With that selfish gesture, Juanlan decides that she likes Lulu. Her sister-in-law was once so smooth she couldn’t find a crack in the surface; now she is all rough edges. As Juanlan watches, she pulls apart the fish’s skull with her fingers and then burrows the tips of her chopsticks inside. When they’re both finished eating, the table is strewn with bones and grains of rice, and Juanlan begins cleaning up. “Don’t bother,” Lulu says. “Zhuo will do it when he gets home.”
“I can do it. He works all day, and I’m not doing anything.”
Lulu levels a gaze at her. “Go ahead and judge me. Everyone else does. But you don’t really know anything about my marriage.”
Juanlan pictures the normal evening scene: her brother parking his motorbike behind the stairs and then climbing the six stories to his flat. Inside, his wife sits on the sofa doing nothing. The table is filthy. Her hands are unmoving in her lap as she mindlessly slaps the heel of one slipper against the tile floor.
Zhuo Ge has too much life in him to bear such quietness. His charm wafts off him like the scent of a flower hung over a shirt button in the spring. It’s always been this way. He is someone who wins and keeps on winning. Even when he was a child, every game went his way, and though Juanlan tried to hate him for it, she never could.
Despite her sister-in-law’s instructions, she carries the dishes into the kitchen and washes them in the sink. When she’s finished, she goes into the other room and finds Lulu in the posture she’d imagined her brother finding her in each night: idle, staring out the window. “I’m going now.”
Lulu looks over abruptly. Her face is clouded with something between melancholy and impatience. Juanlan recognizes this combination; it’s the way she feels when she’s thinking of Chengdu, of Du Xian, of her own shapeless future. “You should stay,” Lulu says.
Juanlan seats herself on the other end of the sofa. “Do you want to listen to another tape?” she inquires, but Lulu shakes her head as if offended by the suggestion. A few seconds pass, and then Lulu asks to hear about life at the university. “What do you want me to say?” Juanlan says, and hears the bitterness in her voice. “I was there for four years. Now I’m back here.”
“Did you have a boyfriend?” When Juanlan hesitates, Lulu presses her hands together eagerly. “You did, I see. What’s he like?”
What to tell her about Du Xian? With her college roommates, Juanlan could sit cross-legged on a bed and recount the date she’d just had, pausing when she got to the part where they’d groped each other on a park bench, give a significant look, and say, “We sat together at least an hour.” Then the girls would laugh, and Hualing would remark, “I hope you sat close enough to make that hour worth it,” and sway her chest seductively to make them all laugh even more. Hualing was big-breasted and had crooked teeth. She’d had a boyfriend in the chemistry department for three years, and every time she came home from their once-weekly date at a cousin’s flat outside the university campus, she reported on what they’d done in bed. She liked to tell stories that made the whole thing sound amusing, like she was playing with a pet rabbit, coaxing it to do tricks. It sounded nothing like Juanlan’s own experiences with Du Xian, which were rare and rushed and difficult. Since neither of them knew anyone with a flat, they had to use the storage shed near the recreation room, the one with a loose window the security guards either missed or chose to ignore. Juanlan never told anyone about it, this part of her relationship that seems now like the only part that means anything at all.
Lulu sits waiting for an answer to her question. Juanlan could tell her that she doesn’t have a boyfriend. Or she could invent a different one: someone taller and more handsome and more devoted to her, a boy who has made her promises. Somehow, she fears that if she tries to describe Du Xian, she’ll get him wrong. She holds her breath for a second, but then quickly decides. “I do have a boyfriend. He’s in Chongqing now.”
“Chongqing’s not so far. Have you heard from him since you’ve been back?”
“No, but he was starting his new job right away. He said he won’t have time to write except on the weekends.” She hears how this sounds, but if Lulu pities her, it doesn’t show.
“What’s his job?”
Juanlan tells her about the company he’s working for, how he’ll help to design engines for motorbikes. “He was lucky to get a job in the private market,” she adds, “and at such a prestigious place.”
