Gold Boy, Emerald Girl

by Yiyun Li

  Returning downstairs, Mrs. Jin entered the hallway and knocked on the first door before pushing it ajar and saying, “Granny, it’s me.”

  There was no answer in the room, as she had expected. Granny, who’d lived in the house for more than a year, was eighty-one and suffered from dementia. As was common, she was not alone—sitting beside her on the single bed was a slender young woman, her hand grasped tightly by Granny’s thin, chicken-claw fingers.

  “Granny is telling me stories about her husband,” the woman said with an apologetic look, and wiggled her hand out of Granny’s clasp.

  Mrs. Jin nodded. All that Granny remembered and talked about was her dead husband. “I’ve told you not to waste your time with Granny,” Mrs. Jin said. “You’ve heard enough of her stories.”

  The woman looked down at the tips of her shoes. “I don’t mind,” she said. “Granny likes to tell the stories.”

  “We have a guest in the house,” Mrs. Jin said.

  “I’ll get dinner ready,” the woman said. She nodded to the reporter and left the room without making a sound. The reporter watched her close the door.

  “Who is she?” she asked.

  Mrs. Jin hesitated and replied, “Susu.”

  “She’s beautiful,” the reporter said.

  “Indeed,” Mrs. Jin said. They were silent, as if still entranced by her beauty. It was not healthy for Susu to listen to the old woman’s tales about a husband executed fifty years earlier, but Mrs. Jin had not wanted to remind Susu of this in front of the reporter.

  After a moment, Mrs. Jin pointed to Granny, who looked lost now that nobody was listening to her stories. “Remember I told you that the jail used to be the landlord’s compound? The landlord was Granny’s husband. She was his fifth wife.” Then, grabbing Granny’s hand, Mrs. Jin raised her voice and said, “Granny, tell us about your Mister.”

  “Mister liked to eat duck gizzards with mustard,” Granny said. This was new for Mrs. Jin. On other days she heard the same stories repeatedly about Mister, how before he settled down he had made enough money traveling with an acrobatic troupe to become the biggest landowner in the region.

  “Where is he now? What happened to him?” Mrs. Jin said.

  Granny thought for a moment and twitched her mouth as if she was crying, though her eyes remained dry. “They took him away,” she said.

  “Where did they take him?” Mrs. Jin said.

  “To the river. Do you know where the river is? They took him there and drowned him, my poor Mister,” Granny said, slapping the blanket on her knees, like a wife newly bereft.

  Mrs. Jin waited for a moment and said, “Granny, I heard you were his favorite wife.”

  Granny calmed down. “Mister says I’m the most beautiful woman in the world,” she said, her wrinkled face blushing like a bashful young girl’s.

  Mrs. Jin stepped back and said to the reporter, not lowering her voice, “What a sad thing for her to live for a man who’s been dead fifty years.”

  “Was he really drowned?” the reporter asked.

  “Executed beside the river in ’51,” Mrs. Jin said. “He was thirty years older than she.”

  The reporter looked at Granny and did not speak for a while. Mrs. Jin walked to the window to straighten the curtain and to give the reporter a moment to absorb the story of Granny. Mrs. Jin did not usually take in old women—their fates were already written out for them, and there was no room for her to make a difference. Granny was an exception. She had come when the last of her husband’s other four wives died; the five wives had all refused to remarry and had remained a close family until their passings.

  “How long has she stayed here?” the reporter asked.

  “Since her last relative died,” Mrs. Jin said. “About a year now.”

  “Did you know her before that?”

  “Yes,” Mrs. Jin said. “I’ve known her almost all my life.” It was not a lie—she had first seen Granny as a bride sixty years earlier. Mrs. Jin had been eight years old then, a poor peasant’s daughter standing in the crowd to witness Granny being married off to the richest man in the village. The new wife was so beautiful that Mrs. Jin, young as she was, wished she could become part of the woman’s life one day, but when she asked to be sold to the landlord’s family as a handmaiden, her father said it was the stupidest idea she’d ever had.

