Authors: Aisling Juanjuan Shen
I STARTED TO
date Teacher Wang, whose full name was Wang Hui. Fate wanted me to, I thought, so I succumbed to it.
We rarely saw each other in the daytime. He got off work earlier and always waited for me at his rear window, through which he could see me standing on the top of the stairs to my attic. When I turned toward him, he would wave to me, smiling shyly. When I went to his room, he didn’t speak much, but he would lift the lid of his rice cooker and show me the dinner he had made. With the door shut and curtains down, it was easy for me to start dreaming. Was this what I had been looking for all my life: a bowl of rice, a few bok choy leaves, flickering candles, and a hand on my shoulder?
But the next morning, the warmth would disappear. I avoided being seen with him on the street. The thought of being his girlfriend in public made every inch of my skin itch. His body felt real and warm, but when I lay next to him my mind rarely had a moment of peace. I was torn. I could not bear to think of a dismal future with him in this deserted town. I didn’t want people to think I had chosen such a poor man.
“How do you picture your future?” I asked Wang one day when I saw him flipping the pages of a book titled
Introduction
to Programming
.
“I don’t know. It sucks here, but what can I do?” He shrugged.
“Why are you reading that book, then?” I asked curiously, some hope rising in my mind. Perhaps he wanted to get out of this town too.
“My cousin is working in a joint venture in southern China. He sent me this book and told me to study English. He says computers and English are really hot down there right now.”
My body tingled with excitement. His cousin was in southern China, one of the few economic special zones in the country, where foreign investors flooded in with money to build factories, where the boldest Chinese headed for brand-new futures. If Wang Hui and I were going to stay together, I knew both of us couldn’t be teachers all our lives. Maybe it would be better if Wang Hui joined the gold rush. Maybe his cousin could help.
“Are you thinking of going there someday?” I sounded him out nervously, praying to hear a positive answer. I hoped my boyfriend was an ambitious man who didn’t want to waste his life in this small town.
“I don’t know. Give up teaching?” He shrugged again. “I don’t know if I can find a job there.”
I replied tentatively. “No, maybe you should go. A man shouldn’t be stuck here forever.”
He scratched his head and didn’t say anything.
We didn’t talk about it again for weeks, but I couldn’t get southern China out of my mind. All I could think about was “jumping in the ocean,” a phrase newly coined to describe people giving up governmental jobs and joining the free market. Since 1949, when New China was founded, every governmental worker had been guaranteed an unbreakable iron bowl into which the government put just enough food to keep your stomach full. Most people chose to stay on the dry land, with their bowls. You might find gold and silver in the ocean; but if you couldn’t swim, you would be lost. But the more I thought about it, the more certain I was that I would rather drown in the roaring waves of the South than let time slowly and painfully suck the life out of me in this town.
A few weeks later, I shared my thoughts with Wang Hui.
“Go to the South. I’ll join you later,” I said confidently.
He sounded doubtful. “Are you sure you’ll come? Teaching is a pretty good job for a girl. Besides, will the school let you go? I am different. I’m a man, and my school is much more flexible.”
“Yes, I promise I’ll join you later. I am not going to stay here forever. Go and see if your cousin can get you a job at his company. I’ll meet you there, and we’ll build a future together,” I encouraged him. I believed every word I said. By conventional standards, Wang was the ideal husband, good-looking, poised, and easygoing, and if he could succeed financially, he would be perfect. I was thrilled by the possibilities.
Wang Hui took my words to heart and arranged to leave for the South. At the end of the fall semester in December, it was time for him to go. Unfortunately, my mother visited me on the very day of his departure. When he appeared on my threshold, my mother was sitting on my bed wagging her tongue as usual. He stayed at the door and said good-bye. My mother looked at him suspiciously. He waved his hand once and smiled weakly before turning around and going downstairs. I pushed all my sad feelings aside. I wanted to remain calm and normal in front of my mother. I instinctively hid every emotion from her.
