Rebellion

by Molly Patterson

  Through the slotted concrete blocks Juanlan sees the shadowed shape of her sister-in-law on the highest landing, and then the one below. When at last she emerges on the ground floor, her face is pale and her forehead has a greasy sheen. It’s been several days since they met, and the shape of her stomach is different, protruding more sharply than before. Even under the loose dress tenting around her, the firm outline is visible. “I feel like if I knock your stomach,” Juanlan says, “it will make a hollow sound like a watermelon.”

  Lulu makes a fist with one hand and raps it against her belly. “Thock, thock,” she says.

  “Do you want to dent your baby’s head?”

  She reaches up and knocks her own head behind one ear. “Now we’re even.”

  They pass through the gate of the apartment complex. “You decide,” Lulu says when Juanlan asks where she wants to go, so they head up to the main street, toward the area with shops and snack carts and people. At the corner they pass construction, a shirtless man sledgehammering the sidewalk while two others watch. The noise keeps them from talking for half a block. Once they’re far enough away, Lulu grabs Juanlan’s arm. “Tell me about him,” she says.

  “Who?”

  “You know who. The foreigner.”

  “What do you want to know?”

  “What he looks like. What you talk about.”

  “He’s not handsome. He doesn’t look like the foreigners you’re thinking of.” Juanlan spreads her hands, picturing to herself the billboards all over Chengdu that have pictures of blond men and women, gleaming white teeth crowding their mouths, blue and green eyes looking out over the sprawl of the city with casual approval.

  “What does handsome matter? Do you think I married your brother because he’s handsome?” A smile flashes over Lulu’s face, a sharp edge to it like the lid of a tin can. “I just want to know what this laowai is like. You’ve been very quiet about him, Juan Mei. I think you’re hiding something.”

  “There’s not much to say. He doesn’t speak Chinese, and talking with him is good English practice for me.”

  “What do you call him?”

  “Rob.”

  “Wah-buh,” Lulu repeats. Then she tries again with the same result and gives a short laugh. “Why do foreigners have such difficult names?”

  “It’s not difficult for them. You should hear him try to say something in Chinese. All he knows how to say is hello and thank you. ‘Nee how, shee-shee nee,’” she says in a flat tone, opening her mouth wide the way Rob does when he speaks.

  “Maybe I could teach him Chinese. Does he want to learn?”

  “Your Mandarin is terrible.”

  Lulu laughs. “No worse than my math!” And Juanlan pictures the high school student she probably was: popular with teachers and fellow students without ever affecting to be anything other than average. Lulu went to a school in Fengquan, an hour away. But at Juanlan’s middle school in Heng’an there was a girl like her, someone who put enough effort into academics without excelling in any particular subject. When they compared grades on exams, she would look briefly discouraged but then laugh it off. Lulu used to have the chirpy lightness of a bird. It’s only since the pregnancy that she has grown angry, sparks flying under her skin the way a cold fire burns inside Juanlan’s stomach.

  “You’re right, my Mandarin is really terrible,” Lulu admits. “That’s why I want to teach your foreigner Sichuanese.”

  “That won’t be very useful for the rest of his travels.”

  “It will be useful! He can go on television.” She affects the stilted Mandarin of a television interviewer and says, “Comrade, how have you enjoyed your stay in Heng’an?” and then answers in heavy dialect, “Oh, I had a lot of fun last night!”

  They walk on for several blocks, Lulu still clutching Juanlan’s arm as if afraid she’ll drop to her knees without the support. When they pass a woman selling chilled watermelon, Juanlan asks if they should buy some, but Lulu shakes her head and leads the way to a nearby baihuodian, where she purchases a bag of chicken-flavored potato chips. “Nothing has flavor,” she complains as she pushes the chips into her mouth, staring mournfully at her fingers, covered in yellow dust. “Do you know that some women never return to normal after being pregnant? Maybe I’ll always want to add extra salt to everything I eat.”

  “Or maybe your hair will change color.” Juanlan tells her about a teacher from the university who had a baby and when she returned had a large white streak on one side of her head.

  “It’s bad enough I feel ugly while I’m pregnant. Now you’re telling me it’s going to turn me into an old woman?”

