Tiger's Heart (24 page)

Furious, Old Yao shut my family outside the security bars while the other family stayed inside. Big Uncle and Small Uncle stood there puffing and blowing with their hands on their hips and giving Spring angry looks. Aunt Jasmine pointed at Spring, weeping and wailing to her about how stupid she was and how much shame she had brought to the family.

I clasped the steel bars with my fingers. I could feel warm tears flowing down my face, mixing with the blood from the bridge of my nose and my neck where Ming’s wife had scratched it open. I was fighting alongside these illiterate peasants when I could have been sipping wine with my American clients in warm, civilized Xiamen. I could have been sitting on the Italian leather couch in the lounge of the Marco Polo Hotel as someone played Mozart on the piano and the waiter handed me a martini. Instead, I was stuck in the mad world of the Shen Hamlet.

I turned away from the bars, and through my teary eyes I saw Spring standing before me. We stood face to face, looking at each other silently. She reached out her finger, touched the scratched spots on my face, and gently wiped the blood off my nose. She was crying. On her chin I saw the tiny round black dot that I had left many years ago when I stabbed her with my ballpoint pen to stop her from pretending to cry to get our mother’s attention. I saw the little pink scar on her forehead from a rock thrown by a man chasing her after she had stolen peaches from his trees when she was only seven. I saw myself holding her small soft hands when she was a little girl, as we huddled together in a corner when our parents were hitting and cursing at each other. I saw her growing up and coming to the crossroads of life on her own and trying to figure out which way to go. I saw her as another me, young but scarred, looking for love everywhere but making mistakes again and again.

I am sorry, Meimei, I thought.

A couple of days later, with the fifteen thousand yuan that Ming had eventually agreed to pay as compensation, my mother took Spring to the hospital two towns away for a secret abortion.

“Did she say it hurt?” I asked my mother as casually as I could manage after they had come back and Spring had gone up to her room.

“No, the little bitch is lucky. They used anesthesia. She said it didn’t hurt at all.”

“Mama, can you and Dad try not to call her ‘little bitch’ in the future and not yell at her for ruining her own future?” I suggested carefully. “It’s like putting salt on her wounds.”

“How can I not yell at her? Her face is still swollen from the motorcycle accident, and now she just had an abortion. How is she ever going to learn if I don’t remind her?”

I sighed and said nothing. Spring had undergone a neardeath accident and had had to get an abortion after getting pregnant with a married man. I hoped this would be enough to teach her to think more carefully from then on. But why should
I
expect her to learn? What about myself? Had I ever learned from my mistakes?

At least she wouldn’t have to remember the feeling of the iron rod inside her for the rest of her life, and at least Mama had been outside the room when she was on the operating table. But it couldn’t feel good to have our parents know about it.

After the abortion, there was finally some peace in the house. Spring went back to Zhenze to tend to her clothing shop. Still angry with her, my father remained uncommunicative as usual. I didn’t feel I could just leave the family in this state, so I talked to Song and got permission to stay an extra week in the hamlet.

My mother and I often sat at the window, looking at the rows of vegetables in the fields and chitchatting with each other. Eventually, she stopped crying whenever she thought of Spring. I found that she had turned old overnight, as if transformed by a magic wand. With the sound of chickens cooing and dogs barking in the background, I told her about my life in Xiamen and tried my best to convince her that life could only get better, because I would make more money and Spring would behave now.

“Mama, where is Honor?” I asked her. I hadn’t seen him once.

She sighed helplessly. “He rarely comes now. We’re both getting old, and our children have grown up. His business is not doing well. Besides, your sister exhausts me. How can I have the energy to care about Honor now?”

I had mixed feelings. The ten-year affair between my mother and Honor had brought so much agony to everyone that I was relieved to see it ending, yet I wasn’t sure I would get used to a home without him.

My mother liked the music box with the moon cakes very much. The six moon cakes filled with egg yolk and lotus buds were like treasures to her, and she ate each of them very slowly. She held the music box carefully in her lap and smiled whenever I turned the tray to make the jingling music play. Her dry, wrinkled fingers, which were used to touching only dirt, didn’t match the vivid ruby-red tray. Her excitement and shy, almost girlish smiles made me feel like crying.

“Mama, I would like you to come to Xiamen with me.”

She lifted her eyebrows high. “Uh, you mean taking an airplane?”

“Yes, take the plane to Xiamen and then take the plane back. You can stay for a month with me and have a vacation. I can take you to the ocean. You’ve never been to the ocean.”

