Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

by Yiyun Li

  When she finished cleaning, Mrs. Jin sat down with a cup of tea behind the counter. She had put up a sign that said the store would be closed for the rest of the day, but she knew the townspeople would knock on her back door when they needed her. The sign was only for those who came from out of town; so were the price tags. Mrs. Jin believed the old saying that the smartest hare would not eat the grass at the entrance to its own hole, and she charged her townspeople much less, barely enough to make a profit.

  She had lived all her life in Clear Water Town and had watched its young children grow up, some leaving, like her son, others staying and marrying to produce the next generation for her to watch; she herself had been watched by older people, though the number of those who remembered her as a young girl with two pigtails, or as a new wife with a plump and desirable body, was dwindling now. In a few years the memory of her youth would be gone with the oldsters, and nobody would contradict her even if she told the wildest lies about her life. Mrs. Jin sighed. She stood up and checked herself in the mirror. Her hair was neatly tucked into a tight bun and her eyebrows newly plucked, and she examined her face as if studying a stranger; after a while she decided that she was still a presentable woman. Not many women could age as beautifully and regally as she had, a fact that Mrs. Jin was proud of, though there was no one to whom she could boast.

  The reporter from Shanghai was less beautiful than Mrs. Jin had imagined—fashionable, for sure, but dresses and jewels and makeup would not help her at Mrs. Jin’s age. Her eyes were wide apart, which gave her a distracted look; her hair was not thick enough, and by fifty she would have to consider a wig.

  “Some women were born with fewer gifts from heaven,” Mrs. Jin said with a smile. “Susu is just one such woman.”

  “Someone from the courthouse told me she lives with you now,” the reporter said. “Can I meet her?”

  “She’s not ready to meet strangers yet,” Mrs. Jin said.

  “I won’t bother her for long. I’ll just ask her a few questions,” the reporter said.

  Mrs. Jin shook her head. Since the execution of Susu’s husband, Mrs. Jin had fended off several reporters for Susu. “She’s like a daughter to me, so if you have questions, I can answer them for you.”

  “What does she think of the court’s decision to deny her a baby?” the reporter asked.

  “It doesn’t matter what she thinks,” Mrs. Jin said. It had been a crazy idea on Susu’s part in the first place. Who would have thought of asking to have a baby with a husband about to be executed? “The judge said no, so she’d better stop thinking about it.”

  This seemed to take the reporter by surprise. “What do you think of it, Mrs. Jin?”

  “I couldn’t have been happier,” Mrs. Jin said. These reporters all came with the same despicable ambitions, to witness Susu’s grief over her dead husband and to analyze her mad notion of bearing his child. Sometimes they talked about the significance of Susu’s case—no one had ever made such a request, they said; she raised the question of whether a man on death row had reproductive rights. But such talk was nonsense. For ordinary people like Susu, there was nothing glorious about occupying a page or two in a history book. “Think about it,” Mrs. Jin said. “What would it make a jail look like if every wife asked to have a baby by a husband inside? A mating station it would be, no?”

  The reporter smiled. “I think what Susu asked for was artificial insemination,” she said, and explained the procedure.

  “What a horrible invention,” Mrs. Jin said. “There’re enough men in this world who will jump at the first opportunity to offer the real thing.”

  The reporter smiled again. Mrs. Jin savored her wittiness, making a young woman from Shanghai laugh, and supposed that she might like the reporter more than she had thought. Perhaps she could reconsider her decision and let the woman see Susu for five minutes—it all depended on how the reporter behaved.

  “Trust me, Susu won’t remain a widow for long,” Mrs. Jin said. “She’ll get a chance to have a baby. I’ll see to it personally.”

  “You said she was like a daughter to you,” the reporter said. “Are you a relative?”

  “No. She came through this door one day to tell me her story. I liked her, so I said, ‘Susu, it’s a cruel world. Why don’t you stay with me for some time until you’re ready to go out there again?’ She stayed.”

