A Private Life Read online

  According to Mother, dying was a total destruction of life. There is no other kind of leaving that carries us as far away; there is no other kind of renunciation that is as final; there is no other kind of forsaking of relatives and friends that is as thoroughgoing. Death is the irreversible termination of life.

  Lying on my bed, I felt like I had been forced to don long, brocade burial robes, which try as I might I could not take off. I stared through the window at a night sky that was as clear as a limpid blue pool, while my heart sent blasts of tropical heat and arctic cold racing through my veins. I didn't want to renounce anything; I didn't want to forsake my mother, nor Widow Ho, whom I liked so much. Why would I want to die? Of course, being able to get away from Mr. Ti and my father was the one thing that made death attractive to me. But still, I didn't want to die.

  I didn't dare go into my parents' room to wake them, so I lay there alone, a victim of my mind's wild imaginings.

  … Hearing about death was like listening to some ear-piercing musical instrument, the sound as shrill as glass or as hard as metal. With one click of the latch, the door would be shut, and I would be forsaken by the world around me.

  At that moment, my corpse dropped abruptly out of the darkness onto the bed beside me and lay next to me as cold as ice. I rolled away from her and looked at her huge eye sockets in the obscuring darkness, but those despairing eyes refused to look at me. Her lips moved ceaselessly, but she refused to talk to me. She was sneezing repeatedly, but the sound was very strange. Her sneezes sounded like those of our former dog, Sophia Loren.

  After a while she got so restless that she got up from the bed and started pacing back and forth in the room, like a shadow moving along a wall. Her intangible image flickered waveringly with no apparent left or right or front or back, seeming to move in a space of infinite dimensions. Whatever she wanted to see, she could see.

  After strolling about the room alone for some time, my corpse came up to me. Suddenly she smiled and asked how I was. She said that she didn't like graves, that she liked to wander through cedar forests. For some reason, I wanted to reach out and touch her bosom to see if she was still breathing, but when I did so I discovered that she did not have breasts. I was filled with terror, but at the same time couldn't bring myself to ignore or abandon her…

  Only when the sky began to lighten did I finally drop off into a fitful sleep.

  In the morning, Mother was astonished when she came in to get me up and saw how pale and distraught I was. She couldn't understand how such a change could take place in just one night.

  Putting her hand on my forehead, she asked, "Niuniu, are you sick?"

  I said, "Mama, is the lady next door going to die?"

  This perplexed Mother even more. She had no idea what had happened.

  I said, "Mama, I'm going to die too. I've got cancer too." Then I started to cry, my tears gushing down like a midsummer deluge.

  Mother started examining my breasts, and indeed found what seemed to be a hard little lump. I pulled back, saying, "It hurts."

  In disbelief, Mother said, "Who ever heard of a child having breast cancer?" But even as she said it she started to look upset.

  That morning I didn't go to school as usual, because Mother took me to the hospital.

  At that time there were no physiology classes in school, so we were not like today's adolescents who learn about the sexual development and maturity of, and differences between, males and females in their regular sex education classes. Although I was almost the same height as my mother, my awareness and knowledge of sexuality were abysmal. My mother refused to accept that I was growing up and continued to treat me as a child.

  In the obstetrics ward at the hospital, most of the women coming and going were expectant mothers with stomachs swollen like drums. One woman about to give birth was stretched out face upward on a high, hard bed. Her bare stomach looked like a huge white drum that had been pumped so full of gas that it was ready to burst. A middle-aged male doctor was pressing here and there all over her stomach as he asked her questions. I was waiting off to one side, terribly afraid that her stomach would split from the pressure of his hand.

  When it was my turn, Mother took great pains to explain my condition to him.

  He had a very thin face, wide-set eyes, and a very offhand manner. His thin face made his large mouth look huge, which only served to make his disapproval more obvious.

  I was too bashful to undo my blouse in front of a strange man, but since he asked me to, I did so. Very casually, but with meticulous thoroughness, he felt my breasts; then he laughed at my mother as if mocking her and said, "There's nothing wrong with her. She's entering puberty."

  My mother said, "But she says she has some pain."

  A bit impatiently, the doctor said, "You're a woman, surely you've gone through puberty yourself. This is quite normal."

  After that, perhaps realizing how he had behaved, he asked in a friendly tone, "How old is she?"

  Mother told him.

  He replied, "She's noticeably thin for a girl her age. You should make sure she eats more nutritiously."

  The examination for my "illness" over, both Mother and I heaved a sigh of relief as we left the antiseptic-laden air of the hospital.

  In the little shop at the hospital entrance, in an instant response to the doctor's admonition, Mother bought me a bottle of yogurt and a ham sausage to make sure I ate more nutritiously, as if I would start getting fat the moment I ate them.

  I was eating all the way home.

  As I walked, images of Widow Ho's pale breasts, like a pair of plump peaches, hovered vaguely in my mind.

  7 Yi Qiu…

  Her father let her be born in a "zoo." With her amazing adaptability she was able to flourish within this "cage" and learned through experience the pleasures of the hunter and the hunted… She stands at the paling with one hand supported on her buttocks and the other one clamped over her mouth. Her voice is submerged within her own body. She has no history.

