Katherine (9 page)

Lion Head spoke so freely about concepts like the moon in the water. He said he was a man who “begins with ease, was never not at ease, was unconscious of the ease of ease.”

*   *   *

L
ion Head would bring Jasmine flowers during the day and invite me to his place at night. He’d take me to the park and we would walk around in the dark for hours. He’d speak about Jasmine and her vicious father. He’d calmly talk about survival and his ambition of becoming a hero of his time. He said that Jasmine used her pitifulness to get what she wanted. The truth was that she never gave in. She always won. She made the others feel guilty and eventually they surrendered to her. She had gotten her way ever since she was a little girl. There was poison in her tears.

“But she will never have me to keep,” Lion Head said firmly. “I am nobody’s concubine.”

I admired him. In his unswerving spirit I discovered a desire to share his risk and offered him my protection.

One evening Lion Head had liquor in his room. He put the antiques in the corner and sat on his bamboo bed. He lay down and had me sit on a wooden chair next to him. There was a square table alongside the chair with a dim lamp on it. Books filled the shelves and were piled on the floor; his clothes hung on the back of the door.

We faced each other, two feet apart. I could smell soap-tree fruit. His eyes were shining. He asked me if I knew what today was. I suddenly remembered that it was the day of the mid-moon. He poured me a cup of liquor. I said I didn’t drink. He said just a sip. We toasted.

The antique clock was noisy. It sounded like a dying windup toy. The liquor felt good. My cheeks burned. Nothing mattered. Lion Head said he had made sweet-and-sour vegetables and pickles. It took him three days to prepare. “On the first day, you salt the chopped vegetables,” he said. “Second day, you wash off the salt and dump the vegetables into a jar filled with vinegar and sugar, and close the lid tightly. Third day, you add more vinegar, stir the vegetables, press them tightly against each other, and let it sit. When it’s ready, it should taste sour-sweet and crispy.”

I chewed the vegetables. I heard the crispy sound. I sipped more liquor. My head felt light, my blood running fast. He reached out and his finger touched my cheek. “You are an ancient goddess tonight,” he said. He asked if I cared to hear him recite an ancient poem by Li Ching-chao. I told him that I knew all about Li Ching-chao. “I love her poems.”

“That’s very good,” he said. “Let’s recite one together.”

Lion Head suggested that we go to Wolf Teeth to celebrate the mid-moon. It was four hours by bus from the city. There was an ancient altar down by a cliff. Superstitious people went to Wolf Teeth to pray for deliverance.

We arrived at Wolf Teeth just before midnight. We brought a flashlight but did not use it—the moon was bright enough to see the road. Long wild bushes had grown over the altar. We sat by it and felt like we were sitting in a womb. I looked up and saw the wolf-teeth-shaped cliff outlined in the moonlight. The thick mountain plants dangled down like God’s beard. We heard the sound of a waterfall beyond the cliff, as if God were emptying his bladder.

The smell of wildflowers pierced my nostrils. The leaves trembled in the wind. I felt the humming of the earth. Slowly fog came from everywhere, gathering around our faces and covering our bodies like a blanket.

The color of the night began to sink into our skin. The moon cast its glow on a cloud. “Will there be wolves out tonight?” I asked, although I knew that wolves had disappeared from these parts a hundred years ago.

“Are you afraid?” Lion Head asked. His voice was filled with excitement. “I love darkness.” He turned to look at me. His lion hair stood on its roots.

*   *   *

L
ion Head asked me if I thought he was an attractive man. I told him that actually I used to think he was unattractive. He asked why. I reluctantly recalled that his shortness, his rawness, his arrogance had bothered me. He laughed. “What was it that made you change your mind?”

I admitted that Katherine’s point of view had changed me. She made me question my aesthetics and turned the beast into a beauty. Katherine taught me to respect nature as a whole, to appreciate
individuality, to value uniqueness. It was in seeing him through Katherine’s eyes that he became attractive to me, and it was because of my belief in Katherine that I began to be aware of beauty I had never thought existed. Lion Head nodded appreciatively and said that I was lucky.

