Katherine (14 page)

I did not know that I was so ready to embrace the devil, though I needed little persuasion. I fell into a trap I had set for myself. I was there, ready; she only had to show me the way and I went.

Who was not their true self that night? Who did not break the authority’s rules? Who did not enjoy the sensation? Jasmine sat on a bench, rocking on her buttocks. She was nearly drooling. No one would ever admit to any of this. Not even to themselves. This was how we were raised. To be unconscious of one’s feet implies that the shoes are too comfortable, our ancestors taught us. To be unconscious of one’s waist implies that the girdle is too loose. It was in our tradition to have two minds. We learned to say one thing and do another. We trained ourselves to become like Chui, the ancient artisan who could draw circles with his hand better than with a compass. His fingers accommodated themselves naturally to
his subject, so that it was unnecessary for him to focus his attention on it.

We appeared humble and submissive. We shut the eyes of the heart to make peace with tradition. We could say the Cultural Revolution never happened. We hadn’t meant it when we shouted “Long live Chairman Mao!” We could say we were young, only children, we can’t really remember. We followed the example of the government and said that we wanted to turn our eyes to the future.

We were studying English in order to fight with imperialists. If anyone asked us what we did tonight, we would say we did nothing with the foreign devil.

*   *   *

K
atherine spooned my body and swayed slowly. She held me as we danced, her hands on my thighs. I smiled like a drunkard. She moved me with the rhythm of the music. Her hands were on my shoulders, my waist, my hips. She laughed and said, “Your body moves like a stiff windmill.”

Her bracelet, her necklace. I breathed in her scent. The music, the joy, her rosy lipstick. I thought of the Beatles song because she was holding my hands and I let her. Her body brushed against mine again and again. Before the eyes of everyone in the room. I held my breath. We were in America.

*   *   *

M
y parents were sound asleep like the billion others in this country. In their confusion, they gave up on me, their daughter of no piety.

My brother was talking in his sleep. He sounded like a goldfish making air bubbles in the water.

I rose at dawn. In the dark I heard the sound of rain like beans
jumping in a hot wok. I thought I would read to put myself back to sleep.

Switching on my dim bedside light, I took a book out from under my pillow,
Ancient Poems of the Middle Kingdom.
I was up to the nineteenth century, at a poem by a poet with an ancient name spelled with a character I could not even pronounce. It was called “The Love of the Immortals.” I read and my mind became wildly awake.

I could not articulate even dimly within my mind what I was feeling. I began to feel as if I were being taken, carried away, and reeled back by a force I could only sense. I was being transformed. Katherine, the foreign devil, in her hands, I was reinvented. Everything I saw, I saw now with eyes made by her. The poem which I had read before was no longer the same poem. The love of the immortals, the red-painted boat.

I
f she were a building, he was determined to demolish it. At first Lion Head seemed not to care how Katherine treated him; then, when he understood that there was no way he could possess her, he lost his mind. The frustrated lion showed his claws. From that moment on, in her eyes, his beauty began to fade. She became the naughty mouse to his blind cat. She let him chase her. She toyed with him, driving him mad, and then escaped up a tree. Then she turned into something else, and when the cat in confusion looked up the tree, he saw no mouse, only a bird that laughed and shit on his face.

Katherine spoke with Lion Head after school. She asked him to “get serious” with his homework, or she would have to fail him. We were making great progress with our English. We were able to read Hemingway and Brontë. Lion Head was no longer too good for the class. “I have the whole class watching me,” Katherine
warned him. “I can’t grant you special favors. It’d be unfair to the others.”

*   *   *

T
he winter of 1983 was bitter for Lion Head. He fell in love with the foreign devil and was spellbound. He received no comfort from me. He deserved this because he betrayed me.

I didn’t invite Katherine home for the New Year holiday although my parents insisted, especially my father. “Aren’t you good friends?” asked my father. I didn’t tell my father that I wanted to punish Katherine for stealing Lion Head.

Katherine must have spent her holiday all alone, since she had nowhere to go. It was the first Christmas she spent without her family in America. She thought she would have many places to go and many families to visit. I knew she had counted on me. I felt bad about punishing her, but that was the only way I would forgive her.

I missed Katherine every day during the holiday. Even the neighborhood fireworks—my favorite part of New Year’s Eve—didn’t excite me. I imagined Katherine alone in her hut. I held myself back and tried hard not to write her. A few times I had such an urge to get on a bus and throw myself at her door. I found myself waiting anxiously for the spring term to begin.

Early one morning I was on my way to the market, carrying a bamboo basket. I saw two little girls, about two or three years old, walking in front of me, hand in hand. They stopped and clumsily one girl tried to button up the other’s coat. How beautiful! I thought, and immediately I was amazed. I was rediscovering my long-lost sensitivity. My heart was becoming tender again. My mind went to Katherine, who taught me to love again like a child.

I wrote Katherine a letter telling her about this experience. But I tore it up in front of the post office. “A snake should never
attempt to get a taste of heaven: once seduced it will never be able to go back to hell where it belongs.” I was afraid. If I ran to Katherine, she would take away my heart and leave my body an empty shell.

