood at the end of the second-floor hall, a floor designated for men only. The university thought it best for married women to reside on a male floor rather than a married man on a female floor.
Cai turned our room into a makeshift marital chamber every night by converting our thin bunk bed mattresses into a queen-size futon, placing them side by side on the floor so we could sleep together. We bought a small refrigerator and on top of that placed a new television with a built-in VCR. It was still a dorm room, but it felt like a cozy home.
One warm autumn day after class, we rode the train a couple stops to the Sha Tin mall and wandered into the KPS Video Express rental store. “Why don’t you choose a movie and I’ll choose one, and then we can watch both tonight,” Cai suggested.
“Sounds good. Let’s meet back here in five minutes.”
I scoured the foreign film section and pulled the tape jacket for Blue, the first in a trilogy by director Krzysztof Kieślowski. Back in Washington, DC, I’d watched The Double Life of Véronique two times the night I rented it. I wanted to see another Kieślowski film, and since all movie rentals in Hong Kong included Chinese and English subtitles, both Cai and I could understand them.
But when I returned to our meeting place, Cai was nowhere to be seen. Gazing above the low shelves and scanning the shop, I couldn’t see him anywhere. Had he left the store? It didn’t seem like something he would do without telling me, so I made for the back of the store, in case he was hidden there. Just as I reached the little room off to the side that housed porn, Cai stepped out, startled to see me.
“Did you find something?” he asked.
I showed him the jacket for Blue.
“I don’t want to see that.”
What? What was the point of us each choosing a movie if he vetoed my pick? I was hesitant to make a scene, especially since the porn room was filled with middle-aged businessmen who could probably speak fluent English.
“Let’s get something else,” Cai muttered as he headed toward the front, carrying Sex & Zen. Before we reached the checkout counter, Cai stopped and picked up Apollo 13, as if he had planned to choose it all along. He continued on to the register.
That evening after we’d finished Apollo 13, Cai turned to me. “You can sleep,” he said, popping Sex & Zen into the VCR. “I’ll watch this movie alone.”
Although surprised he had chosen porn, I focused more on his rejection of my movie pick rather than on the warning signs of a future problem in my marriage. It was just a movie, I told myself, not a life-and-death situation. And it was the first time Cai had lived apart from other mainland students since he arrived in Hong Kong two years earlier. Maybe he was just taking advantage of his newfound independence. I just hoped it wouldn’t become a habit, that his preference for porn over me wasn’t going to be constant. As on our honeymoon, I fell asleep to Cai staring at the television screen and the phony groans of porn stars.
The next time we traveled to Sha Tin, Cai headed straight to the porn room again. Within a few minutes, I found a movie—Hong Kong director John Woo’s masterpiece, Hard Boiled—and ended up waiting almost a half hour while Cai perused the porn tapes lining the little room from floor to ceiling. When he finally emerged, he smiled sheepishly.
“I’m going to write an article for a newspaper in China to introduce people there to these movies,” he said as we headed toward the checkout register.
“Aren’t they illegal in China?” I thought back to my first trip to China in 1988. Arriving in Beijing that summer, my suitcases were searched not only for porn, but also for banned American books. I couldn’t imagine things having changed so extremely in just seven years.
“Yes, but people still get them from Hong Kong, Taiwan, and other places.”
I thought it a little juvenile for Cai to think he could write a newspaper article about porn—and a bit unrealistic since I was fairly sure it wasn’t officially allowed in China—but I didn’t question him because I didn’t want to be a nag. I figured it was normal for most men to look at porn, so why should Cai be any different?
As the weeks and then months passed, I sometimes thought about Cai’s article as he continued to rent porn once or twice a week—sometimes more—when we ventured out to the mall. But since he didn’t veto my choices after the Kieślowski film, it seemed like a fair deal. We’d watch one movie together, and after I went to sleep, he’d pop in the porn. He never did write that article.
Chapter 16
The Foreign Stepmother
It was after we returned from our long summer in China that Cai told me he’d heard from a Wuhan classmate about his daughter, Ting-Ting. According to this friend, Ting-Ting had recently moved to Zhūhâi to live with Wei Ling. She was now only a two-hour boat ride away from us.
“That’s fantastic! You should go visit her,” I said. With Ting-Ting out of her grandparents’ reach, Cai could become reacquainted with her. He hadn’t tried to contact her since Wei Ling’s parents had refused to let him see Ting-Ting a couple summers ago. I assumed he felt discouraged after that visit and neede
d a push to try again. I’d been so preoccupied with our wedding in Hong Kong, our banquet in Hidden River, and my chipped self-esteem that I didn’t think to ask Cai about contacting Ting-Ting. But now was the perfect time for Cai to make that trip. He could easily go for a weekend or even a day.
“Would that be all right?” he asked.
“What do you mean? Of course it would be. You don’t need my permission.”
“Thank you.” He kissed me quickly on the lips. “I’ll call Wei Ling. It’s time I see my daughter.”
“Do you know how to contact her?”
“My classmate gave me her number. I think he had the same idea.”
The following day when I returned from my teaching assistant duties in an undergraduate political theory class, Cai told me about his conversation with his ex-wife. Ting-Ting was studying at the school where Wei Ling taught dance. In a month, Ting-Ting would perform in a school dance concert to celebrate China’s National Day on October 1.
“I’d like to see her perform. Is it okay if I go to Zhūhâi that weekend?”
As downtrodden as I’d felt when Cai first told me about Ting-Ting and how he hadn’t seen her in two years, I was thrilled that he finally had the chance to visit her. For a moment, I wondered how he and Wei Ling would interact with each other. They hadn’t seen one another in years. But then I reminded myself that he was going to Zhūhâi to visit Ting-Ting, not Wei Ling. “Do you want me to go with you?” I asked.
Cai looked like he was about to reply, but then paused. “I’d love for you to meet her. But I think this time—”
Good Chinese Wife Page 11