by Meng Jin
Children, she said, were a great responsibility. Contrary to what some people believed, children had nothing to do with the individual and everything to do with the species; they were a lie that biology created to make us feel immortal. Their true use was for labor: to sow the field, to bring in the harvest, to take the oxen out to graze. A person like her, who labored in the mind, had no need for them. Besides, she said, it was hard enough to make your own life what you wanted it to be. It was better—more honest, she said, to do as you have, to live fully in this life with no pretense.
I told her I’d hardly made such a dramatic decision.
She did not know, and I did not tell her, that it was not my choice. In fact I had been pregnant many times, and each time, I had hoped for a child.
The first time I had been very afraid. For a while I did not tell Tao Kun and denied it to myself. When he found the little bulge some weeks later, however, he did not react with horror or disgust. He was full of joy, and in his joy I allowed myself to believe I would bear our child. For three weeks I allowed myself to worry about my body’s ability to carry this child, what the extra weight would do to my misaligned hips, if my legs would crack beneath me, the right calf curving out, the knee bending in. Sometimes I imagined that in the moment of birth, the child would squeeze through my pelvis and snap my distorted limbs into their proper places.
Tao Kun fretted over me, calling out to see if I needed anything so often I grew used to ignoring him. When we left the house he took my elbow instead of me taking his, and I wondered if he had ever needed me to guide him.
Our bliss was short. The baby came out of me in bloody clumps. I woke in pain; I rose and sat folded on the matong in the dark. My body ate into itself. I kept still, I breathed low. I did not want to wake Tao. Before daylight I emptied the chamber pot and rinsed it clean. I vomited in the alley. I bathed with a cold towel. The room still smelled acrid and bloody when I crawled back into the bed. That was the closest I’d ever felt to death. Later, we both agreed it was for the best. Did we really want to inflict our attributes onto a child?
For weeks before Su Lan revealed to me her condition, she seemed agitated, her feet tapping the floor, a flush rising quickly to her cheeks. She came into my room one evening before her husband was back from work, strangely giddy, and said, I think I’m pregnant, can you believe it?
She was wide-eyed, as if she herself could not. The back door opened and someone came up the steps. She pressed her finger to her lips and hurried out.
The next day she was more subdued. It was mid-afternoon and she had come home early from work. She had gone to the doctor’s and confirmed it.
It’s real, she said. Strangely, I’m not unhappy. I think—I’m quite sure—I woke up this morning and thought, if it’s true, I’ll keep it.
She spoke again about her fear of having children, the difficulty of raising them, broaching the same points she usually did, but whereas before she spoke quickly and passionately, now her brow was furrowed, her voice soft and light, and her opinions came out as questions and gestures rather than arguments. It was difficult, she said, not only because of the physical work it would entail, but because one wanted the child to be happy, which meant giving it a chance to make a life for itself. But there would always be the problem of history. How could you keep your history from infecting the child?
The child is innocent, Su Lan said. It should be born free. It will be difficult, she said again, it will be tempting to pass yourself on even though you know it’s wrong. Already I’ve been tempted to make lines of causality to bind me to those I love.
You’re a strange woman, I said, and I meant it.
Perhaps this was the first time I noticed that Su Lan spoke often about the past, about history, but always in these vague and abstract ways. She did not mention her childhood, her hometown, not even Beijing where she’d lived just half a year ago. I already knew by then that Su Lan had a great capacity for drawing pictures with words, filling in small details in the darkest corners. But this energy was directed willfully on the present and the future.
I watched her husband. The prospect of fatherhood could change men; some of them grew suddenly loving, treating the wives they’d once bullied as precious things, so that their women glowed, carrying their round bellies like queens. Shy men could become boastful and hold their chests high, letting their voices ring over the din, and slovenly men could grow responsible, and men who looked like boys matured overnight. Of course it went the other way too, pressure exacerbating vices, the prospect of one more mouth to feed making poor men petty and anxious and depressed.
