The Bathing Women

The BATHING WOMEN

TIE NING

Translated by Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer

About the Book

Three women

Thirty life-changing years

The dawn of a new China

Displaced from Beijing as a result of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, sisters Tiao and Fan live in the small town of Fuan. Their childhood consists of daily denouncements, cooking from Soviet Woman magazine and searching for the elusive red lipstick worn by women from the capital.

Their lives are irrevocably changed when they witness the death of their baby sister, Quan. It a death that they could have prevented; a death with the power to destroy their family.

In the China of the 1990s, the sisters lead seemingly successful lives. Tiao is a children’s publisher but struggles to find love. Fan has moved to America, desperate to shun her Chinese heritage. Then there is their childhood friend Fei: beautiful, flirtatious and outwardly ambitious.

As the women grapple with love, rivalry and past secrets will they find the freedom and redemption they crave?

Praise for The Bathing Women

‘As this spirited quartet chase their dreams against a backdrop of shifting cultural values, the novel – a million-copy seller in China – blends romance and feminism to paint an intimate portrait of these women’s ambitions, appetites and rivalries’ Daily Mail

‘The Bathing Women possesses a gentle humanity that makes a refreshing change from the raucousness of recent work by Tie's male peers … an acute, sympathetic observer of Chinese society’ Guardian

‘Intelligent and evocative writing … about the shaping effect of deprivation and how people may still draw reservoirs of love and kindness from these voids’ South China Morning Post

‘[A] fascinating story of sisters growing up in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution’ Good Housekeeping

‘If I were to pick the ten best literary works in the world of the past ten years, I would definitely rank The Bathing Women among them’ Kenzaburō Ōe, Nobel Laureate

‘Tie Ning’s unique novel about three Chinese women and their struggles In today’s fast-changing China is as gorgeous as the Cezanne painting the novel takes its title from’ Xinran, author of The Good Women of China

‘A probing and gracefully written portrait of an extended Chinese family, related by blood and mystery, in which the author explores areas of human behavior traditionally considered off-limits: the intimate and sexual lives of ordinary Chinese women’ Hannah Pakula, author of The Last Empress

Table of Contents

Cover

Title Page

About the Book

Praise for The Bathing Women

Preface

Chapter 1: Premarital Examination

Chapter 2: Pillow Time

Chapter 3: Where the Mermaid’s Fishing Net Comes From

Chapter 4: Cat in the Mirror

Chapter 5: The Ring is Caught in the Tree

Chapter 6: Fan

Chapter 7: Peeking Through the Keyhole

Chapter 8: Disgusted

Chapter 9: Crowned with Persian Chrysanthemums

Chapter 10: The Garden in the Depths of the Heart

About the Author

Copyright

About the Publisher

Preface

Tiao’s apartment had a three-seater sofa and two single armchairs. Their covers were satin brocade, a sort of fuzzy blue-grey, like the eyes of some European women, soft and clear. The chairs were arranged in the shape of a flattened U, with the sofa at the base and the armchairs facing each other on two sides.

Tiao’s memory of sofas went back to when she was about three. It was in the early sixties; her home had a pair of old dark red corduroy sofas. The springs were a bit broken, and stuck out of their coir and hemp wrappings, pressing firmly up through a layer of corduroy that was not very thick. The whole sofa had a lumpy look and it creaked when people sat down. Every time Tiao hauled herself onto it, she could feel little fists punching up from underneath her. The broken springs would grind into her delicate knees and sensitive back. But she still liked to climb up on the sofa because compared to the hard-backed little chair that belonged to her, it allowed her to move around freely, leaning this way and that—and being able to move freely this way and that makes for comfort; ever since she was small, Tiao pursued comfort. Later, and for a long time, an object like a sofa was labelled as associated with a certain class. And that class obviously wanted to exert a bad influence on the spirit and body of the people, like a plague or marijuana. Most Chinese people’s behinds had never come into contact with sofas; even soft-cushioned chairs were rare in most homes. By then—probably in the early seventies—Tiao eventually found a pair of down pillows in a home that only had a few hard chairs. The down pillows were from her parents’ beds. When they weren’t home, she dragged the pillows off, reserved one for herself, and gave one to her younger sister Fan. They put the pillows on two hard chairs and settled into them, wriggling on the puffy pillows, pretending they were on sofas. They enjoyed the sheer luxury of reclining on these “sofas,” cracking sunflower seeds or eating a handful of hawthorn berries. Often, when this was going on, Quan would wave her arms anxiously and stumble over in a rush from the other end of the room going, “Ah-ah-ah-ah.”

