Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

One afternoon, someone from the security department came to the residential area, opened the nurse’s door with a duplicate key, entered the apartment, and hid underneath the bed. Another man outside locked the door and lay in wait nearby.

They patiently waited for the nurse and Dr. Tang. When the man and the woman were enjoying themselves fully, the man hidden under the bed took all of Dr. Tang’s clothes, including his shoes and socks, and dragged them underneath the bed. At the same time, suddenly there was knocking on the door, or, rather, pounding. The people pounding on the door were not waiting for the people inside to open the door; they’d intended to break down the door and enter the house from the moment they started pounding on it. They believed they had the right to break into other people’s houses.

They broke in.

Naked, Dr. Tang jumped out of the bed and automatically looked for his clothes — he had at least to cover himself first, but he found nothing. The man under the bed hadn’t even left him underwear. Dr. Tang was really scared, but no matter what, he wasn’t going to let himself be taken by them. When the security men broke into the room, Dr. Tang leaped to the windowsill, and, without a stitch on, jumped out of the room and down into the courtyard. Maybe he wanted to run back home to find clothes to cover himself, or maybe he was just desperate to escape from those men closing in on him. It would have been a lopsided encounter, a group of men in clothes surrounding a naked man. Intent on fleeing from people, he completely forgot there would be even more people outside. Those who rushed there after word spread got a chance to see this once-in-a-blue-moon scene, so satisfying to their souls: a lively nude man who’d leaped out of the nurse’s apartment in broad daylight.

He was trapped in the crowd, like a cornered animal. The way back home was blocked, and he couldn’t remain here on public display. He could only run, but where to? He first ran in circles in the residential compound and then out of the compound and across the hospital. He passed the laundry room, the canteen, the humming boiler room, and then went up the black craggy coal pile. More and more people gathered behind him, even residential patients with crutches and head bandages staggered along, with the security men at the very front.

He stood at the top of the coal pile and looked at the surging crowd. He stooped over, his skinny bleeding feet clinging tightly to the coal pile. His male organ, startled at first and then bobbing along all the way, lay shrunken at his groin like a crumpled, soiled dishrag. The crowd was approaching closer and closer. Where else could he go? Then he caught sight of the tall chimney — maybe the coal beneath him linked him to it. Without thinking, he clambered off the coal pile and ran to the chimney. He reached the chimney, glanced down at his feet, which were stained with coal dust and blood, and then started to climb. By the time he was halfway up, he had slowly composed himself. Far away from the crowd now, he clung to the sky-scraping, warm chimney and looked down at the cluster of people on the ground, who had become very small, and were getting smaller and smaller. No one would come from the crowd to try to catch him; none of them had the right kind of psychological preparation, a preparation for dealing with someone saying farewell to life, embracing death.

He continued to climb. When he reached the top he felt a total serenity. The sun was setting, and the light was very soft. His view had never been so broad and he had never breathed so easily as now. He scanned the city and the hospital where he had worked and lived, and then his eye paused at the window of the ob-gyn operating room, a window he’d once covered with a blanket. He had performed an operation on Fei that neither could forget. Pressing against the rough chimney with his naked body, he quickly reflected on his life, which hadn’t been very long. The only regrets he had were towards Fei; in many respects he still had debts he owed this poor child. Maybe he should tell her what she had always wanted to know, who her father was.

Who was her father? Actually, Dr. Tang’s sister had never told him the whole story, either; he didn’t even know the man’s name, only that he was an outstanding person who worked for the military at a secret scientific institute. Their own grandfather had held the position of minister for education during the Japanese occupation. To fall in love with a woman of such a family would be a mistake, not to mention the fact that the man was already married. He probably considered divorcing his wife and marrying Jingjing, but when he learned of Jingjing’s background, he realized that couldn’t happen. Just then Tang Jingjing found herself pregnant and, not wanting to sabotage his great future, she left him and gave birth to Fei on her own. Her reticence and pride prevented her from complaining to anyone, including her younger brother. She swore she would never see the man again, and she kept her vow. Her hope was that Fei’s father might try to find out about her and her daughter, even without their knowledge, which would at least prove that he thought about them. All her life she anticipated this search, even if it were to happen only once, but she and Fei had never been looked for. She didn’t expect to die, but she died. Other than asking Dr. Tang to help her raise Fei, she didn’t leave a will. She had nothing to say to this world. Now Dr. Tang also stood at the edge of death; he also had no time to say anything to his niece. Perhaps that was a regret in his life; perhaps it was another kind of perfection. All perfection is relative. Did Fei have to know who her father was? Her father had never been around when she needed a father most. Ah, perfection. Sometimes not knowing is even more of a perfection.

It would be hard to imagine what else Dr. Tang had thought about on the chimney. Perhaps he thought about the two-year-old girl named Quan, his own child, and about how he was about to follow in her footsteps. Perhaps he thought about the word “han,” his favourite word for man. When he ran down the coal pile and climbed up the chimney, maybe he had the word “han” on his mind. No matter how mediocre and tedious his life was, he still respected his naked body. He drove himself down a blind alley because he didn’t want to surrender his naked body to several clothed men.

In that clamorous and quiet dusk in the spring of 1976, many people in People’s Hospital witnessed Dr. Tang’s naked body fly down from the tall chimney. He stopped breathing the moment his body touched the ground.

So many years later, all the way to Beijing, Fei thought about Dr. Tang’s death, his quite undeserving flight down. His body hadn’t hit anyone there, nor had he merely hit the ground — it struck Fei, body and soul, because she was his only family member and only a real family member would have the feeling of being struck, even if Fei had never really liked her uncle. She felt a strong and suffocating sadness. Fei couldn’t figure out why, in an era so far removed from the days of eating raw meat and drinking blood, such a man wasn’t allowed to wear his own clothes in public.

If something similar had happened to Fang Jing, then it definitely wouldn’t have been a reality. It would have been fiction — a movie, a TV drama, or a tall tale — capital for attracting women, with the clear premise that Fang Jing would never jump from the chimney in reality. A thousand times over, he would be just about to jump, or would feel that he “wanted to jump.” But Dr. Tang was simply an ordinary doctor, with a reckless lifestyle. The suffering of an ordinary person can’t be taken seriously; it had no influence or public appeal, thus it was not worth mentioning. Suffering is only true when it happens to other kinds of people; it almost has to play the clown among the celebrities. Suffering leaps at us in a variety of somersaults, wearing a clown hat and painting his nose white. You have to prepare to cheer while shedding tears. Obsessed with her uncle’s death, Fei couldn’t help thinking how different Dr. Tang’s and Fang Jing’s fates turned out, though they were both intellectuals living during the same period. She couldn’t have guaranteed that Dr. Tang’s situation would have improved or that he would have established a peaceful family if he’d lived, but she could guarantee that Dr. Tang wouldn’t have taken advantage of his suffering by selling it because he was at best an ordinary doctor.