  Juanlan tries to explain that though the white hair made her teacher look older, it was in a wonderful way. Teacher Chen was a graceful woman from up north, tall and pale, her skin almost translucent. She’d once been a ballet dancer, and you could see it in the way she lifted her arms at the chalkboard. The streak of white in her hair, Juanlan goes on, only made her more exotic and lovely.

  Lulu squints at her doubtfully. “I’m never going to get my looks back.”

  The lovelier version of Lulu was never her friend. A smeared sort of ugliness has united them, has made them sisters. Juanlan plucks the empty bag from Lulu’s hands and looks for a place to toss it.

  “Bring me your foreigner,” Lulu says as a sudden breeze snaps the bag from Juanlan’s hands, just as she’s dropping it into a dustbin. It cartwheels a few yards and then settles, but neither of them moves to pick it up. “It’s the only thing that will make me happy.”

  When she returns home in the afternoon, Juanlan finds a letter on her bed. The return address is Chongqing, though the name below it is not Du Xian’s but his aunt’s. This is the method they use to keep her parents from asking why a boy is writing to her. She has a story ready: the friend was in her English classes and is now working for a private tutoring school in the city. But her mother hasn’t asked, even though the letter on the bed undoubtedly passed through her hands. Okay, you have your secret. The truth is that a boyfriend is not a problem. If Juanlan wanted to talk about him, she could tell her mother. But then there would be questions, an ongoing inquiry, a repeated demand to meet the young man and a barrage of advice that Juanlan hasn’t asked for and doesn’t want.

  She tears open the envelope, and a photo strip falls out. It’s from a photo booth, the kind with a money slot and a little curtain. An arcade near the university campus had one. In the spring she went there with three of her roommates and they all crammed in—afterward, they cut apart the photos and each took one. Hers is still pasted to the inside of her English notebook. She showed it to Du Xian and suggested that they go take a picture together, too, before they had to say good-bye, but he didn’t want to do it. Girls like that kind of thing, he said; guys don’t. Now, here are four small frames with his head and shoulders facing squarely into the lens and empty space on either side. He’s not making faces in any of the pictures, just a straight-on stare. She looks at them all together and then one at a time, and all she can think is that she’s missing something.

  The letter itself is as restrained as all the others. There is almost nothing of him on the page. In person, Juanlan often felt like she was the one holding back, as if there were a part of herself that had to be protected or hidden away. But also, like that part was out in the open and it was only that Du Xian didn’t notice it there. Sometimes he would grab for her hand, and she would shake it off for no reason, simply to be able to walk with nothing but air touching her skin. Was she sure that she loved him when they were still at the university together? Maybe not. She’s not sure even now. But in the place of certainty is a hunger that comes from waiting, and she can trick herself into believing that this hunger is love. Glancing at the pictures again, she looks for minor differences in the repetition of Du Xian’s face. Here his chin is lowered a half centimeter. There his forehead is wrinkled, a slight crinkle to his eyes.

  She has never gazed at his face so carefully before. T
hey were always walking side by side or seated next to each other on a bench. When they fumbled their way around each other’s bodies, it was always in the dark.

  The closer she looks at the photographs, the less familiar he becomes. And this makes her long for him even more.

  “Twenty-two hours.” Zhuo Ge bends toward his bowl and shovels rice into his mouth. Once he’s swallowed it, he sits back in his chair.

  “Did they have food?” Juanlan’s mother asks. “Or water?”

  “Only on the nearer side. There’s a village a kilometer down the road, so the people caught on this side could walk down there. On the other side, though?” Zhuo Ge shakes his head. “Nothing. Not even a bathroom. Some guys from one of the villages up that way came down on motorbikes with hot water and fast noodles. They sold them for five yuan each. Good capitalists!” He laughs. “The people used the ditch by the road as a latrine. They’re lucky we got the road opened up again today.”