I saw her eyes flashing with excitement, but then she shook her head. “No, I’d better not go. Too much money. Nobody in the hamlet has ever been on a plane except that son of a bitch Beiling, and you, of course.”

I responded with disdain. “Mama, don’t mention that evil person. Everybody knows where his money comes from—embezzled from the Communist government. And who said that only he, Beiling, can step out of the rice fields and go to the beach? Nobody else can? No, I want to show people that you, Feng Lin Yun, my mother, an illiterate peasant woman, can board a plane and lie on the beach too! Who said that once you are born a peasant, you’ll always be a peasant? I can’t wait for the day when that son of a bitch goes to jail. Embezzlement, murder, plus all the women he raped. Maybe he’ll even get a bullet.”

My mother shushed me. “Lower your voice! Don’t you ever say things like that in the hamlet. And don’t ever tell people you worked as a secretary in the South. I always tell them that you worked with computers, translating. Otherwise people think you’re making dirty money, like all the girls hooking in the South.”

I thanked God that I had left this place and didn’t have to give a damn any more about whatever was going on in these people’s minds.

The night before my mother and I left for Xiamen, Spring and I shared a bed just like we had when we were little. For a while, we lay quietly in the dark and let our thoughts run free.

“Meimei,” I called her gently. “Are you feeling a little better now?”

“I don’t know. I don’t know what I’m doing.” I could sense her smiling in the dark, helplessly.

“Meimei, I understand why you like older men. It’s because our father was never there for us when we were little, because we grew up in a broken family. You and I never felt safe and protected. Married men have families, and we’re jealous of their families, so we want to have our own families.” Having gone through so many men in my life and having condemned myself continuously, I had finally figured out why Spring and I were drawn toward married men like moths to a light.

“I feel the same way. I don’t like younger men. They’re reckless and unreliable,” she said.

“I know. I understand.” I was happy that she was finally willing to open up to me. I kept nodding my head, though I knew she couldn’t see me. “Just don’t feel bad about yourself, okay? It’s not your fault.”

“But society doesn’t think that way,” she said dryly. “Jiejie, I am jealous of you. You can leave the hamlet and be on your own.”

“You can leave too, if you really want. In fact, you can come to Xiamen to stay with me for a while. Just let me. I’ll pay all the expenses. You can decide if you like the outside world or the hamlet better.” I paused. “Just remember, your fate is in your own hands. You can control it yourself if you really want.”

She hummed in the dark, half confused, half understanding.

“Meimei,” I said gingerly. “Don’t hate Mama and Dad, okay?”

She remained silent.

I continued. “It’s hard to believe, but whatever Mama and Dad do for us, they think they are doing it for our own good. After what I’ve gone through, I’ve learned that family is always family and will always be there for you, because we share the same blood.”

“Jiejie, I’ll be careful now,” she promised me.

23

THE NEXT DAY,
I took my mother with me to the Shanghai airport, where we boarded a Shanghai Eastern airplane. During the one-hour flight, my mother didn’t close her eyes once. She sat in the window seat and looked outside the whole time. She was carefree all the way to Xiamen, like a feather floating in the air.

I led her into the fast, modern Otis elevator, which took us up to my spacious apartment on the eighteenth floor. She stared at the flashing numbers above the elevator door like a child trying to solve a puzzle.

Old Two smiled to my mother and welcomed her unctuously when we entered the apartment. My mother looked uncomfortable and cautious in front of this Shanghai man. Shanghainese are known for looking down on people from the countryside and condemning them as rude and dirty. But I swore to myself that I would not allow my mother to feel any snobbery as long as she was with me.

I smiled. “Mama, take a rest, and then I’ll take you to a good seafood restaurant. You’ll have the best seafood in the country tonight.”

At dinner, facing a whole table of delicacies including lobsters, jumbo crabs, shark-fin soup, and roasted pig, my mother was so delighted that she couldn’t keep her mouth closed. But remembering the tips that I had given her about table manners, she ate slowly and politely. She didn’t chew the bones or drink the soup loudly as everyone did in the hamlet. Watching her carefully enjoying the dinner, I thought to myself: Mama is a smart and strong woman. If she hadn’t been born into a poor peasant family, if she’d had any education, she would have been a different person.

“Mama, did my grandfather Lianshen ever think of sending you to school when you were a little girl?” I asked her curiously that night, when we were sitting on the balcony enjoying the starry sky.