“Who is he?” she asked, getting up to clean my gas stove.
“Just a teacher at the school,” I answered nonchalantly.
“Are you dating him?”
“No!” I said.
She clearly didn’t believe me. She continued to vigorously scrub the stove, but soon she couldn’t keep quiet. “I know you’re dating him,” she said.
I didn’t respond.
“A teacher,” she scoffed. “What does he have besides his own penis?”
I couldn’t believe my ears. “Mama! He is leaving for the South. Come on. I am not dating him. I wouldn’t date a teacher.”
“Learn a lesson from me, Juanjuan. Date any man, just not a poor and incompetent man like your father,” my mother said.
“Mama, have some confidence in me. I won’t,” I replied impatiently. I had faith in Wang Hui. I was certain he would build a warm nest for us in the South.
Wang Hui had come into my life and left in just five short months. I was alone again. My attic no longer had any scandalous visitors. I had no friends and lived like a hermit. But I felt calmer, since I had a future to look forward to.
In February I received a postcard from Wang Hui, on which he had handwritten a poem to me:
Raindrops fall onto the banana leaves outside my window.
When I wake up, my tears are all over the pillow.
A rush of sweetness mixed with relief swept through me. He was safe, and I was sure he would have found a job by then. I knew nothing could stop me from going to the South. My imagination had already flown me there. In my mind, I’d already touched the green banana leaves. Now I just needed to find a way out of the school.
By then, Principal Chen had left the school, and a new principal from out of town had been in the role for a semester. In April, I volunteered to write a long glorification letter about the new principal, which I read aloud in the town’s committee meeting on electing outstanding leaders. My actions scored major points for the principal’s political career. At the end of the semester, bringing a couple of cases of nourishment drinks, I visited his house one night. After rounds of sincere begging, I finally got his nod.
The next day, I signed my name on the contract of Shen Juanjuan vs. Hope Middle School. I was given my freedom for three years, during which the school would not only take my paycheck issued by the government every month, but also expect me to pay an annual fee of five thousand yuan. If I chose to return within three years, my teaching position would still be available, as well as the benefits of a governmental worker.
Five thousand yuan was equivalent to my whole yearly salary and year-end bonus as a teacher. I would have to earn at least double this amount in order to survive. How? I had no idea, and I didn’t care.
My last day of teaching ended with me flicking the chalk dust off my clothes and walking out of the classroom with nothing: not my teaching notes, not my lunch box, not my pointer. The cement walkway outside the school entrance was no longer narrow and dull; it was a colorful, wide rainbow to the world beyond the sky. I skipped down the walkway. I was free. I couldn’t believe it—I was free! I was going to leave this town, this trap that I had been in for the last three years, and I was sure I would never miss anything about it.
I did very little packing. After purchasing an airline ticket and sending Wang Hui a telegram, I spent the rest of the day dancing excitedly about my room like a lunatic.
The next day, I caught a bus to the Shen Hamlet. I knew that it would be almost impossible, but I still wanted to try to step over another stumbling block—my family. I wanted their support.
“Are you out of your mind?” my mother said as soon as I told her that I had signed the contract. “What are you going to do now?” she questioned me sourly.
“I’m going to the South,” I said.
“The South? Only businessmen and hookers go there! What are you going to do there?”
“I don’t know yet.”
“Did that son of a bitch ask you to go?” She meant Wang Hui.
“No, this has nothing to do with him,” I said instantly.
My father looked like he wanted to eat me alive. “What’s wrong with you?” he howled. “Are you sick of being a teacher? Go plant some rice with me tomorrow, then.”
That evening, Honor and Small Uncle came to the house. Surrounded by my whole family, I sank into the wicker chair, telling myself to be strong.
“You know that every girl wants to be a teacher. It’s the most stable position for a girl like you. Do you remember how tough it was for you to go to college and become a teacher? For so many generations, our ancestors have worked in the fields, have always been peasants, and now that you’re a teacher, a government worker, you throw it all away. Why?” Small Uncle said patiently.
