by Te-Ping Chen
“Please don’t,” she said, voice cracking.
He didn’t seem to hear: his hand was in her hair now, fingering her scalp. He leaned in as though for a kiss, tenderly murmuring her name, until she recalled herself and jerked away.
“No,” she said, more forcefully than she meant to.
His face was that of a child who’d been struck, and for a moment she regretted her reaction. But then Keju turned to face the plaza’s screen, and she saw his face smooth and rearrange itself, as though nothing had happened. He was proud. It was something she’d always liked about him.
They watched the crowd silently: a distant sound of drumbeats was starting up. Out of the corner of her eye, she could see him looking at her, but she stared determinedly ahead.
“Anyway, I’m glad I got to see you,” he said finally, as though the city had a set number of attractions and she was on the list.
“It’s nice here, isn’t it?” she said, relenting.
He looked beyond her: it was a pleasant scene, the kids running around, the crowds of retirees in their bright skirts and sequined tops, getting ready to dance. On the perimeter were the black-uniformed security officers, a couple of them casually talking with tourists crossing the plaza, a few speaking into walkie-talkies.
“To be honest, it gives me the creeps,” Keju said.
“I guess it takes getting used to,” she said stiffly. She looked at the lanyard strung around his neck, its green cord and green badge the size of a soap dish clearly identifying him as a non-resident. The photo of him was scarcely recognizable, his face sallow, too broad, its proportions badly rendered to fit the badge; it made him look like a much older man.
“You should really call your local satisfaction office,” she said. “I hope your dad will be okay.”
Keju was silent for a few minutes, staring at the fountain. “You always thought you were too good for everything,” he said. “You were going to be this great singer, remember?”
She shut her eyes, briefly. “I remember.”
“Now look at you, taking calls all day in a cubicle,” he said, his voice harsh. “All alone in this big city. Really, Bayi, I’m sorry for you.”
Strains of Caribbean music were starting to drift to them, some of the black-uniformed police were handing out maracas. They finished their lemonade and lapsed into a strained silence, which finally she broke. “I’ve got to go, Keju.” There wasn’t anything else to say. “Good luck with everything,” she said.
After they parted, Bayi couldn’t bring herself to go underground, not quite yet. She’d walk awhile, she decided. Her parents, she thought, would have liked her to marry him. There was something quietly dependable about him: once when he was away on a holiday and the networks were down he’d walked two miles to find a place to call and say good night to her. “You’ll never find anyone who loves you so much,” she remembered her mother saying. If they’d married, too, it would have meant that Bayi would’ve stayed at home, wouldn’t have been a single girl in the capital, taking calls from who only knew—of course it was a good job, a government job, but still.
There was a bulletin on her phone that had popped up moments after they’d finished their lemonade. Attention, it ran: learn the five things to do before bedtime to wake up refreshed. She turned her attention to the screen and watched as a beautiful woman cut the stems off a quartet of ruby-red strawberries and rinsed them at a sink.
A few blocks later, someone shouted and she looked up. It was Suqi, sitting at the steering wheel of a large van, window rolled down, grinning.
It was an unmarked government van. Anyone could tell it was intended for the discontented, the protesters who tried to stir up trouble, usually from out of town. It had all the subtle signs: the missing license plate, the large man staring stolidly ahead in the front passenger’s seat, the metal grill separating Suqi from her human cargo, bound for a nearby detention center. The backseat windows were tinted, but through the windshield she could see the seats were mostly filled.
“You want a ride?” Suqi said, gesturing to the backseat.
Bayi forced a laugh. “Shut up,” she said, and kept walking.
“Have it your way,” Suqi said, and stuck out her tongue, a little fillip of pink. Bayi smiled back and watched her drive off. She’d go home, she thought, put her feet in some hot water, maybe watch something. She was glad to be off work, glad it was spring. It was good, she thought, to be young, to have a weekend, to be free.
New Fruit
It was a peculiar fruit: the orange-red tawny skin, its flesh dense and velvety and luxurious. It was shaped roughly like an egg, with a tiny yellow pit, sold packed into crates lined with its deeply green leaves.
