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The flag flutters in the wind

flowers cover the land

each blossom welcoming a friend with a smile …

Suddenly, she heard a quiet voice behind her. It was Sheng: ‘Why don’t you train as a soloist? You’ve got the voice, you’re a natural!’ So Tianyi learned to sing solo, making quite a name for herself in the commune.

Nowadays, Tianyi still loved to sing. Lian asked a Japanese friend to buy a karaoke machine for them and, in the evenings, if he and Tianyi had nothing to do, they would sing together:

I come from deep in the mountains

I bring orchid plants, and plant them in the school garden

I long for them to bloom …

And:

Where have you come from, my friend

like a butterfly, you fly in through my window …

They had to keep the volume low. Too loud and it might bring old Sheng knocking on their door. The trouble was that Lian sang horribly, stubbornly, out of tune. Tianyi did not have the heart to take him to task over it, but it drove her mad, and eventually she just had to turn off the machine.

Tianyi remembered the two tunes that Sheng loved to play on the commune. One was the Korean song, ‘Mangyongdae’ and the other was ‘The Nightingale’. As he played the accordion, Tianyi would sing:

At Mangyongdae

at the fork in the road

there stands the general

gazing at the open door of his humble home

then hastening towards it.

Finally one day, Sheng had paid her a visit at her parents’ home. Tianyi spent an entire morning getting ready for his arrival, even putting out two champagne flutes in her dingy room. Her father’s salary as a professor was barely enough to support the family, but Tianyi did not want Sheng to see how poor they were and did her utmost to spruce the place up. However, when Sheng arrived at their home, he seemed oblivious to his surroundings. His attention was wholly focused on Tianyi, so much so that he hardly tasted the glutinous rice balls delicacies she served him. After lunch, the pair of them shut themselves in her room and chatted. Suddenly, Sheng went deathly pale and, clapping his hands to his ears, gave a muffled cry: ‘Oh God!’ Tianyi leapt to her feet in terror.

Tianyi took him to the campus hospital, where he was diagnosed with acute middle ear infection. It was serious, and agonizingly painful. Tianyi sat at his bedside, silently remorseful. If only he hadn’t come to visit me, he might not have … But Sheng displayed an almost superhuman fortitude. He chatted to her about himself: ‘I expect you’ve heard the girls gossiping about me.’ Tianyi hesitated, then decided honesty was the best policy. She nodded. Sheng flushed. ‘That was when I was much younger,’ he said. ‘I was very immature.’ It occurred to Tianyi that he might be referring to something she had not actually heard before. ‘In the fourth year of primary school,’ he went on. ‘The Cultural Revolution had just begun, and my parents were detained. I got in with a gang of kids, and that’s when it happened.’

‘When what happened?’

Sheng looked as if he was being dragged to the scaffold. He looked down then, after a long moment, raised his head again. Even his eyes were reddened with shame. There was not a trace of his usual noble, even haughty, expression. He told her how he was led on by the bigger kids and they climbed up to the windows of the women’s public baths to watch the women bathing. He finished speaking, and fainted apparently from a terrible stab of pain.

A month later, Sheng wrote Tianyi a letter. The first half page was entirely filled with quotes from Chairman Mao Zedong, including the one about caring for, cherishing and helping each other — it was customary for young people to regurgitate quotes of this sort from Mao when they wanted to write love letters. Then Sheng wrote that he had fallen in love with Tianyi the first time he set eyes on her. He confessed that he had always been attracted to older girls and called Tianyi ‘My beloved big sister’.

Tianyi was horror-stricken at the letter. Then her face flamed scarlet. It was outrageously immoral to call a girl ‘beloved big sister’. If it had been anyone other than Sheng, Tianyi would have denounced him, and he would have been damned forever.

But this was Sheng. He was nineteen years old, and he was in love with Tianyi, then twenty-one. She was the one who was damned.

3

T ianyi’s pregnancy was the happiest time of her life. Every morning, Lian made up a cup of milk for her, from milk powder, or he would fry her an egg. There would be bread or a steamed mantou bun. She would have either the milk or an egg. Having both together felt greedy to Tianyi. She remembered vividly something her father had said when he was suffering from TB and spitting blood. He had come home from hospital, Tianyi’s grandmother offered him milk and an egg for breakfast, but he had shaken his head: ‘Having milk and egg together is greedy.’ That was 1959, the first starvation year in China. Tianyi was just six years old, but she never forgot his words.

When she contracted cholecystitis during her pregnancy, Tianyi pedalled herself to the Police Hospital in Dongdan to have acupuncture in her ears, considered the only safe pain-killer for a pregnant woman. But she enjoyed the daily trip. It was an easy ride and did not tire her. She remembered her mother saying: ‘You can’t afford to fuss when you’re poor,’ although her mother did. As long as Tianyi lived at home with her, not a day went by without her mother complaining about something. It would start as soon as she got out of bed in the morning: ‘Ai-ya! My head hurts! Or ‘Ai-ya! I didn’t sleep a wink all night!’ If it wasn’t one thing, it was another. Tianyi was exactly the opposite. Even if she was unwell, she numbed herself to it and refused to admit it. ‘You can’t afford to fuss when you’re poor’ made perfect sense to her. She just put up with things.

After her hospital visit, Tianyi hurried home to cook lunch, fish or some sort of meat. She was always in high spirits. She had spent so many years poring over her books, she liked a change of role. I’ll show Lian, she thought, that he was so right to choose me, he’ll be the envy of everyone. She was quite certain she would make a good wife and a loving mother. And Lian did feel himself fortunate in those days. He often brought treats home — watermelon, walnuts, chestnuts, once even a live, eight-pound mandarin fish. He really was a conscientious husband, ready to embrace and enjoy their new life. It was a simple life but a good one. He was doing well at work and his bosses liked him. And he felt he had struck gold with Tianyi. He put his feelings of satisfaction into words too, praising his wife to the skies to his friends. Tianyi felt he sometimes exaggerated but she did not mind. She thought it showed how honest Lian was. He clearly meant every word of it.

In those days, they had many friends, and people were always dropping by. Tianyi liked to serve them her speciality, a whole chicken cooked in a small oven that had only cost 60 yuan. She would clean the bird and stuff it with a mixture of seasoned, chopped meat and fish, prawn balls and crabmeat. Then she put it in the oven on the highest setting for an hour and a half, constantly turning and basting the bird. Their friends might be in a state of anxiety over the new reforms and liberalization and what the effect would be on their country, but when she brought out the fragrant, juicy chicken, crisp on the outside, tender inside, the discussion gave way to gasps of admiration.