I asked Lion Head about the way he grew up and about his family. He said that he was the eldest of seven children. His father was a dockworker and his mother a washwoman. She charged two cents per garment. From the time he was five years old, he collected and delivered clothes around town. Hunger was the prominent memory of his childhood. He said he did anything for food. He fed his brothers and sisters with the food he stole. He learned how to con people and once in a while he’d get caught and play innocent. He always got away. He became a self-educated opportunist at a very young age.

He was small for his age and had to fight his way through school. But his three-generation-true-proletarian background made him look politically reliable. He joined the Communist Party at sixteen and was honored as a good comrade every year.

He knew he was not what he seemed. While in school he stole books. Western books which made him realize what he truly desired. He managed to gain the trust of his Party bosses and peers. He made everyone believe he was sincere, that he would die for the Party. He made himself a humble man in the Party’s eyes and he won privilege.

When he swore his allegiance at the Party’s enrollment ceremony, he did not feel guilty about his lies. He firmly believed that to lie was the only way to live a truthful life.

Lion Head said he was honest with me because we were of the same kind. “You are a woman with a split personality,” he said. “You are a masked lady during the day, just like I am a masked
good guy. But we become our true selves at night. In the dark we can do things our way. When Chairman Mao closes his eyes, we come out to catch field rats like owls. We are too smart to starve, and too curious to waste our lives. The only way to be ourselves is to answer each other’s call. Like radio waves in the air, we connect ourselves to the right channels.”

I felt a chill and could not reply.

“Here we are, and this is our fate. I don’t think you would sell me out, because we’re on the same chopping block. We need each other, we are each other’s spiritual food. Selling me out means selling out yourself. I know that you think this is cold and dispassionate, but let me tell you, I am passionate enough to come here with you, and you know the risk involved. Comfort me now and I will comfort you. Let’s strip the great proletarian mask. Let’s be naked, be bad, be animals. We’ll be our hidden selves.”

*   *   *

L
ion Head took off his clothes. He lay down next to me. Tenderly he touched me. The warmth of his body stirred my insides. He began whispering. He said that he wondered if I understood the phrase “the spine of the wind,” because that was what Lion Head was all about. He was the wind, he walked at the wind’s will. His free-spirited soul was everywhere and nowhere. He came without a sound, went without a shadow.

*   *   *

L
ion Head asked me to tell him where I came from. He wanted me to tell the story straight and flat, and I did. My family was from the southern part of the country. My grandfather worked as a bank clerk. He was a little man with a pair of thick glasses. He was scared all the time. He lost his job when his company went bankrupt. The family fled from the Shantung Province to Shanghai.

On their way to Shanghai my mother, a thirteen-year-old girl,
had a nervous breakdown on the ship. There was an outbreak of typhoid fever on board. My mother’s elder brother and younger sister were infected. There was no money, no doctor. The children were dying. The passengers were superstitious—they said that if anyone died on the ship, it would sink. Her dying brother and sister were thrown into the sea before they exhaled their last breath. My mother witnessed the scene in shock. No goodbyes, no tears. She broke down silently. Her family was no longer the same. A year later, in Shanghai, my grandmother died of throat cancer. My grandfather suffered sudden heart failure and died shortly after.

My mother married my father when she was a college student studying to become an elementary-school teacher. She believed that education was the only way to save China. My father was a grocery-shop clerk. I delivered goods for him from the time I was five.

Then came the Anti-rightist Movement. The Party security force arrested my father at midnight. I was sound asleep, dreaming about riding a train. There was noise. A group of people were knocking at our door violently. They broke in and took my father away. They said he was a capitalist promoter. The date was April 3, 1959; he and my mother had just celebrated their tenth wedding anniversary.