  Mrs. Jin observed the reporter. People in this world belonged to two groups: those who were curious about others’ stories, and those who were not. Mrs. Jin decided that if the reporter did not show a genuine interest in Mrs. Jin herself, she would finish the interview in a few minutes and make the young woman’s trip from Shanghai worthless.

  The young woman raised her eyebrows. “You just took her in like that, without even knowing her?”

  Feeling the reporter’s eyes probe her own for answers and stories, Mrs. Jin was satisfied. “Why? How much more does one need to know to lend a hand to a drowning life?” she said. “It’s not the first time for me, anyway. You don’t close the door to those who need you.”

  It was true that Susu was not the first woman Mrs. Jin had picked up from the street, nor would she be the last one. These women lived with Mrs. Jin now in the big house she had once shared with her husband. She had been married to him for forty-three years. There was nothing about him to complain of—in fact, if anyone asked Mrs. Jin, she would say that her husband was the best man she could ever have imagined. Unlike many other men in town, who drank and beat their wives and children, Mrs. Jin’s husband was strictly obedient; she had been the one to make decisions and he the one to follow them, from the color of the curtains to the naming of their only son.

  It had been her idea, too, to buy the almost defunct general store from the township twenty years earlier, when small private businesses ceased to be illegal. What if there came another round of the Cultural Revolution and the cutting of capitalist tails? her husband said; their business would be the biggest tail in town. Mrs. Jin told her husband one could worry himself to death even in bed, and if he would choose to hide from life like a tortoise, he’d better remember that she would not remain a tortoise’s wife. It was the harshest thing she had ever said to him, but it shut him up. She bribed officials of all ranks in the jail so that her husband could go inside twice a week to sell, at high prices, cigarettes, matches, toothpaste, towels, poker cards, and other goods to those who did not have visitors. The store blossomed under the couple’s hard labor.

  The idea of gathering women companions first occurred to Mrs. Jin not because she felt lonely or abandoned after her husband’s death. Rather, she saw this as a new stage of her life. She had taken good care of her husband for four decades—her son, too, before he had gone out and made a man of himself—and now it was time for other responsibilities. It was not difficult to find such women—once a week, female visitors were allowed in the jail to see their men. Some stopped by Mrs. Jin’s store for last-minute purchases of articles they had forgotten; more came in after the visiting hour for Mrs. Jin’s hospitality, the hot tea and freshly baked buns she offered them for free. Sooner or later they started to talk about their men—fathers, sons, brothers, husbands—similar stories in which the women either believed in the innocence of their loved ones or were readier than the rest of the world to forgive them. Mrs. Jin listened, pouring tea and handing them tissues, reminding herself what a lucky woman she was. She shed tears with them, too, and because of the hours she spent sympathizing, she charged these women extra for any purchases. They left with gratitude. Some returned for more tea and talk; others, whose men were sentenced and either transferred or executed, would be replaced by new women with the same stories.

  The reporter, who had come for Susu, decided to write a story about Mrs. Jin instead. An impressive story it would be, she told Mrs. Jin, an important one about sisterhood that would reach all the female readers of the magazine. The reporter’s talk was like her big-city clothes, fancy but laughable. She called Mrs. Jin’s h
ouse “a commune,” and praised Mrs. Jin’s charity as “revolutionary.” Such words reminded Mrs. Jin of a past era: Her own father had been the leader of Clear Water People’s Commune, when the town had been a village, before the surrounding farmland was sold for mining. Yet, regardless of the reporter’s inanities, Mrs. Jin decided that she herself was indeed extraordinary and worth a story, so when the reporter asked to see Mrs. Jin’s commune, she agreed.

  The reporter took a picture of Mrs. Jin across the street from the jail. The enclosed compound had been the home of a big landlord, she told the reporter, who found this interesting and snapped more pictures and wrote in her notebook. A few townspeople stopped by to watch and congratulated Mrs. Jin when she told them the news of her being featured in the women’s magazine.

