Tianyi was quite convinced that America was her ideal country. Her American dream lasted right up until she stepped on its soil for the second time, some years later, and found everything had changed. Nine Eleven destroyed this people, there were no more clean, innocent winks.
On this first visit, however, Tianyi fell in love with the place, its people, its scenery, everything about it. Every morning she got up early and went out for a walk in the snow, wearing her bright-red cape, enjoying the extraordinary blossoms, the fairytale-like houses, and those clean, innocent smiles.
Some of the shops opened very early but most at ten o’clock. Any that had an OPEN sign, and a display of fresh flowers and souvenirs (often made by the native Americans), she would go in, saying in response to the sales assistant’s friendly smile: ‘I’m just looking.’ Then she would subject the displays to a careful inspection, feeling quite safe and content. She made the occasional purchase, too. Everything was so ingeniously made, for instance a tiny house made out of wire, or a piece of light blue stone carved with the head of native American. Often, when she took them home, Ke teased her: ‘You’re just like Lian said, like a child!’
A Professor Jones had asked her to give a lecture at Salt Lake University, on the subject of women’s writing and Drowning. The thought of her book reminded Tianyi that she was only here on a visit. The reality she had deliberately ignored came back with absolute clarity: far away in the East, in a very ordinary apartment building, she had a violent husband and a weakling of a son. That clarity turned in her guts like a knife.
All the overseas Chinese students, and students studying Chinese culture and language turned up. There was not an empty seat in the lecture theatre. From their expressions and their applause, she knew that they understood Drowning, and her. It was no doubt the first time they had had a Chinese author come to lecture them on Chinese literature here in this rural backwater. Most Americans imagined that Chinese were like the people in Zhang Yimou’s films, the women tottering along on bound feet, the men smoking opium, or dressed in baggy trousers, herding their animals on the loess plateau. This ordinary-looking Chinese woman gave them a very different view of China. The world of Chinese intellectuals and scholars had been closed off to the rest of the world since the 1930s. The rulers of New China had been extremely hostile to the educated class, targeting them in one movement after another. By the modern era, there were no traces left of the moral principles of China’s ancient scholars.
Tianyi often lay awake worrying about what kind of race the Chinese would turn into if things carried on like this. Over the centuries, most of those loyal officials brave enough to criticise their superiors to their faces had been punished with death while those who were lucky enough to escape that fate were subjected to one calamity after another. That just left sycophants prepared to work the system. A whole people had been bled dry of the quality of loyalty. Zheng was one of a kind and, by sheer good luck, had managed to survive, but only by risking his life and staring death in the face. She felt as if her heart was breaking.
From the day when she first trod on the soil of the United States of America, she had been searching for Zheng. All she knew was that he was on the East Coast, nothing more than that.
The evening of the lecture, Ke mysteriously pulled her to one side and said in a low voice: ‘I’ve been thinking today of…of trying to get your sister on side. What do you reckon?’ Tianyi almost laughed out loud: Ke’s jokey way of putting things surely concealed a deep insecurity. She said offhandedly: ‘Do you think it’ll work?’ Ke eyed her uncertainly. ‘You know, my sister is pretty much immune to being “got on side”,’ she went on. Ke’s thick eyebrows clumped together in a frown, and she softened: ‘From what I know of my sister, she’s someone who goes for spontaneity, so the less you plan it, the better the results will be.’
That evening turned into a seminar on Ke’s problems. Tianyi had not realized just how serious they were. What Ke had told her was just the tip of the iceberg. Actually, he was in very deep trouble. He had started with a software company, and moved into property in the early nineties. His was probably the first real estate company on the mainland. He got himself certificated by a high-level local official who, in his words, was a ‘hyena’. And not the only one. Ke had taken on a tower block, and when it was under construction, this official was just one in a whole pack of hyenas, all busily engaged in getting their rake-off from the wealthy investor who was funding the project.
Of course, the wealthy property investor was not above a bit of wheeling and dealing himself. He only knew Ke, never having met the officials who were on the take, so it was Ke he started to put the screws on. The odd thing was that, even before she knew the facts, Tianyi’s I Ching reading had been that Ke needed to ‘wade the great river’ and start afresh. This prediction had earned Ke’s undying admiration.
In any case, this investor had now brought a lawsuit against Ke’s company. In Ke’s view, the only way of clearing his name was to find the official concerned. Tianyi felt a flicker of doubt — she had never been quite convinced of Ke’s probity. Not so Tianyue. Like so many women, she was completely blinded by love and insisted Ke was innocent. Ke spent that evening puzzling over the draft of a fax to send to his company in Beijing. He kept scratching words out and re-wording it, convinced it was full of mistakes. Tianyi could see that Tianyue could hardly keep her eyelids open and offered to draft the fax herself. Ke was sceptical that she had any talents in this direction but, by this stage, his options were running out. And that was how Tianyi did her bit to push her sister into bed with Ke. Once she had finished the fax, she got washed and went to bed herself.
The next morning, she was startled awake by Ke’s shout of amazement. He had seen the fax lying on the table.‘Ai-ya! I’ve met plenty of women in my life but I’ve never met one as clever as this! Tianyi, however did you think up such an amazing ruse?’
Tianyi looked in confusion at the happy couple and for a moment did not reply. Then she saw Tianyue’s jealous look and realized that the fax she had written last night had been of considerable help to Ke. But Tianyue was far from grateful. She was extraordinarily pig-headed, and it was this determination in her which made up for her natural deficiencies. From then on, she spent every evening drafting and re-drafting for Ke, until finally Ke said: ‘Good, that’s enough.’
Tianyi was well and truly on her own now. But the news of her success at Salt Lake spread fast and she began to receive phone calls from other universities asking her to lecture. Since she had forgotten almost all the English she ever learned — it was so poor she could scarcely even manage to ask the way — could she travel on her own? She soon overcame her doubts; you hardly needed any English to move around freely in America. It was even easier, she felt, than moving around the country she had grown up in.
The first stop was Rocky Mountain University where she had been invited by a celebrated American sinologist. The professor had taken a Chinese name, Zheng Miaowu, and spoke excellent Chinese. Tianyi arrived, wearing a black woollen skirt under a dark blue-and-white batik cape that she had bought in Yunnan, and a Japanese necklace made from pieces of wood that tinkled pleasantly. The professor told her visiting lecturers came in three price tags; for instance, Wusheng, the author of Old City, did not get the highest fee when he came to talk. He told her she should take the highest fee she could, and so on. A great many people came to listen to Tianyi, far more than at Salt Lake, and Tianyi knew this was down to the prestige of her host. As before, she talked of women writers in China, taking pains to say nice things about her young friend Xi and her cohort of writers and equally carefully avoiding mentioning herself. She was to learn, many years later, that in this way she had sent her listeners off to the pinnacle of the pyramid that was the world of letters (Xi) while she found herself left far below. It is a truism, however, that people habitually find it convenient to forget the people who have boosted their careers, and so it was with Xi.