Anchee Min - Red Azalea

As I was making jasmine tea for her and myself, the feel of her touch went through me. I felt the warmth of her body. I was possessive of that body. My hands shook. The hot water streamed out of the mugs onto the floor and wet my feet. I grabbed a mop and began to wipe the floor. My mind went on seeing things. I could see the joy on her face, the joy of being taken, being deeply penetrated. I could feel her wetness. I could hear her animallike groan. I knew the way she moved when she was aroused and could not help herself from pulling me closer and closer to her, pressing me, pasting me to her skin, leaving teeth marks on my shoulders. I wanted to be an observer, to observe Leopard doing what I have and have not done.

Yan stood by the kitchen entrance, looking at me.

It was ten in the morning. We had a few hours before Leopard would arrive. Yan asked me if I would have any problems with my working unit. I said I would lie again. Yan asked how I would lie. I thought for a while and said I would break my bicycle, then tell Soviet Wong that I had a traffic accident. Yan said, Would it do? I said, To lie or not to lie-the result would be the same because they would not believe me anyway.

Yan suggested that we go and take a shower in the public bathhouse on Salty Road. I agreed.

We were hand in hand like schoolgirls. Her braids were sun-beaten, yellowish. A neighbor saw us as we passed by; he nodded at me, looking at Yan, and said, A relative from the countryside? Then he asked Yan, How do you like Shanghai? Ma-ma-hoo-hoo, Yan said in the Shanghai dialect. So-so. The neighbor was surprised. He said, Her dialect is pretty good. I am a Shanghainese, can’t you tell? Yan said. The man shook his head. You look Tibetan.

Yan said, Let’s go to the department store. I want to buy something I’ve wanted to have for a long time. We moved through the crowd and stepped into the Shanghai Second Department Store. We went to the fabric counter. Yan said she was too old for the colors she liked. She said, Maybe I could make them into underwear. What do you think? I said they cost too much to be worn as underwear. We moved on to the clothing counter. Yan saw bright red underwear. She immediately asked a clerk to show her a pair. Without consulting me, she bought a set, the bright red underwear. Stop it, she said to me when she saw me smiling. I said, Can you ever get over the color red? I started laughing. She said, What’s so funny? I said it had just popped into my mind how we used to use red cloth to make bags for the Little Red Book. She said, Well, to me red is a passionate color, and one is what one wears. I said, Is this what you have been wanting? She said, As always, you know me better than the worms in my intestine.

I said I was afraid of being seen by any unit colleague. She said, What’s all that shit about? I said, You don’t understand the studio people. They are starving wolves. They don’t like me. Yan said, But you made it through their competition. Shouldn’t they respect you? I said, Lu is everywhere. All right, she said, now I understand.

The exit was mobbed with people who spoke northern and southern dialects. Although there was not much to choose from in the store, Shanghai was always the nation’s fashion center. People from outside the province came once every few years to buy clothes that would last for generations. They sat on the pavement and smoked tobacco, showing their rotten teeth.

We passed a street where there was a window display of opera performances. Yan looked at each picture slowly and said suddenly, I dreamed about you being in these. She turned to me and said, In my dream you didn’t look like yourself anymore. You were someone else, someone like Lu. I guess that was my fear. But see, you have not changed much. I said, I would have had a better chance if I had changed.

We stopped talking but kept walking. I found that I could not think about Yan’s leaving. I could not think about her life back at Red Fire Farm.

A young girl was walking toward us. She was fresh as a peach picked from a tree. She was wearing a sea-blue diagonal-striped skirt and a pair of green plastic sandals. Yan stared at her and her feet. I said, You don’t have to envy her pretty toenails. Yan said, My toenails are ruined by fungicide. I would love to wear sandals, but I can’t.

She was not confident walking among the city girls. The people who stared at her weather-beaten face annoyed her. We went to a soup shop where it was steamily hot. Yan went to sit at a table facing the wall. I went with her. We sat facing the wall. A waitress with a long face came to mop up the dirty table. We ordered two red-bean soups. The soup arrived. The edges of the soup bowls were like dog teeth. We ate carefully with spoons. Yan ordered steamed bread. She ate four pieces and I ate two. The shop was wallpapered with Mao portraits and Mao quotations. There were smeared red-bean fingerprints on the wall. The Mao portraits were fading yellow-brown. The smell of tobacco was heavy. Yan and I sat and said nothing to each other.

The waitress came. Her face grew longer. She said, Shit or get off the pot. Yan gave her a sidelong look. The waitress said, What’s wrong with you, villager? Yan kept quiet. I asked, Why can’t you be a little friendly? She shot back, Why should I be friendly with you? Who are you, you villagers? Yan looked her up and down. I knew she was thinking about a way to attack. The waitress was in a heavy sweat. She mopped the table and swore. Let’s go, Yan said. As we walked out on the street, Yan said she could have made a fool of that waitress but thought she was pitiful. Unhappy people are dangerous, she said.

We bought tickets for a shower bath, fifty cents per person. Our numbers were 220 and 221. The bathhouse was located behind a rice shop. Hundreds of bicycles were parked in rows on the pavement. Men and women fished in and out of the bathhouse, their wooden sandals making ding-ding-ding sounds on the cement.

We waited in the ladies’ line to get in. A crooked-faced man was guarding the entrance. He was loud-voiced. Number 185, tub-bathing, he yelled as he let one in. Ten minutes went by-no one came out. The woman in front of us began to chat with the guard. She complained about the slowness of the bathers. The man said, People are all the same. They come to shower three times a year. They pay so much, they have to wait for so long, so of course they want to get their money’s worth-they have to spend as much time as possible in the bath. It’s not unusual that we have people fainting in the tub. The man laughed as he shook his head. I won’t, said the woman. It’s stupid. I can’t imagine being carried out naked. The guard said, Who knows? One thing I can guarantee everybody here is that you will come out a couple of pounds lighter. The crowd laughed with the guard. A woman came out. Number 186, tub-bathing. The guard let in another. What about shower-bathing? I asked the guard. No shower-bathing space available yet. As I’ve told you, people are taking their time.

Yan said, We should have paid a little more to have the tub-bathing for two. I said I doubted the cleanliness of the tubs. I motioned to her to take a look at a woman a few yards behind us who obviously had some type of skin problem. Yan scratched her head and said, Oh, no. The woman in front of us asked the guard if he knew anything about the incident which took place a few months ago. The guard said, How could I not know it? The woman asked, What happened to that nasty man? The guard said, He was arrested, of course, and was sent to jail. It was not his first time doing this type of thing. He was good at it. He had a fine face and had no trouble dressing up like a woman. How did you let him pass? the woman asked. The guard was a little embarrassed. He said, How was I supposed to know? A few hundred women pass through every day. How could I tell he was a man? If he was normal, he wouldn’t have gotten on the ladies’ line. How did you finally catch him? the woman asked. The guard said, Well, there was an old lady. She was so old, about seventy years old, and very demanding. She never cared about her body being seen. She ran around the whole bathhouse naked complaining that the water temperature was too hot. She would faint if the air got too steamy. And you know, when there isn’t much steam in the air, things get clear. She happened to notice his you-know-what. And then she fainted. We took her out and cooled her down. When she woke, she told us what she saw. The man was just getting dressed. He tried to make an escape, but I’m a vegetarian. My strength never fails me. The woman turned to us and sighed, Isn’t it bizarre? The guard said, What’s so bizarre about it? A few hundred men are arrested each year for peeking through the women’s shower window.