February Flowers Read online

  “I’m a good dancer,” she said, slowly raising her hands above her head. “All Miao girls are good dancers. I was once picked to dance at a national spring festival show in Beijing.”

  “What do you dance?”

  She didn’t answer. Then she started to whirl round and round, up toward me, then away, the wide legs of her pants fluttering as she moved.

  It was the early morning of a hot spring day. The reddish morning light poured in through the half-opened door and there she was, whirling against it. She looked so angelic, so delicate, the most beautiful thing I had ever seen. I sat on the edge of my bed and watched her, my heart jumping, speechless.

  Then, with the suddenness of a door slammed shut, she stopped swirling; she bowed her head and curtsied, holding on to her pants legs, as though she was responding to a curtain call. Her glittering smile contained no trace of shyness or restraint, as if she was confident of a standing ovation. Before I could say a word she put on her shoes and hat, all the while smiling dazzlingly at me, then backed out of the door and closed it without a sound.

  I wanted to follow her but instead I fell back onto my bed—a strange dizziness struck me in a kind of ecstasy. I felt my blood pumping through my veins and crushing my organs. A strong current of warmth permeated my heart. I had difficulty breathing. Never before in my life had I been so paralyzed by an unspeakable emotion and so incapable of expressing my thoughts.

  In later years, whenever my friends talked to me about their first love, I would think of this moment when I saw Miao Yan dancing in the morning light. At seventeen, I was both frustrated and thrilled by the intimacy I shared with her. I couldn’t ignore it, nor did I dare face it.

  I remember writing a poem for her on that day she danced in my room.

  I saw you, in the morning glow

  Pondering, eyes cast low

  On tiptoes, I passed by you

  Not wanting to disturb the grass

  And the sleeping dew

  For some reason I never showed it to her. Perhaps I felt it read too much like a love poem.

  From that day on I began to view her as a sister, as someone superior, dominant, sexy, and mature—all the things that, as a teenager, I wasn’t. Reassured by this conclusion, I allowed myself to be drawn even more closely to her. Whenever she needed my company I was available; wherever she wanted to meet, I was there. I played truant, avoided social activities, minimized my time in the library. I did what I could to be with her. I didn’t know how to hold back; I just let my passion and will run their full course without worrying about where I would end up. Later, I questioned my friendship with Miao Yan and the value of spending so much time with her. But early on I didn’t think about it any more deeply—or my mind simply refused to do so.

  A few days after she surprised me with her dancing, Miao Yan suddenly disappeared. I waited for her during lunch, went up to the roof in the evening to find her, even visited her department hoping to bump into her. She was nowhere to be seen. Finally I decided to go to her dorm room—I should have gone there first but somehow I felt that if she had been there, she would have visited me.

  I could tell just from the clothes on the clothesline that the eighth floor was occupied by more senior students. There were dressy pants, frilly skirts, pantyhose, and other fancy clothes. I even saw a few men’s shirts—their girlfriends must have done laundry for them. Against the wall, two pairs of silk high-heeled shoes stood side by side, one with thin blue ankle straps. A little farther, a stuffed garbage bin was next to the gutter, a bunch of dried flowers sticking out from under the lid.

  I didn’t know her room number so I asked the first girl I saw in the hallway of the eighth floor—she was picking up a sweater from a basin near her feet and was going to hang it up. The water was dripping onto the floor, forming rivulets. I jumped back as they threatened to come my way.

  “Miao Yan?” She didn’t look at me. “The other side.”

  “Which room?”

  “I don’t know.” She bent and picked up a blouse from the basin.

  There was no one in the hallway on the other side. All the doors were closed. I decided to wait—Miao Yan might be sleeping right now. She once told me that she sometimes slept in the daytime.

  Two girls strolled toward me but before I could question them they went into the second room near the stairway, leaving the door open. I walked over to the room and heard them chatting. I didn’t want to appear rude by interrupting their conversation so I stayed in the hallway, out of sight, thinking I would knock on the door when they stopped.

