Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

The old man soon looked bored and got out some maths problems he had brought from the school in his home town, for Tianyi to do. It was a bit of a stop-start process at first, but once they had done a few sums, the old man’s eyes began to shine. When Tianyi’s father came into the room, his face was wreathed in smiles: ‘Ai-ya! What a little treasure you’ve got here! She got the right answer to sums that even our senior middle school students can’t do! It’s amazing, really amazing! You were never that bright when you were a child!’ Tianyi’s father was a considerate son and when he saw his father’s joy, a great weight fell from his shoulders. Even better, the child being praised was his favourite daughter. He beamed along with his father, a white-teethed smile of rare genuine happiness.

Siqin immediately jumped in. ‘What are you smiling about? Come on then, tell us so we can share the joke!’ When Tianyi’s father told her, she looked disdainful. Ignoring her father-in-law, she said pointedly to her husband: ‘So he’s heaping praise on that daughter you always make such a fuss of, is he? Well, “like father, like son”, why should I expect any different? The old man’s just saying what you’ve always felt!’ And she stalked off. In fury, Tianyi’s father shouted after her: ‘Isn’t she your daughter too?’ His wife turned around and retorted: ‘And Tianke’s not your son? Why do you give him such a hard time? If Tianke ever manages to please his granddad, you make a point of turning the old man against him! He’s not the brightest kid, he takes after me in that, but that’s no reason to dislike him so much!’ Under normal circumstances, her father would have backed down but today his own father was with him and he could not allow her to browbeat him. He parried, and the arguments went back and forth until finally Tianyi’s grandfather intervened with his daughter-in-law:

‘Now listen, Siqin, you’re in the wrong here. Your son and your daughters, they’re all yours and you should treat them fairly. While I’ve been staying with you, I’ve been watching you. My son goes to work and when he gets back, he has to rush around cooking dinner. That’s not good at all. You should take a leaf out of your sister-in-law’s book.’

Tianyi’s mother never forgot the old man’s words, and never let anyone else forget them either. ‘Take a leaf out of my sister-in-law’s book? That’s a joke! The old fool has no idea the kind of things Hui says about him behind his back! My trouble is I’m just too kind-hearted. I should have told him straight up. He would have been furious! It was time he knew who should take a leaf out of whose book!’

Tianyi’s mother was a very odd person. She gave the impression of being timid and naïve, but when she got fired up, she was anyone’s match. She was a wily strategist and tactician, playing weak, but adept at stealthily muddying the waters and turning the proposition on its head. Tianyi’s father was an intelligent man but, when her parents quarrelled, he never failed to fall into her traps and ended up bamboozled and defeated.

Back in 1962, the third of the famine years, when she was nine years old, Tianyi spoke out in favour of her grandfather. Her mother always favoured Tianke, she said. She, Tianyi, had become a sort of Cinderella, she said. Were there really such old-fashioned folks in the countryside who paid no attention to a mere girl? She asked.

Tianyi’s grandfather’s arrival put a stop to her obsession with The Story of the Stone , and made her feel suddenly that she was not only clever but should not hide her gifts. When he left, taking with him Tianyi’s ‘Parrot Girl’ painting, it was very clear that although he had come to claim his grandson, it was his granddaughter that had brought him comfort.

However, the insomnia triggered by The Story of the Stone persisted, and had disastrous and enduring consequences. Many years later, Tianyi reflected on her own marriage and realized that it was sleeping in different beds that put paid to a marriage. After that, there was no going back. It was one thing to share a bed but have different dreams, quite another to dream in different beds. That was the true end of a marriage.

She could never forget the morning after their wedding day, the frantic hammering on the door, the loud yell, startling the couple awake. It took a while for Tianyi to work out that her mother-in-law was shouting her son’s name, ‘Lian! Lian!’ as if he was being kidnapped or murdered. She was not just startled, she was very annoyed. What peasants! But surely, even countryfolk did not act like this? People always said you should steer clear of old women widowed too young. They were so embittered by not having had a normal marriage that they would do anything to stop the rest of the world being happy!

As time went by, she was proved only too right. Lian’s grandmother did nothing but issue orders through her daughter, Tianyi’s mother-in-law. The child must absolutely not have its own cot, it absolutely must sleep either with father or mother, it must be breastfed round the clock … in short, the two women did everything in their power to prevent husband and wife sharing the same bed. Tianyi privately considered it amusing. What on earth good did it do them?

Thinking back on it, Tianyi realized how naïve she had been. If she had her time again, she would have paid no attention to the pair, she would have talked and smiled with them but completely ignored their injunctions. She would have treated them like so much hot air. Her failure, she felt, lay in being too honest. If she looked at the people around her, no one remembered the honest ones, they were here today, gone tomorrow. People did what they wanted nowadays, only a fool would put any value on honesty in this fast-moving, materialistic age.

The old women’s strategy must have been effective. Tianyi fell pregnant on the night her marriage was consummated and, as soon as she found out, did not dare share a bed with Lian, thus quenching his ardour. Once the baby was born, they only had sex once more, and she fell pregnant again. After that they kept to separate beds, right up until they separated. Of course, when Niuniu was still a baby, Lian would burrow into Tianyi’s bed for some cuddles while the baby was asleep, but the occasions on which they had full sex grew fewer and fewer. On the odd occasion it happened, Tianyi realized her husband was increasingly unenthusiastic. She, however, was just the opposite. It seemed that childbirth had lit a flame in her that could only be quenched by sex. Tianyi began to feel as if she was on fire. Very soon the flames would consume her until only ashes were left.

It was not that she had not thought of finding a lover. For instance, if Xiao’ou had taken the initiative, she would not have turned him down. The trouble was, a man like Xiao’ou was not in the habit of taking the initiative and, even if he did, it would have taken someone cleverer and more sexually experienced than her to take him up on it.

Tianyi was in torment. The best way of sublimating her desires was to scribble stories. Sublimation was not a new idea by any means: Freud had talked of sublimation too. So Tianyi wrote as if she was giving birth to another baby. During this period, she wrote so many articles that, years later when she looked back at them, she was astonished. In this era of family planning, when men were not like men nor women like women, a woman like her, brimming with vitality but deprived both of sex and of giving birth, could only throw herself into writing reams of articles, covering sheet after sheet of paper. They were beautiful pieces. If she had been able to transform them into children, they would have been beautiful children, but what good was beauty? Tianyi had always put too much value on other people’s tastes, and readers’ tastes ran in the direction of crude writing and vulgar content, not her sort of work, never mind that every word contained pearls of wisdom.