Braised Pork
Page 5
‘That’s wonderful. Don’t let me disturb you.’
That was their only exchange. She left early that afternoon so that the husband and wife could spend some time together. No one told her to leave and the couple did not seem to mind her presence, but she did not feel like painting any more. Instead, she found herself heading to Leo’s bar.
‘I’m not sure about this job,’ Jia Jia told Leo, as he watched her sit down on her stool. ‘I barely have time to work on my own art.’
Leo took a glass and poured her some water. It seemed like she had decided to keep her hair down permanently. She looked exhausted, though also younger. Perhaps it was the way she was dressed – blue jeans, black sweater and white trainers. She had a canvas bag with her tools inside. Her lower eye make-up was a little smudged. Leo found her to be more beautiful this way. More honest, perhaps.
‘I can’t do it,’ she repeated. ‘How are we supposed to know what the Buddha looks like? What if the lotus is supposed to have, say, six petals instead of five? Then I would have messed it up.’
‘I thought Buddhist wall paintings were only seen in caves and temples,’ Leo said. ‘This woman must be a devoted believer.’
‘You know what?’ Jia Jia pushed aside a small plate of olives and leaned across the counter closer to Leo. ‘Yesterday when Ms Wan was studying the painting, she said to me, “I pray to this wall every night. I’ve been doing it ever since the first day you started working on it. I can’t stop now.” Then she said that it’s the only way to make herself feel safe. Every night, this woman prays to my painting to feel safe … and I barely even know what I’m doing.’
‘Look at that guy.’ Leo pointed out the window towards a guard dressed in uniform who was sitting at the entrance to the car park. ‘Do you think he knows what he’s doing?’
The boy was no more than eighteen years old. Indeed, it did not seem like he had had a proper education in safeguarding car parks. He saluted each driver with his left hand and his mouth opened slightly whenever an expensive model drove by.
‘Don’t be ridiculous, it’s not the same.’ Jia Jia laughed. Her slightly bulged teeth made her adorable.
‘Well, sometimes I barely know what drink I’m making.’
‘Is that so?’
Leo put his index finger on his lips, indicating that it was a secret not to be shared with other customers.
‘What are your plans for Chinese New Year?’ he asked, beginning to carve out an ice ball with a knife. ‘Want to come with me to my parents’?’
Jia Jia’s expression stiffened.
‘I’ll have to check with my family,’ she said, averting her eyes. ‘Hold on a minute.’
Pretending to make a phone call, Jia Jia stepped out of the bar and looked in the direction of the car park. The guard was playing on his phone when a red Porsche Panamera stopped at the barrier. The car honked, startling the boy, and he walked up to the window and said something to the driver with a nervous questioning expression on his face. Whatever the boy said seemed to have angered the driver and he started driving slowly towards the barrier. The boy panicked and slapped his hand on the door of the car.
‘You fucking idiot!’ Jia Jia heard the driver yell from his car.
Jia Jia walked around the corner of the building into the silent shadows. She allowed herself a crazy thought, one that involved starting a life with Leo, learning to love him – not the violent seas of love that she had read about in novels, but more a serene lake, contained within its boundaries. And she would bury Chen Hang away, sell the apartment, forget about the fish-man, tear up the drawing. Could she really live like that? No. Probably not. There was something unfulfilled about her relationship with Leo. The closer they pulled themselves together, the tighter her skin held her heart captive, unable to touch his. Still, she wanted to try, to free herself from Chen Hang, to try and live another kind of life.
By the time Jia Jia made her way back to the bar, the red Porsche was gone, and the boy sat there on his chair without his phone, turning his head to follow every car that passed by on the road.
At the end of the night, before the bar closed, Jia Jia accepted Leo’s invitation.
6
Jia Jia had agreed to meet Leo in the afternoon to drive together to his parents’. She felt unsure and anxious. Three months after her husband’s death, she was already spending the holidays with another man’s family: maybe Chen Hang’s parents were right, she thought, she was a curse. A destructive, vile scourge. First her mother, then her husband. And now, all tangled up with another man so soon, like moss that clings to other plants for life.
