The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories Page 4

  One day someone in the dorm room suggested they write an anonymous love letter to Liu Meiyan to invite her out for a date and see how she would respond. There was nothing else to do for fun anyway. The suggestion received warm, unanimous approval. Since everyone was bursting with Tang poetry and Song lyrics, writing up a sugar letter would be like a master chef preparing an appetizer. That evening they penned a draft. Having praised Liu Meiyan with all the beautiful words available, the letter invited her to meet in the plum tree woods north of the school’s Big Sports Ground at 6 o’clock in the afternoon: “Stay till we meet.” The letter further explained that the 6th hour (after noon) of the 6th day of the week was chosen for its auspicious ring: “Six Six Success!”

  This letter was composed on Monday evening.

  The next day the sealed letter was dropped into the mailbox.

  The plum tree woods north of the Big Sports Ground was chosen as the site for the date because the window of Dorm Room 6028 commanded a very good view of everything inside the plum tree woods.

  Over the next few days, Liu Meiyan’s hearty singing could be heard in and outside the classrooms and on the way to the library. She might be a bit on the heavy side, but, honestly, she had a really good voice. When she sang Meng Tingwei’s “Come and See Winter Rain in Taibei,” one would feel as if it were Meng herself singing.

  Six o’clock on Saturday afternoon arrived at last. In Dorm Room 6028, everyone squeezed together at the window and, eyes wide open, gazed toward the plum tree woods north of the Big sports ground.

  Liu Meiyan appeared right on time. Once in the plum tree woods, Liu Meiyan lifted her hand to check her watch, probably wondering to herself: I’m on time. Now, you, the mysterious admirer, it’s your turn to show your face.

  Five past six. Liu Meiyan gazed left and right.

  Ten past six. Liu Meiyan paced back and forth.

  Fifteen past six. Liu Meiyan stopped pacing. She stood there and stood on her toes again and again to see better and further.

  The spectators chattered and chuckled mirthfully.

  Usually, Chen Hao would not partake in the things of his younger roommates and would stay far away from their practical jokes like this. He had a principle to follow: Big Buddy should behave like Big Buddy. Yet, this time round, the chattering and smirking of the younger roommates attracted him to the window despite himself. He took a look at the plum tree woods and was stunned: Liu Meiyan in a rosy down jacket and white jeans reminded him of someone. Last year when he went home for New Year’s, his younger sister wore exactly the same clothes. The sister, who had leukemia, had already died half a year ago. At this thought Chen Hao’s heart beat wildly. He could feel something hot washing over his entire being. Without a word to anyone he pulled open the door and dashed downstairs.

  That same night Chen Hao came back very late. His younger roommates, already in bed, were in the midst of a heated conversation. When he pushed open the door and stepped in, a hushed silence fell on them suddenly. Without turning on the light, Chen Hao washed, got into bed, removed his clothes, and crawled into his quilt. The whole time Chen Hao didn’t say anything, not a single word. He could hear his own heavy breathing.

  Finally, Chen Hao opened his mouth. “I have an announcement for everyone: Tonight Liu Meiyan and I have decided to be boyfriend and girlfriend.”

  With that Chen Hao sighed deeply, a thousand-jin burden on his shoulder having been relieved. Chen Hao thought to himself: If anyone dares to say half a word against Liu Meiyan, I’ll kill him.

  Surprisingly, though, someone clapped his hands. Then, everyone in the room clapped their hands.

  Tears flowed down Chen Hao’s cheeks.

