The Bathing Women (14 page)

Teacher Tang, Tang Jingjing. Tiao remembered that denouncement meeting—the smell—how Teacher Tang, thin and white as a toothpick, knelt to walk to the teacup that held shit. She thought that it had been because Teacher Tang didn’t want Fei to be denounced with her. She ate the contents of the cup because she didn’t want Fei to be insulted in public. She also remembered how she rinsed her own mouth and brushed her teeth after she got back that day.

“There was a denouncement meeting,” Fei continued.

“I attended that denouncement meeting,” Tiao said.

“My mum hanged herself later.”

“Were you there that day?” Tiao asked.

“I was.”

Tiao had originally wanted to ask, “What about your dad? Where is your dad?” But she didn’t. She recalled that at the denouncement meeting, which seemed so long ago, people with angry, pale faces demanded in harsh tones that Teacher Tang tell whose child Fei was. But no one knew who her father was because Teacher Tang had never married. Because she had never married, people were especially intent on identifying the child’s father. She remembered the big sign hanging over Teacher Tang’s chest, which read “I’m a female hooligan.” If an unmarried woman who gave birth to a child was a female hooligan, then a married woman with children who had a man besides her children’s father must be a whore. Whore or female hooligan, which was worse? Tiao thought hard about these sad things, but they only got jumbled up in her mind. She knew she couldn’t ask anyone to untangle them for her, but that twelve-year-old head only came to one conclusion: that Fei was more unfortunate than she was. Although Fei had just slapped her, nothing could stop them from becoming good friends.

They stood there blankly for a while, and then it was Fei who broke the silence. She wiped her tears and waved her hand at Tiao. “Follow me. Let’s buy something delicious to eat.”

They went to Old Ma’s Spiced Meat Shop. In the mid-sixties, the shop had changed its name to Innovations. Fei spent six cents on two marinated rabbit heads and handed Tiao one of them. Now the movie came back to Tiao, and she knew her chance had come. She curled her lips and said to Fei, “Thanks. Fascists’ humanitarianism, I know.”

Fei started to laugh, this time from her heart. “Go to hell with your fascists!” she said to Tiao. “I bought the marinated rabbits’ heads for their ears—crispy, tasty, and crunchy when you chew on them. Listen. Listen to it.”

Crispy, tasty, and crunchy.

“I have never eaten a rabbit’s head and I’m not going to eat one now.”

“Don’t you dare refuse,” said Fei.

Tiao looked at the rabbit’s head, bit off half of the ear, and chewed. It was true; it was indeed crispy, tasty, and crunchy. Many years later, when Fei was sick and really wanted to nibble on a rabbit’s head, Tiao searched all over Fuan in vain. The snack had gone out of fashion; its shape and surprisingly cheap price were like a dream. A rabbit’s head for three cents, the price of a popsicle; had such a thing really existed in this world? They both chewed on the crispy, tasty, and crunchy rabbit ears; Tiao’s mouth got extremely messy. She looked at Fei, whose lips were still so bright and clean. Anyone could see that she treated her mouth especially well and that she really knew how to eat. With anything that entered her mouth, she was very careful, but not with what came out, like what she had said about Tiao’s mum.

2

Before she met Fei, Tiao was often lonely at school. Fuan was a different place from Beijing. The teachers here asked the students to use Mandarin in class, but after class everyone spoke Fuan dialect, including the teachers. Tiao, as a newcomer, had been called on twice to read aloud; the teacher complimented her standard, clearly pronounced Mandarin and fluent reading, which made a lot of girls jealous. She wanted to participate in their activities: hopscotch, rubber-band jumping, jump rope, sandbag toss, and sheep-bone grab, but they didn’t let her. “What is that language that you’re talking?” they asked. “We don’t get it.” They said “thayat” instead of “that” and “doan” instead of “don’t.” And even the “o” in “don’t” sounded more like a combination of “ah” and “oh.” So “don’t” came out in a drawl. They talked to her in a thick provincial accent, pretending they didn’t understand her even though they knew perfectly well what she was saying, and then they accused her of playing high and mighty with them. Although she was disdainful of the strange Fuan dialect, she feared being left out and was desperate to join the group. She tried to change her pronunciation, but it was awkward and strange, making them laugh in her face and discouraged her from talking at all. She kept to herself quietly, waiting for the days to drag on and the bell to ring at the end of the last class.

