Authors: Aisling Juanjuan Shen
When July came, I found myself on the bus to Shanghai again.
I didn’t know where I was going, so after getting off the bus I roamed the streets. With construction sites all over, the city was like a sick person in the process of a long surgery, riddled with gaping wounds. Giant cranes digging the ground grumbled day and night, and the mantles of dust they produced hung above the city like a big gray wok. People with frowning eyebrows walked by me in a hurry, but I felt happy. I raised my head and inhaled the dirty air, enjoying the brief freedom of being a total stranger in a city.
At a turn in a seemingly endless flagstone street lined with ivy-covered buildings, I stumbled upon a group of magnificent Western-style villas behind a tall Victoria arch. On the open ground near the arch, I saw two middle-aged country women chatting and four white children playing at their feet. The children looked adorable, like the dolls in movies from the West. Standing outside the guardrails, I stared curiously at them for a long time. This must be a foreigners’ residence, and these two women must be nannies, I realized. I watched the two women enviously at the same time as I felt my chest expanding with excitement at seeing a light at the end of the tunnel. If these two peasant women could work here as nannies, maybe I could too. I didn’t care how little money I’d make. As long as I could get out of Ba Jin, I would be happy. Besides, more doors would open to me in the city, and eventually maybe I would make enough money to keep my teaching post in case I needed to come back to it, I thought.
The next Sunday, despite the scalding sun, I went back to Shanghai, with a stack of handwritten seeking-nanny-job letters in my bag. I waltzed through the arch when the security guard was looking the other way, and I started to knock on the doors of the villas.
A tidy middle-aged white man with a thick moustache came to the first door. Facing his interrogative eyes, I held out my letter and stuttered that I was looking to be a nanny. Holding the door edge, he politely told me that he didn’t have any children. Undiscouraged, I kept going. Nobody answered the second door. Then there was a polite rejection. Doors slammed before I could open my mouth. People pressed their eyes against the peephole and didn’t even open up.
Two hours later, I had gone through all the villas, but nobody was interested in talking to me. Between a wall and some lush roses, I dropped down on the cement ground and buried my face between my knees, holding back my tears. The broiling heat of the sun was melting my limbs and cracking my lips, but I knew that the weakness I was feeling right then came from within. There was a desert in my heart, and I was the only traveler in it, and now I had lost my direction. I had never felt so desperate before.
Soon it got dark. I left the villas and started to walk on the street. I didn’t know how far I went. I just kept going, not feeling tired. Finally I stopped at a small bridge and leaned against the stone railing. The sewage ditch under the bridge gave off a smell of rotten meat after the day’s heat, but it didn’t bother me too much. I stood there for a while, ignoring the looks from passersby.
A man in shorts and flip-flops stopped about a yard away from me and then leaned against the railing, glancing over at me once in a while. After five minutes, he had shown no sign of leaving, so I decided to go. As I walked away from the bridge, I heard him following me. I started to get nervous and walked faster.
After a few minutes, the man quickened his steps and was soon at my side. He was middle-aged and balding. He looked at me with drooling lust and smiled. “How much, Miss?”
He thought I was a hooker. I gave him an angry look and walked off in a huff.
What on earth made him think I was a hooker? How could he? Was it written on my forehead? Maybe I had been born a hooker. I chuckled to myself. I spread my legs quicker than a hooker. At least hookers got something in return. They were probably happier than me, too. Maybe I should become a hooker, I thought. Why not? It wasn’t as if I couldn’t use the money.
I wheeled around and made eye contact with the man. “How much can you pay?”
He pointed to a building across the street. “There’s a café over there. We can go there and talk.”
I followed him to the café, which was hidden in a basement. The only light came from a few candles flickering against the wall. A quiet, mysterious woman led us to one of the love seats behind the thick red curtains. As soon as we sat down and the curtains were shut behind us, the man grabbed me, and his hand started to rove my body. I sat still, closing my mouth tightly to avoid the man’s wet lips, which were searching for mine.
When his hand unzipped my shorts and dug beneath my panties, I felt empty and anxious. When he inserted his middle finger inside me, an immense feeling of invasion came over me. The cuticle around his fingernail scratched me. I suddenly felt so miserable that I wanted to die.
I pulled his finger out with a jerk, and then I started to sob. “I’m sorry,” I said. “I can’t do this. I’m a teacher, not a hooker. I just want to find a job here.”
He seemed confused, but he just shrugged and didn’t try anything else. We walked out of the café in silence. He took out a piece of paper, jotted down a number, and handed it to me along with a fifty-yuan bill. “Give me a call if you come here to stay,” he said and walked away.
The evening lights were lit on the street, and a popular Cantonese song was playing in the distance. A crowd of people stood in front of a ditch left by construction on the street, sticking their heads over the edge and all talking at once. Beside it, a bicycle was lying upside down with its wheel still turning. Someone asked anxiously, “Is he dead?”
I rolled the piece of paper into a ball and tossed it into the ditch.
MY SHANGHAI DREAM
broke easily, like a beautiful but fragile vase. I continued to live my life in the small town of Ba Jin, believing I would be there the rest of my life. I felt as miserable as before—the only difference was that now I had stopped dreaming. I resigned myself to my teaching life and resolved at least to try to fix what I could, since I was stuck in this small town.
