Braised Pork

by An Yu

  17

  ‘If I had it my way, I’d never speak about it. These memories have been like a hole in the ground, right beneath the steps to my door. On rainy days there would be a puddle, and I’d always step around it. Sometimes, there’d be relentless storms, and I’d stay inside and watch the hole fill up and overflow. Long periods of time would also come when the hole would be dry and almost unnoticeable. And then, without warning, it would rain again. But throughout the years, I have come to accept that the world spins, one season pours into another, and the past travels full circle back to you. So I’ll tell you everything I know, Jia Jia, because I owe it to you, and to your mother. But also, more importantly, I’ll tell you because maybe then you will understand.

  ‘First of all, let me prelude this story by saying that I have never seen the fish-man or the world of water. As such, I do not know what it is. And to this day, I cannot say whether I’m grateful for that. But all this is not to tell you that it has no effect on me. No, no. On the contrary, my life has been governed by the world of water since the day I came to know about it, or maybe even before I became aware that it had flooded into your mother, thirty years ago.

  ‘At the time when I met your mother, she was struggling to become a sculptor and I was a very average man. Why, of all art forms, she chose sculpting, I do not know. How and where she learned to sculpt, she never told me either. But she had her mind set on becoming a sculptor, and no one was ever going to convince her to change. I got to know her the first week after Chinese New Year, at the Ditan temple fair. Her head popped up from the sea of people directly into my vision: she was standing on a bench, searching for a sugar sculpture stand, which I eventually helped her find. She wore a large, brown ushanka-hat that covered half of her face. It belonged to her father, she told me later, who had received it as a gift from a teacher during his studies in the Soviet Union. Your mother wore it every day in the winter, and during most of the dates we went on, I was barely able to see her properly. As a result, for a long time I had no idea what her hair looked like. But that only added to her charm and made her even more desirable.

  ‘I had never met anyone like her before. She daydreamed, her thoughts would often run wildly. One minute, she might be speaking about different kinds of beer, and the next, she would be reciting poetry. She was a woman who would jump into frozen lakes naked or ride her bike into the suburbs in the middle of the night. She was the opposite of me and none of our friends could imagine us being lovers. But after a few months, we got married, and she became my entire world.

  ‘All I wanted thereafter was to live a lifetime with her, where every day I’d return to a home that smelt like fresh noodles, and she would greet me with a face that always bloomed like a daisy when I opened the door. As long as I had her, I didn’t care about the hardships of life. She was like a pair of shoes that fitted perfectly, wrapping me up, keeping me warm. We lived in a sixty-square-metre two-bedroom apartment that was comfortably big enough for the two of us. It faced the south and kept us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. More than enough light shone into our living space during the day, and seeing the way your mother hummed different tunes and held a bottle of beer in her hand while she worked on her sculptures, I deemed that she was content.

  ‘But as time passed, I came to gradually forget who she was and what she wanted. Or hell, I admit I most likely didn’t even know in the first place. She dreamed of something much bigger than our apartment and our placid lives within it. She wanted to be outside. Still, she stayed with me and pretended that the life I had designed for us was the one she wanted as well. Of course, I was unaware of any of this at the time and my vision only gradually cleared later, after we decided to have a baby.

  ‘A few months into our marriage, we tried for a child. I can’t remember whose idea it was in the first place, but one of us must have decided that he or she wanted a child, and the other person must have agreed. It was the natural thing to do anyway. We worked on this mission for months but nothing happened. At first, we didn’t think too much about it all and agreed that luck was not on our side. We carried on with our lives. I went to work as usual while your mother stayed at home and made all sorts of sculptures. But ever so slowly, our failure to make a child began to infiltrate our lives like water seeping through walls. Your mother began to sob whenever she got her period. Although nothing had changed, the apartment started to feel empty, as if we once had a child and now the child was gone. A thick, dark cloud was taking shape and expanding, gnawing at us in our sleep. At some point, I noticed that your mother was making sculptures of children she saw out on the streets. She told me that she didn’t even remember when and why she had started doing that.

  ‘It was as if we had been cursed, and soon enough, the curse began to manifest itself physically. Things started to break – the kitchen light, the heater, the radio, your mother’s gold earrings, my most expensive pair of shoes. One morning, on your mother’s way to the vegetable market, the sun was shining brighter than usual, so she decided to remove her ushanka-hat to immerse herself in the warm winter day. A few seconds later, a stray dog snatched the hat from her hands and ripped it in half, right there, before running off never to be seen again. She came home and wept, forgetting entirely about the market. I had tinned food for dinner that night, and your mother didn’t eat at all. Each day she slept less and less, which put me on edge and gave me sweats and nightmares. She’d wake up at dawn and stare out the window for hours, like a floating spirit that had lost all those who had known her in her lifetime. At first, I’d get up too to comfort her, but eventually I just pretended to be asleep.

