‘Lina Duan!’ she cried. Ji, at the other end of the phone call, said nothing. Tianyi was nonplussed. Why wasn’t he saying anything? ‘That girl’s eyes are remarkable, don’t you think? Even though she was dressed in rags, her character shone through, like a princess fallen on hard times, don’t you think …?’ She babbled on until she ran out of things to say. It dawned on her that there was still silence at the other end of the phone.
It was an afternoon in the middle of summer, and Tianyi had gone to the neighbourhood residents’ committee office to take Ji’s call, as they did not have a phone at home. It was quite a business to apply for a phone to be installed in those days, and it took a long time, so Tianyi always gave people the residents’ committee number and got the woman to come and fetch her. The phone booth window was open, and outside some old ladies were fanning themselves in the shade. It began to drizzle, and a great dark cloud settled overhead. The old ladies picked up their stools and, holding their fans over their heads, scuttled for cover, all except for the one in charge of the phone who came into the booth. Then something happened that Tianyi was never able to explain: there was a clap of thunder and a streak of white light shot from the telephone. Instinctively, Tianyi flung the receiver from her but just at that moment, it was as if something stabbed her in the ear. I’m finished, she thought. But it only lasted an instant, no more. Then it was gone, leaving nothing behind. And Tianyi could not recall what the pain had felt like, except that it was like a solid object thrusting into her ear canal. Days later, when the pain had completely gone, Tianyi suddenly realized that she was feeling a wonderful emotional release.
While Tianyi was still in this elated mood, filming began for The Tree of Knowledge. The female lead was Kexing and finally Tianyi understood the director’s laborious hints. But then she put her foot in it once again.
‘You can’t have Kexing!’ she burst out without thinking. ‘She’s the very opposite of how I imagined the female lead would be. How can she play her?’ She was talking to the assistant director. Then she added: ‘She can’t play the heroine. But she could play Shanshan, she’s got the right kind of shrewdness.’
At the next production team, Kexing dropped all pretences at affection and went stony cold on Tianyi. Ji was as polite and respectful as he had always been. ‘Mrs Yang,’ he said, ‘when the film is finished, I hope you’ll help us with promoting it.’ In those days, Tianyi had no idea what doing business meant.
She did not sleep well that night. Insomnia was a chronic problem, and she never found a long-term cure for it. It had got better for a short time after she got married, and she was actually able to sleep through Lian’s stentorian snoring. But after her baby was born, it got worse again, because she was not sharing a bed with Lian. He had the baby in his bed, she had to sleep alone.
She was nine years old when the problem began. (Heavens! Was she really that young?) The culprit was the novel, The Story of the Stone. The complete set of volumes had just come out in an illustrated edition, and her father bought them for Tianyue, who had just started middle school. However, there was no way he was going to let Tianyi and Tianke read it.
Each of the three children had their place in the family, and Tianyi was her father’s pet. He never stopped treating her as his little girl, even when she was grown up, but he never knew what really went on deep in his darling daughter’s heart, nor the extent of her curiosity. The very evening that he issued his edict about The Story of the Stone, Tianyi scrambled to the top shelf of the book case at dead of night. She took down the book, still fragrant with the smell of printing ink.
As she leafed through the book, looked for the first time at the fine-line illustrations, and read the names of the star-struck lovers, Baoyu and Daiyu, she was gripped. She had read about love before, mostly in the huge assortment of children’s picture books (more than 400 of them), most of which had been collected by her big sister. Tianyue was neat and tidy and kept all four hundred-odd books arranged in four drawers, to keep them clean, and had listed every one so that if any of the neighbours’ children came to borrow them, she could note down the date they were borrowed and the date they were returned, and it was all nice and clear.
As a small girl, Tianyi loved copying pictures of pretty ladies from these children’s books, in fact she filled a whole notebook with her drawings. She copied the ‘Parrot Girl’ from a calendar they had too, a girl dressed in ancient costume, smiling and holding a fan with a parrot perch on a circular stand behind her. Mrs Feng, who ran the local library saw Tianyi’s efforts, and liked them so much she offered to teach Tianyi to paint. Mrs Feng made traditional costume dolls and was somewhat reclusive, so when she offered to take on Tianyi as her pupil, the news swiftly spread through their compound. Tianyi instantly became known as their ‘little artist’.
These picture books, with their cast of female characters, passionate, tender or staunchly heroic, imperceptibly stole into Tianyi’s young heart, so when she opened the first volume of The Story of the Stone, she immediately recognized the hero and heroine, Baoyu and Daiyu, picking them out from among dozens of other characters. She chose the bits in the book that were about their love story, reading obsessively through the dark hours of the night, until finally she read herself into a state of complete mental exhaustion. Night after night, she went without sleep, going to school the next morning feeling unwell, her eyes and face puffy. Back then, Di used to drop by so that they could go to school together, and one day she found the book lying by her bedside. She read the first line: ‘The author had a dream and spake …’ ‘Oh!’ Di cried, ‘So the author of The Story of the Stone’s called “Spake”’. Scornfully, Tianyi said: ‘Whatever do you mean, “Spake”? “Spake is the past of to speak! How could you get to third grade without knowing that the author of The Story of the Stone was Cao Xueqin?’ Di, an unsophisticated girl, had always looked up to Tianyi, and now admiration turned into hero-worship. She put Tianyi on a pedestal, deferring to her in everything. There was no one to beat her friend, in her view, for knowledge, bravery, intelligence and good looks.
But too much living in fantasyland can take its toll on a little girl’s mental health, and Tianyi actually became delusional. She was put to bed, but even then, when no adult was watching her, she would sneak her copy of The Story of the Stone from under her pillow, and carry on reading. She got to Chapter 97, where Lin Daiyu burns her poems to signal the end of her heart’s folly and Xue Baochai leaves home to take part in a solemn rite.’ In her mind’s eye, she saw Daiyu, the hapless heroine, ashen pale, vomiting a stream of blood. Tears poured down Tianyi’s face like a tap that someone had forgotten to shut off, drenching the pillow cover, as she read Daiyu’s deathbed exhortations to her maid Nightingale. Increasingly self-pitying and troubled, she became convinced she was the dying girl. She was sleeping no more than a couple of hours a night, and her father became desperate to find medical treatment for her. Nothing worked however, and his darling daughter was becoming thinner before his very eyes. But the grim Reaper was not ready for her yet. One day, her paternal grandfather turned up.
Her grandfather still lived in the old family home in Shayang county, Hubei province. He was no ordinary granddad, having joined the Northern warlords and risen to a high rank in his youth. He had three sons and a daughter, but had passed down his love of military matters only to his eldest son, Tianyi’s Uncle Huairen, and not at all to her father or the youngest son.