by Yiyun Li
“Ah, yes,” he said. “Let me get it to the students first. They must be hungry now.”
“Do you cook for the students?”
“Otherwise I wouldn’t have more than half of them,” Uncle Bing said, and explained that for many students, the porridge would be their only meal during the day, and they came to school because of that.
“Baba came home yesterday and asked for a divorce from Mama,” Ruolan said, cutting off Uncle Bing.
“So he told me. He came by last night,” Uncle Bing said, and went out of the shack with the porridge. Ruolan sat down on the cot and looked at the pillowcase, torn at a corner and in need also of a good wash. She remembered Uncle Bing’s scent left on her pillow.
When Uncle Bing came back with the empty pot, Ruolan had found the sewing bag in a basket underneath the cot, and was mending the pillowcase. The needle was rusted, and she wiped it on her hair from time to time. Uncle Bing watched her work for a moment and then said that he had canceled the afternoon’s class. Ruolan looked out the window and saw the children chase one another off. “Let’s catch the next bus home,” Uncle Bing said and walked to the door. “Mama must need comfort now.”
Ruolan checked the stitches without replying. He had only one person in his heart, and Ruolan was disappointed that it was not she. “Don’t worry,” she said finally. “Mama won’t die before everyone she knows dies first.”
“Ruolan,” Uncle Bing said disapprovingly. “She’s your mother.”
“Is she really?” Ruolan said, looking up at Uncle Bing. “Baba said I wasn’t his daughter. How could I be her daughter?”
“She brought you up.”
“She did it only to have someone to torment.”
“Ruolan.” Uncle Bing raised his voice, and she stared back. “She’s in a bad mood because she’s ill. You need to help her feel better,” he said.
Ruolan did not reply, and started sewing again. When she finished, she broke the thread between her teeth and ran a finger to smooth the stitches. She patted the pillow into a good shape before putting it back on the bed. “Why do people all expect me to be her medicine?” she asked.
Uncle Bing sat down by the stove. “You’re the only one she has now,” he said.
Ruolan sneered. Uncle Bing hesitated, and said, “Perhaps it’s time to know their story so you’ll understand her.”
“There’s nothing for me to understand,” Ruolan said.
Uncle Bing ignored her words. He poured a bowl of water into the stove to put out the leftover fire, and said, “I’ve known your mother all my life, since when we were small children. She was a beautiful girl. She was loved by many boys my age, and she was proud and happy about it, but when we reached eighteen, something changed. The proposals that many of us sent with the matchmakers to her parents were rejected, and she became less happy. Her parents must be holding on to her for an offer better than any of us could afford, the townspeople said; look how the greedy parents are wasting her youth for money, the townspeople said. Soon many boys found other girls as wives, but year after year, there was no sign of marriage on her side. They must have some unspeakable and dirty secret in the family, the townspeople said, and then had wild guesses. Your mother became very sad and pale.
“The year when we were twenty-seven, her parents suddenly married her off to your father, who lived two counties away. After the wedding, the couple moved to a new town even farther away. I was the only boy who hadn’t married then. A fool stricken by love, people said about me, and perhaps I was. When she left, I moved too, to the town where she lived with her husband. I thought I would be satisfied if only I could see her in the street from time to time, but a few days after the wedding, rumors started that every night the bridegroom was heard sobbing in the yard. People talked about the scandal that the bridegroom’s family must have hid his mental disorder from the bride before the wedding, and when your mother’s family did not show up to denounce the cheating, people looked down upon her, too.
“For the first year of their marriage, I was your mother’s only friend, and she came to talk to me every day, until there were rumors about our affair. I thought it would only make her life more miserable, so I planned to leave her for good. When your father learned that I was leaving, he came to visit me. I thought he was coming to fight me; I told him your mother and I were innocent, but he only smiled and brought out a bottle of liquor. We drank for the whole night like a pair of old friends, and he told me his story. He had been in love with a widow twelve years his senior since he was fifteen, he said. His family thought a wife would cure him of his infatuation with the older woman, so they arranged for him to marry a girl from out of town and arranged for them to move away so nobody would know his history. But on the wedding night, your mother told him that she could not become his real wife.”
