She learned to knit with wool too, and in no time at all was creating all kinds of designs of her own. She progressed to crocheting, tea cosies, and toys crocheted from fibreglass, and then to tailoring. In everything she took up, she was better than any of the girls in their courtyard. Even their neighbour, Aunt Jie, Di and Xian’s mother, was moved to comment: ‘Your Tianyi is so clever, she can learn anything, and she’s so clever with her designs.’
Her needlework certainly came into its own when Niuniu was born. They had no money, so Tianyi bought her own material and made all the baby’s clothes. The results fitted well and looked good too. Di gave her some new woollen yarn and she made Niuniu a little jacket and trousers and hat. The garments were so tiny that, years later, Niuniu took a look at them, and refused to believe that he really had been that small.
One bright sunny day, Tianyi was sitting in the sunshine breast-feeding when her mother-in-law came into the courtyard. ‘How come he’s so pale?’ she exclaimed, ‘You haven’t been putting face powder on him, have you?’ So cold towards her grandson, Tianyi felt, but she choked back a retort and said nothing. Her mother-in-law watched the baby from a distance, but did not appear to want to hold him in her arms. She made a few more idle comments, then turned to go. Tianyi could think of nothing to say. Finally, she took the little boy’s hand and waved it: ‘Say bye-bye to Granny!’ These innocent words triggered her first clash with her mother-in-law.
A couple of weeks later, the older woman returned from a holiday in Guilin and made her husband and her son listen as she recounted the incident. She had not enjoyed her holiday, she said, because all she could think of was Tianyi saying: ‘Say bye-bye to Granny!’ She had understood it to mean that Tianyi did not ever want to see her mother-in-law again, or even that she hoped that she would die down in Guilin and never come home. Her voice was choked with tears and she could hardly get the words out. Lian had to promise to ‘have a word with Tianyi.’
That day, Lian clearly had something on his mind when he got home but it took a lot of probing from Tianyi before he finally told her. Tianyi looked scornfuclass="underline" ‘Is there something wrong with that mother of yours? Why does she always see things in the worst possible light?’ Such an ordinary thing to say, and she had said it so quietly and so naturally, but to her astonishment Lian exploded with rage. Puce in the face, he burst out: ‘Can’t you stop making trouble for one moment? Can’t you both leave me alone? …’ Her husband had become another person, and Tianyi was shocked. He wouldn’t listen to reason, he was hysterical, and he shouted so loudly it was as if he was going to bring the house down. Niuniu, asleep in his cradle, awoke screaming in terror. That was the first time Lian lost his temper with her.
Tianyi felt as if her own anger was stuck in her throat and she could neither swallow it nor cough it up. She could not eat a morsel of her dinner. On that occasion, Lian apologized and spent a long time trying to make it up to her. But this became the pattern: he would lose his temper, then suddenly go soft, like a premature ejaculation. It happened again and again. She forgave him in words, but in her heart she was still angry. What could she do? If every little thing she said brought down such anger on her head, what could she say? She longed for her confinement to be over, so that she could go back home. It was as if all her conflicts with her mother and brother had never happened. She just wanted to go home and see her mother.
The one-month party for Niuniu was a big affair with all of Lian’s family there. Niuniu, dressed up like a little doll, was passed around to be admired. But Tianyi was completely ignored. No one said: ‘This is Niuniu’s mother.’ Only Lian’s grandmother shot her a glance, and said: ‘What are you doing sitting there? Niuniu needs a feed!’
Tianyi felt as demeaned as if she were a household slave, as if anyone could tread her underfoot. And this was the 1980s! Her anger threatened to overwhelm her. With great difficulty, she swallowed it back, but it felt like a solid object stuck in her throat.
7
B eing back home did not live up to Tianyi’s expectations. Her sister Tianyue was at university doing a Masters. Just her mother and brother, Tianke, were there. For the first two days, all the neighbours in the compound came to look at the baby, exclaiming at how bonny he was. They were all old ladies who had known Tianyi since she was a child and greeted her affectionately. Her mother and brother were wreathed in smiles. Lian was anxious to please and went out of his way to be helpful, shopping every day for fresh meat and fish, and preparing all kinds of good food for them. Tianke was busy romancing his girlfriend and in quite a good mood. Everything was peaceful. Then suddenly, one day, nothing was peaceful any more.
It was a gloriously sunny afternoon when Tianyi’s friend Di tiptoed in with a mysterious air and whispered in Tianyi’s ear. Tianyi instantly said to her mother: ‘I’m just popping out, go ahead and have your dinner. Don’t wait for me.’ ‘What are you going to do with the baby?’ asked her mother. What are you going to do with the baby? It was a question that would vex Tianyi for another fifteen years, and she never knew the answer. But just now she said: ‘Give him a little cow’s milk.’
What Di had said was: ‘Jin’s here.’ Jin was an old friend of theirs. Tianyi knew that the reason Di was not married was because of her feelings for Jin. He was ten years younger and, in Tianyi’s eyes, just a clever kid. Di, however, adored him. He was extremely bright. Four years previously, he had been a student at Fudan University and some friends put him in touch with Di. He came to Beijing to show her a book, Deep Level Structures of Chinese Culture, by the Taiwan scholar Sun Longji. It so happened that Tianyi had just published her paper on bisexual love, and she met him with Di. The three of them had a very pleasant discussion. Tianyi gave him an unpublished story of hers, and the next day Jin turned up with a story he said a friend of his had written. Di grabbed it first but, no sooner than she had read the first few lines than she blushed scarlet. She thrust the bundle of paper at Tianyi, exclaiming: ‘It’s disgusting!’
‘Disgusting!’ was a word much in vogue with girls back then, and Di and Tianyi were no exception. Tianyi read it too, and also found it ‘disgusting’, but strangely, the more ‘disgusting’ she found it, the more she wanted to read on, and in fact read right to the end. It was about a girl who became a stripper to keep her family. The story was completely improbable, had no literary value to speak of, and was mainly one long description of sex. Tianyi suspected that Jin had actually written it himself. Anyway, the two girls gave it short shrift. Jin spluttered in red-faced fury: ‘It was my friend who wrote it, it’s nothing to do with me … All the same, I think it’s very realistic. Not like your story, Tianyi, which is so simple, it’s insipid. That’s not realistic.’
Jin was on holiday, and after that, came over almost every day. They talked about anything and everything. In those days, Tianyi greatly admired the novel Rosy Sunrise, Evening Glow. The author went under the mysterious pseudonym, A-Xiong, and no one had any idea who he was. Quite by chance, it turned out that Jin knew the deputy editor at the publishers of Rosy Sunrise, Evening Glow, who told him that the writer was a well-known old Beijing Red Guard leader from Cultural Revolution days. That made Tianyi intensely curious. ‘I’ve just got to meet A-Xiong,’ she said.