“There’s no future as a teacher. I’ll be poor forever. I want to fight. I want to try at least once in my life.” I wasn’t sure if he could understand, but I tried to explain.
“Well, the girl at least has courage and ambition,” Honor said. “Maybe it’s not a bad thing, you know. Women have advantages in the business world. There is a woman in my circle; she gets the best cocoon silk from the dealer every time.”
My mother and father both glowered at him.
“Stop it!” my mother shrieked. “If she doesn’t sleep with those guys, can she get the best silk every time? A woman can’t do anything in this society unless she whores herself.” Then she started to weep. “Are you crazy?” she said to me. “What the hell are you thinking? The South is a dump. Go back to the school tomorrow. I’ll go beg the principal to ignore the contract and take you back.”
“It’s too late. I already bought the ticket.” I threw the words out as toughly as I could, to extinguish her last hope. Sure enough, she cried even louder.
“What about your residence? What about your dossier? Everybody has to have one to live. Your dossier will still be in Ba Jin. You’ll have no identity in the South. You’ll be a person with no history,” Small Uncle warned me solemnly.
“I don’t care.” Deep down, I longed to be a person with no history.
The reasoning and arguing continued for another four hours, all the way until midnight. I curled myself into a ball in the wicker chair, feeling like a hedgehog, resistant to all its predators. The only person who didn’t join in was Spring, who just sat and listened. Perhaps she was the only person who understood why I wanted to throw away my past.
Finally Small Uncle gave a deep sigh and left. My father, who had been sitting like a simmering volcano all night, gave me an ultimatum. “If you walk out of this house tomorrow, you are no longer a Shen. Don’t ever come back.”
I wanted to yell that I had never felt like a Shen in the first place. I wanted to cry to him, Dad, do you have any idea how much I suffered during my three years in that small town? Of course, I was as silent as a sculpture. I didn’t want to come back to this hateful house anyway.
The next morning was drizzly. I walked downstairs and saw my mother sitting on the stool behind the stove. Her eyes were puffy like two apricots. She must have been crying the entire night. I avoided looking at her. The last thing I wanted to do right then was get sentimental.
I lifted my bag off the ground and walked toward the door.
“Are you still going?”
I kept walking without turning around.
“Wait,” she pleaded, weeping. “At least have a bowl of congee before you go.”
I told myself not to look back. She followed me out the door.
The path from the front of the house to the main road was muddy. I put the bag on my shoulder and walked quickly in the rain. My mother ran behind me.
“Please, Juanjuan, don’t go.” Her broken sobs floated to me over the sound of the rain. “Don’t go!”
I told myself to hold back my tears. I ran faster. I jumped onto a passing bus as soon as I reached the asphalt road. I looked out of the window as we pulled away and saw my crying mother limping on the muddy countryside road in the rain, waving her hand to me.
Three hours later, I boarded a Shanghai Eastern Airlines plane in Hongqiao Airport. The destination was the city of Guangzhou, the hub of southern China. It was my first time on an airplane. I sat on the plush chair next to the window, feeling numb. The sweet, soft voice of the flight attendant coming over the intercom was mere background noise.
The plane started to move slowly and then cruised down the runway. Then it accelerated. My eardrums popped, and I woke up from my trance. I looked out of the window and realized that the plane was taking off.
From now on, I told myself, I would no longer mourn my past. I would not loathe, degrade, or abuse myself any more.
Like the Monkey King from the epic
Journey to the West
, I was born from a crack in a rock, and with sunshine, rain, and dew it was I who had brought myself up. Now I was a person without family, history, or identity.
III
IN JULY 1996,
when I left the middle school and then the hamlet, all I wanted was to chop off the past. I didn’t expect the process to be so painful. I didn’t know that your past was as vital as your blood. But the bravest soldier swallows his pain. The fiercest shark only cares about going forward. A one-way ticket, a duffel bag, and Wang Hui’s address were all I needed as I headed for the South.
