The Bathing Women (32 page)

“So you’re not going to give me the windbreaker?”

“I don’t think I can.”

It was pretty much the first time that Tiao had said no to Fan. She said it very quickly but unambiguously. Feeling uncomfortable, Tiao didn’t know exactly what the trouble was. Maybe she had been wrong. Why couldn’t she give Fan whatever she liked? But she couldn’t.

Fan’s mood obviously darkened—she never tried to disguise her moods. The two of them sat there facing several empty yogurt bottles, not knowing what else to talk about. Changing the subject would have been a way to cheer things up, but they were even unable to do that. They were sisters and knew each other too well. Changing the subject is for people who are not related, but for sisters it would have been too artificial. They avoided each other’s gaze, sitting silently for a while, and then Fan glanced at her watch and said, “I should go.”

Tiao said, “Don’t forget your skirt.” Fan reluctantly picked up the new woollen skirt and stuffed it into her backpack carelessly, as if saying, A skirt isn’t enough, isn’t the equivalent of the windbreaker …

Some events out of the past are taboo subjects—and there can be many of these in families—like the incident of the windbreaker. Other things get brought up all the time, to hearty laughter. When the family spoke about Fan’s unusual gift for mimicry, they would always recall the way she imitated a relative with a stiff neck: she tensed up her neck but twisted it before she got to open her mouth, ending up with a stiff neck herself, and missing two days of school. When Tiao had to use a hot rolling pin to massage her neck, Fan said, in a Fuan accent, “Give me the rolling pin”—except the word for “pin” sounds the same as the word for “cabinet,” so it became “rolling cabinet.” It was Fan’s discovery that Fuaners pronounced “pin” like “cabinet.” These are the sorts of things that can be brought up anytime; they were part of her, a source of both her liveliness and her down-to-earth quality. Even after Fan became an American citizen, and was constantly in conflict with Tiao, her cold heart, which was also so fragile, would suddenly warm when these things from her teenage years came up.

However, it was just momentary warmth. To have lasting warmth didn’t seem like American behaviour to Fan, who had learned to be a perfect American citizen—drinking cold water, gulping down large quantities of coffee at work, using mint floss after meals, adding a lot of ice to Coca-Cola, taking a hot shower in the morning, washing shirts after wearing them only once, eating pork only occasionally, avoiding stir-frying food in the kitchen, driving skillfully (particularly when backing up the car), visiting a dentist regularly, taking vitamins—absolutely no quilt nest for the bed, and the fewer covers, the better … She was the kind of person who could quickly adapt to her environment, or, to put it another way, she was eager to adapt to David quickly.

David had never said he didn’t love Fan; he continued to call her “my little sweet pea.” But not too long after they got married, he began an affair with a German woman, an old friend who was ten years older than he was. His getting married didn’t stop them from having a relationship. If he loved Fan, what was this affair with the German woman all about? It was something that Fan couldn’t tolerate, particularly since she lived in America. If it were in China, instead of fighting with her husband she could go back to her parents’ home and complain, or turn to her friends for help. But she lived in America, where her parents didn’t, and she had no really close friends. Her fluent English removed the obstacles to communication with anyone in this land, but language couldn’t do anything about the obstacles in the heart. And the obstacle was in her heart. When David was seeing the German woman, she realized for the first time that she didn’t belong in this country. She was a foreigner and would never be able to understand all the mysteries of what happened in the United States of America between David and his German girlfriend. She had had heated arguments with David, and called him “son of a bitch” without any difficulty, but her screaming only drove David to see his girlfriend more frequently. He didn’t want to divorce Fan, because his girlfriend already had a husband.

Fan never told any of this to her family in China; the hurt of having nowhere to complain was something she brought on herself. Like someone who had a disease, Fan suffered from after-effects. David’s unfaithfulness made her emphasize particularly in her letters how deeply they loved each other, despite the fact that she felt very confused about David. No one knew better than Fan that it was almost impossible for an Asian and a Westerner to understand each other completely, even if they had been a happy couple all their lives. Sixty percent’s worth of a mutual understanding was good enough. Fan was unwilling to admit this, but her life led her inexorably to this conclusion, a conclusion that she couldn’t share with others, because she wanted to seem a winner. She wanted her family to recognize that she, indeed, lived a better life than they did.

