February Flowers Page 4

  Perhaps because Yishu and I preferred to be alone, Pingping and Donghua quickly became best friends and were always seen together, whether they were going to a class or a movie. Sometimes they even waited for each other to go to the bathroom. Though I was mostly in my own world, I observed my fellow students and the things happening in the dorm with curiosity—they made my life more interesting. I was amazed to see how different people were from one another.

  When I think of myself at seventeen, I see: short hair to the ear-lobes with a fringe above the eyebrows, round face with a curved jaw, high forehead, thoughtful eyes often narrowed slightly. My bag was always stuffed full and I sometimes had to hold extra books in my arms. When not in a hurry, I liked to walk and knew exactly how long it would take me to get to certain destinations: eighteen minutes from West Five to the Central Library, seven minutes from the Central Library to the building of the Chinese Language and Literature Department, twenty-two minutes from West Five to Classroom Ten, where I normally had my classes. I walked fast, often looking at the sky or the ground with a preoccupied expression on my face. I wasn’t really seeing either of them; I was dreaming about my future. The question of what would become of me was stuck in my head. As much as I took pride in myself for being a university student, I felt anxious about the uncertainties of the future.

  I had tried to make friends when I first came to university. I watched a movie or explored the city with classmates every weekend. Most of us had left our parents for the first time to live in a city far from home. Though Guangzhou, the capital of Guangdong Province, was just as polluted and crowded as where we had come from, it was a dazzling metropolis with soaring skyscrapers, air-conditioned buses, and gorgeously decorated department stores that sold brands I had never heard of before. As the richest and most liberal province in China, Guangdong was one of the most desirable places to live for the Chinese. A popular saying was, “East, West, South, North, and the Middle, no matter where you go, the money is in Guangdong.” Guangzhou, as its capital, of course, was even more appealing. While businesses usually closed at eight in my hometown, the nightlife here lasted until dawn. Once my classmates and I went to the evening fair on Up and Down Nine Street, downtown, and saw thousands of makeshift stands selling everything from clothes, accessories, and handicrafts to electronics and flowers. Sometimes, if we wanted to be outdoors, we would climb White Cloud Mountain or row a boat at Flowing Flower Lake Park. How thrilled we were by our newly acquired freedom!

  My effort at making friends didn’t last long though. I quickly realized that I couldn’t be close to any of my classmates. Many of them spent their free time playing poker, shopping downtown, or working part-time to make money. Apparently getting into a prestigious college had been their ultimate goal after studying hard for twelve years. From then on, to them it was party time. It was common knowledge that once you got into a university you would have no trouble getting a diploma.

  As for those classmates who studied hard, they mainly read what our professors told us to and weren’t keen on going beyond that. But I had read most of the prescribed texts before entering university, thanks to my father’s book collection, so with time on my hands I could delve into foreign literature that I had been interested in since middle school. I remember being so absorbed in Marquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude that I skipped meals. Whenever I discovered a good book, I was excited for days.

  As my reading list expanded I began to spend less and less time with my classmates. Since we all came from different provinces and knew nothing about one another’s past, it somehow felt fine to be a little aloof. In any case, because I played music and had published a few poems in the university’s newspaper, I had earned the reputation of being one of the most intelligent students in the class and that helped justify my aloofness.

  Whenever I told Miao Yan about the girls in my class, she would reply with a snort. “A bunch of little girls,” she would say. By this time, I had learned some basics about her: she lived on the eighth floor and was a third-year library and information science student. Most interestingly, she was a Miao, a minority group mainly from southwestern China.

  But she didn’t seem interested in discussing her background. “All the people in my town have been assimilated by you Han people,” she said, her face blank. “We wear Han clothes, we eat Han food, we go to Han schools, we speak your Mandarin.” But she did tell me at some point that her original surname wasn’t “Miao”—her father changed it for her when she went to primary school to make her remember her ancestors.

