The Bathing Women (6 page)

I’m willing to let you curse me ten thousand times. Only when you curse me does my empty soul find a peaceful place to go. Where can my soul rest safely? Maybe I demand too much. Why, when I kept getting those prizes I dreamed of—success, fame, national and international awards, family, children, admiration, beautiful women, money, etc.—and the rest … —did my anxiety only deepen?

I had a woman before I was married. She was a one-legged woman, fifteen years older than I was. She was a sadist. I took up with her because even though I was the lowest of the low I still needed women. Or you could say she took up with me. But I never guessed that she didn’t want me for the needs that a man could satisfy. She had only one leg but her physical strength was matchless. I certainly couldn’t match her, with that body of mine weakened by years of hard labour and starvation. She often tied me up late at night and pricked my arms and thighs with an awl, not deep, just enough to make me bleed. What shocked me even more was the time she lifted up the blanket when I was dead asleep, and began frantically plucking my pubic hair … she was crazy. She must have been crazy. But I didn’t go crazy and I think it must have had something to do with the mountains I saw every time I went out. When I stepped out of the low, small mud hut and saw the silent mountains, unchanged for more than ten thousand years, when I saw the chickens running helter-skelter in the yard and dung steaming on the dirt road, the desire to live surged in me. I developed a talent: even when she tortured me until my body was bloodstained and black and blue all over, as soon as she stopped, I could fall back asleep immediately, and without having a nightmare. But today, I have to ask myself again and again: What do you want in the end, what do you want after all?

I don’t want to pollute your eyes with the above words, but I can only ease my heart by writing to you. I have such desire to be with you, so much so that this desire has turned into fear. And moreover, I have the uncouth and unreasonable fear that you are with other men. From my own experience of men and women, I know extremely well the power you have. When we were drinking coffee at the Beijing Hotel, you probably didn’t notice two men sitting at the next table who stared at you the whole time. There was an old Englishman sitting across from our table—I’m certain he was English—that old man also stared at you constantly. You didn’t notice any of this; you were too nervous at the time. But I noticed; it didn’t take much to figure out; glimpses from the corners of my eyes were enough. I’m very sure of my judgment. You’re the kind of woman who can capture a man’s attention; there is something in you that attracts people. You have the power to make people look at you, even though you are not polished at it yet. I think you should be more aware of this: you need to learn to protect yourself. Has anyone said this to you before? I believe I’m the only one who has. You should always button up your clothing; don’t let men take advantage of you with their eyes. Don’t. Not that the men who admire you would actually do something to harm you. No, I have to admit those who stare at you have taste. They are not hooligans or perverts. And I’m more nervous precisely because of that. I don’t want them to take you away from me, though I still don’t know how you truly feel about me. I’ve said before it was very likely that I would go to your city—Fuan, that tiny grain of rice that I caressed with my fingers when I was in the States. I will figure out a way to disguise myself in the street. Someday I will do that.

Now let me talk about the book you asked me to write. I tried to write the beginning and finished fifteen hundred words. It was very difficult because I couldn’t find a direct, uncluttered tone. If the readers are kids, the writer should first get himself an open heart. My heart is open—at least to you, but not very clean. I feel very guilty and challenged by it. I plan to focus on writing the book after I finish shooting
Hibernation
. I’m curious to find out my potential as an author. Will you think I’m too wordy? But wordiness is a sign of aging. Do you know what else I’m thinking about? How I look forward to you getting old quickly. Only when you get so old that you can’t get any older, and I also get so old that I can’t get any older, can we be together. By that time we’ll both be so old that people won’t be able to tell what sex we are: you might be an old man and I might be an old woman. We’d lose all our teeth, but our lips would still be all right so we could still talk. The human body is so strange, the hardest things, like teeth, disappear first, but the softest things, like tongues and lips, will come along with us to the last moment of our lives …

6

One day in the autumn of 1966, Tiao, as a new student in the first grade of Lamp Alley Primary School in Beijing, participated in a noisy and confusing denouncement meeting on the school’s sports field. It was an assembly that the entire faculty and student body attended, where many desks were brought together and stacked to make a tall stage. In front of the stage, students from all grades sat on their own little chairs that they brought out of the classrooms.

