‘Ordinary workers are important,’ I say. ‘They serve the people and the motherland too. I will be proud to be a cleaner, and will work my hardest at the job.’
You nod, accepting that I will be content to mop floors for the rest of my life. And suddenly I am heavy of heart, for my future looks as bleak and hopeless as my life now.
At dusk we cycle to a noodle shop in Wet Nurse Alley, where the owner greets you like a visiting dignitary and immediately serves us two bowls of noodles with ground beef.
‘This costs a week of my mother’s wages,’ I gasp, reading the menu. ‘I can’t afford this!’
‘Don’t worry,’ you say casually. ‘My father has an account here. He has accounts in most places in Haidian.’
The delicious aroma of beef rises from the noodles. The last time I ate meat was during the Spring Festival, nearly a year ago, and I bury my head and chopsticks in the bowl, slurping up the noodles and broth. When the bowl is empty, I belch and wipe my mouth, and am ashamed to see that you have been watching me. How greedy I must have looked. Your own noodles are untouched.
‘We can’t be friends at school, Moon,’ you say. ‘You understand why, don’t you?’
I understand why. You are as red and glorious as our national flag, and I am as black as the grime under a convicted rightist’s fingernails. Of course I understand why. But I still feel slapped.
‘Then why be my friend at all, Liya?’ I ask. ‘Why bother with a friendship that must be kept secret?’
You widen your eyes in surprise at my question. ‘How could I not want to be your friend, Moon?’ you say. ‘When I am with you I’m so at ease. It’s as though I have known you all my life. .’
Your praise makes me blush, and I forgive you at once. Your request is understandable, and it’s selfish of me to take offence.
‘I understand, Liya,’ I say. ‘It’s important that you maintain your red status, so you can one day fight for Chairman Mao and our motherland. I don’t mind if we can’t be friends at school. I am lucky to get to be your friend at all.’
You smile at me, your deep-set eyes wells of gratitude. And I smile back, hoping that my understanding will last. Hoping resentment won’t creep back in.
The next weekend, when your father is away on Party business in Beidaihe and your stepmother visiting relatives in Tianjin, you invite me to stay at your home. You live in a courtyard like me, but whereas six families are crowded into our ramshackle building, the Zhang family have the entire property to themselves. You show me around, and I sigh with envy. The furniture in every room is elegant and skilfully crafted, and as well as portraits of Chairman Mao, delicate bird and flower paintings by a famous Hangzhou artist decorate the walls. But what I envy most is the privacy. Never do you have to listen to your neighbours rowing, or making noisy love, weeping or sneezing, or beating their kids in the next room. You even have your own private bathroom, with a flushing toilet, hot and cold running water, and a wooden bathtub — sparing you trips to the stinking public convenience and the lice-ridden communal bathhouse, crowded with other people’s naked bodies.
‘You bath in your own home?’ I ask.
‘Every night,’ you say. ‘Let’s have a bath now.’ And you turn on the hot tap and strip.
The water is cleaner and hotter than in the communal baths, and we steep at opposite ends of the wooden tub, speechless with pleasure. Submerged in water, I hug my knees to my chest, conscious of how skinny I am. The Three Years of Natural Disasters, and the food shortages that ensued, stunted my growth. The hundreds of meals I went without during those hardscrabble years have left me as underdeveloped as a child. One look at your healthy, womanly body, however, flushed a radiant pink, tells me you were never kept awake at night by a growling stomach. You smile at me through the rising steam, then surprise me by wistfully saying, ‘Moon, you have such lovely long hair. Can I wash it for you?’
I turn my back to you, slide up the tub and sit between your legs. You unbraid my hair and comb it out with your fingers. You lather up a bar of soap.
‘Your hair is like silk. .’ you praise, fingers massaging my scalp. ‘So lustrous and soft.’
‘Why don’t you grow your own hair?’ I ask, thinking of your short bob, cut to the earlobes.
‘No way,’ you laugh. ‘Long hair is bourgeois.’
I hear the shudder in your voice, and I say, ‘Well, in that case, I ought to cut mine short like yours.’
‘Don’t you dare!’ you joke in a warning tone. ‘Don’t touch a strand!’
I slide down the tub and slip underwater, swishing my hair about to rinse out the soap. How strange and contradictory you are, I think, to admire my hair and condemn it at the same time.
After a meal of pork dumplings, cooked for us by your servant, we go to spend the evening in your bedroom. The room has a bed, a desk and chair, a white bust of Chairman Mao and no character to speak of. Though you must sleep there every night, the room has a bare and utilitarian air, as though purged of your girlhood things to prepare for life in the Liberation Army barracks. I sit by the record player and flip through the collection of vinyl. ‘The East is Red’. ‘Ode to the Motherland’. ‘The Night-soil Collectors are Coming Down the Mountain’. Revolutionary anthems with rosy-cheeked workers holding their hoes and scythes aloft on the cardboard sleeves.
‘You can listen to any record you like,’ you say.
‘Um. . that’s okay.’
Sensing my boredom with your record collection, you ask hesitantly, ‘Do you want to hear a different kind of music?’
I look up from ‘Raise the Red Flag for the Soldiers, Peasants and Workers’. ‘All right.’
You go to your bed and grope under your bedding for a screwdriver. You then use the screwdriver to pry up a loose floorboard and reach beneath to pull out a battered cardboard box.
‘A servant was cleaning out a store cupboard a few years ago,’ you say, ‘and found some of my mother’s things. My father said they were decadent trophies of the Nationalist era and threw them out. But I sneaked out in the night and got them out of the bin.’
You tilt your chin and say defensively, ‘My mother died when I was six. This is all I have of her.’
You pull the lid off the cardboard box and lift out a scarlet qipao, embroidered with golden flowers. I gasp and stroke the qipao, my fingers enjoying the sensation of pure silk.
‘This was my mother’s dress,’ you say. ‘Here is a photograph of her when she was twenty.’ You show me a black and white photo of a beautiful woman, posing with her hand under her chin. She has an enigmatic smile on her lips and a white gardenia in her hair.
‘Your mother looks like a movie star,’ I sigh.
You modestly brush my compliment aside, though I can tell you are pleased. ‘Of course,’ you say sternly, ‘my mother would never doll herself up like a woman of loose morals if she was alive today. This photograph was taken in the Nationalist era, when women were exploited and oppressed by the shackles of beauty.’
‘Yes,’ I agree. ‘Thanks to Communism, women are now emancipated from the tyranny of lipstick and hair-curlers.’ Though, gazing at your lovely mother, I can’t help but think that lipstick and hair-curlers weren’t all bad.
There’s one more object in the cardboard box: a record with not a worker, peasant or soldier on the sleeve but a glamorous woman with her hair in the stiff waves of a permanent and the same hand-under-chin pose as your mother.