Tiger's Heart (13 page)

My inner debate ended as soon as a bunch of girls entered the room and lined up in front of us. They were all tall and slender and wore short skirts with leather boots or dresses through which you could catch a glimpse of lacy bras and panties. Each boss pointed his finger at two of the girls, and the two selected walked to the couch and sat with the boss in between them. Director Yip chose two girls quickly and then ordered another for his driver, Xiao Ma. The girls, all of whom had sweet, charming voices, began to skillfully nudge the men’s arms or lean themselves over their chests, feeding them orange wedges or pouring beer into their mouths.

The room started to boil with laughter, and the atmosphere became giddy as in a brothel. I sat alone, staring intently at the screen and pretending that I didn’t feel awkward at all. Once in a while, one of the girls would get up to take the microphone and would give me a curious look. I would smile. So I was finally in the same room as those girls in the South who were cutely nicknamed “miss at the table” or, not so cutely, “whore.” Their delicate skin, tall figures, red lips, and thickly powdered faces made men love them and women jealous; but once they opened their mouths, nothing could cover their lousy, heavily accented Mandarin.

I wondered whether I should talk to them or just do my best to ignore them. Most good girls would turn away at the sight of such a girl, perhaps even spit on the ground. But had I ever been one of the good girls? I remembered the time when I had roamed the streets of Shanghai and almost sold my body for cash. Although I had an associate’s degree and could read those Western letters, I wasn’t better than them. After all, we were all migrant workers. We all had flung away our past, left our home towns, and come to the South with the same dream—to have a better life.

At last the men called it a night. Yip stood in the middle of the room, holding a stack of hundred-yuan bills in his hand. Each girl giggled as she took hers. After he was done, he scanned the room, making sure he hadn’t missed anyone. His glance flickered over me for a second. I couldn’t help but be mesmerized by the stack of bills in his hand. Maybe it was better to be one of those girls. I had come to the South to make money, and here they were getting so much of it.

With difficulty I forced my eyes to move away from Yip’s hand. With one arm around his waist, one of girls he had picked for the night suddenly snapped another bill from his hand and hid it behind her back, giggling. “Fuck your mother!” Yip pinched her cheek, clearly teasing. He let her get away with it. Convulsing with laughter, the rowdy party moved to the door.

I shook my head firmly, trying to drive these thoughts from my mind. I would never, ever sleep with Yip, for money or anything else, not because I didn’t want money, but because I already had a man in my life, a man who didn’t have much money, a man who sometimes yelled at me but who also gave me warmth and care.

The next day I was alone again on the eighth floor. After taking a good look at Yip’s office, I went back to my desk and idled my morning away. I felt like a bird sitting on a branch above a graveyard. Soon the boredom overtook me. It was so hard to fight off my sleepiness.

Just as I was ready to give up and let my head drop to the desk, Yip stomped out of the elevator, which was now in operation. My drowsiness flew away. I sprang to my feet and studied his face, trying to see if he was angry with me because of the previous night. He went right into his office and slammed the door behind him.

A minute late, he strode out and shouted, “Ah-Juan! Why is there dust on the table in my office? And did you mop and wax the floor?”

I stammered and stuttered. I’d had no idea that my job responsibilities included dusting the table and waxing the floor. I quickly shook my head. I was scared to death that he might yell more, and my legs were shaking. When Yip was extremely annoyed, I got the feeling that he could just eat me alive.

The moment he stormed out, I grabbed the mop and feather duster in the closet and started to do my work. As I knelt and poured wax onto the wood floor, I groaned to myself: Did I have to mop and wax this entire floor of over a thousand square feet every day? Was this what Bill Gates’s secretary did, clean and dust, instead of copying, faxing, and translating? Well, maybe I shouldn’t compare LongJiang with Microsoft, I thought to myself. After all, LongJiang was built entirely on bank loans and my boss showed up for work for only fifteen minutes a day.

I sat on that floor of the finest wood and sighed heavily. Then I rolled up my sleeves and started to clean like crazy. Three hours later, the entire floor shone with wax; I had not missed even one corner. My second day as secretary had ended, and I was exhausted.

