Tianyi’s labour began on her due date, thus giving her the distinction of being among the one percent of women who give birth on time. When the contractions started at two o’clock in the afternoon, she went to phone Lian. It was nearly four o’clock by the time he got back, and by then her abdomen was going rigid with each fierce spasms. Lian kept his head and quickly put together the things she needed for the hospital. They got a taxi and the taxi-driver took in the situation at a glance. ‘A son to birth, the mother to death, the King of Hell separates them by a hair’s breadth,’ he recited in a flippant tone. Tianyi was appalled.
A son to birth, the mother to death, the King of Hell separates them by a hair’s breadth. Good heavens! What a frightful proverb. In a daze, Tianyi felt the sweat trickle down her back.
By midnight, the contractions were coming fast and furious. Little by little, the mouth of the womb was forced open. With every minuscule dilation, the pain was almost unbearable. Tianyi was woefully ignorant of the facts of life: intercourse, birth and the female reproductive organs. When she was growing up, these were forbidden topics. She had had plenty of boyfriends before marrying but she had stayed a virgin. She had become pregnant from her first experience of sex and, during her pregnancy, they had somehow been afraid to make love again, although Lian had had a wet dream on one occasion.
Tianyi remembered it well. Lian had sat up in bed in the darkness, refusing to speak. Tianyi found his dumb silence unbearable and asked him repeatedly what the matter was. Eventually, he answered in muffled tones: ‘What do you think it feels like to have a wet dream with your wife in bed beside you?’ Then he buried his head under the quilt and fell fast asleep. Tianyi, however, tossed and turned and did not sleep a wink for the rest of the night.
She felt guilty. Her character was oddly soft and tender under a tough exterior. Just at the moment when she most sternly repulsed other people, a gentle little voice inside her disagreed. Her defiance as a young girl had only been an attempt to get her mother to acknowledge her, to pay attention to her, to love her; she really was a good little girl at heart. Yet few people managed to get under that unyielding carapace. If only Lian had been clever enough to find way in, she would no doubt have been easy tamed. He was not.
Lian sat sleepily on the bench outside the labour ward, along with couple of other men. There was the murmur of conversation but it was almost inaudible because an ear-splitting roaring noise drowned their words. It was a very long time before Lian realized it was the sound of rain pelting down outside. Tianyi’s contractions were being accompanied by a torrential rainstorm, the like of which the city had not seen in years. The tumultuous din sounded like the drumrolls of a symphony orchestra, and made the building shudder. Even the stolid Lian, who loved his sleep and could sleep through anything, was shaken awake.
Tonight was his son’s birth night, and it was right in the middle of a violent storm … or perhaps he should put it the other way round, thought Lian. Everything seemed confused, although he was vaguely aware that the storm was passing, with even the terrible drumrolls becoming more distant. He heard a cry above the noise but it somehow sounded unconvincing, as if someone was having a bad dream, their mouth yawning desperately in a mute scream. How horrible, as if your head was going to explode.
Tianyi was wide awake all night. She had always found it hard to drift into unconsciousness. As a little girl, she sometimes did not sleep for nights on end. It got worse in adolescence, when the heady fragrance of spring flowers made her feel as if her body was swelling and floating away. Her body … back then she had been delightfully slender and was so flexible she could arch over backwards, her hands on the floor, and lift one leg above her head. Her skin, especially from the neck downwards, was alabaster-pale, and seemed as delicate as almond milk curd, impossibly fragile. When her maternal grandmother was alive, she used to say that in another era, Tianyi would have been an imperial concubine.
Tianyi certainly never became an imperial concubine and she had found it hard to get even an ordinary boyfriend. It was hard to say why. She was not bad-looking. She was intelligent, healthy, competent and well-educated. She had no especial faults in any particular area, it was just that, as they would say nowadays, she just didn’t attract the boys. Her friend Di could not understand it. Tianyi’s lithe, shapely body, together with her passion for life, should have made her popular and sexy. She was someone who brimmed with sex hormones, even her abundant periods made that clear. Well, that was the impression that Di had, anyway. Tianyi always bled copiously, whereas she, Di, had only scanty periods. When they were girls, Di had lacked self-confidence and Tianyi had been filled with it. Tianyi still seemed full of self-confidence, at least when she was with Di. As far as boyfriends went, Tianyi simply explained to her friend that the boys were too keen; it was she who was not keen. Di looked up to Tianyi so she was more than willing to accept this explanation.
Alone, Tianyi had to face the sobering fact that emotionally she was a failure. She knew quite well why. First, she was too much of an aesthete, constructing a perfect love in her imagination; in reality, she completely lacked either the skills or the courage to fall in love. Secondly, she was too self-regarding — even if she were to meet someone whom she admired, she could not bring herself to make the first move and so she frequently missed her chance. Worst of all, she let her tongue run away with her and often said things that were the opposite of what she really believed. Then, when she was misunderstood, she was too proud to correct the misunderstanding. So Tianyi’s excuse that she ‘didn’t attract the boys’ had become a self-fulfilling prophecy and by the mid-1980s she felt she was well and truly on the shelf.
In the agony of her labour, Tianyi could not make out exactly what the terrifying din was. She was quite sure it was not just a rainstorm. It was too loud for that. She was in such a blur of pain that she could not hear or think straight. Every time she had a clear thought in her head, the waves of pain seemed to tear it to shreds. She felt the thunderous noise must be a ringing in her own ears. An even more mysterious thought came to her: was this the noise that accompanied every childbirth? And Sheng, had he heard this noise too, when he got his middle ear infection?
Tianyi had secretly revelled in Sheng’s gentle declarations of love, without wanting to examine them too closely. This must be happiness, she felt, and hugged it tight to herself, as if afraid that this pathetically small ray of joy might be scared away.
On the day that the Propaganda Troupe went to the Commune HQ to do their recording, her song was not on the programme. But after the Party Secretary heard all the girls sing The Tractor Drives into Miao Shan Stockade in chorus, he was impressed enough to pick out Tianyi and ask her to sing a solo. Tianyi exchanged a secret glance with Sheng. His eyes lit up as he met hers, and he struck up the tune, When the Communist Party comes, the bitter turns sweet. This was the Tibetan singer Tseden Dolma’s song, and was the Party Secretary’s favourite, although Tianyi did not know that at the time.
The commune’s recording was broadcast that day and Tianyi’s solo was heard all over Beijing. But rumours flew with the song. From that day on, no one looked at Tianyi in quite the same way again. This was the first time it had happened to her, but certainly not the last. She found it a bit frightening, but exciting too. She went looking for Sheng. She liked feeling that the experience had drawn them together and made them forever invincible. She constructed the scenario in her imagination in great detail, convincing herself that it would all come true. Until she saw Sheng. He was crouched over as if he would never straighten up again, and in his crystal clear gaze, there were now flickers of hesitation.