Su Lan’s husband stayed the same. So much so that I wondered if she had told him. I did not hear the subject in the courtyard gossip when the couple was at work. Su Lan continued to give me a conspiratorial look, one that said we were different together, which I had never understood before. Now I read in it the secret: she’s pregnant, and nobody knows but me, and I don’t know why that is.
Things went on as usual until she began to show.
Pregnancy did not suit Su Lan. The neighbors said she was letting herself go, she was getting ugly, and I saw that it was true. The bump ruined her figure. Her small body now looked short and squat. The child had sucked the blood from her lips and bloated her face, made her skin gray when she was tired, splotchy and red when excited, and covered her once-smooth cheeks with freckles and spots. Her hair dried to a brittle, dull floss. She was still attractive, but in a harsh, used sort of way. She smelled of sweat and rancid breath. She vomited frequently, sometimes more than once a day, reacting to the smell of simmering oil, which was impossible to avoid in the longtang.
She began to work at home, going into the university only to teach and attend meetings and occasionally run an experiment at the lab. She said she preferred this, that the sterile silence of the lab spooked her.
I thought she didn’t like people seeing her weak. She shut the door when she was sick and hurried down the stairs to rinse the bucket immediately after. Returning with the clean bucket, she told me that she liked working in noisy conditions, liked hearing the conversations in the hallways and the vendors cycling past in the alley, the dogs barking and children crying and pots being dropped into sinks. When she was a university student, she said, she had studied in the most crowded public places—train stations, busy squares, restaurants and cafeterias. An unintended side effect of this practice was that her classmates and colleagues never saw her study, and thus considered her accomplishments the result of unnatural intellectual gifts. Even now having to mute outside noises helped her focus.
But she couldn’t focus. She was listless, milling about the landing and terrace, walking back and forth without aim. As her belly grew she became afraid of going down the steep stairs but was also unable to sit still in her room.
I mentioned that her husband, a doctor, might have some medical advice. She denied that anything was wrong. I pointed to the changes in her complexion.
She said with a wicked smile, It’s just my true self coming out.
Some strange shift was taking place in the room next door. Su Lan began to embrace her role as wife and expectant mother. Her morning sickness had passed; she insisted now that pregnancy was a delicious feeling. She replaced her earlier reservations about motherhood with the idea of creating someone entirely new, the likes of whom she could not predict, and relished this idea. On more than one occasion she said with optimism, It makes the future new. I saw her surveying herself in the mirror.
Look, she said, beckoning me in. She turned sideways, and her belly was undeniable now, it defined her body’s relationship with space.
I barely recognize myself, she said. Her body felt and looked strange to her. It was as if she had discovered for the first time her flesh, her blood, her bones, her organs, her skin, her saliva, all those thin membranes. Those elements that composed her body were changing, truly changing, transforming into something else, something that existed not just to perpetuate
its own survival but to grow a separate body. It was change on a depth and scale that she’d been too dull to even imagine until it happened to her. Her new body, and inside it, another new body—two strangers, the result of this process. She said this as if it were the obvious solution to a question she’d been asking all her life.
To the problem of history she seemed too to have found an obvious solution. She said, as if stumbling upon a magnificent discovery: This child will be born in Shanghai. And wasn’t this why she had married her husband after all? In order to create a new life inside his world?
For once, Su Lan did not feel trapped in her body but rather taken along with it as it transformed, making her into something strange and new. What creative feats the body was capable of, she said admiringly, how they surpassed the puny abilities of the mind. She stroked her belly and spoke to you tenderly, addressing you with delight: Who are you, little stranger?
Meanwhile, her husband changed too.
I never knew if she told him she was pregnant. Perhaps she had, like me, let her body do the telling. There was no quarrel, no smashing of plates on the ground. Not yet. It began, as most things do, without announcement. I saw more and more of Su Lan and less and less of her husband. He stayed later at work. He was on call. He started a research project and spent additional hours at the hospital enrolling patients in clinical trials. When he was home he was less social, greeting me only with an impassive nod.
