Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Lian did not give her a cent; she was now the family’s sole bread-winner. She knew she must not say anything, that Lian was waiting for her to say something. The barefooted don’t fear the shod and Lian had nothing nowadays, so he had nothing to lose if they fought. But Tianyi did. Their building was full of Lian’s colleagues, who could hear Lian’s constant shouting. It was so ignominious.

Lian behaved like a man possessed. He kept coming up with one madcap idea after another. One day he came back with a gigantic fridge-freezer, then started buying the cheapest meat he could find from the morning market. The problem was, he kept forgetting about it, so it went bad and he had to throw it out. Every time, he would shout at Tianyi: ‘What are you thinking of? Isn’t this your home too? I buy all this food for you, why don’t you defrost it and cook it once in a while?’ Every time he had these outbursts, Tianyi would think of her brother, Tianke. Back then, her husband had been such an meek, easy-going character. Now he was as irascible as Tianke. How had that happened? Maybe he had been like that all along, and had just been hiding it.

He would cycle off to the market and buy up all sorts of rags and tatters, even stuffing them underneath their bed. Their home became such a mess that it really upset Tianyi. One day … The thought reminded her of the time before her marriage. She used to think then too, One day … Meaning: One day I’ll get away from the you all, and go to a happier place where I’ll be free of worries and the world will belong to me. Was Heaven the only place you could hope for happiness? The thought made her tremble. She had dreamed about it so many times as a child. Was death what it took for people to enter a world of contentment? She had made the decision, as a young woman, to leave her mother and brother, to find a world that belonged to her alone. But she was no longer young. If she left the people around her now, would she have the energy to create a world of her own? She doubted it, and that frightened her. Really frightened her. She had better hang on, make the best of things. Put up with the slings and arrows of outrageous fortune. She remembered Lin Biao’s exhortation to the fighters going to Vietnam: ‘Endure.’ But what did ‘endure’ mean for her? Getting old and grey and sinking into dementia? She could not bear to think about it.

Her son was acting as cowed as she was. He was preparing his end-of-year exams but his grades were sliding rapidly, which was making Lian even more irascible. His temper needed an outlet, so he stood over his son every day as he did his homework. If he could not boss the show at work any more, at least he was master in his own house. He did not realise that to his son it was like having the devil breathing down his neck. How could he possibly concentrate on his maths homework?

She had to stick it out at home. She had another writers’ tour coming up, this time to Taiwan. Everything at home troubled her. Her son was not going to get the necessary grades for upper middle school, and she knew why that was, but there was nothing she could do about it. She did not want to upset the apple-cart, because in some ways she still relied on Lian. If she left, he would be left in charge of their home and their son. But in the end, she could not keep the lid on her feelings.

Things came to a head the day before she left for Taiwan, when he gave her the new business cards he had printed for her. She inspected them. They were hideous. Was this really the man she had married, the man who, not ten years ago, had such good taste? The worst of it was, she told him so. The repercussions were awful. He threw the box of cards to the ground in a frenzy, scattering them everywhere, stamping on them, grinding them into the floor with his heel, shouting furiously: ‘I was just trying to help! So I got it wrong again? Well, sorry, but this is the last time I’m waiting on you hand and foot!’

Her chest hurt as if it had been stamped on too. It was a dull sort of pain. She had to face up to things. She would wait until she got back, she thought, but one thing was certain, she could not sacrifice her life to this marriage.

Taiwan did not live up to her expectations at first. Taipei was no different from Beijing, though she at least she managed to pick up a nice set of coins with Chiang Kai-shek’s face stamped on them. Kaohsiung was nicer. There the air was clean, the people honest and straightforward. Maybe because it reminded her of her uncle’s family, the place gave Tianyi a warm feeling.

But even here she was disappointed. Her aunt had died and her uncle was living in an old people’s home. Tianyi put the carefully chosen gifts in front of him, but he did not recognise her. She was overwhelmed by grief. She unwrapped the dried longans one by one and fed them to him. If only she could have chewed them for him too. The toothless old man gnawed and gnawed, dribbling as he did so. Tianyi sat by him, wiping his mouth and chin, until dusk, when the home was closed to visitors and her cousin, her uncle and aunt’s only daughter, took her away from this dismal place.

Her cousin had grown to look just like her mother. Not exactly pretty but sweet-tempered, the kind of face rarely seen on the mainland. She was sweet-tempered in the way women used to be, a legacy from the Republican era. She had a lily-white complexion too, as if her skin had never seen the sun, a mark of her true Chinese heritage. Women on the mainland had had years of being toughened by labour. The times they lived through had left them soiled and weather-beaten, making them more masculine, stronger, and more resourceful than men. It was only when she saw her cousin that Tianyi realized that she herself had changed too. Surely all little girls wanted to grow up to be petted and protected by a man, but there was no chance of that for women from the mainland, even tenacious ones like Tianyi. They had a different destiny, and that was that.

Destiny! It was all destiny Tianyi had always despised the word, but now it forced itself on her, and she had to believe in it.

At least in Taiwan she could enjoy the beauty of Mount Ali. Mount Ali cleared Tianyi’s mind. She could smell Mount Ali from far, far away. The fragrance of fresh greenery. Lush and wet. The endless swathes of green were so beautiful, it reminded her of a line from a Lu You poem: ‘Towering green mountains, five thousand ren high.’

Tianyi and her companions walked through the trees on Mount Ali, taking pictures. It had been such a long, long time since they had seen such pure verdant greens, such lush, bright greens, greens without a smudge of mud or dirt. The cool fragrant air brushed their cheeks, making them tingle as if they having a facial. Greedily they breathed it in, letting it cleanse every organ of their body, making their bodies glow, reminding them that Mount Ali once had its own spirits. If you made a pilgrimage there, you had to light incense and bathe yourself until you were completely cleansed.

The most surprising thing about Mount Ali was its strangely-shaped trees. One species, in particular, grew almost horizontal, its long graceful branches reaching along the ground. On a twisting mountain path, it looked like the perfect modern sculpture, like those entwined tubes of metal you find everywhere in cities, though even the most imaginative of artists would have a hard time conceiving a tree this fantastic. They must be the creation of a higher being. When she had her photograph taken among the trees, she trod cautiously lest she disturb a wood sprite. Looking up, she saw layer upon layer of forest canopy. The towering trees and the undergrowth looked like something out of a Corot painting. She could imagine the spirits emerging to roam here after dark.