After David Copperfield, we read Great Expectations. Then The Return of the Native and, later, Tess of the d’Urbervilles. It was during Jude the Obscure that she began to tell me her story, in fragments I would piece together later. Sometimes the story came at the beginning of the afternoon, sometimes when she took a break from reading the novel to me. She never talked long about herself, and afterward we did not discuss it. I had become less nervous around her; still, I did not talk much about my life at school or at home — intuitively I knew she had little interest in the life I lived outside the hour in her flat. Only once did I ask her advice, about where to go for high school. I was not an excellent student, though decent enough to do well in entrance exams. She asked me my choices of schools, and when I listed them for her, she answered that they were all good schools, and it rather did not matter, in her opinion, where I went. In the end, I chose the school farthest from our neighborhood, a decision that later proved convenient when I had to come up with an excuse to stop visiting Professor Shan.
I TURNED OUT to be excellent at shooting. I was one of the few who scored all tens in our first live-ammunition practice, and when we marched back from the shooting range, I was displayed in front of the company along with three other girls with a red ribbon pinned to my chest. Major Tang called the four of us budding sharpshooters and gave a speech that ended with the slogan “My gun follows my orders, and I follow the Communist Party’s orders.”
“That slogan,” said Jie, one of the other sharpshooters. “Don’t you think it sounded so … off-color?”
“What do you mean?” I asked.
“You’re too innocent for this discussion,” Jie laughed, but a few days later she sought me out. “Do you read English?”
Apart from the officers and the conscripts in the cooking squad, all of us were able to read some English, since we had studied it in high school, and I said that to Jie. “I know that, of course,” she said. “I’m asking you if you could read an English novel for me.”
I had never talked to anyone about Professor Shan, and I did not memorize English vocabulary during the free time, as some of the other girls, who had their hearts set on going to America after college, did. I replied vaguely that I could try, and after dinner the next day Jie approached me with a copy of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. “It was once a banned book,” she told me with hushed excitement, and asked me to promise not to let the secret out to anyone. “My boyfriend sent it to me. Don’t lose it. He went to great trouble to find a copy.”
The book, a poorly Xeroxed copy, was wrapped in an old calendar sheet, the words small and smudged. “Don’t look like I’m corrupting you. You’re old enough to know these things.” In a lower voice Jie told me that there were many colorful passages in the novel, and could I mark all the passages describing sex between the man and the woman for her? I blushed at the words she used—zuo-ai, doing love, an innocent yet unfortunate mistranslation of the English phrase making love. Jie said she didn’t have the patience to read the book herself, and told me if I wanted to I could skip pages as long as I did not fail to mark what she should be reading.
Jie was an outgoing girl, loud and confident, fond of crass jokes. Perhaps the fact that I did not have someone to reveal her secret to was behind her reasoning; or she might have simply pitied me for my naïveté about the world, and thought of me as someone in need of enlightenment. In any case, I did not ask her for an explanation — it was easier to let people have their opinions than to convince them otherwise.
At night I covered my head with the quilt and pointed the light from my flashlight onto the pages. I was sixteen when Professor Shan began to read the stories of D. H. Lawrence to me; it was the fall I entered high school. My favorite author, she said of Lawrence, but did not say more. It became clear to me — and I tried not to show my disappointment — that we would not return to Dickens or Hardy, at least not for a long while. She pointed out the novels she would read to me after we finished with the two volumes of Lawrence’s stories: The White Peacock, Sons and Lovers, The Rainbow, Women in Love. Her eyes seemed to gleam unusually as she laid out her plan. I wonder whether she had been waiting for that moment ever since I had begun visiting her. Were Dickens and Hardy only a preparation for Lawrence? Was she waiting for me to grow older, or to become better with English, so that I could understand Lawrence?
That fall, milk was no longer rationed, but our family could not afford it, as I needed lunch money for the high school canteen. Every day I rode out of the school gate at quarter to four, the earliest possible time, and cycled across a district and a half to get to Professor Shan’s flat at quarter after five. I did not go home to report to my parents first. My father, on a longer night shift now, would leave for work around five, and it mattered little to my mother when I returned home — my father left a cooked meal for us, which my mother rarely touched. She was becoming even thinner, ghostly hollows around her cheeks, and she lay in her bed and read ancient romance novels for hours.
There was a woman who was beautiful, who started with all the advantages, yet she had no luck. She married for love, and the love turned to dust. Professor Shan began reading to me as soon as I arrived. Sometimes she would lay snacks on the table — a few biscuits, half an orange, a handful of roasted chestnuts — but she herself never ate anything when I was around, so I did not touch the food either.
I did not like Lawrence, and my mind began to wander to other things. I had enjoyed Dickens, who talked to me at times in a wordy manner as I imagined a grandparent would. I had never met my father’s parents, and my mother’s parents had washed their hands of her, so I was only a stranger to them. I had loved Hardy, and had dreamed of the countryside in his books — black-and-white dreams in which everything looked slanted as if in a woodcut print — but this may have had more to do with the joy of finding myself able to understand English. I dared not show that I was annoyed by Lawrence. I had lived with a mad mother all my life and had found madness, which seemed prevalent in the stories read to me now, the most uninteresting topic. I tried to suppress a yawn and let my mind wander to a man whose name I did not know and whose face had begun to haunt me. The man lived on the second floor of Professor Shan’s building and had a young daughter named Nini. “Nini’s Papa” was how I greeted him. He did not use my name — he had never asked me for it, so perhaps he did not know mine either — and he called me Nini’s Sister, as if I were connected to his daughter by blood.
I now know his name, as he has become one of the most renowned flutists in the nation. I have seen his face on posters, and read in newspapers and magazines the story of his success after years of hardship, about his childhood spent as an orphan with distant relatives, serving in his teens as an apprentice to a blind folk musician whom he then had buried while traveling across south China, about his years of playing in the street for small change, his failed marriage and estranged daughter. The articles called him “a figure of inspiration.” He has not aged much in twenty-five years, though he looks less melancholy, more at ease with the world. I imagine his students in the conservatory having youthful crushes on him, love that has long been due him. Sometimes I wonder if he still remembers me, but the moment the thought occurs to me, I laugh at myself. Why should he think about someone who is a reminder of his humiliation? Only those who live in the past have space in their hearts for people from the past; the man surely has enough success to savor only the present, with many people to occupy his heart, perhaps far too many.