When they first moved into the longtang, he had been unabashedly and passionately in love, letting everyone see it as if it were his first virtue. He had brightened when speaking about her, describing her as if a rare, most valuable jewel. I think he was by nature a quiet man who preferred to keep to himself, or perhaps a man with too much pride to speak freely. But at her side he’d light up and become gregarious, generous, almost carefree, laughing easily, asking after all those around him. Every few minutes he’d look at her and touch her wrist, or the small of her back, to make sure she was still there, still watching, as if his life found purpose only in her witness.
Now, through the wall between our rooms, I heard him speak more and more often in that tone used for complaining about insignificant things. The room was too small, they had too much furniture, the walls were too thin, the air was thick with dust. They both worked but he did not take over any more of the household chores. The rare times I saw the two of them together, in the evenings or on Sundays, he would be sitting with a paper or staring at the news on television, while she cleaned or cooked, sweating under the fatigue of her condition. He avoided looking at her; when he did look it was with contempt. Once, while Su Lan was sweeping the room, I saw her husband scanning her body up and down as if appraising it, his face blank with disgust. When he spoke, it was limited to the practical and mundane. He never raised his voice. He sounded tired, annoyed.
Retrospectively, it is too clear. If Su Lan had set her story going one way, this was where it pulled onto its own course, dragging me along with it. Perhaps if everything had turned out as Lan intended, I would have been left unimplicated, simply drawn out as she’d said, but as it was I found myself pulled in, the limbs of my life entangling with my accidental neighbor’s future. Sometimes I wonder what I could have done differently, if perhaps I should have tried harder to extricate myself. But it all happened so quickly. It was only months later, when I was holding you, that it struck me like a light: Su Lan got pregnant, and her husband got mean.
It was the spring of 1989. The city’s skin stretched too. In April a former government official died abruptly and the young people of Shanghai poured into the streets to mourn. The dead man had been very popular among the youth for his reformist policies but had some years ago been removed from power, and so his death carried great symbolic potential. I heard people marching past the longtang gate in waves, shouting about true patriotism and political reform. In the following days handwritten posters papered the walls of the alleys, before which groups of people I knew and people I’d never seen before gathered, reading over one another’s shoulders with their hands clasped behind their backs. The quantity of posters increased and so did the quantity of people, who not only came to read but stayed to discuss and argue, and at times burst into spontaneous public speech, gesturing with their arms and pounding their fists. Torn and crumpled pamphlets filled the cracks in the cobblestone. Stray fallen petals, on their way to some makeshift public memorial for the deceased politician, gathered bruised and trampled in the gutters.
On my way back from the latrine a crumpled pamphlet stuck to the bottom of my cane. I unfolded it and read: tirades on government corruption and rising prices, demands for labor rights and increased salaries for intellectuals. Sprinkled between were repeated impassioned phrases wielding words such as democracy and human rights like righteous cudgels. In the newspapers I read about an ongoing student demonstration in Beijing at Tiananmen Square. I checked the publication date on the top corner. It seemed that these exact events had happened before, these same slogans chanted and these same patriotic songs sung in unison. I had read the same abstract arguments in pamphlets and big character posters, and perhaps it was this same deposed government official who had died and whose death transformed him into a martyred hero, propelling the parading of these same wreaths of flowers through the streets. In the People’s Daily I read an editorial denouncing the demonstrations as incited by counterrevolutionary factions, and again it sounded very much like something I had read before.
In the streets the editorial was denounced with such fury it could have been mistaken for zeal. The television screens in the longtang windows flashed images of young men kneeling before the People’s Hall with a scroll raised above their heads. Thousands of young people began to sleep in Tiananmen Square, some refusing to eat until the senior party leadership agreed to a list of demands. In the building the usual gossip—who was sneaking around with a mistress, which siblings were fighting over an inheritance—was replaced with rumors about government leaders, Li Peng’s Hainan mansion or Zhao Ziyang’s secret visit to the students on hunger strike. In front of the marketplace the old woman from Xinjiang who read faces for a dime began to sell cartoons of Deng Xiaoping in various poses of disgrace.
