Tiger's Heart (15 page)

I thanked God that that was all he had said. For Director Yip, it was a mild response. I shot a look at Chen, who was pouring water into a teacup with her back to me. She must have kept Director Yip happy. He had rarely been so easy on me before.

That night, I went to Huang’s room. He was sitting on the bed watching TV. At the sight of me, he shook his head and scolded me mildly: “Ah-Juan, where have you been?”

I sat next to him and put my arms around him. His image rarely entered my mind when I was in my frenetic Amway world. I still loved him, but we weren’t close any more. I had emerged from under his wing and taken on my own mission.

I continued to work at LongJiang as one of Director Yip’s secretaries. I realized it was best to keep my job while doing Amway business. After all, I hadn’t made any money from Amway yet. But one month later, Assistant Director Li called me in for a serious talk.

“I heard you’re selling Amway products around the town. Do you know how bad this sounds? The secretary of Director Yip of the LongJiang Group, the biggest boss in town, is selling shampoo and detergent to people on the street?” The scholarlike Assistant Director Li spoke softly but sternly.

“I want to make some money,” I mumbled, feeling a little scared and embarrassed.

“I know LongJiang is not paying you a lot right now, but you need to think about the consequences of your own action, and always have Director Yip’s reputation in mind,” he cautioned. “Ah-Juan, you need to think about your future. LongJiang is a big company, and you’re so close to Director Yip that maybe some day he’ll promote you. You’ll have a much better future here than with Amway.”

I nodded but inwardly rolled my eyes. I didn’t really look forward to a promotion at LongJiang, where I had to tiptoe around to avoid being yelled at by my boss.

One week later, Director Yip stuck his head out of his office and yelled to Chen and me, “What the hell is going on with the floor? Why is it so dirty?”

Chen and I exchanged looks, and then, to my surprise, she pointed her finger at me and said, “I don’t know. It’s her day to clean the floor.”

I looked at her in disbelief. It was, in fact, her day.

Upon hearing her words, Yip glared at me and exploded, “What the fuck do you think you are doing lately? You can’t even do this one little thing?”

I felt a mixture of anger and disgust toward both of them—toward Chen for pushing her blame off on me, and toward Director Yip for scolding me before bothering to hear my side of the story. As soon as he finished his diatribe and returned to his office, I sat down at my desk and started writing my resignation letter. I knew Yip would never like me, and I would never be calculating enough to compete with Chen, so it was time for me to leave, to march on toward my bright and promising Amway future.

Later that afternoon, as I was packing up my things in my room, Huang came in with a sad look on his face.

“I heard what happened and that you wrote a letter.” He sat on the edge of the bed and sighed. I kept throwing things into my duffel bag and didn’t say anything.

“Yip told me that in the letter, you said that he heeded and trusted only one side. You shouldn’t have said that. After all, he is the big boss,” Huang said.

“I hate people not believing me,” I told him angrily.

“Come on, you shouldn’t have made such a big deal of it. Everybody, including Yip, knows that you’re very honest, and he’s realized now that perhaps he shouldn’t have yelled at you like that.”

“Too bad honest people aren’t popular.” I chuckled. Nothing could change my mind. Amway was calling me.

“Well, it happened, and there’s nothing we can do about it. Yip is the big boss. He can’t apologize to you. But guess what. I just talked to him. He says if you don’t leave, he’ll consider promoting you to the position of departmental manager.” His tone had turned cheerful, and he looked at me expectantly.

A little surprised, I raised my head and stopped packing. I felt so sad at that moment, seeing Huang’s efforts to keep me there. I didn’t understand why Yip had treated me like a slave if he had expected to promote me one day.

“Too late. My heart is not here any more,” I said. I cringed at the look of disappointment in his eyes.

“Are you going to your Amway friends?” he asked me carefully.

I nodded.

“I knew you would leave me some day,” he murmured.

His distressed tone affected me, but it was time for me to move on to the next phase in my life, and he didn’t belong in it. It was heartbreaking to leave him, but I knew I had to.

I forced a smile. “I’ll come back and see you as long as I am in Guangzhou.”

“Be really careful out there,” he counseled.

I called Brother Yong and told him that I had quit my job and that I would come to the meeting that night in Guangzhou.

“Brother Yong, do you know any place I can stay for tonight?” I asked.

“Let me see what I can do.”

I had my long hair cut to my ears, bought a new dress for myself, and left for Guangzhou that evening. I wanted a new start, to appear as a new person in front of Brother Yong.

“Wow, you look even prettier now!” Brother Yong exclaimed as soon as I came up to him after the Amway meeting.

“Everyone!” He clapped his hands. “Ah-Juan followed in Sister Grace’s footsteps and had her hair cut short. And what is even more exciting is that she has quit her job to do Amway. Now she is a full-time Amway doer. Congratulations!”

People applauded my devotion to Amway. I stood in the middle of the circle with my hands clutched together, turning red and glancing bashfully at Brother Yong. Now that I had cut my hair for him, now that I had given up my job for Amway, now that I was willing to follow him everywhere, would he want me, a country girl?

After the meeting, we went to his motorcycle together. Quietly I glanced at him walking steadily next to me, hands deep in his pockets.

We had been alone many times this late at night, but I had never felt so romantic before. Stars were shining in the sky; my dress rippled gently in the wind; and I had quit everything to come to Brother Yong, a city man I desperately admired.

