The Bathing Women (15 page)

They came to the internal medicine ward again and the head nurse was still squatting by the wall, scraping with a small knife. Though this time Tiao’s desire to see her was even stronger than before, she didn’t dare get too near. The passwords proved the woman was an actual spy, and Tiao was a little panicked. She suddenly felt that the reason for them to keep coming to see her was to respond to the password. The head nurse would take them by surprise by turning that seemingly serene face to them and say, “Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”

They would answer: “From the ocean.”

They eventually left before the head nurse turned around. Tiao sighed, saying she didn’t believe the serene expression on the head nurse’s face was fake. What she didn’t know was that the head nurse had actually made up the passwords when the torture became unbearable, and she was willing to confess to anything to make her confession convincing. The passwords she made up were so poetic; she satisfied people’s curiosity with these poetic fantasies and was regarded as a spy forever.

3

Then Youyou came into their lives. Youyou was not the mermaid’s fishing net, and she didn’t come from the ocean; she was in the same class as Tiao.

She’d got into trouble almost as soon as she entered middle school. She was called on by her language arts teacher to recite Chairman Mao’s quotations by heart. Memorizing and copying Chairman Mao’s quotations was a part of the language arts classes then. She had to memorize the part about revolution: “A revolution is not inviting friends to dinner, not writing an essay …” She stood up and recited by heart: “A revolution is inviting friends to dinner, is …” “Stop! Stop!” said the teacher. Youyou stopped and found her classmates were all covering their mouths and laughing. The teacher knocked on the desk with a bamboo pointer and said, “What are you laughing at? Meng Youyou, do you know you recited Chairman Mao’s quotation wrong?” Youyou nodded her head and said she knew, but when the teacher asked her to start again she just couldn’t open her mouth anymore. She was so afraid she might get it wrong again. Because she refused to open her mouth, the teacher had no choice but to let her sit down. What if she had got it wrong again? Who would be held responsible for such an incident? Probably not Meng Youyou; she was only thirteen. The teacher would have to take responsibility. From then on, the teacher never called on Youyou in class again; she believed the child was either stupid or actually retarded.

Tiao and Youyou took the same route home from school. Soon Tiao discovered that Youyou lived in the same complex as she did. They hadn’t met before because they had not been in the same elementary school, and now that she found that they were in the same class and complex, Tiao wanted to make an effort to get to know her. She didn’t look down on her at all, believing that even though reciting Chairman Mao’s quotations wrong was dishonourable, Youyou hadn’t done it on purpose. She was just a little careless. She also wanted to talk to her because Youyou spoke Beijing dialect, not Fuan. Tiao hurried after Youyou and called to her, “Hey, Youyou, wait a second.”

Her greeting sounded like an old friend’s, but the two hadn’t spoken before. Youyou, who was walking ahead of Tiao, stopped after she heard the greeting, waiting for Tiao as if she were an old friend. Youyou stood there, a thirteen-year-old with a tendency to put on weight, or, one could say, she was already a fat young girl. She had skin as smooth and pale as butter, short hair, and large breasts. Yet nothing about her seemed sexual, perhaps because of her innocent, cheerful face.

From the very beginning, they communicated with ease and needed no small talk because they instinctively liked the look of each other. They started from “Revolution is not inviting friends over for dinner.” Youyou said, “I’m actually not as stupid as the teacher thinks. Yes, I recited the quotation wrong, but think about it carefully: If revolution is not inviting friends over for dinner, what is revolution for?”

What is revolution for? This was a question that Tiao had never considered before. Now this Youyou who looked so carefree on the surface got her thinking. “Revolution …” Youyou said, “revolution at the very least ought to allow people to invite friends over for dinner.”

“But Chairman Mao said revolution was an uprising,” Tiao said.

“Exactly. If the people uprising don’t have food, how will they have strength to rise up?” Youyou said. “I’m afraid of being hungry—it scares me more than anything. If someone gives me a mouthful of food, I call him Grandpa.”

Tiao couldn’t help smiling, because of Youyou’s big heart, and because of her strange talk about revolution. Youyou pleased and surprised her. As they walked side by side, arriving at Building Number 6, Youyou had already put her cool, plump arm around Tiao’s shoulder. She whispered to Tiao, intimately and naturally, “Tiao, I really want you to know that I don’t blame our classmates for avoiding me. I’m a backward person. I just think the best thing to do is to sleep when your eyes are closed, and to eat when your eyes are open. So, guess what I want to be when I grow up? I want to be a chef. How much good stuff is there for a chef to do? A chef spends the day either treating people to food or eating it. Have you seen the movie called
Satisfied or Not Satisfied
? It’s about a chef. Someday I’ll put on the tall white cap that the chefs wear! Don’t tell anybody. I know you won’t.”