  When I was fourteen, I finally found among my classmates a companion who enjoyed talking to me. We got to know each other after Mr. Ti put us together in a summer vacation study group.

  Yi Qiu and I were the only members in our little group. She had contracted infantile paralysis as a child, and though one of her legs was normally developed, the other was skinny as a broomstick and a bit shorter in length, which made her walk with an exaggerated shuffle, her plump buttocks swinging back and forth, rather like a supple and nimble-footed orangutan. She was unusually tall and sturdy, and her rambling gait always announced her approach before she appeared in the doorway.

  Yi Qiu was three years older than me. When she was seven, she didn't enter primary school like most children her age. Instead, her uncle took her to a small town in the north for medical treatment. There was a folk doctor who was supposed to be able to restore normal movement to the atrophied limbs of his patients by regularly rubbing into them a thick medicinal ointment. But after two years of treatment, Yi Qiu's crippled leg showed no sign of recovery. Eventually her uncle couldn't afford to have the treatments continued, and she returned home.

  Although she was only three years older than me, Yi Qiu was already a fully developed, sexually aware young woman. She was amply bosomed, with full breasts that trembled with each step she took. They pushed upward so vigorously under her thin Dacron T-shirt that people around her were afraid that if she should start laughing or breathe heavily, the shirt would burst. In short, there was no way they were to be concealed.

  But as fortune kindly had it, Yi Qiu had no desire to conceal her ample breasts. I could tell from the way she behaved that she took pleasure in her own sensuality. It is almost impossible to explain a feeling that I sensed in her – that she, in fact, deliberately took advantage of her sexuality to entice men into illicit and obscure doings. She swayed her hips in a suggestive mince and jutted out her buttocks erotically.

  Although Yi Qiu was awkward and clumsy in spee
ch and fat and ungainly, she had a strikingly beautiful face, with the large, gentle eyes of an antelope; long, thick, black eyebrows; and a milky white complexion suffused with a delicate pink glow. Setting off her beautiful oval face, her generous, eager mouth looked as if it were capable of swallowing down everything in this world – the pure and the polluted, the painful and the hideous. Her strong teeth could grind the sweetest song to dust, could crush the cruelest of tragedies to nothing.

  It seemed to me that Yi Qiu's face exhibited the nature of her intelligence. At the same time that it exuded a kind of stupidity, it was filled with a contradictory, stubborn brilliance that found its expression through her stupidity.

  ***

  I rode my bicycle as if it were a huge bird, alternately along a narrow road lined with trees and between the bare, gray walls of a long corridor. I wasn't the least bit worried about going too fast, because I knew the roads I was rushing down were in my dream; they were not the real roads of an early morning. The beech trees along the narrow road kept me feeling wonderfully cool, refreshed, and content. I noticed that the road looked very familiar. It was long and narrow and sloped consistently to the right. For the moment I couldn't figure out why it felt familiar.

  So I kept on going, entering a bare corridor with towering walls rising abruptly on either side. There was not a person to be seen, but the many dull red beams of light staring out from the cracks, like so many watchful eyes that had been set into the walls, filled me with fear. I had a vague feeling that this corridor was also strikingly familiar. It was a bit like the long, narrow passage from Mr. Ti's office to the front gate of our school, but it was somehow different. I was again puzzled because I couldn't account for this feeling of familiarity.

  After thinking about this for a long time, I eventually realized that in all these dreams I was riding a bicycle. I thought that when I came to the next street, when I entered the next tree-lined path, the next bare passageway, I would indeed be going down a real road that would take me to Yi Qiu's home in about seventeen minutes so we could start our lessons…

  Just at that moment the alarm clock went off.

  Opening my eyes, I jumped quickly out of bed and into my clothes, and grabbed something to eat as I dashed off to Yi Qiu's.

  In fact, I don't know how to ride a bicycle. I have a negative attitude toward modern, mechanized things.

  I was a bit surprised when I entered the courtyard of Yi Qiu's home because it was not at all like ours. In its spacious interior there was a single large structure, its wooden door and window frames in terrible disrepair, its dark red roof tiles askew, and its walls covered with a layer of green mold as a result of the humid wet season. It looked more like an empty workyard with an abandoned warehouse than a place where people actually lived.

  On the clothesline, I caught sight of a faded pink dress that belonged to Yi Qiu waving listlessly in the shade, so I knew this was definitely where she lived.

  Crossing the dark gray bricks of the courtyard, I brushed past some sunflowers slightly withered by the heat of the scorching sun and stopped before the old house.

  Standing there, I called, "Yi Qiu! Yi Qiu!"

  A space creaked open in the wall of the old house, and Yi Qiu poked her head out from behind the old wooden door that was weathered almost beyond recognition. She greeted me happily and invited me inside.

  When I entered the house, I saw that she was standing solidly and very erect in her bare feet on the uneven concrete floor, combing her hair. She was wearing a very ordinary short skirt with an embroidered hemline and the neckline of her blouse was cut very low. She was plaiting her hair into a long, thick braid, which she then coiled into a bun on the back of her head. Her sensual arms held high above her head in front of the mirror kept moving so that it was impossible for me to see her face in the mirror. From behind I could see that this dated, old-fashioned hairstyle in her hands had a wonderful new freshness and charm.