  The sides of Lulu’s mouth twitch down. She’s heard all this already, Juanlan thinks. But Juanlan and her parents haven’t, and Zhuo Ge is enjoying telling the story of another landslide blocking one of the mountain roads nearby. As a traffic policeman on a motorbike, Zhuo Ge gets a close-up view of these minor calamities; he has tales to tell. He’s a good storyteller, too, with an eye for the best characters and a willingness to embellish. In his rendition of events, the people stuck on the mountain for twenty-two hours demonstrated the best and worst of humanity: there were heroes and villains. The heroes in this case were the enterprising villagers who lived nearby, who made money selling fast noodles and packets of toilet paper. The villains were the drivers who tried to get around the barriers and ended up blocking the road so even motorbikes couldn’t get through.

  Juanlan discovered quickly that the landslide happened on the road to Tao Xu, the opposite direction from Kangding, which means that Rob should be back tomorrow, as planned. She listens with only one ear to Zhuo Ge and watches his wife, whose face is pinched and unhappy again. Lulu picks at the chicken in her bowl, and every few minutes her mother-in-law urges her to eat. “Drink the broth, Xiao Lu,” she says when Lulu complains that she can’t eat any more. “It’s healthy for you; it will make the baby strong.”

  Zhuo Ge scoops rice into his mouth while their mother lectures his wife, who is wearing an expression of forced patience. He won’t come to her defense; she should make a show of sipping the broth, but instead she pushes the bowl away from her with a scowl.

  “Wait,” Juanlan says, “you said the landslide was on the road to Tao Xu? Director Wei was supposed to go up there yesterday. Do you think he got stuck?”

  Her brother glances at her, thinking. “That would explain why he didn’t come out last night. We all figured Teacher Cao kept him home.” He grins and adds, “‘The lioness from Hedong roars.’ Ba knows. Don’t you, Ba?”

  Their father looks at his wife and says, “I don’t speak a word.”

  “Exactly!” Zhuo Ge says, and they all laugh.

  But Teacher Cao does not seem to be an overbearing wife. As a mother, maybe: earlier in the week, when she came home at lunch, she’d sent Wei Ke out to buy fruit so she could have a few minutes to speak with Juanlan alone. She’d wanted to know what more her son could do to improve his English. “He has a lot of pressure on his shoulders,” Teacher Cao said. “But he must work harder to get ahead. Tell me, what else do you think my son should do?”

  Juanlan had grasped for an answer, some action she could point out that was easy to enact. At last, she suggested that he watch English-language movies. Teacher Cao frowned, clearly disappointed in the answer. “Of course. That is one more thing we could try.” A perverse pleasure warmed Juanlan’s skin, seeing this woman feeling thwarted by her son’s inadequacy.

  Zhuo Ge has gone back to talking about the landslide. Maybe Teacher Cao caused it, he jokes, to keep her husband from losing all his money playing mah-jongg. At this, Lulu looks up suddenly and says, “Maybe it’s a ghost that caused it.” They all look at her with surprise, but she shrugs and goes on: “That’s what they say in Fengquan. Landslides happen when ghosts go walking.”

  “A ghost,” Zhuo Ge echoes. His eyes light up and he adds, “It could even be a ‘foreign ghost.’” It’s a pun, a joke, but Juanlan feels uneasy when he turns to her and says, “What do you think, Mei? You think that’s possible?” His face is merry. Of course he knows about Rob.

  “Anything is possible,” she says tightly. “But I doubt there have been many foreigners up there.”

  “Not many,” Zhuo Ge says, “but Director Wei knows some stories. You should ask him.”

  Juanlan cannot imagine asking Director Wei to tell her a story about foreigners wandering into the mountains nearby. She can’t imagine asking him to tell her a story of any kind. She still has the money he gave her yesterday morning; at the restaurant after the visit to the temple, when she tried to cancel some of the dishes that had been preordered, the owner told her that it was all set, the bill had been taken care of. Had Director Wei forgotten about the hundred yuan he had given her? Juanlan doesn’t think so. The money remains in her pocket, and she has already decided not to give it back.

  “Maybe we’ll even get a foreigner in Heng’an someday,” Zhuo Ge says with a wink.

  “There were those professors who came a few years ago.” Juanlan glances around the table. “Remember, they were on the news? They were doing research.”