But what about the after-effects of her disease? They controlled her, making her fear for no reason. She instinctively sensed David’s attraction to older women, so she had to be vigilant against all older women, including Tiao, who was six years older than both she and David. She was sure not to put Tiao’s pictures on display, just a childhood picture of them, in which Tiao knitted her brows and seemed very unhappy while Fan laughed foolishly. David asked her, “Why don’t you have a recent picture of your sister? I’d like to see her pictures now. Didn’t she send us some?” Fan explained that she liked to reminisce about the past, that only childhood pictures could bring her back to the past, her past in China.

Ah, her past in China.

When Fan’s confidence reached its lowest point, she even refused to go back to China with David. To have David screw the German woman in their house would have been preferable to returning to China with him. She was so afraid that she couldn’t bear to hear Tiao invite David enthusiastically in English, “You would be so welcome to come home!” She held on to the extension and interrupted Tiao’s conversation with David, “Older sister, your accent is horrible. Where did you learn your English?” She ended the conversation between Tiao and David by criticizing Tiao’s accent; she’d almost shouted for Tiao to shut up. Fan’s rude interruption annoyed David. They quarrelled after they put down the phone. David said, “I have the right to talk to anyone I want to. You shouldn’t interrupt our conversation.”

Fan said, “I didn’t interrupt you and her. I was just encouraging my sister to speak more English. She’d made some progress.”

David sneered. “You were not encouraging her; you were ridiculing her.”

“You don’t even know Chinese. How can you talk such crap?”

“I can understand your tone—it was unfriendly—besides, your voice was so loud. You Chinese people talk loudly.”

“What’s wrong with being loud? Since you know we Chinese talk loudly anyway, then you can’t draw the conclusion that a loud voice means an unfriendly tone.”

“I stand by what I said about your tone a moment ago. I know you.”

“You know me? You could never know me if you tried the rest of your life.”

“Don’t say that. Don’t say the rest of your life.”

“The rest of your life … the rest of your life … the rest of your life.”

David suddenly laughed and said, “Let’s make up.” Maybe he did love Fan; there were simply a lot of things that he didn’t understand about his Chinese wife. For instance, he had no idea why Fan wouldn’t allow him to return to China with her. He hadn’t been back to China for five years. Back then he was an intern in his father’s agency in Beijing and learned a few simple Chinese sentences, of which he could remember only one, “Have some cola.” He genuinely wanted to revisit China and see his wife’s parents and his sister-in-law.

2

Tiao waited for Fan at Beijing International Airport. Not yet the vice director of the Children’s Publishing House, she was the managing editor at the main editorial office. The story of her and Fang Jing had become entirely a thing of the past, which meant a genuine release for her from the misery of that love. She’d needed to rest and to heal, to “recover,” and only complete release could have brought recovery. Maybe all women capable of love have the ability to “recover,” like the range grass, full of exuberant life: “Even the fires that sweep the prairie cannot kill the long grass, / which rises once again in the light winds of spring.”

Tiao recovered.

For those few years of her recovery, she channelled all her energy and intelligence into her work. Focused and clear-thinking, with an inner calm, she succeeded in making substantial profits for the publishing house. Her tears no longer dropped into the desk drawer and her appearance slowly began to improve. Was there still some opportunity lying ahead of her? She seemed to be waiting, with the composure of the experienced and the anticipation of the persistent. Except now, with her understanding that real happiness couldn’t be won by struggle, she no longer had the heart to compete. Sometimes she would think about a girl she had seen in the post office. It was during the National Day break, when she went to the post office bank to withdraw some money. There were a lot of people waiting in line, and she was standing near the end and overheard a girl’s telephone conversation. She didn’t want to admit she was eavesdropping; in fact, at first she was just looking absently at the girl’s back. Judging from her back, the girl on the pay phone seemed to come from the countryside—the way she plaited her hair and stood, the strength in her stance, and the hand that held the phone—all evidence of her country background. She was healthy and a little ungainly, not all that comfortable in her skin. The content of her phone conversation established that she was a student, at college or technical school, which meant she must have got into a school in Fuan through her exam results. Apparently the person she was talking to was male, and Tiao heard the girl ask in country-accented Mandarin, “How many days off does your school give?” The other person answered, and the girl said, “We get three days off, too. I don’t plan to go home, do you?” The other person apparently said no, and the girl said happily, “That’s great. Come to our school and have some fun.” The other person refused, and the girl started to work on him. It was then that Tiao started to pay attention, eavesdropping on the conversation.

