Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Finally, he helped her to lie down and laid the quilt over her with great gentleness. The tenderness and restraint of this young man flooded her heart and the tears came again, but now she was completely soft, as if he had dissolved all her stiffness. At that moment, if he had laid his finger anywhere on her, her skin would have seeped like ripe fruit, but he did not touch her. His expression told her that he liked her, liked her very much, but it would be wrong.

The characteristic that all good Chinese men share is that they do not want to hurt a woman. The trouble is that they do not understand what really hurts a woman. It was a good man like that that she had met — and fallen madly in love with.

After she was discharged, she made frequent visits back to the hospital, even though it meant a long journey and changing buses three times, just so she could see him. The first story she ever wrote, for which she won a prize, had Lin as its main protagonist. On New Year’s Eve that year, she suddenly received a phone call that made her heart skip a beat: ‘Is that Yang Tianyi? … This is Lin, I’m on duty tonight in Emergency … If you have nothing on, would you like to come and keep me company?’ Her heart pounding with excitement, she dressed up and put on some make-up, then finally scrubbed her face clean and wore something very simple. She wanted her face to be completely naked.

Flickers of emotion softened his stern expression. His first words were: ‘Your story. I read it.’ Her face flamed.

Twenty years later, when she met him again, the years had given her complete self-possession. Or so she thought. After all, it had been twenty years, she had surely changed out of all recognition, would he even know her? In fact he recognised her immediately, and he flushed, just as he had twenty years before. The sign on his door read: ‘Professor Lin, Outpatient Services’, but nothing else had changed. There was the same unresolved tension between them, as if twenty years ago was just yesterday. He finished writing a prescription for the patient he was seeing, making, then correcting, four spelling mistakes. Then he saw the patient out and shut the door without calling the next one in. Just like twenty years ago, his consulting room was theirs.

Of course, he had aged, but not much. His face looked the same, though his hair was thinner and there were a few sombre frown lines on his forehead. However, once again, she had missed her chance. She asked a wise friend for advice. The response was: ‘Of course, because you are both too noble. Who needs nobility nowadays?’ Was that really true?

The same thing happened when she stayed up late into the night with Xiao’ou. Precisely nothing. Three months later, when Xiao’ou’s TV drama was about to go on air, he called her. She focussed all her attention on his tone of voice rather than the words, and discovered that that tone had changed. It was not that she was being over-sensitive, he really had changed. She put down the phone with a sigh. She realized that yet again love had passed her by.

She had not understood that the male of the species was an utterly pragmatic animal. There was not a man in this world patient enough to have a platonic relationship with her. Worse, none of them had the courage to bring this goddess down from her pedestal and turn her into a real woman. Only that rude boy Lian. He boldly took his chance, and actually succeeded.

One day Lian came home from the office and said to Tianyi: ‘They’ve let Mrs Zhang go, and they’ve got my cousin’s daughter Jiaojiao in to help with Niuniu. First, she’s family so she can be trusted and, second, she’s young so if there’s stuff she doesn’t do, the old folks can make her do it, it’s not like with a nanny, you have to tiptoe around them.’ Tianyi gave a faint mutter of assent, and carried on with her writing. Lian was always most respectful when he saw her scribbling away. He was in almost superstitious awe of the written word. He had had an article published in some newspaper once, had kept a copy, and had it still. Far from being scornful, Tianyi actually felt sorry for his foolishness.

Jiaojiao’s arrival had entirely unforeseen consequences. It triggered a crisis in their marriage that rocked it to the foundations.

That afternoon, Tianyi and Jiaojiao lay on the bed in the extra room Tianyi and Lian rented opposite her in-law’s home, as Niuniu slept soundly between them. It was just the two of them, chatting quietly because Lian was away on business, and Tianyi had come on her own to see her baby. Jiaojiao was a skinny girl, with a long face and protruding teeth. She was not pretty but she was young and had good skin, so was not unattractive. Tianyi had given her some clothes and a few knickknacks, the sort of things that girls liked, and that broke the ice. On that pleasantly warm afternoon, Jiaojiao began to whisper an alarming story in Tianyi’s ear.

‘Uncle Wang keeps everything to himself,’ Jiaojiao said. ‘I bet he hasn’t told you that your mother-in-law’s his step-mother.

‘Uncle Wang’s real mother is a peasant,’ she went on. ‘His father left her behind and got a new wife when he moved to the city, that’s Uncle Wang’s step-mother. She’s my auntie.

‘When she couldn’t have children, Uncle Wang’s father wanted to bring him from the countryside, but his real mother wouldn’t let him go, so his father got two relatives to kidnap him. Uncle Wang’s real mother was out of her mind with fury. She was so mad she started to pull the kang to pieces with her bare hands … you know, the mudbrick beds we use in the countryside, with a fire underneath to heat them …’

Tianyi was struck dumb. The whole story was almost too fantastic to be true! She felt devastated, totally unprepared for a revelation like this. Her first reaction was: How could he have kept such a big thing from me? If he could keep that from me, what else might he be hiding? Her second reaction was: If it’s true, then the whole family’s completely immoral! Her third was: How traumatic it must have been for him. Jiaojiao said it had happened when he was seven or eight years old. In that case, he must remember his birth mother. So why had he never mentioned her, or acknowledged her? What a dreadful business!

No, she could not believe that Lian knew about it. She could not! Jiaojiao must have mis-remembered his age, he must have been too small to remember. Lian’s honest, earnest face floated before her eyes. It was impossible that such a guileless man could have pulled the wool over her eyes. He could not possibly know. She must tell him, immediately, it was too tragic for him not to know who his birth mother was! She did not sleep a wink that night.

And that was the cause of Lian and Tianyi’s first proper fight. As soon as Lian came back from his business trip, Tianyi burst out with her appalling revelation. To her amazement, he said nothing, nothing at all. Instinct told her that he had known, had known all about it. He looked completely unmoved, just as if it was all quite normal, and the more worked up she got, the more he withdrew into silence. She frequently said things that were unwise when she was in a state. And he seemed to be deliberately winding her up, leading her to say things which would have been better left unsaid.

‘Why don’t you say anything? Did you know about it, or not?’

‘I want to know how you feel about it! That’s really important to me!’

‘Tell me something! Are you going to go looking for your birth mother? She may be a peasant, old and poor, but she’s still your mother! You knew when I had Niuniu how much a mother bleeds and suffers when she gives birth! How can you forget your beginnings like that?!’