So off she went to the passport office, filled with enthusiasm. She chose the male officer, figuring it was easier to do business with someone of the opposite sex. Then she discovered that although she could be quick-witted when the situation demanded it, her physical reactions were awkward. Just seeing the police officers made her feel guilty, as if she had something to hide. She didn’t know where to put herself. It took six visits before she finally got her passport. On that occasion, she brought a copy of The Tree of Knowledge with her, and presented it to the male officer. He looked up at her: ‘Hey, if you write stories, why didn’t you bring two copies?’ Alarmed, she shot a glance at the woman officer, who had taken the book and was flipping through it with keen interest. In her discomfiture, she stammered: ‘Next time … next time, I’ll bring you a copy.’ She always stammered when she was at her most uncertain.
But there was no next time. A short-term passport was there for her to collect. It gleamed before her eyes and suddenly she was blind to everything else. She certainly never imagined that it would be America, not China, that would bar her way.
The two weeks before she went for her visa interview at the US Embassy she spent preparing her answers until she knew them off by heart and back to front. She carefully read up on the kind of thing the visa officers liked and disliked, and how to deal with them. The day before the interview, she could not sleep, and got up to take three sleeping pills, which finally reduced her to a fuzzy-headed doze. First thing the next morning, she got up and put on a new woollen skirt, with a grey stripe on a dull red background, which Peng had bought her down south. She wore an unusual necklace, made of black threads, interwoven with tiny shells. Thinking back on it, she felt she had got her outfit wrong. She should have worn something more ordinary. But it was impossible to foresee everything, things happened so randomly. In the event, on her first visit to the American visa office, she blundered irretrievably. All the same, some things could only be blamed on fate. Previously, in the Chinese passport office, Tianyi had been able to make her choice between a male and a female officer, but in the American visa office, there was no way she could choose her officer. So when she was called to Window 3, she had a gut feeling that she was finished.
Many friends had warned her to avoid the old woman at Window 3 like the plague. She would refuse your visa application for sure, especially if you were a woman. Yang had made a point of telling her that if she was called to Window 3, she would be better off playing deaf, and missing her turn. She almost did that, but was overcome with a sudden urge to take her chances. Maybe she would be lucky.
She approached the window to which she had been summoned, with all the poise she could muster, in the manner of a gallant Communist Party martyr in a film epic. She saw the legendary ‘old woman’. She was not old, forty-six or forty-seven at the most, but she was scrawny and old-maidish. Tianyi registered the frown lines on her forehead with trepidation. She would never be able to stand up to a woman with frown lines like that.
The ‘old woman’ questioned her closely, first in Chinese, then in English. She tried to answer in English, and the woman appeared to be listening earnestly, nodding away. Tianyi felt better and better, until she finally got out the entire spiel she had prepared, in fluent English. Finally, the old woman stopped asking questions and picked up the sheaf of papers as if she was going to sign on the spot. Then suddenly she put another question, one which Tianyi did not hear properly. She said: ‘So, apart from your child, you wouldn’t need to come back to China at all, would you?’ The question would have sounded convoluted enough in Chinese, let alone in English, let alone after such gentle questioning. Tianyi fell right into her trap and, nodded dumbly even though she had not understood, thus, in a single instinctive response, undoing all her previous efforts. The woman’s face grew serious. Tianyi realized she had committed a fatal error.
Her short-term passport was stamped with a visa refusal. At that instant, she suddenly thought that the hatchet-faced visa officer was just like the soft-faced woman in the academy’s Personnel Department. It did not matter whether you lived in the east or the west, it was all essentially the same, people counted for nothing when it came to national interests. Both the policewoman and this woman were the padlock on the shackles, the guardians of authority. She had schemed and fought so hard for freedom — but ultimately she was to be disappointed.
Lian, however, got a visa with no problem at all. Three months after Tianyi was turned down, he went to America as part of an investigative team from the Planning Commission.
His first letter from America was a long one. He gave her a blow-by-blow account of everything that had happened. He had travelled on his own and had no sooner got off the plane than he discovered he had lost the address where he was staying. A kind-hearted elderly American couple took him under their wing and to a hotel. He was so grateful that he gave them one of the small gifts he had taken with him, a satin pincushion in the shape of a pumpkin dolly. He could not say enough good things about the Americans he met — and enough bad things about the overseas Chinese. He finished by adding portentously that although America was wonderful, it belonged to the Americans, just the same as China belonged only to the Chinese.
Tianyi had to admit to herself that Lian was quite clever. A lot of what he said and many of the conclusions he came to were pretty much right. She even thought that Lian would be best-suited to a job with a think-tank — he was excellent at dreaming up wonderful ideas for other people, no good for anything else.
After he went, leaving Tianyi and Niuniu at home, she felt a sense of release. Like many people, she had an instinct for avoiding freedom and another instinct that longed for freedom. Now, she found being stuck at home for too long unbearable.
Tianyi took up the activity she had been good at as a child, painting. She had not lifted a brush for many years, and soon found herself engrossed in it. Apart from a couple of visits each week to the academy and caring for Niuniu, she spent the rest of the time painting. She felt inspired: she used abstract lines to express her life and loves, in a way that only she could understand. She found the fineness of this technique intoxicating, and was completely and utterly absorbed in her own little world. If there is real happiness in this world, then that summer of 1990, Tianyi found it.
When, a month later, friends came to visit Tianyi, they were flabbergasted at the paintings that filled the apartment. After a long pause, there was a chorus of exclamations: ‘You must have an exhibition! It would be such a pity not to show these paintings!’ So, that autumn the Yang Tianyi exhibition was shown at the Central Gallery of Art. Almost all Tianyi’s friends in Beijing attended the launch, including one that Tianyi had never imagined in a million years would come. Her name was Qing, and she was twenty-three years old. Peng brought her, and introduced her as Zheng’s girlfriend when he was in the South.
Tianyi had mixed feelings. On the one hand, it was quite normal that Zheng should have had a girlfriend — after all, he was a hot-blooded young man full of life and energy. On the other hand, it niggled her that Zheng had never mentioned the girl to her. For ‘Zheng’s girlfriend’ suddenly to spring out of nowhere was hard to swallow. But Qing was a very likeable young woman. She immediately treated Tianyi with a warmth that the latter, who hid a soft heart under her sharp tongue, found hard to resist.
Qing’s rather flat face, large eyes and mouth that tilted up at the corners as she spoke made her look like a doll. She said she knew all about Tianyi — on her first trip to Beijing, she and Zheng had cycled with a group of friends to Haidian and on the way, Zheng had suddenly braked, pointed to a grey tower block and said: ‘That’s where Tianyi lives.’ ‘Take us to meet her,’ said Qing, but Zheng said firmly; ‘No, I can’t do that.’ Peng had said with a wicked laugh: ‘You don’t know but this woman’s Zheng’s secret goddess. He’d never agree to take you ordinary mortals to see her!’ Zheng had flushed and then lapsed into silence, said Qing. She had been very struck by that.