  “Yes, on ‘Chinese market culture.’” Their mother sniffs in disdain at a subject so unworthy of study.

  “And more will start coming soon,” Zhuo Ge says, and Juanlan is certain she’s saved because he’s started talking about the new expressway again and will forget what they were discussing before. But Lulu, as if waking from a dream, cuts him off and declares, “But we already have a foreigner here. Juan Mei met him a few days ago.”

  Their parents both turn to Lulu, and then to Juanlan with surprise. “Is that true?” her father asks.

  “It’s not such a big event.”

  Her mother is still staring at her. “What does he want with you?”

  “He wants to be able to communicate. He doesn’t speak any Chinese, and he’s traveling by himself. He’s older. It’s nothing to get excited about.”

  Her father clears his throat. “You should be careful, Lan’er, trusting a person like that.”

  “A person like what?”

  “An older man. Who knows what his intentions are.”

  “No, it’s not like that—”

  “And someone who is so alone.”

  Juanlan just shakes her head. This is none of their concern. Annoyed with Zhuo Ge, who is happily slurping soup, she says, “Why don’t you ask my brother why he’s interested in foreigners coming to Heng’an?”

  Zhuo Ge finishes his soup and sets down his empty bowl. Then he turns to their mother. “We’ve talked about the future of the Three Springs.” He glances at their father, who has finished eating and is sitting with his hands on the edge of the table.

  “You think we should try to be like the Friendship Hotel.” Their mother makes a face. “We’re a small place, Zhuo’er. We don’t need to try to do more than we know how to do.”

  “It will be no problem if Director Wei helps us out. That’s why it’s important that we do him a favor now.”

  “It’s easy to offer favors when you’re not the one doing the work,” Juanlan says.

  “I don’t understand.” Their father looks from her to Zhuo Ge. “We have to register every guest.”

  “Yes, but Director Wei is close friends with the leader of that danwei. They might overlook some things, Ba. It’s not very difficult. This happens nearly everywhere now—everywhere there are a lot of foreign tourists.”

  “So you’re buying his favor,” their father says, and turns back to Juanlan.

  She lifts her hands. “I’m doing what Zhuo Ge asked me to do.”

  “What would we do with a foreign guest?” their mother
asks. “I’ve never even met a laowai. We wouldn’t know how to talk with one.”

  Their father is still sitting with his hands on the edge of the table. He looks like he is about to push back his chair. Or like he’s keeping himself from falling forward. With a slow shake of his head, he says, “We won’t survive unless we take a chance.”

  His wife gives him a sharp look. “And are you going to learn the foreigners’ language? Are you going to have our daughter tutor you, like she’s tutoring Director Wei’s son? Or maybe she is planning on staying here for good. Maybe that’s our children’s plan for us.”

  Juanlan doesn’t say anything. There is anger in her mother’s tone, and desperation, and perhaps also hope. But the hope rests on Juanlan; she feels it teetering on her skull like the elaborate headpiece of a Sichuan opera singer. She glances at Lulu to see whether her sister-in-law looks sorry for bringing this discussion on them all, but Lulu’s eyes are closed: she appears to have fallen asleep.

  10

  On Monday, the day Rob said he would return, Juanlan calls the Friendship Hotel. Rob sounds tired and irritable, a change from the easy personality he displayed last week. The bus ride from Kangding, he tells her, was terrible; he spent half the time vomiting into a plastic bag. By the time she gets to his hotel the next day, he is back to being cheerful. The weather is fine—for once it isn’t raining—and they have made plans to go on a bicycle ride outside of town.

  They turn down the street toward Zhuo Ge and Lulu’s place. Her brother has agreed to let Rob borrow his bike, but this means they have to see Lulu. When they arrive at the apartment complex, they find her in the courtyard, seated on a bench beneath the little trees. “At last,” she says, standing. “I’ve been waiting for almost an hour.”

  They aren’t late, but Juanlan lets it pass. “Rob, let me introduce Lulu. My sister. My brother’s wife.” She lifts her hand in the manner of a museum guide.

  “Sister-in-law,” he says to her in a friendly, instructional tone. Then he steps forward to shake Lulu’s hand. “Ni hao.”