It was still early, not even lunchtime. Jia Jia checked her bank account, though she already knew how much was in there – forty thousand left from Chen Hang, plus ten thousand from Ms Wan as a deposit for the wall painting. She had to go shopping before meeting up with Leo: she could not arrive at his parents’ door empty-handed. She might as well slap him across the face.
She put on a long, orange wool dress, tied her hair in a high ponytail, and rubbed some perfume on her wrists. She looked younger this way. Pleased with her appearance, she took the subway to SKP Mall and began browsing the shops. International brands lined the floors, and their windows were mopped so clean that there seemed almost no point in having them at all. Since the last time she had come here, a week or so before Chen Hang died, a few shops had moved from one floor, one corner, to another, like a pack of cards that had been shuffled.
Before Jia Jia and Chen Hang got married, he had taken her back to Fujian once to meet his parents. She had come to this mall then and selected some clothes for his mother and a watch for his father. Chen Hang had paid for it all. The watch shop was still there, but an ostentatious style with diamonds around the face had taken over the window display. Jia Jia stopped briefly to look at it and then walked past the black marble shopfront towards a section of the mall where she knew she would find cashmere. She flipped through the racks and picked out two matching red sweaters. The saleswoman told her the price: a little over seven thousand yuan for both.
‘There is a holiday discount of forty per cent,’ the saleswoman told her.
‘How much will it be after the discount?’ asked Jia Jia.
‘The price I gave you was already inclusive of the discount, ma’am.’ The saleswoman smiled and blinked at Jia Jia with lashes that were far too perfectly black and lush to be her own.
‘That’s right,’ Jia Jia said, forcing a smile back at her. ‘I’ll take another look around.’
Jia Jia quickly left the mall, feeling like a rat that had been caught stealing. She had intentionally chosen to shop in the section where the brands were cheaper, but those sweaters alone would have cost her almost two months of apartment charges. They were marvellous sweaters, though, soft and fine; she would very much have liked to buy one for herself. But she was still living in the apartment that was far too costly, with a job that could hardly be considered a job. She entered the subway without looking back, feeling the cashmere saleswoman’s fake eyelashes flickering at her from behind.
Jia Jia got off at Dongdaqiao station and marched purposefully into Blue Island Mall. Shoppers dressed in all kinds of bright colours crowded the floors, digging through piles of clothes and trying out skincare products. This mall was far too hot despite it being near freezing outside. Almost all the salespeople were middle-aged women. A few of them stood next to a cashier, chatting about their children while buttoning shirts and folding them back into semi-neat piles of squares. Jia Jia roamed the various floors, searching for knitwear shops. She had decided, for no particular reason, that she was going to buy Leo’s parents matching sweaters. Finally, she came across a brand that seemed promising.
The wool felt surprisingly soft in her hands. All she needed to do now was find two styles that could be gifted as a pair. She examined the racks, making sure not to leave a single piece unseen. She came across a dolphin-grey crewneck sweater, with flowers embroidered on each of t
he shoulders. She called the saleswoman over.
A plump woman with a pixie haircut approached her. She had a large black mole on her face right next to her nose that startled Jia Jia when she turned her head.
‘You want this sweater?’ Mole-lady asked.
‘I wanted to see if there are any men’s sweaters in the same colour,’ Jia Jia said quietly, afraid to irritate this woman.
Mole-lady bent over, grunting, and took out a pile of folded sweaters from some low drawers. As she straightened up and dumped the pile onto a table, her body emanated a strong smell of tobacco combined with sweat.
‘Check here,’ Mole-lady said.
Jia Jia compared the sweaters to the one in her hand. Towards the bottom, she found one that was in the same shade of grey, with a black horizontal stripe across the chest. This could certainly do, she thought.