Lulu chews her lip, distracted. Then she asks if Juanlan loves him.
“I don’t know,” she says, startled. “I guess I do.”
“If you did, you wouldn’t give an answer like that.”
“We’ve been seeing each other for seven months. It’s not long enough to tell.”
For the first time, Lulu smiles. “I’m telling you, you’re not in love. If you were, you would have known the first time you touched.” She leans back against the arm of the sofa and rubs her belly. “Have you had sex with him?”
“Yes.”
“And did you enjoy it?”
“Of course.”
A lock of hair falls forward, and Lulu brushes it back with her hand. “If you didn’t know before and you still don’t know now, then there’s no way that you love him.”
Juanlan stands and walks to the kitchen. Her limbs are shaking from anxiousness or anger, from the thrill of talking openly and also from the fear. There’s a thermos on the floor, and she picks it up to test whether it still holds any water. Returning to the room with two glasses, she sets them both on the table and opens the drawer below. “You keep the tea in here?”
Lulu nods and picks up where she left off: “It’s better that you figure this out now, so you don’t waste any more time.”
Juanlan concentrates on tipping the bag over the rim of each glass, watching the tea leaves scatter on the surface of the water. “What makes you an expert, anyway?” she asks. “How many boyfriends did you have before my brother?”
“I dated one boy,” Lulu says as she takes the glass of tea. “He was very sweet, but it was only a high school relationship. We never did anything more than kiss and hold hands.” She lifts the glass to the light and looks through it, closing one eye. “I remember his hands were always so sweaty, he’d have to wipe them on his pants every few minutes to dry them off. Poor boy, he was always apologizing for them. Really, his hands didn’t bother me that much, but his embarrassment made me think he wasn’t really a man.”
In the courtyard outside, a motorbike starts up, and the noise of the revving engine echoes off the walls. Immediately, a dog begins yapping like mad. These distractions draw Lulu’s attention, her face turning toward the window as if she expects to see the dog right there. “Anyway,” she says, turning back, “we were talking about your boyfriend. What do you like about him?”
What floats before Juanlan is a wavering image of Du Xian standing outside her dorm beneath a light, smoking as he waits for her to come down. He has a funny way of smoking: he holds the cigarette between his thumb and his fourth finger, so the index and middle fingers stick up by his eye, and the pinkie stands as straight as a flagpole. But she can’t give this answer to Lulu; it wouldn’t make sense. Instead she says he has straight shoulders, he likes the same music as she does, and the year he took the gaokao he scored in the top seven hundred in the whole province.
“Oh, a smart guy, huh?” Lulu’s mouth is pinched for a moment before she says, “You really should break up with him.”
“Okay, fine.” Juanlan laughs. “I’ll write him a letter tomorrow.”
Lulu frowns. “I don’t know him, I haven’t met him. But I can tell that you’re waiting for him because you have nothing better to do. That’s not a good enough reason to marry someone.”
“Who said anything about marriage? Just because I’m finished with college, I should find a husband right away?” She doesn’t say You didn’t even wait this long.
“I thought you were saying that you’d already found him.”
“A boyfrie
nd. I found a boyfriend. It’s not the same thing.”
“And you’re not a virgin,” Lulu goes on. “It’s not going to be easy to find someone else. But twenty-two is still young enough a man will forgive something like that.”
Still young enough. And yet already her life is looping back on itself, bringing her back here, when she’d rather be anywhere else.
“Do you want to know what I’m having?” Lulu says suddenly, pointing to her stomach. She explains that the nurse who did the ultrasound was a friend of Zhuo Ge’s, and he’d convinced her to break the rules and tell them the gender. “It’s a girl. She made me promise to be a ‘responsible mother.’ Like I might go home and stab myself in the stomach.”
“Does my brother know?”
“Of course.” Lulu shrugs. “He’s happy. He says girls are more reliable and will take care of us when we’re old.” The corners of her mouth lift in an expression that is not quite a smile.