But even her silence didn’t satisfy them. They saw it as a challenge that made them feel more uncomfortable than her begging to join their group. So they tried to provoke her. They often came up behind her suddenly when she was sitting at her desk staring into space and shouted, “Hey, do you have mung bean cake? Do you have mung bean cake?” She was confused and didn’t know how to respond. But their expressions were urgent, as if they were expecting to grab a mung bean cake from her hand immediately. So she would hurriedly answer, “No, I don’t have mung bean cake.”

“Oh, really, now, you don’t have mung bean cake!” they would exclaim.

“Do you have egg cake? Do you have egg cake?” they would ask immediately.

“No, I don’t have egg cake,” she would answer again sincerely.

“Oh, really now, after all this you don’t have egg cake!” they would exclaim.

They were so pleased with themselves for making her fall for their tricks that they broke into squeals of laughter. It was so much fun that they kept it up all day long, repeatedly asking her for mung bean cake or egg cake. Tiao finally caught on, but she didn’t really appreciate this kind of “cleverness” and didn’t think their antics were funny. She believed this sort of clowning was low-class and she looked down on them, although she herself didn’t have any highbrow jokes as a comeback.

She also didn’t like the hairdo popular in Fuan then: two plaits, tight and low, starting at the earlobe, and so short that, seen from the front, they seemed to stick out of the cheeks like the two legs of an alarm clock, which was why the style was called Little Alarm Clock. She wore the Little Alarm Clock style for a few days, so that she could look like her classmates, though her mother said this provincial hairstyle did nothing for her; it didn’t make her look younger or older, nor did it make her look more like a country girl or a city girl. Wu hauled her in front of the mirror and said, “Look at yourself.” She told Tiao to change her hair immediately, even if it meant wearing common pigtails, tied with rubber bands. Tiao shared her mother’s opinion on the subject, puzzled at why such an ugly style would become popular in Fuan. She changed her hair from Little Alarm Clock to pigtails as if to announce her determination to be different, to stand on her own. Then Fei entered her life. Fei didn’t wear the Little Alarm Clock hairstyle and didn’t drawl. On the contrary, she grew her hair to the maximum length allowed back then—shoulder-length. She wore her plaits loosely, and had her fringe curling wildly on her forehead, giving her the look of a revolutionary fighter, a combination of languor and high spirits. She taught Tiao the trick of curling her fringe—wetting the hair before bedtime, and then rolling it on black steel clips, round and round, one after another. When the clips came off the next morning, the fringe would be curled like a perm and last the whole day.

Tiao performed the experiment with her fringe and they did curl, and she looked at herself in the mirror and felt she resembled a doll she’d had in childhood, so cute and lively. She was afraid to go to school with a curled fringe, so she could only demonstrate at home in front of Fan. Fan said happily, “Show off, new bride, / shake your butt from side to side. / Show off, foreign shrew, / hands on hips, strutting through.” She said this children’s rhyme in Fuan dialect, which was usually the way children shouted it at women who wore unusual clothes, something that people like Fei would often hear. In the middle school Fei attended, she heard worse words than these. Had such words been applied to Tiao, she would have killed herself, but Fei could scoff at words. She poked at her face and said to Tiao, “My skin is thicker than a city wall. Hmm, I would like to see them try that stuff on me.” A loner with no friends, Fei played things light and loose, but she had a strength of her own, which attracted and inspired Tiao, making her feel there was something she could rely on. When she thought about the rejection of her classmates and their stupid pranks, she was glad to be left alone to drift around with Fei. When Tiao graduated from elementary school, she and Fei happened to be in the same middle school. They grew closer and saw each other more frequently.

