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It was a long time before Tianyi’s son was brought to her. The nurses told her she must be patient. ‘He was deprived of oxygen for five minutes, we need to keep him under observation.’ Finally, after a day had passed, the matron herself carried a baby into the room. ‘Look! Yang Tianyi,’ she said, ‘there’s nothing wrong with your son!’ Tianyi took the child from her, and all her imagined worries suddenly evaporated. Her son was perfect, his skin as sleek and smooth as if he were weeks, not hours, old. Tianyi called him Niuniu, little ox, because his birth year, 1985, was the year of the ox.

Niuniu was formally registered as ‘Wang Zhe’. This was a commanding, arrogant-sounding name chosen, like his nickname, by Tianyi. Lian just thought it was amusing. He followed her lead in everything and said little, no matter what she did.

Tianyi ran a fever for a week after the birth. One day, she sneaked a look at her medical chart. There were two closely-written pages of notes about foetal occiput posterior position, foetal distress, respiration of the new-born … and so on and so forth. It was all in medical language that she did not fully understand but still made her feel afraid. There was also a drawing of her vagina, and with two long lines of sutures, clearly marked. Tianyi remembered that the doctor had spent an hour and a half sewing her up after the birth. The cuts had become infected, which was why she had a temperature. They also hurt badly, but Tianyi was surprised to find that, after the baby was born, all the pain seemed numbed, and was quite bearable. Giving birth stripped a woman of her carapace and returned her to a more primitive state. If someone, some day, could invent a civilized way of giving birth, they would be doing immense service to humankind, she thought. Only then could women be truly liberated. Talking about women’s liberation and gender equality now was just a nonsense.

6

Tianyi and Lian had nowhere to live. Their old place was gloomy and had no heating, so was too cold for a baby. They had to move into the room Lian’s parents had rented for them after their wedding, even though it had a shared kitchen and bathroom. Tianyi was astonished at how glum her mother-in-law seemed, apparently unable to raise a smile. Her father-in-law, however, beamed with pleasure at the arrival of the latest little Wang. On her return from hospital, her in-laws looked after them, her father-in-law doing the cooking and her mother-in-law ferrying it to them, while Lian washed the nappies. Tianyi had slept badly in the hospital for a whole week and longed to catch up on some rest. Lian felt so sorry for her that he bundled the baby up and took him to his mother and grandmother to look after for the night. To Tianyi’s surprise, however, no sooner had she shut her eyes than Lian was back with the baby. Tianyi was furious but, when she saw the tears in Lian’s eyes, she swallowed back her anger. It was September, there was a cold wind as Lian carried him across the street, and Niuniu set up a loud wail. Tianyi felt wretched.

‘They said a baby shouldn’t leave its mother.’

‘Not even for a night?’

‘My grandmother said that a baby should be at the breast the whole time.’

Tianyi felt a yawning chasm open up before her, and smiled bitterly. Lian held both her and the baby in his arms, and tears ran down his face. ‘Don’t worry, soon it will be just the three of us and no one to tell us what to do.’ It was the first time that Tianyi saw Lian cry, and the last.

The next day, her in-laws brought dinner over but Tianyi could not get a mouthful down. By now, she had not slept for ten whole days. Her mother-in-law was grim-faced: ‘You two went ahead and had a baby without waiting till you were settled.’ She turned to Tianyi and said brusquely. ‘You got pregnant rather quickly, didn’t you?’ Tianyi was struck dumb. Was this the kind of thing a mother-in-law was supposed to say? She wanted to answer back: ‘Have you lost all humanity? Aren’t you a woman too? Did you never have a child? Aren’t you happy to hold your grandson in your arms?’ She forced herself to swallow the words back and say nothing. She simply could not be bothered. It was all so boring. How had she got herself into this situation? What was going on? Was this the kind of life she was going to have to live from now on? Heaven knows, it was a million miles from the kind of life she really wanted!

‘You got pregnant rather quickly, didn’t you?’ One woman’s criticism of another, the subtle resentment of a young woman by an older one. Tianyi sensed more but could not put a finger on it. She did not discover the real reason for her mother-in-law’s coldness until a couple of years later, by which time the cracks had begun to appear in her marriage.

Everything was different now that, seemingly out of the blue, a third person had arrived in the couple’s world. Niuniu was ravenous, and was taking three bottles of formula milk a day in addition to breast milk. Tianyi had a lot of milk, white, fragrant and rich. The neighbours all commented in astonishment that a woman of her age should have such good milk. Left alone after their visits, Tianyi revelled in the pleasure of motherhood, picking up Niuniu, marvelling at his soft warmth. ‘Look, light,’ she pointed out and his face turned upward. He had a funny little face, his little chin round like a button, no neck, and very large eyes between their enfolding lids. As the days wore on and Tianyi was stuck at home, she soon learnt what the ‘one-month confinement’ meant — pretty much like prison in her view. The only thing that made it better was this little person at her side. She could talk to him, gaze at his sweet little body.

She occupied herself with needlework. She had always done things like that, was better at it than most of her generation. That was thanks to her mother who, when Tianiyi was only six years old, had taught her to knit socks, using those big balls of white cotton yarn. Sometimes, she had used pink, or pale blue. Her mother taught her how to knit a heel and cast off. She was a quick learner, and was soon better at it than her mother. With her unusual aptitude, the socks she knitted looked as if they could have been shop-bought. Then her mother taught her to embroider, to net string-bags, and knit with wool. It took her no time at all to pick up the skills. Her mother had two thick pads of pattern paper, densely covered in embroidered patterns. One of the designs was rather strange: a half-opened flower, at its centre a beautiful girl with very long eyelashes. She practiced the design over and over for a whole evening, using madder pink thread for the petals, light blending to dark and at its deepest at the very centre of the blossom. She made the leaves dark green, and the beauty’s cherry-like lips were scarlet. She was pleased with her results, until her grandmother brought out the teacup coasters she had embroidered when she was young. Flowers embroidered in gold thread on sapphire blue satin, and a pattern of lotus blossoms and roots on a pale green satin background. They were exquisite. On the sapphire blue coasters, the flowers were all edged in gold thread, drawn with an extraordinary sureness of line. The effect was like that of Rococo stained glass. On the pale green piece, silver thread predominated, and the lotus flowers were in a jade white. Both pieces had an embroidered edging, executed in a traditional style with particular skill. The embroidery was so fine on the blooms that there was not the slightest gap to be seen, and it looked like a solid piece of satin.

When she first saw the coasters, Tianyi felt truly moved. They seemed to give her a peek into the lives of women generations before. She thought of her mother and her maternal grandmother, their skin lily-white because it had never seen the sun’s rays, the figure-hugging qipao gowns, with their high necklines, that reposed in their trunks. She suddenly felt a rush of admiration for these old-fashioned women. Perhaps tradition had something going for it after all.