  (2005)

  Return Visit

  Ai Ya

  He wrote “twenty” on the check, signed his English name gracefully, and started to write a letter to his friend:

  Please, my friend, buy a hand-braided straw hat. Please, then, buy a ticket to my hometown, and at the corner of the station, buy a bunch of lychee from the elderly man who is often in his faded shirt. I know lychee is now in season. Afterwards, instead of getting on the train, please put the straw hat on, walk through the noisy, muddy farmers’ market, turn at Old Wang’s Beef Lo Mein stand, and you will be at my home. No need to knock on the door. Just call out: “Uncle Ah Lang’s Son!” That’s my Pop. Then, please place the lychee on the table and sit down to drink tea with Pop. Then, please stroll to the neighbor to see a young woman, an uncultured woman dressed in simple clothes. She was my first love. Please see if she still has the sweet smile on her healthy face. Has she given her husband another son? Please do all these on my behalf. Enclosed is US$20 to reimburse your expenses. Thanks.

  He put the letter and check into the envelope, sealed it with tears and a lick, and put an airmail stamp on it. Then he picked up the pen and wrote the following in the record section of the checkbook:

  June 18, Return visit fare and misc. expenses, $20 exact.

  ( n.d.)

  Butterfly Forever

  Chen Qiyou

  It is raining. The asphalt road looks cold and wet. It glitters with reflections of green, yellow, and red lights. We are taking shelter under the balcony. The green mailbox stands alone across the street. Inside the big pocket of my white windbreaker is a letter for my mother in the South.

  Yingzi says she can mail the letter for me with the umbrella. I nod quietly and hand her the letter.

  “Who told us to bring only one small umbrella?” She smiles, opens up the umbrella, and is ready to walk across the road to mail the letter for me. A few tiny raindrops from an umbrella rib fall onto my glasses.

  With the piercing sound of a vehicle screeching to a halt, Yingzi’s life flies in the air gently, and then slowly falls back on the cold and wet road, like a butterfly at night.

  Although it is spring, it feels like deep autumn.

  All she did was cross the road to mail a letter for me. A very simple act, yet I will never forget it as long as I live.

  I open my eyes and remain standing under the balcony, blankly, my eyes filled with hot tears. All the cars in the entire world have stopped. People rush to the middle of the road. Nobody knows the one that lies on the road there is mine, my butterfly. At this moment she is only five meters away from me, yet it is so far away. Bigger raindrops fall onto my glasses, splashing into my life.

  Why? Why did we bring only one umbrella?

  Then I see Yingzi again, in her white windbreaker, the umbrella above her head, crossing the road quietly. She is mailing the letter for me. The letter I wrote to my mother in the South. I stand blankly under the balcony and see, once again, Yingzi walking toward the middle of the road.

  The rain wasn’t that big, yet it was the biggest rain in my entire life. Below is the content of the letter. Did Yingzi know?

  “Ma, I am going to marry Yingzi next month.”

  (2006)

  Cold Night

  Yu Dafu[2]

  Have to tell her to go back first; with a promise to join her in half an hour.

  Have had more than enough to drink. The neighboring rooms are completely dark now, their guests long gone, the servants having turned off their yellowish lights. Coal in the stove, once glowing red, has crumbled into a smoldering mess, and the small door below the vent, once so red hot, almost translucent, has turned pale, too.

  Feeling woozy all the time, what with sleepless nights and then drinking all day long. Have really gotten into talking to Yusheng, but with her hanging at my side all the time, I can’t even stand up and to go take a pee.

  Took me a while to talk her into leaving, on her condition of me joining her in half an hour. Shivered badly when, escorting her to the door, a gust of cold wind blew right in my face. With the door open, the reddish light from inside shone into the misty night, revealing snowflakes drifting down.

  “Snowing again! Snow may prevent me from coming, you know!”

  Half joking; half out of a genuine desire to go
home and see if any important mail had arrived the past week.

  “How come! No deal then, and I won’t leave!”

  She opened her shawl, wrapped it around my body, and brushed her face, cool, smooth, and fragrant, and her soft, light breath and thin lips, against mine.

  “Alcohol! Smells disgusting!”

  She pretended to be angry and flashed me another stare. When she was about to brush her face against mine again, Yusheng cried out from inside the house:

  “Stop it, Liuqing. Stop it! Having the audacity to do this in the courtyard! Ten dollars, fine!”