  “Did she go to Shenzhen again?” one girl said.

  “I guess so. She always has an entry permit ready. But what’s the point of her looking for a job right now? She isn’t even a senior yet,” the other girl said. “Also, there are only two openings in Shenzhen right now. Everybody wants them. There’s no way that she can compete against us senior students.”

  “I think she’s desperate. Perhaps she’s just trying to build connections.”

  “For God’s sake, she’s a C student, you know. I heard from her classmates that she cheats on almost all the tests.”

  “I’m not surprised. She got into university under a special policy. I bet she had failed in the university entrance exam many times before finally getting lucky. That ’s why she’s so much older than us.”

  “She thinks her pretty face will get her a job.”

  Both laughed. The girl who had just spoken repeated “her pretty face” in a mocking voice.

  “Someone told me that she sent a lot of gifts to Counselor Liu,” the other girl said.

  “Must be more than that. She might even have slept with the old dog.”

  “I don’t think he could help her much even if she was a senior. Job arrangement has to be transparent.”

  “Hmm, you don’t want to be too trusting. You just never know.”

  “So…you think we should buy him some gifts, too?”

  “I don’t know. But it wouldn’t hurt.”

  “I don’t want to get into trouble for bribery.”

  “Come on, don’t be so naive.”

  Then there was a pause. I walked to the door and was going to knock on it—I could see both girls lying on their beds. Just then the girl on the bed near the window said, “But isn’t she a Miao? I thought minority people had to go back where they came from.”

  I kept quiet but the girl near the door saw me. She sat up. “Yes?”

  “Oh, I think I’ve got the wrong room,” I managed to say, flustered.

  “Who are you looking for?” The girl near the window sat up, too.

  “Hmm,” I said, “Pingping.”

  “No such person here,” the girl near the window said impatiently.

  “Check the list in the duty room,” the other girl said.

  “Thank you. Sorry for the trouble.” I ran off as fast as I could.

  Miao Yan returned a week later. She said she had gone to Shenzhen to visit a sick relative. I wanted to tell her what the two girls on her floor had said about her—though I didn’t believe what they had said, I couldn’t forget it. But when I saw how tired she looked, I decided not to say anything. I assumed that the two girls were jealous of her beauty and diligence in looking for a job.

  That Friday, for the first time, Miao Yan invited me to her dorm room. It was the fifth from the stairway. A square mirror with blue ribbons taped around it took up a good part of the door. Her room was the same size and shape as mine but she had five roommates. Like my bed, hers was close to the door and on the upper level. Despite the crowding, Miao Yan had many places to store her clothes. Besides her standard assigned space in the wall, filled to capacity with one suitcase and half a dozen shopping bags, a lot of suits hung on a row of nails hammered into the wall above her bed. I did a quick count: nine suits. All were of solid colors, spanning the entire spectrum—red, orange, yellow, green, blue, violet—stacked on top of each other and covering half the wall, which at first sight l
ooked like a huge abstract painting. On subsequent occasions when I was there, a few nails failed under the weight and fell out. I would help Miao Yan gather the clothes on the bed or floor and find new places on the wall to hammer those nails back in. It was not easy—the wall was already dotted with nail holes.

  “How come they’re all solid colors?” I asked.

  “You never read fashion magazines, do you?”

  “But you were wearing a floral-patterned blouse when we first met on the roof.”

  “Your memory is terrible!” She laughed. “I have no such blouse.”

  “You do!” I could recall it perfectly.

  “I don’t. Only country girls wear that type of blouse. Country girls, you know, they’re everywhere in Guangzhou. Janitors, street sweepers, garbage collectors, waitresses.”

  “Without them, the city would be a mess. They—”

  “Drop the subject, will you? We’re not in a Party meeting.” She kicked a fallen hanger under a bed.

  “Where did you get the money to buy them?” I asked.

  “I have a part-time job.”

