Cindy brightened and slapped Eddie gently on the arm.
“Right, boss, I get it. You’re not gay. So wouldn’t this be a good time for us to drink out of the same glass like they do in Europe, so we can officially be friends?”
Without waiting for an answer, Tsin took her glass and entwined her arm with Ni’s. They drank and Tsin leaned across the table for a kiss.
“No!”
Ni put his empty glass down on the table, leaned away, and looked around to see if there was anyone nearby who might know him.
“You see, Tsin,” he said, “there are certain things that I just can’t tell you about. It’s about my family. I couldn’t get married just now.”
“What did you say?”
“I’m not free. For the next few years I can’t allow myself to marry and have children, I mean, a child. That’s what I’ve been trying to tell you.
Ni’s confession made no impression on Tsin.
“So?”
“What do you mean, ‘so’?”
“What do you mean, ‘what do I mean’?”
Eddie was confused. He would have thought it would all be obvious to Cindy, who was, after all, a clever young lady.
“I can’t marry you, so we can’t date, or be together.”
“Who told you that?”
Ni was utterly and sincerely baffled at this. Then Tsin’s shoulders began to quiver. She covered her mouth with her hand and laughed silently.
When she recovered, she bent her head over the table and said, a little too loudly:
“Eddie, I don’t want to marry you. I don’t want to marry anyone right now, if you must know. I just want someone to sleep with. That’s all, get it? Tingi-tingi, chpok-chpok, like in the movies. You watch porn, don’t you? Of course you do, everyone does. Or even better, like in Japanese anime. I want you to lay me out on your bed, spread my legs out wide, and fuck me hard. I want you to lean me up against the windowsill and screw me there. I want you to screw me on the floor, pressing my head into the tatami. I want you to flatten me up against the wall and lift up my left leg. I want…”
“Enough!”
With trembling hands, Ni got out his wallet, counted out some bills, tossed them on the table, and stood up. But Tsin took his hand and stared into his eyes.
Ni Guan felt his resolve weaken. He was going to have to give in.
“I live alone.” Cindy raised her hand. The waiter appeared.
“Call us a cab, please.”
The Qingdao weather report came on the radio: 23.5 degrees Celsius, overcast, a north wind, four meters per second, humidity 94.1%. When Eddie and Cindy left the café, a light rain was falling. The cab arrived. Cindy tipped the waiter, who had accompanied them out, and gave the driver her address.
They rode the whole way without a word. Cindy pressed up against Eddie but refrained from any improper touching. She sat demurely with her hip pressed against his, holding his hand. Ni’s eyes clouded over. The mere touch of the girl’s narrow, warm palm filled him with desire.
The taxi took its time, driving through the entertainment district and the residential area of the city with its blocks of nondescript, identical high-rise apartment buildings. The driver honked apathetically, steering through the thick crowd of cars, motorcycles, bikes, and pedestrians.
At the entrance to Cindy’s building a gray-haired woman stared mutely at them as they walked in. “From the apartment executive committee, no doubt,” thought Ni. “She’ll file a report. To hell with her!”
Tsin unlocked her door and they tumbled into a tiny room. The only furnishings were a small sofa bed, a nightstand, and a wooden bookshelf nailed into the wall.
Ni picked up a book at random. Lyrics by Wang Wei, a Chinese poet from the Tang dynasty period.
Ni opened the book and read aloud:
Tsin continued, reciting from memory:
Ni Guan continued:
Tsin Chi continued:
…Outside the window, the rain stopped, then started again, and the northern wind hurled handfuls of ocean water against the glass. Ni and Tsin lay naked on the narrow sofa bed, clinging to each other and smoking Great Wall cigarettes, tossing the butts into an empty Pepsi can.
“Ni!”
“Tsin?”
“Those things you couldn’t tell me about, why you can’t get married, do they have to do with some violation of the Party’s demographic program?”
“Yes.”
“Do you have an illegitimate child? Maybe two or three?”
“Ten. Like a sailor with a girl and a baby in every port. No, of course not.”
“So there’s no kid?”
“There is one, but it’s not mine.”
“Oh!”
Tsin asked no more questions. She snuffed out her half-smoked cigarette, propped herself up onto her onto her elbow, and looked out the window.
“When I was a kid I lived out in the country. There was a poster on the biggest building in the town, which was the schooclass="underline" ‘Fewer children—more pigs!’ I saw that poster every day. And when I learned to read it was the first thing that I read all by myself. It scared me. I’m still scared. Sometimes I have nightmares: I’m in labor, surrounded by doctors. I’m screaming and straining, but then it’s over. The baby cries, but something’s wrong. The doctor in his white coat holds the baby up for me to see, and it’s a piglet. It just gets worse from there. Everyone congratulates me—it turns out there are sixteen piglets in my farrow and that they’re going to send me to Beijing and put me on exhibit at the big agricultural exposition. I also have this other recurring dream: I’m in the maternity hospital, and there are rows of basinets with babies in them, and then these butchers come in with knives, and they chop the babies into pieces and throw them into a big plastic bag, and I see that the babies are pigs. And one of the butchers says that suckling pig is really tasty with sweet-and-sour sauce. It was only when I got older that I wondered what the slogan meant. People think that it means you need to have fewer babies and work harder on the farm, raising pigs and other animals for meat. But it could mean something else, that it’s the babies who eat up the pigs—all those babies will grow up and eat meat, or else eat all the food meant for the pigs, which means, either way, that the more children there are, the fewer pigs. Which means that the Party and the country need pigs more than they need children.”