Juanlan thinks of what her mother said, how she wonders if Lulu really wants the baby. “And what about you? Are you happy?”
Lulu looks right at her. “No, I’m not happy.”
“You wanted a boy,” Juanlan says carefully.
“It has nothing to do with that.” Lulu blinks and shakes her head. “It would be the same either way.” A long moment passes, and she adds, almost as an afterthought, “I’m just tired of it.”
Juanlan waits for her to go on, to name what exhausts her. But it seems there is nothing to explain; there is only the result. Lulu tells her she’s going to take a nap, and Juanlan says that’s fine and lets herself out.
5
The letter from Du Xian, when it finally arrives, is disappointing. He writes that Chongqing is an interesting place, and already his legs are stronger from climbing the city’s hills; the flat where he is staying with his aunt and uncle is located on a street so steep that it is actually a stairway. Every day, he takes two buses to get to work and it takes more than an hour, but the work is interesting and his uncle and aunt and cousin have been kind. On the weekends, he often plays basketball with some of his friends. “I am glad to be working, not worried about school anymore. Altogether, I am happy with the arrangements postgraduation. Of course, I wish we could be together.” His handwriting is neat, not elegant but clear: the characters all the same size and evenly spaced, as if he has used a writing grid like the ones on which children practice their handwriting. Juanlan has never had a love letter before, yet this does not seem to be one.
She writes him back:
My handsome guy,
I am glad your uncle and aunt have been kind, and your cousin, and everyone in your danwei. I’m not as happy in Heng’an. The hotel isn’t busy, and it’s pointless for me to be here. Every day I put on music and try to imagine I’m back at school with you. When my mother came in and heard “Fenlie” one day, she asked who was singing it and I told her it was Wang Fei, and she said it was not as good as “Xiangyue 1998” . . . so you see, it’s true that everyone loves her big hits, but only real fans admire the earlier album. I remember listening to this song over and over together. I miss you and wish we could be together every day.
Giving you ten thousand hugs and kisses,
YOUR “LITTLE MOUSE”
She had been his little mouse when they sat by the river, back in the fall when they first got together. This was before they ever had sex, when they had only been boyfriend and girlfriend for a few weeks. It had stayed warm through October, but then one evening it was suddenly cold and she tried to burrow under his arm as they sat on the bench. “Like a mouse,” he laughed, “like a little mouse,” and he’d made his nose quiver to demonstrate. The next time he called her a little mouse, she protested that she didn’t want her nickname to be a vermin, but the name stuck, anyway. She gave in because it was an endearment. Now she clings to it as evidence of a promise never clearly spoken. It is all she has.
She mails the letter and waits for a response. In the meantime, she helps with the hotel, sitting at the desk when needed, cleaning rooms or refilling thermoses with hot water. Her tasks are menial, and in the long hours she spends mopping the linoleum floors upstairs or hanging sheets to dry in the alcoves at the end of each hall, she tries to clear her mind. There is no joy in thinking about Du Xian and their relationship, about her father’s slow recovery, about the in-between state that she’s living in now. She is impatient; she sloshes water on the floors and pushes the mop halfheartedly through the puddles, leaving long wet swaths that take hours to dry in the humid air.
One day, her brother comes by while she’s sweeping the lobby. He’s in uniform, and she wonders briefly if his stopping by the hotel is an excuse to avoid going home to Lulu during the lunch hour. He lights a cigarette, leans against the desk, and tells her he’s been busy trying to figure out how the hotel can start accepting foreign guests. “See, Mei, I’m doing what I can behind the scenes.”
“Ba hasn’t mentioned it.”
“He and Ma don’t know yet. I’ll tell them when it’s a real possibility.”
In the corner, by the standing ashtray, sunflower seeds litter the floor. She goes after them with her broom. “What do we need to worry about that for? Heng’an has no foreigners. And if there were any, the Friendship Hotel already has the permits to accept them.”
“The Friendship Hotel is for businessmen.”