  “I don’t care, I don’t. . . .”

  She brought her face close to mine again, a laugh escaping her lips.

  Wrapped in the same shawl with her, I cautiously treaded through the dark, slippery courtyard toward the gate, where the shopkeeper hollered “Cab!” Startled, I jumped out of the shawl and shivered again when another gust of cold wind blew into my face.

  She turned her head and reminded:

  “In half an hour. Don’t forget!”

  And left without looking back.

  Through shivering cold I took a few steps along the wall to a dark corner and peed. Then, as I walked back to the house, my face was once again greeted with icy snowflakes. I looked up into the sky and couldn’t make out anything except for a nebulous gloom; lowering my head somewhat, though, I saw a row of shingles on the rooftop: chilly, blurry, vaporous like beer.

  Once inside the house, I noticed that Yusheng was already laying on the kang. A door behind me opened, and the shop clerk handed me a warm towel and a bill.

  “Why the hurry? Want to go to bed, too? Go get me another pack o’ cigarettes!”

  The clerk was unhappy with the request, but since I was a regular, there was nothing he could do but go and run the errand with a big smile on his face.

  I lay on the kang across from Yusheng’s for who knows how long until the clerk shook me and woke me up, mumbling: “It’s snowing real hard outside. Shall I call Flying Dragon and get you a cab, so you won’t catch cold?”

  “Fine!”

  I woke Yusheng, wiped my face and hands with a towel, and had a smoke. We sat and waited for the cab, still very drowsy, neither in a mood to talk.

  Upon hearing a sudden sputtering sound in the quiet air, I put on the coat and hurried outside with Yusheng. The courtyard was already too wet and slippery. More snowflakes hit my face.

  “Snowing like this, I won’t be able to leave again tomorrow, I’m afraid.”

  My voice sounded a bit odd to my own ears, like beating a drum wrapped with a layer of cloth.

  The shops along both sides of the street had closed. All quiet, except for the cab’s wheels grumbling through wet mud. It bumped along; the street looked all but deserted. Inside the cab was complete darkness, the dome light broken, it seemed. The snowflakes caught in the beams of the headlights looked so gossamer, so faraway, like in a dream.

  The cab squeaked as it turned, its lights shining on a white wall. When it neared Yusheng’s home, I became excited, suddenly, as if a pot of water was boiling inside me, something welling up in my eyes.

  “Yusheng! Don’t go home! Let’s go back to Han’s Lake. Let’s go to Liuqing’s place and chat all night!”

  I broke the silence and thus begged Yusheng as I half stood up from the seat, pounded hard on the glass window, and ordered the cabbie to take us to Han’s Lake.

  (1926)

  Sweetheart

  Ku Ling

  She didn’t know how he had fallen in love with her.

  What he liked the most was to nestle in her arms and put his face to her chest to listen to her heart beat.

  “Put his ear to his heart/Listen to the sound of its beat” is a line from a poem she wrote her first year in college. She had felt her heart beat faster than normal ever since she was small. Sometimes, while doing any physically intense activity, she would feel her heart all but bursting out of her mouth. As she grew up, whenever she had to walk up to the second floor, she would hear her heart beat so hard. It hurt badly.

  When it hurt badly, she would feel her chest inside which the heart was beating intensely, and ask her parents. Her father would lower his head and sigh and her mother would sob with tears all over her face.

  When she knew she was afflicted with congenital heart disease, she cried, too; tears gushing down her face. Gradually, however, she became stronger and was not afraid of the hospital bed, intravenous bottle hanging high, and the nurses’ white masks any more. Sometimes she could calmly gaze at the signals of her own heartbeat on the monitor dancing up and down and wonder when they would fall into a deadly horizontal line.

  Perhaps God didn’t mean to take her back yet. In the year she turned 30, a heart donor for her was finally available. The day before the surgery she cried the whole night, her tears soaking the white pillow and sheet. She cried for finally having another shot at life and she cried for the donor who lost her own to save hers.

