“These ones that are already dry,” she said to the young man, pointing, “take them. We’ll finish the others in the evening.” She said this in a bossy way, but the man did not seem to mind. He quickly rolled up several posters, told me he was happy to meet me, then left.
I did not know what to say, so I gave her the gifts, both of them covered in paper. She looked annoyed, then sighed and took them. I thought she would put them away and open them in private. That was the polite thing to do. Chinese people always do that, so if you don’t like the gift, nobody has to see the disappointment in your face. But she didn’t wait.
She opened Old Aunt’s first. It was a small old-fashioned mirror, silver, with carvings on the back and on the handle.
“Ai! Look at this,” said Peanut, frowning. “The last time I saw her, she said to me, ‘The pretty girl I once knew, does she still exist?’ I told her I did not have a mirror to see myself, but pretty or not, I did know I existed. So now you see what she’s given me. Hnh! She thinks this silly thing will convince me to come back to my old life.”
Peanut looked in the mirror. It seemed to me she still had her old vanity. She patted her cheeks, widened her eyes, smiled at what she saw. And it’s true, she was pretty in a way. Her skin was smooth, her eyes were big. Although her face was too broad. Of course, this fault had nothing to do with her becoming a Communist. It was that way even when she was a spoiled girl with no sympathy for a person with a poor background. She put the mirror down and turned to the next package.
“I’m afraid my gift is not suitable either,” I said.
She tore open the package, just like a child. When she held up the stockings, she started to laugh, a big, long laugh.
“I can take them back,” I said. I was very embarrassed. “Here, give them to me.”
“No, no,” she cried, holding them close to her body. “These are very valuable. I can sell them on the black market for a good price. It’s a good gift.” She looked at me, then said in a very frank voice, no apologies, “I have nothing for you. I have no time these days to keep up with all the polite customs.”
“Of course,” I said. “You did not even know I was coming. How could you—”
“No,” she stopped me with a firm voice. “I am saying, even if I knew, even if I had the money, I would not bother with these customs anymore. It is too much bother—and to what purpose?”
I was worried Peanut had grown bitter. She put the stockings on a shelf. But when she turned around, she held out her hand to me and said, “Tang jie”—sugar sister, the friendly name we sometimes used for one another when we were younger.
“Tang jie,” she said again, holding my hand and squeezing it hard, “I’m so glad you came. And now you know, these are not just polite words.”
That afternoon, we had such a good talk. We sat on the bed and told each other secrets, in the same way as when we were girls, only this time we did not have to whisper. We talked openly about everything. Nine years before, we had argued over who had found the best marriage. Now, nine years later, we argued over who had the worst.
“Just think,” I said. “You were once so mad that Wen Fu married me instead of you. Now you know what regrets you avoided.”
“Even so, you got the better marriage,” said Peanut. “Mine was the worst!”
“You don’t know,” I said. “You cannot imagine a husband that evil, that selfish, that mean—”
And Peanut broke in: “My husband was zibuyong.”
When Peanut said that, I didn’t believe her. I don’t know how you say it in English, but in Shanghainese, zibuyong means something like “hens-chicks-and-roosters,” all the male and female ingredients needed to make an egg that turns into a chick. We had heard Old Aunt tell a story once about a distant relative who gave birth to a zibuyong, a baby with two organs, male and female. Old Aunt said the mother of that baby did not know whether to raise it as a son or a daughter. Later she did not have to decide, because the baby died. Old Aunt thought the mother killed it, because even if she had raised the zibuyong as a son, he could never have had children.
“How could your husband be a zibuyong?” I asked Peanut. “I remember your letter saying he had five sons by the first wife, who died.”
“The family went to little villages and bought a new baby son every year. You should see them—none of them look alike. One is dark-skinned, another very light. Another is lively and chubby, another thin and quiet. Anyone with eyes and brains can see the sons were bought.”
“But how could Miao-miao marry you off to such a person?”
“She didn’t know. The mother had always raised the child as a son. And for many months after my marriage, I didn’t know either. He didn’t touch me. I thought he was unhappy with me.”
“And then you saw the two organs?”
“I saw him in our bed with another man! The female side of him had enticed a male. I ran to his mother and told her what I saw. And do you know what she did? She slapped me, told me never to repeat such lies about her son again.”
“If you never saw the two organs,” I said, “how can you be sure he was zibuyong?”
Peanut sighed. “Because I told the mother her son was zibuyong, and she slapped me again and again, as if she could change this fact by making me believe otherwise.”
I am telling you this story the way Peanut told it to me. So I cannot tell you if her husband truly was as she said. Maybe she said that only because we had no word back then for “homosexual.” If a man never married, people whispered, “Maybe he is zibuyong.” They did not say this about women who did not marry. They had another word for that. But now I forget what it was.
Anyway, Peanut said she became a mock wife. “After a year, the mother forced me to go into hiding for five months,” she said.
