Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

“Yeah, I like it, too.”

“Get one for me.”

“It was imported from abroad.”

“Who bought it for you?” Fan asked.

“Fang Jing.”

“You mean you can’t find one in China?”

“Probably not.”

“Then what am I going to do?”

“Just wait. When I find something similar, I’ll buy it for you.”

Fan said, “Actually, you can give this one to me now and buy yourself something similar later on.”

Tiao hadn’t expected Fan to say something like this. It embarrassed Tiao that her sister had asked her so directly to take off her windbreaker and give it to her. She would have given Fan many things, but not the windbreaker, and not just because it was imported and a gift from Fang Jing, but because the way Fan demanded things from her seemed strange and troubled her. She didn’t know what to say and they paused awkwardly. Then Fan asked, “Older sister, do you like me?”

“I like you. You know I like you.”

“If you like me, you should give me the things I like.”

“Is that how you see ‘like’?”

“Yes.”

“But I don’t see it that way.”

“So you’re not going to give me the windbreaker?”

“I don’t think I can.”

It was pretty much the first time that Tiao had said no to Fan. She said it very quickly but unambiguously. Feeling uncomfortable, Tiao didn’t know exactly what the trouble was. Maybe she had been wrong. Why couldn’t she give Fan whatever she liked? But she couldn’t.

Fan’s mood obviously darkened — she never tried to disguise her moods. The two of them sat there facing several empty yogurt bottles, not knowing what else to talk about. Changing the subject would have been a way to cheer things up, but they were even unable to do that. They were sisters and knew each other too well. Changing the subject is for people who are not related, but for sisters it would have been too artificial. They avoided each other’s gaze, sitting silently for a while, and then Fan glanced at her watch and said, “I should go.”

Tiao said, “Don’t forget your skirt.” Fan reluctantly picked up the new woollen skirt and stuffed it into her backpack carelessly, as if saying, A skirt isn’t enough, isn’t the equivalent of the windbreaker …

Some events out of the past are taboo subjects — and there can be many of these in families — like the incident of the windbreaker. Other things get brought up all the time, to hearty laughter. When the family spoke about Fan’s unusual gift for mimicry, they would always recall the way she imitated a relative with a stiff neck: she tensed up her neck but twisted it before she got to open her mouth, ending up with a stiff neck herself, and missing two days of school. When Tiao had to use a hot rolling pin to massage her neck, Fan said, in a Fuan accent, “Give me the rolling pin”—except the word for “pin” sounds the same as the word for “cabinet,” so it became “rolling cabinet.” It was Fan’s discovery that Fuaners pronounced “pin” like “cabinet.” These are the sorts of things that can be brought up anytime; they were part of her, a source of both her liveliness and her down-to-earth quality. Even after Fan became an American citizen, and was constantly in conflict with Tiao, her cold heart, which was also so fragile, would suddenly warm when these things from her teenage years came up.

However, it was just momentary warmth. To have lasting warmth didn’t seem like American behaviour to Fan, who had learned to be a perfect American citizen — drinking cold water, gulping down large quantities of coffee at work, using mint floss after meals, adding a lot of ice to Coca-Cola, taking a hot shower in the morning, washing shirts after wearing them only once, eating pork only occasionally, avoiding stir-frying food in the kitchen, driving skillfully (particularly when backing up the car), visiting a dentist regularly, taking vitamins — absolutely no quilt nest for the bed, and the fewer covers, the better … She was the kind of person who could quickly adapt to her environment, or, to put it another way, she was eager to adapt to David quickly.

David had never said he didn’t love Fan; he continued to call her “my little sweet pea.” But not too long after they got married, he began an affair with a German woman, an old friend who was ten years older than he was. His getting married didn’t stop them from having a relationship. If he loved Fan, what was this affair with the German woman all about? It was something that Fan couldn’t tolerate, particularly since she lived in America. If it were in China, instead of fighting with her husband she could go back to her parents’ home and complain, or turn to her friends for help. But she lived in America, where her parents didn’t, and she had no really close friends. Her fluent English removed the obstacles to communication with anyone in this land, but language couldn’t do anything about the obstacles in the heart. And the obstacle was in her heart. When David was seeing the German woman, she realized for the first time that she didn’t belong in this country. She was a foreigner and would never be able to understand all the mysteries of what happened in the United States of America between David and his German girlfriend. She had had heated arguments with David, and called him “son of a bitch” without any difficulty, but her screaming only drove David to see his girlfriend more frequently. He didn’t want to divorce Fan, because his girlfriend already had a husband.

Fan never told any of this to her family in China; the hurt of having nowhere to complain was something she brought on herself. Like someone who had a disease, Fan suffered from after-effects. David’s unfaithfulness made her emphasize particularly in her letters how deeply they loved each other, despite the fact that she felt very confused about David. No one knew better than Fan that it was almost impossible for an Asian and a Westerner to understand each other completely, even if they had been a happy couple all their lives. Sixty percent’s worth of a mutual understanding was good enough. Fan was unwilling to admit this, but her life led her inexorably to this conclusion, a conclusion that she couldn’t share with others, because she wanted to seem a winner. She wanted her family to recognize that she, indeed, lived a better life than they did.

But what about the after-effects of her disease? They controlled her, making her fear for no reason. She instinctively sensed David’s attraction to older women, so she had to be vigilant against all older women, including Tiao, who was six years older than both she and David. She was sure not to put Tiao’s pictures on display, just a childhood picture of them, in which Tiao knitted her brows and seemed very unhappy while Fan laughed foolishly. David asked her, “Why don’t you have a recent picture of your sister? I’d like to see her pictures now. Didn’t she send us some?” Fan explained that she liked to reminisce about the past, that only childhood pictures could bring her back to the past, her past in China.

Ah, her past in China.

When Fan’s confidence reached its lowest point, she even refused to go back to China with David. To have David screw the German woman in their house would have been preferable to returning to China with him. She was so afraid that she couldn’t bear to hear Tiao invite David enthusiastically in English, “You would be so welcome to come home!” She held on to the extension and interrupted Tiao’s conversation with David, “Older sister, your accent is horrible. Where did you learn your English?” She ended the conversation between Tiao and David by criticizing Tiao’s accent; she’d almost shouted for Tiao to shut up. Fan’s rude interruption annoyed David. They quarrelled after they put down the phone. David said, “I have the right to talk to anyone I want to. You shouldn’t interrupt our conversation.”