Katherine (10 page)

He whispered that he was burning for me. His touches were oil on a fire. He murmured that he wanted me, and I heard my body moan in pleasure. My mind began to surrender. Sweat dripped from his forehead onto my face. I let myself be led.

The midnight wind began to whistle. The dog-tail grass brushed my face. I cried because it had been so long since I had allowed someone to touch me. Lion Head’s gentleness made me believe I was loved. As he aroused my body, he aroused my memory.

Images presented themselves in full force without my mind’s consent. Gray sky and dynamite, blood spreading down my legs, dyeing my shoes, wiping my bloody hand on the dry reeds, my running feet, the moving land, my voiceless scream, the horizon tilts . . .

Lion Head felt me shudder. He stopped. He hugged me tightly as if he knew. His fingers smoothed my cheek. I thought of Katherine, wished I were her so I wouldn’t be so uneasy. The thought surprised me and made me think how much I had been wanting to be Katherine and not myself. I could hear Katherine’s laughter, hear her sweet voice speaking Chinese.

Lion Head resumed his caresses. Until now I hadn’t understood how much had been taken away from me. I put my arms around Lion Head. I felt like a child.

“You are a bird who’s lost her wings,” he said softly. “I want to give you new wings. I want to see you fly again. I want you to need me, to depend on me, to share the madness of desire with me. I’ll throw the flashlight into the waterfall so we won’t be able to go home, so we’ll be scared. We will protect each other. We’ll fight our fear together.”

He rolled on top of me, touching me with his breath, massaging me with his words. “Don’t worry. I will not enter you. Feel the wind’s hand,” he whispered in my ear. “Listen. I can hear the far sea moan. Listen carefully.” My imagination rippled like the sea. “I can hear the wind sing in the trees.” His hair swept my face and I heard him say, “Show me your wild summer, show me now.”

He moved his body over me, then pulled away, away from my lips, my chest. “No,” he said, clenching his teeth. “Don’t break the rules. You’ll be eaten by darkness, disfigured.” Electric charges ran through my body. Our lust was like the chill of the grave. I wanted to beg him, beg him to touch me. I wanted to say, Please, please hold me. But I couldn’t say it. I was ashamed of my desire. “Tell me you don’t want this,” he commanded. “Tell me you can live by yourself and be alone forever.” I felt my body opening for him.

“Tell me you need me, say it, let me hear it, say it to me,” he groaned. His head was wet, his mouth sweet.

“I want you,” I heard myself say.

He grabbed me and shook me. “You poisoned snake, you thick cloud, you pouring rain, you hungry tiger, bite me, take my life, give me yours, I’ll give myself to you.”

He guided my hands to explore his body. He took pleasure in resisting pleasure. He enjoyed the torture, the cruelty. He watched me turn into a wild animal.

Our bodies began to wrestle. He wouldn’t let himself have me. When his breath came heavier, he pulled himself back and rolled
off my body, leaving my head against his knees. “Say you want me,” he ordered, touching himself with my hand.

“I want you,” I repeated after him breathlessly.

Like the sea roaring at a night of thunder, Lion Head lay on his back and wailed, “Oh, my wild horse! My poisonous scorpion! My sweet lilac, my fat lotus . . .” His other hand pulled at the grass, his feet digging pits in the earth, as he arched his body, exposing himself to the mid-moon.

My body trembled in violent pleasure.

“Wait for me,” he murmured. “I will come again.”

*   *   *

“I
could tell you guys had something going on.” Katherine’s frankness embarrassed me, though I was eager to have someone to confide in. Katherine insisted on knowing what we did, how I felt, and whether I was in love. I didn’t know what to say.

She asked if Lion Head was a good lover. I said that I had no way to compare. Katherine demanded the details. She wanted to learn the Chinese way, she said.

I was secretly pleased to have her attention.

“Lion Head wanted to please me and he wanted to know if I was pleased,” I began my reporting.

“Were you?” Katherine asked. Her eyes were bright.

I told Katherine that I was not clear about my feelings. I didn’t feel pleased or unpleased. I recognized my lust and it embarrassed me. I remembered the desire and I was not sure about the rest.

