The Good Women of China: Hidden Voices (15 page)

The year Taohong turned fourteen, however, the events of one summer night changed her and her view of men and women completely. It was the summer before she was to enter senior school. She had been told that senior school was the most terrible time: the course of her life would be determined by it, achievement there would lead to future success. She was determined to enjoy the summer to the full before buckling down to study hard for three years, and she spent many evenings out with her friends.

That particular night, it was about eleven o’clock by the time she set off for home. She didn’t have far to go, and it wasn’t an isolated route. Just a few paces from home, a gang of four men leaped out of the shadows and grabbed her.

They took her, blindfolded and gagged, to what seemed to be a tool shed on a building site. Her blindfold was removed, but she remained gagged. There were three more men in the room, making the gang seven altogether. They told Taohong that they wanted to see what she really was, a man or a woman, and began removing her clothes. They were momentarily struck dumb by the sight of her young woman’s body but then their faces flushed red, and all seven of them threw themselves on her. Taohong lost consciousness.

When she came round, she found herself lying naked and bloody on a workbench. The men lay snoring on the ground; some of them still had their trousers around their ankles. Taohong sat in a blind panic for some time before she finally shifted herself awkwardly off the bench. Trembling and swaying, she slowly gathered her clothes from the floor. As she was moving about, she trod on one of the men’s hands; his cry of pain woke the other men. They watched, paralysed by guilt, as Taohong picked her clothing up and put it on, piece by piece.

Taohong did not say a word in the thirty minutes it took her to dress with difficulty.

From then on, she hated all men, even her father. To her, they were all filthy, lustful, bestial and brutal. She had only had two periods at the time.

She continued dressing as a boy, for no reason that she could explain, and never told anyone what had happened. The gang rape had made it quite clear to Taohong that she was a woman. She started to wonder what women were like. She did not believe that she had feminine beauty, but she wanted to see it.

Her first attempt to do so was with the prettiest girl in class in the first year of senior school. She told her classmate that she was afraid to be alone while her father was away on business, and asked if she would stay the night with her.

Before they went to bed, Taohong told her classmate that she slept naked. The girl was a little uneasy about doing the same, but Taohong said she would give her a massage, so she agreed to undress. Taohong was astonished by the soft smoothness and pliability of the girl’s body, especially her breasts and hips. The slightest contact with it sent the blood rushing to Taohong’s head, and thrills all over her. Just as Taohong was rubbing the girl until she gasped for breath, Taohong’s father came in.

With unexpected calm, Taohong pulled a quilt over their naked bodies and asked, ‘Why are you back, didn’t you say you were off on business?’ Her father backed out without a word, stupefied.

Later, when I interviewed Taohong’s father on the telephone, he told me that, from that day on, he knew Taohong had grown up, and, moreover, had become part of a special group. He could not bring himself to ask Taohong why she was homosexual, but often put the question to her dead mother when he swept her tomb during the Festival of Pure Brightness every year.

From then on, Taohong often brought girls home ‘for a massage’. She thought women were exquisite beings, but there was no love in her feelings for them.

She fell in love for the first time during the preparations for the homosexual conference she had told me about. Taohong was allocated a hotel room with a woman fourteen years her senior. The woman was graceful, quiet and very friendly. She asked Taohong why she was attending the conference, and learned that Taohong liked women. She told Taohong that sexual love was the most exalted mental state, and that that of women was the most precious of all. When the conference was aborted, she took Taohong to another hotel with her for a course of ‘sexual training’. Taohong experienced sexual stimulation and pleasure that she had never known before. This woman also gave Taohong guidance about sexual health and how to use sex tools. She told her a lot about the history of homosexuality, in China and outside it.

Taohong said she fell in love with this woman because she was the first person to share ideas and knowledge with her, to protect her and give her physical pleasure. But the woman told Taohong that she did not and could not love her; she could not forget, let alone replace, her former lover, a female university lecturer, who had died many years before in a car accident. Taohong was very moved; she said she had known that love was more pure and holy than sex since she had been a child.