  Not long afterward, however, their lives intersected when Granny’s husband was sentenced in a public meeting as an enemy of the new proletarian regime: Mrs. Jin’s father was one of the two militiamen who had pushed the convict down to the river-bank and put a bullet into his head. Nobody remembered such old stories except Mrs. Jin. She had waited all these years to become part of Granny’s life. Mrs. Jin’s lifelong loyalty, however, went unnoticed by Granny, who never recognized her as the eight-year-old admirer, or the daughter of the poor peasant who became a power figure after the revolution.

  “Are Susu and Granny friends?” the reporter asked.

  “I wish they weren’t,” Mrs. Jin said. Granny was a bad influence, a woman who let the memory of a short marriage become the only life she knew. Who would be around to take care of Susu if she let herself grow old like that?

  “Do you think I can ask Susu a few questions?” the reporter said.

  It was hard to refuse someone who had promised to write a story about her, Mrs. Jin thought. Besides, she felt a little tired. She had worked so hard to make a haven for Susu, who still refused to open her eyes to the future. All those reports about her request to the court for a baby must have made her believe she was justified in her grief, but it was wrong to mourn for any man like that, her husband especially, a useless, replaceable person.

  Mrs. Jin had read about the case in the newspapers. The young man, twenty-three and newly wedded to his childhood sweetheart, was in an argument with his woman boss. He confessed to the police that she had slapped him a couple of times, and that made him lose his temper; she was found strangled to death in her office with him weeping under her desk, unable to move when the police ordered him to come out.

  Mrs. Jin had not connected Susu with the man in the newspapers when she had first come into the store. Unlike the other women, Susu did not talk about what had brought her to the jail, even when Mrs. Jin asked. Mrs. Jin studied Susu; her accent was not local but from the next province, her hips narrow and her eyes clear, still like a maiden. She was beautiful in an unhealthy way, her skin bloodless, almost transparent. Mrs. Jin imagined caring for Susu as her own daughter, filling her bony frame with more flesh and putting color in her cheeks. The more Mrs. Jin thought about it, the less willing she was to let the girl slip away. She offered Susu a free room in her house, so that the young wife would not have to rent cheap accommodations in town while waiting for the trial. Mrs. Jin cooked homemade sausages for Susu to bring to the jail on visiting days and did not ask whom they were for. Eventually, Susu started to talk. She showed her wedding album to Mrs. Jin; in the pictures the husband, slim and tall in a boyish way, did not look like a murderer.

  He got a death sentence; when the appeal failed, Mrs. Jin thought the worst was over and it was time to reconstruct the young woman. Her sadness did not bother Mrs. Jin, and when Susu mentioned her hope to have a baby with her husband before his execution, Mrs. Jin was only slightly alert. Susu would come to her senses, Mrs. Jin decided; it was only the whim of a young woman struck by grief. But when Susu asked to borrow money from Mrs. Jin to hire a lawyer for the request, Mrs. Jin became scared. She had not anticipated the determination in that frail body. Susu was wrong to bet all her future, and the future of a child, on the love of a man who had made the stupidest mistake in life. Mrs. Jin would do anything to prevent that. In the end, however, she gave the money to Susu, not ready to oppose the girl’s wish in any way and thus lose her.

  Mrs. Jin was relieved when the request was denied; without a child binding Susu to her dead husband, her future was a blank sheet again, full of possibilities. Mrs. Jin persuaded Susu to conti
nue living in the house—she needed some time to recover, after all. The money Mrs. Jin had lent Susu was, in retrospect, a smart move; Susu was not a person who could ever say no to a generous and sympathetic soul.

  Mrs. Jin showed the reporter the rest of the house before they came to the kitchen. Susu looked up from the cutting board, where she was chopping vegetables for dumpling fillings. “Susu, this reporter wants to talk to you,” Mrs. Jin said.

  “Dead is dead. There’s nothing to talk about now,” Susu said, without acknowledging the reporter.

  “She came all the way from Shanghai for you,” Mrs. Jin said, “so maybe we’ll just answer a few questions for her?”