“I could see no one. And at the end, the mother presented a new baby boy to the world. I had to pretend that baby was my own. I tell you, I took no interest in that baby. I lost interest in everything, all my pretty clothes. They meant nothing. My life was just like a saying I read the other day: how we are living in a world where everything is false. The society is like bright paint applied on top of rotten wood.”
Oyo! When she said that, she sounded just like a revolutionary. And yet she was also the same Peanut I knew when we were growing up: full of pride, headstrong about getting her own way, using words fashioned by somebody else’s ideas.
“How did you finally leave?” I asked.
“Do you remember that girl Little Yu, who went to our school?”
I nodded. “Of course I remember, the naughty one who switched everyone’s shoes when we were sleeping. What chaos the next morning! Each girl had a big right shoe and a small left shoe, or two right shoes, or two left shoes. We were late to classes, trying to sort them out. What a bad girl.”
“She helped me leave my marriage,” said Peanut.
“Little Yu?”
“In a manner of speaking,” said Peanut. “It was after I had been married for four years to that hen-and-rooster, and his mother always pecking at my feet. I was thinking how easy it is to ruin your life with no chance of ever fixing it.”
“I have felt the same way,” I said. “Exactly the same.”
Peanut continued. “I thought about my youth, things I once dreamt.”
“All your hopes, your innocence,” I added.
“Let me finish,” Peanut said. “Anyway, with that feeling in my heart, I decided to pay a visit to the school, to see our old teachers. So I went, and Sister Momo—you remember her, the one with one big nostril, one small.”
I nodded. “She was always very strict.”
“Sister Momo had become director of the school by then. And she wanted to show me how much money had been donated to the school. She showed me the new library, the chapel with the new Baby Jesus window.
“And then she took me to the back, to the little cemetery. Remember how Sister Momo would send us to the cemetery when we were bad? She thought thi
s would scare us into being good for the next world. The cemetery had a new fountain, water coming out of a baby’s mouth. I was admiring this, and that’s when I saw a memorial with Little Yu’s name. I was so shocked. It was like seeing Little Yu turned to stone.
“ ‘What happened? What happened?’ I asked Sister Momo. And she said, ‘Oh, this is a sad story. Only one year into her marriage, and then she died very suddenly, an accident.’
“Sister Momo did not say what kind of accident. But right away I was suspicious. Why was she buried here in the school cemetery? Her husband’s family should have buried her body in their family grave. I said this to Sister Momo. And she said, ‘She was happy here for so many years. That’s why her mother thought she should be surrounded by other happy girls.’
“And I thought to myself, This is a wish, not a reason. And as I puzzled over this, I heard a voice whispering in my ear. ‘Go find out,’ it was saying. Right away I found myself asking Sister Momo for the address of Little Yu’s family, so I could pay my respects. I don’t know why I did that. I was no longer myself. Something was pulling me.
“I left the school and went to the Yu family house immediately. This is when I had my second shock. Little Yu was not from a rich family like most of the girls at that school. The family house turned out to be a two-room flat on the second floor of an old building. One level above poor. And the family turned out to be only one widowed mother. That poor mother had taken a small inheritance from her uncle and stretched it into tuition for Little Yu, with enough put aside for a modest dowry. So you see, all her life’s hopes went for that daughter, now dead after one year of marriage.”
“Ai-ya!” I cried. “This is too sad.”
“Even sadder than that,” said Peanut. “The mother was so glad to see me. Nobody, it seemed, ever mentioned her daughter’s name anymore. And this was because her daughter did not die from an accident. She committed suicide.”
“Suicide!”
“She said the husband’s family drove her to killing herself. My body shook when I heard this. Only that morning I had been thinking I might kill myself if I did not find a way out of my marriage soon.”
“I have had these same thoughts,” I whispered to Peanut.
“The mother blamed herself as well,” said Peanut, “because she had helped to set up the marriage—to a nephew of a cousin’s friend in a village outside of Soochow. The future husband, she was told, had a high position with his father’s noodle business.
“Little Yu’s mother had never met the nephew. She saw him for the first time at the wedding. He seemed nervous, she said. People had to keep reminding him which direction to walk in, what to say. He giggled and laughed out loud at all the wrong times, making Little Yu’s mother think that he was drunk. He wasn’t drunk. He had the mind of a little child! He still wet the bed. He cried when the wind blew too hard. He thought Little Yu was his big sister.
“When Little Yu came to her mother, asking for help to end the marriage, her mother said her life could be worse. At least the family was good to her, gave her plenty to eat. And even though the husband was simple-minded, she had heard he could still father children. He had done this with a girl in the village. So the mother told Little Yu, ‘Be good, try harder.’ And Little Yu returned to her husband’s house. She climbed the tree in the courtyard, tied one end of a rope to a branch, the other to her neck, then jumped.
“ ‘For one year,’ the mother said, ‘my only thought was to do the same thing.’ Little Yu’s mother was crying when she told me this, and I was crying, too. I was feeling my own neck when she told me that. I was talking as if in a dream: ‘So this is how a girl ends her marriage.’
