‘Xinran,’ he said, ‘have you ever been inside a sponge cake factory?’
‘No,’ I replied, confused.
‘Well, I have. So I never eat sponge cake.’ He suggested that I try visiting a bakery to see what he meant.
I am impatient by nature, so at five o’clock the next morning I made my way to a bakery that was small but had a good reputation. I hadn’t announced my visit, but I didn’t expect to encounter any difficulty. Journalists in China are called ‘kings without crowns’. They have the right of free entry to almost any organisation in the country.
The manager at the bakery did not know why I had come but he was impressed by my devotion to my job: he said that he had never seen a journalist up so early to gather material. It was not yet fully light; under the dim light of the factory lamps, seven or eight female workers were breaking eggs into a large vat. They were yawning and clearing their throats with a dreadful hawking noise. The intermittent sound of spitting made me feel uneasy. One woman had egg yolk all over her face, most probably from wiping her nose rather than some obscure beauty treatment. I watched two male workers add flavouring and colour to a thin flour paste that had been prepared the day before. The mixture had the eggs added to it and was then poured into tins on a conveyor belt. When the tins emerged from the oven, a dozen or so female workers packed the cakes into boxes. They had crumbs at the corners of their mouths.
As I left the factory, I remembered something a fellow journalist had once told me: the dirtiest things in the world are not toilets or sewers, but food factories and restaurant kitchens. I resolved never to eat sponge cake again, but could not work out how what I had seen related to the question of understanding women.
I rang my friend, who seemed disappointed with my lack of perception.
‘You have seen what those beautiful, soft cakes went through to become what they are. If you had only looked at them in the shop, you would never have known. However, although you might succeed in describing how badly managed the factory is and how it contravenes health regulations, do you think it will stop people wanting to eat sponge cake? It’s the same with Chinese women. Even if you manage to get access to their homes and their memories, will you be able to judge or change the laws by which they live their lives? Besides, how many women will actually be willing to give up their self-respect and talk to you? I’m afraid I think that your colleague is indeed wise.’
2
The Girl Who Kept a Fly as a Pet
Old Chen and my friend at the university were certainly right about one thing. It would be very difficult to find women who would be prepared to speak freely to me. For Chinese women, the naked body is an object of shame, not beauty. They keep it covered. To ask women to let me interview them would be like asking them to take off their clothes. I realised that I would have to try more subtle ways to find out about their lives.
The letters I received from my listeners, full of longing and hope, were my point of departure. I asked my director whether I could add a special women’s mailbox feature to the end of my programme, in which I would discuss and perhaps read out some of the letters I received. He was not opposed to the idea: he too wanted to understand what Chinese women were thinking so that he could address his tense relationship with his wife. However, he could not authorise the feature himself; I would have to send an application to the central office. I was only too familiar with this procedure: the ranks of officials in our station were merely glorified errand boys, with no executive power. The upper echelons had the last word.
Six weeks later, my application form was sent back, festooned with four red seals of official approval. The time of my proposed feature had been cut down to ten minutes. Even so, I felt like manna had fallen from heaven.
The impact of my ten-minute women’s mailbox slot went far beyond my expectations: the number of listeners’ letters increased to a point where I was receiving over a hundred a day. Six university students had to help me with my post. The subject matter of the letters was becoming more varied too. The stories the listeners told me had taken place all over the country, at many different times during the past seventy or so years, and came from women of very different social, cultural and professional backgrounds. They revealed worlds that had been hidden from view to the majority of the population, including myself. I was deeply moved by the letters. Many of them included personal touches such as pressed flowers, leaves or bark, and hand-crocheted mementos.
One afternoon, I returned to my office to find a parcel and a short note from the gatekeeper on my desk. Apparently, a woman of about forty had delivered the parcel and asked the gatekeeper to pass it on to me; she had not left a name or address. Several colleagues advised me to hand the parcel to the security department for inspection before opening it, but I resisted. I felt that fate could not be second-guessed, and a strong impulse urged me to open the parcel at once. Inside was an old shoebox, with a pretty drawing of a human-looking fly on the lid. The colours had almost completely faded. A sentence had been written next to the fly’s mouth: ‘Without spring, flowers cannot bloom; without the owner, this cannot be opened.’ A small lock had been cleverly fitted to the lid.
I hesitated: ought I to open it? Then I spotted a tiny note which had clearly been pasted on recently: ‘Xinran, please open this.’
The box was filled with yellowing, faded pieces of paper. Covered in writing, the pieces of paper were not uniform in size, shape or colour: they were mostly scrap paper of the kind used for hospital records. It looked like a diary. There was also a thick recorded-delivery letter. It was addressed to Yan Yulong at Production Team X, Shandong Province, and was from someone called Hongxue, who gave as her address a hospital in Henan Province. The letter was postmarked 24 August 1975. It was also open, and written at the top of it were the words, ‘Xinran, I respectfully ask you to read every word. A faithful listener.’
Since I did not have time to look at the scraps of paper before I went on air, I decided to read the letter first:
Dear Yulong,
Are you all right? I am sorry not to have written sooner, there is no real reason for it, it’s just that I have too much to say, and I don’t know where to start. Please forgive me.