  Susu glanced at the reporter. “I’ve never been to Shanghai,” she said.

  “When you feel better, we’ll take a trip to Shanghai together,” Mrs. Jin said.

  Susu looked at the chopper in her hand for a moment and said, “We thought of going there for our honeymoon, but it was too expensive.”

  Mrs. Jin watched Susu, whose mind was elsewhere. It was the first time she had mentioned her life with her husband since his execution a month before. Mrs. Jin wondered if Susu would, like Granny, start to tell stories so she could remember him—Mrs. Jin wondered what she would have to do to battle against another dead man.

  “I’m sorry about your husband,” the reporter said. When Susu did not reply, the reporter smiled apologetically at Mrs. Jin and then said, “Your request to have a baby with someone on death row—have you realized that it has sparked a national discussion about the legal as well as the moral and social significance of your case? Can you talk a little about what you think of the discussion?”

  Susu looked up at the reporter. “I don’t understand your questions,” she said.

  “Some picture you as a challenger to the present judicial system; some think of you as a victim of the old patriarchal society in which a wife’s foremost responsibility is to ensure the continuity of the husband’s blood; and some—pardon me—think you were using the petition to draw undue attention to your husband’s case—”

  “He’s dead, isn’t he?” Susu said.

  “Of course I’m not saying I agree with some, or any, of these views,” the reporter said. “I’m curious what you think of these reactions.”

  Susu looked at the chopper in her hand. “I have nothing to say,” she said. “I’m sorry.”

  The reporter nodded and thanked her. Mrs. Jin was relieved. After all, Susu would remain a minor character in the reporter’s story; Mrs. Jin herself would be the heroine.

  The twins sneaked into the kitchen like two kittens drawn by the warmth of the hearth. One of them picked up the teapot and poured tea in two cups, and the other brought them for Mrs. Jin and the reporter. “Auntie, are you going to take our picture?” the girls asked.

  “Ah yes,” the reporter said.

  “Will you send us our picture when you go back to Shanghai?” one of the twins begged, and the other added, “We want to show the picture to our dad so he knows he doesn’t have to worry about us.”

  The reporter promised that she would, and Mrs. Jin watched the two girls clap as if they did not doubt the woman’s sincerity at all. They would never miss a chance to put on such a show, to make their presence known to the world. Mrs. Jin looked at them and then at Susu, who watched the girls with hazy eyes. None of the women had reformed for her, and Mrs. Jin wondered how long it would take her to make that happen, and whether she still had time. The thought exhausted her, and she turned to the reporter and asked brusquely if she would like to stay in the house for the night, as the last bus was leaving town in less than an hour.

  The reporter hesitated and said she would rather catch the bus. Could she take a picture of them all in the yard? she asked.

  The twins were the first ones to get ready. They put on the princess outfits and patent leather shoes that Mrs. Jin had bought for their first performance in school. After a while, Granny walked out of the house, supported by Susu. Granny was dressed in a black satin blouse and pants embroidered with golden chrysanthemums, the outfit that she had ordered long before for her own burial. Mrs. Jin frowned. She did not know if it was an unintentional mistake, but regardless, it was a bad omen. She patted some rouge onto Granny’s hollow cheeks, adding color for good luck and hoping no harm would be done to her. She led Granny to a cushioned chair in the middle of the yard and then directed Susu to stand behind the old woman. The twins stood close to Susu, each clinging to an arm. Mrs. Jin studied the group, young and old; all their sufferings came from the men they had been wrongly assigned by heaven. She herself could have been one of them if fate had not been lenient and given her an easier life: a father who, though born into a peasant’s family, had risen to the right position through revolution; a husband who had never made a stupid mistake; and a good son who would not leave her to die in the hands of unsympathetic nurses in the old people’s home.

  The reporter looked through the camera and asked Mrs. Jin to join the group. She walked over and stood straight, an arm’s length away from the rest. The light from the setting sun blinded her, but she did not squint. She imagined, in twenty years, the twins, Susu, and all the other women who were not in the picture but who had or would come to this house at one time or another—she imagined them looking at the picture in an old magazine and telling each other how Mrs. Jin had changed their lives. She would be happily watching over them then from the otherworld, where Granny would finally recognize her as the most loyal soul in the world.