How clever and lovely you are, Youyou! Tiao thought. Although Tiao had never thought about becoming a chef when she grew up, her passion for food wasn’t any less than Youyou’s. She and Youyou shared the same dangerous tastes, but she could never express herself so thoroughly, so bluntly and truthfully, so … so corruptly and decadently. Right in the middle of a revolution that was an uprising: here they were, talking about giving a dinner party and wearing a chef’s white cap. This was the pursuit of the corrupt and decadent lifestyle of the bourgeois; this was corruption and decadence itself. Tiao couldn’t help agreeing with Youyou’s philosophy while at the same time criticizing herself in her heart. She very much wanted to enjoy corruption with Youyou secretly, to experience decadence secretly.

They reluctantly said goodbye to each other. Although Youyou lived in Building Number 2, the same one as Chen Zai, only four buildings away from Tiao, they still felt reluctant to part, a feeling that Tiao would never again experience with a friend in her life.

Youyou was going to give a dinner party. One day early in winter, after school, she invited Tiao to come to a banquet at her house on Sunday. She chose Sunday because she would be the only one home. Her parents were in the Reed River Farm, like Tiao’s father. Normally, her grandmother stayed with her, but Youyou’s aunt had recently given birth to a child and her grandma had gone to look after the baby, so Youyou was the only one left at home.

She was happy to stay home alone; first of all, she didn’t have to answer her grandma’s gabby, irrelevant questions. Grandma loved to listen to the radio, but she often misunderstood what was on it. The radio always broadcast the news of whom the great leader had just met, and that “the meeting took place in a cordial and friendly atmosphere.” Grandma would ask, “Youyou, how come this cordial and friendly meeting only lasted for seven minutes?” She also mistook Nixon for “onion” and said, “Youyou, how come they call a big shot like him an onion?” Now that Grandma was away, Youyou, with her intense devotion, could take over the kitchen.

People’s food back then was simple and boring, so their kitchens were bare and basic. Although born with a passion for food, Youyou hadn’t seen much by way of gourmet cooking, nor did she have much money. But even with a single yuan in her pocket, she had the confidence to invite friends for dinner.

She spent fifty cents to buy a piece of streaky pork. She sliced off the skin and cooked it on a low heat for several hours. When the skin quivered and turned fluffy and soft and the juice thickened, Youyou added soy sauce and chopped spring onions, set it aside to cool and congeal, and she had jelly from pork skin, a dish called pork skin aspic—done. She then diced the fatty pork, coated it in flour batter, and fried it in oil (the diced pork burned because there was not enough oil), and the fried crystal pork was done. To be eaten dipped in salt and pepper.

She fished out some dried wood-ear mushrooms and daylily buds from the kitchen cabinet, soaked them open, and used leftover pork to make muxi pork—another dish done.

She wanted to serve four dishes and a soup, so she spent two cents on a piece of pressed crabapple cake. She shredded white turnip and sliced the cake. White turnip mixed with red crab-apple cake, delicious even to the eye. She then made a bowl of dried shrimp soup with soy sauce. Now the banquet, for which she had spent a total of fifty-two cents, was complete. Lastly, she grilled a handful of rice noodles on the stove for decoration. This was her own invention and ahead of its time—clear rice noodles that would puff up and whiten after being grilled, nicely crunchy, like the puffed food that would become popular in the eighties.

Tiao came for the banquet and brought Fei along. Youyou felt honoured to have a great beauty like Fei at dinner. She believed the gourmet food she created was intended for someone like her, and only a great beauty was worthy of it.

The three of them sat down to enjoy Youyou’s cooking. At Fei’s suggestion, they even drank some wine, which was really water. When the girls heard that Youyou had spent only fifty-two cents on such a big table of gourmet food, they couldn’t help praising her as a culinary genius, a genius who could turn lead into gold. Fei gulped the wine, gobbled up the pork skin aspic and the turnip, and munched on the crispy rice noodles. She ate and drank until her body slumped and her eyes went hazy. Youyou and Tiao helped her lie down on the bed. She lay on her side with her face propped up on an elbow and said, “Youyou, you have a really nice place, I wouldn’t mind staying here forever.” She looked so pretty at that moment, like a princess or a queen, that Tiao and Youyou, who stood beside the bed, were willing to serve her with all their hearts.

