Katherine (13 page)

I could feel Lion Head move inside me. I knew what Katherine was feeling. Her shiver of pleasure, her madness of wanting more. I entered Katherine through Lion Head. I could hear her moan, exactly as I had imagined.

He watched her, her swelling breasts, her milky skin and flaming eyes.

With the echo of Lion Head’s groan, the mountain became enclosed in a white curtain of rain. The curtain grew thicker and finally blocked my sight.

The wildness disappeared from my mind’s eye.

Before long the shower stopped. The sun came out and mocked the naughty rain. A rainbow began to form between the peaks. All of a sudden, I saw the outline of a shoulder-shaped peak in the sunshine—the Shoulder of Beauty Tang. It was a fresh green and the rainbow looked like a lacy sleeve. I envied the ancient woman because she had known a perfect passion.

*   *   *

J
asmine and I ran into each other on our way to the “shoulder.” She was in a talkative mood. For the first time, I felt like talking to her a little. I hoped the conversation could stop my running thoughts. Jasmine portrayed herself as a victim of love. She wore a light yellow shirt and a matching knit skirt. She said that she kept getting eye infections because she couldn’t help crying whenever she saw Lion Head. She said that she only ate six pieces of noodle a day and could hardly sleep. She was lovesick. She would die for him. She believed that she had already begun to die. I noticed that her flying eyebrows were now the shape of two dropping geese shot by gunfire. Her cheeks were streaked with the trail of tears.

“You can believe it or not, but I will die soon,” she said. She spoke about death with such nobility in her voice. She said she wasn’t complaining. “I shall never resent him. He can have his freedom once I am dead.”

I had nothing to say. She didn’t seem to need my comfort. She needed only an audience for her performance. She had secretly written a letter to Lion Head, she said. She hoped that he would find out about it and read it after her death. “He will realize what great love he missed, but by then it will be too late,” she said. “Too late for him to cry over me.”

Jasmine waited for me to offer to tell Lion Head about the letter waiting for him.

I looked at Jasmine; I was not going to fulfill her wish.

“Nobody dies from lovesickness,” I said. “Not in our time. Not anymore.”

*   *   *

F
inally the birthday party took place in the mist. All fifteen of us arrived. Laying out food and drink, we began singing and playing traditional music with harmonicas. Jim brought a cassette player and played Katherine a piece of music by a friend of his who
was an underground composer. The music was based on the Ming Dynasty play
The Peony Pavilion
by Tang Xian-zu, a playwright compared with Shakespeare, Jim explained. It was the story of a romance between a poor scholar and the daughter of a rich lord, and it had a happy ending. Katherine was greatly pleased. She sat apart from Lion Head, as if nothing had happened between them just an hour ago. Lion Head looked unusually serious.

Clouds sat above our heads. Wind brushed through the leaves. Although it was late autumn, the mountain held the noon heat. It felt like summer. Squirrels tried to get closer and steal our food.

Katherine did not know that she held power over our future. If she told the school authority that this or that one was a linguistically gifted student, then that person would have a great chance at an important post, such as being appointed a secretary in the Department of International Relations, or a clerk in the Bureau of Foreign Affairs. A post unlike one any of us now held. A dream.

The birthday party gave the students the chance to flatter their teacher. Katherine was showered with gifts we were not able to afford but bought anyway. We were in competition to please the foreign devil. Katherine knew nothing of what was on our minds. She trusted us too much. She would never think she was being used in such a way. The Chinese believed in the saying “One’s sharp tongue becomes blunt when one takes the other’s food; one’s arm becomes shorter when one picks up the other’s gift.” The people in the class believed that gifts would buy them a good impression, which would turn into words of praise to be dropped in the Party’s dossier. Yet my classmates liked to believe that they were not superficial, not opportunistic, that their gifts did not mean to buy Katherine’s favor. They preferred to think of themselves as nice people, people with a great history of being kind and generous.

“We Chinese value great friendship. Long live our great friendship,” everybody said as the gifts were unwrapped.

