Mountain Girl River Girl (5 page)

Chapter
Six

Shui-lian

Shui-lian rose slowly from the depths of a dream in which she lay in the bottom of a boat rocked by choppy waves. As consciousness returned, she remembered where she was—in a warehouse with other hopeful young women, on the last stage of a long journey. Soon she would be in Shanghai, a factory worker. She smiled to herself in the darkness.

Then she became aware of a weight pressing on her bed. Rough fingers crawled at the waistband of her underpants. The elastic gave way with a rip, and her eyes snapped open. Terror struck her, driving the air from her lungs. A shadow loomed over her. The stink of rice wine and garlic in her face was as real as the sharp stubble that scraped her cheek as a man lowered himself onto her, grunting and grinding his body against hers. Shui-lian struggled, pushed against him, and yelled for help, only to realize that from behind the partitions similar shrieks were ringing out. She twisted her torso under the man’s weight and tried to free herself by raising her knees, but he was too heavy. Cursing, stricken with panic, Shui-lian pounded the attacker’s back with her fists as she flung her head from side to side. In desperation, she raked his face with her nails.

“Get off me, you filthy son of a dog!” she screamed, digging her nails in deeper.

“Ow! You bitch!” the man howled. He swung his head aside to avoid her fingers, then smashed his fist into Shui-lian’s face. Clutching a handful of Shui-lian’s hair, he slammed her head against the thin mat. Sparks flew before her eyes. The ache in her skull was unbearable.

Then Shui-lian felt something near her groin. She cried out in pain as the man jammed himself into her. She gasped for air but couldn’t breathe. Wailing and pleading tore the air around her, reminding Shui-lian that this was no nightmare.

At length, the man got off her, huffing heavily in the darkness. Groaning, Shui-lian curled up and rolled onto her side. It’s finally over, she said to herself. It’s finished. But, a few seconds later, she heard a low laugh and the shuffle of feet, before someone else grabbed her and turned her onto her back. A second assault began. Clenching her teeth and squeezing her eyes shut, Shui-lian repeated to herself, Let it be finished or let me be finished.

B
Y THE TIME
the intruders had stolen away, Shui-lian was barely conscious, despite the groaning and weeping nearby her and the sea of revolting smells—sweat, vomit, and blood. One by one, shadows emerged from behind the curtains and made their way to the sinks. Standing on wobbly legs, turning the tap with a shaking hand, Shui-lian tried to comprehend what had happened. Behind her, others moved around like ghosts, avoiding each other’s eyes.

Shui-lian scrubbed raw every inch of her exposed flesh and used up the small bar of soap washing and rewashing her face and thighs. Her guts on fire, her head aching, she was not sure if she would ever clean the men’s stink from her skin and the shame from her body. Bruised and disoriented, she pulled on her clothes, ripped the soiled blanket and straw mat off the bed, and lay down on the bare planks.

“Ruined,” she heard Jin-lin crying on the next bed. “Now no man will want me for a wife. I’ll never have the face to go back to see my family again!”

Still in shock, Shui-lian didn’t reply, but anger was slowly building up inside her the way the rivers of Sichuan swelled after a violent storm. She lay curled into a ball, hugging herself, staring dry eyed at nothing until pale light seeped under the door.

Before noon there was a knock on the door. Shui-lian lifted her head and saw Da-Ge sidle into the room like a crab. Most of the women averted their eyes. Looking sorrowful and choking as though heartbroken, Da-Ge told them that he’d been badly beaten by the intruders, thrown hard to the ground, then tied hand and foot. He was lucky to be alive, he said mournfully, letting out a few dry coughs to show his suffering and pain.

Shui-lian fixed him with a hateful look. For a man who claimed to have been attacked and trussed up, he had no welts on his wrists and his pie-shaped face was free of cuts and bruises.

Thumping his chest with his open palm, Da-Ge vowed that if the young women kept what had happened to themselves, he wouldn’t tell a living soul either. “Don’t worry, I’ll keep your secret. It’s over now. Let’s put this behind us and look forward to the future,” he soothed, parroting an insincere government slogan. “In life, we have to make small sacrifices in order to score big gains,” he added, turning and pretending to limp out the door.

“We?
Small sacrifice?” Shui-lian spat, pulling down the torn plastic partition. “That son of a turtle makes it sound as though this is what we should have expected. We have to do something about it.” Her remark was confronted with silence.