My father was charged as a traitor because he had worked as a policeman-in-training for the railroad before the 1949 Communist Liberation, when he was a middle-school student, a teenager. He was charged as a result of his confession. He could have hidden his past from the Party. He didn’t have to tell the truth. He could have denied everything like so many of his colleagues. But he was an honest man.

My father thought serving as a policeman was not wrong. His intention was to protect passengers on trains who were working-class people.

Being honest killed my father. He was sentenced to twenty years in jail because one more body was needed to fill a quota established as a response to Chairman Mao’s anti-rightist call. For twenty years my father left his wife and young children behind. I began to hate trains because they took my father away.

I was never the same after my father left. My mother’s fairy tales lost their effect. The lesson I learned from my father was chiseled into my little brain. I learned that to be honest was to be stupid. I couldn’t forget the moment my father was taken away. I could never trust again. My father was allowed to visit his family only once, when I was eight. Our life was ruined because of his sin.

My father was pronounced innocent in 1979. Two days before New Year’s Eve he was released, with a piece of paper issued by the government saying he was a “good comrade.” We went to pick him up at the train station. I didn’t recognize him. I saw my mother take a blue cotton bag from an old man. The man walked with trembling legs. Mother told us to call him Dad. We did it awkwardly. My father’s hair and beard were white. He said that he couldn’t see very well. He almost got hit by a bus when we crossed the street. He sighed and sighed and rubbed his eyes all the time. He had strange habits. He had to sleep with the light on.

My mother had become an eccentric old lady. From the start she had a hard time with my father. She’d grown used to living all by herself. There were other men who had been nice to her. But for us, she waited for our father. She had dreamt about the family’s reunion for the last twenty years. Now she had it. But my father was no longer the man she had known. Her expectations crashed.

My father turned into a lunatic. My mother would talk about her lost youth. She spoke about her bad luck for ever having married such a man. My mother made me sick to my bones with her complaining, but I could see her point. I couldn’t stand my father
either. His mind was still imprisoned. He was frightened all the time. He kept the windows shut all summer. He was afraid of the sunshine. He would rather sit and steam than come outside and enjoy the cool air. He would shout in his dreams, “Yes sir, death to reactionaries! Long live Chairman Mao!” Once he woke up the whole neighborhood. My mother said that he had been sent back from hell because he woke up the dead and the god of hell thought he was too much trouble.

I grew up on the street. I thought I deserved it because I had a father in jail. He was an enemy of the proletariat. I publicly denounced my father at ten. I took my mother’s last name. I had the wildest imagination about the life I should have lived, a life free of guilt. I would make believe I was a revolutionary martyr’s orphan. I would pretend I’d been injured in a car accident while saving the lives of three children and was brought to meet Chairman Mao. This is what I dreamt of throughout elementary school.

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L
ion Head was holding me, listening to me in the dark.

I didn’t tell him much about Elephant Fields. I only told him that the village chief invited me to his family dinner the day I arrived. The family cooked a big bowl of rice for the occasion. I was waiting for the black lid to be lifted off when I realized it was a layer of flies. They formed a thick, dark fly-lid. I threw up.

Peasant families ate with the flies without a blink of the eye. I lived with one family for eight years, until I could eat with the flies without a blink of the eye, until my hair turned gray. I was twenty-six when I left.

Lion Head felt me shiver. He said I didn’t have to go on. He said he understood that I lost all I had at Elephant Fields—youth, dreams, and most of all, faith. He said what I told was not just my story, it was the story of many of our generation.

*   *   *

I
looked at Lion Head as he leaned over to kiss me. He whispered that we’d had enough misery and now we must enjoy life. Softly his hand began to touch my body. I became tense. My body was longing for intimacy, but my brain was not in sync. I could feel my mind split in two: I wanted to throw myself into Lion Head’s embrace, but I resisted this journey of passion. I wanted to be loved, but I knew all I had with Lion Head was physical attraction.