Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

It was 1996. Now that she was back in China, Tianyi found the contrast with America almost unbearable. The filthy puddles around the food market made her shoes dirty, and these were shoes that had walked the streets of America for three months and stayed clean. Lian just told her to get real. ‘This is China,’ he said.

But Tianyi’s patience was wearing thin. Before, she just got on with things and kept herself to herself, but recently things had changed. The man she loved was unable to return home, her friends had scattered, the atmosphere was oppressive, and with her husband and her son, the two people she had to face every day. It was like her feelings were choking her. She could neither swallow them back, nor say how she really felt.

Her son had become a liar and a thief. She had to keep a close guard over her purse, although she was not happy about doing it. She searched her son’s face and saw a gradual change. Of course, his skin had lost its flawless smoothness as he grew into a youth. But it was not that. She had noticed a new quality in him, a sort of viciousness. Yes, viciousness. It was not too strong a word to use. She kept an eye on him, and saw he was always with an older boy called Liang, a particularly vicious-looking young man.

One day she cracked her son’s password on his computer. Her son had been surfing foreign porn sites! She clicked and clicked: photo after photo, one video after another. She was appalled. Oh my God! Do today’s young people really look at this stuff? She thought back to the stifling rules they had had to live by in her youth. This is beyond belief. She felt completely powerless, like an ant whose life could be ground underfoot at any time by the relentless march of a new era. But she was too frightened to tell Lian.

Lian had become increasingly moody of late. His salary had increased tenfold since starting at the B. O. Holdings. His three hundred yuan salary had gone up to three thousand. But as far as Tianyi was concerned, it had actually dropped. Before, those three hundred had gone straight to her, but she never saw a cent of the three thousand.

Every evening Lian would come home and slump in front of the television until the programmes closed down and the screen filled with static. Then one day there was an explosion of rage. He went off, literally, like a rocket. It was around nine o’clock in the evening, and Tianyi had been reading. Suddenly she heard him bellow: ‘Mother fucker!’

When she got to the other room, she saw that Lian’s face was contorted with rage as he shouted abuse down the telephone. ‘You fucking bastard, you still want to fucking control me? No way!’ Tianyi felt her blood run cold. She marched up to Lian and tried to wrest the phone from him, but he pushed her away. She stood there gesturing furiously, but he completely ignored her. Damn it, Tianyi thought, no more peace in this home.

Lian was shouting at Qiankuan. He had been finding Qiankuan’s stubbornness hard to take for quite some time, but he had held himself in check. As he had a tendency to go to extremes, this meant putting himself down until he was practically grovelling in the dust, and that just encouraged Qiankuan to trample on him, until one day he went too far and humiliated Lian in front of all the staff.

Lian had responsibility for finance, the part of the business that made Qiankuan most nervous. In fact, there were two things that worried him: first, that Lian often made stupid mistakes, and second, that Lian might fiddle the books. Lian had a lot of friends outside the company, and Qiankuan was afraid Wang might borrow money on the strength of the company’s reputation. Qiankuan’s worries were not unfounded: Lian had had this in mind for a while, but before he had time to do it, Qiankuan stepped in.

He hired a young man called Li Haibin, who had a masters in finance and practical experience too. Lian could see perfectly well what Qiankuan was up to, and it threw him into a panic. So he lost his temper with Haibin a few times, to see what would happen. Lu Qiankuan, however, had outsmarted him. Li Haibin ignored Lian as he let off steam, then chuckled and carried on as if nothing had happened. To add insult to injury, Qiankuan proceeded to interrogate Lian in front of Haibin and all of their colleagues about some entry in the accounts. Lian was mortified. He had bottled up his anger but now he was ready to exact revenge. He found a new job to move to.

As Tianyi listened to the phone call, she thought she had never heard her husband behave so childishly. For Lian, although he did not know it, that call would have lifelong, even life-threatening, consequences.

Lian threw himself enthusiastically into his new job — again he was deputy CEO. For the first few weeks, when everything seemed to have calmed down, Tianyi won herself a bit of peace and found a quiet moment to talk to her son. She gave him a stack of world classics she had bought for him to read, though he soon discarded them like so much junk. Everything nowadays is ersatz, she thought to herself, nothing real has any value. She could not let her son go on like this. What could possibly replace pornographic websites? She racked her brain until she was close to admitting defeat. Then she hit on a solution. During the summer holidays, she bought a martial arts classic, Louis Cha’s The Deer and the Cauldron, and casually left it lying around at home. Once her son had picked it up, he could not put it down and took it with him everywhere, even to the toilet. She kept her delight to herself, afraid that a word from her might break the spell.

With her husband and son fully occupied, she opened a notebook and started to write what was probably going to be the most important book of her life — a story about destiny. As she wrote, Tianyi felt a suffering that was no longer psychological, but physical, stirring deep within her. Sometimes she was in so much pain she was unable to write. It was as if she was dying. Perhaps she really was terminally ill, in much the same way as the society she lived in was terminally ill. The two were connected. And nothing could cure this illness. The strange thing was that, as she wrote, memories long-dimmed by the passage of time resurfaced and were as vivid as if they had only happened yesterday.

Tianyi looked at some of her baby pictures. She had been a strikingly pretty baby. The future had seemed so full of possibilities then, as if that baby could have grown into a real beauty. But she had not. Tianyi felt that she was getting more average-looking the older she got. Before, when she was still single and felt the attractions of getting married, she was a lively young woman with a sparkle in her eyes. But now the vividness was gone, the vitality in her face was fading.

She studied the photographs carefully and made an unexpected discovery. After the age of five, something about the face of this angelic little girl had changed. She had lost a lot of weight, her big eyes were sunk deep in their sockets and her baby teeth had gone yellow. Of course, the trigger was the loss of her mother’s love. After her brother was born, her mother started to hate her. She did not know why, but she knew she was not mistaken: she sensed love and hate in other people acutely. Often she would sneak off to her room in the evenings and sit in the darkness crying, staring out at the red star on top of the Beijing Exhibition Hall, which in the late fifties was still known as the Soviet Exhibition Hall. As there were no taller buildings around it, the star was clearly visible from her home. She was ashamed to cry in front of people. Her feelings were complex and fragile, and she kept them carefully to herself. When she did show her feelings, she refused to let them out neatly and they exploded with a violence that belied the softness in her heart. Her longing for her mother’s love consumed her, turned into a kind of hysteria. From childhood right through to adulthood, her heart had been filled with anguish. Deprived of love, that pretty, affectionate, lively child became ugly, introverted, and bad-tempered.