Half an hour later, the minibus with the blacked-out windows picked them up. After a short ride, during which every one of them tried in vain to find a comfortable sitting position, the bus pulled to a halt in front of a small, dilapidated roadside inn. Shui-lian and Jin-lin were lodged in a tiny room with a smooth dirt floor. But at least there was a toilet and a sink with running water—heavenly luxuries which failed to lift their spirits.

Da-Ge had given each of them a cloth-wrapped parcel containing a pair of sandals, a couple of shirts, pants, and socks. Some of the clothing was new and some used, but it was all clean—a great improvement over the rags they’d been wearing for days.

“Tomorrow will be your big day,” he had declared with false cheer after passing out the packages. “Your new boss is coming to get you. Make yourselves presentable.”

“How are we supposed to do that?” Jin-lin had wheezed, her left eye purple and swollen, the rip at the corner of her mouth still leaking blood each time she opened her mouth. “We can barely walk!”

“That stinking bastard,” Shui-lian hissed later that night as she lay beside Jin-lin on the wide platform bed. “I’d like to strangle him, or hold his head under water and watch him drown. Does he really think we fell for that pathetic story of his? All this happened because of him! Either he planned it or he let it happen.”

“But what can we do?” Jin-lin said. “We’re under his power until our new boss comes to collect us. We don’t even know where we are.”

“We’re in hell,” said Shui-lian, pounding her fist against the thin mattress. “I wonder if the factory will still take us, seeing us in such a state.”

For the first time since they had known each other, Jin-lin had no answer.

Even though they were both exhausted, they were unable to sleep, starting at every creak or rustle outside the window, each footfall that floated into their room from the corridors. Shui-lian stayed awake most of the night. The slightest sound made her jump and shake with fear.

The next morning, Shui-lian and Jin-lin filed into the canteen with the others and sat down to a bowl of rice gruel and pickled vegetables. Shui-lian had to force the food down, for she had no appetite. As she scooped gruel into her mouth, she heard the screech of brakes outside, a muffled shout, and then the tramp of feet on the path. The door flew open and a tall man strode into the room, followed by three more men, who immediately fanned out to block the exits. They all wore the uniforms of the Public Security Bureau.

“Police!” Jin-lin hissed, her eyes wide.

“All of you! You are under arrest!” The leader bawled. “For prostitution.”

Chapter
Seven

Pan-pan

Pan-pan felt like she was in a heavy fog the rest of the day, speaking to no one unless spoken to. As the afternoon dragged on, with the continuous racket of drums and gongs, she couldn’t wait for the monks to leave.

Finally, as the sun shifted farther westward and sank behind the mountains, everyone in the village, it seemed, gathered in front of Pan-pan’s home and watched her father slowly and with great formality approach the house of gold paper. Solemnly he kneeled, struck a match, touched it to the corner of the front wall, and then tossed it into the paper automobile. In less than a minute the structure was engulfed in flames. The paper curled and sparkled; the bamboo sticks crackled fiercely. A huge ball of fire lifted off the ground and rose, nearly reaching the electric wires overhead. Heat and black smoke drove the onlookers back. The model furniture and appliances, as well as the chickens, the car, and the driver—all were swallowed by the hungry flames within minutes. Glowing ashes danced and swirled in the air before falling to the ground. Mom’s house was on its way to the afterworld. Pan-pan’s eyes trailed after a large piece of ash slowly drifting toward the fields, wishing, through her tears and the deep sobs that shook her to the core, that her mother’s spirit would stay.

“L
ET’S FACE IT,
my child, I’m a farmer—or I used to be,” began Pan-pan’s father, a bitter smile on his bony face. “We’re peasants. Who in the world knows more about smells and odours, stinks and fragrances? We live with them day after day, year after year. We sense them all, and we don’t give a damn!”

It was the morning after the ceremonial offering and fire, and her father had sat Pan-pan down at the table. Her mother’s photo still stood in the centre. Ah-Po had made herself scarce, remaining in her room, and Xin-Ma, her puffy eyes telling that she too had passed a sleepless night, had taken Gui-yang out for a walk.

Pan-pan’s father’s face was pale and drained, the same colour as the ashes scattered across the yard, as though the fire had also extinguished something inside him.

