The Season of the Stranger (20 page)

Li-ling said, “A turtle needs food and carries his clothing and shelter with him. Therefore all men are turtles.”

“Not very wrong,” Han-li said, “if you will remember.” The others smiled and looked at Li-ling. She had not for a long time known why everyone laughed about turtles and finally Han-li had told her. Han-li had enjoyed telling her. Li-ling had sat on the bed. Han-li, dropping her pencil and swiveling in the desk chair, had stared gravely and sympathetically at her. In a low professional voice she had told her. A turtle, she had said, is supposed incapable of the sexual act. Because of his unusual structure. It is therefore assumed that it is necessary to have a snake, capable of penetrating between the body and the shell, substitute for the male turtle. Do you see? If you call a man a turtle it means he is a cuckold. If you call him the son of a turtle it means he is a bastard. A very pleasant little story. I have enjoyed telling it to you, she had said. And as you are studying English let me recommend the western story of Adam and Eve as related reading. Also the Mongol story of the seven-headed speckled snake. If there are any other perplexing problems, you may bring them to me. Then she had swung herself around to the desk and taken up her pencil, but before beginning to work she had looked back over her shoulder and let her murky brown eyes look unhappily into Li-ling's and said, I will tell you all that I know, but it will be hearsay.

Now Li-ling thought of all this and said, “I remember.”

Han-li continued, raising her hand in warning. “You have neglected the spiritual side of man,” she said.

Li-ling stared at her and then she was laughing all alone, laughing with tears on her face. When she could see she looked at Wen-chen and Yün-chün. They were puzzled. Han-li looked furious.

She said, “Are you laughing because Mr Girard has no spiritual side?”

“No,” Li-ling said, “I am not laughing because of that.” She wiped her eyes.

“Most foreigners do not seem to,” Wen-chen said.

“How many do you know?”

“Not many.” She smiled. “I should not have said what I did.”

Li-ling shrugged. “It does not hurt me. I did not mean that you were insulting me, or Mr Girard. But it is a bad habit, to generalize in that way.”

“I am not so sure,” Yün-chün said. “You can say some things that are almost always true of foreigners.”

“Such as?”

“They are crude. Blunt. Unintelligent. They drink much. They know nothing of Chinese culture and do not care.”

“That is almost too silly,” Li-ling said. “To them most of us may appear crude and blunt and unintelligent. And all foreigners do not drink. Many of the missionaries certainly do not. And how much do you know of foreign culture?”

“There is a difference,” she said. “They are here. If I were in their countries I would try to learn.”

“What about Mr Girard. Is he so ignorant of Chinese culture?”

“I do not know,” Yün-chün said. “I do not know him well enough.”

“He is not,” she said. “You may believe me.”

“And the others?”

“There is no need to speak of the others. With one exception the generality is punctured. By admitting one exception you admit the possibility of more.”

“You may be right,” she said.

“This is sudden zeal,” Han-li said. “You formerly did not care.”

“True love,” Wen-chen said.

Yün-chün was still thinking.

“Not quite,” Li-ling smiled. “But knowing him has helped. I worry about things now.”

“Why?”

“I am still not sure,” she said. “But I have an idea. I thought of it yesterday. Do you remember last year what we heard about the Japanese? The man who came to talk, and the posters said he was American, and when we saw him he was Japanese? He lived in the United States. Do you remember what he said happened to him during the war?” Now her mind was working rapidly and clearly. She was glad that she had thought of that.

“I remember,” Yün-chün said. “They moved him.”

She nodded. “And they did other things to him, and to his family. Because to them all Japanese were the same. And now you begin to think that all foreigners are the same.”

“You may be right,” she said again.

“And if foreigners were all the same then tell me why we did not join with the Japanese to rid ourselves of the foreigners.”

“Japanese are foreigners too,” Yün-chün said. “But we almost did.”

“And the reason we did not was that this one time the people would not let the government have its will. The people would not allow themselves to be sold.”

Han-li said, “What have you been reading?”

Yün-chün said, “She has become a missionary.”

