To her dismay, she discovered that she was turning out like Tianyue, but perhaps even worse. The failure of her marriage and the onset of middle age had brought Tianyue a string of lovers to satisfy her sexual needs. But Tianyi was different, preferring to keep her distance from other people or rather, strictly speaking, from men. She was a woman who thought she could live forever in her dreams, now confronted by the very real challenge of her physical needs.
Times were certainly tough for her. The worst of it was that a young woman, Xi, turned up to add fuel to the flames of her desires. Xi brought her some porn videos, the first that Tianyi had ever seen in her life. The blood rushed to her face as she watched these naked men and women coupling shamelessly in every imaginable position. Xi just laughed: ‘Tianyi, you don’t know anything about anything!’ The more Xi teased, the redder Tianyi became. To her relief, there was no one else with them, but Tianyi found it intolerable all the same. When they had finished watching, Xi said very seriously: ‘Tianyi, you’re just too innocent!’
Strictly speaking, Xi was one of Zheng’s circle — she was his friend Tong’s second wife. Tong had once had an animal virility but impotence struck after the painful break-up with his former wife. It taught him a lesson and when he looked for a new bride, he chose a virgin fifteen years younger than himself. No doubt the logic was that if he could get someone young enough, he could mould her and she would be subservient for the rest of her life.
Tong may have been politically astute but he knew nothing of female psychology. A girl like Xi, once the scales had fallen from her eyes, was as dangerous as a river in spate. When her grievances threatened to boil over, she came to Tianyi to get it all off her chest. ‘Tong deceived me, Tianyi, he’s nothing but a fraud!’ she said after the videos were over. Then she reeled off a dozen offences without pausing for breath. The two chief ones were, one, he could not get it up, and, two, he did not want children. To enforce the second, he had forced Xi to have five abortions. Five!
Xi was so distressed by this point that she burst into tears and could not go on. Tianyi was at the point of shedding tears of sympathy when, to her surprise, she saw Xi start to undo her buttons. ‘Look, Tianyi,’ she was saying, ‘Look, let me show you, I’m not even thirty years old and look at me!’ Tianyi did not have time to avert her eyes before Xi had stripped to the waist. Xi was a tall girl, at nearly five foot nine, and to all appearances had a decent figure, but what Tianyi saw truly shocked her: Xi’s large breasts hung slack and pendulous. Without a bra, they would have reached to her waist!
Tianyi had to turn away. However sympathetic she was, she could not bring herself to look at another’s nakedness, especially such an ugly sight as this. But what followed astonished her even more. Xi carried on stripping off her clothes, saying as she did so: ‘Tianyi, I’ve been thinking, why do we rely on men for everything? Didn’t you see on the video, that women can give themselves orgasms? I’ve brought everything we need, will you be my partner? I’ve thought a lot about this, and you’re the only one who’ll do, even though you’re older than me, you behave as you’re young and innocent, and I feel at ease with you! Besides, I can see Lian’s not a real man, so you must have the same problems as me!’
Tianyi was flabbergasted. At first, she simply froze, and even allowed Xi to remove her top for her. Xi was dazzled: Tianyi was wearing a rose-red, floral bra whose brilliant colour set off her alabaster white skin. Xi exclaimed joyfully at Tianyi’s unimaginably deep cleavage: ‘What a stunning body you have, Tianyi! It’s so beautiful, I don’t understand why you don’t dress up more! You should wear tight-fitting tops and show a quarter of the breast, and you’d have men all over you!’
It was many years later, in a foreign country, when Tianyi heard that phrase ‘show a quarter of the breast’ again. She could not help secretly admiring Xi for having picked all this up on her own. But Tianyi was just too inhibited to go on, and so Xi, who dared to experiment where Tianyi did not, was left disillusioned and had to go and find herself another partner.
Tianyi still remembered how she turned away and went and locked herself in the kitchen, refusing to open up to Xi who pounded on the door and cried bitterly. Xi kept it up for an hour or more, before finally flouncing off. Several months later, Xi came to see her again, her eyes shining with excitement, and told Tianyi she had found a lover. He was an artist in the Central School of Arts Woodblock Printing department. ‘His name’s Lang, and he’s a real man!’ Xi exclaimed, wide-eyed. ‘We have sex on the floor, a dozen times a night! Oh, Tianyi, now I know how good it feels to be a woman!’ As Tianyi listened, she felt envious, but also fearful, it seemed a little unfair on Tong, but before she could say so, Xi had further denunciations of her husband: ‘Tong can’t get it up more than once a month! He marks it on the calendar when we do! I can’t bear a man like that, it doesn’t matter how knowledgeable and capable he is! But now I’ve got this relationship with Lang, so I’ve got a husband and a lover, and what more could a woman want? What about you, Tianyi? It’ll be more than ten years before Zheng gets out, shouldn’t you find someone else?’ Tianyi flushed scarlet and said nothing. She was actually thinking that at least Tong did the business once a month, whereas Lian had not even broached it for as much as half a year. Tianyi had far too much self-respect, she would have died rather than talk to Lian about it. She was utterly conflicted: intellectually open-minded, in her behaviour very conservative. In those days, she believed that the man should always make the first move. If she had initiated it, she would not have felt happy even if the man actually responded. As day after day passed in their busy lives, Lian never wanted intimacy. They had changed, it seemed, from being lovers to being friends, and from friends to comrades.
At least she still had the film company, and work to do for it. Wei Qiang talked to her about Old City and she got on the phone to the author. Wusheng was self-deprecating: ‘Tianyi, is it really you? What an honour to hear from you! Six years ago, I had the privilege of reading your masterpiece, The Tree of Knowledge—that was such a good film — I read it through twice.’ Tianyi hurriedly brushed the compliments aside: ‘Oh, that’s all in the past now! What I’m phoning about is your novel, Old City. I’ve heard a number of publishers are bidding hard for it, and my boss read the reports and asked me to contact you to ask if you would let us read the proofs?’ Wusheng’s voice instantly cooled: ‘Ah, so it was your boss who asked you to contact me. Well, let me give Golden Autumn magazine a ring, they’re previewing it. They can let you have a proof copy. But you may not like it when you’ve read it!’
Tianyi, however, was still brimming with enthusiasm for the project, or rather, to be truthful, for her boss Qiang. So she leapt on her bicycle and pedalled off to the Golden Autumn magazine offices where an old friend, Huilan, was the deputy editor. Huilan had been on the literary scene since the eighties, and was known for being blunt in her dealings with people. She was bit past her prime nowadays, but her fighting spirit was undimmed. When she met Tianyi, she gave her the low-down on Old City and how it was written. This was early in the nineties, and few authors had made it into film and TV. Talking to Tianyi about her company’s interest in the book, Huilan was not slow to see an opportunity, and was canny enough not to commit herself to terms and conditions. The gist of it was that as soon as the film company had bought the rights, she wanted to be Planning Director. Tianyi thought a moment: ‘I don’t think that will work. As far as I know, we won’t be doing any of that. The most we could swing is to get you made literary consultant.’ ‘Sure, that’s fine,’ said Huilan. ‘At least I’ll get something out of it.’ And she gleefully got out a set of proofs and handed them to Tianyi.