  She didn’t like to talk about her hometown, either. She was from Yunnan, a western border province famous for its tobacco industry and textiles. “I like Guangzhou much better,” she said. “And my favorite city is Shenzhen.”

  “What’s Shenzhen like?” I asked. I knew it was the first special economic zone in China and right next to Hong Kong, but had never been there.

  “It’s like Manhattan in the United States,” she said curtly, as if everyone should know what Manhattan was like.

  The first month after I met her had passed like a quick summer shower. Every few days she would visit me—we had dinner together, we went for walks, we had long conversations during which I was usually the listener. She knew all the small paths on campus and often took me to places I had never been. She also seemed to know everything about Guangzhou. Two more disco halls had opened on Beijing Road, an eighty-story skyscraper would be built in Tianhe District, two robberies had just taken place near the train station, a British rock band was going to arrive in a few days—she always knew what was going on.

  Once she took me to Qingping Market near Shamian Island in the old part of Guangzhou to show me that Cantonese people can eat just about anything. As I frowned at the stands selling dried bear claws, guinea pigs, live turtles, snakes, and armadillos, she reached over to pick up a live scorpion with chopsticks and asked the vendor to fry it on the spot. The scorpion struggled wildly when it landed in the boiling wok.

  “Yuk!” I turned away from this gross scene.

  “That’s nothing.” She looked smug, gobbling down her cooked scorpion. “I once ate them raw. I drowned them in strong alcohol and ate them. They’re nutritious and good for your skin.”

  “Aren’t scorpions poisonous?”

  She laughed. “Don’t you know I’m more poisonous than scorpions?”

  In the beginning, I went out with her merely because I didn’t know how to say no. I figured she must have been lonely after breaking up with her boyfriend and needed someone to talk to. As soon as she got over it, she wouldn’t come to visit me anymore. But she seemed to like being with me. In fact, ending her relationship with her boyfriend didn’t appear to bother her at all.

  I soon found myself sitting in my room awaiting her impatiently. I wondered where she would take me this time and was eager to know about all the new things happening in Guangzhou. To my surprise, I felt much happier since I had come to know Miao Yan. I was more talkative in the dorm and would hum songs while eating. Even Pingping noticed this change in me. “Did you receive a love letter or something?” she asked me more than once.

  Every time we walked together Miao Yan held my arm tightly, leaning her head against my shoulder. She did this without any pretension and seemed to enjoy the intimacy between us. It was not uncommon for girls to walk hand in hand or even to put their arms around each other’s waist to show their friendship, but growing up as an only child I had never been so close to another girl. This intimacy scared me as much as it excited me. The harder I tried to push her away, the closer she stood next to me and the more she mocked my resistance.

  “What’s there to be afraid of? I won’t eat you. You’re a girl. I’m a girl, too,” she would say.

  I remember the first few days she stood close to me, the strong scent of her perfume made my heart pound. Her soft breath never failed to make my legs stiff. The two of us must have made a real contrast—me: stiff, face red, eyes lowered; her: body swi
nging, smiling brightly, flirtatious. But in less than a month I found myself at ease with the intimacy and it even occurred to me that it was how girls should act in a close friendship: Pingping and Donghua always held hands while walking and girls in my class sometimes shared one bed when they had visitors staying over.

  But I never liked her flirting with guys. I could hear myself saying to her: “Don’t be such a superficial girl.” Sometimes, if a group of guys passed us, she would laugh loudly for no reason and even throw seductive glances at them. She would poke me in the side and laugh even louder when those guys turned their heads to watch us. Once, a young man on a bike collided with a big tree because he couldn’t avert his eyes from us. Another time, a bespectacled, baby-faced male student followed us for more than half an hour, insisting on walking with us. He didn’t leave until we threatened to report him to the Security Department.

  Miao Yan said it was me they were looking at.

  “Don’t try to fool me,” I said.

  “Actually you’re good-looking,” she said, “like a white daisy.” As she said this she stopped to look at me, then fumbled out a round mirror from her pants pocket and studied herself in it. “We’d be twins if your face was a little thinner, your eyes a little bigger, and your nose a little higher.”

