Tie Ning - The Bathing Women

David came over and asked them what they were talking about. Fan lied and said they were gossiping about a mutual acquaintance in China. David noticed their strange mood, but couldn’t understand a word they said. That was the convenience of the language barrier; they could talk about vaginas and tampons right in front of David.

Fan lied to David and then turned back to Tiao. “You’re right that I’m not happy. It was you who brought me all the unhappiness. You! When I was seven years old …”

Tiao knew very well where they were heading yet again; the unfortunate “before,” the “before” that was embedded in her heart, tormenting her constantly. Strangely, though, she was not as panicky as when Fan first mentioned it in China, as if the change of venue had performed some magic. Even the most shameful thing, when mentioned in a strange place, far from its original setting, didn’t seem that terrible. Strange places are ideal for recalling past horrors. So Tiao wasn’t frightened by Fan’s reference to the event. She even felt that she had the courage to stand here, in Chicago, Illinois, right in front of Fan, to retell the whole story from beginning to end, and simply to declare again, I was the murderer. Her candour, no matter how detailed and complete, would be overwhelmed by the vastness of America, because America doesn’t care — has no interest in denouncing the secret crime committed by a strange foreigner. It made her feel as if she were about to tell someone else’s story — half truth and half fiction — with calm and detachment. This was a new discovery for her, which disconnected her from the incident. Maybe she was not all that detached, but she was at least granted calm by the foreignness of the place. Calmly, she interrupted Fan. “I want to say something that I have held in for a long time, and today I’m going to let it out: don’t you try to terrify me with ‘before.’ Even if everything I did before was wrong, it doesn’t mean what you did was right.”

Even if everything I did before was wrong, it doesn’t mean what you did was right.

Fan must surely have heard, and taken it in — there are words that can force a person to remember.

Tiao left Fan’s home ahead of schedule. She called a taxi and went to the airport seven hours before her flight. It was a day of rain and snow, and Fan drove to the airport after her. She wanted very much to run to her sister and to hug her, as she had done when she’d picked her up two days earlier, and then to tell her, I was wrong. But she didn’t have the courage. A man named Mike went in and out of her mind. Yes, Mike. Didn’t Tiao have too much? She was going to fly to Mike’s city. She was abandoning Fan again. A sharp sadness struck her, and Fan felt a moment of dizziness. She was a victim; she had always been a victim, lonely, with no one on whom to depend. The deepest suffering in her heart was not the loneliness, but the fact that all her life she had no one to turn to, no one to tell.

1

Tiao was preoccupied on the aeroplane to Austin; Fan’s bitter face was flashing in front of her eyes all the way. She knew she had upset Fan, and this time she’d used Mike. Why would she mention Mike when Fan was talking about the several brief affairs she’d had? Using Mike as counterpart to Fan’s short-term lovers made it seem like Mike had become Tiao’s lover, or at least implied that Mike was going to. This wasn’t Tiao’s style; it sounded a little like bragging, it was immodest, and seemed like a conscious provocation of Fan. But maybe that was what she had intended; gradually realizing Fan’s weaknesses, she’d provoked her on purpose, although she was reluctant to admit it to herself. Perhaps, though, she hadn’t said it to provoke her but, instead, only wanted to indulge herself. Breathing foreign air seemed particularly conducive to self-indulgent thoughts, even if they merely remained thoughts. In another country no one pays attention to you or bothers to talk to you, unlike those above or below her in the Publishing House, pleasant or unpleasant, and those incompetent little plots they liked to spin and believed to be clever. There were also one or two men in particular who were corrupt. If you went along with them, you would win their cheap approval; if you looked down on their contemptible behaviour, they would get back at you with ten times the contemptible behaviour. You don’t have to notice, but it’s hard to ignore because it’s such a part of the reality of your life. In another country no one pays attention to you or bothers to talk to you, so you pay attention to yourself, which means indulging yourself, caring for yourself and not caring too much about what others think. Yes, not caring too much. In her own country she cared too much, every word she said and every action she took, every time she made a move, her job in the Publishing House, the chance to advance her position, the chasing after national book awards every year, and the profit the Publishing House made … every slipup might result in a huge loss. Caring too much should be the opposite of being cruel, right? She needed compensation, and she had the right to it, any compensation, good or bad. She needed to escape from her own demons and carve out a space for herself, her own space in which she could care for herself. Where was it? Was it here, in other people’s country? Wasn’t the conclusion a little absurd? She could find her own space only in someone else’s country.

She cast a glance from the corner of her eye at the neighbour on her right, an American man with blond hair and conservative dress, who had the look of a senior corporate executive. He let down the tray table soon after the aeroplane took off and started to write something on a stack of paper. He was left-handed, as many Americans seemed to be. That was how Tiao noticed the fancy oval cuff link on his expensive-looking shirt. It must have been silver, with a kind of black luster like titanium’s. Even senior executives wouldn’t wear cuff links every day, so the appearance of the left-handed man beside her suggested that an important occasion awaited him as soon as he got off the aeroplane. Of all the accessories for men, Tiao was fondest of cuff links, and found them elegant. The impression might have come from a pair of cuff links that Wu had, which were eighteen-carat gold and diamond and had belonged to Wu’s father, Tiao’s grandfather. The story went that the grandfather’s lover had sent the cuff links to him as a gift when he returned from studying in England. The gift from the lover eventually came into the hands of his daughter, Wu, which must have made her feel uncomfortable. She had saved them probably because her love for the cuff links surpassed her disgust for her mother’s rival. It was the pair of old diamond-studded cuff links that wakened Tiao’s initial secret yearning for men. She asked Wu hundreds of times about the lover, with appreciation, sympathy, and envy that crossed generations. Only at a distance of generations could someone respond to a family’s complicated suffering with those emotions. Unfortunately, Tiao had never seen pictures of her grandfather’s lover, which, according to Wu, had all been burned by Tiao’s grandmother. Later, when Tiao’s relationship with Fang Jing was at its unsteadiest, she’d even thought about stealing her grandfather’s cuff links and giving them to him. She was really crazy, so crazy that she got the roles thoroughly confused. Obsessed with becoming Fang Jing’s wife, she decided to follow the example of her grandfather’s distant lover, who was so tenacious with her love. Did she understand this as the dream of all women — to be the best wife for a man and at the same time to be his best mistress? No, Tiao wasn’t aware of it; she was far from reaching this kind of self-realization.