‘How much are the two?’ Jia Jia asked.
‘This one is …’ Mole-lady lifted her head and checked the price for the women’s one, squinting her eyes at the tag. ‘One thousand eight hundred and ten yuan. And the other one is a bit less, if I remember correctly. Let me see … it’s one thousand six hundred and ten.’
‘Are there any discounts? It’s a present. I imagine you’d have some sales going on at this time of the year. Could you give me a member’s discount or something?’
‘Are you a member?’ Mole-lady looked up at Jia Jia, displeased.
‘No, I’m not. But I could apply—’
Another group of customers walked in and Mole-lady immediately left Jia Jia to greet them.
‘What were you saying?’ she asked when she returned.
‘I said that I could apply for a membership.’
‘We don’t do member discounts.’ Mole-lady began folding the sweaters.
‘Then why did you ask me if I was a member? But never mind, can I buy both for three thousand?’
‘Young lady, this is a mall and we are a brand, we don’t bargain here. If you can’t afford it, go to another shop.’ Mole-lady took the grey sweaters and began stuffing them back into the drawers.
Jia Jia took a few deep breaths, summoning all the patience in her.
‘… dressed nicely like a rich girl,’ mumbled the woman to herself. ‘The bag is probably fake. If you don’t have money, don’t come out shopping.’
Jia Jia wanted to file a complaint with the manager, but found she could not piece together the words in her mouth. She was not good at this, too accustomed to being with Chen Hang, who would have demanded to speak to a supervisor right at the beginning when he first sensed the woman’s attitude. And Jia Jia, of course, would have assumed the role of the silent wife.
She turned and fled the mall, more wretched than before. A rat that had not only been caught, but beaten up, stamped on, driven into a dark corner. She felt herself shrinking, her back curving, her muscles weakening. She hailed a taxi.
‘SKP Mall,’ she said to the driver. She had to save herself, to charge out of the corner and make the grandest appearance on a bigger, open stage.
When they arrived, Jia Jia paid the driver and told him to keep the change. She stormed past the European designers, the jewellery stores, the watch brands, and approached the young woman with the fake eyelashes.
‘I would like the two red sweaters that I picked out before,’ Jia Jia said, as calmly and firmly as she could.
The saleswoman blinked, and then smiled courteously. ‘Certainly,’ she responded. ‘Anything else you’d like?’
‘That’s it,’ Jia Jia said. ‘Wait a minute, give me this scarf too.’ She took a red scarf from the rack and waved it at her.
After the woman had gone behind a door to gather the items, Jia Jia felt able to breathe again, having picked up a piece of her dignity. The woman wrapped the items carefully and rang up the total. Jia Jia paid, shopped around inside the mall a bit longer, bought nothing more, and went out.
She sat on a bench, the shopping bag lying flat on her lap. She wanted to cry, but she did not have time to go home and re-do her make-up before meeting Leo. So she held her face in her hands and imagined herself crying, screaming at the city, screaming so hard that her heart was coming out and everybody could hear her. She imagined herself crying like a newborn, innocent of all the twists and turns of being alive, the crossroads, the dead ends. She imagined herself crying for only a short while, before she stood up and walked down into the subway to catch the next onward train.
Jia Jia would be the second woman that Leo had ever taken to see his parents. The last time had been five years ago. He wanted them to accept her, and more importantly, he hoped that she would like them. But immediately after he had asked her to spend the holidays with him, he had regretted his words, expecting her to refuse. He should have been more cautious about throwing the question at her like that. Her acceptance had been worried and guarded, as if he had left her with no choice, and to reject his invitation would have been an act of rudeness. From what Leo had learned so far about Jia Jia, he knew that she always chose the option that she thought made others happy, not what brought happiness to herself. So Jia Jia had agreed, and ever since then, Leo had seen an unconcealable although well-hidden trace of anxiety in her. She had sent him messages often, enquiring about what his parents liked to eat; what kind of alcohol they preferred; whether his father smoked Chinese cigarettes or imported ones; what his parents’ shirt sizes were.
