The court called me to pick up the remains of my wife—we were never formally divorced, but the last time I saw Wanyi was January 7th, 1995.
The landlady planned to lease the room out, the woman by the phone announced, and I had until April 20th, 2005. I reassured her that this has been on my mind, but the funeral had kept me busy. I asked, before she ended the call, to confirm the address.
She had been living in a room by the turn of the staircase in a three-story shikumen house, once occupied by grand families of the bund, until those households dissolved and the shikumens split into apartments. The staircase room became a room without a household.
I was told by the landlady to clear everything away, which was a considerably difficult task, since Wanyi never anticipated her passing and thus before me spread twelve years’ worth of her life. The wine wool coat from our trip in the early 90s. A metal black sewing machine under a pale embroidered cover, ochre at the edge. A picture of our son from middle school. Reading glasses.
The room was small and square, with barely enough space to fit a closet, a small bed, and a writing desk below the window. I knocked my knees on the sharp edge of her bed frame, surprised. When our son was little, he ran into the kitchen table and sliced his head. When I came home from work, I saw her sewing red cotton cushions in tears. She taped them around every pointed edge in our apartment and replaced them every time the red blackened. They were ugly but useful.
In the first drawer of her writing desk, I found a small rosewood box. Well-oiled by time, the box felt aged, heavy, but I had never seen her take out the box back when we still lived together. Inside stacked letters bonded by rubber bands, sealed and stamped.
*
Dear editor,
Sorry for all the time it might take to read this letter, if you even get it at all. It’s probably not worth your time. But I have no one else to tell.
More and more recently I find myself losing color. My curls are becoming sparse and sticking to my scalp. I found a cluster of white hairs last night and asked him to pick them out. He stared at me as if I asked him to touch his nosetip with his tongue, and switched to the sports channel. Later he explained he was just tired.
When Guran and I got married in the 70s, every night he came back from work I would massage his shoulders while we watched night news. My fingers travelled through the blocks and tenseness of his muscles and like pulling a loose knot he soothed in my hands. One night—they were commemorating the first anniversary of the death of Chairman Mao, it’s all too vivid in my head—he fell asleep, and, awaking in my arms, held the back of my hand against his cheeks. I don’t care what happened in that moment—the world could have vanished and Chairman Mao reincarnated and the cats flying backwards, and it would have felt like home.
1977—that was also the year gaokao resumed. He announced to me that he wanted to go to university after so many years, and holding my hands, asked me to be with him as he studied for the exams. He resigned from his job at the electric appliances factory for three months, and I found a job working in an alleyway factory sticking soles to shoes. Those days were poor as air but sweet. When I came home sweaty and smelling of glue, he’d hand me little cranes and roses from scrap papers here and there. I didn’t know what to do with them so I giggled and stored them in my box. I studied with him sometimes, testing each other on classical Chinese verses, my favorite subject back when I was a schoolgirl. He liked Su Shi, I Li Qingzhang. When the acceptance for engineering came out the whole alley stirred in awe. I was the first person he showed the acceptance letter to.
Did I ever tell him I too was excited for gaokao? Yet when he asked me to be by his side we both knew that only one of us could leave work.
You might ask why I didn’t try for gaokao in the ensuing years, dear editor, but soon after that I found out I was pregnant, and everything else was history.
This morning while ironing his cloths I examined the button that overstretched and fell off the middle of his shirt and wondered, what became of that lanky boy who biked across the city to pick me back from work? Or the man who held me in his arms and promised to protect me forever—who is this gloomy, heavy pile of stone that rolls back through the door crack leaving little indents on the apartment floor which I must spend the next few days kneeling on the floor fixing?
Respectable Editor, none of this, I assume, would be particularly resonant with you, but it takes a load off me to even begin this letter. You will probably suggest that I read more. You’re right. It’s been a long time since I opened a book.
Yours truly,
Xie Wanyi
March 28, 1987
*
Wanyi was writing to some editor long before she ever met Ping, I mused. Did she write all these letters only to keep them in a dusty little box?
I remember the time she brought the editor in as a guest. Ping was meek and slender, a few finger widths shorter than her, which made my wife, a voluptuous woman who wore as her uniform nylon stockings in black leather block heels look big, imposing. He sipped soup soundlessly.
I knew Ping. In my alley he was known as the destitute and sick son of a professor who killed himself in the middle of the Cultural Revolution. We had lived in the same alleyway when his father’s death made a scene. That night my mother clenched my father, whispering to him that he must not die like that—what else would she do? She turned her teary gaze to me, and her expression solidified. You can’t leave me either, son. I nodded, shivering.