“So are we.”
“For now, yes, okay. But Western travelers want a different kind of place—a smaller hotel, not so fancy. You remember Radish Head?” He waits for her to remember his old classmate. “He was transferred to Guilin a few years ago, and he says that almost every week, a new place opens up that caters to foreign guests. They’re all small places, little hotels like ours.” He glances around the lobby at the dingy linoleum, the worn furniture. “We’ll have to renovate,” he says.
With what money? she could ask. Instead, she says, “Heng’an isn’t Guilin. We don’t have any Western travelers here.”
“Not now, maybe, but once the expressway is completed, we will. There are already a lot of foreigners coming to Sichuan to see the Giant Buddha or Jiuzhaigou. Why not Heng’an? It’s only a matter of time. When it takes less than two hours to get here from Chengdu, lots of people will want to come.”
She sweeps more sunflower seeds into the dustpan. “You’re more optimistic than I am.”
“That’s because you’ve been away. Heng’an is changing, every day a little faster.” He takes a drag on his cigarette and coughs. Stepping aside so she can get behind the front desk to the trash, he adds, “In another few years, we won’t recognize this city.”
“A city? I always thought we were a town.”
“That’s what I’m talking about.” He reaches over the desk to retrieve the tin plate their mother uses to hold fruit; Juanlan swats him away and points to the ashtray in the corner. As he’s crossing the lobby to stub out his cigarette, she asks what he’s done to get the necessary permits.
“That isn’t necessary,” he explains. Like almost everything, it’s all about guanxi—who you know, and what they are willing to do for you, and what will be expected in return. One of the people he knows is Director Wei, leader of both the Department of Tourism and the Department of Tourism’s Communist Party. He has a teenage son, a fifteen-year-old who just graduated from middle school and in September will start high school at one of the most elite schools in Chengdu. But his English isn’t good, and his parents are worried he’ll be behind his peers. When Zhuo Ge mentioned that his sister had won a university-wide prize in English at Sichuan Normal, Director Wei was impressed. He wanted to know if she would tutor his son.
“You don’t have much else going on right now, do you?” Zhuo Ge asks.
Juanlan sweeps an arm around the lobby. It’s as quiet as ever. “Ma has me clean in the mornings while she helps Ba with his exercises.”
“This place doesn’t need so much cleaning.” He runs a finger over the counter of the desk and holds
it up to the light.
The next night, Juanlan meets Zhuo Ge by the river, and together they walk to the beef restaurant near the mosque for a dinner hosted by Director Wei. When the hostess leads them into a private room in the back, a tall woman in heels even higher than the waitresses’ rises from the table. “Policeman Bai! You’ve brought your sister. We’re so happy to see you both. Call me Teacher Cao,” she says, taking both Juanlan’s hands in her own.
“What do you teach?” Juanlan asks, taking in the woman’s stylish clothes, the careful cut of her bangs.
“Oh, I don’t teach any longer. I’m in the education department. But I used to teach art. My specialty is calligraphy—”
“Welcome!” Director Wei cuts off his wife. “Please, have a seat. Zhuo Ge, we’re drinking Wuliangye tonight. You think you can keep up with me?”
Over dinner, Teacher Cao asks Juanlan about the prize she won. She talks to her about Chengdu. She plucks the choicest pieces of meat from the dishes that keep coming to the table and places them in Juanlan’s bowl. Finally, she mentions her son, who is seated across the table and has barely spoken a word since saying hello. “Do you play any instruments?” she asks Juanlan. “Those with musical talents are said to be very good at studying languages. Wei Ke is quite musical—he plays both the piano and erhu—but so far we haven’t seen that particular benefit.” She glances across the table at her son with pride. “He mastered the Mozart sonatas when he was still an Elementary Four student, can you believe that?”
Juanlan smiles at the boy, but he immediately looks down and goes to work stirring his chopsticks around in the grease accumulated in the bottom of his bowl.
Rebellion Page 9