I ended things with Gold Hill. Nights, I still went out to the club. Calm as lake water, my heart didn’t ripple at all when I saw him with other girls. I had run out of feelings for men.
To ensure that Gold Hill never knocked on my door again, I requested yet another move. I was transferred to the attic on the third floor of the teacher’s compound.
In the hot August of 1995, the tiny attic felt like a steamer. The water I fetched from the public faucet downstairs ran out constantly—I had to splash it all over my body every few minutes in order to bear the scorching heat. By the end of the first day in my new room, I was lying prone on the cement floor, dog-tired and stark naked.
I watched the sky in the west gradually flush pink through the window as the insufferable heat crept away. Downstairs, people’s chatting and children’s boisterous yelling continued as darkness filled my attic. I laid my cheek on the cement. It felt cool. I closed my eyes. The floor echoed with my strong, rhythmic heartbeat. I felt safe. Now nobody, neither Gold Hill nor Hao nor any other hooligan, would know where I lived.
It was not too late. Everything could be put in a jar, sealed up, and then thrown into the river. I could start over.
“When are you going to get a boyfriend, Little Shen?” an older teacher had bluntly asked me earlier in the day, when I had joined my colleagues downstairs.
I had smiled and shrugged my shoulders. “Nobody wants me,” I said jokingly.
“Come on, Little Shen. You are young, pretty, and an English teacher. You’re a dream girlfriend for men in this town,” she had responded, comforting me.
Remembering that moment, I felt good for the first time in a long time. Being surrounded by colleagues and watching children play in the lively compound made me feel as if I had climbed out of a tomb and come back to life.
Maybe I should get a real boyfriend now, I thought as I dozed off.
A few days later, the new semester began, and the school was overrun with students again. After finishing my duty of giving out textbooks on the first day, I biked back to my attic. It was my third year in the town. It was also the final year of middle school for the students I’d been teaching since they had started at the school. Soon they would graduate and disperse to many different places, some to senior high schools in Suzhou, some to cheaper high schools in other towns, and some back to the rice fields.
I stopped at the grocery store at the corner, rested on the bench in front of it, and quietly watched the teenagers on the street laughing and chasing each other. I was jealous of them. I felt as though I had never really lived a single day of my life, and as though I never would.
A young man in a light brown suit appeared in the corner of my eye. I turned and studied him as he walked into the store. His leather shoes were shiny, and he was tidy and clean all over, like a newly washed and ironed white shirt. I saw him glancing around the store as he waited for his bag of salt. His skin was fair and delicate like wax. I saw anxiety flickering in his fine eyes, and I couldn’t help but pipe up: “You must be the new teacher, Wang.”
“How do you know?” He turned to me, surprised.
“Everybody in town knows.” He looked so brand-new. No one here had such long and slender fingers. At first glance, they reminded me of piano keys.
Wang was a new math teacher at the local vocational school, which offered continuing education for students who had failed to enter any senior high schools. At first, since the school was located in a different part of town, we seldom saw each other. When we met on the street, we simply nodded our heads. But he was soon assigned to live in the teacher’s compound, and we became acquaintances. When our paths crossed, we would stop our bikes for short conversations.
“Man, what a shitty place. What a shitty school. When they recruited me in my province, they painted it as a paradise. It’s a shithole,” he would say. He had an innocent smile, and his eyes were bright. He was like a shy boy. He spoke so softly when he was complaining that it didn’t seem like he meant it at all.
I would nod my head and agree with him and then say good-bye, jump on my bike, and leave quickly. I wanted to stay and look at his handsome face longer, but I had to keep moving. If we were seen together on the street more than three times, I was sure everyone would say we were dating.
But then, what would be wrong with dating him? It was common for a teacher to grab another teacher and rush to the marriage registration office. Sooner or later you needed to marry someone and have children, so why not do it quickly and conveniently? Then you would be set, entitled to a bigger room, a condo, or even a house from the school. Plus, you’d always have someone to look after you.
The thought of Teacher Wang being my boyfriend made my cheeks burn. What would it be like? I wondered. It had been so long since I’d had a real boyfriend.
But as soon as I opened my tattered door with its flaking red paint and saw my tiny attic, which was as ratty as a dump, I sobered. That sight drove away the thought of becoming a teacher’s wife. I had suffered so much as part of a poor family. For a poor, lowly couple, everything in this world would be sorrowful. You couldn’t be merry if you spent all day worrying about your next meal. Would you be in the mood for love when the mosquitoes were biting you like crazy just because you couldn’t afford a bottle of bug repellent?
No, I couldn’t marry a teacher. It would take us three years to buy a refrigerator and maybe five years to get a Sony television for the living room—if we had a living room. No, I definitely couldn’t marry Teacher Wang, who also came from a peasant family and had no connections in this town. I didn’t want to relive my parents’ life.
