Many years later, however, when she read Milan Kundera’s The Unbearable Lightness of Being and came across the surgeon Tomas who, in spite of his string of affairs with female nurses, insisted on sharing his bed only with his wife Teresa, she had to smile. It was nonsense for Tomas, or any man, to pretend that he could separate love and sex.
That evening, they were home very late. At the door, she had a premonition that something was wrong. Sure enough, no sooner had she stepped inside than Tianke thundered at her: ‘What the hell do you think you’re doing getting back this late! You two had this baby, don’t dump it on other people to look after! You know Mother’s not well! You know my work’s crazy! I’ve been slaving away all day and I have to come home and look after your child! What kind of people are you? What way is this to behave?!’
Tianke’s tirades were nothing new but, each time, it carried the same power to wound Tianyi to the core. His eyes seemed about to pop out of his sockets, and his spittle landed on her face. Short of screaming back at him, however, there was nothing for her to do but grin and bear it.
His shouting woke up Niuniu, who began to wail in terror. ‘Lian, I’m sorry, our Tianke just can’t behave decently,’ said Tianyi’s mother. She had got up and thrown on some clothes and stood between her son and her daughter, facing her son-in-law. ‘He’s certainly looked after the baby, carried him back and forth, and thank heavens he had the patience to do that. But now you’re back, and he can’t help but let off steam. He just can’t talk about it, he has to insult the two of you!’ Tianke grabbed hold of his mother: ‘Don’t waste your breath on them! Either I go or they can get the hell out of here! You choose. There’s nothing more to be said. I’ve had enough!’ This was too much for Tianyi. ‘We’re going!’ she shrieked. ‘How much longer are you going to go ranting on?’
Lian stood looking contrite, saying nothing. Tianke spoke to him: ‘Lian, don’t worry, I’m not getting at you personally. This family has been arguing for decades, we’re used to it! You ask Tianyi, isn’t that right?’ Then he added:’ When you married her, I was worried it wouldn’t last, because she’s so weird. If she was a good woman, would she have waited until she was such an old maid before she got married?!’
Somehow, Tianyi found the bottle of baby milk flying out of her hand. Tianke ducked, and the bottle smashed into the full-length mirror, making it craze all over into fragments like snowflakes. There was a moment’s silence, and their mother burst into floods of tears. ‘Oh my God! Now you see what a terrible temper she’s got, Lian! That’s how she treats us, there’s just the two of us, her mother and her little brother, now her Dad’s passed on, and I’m a poor old woman, and that’s how she treats us!’ This was followed by further wails.
Tianyi clutched her baby in arms that would not stop trembling. ‘Let’s go, Lian, let’s go! What are you waiting for?!’ Lian picked up Niuniu’s bag of things and silently followed Tianyi out of the house. Tianke’s furious shouting and swearing followed them all down the road. The Yang family rows made a deep impression on Lian. A dozen years later, when their marriage was truly on the rocks, Lian would stamp in rage and tick off on his fingers all Tianyi’s faults. Among them was her family’s propensity to loud quarrelling.
Two months after this incident, they finally got an apartment of their own, consisting of two bedrooms and a sitting-room in a modern concrete-built block. It was spacious, forty-six or forty-seven square metres. But for some reason, Tianyi did not take the same delight in this as she had with their first home. They had no money to renovate it properly. Tianyi bought the cheapest furniture she could find in the showroom, and still spent more than 700 yuan. It was all made of woodchip, and looked shabby by today’s standards, but it was all they could afford. She got a bed, bedside cabinets, a liquor cabinet, a wardrobe and a bookcase. It was obviously not enough, and Lian managed to pick up some wood from a nearby building site and get some migrant workers to knock together a dressing table, a writing desk and a crockery cupboard, and two more bookcases. The workmanship was shoddy and they charged Tianyi over 300 yuan, which was a week’s food bill. When Tianyi realized just how shoddy, and tried to get them back to fix it, they had vanished without trace.
Tianyi, who held the purse strings in the family, was annoyed. She had been earning her living as a writer for some years now and this money came from her writing, from the sweat of her brow. Money did not grow on trees, and when it was gone it was gone. She asked Lian but he said he did not have a cent in savings, which seemed incredible. But as time went by, she came to believe that Lian really did not have any money. He was a very strange person, one in a hundred, or perhaps one in a million. He was completely scatter-brained in everything he did, acting without planning or forethought. His monthly salary in those days was 300 yuan, and he handed over the lot to Tianyi. But he seemed to need double that, sometimes three or four times. He acted like Tianyi was a bottomless purse. Their relationship was like an accounts ledger: Lent: from Tianyi’s purse. Borrowed: for Lian’s spending. Tianyi came to feel increasingly that Lian was a wild child, grown up in the crack between the rocks, drifting through life completely rudderless. Lian used to say that Tianyi was his rudder. Tianyi was distressed to discover that Lian treated her not only as his wife but also as his mother. It was a terrible thing. The truth was that she herself longed to have a mother who loved her, made a fuss of her. But now Lian had thrust her into a dual role. She had to mother her son and her husband. It was intolerable!
Lian may have had no ready cash but, with an air of mystery, he told her that his family had savings, 50,000 yuan. That was a huge sum in the mid-1980s. But the family had only donated 1,200 yuan for the wedding of their precious only son. Lian had spent every cent of it, and now there was nothing left.
8
T ianyi really had not made enough preparation for her child’s birth, though there was no excuse at her age. In her heart of hearts, she had believed she could reclaim some of her youth by getting married. She did not want a child. She envied the childless yuppies of the west. Let hedonism rule! A late marriage should give her endless pleasure, endless love-making! They would earn big money and buy a car and a house! They would splash out on travel! They would stroll through shopping malls buying fancy clothes! They would have weekends away, go abroad! Emigrate! Whatever form it took, the future promised glittering excitements, but she never even got a taste of the cherry before the child made his grand entrance, and now he was here to stay.
What was even more galling, she loved this child. She felt like she was caught between the devil and the deep blue sea: her baby and the life she wanted to lead. Tianyi had never liked stark, black-and-white choices, but that was what she faced now. Again and again, she had to choose, and it was extremely painful. She had hoped and planned for a different future. Lian never made plans, he just lived from day to day. He never liked thinking very much, and he did not want her to think either.
When it came to looking after her child, Tianyi was intent on avoiding her responsibilities, at least at the start. She felt wounded — by the birth, by her post-natal confinement. She needed a good rest from it all. Whenever she went out, she felt reinvigorated. And she knew that if she was to go out more often, then she needed to do one thing: wean her child off the breast.