Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

“No, no, please don’t.”

“Why, what’s the problem?” Fei asked.

“It’s not that, there’s … I think you shouldn’t act rudely,” Tiao told her.

“That’s the kind of thing only someone like you would think of,” Fei said. “Even now you’re still protecting him!”

Tiao began asking how Fei was going to meet him, and it was clear Fei’s fierce sisterhood buoyed up the dispirited Tiao.

3

Feeling the unfairness of what had happened to Tiao, Fei set out for Beijing, intent on standing up for Tiao with Fang Jing. However, on her way to Beijing she thought constantly about her uncle, Dr. Tang. The two were completely unrelated: Dr. Tang and Fang Jing didn’t know each other, and would never have a chance to meet.

In the spring of 1976, two years after Fei started at the factory, Dr. Tang became acquainted with a nurse in the surgical clinic. He’d hurt his hand in a bike accident and had gone there to have it dressed. The nurse cleaned his wound, put on some ointment, and then bandaged it efficiently and carefully. They were colleagues. Although one worked in internal medicine and the other in surgery, they greeted each other with a nod every time they passed. Around the hospital, there was talk about the nurse. Her husband worked in another city and couldn’t get transferred to Fuan, so she’d had affairs with some men in the hospital. She wasn’t too choosy about the men, nor did she mind much what other people thought. At a time when “lifestyle problems” were second in seriousness only to political ones, she wasn’t shy about her “lifestyle problem.” In her department, she was the butt of the jokes of the middle-aged men and women. When they teased her with double entendres, her thick-skinned, blunt comebacks would startle them. She often said, “What can I do if a man wants me? Can I forbid him to want me? I can’t stop him, so I have to let him come to call.” In this way, she turned the unmentionable into the stuff of everyday life, like shopping, cooking, and eating. Likewise, her whole being radiated earthiness. Whether they were electricians in the hospital or cooks from the canteen, it was all the same to her. She never looked down on the cooks, so she always got served heaped portions of food — and who doesn’t live to earn a mouthful of food in this world? The servings on her lunch tray, supposedly for one person, were enough to feed her and her two children. Her carefree lovemaking also seemed to make her complexion glow with health. She loved to laugh, often giggling while she lay on men’s bodies, and had never felt that she was less than they were or that she was being taken advantage of; she always believed it was the other way around. This was not the rationalizing Ah Q spirit helping her to deceive herself; it was simply because she was ordinary, practical, simple, and emotionally detached that made her a spiritual victor. She was the vampire, and Dr. Tang’s wounded hand gave her a chance to suck his blood.

Dr. Tang would sit, while she stood to change the bandages, and she would take longer and longer each time. Changing bandages gave him a reason to sit in front of her, and her a reason to stand in front of him. Whether by accident or on purpose, her knee brushed his. He didn’t react or try to avoid it. She got closer, and her knee pressed against his knee. Next, she used both of her knees to sandwich his, tightly. There were others in the room; not far from them, the unit director was checking a man whose face was twisted into a grimace by the corns on his feet. The nurse’s brazen seduction made Dr. Tang nervous, even though her knees were somewhat hidden by her white smock. But the public seduction also gave him a special thrill; his knee was wedged, his wound, which was not too serious, was being bandaged in routine fashion. He quickly glanced over at the clinic’s beds, but no one was paying attention. It was a moment of extreme boredom, and people often need to do something to relieve their boredom. By the time she let go of him, he was thinking, what the heck, why not have a relationship with her? They lived in the same hospital compound, only two or three dormitories away, so there wouldn’t even be any travel involved.

Both appeared willing, and hit it off very well, with no expectations between them, just sex and stolen pleasures. Dr. Tang and the nurse mostly did their business during the day, when her kids had gone to school and the residential area was quiet, often disappearing from their offices suddenly for a while, half an hour or forty minutes. The hospital was chaotic all day long, and who would notice? Maybe they’d gone to the bathroom, or maybe they went off to meet the acquaintances whom every doctor and nurse would have. Usually Dr. Tang went to the nurse’s apartment. They’d enter, close the curtains, and then rush to their purpose without any extra words. The nurse had many tricks, and she allowed Dr. Tang to experience many vulgar pleasures — and vulgar pleasures are still pleasures, after all. He often thought about what she said the first time he came home with her: “Now I only leave the door open for you.” Expressions like this were strange to Dr. Tang, but they conveyed a feeling intimate beyond words, which seemed to suit a country woman like her well. The door that would be reserved for him alone also called up a concrete image for Dr. Tang. It was a door that a house in the northern countryside would have, like those he had seen when he served his short internship in the countryside after graduation: double doors made of locust and poplar wood and studded with rusty iron rings. This reminded him of those filthy words those women would howl at each other: “Come out, you slut with a kept han. You shameless stinky dog cunt …” He played with the word “han,” always feeling the word “han” was a more masculine-sounding word for man than other words. When he pronounced the word “han” he had an expansive feeling, vast and carefree. “Han” —man — plain and vigorous as crops. Sturdy and responsible. Was he a “han” ? In what way did he seem that sort of man?

He and his nurse thought they had managed to keep things secret and that no one knew of their affair, but they failed to escape the eyes of the security department after all, though they didn’t have a clue that the security department was on their trail. As they skillfully slipped out and went home to do their business, two security men were planning a raid on them. The security department was very well aware of the nurse and had caught her in flagrante more than once. It was exciting to expose adultery: the plotting beforehand, the stakeout — and then the actual scene of exposure — all gave people a joyful feeling. It serves as the cruelest and most thorough punishment of the adulterer and adulteress; it’s the most open and aboveboard channel for all the participants to gratify their sexual desire. Exposing adultery contributed to the cultural life of a boring era by providing entertainment. However, to bring about the exposure requires a fresh story, and only new characters and a new story could get people interested. The nurse had lost the interest of the security men; she was no longer a new person in adultery who could offer a new story. She was beyond being even “an old bottle filled with new wine,” just those shameless things with the electricians and cooks happening over and over. Someone has to be completely shameless to make people lose interest entirely.

Dr. Tang was a different matter altogether, and the one that the security department valued. His dubious family background, his position as a doctor, along with that quiet, standoffish manner, were all an irritant to people. If the goal was to humiliate someone in public, he would be the right person; it would be more fun to watch the humiliation of his sort — much more interesting to watch him than a piece of damaged goods of whom so many people were already aware, wouldn’t it?