“When your mother was a girl, she wasn’t bothered by her strong body odour until your aunt Cai-fei put a name to it and told her it was a condition only a few suffered from. I blame Cai-fei to this day. As far as I understand, it’s the work of a person’s sweat glands. Some people perspire more than others, so it’s only normal they smell stronger. But ‘fox stink’?” He swallowed hard, shaking his head. “What kind of ignorance is that? For one thing, I’ve never seen a fox in my life, let alone smelled one. I would never have wasted my time listening to such rubbish if it hadn’t been your mom telling me this.”

He soon forgot about the whole thing, her father continued, because at that time, in the eyes of the government and the Party ideology, emphasizing personal needs, even hygiene and appearance, was condemned as unrevolutionary. Bourgeois vanity, it was called. The more you gave in to your individual concerns, the less you were committed to the Communist cause. In those days, the villagers competed to see who could appear the dirtiest and smell the worst, so they would be praised as pure proletarians. “As a matter of fact, your mother was often the target of such criticism simply because cleanliness and femininity were important to her. Once, she was accused of smelling like a flower because growing flowers and even houseplants was denounced as self-indulgent.”

Pan-pan’s father sipped his green tea and shook his head again. Then came the changes and reforms, he explained, which brought new ways of living and thinking. Everything was turned upside down. Wrong didn’t just become right, it was sought after. Even the fashion industry, which had been banned for decades as rotten capitalist rubbish, returned with a vengeance and made its way even to backwater places such as Tongren. During her visit to Yunxi Village at Lunar New Year, Cai-fei showed Pan-pan’s mother a poster she had peeled off an electric pole on Tongren’s main street. The flyer advertised a special treatment that cured fox stink. Easy and fast, it said. In and out the same day. Guaranteed results.

“That damn flyer stirred up the whole thing again, like blowing on dying embers,” her father continued angrily. “I wasn’t totally surprised that such nonsense would gain ground since everything modern or stylish that could make money was called a new trend. Everybody, it seemed, was chasing after money. But I didn’t expect your mom would buy into this and go to such an extreme. It was around the time when the whole country was worried about some kind of bug that would eat up words and numbers stored in computers when the new millennium arrived, like rice borers devouring our crops.

“After the New Year celebration, Cai-fei returned home but left the flyer with us. She had raised your mother’s hopes that she could get rid of her social handicap once and for all—and that’s what she called it, a social handicap. I had no idea she’d been feeling that way, and for so long. I tried to talk her out of it but failed miserably. She wouldn’t even let me go with her to Tongren for the operation, saying it was only day surgery and that she would be home in no time.”

Pan-pan’s father told of how Cai-fei took Pan-pan’s mother to a two-room flat on the second floor of an apartment building in downtown Tongren. There was no sign on the door, just the unit number. The young woman in a white gown who let them in asked for payment before they even sat down. The doctor, also in a white robe and cap, greeted them with a heavy accent Cai-fei said was not local. He insisted that Cai-fei not come into the operating room because it was sterile—that seemed like a sign of high standards. Cai-fei watched as her sister was led away, confident that things looked official and promising.

“Then through the thin wall she told me she could hear the snips of scissors and the groans of your mother,” Pan-pan’s father went on. “It’s surgery, she reminded herself. It’s only natural to suffer some pain and discomfort.”

Cai-fei brought her sister home to recuperate. One day passed, then two, but the swelling wouldn’t go down. If anything, it grew worse. Pan-pan’s mother couldn’t move her arms, and the angry red welts in her armpits festered. Each time Cai-fei went back to the doctor, he assured her that everything was normal, swelling was to be expected and so was the pain, and sent her away with stronger painkillers.

“But your mother must have sensed that something had gone terribly wrong,” said Pan-pan’s father, his voice quaking. “By the end of the week, she asked Cai-fei to bring her home. And you know the rest of it.”

Yes, I do, thought Pan-pan bitterly, recalling the day Mom was carried into the house on a stretcher, pale and motionless, a heavy quilt pulled up to her chin. It was clearly a strain for her even to greet Pan-pan and offer a weak smile.

“But I still don’t understand what she died from.”

“From infection,” Xin-Ma cut in. She had come into the room and taken a seat beside her husband. “The doctor botched the operation. After your mother’s funeral, your father went to Tongren to confront the doctor, but instead of a clinic he found an empty apartment. No one in the building was able to tell him who the doctor was or where he’d gone. The building supervisor was shocked to learn the flat had been used for surgery. Your father searched the city for the man, wandering the streets for days. All he got for his trouble was a bagful of advertisements he ripped off electric poles and walls, offering surgery to enlarge breasts or eyes, shrink and reshape noses, and to cure fox stink and other body odours.”

