Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Now she realized, with some desperation, that her whole being, her life, her appearance, her everything, had been ruled by her emotions. When she was loved, she blossomed, she was beautiful. But without love, she withered. She had the same face, the same features, yet she looked like a different person. The only time she had ever really been beautiful again after babyhood was during her pregnancy. Now she was a sallow-faced old woman, with no spirit, just a bellyfull of resentment.

She sat for twelve hours a day, so engrossed in writing that she forgot to eat. When she did eat, she did not taste it. This was her way of escaping the world, of escaping herself.

One day, however, Tianyi’s writing was interrupted. It was an ordinary evening, no different from any other. Tianyi had washed and got ready for bed as usual when there was a knock at the door. The two smartly-dressed men were polite. They got out a sheet of paper and presented it to Lian, who was visibly terrified. He shrunk into his chair, and tried to look ingratiating. Tianyi could tell the document spelled disaster. She caught a glimpse of it while pouring the tea, but all she could make out was a red seal: Xicheng District Procuratorate. And so Lian was taken away.

It took a while for Tianyi to pull herself together, but then she started making calls. She had an old-fashioned dial phone, and her fingers were swollen from turning the dial by the time she had found a way of getting him released. She reached Tong, or rather Tong’s third wife Jiao, a celebrated lawyer, who asked a few preliminary questions in a cool, professional manner and passed her on to a friend of hers in the Xicheng District Procuratorate. Friends are friends, but money still had to change hands, and Tianyi paid over a substantial amount of the money she had earned through sweat, tears and her pen, although it distressed her to do so.

Lian was released forty-eight hours later. Without a word, he drew Tianyi into his arms. Tianyi quietly struggled free. It felt strange to be intimate with her husband after such a very long time. And his words sounded so insincere, they made her skin crawl: ‘You know what they say, troubled times tests a relationship. And you came through for me!’

She felt acutely uncomfortable. This was the kind of thing he used to say when they were first married. But this was 1997, and thirteen years had passed. Thirteen years … Tianyi felt she had done a very poor job of improving him.

What she found most unbearable was that Lian still refused to talk about what had really happened in the company. She felt deeply wounded, because it showed that he did not trust her. She had come through for him, as he put it, but he could discard her whenever he liked. Of course, she picked up a few clues when she overheard Lian shouting and swearing, it was something to do with his old company sponsoring someone, which led Qiankuan to accuse Lian of ‘embezzling public money.’ Even though it was the late nineties, the words still struck fear into Tianyi. How could they be used against her own husband? She tried not to hear the old cliché ringing in her years: No smoke without fire.

Back at home, Lian either slumped on the sofa at home, or took out his bad temper on his son. Tianyi found any excuse she could to get out of the house. Their home had become a powder keg ready to go off at any moment. One evening, as Tianyi huddled in her single bed under the chilly bedclothes, she wondered whether all marriages, all families, got to this point sooner or later. Perhaps everyone was unhappy, but some people put a brave face on it, while others were more upfront about their feelings. Her thoughts reminded her that a letter from Di had arrived the previous day, but she had not had time to read it. She ripped open the envelope. As usual, Di had written on thick, yellow paper lined in pale blue, and began her letter: Dear Tianyi. It was what came after that, though, that alarmed her.

Di said she had not written for so long because she had been on the verge of a breakdown. Of course, she and Du had broken up after a year of living together, Tianyi knew that because Di had written about it often enough. What was new was that Di had split up with her American, Brian Brown, and he wanted a divorce. There were many reasons, some of which she did not want to go into, but the main one was that he had wanted her to become a stay-at-home housewife. Di had put her heart and soul into her housekeeping but, to her astonishment, although she did everything perfectly capably, he and his mother never stopped criticizing her. Soon Brian was subjecting her to humiliating verbal abuse. He called her things like ‘lazy’ and ‘dirty’. Di was frank. There was no way she was going to agree to a divorce, he would get more out of it than she would and she refused to walk away from the marriage with nothing. At the very least, she would drag her heels until she got American citizenship.

Tianyi put the letter down and stared into space. Two arms locked around her from behind. She knew it was Lian and shuddered. Physical intimacy with him disgusted her, and had done for quite some time. She forced a smile and tried desperately not to let her feelings show. Lian’s eyes fell on the letter. ‘A letter from Di?’ he asked. She nodded. Lian picked it up. She was not happy, but managed to stop herself from snatching it off him. She could not keep something like this from him. Lian skimmed the letter and, sure enough, a sneer spread across his face.

‘I knew it! I knew Di’s marriage would never work. She thinks she’s so great, but she’s greedy and lazy. You know what, those sisters are jealous of you!’

‘And what,’ Tianyi replied coldly, ‘do you think they’re jealous of?’

‘That you’ve got such a good husband!’ Lian said. ‘Don’t all the neighbours say that I’m the model husband? Carrying the shopping for you every day. Where would you get another man like me?’

Tianyi gritted her teeth and said nothing. She could not rock the boat now. She had just been informed that she was to be sent on a writers’ trip to the Czech Republic. In any case, she was coming round to the idea that she was the real problem, she was too negative. Instead of confronting problems head-on, she preferred to avoid them. She felt less and less inclined to talk. She had said goodbye to the chatty girl of her childhood and had turned into a sallow, silent old woman. She used to be in love with her mirror; now, feeling she was ageing more quickly by the day, she did all she could to avoid it. Classical poetry was full of couplets to describe a woman like herself. There was Lin, the heroine of The Dream of the Red Chamber: ‘How can the lovely flowers stay intact, Or, once loosed, from their drifting fate draw back?’ Or the Tang dynasty lines: ‘Pluck the blossom while it’s there, Don’t wait until the branch is bare.’ How right the ancient poets were! The problem was, who was going to pluck her? No good man would dare to. If he was bold enough to try, Tianyi would not let him. There was nothing left to her but to wither and fall.

Trips away were her only pleasure. They were a brief chance to escape. Tianyi had first become conscious of her desire to flee when she was a child. She and her mother were not getting on, and so she would imagine a tunnel that linked her to her past, a place of tranquility. She was imagining paradise, she realized afterwards. But she was no nearer to it now than she had been then.

Here at least was a chance of a respite: her trip to the Czech Republic. There would be three others going: two writers, a novelist, Zhao Ping, and an essayist, Wu Shanliang; the first was an old man, the second middle-aged. Then there was an older woman, a translator, Qiao Chun. Decent people, good writers. Tianyi was delighted to be going with them.