It is already too late to beg you to forgive my terrible, irrevocable mistake, but I still want to say to you, Dear Yulong, I am sorry!
You asked me two questions in your letter: ‘Why are you unwilling to see your father?’ and ‘What made you think of drawing a fly, and why did you make it so beautiful?’
Dear Yulong, both of these questions are very, very painful for me but I will try to answer them.
What girl does not love her father? A father is a big tree sheltering the family, the beams that support a house, the guardian of his wife and children. But I don’t love my father – I hate him.
On New Year’s Day of the year I turned eleven, I got out of bed early in the morning to find myself bleeding inexplicably. I was so frightened that I burst into tears. My mother, who came when she heard me, said, ‘Hongxue, you’ve grown up.’ No one – not even Mama – had told me about women’s matters before. At school nobody had dared ask such outrageous questions. That day, Mama gave me some basic advice about how to cope with the bleeding, but did not explain anything else. I was excited: I had become a woman! I ran about in the courtyard, jumping and dancing, for three hours. I even forgot about lunch.
One day in February, it was snowing heavily and Mama was out visiting a neighbour. My father was back home from the military base, on one of his rare visits. He said to me, ‘Your mother says you’ve grown up. Come, take off your clothes for Papa to see if it is true.’
I didn’t know what he wanted to see, and it was so cold – I didn’t want to get undressed.
‘Quick! Papa will help you!’ he said, deftly removing my clothes. He was totally unlike his usual slow-moving self. He rubbed my whole body with his hands, asking me all the time: ‘Are those little nipples swollen? Is it here that the blood comes f
rom? Do those lips want to kiss Papa? Does it feel nice when Papa rubs you like this?’
I felt mortified. Ever since I could remember, I had never been naked in front of anyone except in the segregated public baths. My father noticed me shivering. He told me not to be afraid, and warned me not to tell Mama. ‘Your mother has never liked you,’ he said. ‘If she finds out I love you this much she will want even less to do with you.’
This was my first ‘woman’s experience’. Afterwards, I felt very sick.
From then on, as long as my mother was not in the room, even if she was just cooking in the kitchen or in the toilet, my father would corner me behind the door and rub me all over. I became more and more afraid of this ‘love’.
Later, my father was moved to a different military base. My mother could not join him because of her job. She said she had exhausted herself bringing up my brother and me, she wanted my father to fulfil his responsibilities for a while. And so it was that we went to live with my father.
I had fallen into the wolf’s lair.
Every midday, from the day my mother left, my father climbed into my bed while I was resting. We each had a room in a collective dormitory and he used the excuse that my little brother did not like taking a midday nap to lock him out.
For the first few days, he only rubbed my body with his hands. Later, he started to force his tongue into my mouth. Then he began shoving at me with the hard thing on his lower body. He would creep into my bed, not caring if it was day or night. He used his hands to spread me open and mess about with me. He even put his fingers inside me.
By then, he had stopped pretending it was ‘father’s love’. He threatened me, saying that if I told anyone I would have to endure a public criticism and be paraded through the streets with straw on my head, because I was already what they called a ‘broken shoe’.
My rapidly maturing body made him more excited by the day, but I grew increasingly terrified. I fitted a lock to the bedroom door, but he did not care if he woke all the neighbours by knocking until I opened it. Sometimes he deceived the other people in the dormitory into helping him force open my door, or told them that he had to climb through the window to collect something because I was sleeping so soundly. Sometimes it was my brother who helped him without realising what he was doing. So, regardless of whether I had locked the door or not, he would enter my bedroom in full view of everyone.
When I heard the knocking, I was often paralysed with fear, and just curled up in my quilt shivering. The neighbours would say to me, ‘You were sleeping like the dead, so your father had to climb in to collect his things, poor man!’
I did not dare sleep in my room, I did not dare to be alone in it at all. Father realised I was finding more and more excuses to go out, so he made a rule that I had to be back home in time for lunch every day. But I often collapsed before I had even finished eating: he had put sleeping pills in my food. There was no way I could protect myself.
I thought of killing myself many times, but could not find it in my heart to abandon my little brother, who had no one to turn to. I grew thinner and thinner, and then fell seriously ill.
The first time I was admitted to the military hospital, the duty nurse told the consultant, Dr Zhong, that my sleep was very disturbed. I would shake with fright at the slightest noise. Dr Zhong, who did not know the facts, said it was because of my high fever.
However, even when I was dangerously ill, my father would come to the hospital and take advantage of me when I was on a drip and could not move. Once when I saw him walking into my room, I started screaming uncontrollably, but my father just told the duty nurse who came running that I had a fierce temper. That first time, I only spent two weeks in hospital. When I came home, I found a bruise on my brother’s head, and bloodstains on his little coat. He said that while I had been in hospital, Papa had been in a foul temper and had beaten him on the slightest pretext. That day my sick beast of a father pressed my body – still desperately frail and weak – to him madly and whispered that he had missed me to death!