It was new to Tiao, who had just become an elementary school student a few days earlier. Back then she didn’t have a clear idea about what having such a meeting meant. She thought sitting this way on the field was like having class in the open air, and felt freer than having an ordinary class. During class, teachers required children to sit straight with hands behind their backs; only correct posture would help their bodies grow healthily. But today, on the sports field, their class teacher didn’t ask them to put their hands behind them; they could keep their hands wherever they wanted. Maybe, with the atmosphere so serious and subdued, the teachers couldn’t bother about the students’ sitting positions. Tiao remembered the senior students leading them in the continuous shouting of slogans. No one told them to clench their fists and raise their arms when they shouted, but somehow they all figured it out by themselves. They raised their little arms over and over again and vehemently shouted those slogans, even though they had no idea what the slogans meant. As some of the slogans slowly began to make sense to her, she started to understand what they were and at whom they were directed. For instance, there was the slogan “Down with female hooligan Tang Jingjing!” As Tiao shouted, she knew Tang Jingjing was a female teacher who taught senior students maths in their school. She also heard boys from other classes behind her talking: “So, Teacher Tang is a female hooligan.”

Teacher Tang was escorted to the stage by several senior girls. She had a big white sign around her neck, hanging down over her chest, with words in ink: “I am a female hooligan!” The first grade sat in the first row, so Tiao saw the words on the sign very clearly. She recognized three characters, “I am woman,” and figured out the last word must be “hooligan,” based on the slogan they’d shouted a moment before. The sentence terrified her because, in her mind, “hooligan” didn’t just mean bad people, but the worst of the worst, worse than landlords and capitalists. She was wondering how an adult could so easily admit “I am a female hooligan” in the first person. That use of the first person to declare “I am ***” made Tiao extremely uncomfortable, although she couldn’t explain why.

Sitting in the front row, Tiao also had a clear view of Tang Jingjing. Tang Jingjing was about thirty years old, fair-skinned, and thin; so thin and white that with the pointiness of both her nose and close-cropped head, she resembled a toothpick. Toothpick would be how Tiao described her afterwards. She indeed looked like a toothpick, not a willow wand. She appeared thin and weak, but she was very tough and strong. She stuck herself into the stage like a toothpick and refused to bend or lower her head no matter how the senior girls pushed her around. Tiao at the time wouldn’t have been able to come up with the description “toothpick”; she simply had a natural sympathy for Teacher Tang, because—it was funny that Tiao didn’t know where she got the idea that the word “hooligan” only referred to men—how could a woman be a hooligan? She sympathized with Teacher Tang also because Teacher Tang was pretty. Pretty, that was the reason.

Since Teacher Tang refused to lower her head and bend her back, both on stage and off, people appeared excited and a little out of control. The senior girl students apparently didn’t know what to do, and other teachers just shouted the slogans. None of them personally seemed willing to grab their colleague’s neck and force her to lower her head. Just as the scene looked like it was about to run out of gas, a middle-aged woman in a moon-white shirt rushed onto the stage (only later did Tiao learn she was the director of the Lamp Alley Street Committee) and pointed at Teacher Tang. “Did you feel wronged because we said you were a hooligan? Then let me ask you: Are you married or not? According to the information we’ve collected, you’ve never married. Why do you have a child, then, even though you were never married? You have to confess truthfully the identity of the person with whom you had the child!” The chanting arose again: “Tang Jingjing must confess the truth! If she doesn’t confess, we revolutionary students will not stop!” Then a group of even older students jumped up onto the stage; they had come from a nearby middle school, all wearing red armbands, to assist their little brothers’ and sisters’ revolutionary action.

