Niuniu was two-and-a-half months old. He was such a bonny baby! She used to try and step back, to see him as others did, and her conclusion was always: this little boy was, by any criterion, the bonniest baby she had ever seen. He had beautiful big, limpid eyes, their whites verging on blue, fringed with long eyelashes, enfolded within almond-shaped eyelids; clearly-outlined, cherry lips. His prominent nose and almond eyes were as delicately-crafted as those of a doll. On the day he was one month old, Tianyi took him to the doctor’s to be weighed. When he plumped down on the scales, even the doctor’s mouth dropped open in disbelief. In the first month of his life, this chubby little baby had put on a whole five pounds!
Tianyi cradled him with the utmost care. His sturdy, supple little body was a translucent, alabaster-white all over, with the exception of a purple birthmark on his bottom, the exact same shape as the mark on that Russian leader Gorbachev’s face. Lian joked that their baby had taken the map-like port wine stain off Gorbachev and stuck it on his bum. When he had filled himself with milk, he lay in her arms in the sunshine, and gazed at his mother. One day, his little mouth split open in a smile, such a sweet, glittering smile that Tianyi was almost afraid. It was wholly self-aware, nothing like the instinctive parting of the lips when he had taken his fill. My baby can smile! My baby recognizes me! They said that a baby knows its mother at three months, how come he recognized her at less than two months? He was clearly exceptionally intelligent. Tianyi’s secret delight was no different from that of any ordinary housewife. She suddenly felt she had been drawn into the ranks of foolish mothers and, if she did not take care, she would never get out again!
It was no good! She had to pull back from the brink before it was too late. In her research paper on bisexuality, Tianyi had given her opinion that women were their own worst enemies. And the facts proved it. Look at those swollen-breasted women just delivered of daughters, who had scarcely recovered from the pain of childbirth before they started planning for a son. Were women really born masochists?
Tianyi gritted her teeth and dosed herself with Chinese herbal medicine to dry up her milk supply. Weaning proved to be easy, very easy indeed. But for some unexplained reason, Tianyi suddenly lost a lot of weight after she stopped breast-feeding. She became scrawny, and looked unhealthy. Her chin sharpened, dark rings appeared around her eyes, her nose was oddly red, and her face mottled. She had lost all her good looks. Tianyi felt that if her face got any thinner, she would look like a leprechaun. She just could not bring herself to look in the mirror, could not be bothered to. She put away all the mirrors in the house, and wore sunglasses when she went out of doors. Even so, she was recognized by an old acquaintance at the bus stop, the editor of a women’s magazine. The woman did not mince her words. ‘What on earth have you done to yourself?’ she exclaimed. ‘Most women look fair and plump after they have a child. How come you’ve gone so dark and skinny? I hope you’re not ill! You need to see a doctor.’
Tianyi laughed it off at the time, but the more she thought about it afterwards, the more afraid she felt. She consulted the deputy-head of the Hospital for Chinese medicine, a very well-known physician. As the old man took her pulse, he looked increasingly grave. ‘Have you resumed relations with your husband since the birth?’ he asked.
‘Once,’ said Tianyi.
‘You’re pregnant again.’
‘But I can’t be!’ I’ve only just had a period …!’
‘That wasn’t a true period, just an indication that you might lose it.’
Tianyi was aghast. Her legs turned to jelly and she could hardly stumble out of the hospital. She found herself looking at a woman at the road-side, guzzling down a pancake wrapped around two fried eggs and dripping yellow oil. She saw the woman’s mouth greedily opening and shutting, completely at odds with her scrawny body. Tianyi stood rooted to the spot, watching. How lucky that woman is, she thought, she can eat anything she wants and not get fat. There were, she considered, two kinds of women she most envied in the world, those who could eat all they wanted without getting fat, and the other kind, those who could have as much sex as they wanted without getting pregnant. Unfortunately, she fell into neither category: she put on weight from a sip of cold water, and a man only had to touch her for her to get pregnant. The polar opposite!
A friend fixed Tianyi up with an abortion. She was surprised that, even after having had one baby, the procedure was so painful. The problem was that she was over-sensitive and, even after the anaesthetic had been administered, she could hear every tiny, icy metallic sound. The sounds followed her for years afterwards. If she ever heard anything like that again, she would shake uncontrollably. After the procedure, the doctor showed it to her: ‘Look how perfectly formed she is.’ That reduced her to tears. A little girl, she thought to herself, that was my daughter, my son’s little sister. Poor little girl, to disappear just like that. If she had lived, she would have been one year younger than Niuniu.
‘You didn’t do a proper confinement the first time,’ the woman doctor told her. ‘You need a mini-confinement for a miscarriage so take the opportunity to get really well.’ Tianyi took the woman’s words to heart, and got a nanny to come and look after Niuniu. Then she concentrated on looking after herself and regaining her strength. Mrs Zhang, the nanny, was from Anhui province, in her fifties and extremely myopic. Tianyi wanted her to take good care of her baby so she went out of her way to be nice to the woman and Mrs Zhang responded with gratitude. A little while later, when Lian sent Niuniu off to his parents’ house to give Tianyi some peace and quiet, the nanny went with him. The day of their departure, Tianyi looked at her baby, a muslin scarf covering his face, fragile as a lily, sleeping contentedly after his feed, and about to be borne away by his grandfather. How he would wail when he woke up! She tried to push the thought out of her mind. She felt her heart was breaking. She finally understood what ‘broken-hearted’ meant. It was no exaggeration.
In the morning, Lian got up and went to work. Tianyi lay alone in bed, her head teeming with thoughts. Lian was very good to her but she was quite sure that this was not how she wanted to live. When it was nearly midday, she realized that Lian had not taken the pork ribs out to unfreeze. She got up and opened the freezer lid, feeling a sudden chill emanating from the package, penetrating her hand, travelling up her arm. The chill seemed to freeze right inside her and swell. Her palms itched, and she could not bring her fingers together.
Lian arrived back from work to be greeted by a chorus of complaints from Tianyi: ‘It was all your fault, you don’t look after me, I had to get them out of the freezer myself, I couldn’t get a grip on them …’ Lian did not pay much attention. In his view, Tianyi was just acting spoilt. ‘Fine, fine, I’ll make you a nice dinner. We’ll have lamb with scallions, and pork ribs and mouli soup, how about that?’
Tianyi had to admit that Lian was a very good cook indeed. He was quick and economical, and everything he produced smelled, looked and tasted great. Tianyi remembered reading once that a good husband should, first, give his wife plenty of spending money and, second, make sure she had nice meals. There was a third criterion but she had forgotten it. In any case, Lian got one of those right, and that was a lot better than men who failed to manage any.
Lian’s cooking was always fresh. Now she had eaten his food, she always felt that restaurant food was somehow not very fresh and too oily. His stir-fried vegetables emerged glossy and green. His casseroled meat was appetisingly brown and tender. When they had finished their meal this evening, they put the TV on, and watched right through from the News until shutdown, and the screen filled with snow. Mexican soap operas were broadcast every day in those days. Bianca had just concluded and Libel was on. The plots were boring but Tianyi and Lian snuggled up together and watched the episodes end to end.