Day three, day four, and then day five continued in the same way. Gradually, I decided that although I was called by the fine-sounding title “secretary of the director,” in reality I was just his cleaning lady. The only difference between an ordinary cleaning lady and me was that I dressed up a little bit; I had an associate’s degree in English; and occasionally I could become his drinking companion. I imagined that Yip wouldn’t want an illiterate woman wearing ragged clothes in his fine new office, or in the deluxe room of his excellent Cantonese restaurant.

As long as I did my job well and behaved cautiously, I thought some day my boss would learn to respect and appreciate me. Though I lived like a mouse that trembled at the sight of a cat, my life as Director Yip’s secretary was, after all, better than planting rice in the fields or eating chalk dust in front of a blackboard.

The days stumbled along. By thinking carefully before speaking or acting, I had survived as Director Yip’s secretary for two months. Every day, my boss came to the office for only a short period of time, and once in a while he would give me an easy order, such as pouring a cup of tea for him or calling someone to his office.

One day I found a letter on his desk written in English. Out of sheer boredom, I translated it into Chinese for him. It was in fact a very simple invitation, but I was sure that Director Yip couldn’t understand it since he had only reached junior high. Afterward, I heard through the grapevine that he had praised my translation in front of other heads of the company. I was happy and thought that I had finally attained his approval. As time went by, maybe he would give me more responsibility, I hoped.

14

“YOU ARE A
devil!” Huang shouted through clenched teeth as he moved on top of me. “Why don’t you go to hell? I can’t even be a man to my wife any more.” Every time he came back from visiting his wife and son, he wouldn’t talk to me for days, and then he would let out his anger by making love to me like a madman.

I kept quiet, as usual, with my eyes focused on his twisted face. I was sorry that I made him feel guilty. But I couldn’t imagine not having him in my life in this strange land. He was a brick wall, and I was the ivy. He was married, but I loved him. He was the first man I had loved since Chi, although the love was much different. My feelings for Chi had been innocent, but my love for Huang was consuming and heavy, like loving a brother, a father, and a lover all at once. He had a wife in another city, but in the small town of Long Jiang, Huang, I thought, only belonged to me.

“Don’t ever leave me alone here, please,” I would murmur to him at night when he held me tight.

“Don’t worry, Ah-Juan. No woman would want me except silly you! I am married and have no money,” he’d tell me jokingly, and I would cup his face in my hands. I believed him completely, even when I overheard him talking on the phone with a girl.

“It’s Ah-Min, a friend,” he explained. “We used to work together back in Shenzhen. She’s very smart, just like you. She’s from Inner China and also learned Cantonese from scratch.”

One Sunday evening when Huang had gone to visit his family for the weekend, I was sitting in my room, flipping through a magazine, when I heard a loud noise coming from downstairs:

“Manager Huang, open the fucking door!” Someone was pounding on Huang’s door. I ran downstairs and saw it was a mah-jongg friend of his.

“Has he come back from Shenzhen?” I asked. I wasn’t expecting him until the next day.

“He should’ve. Before he left, he told us that he would come back and play mah-jongg with us tonight.” He kept pounding the door for a couple of minutes. “Manager Huang, I know you are inside. Open the fucking door!” No one answered. “I guess he’s not back yet.” Disappointed, he left.

Why had Huang told his mah-jongg friends he would return Sunday night but told me Monday morning? I ran up a few stairs and looked at Huang’s windows. The curtains were all drawn, and I couldn’t see inside. They had been up on Friday morning when he left. He was in there. I could feel it.

I knocked on the door. No answer.

I stood outside, feeling my knees getting weaker. Why was he hiding? Was he with another girl? I couldn’t think any further.

The next morning, I went to work early. Around ten o’clock, I called Huang’s office. “Ah-Xia, is Manager Huang in the office yet?” I asked the salesgirl who answered the phone. “Director Yip might want to see him today.”

“Yeah, he just came in ten minutes ago,” she said.

I put down the phone and slipped out of the office. I ran all the way from the headquarters building to the dorm and then up the stairs to Huang’s room.

I knocked on the door and waited. My nervous heart was twisting inside me. A minute later, the door opened, and a girl appeared, a small girl in a blue daisy-patterned dress with delicate skin and slanted eyes like two crescents.

“Are you Ah-Min?” I asked, lifting my chin.