  “If we could be twins, then you could be twins with any other girl in the world.” I laughed. “You could even say the same thing about a black girl—if your skin is a little fairer, your lips a little thinner, and your hair a little straighter…”

  She put the mirror back into her pocket and shrugged. “You don’t know what you’ll be like in the future, but I know what I was like before.”

  One Thursday evening after dinner I sat down at my desk to write to my parents. As a ritual, every Wednesday or Thursday I would receive a letter from them; every Thursday night I would write to them. Their letters were almost formulaic—first they would say they were doing well and tell me of their daily life, then ask about the weather and living expenses in Guangzhou, then my university life and what books and authors I had read. At the end, they would stress the importance of focusing on study. My mother would typically write the first half of the letter and my father the second half. In quite a few letters my father warned me not to be distracted by what he called “unhealthy ideologies among college students,” which included smoking, drinking alcohol, and dating.

  Their letters bored me. Sometimes, when my father wrote too much “don’t do this and that,” I would get irritated and want to rebel just for the sake of it. I wasn’t a kid and they should have trusted me. I had never disappointed them. Ever since primary school I had been the top student in my class. I even skipped two grades in middle school. Whenever the result of finals came out at the end of a school year, I would bring home an award, a trophy, or some kind of scholarship. “Your daughter will grow up to be a professor, a scholar,” every teacher in the school said to them. Though my parents always replied modestly, I knew they were proud of me. Whenever they talked to me, they would only ask about school, nothing else.

  Sometimes I had felt that becoming successful was not just about me, it was about fulfilling their own unrealized dreams, especially my father’s. My mother once told me that when she met my father he was about to publish two books on ancient Chinese literature. But in the mid sixties, when the Cultural Revolution started, the book deals were quashed and my father was condemned for his “feudalist” research and confined to the farm. For a few years he lived with pigs and ducks. These days, he only wrote student lectures. Once I overheard him telling my mother that he had lost his passion for academic writing.

  As for my mother, she was a biologist before she was sent to the farm. After the Cultural Revolution, when my father was offered a teaching job in Nanchang on the condition that my mother also taught in the same school, she gave up her beloved biology and became a math teacher.

  As I wrote to them this particular Thursday, Pingping and Donghua were hanging up their laundry on the clothesline outside in the hallway. Donghua’s big-legged flowery underpants swayed on the hangers next to Pingping’s bikini-shaped underpants.

  “Did your ma make those underpants for you?” Pingping asked.

  “I made them myself.”

  “You’d better throw them away before I do it for you.”

  “I can’t wear the small underwear you city people wear. It hurts.”

  “You just have to get used to it.”

  “I like mine better than yours. No one sees them anyway.”

  “Look at that guy! Over there, the one holding a bunch of pink roses. I love pink roses.” It was Pingping’s loud, squeaky voice.

  “They must have cost a fortune. Isn’t one rose five yuan? That’s two meals.”

  “Look! See the tall guy who’s speaking with Dama right now? Isn’t he handsome? I like guys with broad shoulders and muscular legs.”

  “Why don’t you go down and talk to him? If you stare any harder, your eyes will fall out of your head.”

  “None of the boys in our class has muscles like that. Lucky us, there are only ten of them. They probably think they’re pretty charming. The other day, Qi Wen asked me out to see a movie or something. Who wants to go out with him? Just look at his freckled face and bowlegs. His arms are even thinner than mine.”

  “Only gloomy boys study literature. They never exercise.”

  “Check out that girl! She must be his girlfriend. Don’t you think it’s too cold for her to wear that miniskirt?”

  “I don’t think she’s a first-year.” Donghua hesitated. “If I dressed like her my parents wouldn’t let me into their house. They’d kill me if I dated. They said I’d get bad grades if I dated. They had to sell a few pigs to pay my tuition. I ’m the only one in my village who has ever gone to university.”

  “They don’t know. They’re too far away,” Pingping snorted contemptuously.