Quan, the younger sister of Tiao and Fan, would have been two years old then. She would stumble all the way over to her two sisters, obviously wanting to join their “sofa time,” but they planned to ignore her completely. They also looked down on her flaw—Quan couldn’t talk even though she was two; she would probably be a mute. But the mute Quan was a little beauty, the kind everyone loved on sight, and she enjoyed communicating with people very much, allowing adults or almost-adults to take turns holding her. She would toss her natural brown curls, purse her fresh little red lips, and make all kinds of signs—no one knew where she picked up these gestures. When she wanted to flirt, she pressed her tender fingers to her lips and blew you a kiss; when she wanted to show her anger, she waved around her bamboo-shoot little finger in front of your eyes; when she wanted you to leave, she pointed at the sky and then put her hands over her ears as if saying: Oh, it’s getting dark and I have to go to sleep.

Now Quan stood before Tiao and Fan and kept blowing them kisses, which apparently were meant as a plea to let her join them in “sofa time.” She got no response, so she switched her sign, angrily thrusting out her arm and sticking up her little finger to tell them: You two are bad, really bad. You’re just as small as this little finger and I despise you. Still, no one spoke to her, so she started to stamp her feet and beat her chest. This description isn’t the usual dramatic exaggeration—she literally stood there beating her chest and stamping her feet. She clenched her hands and beat the butter-coloured, flower-bordered bib embroidered with two white pigeons, her little fists pounding like raindrops. Meanwhile, she stamped on the concrete floor noisily with her little dumpling feet, in her red leather shoes. Then, with tears and runny nose, she let herself go entirely. She lay on the floor, pumping her strong and fleshy legs vigorously in the air, as if pedaling an invisible flying wheel.

You think throwing a tantrum is going to soften our hearts? You want to blow us kisses—go ahead and blow! You want to hold up your finger at us—go on and hold it up! You want to beat your chest and stamp your feet—do it! You want to lie on the floor and pedal—go pedal! Go ahead and pedal, you!

Through half-closed eyes, Tiao looked at Quan, who was rolling around on the floor. Satisfaction at the venting of her hatred radiated from her heart all over her body. It was a sort of ice-cold excitement, a turbulent calm. Afterwards, she simply closed her eyes, pretending to catnap. Sitting in the chair next to her, Fan imitated her sister’s catnap. Her obedience to her sister was inbred. Besides, she didn’t like Quan, either, whose birth directly shook Fan’s privileged status; she was next in line for Fan’s privileges. Fan was unhappy simply because she was like all world leaders, always watchful for their successors and disgusted by them.

When they awoke from their catnap, Quan was no longer in sight. She disappeared. She died.

The foregoing memory might be true; it could also be one of Tiao’s revisions. If everyone has memories that are more or less personally revised, then the unreliability of the human race wasn’t Tiao’s responsibility alone. The exact date of Quan’s death was six days after that tantrum, but Tiao was always tempted to place her death on the same day that she beat her chest and stamped her feet, as if by doing so she and Fan could be exonerated. It was on that day that Quan had left the world, right at the moment we blinked, as we dozed off into a dream. We didn’t touch her; we didn’t leave the room—the pillows under us could prove it. What happened afterwards? Nothing. No design; no plot; no action. Ah, how weak and helpless I am! What a poisonous snake I am! Tiao chose to believe only what she wanted to believe; what she wasn’t willing to believe, she pretended didn’t exist. But what happened six days later did exist, wrapped up and buried in Tiao’s heart, never to be let go.