“Yes. Who are you?” she answered in perfect Cantonese with a small, piercing voice.

So Ah-Min was his girlfriend, not just his former coworker.

I walked past her into the room. She followed and sat on the bed. I took the chair across from her. We faced one another, reading the fear and pain in each other’s eyes.

I cleared my throat and introduced myself. “My name is Ah-Juan. I’m his girlfriend.” I stared at her provocatively.

Her shoulders were trembling, and her pale face was rigid. She looked so small and delicate, like a gust of wind would just blow her away. Jealousy spread through my heart. I felt as though someone had grabbed me by the waist and was breaking me in two.

“Has he been seeing you all this time when he goes back to Shenzhen?” No answer. I continued: “You know, our relationship isn’t ordinary. We have deep feelings for each other.” After a short pause, I told her coldly, “I had an abortion for him.”

I started toward the door. I realized that I had just lied without flinching. The white clothes I was wearing suddenly felt dusty and heavy. The four lime walls were shrinking, closing in, trapping me. I turned and I saw tears flowing down her cheeks. Good, I had hurt her, just like he had hurt me.

I raised my head and left the room with a straight back.

When I went back to Huang’s room that evening, he was sitting on the bed, sighing. I looked around. Ah-Min was gone.

The fire of jealousy that burned inside me earlier had died down a little. I waited for his explosion. “Why did you lie to her?” I wanted him to yell at me. But he just looked gloomy.

“Why did you do that?” He sighed. “It’s meaningless.”

“I thought I was your only girlfriend.” I sat next to him gingerly. He was not as angry as I’d thought he’d be.

“But you’ve seen her. She isn’t like you. She’s not the kind of girl you can easily leave behind in a strange city. After I left Shenzhen, she called me all the time and cried on the phone. She’s fragile and needs someone to take care of her,” he explained patiently.

So because I was strong, I was doomed to be hurt?

“She cried and cried, wanted to follow me here. What could I do?” Then he smiled. “Ah-Juan, you’re like a fierce tiger. I do like that.”

I wanted to tell him that I too was fragile and soft, that I wanted love more desperately than anyone else in the world, but I was silent. As long as he didn’t tell me to get lost, I could sacrifice my pride and hold back my tears.

He took me in his arms. We lay in bed silently and never mentioned Ah-Min again, but her desolate face and slender figure had permanently cast a shadow on our relationship. It shook my love for this man, who I had thought was my warrior but who turned out to belong to more than one young girl in need of love.

Why was love in the South so flimsy and easily changed? I realized that my affection for Huang was a tree that would never blossom.

It had been three months since I’d become Director Yip’s secretary when, one day, two girls, both of them tall and pretty, followed Huang into the office.

Huang introduced them to me. “This is Mei, and this is Chen. They are Director Yip’s new secretaries. They just came from Harbin.” I remembered that Director Jia recently had gone up north and had hired seven pretty girls to become secretaries for the directors in the company. This was one of the tricks of the business world, to decorate the façade of the company, the deputy director had claimed.

I stood up and shook their hands. They were so tall that my head only reached to their shoulders. I arranged for them to sit next to me. Now I would have help with mopping and waxing the floor and perhaps people to talk to during these boring days, I thought happily.

“What? Wax the floor? I’m a college graduate. I didn’t come all the way here to wax his damn floor,” Mei snorted as soon as I told them that this was part of the job. Then she took out a cosmetic bag from her purse and started to pluck her eyebrows, holding up a tiny mirror in her hand. The other girl, Chen, shrugged and walked away.

Shocked, I looked at their powdered faces and pursed red lips and wished I had the strength to stand up to them. “You were here first, so you should tell them what to do,” Huang had counseled me earlier, but I realized that there was no way I could order these two city girls around. They were ten times better looking than me and as proud as two peacocks with their tails spread.

Chen eventually agreed to help me sweep the floor and take care of the tea service for Director Yip and his guests. But Mei, who completely detested the place, spent most of her time putting stuff on her face and then taking it off and complaining that the company had lied to them at recruiting. She fiddled with her cosmetic tools constantly, plucking, shaving, or smoothing, and at the end of the day her face always looked like a shelled whole egg just rolled out of an oily pan.

