Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

The families who lived in the Architectural Design Academy were doing a side job now, binding The Selected Works of Chairman Mao . The book was eight-by-ten and used high-quality, extra-white dictionary paper, and fine strong nylon thread. The families stitched the pages into covers with the nylon thread, and they were paid five cents per volume. The binding had originally been done at the printing factory, but since the book was in great demand at the time and the workload kept increasing, the factory outsourced part of the process, just as the foreign export trading units did in the nineties, giving embroidery and knitting to housewives. A woman in their complex worked in the factory, which was how the families got the job. They liked it very much; binding The Selected Works of Chairman Mao was a sacred task to begin with, not to mention the money they made. What’s more, the sewing also enriched their drab lives. When the job came in summer, groups of sewing women were all over the place, in front of the buildings and under the shade of trees. Old women with poor eyesight kept trying to get their grandchildren, just back from school, to help them thread needles and mark places in the books’ spines with the teeth of special small steel saws to make it easy to push the needles through. The scene was very peaceful, viewed from afar, a courtyard of women, old and young alike, burying their heads in sewing.

Women must embroider and sew, they must, to make a living, for their families, and even more, to suppress their wild natures. It served to kill spare time as well as to add colour to their pale lives. So when the flatbed tricycle pulled the unprocessed books into the complex, the adults and the children would cheer. Even Fan would use the ugly Fuan dialect to shout at the top of her lungs in front of the building, “The job’s here. The job’s here.” Really, what did the “job” have to do with her? Why was she always so enthusiastic about everything in the world? Was it because she was so enthusiastic as a child that she would become so angry as an adult, after she had gone to America?

Wu didn’t take on work like this herself, nor did she allow Tiao to participate. She had contempt for this kind of thing, and she didn’t plan to let her own children do child labour, which meant that Tiao had more free time. Whenever she passed the sewing crowds in the complex as she went to look for Fei, girls her own age or older were holding The Selected Works of Chairman Mao and attentively wrestling with needle and thread, along with their grandmothers, making asterisks of crisscrossed threads on the thick spines.

Tiao didn’t sew this “treasured red book,” nor did Fei. They were intent on other things, such as calling on pretty women. One day Fei said, “I want to take you to see the head nurse of internal medicine at People’s Hospital. I bet you’ve never seen anyone as good-looking as she is.” They went to the hospital and Fei pointed her out in the hallway of the internal medicine ward. She was probably about fifty years old then. A nun from the old society before 1949 who had worked in the church hospital, she had been suspected of being a spy and was no longer the head nurse. Her daily job now was to clean the hallway and the bathrooms of the ward. She wore old light blue clothes and was squatting by a wall to scrape saliva stains and spots of filth off it. When she sensed Tiao and Fei standing behind her, she turned her head to them.

What a beautiful face, Tiao thought, beauty from a bygone age. But what left a deep impression on Tiao was not the woman’s beauty, but her unusually serene expression. In the noisy, messy hallway of the internal medicine ward, she assumed a humble squatting position and faced a wall full of saliva stains. Grey hair clustered around her face, but she didn’t seem sad or worried. What made her treat spit stains with such care? Really such a beautiful face, looking up from the foot of a dirty wall, so serene and detached. Tiao never forgot that face.

They left the internal medicine ward and went out to walk in the courtyard. Besides having to work as a janitor, the woman often underwent denouncement. “But she doesn’t look like a spy at all,” Tiao observed.

“I don’t want to believe she is a spy, either,” said Fei, “but she confessed the passwords. They had passwords. My uncle told me that.”

“What are their passwords?” Tiao asked nervously.

Fei said, “When someone came to contact her, the head nurse would ask, ‘Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?’ The other one would answer, ‘From the ocean.’”

Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from? That was it; that was exactly the sort of thing spies would say. Although neither Tiao nor Fei knew what a spy’s passwords would be, they both felt the head nurse’s passwords fit. The words were so mysterious and romantic, yet shadowy and frightening at the same time, so erotic and tender, but also having the scent of death about them. They couldn’t help repeating them a few times. Fei lowered her voice and said to Tiao, “Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”

“From the ocean,” Tiao answered immediately, also lowering her voice.

“Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”

“From the ocean.”

They said the passwords back and forth several times, spellbound. Then they looked at each other and were suddenly frightened, as if they had turned into spies in the blink of an eye and would be drowned in the ocean of the people’s war. They looked around — there was no one nearby, but they took to their legs and ran as fast as they could, as if saying a spy’s passwords in a deserted place made them look suspicious and dangerous. They ran to the hospital’s outpatient department, which was dense with people. They manoeuvered through the crowd, but Tiao was not ready to leave yet; she wanted Fei to take her to see the head nurse one more time.

They came to the internal medicine ward again and the head nurse was still squatting by the wall, scraping with a small knife. Though this time Tiao’s desire to see her was even stronger than before, she didn’t dare get too near. The passwords proved the woman was an actual spy, and Tiao was a little panicked. She suddenly felt that the reason for them to keep coming to see her was to respond to the password. The head nurse would take them by surprise by turning that seemingly serene face to them and say, “Where does the mermaid’s fishing net come from?”

They would answer: “From the ocean.”

They eventually left before the head nurse turned around. Tiao sighed, saying she didn’t believe the serene expression on the head nurse’s face was fake. What she didn’t know was that the head nurse had actually made up the passwords when the torture became unbearable, and she was willing to confess to anything to make her confession convincing. The passwords she made up were so poetic; she satisfied people’s curiosity with these poetic fantasies and was regarded as a spy forever.

3

Then Youyou came into their lives. Youyou was not the mermaid’s fishing net, and she didn’t come from the ocean; she was in the same class as Tiao.

She’d got into trouble almost as soon as she entered middle school. She was called on by her language arts teacher to recite Chairman Mao’s quotations by heart. Memorizing and copying Chairman Mao’s quotations was a part of the language arts classes then. She had to memorize the part about revolution: “A revolution is not inviting friends to dinner, not writing an essay …” She stood up and recited by heart: “A revolution is inviting friends to dinner, is …” “Stop! Stop!” said the teacher. Youyou stopped and found her classmates were all covering their mouths and laughing. The teacher knocked on the desk with a bamboo pointer and said, “What are you laughing at? Meng Youyou, do you know you recited Chairman Mao’s quotation wrong?” Youyou nodded her head and said she knew, but when the teacher asked her to start again she just couldn’t open her mouth anymore. She was so afraid she might get it wrong again. Because she refused to open her mouth, the teacher had no choice but to let her sit down. What if she had got it wrong again? Who would be held responsible for such an incident? Probably not Meng Youyou; she was only thirteen. The teacher would have to take responsibility. From then on, the teacher never called on Youyou in class again; she believed the child was either stupid or actually retarded.