I could not stop crying. Was this my father? Had he had children just to satisfy his animal lusts? What had he given life to me for?
My experience in hospital had shown me a way to go on living. As far as I was concerned, injections, pills and blood tests were all preferable to living with my father. And so I started to hurt myself, again and again. In the winter, I would soak myself in cold water, then stand outside in the ice and snow; in autumn I would eat food that had gone off; once, in despair, I stuck my arm out to catch a falling piece of iron so that it would cut off my left hand at the wrist. (If not for a piece of soft wood underneath, I would certainly have lost my hand.) That time I won myself a whole sixty nights of safety. Between the self-injury and the drugs, I grew painfully thin.
More than two years later, my mother got a job transfer and came to live with us. Her arrival did not affect my father’s obscene desire for me. He said that my mother’s body was old and withered, and that I was his concubine. My mother did not seem to know about the situation until one day last February, when my father was beating me because I had not bought him something he wanted, I shouted at him for the first time in my life, caught between sorrow and fury: ‘What are you? You beat anyone as you please, you mess about with anyone as you wish!’
My mother, who was watching from the sidelines, asked me what I meant. As soon as I opened my mouth, my father said, glaring at me fiercely, ‘Don’t talk nonsense!’
I had taken all I could, so I told my mother the truth. I could see that she was terribly upset. But just a few hours later, my ‘reasonable’ mother said to me, ‘For the security of the whole family, you must put up with it. Otherwise, what will we all do?’
My hopes were completely crushed. My own mother was persuading me to put up with abuse from my father, her husband – where was the justice in that?
That night my temperature reached 40°. Once again I was taken to hospital, where I have stayed until now. This time I didn’t have to do anything to provoke my illness. I just collapsed, because my heart had collapsed. I have no intention of going back to that so-called home now.
Dear Yulong, this is why I don’t want to see my father. What sort of father is he? I am keeping quiet for the sake of my little brother and my mother (even though she doesn’t love me); without me they are still a family like before.
Why did I draw a fly, and why did I make it look so beautiful?
Because I long for a real mother and father: a real family where I can be a child, and cry in my parents’ arms; where I can sleep safely in my bed at home; where loving hands will stroke my head to comfort me after a bad dream. From my earliest childhood, I have never felt this love. I hoped and yearned for it, but I have never had it, and I will never have it now, for we only have one mother and father.
A dear little fly once showed me the touch of loving hands.
Dear Yulong, I don’t know what I am going to do after this. Perhaps I will come to look for you, and help you in some way. I can do many things, and I am not afraid of hardship, as long as I can sleep in peace. Do you mind if I come? Please write and let me know.
I would really like to know how you are. Are you still practising your Russian? Do you have any medicine? Winter is coming again, you must take good care of yourself.
I hope you will give me a chance to make it up to you and do something for you. I have no family, but I hope I can be a younger sister to you.
Wishing you happiness and good health!
I miss you.
Hongxue, 23 August 1975
I was deeply shaken by this letter, and found it difficult to maintain my composure during that evening’s broadcast. Later, many listeners wrote in to ask if I had been ill.
After my programme had finished, I called a friend to ask if they would go to my house to check that my son and his nanny were all right. Then I sat in the empty office and put the scraps of paper in order. So it was that I read Hongxue’s diary.
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br /> 27 February – Heavy snow
How happy I am today! My wish has come true again: I’m back in hospital. This time it wasn’t too hard, but I’m suffering so much already!
I don’t want to think any more. ‘Who am I? What am I?’ These questions are useless, like everything about me: my brains, my youth, my quick wit and nimble fingers. Now I just want to have a good, long sleep.
I hope the doctors and nurses will be a bit lax, and not check the wards too diligently on their rounds this evening.
The hospital room is so warm, and comfortable to write in.
2 March – Sunny
The snow has melted very quickly. Yesterday morning it was still pure white; today when I ran outside, the little snow left had turned a dirty yellow, stained like the fingers of my fellow patient Old Mother Wang, who smokes like a chimney.
I love it when it snows heavily. Everywhere is white and clean; the wind traces patterns in the surface of the snow, hopping birds leave delicate prints, and people too, unwittingly leave beautiful tracks. Yesterday I sneaked outside several times. Dr Liu and the head nurse scolded me: ‘You must be crazy, running outside with a high temperature! Are you trying to kill yourself?’ I don’t mind what they say to me. Their tongues may be sharp, but I know they are soft underneath.
It’s a pity I don’t have a camera. It would be nice to take a picture of the landscape blanketed in snow.
17 April – Sunshine (wind later?)
There is a patient here called Yulong: her chronic rheumatism brings her to hospital several times a year. Nurse Gao is always tutting sympathetically, wondering how such a pretty, clever girl could have got such a troublesome illness.
Yulong treats me as a dear younger sister. When she is here, she keeps me company in the courtyard whenever I can leave my room (patients aren’t allowed to visit other wards. They are afraid we’ll infect each other or affect the treatment). We play volleyball, badminton or chess, and chat. She won’t let me get lonely. When she has something nice to eat or to play with, she shares it with me.