I began to avoid Teacher Wang as much as I could and was reserved when I ran into him on the street. But when loneliness drilled into me, my heart wanted to go against my mind. I longed to have someone I could talk to, someone who had graduated from college and could speak Mandarin instead of the raspy local dialect that came out of the mouths of everyone in this town. So when one day after work Teacher Wang ran up the stairs to my attic and asked if I wanted to join him and his friend in his room for dinner, I looked into his tender eyes and said yes.
He asked if I could cook the chicken he had bought at the market, like a boyfriend would expect his girlfriend to do. His friend asked if I wanted a beer. I said yes to both, smiling, happy in his crude but warm room. Then I sat quietly at the table and listened to him and his friend complaining about their schools. He turned to tell me that he liked the chicken. When our eyes met, he quickly looked away. In the dim light, I saw his cheeks turning red. His friend chuckled. I lowered my head.
His friend left to catch the last bus to the town where he lived. I cleaned the pots and dishes, and then I sat down on the edge of his bed. He had been sitting in his only chair and watching me. The light from the bulb in the middle of the room seemed extremely bright through my tipsy eyes. There was a nervousness in the air. Faintly, I heard him speaking and my own voice talking back to him. I leaned against the folded sheet on the bed, wondering why I was suddenly so giggly. Then I saw his handsome face moving close to me, and, the next thing I realized, his lips were on mine.
The alcohol emboldened his hands. He stripped off my coat and then unbuttoned my blouse. He was breathing quickly. He seemed shy but glad. I realized that he liked me. He liked me in the way a normal man liked a woman. He got on top of me. He smelled fresh and clean, like bamboo leaves after a spring rain. He was trying to be my boyfriend, and then he would become my husband, and then—I couldn’t think. I couldn’t let him become my boyfriend. I liked him, but I didn’t love him. I pushed him and leaped up from the bed before he got too far. I stood indecisively on the bare floor. He looked like an injured deer.
“I can’t. . . .” I tried to explain but couldn’t articulate the reason. It would hurt him like hell if I told him that I couldn’t be with him because he was as poor and lowly as I was.
I turned around and ran.
Later that night, a couple of light taps on my door woke me. I got up, opened the door slightly, and peered out. Hao, who had discarded me like a cigarette stub a year earlier and left for Shanghai, was outside my door. How had he found me here? Fear started to rise inside me.
“How are you?” With his chin lifted, he slowly pronounced each word to me. Grinning, he unhurriedly exhaled whiffs of smoke through his nostrils.
He pushed the door all the way open and strode into my attic. He sat down on my bed and put his feet up on the chair, as if he had just entered his own home.
“I thought you were in Shanghai.” I forced a grin.
“I come back here once in a while.” With a cigarette dangling from the corner of his mouth, he looked as haughty as ever. Cold, I went back to the bed and wrapped myself in my blanket. It was autumn already.
“So, did you miss me?” he asked jokingly.
I giggled nervously and pulled the cover around my waist. “How is Shanghai?” I said, trying to make conversation.
“Oh, Shanghai is fucking awesome.” Engaged by my question, he leaned forward and told me excitedly, “Hey, you know, you should really leave this fucking stupid town and go to Shanghai. You can speak English, right? Go wait in the airport. So many rich foreigners get off planes every day. Talk to them and take them to hotels. Do you know how much you can make sleeping with foreigners?”
I looked at his puffy face, the result of a lifetime of debauchery, as he prattled on about Shanghai, and I couldn’t help but laugh at his absurd idea. A few months ago I had been willing to sell my body on the streets of Shanghai, but right now I just wanted to tell him to shut up.
He yanked the corner of the cover toward him and tried to sneak under.
“I’m cold,” he said.
“No,” I refused, but it was useless. He pushed me back and squeezed himself closer to me.
“I have a boyfriend now. Please leave,” I begged, irritated. Teacher Wang’s face flashed across in my mind.
Hao chuckled at my pleas and kept pulling the quilt toward himself. Then he wrapped his arms around my waist. I twisted myself away forcefully and got off the bed.
“If you don’t leave, I will,” I announced. I knew this time my heart wanted him to go, as well as my senses.
“Come on. Didn’t you miss me?” He sat wrapped in the cover, an expectant look in his eyes.
I realized that it would be impossible to get him out of my attic without waking up the entire compound. I grabbed my coat and ran out of my own home. He could do whatever he wanted while I was gone. I knew he wouldn’t follow me. I was never that important to him.
Outside, I stopped in front of Teacher Wang’s room. I stood below his windowsill for a while. The moonlight reflected off the thin layer of frost on the cement ground. The world was bathed in silvery white. I pulled my coat tightly around me, raised my head, and looked at the full moon hanging in the sky.
I felt confused. I didn’t know what I really wanted. Wang was so poor, but maybe he was the best I would ever find. After all, he was pure and fresh, while I was beaten and incomplete. I didn’t feel love for him, but then, I told myself, I wasn’t a woman who deserved to love.
I thought of what the great poet Li Bai had written two thousand years ago:
The luminous moonlight before my bed—
I thought it might be the frost fallen on the ground.
I lift my head to gaze at the cliff moon
And then bow down to muse on my distant home.
Suddenly an overwhelming desire to have a home hit me. I had a home in the Shen Hamlet, but that had never felt like a real home. Was a home really too much to ask?