Before she did finally leave, she did her best to make it up with her mother and brother, to have some good memories to take with her. But reconciliation was not easy. She started by looking for a job where she did not have to keep office hours, so that she could continue her research, but very soon not keeping office hours came to mean not going to work at all. In the mornings, she went to the University Library, then hurried home to prepare lunch for them. But every time she went out of the door, she was accompanied by a barrage of sarcasm. She put her very best efforts into whatever she was doing but it was no use. She frequently came to the table to eat, having served up the dinner, to find the dishes already half-empty. Her mother and Tianke, her brother, liked their food but she might as well not have been there. Once she had finished the cooking, she was no more than empty air to them. She would sit there, feeling desolate, knowing what it meant to be superfluous. At such moments, she would think: Just you wait, one day I’m going to leave …
As the autumn of 1984 passed, she alternated between hope and despair. The First of October holiday approached and the fortune-teller turned up again. ‘On the tenth of the tenth month,’ she said, ‘you’ll meet someone and you can marry him.’ Tianyi was startled. She stuffed some money into the woman’s hand, and the fortune-teller swiftly disappeared. But her words continued to ring in Tianyi’s ears.
Aunt Jie really had fixed up a date for her on the evening of 10th October. The man worked in the Planning Commission and he was called Wang Lian. Aunt Jie was busy at home that day and told them to go out for a walk. Tianyi took him to the small park on the Mingda University campus, where they could sit by the fish pond.
They talked about their respective middle schools. He said he was at the middle school affiliated to Qinghua University and she remembered that her sister, Tianyue, had mentioned someone called Wang Lian in her diary. Her sister had been at the same school. ‘That was me,’ he immediately responded. ‘What a small world!’ Tianyi smiled, because Tianyue had not been complimentary. She said that he used to pick his feet during the breaks, and make the whole room stink. When the class monitor told him to stop, he not only took no notice, he made her so angry that she cried. Lian laughed. ‘We were just kids,’ he said. ‘It’s all water under the bridge. Everyone’s different now.’ Then he added: ‘Best not to tell your sister and the family that we know each other.’
Foolishly, Tianyi gave her word, and kept it too. She never so much as mentioned Lian’s name to her sister and brother-in-law, not until the day, sometime later, when she and Lian were off to the Registry Office to get 300 Tianyue looked sick with worry. ‘Lian? He had the worst temper in the whole class. He was always flying off the handle. Are you really going to spend the rest of your life with him?’ Tianyi smiled: ‘Everyone can change. He’s very good-tempered now.’ She proved to have absolutely zero ability as a judge of character. She had forgotten the old saying that a leopard never changes its spots.
They had liked each other at that first meeting. A couple of days later, he turned up at her home uninvited. He was wearing an overcoat in dark blue wool, which looked comically big on him — the padded shoulders were much too wide. He always wore ill-fitting clothes but it never occurred to her to look down on him because of it. She even felt sorry for him. She had met far too many youths who were rich and handsome. Compared with them, an ordinary man would make a more reliable husband, she reckoned, thus committing the cardinal error of believing that a handsome man was necessarily unfaithful and an ugly one would never cause any trouble.
The arrival of the uninvited guest that day caused a few ripples in the stagnant backwater that was Tianyi’s home. After he had gone, Tianke remarked critically that Lian thought too much of himself. ‘Tianyi’s always gone out with handsome, well-dressed men. What makes a squat little man like him, with stained teeth, think he has any chance at all?’ Tianke may normally have been at loggerheads with his sister, but as soon as an outsider appeared, the family closed ranks, and it never occurred to him that this squat, yellow-toothed man would marry his big sister.
Actually, Lian was not bad-looking, though he did not measure up to Tianyi’s former handsome boyfriends. He was of medium height, with regular features, he was very clean and his teeth were not yellow at all, there was just a bit of a gap between the two front ones. After his visit that evening their relationship gathered momentum. He invited her to a pop concert at the Capital Stadium, where the Hong Kong singer, Tsui Siu-Ming, was appearing. Half-way through, they left their seats and sat out the rest of the concert in the lounge of the semi-circular stadium, listening over the speakers to Any Empty Wine Bottles For Sale, then a very popular Taiwanese song, and the theme song of the Taiwan film, Papa, Can You Hear Me Sing. He bought lots of snacks and they munched them. She felt that he was really nice, dependable and considerate.
Next, they went to the Black Bamboo Garden restaurant for his birthday. The weather was getting cooler, and the duckweed and lotus leaves floating on the surface of the water had died back. With some difficulty, they found a sunny spot near some trees, he spread out a plastic sheet and they laid out all the things she had brought to eat. She had prepared them all herself: smoked fish, salad, roast duck, soy-stewed meat, and pickled cabbage. He tasted everything and pronounced it all delicious. He joked that now that he had tasted her superb cooking, he had better confess that cooking skills were a tie-breaker in a relationship, for him. She had put a lot of effort into this birthday picnic and it made her happy to see him tucking in with relish. They stayed out late, chatting by the lotus pond. He had brought a blanket and, when it got really cold, he draped it around her shoulders. She felt like an ice-cold fish, irresistibly drawn to seeking out a warm current. Love still seemed like an illusion, but marriage … somehow that was very simple, she would marry anyone who was good to her.
A few days later, they were strolling down a path, with him pushing his bicycle, and he put his arm around his shoulder. On and on they walked and never seemed to run out of things to say. As he was seeing her home, he suddenly dropped the bike and kissed her. The clatter of the bike as he let it drop shattered the silence of the deserted street. Whenever she thought back to that night in years to come, the echoes filled her head.
‘Let’s speed things up a bit,’ he said. ‘We met on the 10th October, we’ll make the announcement on the 11th November and tie the knot on the 12th December. She liked his sense of humour, and laughed. He kept that sense of humour until the second year of their marriage.
The next step, of course, was to pay a visit to his family. He had already told her that the family got on well, that his parents were like a pair of Bodhisattvas, and his maternal grandmother, who lived with them, was very good about the house. But when she met his parents, she just could not make the Bodhisattva image stick. The first thing his mother asked was her age. Then she gave a tight little smile and said: ‘You’re both old enough to know your own minds, so get it sorted quick, so there’s no gossip.’ Both parents avoided her gaze, which made her very uncomfortable. His mother was quite ugly, with a pair of piggy little eyes, a very big mouth, and very short legs. Apparently Lian’s grandfather had died just ten days after her birth, leaving the young widow to bring her up single-handed. While she was talking to Lian and Tianyi, the father was in the kitchen making dinner. They were all rather reserved at dinner. The father sat stern-faced saying little, except to urge Tianyi to eat, while the mother insisted on putting morsels of food into Tianyi’s bowl. Unfortunately, it was all things she didn’t like. In fact, having her mother-in-law serve her like this was one of the reasons she came to hate going to eat there. She had been brought up not to waste food and to eat everything on her plate, so eat she must. Finally, she thought she would vomit it all up and had to tip her food into Lian’s bowl. When his mother saw her doing that, she grimaced: ‘Our Lian’s not a slop pail you know.’ This was Tianyi’s first taste of her mother-in-law’s sharp tongue. She was shocked.