  House Fire

  THEY CALLED THEMSELVES saviors of burning houses, though none of the six women, their ages ranging from mid-fifties to early seventies, had had much experience outside the worlds of their employment before retirement: small cubicles behind barred windows for the two bank tellers; large offices shared by too many people for the three secretaries; and a front room in a six-storied university building, where for many years Mrs. Lu had guarded the door to a girls’ dorm.

  The six women, friends and comrades for about two years now, had first met at a local park, where mothers, anxious for their children’s marriages, met other equally fretful mothers. Between them the six women had four sons and four daughters, all of them unhurried by the ticking of the clock that kept their mothers sleepless at night. Shortly after they befriended one another, the women made ingenious plans in the hope that some of them would become connected by marriage and then by shared grandchildren. Meetings of their children were arranged, coerced in some cases. In the end, none of the matches produced any fruitful results. Still, the six women remained close, and when Mrs. Fan, the youngest among them, realized that her husband was having an affair with a woman whose identity he refused to reveal, the other five women, enraged by the audacity of the husband, who was approaching sixty yet behaving like a foolish boy without a heart or a brain, appointed themselves detectives to find out the truth.

  Their success in uncovering the mistress’s name, address, and work unit did little to save Mrs. Fan’s marriage. “An old man in love is like an old house on fire, which burns easily and burns down fast,” went a popular joke that circulated as a text message from one cellphone to another around the city. The joke must have been made up by some young, carefree soul, but how sadly true it was. Mrs. Fan was taken aback by the intensity of the fire that engulfed her marriage: Three decades of trivial arguments and unimportant disagreements turned out to be flammable material. More appalling was the simple procedure for divorce. In the old days, the employers of both parties, the neighborhood association, the local workers’ union, and the women’s union would all be involved in the mediation, and the court, as the last resort, would not grant the divorce without making a lengthy effort of its own to save the marriage. After all, any assistance in breaking up a marriage was more sinful than destroying seven temples. But such a belief no longer held in the new era: An application speedily granted by the district courthouse soon left Mrs. Fan a single woman and released her husband to become th
e bridegroom of an immoral intruder.

  The six friends declared war against love outside marriage. They did not need to look far before they found another woman suspecting a cheating husband, and with their previous experience, and a talent that seemed to come naturally to them, they identified the mistress within two weeks. It dawned upon Mrs. Guan, whose son was a recent graduate from a top MBA program in America, that they could turn their skills into a business, and soon, through word of mouth, their clientele expanded. As agreed by the six friends, they would work for the principle of cleansing society and fighting against deteriorating morals, so they charged less than other firms and accepted only cases in which wives were endangered by disloyal husbands and conniving mistresses. Saviors of burning houses, they called themselves, their belief being that, discovered early enough, a fire could be put out before more harm was done.

  THE STORY OF six older women working as successful private investigators was, against their will and without their consent, reported by a local newspaper in a gossipy column called “Odd People at This Unique Time.” What transgressor would have thought that an old granny in the street had a mini-walkie-talkie hidden in her palm, or that her most innocent conversation with one’s acquaintances would reveal one’s secrets? The story was soon picked up by a women’s magazine, and when the city TV channel proposed a short documentary on them as part of a month-long series on family values in the new era, the six friends decided to welcome the opportunity.

  The anxiously awaited filming took place on a blustery day in early spring. Their complexions, Mrs. Tang explained to the woman in charge of makeup, ranged from raisins to months-old apples, so she might just as well save her powder and rouge for women with better reasons for looking desirable. Such self-mockery amused the TV crew. Even more surprising, the six women acted relaxed and natural in front of the cameras, but when complimented, they looked confused. She had no idea what the director was talking about, said Mrs. Cheng, the oldest and the loudest. If they were expected to be themselves, why the comment on their acting?