Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

4

When Tiao saw Fei afterwards, she could hardly resist the urge to tell her, Do you know, Fei? I was the one who killed your cousin. I killed her! In her heart, she bellowed and shouted the statement again and again, not sure if she wanted to use the confession to make atonement herself, or to accuse Fei. Wasn’t it Fei who stirred her to action? Before Quan’s accident, Fei went to see Quan frequently, even pointing out the cruel fact of Quan’s resemblance to Dr. Tang. If Fei seemed like the director of the play, the lead actor would be Tiao. Who was more guilty? Tiao couldn’t decide. In the end she had to judge Fei innocent because at most she merely provided the idea for Tiao. Just a suggestion to follow or not.

Everything was over now and both Tiao’s and Fei’s families returned to a state of calm. The extreme awkwardness and secrecy between Tiao and Fei disappeared. When they saw each other again, Tiao clearly sensed Fei’s serenity. Tiao might have been able to have the same peace herself, but she had no one with whom to celebrate her successful revenge. She didn’t even have the opportunity to feel fear. In order to forget, she buried it deep in her heart. It was the sort of feeling that she couldn’t communicate, particularly when faced with Fei’s peacefulness. Fei had unconsciously discharged her own heaviness onto Tiao — letting Tiao live to suffer. Tiao harboured a vague resentment toward Fei because of this, but she was not able to end their friendship, nor could she help thinking about Quan because she would suddenly see Quan in Fei’s face. If Quan hadn’t died, she would have become another Fei. Tiao had an absurd feeling that Quan actually hadn’t died; that she instead possessed Fei and became a part of her.

And Quan was a part of Fei, an integral part. In Tiao’s presence, she would intermittently shine out of Fei for Fei’s entire life, and be forever present in Tiao’s life. It was an intermingling. Fei was a version of Quan who could open her mouth and speak, and she brought Quan into adulthood.

By then Fei had moved out of her uncle’s place. She had worked in a factory before she finished high school and lived in the single person’s dorm; otherwise she would have gone to the countryside to accept the peasants’ reeducation, a fate similar to that of Captain Sneakers and her only other option. She feared the countryside. To avoid working there, her classmates with connections all dropped out of school and tried to find jobs. Some worked as salespeople in the stores, some worked as ticket-sellers on the buses, and one girl even worked at a pickle factory, staying in Fuan by stirring a vat of pickled vegetables all day long. She complained to her classmates about how her hands and arms got soaked in the pickle juice and became so chafed. But she had a job, and could stay far from the countryside. Every day, after finishing her job of stirring pickles, she could go home. No matter how nasty a pickle vat was, the factory was still located in Fuan. Its nastiness didn’t rise to the next level; it belonged to a city’s nastiness, and therefore could be accepted, if reluctantly. Although not much when compared to situations above it, it was better than the ones below. Sometimes even this kind of nastiness, though, could make a person smug.

Fei observed her classmates with a cold eye. She felt their opportunities were all better than hers. But she also held them in the deepest contempt. Her highest goal was to become a real manufacturing worker, and those few major factories located in the western part of Fuan were the objects of her yearning … She believed the “working class” that Chairman Mao referred to in his maxim, “The working class leads everything,” specifically meant the workers in those factories. Their temperament, their style, simply represented the pinnacle of the spirit and status of the age. Salespeople, ticket-sellers, and workers in a small pickle factory didn’t count as working class at all; they were at most in the outer circle, and even saying that had a hint of “passing off paste as pearls.” Back then, with Fei’s background, that she could have such an exaggerated notion of the range of her abilities made her like the fox that couldn’t get the grapes. The sour grapes.

Maybe Fei was that fox, but she wasn’t so ready to declare that the grapes were sour. She presumed to eat a bunch of grapes that were simply impossible for her to eat, and she had the guts not to quit until she got them. Her courage probably came from her new view of life, which started from her abortion, from the night when she and her uncle embraced each other, weeping without restraint. Her childhood had ended, and she simply couldn’t depend on her uncle blindly, nor did she want to be defeated by the ambiguous stares of her classmates. They all knew her family background, and all expected to see her miserable in the countryside someday. But she insisted on becoming a member of the working class, had to become a part of the working class. Only when she entered the working class would she stand unassailable. She did set a presumptuously high standard for herself because only such a standard could really fire the soul.

When graduation approached, word had it that a manufacturing plant had sent a senior worker to their school who was going to recruit two outstanding students with advanced political consciousness and superior moral character from the boys in the graduating classes. The selection process was based on the combination of a teacher’s recommendation and the factory’s interview. The news made the boys rub their hands together with eagerness and the girls sigh despondently and then become indifferent. Fei kept mulling over the information, even though there were only two positions and the factory requested boys. She was thinking that maybe she didn’t have a chance this time, but she should try to make the acquaintance of that recruiter.

A school campus is like a village sometimes. The arrival of a stranger puts the entire place on alert. Although people might not know everyone in their village, they would immediately spot an outsider. That was how Fei discovered the stranger on campus; she saw a man in his thirties holding a bicycle as he stood in front of the administration building talking to the principal. Her first glance told her he wasn’t a teacher. She wondered whether he was the recruiting worker. She dawdled purposefully around the entrance of the administration building, hoping to get close enough to eavesdrop. In the end she didn’t hear much of their conversation except for the principal saying, “Master Qi, let’s go to my office and talk over the details.” Master Qi locked his bike and entered the building with the principal.

Fei walked over to Master Qi’s locked bike, which she recognized as a Phoenix Manganese 18, the most fashionable of the day, brand-new and shiny. She squatted down and pretended to tie her shoe. Seeing no one around, she deflated both tyres of the Phoenix and pulled out the air valves. With the valves clutched in her hand, she ran out the gate and all the way to the bicycle repair shop on the street corner west of the school. She’d made up her mind to wait for Master Qi there, confident he would come.

Half an hour later, Fei indeed saw someone push a bike out the school gate. As the person drew nearer, she could make out the Master Qi who had been talking with the principal earlier. He knitted his eyebrows together slightly, obviously unhappy about the vandalizing of his new bike. He walked directly toward the shop, and his unhappy expression frightened Fei a little, or rather what she feared was not his expression, but how he would respond to her over her little trick. The closer he got, the faster her heart beat. She felt it almost jump into her throat and she had to swallow hard in order to get it back down. She gulped and watched Master Qi set the kickstand to let the bicycle repairman fit the new valves and fill the tyres with air. Unless she could open her mouth and talk, she would have no chance, but she was like a mute and no matter how hard she tried she couldn’t speak. It was as if her heart were still bouncing around in her throat and once she opened her mouth it would fly out onto the floor. Master Qi had already raised the kickstand and wheeled his bicycle to the pavement. She must open her mouth, and there was no turning back. She addressed the back of Master Qi, who was about to swing his leg up to mount his bicycle. “Master Qi. Aren’t you Master Qi?”