“What a waste, Pan-pan,” Dad repeated, drying his eyes on his sleeve. “Your mother died for nothing!”

“But why didn’t she tell me about all that?”

“Shame, I guess,” her father murmured. “Shame for her condition. Shame for the way she was regarded by some villagers. And she was scared for you, afraid you might have inherited the same thing. She said to me the night before she left for Tongren that if she had the operation and it worked, then she’d know where to take you if you wanted to get it done.”

F
OR THE NEXT THREE DAYS,
Pan-pan mostly kept to herself, thinking and sorting things out inside her head. More than once her eyes rose to the tops of the purple mountains and she felt the familiar tug of new and strange places behind the peaks and beyond. On the fourth day, she was waiting for her father when he returned from a long walk around the village. He had decided to delay his return to the construction site because of what had happened at home. Pan-pan watched him hang up his jacket and change his shoes before joining the family at the supper table. As soon as he was settled, Pan-pan took a deep breath and began to speak.

“Dad, Ah-Po, and Xin-Ma, I’ve got something to tell you.” She stopped, casting a nervous glance around her. “I’ve decided to leave home to find a job. I want to go to Beijing.”

Silence fell. All three adults stared at her, then at one another, as though a stranger had wandered in from the fields and taken Pan-pan’s place.

“No, you can’t! I won’t let you!” Ah-Po spoke first, jabbing her chopsticks in the air to make her point.

“Ridiculous,” Xin-Ma grumbled, frowning. “You’re still a kid.”

Pan-pan’s father slowly put down his chopsticks and stared at the bowl of rice in front of him, giving Pan-pan an uneasy feeling. She’d have preferred to hear him say something, even shout at her—anything but the pained look in his eyes.

“Hear me out, Dad,” she said. “My decision has very little to do with what I’ve learned about Mom or me. The truth is, I’ve been thinking about leaving for some time—from the day you went away to look for work in the cities. So many people in the village have done the same thing. There’s a whole world out there that I know nothing about.”

“But why Beijing? Why so far away?” Xin-Ma interrupted.

“Because it’s the capital,” Pan-pan answered right away. “Ever since I was a child and listened to Ah-Po talking about the girl from Beijing I’ve dreamed of seeing the famous sights with my own eyes. Now that it’s allowed, I can live and look for a job there. If it doesn’t work out, I can always come back.” She paused and quickly looked around the table. “But first I plan to visit Auntie Cai-fei and go to the places Mom walked for the last time.”

Gui-yang chose that moment to wake up. His cries carried easily from the backroom and Xin-Ma got up to go to him. As if he too had just awakened, Pan-pan’s father began to rub the side of his face with one hand, back and forth over his stubbled chin, his eyes avoiding Pan-pan’s.

It was Ah-Po who broke the tension. “If that’s what you really want to do, I for one won’t try to stop you.” She swallowed hard and continued. “When the girl from Beijing was sent to the village to live with us she was about your age, so it’s not the first time I’ve seen kids travel from place to place on their own. In those days, youngsters were forced to leave their homes in the city and come down to the countryside, to be re-educated by us peasants. I didn’t understand it at all then, and I still don’t. Why would the government send us more mouths to eat from our bowl of rice, which was only half full as it was?

“It was the government’s doing at the time. Now it seems the same thing is happening again, only in reverse.” Ah-Po stopped to catch her breath. “I try not to be too upset when I see skilled farmers like your father abandoning the fields, their homes, and their families to travel hundreds of kilometres to work in the cities. My head spins whenever I think about it. Look around here. Spring planting is coming up soon, but the fields lie unplowed. What’s left behind in this village is an army of mothers and grandmothers and children. Maybe Beijing is not a bad choice, Pan-pan, since I have a connection there. The girl named Sun Ming. Remember, son?”

Dad lifted his eyes. “Yes. Sun Ming. I remember. It was a long time ago, though. I was only eight.”

Ah-Po left the table and went to the room she and Pan-pan shared. Pan-pan could hear drawers open and shut. When she returned, Ah-Po sat down and unfolded a piece of lined paper on the tabletop. “Nearly thirty years,” she murmured to herself as she slid the flattened paper across to Pan-pan. “This is her address. I wonder if she still lives there.”