I have never thought that the family alone could generate in an individual such powerful negative feelings.
Not long after my father left, an official order came down for the demolition of the houses on our block, and we were given two apartments in a new high-rise residential complex in the western sector of the city.
To our good fortune, it was fated that Ho would move into the same building, two floors directly below my own apartment.
Mr. Ge from the courtyard in front of us had disappeared without a trace after the murder of his wife, and his daughter's family had moved into the house. So she too was moved into our building.
On the day that Mother, Widow Ho, and I went to look at our new quarters, the building, which had just been completed, towered gray and empty on the construction site. As there had not been time to plant trees and grass, the surrounding land was barren on all sides. Like a man caught naked in broad daylight, the building seemed displeased and unwilling to be seen, and we had to look for a long time before we found the path to the main entrance.
The elevator wasn't working yet, so we started up the narrow but gently inclined stairway. After climbing around and around, Mother and I finally found ourselves standing at the end of a hallway on the eleventh floor before the door to a three-room apartment.
It was a depressing door, gray and huge. As we stood there catching our breath, I noticed that the weak, unsteady light came from a ventilation hole covered with a steel grid, which served as a sort of skylight in a corner above the door on the left. Through a crack in the door I could hear a strange, faint noise, perhaps from air in the water or heating pipes, that sounded like unbroken sneezing from some tormented netherworld. I put my ear against the door, straining to hear more clearly, but the noise had faded away.
This was to be my mother's apartment, my own being down the corridor. At the very outset, a kind of cold, ominous premonition had twisted its way out through the crack in my mother's door and crawled up onto my face. In some vague way, through that gray steel door that made me step back as soon as I looked at it, I felt I had touched upon something associated with death. This totally groundless premonition made me reluctant to open the door for my mother, as if doing so would open the door to some disaster.
And in fact, not too many years later this turned out to be true.
It was a dreadfully hot and long summer. Like unleavened loaves of steamed bread that never seem to be done, no matter how long you leave them in the steamer, the days dragged by interminably. I opened all the windows in my apartment, but it was very noisy outside because on the opposite side of the street not too far from our building, another high-rise apartment building was under construction. From my window, where I could see the scaffolding that was being erected in the construction area, the building modules seemed more like toys than actual parts of the building. I stood by my window thinking that it wouldn't be long before that building too would be jammed full of people, all separated by walls into their own square spaces, all living their not very real lives.
I turned around and examined my own place. The light blue of the lower part of the walls looked back at me serenely. The front room, the kitchen, the bathroom, and the bedroom – all told me that this was a home where I could pass the days peacefully. The hubbub of the crowded living of earlier years was a thing of the past. The furniture and the walls would no longer be troubled by the tension and confusion caused by the endless traffic of people.
I had always dreamed of having a place of my own, because it is a prerequisite for the pursuit of a life of reflection.
In her apartment down the corridor from mine, my mother was trying to recover from the invisible "wound" left by her almost twenty years of marriage; and I could communicate with Widow Ho, resting on her big, soft, warm bed in the apartment two floors below mine, by knocking on the water pipes. And more important than this, my special silent conversations with her were not impeded by the concrete slabs separating the building's floors. With my mother and my dearest friend so close to me, I was calmer and more at ease than I had ever been before.
Late one evening an unexpected guest suddenly arrived at the door of my new apartment.
I assumed that it was Ho coming to see me, so when the bell rang, stuffing my feet in my slippers and slipping into a cotton T-shirt that reached to my thighs, I went to open the door.
When I opened it, I was caught completely off guard.
Tall and handsome and dressed to the nines, Mr. Ti was standing there holding a bouquet of fresh flowers. His flashing eyes betrayed a kind of confusion, but he had a stiff smile fixed firmly on his face.
For the two months prior to the university entrance exams the students studied at home and no longer attended classes, so I had not seen him for three months.
Ti's sudden appearance left me confused, especially the unexpected bouquet of flowers. I had no idea what I should do. A cold chill ran through me to my very fingertips, which felt like icicles.
For many years, Ti and I had apparently been caught in some kind of subtle entanglement or relationship, but it had always been like a balloon pushed beneath the water's surface, lurking there where I wasn't quite conscious of its existence. Perhaps it was our uncertainty and blindness that had exasperated him to the point where he was at times rude and contemptuous toward me, and at other times affectedly solicitous and understanding.
This abrasive, confrontational, even antagonistic relationship had gone on this way for many years.
My feminine intuition had made me dimly aware that these years of confrontation and antagonism perhaps stemmed from some latent, unspoken danger that had always had a secret existence between us, even though I couldn't clearly identify it. So I instinctively avoided him, keeping him at a distance.
When I opened the door and suddenly saw him again, after we had already parted, it felt like the huge door that had been closed between us had been reopened, catching me completely by surprise.
Standing there at the door, I was nonplussed for a moment; then I moved aside and invited him in, while I very self-consciously pulled down on my big T-shirt.
Ti said, "I've come to congratulate you."
I was terribly embarrassed, my face flushed hot, and for a while I could think of nothing to say.
Finally, when he was already in the living room, with a great effort I managed to say, "Sit down."
He again said, "I"ve come to congratulate you!" and the stiff smile on his face seemed to relax a bit.
Awkwardly and a little coldly, I said, "For what?"
"For all that you've managed," he said.
After he sat down on the sofa, since I still hadn't gone over to take the flowers from him, he very casually put them down on the tea table in front of him. I sat down in the chair facing him.
He rattled on about whatever he could think of, not at all like the urbane teacher at the front of the classroom. I responded somehow or other, not really thinking about what I was saying.
I felt very uneasy sitting there, because my thighs were almost completely exposed.
Eventually I drummed up enough courage to stand up and say, "I'm going to put on something more suitable."
"It's not necessary, Niuniu. I like you the way you are." He paused a moment, then went on, "Your legs are slim and shapely. They're extremely beautiful." As he spoke, he stood up as if he were going to stop me, as if he were afraid I was going to leave to change my clothes.
I hesitated a moment, then went to the bedroom.