To Tiao the girl now seemed more nervous than earlier, with her right arm clenched closer to her body, as if something under her armpit urgently needed to be held in place. She kept feeding coins into the slot to get more minutes, and her back looked quite uncomfortable. She said, “Come on, everyone in our dorm is gone and it’ll be a fun time. What? You need to prepare for the exam? No, no, I want you to come …” While saying this, the girl started to wriggle slightly, which made Tiao a little uneasy but also supported her impression that the person on the other end of the phone was a man. The girl obviously was using an unfamiliar strategy to entice the man, repeating, “No, no, no, just come. There won’t be anyone else in our dorm, no, no …” Now persuasion turned to earnest invitation, to begging, to mumbling, to … to what? In the end she composed herself with some difficulty, trying to adopt a casual tone. “No problem. You don’t have to apologize. I know exams are more important than having fun. Then, let’s plan to meet later. Okay, ‘bye …” But at the same time, Tiao noticed the hand that held the phone trembled, the knuckles pale. When she hung up the phone and rushed out, she was in tears. Tiao’s heart was full of sympathy for this strange girl with her pretence of unconcern. It was a moment that people hardly noticed, the noise and bustle of the post office covering the girl’s embarrassment. Tiao noticed but was unable to show the girl her sympathy, to tell her that she was not the only unhappy person in the world. Her phone call was undoubtedly aggressive, an effort to take over a man’s holidays. As long as the girl assumed an aggressive posture she was doomed to fail. In the past, Tiao had attempted to take over things; all young, energetic people had tried to conquer life, one way or another—it was naïve but not ridiculous.

Fan’s plane arrived. From far away, Tiao immediately singled out her younger sister, whom she hadn’t seen in five years, in the crowd waiting for luggage. Fan was much thinner than before, and with the scarlet wool coat she had on, which almost touched the floor, she appeared taller. She pushed a luggage cart over and they hugged. She didn’t look that well. Tiao had noted long ago that many Chinese from America didn’t look very healthy; their faces seemed to have turned browner among the hordes of white people. Even someone like Fan—who had a nice family and career, an MBA and a job at an international investment company—her privileged life still didn’t nurture her complexion. When she smiled, Tiao noticed the wrinkles around her eyes. She wasn’t quite thirty years old that year.

Compared to her, Tiao, this Chinese woman still a resident of her native land, shone. Fan couldn’t help saying with a sigh, “Older sister, I didn’t expect you to have grown even more … more attractive than before.”

“Do you really think so?” Tiao asked.

“I really think so,” Fan said. They left the terminal, came to the car park, and got into the Peugeot that Tiao had got from the Publishing House. Fan said, “I thought we were going to take the train home, like when I was in college.”

Tiao said, “We don’t have to do that anymore. See, I drove the car here.”

“Is this yours?”

“No, it belongs to the Publishing House.”

“Is the use of the Publishing House’s car part of your perks?”

“Not yet, but for special occasions it’s not a problem.”

“There is nothing like this in America,” Fan said. Tiao couldn’t tell whether Fan was envious or disapproving.

It was a ninety-seven kilometre trip, and they arrived home very quickly. Though it was already late at night, Yixun and Wu were up waiting for them, wide awake. They still lived in the compound of the Architectural Design Academy, but had recently moved to a new apartment—four bedrooms with two living rooms, three times bigger than the one they’d had during the Reed River Farm period, twice as big as the one they’d had before Fan went to America. The difference was obvious, and Fan sensed various changes as soon as she got off the aeroplane. The only thing so far that remained unchanged was the airport itself, dark and crowded, with the customs officials as indifferent as ever. But everything seemed transformed once she was out of the airport and arrived at the house. Her parents and her older sister surrounded her at their brightly lit, warm home, and a familiar aroma of spare-rib soup immediately greeted her. That was the base for the wonton soup that Yixun had prepared especially for her—they all knew wonton soup was her favourite.