Now neither of them sits on the sofa. When Tiao and Fan chat, they always sit separately on those two blue-grey armchairs, face-to-face. More than twenty years have passed and Quan still exists. She sits on that sofa at the centre of that U as if it were custom-made for her. She still has the height of a two-year-old, about sixty centimetres, but the ratio of her head to her body is not a baby’s, which is one to four—that is, the length of the body should equal four heads. The ratio of her head to her body is completely adult, one to seven. This makes her look less like a two-year-old girl and more like a tiny woman. She wears a cream-coloured satin negligee, and sits with one thigh crossed over the other. From time to time she touches her smooth, supple face with one of her fingers. When she stretches out her hand, the bamboo-shoot tip of her little finger curves naturally, like the hand gesture of an opera singer, which makes her look a bit coy. She looks like such a social butterfly! Tiao thinks, not knowing why she would choose such an outdated phrase to describe Quan. But she doesn’t want to use those new, intolerably vulgar words such as “little honey.” Although “social butterfly” also implies ambiguity, seduction, frivolousness, and impurity, the mystery and romance that it conveyed in the past can’t be replaced by any other words. She was low and cynical, but not a simple dependent, stiffly submitting to authority. No one could ever know the deep loneliness behind her pride, radiance, and passion.

Life like falling petals and flowing water: the social butterfly Yin Xiaoquan.

Chapter 1

Premarital Examination

1

The provincial sunshine was actually not much different from the sunshine in the capital. In the early spring the sunshine in both the province and the capital was precious. At this point in the season, the heating in the office buildings, apartments, and private homes was already off. During the day, the temperature inside was much colder than the temperature outside. Tiao’s bones and muscles often felt sore at this time of year. When she walked on the street, her thigh muscle would suddenly ache. The little toe on her left foot (or her right foot), inside those delicate little knuckles, delivered zigzagging pinpricks of pain. The pain was uncomfortable, but it was the kind of discomfort that makes you feel good, a kind of minor pain, coy, a half-drunk moan bathed in sunlight. Overhead, the roadside poplars had turned green. Still new, the green coiled around the waists of the light-coloured buildings like mist. The city revealed its softness then, and also its unease.

Sitting in the provincial taxi, Tiao rolled down the window and stuck out her head, as if to test the temperature outside, or to invite all the sun in the sky to shine on that short-cropped head of hers. The way she stuck out her head looked a bit wild, or would even seem crude if she overdid it. But Tiao never overdid it; from a young age she was naturally good at striking poses. So the way she stuck out her head then combined a little wildness with a little elegance. The lowered window pressed at her chin, like a gleaming blade just about to slice her neck, giving her a feeling of having her head under the axe. The bloody yet satisfying scene, a bit stirring and a bit masochistic, was an indelible memory of the story of Liu Hulan, which she heard as a child. Whenever she thought about how the Nationalist bandits decapitated the fifteen-year-old Liu Hulan, she couldn’t stop gulping—with an indescribable fear and an unnameable pleasure. At that moment she would always ask herself: Why is the most frightening thing also the most alluring? She couldn’t tell whether it was the desire to become a hero that made her imagine lying under an axe, or was it that the more she feared lying under the axe, the more she wanted to lie under it?

She couldn’t decide.

The taxi sped along the sun-drenched avenue. The sunshine in the provinces was actually not much different from the sunshine in the capital, Tiao thought.