Wen-chen said, “She is right,” meaning Li-ling, and then, “Anyway brother Andrew is different.” She bowed her head toward Li-ling and touched her forehead with one hand. “If I may call him brother Andrew. He has always been as a brother to me.”

They laughed. Yün-chün and Li-ling smiled at each other. Han-li asked, “How is he different?”

“He knows more,” Yün-chün said.

She has never known how to be sarcastic, Li-ling thought. “That is the answer,” she said, “and it is the only real difference.”

“You mean that he is a boy with the mind of a man,” Han-li said.

“Yes.” She smiled.

“How old is he?”

“That too is his own story,” she said. “He told me that the younger we thought he was, the better he would get along with the students; and the older they thought he was, the better he would feel among the teachers. He said he would let everyone decide for himself and that way we would all be happy.”

“If he were Chinese I could guess easily,” Wen-chen said, “but I cannot tell with foreigners.”

“It is difficult,” Li-ling said. “They are all the same.”

Yün-chün laughed and looked embarrassed. “Ask him to show you his passport, Wen-chen,” she said. “It will be written there.”

Wen-chen said, “I think Li-ling ought to ask his permission to tell us.”

Han-li said, “Of course. He cannot refuse her anything.”

“What does he call you,” Yün-chün asked, “Miss Hsieh or Li-ling?”

“Delicate Daughter of the Midsummer Lotus,” Han-li said.

“Shut up,” Li-ling said to her, and then to Yün-chün, “He calls me Li-ling.”

“Does he kiss your hand when he sees you?” Wen-chen asked. “They say he once lived in Europe.”

Li-ling sighed. “And all Europeans kiss the hand?”

“No,” she said. “I wanted only to know about him.” She was very serious again.

Li-ling said, “No. Sometimes he kisses the back of my neck, the way they do in America.”

“Truthfully?” Wen-chen was dazed. Han-li had her hands over her face. Wen-chen looked at her and then at Li-ling and said, “I was serious.”

Yün-chün stood up and said, “It is eleven o'clock. I have a class.”

“Eleven?” Wen-chen got up too. “I must go to the infirmary.”

“What for?”

“I do not know. A note came. Perhaps I missed an injection in the fall.”

“I will walk to the door with you,” Li-ling said.

At the door they said goodbye and Li-ling said that she would come again soon. Yün-chün told her not to think that there was anything personal in what she had said about foreigners; that in a way it was a kind of envy. “I did not take it personally,” Li-ling said. She smiled. “Yün-chün smiled. Neither smile held any meaning. Then Yün-chün and Wen-chen left.

When Li-ling got back to the common room Han-li was grinning at her from the same chair. “You are a victim of verbal assault.”

“I did not mind,” Li-ling said. “They meant nothing by it.”

“I did not mind either,” Han-li said. “I enjoyed it. But I do not believe that they meant nothing by it.”

Li-ling looked away. “Neither do I,” she said.

“Come upstairs,” Han-li said. “We can make tea. And try to smile, will you?”

“I am trying,” Li-ling said.

Han-li had a small kerosene stove hidden under her bed. She dragged it out and took a pan from a shelf and went to get water. Her room looked the way it had looked when it was also Li-ling's room: neat, the books arranged, the floor clean, only Han-li's bed rumpled. Li-ling sat on the new roommate's bed. When Han-li came back Li-ling asked:

“Where is your roommate?”

“At class, I imagine.”

“Do you know any more about her?” Her roommate's name was Ting Ch'üan-tzu and she was untalkative about herself.

“Oh, yes,” Han-li said. “A great deal more. Her personality becomes clearer and fuller.” She lit the stove. “She has taught me to smoke. Of the hundreds of vices in the world to which I would not mind being initiated, she has chosen the least exciting. She has also taught many of the girls to play games for money. For a time I thought she had a weakness of the mind. Then she suddenly became stupid and began losing to them. In that way she supports four girls in the dormitory who have not another thing to depend on.”

“She sounds nice. She must be very rich.”