When every scrap of food was gone, they started to discuss the menu for their next banquet. Tiao said, “My dad knows how to do a dessert called grilled miniature snowballs.” Youyou said, “Wait, wait, grilled miniature snowballs? That sounds wonderful. Just by the name I can tell it’s unusual. Who would have imagined? Can snowballs be grilled?” She wanted Tiao to tell her every detail of the recipe for grilled miniature snowballs, but Tiao couldn’t remember it all, so she promised Youyou she would look it up when she got home.

How exciting it would be to make grilled snowballs! It got Tiao enthusiastically searching for old magazines at home. Even though there were not many left, she remembered that when they moved from Beijing, Wu had kept a few copies of the Chinese edition of
Soviet Woman,
selling or discarding the rest. A magazine that Wu used to subscribe to,
Soviet Woman
introduced different styles of cooking, knitting, cosmetics and grooming, and fashion. Wu loved the knitting and fashion sections in the magazine—it was where she had found many of her jumper patterns—but had no interest in the food. When a holiday came, it was Yixun who created novelty dishes from the magazines. He successfully made the grilled snowballs, the magic of which Tiao would never forget. She came back to rummage through the books and magazines, taking advantage of Wu’s absence. Wu must have gone to People’s Hospital to see Dr. Tang, but Tiao found herself less concerned about that than she had been. It was definitely not because she’d become more accepting of Dr. Tang, but because she now had her own friends, friendships that were more important to her than the relationship between Wu and Dr. Tang.

She searched for the issues of
Soviet Woman
at home, and Fan, just back from school, helped her until they finally found them. Tiao knew that to carry around this kind of magazine was illegal, and that it would be subject to confiscation, which was exactly why she experienced the excitement and vigilance of a secret agent. She wrapped the magazines in newspapers, hid them in a big backpack, and then dragged Fan along with her to Youyou’s place.

She came through the door and signalled to Youyou to lock it behind her. Youyou bolted the door and tiptoed to sit beside Tiao, patiently waiting for her to show her the
Soviet Woman
magazines. Tiao opened the backpack, took one of the illustrated magazines out of the newspaper wrapping, turned to a page, and read aloud, word for word: “Nothing could be better than following your holiday lunch with a delicious, easily digested dessert like grilled miniature snowballs.

“Mix powdered sugar and citric acid into egg white that has been beaten into foam, then dip a soup spoon in cold water, scoop up the egg white batter, one spoonful at a time, and drop into the boiling milk. Don’t let the balls stick together. These balls of egg white and citric acid will then absorb some milk and react chemically with it to form miniature snowballs. Cook the snowballs for three minutes, gently scoop them up with a straining ladle, and then put them in a colander. When the miniature snowballs dry, serve on a plate with syrup. Take care not to let them stick together.

“Syrup: Carefully mix egg yolk and sugar and beat well. Add a soup spoon of flour and pour the batter into boiling milk. Keep stirring as it cooks, until the syrup begins to thicken. Add vanilla, stir, set aside to cool.

“To make miniature snowballs, you’ll need two egg whites, 30 cubic centimetres of sugar powder, 30 cubic centimetres of citric acid, and 200 cubic centimetres of milk. To make the syrup, you’ll need 100 cubic centimetres of milk, 100 cubic centimetres of sugar, and one egg yolk. The quantity of vanilla will vary according to taste.”

What Tiao read aloud struck Youyou with awe. Although many things in the recipe, such as vanilla, citric acid, and sugar powder, were mysterious to her, she had the superior intuition of the world’s gourmets. Her intuition involved her sense of smell, taste, and touch, and allowed her to come to the conclusion that the grilled miniature snowballs must be full of flavour, rich, mellow, and delicious. Her pork skin aspic and fried crystal pork were nothing compared to the snowballs; they were not on the same level—didn’t belong in the same world. But she was not intimidated; she believed she could make the dish. She asked what a cubic centimetre was, and Tiao said one cubic centimetre was a gram. Now Youyou became more confident—an experienced chef always pays attention to details. Her other questions concerned where she could find the ingredients. Youyou didn’t drink milk, and there were only egg, sugar, and flour in her house. Tiao said, “That’s no problem. We still have citric acid and vanilla. We also have milk. Fan and I drink half a
jin
of milk every day, which we can save for snowballs. Doesn’t the magazine say it takes only three hundred cubic centimetres? Three hundred cubic centimetres are three hundred grams, not even a
jin,
which is five hundred. Fan, what do you think?”