After Taohong had answered my two questions, we left the Cock-Crow Temple. As we walked Taohong told me she had been in search of a woman with whom she might be able to share the same kind of relationship as with her first lover. She read widely, and had passed the exam to be a presenter in Radio Ma’anshan eight months ago. She presented a hotline programme on film and television. She told me that one of her listeners had written to her to suggest that she listened to
Words on the Night Breeze
. She had tuned in every day for six months, and had pinned her hopes on me as someone who could be her new lover.

I told Taohong a saying that I often repeated on air, ‘If you can’t make someone happy, don’t give them hope,’ and said frankly, ‘Taohong, thank you. I am very happy to have met you, but I do not belong to you, and I cannot be your lover. Believe me, someone is waiting for you out there. Carry on reading and expanding your horizons, and you will find her. Don’t make her wait for you.’

Taohong was subdued. ‘Well, can I consider you my second ex-lover?’ she asked slowly.

‘No, you can’t,’ I said, ‘because there was no love between us. Love must be mutual; loving or being loved in isolation is not sufficient.’

‘How should I think of you then?’ Taohong was beginning to come round to my point of view.

‘Think of me as an older sister,’ I said. ‘The ties of kinship are the strongest.’

Taohong said she would think about it, and we parted.

When, a few days later, I received a call from a listener who preferred to remain anonymous, I could tell immediately that it was Taohong. ‘Sister Xinran,’ she said. ‘I wish that everyone had your sincerity, your goodness and your knowledge. Will you accept me as a younger sister?’

There is a saying in Chinese: ‘The spear hits the bird that sticks its head out.’ I had not been a radio presenter for long before the number of letters I received from listeners, the promotions and awards that were given to me earned me snide remarks from my colleagues. The Chinese say, ‘If you stand up straight, why fear a crooked shadow?’, so I tried to remain cheerful in the face of any envy. In the end, it was the voices of Chinese women themselves that brought my colleagues closer to me.

The radio station had bought for me four long-playing telephone answering machines, each with tapes that lasted four hours. Every evening after eight, these machines would be available to women who wanted to offer an opinion on the programme, ask for help or tell me their story. My greeting on the machines invited them to unburden themselves so they could walk towards their futures with lighter loads, and assured them that they need not identify themselves or tell me where they were from. Each morning, when I arrived at the office, I found more and more of my colleagues – editors, reporters and presenters – waiting to hear the stories that came spooling out of the tape recorders, told in voices coloured by embarrassment, anxiety and fear.

One day, we heard:

‘Hello, is anybody there? Is Xinran there? Oh, good. It’s just a tape.’

The woman paused for several seconds.

‘Xinran, good evening. I’m afraid I’m not really one of your regular listeners; I’m not from your province, and I only started listening to your programme recently. My colleagues were discussing you and your programme the other day, they said you had installed special telephones where listeners could leave messages – and where every woman could tell her story anonymously. They said you broadcast these stories the next day for your listeners to discuss freely on the hotline, hoping to help women understand each other, help men understand women, and bring families closer together.

‘For the last few days, I’ve been listening to your programme every day. The reception isn’t very good, but I like the programme a lot. I hadn’t thought there would be so many women’s stories, similar yet different. I’m sure you’re not allowed to broadcast all of them. Even so, I think many women will be grateful to you. Your phone lines give women the opportunity to talk about things they have not dared to or have not been able to talk about since they were very young. You must know what a great relief it is for women to have a space to express themselves without fearing blame or negative reactions. It’s an emotional need, no less important than our physical needs.’

There was another long pause.

‘Xinran, I seem to lack the courage to tell my own story. I want very much to tell people about what kind of family I live in. I also want to hear my own story, because I have never dared look back at the past before, afraid that my memories might destroy my faith in life. I once read that time heals everything, but more than forty years haven’t taken away my hatred or regret; they have only numbed me.’

She sighed faintly.

‘In the eyes of others I have everything a woman could want. My husband has an important post in the provincial government; my son, who is nearly forty, is a manager in the city branch of a national bank; my daughter works in the national insurance company and I work in the office of the city government. I live quietly and peacefully; I don’t have to worry about money or my children’s future like most people, and I needn’t worry about being made redundant either.