Katherine was like a happy schoolgirl. Lion Head gave her a silk robe embroidered with peonies. Jim gave her a set of long necklaces made of pieces of hairpins from his great-grandmother’s opera costumes. Jasmine bought her a set of ancient minibattleships carved from ivory. I bought her a white-and-green-jade hand mirror and comb. Katherine got bamboo table mats, expensive slippers, crystal hand massagers, an ivory shower claw, a hand fan made of animal bones. We spent all we could to buy our good impressions.

Katherine looked at me twice as she took my gift. Was she wondering if I sensed that something had happened between her and Lion Head? I returned her look and smiled. She looked uneasy. She could tell I knew something. I left her to cook her doubts. I decided to wait until they boiled and spilled over the top.

Jim took out his Yangtze River–brand camera and wanted us to pose for pictures. The men looked for good backdrops while the women fixed themselves up. Jasmine took out a red hair band and pushed it back on her head. She looked like a big turkey. I took out a black jacket with a chrysanthemum pattern. I’d bought the jacket to match Katherine’s taste in black.

Katherine opened her bag and took out a tube of reddish lipstick. She was in a tight brown cashmere sweater. She avoided my eyes. She sat quietly on a rock, brushing her face with powder. The mountain heat maintained its intensity. I suddenly remembered how Katherine had once told me that she loved summer for its heat.

She sat, motionless and elegant, as if trying to absorb the warmth of the air. Everyone watched her, trying not to stare, taking in the wide, thin back, the long arms, the round, horselike hips,
and the bosoms that stuck out like tomatoes. She made the women self-conscious with just her presence. Each man, except Lion Head, asked to have his picture taken with the teacher. Jim the cameraman got to take two with her, one with his arm around her shoulder. The women wanted to eat her up.

We made toasts with Chinese wine that was soft in taste but strong. Katherine became more talkative. She said she had never gotten drunk on wine before, but then again she had never tried with Chinese wine, especially Green Bamboo. Jim told her Chinese wine was just like Chinese culture—it worked slowly but potently. One could get intoxicated without knowing. Katherine asked for more. Her Chinese began to knot, and she began to speak fast in English.

Everybody was getting more animated. Our tongues loosened. The men stared at Katherine’s body freely.

Katherine asked about the assignment on the Shoulder of Beauty Tang. Everyone reported the same story I learned. But I was the only one to come up with Beauty Tang’s poem.

Katherine cracked her rose-colored lips as she listened to the story of Beauty Tang’s passion. The men drew closer to her and sipped more wine. The women watched the men at first, but soon we too focused our eyes on her, watching Katherine’s lips pronounce, “What a story! What a woman!”

We made no response. Beauty Tang was not on our minds. The Chinese classic had much less impact on us than the foreign devil’s red lips.

Katherine became self-conscious. She changed her pose several times. Still uncomfortable, she said: “It’s my lipstick, isn’t it? What are you staring at? Is my lipstick bothering you? I can take it off.” She took out her handkerchief.

Lion Head came up to her and froze her arm with his hand.
“It’s your birthday,” he said, taking away her handkerchief and stuffing it in his jacket pocket. “Allow us to appreciate the beauty of nature.”

Katherine looked up at Lion Head. She saw a pair of burning eyes. She opened her makeup bag. “I want to do a face,” she said. “I want to do a Chinese face! Any volunteers?”

Jim stood up and we giggled. “How about me?”

Lion Head pushed him away. The men shoved him and punched Jim playfully. “A mouse offers to wipe the oily kitchen counter! What an opportunist. Get out of here!” they said.

I saw Jasmine’s O-shaped mouth twist, as if she were about to make up her mind. I thought about Katherine’s fingers touching my face, about smelling her perfume, about how she would make me look like her. I stood up and sat down in front of her right before Jasmine took action.

“Do my face, if you please,” I said, staring into her eyes.

*   *   *

I
t took her forty-five minutes. She lit a cigarette before she began. She turned aside as she exhaled the smoke, but the wind blew it back in my direction. I smelled her breath, along with her fragrance.

She was patient. She applied the base with her fingertips. You westerners call yourselves civilized people, I thought, but you, Katherine, seem to be from the wild jungle of animal instinct. You’ve begun an affair with Lion Head. Do you like conquering our men? Without effort, you won our men’s admiration. How does that make you feel?