The families who lived in the Architectural Design Academy were doing a side job now, binding
The Selected Works of Chairman Mao
. The book was eight-by-ten and used high-quality, extra-white dictionary paper, and fine strong nylon thread. The families stitched the pages into covers with the nylon thread, and they were paid five cents per volume. The binding had originally been done at the printing factory, but since the book was in great demand at the time and the workload kept increasing, the factory outsourced part of the process, just as the foreign export trading units did in the nineties, giving embroidery and knitting to housewives. A woman in their complex worked in the factory, which was how the families got the job. They liked it very much; binding
The Selected Works of Chairman Mao
was a sacred task to begin with, not to mention the money they made. What’s more, the sewing also enriched their drab lives. When the job came in summer, groups of sewing women were all over the place, in front of the buildings and under the shade of trees. Old women with poor eyesight kept trying to get their grandchildren, just back from school, to help them thread needles and mark places in the books’ spines with the teeth of special small steel saws to make it easy to push the needles through. The scene was very peaceful, viewed from afar, a courtyard of women, old and young alike, burying their heads in sewing.

Women must embroider and sew, they must, to make a living, for their families, and even more, to suppress their wild natures. It served to kill spare time as well as to add colour to their pale lives. So when the flatbed tricycle pulled the unprocessed books into the complex, the adults and the children would cheer. Even Fan would use the ugly Fuan dialect to shout at the top of her lungs in front of the building, “The job’s here. The job’s here.” Really, what did the “job” have to do with her? Why was she always so enthusiastic about everything in the world? Was it because she was so enthusiastic as a child that she would become so angry as an adult, after she had gone to America?

Wu didn’t take on work like this herself, nor did she allow Tiao to participate. She had contempt for this kind of thing, and she didn’t plan to let her own children do child labour, which meant that Tiao had more free time. Whenever she passed the sewing crowds in the complex as she went to look for Fei, girls her own age or older were holding
The Selected Works of Chairman Mao
and attentively wrestling with needle and thread, along with their grandmothers, making asterisks of crisscrossed threads on the thick spines.

Tiao didn’t sew this “treasured red book,” nor did Fei. They were intent on other things, such as calling on pretty women. One day Fei said, “I want to take you to see the head nurse of internal medicine at People’s Hospital. I bet you’ve never seen anyone as good-looking as she is.” They went to the hospital and Fei pointed her out in the hallway of the internal medicine ward. She was probably about fifty years old then. A nun from the old society before 1949 who had worked in the church hospital, she had been suspected of being a spy and was no longer the head nurse. Her daily job now was to clean the hallway and the bathrooms of the ward. She wore old light blue clothes and was squatting by a wall to scrape saliva stains and spots of filth off it. When she sensed Tiao and Fei standing behind her, she turned her head to them.

What a beautiful face, Tiao thought, beauty from a bygone age. But what left a deep impression on Tiao was not the woman’s beauty, but her unusually serene expression. In the noisy, messy hallway of the internal medicine ward, she assumed a humble squatting position and faced a wall full of saliva stains. Grey hair clustered around her face, but she didn’t seem sad or worried. What made her treat spit stains with such care? Really such a beautiful face, looking up from the foot of a dirty wall, so serene and detached. Tiao never forgot that face.

They left the internal medicine ward and went out to walk in the courtyard. Besides having to work as a janitor, the woman often underwent denouncement. “But she doesn’t look like a spy at all,” Tiao observed.

“I don’t want to believe she is a spy, either,” said Fei, “but she confessed the passwords. They had passwords. My uncle told me that.”

“What are their passwords?” Tiao asked nervously.

Fei said, “When someone came to contact her, the head nurse would ask, ‘Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?’ The other one would answer, ‘From the ocean.’”

Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from? That was it; that was exactly the sort of thing spies would say. Although neither Tiao nor Fei knew what a spy’s passwords would be, they both felt the head nurse’s passwords fit. The words were so mysterious and romantic, yet shadowy and frightening at the same time, so erotic and tender, but also having the scent of death about them. They couldn’t help repeating them a few times. Fei lowered her voice and said to Tiao, “Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”

“From the ocean,” Tiao answered immediately, also lowering her voice.

“Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”

“From the ocean.”

They said the passwords back and forth several times, spellbound. Then they looked at each other and were suddenly frightened, as if they had turned into spies in the blink of an eye and would be drowned in the ocean of the people’s war. They looked around—there was no one nearby, but they took to their legs and ran as fast as they could, as if saying a spy’s passwords in a deserted place made them look suspicious and dangerous. They ran to the hospital’s outpatient department, which was dense with people. They manoeuvered through the crowd, but Tiao was not ready to leave yet; she wanted Fei to take her to see the head nurse one more time.