Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

When Du discovered that Di was still a virgin, he was amazed. He never imagined in his wildest dreams that two virgins would fall into his lap, just like that.

She bled copiously the first time, Di told Tianyi. Du had been a very considerate lover. She blushed scarlet, then pulled the string of garlic from round her neck and showed it to Tianyi.

‘What are you going to do now?’ Tianyi asked. Di told her that they had decided to go to America together. Di would get herself a research place there and go, and as soon as Du had passed his English test, he would join her.

‘But what about Xian?’ Tianyi said again. Di looked pensive, then raised her head and said with determination: ‘Time heals all wounds.’

Tianyi was chilled by her words. My god, she thought, and these are sisters! If even sisters can betray each other like this, then morals have really changed!

Tianyi did not know what to say to her old friend. After a while, she ladled out some chicken soup and gave her a bowl. Di took a mouthful and said how good it was. Then she said sadly: ‘It’s going to be a long time before I taste your cooking again.’

Before he left China, Du divorced Xian.

When Tianyi next met Di, ten years later in a restaurant in Hong Kong’s Wanchai harbourside, they were both in their forties. Di had aged greatly. I’ve been blessed , thought Tianyi, I was once so desperate to leave China but I couldn’t get away. Now look at all my friends who did leave. None of them have got along well .

Di was single again. She lived with Du for a year after they went to America, then they split up. Du had lied to her — he had a girlfriend on the side. Having got hold of Di’s money, he spent all his time having torrid sex with the other girl. Tianyi was not surprised. Du was just up to his old tricks, she said. A man who could betray the woman he had only just married was capable of anything!

But something even more terrible had happened. When Di finally caught Du out, the shame made him fly into a terrible rage. ‘What the hell do I owe your family anyway? You were just a couple of old birds fighting over who was going to push their fannies in my face first?! Don’t you ever look in the mirror? Have you any idea how old you look? Why would I want to fuck you?’

Di fell seriously ill, and found it particularly distressing because she was away from home. Finally, she pulled through. An American researcher who had worked at her institute in Beijing came to visit her. His name was Brian Brown and he had always liked her a lot, only he never got a look in because Di had been involved with other men at the time. First it was Jin, then it was Du. They were both ten or more years younger than her — she obviously went for younger men, because Brian was also four or five years younger than her. Di, on the rebound, quickly took up with him.

Her letters to Tianyi tailed off, so when Tianyi had a spare moment, she dropped in on Aunt Jie to ask for news. Di’s mother said proudly: ‘Our Di’s going out with an American. They’re getting on really well. Didn’t she tell you?’ Aunt Jie sounded comically enthusiastic. ‘Yes she did,’ Tianyi reassured her with a smile. ‘It’s just that I’m still a bit worried.’

Aunt Jie laughed heartily. ‘You’re so old-fashioned! Even I’m more open-minded than you! Loads of girls marry Americans nowadays! You marry, you get your Green Card, then two years afterwards, you can get American nationality!’

Tianyi did not know whether to laugh or cry. Was Aunt Jie really so keen to get an American son-in-law? She wondered. Then she heard Aunt Jie say: ‘My two girls are always out of step. Di’s thinking of getting married just as Xian’s got divorced!’ ‘Xian, divorced?’ Tianyi pretended this was the first she’d heard of it. ‘Yes, that wretched man Du, he was only using her to stay in Beijing. Then as soon as he left for the US, he divorced her! Xian was so generous to him that even when she knew she was going to be dumped, she went to see his family and bought them a colour TV?’

Aunt Jie’s words that day came back to Tianyi in a rush of sadness when she met up with Di, now divorced herself, ten years later. At the time, she had paid little attention to Di’s American marriage. She was absorbed, body and soul, with another event, the catastrophe that was 1989 in China.

Just after New Year in 1989, Tianyi fell ill and was admitted to hospital suffering acute abdominal pain. It was the Year of the Snake, her birth year. Dire things always happened to her in the Year of the Snake, as it did this year to the entire country.

The doctor diagnosed acute appendicitis; they would have to operate. This would be Tianyi’s third operation in ten years. She lay on the operating table feeling very unwell and weak. Then the anaesthetist came in to inject the local anaesthetic, and the surgeon took a thin-bladed knife and sliced into her abdomen. She felt some pain and made a big fuss: ‘It hurts! It hurts!’ Other women in the ward had told her that that was the way to get more anaesthetic and make the operation more bearable. But she had forgotten that everything came with a price.

The anaesthetist made her curl up and inserted a needle into her spinal column. When the surgeon next asked if she felt pain, she had no feeling at all. Her body seemed to be fluttering downwards, almost weightless. Then the operating lamp was extinguished, plunging the theatre into pitch darkness. The surgeon and nurses around her turned into demonic shadows, and she wanted to scream but no sound came out. She felt someone bend close to her ear and, in a remaining flicker of awareness, she sensed that he was listening to what she was saying. Then a mask was put over her face, and for a few seconds, she had time to think: So this is dying, this is what dying is like. The colour of death really is black.

But she would not give up, her voice had not been extinguished, she would put up a fight. A voice inside her said: I won’t die, I won’t die, I’m not going to die! She saw her lips form the words as she formed the thoughts. She suddenly realised how important willpower was. If you refused to give in, even death had to back off. The dead were people who had been ready to abandon hope, and had abandoned it. If she did not give up, then no one could force her to.

When she was recovering from the operation, she asked an intern at the Beijing Hospital, who had been present: ‘What happened?’ The young man stammered in embarrassment: ‘If you promise you won’t tell them, absolutely promise …’ ‘I promise.’ ‘It was like this … they put the anaesthetic in the wrong place, it caused an anaesthetic accident.’ ‘And what does that mean?’ ‘Well, it can be fatal.’ ‘Exactly.’ ‘What do you mean “exactly”?’ ‘I was very near to dying.’ ‘Don’t joke.’ ‘Really. I’ve found out what dying means.’ She said nothing more. She did not want to say that she could tell just by looking at him that he had not an ounce of spirituality. Even if she did say it, he would not understand.

She had vomited all that night after the operation. It may have been a reaction to the anaesthetic, it may have been something else. The violent retching was agony and she felt as if the incision was going to burst apart. The woman sharing her room thought so too, but Tianyi looked and there was no blood seeping through the gauze.

The wound was painful but she was not bent double like the other patients, so the next day, she got up and, holding herself very straight, she walked up and down. Lian stayed with her for the first night but was impatient with her, quite unlike when Niuniu was born. That gave Tianyi a choking feeling in her chest, and her wound felt even more painful than before.