The fruit had a taste marvelous and rare, sweet with an underside of acid. We lined up for blocks to buy it from street peddlers. We exchanged bites, though never satisfactorily. What tasted to me like the look of freshly arranged sunflowers in a green vase might taste to you like the way your daughter’s tiny socked feet sounded romping down the hall.
For Lao Zhou, it smelled like it did when he wiped the shavings off a bench he’d carved himself, and applied a creamy varnish. For Zhu Ayi, it was the scent of her mother cooking rice, long-remembered from childhood, and the sound of rain outside. For others it was the look of mingled envy and admiration that came when you were young, and beautiful, and wearing something new that suited you exactly.
The fruit had arrived one day in trucks at the city’s wholesale market in crates that said SUNSHAN PRODUCE, sharing space with peaches and plums and grapes and other fruit with which we were more familiar. At first it was just the peddlers who sold the fruit—who’d picked it up because it was cheap and novel and sweet—but soon grocery stores were stocking it, too, under the name qiguo, peculiar fruit.
Lao Zhou was the first on the street to try it. He was a widower who woke early every morning and did his shopping, was usually among the first at the neighborhood market. One day in April, he came back with a dozen of the fruit swaying in a plastic bag and handed them to anyone he saw. “Try it,” he said, an alertness in his voice that surprised us.
Pang Ayi, out for a stroll, took one curiously. The first bite made her cheeks burn softly pink. “Oh,” she said. “Oh, how tasty.” Those of us who stood watching the exchange between her and Lao Zhou raised our eyebrows. There was something private in that moment, even though Pang Ayi was frequently found gossiping while squatting in the common privies and it would not have occurred to us, to any of us, to suspect her of holding anything in reserve.
It had been an especially frigid winter, months of chapped lips and living off stocks of stewed cabbage, months in which we had turned up our coat collars and nodded to one another in passing and kept to ourselves and turned the television up high. By the time the qiguo arrived, spring was just making itself felt, and it was a relief to shed our coats and walk unencumbered.
Those of us who ate the qiguo noticed that the sun was warm on our limbs and the sound of a bicycle bell tinkling outside reminded us of the warm air, of the spring breeze, of possibilities. We smiled more often, let our eyes meet in the street. “Today I had one that tasted like I had just told a good joke and everyone was laughing,” Lao Sui might say. Mothers would feed mashed-up pieces of the fruit to their babies and we’d crowd around to watch the surprise and wonder that transformed their small faces.
We were kinder to one another that season. Mr. Feng, who worked at a local bank, tasted a qiguo one morning and afterward it occurred to him that the metal door at the entrance to the apartment building was sticking, so that the elderly woman who lived on the first floor could sometimes be seen standing outside, waiting for a neighbor to enter or exit so she could slip in behind them. He grabbed some pliers and went downstairs to see whether he could fix it.
Other changes happened, big and small. To everyone’s astonishment, Zhu Ayi’s son, who lived with her on the third floor, quit his job at a local factory and moved south to be
a painter; he had taken a bite of the qiguo and (so he said) seen a sunset of moist silver and cloudy gold that he was determined to capture on canvas, no matter (so his mother said) that he had no talent and would come to a bad end.
Lao Zhou, who worked as the neighborhood handyman, was often seen eating the fruit. That spring, he found himself singing more often as he swung his hammer, feeling a long-dormant restlessness in his blood. He noticed the young girls in the neighborhood were wearing high-waisted skirts; it seemed to be the new fashion. He noticed the far-off sound of a revving engine in the distance. The day he’d given Pang Ayi her first piece of the fruit, he noticed that the shape of her waist was still visible, even in the baggy shirts she wore now, and though they had known each other for years, there was a freshness about her eyes that surprised him. For the first time it occurred to him, tasting the qiguo, that he was not yet an old man.
