Qiang began to be interested in this woman who wrote about love yet clearly did not understand it, who had reached middle age yet had the mentality of a girl. He pursued her with phone calls, on any pretext that came to mind. They were very relaxed in these conversations, forever cracking risqué jokes, although at work they kept up a dignified appearance as if, face to face, they were two completely different people. Sometimes they were on the phone for a couple of hours, or more. It has to be said that Lian was remarkably tolerant of this, no doubt because he had absolute trust in his wife. After all, he had never had any cause to complain.
There was also another reason: he was quietly preparing to quit his government job and start work for a commercial company. To his surprise, the ‘personal report’ he had worked so hard on after his return from America had not received the rapturous reception he had anticipated, even after it was cascaded to the other departmental Party Committees. He had the impression that his superiors were not going to get around to promoting him for a while. So he decided to move to B.O. Holdings, a company that was making a lot of money. Post-America, Lian had made up his mind to become rich and powerful, like so many of his contemporaries. He was so fixated on the idea that he hardly noticed his wife spending hours chatting on the phone. So Lian started work as Deputy CEO in charge of Finance in the kind of big company where so many people dreamed of getting a job in the mid-nineties. The company CEO, Qiankuan, was a good friend of his. In the 1980s, he had often dropped by with his wife, lured there by Tianyi’s fragrant roast chicken.
Qiankuan was originally from Hunan province, and was an only child like Lian. There, the similarities ended: Qiankuan was tall and slender, and carried himself with an easy grace. His wife, Yufan, had a figure like a model, and was ultra-fashionable. Tianyi was fond of Yufan and always liked trying out some new delicacy on them. When Yufen was pregnant, Tianyi felt that she should make a special effort to be kind to them as neither sets of grandparents were in Beijing. Very soon, the couple were treating Tianyi’s house as their second home, dropping in whenever they felt like it. The two men would go outside to talk politics and economics, while the women stayed inside chatting. So when Qiankuan was head-hunted by the B.O. Chairman of the Board, the first person he thought of was his old mate, Lian.
Everybody wanted to be rich nowadays and Tianyi was no exception. She and Lian had been married ten years and Niuniu was now nine. She felt it was time to draw a line under their hand-to-mouth existence. This has got to stop, she thought, looking around her cramped, shabby study. She had had enough of visitors staring and exclaiming: ‘So this is where you do your writing?!’
Lian’s new job brought a succession of changes — first, he started bringing home presents from clients, followed by gift vouchers, then one brilliantly sunny day, a shiny blue Chevrolet drew up in the courtyard below their apartment. Niuniu had always had an eye for cars. Even as a small child, he could tell one make from another, however far away they were. Standing at the window, he shouted in excitement: ‘Mum! Come quick! Dad’s got a car!’
Tianyi and her son stood close together at the window and watched as Lian leapt out. He stood there and took out of his pocket a rectangular thing with an antenna. ‘Hello?’ they heard him say into it, and then the house phone rang. That was how Tianyi discovered that the rectangular thing was a mobile phone, then called a Dageda, or Big Bro Phone. When Tianyi and Niuniu got into the car, they learned that it had a phone too, a car phone. And then … the young driver looked around with a smile, and Lian said to Niuniu: ‘Say hello to Uncle Xiaoming. Tianyi, this is Xiaoming.’ Tianyi nearly jumped out of her skin: he was the spitting image of Zheng as a young man, perhaps even more handsome. There was something very noble in the way he held himself. Where on earth did that come from?
Bursting with pride, Lian took his wife and child to the Dragon’s Vein Hot Springs in Xiaotangshan, on the outskirts of the city. Tianyi and Niuniu were thrilled at the sight of the pools filled with jade-green water. In the changing room, Tianyi looked at herself in the mirror. She had put on a lot of weight, she discovered, and not just in her chunky arms and legs, but in her already generous bosom too. Red with embarrassment, she draped herself in a swimming towel before venturing out. She instinctively felt that she did not want the driver, Xiaoming, to see her half-naked.
The water was delicious. It spurted from the fountains with enough force to knock you over if you stood too near. Lian and Niuniu splashed each other energetically, and Tianyi found another spot where she could swim. She did a few circuits then found the hot pool to soak in. Comfortably relaxed, she stretched her arms wide and floated lazily on her back, quite unaware of how seductive this made her look. After a little while, she felt a pair of eyes on her. She sneaked an uneasy glance in that direction and met Xiaoming the driver’s bright gaze. He seemed even more embarrassed than she did, flushed scarlet, and looked mutely away. Tianyi decided it was time to get out — although that exposed even more of her body to view.
In the interval between swims that day, they had lunch at the hot springs restaurant, an open-air eating-area set with chairs and tables between the pools. It was simple home-style food too, but today it tasted especially delicious, perhaps because swimming had given them an appetite. Lian ordered stewed beancurd, stir-fried wild greens, Mao-style red-cooked pork, asparagus and ‘vegetarian roast goose’, actually made of sheets of beancurd. This they demolished in no time at all, and Lian had to order two more dishes, catfish with aubergine, and shredded pork vermicelli. When this, in turn, had been consumed, the girl brought them tea, and they sat back, feeling pleasantly full, and chatted. Somehow it made Tianyi think of Mister Ma the Second in the Qing dynasty novel The Scholars who, on a visit to Hangzhou’s West Lake, ignored the beautiful scenery and concentrated on stuffing himself with all kinds of food. She wanted to laugh: was it true that Chinese scholar officials down the ages were just a bunch of vulgar gluttons? Here she herself sat, stuffed to the gills with food and drink, apparently holding a dignified conversation, while she was secretly thinking that Xiaoming the driver must surely have seen her breasts just now when she was lying by the pool. No doubt they were seductively prominent, perhaps even with her nipples showing through the fabric. He could not have failed to see, could he?
Tianyi felt that the older she got, the more sexual she became. That young girl’s purity, that aversion to the least smuttiness, had vanished. The more unobtainable sex was to her, the more her imagination ran riot. The problem was that before she married, a woman rarely had much insight into her own character. Take her, for instance, she had been convinced that she was someone who did not need anyone, was content to be proud and aloof from the rest of the world. She had imagined herself as one of those clever female scholars who featured in ancient, thread-bound books. But living with a man, even if it was a man she did not love, had opened her up. She had betrayed herself, and suddenly found herself interested in all the things she used to despise. She did her utmost to suppress these urges, but the more she suppressed them, the fiercer they grew. She sometimes had erotic dreams, which she dreaded, since all the books said they were extremely harmful to one’s health.
When she was a newly-wed with a phobia of sex, Lian had thought of nothing else. But now she had become a sexually voracious woman, he could not do it anymore. After a few occasions on which he failed miserably, she was suddenly seized with a terrible panic. This was a problem that she simply could not solve on her own