Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Tianyi laughed it off at the time, but the more she thought about it afterwards, the more afraid she felt. She consulted the deputy-head of the Hospital for Chinese medicine, a very well-known physician. As the old man took her pulse, he looked increasingly grave. ‘Have you resumed relations with your husband since the birth?’ he asked.

‘Once,’ said Tianyi.

‘You’re pregnant again.’

‘But I can’t be!’ I’ve only just had a period …!’

‘That wasn’t a true period, just an indication that you might lose it.’

Tianyi was aghast. Her legs turned to jelly and she could hardly stumble out of the hospital. She found herself looking at a woman at the road-side, guzzling down a pancake wrapped around two fried eggs and dripping yellow oil. She saw the woman’s mouth greedily opening and shutting, completely at odds with her scrawny body. Tianyi stood rooted to the spot, watching. How lucky that woman is, she thought, she can eat anything she wants and not get fat. There were, she considered, two kinds of women she most envied in the world, those who could eat all they wanted without getting fat, and the other kind, those who could have as much sex as they wanted without getting pregnant. Unfortunately, she fell into neither category: she put on weight from a sip of cold water, and a man only had to touch her for her to get pregnant. The polar opposite!

A friend fixed Tianyi up with an abortion. She was surprised that, even after having had one baby, the procedure was so painful. The problem was that she was over-sensitive and, even after the anaesthetic had been administered, she could hear every tiny, icy metallic sound. The sounds followed her for years afterwards. If she ever heard anything like that again, she would shake uncontrollably. After the procedure, the doctor showed it to her: ‘Look how perfectly formed she is.’ That reduced her to tears. A little girl, she thought to herself, that was my daughter, my son’s little sister. Poor little girl, to disappear just like that. If she had lived, she would have been one year younger than Niuniu.

‘You didn’t do a proper confinement the first time,’ the woman doctor told her. ‘You need a mini-confinement for a miscarriage so take the opportunity to get really well.’ Tianyi took the woman’s words to heart, and got a nanny to come and look after Niuniu. Then she concentrated on looking after herself and regaining her strength. Mrs Zhang, the nanny, was from Anhui province, in her fifties and extremely myopic. Tianyi wanted her to take good care of her baby so she went out of her way to be nice to the woman and Mrs Zhang responded with gratitude. A little while later, when Lian sent Niuniu off to his parents’ house to give Tianyi some peace and quiet, the nanny went with him. The day of their departure, Tianyi looked at her baby, a muslin scarf covering his face, fragile as a lily, sleeping contentedly after his feed, and about to be borne away by his grandfather. How he would wail when he woke up! She tried to push the thought out of her mind. She felt her heart was breaking. She finally understood what ‘broken-hearted’ meant. It was no exaggeration.

In the morning, Lian got up and went to work. Tianyi lay alone in bed, her head teeming with thoughts. Lian was very good to her but she was quite sure that this was not how she wanted to live. When it was nearly midday, she realized that Lian had not taken the pork ribs out to unfreeze. She got up and opened the freezer lid, feeling a sudden chill emanating from the package, penetrating her hand, travelling up her arm. The chill seemed to freeze right inside her and swell. Her palms itched, and she could not bring her fingers together.

Lian arrived back from work to be greeted by a chorus of complaints from Tianyi: ‘It was all your fault, you don’t look after me, I had to get them out of the freezer myself, I couldn’t get a grip on them …’ Lian did not pay much attention. In his view, Tianyi was just acting spoilt. ‘Fine, fine, I’ll make you a nice dinner. We’ll have lamb with scallions, and pork ribs and mouli soup, how about that?’

Tianyi had to admit that Lian was a very good cook indeed. He was quick and economical, and everything he produced smelled, looked and tasted great. Tianyi remembered reading once that a good husband should, first, give his wife plenty of spending money and, second, make sure she had nice meals. There was a third criterion but she had forgotten it. In any case, Lian got one of those right, and that was a lot better than men who failed to manage any.

Lian’s cooking was always fresh. Now she had eaten his food, she always felt that restaurant food was somehow not very fresh and too oily. His stir-fried vegetables emerged glossy and green. His casseroled meat was appetisingly brown and tender. When they had finished their meal this evening, they put the TV on, and watched right through from the News until shutdown, and the screen filled with snow. Mexican soap operas were broadcast every day in those days. Bianca had just concluded and Libel was on. The plots were boring but Tianyi and Lian snuggled up together and watched the episodes end to end.

Tainyi felt she was getting stupider by the day. It worried her but she did nothing about it. Her academy was about to host a seminar on issues around women in the Asia-Pacific Region. They wanted her to present a paper, but she could not muster any enthusiasm for it. One evening, Lian suddenly looked at her: ‘Tianyi, I know you don’t love me anymore.’ Tianyi was knitting Niuniu a pair of tiny socks for his sweet, plump, little feet. ‘Please, don’t start a quarrel,’ she said, with an impatient frown. A good quarrel was just what Lian wanted, but he was quelled by Tianyi’s expression. Aggrieved and disappointed, he grabbed a book and began to read. It was The Third Wave , a hugely popular best-seller in those days. That made Tianyi feel she had been too harsh. For the sake of something to say, she commented: ‘That’s something new, you reading a book.’ Lian’s enigmatic reply was: ‘Two thousand years ago, the Emperor Qin burned the books and buried Confucian scholars alive but when it came to it, he was overthrown by an illiterate bandit.’ It dawned on Tianyi that her husband was not nearly as straightforward as he appeared. For one thing, he had an invincible belief in himself.

Tianyi’s judgment was eventually proved correct. Lian was aspirational — or rather ambitious. It was just that his character destroyed his ambitions.

B efore the ‘Women in the Asia-Pacific Region’ seminar, Tianyi went to see her baby, who was still staying with Lian’s parents with his nanny. To try and conceal her pallor, she put on her fashionable, red velour coat, then sat on the bicycle, as usual riding pillion behind Lian. She was laden with things for her mother-in-law, as well as clothes for the baby. ‘It’s always good to arrive with presents, it buys you a welcoming smile,’ her mother used to say when she was in a good mood.

But every visit to her in-laws filled Tianyi filled with apprehension. She never knew what devilry the old folk would get up to next. At least on this occasion, Lian’s grandmother did not scowl when she piled her packages on the table, though she did complain: ‘That woman you sent along has eaten us out of house and home, and she expects me to wait on her.’ Tianyi knew ‘that woman’ meant Mrs Zhang the nanny. She looked at Lian. ‘Don’t go looking at him,’ she heard next. ‘This was your idea!’ The old woman was implacable. In her black woollen top and trousers, she looked just like a crow. ‘Mum,’ remonstrated her daughter-in-law, ‘you wanted them to come, and now they’re here, you just …’ ‘And why not? I’ve got something to say and I’m going to say it. I’m over eighty years old, and I’m not afraid of anyone!’ Tianyi felt incapable of making her usual retort. Lian tried to come to her rescue by making a funny face and having a dig at the old lady, which at least earned him a small smile. She batted him playfully with her fan and said nothing more. Tianyi felt disgusted at the scene, and could hardly raise even a perfunctory smile.