Get better once I’m married? Why? I had no idea. Surely marriage would bring even more pain? All that rubbing, that pressing … and what about giving birth? All that straining — your womb swollen, the skin stretched tight, the vagina torn as that thing forces its way through. There would be no salvation then. All you could do was repent. Repent getting married, repent growing the vile seed inside you. Why were all these women so over the moon about girls getting married, having babies, living like this? It seemed like a con to me. The director of gynaecology conned the sick, old crones conned the young, mothers conned their daughters, pregnant women conned themselves and as soon as the pain was over, they started thinking about another child. Couldn’t they remember? Was there no end to suffering?
3
It wasn’t the gynaecologist’s fault. She really was a very good doctor. But if there was nothing a doctor like her could do for my pain, then what was the point of medicine?
I only made it into the world thanks to her. I was a breach baby. They asked my dad if they should save the mother or the baby. He said the mother, of course — it was what everybody said back then. But the operation was a success — in fact a pioneering success — and my long-suffering body survived. Maybe that’s why I resented the gynaecologist.
My father also used to go around with a stethoscope and a white coat. He would stand very straight by the bed with his hands in his pockets, and as he watched the patients writhe and cry out in pain all he would do was push his specs back up the bridge of his nose. He was used to it.
He was a doctor. The bottom line for him was saving lives, even if the patient wound up a vegetable. That was all he knew how to do.
My father always stood up tall, until the day liver cancer felled him. Everyone said he’d got the wrong disease. He didn’t smoke, or drink, or eat pickles or any fried food. He had none of those bad habits which are supposed to cause cancer. If you were superstitious, you’d say that it was because Yama the King of Hell hated him for snatching so many people from its jaws. But I reckon he got ill because he had seen so much suffering. A doctor can’t live the good life, spouting the kind of pleasant bullshit people want to hear. May you live a long, long life. May you be prosperous. May you enjoy your rest. No, doctors have to face up to the relentless cruelty of human existence.
Without his white coat, my father lost all his dignity. Those coats look after doctors even better than the Party looks after its members. Other people get sick, catch diseases, die … but not doctors. As soon as he was diagnosed, my father was reduced to a mere mortal.
Frail and helpless, they wheeled him from surgery to radiotherapy, from radiotherapy to chemotherapy. He used to plead with his old colleagues like a child as they prepared him for treatment: ‘I don’t want it! I don’t want it!’ Stage four cancer is horrifically painful.
No one could save him. All we could do was watch and weep as he shrivelled up. At the end he was nothing but skin and bones. He had been a big man, 1.8 metres and 73 kilos, full of energy for all his forty years. Now something unimaginably powerful was crushing that vitality out of him.
‘Dad,’ I asked. ‘Does it hurt?’
‘Yes,’ he said, and then more loudly, ‘life is just a big trap, and I fell right into it!’
My father knew he wouldn’t get better right from the start. He knew far more about it than the rest of us. He was a doctor. We made pathetic attempts to deceive him. Sometimes we told him he looked better, plumper in the face. Other times, we said his tumour had reduced in size, or that before the year was out there would be a new, groundbreaking anti-cancer drug. He just smiled. His smile was all that was left of him, but sometimes it allowed us to believe, naïvely, that there was hope.
One of the doctors looking after my dad had worked under him as a junior doctor, and had become his assistant. In those days, he was my father’s shadow — they would go everywhere together. Three days before my dad died, he stopped his assistant while he was doing the rounds.
‘Give me some pethidine,’ he said.
The doctor flinched as though he had been knifed in the ribs. Pethidine is an opiate — everyone thought it was as bad as heroin. He opened his mouth to speak, but my father stopped him with a look. The assistant left the room without a word.
My father was very dignified while he was dying. He just lay there quietly until he sank into a coma. Once he called my name, his voice filled with an extraordinary calm. I was amazed to see how he accepted death.
Another time his colleagues were conferring in whispers by the window, the sunlight pouring in and giving them a sort of fantastical halo. And then he said it again: ‘Pethidine.’ I’ll never forget the look of panic on their faces.
4
My father’s assistant was always there when me and my mum visited the hospital. If he was sitting down, he would stand up straight away, arms by his sides. If my dad wasn’t with him, he would say politely ‘Ah, the Director is…’
After my dad died, I bumped into him at the hospital.
He stammered out ‘Ah, the Director is…’ and blushed scarlet.
I smiled and finished it off for him ‘…in the grave.’ He smiled back and said he was sorry.
I was always bumping into him at the hospital, accidentally on purpose, of course. I liked the way he panicked whenever he saw me, like a rabbit in the headlights. I used to go straight to his consulting room and lean against the examination couch, watching him. He’d carry on, but he knew I was there. His colleagues would come in and give me a knowing smile, but I didn’t care if they thought something was going on between us. I liked it. He was always embarrassed. After the patient left he’d make a clumsy show of surprise, as if he’d only just noticed me. ‘Oh! Were you looking for me? Is something up?’ He wouldn’t even look at me. He’d just stare at the wall, as if he was talking to the poster hanging there. It read: ‘The Party is our mother and our father. Patients are our family.’
‘You mean I can only come looking for you if something’s up?’ I asked.
Now he was confused. I liked seeing him in a fix. He looked like a thief. All men are really thieves — I was just persuading him to follow his instincts.
Of course I knew what would happen if I carried on like this. Pain. That was the price I’d have to pay. I’d never been in love, was never going to be. But would I be able to avoid the pain of making love? That gynaecologist who’d burrowed so brutally into me said that things would be better when I was married. But I could remember the pain, the way my vagina went into spasms. I still had bad dreams about a drill tearing into those walls and bloody red pulp gushing out. For women it is pain and more pain. Pain is a woman’s fate.
When Chairman Mao asked his ministers how to get a cat to eat a chilli, Liu Shaoqi said to starve it for two weeks. Zhou Enlai, said to hide the chilli inside a piece of fish. But Mao shook his head.
‘Stick the chilli up the cat’s arse,’ he said. ‘The cat licks where it hurts, so it eats the chilli. The more it hurts, the more it licks.’
The more it hurts, the more it licks…
My dad’s assistant told me it takes time for feelings to grow, that he didn’t believe in love at first sight. He was like a key fitting tooth by tooth into a lock, with his fine words. He was pure reason, but I was a piece of trash. I loathe reason. Reason is the sort of rubbish you can indulge in when life is sweet, like love and honour. I totally reject it. The way he said the word ‘marriage’ made it sound so right and proper, but he couldn’t see how it was tearing me apart.