*   *   *

T
he spring term began. I got up early and washed with soap-tree fruit so I would smell good. I put on a navy blue Mao jacket and pants and People’s Liberation Army boots, an outfit no Chinese would wear anymore. I arrived too soon and bicycled around the campus. There were many new faces, young and fresh-looking.

I checked the bulletin board. My heart tightened as my eyes moved over the class listings. My sight blurred in nervousness. I was to report to a new classroom, but Katherine was still our class’s main instructor. When her name, the Chinese character for “peony,” came into focus, I let go a long breath. My steps carried me quickly to the door of the new room.

She had a new haircut. The jellyfish-tail hair that spread down her back was gone. She was in a beige sweater, black jeans, and a silver belt. She stood before the blackboard, looking out the window, her back to the door, as if deep in thought. She was alone in the room.

I stood as if frozen. The wind blew open the door. She turned and saw me. A little awkwardly, she smiled.

I made myself say hi.

“You look wonderful,” she said, like her old self. “I like your outfit a lot.”

I dressed up for you, I thought.

She looked at me as if studying my face.

I felt her fingertips running across my cheeks.

My classmates began to arrive. She was taken away. She glanced at me as she said hello to them.

I took a corner seat.

Lion Head showed up quietly. Jasmine followed, carrying his green army bag. Lion Head was in a high-collared brown cotton winter coat. He sat by himself in a seat off to the side without saying hello to anyone. Jasmine passed his bag to him and hesitated for a moment before finally sitting down one seat behind him.

Katherine got up in front of the lecture table. Her smile was just as beautiful as last year’s. “I got a lot done during the New Year break,” she began. “I was more alone than I’d ever been in my whole
ta-ma-de
American life.” A few giggled at her use of swear words. She looked at me. “But it was good. A good experience, a Chinese experience, for sure.” She began pacing. “I answered letters, worked on my dissertation, and finally finished reading
Dream of the Red Chamber.
” She turned away from me. “It made a lot of sense to me. A lot of sense. I must thank you for such an education. Now let’s begin our text on Virginia Woolf.”

She will forgive me if she understood the essence of the book, the essence of the Chinese way, I thought, and felt a little relieved.

*   *   *

K
atherine told the class that she was glad to learn that the Central Bureau’s new policy sought to improve East-West communications, which meant she would have a little more freedom in choosing texts.

We showed her an expressionless face. To us this was not news. The Central Bureau could open the door at any time but that didn’t mean it would stay open.

Lion Head watched Katherine, his face twisted, his hair standing up from the roots. In an effort to get away from Katherine, he traveled to the North over the holiday. But he came back still unable to find his mind. He had never been this way with me or, I believed, with any other woman. He had never been in love with
anyone but himself. I saw a flame of anger in his eyes. He was a wounded bull.

He’d always been lucky with women. Like the petals of peach flowers, they rained down on him, just fell on his face, and all he had to do was smell the fragrance. When he was no longer interested, he would brush the petals off, stamp them into the mud, let them turn brown, dry, and blow away in the wind. Then he would sigh, “Oh, what a beautiful day!” and with a smile he would look toward the new spring.

But the winter storm of 1983 made its appearance without warning. The chill zipped through Lion Head and froze him. He did not know if his heart would survive the new year.

Katherine looked at him with remoteness. Are you all right? her eyes asked him. Mirrors of a clear lake, her eyes, so clear that on their crystal surface his thoughts were reflected. He was exposed, inside out. He had gotten himself drunk on gasoline, and with the spark from her eyes he set himself on this burning journey.

He could not bear her polite, concerned looks. I could tell he was having a hard time just being near her. At the break he asked if she wanted to see some new antiques he’d collected. She said, “Thanks, maybe some other time.”

He said, “May I help you with your Chinese?”

She said, “That’s okay, no thanks.”

He said,
“He-bi-ne?”
Why are you giving me such a hard time?

She said, “I don’t get what you’re saying.”

He said, “Please stop doing this to me.”

She said, “What are you talking about?”

The class watched. And pitied Lion Head. After all, Lion Head was a Chinese. We could not help but be on his side. Whether I loved Lion Head or not was another issue. We secretly wished that Katherine would suffer a little. We needed to see her suffer, to
balance things out. Lion Head had never lost himself over one of us. In this, Jasmine and I were comrades.

*   *   *

L
ate Thursday afternoon I was making light switches. The molding machine had been on all day. It sounded like a helicopter. I had done four loads of switches since morning. I could not help feeling scared wondering what would happen after the term ended, where I would be, what I would be assigned to do. The factory boss who had been so interested in having me translate his product catalogue had been charged with corruption and transferred. He was caught using factory funds to entertain his relatives. I was once again a worker borrowed from Elephant Fields. I lost sleep at night. I set my sights on being the best student in the class; if a good opportunity arose, I would be the one best equipped to grasp it.