Once I stepped out of the lobby of Guangzhou Baiyun Airport, I realized that I hadn’t just come to a different part of China; Guangzhou seemed like another country entirely. The clouds hung higher in a sky that was bluer and crisper than the one over the hamlet, and the sun shone more ardently. People were smaller and darker, spoke louder and ran faster, and they took up almost every inch of earth. There were cars everywhere, small cars, like toys, and the entire road was jammed up like a pile of tangled linen. All sorts of noises converged into a dome of echoes droning continuously above the city.
Flustered, I didn’t know how to melt myself into this pile of heat and noise, find my way to the bus station, and eventually get to a suburb called Gao Ming, where Wang Hui lived. At first I just stood near the airport entrance, not daring to step out into the city. But then, remembering my experience in Shanghai, I took a deep breath and held my arm out for a cab.
“Could you please take me to Gao Ming?” I asked the driver after I had squeezed myself into the car. He was lean and dark, reminding me of the image of a man working on a Malaysian rubber plantation that I had once seen on television.
He talked in a strange language, as if he had a twist in his tongue. I had no idea what he was saying. People in the South spoke Cantonese. Unlike most of the rest of the country, they didn’t speak Mandarin, our national language. The pronunciation of the two languages is completely different, although they have the same characters.
I repeated myself. He repeated himself in Mandarin, but his accent was so heavy that his words didn’t make any sense to me. Finally I gave up trying to understand him and let him take me wherever he had said he would, praying that I had run into a nice person. After many struggles with the snarled traffic, he stopped at the side of a road, at what appeared to be a gas station, and gestured for me to get out of the car. As soon as I got out he drove away. Full of misgivings, I stood and surveyed my surroundings. Before I could see clearly through the clouds of dust churning everywhere, a loud noise blared from a speaker a few feet away from me, giving me a start.
“Gaooooo-Minggg, Gaooooo-Minggg . . . going to GaoMing?” I saw a man shouting through a huge megaphone. I was stunned. I had never seen anyone crying out for customers with a megaphone as big as the one on top of the flagpole at the middle school, which was only used occasionally for broadcasting. Didn’t he feel ashamed, displaying his desire to make money so out in the open?
“Yes. . . ,” I answered uncertainly.
He grabbed my arm as he shouted to me in barely comprehensible Mandarin, “Gao-Minggg? Come with me, the bus is leaving.” He led me to the gas station’s parking lot, where several buses waited for customers. I was relieved to see the cardboard plates reading
Gao Ming
on their windshields and quickly got on one of them.
The air was hot and dry. I looked out the window. All the women I saw were petite, with brown skin, their hair put up at the backs of their heads with big plastic clips. Every man wore a suit, though most were crumpled, and the faces above the suits looked twitchy. The guy with the megaphone was still yelling for all he was worth. A man stood next to a gas pump with one hand on his hip, staring at the dust with a look of sheer boredom. In his other hand, I saw a small colorful cardboard box with the characters for waxberry juice printed on it. He was sipping the juice through a straw.
I was amazed that people in the South made juice out of waxberries and sold it for money. Even funnier, they put the juice in a cardboard box so that they could save money instead of using plastic or tin. I was fascinated. I’m really in the South now, I told myself.
Once it was full, the bus started to move. It maneuvered through traffic on the narrow, dirty streets of downtown Guangzhou and soon entered the suburbs, where rows and rows of factory buildings sat in front of small bare hills. About half an hour later, buildings became scarce and we were driving on a winding asphalt road among tall mountains covered in lush greens. I had grown up on a plain; having never seen mountains before, I gazed out the window and greedily enjoyed the breathtaking view.
Two hours later, we reached a small town. The bus driver shouted to me that this was my destination. I got off the bus, perplexed. I saw no sign of Wang Hui at the stop. A wave of disappointment hit me. Maybe my telegram hadn’t reached him. Before I could think further, a group of motorcycles flew toward me and parked right at my feet. The drivers all stretched out their arms and tried to pull me onto their back seats, yelling in Mandarin with funny accents: “Only five yuan gets you anywhere in the city. Where are you goinggggg?” I gave one Wang Hui’s address and hopped on.