Her brush moved here and there as she put on the eye shadow. China is easy for you, Katherine. I am sure soon you will find it boring. I can tell—I see it written on your face, etched into your wrinkles. You will find it all smells like spoiled dirty dishes.

I studied her features in detail as she rubbed my cheeks with rouge. The sculptural contours, the deep-set, double-lidded, almond-shaped eyes filled with unspeakable energy, the irises like ripples in the river. The tip of her nose was inches away from mine. It was a bony nose compared to flat Chinese meatball-like noses. What’s marinating inside this head-jar? Do you know what you’re taking away from me? You spoke of respect but you take pleasure in stealing Lion Head. You care only about satisfying your lust, just like me. Could it be that you are lonely too?

I examined the texture of her skin and the tiny veins underneath. Her warm breath kept hitting my face. I felt the tip of her pencil outlining my lips. Her long eyelashes blinked as if aware of my staring. Her cheeks suddenly turned red. What now? Have your hands told you what I am thinking?

*   *   *

T
he men said I looked like a westerner. They said a Chinese woman could never do that to herself. That was why all Chinese women looked like midwives, like the dregs of tofu. Now these men believed that their own women could look desirable too. It was just makeup, after all. Thank you, Katherine, for the enlightenment. I thought how Chinese men, creators of the foot-binding tradition, the tradition that was inspired by the sway of the willows, were now pronouncing a new aesthetic on how women should look. I should have been grateful for the lesson, but I was not. I wore Katherine’s face and for a moment I could pretend to be American, but I was not Katherine. I could never be her. Even if I could be her, with this borrowed face, I would not.

*   *   *

W
e returned to the city and Katherine invited us back to her hut to dance. We were never this wild in our lives, except during the Cultural Revolution when we copied Mao’s teachings on the walls.
We worked through the night and sang, “We love you, our dearest Chairman / We’re ready to open our chests and offer you our hearts.”

Katherine lit three candles, and all of a sudden the room looked like the enemy’s rooms depicted in our propaganda movies. We did not say this to Katherine. We didn’t want to spoil her mood; we didn’t want to make her cautious. Lion Head, Jim, and I spoke to each other without opening our mouths. We were trained to think alike with little different “personality flavor.” We thought as one in silence. We carefully kept Katherine from knowing too much because once she learned the rules, she would become one of us, she would become Chinese and we would lose touch with the America she had created in our minds. We were old Chinese master painters, trained in the rules of tradition for so many years we’d lost the “heavenly joy” we were supposed to gain. We could never splash ink on rice paper to make a wild landscape the way a child would. Katherine was our child; we wanted her to draw from her imagination so we could rediscover innocence.

*   *   *

W
e pretended the room was brightly lit. We sat around Katherine as she began to move her body to the American music. We prepared our escape in case the authorities broke in. Everyone but Katherine knew that dancing by candlelight was forbidden in China. Secretly we took turns watching for police outside the hut. Now it was Jim’s turn. He stood in the dark, pretending to smoke. We could be arrested and thrown into detention houses. Someone like Jasmine might get away with it because of her father, but not the rest of us. Yet no one wanted to leave. It was too exciting to be missed.

Katherine twisted her hips as she danced. To us, dance meant striking Mao’s propaganda poses. We threw up our hands, made a motion of opening hearts, and sang, “Chairman Mao, and the Great
Party, we love you with all our hearts and souls.” We made kicking poses, stabbing poses, we shouted, “Down with bourgeois imperialism!” We didn’t know there was another way to dance until recently. We’d heard about it because of the country’s new “open door” policy, but we’d never seen it with our own eyes. Katherine’s dance was so animal-like. She reminded me of a writhing snake, a swimming sea lion, a chewing silkworm, a chopping woodpecker.

This is corruption, my mind said. If you don’t want to resist, at least you should not actively participate. But the foreign devil was getting under my skin. It was hard to sit still. I watched Katherine swing her body and my bones began to itch.

Katherine asked Jim to stand up, relax, and move his body in sync with hers. She called this the “spoon dance.” She pasted her body onto his and rocked slowly. She didn’t know what she was doing to our heads. We were defenseless against this bourgeois influence.