  ‘It all became even worse when two of our friends gave birth at around the same time. One girl, one boy. Your mother locked herself inside the apartment for a week: she wouldn’t speak to anyone, not even to her own mother and sister. Finally, a close friend of mine at work gave me an idea. He found a doctor who agreed to tell your mother that negative moods had dire consequences on fertility and that she mustn’t allow herself to be so gloomy. That worked. The next day, as though nothing had happened, your mother began eating and sleeping normally again. She offered to take care of our friends’ babies, for which our friends were delightedly grateful and called her a kind-hearted woman. She soon became known around the neighbourhood as the childless woman who ran a nursery in her home. As a result, during the day, our apartment was always bursting with the frantic wailing or laughing sounds of children who weren’t our own. But once nightfall came, an unendurable silence fell upon our home.

  ‘This continued for a while. Even though the crisis seemed to be over, we both knew that there was a wound below the surface that was festering and corroding our minds, and if things continued the way they were, one day, both of us would be nothing but empty, fractured shells.

  ‘I suppose the other thing that became different in our day-to-day lives was that your mother began to read. A lot. She immersed herself in all sorts of books. When she started reading a book, she wouldn’t stop until she finished the entire thing. She read Chinese novels, European classics, poems, books of quotations from famous people, newspapers – pretty much anything legible she could lay her hands on.

  ‘One winter afternoon, out of the blue, while I was tossing some cabbage into a pan and she was reading Jane Eyre, she looked up at me and announced that she was going to Tibet and wanted me to go with her. It was impossible, I laughed. It was too far, and we didn’t have the time or money. How ludicrous. But she was entirely serious. I could tell from the way she widened her eyes and held her hands in fists. I never found out whether her decision had anything to do with Jane Eyre, though I can’t imagine how those two things could have been related.

  ‘Though it was not easy, I still managed to take a month off. She sold her bicycle and we used our savings to buy an army motorbike to be picked up in Chengdu. We barely packed anything, only some thick clothes, a duvet, a tent we borrowed, and some basic cooking equipment.

 
; ‘A few days before we were supposed to leave, we found out that your mother was pregnant. I felt as though everything was going to be wonderful again. Your mother, with you growing inside her, was the most prized treasure to me, and I became excessively protective. I asked an acquaintance to bring all kinds of natural supplements from Hong Kong, fearing that your mother was not getting enough nutrients. When I came home with the bags of supplements, she began to cry, saying that we needed to save money for the trip.

  ‘I wasn’t going to let her go to Tibet. She was far too delicate for such a journey. What if we lost our hard-earned child? Whose responsibility would it be? Did she understand how difficult it would be for us to find an adequate hospital if we were in the wild? But your mother said she knew, she knew better than anybody, and she wanted to protect her child more than I could ever imagine. But she needed the trip just as much as she needed our child, she told me. She was set in her own ways and refused to budge an inch. She spewed out a series of accusations, calling me self-centred, overbearing, ignorant and limited. She told me that I was a man without dreams and didn’t even understand hers. What was her dream? We were finally going to have a child. Wasn’t that what she wanted?

  ‘When she saw that I was perplexed, the exact words that came out of her mouth were these: “I must have this child, but I must also go on this trip. Otherwise, I’ll be eternally caged in this apartment, for this life and my following lives, like you, caught in the delusion that there is some sort of meaning to all this. But we live in a far larger reality.”

  ‘For the first and only time, I slapped her, across the face.

  ‘Neither of us had the heart to cook dinner that day. We refused to speak to each other. Your mother continued to prepare for the trip, though I wasn’t sure who she had in mind as a substitute driver if I insisted on staying. It turned out that the day came, and nobody showed up. She grabbed everything, including my clothes, and headed for the train station. She didn’t have a motorbike licence, but once she arrived in Chengdu, she would have ridden off regardless, with or without me. I knew her well enough. Her determination frightened me, and out of what was most likely my male instinct to protect my wife and my unborn child, I yielded and took over the luggage.

  ‘During our trip, we did come close to death, more than once, due to landslides or rain. Once, we encountered a wolf pack in the mountains while we were camping at night. We were terrified: we secured ourselves inside our tent and prayed for safety. Another time, our bike tumbled over while we were taking a curve, and your mother was thrown off, injuring her shoulder. There weren’t any health stations nearby but we were close to a small town. We knocked on every door, and luckily we found a man, an ex-combat medic, who was willing to help us.

  ‘For many nights, I watched your mother’s back as she stood ruminating in the darkness of the wild mountains, taking short breaths under a star-filled sky that seemed as though we’d be able to touch it if only we jumped. Her thoughts were silent, and I never mustered the courage to ask her about them. We didn’t fight again, nor did we talk much.

  ‘We never made it to Lhasa. We stopped for two weeks at a small village. It already seemed to me like we were at the edge of the world. Your mother was having severe reactions to the harsh conditions on the road, yet she continued to insist on travelling deeper into Tibet. She would hug me and say that only when she had gone as far as she could would she be able to return home with me. I didn’t question this, because I had come to see that I should never have tried to apply my understanding of things to her. She was a different human being, after all. I made up my mind to accompany her on this journey, to the very end, and then bring her back home with me. I told myself that I was being selfless, and what I was doing was for love. So I believed her unconditionally, or at least kept that facade, when she came racing back to the farmhouse, on the second night we spent at the village, and told me about the world she had plunged into.

