Bi Feiyu - Three Sisters

Yuyang was the seventh and youngest girl, which normally would have made her the baby of the family, but no such luck. Her father had refused to give up and mustered a bit more strength before returning to bed to give it another go, which had led to the birth of a son, Little Eight. That had rendered the youngest daughter inconsequential. At best she’d been a necessary preparation for her parents’ project of producing a baby boy, a rehearsal, a trial run. In a word, she was an extra, born to be disliked and shunned by her parents. In fact, she wasn’t even brought up by them. At first Yumi took care of her and after Yumi was married, Yuyang had no choice but to move in with her grandparents.

She was clumsy—verbally and physically—and antisocial. That actually saved the parents and grandparents trouble and worry. She did, however, possess one unique quality, which the teacher discovered as soon as she entered school—she loved to study. Stubbornly burying her head in books, she was willing to put in all the necessary effort and expend the required energy. She might not have been at the top of her class, but she was solid and pragmatic, and could commit page after page of her textbooks to memory. Her admission into a school in town gave the old principal a lot of face. He insisted that she share some of her learning experience so, standing with her back to the wall in the teachers’ office, Yuyang rubbed the sole of her shoe against the wall nervously until she managed to force out a sort of golden rule: memorize. How simple the plain truth can be. The old principal grabbed her hand and said excitedly, “Practice is the way to verify truth. We must spread Yuyang’s wisdom around. Starting next semester, we’ll rally the students to learn from Yuyang—memorize.” His excitement prompted him to retroactively award her a Three-Good Student certificate, while counseling her to keep all three things foremost in her mind when she went to town. He raised his middle and ring fingers, as well as his pinkie, to indicate good health, good grades, and good work.

Yuyang spent that summer fully vindicated in Wang Family Village. She was lonely every day, but it was a special kind of loneliness, different from what she’d felt before. In the past, loneliness had been the result of being neglected by others, being forgotten and ignored. In the summer of 1982, she was still alone, but it was the solitude of someone who stood out like a crane among chickens. She was standing on one foot as she silently tucked her head under a wing on which snowy white light glinted off of every feather. It was a cheerless solitude that drew together a unique beauty and pride, the restful moment before she spread her wings and soared into the sky. At any moment she could turn into a cloud and glide toward the horizon. What made her proudest was that it even prompted her big sister to make a trip home from Broken Bridge. Yumi told people that she had come home to see “our little Yang.” Though they were sisters, the two of them had nothing much to do with each other. In Yumi’s eyes, Yuyang had always been just a child. On her infrequent visits home, Yumi would send her sister off with some hard candy telling her to go out and play.

But this time Yumi came home as the wife of an official, her hair wound into a bun at the back of her head. She had put on weight and had a new tooth that gave off a golden glint even though it was copper veneer. Highlighted by this golden sparkle, her smile signaled affection and magnanimity. And it exuded happiness. In order to show off her gold tooth as much as possible, Yumi smiled a lot, the broader the better. Although she was now the wife of a commune cadre and could play the exalted role of an official’s wife, Yumi spent her own money on a two-table banquet to which the village leaders and Yuyang’s teachers all came. Yuyang was allowed to sit at the table, which marked her status at the first formal banquet she had ever attended. Feeling shy and proud at the same time, she smiled with her lips pressed tightly together. In reality, of course, Yuyang’s presence at the table was symbolic because Yumi was busily in charge, taking over and tossing down one cup of liquor after another. Having developed a remarkable capacity for alcohol, she appeared brash and aggressive, even drinking a cup “on behalf of Yuyang.” She drank so much that everyone assumed she was drunk. But no, she kept up the pace, one cup after another, and by the time the banquet was over, the people in Wang Family Village knew that Yumi could hold her own around a table. She managed to put away more than twenty ounces of strong liquor and still played two hours of poker with the village cadres. She threw down her cards one at a time with a loud snap, always on the attack and showing no mercy.

After three rounds of poker, Yumi crawled under Yuyang’s mosquito net, where the younger girl was fast asleep. Nudging her awake, Yumi began counting out money under the oil lamp so Yuyang could see—five-yuan bills with consecutive numbers, so new they could slice cakes of tofu or slap someone in the face. It was not money she’d won at poker, but bills she’d brought back especially for Yuyang. She counted out ten of them, plus coupons for twenty-five jin of grain, which could be used anywhere in the country. It was a large sum of money, possibly enough to kill for. Thrusting the fifty yuan and grain coupons at her sister, Yumi ordered Yuyang in a gruff, but somehow tender manner, “Take this, little girl.”

“Just put it there,” Yuyang said sleepily.

“Open your eyes, sleepyhead, and tell me what you see.”

Still half asleep, Yuyang did not seem impressed.

“Let me sleep.”

She shut her eyes, and Yumi stared at the back of her sister’s head. She was surprised by the girl’s reaction. Not only had her foolish baby sister dismissed Yumi’s generosity, but she had already begun to talk like a city girl who knows the value of understatement in important matters. Without another word, Yumi stuffed the money and grain coupons under her sister’s pillow, blew out the light, and lay down next to Yuyang, whose back was to her. But she’d had too much to drink to fall asleep right away. Her thoughts were on her sister’s accomplishments. Relying only on the pen in her hand, Yuyang had made all the strokes necessary to get into town. That was no small feat; it was actually quite remarkable, something no one would have dared predict a few years earlier. A foolish girl can enjoy foolish good fortune, Yumi thought to herself. The timing was perfect for a little girl who was destined to make a name for herself.

The day after the track meet was a Sunday, when most girls stayed in bed late, even if they were fully awake. They wanted to lie there and think their own thoughts. Better to be lazy than to get up, even for breakfast. They lay in bed for the sake of lying in bed; not to do so would be wasting an opportunity. Imagine their shock that Sunday when they learned that a thief had taken things out of Pang Fenghua’s case. No one knew when it had happened, but sixteen yuan in cash and four yuan’s worth of meal coupons had turned up missing.

Fenghua had the commendable habit of counting her money and meal coupons when she took a tube of toothpaste out of her patent leather case each morning. On this morning, she discovered that the cash and coupons were gone. It was a considerable sum to lose, which made it a serious incident.

At 10:15 Beijing time that Sunday morning, every student in Section Three of the class of ’82 was called together before many of them had eaten breakfast. Yuyang did not even have time to brush her teeth and wash her face. The homeroom teacher was there, and so was Director Qian of student affairs, but not Pang Fenghua. She stayed behind in her room to give a statement to the police. Students who saw her on their way out of the dorm said she was sitting on the edge of her bed, hair hanging down, eyes puffy. She looked sad and drained of energy. The policeman poured her a glass of water. She didn’t touch it. This time her grief was genuine, unlike the day before out on the track. It was not a look she could easily fake.