In my novel, Feathered Serpent, the hero says: ‘The past ten years have allowed the genie out of the bottle; the devil has slipped out and can never be put back in the bottle. The country will rise, economic material will be gained, and we will catch up with advanced countries; but what about the realms of the spiritual and metaphysical? Will they ever be restored? This is a quandary that is more frightening than being poor.’1 Sadly, all my predictions in Feathered Serpent have come true.
As a young woman writing Feathered Serpent, I felt acute grief for my beloved country but powerless to change the situation. Along with this pain, I was suffering personal heartache, so every word was written in blood and tears. Crystal Wedding, on the other, is a simple record of what happened. When I wrote Feathered Serpent, I still had tears to cry, whereas now I am dry-eyed. If anything, hurting and not being able to cry runs even deeper and is even harder to cure.
My thanks to Nicky Harman, whose fine translation and hard work in finding a publisher for Crystal Wedding has helped make this book available to Western readers; to my publisher, Roh-Suan Tung, without whose perceptiveness and courage this translation might have taken a lot longer to come out; to Eric Abrahamsen, China expert, for his support for this book; and to my agent, Joanne Wang, who brought my previous novels to the outside world, for which I am extremely grateful.
I hope that Western readers will enjoy Crystal Wedding.
XU XIAOBIN
(translated by Nicky Harman and Natascha Bruce)
1 Feathered Serpent, Xu Xiaobin, tr. John Howard-Gibbon, Joanne Wang (Atria, 2009:241).
1
Afortune-teller once told Tianyi: ‘You’ll be single at 30, married at 31.’ And that is just what happened.
At 30, she had felt like an old maid, an old old maid — though later, she came to realize that for a woman, at least for her, 30 was really very young, and she need not have been in such a hurry to marry. Every day she had to face questions about whether she had a friend yet — that meant a boyfriend, of course. Aunt Jie from next door, the mother of her best friends, Di and Xian, was particularly persistent. She had already started on finding men for her two daughters, and she knew what she was doing: she could line up several good potential matches for them to meet in the space of a day. She managed to introduce Xian, the more amenable of the two, to quite a few boys. One day, Tianyi looked out of her dimly-lit room to see Xian walking by in a brightly-coloured headscarf, her face vivid with excitement. Tianyi’s eyes brimmed with tears, and she felt a stab of — what was it, jealousy? No, not jealousy. Admiration? No, not that either. She was not sure what it was. But she remembered the poem the three of them used to recite, by the emperor poet, Xiao Gang:
The sky is frosty, the Milky Way pale, the evening stars are few
A wild goose cries a mournful note — where is it going?
If it had known it would lose its mate on the way
It might have chosen always to fly alone.
Tianyi felt a looming, terrifying sense of loneliness.
But the boyfriends trickled away one by one, like flour through a sieve. A year went by and Di and Xian were still unmarried. Aunt Jie changed tactics, and began to use her network of friends. She included Tianyi too. It was as if she had realized that her daughters would never get married unless their friend did, as if Tianyi was the root cause of the problem. Only if she was got safely out of the way would her daughters forget all this nonsense and face up to reality. She was probably right.
Aunt Jie made her wares sound highly desirable. In the advertisements she placed for her daughters she gave the girls nice-sounding nicknames then added phrases like: ‘very pretty, pleasant nature, university graduate, loves literature, art and music …’ To Tianyi’s she added: ‘Good cook.’
To Tianyi’s utter astonishment, within a month she received almost two thousand letters in reply. And what letters! They came from places as far-flung as Heilongjiang in Manchuria and the Paracel Islands in the South China Sea, from the Pamir plateau in the far west of China to the Ussuri River in the north-east. There were a bewildering array of suitors: from government officials to young farmers, and every other possible occupation, from 50 down to 20 years old. It was really too bad that she moved house several times over the following years, and the letters got thrown away, because on close examination they represented a microcosm of Chinese males in the 1980s. Mrs Wu, who collected the letters for her at her own address, helped her to choose a few of them, all from Beijing and university graduates, and she met one or two, but there was no spark between them … No doubt the men felt the same. Just the year before, she had published her book Research into Bisexual Love, and her feelings about her case studies were still fresh in her mind. Reality did not come close. No wonder she was left feeling unsatisfied.
But the atmosphere at home was so bad that she was forced to think again. After her father died, and her elder sister, Tianyue, moved away, her relationship with her mother and younger brother deteriorated. Home life was stifling and, worse still, she found herself being humiliated at every turn. Yes, humiliated, that wasn’t too strong a word for it. There was no one better than her mother at heaping on the insults, and Tianyi was super-sensitive, so there were arguments morning, noon and night.
It had been like this when her father was alive too. When she took the frail old man out for walks, it used to earn her stinging comments from her mother: ‘Ai-ya! What a good little daughter! Her father can’t move hand or foot until she comes along and then suddenly he can walk!’ Tianyi, looking at her father’s gaunt, ashen face, could not help herself: ‘Mum, what a thing to say!’ Her mother’s face would darken: ‘I’m his wife, I can say what I want!’ She might fling out a final insult as she turned to go back into the house: ‘Huh! You behave just like his mistress!’ That made Tianyi go pale with fury, and her father trembled all over. In her heart of hearts, Tianyi felt that all this was killing her father. It was death by a thousand cuts, a slow torment at the hands of her mother that had gone on for more than 30 years. With the wisdom of bitter experience, Tianyi’s father advised her to get away, rather than stay around to die a slow death as well.