The only one on the block who refused to try the fruit was Mr. Sun, Pang Ayi’s husband. A retired railway inspector, he had a stubborn streak and refused to eat most fruits, preferring instead to subsist on his wife’s hand-pulled noodles and crescent-moon-shaped dumplings. He was a sober man, not given to talking much, though he did inveigh against the qiguo when his wife asked. “Not natural,” he said. “Don’t trust it. Sunshan, pah!”
The founder of Sunshan Produce, Fan Shiyi, was feted everywhere that season. He was a tiny, wizened old man, usually pictured on television standing before a grove laden with the qiguo. The trees were short, their branches gnarled, the fruit glowing red and orange against their deeply dark leaves. Often his wife was pictured with him, grinning, gap-toothed, at the camera.
By the end of that spring, we all knew Fan Shiyi’s story by heart: how the old man had crossbred fruit as a hobby for years, how so many of his experiments had tasted sour or mealy or had withered on the vine before he had finally invented the qiguo—healthy, full of vitamins, and delicious!
The state media embraced Fan Shiyi’s tale of success. The qiguo was a symbol of grassroots ingenuity, its reporters said, “a new fruit that is a symbol of our new nation.”
We ate it standing by the sink, juices running down our chins. We ate it in smoothies while strolling and sliced atop frozen yogurt. In classrooms, teachers handed it out to students; it was said it made the brightest pupils more clever, the recalcitrant ones more heedful of their classmates’ needs. In our neighborhood, on our block, those of us who ate it found the sun seemed to shine with an unwonted brightness, the tree leaves reflecting a more brilliant shade of jade. Even the surly bao’an, the man who guarded the front gate, began smiling and nodding at residents who came and went.
The season, though, didn’t last. The last trucks bearing qiguo arrived in late May, and by early summer, the fruit was no longer being sold. Instead we roamed the supermarket aisles discontentedly, passing piles of pears and apricots and bananas, which now tasted insipid and wooden, without flavor. We bought more of the fruits that reminded us of the qiguo—nectarines, oranges—and discarded them half-eaten.
Summer was unusually hot that year. As the weeks went by, we grew increasingly irritable with one another, prickly with the heat. Couples fought. The noise of children chasing one another in the courtyard grated on our nerves. Without the qiguo, babies fussed in the humidity and refused their mothers’ breasts. A few blocks away, the No. 8 Production Facility workers went on strike after one of their number succumbed to heat and overwork and died; the girl had been just sixteen years old.
Pang Ayi, though, remained in good temper. In fact she had blossomed astoundingly. Before, we had thought of her as little more than the neighborhood gossip, a woman who had borne two children and excelled at dumpling-making and, yes, resembled to a certain degree a dumpling herself, who usually wore the same cheap full-legged slacks and a baggy, gauzy shirt. That summer, though, we noticed that she had gotten a perm and had taken to wearing short, flouncy skirts in bright colors, the kind other women would go dancing in. She had been observed snapping a half-opened rose off one of the bushes that grew in the apartment’s courtyard and putting it, absurdly, in her hair.
Often she and Lao Zhou could now be found chatting in the market, lingering over the cauliflower and long beans. On several afternoons, she and the widower were seen climbing a jasmine-covered hill at a nearby park and lunching on some of her crescent-moon-shaped dumplings while gazing at the view.
Some of us remembered that when Pang Ayi’s youngest son had broken his leg all those years ago and Mr. Sun was away traveling, it was Lao Zhou who had carried him to find a rickshaw. “He’s always been devoted to her,” we told one another.
Summer mellowed into fall, and the heat finally broke. Carina Wei’s new hit, “My Sweet Qiguo,” was released, and for a few months, the treacly single played everywhere, on buses and in supermarkets. It was a love song: From the bitter comes the sweet, my baby, my sweet strange fruit. When the song came on, a peculiar feeling would steal over the crowd: a kind of backward yearning. Often someone would begin to hum, and soon more than a few of us would be singing. With so many voices, it was curious; the cloying lyrics took on the feeling of something more like a dirge.