  I put on the headphones and turned on the music. “Dear Ma and Ba,” I wrote, but couldn’t continue—I hadn’t read much during these past few weeks since I met Miao Yan. Sometimes I was amazed and a little puzzled by how quickly I had been drawn into this friendship. Though I didn’t wish to be like her, her boldness, rebelliousness, and wildness attracted me. She was so different from me, from the rest of the people I knew, like a strange species from another planet. The more I was with her, the more I wanted to know about her. Perhaps I should have mentioned her to my parents. But then they would have asked a lot of questions—where she was from, what her parents did for a living, what we did when we were together. Almost certainly, they would have asked what she wanted to become after graduation, to which I had no answer.

  I stood up and paced. On Yishu’s desk was a small bunch of carnations in a vase—though she didn’t usually stay overnight she stopped by at least once a week to put flowers in the vase. I smelled the carnations before settling back at my desk. No, I wouldn’t mention Miao Yan to my parents. I would keep her a secret, even if only for the sake of disproving my parents’ illusion that I was a perfect kid. “I’ve been reading Lu Xun,” I wrote, as I always did.

  My father often said that one could never claim to have mastered Lu Xun because his writing is so profound and elusive, thus often difficult to interpret. He especially liked Lu Xun’s essays and short stories, which occupied two full shelves of his biggest bookcase. Though he typically didn’t write notes inside a book—he had a box of notebooks—he filled the pages of Lu Xun’s books with highlights and notes.

  Once a few of his students visited him at home and I heard him talking about Lu Xun’s revolutionary spirit and thorough criticism of feudalism and reality. My father’s voice was passionate, almost quivering, as he analyzed the Crazy Man, Kong Yiji, and Ar Q, as though he wasn’t talking about characters in a book but people he knew intimately. I liked reading Lu Xun, too, but I preferred his poetic prose, like Wild Grass. The book I had was printed in the early eighties, the pages yellowish with age and half-transparent. I learn
ed some of the prose in middle school. Though the teachers, just like my father, focused on Lu Xun’s political views, I was mesmerized by his innovative language and metaphors. Smiling pink flowers, snow with spirit, fire that committed suicide, and sad dreams. Whenever I read his prose, I would be transported to a different world.

  “301, Chen Ming,” the speaker blared with Dama’s voice. I was so startled that I almost dropped my pen. Who wanted to see me?

  “Come down, sweetheart,” Miao Yan yelled through the speaker, mimicking a man’s voice. “It’s ferry cruise time!”

  I laughed, then my eyes sparkled—she had remembered me telling her I wanted to go for a cruise on the Pearl River.

  We took the ferry at the northern gate of the university. Since it was a weekday, few people were on the boat. We leaned against the railing shoulder to shoulder at the bow. Not far from us an old couple chatted intimately. The woman, petite-looking, with silver hair, sat in a wheelchair, her lap and legs covered with a checked blanket. The man, also silver-haired, sat on a bench beside her, his hand on her shoulder. They often smiled at each other as they talked.

  “What a nice couple!” I said, noticing Miao Yan was watching them as well.

  She turned away from them. “Do you believe there’s true love in the world?”

  “Of course. Don’t you?”

  “I guess you have to get lucky.”

  “I think both of us will get lucky.”

  She smiled faintly, combing her hair with her fingers. “Perhaps.”

  We spoke a little more but mostly were quiet, listening to the rhythmic humming of the engine resonating above the Pearl River, watching the whitish moonlight chasing the endless dark ripples. The reflections of lights from hotels, restaurants, and newly built residential high-rises twinkled in the river.

  “Want to hum the song Let’s Row Our Oars?” she suggested.

  It was a song I had learned in primary school. So we hummed and in our synchronized low-pitched humming my mind drifted back to my childhood, to those carefree days on the farm. I turned to look at Miao Yan. She was looking straight ahead, statuelike, her chin resting on her folded arms, her hair waving. She looked ten years older when she wasn’t smiling.