The Bathing Women. Tie Ning

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СКАЧАТЬ more and more of her disgusting actions were revealed. The intractable hostility on her pale, skinny face made people on the stage burn with anger. A boy student with a red armband suddenly stuck out his rubber army overshoe into Tang Jingjing’s face and said, “If you can kiss a bourgeois cat, can’t you kiss a working-class shoe?” He kept his foot in Tang Jingjing’s face as he spoke. A girl ran over and pressed Tang Jingjing’s head down to force her to kiss the boy’s shoe. More dust-covered shoes were extended forcing her to kiss them.

      The field seethed and the stage gave way to chaos. The students in front of the stage could no longer sit still, some knocking over their chairs, some standing on them, and others pushing their way to the front in order to see more clearly. Dust flew around and choked Tiao until she coughed. She also stood up and wanted to see more clearly. But unlike some of the boys in her class, she didn’t step on her chair; she instinctively thought it was improper, something that a student shouldn’t do. But she felt so small in the midst of the crowd and could see nothing on the stage, which made her anxious. Just then a stink wafted over. Someone brought up a cup of shit, and then a voice rang out, “Tang Jingjing isn’t worthy of kissing our shoes; her mouth simply deserves to eat shit!”

      “Right, right,” others chimed in. “Let her confess to the revolutionary teachers and students. If she doesn’t confess we’ll make her eat.”

      Make her eat shit.

      This suddenly calmed the boiling crowd, and the smell also made people hold their breath and concentrate. The shit was carried to the stage openly in a teacup, which played on the ugliest nerve hidden in the depths of the human mind. Its terrorizing power came onto the stage. The ones who had crowded to the front backed away, and the ones who stood on the chairs sat down. It was just like at a concert, when there’s some opening act during which the audience can raise as much clamour as they want, and only during the star’s big number will they sit straight and properly appreciate the performance. Making Tang Jingjing eat shit might well be the big number of the day’s denouncement meeting.

      The teacup was placed in front of Tang Jingjing, only a metre away from her. She kept that ghostly pale face of hers still. Everyone is waiting for you to confess, why don’t you just open your mouth? … Tiao’s heart contracted as if clutched by a hand, and she could hardly breathe. She hoped Teacher Tang would open her mouth immediately so that she wouldn’t have to eat shit. But many people might not have thought like Tiao, and they might not have been so eager to hear Tang Jingjing’s confession anymore. When a person is given a choice between confessing and eating shit, what others are eager to see may not be her confessing.

      She didn’t open her mouth, nor did she eat the shit. So a boy student ran to the middle-aged woman in the moon-white shirt and whispered something in her ear. He then returned to Tang Jingjing and spoke to the entire audience. “If Tang Jingjing refuses to confess or eat shit, we have another method. We revolutionary masses will not be frightened by her hooligan’s arrogance. We will bring her daughter to the stage and let you look at her. Let everyone take a look at her daughter. Her daughter will be the evidence that stands as proof of her hooligan activities.”

      Tang Jingjing finally lost her poise. Tiao saw her quickly move two steps in a kneeling position towards the teacup. Those urgent and determined “kneeling steps,” which came like a thunderclap exploding before anyone could cover their ears, left a lifelong impression on Tiao. She moved with her “kneeling steps” to the teacup and stared at the cup for a while. Then, under the gaze of everyone, she grabbed the teacup with two hands and drank it down in one swallow …

      The first thing Tiao did after returning home was brush her teeth and rinse her mouth; she couldn’t resist the urge to eat all the toothpaste in the Little White Rabbit tube that only she and Fan used. Brushing her teeth made her vomit and after vomiting she continued to brush her teeth. Once she had finished brushing she continued to reach into her throat with the toothbrush. Then she began to vomit again. She vomited some food until at last only sticky sour fluid came out. She finished vomiting and brushing and then cupped her nose and mouth with her two hands—she cupped them very tightly, careful not to leave any space—and then she exhaled in big breaths—as she learned to do in kindergarten. She could smell her breath this way. Finally she could relax and she should relax; there wasn’t any taste in her mouth. She looked at herself in the mirror numerous times; she saw that her lips were white, like they’d been dyed white with the toothpaste, but they were even whiter than the toothpaste. She rubbed her lips hard with a towel until they became hot and red and almost bled, until they throbbed with pain. She locked herself in the bathroom tormenting herself for a long time.

      Then she came out of the bathroom with red eyes and a heavy head. Fan came over, and she embraced Fan and kissed her. Fan kissed back and they kissed each other loudly. She then went to kiss her father, her mother, that pair of old corduroy sofas at her home, her little chair, and the ice-cold radio/tape recorder made in the Soviet Union. Believing that she must be sick, her father and mother told her to go to bed. There she saw her folded handkerchief. She opened the handkerchief, at the centre of which was a white, yellow-eyed cat. She stared at the white cat and swept the handkerchief to the corner of the bed, but later she reached out to get it back. She opened the handkerchief and stared at the white cat. She put her mouth on the cat’s mouth and cried.

       Chapter 2

       Pillow Time

      1

      Like everyone else arriving at the Reed River Farm, Wu and Yixun were placed on male and female teams. Located in the alkali salt flats southwest of Fuan, the farm was where the provincial Architectural Design Academy congregated its own intellectuals for isolated labour reform.

      The couple’s transfer from Beijing to the provincial capital Fuan in the late sixties already had an undertone of punishment: as an engineer in the Beijing Architectural Design Academy, Yixun had aired his dissatisfaction with Beijing’s urban planning. He was young and aggressive back then, often speaking bluntly. A piece of history most people might not be aware of: when the country was just established, Chairman Mao invited Mr. Liang Sicheng to the Tiananmen Tower to discuss the future urban planning of the new Beijing. Not knowing much about cities, Chairman Mao might well have been in the grip of his own excitement at having won the revolution, or he might actually have had an in-depth understanding of the urgency of rapid industrialization, if the country was to be strong and prosperous.

      In either case, he stood on the Tiananmen Tower and looked down, sweeping that great-man’s arm of his towards the grey misty distance and saying to Liang Sicheng, “In the future, chimneys should be visible from here in every direction.” The great leader’s declaration must have terrified Liang Sichang, the great architect so devoted to preserving old Beijing. And Yixun, an undistinguished young architect, immediately expressed his own doubts on hearing this piece of privileged information. He thought it was absurd and inconceivable to make chimneys appear everywhere in the view from the Tiananmen Tower. How could Beijing, a city famous for culture, which had survived so many dynasties, be turned into a huge factory? A few years later, when Yixun’s sympathetic comments to Liang Sicheng were reported, both he and his wife, Wu, an English translator in the reference room, were transferred to Fuan.

      This transfer didn’t set off panic in their hearts. The Cultural Revolution had already started by then, and one city was much like another. Most people at the Beijing Architectural Design Academy were headed for a farm located somewhere СКАЧАТЬ