‘Uncle Wang keeps everything to himself,’ Jiaojiao said. ‘I bet he hasn’t told you that your mother-in-law’s his step-mother.
‘Uncle Wang’s real mother is a peasant,’ she went on. ‘His father left her behind and got a new wife when he moved to the city, that’s Uncle Wang’s step-mother. She’s my auntie.
‘When she couldn’t have children, Uncle Wang’s father wanted to bring him from the countryside, but his real mother wouldn’t let him go, so his father got two relatives to kidnap him. Uncle Wang’s real mother was out of her mind with fury. She was so mad she started to pull the kang to pieces with her bare hands … you know, the mudbrick beds we use in the countryside, with a fire underneath to heat them …’
Tianyi was struck dumb. The whole story was almost too fantastic to be true! She felt devastated, totally unprepared for a revelation like this. Her first reaction was: How could he have kept such a big thing from me? If he could keep that from me, what else might he be hiding? Her second reaction was: If it’s true, then the whole family’s completely immoral! Her third was: How traumatic it must have been for him. Jiaojiao said it had happened when he was seven or eight years old. In that case, he must remember his birth mother. So why had he never mentioned her, or acknowledged her? What a dreadful business!
No, she could not believe that Lian knew about it. She could not! Jiaojiao must have mis-remembered his age, he must have been too small to remember. Lian’s honest, earnest face floated before her eyes. It was impossible that such a guileless man could have pulled the wool over her eyes. He could not possibly know. She must tell him, immediately, it was too tragic for him not to know who his birth mother was! She did not sleep a wink that night.
And that was the cause of Lian and Tianyi’s first proper fight. As soon as Lian came back from his business trip, Tianyi burst out with her appalling revelation. To her amazement, he said nothing, nothing at all. Instinct told her that he had known, had known all about it. He looked completely unmoved, just as if it was all quite normal, and the more worked up she got, the more he withdrew into silence. She frequently said things that were unwise when she was in a state. And he seemed to be deliberately winding her up, leading her to say things which would have been better left unsaid.
‘Why don’t you say anything? Did you know about it, or not?’
‘I want to know how you feel about it! That’s really important to me!’
‘Tell me something! Are you going to go looking for your birth mother? She may be a peasant, old and poor, but she’s still your mother! You knew when I had Niuniu how much a mother bleeds and suffers when she gives birth! How can you forget your beginnings like that?!’
She probably said a lot more too, she didn’t remember. What she did remember was Lian’s sudden, silent explosion of rage. It left her absolutely terrified. First came a crash so loud that she was quite sure the whole building must have heard it and been shocked into silence. Then she saw her beloved tape-recorder. It was in tiny pieces.
She had acquired it in the third year of university. She had asked a classmate who was good with electrical stuff to come and choose it with her. She was a girl who lived frugally, and when she bought something, she chose with great care. She and her friend went through every item on the shelves, until they finally settled on a Taiwan-made machine, of decent quality. That was 1981, and she had one of the best tape-recorders in her year group. Now, after looking after it so carefully over the years, it had come to a sorry end.
When the echoes had died away and quiet descended once more, she said nothing more. She put on her coat and scarf, flung out of the door and into the teeth of a snowstorm. She peddled madly through the storm on her bike. It did not bother her — she was still young and energetic, still physically fit from her time in the commune. But very soon she realized there was someone chasing her, going as fast as she was. She trod furiously on the pedals but he caught her up at the junction of Weigongcun Road.
‘Get lost!’ she screamed into the whistling gale. The dark figure on the pursuing bicycle braked. She heard: ‘You’re so fierce, no wonder Lian doesn’t stand up to you!’ Up close, she saw the black figure was very slender. It was Di.
The snowstorm that evening seemed to swallow up all the houses. It was too late for Di to go home, so she stayed with Tianyi, and Lian slept on the sofa. Di had little sympathy for Tianyi’s rage. She just said, over and over again: ‘Lian has his reasons. Don’t go making wild guesses, and stop forcing yourself on him.’ The two talked far into the night. The next day Lian apologized but Tianyi felt instinctively that he did not really think he had been in the wrong.
When they separated many years later, Tianyi spent a long time searching her memories. She came to the conclusion that that night, when he broke her tape-recorder, was the beginning of the rift in their relationship, a rift that never healed. It showed how different their values were. Tianyi even believed that if Lian had told her about his mother at the start, she might well not have married him. Of course, that was just conjecture.
11
N iuniu had been such a lively, chubby baby, but when he came back from Lian’s parents he was listless, and thinner too. His legs looked scrawny and short, as if he was under-nourished.
Lian went on a frantic search for remedies, buying up all the bone-strengthening infusions, zinc and iron supplements he could lay his hands on but nothing made any difference and, when Niuniu started at nursery, he was the smallest in his class. Tianyi just said: ‘What on earth were your parents doing with him?’ Lian pressed his lips together in a furious silence. This made Tianyi even angrier. The more she thought about it, the more she felt it was her in-laws’ fault. Every day when she picked him up, she rushed to the school canteen and peeped in through the crack in the door. She spotted his large head immediately. He was not eating, she could see that. He just played with his food, poking at it with his chopsticks. She found it distressing to watch. This was her son, the beloved baby she had nurtured for nine months in her womb, and given birth to in such agony that the first time she set eyes on him, she glared at him, convinced the nurses were giving her the wrong baby. Of course, the second time, she was in no doubt. He was hers, this small person with his smooth head and flawless complexion. She would never forget his sweet smile when he was two months old. It was more beautiful than anything she had ever seen. He had his father’s mouth, small but very mobile and widening into a startling smile. He had been such a sweet child, sucking down his mother’s milk with resounding, greedy gulps that astonished all the other mothers in the ward. Yet this baby, so bonny at birth, had turned into a skinny little runt, his bright, intelligent eyes now dull and listless. It was common in children who did not get enough love. She felt ashamed. She hid her shame deep inside her, but it was exquisitely tender to the touch.
Good mothers needed to love selflessly. She was not a good mother. Firstly, she did not sleep with her baby, the way most mothers did, because his slightest fidget woke her up. Actually, she could not share her bed with anyone. So when, all those years later, she read Milan Kundera’s Unbearable Lightness of Being, she felt a shock of recognition. The surgeon Tomas was an inveterate womaniser yet was unable to share his bed with anyone. Except Tereza, the girl who drifted into his life like a little basket bobbing on water; with her, he had been able to sleep, hand in hand. No doubt many Chinese readers found that sentimental, but personally Tianyi understood it only too well. She felt she was just like Thomas. People like them, whether they were God’s chosen or God’s rejects, or one way or another had been singled out by God’s patronage, had an unequivocal need for their ‘other half’. If they failed to find their other half, then they were reduced to flotsam, destined to drift alone and lonely in the world for the rest of their lives. God had not endowed this child she had thought so wonderful with any natural gifts at all.