Yet at this moment, in the midst of the provincial capital, Fuan, a city just two hundred kilometres from Beijing, the dust and fibre in the sunshine, people’s expressions and the shape of things as the sun struck them, all of it seemed a bit different from the capital for some reason. When the taxi came to a red light, Tiao started to look at the people stopped by the light. A girl wearing black platform shoes and tight-fitting black clothes had a shapely figure and pretty face, with the ends of her hair dyed blond. This reminded her of girls she’d seen in Tel Aviv, New York, and Seoul who liked to wear black. Whatever was trendy around the world was trendy here, too. Sitting splayed over her white mountain bike, the provincial girl in black anxiously raised her wrist to look at her watch as she spat. She looked at the watch and spat; she spat and then looked at her watch. Tiao supposed she must have something urgent to do and that time was important to her. But why did she spit, since she had a watch? Because she had a watch, there was no need for her to spit. Because she spat, there was no need for her to wear a watch. Because she learned the art of managing her time, she should have learned the art of controlling her spit. Because she had a watch, she shouldn’t have spit. Because she spat, she shouldn’t have a watch. Because she had a watch, she really shouldn’t have spit. Because she had spit, she really shouldn’t have a watch. Because watch … because spit … because spit … because watch … because … because … The red light had long since turned green and the girl in black had shot herself forward like an arrow, and Tiao was still going around and around with watch and spit. This obsession of hers with “if not this, it must be that” made people feel that she was going to run screaming through the street, but this sort of obsession didn’t appear to be true indignation. If she’d forced herself to quietly recite the sentence “Because there is a watch there shouldn’t be spit” fifteen more times, she would have definitely got confused and lost track of what it meant. Then her obsession was indeed not real indignation; it was sarcastic babble she hadn’t much stake in. The era was one during which watches and spit coexisted, particularly in the provinces.

Tiao brought her head in from the car window. The radio was playing an old song: “Atop the golden mountain in Beijing, / rays of light shine in all directions. Chairman Mao is exactly like that golden sun, / so warm, so kind, he lights up the hearts of us serfs, / as we march on the socialist path to happiness— / Hey, ba zha hei!” It was a game show from the local music station. The host asked the audience to guess the song title and the original singer. The winner would get a case of Jiabao SOD skin-care products. Audience members phoned in constantly, guessing titles and singers over and over again in Fuan-accented Mandarin, but none of them guessed right. After all, the song and the old singer who sang the song were unfamiliar to the audience of the day, so unfamiliar that even the host felt embarrassed. Tiao knew the title of the old song and the singer who sang it, which drew her into the game show, even though she had no plans to call the hotline. She just sang the song over and over again in her head—only the refrain, “Ba zha hei! Ba zha hei! Ba zha hei! Ba zha hei! …” Twenty years ago, when she and her classmates sang that song together, they loved to sing the last line, “Ba zha hei!” It was a Tibetan folk song, sung by the liberated serfs in gratitude to Chairman Mao. “Ba zha hei!” obviously isn’t Chinese. It must be because it was not Chinese that Tiao used to repeat it with such enthusiasm, with some of that feeling of liberation, like chanting, like clever wordplay. The thought of clever wordplay made her force herself to stop repeating “Ba zha hei.” She returned to the present, to the taxi in the provincial capital of Fuan. The game show on the music station was over; the seat in the quiet taxi was covered by a patterned cotton cushion, not too clean, which resembled those shoe inserts handmade and embroidered by country girls from the north. Tiao always felt as if she were sitting on the padding over a Kang bed-stove whenever she sat in a taxi like this. Even though she had been living here for twenty years, she still compared everything to the capital. Whether psychologically or geographically, Beijing was always close to her. This would seem to have a lot to do with the fact that she was born in Beijing, and was a Beijinger. But most of the time she didn’t feel she was a Beijinger, nor did she feel she was a provincial person, a Fuaner. She felt she didn’t belong anywhere, and she often thought this with some spite, some perverse pleasure. It was almost as if she made herself rootless on purpose, as if only in rootlessness could she be free and remain apart from the city around her, allowing her to face all cities and life itself with detachment and calm. And when she thought of the word “calm,” it finally occurred to her that the person sitting in the taxi shouldn’t be so calm; she was probably going to get married.