“She is. I think her father operates a brothel in Shanghai. A very large splendid brothel.” She shook her head. “It is the only safe vocation left.”

“Prostitution?”

“No. Operating a brothel.” She went to her desk and took a package of cigarettes from the drawer. “Would you like one?”

“All right.”

“Do you smoke much now?”

“Not much,” Li-ling said. “Hardly at all. But this is an occasion.”

“It is?” She took a plate from the drawer and put a cigarette on it and handed it toward Li-ling, bowing. Li-ling took the cigarette and bowed back. Han-li put the plate away.

“I regret having to give you this particular brand,” she said. “At the emporium they had Elephants, Antelopes, Tigers, and Hup'us. The hup'u, you will remember, is a famous and widely traveled bird. He was known to the Greeks, historians tell us, by the same name: hup'u. Knowing, as we all do, that our cigarettes are made of droppings, and that the kind of droppings varies with the brand name, I bought a package of Elephants. I expected a strong, meaty, leathery flavor, but I find that they taste more like Hup'us.”

She would probably be like that all her life, Li-ling decided. Now Han-li flopped onto the bed and sat with her back to the wall, smoking and squinting at Li-ling.

“So,” she said, “you are well mixed up with your foreigner.” Li-ling nodded. “It is a difficult thing,” she went on. “The war does not help much either.”

“In some ways it does,” Li-ling said. “People have not the time to worry about us.”

Han-li flicked ashes down between the bed and the wall. “Use the floor,” she said. “But what if the City falls? How will the Communists like him?”

“I do not know. But they cannot dislike him more than the present government does. So it may be that the important question is How will he like the Communists.”

“True,” Han-li said. She sighed. “He is a nice boy. How far has it gone?”

Should I tell her, Li-ling wondered briefly. But Andrew might not like it. “We are reasonable,” she said. “We like each other. But we are reasonable.”

“Have you made any plans?”

“No. Not that far.”

Han-li looked at the water in the pan. It was beginning to boil. She said: “Have you taken him to bed?”

There it was again, the blush. It was coming to be very convenient. She must have looked virtuous. “No.”

“Do not misunderstand the question.”

“It is all right,” Li-ling said. “It is a natural question for you, I suppose. But no one has ever asked me before.” Soon, she was thinking, there will be no need for me to know the truth because even knowing it I will not be able to speak it.

“It is a natural question,” Han-li said. “And it may be asked again. I think there is a trace of envy to be reckoned with in the people who speak of him to you. Even among the women who disapprove in principle, and there are many, there is this envy.” She smiled. “The fact that opposition exists makes you neither right nor wrong. You should not take offense. And you should not be embarrassed.”

“I have so far done neither.” Li-ling hesitated. “How much … opposition is there?”

“Much. And it is not so much opposition as it is fear, coupled with the envy I speak of.”

“Fear of what?”

“Fear … I do not know, really. But part of it is a nationalism. Fear that a Chinese girl, by compromising herself with a foreigner, will compromise all Chinese girls in the eyes of all foreigners.”

“Then I am a symbol.”

“Yes. And I wish it were someone else.”

“Because you worry about me?”

“Partially. And partially because you are too calm. Another girl in the same position would weep and rage and drive herself to a nervous crisis. She would give the critics reason for self-satisfaction, and once the critics felt that, they would be inclined to sympathy. But you are calm; you like your friend, and there are no tears and nothing to be nervous about, and the girls will call you callous and the foreigners will call you wanton. So I wish it were someone else.”

I may not be calm for long, she thought.

Han-li took two cups from the drawer. “Do you ever think about marrying him?”

“Yes,” she said, “but I do not talk to him about it.”

“Do you want children?”

“By him?”

“In general.”

“Yes.”

“This is a bad world into which to bring them.”

“You mean if they were by him.”

“Yes.”

Li-ling shrugged. “Perhaps the world will get better.”

“Perhaps. But you know what it is today. The Europeans do not care for the ‘Asiatic' Eurasians and the Asians do not care for the ‘European' Eurasians. It is like being half bird and half horse. You cannot fly and you cannot pull a wagon.”