Ten minutes later, I stood at the gate of a cement building. I looked at Wang Hui’s postcard to make sure that this was where he lived. It was a shabby, dull apartment complex with clotheslines or sticks protruding from every balcony, draped with clothes swaying in the wind. The alley next to the building was full of hollows and puddles. The air smelled like burning rapeseed oil. I heard two young women shouting to each other behind one of the windows with rusty bars. From their heavily accented Mandarin, I could tell that they were from northern China. They must be migrant workers, I thought, those who had left home and come to the South for jobs. From that day on, I would be one of them, I told myself, a grain of sand surfing on the waves.
I didn’t know which apartment Wang Hui lived in, and I prepared to ask someone for help. But before I could step into the complex, he appeared. With his head lowered, he walked listlessly in shorts and flip-flops toward the gate. He was thinner and darker, and he looked like he had a load on his mind. A spell of tender affection came over me. I was happy to see him. I wondered how he had been doing during the six months we had been apart, whether he had missed me. I sure had missed him. Seeing him made me relax. There would be nothing to keep me away from him now. This was the man I had come to for shelter, the man with whom I was going to build a future.
When he was a few feet away, he looked up and spotted me. I saw his eyes open wide.
“I thought you were picking me up at the bus station.” Though I knew I couldn’t hide the happiness in my eyes, I still made my tone grouchy. I had pictured him opening his arms and embracing me at the station after we had been apart for so long.
“Y-yeah, I was on my way there,” he stuttered.
I glanced at his casual shorts and flip-flops suspiciously. “You would have been so late. Didn’t you get the telegram?” I whined as we entered the complex.
“I left work late.”
I stopped walking and confronted him. “Did you know I was coming?”
I saw him blush. “I got the telegram, but I didn’t believe that you were really coming,” he confessed.
“You didn’t believe? This is what we have been planning all along!” Shocked by his words, I was almost shouting.
He came up with an awkward, guilty smile as a response. All of a sudden, everything I had done—leaving the school, abandoning my running mother in the rain, and traveling hundreds of miles to this man—seemed meaningless. He had never even believed in me. I felt betrayed and angry. We walked up to his apartment in silence.
We stopped at an iron anti-theft door on the third floor. He reached into his pocket for the key, telling me that his older cousin rented this apartment with his girlfriend and let him stay with them. Knowing that migrant workers often crammed together in apartments, I wasn’t surprised that he lived with his relatives, but I still couldn’t help feeling a little disappointed. I had thought we would have a place of our own.
He told me that his cousin, a manager at a local joint venture, had gotten him a programmer job at the same company. “Eight hundred yuan a month, less than I thought, but not bad. Three times what I was making as a teacher.” He carried my bag through the door. I felt relieved. At least one of us had a job, though the pay was not as much as I had expected.
He took me to a small room and told me that I was going to share a bed with Rong, another cousin of his who had left her husband and children back home and come here to work on an assembly line at the same company.
“Where’s your room?” I asked, puzzled and displeased by this arrangement.
He pointed to a small room next to mine. “Older Brother doesn’t like young people living together before they get married,” he told me helplessly.
“Why is he living with his girlfriend, then?” What a hypocrite this Older Brother was.
Wang’s face still looked quite pleasant, and his eyebrows were still dashing, but he also looked cowardly. “He’s the oldest cousin in the family. Older Brother is just like your father. You have to obey him.”
So, after years of fighting for my freedom and traveling hundreds of miles, I had just walked into an apartment still ruled by a patriarchal family system.