‘At home, we have more than enough of everything we need. My son has a big flat of his own, and my daughter, who says that she remains single on principle, lives with us. The three of us live in a big flat of nearly two hundred square metres, with designer furniture and the latest electrical appliances – even the toilet bowl and seat are imported. Most days, someone comes in to do the cleaning and brings fresh flowers. However, my home is merely a display case for household objects: there is no real communication in the family, no smiles or laughter. When we are alone with each other, all you hear are the noises of animal existence: eating, drinking and going to the toilet. Only when there are visitors is there a breath of humanity. In this family, I have neither a wife’s rights nor a mother’s position. My husband says I’m like a faded grey cloth, not good enough to make trousers out of, to cover the bed, or even to be used as a dishcloth. All I am good for is wiping mud off feet. To him, my only function is to serve as evidence of his “simplicity, diligence and upright character” so he can move on to higher office.

‘These were his very words to me, Xinran – he said them to my face.’

The woman broke off, sobbing. ‘He told me that in such an indifferent manner! I thought of leaving him countless times. I wanted to rediscover my love of music and rhythm, to fulfil my longing for a true family, to be my old free self – to rediscover what it meant to be a woman. But my husband said that if I left him, he would make life so difficult for me that I’d wish I were dead. He would not stand for me jeopardising his career, or making him a target for gossip. I knew he would be as good as his word: over the years, not one of his political enemies has escaped his revenge. The women who rejected his advances have all been trapped in the worst jobs, unable to leave or transfer for a very long time. Even some of their husbands were ruined. I cannot escape.

‘You may wonder why I believe I don’t have the position of a mother. The children were taken away from me soon after they were born and sent to the army nursery because the Party said they might affect the “commander’s” – their father’s – work; it was the same for most soldiers’ children back then. Whereas other families could see their children once a week, we were often away, so we saw our children only once or twice a year. Our few meetings were often interrupted by visitors or telephone calls, so the children would be very unhappy. Sometimes they even returned to the nursery ahead of time. Father and Mother were only names to them. They were more attached to the nurses who had cared for them for so long.

‘When they got a little older, their father’s position brought them many special rights that other children didn’t have. This can influence growing children for the worse, giving them a lifelong feeling of superiority and the habit of contempt for others. They regarded me as an object of contempt too. Because they picked up how to deal with people and get things done from their father, they saw his kind of behaviour as a means to realise their ambitions. I tried to teach them how to be good, using my ideas and experiences, hoping maternal love and care would change them. But they measured a person’s worth in terms of status in the world, and their father’s success proved that he was the one worth emulating. If my own husband did not see me as worthy of respect or love, what chance did I have with my children? They did not believe that I had once been worth something.’

She sighed helplessly.

‘Forty years ago, I was an innocent, romantic girl, and had just graduated from a small town girls’ senior school. I was much luckier than other girls of my age; my parents had studied abroad and were open-minded. I had never worried about marriage like my classmates. Most of them had had their marriages arranged for them in the cradle; the rest were betrothed in junior middle school. If the man was very keen or family tradition dictated it, the girls had to leave junior middle school to be married. We thought the unluckiest were the girls who became junior wives, or concubines. Most of the girls who dropped out of school to be married were in this position, married off to men who wanted to “try something fresh”. Many films now depict concubines as the apple of the husband’s eye; they show them making use of their position to throw their weight about in the family, but this is far from the truth. Any man who could marry several wives was bound to be the son of a large, important family, with many rules and household traditions. These families had more than ten ways of greeting people and paying respects, for example. Even a slight deviation from these rules would cause the family to “lose face”. An apology was not enough – the junior wives would be punished for any perceived misdemeanours. They would be slapped by the senior wife, forbidden to eat for two days, made to do hard physical labour or forced to kneel on a washboard. Imagine how my classmates from a modern, Western-style school bore all this! There was nothing they could do; they had known from their earliest youth that their parents had the final say in choosing their marriage partner.