“You silly child, your grandfather couldn’t even feed his children, let alone send them to school. When I was six, he gave me to a family in the Lin hamlet as a child bride just to get some rice.”

“Child bride? You mean like a slave who’ll marry the son after she grows up?” I’d only read about child brides in books and was shocked to find that my own mother had actually been one. Then I realized that this would have been in the late 1950s, when the massive famine had struck China. Back then, although child brides were forbidden by the government, they still existed in the countryside.

“Yes.” My mother recounted her memories painfully. “I worked like a slave there for two years. The Lin shrew whipped me every time I couldn’t find enough grass for the pigs. My child groom always rode on my back and twisted my arms. I couldn’t take it and finally ran away after two years.”

My mother told me about her young life, history that I’d never had a chance to learn. It was a night with a full moon when she ran away from the Lin family, she said. The zigzagging path through the fields between the Lin and Feng hamlets seemed endless. Prickly bushes stung the wounds on her arms and legs. She ran for all she was worth, panting loudly and scaring away the frogs jumping around her feet. Her thin, patched cotton coat was soaked in sweat.

The mulberry trees in front of the Feng Hamlet looked like a line of glowering ghosts. Faint light from a kerosene lamp came through the small window of a shack set off a little to the east. She knew her father was inside, sitting at his desk with knitted eyebrows while her mother lay in bed coughing. She quickened her steps.

She pushed open the shack’s wicker door. Her father leaped to his feet, shocked. She threw herself at his knees and grasped his right leg as firmly as she had held it two years earlier, before the Lins had pulled her away. She pleaded with her father to take her back. Looking at his second daughter’s limp skinny body at his feet, my grandfather felt his legs shaking as if he too were going to collapse. He had never felt so weak in his limbs. That day, his only meal had been some bark and weeds his two boys had gathered. But despite his poverty, he couldn’t turn his daughter away.

After several unsuccessful trips to the Feng Hamlet, the Lin family stopped searching for my mother. Using her bamboo walking stick, my grandmother took my mother with her from village to village to beg. My grandmother was always sick and could not walk for too long. When they came to a house, she would lean against the door and try to catch her breath. Clutching the bottom of her mother’s ragged clothes with one hand, my mother would hold out a dirty ceramic bowl with the other and chant, “Uncle, Aunt, Big Brothers and Big Sisters, please be generous and throw us some leftovers. My mother is ill, and I have two younger brothers waiting for food at home. We will pray for you day and night and wish that you live longer than Mount Tai.” When it grew dark, Mama would cuddle next to her mother in a haystack or under a leeward eave and fall asleep with a smile on her face. Her mother was so thin that her body felt like a skeleton, but despite having rags for clothes and little in her belly and occasionally having to escape ferocious dogs, my mother wished life could go on like this forever.

It was dusk on New Year’s Eve when they arrived home at the Feng Hamlet. Every family gathered at their table for the big New Year’s dinner, and firecrackers could be heard firing from Zhenze. Inside the ragged cloth bag slung over my grandmother’s shoulder, there were four steamed buns and a small sack of rice for the family. My grandmother knew that her children were waiting eagerly for their food, but after six months of drifting, her life was like the last dim flame in a dried-up oil lamp. Before her hands touched the wicker door of the shack, she fell to the ground.

My grandmother was confined to her bed, and she never got better. My mother’s older sister, Jasmine, was thirteen then, old enough to follow her father to work in the commune, planting rice. Every day at noon, my mother would take her two younger brothers and the dirty ceramic bowl to the commune canteen, stand in line, and wait for the allotted porridge. It contained so few rice grains that they could see their faces on its watery surface.

Life was indifferent to my mother’s prayers and diligence. My grandmother eventually grew so ill that my grandfather Lianshen had to take her to the hospital in the city of Huzhou. Back then, the doctors and nurses were kind and didn’t ask for a deposit. He returned to the commune and left my mother at the hospital to take care of my grandmother.

She stayed at her mother’s bedside for a month, listening to her coughing hoarsely day and night, sounding as if she was going to cough up her lungs. The doctor in white overalls stroked my mother’s head and praised her, calling her a wonderful girl, only twelve and taking care of her mother all by herself.

The smell of sodium carbonate from the doctor’s cuff lingered in my mother’s dreams the night they left. My grandmother shook her awake. She whispered that they had to get out of the hospital right away, because they didn’t have the money to pay the bills. They walked on tiptoe to the end of the long, white corridor and staggered into the darkness. The six miles between the city and the Feng Hamlet stretched on forever. Mama supported her sick mother with her arm, and they had to stop so often that it was almost dawn by the time they reached home.