“And Little Yu’s mother cried, ‘No, this was wrong, what happened to her, that she could find no other way, that she had no one to help her.’
“That afternoon, at last, I had a sympathetic heart to listen to my troubles. I now think it was Little Yu’s voice guiding me to her mother. Because later that year it was Little Yu’s mother who helped me escape from my marriage.”
“How did she do this?” I said. I thought I was a few words away from hearing the answer to all my unhappiness.
Peanut stood up. “Why don’t you ask her yourself?”
“What?”
“Ask her,” Peanut said. “Ask Little Yu’s mother. She’s downstairs, cooking the noonday meal for all the women of this house who have already left their marriages.”
So that’s how I found out that whole house was an underground hiding place, filled with women and children. Can you imagine? I was scared and excited at the same time. I’m not saying I wanted to become a Communist, no such thing. I was excited because I was in a house with nine women who had once had awful marriages, nine women who no longer had to obey their husbands and mothers-in-law.
Little Yu’s Mother was still cooking when we went downstairs. That’s what everyone still called her, Little Yu’s Mother. To look at her, you would not think this small woman, frying her dried fish and bittermelon, was an underground worker. But then again, most Communist people did not wear uniforms openly back then. You would be crazy or dead if you told someone you were a revolutionary.
The other women were coming home for lunch, one at a time, from their different workplaces. One tutored students in French. Another worked in a shoe factory. Another made straw brooms and sold them on the street. They came from many different backgrounds. Really, they were like any kind of people you might meet in Shanghai.
So nobody said to me, “I’m a Communist. How about you?” But you could tell by the things they said. When we all sat down to eat, for example, Little Yu’s Mother said to me, “I hope bittermelon doesn’t disagree with you too much. I don’t eat it very often myself. But when I do, I remind myself how grateful I am to have other things to eat.” She laughed, and Peanut and the other women laughed with her.
They all liked that bittermelon, not for the taste, but for the conversation that went with it. “Oh, you haven’t tasted bitterness,” one of those women said, “until you have lived a whole winter with only one coal brick for heating and cooking.” And another said, “This melon is sweet compared to what I have had to swallow as a slave to a rich family.”
I can tell you this. I did not like bittermelon, not before, not after, not now. And I was not revolutionary in my thinking. But I would have joined them if they had told me I had to. I would have eaten bittermelon every day, every meal, if it had meant I could leave my marriage. If I had had to change the whole world to change my own life, I would have done that. I think many of the women at that house felt this way about their lives.
After we finished eating our simple meal, they all asked me questions. And even though they were strangers, I told them everything, about Wen Fu’s family, about my family, about how Wen Fu now controlled everything.
“He will not agree easily to a divorce, then,” said one of the women at the table. “I too came from a rich family. My husband did not want to give me up, because that meant giving up my family’s riches.”
“How about your son? Do you want him to come with you?” Little Yu’s Mother asked.
“Of course. My husband cares nothing about our son. He only uses him as a weapon to stop me from leaving.”
“Money?” said another. “Do you have money of your own?”
“Only a little bit left from my dowry. Just spending money for everyday shopping.”
“Don’t forget your jewelry,” said Peanut. “The two gold bracelets you received for your wedding—do you still have them?”
I nodded. “And two necklaces, two pairs of earrings, one ring.”
“Does your husband have a mistress?” Little Yu’s Mother asked.
“Many!” I said. “He’s like a dog, sniffing from one bottom to another.”
“But is there a special woman, someone he sees all the time?” asked another woman at the table. “Sometimes a mistress can force a man to divorce his wife, if his desire for the woman is stro
ng enough.” She gave out a hollow laugh.
“He cares for nobody that way,” I said. “In the past, his habit was to pick up a woman, use her for a few weeks, then throw her away. Now we are living in my father’s house, also with his own mother and father. There are too many eyes on him. So he does not bring his dirty business into the house anymore. I don’t know who he is seeing.”
“And what about you? Do you have a lover?” said a woman with a front tooth missing.
“Of course not!” I said in an angry way. “My husband’s morals are the ones that are bad, not mine! How can you think—” And then I became confused, then embarrassed by my confusion. Because, of course, I was thinking of Jimmy Louie. We were not lovers, and yet I felt for the first time the secret feelings that lovers must have, shame and the need to protect that shame.
Little Yu’s Mother patted my hand to soothe me. “This question is not meant to insult you,” she explained. “Sometimes it’s useful for a woman to pretend to have a lover.”
“Especially if the husband has a big face he doesn’t want to lose,” said Peanut.
“That’s what we did in your cousin’s case,” said Little Yu’s Mother. “Made up a lover. She got her divorce very fast after that.”
“But why should I make this my fault?” I said.
“Fine,” said the woman with the missing tooth. “Save your face and keep your miserable marriage! So pretty and proud—it’s women like you who can’t give up the old customs. In that case, you have only yourself to blame.”
“Stop fighting, stop fighting,” said Little Yu’s Mother. “We are only trying to find out as much as we can to determine the best way.”