Howard Goldblatt (Editor) - Chairman Mao Would Not Be Amused – Fiction From Today

That night after dinner, it was time once again to light the lamp, but the two of them stiffly and wordlessly held their ground. The child had already flopped over to a corner of the kang to sleep.

The woman was waiting for him.

He smoked; his heart rankled. He couldn't let this night pass, he couldn't knowingly let go of this final opportunity. After this evening, who knows how many years he'd have to go parched with thirst all over again? Lighting his deer-hoof pipe, he satisfied his craving for a smoke. He smoked bowl after bowl, and bowl by bowl he knocked out the ashes against the edge of the kang. A hopeless hope was shattered; a sham that had been a sham from the start was over. But the heart of this lonely rod, who had endured somehow for twenty years, was suffering endless torment from the whole affair. And the greater his torment, the more agitated and rancorous he became. He did not know how he was going to release that agitation and rancor; meanwhile, the woman who would be leaving tomorrow was waiting for him. Abruptly, he snatched up his splendid pipe and smashed it against the stove, whirled around, and ordered: "Sleep!"

The woman undid her buttons, and her dingy clothes revealed those two full breasts. Suddenly, a thought burned in his head. He demanded, "Did that fucker of a team leader touch you?"

The woman bowed her head bashfully and covered her exposed chest back up.

"Say it! Did he touch you or not?"

The woman hesitated a moment, then nodded reluctantly.

"That fucker. Make me eat his leftover noodles, will he? I'll fuck his ancestors!"

The wild wave in the man's chest plunged and split his head open. He lunged for the woman, brutal, rabid, giving vent to the bitterness of half a lifetime, which had turned even more bitter because of all of this. It was as if the net of this life and this world, which could never be thrown off, now lashed him even more tightly, and all because of this woman. With his savage spasms and gasps, the torment and suffocating bitterness he could never find words for and the body and soul he could neither tear nor break apart-all pulverized into fragments, into a foul slime of flesh and blood as it spurted into the woman.

She put up with it in silence; her warm and soft, broad and giving bosom, under the lashing of the driving waves, was as warm soft, and giving as always.

A flame of lamplight the size of a bean burned dimly on the oil lamp, struggling to sustain a faltering smear of light in the unyielding darkness.

It was after the driving wave had finally calmed that the man's thickly calloused palm brushed across the warmth of tears on the woman's face.

Translated By William Schaefer And Fenghua Wang

From a good distance away, I spotted the medical academy's sign, but then another sign leaped into view next to it-the business school's. I was about to stop one of the students to ask directions when I heard-no, saw her coming toward me with a "Hey!" Relieved now, I eased out of the big manic strides I had been taking. I walked along beside her. Suddenly, I felt as though someone had been added in between the two people here and that this other someone was me. Whatever this feeling was, it trapped inside me everything I had intended to say to her.

All I said as we walked through the medical academy was her name, Xiao Tong, in a flat, dry voice. Was I afraid of never being able to call her name again?

Inside the dormitory, clothes were hung up all over the place to dry. I had to push through at least three or four layers of laundry before I could make out the door to the inside room. Once inside, we stood there, facing each other, then sat down. A bed, a desk, two chairs (one for me, one for her), a radio-cassette deck, four bare walls, and a table, which would have been bare as well if it hadn't been for the dust. Just then I noticed I'd forgotten to bring cigarettes. I hardly asked anything about her. None of the usual "How's it going?"-a commonplace I'm sick of. What does that mean, how? How could it be going? But she wasn't exactly making me feel at home either, I noticed. I rested my arms on the table, rapped out a little beat with my knuckles, crossed my legs, recrossed my le»s and knew this visit was not going to be a pleasant one. In a year and a half (she'd been transferred to the medical academy a year and a half ago), she'd had maybe four visitors. She'd got fat, ugly, and she was telling her favorite stories about herself. My heart sank when she said she hardly drank any water except at the three meals in the cafeteria (Sundays she often didn't go at all). Now I had no choice but to ask her to please bring me a glass of water. I was waiting for that water.

So that was about it. Then from somewhere or other, out popped that little gem of a phrase, nervous breakdown . She perked right up, hearing that. She hadn't slept a wink last night ("You've just got to get sleep after sweating heavily"). Except for lectures (she was a teacher) twelve periods a week, she slept through everything, all through those two years she didn't have classes, and on Sundays, too.

"Oh really?… Is that right?" When did I start humoring her like this, I wondered. It probably got this way because she had no interest at all in anything I could have said to her but was perfectly content with the way her own life was going these days. Compared with someone like me, who is always criticizing himself, who tries hard to straighten himself out, she came across as being as neat and composed as could be. I had the feeling, though, that she treated everyone as if he or she were her doctor. That would explain why everything we talked about had to do with pathology and why I suddenly found myself playing psychiatrist, racking my brains to come up with the most pedestrian advice: "No, that won't do… No matter what, you can't go on like that… You've got to do something, anything, just do it… Do it along with other people…"

This was leading nowhere. For two hours, it was as though she were someone perpetually waiting at a bus stop, and I was the bus. No cigarettes, no water-just me trying to help an overweight, imperturbable woman try to figure out how to get her life together. I mean, I was trying to think it through for her: one way is to see that people are different, that they behave differently. She didn't make that derisory little sniff when I got on the subject of behavior, or at least I don't think I heard one, but even so the second I said the word behave , my confidence drained away. She was totally wrapped up in herself-her reactions had slowed, making her use-less to herself and to anyone else. "So… you should love…"

I told her how I had rescued myself-that is, how I had admitted to myself that I had a problem: lonely to the edge of madness, disgusted, hiding from everyone. I told her how I missed my cat so much after it ran away that I spent a month looking for it; how every night coming into the stairwell, I would stare ravenously at my mail slot, though I couldn't remember having written to anyone, not even a simple card; and how after work, I let myself pedal my bicycle on and on, oblivious to where I was headed; and then how I finally understood something. "You should…"

You should help others, abandon the idea of self-worth-or rather, making your own life more worthwhile is what it's all about. One day around noon at a greengrocer's stall, I saw a boy dragging his younger sister along the ground. I broke through the crowd of indifferent onlookers, shoved the little brat away, helped the girl to her feet, and ordered the boy to take her home. I told Xiao Tong about the throb of joy I felt at doing this good turn, how from then on, I kept on doing good turns, and how I felt happier than ever before. Then I couldn't take it any longer: "Can I-may I have a glass of water?"