  “What kind of job?”

  “I’ll tell you later.” She picked a banana from a bamboo basket on her desk, peeled it, and took a big bite. With her mouth full, she muttered, “I’m hungry. Do you want something to eat?”

  “I’m okay,” I said, still thinking about her many suits. “But why do you need so many clothes? It’s a big waste.”

  She finished the banana in another two bites and wiped her mouth with the back of her hand. Standing where she was, she threw the skin into a wastepaper basket near the window. “I like looking at them. They make me feel good. And I lend them to my roommates so I won’t need to clean the room and fetch hot water. The better they treat me, the prettier the clothes I’ll lend to them. The world is all about people using each other.”

  I was going to ask if she was also trying to use me, but since I didn’t see how I could possibly be used, I said instead, “I never see you wearing them on campus.” I stood closer to examine those expensive-looking suits.

  “They’re for my interviews, you silly girl.”

  “Don’t call me silly.”

  “You silly woman!” she laughed.

  “Don’t call me a woman!”

  “I can call you whatever I want: little birdie, dearest kitten, sweet cookie, fresh cabbage, sad poet, pretentious philosopher, silly—”

  “You crazy woman!” I covered her mouth with both hands, but she shook me off and jumped aside, laughing so hard that she had to hold her stomach and squat.

  Her laughter was contagious; I couldn’t help but laugh with her.

  “If you want, you can call me chameleon,” she said after we stopped laughing.

  It was perfect—a chameleon changes its body color depending on the environment, as Miao Yan changed her outfit depending on her mood.

  I noticed a two-piece blue bikini on her bed. I picked up the bottom with two fingers—it was small enough to fit into a matchbox. “Do you actually wear it?”

  “Of course, I’m no country girl. I’ve even watched porn videos. Don’t stare at me like that. I’m twenty-four. I haven’t told you even one-tenth of what I’ve experienced. Want to know? I’ll tell you when you’re eighteen.” She laughed again.

  “It’s only a few months away. Why not tell me now?”

  “Well, you’ll be a woman when you’re eighteen. I’d feel better telling you everything about me if you’re a woman like me. At least your parents couldn’t blame me for making you a bad girl then,” she said, half jokingly. “I don’t want them to chase me all over the world, asking me to return their innocent daughter.” She put a cigarette between her lips and lit it. When the ash was about to fall, she walked to the window and tapped it off outside.

  A woman like her? That would never happen, whether I was eighteen or thirty, I thought.

  That night I remember counting the days until my eighteenth birthday. Though I liked to imagine that something magical would happen when the day arrived, I knew in reality it would be just another day, a normal day on the calendar. It wouldn’t be any different from my sixteenth or seventeenth birthdays. But being eighteen did sound different from being seventeen. Somehow I felt I would be reborn on that day, like a new person. There was uncertainty attached to that age, a transition from being an adolescent to the world of adulthood. I wondered how people would see me as an eighteen-year-old. Would they treat me like an adult or would they just get impatient with me for not knowing more than I did when I was seventeen? Would my parents stop lecturing me after I turned eighteen? Would I suddenly want to date, even if I couldn’t find the perfect man?

  Just as showing off her wardrobe pleased her, criticizing my clothes was also something Miao Yan truly enjoyed.

  “You’ve got to show off your curves,” she said. “Curves! You hear me? You can wear these T-shirts and jeans when you’re eighty.”

  “Come on, they’re not as ugly as you say,” I argued. “Other girls in my class also wear these kind of clothes. If I wore clothes like you—” I was going to say, “everyone would laugh at me,” but changed it to “I would no longer be myself.”

  “Not being yourself might be a good thing. I hate to see girls in baggy clothes.”

  My biggest mistake, Miao Yan pointed out, was not having a pair of high-heeled shoes. “Every other woman in the world owns a pair of high-heeled shoes!”

  “Why does it matter? I’m not a woman yet,” I said.