Two months after leaving the hospital, my grandmother died of tuberculosis, leaving behind nothing but debt. After burying her in a small tomb behind the Feng Hamlet, my grandfather moved the family half a mile away, to the Shen Hamlet where there were better fields and crops.

“And then my grandfather Lianshen started to carry on with Old Number Two and gave you away to Dad?” Our neighbor, Old Auntie Feng, had told me this when I was little.

“Yes.” Mama nodded her head in disgust. “I’ll always hate your grandfather for that. He could’ve carried on with any woman, just not that dying old bitch.”

“Mama, I had no idea you went through so much.” Mama, I wanted to say, this is all in the past. The future will be much better. I will take care of you. I will make sure you have food, even if I have to starve.

The next morning, I got up early and went to the eatery downstairs. After breakfast, I sat at the computer and waited for my mother to wake up. Soon her sleepy voice came from the bedroom. “This is the first time in years I slept more than two hours in a night!”

I entered the bedroom, put a pillow behind her, helped her sit up, and then handed her a bowl of congee.

“What is it?”

“It’s congee with preserved egg and lean pork. It’s delicious.”

Her eyes became moist and glinted in the room’s pallid light. “Did you get this for
me
?”

She was that moved just by a bowl of congee. Probably no one had ever done even such a small thing for her as bringing her breakfast in bed.

I lowered my head, avoiding her eyes. Then I waved my arm in the air and said hurriedly, “Yeah, have it while it’s still hot.”

I rushed out of the room, running away from my mother’s tears like a hare fleeing from a hunter. I knew now that my mother had suffered greatly, and I had secretly forgiven her for all the things she had done to me when I was a child, but I was still not ready to break down the wall between us.

The next three weeks flew by. I took my mother everywhere in the city—downtown, to the beach, and to the famous tourist spot, Gulangyu Island, a small island five minutes away from the city by ferry. It’s also called “Piano Island,” as there is a piano in almost every residence on it. We strolled leisurely through the small lanes on the island where motor vehicles were prohibited, enjoying the classic European-style architecture while breathing the extremely clean, fresh air. My mother was very excited everywhere we went. It was the first time in my life that I had seen her laughing genuinely, without a hint of sadness.

We took rolls of pictures together, and I had all of them developed as soon as possible so that she could take prints with her when she went home.

About a week before she left, I went into the bedroom with a Kodak envelope in my hand. “Mama, the pictures are here!” I yelled gleefully.

I sat on the bed and took the pictures out of the envelope. My mother moved closer to me. We laughed together when we saw the picture of her struggling to take her shoes off in the tide at the beach.

She put her arm around my shoulder, but when her skin touched mine, it shocked me like electricity. I felt uncomfortable, as if a bug were crawling around my neck. I shook her arm off and moved away from her.

She looked at me with a helpless but amused smile. “You’re a strange child. Ever since you were a little baby, you always hated me even laying a finger on you. Other mothers and daughters are not like this at all.”

She clearly did not remember how she’d neglected me. So many times, she had held Spring and left me in a corner. Now she blamed me for avoiding her touch. But I didn’t mention any of that. “I just don’t like to be touched,” I said.

We continued going through the pictures. Holding a picture of me standing on the beach looking at the camera happily, my mother heaved a sigh and said regretfully, “If only Spring were like you.”

I found I couldn’t control myself any longer. All of a sudden, the question that had haunted me my whole life came out of my mouth like a firework shooting into the air.

“Mama, why did you love my sister more than me?”

She raised her head and looked at me, utterly confused. “What are you talking about?”

“Why did you love my sister more than me? Why did you pay so much more attention to her than me? Why did you never care about me?”

“Oh, you silly child. You’re the older one. Of course we needed to pay more attention to your younger sister. We were so poor at that time. Your Dad and I worked in the fields day and night like two dogs. We barely had time to care about ourselves.”

That was it? That was the reason why she had loved my sister more than me? It was just because I was the oldest? I didn’t know if I could accept that.

“Why did you and Dad beat me with the broom all the time, but you never beat Spring? You didn’t raise your voices to her once.”

“We were so poor at that time. Don’t you remember? Some days we had nothing to eat. I was always in a bad mood. When you didn’t listen to us, of course we would beat you.”