  She smiled and nodded, already feeling important. She led the reporter across town to her house, a good brick one with a big yard. Upon entering the gate, they bumped into a pair of children who were running wild. The reporter dropped her pen. The two girls, identical twins dressed in the same clothes, stopped immediately. One picked up the pen while the other chirped an apology. Mrs. Jin frowned. Many times she had told the twins to behave properly in her home, but the two girls just did not have the brains for useful lessons. “These are my youngest girls,” she said, without introducing them. As she sometimes confused the two, she never used their names.

  The twins studied the reporter and smiled simultaneously. “Auntie, I like your bag,” one said, touching the reporter’s leather handbag. The other handed the pen to the reporter and said, “Auntie, are you an actress? You’re the prettiest woman I’ve ever seen.”

  “What sweet girls,” the reporter said. “How old are you?”

  “Six,” they both said.

  Mrs. Jin watched the twins put on their best charming expressions. Their eyes, too big for their small, heart-shaped faces, gave them a look of helpless innocence. Mrs. Jin said to the twins, “Don’t bother the guest.”

  The girls stepped back, still bearing their matching smiles.

  “Their father was sentenced to thirty years,” Mrs. Jin said to the reporter, “for robbing an old woman and making her die of a heart attack. Their parents of course did not get married before the girls were born, so they had to hide them from the household registrar.”

  The two girls followed Mrs. Jin and the reporter to the living room and sat by the foot of the couch, as if the discussion had nothing to do with them.

  “Are they in school now?” the reporter asked.

  “I got them legalized after they came to live here, so they could go to school. You just have to pay a price,” Mrs. Jin said, rubbing two fingers together. The girls listened to Mrs. Jin and the reporter, their eyes moving from one person to the other, not blinking.

  “Where is their mother?” the reporter asked.

  “I found her a job at a county hospital, washing laundry,” Mrs. Jin said. “She comes home once a week.”

  With great interest the two girls watched the reporter take notes. Mrs. Jin stood up and left for the kitchen, knowing the reporter would have questions for the girls. Mrs. Jin thought that it would look better if she were not present when the twins sang her praises, which she trusted they would do to the best effect.

  The girls’ mother had come to Mrs. Jin just as many other women had, with a story of a hard life and an unfair fate. She and the father of her children had been so poor that they lacked the application fee for a marriage certificate, and had no money to pay the fine for being pregnant without permission from the county’s birth control office.

  “Their father was optimistic,” the twins’ mother had said. “He thought when we had more money, we would pay the fine or the bribery. But nobody gets rich selling pickled pigs’ ears, and the girls could not go to school unless they were registered soon. So he robbed the old woman. Silly man! I would’ve never let him. I would’ve gone to the street to become a whore myself had I known his plan. He thought he could solve the problem by himself, but now who knows when he’ll be released.”

  Mrs. Jin had no hope for the husband, even though he had not set out to kill the old woman. In fact, he had called for help when she had become motionless, but that, as Mrs. Jin had suspected, did not help him much in the courthouse.

  Mrs. Jin did not intend to take in the woman and her children at first. The woman’s circumstances were hard indeed, but she was a mother, and a mother should never be defeated by circumstances. The second time they came into the store, however, Mrs. Jin caught the twins stealing candies when she stood up to fetch tissues for their sobbing mother. Mrs. Jin pretended not to notice, but when the three of them were about to leave, she brought out some snacks and insisted on putting them into the two girls’ pockets herself. She pinched them and made sure the girls knew that she had seen them take what did not belong to them. But they showed no signs of panic. Instead, they gave Mrs. Jin the most candid smiles, as if they knew she would not have the heart to reveal their crime to their mother, who stood by the store entrance, sighing and dabbing her eyes with a corner of her blouse. Where did the girls get such shameless courage? Mrs. Jin studied their mother again—she was a dull woman, foolish-looking; the twins were much prettier, their eyes too smart for children their age. Perhaps they had inherited this from their father. The possibility that they would grow more like him, wasting their gifts on the wrong ideas, troubled Mrs. Jin. His sentence was long, so his influence on the two girls could be minimized; but she worried about the mother’s inability to raise them properly.