Su Lan had a hungry human inside of her. Her classes had emptied onto the street, and so she spent most days at home, scratching out calculations with her swollen feet elevated on the bed. The chanting and crowds did not bother her; she went on as if they were a part of normal life. I tried to do the same but could not help feeling agitated and embarrassed for reasons I did not fully understand. I was embarrassed for the protesters, who looked so young and sounded so naïve, but I was also embarrassed for myself. Each time this kind of thing happened, my alienation darkened; there was something in the collective mob of passion that challenged the tolerable solitude of living in my given body. Sometimes I felt as if I had been transported to a foreign land, thrown into the midst of many people speaking a language I could not understand.
Su Lan and I both avoided leaving the house, each of us with our own set of justifications. I told her I had been alive for long enough to see the order of things turn upside down once, and then again, and did not need to witness it yet another time, which wasn’t untrue. But it was also true that even then I understood my behavior was not so unlike that of a child’s, closing her eyes in hopes that what she doesn’t want to see will simply disappear.
When I did venture outside for the necessary errands, battling through a crowd of shins with my cane, I would often look up to find myself face-to-face with Su Lan’s husband. There he was, standing in a huddle, arguing with someone, nodding to an impromptu speech, once even gesticulating in the center of a circle at least twenty onlookers deep, his handsome face scrunched in scrutiny, the shadows under his eyes lengthening. I sat on the terrace and watched a procession going past the wall, fists and banners peeking over the roofs of the neighborhood, and thought I saw a man who looked very much like Su Lan’s husband lifted above t
he crowd and carried along on its shoulders, waving a Chinese flag.
Many evenings he arrived home after the house had gone dark, banging his way up the stairs. Beyond the shared wall came the hissing of hard muffled speech. Interest in politics had changed his voice; it was now laden with the too-knowing tone of political science professors, laden too with the weight of the pamphleteers’ words, right and justice and wrong. He accused Su Lan of not supporting her students like other university professors were doing, and asked why, if she disapproved or thought the students’ tactics wrongheaded, she did not try to steer them the right way. He called her selfish and apathetic and unpatriotic. A few times Su Lan responded. Unlike her husband, she spoke without passion, and softly, so I could not make out what exactly she said. But her tone was firm and confident, and after she spoke there followed what sounded to me like a defeated silence. I fell asleep believing her husband had been proven intellectually inferior, and put back in his place.
The other residents of the house must have heard these conversations too. One day as I was coming back from the market I saw Ma Ahyi from the front unit holding Su Lan’s elbow in the kitchen, her mouth an inch from my neighbor’s ear. Sometimes you have to pretend to be stupid in front of your husband, I heard, sometimes you have to let him win. It’s not attractive for a woman to be so strong. A truly clever woman, Ma Ahyi said, knows how to let a man think he’s right even when he’s agreeing that he’s wrong. Especially—Ma Ahyi lowered her voice—when it comes to politics. If you ask me, I wouldn’t even bother with it, let him have his opinions.
If Su Lan thought anything about this advice one way or the other, she didn’t show it on her face. But she began to overcompensate for her husband’s increased absences. She became too cheerful. She welcomed him home, a caricature of a perfect wife, with warm smiles and caresses and sweet sentences about absolutely nothing. She turned the television to the news for him but didn’t discuss the contents. She made his favorite dishes—she tried. She was a disastrous cook, I discovered, she had no natural affinity for household tasks. I helped her in the kitchen; I taught her how to make some Shanghai dishes. If her husband was placated, I could not tell. I felt at once ashamed for and impressed by your mother, by how far she would go.