“If you study at a Beijing university you end up with a good job. Don’t you?”
“Beijing!” Yiwen made a face. “We should all go to the West. America owns the past and they own the future, too. What do we own?” She slapped the water. “Hey, what kind of rock music do you like?” Her T-shirt dress had soaked over her thighs and soap bubbles slid down her knee.
“Are there different kinds?”
Yiwen giggled. “Like Northwest Wind style. Do you like that? Let’s sing something. You know anything by White Angel? Or Mayday?”
All afternoon, Ai-ming had been reading Let the Natural Sciences Contend and her head was full of geological disturbances. “I’m not good at remembering lyrics.”
“Ai-ming, little country girl. My father told me that your father used to be a musician! Is that true? Like a rock musician? Hey, come on, you’re not really this shy. Are you?”
This was worse than the national examinations. Ai-ming had no idea what the correct answer could be. Fortunately it didn’t matter because Yiwen had her own monologue going. Now she started singing by herself: “I’ve never stopped asking you, When will you come with me? But you always laugh at me because I have nothing! I’m giving you my aspirations and my freedom, too.”
One of the neighbours, a little boy known as Watermelon, started singing along. He was small but he had big, wet voice. “I want to grab your hands. Come with me…”
Yiwen stood up, the little dress too small for anything.
“Want to come to the Square, Ai-ming?”
“I can’t.”
“Tomorrow then.” Yiwen tipped over the bucket of soapy water, dumping it out, and then put the clean dishes inside.
“What’s your boyfriend like?” Ai-ming asked.
Yiwen got to her feet, swaying slowly, the dishes clattering like rattled birds. She smiled teasingly. “I like it when you leave your hair down.”
Ai-ming plunged her hands into her own dish water and said, “Yiwen, where did you get your cassette player?”
“From Fat Lips, on the corner. You want one? He always gives me a really good price.”
“I want one. For my father.”
“Sure, anytime. Knock on my window. We’ll go together.”
—
“We’re not Red Guards! We’re the surviving remnants of the May Fourth generation. Can’t you tell the difference?” Ai-ming’s alarm clock hadn’t sounded yet, it must be early. Or maybe it was late, the middle of the night, but Yiwen’s voice was instantly recognizable.
“Queen Mother of the West! We put aside every dream for you and look what a terror you’ve become.” Ai-ming sat up in bed. Yiwen’s father sounded exhausted. His voice seemed to split into three parts as he shouted louder. “Protesting the government at Zhongnanhai in the middle of the night! Getting arrested! You’re not really my daughter, are you?”
Yiwen’s mother kept repeating the same words over and over: “Calling the leaders by their first names!”
“So what if I call Li Peng by his name? They’re just people,” Yiwen shouted. “People have names! Why can’t you see that? You had the Revolution to believe in, but what do we have?”
A door slammed. Someone, it must be Yiwen, was crying. But perhaps it was Yiwen’s father.
Ai-ming sat up. Nobody talked like that so the whole interlude must have been a dream. Patiently, she waited to come to her senses. Shadows fell in waves across the bedclothes and nothing in the room seemed still. She hugged the sheet and remembered Yiwen’s pink dress which expanded, covering her, smelling of jasmine, even as the argument went on, fitfully, only partially overheard, lulling her back to sleep.
—
“If you can solve a physics problem, you can solve this.” The Bird of Quiet was looking over her shoulder, later that morning, examining the study questions on Ai-ming’s desk. “All you have to do in this essay question is demonstrate correct political understanding. I think you should do a more careful study of Mao Zedong — Marxist-Leninist thought, especially this chapter on methodology, and matter or materialism as objective reality….”
Two cantaloupe seeds had stuck to his hand, and she noticed two on her left hand as well. These four seeds blocked out everything Sparrow was saying.
After her father had closed the door again, she returned to staring out the window. Of course, the people outside, the neighbourhood aunties, Yiwen and Watermelon, could see her as well as she could see them. They were taking down the laundry before the rain resumed, and no one paid any attention to her sitting miserably between her stacks of books. Yiwen’s eyes were puffy. She was singing mournfully to herself,
I grew up beneath the Red Flag.
I took the oath.
To dare to think, to speak up, to act.
To devote myself to Revolution,
The air had the icy kiss of winter, which was perfect, really, for a funeral. Hu Yaobang would have approved. A week had passed since the announcement of his death, and today, a Saturday, the whole city was going to Chang’an Avenue to pay their respects. Sparrow, however, said they weren’t going, Tiananmen Square had been barricaded off, so they would watch it on the neighbourhood television. Television was better, he said. Her father had allowed one of his co-workers to give him a haircut, she didn’t know how much baijiu the comrade had drunk, but it all looked a little lopsided. She found it difficult to argue with him, that bad haircut evoked too much pity. Meanwhile Ma unexpectedly announced she was going to the funeral procession because it was the correct thing to do. “You can come with me, Ai-ming. If you like.”
To go or not to go? In the end, the bad haircut won.
“It’s okay. I’ll keep Ba company.”
If Ling was hurt she didn’t show it. She put on her good shoes and walked elegantly out. Her mother was unfailingly elegant, as if she were a stranger in her own house, which she was. Ai-ming hadn’t lived with her since she was three years old, and even though it wasn’t Ling’s fault, she still felt as if Ling was only impersonating a mother. Ai-ming had always felt more at ease with her great-aunt, the Old Cat, a rare books collector who ran a mobile library, she drove it around in the back of a vegetable truck. The Old Cat lived by herself in Shanghai—“I’m a single modern woman”—and was almost seventy years old.
The funeral was due to start at 10 a.m., so Ai-ming and Sparrow had a slow breakfast. He read the newspaper and she alternated between Collected Letters of Tchaikovsky and Sun Tzu’s The Art of War, and the only sound was the crackling of the pages and her father grunting softly in response to an article or maybe just an advertisement. Radio Beijing was announcing things that everyone already knew, and then repeating them again. For security, Tiananmen Square had been closed to the public, people would have to gather on the surrounding boulevards, etc., etc. Ai-ming realized she was looking forward to the few seconds of silence during the funeral because, finally, the radio would have to stop lecturing.
Sparrow poured her a glass of pear juice. “It’s strange that the government would close the Square. I suppose Comrade Hu Yaobang was very popular…”