  She decided to take over their upbringing. The mother was overjoyed that someone with power and wealth would think of her own children’s welfare; it was not hard to persuade her to accept a job away from them. She talked about saving every penny to pay back Mrs. Jin, but Mrs. Jin made it clear that she had no need for the money. “Save for the future,” she told the mother, who was in grateful tears. “I won’t always be around to take care of them for you.”

  When Mrs. Jin returned to the living room with a cup of tea for the reporter, the twins were leaning on the young woman, who was showing them her small tape recorder. Given an opportunity, the girls would try to charm anyone, Mrs. Jin thought with frustration. Six months they had been living under her roof now, and she had been unable to wipe away that smartness from their eyes. Sometimes she wondered if she had enough time to change them into what she wanted them to be, girls with fear and reverence for what was beyond their control in life; what a shame it would be to be defeated by a pair of six-year-olds. Mrs. Jin placed the tea in front of the reporter, and right away both girls looked up.

  “Nana,” one of them said. “Auntie said she is going to write a story about you so everybody will know what a good person you are.”

  “And she’ll take our picture so everybody can see how lucky we are,” the other girl said.

  Mrs. Jin smiled tightly, annoyed by the mock she always perceived in their eyes when they sweet-mouthed her. “Did you both finish your homework?” she said.

  “Yes,” they said.

  “Then go practice knitting in your room.” She turned to the reporter and said, “There’s so much for them to learn. I want them to be prepared as best they can.”

  The girls left but a minute later returned with their knitting needles and yarn and sat down by the couch. The reporter watched them knit and took a few pictures; in the flash of light, the girls looked serious and engrossed in what they were doing, though they would never have remembered to pick up their knitting needles if Mrs. Jin had not told them to. She sighed. If not for the reporter, she would have told them in a sharp tongue not to put on a show. More and more now she talked to the girls harshly, which seemed to work only for a minute or two before they became their old selves, smiling at her and talking as if they were her beloved grandchildren. Mrs. Jin was happy that they had not come from her blood.

  When the reporter put away the camera, Mrs. Jin suggested a tour of the house, and before the girls could ma
ke a move, she told them not to follow.

  The house, two-storied, had two bedrooms on the first floor and three more on the second. Mrs. Jin led the reporter upstairs and showed her the two small rooms at the end of the hallway. Standing in each was a single bed, neatly made by Mrs. Jin herself. “These belong to the two older girls,” she said. “They come home only on weekends, like the twins’ mother.” Strictly speaking, it was not a lie, as Mrs. Jin still hoped for the girls to return to her house. They had come at different times but left together. The older one, twenty-one and slightly beautiful, had no place to live after her boyfriend, a small-scale drug dealer, got a sentence of seventeen years. The younger one was nineteen and had told Mrs. Jin stories about her stepfather, who had repeatedly raped an eight-year-old girl, and her mother, who had helped to bait the young girl into their house. Mrs. Jin did not know if she believed the girl’s tales, but both would certainly benefit from her supervision.

  For a while both girls worked in Mrs. Jin’s store, though she could handle the business herself perfectly. She thought she would teach them how to make a living with their hands before sending them out to the real world, but one day they left a note for her, explaining they had borrowed her money to go to Shanghai. They promised to come back to see her and return the money when they found good manual jobs, but Mrs. Jin was certain they would fall into the hands of drug dealers and pimps. It was upsetting that they had left without Mrs. Jin’s assent, but she knew that soon she would find two more girls to fill the vacancies; the next time she would have to choose carefully so she would not be disappointed.