  ‘She said, with her eyes wide, that she had met a creature, a man with the body of a fish, near the river. It wasn’t big but it wasn’t small either. It measured about a metre long, she told me, and it was swimming in the air, just high enough for her not to be able to reach it. Behind the creature, there was darkness. At first, the darkness resembled black curtains drawn across an unlit stage, and the creature was whirling in front of it, under the spotlight. After a moment, once her eyes adjusted, she could faintly discern the movement of water. The creature turned away from her and swam into the water behind, and your mother, fearless as she was, followed.

  ‘Inside, it was black and infinite, she recalled, as though she was at once trapped in the core of the earth but also floating freely in outer space. Though this was an inaccurate description, she added, because the real sensation of being in those waters was incomparable to anything else she could imagine. I prodded for more, and finally, after many stuttering attempts at giving me an answer, she arrived at the conclusion that her reality had become nothing but water. This baffled me even more.

  ‘How did she get out? I wanted to know.

  ‘“I just swam,” she told me.

  ‘Where did the creature go? Were there other creatures? If it was a sea, I reasoned, there must have been other organisms.

  ‘“The creature disappeared as soon as I entered,” she responded. “And then there was nothing at all, not a single fish. Not even light. It was the most frightening yet beautiful experience.”

  ‘The following day, she gathered the villagers and told them what had happened. She wanted to see if others had seen it too. Most of her audience were just as perplexed as I was. The children listened intently as if being told a fairy tale, but left to play as soon as she finished. But one man became particularly fascinated. He was a bald man with a piercing look, about sixty or so, who claimed that he had been searching for what he called “the world of water” for as long as he could remember. The villagers addressed him as Grandpa. All day long, Grandpa followed your mother and asked her questions. What did the creature look like? What did she mean, man’s head and fish’s body? So your mother began making these sculptures for him, carving them out of anything she could find around the village.

  ‘“Here,” she would tell him. “This looks about right.”

  ‘Your mother and Grandpa marched down to the river every night in search of the world of water, but not a single time did they come across it or the creature again. Disappointed, they’d return to the farmhouse early in the morning, sit around the table, and carve more of these sculptures while discussing this new world that had been forced into our lives.

  ‘Once, while they were carving, I asked Grandpa how he had come to know about this world. He told us that in the mountains where he was from, there used to be an abundance of wild tulips. Unlike the ones we knew, these tulips had larger petals. They’d all bloom overnight and occupy entire fields, and then they would all wither together again, as if they were nothing but a fleeting dream. Rarely would you spot two different-coloured tulips in the same field. The beauty of it all was difficult to put into words, he said wistfully.

  ‘The first time Grandpa heard about the world of water, he was still a child. Someone had tripped on a rock amidst a field of white tulips and tumbled into that world. The man came back shivering, frightened like a beaten dog. After that day, the man who fell into the world of water would never again leave the farmhouse alone. If he had to go somewhere, he would take a yak with him. Whenever that man was forced to remember the world of water, all he said was, It’s black, it’s black. However, none of this frightened young Grandpa. He felt that an invisible string had been woven during the years of his past life and the lives before that, and that the purpose of his current life was to continue extending the string. He made up his mind to look for the world of water. To him, it was not even a choice, but a destiny of some sort.

  ‘As the years passed, the man who had seen the world of water died, and people gradually forgot about the entire thing. Grandpa, however, wen
t to the tulip fields every day. Until one particular sorrowful year, when the tulips didn’t grow. Not a single one. The year that happened, Grandpa had just turned thirteen and lost all his family members in a kitchen fire. It was as if the tulips had taken with them everything from his life, and he came to understand what it meant to be truly alone, and the fact that life was ever-changing. He sat in the mountains for three days and three nights, staring at the bare fields, hearing the wolves howl up at the moon.

  ‘Then he left, in search of the one last thing that he still had – the world of water.

  ‘“Why did you stop here?” we asked him.

  ‘“It felt like home,” Grandpa answered.

  ‘Afterwards, your mother and I began gathering tulips for a few days. We took our motorbike and spent all our mornings out in the mountains, searching for those wild flowers. To our surprise, these tulips were not rare, and we were able to find quite a large quantity of them. Just as in Grandpa’s memory, they grew densely, filling up entire fields. Your mother picked anything she came across – white, yellow, red, blue, purple, you name it. As long as it was a tulip, she brought it home with her. We filled the room up with these beautiful flowers.

  ‘But things took an unexpected turn. I could never have imagined that one rainy afternoon, in that little Tibetan village, amid the honey-like scent of blooming tulips, I would lose my entire world.

  ‘That day, your mother woke up from a nap and found herself submerged in the world of water. I was there in the room too, but there’s a blank white spot in my memory. No matter how hard I try to think back to that afternoon, all I remember is the two of us going to bed for a nap, and the mist blanketing over the village. Then what I recall, clear as the sound of a trumpet, is the moment when I opened my eyes and saw the tears all over your mother’s face, the blood oozing from the cuts on her arms, and the knife she held at her throat.