“Why?” Ruolan said for the first time since Uncle Bing started the story.
Uncle Bing hesitated for a moment, and said, “Your mother—she is a stone woman.”
“A stone woman?”
“It’s something you’ll understand when you’re older,” Uncle Bing said.
“How does one know if she’s a stone woman?” Ruolan asked. She wondered if all the medicine her mother drank in the morning year after year had turned her into a solid rock. Ruolan wondered if she herself would be poisoned, by the years of breathing in the bitterness from the dregs, into an ugly and cold woman like her mother.
Uncle Bing did not reply, his eyes looking past Ruolan into a distant past. “She told your father to either live with the fact or divorce her; she said she didn’t mind because her only goal was to get married and leave her hometown so people would no longer talk about her. Your father was shocked that her family had cheated in the matchmaking, but he could not tell this to anyone, including his family. I asked him why, and he said a husband was a husband no matter what was missing from the marriage, and it would be unforgivable if he attacked his wife’s name even with the truth. Besides, he said, they deserved it because they had planned to deceive, too. Your father, he’s one of the good people in the world. There was nothing wrong with his mind. He was in love with an older woman, that’s all, but he was willing to be thought a crazy person and stay in the marriage to protect your mother’s name.
“After that night, your father and I became close friends. I helped them to adopt you. We—your father and I— thought it would make their marriage better if they could raise a child together. To make you their own child, they moved farther away, to a different province—where we live now—so that people would not know anything about their past. I did not move at first; I thought I would let them live in their own marriage, and it seemed that things were fine for a while. But after three years, your father came to visit me again. We had another night of drinking, and he confessed that he could not help going back to the widow from time to time. Your mother was very upset when she found out about it, and she refused to leave her bed. I moved again to be close to your mother. I came to take care of her and you when your father was away to live with the other woman. He stuck to his words and came home as a husband for the year-end housecleaning and celebration. The rest of the story you’ve known. Believe me, Ruolan, your parents are good people. They’ve tried all these years; they’ve tried very hard.”
“Why does he want a divorce now?”
“The other woman—she used to work as a nanny for people—she’s sick now, and he wants to marry her so he can take care of her, and help with the medical bills.”
Ruolan thought about her father and the other woman, and she pitied them. “Why didn’t you get married, Uncle Bing?” she said.
Uncle Bing smiled. “I’m one of those fools who puts a magic leaf in front of his eyes and then stops seeing mountains and seas.”
“Would you marry Mama if their divorce goes through?”
“What difference would a marriage make now?” he said.
Ruolan was relieved but unsatisfied. “Don’t marry her,” she sai
d. “She’s poisonous. Look how she’s already destroyed half of a life for Baba. You don’t want her to destroy your whole life.”
“Ruolan!” Uncle Bing raised his voice.
Ruolan looked at the dark veins on his forehead. He looked unfamiliar, ferocious even, but she did not recoil. She had seen two men poisoned into sad and sheepish beings by her mother, and she wanted to correct the mistake. “What’s good about her? She’s lazy, ugly, bad-tempered,” Ruolan said. “Whatever she does, I can do a hundred times better.”
“Ruolan?”
“Think about it, Uncle Bing. We’re not related to her. We can leave her, and make a new family ourselves. I can cook. I can sew. I’ll do all the housework. I’ll find a job after middle school. When you are too old to work, I’ll earn money and support you. Why do you need her if you have me?”
Uncle Bing watched her with a sad, tender look. “You’re too young to know what you’re talking about,” he said.
“I’m old enough to tell what’s good for you,” Ruolan said, and felt something soften inside her. She was not a stone woman, after all. She walked to where Uncle Bing sat on the stool, bent down, and put her hands palms down on his knees. “Uncle Bing,” she said in a whisper, looking into his eyes the way she imagined a seductive woman would do. “Have you heard of the saying that what a mother owes, a daughter pays back?”
Uncle Bing’s lips quavered. “No, I’ve never heard it.”