“It’s all right not to be so clear,” Katherine comforted me. “Your Zen masters say that one’s true state is ‘unclassified.’ It’s not meant to be learned. You know, like how the hand can’t grasp itself. Then again there’s the old American saying, ‘Relationships are like buying a pair of shoes; you’ve got to try them on to see if they fit.’”

I did not like her American saying. Her dirty frankness bothered me. “I am no shoes to be tried on.”

“Forgive me,” she said. “You have to remember that I’m just trying to be your friend.”

I told her that in China we called prostitutes “worn-out shoes.”

*   *   *

T
he leaves outside my window looked like paper cutouts. I couldn’t sleep. The world around me seemed so senseless, yet I could not stop myself from trying to make sense out of it. Maybe that’s what Lion Head and I were to each other, an escape from the senseless world.

The way he talked about escape, though, was full of contradictions. He talked about letting the mind go and moving with the flow of change, like a ball in a mountain stream, how transcendence would be a kind of ecstasy, but then he would say: “I really want to go away. Far away and never come back. I want to go to a place where no one can abuse my will, where I’d be free to do whatever I pleased.” He said he was just waiting for the chance. “Pray for me when you go to the temples,” he said.

I tried to catch his thoughts but it was like trying to catch water with a sieve. When I asked him how he defined love, he sang me an ancient song.

“Love is a song,” Lion Head continued. “It’s all in the presentation. I worship love for its magic and power. Do I know what it is? You’re asking the wrong person. We grew up with hatred—how are we supposed to know love?”

*   *   *

T
hat night I thought again of my father’s life in jail. Of his solitary cell, no larger than a coffin, a small opening the only source of light and air. How it was impossible to stand up, how he lay on the bare concrete without a cot, how he was defenseless against the winter, how his joints were slowly destroyed. Twenty years of longing, every waking minute wondering how his wife and children were. Twenty years of severe loneliness. The Party believed “loneliness was the scalpel one used to perform surgery on the soul.” My father relied on his imagination to survive.

Unlike Lion Head, I felt I knew love because I had experienced enough hatred. I knew what it was like to miss a dear person like my father as a child. I knew what it was like to sit on the corner, dreaming of greeting my father as he gets off the bus. I learned that the cruelty of winter teaches one to appreciate the warmth of spring—unbearable summer, the coolness of autumn.

*   *   *

I
visited Katherine early one evening to look over her Chinese composition. It was an excuse to see her. She never mentioned paying me money again; perhaps she understood she could pay me back with her attention.

I found Katherine interesting no matter what she said or did. I collected in my mind the comments she dropped. She said amazing
things that I had never thought of, like, “Give voice to your deepest and most immediate emotion.” She would explain and explain until I understood what she meant. In this case she said she had been talking about the kind of emotion that existed in poems and that responded only to the thoughts and sensations that gave birth to poems.

Sometimes I could not follow her at all, but I would keep listening to her. I was in rapture, for she stimulated me in such an unfamiliar way. I watched her when she spoke. Sometimes I felt like I was dreaming. She was my window, and through its frame, I saw another world.

She laughed with such directness. When she learned that I was embarrassed about what happened with Lion Head at Wolf Teeth, she laughed. She kept saying to me, “Look, you are twenty-nine years old. If you were in America, you’d probably have been married and divorced by now. Big deal.”

“No, no, no,” I said. “You have missed my point . . .” I tried to explain. “You must understand the differences between East and West.”

She said, “Oh, come on, underneath it all, people are the same.”

She said that I was a nut, that Chinese were nuts in a lot of ways. “You’re driving me crazy, and unfortunately I like it,” she said, smoothing her hair with her hand. “You want to know something? I think you are wild. Just like me. Nobody can really tie you down. You know, you don’t live with the foot-binding cloth anymore.”

I looked at her. I nodded. I found her so beautiful. I wanted to be like her.

She laid out my thoughts for me. She was a sickle and I a rake. I was amazed at her logic, the way she tallied her thoughts, pro and con, on a piece of paper with a pencil, how she made decisions.
She said life was a process of making choices. One had to prepare for the inevitable deaths that came with change. She asked me to remember that there would be no choice that did not mean loss. She liked to sing, “You gotta win a little, lose a little . . .”

