Ran Chen - A Private Life

When I was fourteen, I finally found among my classmates a companion who enjoyed talking to me. We got to know each other after Mr. Ti put us together in a summer vacation study group.

Yi Qiu and I were the only members in our little group. She had contracted infantile paralysis as a child, and though one of her legs was normally developed, the other was skinny as a broomstick and a bit shorter in length, which made her walk with an exaggerated shuffle, her plump buttocks swinging back and forth, rather like a supple and nimble-footed orangutan. She was unusually tall and sturdy, and her rambling gait always announced her approach before she appeared in the doorway.

Yi Qiu was three years older than me. When she was seven, she didn't enter primary school like most children her age. Instead, her uncle took her to a small town in the north for medical treatment. There was a folk doctor who was supposed to be able to restore normal movement to the atrophied limbs of his patients by regularly rubbing into them a thick medicinal ointment. But after two years of treatment, Yi Qiu's crippled leg showed no sign of recovery. Eventually her uncle couldn't afford to have the treatments continued, and she returned home.

Although she was only three years older than me, Yi Qiu was already a fully developed, sexually aware young woman. She was amply bosomed, with full breasts that trembled with each step she took. They pushed upward so vigorously under her thin Dacron T-shirt that people around her were afraid that if she should start laughing or breathe heavily, the shirt would burst. In short, there was no way they were to be concealed.

But as fortune kindly had it, Yi Qiu had no desire to conceal her ample breasts. I could tell from the way she behaved that she took pleasure in her own sensuality. It is almost impossible to explain a feeling that I sensed in her – that she, in fact, deliberately took advantage of her sexuality to entice men into illicit and obscure doings. She swayed her hips in a suggestive mince and jutted out her buttocks erotically.

Although Yi Qiu was awkward and clumsy in speech and fat and ungainly, she had a strikingly beautiful face, with the large, gentle eyes of an antelope; long, thick, black eyebrows; and a milky white complexion suffused with a delicate pink glow. Setting off her beautiful oval face, her generous, eager mouth looked as if it were capable of swallowing down everything in this world – the pure and the polluted, the painful and the hideous. Her strong teeth could grind the sweetest song to dust, could crush the cruelest of tragedies to nothing.

It seemed to me that Yi Qiu's face exhibited the nature of her intelligence. At the same time that it exuded a kind of stupidity, it was filled with a contradictory, stubborn brilliance that found its expression through her stupidity.

I rode my bicycle as if it were a huge bird, alternately along a narrow road lined with trees and between the bare, gray walls of a long corridor. I wasn't the least bit worried about going too fast, because I knew the roads I was rushing down were in my dream; they were not the real roads of an early morning. The beech trees along the narrow road kept me feeling wonderfully cool, refreshed, and content. I noticed that the road looked very familiar. It was long and narrow and sloped consistently to the right. For the moment I couldn't figure out why it felt familiar.

So I kept on going, entering a bare corridor with towering walls rising abruptly on either side. There was not a person to be seen, but the many dull red beams of light staring out from the cracks, like so many watchful eyes that had been set into the walls, filled me with fear. I had a vague feeling that this corridor was also strikingly familiar. It was a bit like the long, narrow passage from Mr. Ti's office to the front gate of our school, but it was somehow different. I was again puzzled because I couldn't account for this feeling of familiarity.

After thinking about this for a long time, I eventually realized that in all these dreams I was riding a bicycle. I thought that when I came to the next street, when I entered the next tree-lined path, the next bare passageway, I would indeed be going down a real road that would take me to Yi Qiu's home in about seventeen minutes so we could start our lessons…

Just at that moment the alarm clock went off.

Opening my eyes, I jumped quickly out of bed and into my clothes, and grabbed something to eat as I dashed off to Yi Qiu's.

In fact, I don't know how to ride a bicycle. I have a negative attitude toward modern, mechanized things.

I was a bit surprised when I entered the courtyard of Yi Qiu's home because it was not at all like ours. In its spacious interior there was a single large structure, its wooden door and window frames in terrible disrepair, its dark red roof tiles askew, and its walls covered with a layer of green mold as a result of the humid wet season. It looked more like an empty workyard with an abandoned warehouse than a place where people actually lived.

On the clothesline, I caught sight of a faded pink dress that belonged to Yi Qiu waving listlessly in the shade, so I knew this was definitely where she lived.

Crossing the dark gray bricks of the courtyard, I brushed past some sunflowers slightly withered by the heat of the scorching sun and stopped before the old house.

Standing there, I called, "Yi Qiu! Yi Qiu!"

A space creaked open in the wall of the old house, and Yi Qiu poked her head out from behind the old wooden door that was weathered almost beyond recognition. She greeted me happily and invited me inside.

When I entered the house, I saw that she was standing solidly and very erect in her bare feet on the uneven concrete floor, combing her hair. She was wearing a very ordinary short skirt with an embroidered hemline and the neckline of her blouse was cut very low. She was plaiting her hair into a long, thick braid, which she then coiled into a bun on the back of her head. Her sensual arms held high above her head in front of the mirror kept moving so that it was impossible for me to see her face in the mirror. From behind I could see that this dated, old-fashioned hairstyle in her hands had a wonderful new freshness and charm.

When I looked around the large old house, I noticed that it contained a separate suite. The door was ajar, and I could see that it was dark inside and apparently had no windows. I could vaguely make out a military cot with some white bedding or clothes piled on it.

The furnishings of the front room were totally dilapidated. There were two identical old-fashioned cabinets so tall that they almost touched the ceiling. In many places across their bottom sections, the finish had peeled away, revealing slivered white wood. It looked like the family once had a cat or a dog that left the scars sharpening its teeth or claws, and the bronze handle rings were mottled with patina.

The concrete floor was swept clean enough, and a wooden chair, a rice pail, a flower stand, and some dirty clothes were scattered here and there around the room. There was not a single picture on the blank, yellowing walls, only some damp mildew stains that looked like blossoming green flowers.

I was surprised to see a battered collection of books that reached halfway to the ceiling in the corner behind me. Nothing there had been cleaned, and the dust lay like a thick blanket over the books. It was obvious that the owner of the house had been a book lover, but I had known for a long time that Yi Qiu had lost her parents very early in life and had been brought up by her uncle. Now, she lived by herself.

I wasn't sure where I should sit, so I turned back to watching Yi Qiu comb her hair in front of the mirror. Looking over her left shoulder, I could see her milk-white reflection in the mirror, her arms raised as if she were running wildly. Though I could not see those eyes that were capable of flashing fire, I was nonetheless aware that the image in the mirror was at the height of its youth and vigor.