All right then.
“When we first married, we got along all right,” I say. “Then we began to quarrel. Now he rarely speaks to me.”
“These things happen in marriage,” Sung-ling says. “You need to try harder.”
“My husband won’t touch our daughter,” I confess, sure this will show Tao for the kind of man he is.
When people in the canteen titter, Party Secretary Feng shushes the crowd and then addresses me. “No one is glad when a girl is born.” He may be illiterate, but feelings about female children are so deep that even he can quote from Fu Hsüan’s famous poem that begins, “How sad it is to be a woman! Nothing on earth is held so cheap.” He must have learned to recite the poem from his father, who learned it from his father, as have probably all the men—and women—in the commune and perhaps the country.
“Baby girls are equal too, aren’t they?” I argue back.
But I get no sympathy on that point.
“You aren’t doing your duty as a comrade,” Sung-ling scolds me. “Anything that doesn’t have to do with the revolution is a waste of time. Arms should be put to the work of improving the country, not to carrying babies.”
And yet I’ve seen Sung-ling cuddle her daughter. We’ve often sat together to nurse our infants. We’ve walked with them in the late afternoons when they’ve cried. We’ve even plotted, as mothers do, about the two girls growing up to be best friends for life.
I don’t want to accuse Tao directly of fooling around, so I list my other reasons. “He criticizes me all the time. He suspects me when I’m late. He rarely speaks to me, even though we live in two rooms. A woman shouldn’t have to suffer in marriage.”
“You have serious complaints, but a divorce is not a trifle,” Brigade Leader Lai comments. “If we grant you a divorce, what will you do about your baby? Will you leave her with your husband? How will you support yourself? Where will you live? A woman is like a vine needing the support of a tree. What will you do?”
I remember Z.G. saying something like this when I announced I wanted to marry Tao. I don’t like it any more now than I did then.
“A woman is like a vine? We’ve been told that women hold up half the sky,” I respond.
Before I can continue, Party Secretary Feng Jin jumps in. “Women are like water; men are like mountains.”
“Bah!” Sung-ling snorts. “If a man is a mountain and a woman is water, then it is the woman who confirms the mountain’s existence. As water, a woman can go anywhere. It gives life. It nurtures life. A man is reflected in her water.”
Could Sung-ling be alluding to my mural? I came up with the idea, mixed the paints, and allowed Tao to take the credit. The other judges—both men—look as though they’ve just swallowed cod-liver oil. When I first came here, I saw how the people of Green Dragon loved Tao for his artistic talents and took pride in him. I piggybacked on their good feelings to get my mural made. This won’t go well if they think I’m now trying to steal credit from him.
“A hurried marriage is not a basis for a good marriage,” I stumble on before the two men can compose their thoughts. “We didn’t know each other well enough to know if we could get along. We do not treat each other as equals,” I add, hoping that, if I accept some of the blame, then they’ll be more compassionate in their deliberations.
“Let us hear from the husband,” the brigade leader says.
I sit down and Tao gets up. I don’t expect him to hold back. I embarrassed him by coming here, and his only hope is to make me look bad. But I haven’t prepared mys
elf for the slipperiness of his honeyed words as he picks up where Sung-ling left off.
“It is natural for a man to go to a higher place, just as it is natural for water to flow to a lower place. When my wife came here, she was a broken-down shoe.”
He just called me a low prostitute! Behind me, people mumble and shift their weight. I don’t turn around, but I imagine hundreds of bodies suddenly leaning forward, eager to hear what Tao will say next. Yes, this is most definitely more entertaining than the loudspeaker, but I’m worried and scared. I wrap my arms around Samantha, protecting her, protecting myself.
“If you give her a divorce,” he continues, “no man will want her, because they only want fresh brides. And she’ll have to leave the baby with me. Ah Fu is mine until she marries out.”
The brigade leader is not at all interested in my baby’s future, not when there’s something more titillating to pursue. “This is a serious accusation,” he says. “What proof do you have of your wife’s bad behavior?”
“She kissed me in the Charity Pavilion before we married,” Tao answers truthfully. Again, the people in the canteen grumble and whisper among themselves. The brigade leader asks for quiet and Tao continues. “She touched me with her naked feet in the stream.” This elicits shocked ohs. “Once we were married, she wanted to do the husband-wife thing right next to my brothers and sisters.” He turns and addresses me directly. “Now you won’t do it at all.”
I jump to my feet. All eyes turn to me, but what can I say? Everything he said is true. I can’t get mad, but I can’t let this go either.
“When Tao and I first met, I was a virgin,” I say. “Now he insults me by saying I was a broken-down shoe—”
“A baby—even a girl—should not be with a mother such as this.” Tao speaks right over me. “Ah Fu belongs to my family and our village, not to an outsider. My wife puts on a red face, but I’ve seen her bourgeois ways. I’ve encouraged her to open her heart to the Party. I’ve told her she needs to be a cog in the revolutionary machine, but she refuses to perform ritual self-examination and self-criticism.”
Everything my mother said about Tao is true. He is hsin yan—heart eye, tricky. He’s using the safety of his background to denounce me as a way of diverting attention from his having sex with girls on the work teams.
“She is not red,” he emphasizes. “She is black and she has tried to spread her blackness to all of us by painting a black mural! There are rules for paintings. They must be hong, guang, liang—red, bright, and shining—but what did she choose for her subject on one of the walls? An owl. The whole world knows that the owl is a symbol of bad omens, darkness, and evil.”