Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

When they were calm, they managed some small talk. Fan praised David’s talents and complained about his naïveté. She said once David saw an old baby bottle — and insisted on spending fifteen dollars on it just because it looked like the one he had used when he was little. The old milk bottle could bring him back to the good days of childhood. Fan said, how could an old milk bottle be worth fifteen dollars? But he insisted on buying it anyway. Tiao said, “That makes sense. It’s human nature to want to look back on the past. You two don’t share the same past and he can’t reminisce with you, so he wants to indulge in a little nostalgia through an old milk bottle.” Fan immediately got touchy again. She said, “It’s true that I don’t have that past with David. When he talks about his childhood with his cousins I always shut up. I only have the present. The present. So what?”

Tiao said, “You have a past. Your past is in China. I don’t understand why you have to banish your past, our common past. Those high school classmates of yours — why don’t you have any desire to see them?”

“It’s not that I don’t want to see them now. I never had anything to say to them.”

Tiao said, “One of my high school classmates went to Australia. Every time he came back, he would have a reunion with his classmates. I went to the reunions quite a few times, not what you’d call intellectual but very touching. He’d been in my class since the sixth grade and liked literature — although there was no real literature back then. Once our teacher assigned us to write a composition titled ‘Our Classroom,’ and this classmate wrote, ‘Many of the windowpanes in our room are broken, as if our classroom’s face were smiling.’ His composition was severely criticized by our teacher, who believed he’d insulted our classroom by making the pattern of broken windows into the personification of a smiling face. This classmate explained that that was what he sincerely imagined, and that he didn’t think broken windows would necessarily make a place look desolate and embarrassing; they truly gave him feelings of happiness and freedom because then he could look outside during class without anything blocking his view.” Tiao said many years later his classmates still remembered what he’d written. At the reunion, when someone recited from this old composition—”Many windowpanes in our room are broken, as if our classroom’s face were smiling …”—people smiled, as if they had travelled back in time to become their younger selves.

Fan said, “Are you comparing me to your classmate in Australia? You know how I hate that. I hate it that you always compare me to others. If you go on, you’ll probably give me a series of examples — so and so bought a house for his family when he came back, or so and so got ten of his relatives out of the country after he went abroad … just the sort of thing Mum has been nagging about. This is exactly what I can’t stand — this sick attitude that Chinese people have about going abroad. They believe people go abroad to get rich, that everyone who went abroad should get rich. Why do you put so much pressure on people who have gone abroad? Why do I have to listen to you even about whether or not I should see my high school classmates?”

Tiao said, “You’re being unfair. No one in our family wants you to get rich abroad. We just want you to have a peaceful and happy life. And if you talk nonsense, ignoring the simple truth, then there is a problem with your character.”

Tiao’s stern words overpowered Fan’s bluster a little bit, but then she used Yixun as an example. “And Dad pressured me in other ways. He kept asking me why I didn’t get a PhD degree. It’s my business whether I want to get a PhD or not. I’d like someone to tell me why Dad doesn’t push you to get a PhD. You don’t even have a master’s but you seem successful. How did I become the one who didn’t try hard enough? What kind of person do I have to be to satisfy you all?”

There was an interval of awkward silence.

Tiao said, “You’re too sensitive. Since when have you become so sensitive? Why do you hate life in China so much?”

“I’m disgusted by your fraud and tax evasion — you told me yourself that you never pay taxes for most of your extra income. This is your so-called good life. Do you know that in America you’d go to prison for evading taxes?”

“Yes, I’ve evaded tax, but I think you’re not angry about my tax evasion, but about the fact that you can’t do it yourself.”

“You’re projecting your own corrupt psychology on me. Americans’ sense of responsibility about taxes is much stronger than your’s.”

“Don’t make living in America sound like wearing the seamless garments of heaven. Didn’t you go through the back door to become an American citizen three months after you got there? You told me yourself that your father-in-law got you a false birth certificate to prove you were born in America. Were you born in America? Were you? You’re a Chinese who was born in Beijing and grew up in Fuan, and your Chinese name is Yin Xiaofan!”

“I would rather I hadn’t grown up in Fuan and I wish I didn’t have that history.”

“What history? What part of that history makes you so bitter?”

“Do you really want me to say it?”

“Yes, I really do,” Tiao said.

“Seven years old,” Fan began. “One day when I was seven years old, I was knitting a pair of woollen socks and you were reading in front of the building. She … she was shovelling dirt under a tree, holding a toy metal bucket. After a while some old ladies called her from a short distance away — they were gathered there to sew the bindings of The Selected Works of Chairman Mao . She couldn’t hear them calling her, but I did. But then she saw them waving at her and clapping, so she … No, I won’t say the rest and I don’t want to talk about it.”

Tiao’s heart started to sink as Fan was telling the story. She thought Fan would never mention this long-suppressed history; she thought perhaps Fan didn’t have such a clear memory, but she did remember, and now was bringing it up at last. Tiao had no right to stop her, nor could she, either. Maybe her day of judgment had come at last. Let Fan tell their parents and announce it to society and let Tiao be free from that moment on. Now, into her sinking heart came a desperate sweetness, like that of an abandoned lover assaulted by an overwhelming surge of hopeless love for the one lost. So she urged Fan to go on; she couldn’t stand to have her drop the subject right in the middle. Fan should have the courage to finish if she had the courage to start.

She urged Fan to continue, but Fan refused. She said, “I don’t want to talk about it anymore. Sorry, I won’t talk about it.”

“You have to finish,” Tiao said.

“Then she saw them; they were waving and clapping their hands at her,” Fan said. “So she … she dropped her little metal bucket and went towards them. She ran down the small road, and there was the manhole in front of her, which was uncovered. At that moment both you and I saw the open manhole and her running towards it. The two of us were standing there, behind her — twenty metres away, thirty? I remember I wanted to call out to her to avoid the hole, but I knew it wouldn’t work because she wouldn’t hear. I wanted to run over, and then … then you pulled on my hand; you didn’t just pull, you stopped me, not just pulling but stopping.”

“Yes, you’re right, I stopped you. Everything you said is true,” Tiao said. “The pull was to stop you.” She added that one last sentence.

There was another brief interval of awkward silence.

Tiao’s frank admission of the way she stopped Fan came more or less as a surprise to Fan. The blame finally belonged to Tiao, and Quan’s death had nothing to do with Fan. Fan finally emerged from the shadow of twenty years before, the sickening history that so disgusted her. But she didn’t feel relieved, because she was unable to bring herself to face the question that Tiao raised then: “Did you like Quan?”