“Now you know,” Ruolan said, and touched Uncle Bing’s face, his sideburns stubby under her palm. Uncle Bing breathed hard, and then brushed her hand off gently. “Your mother doesn’t owe me,” he said, putting his head between his hands, not looking at her.
Ruolan knelt down and looked up at Uncle Bing. “You need an antidote for her poison,” she said eagerly. “Baba has his other woman. You need one yourself, too.”
“You’re a big girl now, and Uncle Bing is getting old,” he said. “It’s getting late. Why don’t you catch the next bus home so Mama doesn’t worry about you?”
Ruolan burst into tears. “Why don’t you understand me?” she said.
“I do,” Uncle Bing said. “But let’s keep life as it is.”
“What’s good about this life, Uncle Bing?”
“You and Mama are my only family now. I can’t afford losing either one of you.”
Ruolan wiped the tears with the back of her hands. She stared at Uncle Bing; he looked weak, despondent, beaten, and she pitied him. If she was willing, she could keep the nameless love, not of a daughter or of a lover, but both. She could as well stay in the arrangement, tolerating her mother for his sake, but then, why should she choose misery because of love? Why should she choose misery for any reason? She touched the money in her pocket. “I’m leaving, Uncle Bing,” Ruolan said, and tears rolled down her cheeks. Perhaps when she was gone, he would realize what a mistake he had made; perhaps only then she would beat her mother, and he would understand that he had chosen the wrong woman.
“Tell Mama I’ll come Saturday,” Uncle Bing said, still not daring to look up at Ruolan.
Death Is Not a Bad Joke If Told the Right Way
THE HOUSE OF MR. AND MRS. PANG IS THE PLACE where I can take a break from being someone’s daughter. The days spent there, one summer week and one winter week, are the only time when I am not living under my schoolteacher mother. Being someone’s child is a difficult job, a position one has no right to quit. Heaven forgive every child who dreams of being an orphan while her parents are working with backs bent to make the child’s life a happy one. No life seems happier than an orphan’s life for a non-orphan like me. So many times have I dreamed of standing on a street corner, wearing shabby clothes two sizes too small, my ankles and wrists frozen to a bluish white. In my dream I am singing songs about all the sadness in the world, my small voice quavering in the wind. After the most heartbreaking song, I bow to the crowd and they let streams of coins drop into my street singer’s basket, men sighing and women wiping tears away with their fingertips.
“Good singing. Sing another song, Little Blossom.” It is always the sons of Mr. and Mrs. Song who clap and awaken me from my daydreaming. I am standing in the center of Mrs. Pang’s yard, wearing my brand-new bunny coat, snow white fur soft and smooth, the two long ears too tender to stay up, resting on my forehead like extra bangs. I push the ears aside and blush from excitement. Little Blossom is not my name but the name of a famous heroine in a movie, played by my favorite actress, Chen Chong. At sixteen, she is already the most famous actress in the country; every day she smiles at me from the calendar by my bedside.
“Come on,” the oldest of the four boys says. “Do you want to be a little blossom?”
I nod hard and the two ears flap in front of my eyes. In other dreams, always following the dreams of being an orphan selling her singing voice, I would eventually grow up into an actress like Chen Chong, my beautiful face on other people’s walls, wearing makeup. Only actresses are allowed to wear makeup without being denounced as morally degenerate. Lipstick and rouge are part of my orphan dreams.
“Oh yeah, you want to be a little blossom for us?” the second of the four brothers says with a teasing smile. The four boys roar in laughter. At seven years old I am too young to understand the meaning of the little blossom in their vocabulary. I laugh with them but Mrs. Pang stops me. She rushes out from the kitchen and waves a spatula at the boys. “Watch your mouths,” she says. The boys laugh again and go back to their room. Mrs. Pang drags me out of the yard and puts me down on the female stone lion in front of the quadrangle. The heads of the pair of lions were chopped off by the Red Guards during the Cultural Revolution as part of the old trash. I sit astride the lioness, fingering the sharp edges left by the axes.
“Now, don’t get mixed up with the Song boys,” Mrs. Pang said. “Wait here. We are going to the market soon.”
