Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

The police began to round up the chief suspects a few days later. In the little hut, Yingqi, looking mysterious, showed her a list: ‘Look, these are the people the authorities want.’ She looked at the list. She could see he had done her a favour by not putting her name on the list even though he knew quite well that she had been to Tiananmen Square. However, there were many, many people on that list that she knew very well, including his old school friend, Xiao. She looked at him shocked. This was outrageous. By the time they scooped a prize in the national fine art competition, Tianyi and Yingqi were no longer speaking.

Many years later, she heard that Yingqi had progressed up the career ladder, to become official, then deputy head of department. He married but it did not last long and he and his wife separated. He refused to divorce in case it had an adverse effect on his career. That did not stop him collecting around him a bevy of beautiful lovers. That was entirely in character.

T ianyi’s labour continued all night. She visualized her womb as made of some kind of tough rubber, and did not understand why it was so hard for her cervix to dilate. Other women in the labour room progressed easily to ten centimetres and were wheeled off to the delivery room to give birth. Women came and went, but Tianyi still lay there.

‘Doctor, is there a problem with my labour?’ she heard someone say. She found it hard to believe it was her own voice. It was so diminished by the pain, it was as thin and reedy as a scrap of paper that the slightest breeze would blow away. ‘Too early to talk about problems,’ the young male doctor glanced at her. ‘It’s your first, right?’

‘Yes.’

‘First labours usually last sixteen hours,’ said the doctor. ‘Be patient, you’re six fingers dilated, things should speed up now.’

Just as the doctor finished speaking, Tianyi felt a surge of sickening pain and warm liquid gushed from between her thighs. She knew it was blood and her legs went limp with terror. She struggled to get up to go to the toilet. ‘You’re bleeding, hurry up!’ the doctor urged her, and she found herself wondering why such a nice young man should be an obstetrician.

It took until eleven o’clock the next morning for her to be fully dilated. It was not good timing: the exhausted doctors had finished their shift and were going off for their meal. Tianyi was left lying there all on her own, almost numb with agony. The numbness and the gradual diminishing of the pains scared her. She instinctively felt that the poor little baby in her womb had no more strength, and was too tired to move.

That was more or less the case. When Doctor Bai, the obstetrician, came to examine her, she noted on her chart the frightening words: ‘Foetal distress’. Then, without further ado, Bai asked whether she and Lian wanted a caesarean. It was the dreadful, age-old choice: save the mother or save the baby. Lian’s unhesitating response was: ‘Save the mother.’

Tianyi never forgot that and was grateful to him, but at that moment, she was incapable to thinking anything. She felt overpowering fear. The taxi-driver’s flippant comment: A son to birth, the mother to death, the King of Hell separates them by a hair’s breadth , seemed to go round and round, banging away inside her head like a drum, making her heart thump in terror.

Tianyi was being wheeled toward the lift when, at the lift doors, Doctor Bai suddenly pulled back the sheet — to reveal the baby’s head already crowned. ‘Hurry up! Get her back in!’ she exclaimed. Then she took the gurney and headed back to the delivery room, leaving the assistants scurrying behind. ‘Get a move on!’ Doctor Bai shouted frantically as they finally caught up with her. The shouts, the running, all somehow became part of Tianyi’s nightmare. There was something else too: the extraordinary moment when the doctor had whipped off the sheet, transforming herself, with that swift movement, into the graceful figure of the goddess of mercy. Doctor Bai had become Guan Yin, Tianyi’s very own saviour, at this, the most terrifying moment of her life.

How she had suffered for this baby, Tianyi reflected when she was in the post-natal ward. All the pain caused by this tiny scrap of a creature. I don’t even like him. She looked at the rows of tiny heads, lined up in their cots, laid on their sides, pointing left or right, and thought how very ugly they were. But every single one of the other new mothers was overjoyed with her baby. It was as if all that agony had been forgotten in an instant.

In the delivery room, she had heard the big-breasted woman who now lay in bed number two calling her husband all the names under the sun. Never again, she swore, would she go through such torments even if the government changed its single-child policy. Then she saw her baby, the infant girl she absolutely did not want, and fell on her fervently, clutching this tiny creature to her breast. In bed seven, a skinny frail-looking woman was running a fever, but constantly pushed her nipple into her baby’s mouth. Quietly, Tianyi watched the other women in the room. Childbirth, it seemed, stripped them of all inhibitions, or rather, de-sexed them, made them invincible. In the stifling August heat, they walked around the room half-naked, as if the doctors were no more than cardboard cut-outs, and those ugly-looking brats in their cots absorbed every ounce of their mental and physical energy. So this is what women, mothers, really were.

Tianyi felt another rush of fear. Why wasn’t she behaving like them? She still had her inhibitions, and made sure that every inch of her body was hidden from their gaze. She averted her eyes from this ugly flesh and fixed them instead on a remaining small patch of white wall. As she waited for her baby to be brought to her, she began to count, fully expecting that by the time she got to one hundred, the young nurse would call out: ‘Bed one! Look what a handsome little boy you’ve got!’ But something quite different happened. She smelled flowers, and heard the flapping of slippers, then a familiar voice said: ‘Tianyi, wake up! I’m here!’

She opened her eyes, to see everyone in the room looking at her. The other women always gawked at any visiting husbands. Right in front of her was a large bunch of lilies and, behind them, Lian’s face, wreathed in anxious smiles. She could still conjure up the scene years later, though the passage of time blurred its clarity somewhat.

It was a long time before Tianyi’s son was brought to her. The nurses told her she must be patient. ‘He was deprived of oxygen for five minutes, we need to keep him under observation.’ Finally, after a day had passed, the matron herself carried a baby into the room. ‘Look! Yang Tianyi,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with your son!’ Tianyi took the child from her, and all her imagined worries suddenly evaporated. Her son was perfect, his skin as sleek and smooth as if he were weeks, not hours, old. Tianyi called him Niuniu, little ox, because his birth year, 1985, was the year of the ox.

Niuniu was formally registered as ‘Wang Zhe’. This was a commanding, arrogant-sounding name chosen, like his nickname, by Tianyi. Lian just thought it was amusing. He followed her lead in everything and said little, no matter what she did.

Tianyi ran a fever for a week after the birth. One day, she sneaked a look at her medical chart. There were two closely-written pages of notes about foetal occiput posterior position, foetal distress, respiration of the new-born … and so on and so forth. It was all in medical language that she did not fully understand but still made her feel afraid. There was also a drawing of her vagina, and with two long lines of sutures, clearly marked. Tianyi remembered that the doctor had spent an hour and a half sewing her up after the birth. The cuts had become infected, which was why she had a temperature. They also hurt badly, but Tianyi was surprised to find that, after the baby was born, all the pain seemed numbed, and was quite bearable. Giving birth stripped a woman of her carapace and returned her to a more primitive state. If someone, some day, could invent a civilized way of giving birth, they would be doing immense service to humankind, she thought. Only then could women be truly liberated. Talking about women’s liberation and gender equality now was just a nonsense.