  When I looked around the large old house, I noticed that it contained a separate suite. The door was ajar, and I could see that it was dark inside and apparently had no windows. I could vaguely make out a military cot with some white bedding or clothes piled on it.

  The furnishings of the front room were totally dilapidated. There were two identical old-fashioned cabinets so tall that they almost touched the ceiling. In many places across their bottom sections, the finish had peeled away, revealing slivered white wood. It looked like the family once had a cat or a dog that left the scars sharpening its teeth or claws, and the bronze handle rings were mottled with patina.

  The concrete floor was swept clean enough, and a wooden chair, a rice pail, a flower stand, and some dirty clothes were scattered here and there around the room. There was not a single picture on the blank, yellowing walls, only some damp mildew stains that looked like blossoming green flowers.

  I was surprised to see a battered collection of books that reached halfway to the ceiling in the corner behind me. Nothing there had been cleaned, and the dust lay like a thick blanket over the books. It was obvious that the owner of the house had been a book lover, but I had known for a long time that Yi Qiu had lost her parents very early in life and had been brought up by her uncle. Now, she lived by herself.

  I wasn't sure where I should sit, so I turned back to watching Yi Qiu comb her hair in front of the mirror. Looking over her left shoulder, I could see her milk-white reflection in the mirror, her arms raised as if she were running wildly. Though I could not see those eyes that were capable of flashing fire, I was nonetheless aware that the image in the mirror was at the height of its youth and vigor.

  After a while, I dragged the single wooden chair, which was very sturdy despite its peeling paint, over to the table. Then I sat down, opened my exercise book, and without much enthusiasm started writing.

  When Yi Qiu finished fixing herself up, she swayed over to me on her crippled leg, accompanied by the cool peppermint smell of prickly heat powder. She sat on the bed facing me, the table between us, and then she too opened her exercise book.

  The two of us had never really talked to each other during class. Because she was two years older than her classmates, and crippled as well, they all made fun of her, even imitating the strange way she hobbled along. But she never got angry, not even when they made her the brunt of their jokes. She appeared to be even more delighted than they were and couldn't stop laughing.

  Though she had opened her exercise book, she hadn't started to do her lessons. Rather, she sat there staring at me.

  After a while she said, "Ni Niuniu, how come you never say anything?"

  I looked up and laughed bashfully.

  I said that I never knew what to say.

  Yi Qiu said, "If you lose the use of one leg, then you're a cripple; if you lose the use of both legs, then you become an immortal. You can fly."

  I didn't really understand what she was trying to say, so I didn't answer.

  "There is a kind of hunger that is the same as time. The longer you suffer it, the more it makes you think," she said.

  When I still didn't respond, she continued her conversation with herself. "When we're talking to an ox – a 'niu' – we can't use the language of dogs."

  I knew that in class Yi Qiu would often laugh uproariously when there was nothing to laugh at, and would frequently say strange things that didn't seem to make any sense. Because she was crippled and because she was older, nobody took her strange talk seriously or paid much attention to her. And even though I was outside the group, I too, of course, didn't know what it was she was trying to say.

  I became aware that she was continuing her one-sided dialogue. "One bird makes music, many birds make noise."

  After talking for a long time without any response from me, she got bored and turned to her exercise book.

  The room became silent for a time, the only sound the quiet scratching of our pens.

  A short while later, unable to bear the isolation, Yi Qiu spoke up again. "Ni Niuniu, to te
ll the truth, it's wonderful to be like you are. Speech is a tangled mess of leaves; only silence is a tree with a solid heart. Too many leaves impede a tree's growth."

  I felt that the things she had to say were truly interesting. How could it be that I hadn't found out earlier how much she liked to talk?

  I looked up from my exercise book and smiled at her, saying, "I like listening to you talk."

  She laughed joyfully, her breasts shaking in rhythm.

  Then lowering her voice she said softly, "Ai, do you know why Teacher Ti put just the two of us together as a study group?"

  I thought about it for a while, then said, "No."

  She said, "Because you and I have something in common."

  I felt surprised. "You and I? Something in common? What?"

  Though I really had no idea what Yi Qiu and I might have had in common, I ventured, "The only thing different about us and them is our ages: I'm a year younger than the other students, and you're two years older."

  She gave a sigh and said, "We are not accepted by the rest of them. We're not part of the group. We're like two strangers standing on the outside. They ignore us."

  At this point, I expressed my disagreement. "But we're not the same," I said. "With me, it's because I don't like them." The implication was that it wasn't because they didn't like me.

  My pride was asserting itself.

  Yi Qiu said, "Your not liking them is the other face of their not liking you. In the end they're the same thing."

  "I don't think they're the same."

  But even as I spoke, my conviction was already weakening underneath. In my mind, I went over her words again and again. In the end, I was convinced that she was right and made no more objections.

  At that point, I suddenly felt that although Yi Qiu gave the appearance of being a sensual and empty-headed fool, in fact, she was the more intelligent of the two of us.