  “Girls can also be sexy! Being sexy is about how to make the world do things for you.”

  “Well, I don’t want to be sexy.”

  “What do you want?”

  “I want to become a professor.”

  “Geek! You don’t even know what sexy is.”

  “You sound like you do.”

  Obviously my answer frustrated her. She became silent and started to walk up and down in my room. Then she asked when my roommates would be back. I said they would be out for at least another two or three hours. Before I could finish my sentence, she darted out of the room and fifteen minutes later returned in a knee-length beige coat and a pair of red shoes.

  “Lesson number one for today,” she announced while closing the door behind her, “is what being sexy is all about.” I laughed and thought she was really funny. It was late April already—way too warm to wear a coat.

  She didn’t look at me or laugh with me. Instead she started unbuttoning the coat. Underneath she was wearing a deep red bikini! She threw the coat onto my desk and smiled at me.

  My first instinct was to leave the room. I was angry—I wasn’t interested in seeing her in a bikini, or in knowing what “sexy” was. It crossed my mind that she might ask me to try on the bikini, which panicked me even more. But a few minutes later my curiosity overpowered my anger and I calmed down. I assured myself that it was perfectly fine for a girl to see another girl in a bikini. I still felt nervous and trapped but I stared at her, wondering what she would do next.

  She had tanned skin and long legs—so long that they seemed twice the length of her torso. Her thighs were firm, though a little thin. There was a light birthmark the size of a pea on her right thigh. She didn’t have much of a bosom, which she carefully covered with her long hair falling forward over her shoulders. Her belly was flat, like a boy’s. A tiny silver ring glistened in her navel.

  “You have a belly ring!” I couldn’t believe my eyes.

  “I got it last week.” She seemed proud. “Now look at me closely,” she said. She retied the straps of her bikini to make them tighter on her shoulders and stretched the bottom to make it wrap her hips more snugly and a little higher up. She did these things slowly and carefully.

  “Walk like this, okay?” She twisted her body to adjust her weight on the fingerlike high heels of the red shoes, and started to pose—craning her neck, sticking out her chest, rolling her waist, swinging her hips, strutting exaggeratedly back and forth as if on a catwalk a
t a fashion show. The room was small and every few steps she had to turn around. It was almost comical to watch her, so gorgeous in a shabby dorm room filled with worn-out furniture, faded mosquito nets, and ugly bunk beds. She glanced at me often to make sure I was looking at her.

  “This is sexy,” she said at the end of the show.

  Though I had been a little daunted by her seriousness earlier, I was now amused and started to laugh.

  She didn’t laugh with me. “That’s my dream. I want to be a model, just as you want to be a professor. You’ve heard of Playboy, right? Those cover girls make tons of money.”

  “Playboy?” I stopped laughing. “You can’t be serious.” I had read about it and knew it was an American porn magazine.

  “They wouldn’t pick me anyway. I don’t have a big chest. But…” She walked to her coat and fumbled out a rolled-up magazine from one of the coat pockets and handed it to me. “Here you go!” She beamed.

  The cover of the magazine showed a photograph of a woman in a two-piece black swimming suit. The picture was a little blurry.

  “So?” I said.

  “It’s me. The model is me.”

  I rubbed my eyes really hard. It was her, though I would never have guessed. In the picture she wore heavy makeup and stood barefoot on a wave-worn rock on a beach, one hand holding a white scarf that fluttered in the wind. I had seen such pictures on magazines sold by street vendors on Zhong Shan Fifth Road for three yuan an issue, or ten yuan for five issues. Most of them were copies of low-quality entertainment magazines from Hong Kong and Taiwan.

  “When did you have this photo taken?” Dumbfounded, I managed to stammer the question.

  “A while back.” She put on her coat. “So I guess you don’t like it.”

  “How did you find out about this magazine?”

  “A secret.”

  “Did you get paid?”

  “Of course.”

  “How much was that?”

  “You don’t want to know.”