Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

Fei grabbed Tiao’s arm and forced Tiao to keep going to Da Guangming Theatre with her. She was very strong and Tiao was unprepared for such physical proximity to Fei. She was escorted to the movie theatre and pushed into a seat. When the movie started and the theatre was all dark, Tiao settled down a little bit. The dark made her relax and let out a long sigh, long but uneven: shivery and halting, as if she were restraining herself. She felt hurt, and reached up with her hand to touch the side of her face; it was numb. With a numbed face, she tried to focus on the movie, but Fei’s words kept ringing in her ears. She couldn’t concentrate on the movie until a good-looking woman guerrilla appeared on the screen. The movie was about the fight between Albanian people and the Nazis during the Second World War. Tiao kept imagining herself as the heroine, the woman guerrilla Mira, beautiful and strong. After a while, Mira’s leader, a woman captain with a big black mole on her upper lip, appeared on the screen. The captain was interrogated and tortured after her capture. Blood trickled from the corner of her mouth; white skin was peeling from her cracked, dry lips. (Later, Tiao would learn the “white skin” was makeup, a layer of dried rice soup.) Then a pitcher of water was placed in front of her, the clear cut-glass making the water seem even more precious. The Nazi officer poured a glass and handed it to the woman captain. She swallowed her saliva, opened her puffed lips with difficulty, and sneered at the officer: “Thanks. Fascists’ humanitarianism, I know!” This was really excellent, a once-in-a-lifetime retort; so witty and proud that Tiao was thrilled. At this point, she decided that she didn’t want to be Mira anymore; she wanted to be this woman captain with the black mole on her upper lip, although she was truly ugly, and her thin, bow-shaped eyebrows, which seemed to have been drawn with a pencil, were particularly hideous. But she refused to surrender even under interrogation and torture and could also come out with heroic utterances. Tiao gazed at the screen with a numbed face; the slap in the alley never stopped reverberating in her heart. Who else could be the woman captain if she weren’t? And the Nazi officer was Fei. She would hand Tiao a glass of water and Tiao would sniff at her and say, “Thanks. Fascists’ humanitarianism, I know.” Unfortunately, Fei hadn’t given her a glass of water; instead she had given her a slap. What should Tiao say to a slap? “I’ll fight you to the death!” Or, “I don’t know. Even if I knew, I wouldn’t tell.” She tried to recall all the anti-Japanese movies she had seen before and make up all the lines that she should say when confronting a slap. She mixed up movies and life, her mind confused and her heart welling up with her sense of having been wronged.

When the theatre lights came on again, the audience stood up one after another, whacking back the plywood seats, and Tiao realized the movie had ended. She didn’t want to leave, especially not with Fei. She didn’t want to go outside with the burden of that sentence, a shame that she couldn’t throw off. She planned to stay here alone, here where people’s eyes fix on the screen, not on each other. But Fei grabbed her arm and asked, “Are you leaving or not?”

“No, I’m not leaving.” She answered Fei with a good measure of the revolutionary’s determination, as if the movie that had just ended had injected some strength into her.

“Are you really not leaving?”

“What can you do about it if I don’t?”

“You wouldn’t dare!” Fei reached out with her other hand to grab the back of Tiao’s collar as she was speaking. Tiao was in her grasp; she really couldn’t believe such a pretty girl would grab people by their collars. She had never been slapped or seized by the collar in all her life, and now she had been treated to both insults on the same day. With Fei clutching her arm, she left the theatre and entered the quiet alley. Seeing no one around, Tiao suddenly stopped, this time determined to take the initiative on whether she would go or stay.

“Why don’t you keep walking? Want another good slap?”

Tiao collected her courage and said, “Puh — let me tell you, my mum is not a whore. Your mum is a whore.”

“Unfortunately,” said Fei, “I don’t have a mum.” She put out a foot as she was talking, turning her hip to one side and standing at ease, in a relaxed stance. “Allow me to repeat: too bad I don’t have a mum.”

This, Tiao hadn’t expected. Since Fei didn’t have a mum, obviously her eye-for-an-eye counterattack not only failed but also appeared crude. She also saw clearly, when Fei said “too bad I don’t have a mum,” how she grinned at Tiao. It seemed she wanted to make Tiao angry with this grin, to annoy her: I don’t have a mum, so you’ve said something stupid. And Tiao couldn’t do anything about it even though her insides ached and itched. But the grin made Tiao feel a little sad. Almost at the moment Fei grinned, Tiao forgave her fierce slap and her shouting.

The grin stayed on Fei’s face, which made Tiao feel she should help relieve her of it with an apology. “I’m sorry, Fei,” she said, “I didn’t know you don’t have a mum.” The grin diminished but still lingered at the corner of Fei’s mouth, as if she were not capable of withdrawing it completely. She hadn’t reached the age where she could let it come and go at will; after all, she was only fifteen. “It doesn’t matter. You don’t have to apologize. You can talk about somebody else, for instance, my uncle. I don’t have a mum, but I have an uncle. Try saying my uncle is a bad man. Maybe you can say my uncle is a hooligan. Say it. You say it.” Fei started to tremble as she was talking, and the corner of her mouth, where the grin persisted, twitched strangely, making it hard for Tiao to tell whether it marked the end of laughing or the start of crying. Maybe there is no real difference between laughter and crying, and Fei’s crying was born in the middle of laughter. She still kept her head high and chest out, but the bossy air she’d had most of the night was gone. She repeated the technique of backing Tiao, step by step, against the wall, but this time she had tears streaming down her face, and she whispered to Tiao, “I know you hate my uncle. You must hate my uncle, just like … just like I hate your mum. You can curse him in front of me, just one sentence, they … they … ai, why would I say these things to you? What do you know?” Fei wiped her tears with the back of her hand and stood against the wall with Tiao, side by side. She cocked her head lazily and squinted her tear-stung eyes, like the yellow cat with the long legs and thin face who sunbathed on the roof all year round.

Tiao couldn’t say any bad words about Dr. Tang aloud to Fei. The fact that Fei was motherless touched her, and the way Fei cursed her own uncle comforted her. From now on she would no longer be alone. They were in the same boat. She felt that they understood each other and that part of the understanding could only be felt, not put into words. But they didn’t have to put it into words.

“Can we talk about something else? Where is your mum?” Tiao asked.

“She died. She died in Beijing. We used to live in Beijing.”

“As soon as I saw you I knew you were from Beijing. My family moved here from Beijing, too. I used to go to Denger Alley Elementary School.”

“Me, too,” said Fei. “My mum was a teacher at Denger Alley Elementary School. Teacher Tang.”

Teacher Tang, Tang Jingjing. Tiao remembered that denouncement meeting — the smell — how Teacher Tang, thin and white as a toothpick, knelt to walk to the teacup that held shit. She thought that it had been because Teacher Tang didn’t want Fei to be denounced with her. She ate the contents of the cup because she didn’t want Fei to be insulted in public. She also remembered how she rinsed her own mouth and brushed her teeth after she got back that day.