On New Year’s Eve, she turned up at his compound’s car park a little before four o’clock. Leo was not a car person; he was aware that there was nothing impressive about his car, a regular black Honda Accord. He had considered taking a taxi with Jia Jia, but ultimately decided that he would drive. This was him. He was not Chen Hang. He wanted her to see that.
She had bought his parents matching red cashmere sweaters, she told Leo in the car, each a size larger than their usual sizes, reasoning that this way, they could wear layers underneath during the cold winters. She had also bought a red scarf for his mother and some Yuxi cigarettes for his father.
It was the best time of the year to be in Beijing. People withdrew into their homes and settled in circles around their living-room tables; the women making flawlessly arranged rows of dumplings, the men chatting over cups of tea and puffs of smoke about all the events that had taken place during the past year. Although Leo never left the city during Chinese New Year, he had not spent the holidays at home for two years now. His parents had not insisted either – they believed that he had been busy with work. He had a close relationship with his family, but he relished his peaceful solitude more, going on hikes at Fragrant Hills, riding a bike down Changan Avenue, and even journeying on the empty subways, which became much more enjoyable without the usual migrant workers racing to their destinations.
Leo’s father was a researcher at the health and science department of Peking University. He was a forward-thinking scholar who spent his days either working in his lab, teaching, or reading at home with a cigarette in his hand. Leo’s parents’ apartment was not very big, but his father had converted the second room into a study where he could read and write. He was writing a book. He had been working on it for as long as Leo could remember. He made it a point to spend some time in his study every night before he went to bed, either reading or writing. Often, Leo’s mother would find him asleep in his armchair with a book opened to the first few pages.
Leo drove fast on the empty roads and they arrived at his parents’ without any delays. They lived in the north-west area of Beijing, just outside the second ring road. When his mother opened the door, Leo started to see what he had foisted upon Jia Jia. His mother was wearing a decade-old apron that was stained all over and was wiping her hands on it.
‘Sorry,’ she said as she invited them in, smiling embarrassedly while patting Jia Jia on the shoulder. ‘I’ll be a little busy in the kitchen. Go and chat with your father! He’s been talking about you for weeks.’
‘Can I help you in the kitchen?’ Jia Jia asked.
‘Jia Jia, don’t bother,’ Leo said. ‘Come.’
‘Yes, yes, come!’ his father echoed deep and loud from the living room.
Jia Jia handed the gifts to Leo’s father and explained what she had got for the couple. Leo watched his father nod and thank her. He left the sweaters untouched in the bag and pulled out the cigarettes to examine the carton.
‘I should really stop smoking,’ he said. ‘A colleague of mine found polyps in his intestines during his annual check-up and had to have them taken out. We’re getting old, son.’ He looked at Leo and sighed. ‘But I suppose giving up now isn’t going to make such a big difference.’
Jia Jia smiled and faintly shook her head.
The sun seeped through the drying laundry at the window and cast its beams on Jia Jia when she sat down on the sofa. She looked like an old photograph, Leo thought, gentle and delicate. At that moment he felt proud of the cleanness in her beauty – her pale skin and minimal make-up. His father had always proclaimed that he did not care about how much housework a woman could do but she must have a pure heart.
There was something particularly moving about the way Jia Jia interacted with his father, Leo thought. There was a sense of distanced familiarity, as if she were a close friend from long ago. She did not speak much, but she seemed to be at ease listening to him blabber on about the different illnesses that were tormenting his colleagues and friends. And occasionally, when silence reigned, she would take a sip of her tea or ask a question, encouraging his father to talk more.
‘One day last month,’ his father said, ‘it was sunny, so I was with our neighbour in the park. You know, the other professor who lives two floors up?’ He turned to Leo and then back to Jia Jia. ‘He brought a friend,’ he continued. ‘An old man with sunglasses and a walking stick.’