After she’d been there a couple of days, I couldn’t restrain my curiosity any longer and asked her how she got her face to be so smooth. She held her mirror up higher and told me contemptuously, “You shave it!” She then turned her head and looked at it sideways in the mirror. “My sister brought this shaver for me from Japan, the best ever made.”

I was embarrassed by my ignorance and rustic background. I had only one red lipstick and no relatives in Japan who could bring me goodies like a shaver. No wonder Director Yip always smiled at them but never at me.

Mei abruptly tossed her mirror on her desk and grumbled, “What a lousy job.” She turned toward my desk, which was behind hers. “One of my friends who came to the South earlier goes to the Garden Hotel in Guangzhou and meets foreigners there, and do you know how much she makes every night?”

I shook my head.

“Five hundred American dollars! That’s four thousand yuan, five times my salary!” she exclaimed. She dropped her elbows on her desk and whined, “What the hell am I doing here?”

I had a feeling that she wouldn’t last long. Sure enough, a couple of mornings later she didn’t show up. Just one week after the company had flown her all the way from the North to the South, she had vanished.

That left only Chen and me on the eighth floor, and we didn’t talk much. Sometimes I sat at my desk, scribbling bits of poems or popular songs on a pad, and wondered how Mei was doing now. Was she working the lobby of the Garden Hotel and making five hundred dollars a night? Was she happy now?

I couldn’t help but wonder: Were those girls out there who slept with men for money just being realistic? Did I, who was stuck with a monstrous boss, a low-paying job, and a married boyfriend, belong to the group of stupid and stubborn girls? I started to doubt whether it was worth it, whether some day Director Yip would ever tell me to stop mopping his floor or whether Huang would ever be able to give me a home.

During the dull days on the eighth floor, I contemplated my future. My life wasn’t going forward, and I felt lost. Was my mother right that only businessmen and whores came to the South? Couldn’t an educated woman succeed without sleeping around?

I remembered the story of a successful businesswoman I had heard from a friendly young man I had met on the bus from Gao Ming to Guangzhou.

“You have the courage to pursue your own dreams. Don’t get discouraged by setbacks in life,” the young man had encouraged me after hearing about my jobless situation at the time. “You know, I have a friend just like you. She studied a foreign language in college and was assigned to a travel agency after graduation, but she didn’t like the job, so she resigned, and she’s doing business on her own now. I’ll introduce you to her if you come to Guangzhou again.”

So once more I visited Guangzhou to try to change my life. When I got into the city, I picked up the public phone at a newspaper stand on the sidewalk and dialed the young man’s pager number. The lady at the page station asked for my name and number. I shouted the information to her over the noise of the dense traffic and then I waited nervously. I wasn’t sure he would remember me. He had looked urbane, affluent, and out of my league.

He called back right away. “Of course I remember you. Who could forget such a pretty girl?”

His solid, pleasant voice was like a ray of sunshine penetrating through the thick layer of gray air above the city. Southerners liked to tell every girl that she was pretty, but such a word from him, a sophisticated and good-looking man, stirred me like a pebble thrown into a river.

Half an hour later, a Harley-Davidson, the newest model, shiny as a mirror and wide as a canoe, stopped in front of the newsstand. The rider took off his helmet and I saw his lean, dark face. I had never believed in stories of knights on white horses, but seeing a city man on a Harley-Davidson smiling at me with white teeth made me think they might be true after all.

“Call me Brother Yong,” he said. As the bike maneuvered in the traffic, he shouted, “Hold my waist!”

I did as I was told. “Do you remember the girl I told you about on the train, the one who left her governmental job?” he asked in the wind.

“Yes, of course,” I shouted back to him. “She’s my role model.”

“Do you want to meet her? She’s giving a speech tonight.”

After making a big half-circle through the city, we came to an old cement building. I followed him to the second floor, and we stopped at a closed door. He gestured for me to be quiet and then pushed the door open a crack. A blast of warm air mixed with sweat escaped. I peered in and saw that the room was packed. People stood pressed up against the door with hunched shoulders and flattened stomachs.

Brother Yong carefully squeezed into the crowd, found a free spot, and waved to me. I sneaked in and stood a few inches from him. I looked through the gaps between the shoulders surrounding me. Everybody was gazing at the front of the room with their heads raised, listening with rapt attention, men and women, old and young.