The atmosphere that day was chilly. Tianyi tried her best to persuade herself that it was probably because it was her first visit, it was just happenstance, or because she wasn’t used to them. Unfortunately, everything that unfolded afterwards proved her first impressions to have been absolutely correct.
On 8th December, they went to get the wedding photos taken, in a photography studio in fashionable Wangfujing Street. You could hire a wedding dress (they had just begun to make a comeback) at the studio. Tianyi had the smallest size; it was a bit grubby but fitted her like a glove. She had a slender eighteen-inch waist back then. The hairdresser cut her hair fashionably short and waved it, and pinned a pink flower on one side of her head. Tianyi sparkled. Soon, Lian came out too: he was dressed in a suit, and white gloves, and his hair looked so shiny you could almost see yourself in it. He was transformed. As the photographer clicked away, he squeezed her hand happily.
Then they went out shopping. She was walking in front, and felt his eyes on her back. ‘What a slender waist,’ he said quietly, ‘it seems to sway as you walk along. Really sexy!’ She was wearing a very nice, tight-fitting, steel-blue coat she had bought in a street market. It was only 44 yuan, but looked like it had cost a hundred times more. She often bought cheap clothes that looked expensive, for the simple reason that she was poor but she liked looking good.
They did not wait until the 12th of the 12th to tie the knot. Two days before, on 10th December 1984, they were married at the Wang family home. Thinking back to that day, Tianyi felt mortified that the two families had not even gathered for a decent meal together. It was all a far cry from nowadays, with a luxury limo turning up to deliver the bride to her new home. Even by the standards of the 1980s, Tianyi felt hard done by. She remembered pinning a happy smile to her face, consoling herself that she had escaped, finally escaped. No more would she be torn limb from limb at home. Even though she felt bruised, at least she was still in one piece.
Through Lian’s job, the Wangs had managed to get an extra room in someone else’s house in a nearby street and for a long time after, this was the newlyweds’ bolt-hole. There, on their wedding night, Lian smashed his prized plaster statuette of Venus and whispered feverishly in Tianyi’s ear: ‘Your body is so much beautiful than any Venus!’ What woman could not be seduced by words like that? Especially when he sounded so sincere.
There was a lot of fumbling that night but they never managed to do the deed. Tianyi felt exhausted and dispirited, although she was careful to conceal it. She did not want him to feel bad. Deep down, she regarded him as her saviour, because he had taken her from the home where life was not worth living, where she had faced a fate worse than death.
In reality, she had gone from the frying pan into the fire. Her new family was absolutely no different from the old one, just hellish in a different way. At dawn, just as she was dropping off to sleep, there was an urgent rapping at their door — her mother-in-law! Lian was forced to throw on some clothes and open up. Tianyi was aghast. Should she get out of bed to welcome the older woman or dive under the quilt and hide her face? If last night’s dinner-table conversation had merely needled her, her mother-in-law’s arrival this morning was like being hit over the head with a truncheon. She later discovered that it was Lian’s grandmother who had put her up to it. She had lived so many years as a widow that she bitterly resented the young couple sharing a bed.
A few days later, she went to the hospital for a check-up, where the doctor was astounded to discover that her hymen was still intact. It must sound preposterous to young folks nowadays, but when Tianyi was young, sexual taboos created a phobia of sex in young women, just more extreme in Tianyi’s case. In fact, for a long time, she congratulated herself on having found a virgin to marry.
They finally consummated their marriage a week later, on 19th December. They were in bed at her home. They lay under the wedding quilts, one green, one red (the only dowry, along with a gold bracelet, she had received from her mother) and he said softly: ‘Sooner or later, it’s got to be done. Bite your lip …’ She bit down on the pillow cloth as grimly as if she was facing martyrdom, protesting: ‘No! What if I get pregnant?’ ‘You won’t,’ he said, ‘haven’t you just had your period? You’re safe.’ And so, in a daze, she let it happen. However, as she was soon to discover, for her there was no safe time.
She started to feel unwell straightaway. After the Chinese New Year, she began vomiting and the pregnancy test came back positive. The thing she most feared had come to pass: she had fallen pregnant that first night. She had had no time to prepare herself mentally. All she had wanted to do when she married was to escape from home, and now, without pause for breath, she had fallen into a new trap.
Tianyi was afraid to go to the hospital for an abortion so she decided to do it naturally. For the first two months, when it was easiest to miscarry, she swam, played badminton, jumped up and down energetically hundreds of times a day — but absolutely nothing happened. She just vomited worse than before. She brought up every single mouthful of food, and then the bile too. Even the smell of cooking oil made her nauseous. The worst of it was that Lian smelled bad too: he had body odour and terrible breath, and made such a chomping noise when he ate. She tried telling him a few times but it was no use.
Finally she found something she could eat, wotou or cornmeal buns. From the beginning to the end of her pregnancy, her belly never rejected wotou. Later on, she found she could tolerate the odd tomato and watermelon too. Three months passed, and one morning, the vomiting stopped and she suddenly felt reinvigorated. She looked in the small mirror that hung behind the door, and saw herself cleansed of all foulness and grown beautiful. She peered at herself over and over again: her face looked as if it were lightly powdered, with a peachy bloom showing through the pallor. She had always had fine eyebrows, but now they extended in an elegant arch like those of a classic Chinese beauty, almost as if painted on. Her eyes were like crystalline lake water, so bright they shone almost blue and you could see the shadow of her eyelashes in them. The expectant mothers she met at her antenatal appointment exclaimed: ‘Good heavens! You don’t look a day over twenty!’
Her complacency was short-lived. They still had no home of their home, and for the time being, lived with her family. Tensions simmered beneath the surface and Tianyi was on tenterhooks, terrified of an impending row. But Lian was determined to get on well with his mother-in-law and brother-in-law, Tianke. Almost every day he brought home a chicken, or a live fish, or some tender pork shoulder for them, and prepared it himself. He was a good cook, neat and clean. His efforts temporarily kept the peace.
But war broke out again anyway. Tianke was going out with Xiaolan, a girl who worked at the same college. Tianyi had met the girl before and reckoned she was a bit of a slut. As a teenager, she plastered on so much makeup, it had left permanent blemishes. Tianke and Xiaolan would never have got together if Tianyi’s father had still been alive. It happened like this: after the old man’s death, Tianke was given a post in the Accounts Department of his father’s university. Xiaolan’s father was a cook in the university canteen and her mother guarded the bicycles in the campus bike shed. They had three children, two girls and a boy, and Xiaolan was the youngest. She was helping out in Accounts, having completed lower middle school and then dropped out, and it so happened that Tianke was her line manager. Little by little the attraction between them grew. A girl like Xiaolan was a natural flirt and Tianke, with no previous experience in love, was fair game. It was not long before they were swept up in an affair.