These middle schoolers were good at fighting. One of them went behind Teacher Tang and swung a leg at the back of her knee and she immediately knelt down with a thud. The audience cheered; the die-hard Teacher Tang was finally subdued by the revolutionary students. The denouncement meeting continued. Several young teachers went onto the stage to speak one by one. With great emotion they accused Teacher Tang of hiding serious corruption in her life in order to deceive her colleagues, school, and students into trusting her. Just imagine, everyone, what a terrible thing it is! A woman with such a degenerate morality and corrupt lifestyle could get into our school and become a teacher … The slogans arose again: “Tang Jingjing must leave Lamp Alley Primary School! We successors of the revolution demand she leave Lamp Alley Primary School!” The middle-aged woman in the moon-white shirt continued to expose Tang Jingjing’s crimes: According to her neighbours, Tang Jingjing pretended to live simply and plainly, but at home she always lived a bourgeois lifestyle—she had a cat, and treated her cat better than people. One day she even dared to kiss her cat right in the courtyard—in the name of heaven, kissing a cat!

The audience first broke into laughter at this and then switched to even angrier shouting. “Down with female hooligan Tang Jingjing!”

How insufficient it seemed just to allow Tang Jingjing to kneel there listening to people shouting while more and more of her disgusting actions were revealed. The intractable hostility on her pale, skinny face made people on the stage burn with anger. A boy student with a red armband suddenly stuck out his rubber army overshoe into Tang Jingjing’s face and said, “If you can kiss a bourgeois cat, can’t you kiss a working-class shoe?” He kept his foot in Tang Jingjing’s face as he spoke. A girl ran over and pressed Tang Jingjing’s head down to force her to kiss the boy’s shoe. More dust-covered shoes were extended forcing her to kiss them.

The field seethed and the stage gave way to chaos. The students in front of the stage could no longer sit still, some knocking over their chairs, some standing on them, and others pushing their way to the front in order to see more clearly. Dust flew around and choked Tiao until she coughed. She also stood up and wanted to see more clearly. But unlike some of the boys in her class, she didn’t step on her chair; she instinctively thought it was improper, something that a student shouldn’t do. But she felt so small in the midst of the crowd and could see nothing on the stage, which made her anxious. Just then a stink wafted over. Someone brought up a cup of shit, and then a voice rang out, “Tang Jingjing isn’t worthy of kissing our shoes; her mouth simply deserves to eat shit!”

“Right, right,” others chimed in. “Let her confess to the revolutionary teachers and students. If she doesn’t confess we’ll make her eat.”

Make her eat shit.

This suddenly calmed the boiling crowd, and the smell also made people hold their breath and concentrate. The shit was carried to the stage openly in a teacup, which played on the ugliest nerve hidden in the depths of the human mind. Its terrorizing power came onto the stage. The ones who had crowded to the front backed away, and the ones who stood on the chairs sat down. It was just like at a concert, when there’s some opening act during which the audience can raise as much clamour as they want, and only during the star’s big number will they sit straight and properly appreciate the performance. Making Tang Jingjing eat shit might well be the big number of the day’s denouncement meeting.

The teacup was placed in front of Tang Jingjing, only a metre away from her. She kept that ghostly pale face of hers still. Everyone is waiting for you to confess, why don’t you just open your mouth? … Tiao’s heart contracted as if clutched by a hand, and she could hardly breathe. She hoped Teacher Tang would open her mouth immediately so that she wouldn’t have to eat shit. But many people might not have thought like Tiao, and they might not have been so eager to hear Tang Jingjing’s confession anymore. When a person is given a choice between confessing and eating shit, what others are eager to see may not be her confessing.

She didn’t open her mouth, nor did she eat the shit. So a boy student ran to the middle-aged woman in the moon-white shirt and whispered something in her ear. He then returned to Tang Jingjing and spoke to the entire audience. “If Tang Jingjing refuses to confess or eat shit, we have another method. We revolutionary masses will not be frightened by her hooligan’s arrogance. We will bring her daughter to the stage and let you look at her. Let everyone take a look at her daughter. Her daughter will be the evidence that stands as proof of her hooligan activities.”