  All she knew was that it was a married woman her age who had died in a car accident. Since she had no way of expressing her gratitude to the donor, she kept the clipping of the newspaper story of her heart transplant, which carried their pictures side by side.

  Then he appeared. The first time he paced into the patient’s room hesitantly, she thought he was a reporter. Soon he became a regular visitor. Bored by long days of inactivity while recuperating from the surgery, she would often sit in her sickbed and comb and do her makeup with anxious expectancy. The joy of first love washed over her in waves. After all, thanks to her fragile heart, she hadn’t even kissed once.

  Now she could kiss to her heart’s content. Another’s heart beat in her chest with a healthy rhythm. Her heartbeat was not hurried, but very calm now. She could now put her heart at ease, hold tight in her arms the half-kneeling man, and say “yes” to his proposal.

  Still, she didn’t know why someone would come and love her, an imperfect, handicapped her, still fragile, with permanent scars on her chest. . . . Yet he didn’t seem to mind at all. And he loved her with such passion. Every time she asked him, he would reply only with a smile. Perhaps he had been through a lot and had thus become reticent. She knew that he was married once but became single again.

  She didn’t know there was a small box hidden at the bottom of his dresser. One day, accidentally, she found the box, opened it out of curiosity, and saw his old wedding picture: The happy bride with a sweet smile on her face looked so familiar, like. . . . then she was stunned. She hurried to find the newspaper clipping. She didn’t need to compare to know that his bride and her heart donor were the same woman.

  That heart was beating hard in her chest. It hurt so.

  ( n.d.)

  Feelings

  Li Ang

  She is a woman in her mid-thirties. Average looking. Her pale, smooth skin, though, gives her plain face a touch of attractiveness, especially when she fixes her hair into a nice roll high in the back of her head.

  She has two kids. Both are boys. The older one is in grade school; the younger has just started kindergarten. She doesn’t want to try again for a daughter. Instead she is thinking of going back to work.

  When she got married years back she worked as an accountant. Later when she gave birth to the first son, she didn’t feel comfortable letting someone else take care of him. Her husband would rather she take care of their son herself and didn’t mind losing the extra income she was making. So she quit her job. During all these years her husband has done well with his business and has saved up some money. They have bought an entire floor of an apartment building as their home and lived a smooth, comfortable life. She is rather careful in managing finances, though, so they will not be caught short.

  For example, she never leaves much cash at home. She always deposits extra money in the post office nearby and then withdraws a certain amount now and then for expenses. In addition to participating in investment pools with friends and relatives, she has a long-term de
posit account with the post office with a monthly deposit of about 1,000 yuan. That way there will be money for the two boys’ education.

  She goes to the post office regularly. Although it is right around the corner once she comes out of the alley, she always makes sure she is properly groomed and dressed each time she goes there. It is a habit of hers. Even when she goes to the small grocery right next door to buy soy sauce and things, she doesn’t want to appear unkempt.

  Since she goes to the post office often and since she has to wait while her deposit or withdrawal is being processed, she begins to notice the employees working there. It’s all so natural. Before she knows it, she begins to notice the director of this suburban post office more than anyone else.

  He is a fortyish man, medium build, a bit on the heavy side, but looks fit. An honest face that shows signs of having been through things. Nothing striking. Yet there is an air of calmness, of confidence, of substance and depth that compels her eyes to linger on him a bit longer.

  When her eyes meet his occasionally, she knows he is noticing her, too. Once, when a clerk hands him a bunch of deposit slips for signatures, he turns hers over to the front side and looks at her name and address carefully. She notices her own face reddening at the moment.

  She continues to go to that post office regularly for the next two or three years. She is busy every day taking care of her husband and two kids and her big home. Only when she goes to the post office and sees the director of the post office there does she feel that there is someone in the world whom she wants to see. Most of the time when he is conscious of the look in her eyes, he will glance back.