Ping’s father was a weak man.
*
Dear editor,
I hope you are doing well, and your life is filled with as much sweetness as possible. It’s been so long since I’ve written to you, but I’ve gladly followed your advice. I even met a new friend.
Every morning when Guran left for work, I would clean up the pots and plates and also leave for my morning shopping. On my way back from the market lately, I’ve been dropping by the New China bookstore down on Huaihai Street if I wasn’t carrying raw meat in wet plastic bags. The day I met Ping, I was carrying a bag of jicai, bamboo shoots, breakfast rice cakes and ginger. My son’s favorite dish in spring is wild jicai freshly picked and diced, then fried with diced bamboo sprouts.
I never got to finish high school, but my mother was a teacher of Russian and kept her “little bourgeoisie” books tucked in a dark corner of our attic even during the difficult years. Idling at home as school dispersed, I snuck into the attic and picked up copies of Tolstoy, Chekhov, Pushkin, Nekrasov under the dim light shining from a crack in the wall.
Father did not like those books. In those years he slouched. Sometimes the slouching became too heavy, too material, and he seemed to collapse into himself, whereupon he took his belt off and lashed my mother until her screams and moans soothed him. He always did it when my younger brothers were in school. I may or may not have been there, but I was always the one who cleaned her wounds. One such night my mother, caressing the callus from her old wounds, turned to me with a solemn face. “Wanyi, your father is a poor man.” I nodded, gently tapping a cotton pad on her new scars. “They poke spines at him all day out there. If this makes him feel more like a man, then I am willing. He knows he is my husband still: these wounds never leave scars.”
So she said to herself.
My mother never saw the old scar—she could only touch what’s left—since father never liked to see her face when he hit her. So, the crisscrossed purple dimmed and darkened into her back skin, unfurling around the spine like ornate flowers in her box of books which still today lay tucked in the attic. My father refused to bring them down, citing another Revolution.
I like to circle around the foreign section of the New China bookstore and look for beautiful covers. Sometimes I could understand what they were saying, but most times, when I could only make out the meaning of each character, I merely mouthed the lines out, feeling raised by the sound of them.
That morning, I picked up a book with the drawing of a balcony. A voice came behind me.
“Would you want to be Juliet?” I hurriedly put the book back and pulled my shopping bag behind me, lowering my head but stealing a peak. Juliet? He was ghostly pale and wore a tired smile under golden frame glasses. He smelt soapy and clear.
He chuckled and said, “I won’t like to be Romeo. I’ll make honey out of poison with my lover.”
His name was Ping, and he was a writer.
I bit my teeth and spent 60 yuan to bring that book home. I didn’t let Guran find out about the book, but I’ve been reading it with a French dictionary. Word by rose-tinted word, line by lily-perfumed line.
Best,
Wanyi
April 10th, 1992
*
What always confused me, and all our schoolmates and neighbours, was why she left me for Ping. I was a good husband. I worked hard, I cared about our family, and I never so much as laid a finger on her. Sometimes my temper got on my nerves and I might have said a thing or two too much, but life was not always easy out there and I am no Bodhisattva. I knew her father was not a good man and I do not define myself with him. I worked day and night as a civil engineer until our son graduated university with first honours and left for a brighter future abroad and the wife left the household. I retired after a toiling career building infrastructure around the country, honoured by badges and silk banners, and every new year my former apprentices—now head of this and chair of that—visit me with their family. In no one’s mouth was I a bad man. Old Gu, always too kind and thinking too much for the other side, the neighbours and old friends would say every time we met. I never said a drop of unkind words about Wanyi even after her betrayal.
The baby who throws a tantrum gets mama’s milk. The good one gets nothing.
And to her I was the bad guy. I made her the oily-haired sullen woman who can’t even go to the bookstore. I knew she liked nice things. In the early 80s she wore bright red in a crowd of dusty navy. Compared to the romantic sweet talk of Ping I was stern, technical, an old-time bore who only had something to say when I was drunk from work. Who wasn’t young once? I had a family, and I had to let go of my indulgent passions to be a man who wouldn’t leave his wife teary-eyed for what to put on the table the next day. Plus, I bought her a red coat when I took her on a business trip to Hong Kong.
*
Dear Editor,
I’ve been making a hard decision.
