Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Tianyi and her son stood close together at the window and watched as Lian leapt out. He stood there and took out of his pocket a rectangular thing with an antenna. ‘Hello?’ they heard him say into it, and then the house phone rang. That was how Tianyi discovered that the rectangular thing was a mobile phone, then called a Dageda, or Big Bro Phone. When Tianyi and Niuniu got into the car, they learned that it had a phone too, a car phone. And then … the young driver looked around with a smile, and Lian said to Niuniu: ‘Say hello to Uncle Xiaoming. Tianyi, this is Xiaoming.’ Tianyi nearly jumped out of her skin: he was the spitting image of Zheng as a young man, perhaps even more handsome. There was something very noble in the way he held himself. Where on earth did that come from?

Bursting with pride, Lian took his wife and child to the Dragon’s Vein Hot Springs in Xiaotangshan, on the outskirts of the city. Tianyi and Niuniu were thrilled at the sight of the pools filled with jade-green water. In the changing room, Tianyi looked at herself in the mirror. She had put on a lot of weight, she discovered, and not just in her chunky arms and legs, but in her already generous bosom too. Red with embarrassment, she draped herself in a swimming towel before venturing out. She instinctively felt that she did not want the driver, Xiaoming, to see her half-naked.

The water was delicious. It spurted from the fountains with enough force to knock you over if you stood too near. Lian and Niuniu splashed each other energetically, and Tianyi found another spot where she could swim. She did a few circuits then found the hot pool to soak in. Comfortably relaxed, she stretched her arms wide and floated lazily on her back, quite unaware of how seductive this made her look. After a little while, she felt a pair of eyes on her. She sneaked an uneasy glance in that direction and met Xiaoming the driver’s bright gaze. He seemed even more embarrassed than she did, flushed scarlet, and looked mutely away. Tianyi decided it was time to get out — although that exposed even more of her body to view.

In the interval between swims that day, they had lunch at the hot springs restaurant, an open-air eating-area set with chairs and tables between the pools. It was simple home-style food too, but today it tasted especially delicious, perhaps because swimming had given them an appetite. Lian ordered stewed beancurd, stir-fried wild greens, Mao-style red-cooked pork, asparagus and ‘vegetarian roast goose’, actually made of sheets of beancurd. This they demolished in no time at all, and Lian had to order two more dishes, catfish with aubergine, and shredded pork vermicelli. When this, in turn, had been consumed, the girl brought them tea, and they sat back, feeling pleasantly full, and chatted. Somehow it made Tianyi think of Mister Ma the Second in the Qing dynasty novel The Scholars who, on a visit to Hangzhou’s West Lake, ignored the beautiful scenery and concentrated on stuffing himself with all kinds of food. She wanted to laugh: was it true that Chinese scholar officials down the ages were just a bunch of vulgar gluttons? Here she herself sat, stuffed to the gills with food and drink, apparently holding a dignified conversation, while she was secretly thinking that Xiaoming the driver must surely have seen her breasts just now when she was lying by the pool. No doubt they were seductively prominent, perhaps even with her nipples showing through the fabric. He could not have failed to see, could he?

Tianyi felt that the older she got, the more sexual she became. That young girl’s purity, that aversion to the least smuttiness, had vanished. The more unobtainable sex was to her, the more her imagination ran riot. The problem was that before she married, a woman rarely had much insight into her own character. Take her, for instance, she had been convinced that she was someone who did not need anyone, was content to be proud and aloof from the rest of the world. She had imagined herself as one of those clever female scholars who featured in ancient, thread-bound books. But living with a man, even if it was a man she did not love, had opened her up. She had betrayed herself, and suddenly found herself interested in all the things she used to despise. She did her utmost to suppress these urges, but the more she suppressed them, the fiercer they grew. She sometimes had erotic dreams, which she dreaded, since all the books said they were extremely harmful to one’s health.

When she was a newly-wed with a phobia of sex, Lian had thought of nothing else. But now she had become a sexually voracious woman, he could not do it anymore. After a few occasions on which he failed miserably, she was suddenly seized with a terrible panic. This was a problem that she simply could not solve on her own

To her dismay, she discovered that she was turning out like Tianyue, but perhaps even worse. The failure of her marriage and the onset of middle age had brought Tianyue a string of lovers to satisfy her sexual needs. But Tianyi was different, preferring to keep her distance from other people or rather, strictly speaking, from men. She was a woman who thought she could live forever in her dreams, now confronted by the very real challenge of her physical needs.

Times were certainly tough for her. The worst of it was that a young woman, Xi, turned up to add fuel to the flames of her desires. Xi brought her some porn videos, the first that Tianyi had ever seen in her life. The blood rushed to her face as she watched these naked men and women coupling shamelessly in every imaginable position. Xi just laughed: ‘Tianyi, you don’t know anything about anything!’ The more Xi teased, the redder Tianyi became. To her relief, there was no one else with them, but Tianyi found it intolerable all the same. When they had finished watching, Xi said very seriously: ‘Tianyi, you’re just too innocent!’

Strictly speaking, Xi was one of Zheng’s circle — she was his friend Tong’s second wife. Tong had once had an animal virility but impotence struck after the painful break-up with his former wife. It taught him a lesson and when he looked for a new bride, he chose a virgin fifteen years younger than himself. No doubt the logic was that if he could get someone young enough, he could mould her and she would be subservient for the rest of her life.

Tong may have been politically astute but he knew nothing of female psychology. A girl like Xi, once the scales had fallen from her eyes, was as dangerous as a river in spate. When her grievances threatened to boil over, she came to Tianyi to get it all off her chest. ‘Tong deceived me, Tianyi, he’s nothing but a fraud!’ she said after the videos were over. Then she reeled off a dozen offences without pausing for breath. The two chief ones were, one, he could not get it up, and, two, he did not want children. To enforce the second, he had forced Xi to have five abortions. Five!

Xi was so distressed by this point that she burst into tears and could not go on. Tianyi was at the point of shedding tears of sympathy when, to her surprise, she saw Xi start to undo her buttons. ‘Look, Tianyi,’ she was saying, ‘Look, let me show you, I’m not even thirty years old and look at me!’ Tianyi did not have time to avert her eyes before Xi had stripped to the waist. Xi was a tall girl, at nearly five foot nine, and to all appearances had a decent figure, but what Tianyi saw truly shocked her: Xi’s large breasts hung slack and pendulous. Without a bra, they would have reached to her waist!

Tianyi had to turn away. However sympathetic she was, she could not bring herself to look at another’s nakedness, especially such an ugly sight as this. But what followed astonished her even more. Xi carried on stripping off her clothes, saying as she did so: ‘Tianyi, I’ve been thinking, why do we rely on men for everything? Didn’t you see on the video, that women can give themselves orgasms? I’ve brought everything we need, will you be my partner? I’ve thought a lot about this, and you’re the only one who’ll do, even though you’re older than me, you behave as you’re young and innocent, and I feel at ease with you! Besides, I can see Lian’s not a real man, so you must have the same problems as me!’