The Bathing Women Read online

  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 t
eacup 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.”

  Tang Jingjing finally lost her poise. Tiao saw her quickly move two steps in a kneeling position towards the teacup. Those urgent and determined “kneeling steps,” which came like a thunderclap exploding before anyone could cover their ears, left a lifelong impression on Tiao. She moved with her “kneeling steps” to the teacup and stared at the cup for a while. Then, under the gaze of everyone, she grabbed the teacup with two hands and drank it down in one swallow …

  The first thing Tiao did after returning home was brush her teeth and rinse her mouth; she couldn’t resist the urge to eat all the toothpaste in the Little White Rabbit tube that only she and Fan used. Brushing her teeth made her vomit and after vomiting she continued to brush her teeth. Once she had finished brushing she continued to reach into her throat with the toothbrush. Then she began to vomit again. She vomited some food until at last only sticky sour fluid came out. She finished vomiting and brushing and then cupped her nose and mouth with her two hands—she cupped them very tightly, careful not to leave any space—and then she exhaled in big breaths—as she learned to do in kindergarten. She could smell her breath this way. Finally she could relax and she should relax; there wasn’t any taste in her mouth. She looked at herself in the mirror numerous times; she saw that her lips were white, like they’d been dyed white with the toothpaste, but they were even whiter than the toothpaste. She rubbed her lips hard with a towel until they became hot and red and almost bled, until they throbbed with pain. She locked herself in the bathroom tormenting herself for a long time.

  Then she came out of the bathroom with red eyes and a heavy head. Fan came over, and she embraced Fan and kissed her. Fan kissed back and they kissed each other loudly. She then went to kiss her father, her mother, that pair of old corduroy sofas at her home, her little chair, and the ice-cold radio/tape recorder made in the Soviet Union. Believing that she must be sick, her father and mother told her to go to bed. There she saw her folded handkerchief. She opened the handkerchief, at the centre of which was a white, yellow-eyed cat. She stared at the white cat and swept the handkerchief to the corner of the bed, but later she reached out to get it back. She opened the handkerchief and stared at the white cat. She put her mouth on the cat’s mouth and cried.

  Chapter 2

  Pillow Time

  1

  Like everyone else arriving at the Reed River Farm, Wu and Yixun were placed on male and female teams. Located in the alkali salt flats southwest of Fuan, the farm was where the provincial Architectural Design Academy congregated its own intellectuals for isolated labour reform.

  The couple’s transfer from Beijing to the provincial capital Fuan in the late sixties already had an undertone of punishment: as an engineer in the Beijing Architectural Design Academy, Yixun had aired his dissatisfaction with Beijing’s urban planning. He was young and aggressive back then, often speaking bluntly. A piece of history most people might not be aware of: when the country was just established, Chairman Mao invited Mr. Liang Sicheng to the Tiananmen Tower to discuss the future urban planning of the new Beijing. Not knowing much about cities, Chairman Mao might well have been in the grip of his own excitement at having won the revolution, or he might actually have had an in-depth understanding of the urgency of rapid industrialization, if the country was to be strong and prosperous.

  In either case, he stood on the Tiananmen Tower and looked down, sweeping that great-man’s arm of his towards the grey misty distance and saying to Liang Sicheng, “In the future, chimneys should be visible from here in every direction.” The great leader’s declaration must have terrified Liang Sichang, the great architect so devoted to preserving old Beijing. And Yixun, an undistinguished young architect, immediately expressed his own doubts on hearing this piece of privileged information. He thought it was absurd and inconceivable to make chimneys appear everywhere in the view from the Tiananmen Tower. How could Beijing, a city famous for culture, which had survived so many dynasties, be turned into a huge factory? A few years later, when Yixun’s sympathetic comments to Liang Sicheng were reported, both he and his wife, Wu, an English translator in the reference room, were transferred to Fuan.

  This transfer didn’t set off panic in their hearts. The Cultural Revolution had already started by then, and one city was much like another. Most people at the Beijing Architectural Design Academy were headed for a farm located somewhere in the south for concentrated labour and thought reform. The revolution was not going to give up on any of its revolutionary targets easily.

  They brought their two daughters—Tiao and Fan—to the provincial capital, Fuan, only to have to leave it behind as soon as they got used to it. They hastily settled their daughters and gave Tiao their residential card, rice ration book, clothes coupons, bankbook, and a small sum of money. After emphasizing to Tiao over and over again what a great responsibility she would have as head of the household, they took their bags and left for Reed River Farm with most of their colleagues. It had been suggested that the period of labour might have no definite end, it wouldn’t be a week or a month; it could be several years, perhaps, so they prepared themselves for a long stay. They were put under the leadership and management of the working class, and the first thing they were asked to do was to separate—husbands and wives must separate in order to help them temper their revolutionary willpower and strengthen their dedication to the labour. They lived in big collective dormitories—men in a male dorm and women in a female dorm—and inside, lines of plank beds stretched out toward the vanishing point. They were assigned to work in the brick factory. Every day, Yixun hauled the bricks in a big cart, originally pulled by a horse, and Wu wore coarse cloth gloves to load the bricks into the cart.

  Those intellectuals who laboured at the Reed River Farm—the male and female teams—didn’t object to the Cultural Revolution. They had plenty of time when they were not labouring to study or to criticize each other, to attend denunciation meetings or to do self-criticism. They diligently tried to use these methods to remove the nonproletarian marks imprinted on their bodies, rolling in the mud and stepping into cow dung, fervently hoping to be reborn. But at the same time they were weak and easily distracted by fantasy. For instance, their hearts and minds didn’t always remain at peace. At the end of a day’s work, when they returned to their separate dormitories, stinking of sweat, their faces all dusty, husbands always longed for their wives, just as wives always longed for their husbands.

  If you were to look at Reed River Farm from the point of view of someone who appreciates landscape, ignoring the atmosphere and mood of the time, you would find it a boundless and magnificent place. The farm was surrounded by thousands of acres of reeds, like the passionate, tender petals clustering around a sunflower. Especially in autumn, the golden reeds, taller than a person, with the white, fluffy flower on their heads, would suddenly grow and swell, releasing a spirit overpoweringly fierce and deeply peaceful, as if they
wanted to take over the world and withdraw from it at the same time. Because the reeds blocked the view and smothered all sound, only the wild dark brown ducks could play freely and nest in the thicket of reeds, laying eggs that no one could collect. Walking in, you would be awed and dumbstruck by the stillness of the ten thousand acres of densely packed reeds; you would also be cleansed by the noble, pure spirit of the ten thousand acres of reeds and feel renewed. At nightfall, clusters of reeds would seem more crowded in the autumn wind, like groups of women in white kerchiefs and skirts holding their breath and walking one after the other in mincing steps. Unfortunately, the farm separated the people from the reeds behind an enclosing wall. At the time neither Wu nor Yixun were in the mood to appreciate the grandeur of the reeds outside the wall. Compared to the charming sweep and vast stillness, the farm seemed very plain and drab, with identical low red-brick buildings everywhere. There was only one attractive place, a small house on top of a hill. Yet how could it actually be a hill? Here, it was an endless plain. The hill was a small slope at the end of a vegetable field slightly higher than the farmland; ordinarily it wouldn’t pass as a hill. But on the plain, even the most modest elevation could be considered a hill. The flatness of the plain made any rise stand out as individual and unique. No matter how small, as long as people were willing to, they could call it a hill. The small house on the hill.