Dissatisfied, I lay down on the single bed in the room I would share with Rong and told Wang that I was exhausted and wanted to take a nap. He left the room quietly, but just as I was about to doze off he came back and sat next to me. I kept my eyes closed. He bent down and started to take off my clothes. I heard his breathing getting heavier, and when I felt a sharp pain in my groin, disappointment washed over me. It was so different from the romantic lovemaking that I had imagined for our reunion. He was so impatient and hurried that he didn’t even know he was hurting me. As he moved on top of me, I started to have doubts: had he ever loved me? Had we ended up together just because we were so lonely in that small town? I guessed that this was what he had wanted from me all along—sex. But there was nothing I could do now but accept it. I had no way back. Perhaps things would get better.
As the sky slowly turned dark outside the windows, we grew nervous, anticipating his family’s return. We sat on the tiled floor in the living room side by side, absentmindedly watching the tiny 21-inch television and glancing at the doorknob once in a while.
Several times, Wang looked at the black dress I was wearing.
“What’s wrong?” I asked.
“It may be a little too transparent. Older Brother doesn’t like that,” he told me hurriedly.
I ran back to my room and changed into the gray suit and skirt I had brought. I had brought little with me to the South: a dress, a suit, a skirt, my toiletries, and my college diploma were all I had.
As soon as I returned to the living room floor, the door opened and Older Brother and his girlfriend walked in. Of medium build with a pair of plain glasses, Older Brother was an ordinary-looking man, the kind you would forget instantly the moment you turned away from him.
“Older Brother!” I called respectfully, standing up.
He nodded his head to me slightly and kept walking toward the kitchen. The tall, thin woman behind him smiled to me like a blossoming flower and said, “This must be Hui’s girlfriend. Hello. Welcome.”
“Older Sister!” I followed Wang and greeted her tensely.
Meeting Wang’s cousin and his girlfriend felt as scary as making a pilgrimage to see the emperor.
Rong soon came home, and we were ready for dinner. Wang Hui whispered to me to go to the kitchen and get rice for everybody. Rong followed me. She looked like an ordinary weatherbeaten middle-aged woman from the countryside who was always worried about something. As soon as I had lifted the rice cooker lid and put it on the counter, she rushed over, looking scared, and turned the lid over.
“Don’t forget to put the lid upside down in the future. She’ll get upset if you put it like that.” She whispered, “She thinks it’s bad luck. She is a typical superstitious woman from Shanghai.”
“I thought Older Brother ruled here. And she seems so friendly,” I said, confused.
Rong shook her head and lowered her voice even more. “Don’t be fooled by her fake laugh. True, Older Brother makes the most money here, but he’s divorced, and it’s not easy for a divorced guy to find a girlfriend. She’s really the one who wears the pants around here.”
Rong and I carried the bowls of rice out to the table in the living room. I walked carefully, holding my breath and feeling like I was in Old China, where a woman had to be approved by a man’s elders before being allowed into his family.
Rong put down a bowl of rice before Older Brother, who sat at the table waiting soberly. Then she placed a pair of chopsticks next to the bowl and said respectfully, “Older Brother, please enjoy your dinner.”
It seemed the only thing the women in the Wang family didn’t have to do was place the food directly into the men’s mouths. While eating, I wondered if they also had to bring their men buckets of water to wash their feet in before bed, an old custom I had read about in books. Later, when Older Brother was ready for bed, Rong proved to me that indeed they did.
I sat at the table and ate, careful not to make too much noise. Wang Hui was sitting next to me, and I could sense his nervous fidgeting. This was ridiculous. Why should I be so afraid of Older Brother? I asked myself angrily, but I remained respectful and quiet. It was my first day in the South, and this group of strangers was all I had.
Older Brother cleared his throat and lifted his chin in my direction. “Ah-Juan, what’s your plan?”
I realized that in the South people usually called each other Ah-something. I guessed that from then on I would be Ah-Juan.
“I want to find a job, of course.” I paused and then gathered all my courage and asked, “Older Brother, could you please see if I can get a job at your company? I heard it’s a big company, and they may need people who can speak English.”
He kept whisking rice into his mouth, and after a moment he said, “I’ll see what I can do.”