Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

One of the highlights here was when the peacocks were ‘released into flight’. At ten o’clock in the morning, they gathered on a distant hillside, and were released into flight by their feeders. It was spectacular! One by one they took off in the distance and flew to the garden where they landed and the males displayed. One … two … three … Tianyi had never seen a dozen peacocks all displaying at once. It was splendid. The gorgeous, shimmering colours clustered together like so many rainbows, were indescribably beautiful. She was unable to take her eyes off them, did not dare even blink, as if she did, the whole scene might suddenly vanish. As she stared, she felt Mo leering at her, his eyes as usual half-closed, very close, and flickering.

She was astonished when Mo followed her back to Beijing. First he made a very long phone call to her. He told her that life was short and he needed some variety, otherwise he would have wasted his life. People who were truly in love, he said, did not need to marry, for instance the 1930s avant-garde lovers, Zhang Daofan and Jiang Biwei never did. Tianyi was familiar with that argument, having heard it once from her old university boyfriend Jianyu. There was nothing more beautiful than making love, Mo said, and asked her: ‘Have you seen lovers making love on the grass, on river banks? Their bodies make the most beautiful shapes. When they’re making love, that’s when a man and a woman then are at their most beautiful, most vital.’

Mo certainly had a fine turn of phrase but what he said was hardly new, in fact, Tianyi found it appallingly clichéd. But clichéd or no, his words still stirred Tianyi’s physical feelings. As Mo talked, there floated before her eyes scenes of green grass and seashores, and writhing naked people. Tianyi felt she was sinking ever deeper into a swamp of seduction.

Thinking back on it, it was Xi who started her on the slippery slope with those porn videos she brought over. Tianyi may have told her they were obscene, but those images set her body on fire. One evening she could not sleep, and the female porn stars came into her mind. How could they strip stark naked before the cameras and allow the male stars to violate them? Or maybe they did not feel it was violation but pleasure. As these thoughts went through her head, her hand crept downward. She was soaking wet. She made an effort to divert her energy to the chakra below her navel, but her hand was busy between her legs and it was no use. She brought herself off.

There had been so little real sexual joy in her life. The best she could manage was the brief thrill of fantasizing and masturbating, but that always left her feeling horribly ashamed, and feeling physically unwell. Her head swam and her loins ached. She wanted nothing more than to take herself off to another world, to get some peace and tranquillity. The three meals a day she shared with her husband and child were torture.

Chastity, loyalty, honesty … the words, so familiar from childhood, began to have a bleak ring to them. She felt like she was falling apart. At the same time, Mo’s imminent arrival in Beijing filled her with a new spirit of initiative. It was very different from her encounter with Peng, when he had forced himself on her. Everything was taken care of. Her husband was off on business, his parents had Niuniu at weekends, and she had cleaned the house from top to bottom. And all this while waiting for a stranger to burst in on her.

But Tianyi still harboured a fear of sex. As young people, her generation had been sexually shackled, and it had destroyed them. Tianyi still had no real understanding of sex, only of her own needs. She tried to encourage herself to follow Xi’s example. They were both women, and Xi wasn’t afraid, was she? And she got pleasure from it too! Xi and the art student Lang had broken up in the end, and she and Tong were divorced, but her increase in sex, far from decreasing, grew. She was now living with a poet. They had been together for two years, but it seemed their ardour was undimmed.

So Tianyi was going to let herself feel some pleasure. She went through all her drawers until she found a sexy nightie, one she had bought a long time ago and had only worn once. It was made of purple silk, with a deep, revealing, V-neck. She was startled when she looked at herself in the mirror and quickly took it off again. When Mo arrived, she was just wearing ordinary clothes, without even her neck showing.

In the event, nothing happened in the way she had imagined. Still afraid, she insisted on turning the light off. She really had no idea that Mo, as a man, needed to be stimulated by seeing her to get turned on. Mo actually suspected that Tianyi had some physical blemish that she dare not let him see. He lost his erection and had some difficulty getting it back. Tianyi made a grab for the condoms. By now frantic, Mo begged her: ‘Can’t we do without?’ ‘No way!’ Tianyi was adamant. ‘I fall pregnant very easily.’ Mo drooped again. After a lot of trying, he managed it in a more or less sort of way. What a magnificent body, but it’s good for nothing, he thought to himself. Even his hick of a wife was a better bet. She might have been flabby, but at least she knew how to have a good time! He didn’t know why he had gone to all this trouble. When the lights were out, all women were pretty much the same.

Watching Mo throw on his clothes and leave, Tianyi knew that yet another man had come and gone in her life. But this time, she had no regrets. His body had taught her to understand herself: she was not a woman who could separate lust from love, or go to bed with a man for whom she felt nothing, and she was deluding herself if she thought otherwise.

Qiang grew colder towards Tianyi. Finally one day he erupted when Tianyi got to work late, and lambasted her. Tianyi was mortified as she listened to his stinging remarks. From then on, they did not speak anymore even if they met. When Tianyi saw him from a distance, she lifted her chin and walked by as if he were not there. Qiang paid her back in her own coin, lifting his already lofty chin and turning on his heel. It was the gossip of the company — Qiang and Tianyi had had a bust-up. And everyone knew the reason: Tianyi had got hold of a book called Old City and Qiang had been severely criticized by his bosses for it, so severely that it could blight his career. According to colleagues in the Arts Department, what Tianyi had done was political entrapment!

Most of the staff in the Arts Department were women with some sort of acting background, and they loved to bitch. Tianyi remembered something her mother always used to say, that whores were heartless and actors immoral. The truism served her well now. The women quickly taught her, however, that certain other maxims were nonsense: return good for evil, persistent effort would be rewarded, no need to gild the lily, people will help you out in your hour of need. In this company, everyone was only out to make big bucks, and as fast as possible. Added to which, the place was full of flatterers and toadies, with a knife up their sleeves, a smile on their faces and a foot stuck out ready to trip you up. But she was treading on very thin ice, and she felt too intimidated to do anything about it. Whatever would be, would be. She was going unarmed into battle, so she might get shot at, but the wounds were unlikely to be fatal.

In the past, Tianyi had been under Wei Qiang’s protection, and the ex-actresses had not dared do anything to her. But now they could see that she had been well and truly dumped and, as is the way of things, everyone was ready to hit a woman who was down. After all, she had been chucked out like an old cleaning rag, why shouldn’t everyone scuff her underfoot? She had only written one big book, The Tree of Knowledge in the eighties, nothing more! She was just one among so many writers in that decade. And hadn’t she just been an assistant in the Academy of Letters, a blue-stocking? What was she doing butting into the world of showbiz? She had no talent and no style in a world where both counted, and she was a bit of a ditherer, too. It was true she had put out some new stuff but she had not made any kind of a name for herself, and in the world of arts and entertainment, if you were a nobody, the safest thing was not to stick your head above the parapet.