Winter came, and with it the same dry chapped skin, the same routine of heavy cabbage-and-leek dishes, two vegetables that we stockpiled in the courtyard. Our troubles weighed more heavily on us, somehow, that season. The city looked more colorless, the gray sky pinning us in. We thought of the family we had lost; our sleep was burdened with too many dreams. On one especially cold night, the old woman who lived on the fourth floor burned some coal without first opening her exhaust vents; she suffocated on the carbon monoxide and died. It was an accident, we said.
All of us looked forward to the spring, and a new season of fruit.
* * *
This time the qiguo were sold exclusively to supermarket chains—you couldn’t buy them from street peddlers anymore. They were wrapped differently, too, each piece surrounded by a collar of green foam and swathed in white tissue paper, sold by the dozen in a decorative box. The cost had gone up accordingly, and, naturally, we groused.
But it didn’t matter, not much, so eager were we to taste the fruit again, to hold it in our hands and again be moved by the feelings that it conjured. On the first day it arrived on shelves, we lined up outside the supermarket for more than an hour with our neighbors, an air of festivity beckoning. Some shops, we heard, were rationing it: only two boxes per buyer. We smiled at one another, we greeted one another, we basked in the springlike weather.
“At last,” we told one another. “At last.”
As we waited, we swapped our stories. Zhu Ayi said that her wheelchair-bound mother had been indoors for years before trying the qiguo, which imparted a wonderful scent of flowers that finally tempted her outside to the courtyard. “Now she goes outside every day,” she said.
“The first one I ate made me feel like I was twenty-five again,” Mr. Feng was heard to say loudly, toward the back of the line. It was clear that he’d tried to capture the same look, too, had taken to combing the remains of his hair over his bald pate, and ever since the previous spring had been regularly spotted doing energetic calisthenics out in the courtyard.
But the next morning, we dodged one another’s eyes uncomfortably; we stared at our feet.
We had gone hurriedly home with our parcels, had unwrapped the fruit and washed it with ceremony. The qiguo tasted the same, the rich texture and resistant flesh that our teeth sank slowly through, the sweetness, with its notes of acid beneath. This time, though, the feelings that followed were dark and discordant, the emotional equivalent of a stomachache.
Alone at home in his kitchen, Mr. Feng had cut expectantly into the fruit. After consuming a few tart pieces, though, he’d begun coughing and had to sit down, a feeling of bile rising up in him as he remembered the look of the old man in a dunce cap that he and some of his schoolmates had beaten until he’d collapsed and . . . well . . . it was many years ago an
d those were different times. Nonetheless, he buried his head in his arms and it took ten minutes before the wave of nausea receded.
The phone rang several times before he picked it up. It was a friend whom he’d seen in line earlier that day. “Was it good?” his friend asked.
“Very good,” Mr. Feng had said, after a pause. “How about yours?”
“Excellent.”
We were lying to one another, covering up the fruit’s effects. Zhu Ayi, when she’d eaten her first piece, was swept with a feeling of shame so powerful that for a moment her vision blurred. There was the time she’d left her son alone and he’d scalded himself on the stove, the time she’d fed her mother-in-law a piece of fish that had fallen on the floor—these and other memories, surging up and reproaching her.
Inside his home, Lao Zhou finished a plate of qiguo and was immediately flooded with a grief so vast and unfathomable that he sat stunned. When he closed his eyes, all he could picture was a man who was forced to wear a big sign about his neck that read BOURGEOISIE, kneeling before a crowd. The man was his father, a calligrapher. He did not see him again until he was buried, days after being stoned. Lao Zhou sat at his table without moving, and for two days after that, he didn’t go outside.
Occasionally a piece of fruit would restore to us a memory of that first qiguo season, a skipping of the heart, like being swung out by a dance partner; a warm feeling of contentment, like being surrounded by one’s family, well and whole and happy. Most of the time, though, the fruit carried with it feelings of remorse, and shame.
And yet we kept eating it. Not so often, of course. But you could hope for a good piece, and anyway we craved its flavor, which lingered for a few glorious moments before the dark feelings began to set in.