Su Tong: Madwoman On the Bridge and Other Stories

The doctor made a grimace of irritation and laughed at them coldly. ‘You don’t want to have a giant baby, do you?’ he said, ‘If you want a normal child, this much is plenty.’

In winter, the doctor would often sit in the sun with the barber from across the road. He was particularly alert when anyone went in or out of town, and asked the barber to warn him if he should ever see a woman wearing a straw hat. Of course, the barber was curious about what lay behind such a mysterious instruction. The doctor, however, though he had been on the point of telling him several times, simply told him that someone held a grudge against him and that sooner or later she was bound to come calling.

Towards the end of the year, a woman with a straw hat did indeed appear on the town’s street, leading a boy of a little over ten. Both were dressed in rags and seemed worn out by the journey. People quite naturally connected their arrival with the floods south of the mountains, since quite a few victims of the disaster had already come to beg in the wealthy area around Liushui.

As they passed by a noodle shop, the well-meaning owner ran out after them with a bowl of noodles that someone had left unfinished and handed it to the boy. Much to her shock, he glared fiercely at her and heaved the bowl back in her face. With a cry, she brushed off the spilt noodles, then she turned on the woman with the straw hat, swearing at her, ‘Damn you! Damn you! What kind of mother are you? Is that how you raise your son?’ She saw the woman incline her head and suddenly lift off the cloth covering her face to reveal her burnt and gruesome countenance. ‘This is the kind of mother I am, and this is how I raise my son,’ she said.

The noodle shop wasn’t far from the clinic, and the doctor heard the owner’s sharp cry of surprise from inside. By the time he went out to see what had happened, Ju Chunhua and the giant baby were already standing on the steps. The doctor saw that in his hands the baby was holding the umbrella he had left that day in Wangbao. His mind went completely blank and he mumbled, ‘So you’ve come. I knew you would. But I don’t want anything to do with the two of you.’

Ju Chunhua looked at him from under her straw hat. Against the sunlight, you could see dust drifting slowly up from her hat and clothes. As if she hadn’t heard his muttering, she pushed the giant baby forward and said, ‘Give daddy his umbrella back.’

The giant baby grinned at him, revealing a row of pitch-black, much-worn teeth. He squeezed the umbrella into the doctor’s hand and then used his right hand to tug at the doctor’s beard. The four fingers on the baby’s hand were perfectly round but very coarse, and they moved wantonly on the doctor’s chin. Under the caresses of the giant baby, the doctor trembled from head to toe. He felt as if he had suddenly shrunk to the size of an infant. The giant baby, with his breath of garlic mixed with tobacco smoke, reminded him of his own childhood. It was an awful smell, the smell of nightmares, and he realized that it was absolutely identical to that of his father and grandfather. Fear and disgust filled his heart. He gripped the baby’s wrists and said, ‘Don’t do that. I’m not your father.’

The baby turned back to look at his mother. The doctor, too, gave her a pleading look and said, ‘You shouldn’t lie to a child about a thing like that. Who is his father anyway? You can’t just make up whatever you like.’

Ju Chunhua, standing on the sunlit stairs, suddenly belched. ‘If he says he isn’t your daddy, then he isn’t your daddy. And if he’s not your daddy, then he’s our enemy. Revenge, child! Revenge!’

Then the doctor received a slap on the face that made his bones smart. The baby was brandishing his four-fingered fist, screaming, ‘Revenge, revenge!’ The doctor fell down the steps, not only because he had received such a fierce blow, but also because it felt like he had experienced a proverbial bolt from the blue, a bolt that had struck him on the cheek. The doctor forgot his pain and allowed the tears of panic to flow freely.

* * *

The year was nearing its end, and there were already children around setting off premature firecrackers. In the spot where Ju Chunhua had disappeared with the baby, there was now a man selling holiday goods and flirting with a group of women. Through the pain, the doctor regarded the town as it prepared for the festival. These oblivious people, he thought. They don’t know the giant baby has come. They’re still in the dark. They don’t know the baby is walking through this town with his mother right now. They don’t realize that this year vengeful blows will replace the bangers and firecrackers. Blows coming like bolts from the sky, striking every person once on the face.

And, oh, will it hurt.

1 Azalea Mountain , written by Wang Shuyuan, was a popular play about the heroine He Xiang and her revolutionary exploits in the late 1920s. The play was adapted into pingju and several Beijing Opera scripts (‘revolutionary’ and otherwise), as well as a 1974 film version.

2A famous aria from Shajiabang , another revolutionary opera, named after a centre of Communist resistance to the Japanese invasion. The town lies on Yangcheng Lake, north of Suzhou in the east of Jiangsu Province.

3Tragic heroine of Cao Xueqin’s 18th Century novel, Dream of the Red Chamber . Frail and emotional, she is associated with melancholy and tears.

4Many Chinese cities have outlying zones set aside to attract investment, typically offering preferential taxation and financial-support policies. A position in such a zone is, in general, highly desirable.

5The Republic of China was established in 1912 (Year 1), after the fall of the Qing Dynasty. The thirteenth year of the Republic would therefore be 1924.

6A festival on the twenty-third of the final lunar month, a week before the New Year’s Festival.

7The Hongmen banquet was an incident during the Chu-Han contention (206–202 bc), a civil war which followed the end of the Qin Dynasty. The warrior Xiang Yu tried to eliminate his rival Liu Bang during a feast held in his honour. In modern Chinese, it suggests a trap during festivities.

8Tang Yin (1470–1523), also known as Tang Bohu, a leading Ming Dynasty painter.

9A Qing Dynasty reign name, lasting from 1796 to 1820, more than 250 years after Tang Yin’s life.

10There is such a place on the Three Gorges. The word being used for goddess in this story can, however, also be a (rather archaic) euphemism for a prostitute. The Chinese reader is likely to make this association by the end of this story.

11A short canon of Chinese Communist heroes. Lei Feng (1940–62) was the archetype of the ‘nameless hero’, selfless and revolutionary. Having died in an accident, he became the model for an official ‘Learn from Lei Feng’ movement. Wang Jie (1942–65) sacrificed his own life and saved those of twelve other men in an accidental dynamite blast. Qiu Shaoyan (1931–52) was a Korean War hero who burned to death rather than move and reveal his unit’s position.

12The song is ‘The People of the World will Be Victorious’, written ‘collectively’ by the national philharmonic in reaction to Mao Zedong’s statement in May 1970 for the ‘people of the world to unite, and defeat the American aggressors and their running dogs’.

13Cai Yi (1906–92), Marxist thinker whose work New Aesthetics contained an influential discussion of the ‘image’.

14Licheng means ‘Pear City’.

Born in 1963 in Suzhou and now living in Nanjing with his family, Su Tong is one of China’s most celebrated bestselling authors, shooting to international fame in 1993 when Zhang Yimou’s film of his novella Raise the Red Lantern was nominated for an Oscar. Madwoman on the Bridge is his first collection of short stories to be published in English. It is to be followed by his latest novel, Check , a violent drama set in the aftermath of the Cultural Revolution, to be published by Doubleday in 2009.