Mrs. Pang does not like the Song family. Mr. and Mrs. Song started as tenants, renting the room at the western side of the quadrangle, but they stopped paying when Mr. Pang was kicked out of his working unit as an enemy of the People. Mr. and Mrs. Song stayed, claiming themselves to be the legal owners of the room. During the years of their occupancy, they demolished Mr. Pang’s flower bed and built a kitchen on the spot. They installed clotheslines between Mr. Pang’s pomegranate tree and grape trellis, their flagging underwear the permanent decoration of the yard. They produced four sons, and the six of them are still living in one room, the youngest son already sixteen and the oldest twenty-three.
THE MORNING SUN is halfway up in the sky. Three old men are sitting under the north wall of the alley, their eyes closed and their toothless mouths half open, enjoying this unusually warm winter day in Beijing. On the other side of the alley, four girls are jumping rope, chanting a song I have never heard before: “One two three four five. Let’s go hunt the tiger. The tiger does not eat man. The tiger only eats Truman.” It will be years later when I realize that the Truman they are singing about was the American president during the Korean War, so in the winter of 1979, the song makes little sense to me. I sit there and chant the song silently to myself. After a while the four girls stop singing and start to draw squares on the ground. I jump down from the lion. “Can I join you?” I ask.
“Say the pledge,” a girl says and the four of them quickly surround me hand in hand, waiting solemnly.
“What pledge?” I ask.
“You don’t know the pledge?” a girl says, making a face. “Where are you from? The Java Island?”
“No, I am from the Institute.”
“What institute?” the girl says.
“Let’s not waste time,” another girl cuts in. “Say with me: I promise to Chairman Mao—she who does not obey the rule is Liu Shaoqi.”
“Who is Liu Shaoqi?”
“A counterrevolutionary,” the girl says, impatient with my ignorance.
I take the oath, feeling strange that they have so many rules unknown to me. It will also be years later when I know
more about Liu Shaoqi: a loyal follower and close colleague of Chairman Mao, he was tortured to death by a group of teenagers when he showed doubt about Mao’s Cultural Revolution.
The alley girls make me feel like a foreigner. The place where I live is called the Institute, in a suburb of Beijing next to an ancient graveyard. The Institute is secured by high walls and patrolled by armed soldiers, bayoneted rifles on their shoulders and leather pistol holsters chained to their belts. Rumors are that the holsters are filled with old newspaper and the rifles are always empty, but the bayonets are real, sharp and shining. The heart of the Institute is a gray building secured by more soldiers. That is where my father as well as many fathers work, a research center for the Department of Nuclear Industry. Children like me growing up inside the Institute have different rules for life and games. We are not allowed to go out of the security gate of the Institute, not allowed to approach the gray building. The game we enjoy playing is to guess whose father is on “calculating duty”—our fathers go to another institute to use the machine, which we know nothing of until “computer” becomes a household word years later. Calculating duty is always performed at night, and every afternoon a father or two ride a luxury car into the dusk to a place nonexistent on any map. We watch the car drive by noiselessly, and then play the game. Every one of us pretends to be the child of the man behind the curtain. Only after asking questions and carefully examining one another’s words do we find out who is telling the truth and who is making up stories.
That is where I am from, a world different from the world of the alley girls. I am surprised that they have never heard of the Institute or nuclear industry. In my world every child knows nuclear weapons, and we have made “atomic bomb” a nickname for the principal of our elementary school. But then I have to admit that they surely know other things that I do not know, like Truman and the Truman-eating tiger.
THE WIND STARTS at lunchtime, the wind from Siberia that brings winter to our city, whistling across the alley and shaking the tiles on the roof of every house. For the whole afternoon I kneel on a chair by the window, waiting for the wind to calm down so that I can go out to play with the alley girls. The blue sky has turned brownish gray, the sun behind the sand and dust pale like a dirty white plate. In the late afternoon, one by one the four boys of the Song family run into the yard, each of them sporting a newly shaved head. I run into the yard. “Hey,” I shout in the wind, my eyes hurting from the dust. “What happened to your hair?”