She had never been married before—the sentence sounded a little odd, as if others who were preparing to get married had all been married many times. But she had never been married before—she still preferred to think this way. She thought about herself this way without any commendatory or derogatory connotations, though sometimes with a touch of pride, and sometimes a touch of sadness. She knew she didn’t look like someone who was approaching forty. Often her eyes would moisten suddenly and a hazy look would float over them; her body had the kind of vigour, agility, and alertness that only an unmarried, childless mature woman would have. The drawers in her office were always stuffed with snacks: preserved plums, dried eel, fruit chocolate, etc. She was the vice president of a children’s publishing house, but none of her colleagues addressed her as President Yin. Instead, they called her by her name: Yin Xiaotiao. She looked smug a lot of the time, and she knew the person most annoyed by her smugness was her younger sister Fan. Particularly after Fan left for America, things became much clearer. For a long time, she was afraid to tell Fan about her love affairs, but the more she was afraid, the more she felt driven to tell Fan about every one of them. It was almost as though she could prove she wasn’t afraid of Fan by putting up with Fan’s criticism of what she did in her affairs. Even right now she was thinking this, with a somewhat sneaky bravado. It was as if she’d already picked up the phone, and could already imagine the troubled, inquiring expression that Fan had on the other end of the overseas line at getting the news, along with the string of her words, delivered with a nasal tinge. They, Tiao and Fan, had suffered together; they’d felt together as one. What made Fan so contemptuous of Tiao’s life? It was surely contempt—for her clothes, her hairstyle, and the men in her life. Nothing escaped Fan’s ridicule and condemnation—even the showerhead in Tiao’s bathroom. The first year Fan came back to visit, she stayed with Tiao. She complained that the water pressure in the showerhead was too weak to get her hair clean—that precious hair of hers. She complained with a straight face, showing no sign of joking at all. Tiao managed to conceal her unhappiness behind a phony smile, but she would always remember it.

Maybe she shouldn’t tell her.

The taxi brought Tiao to the Happy Millions Supermarket. She bought food enough for a week and then took the taxi home.

The heat in her apartment wasn’t on, so the rooms felt shadowy and cold. It was different from a winter chill, none of that dense stiffness filling the space; it was uncertain, bearing faint traces of loneliness. On such an evening of such a season, Tiao liked to turn on all the lights, first the hallway, then the kitchen, the study, the living room, the bedroom, and the bathroom, all the lights, ceiling light, wall light, desk light, floor light, mirror light, and bedside light … her hands took turns clicking the switches; only the owner of the place could be so practiced and precise. Tiao was the master of the house, and she greeted her apartment by turning the lights on. She lit her home with all these lights, but it seemed as if the lights lit themselves to welcome Tiao back. So lights illuminated every piece of furniture, and every bit of dim haziness in the shadows contributed to her sense of security and substance. She walked through every room this way until she finally came to a small corner: to that blue-grey satin brocade armchair, which seemed to be her favourite corner when she was not sleeping. Every time she came home, returning from work or a business trip, she would sit in this small armchair, staring blankly for a while, drinking a cup of hot water, and refreshing herself until both her body and mind felt rested and relaxed. She never sat on the sofa. Even when Chen Zai held her in his arms and asked to move onto the more comfortable sofa, she remained uncooperative. Then, in a desperate moment, finally feeling she couldn’t refuse anymore, she simply said, “Let’s go to bed.”

For Chen Zai, that was an unforgettable sentence because they had never gone to bed before, even though they had known each other for decades. Later, when they sometimes teased back and forth about who seduced whom first, Chen Zai would quote this sentence of Tiao’s, “Let’s go to bed.” It was so straightforward and innocent and it caught him so off guard that he almost missed the erotic implications. It made Chen Zai think again and again that this lithe woman he held in his arms was his true love, and always had been. It was also because of this sentence that they didn’t do anything that first night.