Last night Guran came back before I had a chance to clean up my manuscripts and books. He smelt black and burnt, and traces of saliva slipped down his mouth. He stumbled towards me, snatching my book and began reading in slurred mockery.
Dear editor! I’d rather he beat me than tear my soul into pieces. How kind and gentle he is to the world. “Wanyi, you are lucky,” the women wink to me on the Mahjong table, “you’ve got a good one.”
I got a letter from Ping last week. The letter began with Ma chère. I asked him later what that meant, and he smiled and, closing his eyes, pronounced each syllable for me. The “r” sounded like a cough, but it was beautiful. He said in France it was customary to address your lover in such a way. His eyes made me feel like a rose bud. I stood up and made some honey water for us.
If Guran is the good one, does that make me the bad one?
My mother called me away yesterday. My younger brother was sick, and they needed me, so I will go back home for a week. You see, my editor, while I am away, I must think about the consequence of my love.
I cannot but crave for that cream of life which overpowers my heart when I am with Ping. I saw a young girl smiling with a bouquet of flower walking down the oak trees the other day. How carefree, I followed her with my eyes until she disappeared into the distance. I am a woman of a family with a son who is seventeen and about to take the gaokao in half a year. There’s no romantic novels about a woman like that.
Forgive me, dear editor! How can a person return to a cold wet bed when she had just been warmed by a great fire? Call me a whore, call me a mad woman living, call me the dirtiest of names and condemn me like a rat to a cramp dark stair, but let me live in a castle of words which by their grace alone will render any life infinitely light and free.
I have no other place to go, my editor. I am a woman without shame.
Respectfully,
Wanyi
December 12th, 1994
*
I never quite remember what I say after a few rounds of spirit. For that reason I kept very quiet at work. I let my guards down after I go home. Home is the only place where I could let go. I thought she could understand.
The first winter break our son came back from his university in Beijing he didn’t find Wanyi or his favourite duck soup. To my surprise my son did not stand on my side (or her side, for that matter). He seemed sharply calm. He graduated university early and went abroad soon after, rarely coming back.
*
Dear editor,
Forgive me for taking such a long time to write back to you. Life at home has kept me very busy. As you may have heard, Ping has not been in good health lately. He is sick from a lung infection last winter which never fully recovered—you must understand, he was never the fittest to start with.
He has been trying to publish his short story which he proclaimed was Flaubert of Shanghai. I did not quite understand the message, but it was beautiful language. Most journals returned his work. That night he returned from a writer’s gathering. He is usually very kind with my work, reading them and giving me. But that night when I shared with him the news that you accepted my work, he went in a rage and swept my manuscripts onto the floor.
His words hurt like salt, so I shall not repeat them to you. Thank you for reading all these letters from these years. You are my sole confidant, watching me on my every step. I may come home bleeding, defeated, I may bear a thousand chains of shame for being an adulteress, but who cares, my words—mon soleil—they bring hope to the darkest days. I only decide the worth of my words.
Just as I was drafting this letter I got a call that Ping was in the hospital. I must go—
*
The letter ended there. I followed their news closely although I never ventured to cross paths with them. Ping died in a car accident the seventh day after New Year’s Eve in the year of the dragon, five years after these two got together. I left a voice mail and offered to let her move back with me, but Wanyi never replied and moved to this little room and stayed here until last month. We lost contact after this move.
I looked around and saw that her room was filled with bounded books. Ruffled beige tabs marked the ones outside. She did not have space for a bookshelf. Some she put in transformed shoe boxes. Some she stacked on the floor, below her bed, above the closet, by the desk, inside the drawer. In her obscure circle of literary translators, she did apparently make a name for herself.
It was getting dark, and I was squinting in the orange ceiling light. I was nowhere near clearing the room. I thought about returning to my own apartment. Our son has made his own family and moved abroad, but he occasionally comes back and visits his old man. I thought about the nanny he hired to take care of me; her soft hands. Tonight I will bring this rosewood box home. I will ask the nanny not to touch it when she cleans my desk.
It’s from an old friend, I’d say to her. An old friend I loved.
I laughed. That is all absurdly romantic. I must be getting old, my mind softened, dwelling in contrivances. Wanyi never learnt that words are nothing but soft lies. She was innocent, protected, and pretty words from a pretty mouth got her spinning all mad. But she is dead now, and all I’ve got are words from her that tell me she never belonged to me.
They are from my son’s mother, I might clarify to the nanny. My wife. We decided to bury our ashes together with this box.