Bi Feiyu - Three Sisters

Yuyang lowered her head, a welter of thoughts racing through her mind, as she tried to decide what to do. In the end, being checked by Teacher Wei seemed the better option, since he’d been so nice and would not bring false accusations against a good person like her. So she carefully drew the curtains and walked boldly up to him.

Wei was still seated, but he’d turned sideways and had opened his legs wide like a welcoming bay. At the last moment Yuyang’s courage left her, and she clutched the cord holding up her pants, unable to untie it. With an air of official indifference, Wei said, “We can always go to the hospital.”

His words, hinting at compromise, calmed her mind, yet the blood rushed to her face. True gold does not fear fire, and an upright body never fears a slanting shadow. Go ahead and check.

Standing between his legs, she untied her pants and draped the cord around her neck to let Wei press his hand against her belly and move it around slowly. Assured that this was a scientific search for the truth and confident that she knew what that truth was, she had nothing to fear.

Yuyang was innocent—that was proven beyond all doubt. In the spirit of never sparing a single culprit or falsely accusing an innocent person, Wei gave it his all, body and soul, and conducted a thorough inspection that exhausted him; he was sweating and breathing hard. Fortunately the final result allowed Yuyang to breathe a sigh of relief when he patted her buttocks and said, “Good girl.” She was not convinced until he repeated the words, “good girl.”

As she stood there, she felt like crying, for what can be more comforting than the trust of the organization? As she retied her pants, she concentrated on trying to guess who had written that shameless, slanderous letter. Had it not been for Teacher Wei, the consequences would have been unthinkable. Even though he’d been a bit rough and had hurt her more than she wanted to admit, the end result was worth all of her forbearance. Now, like Agatha Christie, she began to analyze, deduce, and evaluate the people in her class and discovered that every boy and girl was a suspect. But who could it be? She vowed to find and expose that despicable person.

Yuyang may have been exonerated by the inspection, but the one who truly came out a winner was Wei Xiangdong, who experienced an unexpected consequence. While rubbing Yuyang’s belly, he discovered, to his amazement, that a certain appendage had regained its life and revived—and with that he recovered the ability and courage to conquer all difficulties. There is justice in the world, after all; heaven rewards those who work hard.

The elated Wei tried to show off in bed that night but got nowhere. He had been able to do it earlier, why not now? The damned thing was importunely shameless—betraying and splitting him once again. What a tragedy!

As he rested the back of his head on his folded arms, Wei’s dejection seemed to reach into the marrow of his bones and send a searing pain straight to his heart. Suddenly distracted, he could not get Yuyang out of his mind. From that point on, she became his obsession.

The winter break was three weeks long, but to Wei Xiangdong it seemed endless. Listless and lethargic, he was reminded that he was neither man nor woman, but had become a true third sex. Now that the students were away, the campus seemed forlorn. It was bad enough that he couldn’t see Yuyang; what made it worse was that there was no one to report to him or to expose others, no one to order around, and no work to take charge of. Life lost its appeal, and he found it difficult to go on.

Worse yet, the weather was awful beyond words, with nonstop snowfall and days too cold for the snow to melt. The packed snow was a terrible thing, the reflected light inexplicably souring Wei’s mood. The light turned night into day, bringing everything out into the open: no secrets, no hints, and no suggestiveness. Even the normally dark grove was exposed and transparent. Flashlight in hand, Wei roamed aimlessly in the snow, feeling utterly bored. The nights were worse than the days, since there were no more dark corners where people could engage in unsavory acts. He sighed and headed home.

The campus came to life once the winter break ended. Nearly all of the students had put on weight; the boys were heavier than before, the girls even more so. Their faces were a size larger than they’d been only weeks earlier. Rosy, flushed faces told the experienced teachers that the girls had eaten and slept themselves into a fleeting plumpness that would disappear within days.

With the extra weight, the girls looked healthier, and the improved skin tones made them prettier than ever. But when they lost the excess weight, they’d no longer be the scrawny girls of before. Those days would be over. They say that a girl’s looks change at eighteen. That seemed to be the case at the school. But this could have been the sixteenth or seventeenth change on the road to the transformation from little girls into women. Their eyes and the way they carried themselves displayed a new temperament, and this made their metamorphosis complete.

But not Yuyang. She actually had lost weight, for she hadn’t eaten or slept well over the winter break. A movie played continuously in her head, one with unspeakable scenes. She kept feeling that her lower body was exposed and that a hand was stuck to it. She tried to blot it out of her mind, but the hand had the unerring ability to find her like a shadow that cannot be severed, not even with a knife. It found every opportunity to reach out and slither over her body like a snake. Back in the duty room, she hadn’t felt the humiliation, but shame reared its ugly head once the break began and she had returned home. Lacking the courage to discuss it with anyone, she could only bury it deep inside. But humiliation is a strange thing. The deeper you bury it, the smaller its teeth, and yet its bite is sharper.

Yuyang’s sense of humiliation brought her more than pain; she was consumed with outrage. The anger she felt toward the slanderer went beyond loathing. She racked her brains trying to ferret out the culprit. Over the three-week break, this thought consumed all her time and energy. Using logical deduction and imaginative power, she set her mind on finding the slanderer. First she made a list of all the students in Section Three of the class of ’82 and examined each of them whenever she could. Everyone was guilty, and everyone was innocent. When she finally settled on someone, she’d change her mind the next day. Who was it?

Who was it? Two days into the semester, Pang Fenghua tripped herself up and revealed her foxtail. She had developed the habit of skipping the last rung on the ladder to the upper bunk whenever she was in a hurry or in a good mood. That was what she did that morning, except that this time she let out a scream and fell into the lower bunk, where she rolled around. Startled, the other girls crowded around her but saw nothing out of the ordinary. Yuyang, thinking that she might have twisted an ankle, held up Fenghua’s feet to check and was greeted by a frightening sight. Two thumbtacks were stuck in one of her heels and the force from her jump had pushed them deep into her flesh. All Yuyang could do was hold Fenghua down and pull them out, which left two punctures in her heels that immediately began to bleed.

Her face contorted with pain, Fenghua slapped Yuyang.

“You put those in my shoes! You did it!” Her outrageous accusation was groundless, since everyone had been given a box of thumbtacks for a sketching class that semester.

What made Fenghua assume that it was Yuyang who had put the tacks in her shoes? Two of her own tacks could have fallen into her shoes. Covering her mouth with her hand, Yuyang felt tears well up. No one said a word; Fenghua’s wails were the only sounds in the room.