She made me learn from myself. She turned me into a sponge. I sucked the water of her knowledge. She told me that in America there were many psychotherapists, people who earned a living by discussing with people whatever was on their minds. “It’s very expensive. Yet many Americans can’t do without it. The more they pay, the better they feel. Some people believe the only way they’ll be cured is if they pay too much.”

Looking at my confused expression, she said: “Gee, you’re so serious, you don’t get my jokes at all, do you? That scares me, because I can’t help kidding around. If you can’t tell what’s a joke and what’s not, you’ll be all messed up. Talk to me, don’t give me that bull’s face.”

*   *   *

K
atherine told me her secret wish was to adopt a child. I had a hard time comprehending her. I sat on her bed and looked at her. I had just finished telling her a story of a village family in my aunt’s province who’d abandoned their baby just because it was a girl child. Katherine was in tears. “How could any parent possibly have the heart to do that?”

Katherine made me want to ignore her. She did not know that this type of story was not news to me. It happened in China too often.

Katherine refused to accept reality. I told her that she was drowning herself in other people’s tragedy. She went silent. I saw her fury.

“You are cold,” she said to me. “Cruel, you people.” Her lynx eyes opened wide in anger, her pupils became big question marks.

I don’t know how it happened, but at that moment, my heart felt a sudden tenderness. Her way of thinking touched me. It was something I had forgotten or maybe had never known. She unfolded the petals of my dry heart. A flower I did not know existed began to bloom inside me. It had been too long that my spirit had been paralyzed. I couldn’t recall when I stopped feeling for my own people. Katherine stretched my life beyond its own circumstance. It was the kind of purity she preserved that moved me. She had a child’s power. She pinned me to the wall and incited a revolution in my heart.

We sat by the window in her hut, facing the rice paddies. Watching farmers spread pig shit with their hands, listening to them curse the weather and the animals.

I told Katherine that I had always believed that circumstance made me who I was and I believed firmly that humans were born evil. I believed it was a universal truth because I lived through it. Survivors were people who took only what was useful for the moment and abandoned the rest. They refused to understand shame. Did the parents who abandoned their infant feel ashamed? They got rid of that baby just like they got rid of pus on their faces. They thought the pain was worth enduring. Hope was reborn when they laid the sleeping infant on the village road. They refused to hear her cries. They believed that when the sun rose everything would be forgotten. That was my China, not Katherine’s.

I began to cry. Katherine was shocked at how emotional I’d become. She did not know what to do.

I told her that I did not appreciate her sentimentality. “You American, you lived a sugary life. What do you know about survival? Starving kids steal, cheat, and murder—they will do anything to fill their stomachs. This was my life. I gave up trying to reconcile with fate. It was not a baby I killed—it was me! Me!”

Katherine looked at me; slowly her eyes became gentle. She sat down beside me and took my hands in hers. She hugged me and I felt her tears on my cheek.

“I was seduced and raped,” I began. I told her about my Party boss at Elephant Fields, Mr. Kee, a man of sixty. He tortured me when I started working there. He assigned me to the most dangerous jobs. After a year he called me in and told me that he was removing me from the fields and making me his personal secretary. He took me to Party meetings and would touch me while we rode on tractors. He promised that he would send me back to Shanghai if I let him have his way with me. I was just twenty and far from home, but I didn’t want to sell myself.

Mr. Kee sent me back to the fields to work with dynamite. I witnessed several fatal accidents on the job and I began to feel very scared. Mr. Kee invited me to a peasant’s house during the Chinese New Year to “talk about my future.” The peasant was a blind man. We sat on a big clay platform that was both the table and the bed. The house was lit with candles. I drank the wine Mr. Kee offered and I passed out shortly after. He had put drugs in the drink. Before I realized what was happening, I was raped. I could feel him undressing me, but I had no strength to move my limbs or make a sound. I lost consciousness. When I woke up, Mr. Kee was gone and the blind man said that there had never been anyone but me in his house. I confronted Mr. Kee. He was eating dinner with his wife and family celebrating New Year’s Eve. Wiping his oily mouth, he said he didn’t know what I was talking about. He said that he had no such meeting with me. He accused me of insulting him and trying to ruin his reputation.