I stopped and clasped his sleeve. “Brother Yong, I have left everything for Amway. Now I can follow you everywhere.”

“Good!” he said.

I looked up at him. “Brother Yong,” I said timidly. “You know I like you, don’t you?”

“I know,” he answered, cracking a thin smile.

Ah, he knew. I smiled happily. I dared not ask if he liked me too, afraid of breaking my big dream. I blindly followed him.

We traveled on his motorcycle to the northern edge of the city. He led me down a dark lane and into a small room through a back door. The rolling steel front door was shut and the room was crude and dusty, containing only a desk and a chair. “A friend is going to open a store here,” he explained. “He let me use it tonight.”

We stood in the middle of the room in the dark, listening to the sound of rats running around and feeling awkward.

“I guess this is my bed tonight.” I walked over to the desk and lay down on it. “Brother Yong, do you want to lie down too?”

“No, I just want to look at you.” He chuckled nervously.

“‘Look at me’? What do you mean?”

“You know, just look at you. I have never looked at a woman so closely before.”

I sat up. “You mean . . . you’ve never slept with a woman before?”

“Yes.”

I was astonished. He was a thirty-three-year-old goodlooking city man who rode a Harley and yet
still
a virgin. I felt more tenderly toward him, having discovered this secret.

“Brother Yong, I’ll let you look if you want.”

I took off my clothes and lay down in the dark. I heard him approaching the desk carefully and then felt him putting his hands on my knees. He touched and examined me cautiously, like a curious child with a glass ball. The Diamond Bachelor everyone looked up to, the man who gave such stimulating speeches in front of everybody, was a virgin. I wasn’t sure if I felt closer to him now or if I was even further away from him since I was not a virgin.

“Do you want to try it, Brother Yong?” His touch aroused my desire. I closed my eyes. I could hear him taking off his pants. He moved closer to me and then knelt on the desk, and I felt the warmth of his legs as they touched mine. He felt so soft.

After a while, I heard him getting off the desk and getting dressed. I opened my eyes and sat up. “I don’t think I can do it,” he said softly. And then the confident, sunny look reappeared on his face, as if nothing had just happened. I tried to hide my disappointment. He liked me, otherwise he wouldn’t have touched me, I told myself. Some day he would be moved by my persistence.

The next day I moved into an apartment that Brother Yong helped me find. It was hidden in an alley deep in a dirty neighborhood. Butchers, street cleaners, hookers, and Guangzhou’s poorest working classes lived there. The alley was littered with beer cans, coal cinders, and vegetable leaves and was seldom swept. The smell of rotten meat and urine was ever-present.

I shared a bedroom, a living room, a bathroom, and a kitchen with eleven other penniless and frustrated Amway adherents. Six females shared the bed in the bedroom, and the men just crashed in the living room, like dogs that could lie down and fall asleep anywhere. The apartment was moist and humid and smelled like a rat house. The bathroom, which was merely a squat toilet and a showerhead above, was covered with layers and layers of filth. I pinched my nose in the kitchen and the bathroom, telling myself that there were people in this world living in worse conditions and that I could take this.

Brother Yong never talked about what had happened that night. I still looked at him admiringly and believed that some day he would look into my eyes and tell me that he liked me.

A few weeks later, I followed Brother Yong on a trip to Guangxi Province, where one of his subordinates needed help developing his local network. You are a seed; you can take root and blossom anywhere and grow into a towering big tree, Amway taught. Everyone in Amway is your brother or sister, your arm; you should never hesitate to help, Brother Yong told me. So I grabbed all the money I had left, put on my jacket, picked up my backpack, and hopped on the train.

We arrived at a small city called Bingyang, and when Brother Yong told me that we were right next to the border between China and Vietnam, I was surprised that somehow I had gotten myself all the way to the border of my country. I knew little about Vietnam except that my country had helped the Northern Vietnamese fight off the Americans in the 1960s.

“This is what’s so cool about doing Amway: you get to travel to so many places,” he told me as we dodged the locals squatting on the sidewalks. They stared at us strangely, as if we were aliens. All the stories that I had ever heard about drug dealers came to mind. Brother Yong had told me that this region was close to the Golden Triangle, the notorious area where the borders of Laos, Myanmar, and Thailand converge, where opium is grown, turned into heroin, and smuggled out. The Golden Triangle was the source of half the world’s heroin. Heroin was the only illegal drug people could get in China and was considered a great scourge, and anyone who touched one drop of it was seen as a dead person or destined to become a life prisoner in a rehab center. I had never heard of anyone using drugs except in vague stories, let alone met an addict.

We stayed in a mountain village. Life was simple there. Brother Yong and I worked well as a team; when he gave me looks of approval, I felt content and happy. Our audience shook our hands after lectures, thanking us for bringing such a great opportunity to such a backward place; at moments like that, I felt fulfilled. I imagined that this was how Chairman Mao had felt after liberating the peasants from the oppression of the capitalists in the olden days. How simple and frank the people here were!

I slept on a wooden bed in a small room; and every night after the village went dark at around eight o’clock, I thought of Brother Yong’s daytime praises, recited Amway’s mission statement once, and fell asleep peacefully. I stopped worrying about my future, for the first time since I had come to the South.