It was violent. My body was in hunger. I could not make it collaborate with me. I tossed all night, loneliness wrapped me, anxiety distressed me. I lay on my back, as if stretched on prison bars. My hands all over my body, I did not know how to gain back peace. I could feel a monster growing inside, a monster of desire. It grew bigger each day, pushing my other organs aside. I was defenseless. I could see no way out. The mosquito net was a grave with a little spoiled air. Feeling wounded, I could not cry. I had to guard myself because no one else cried in the room. Had my roommates nothing in common with me? The mosquitoes bit me. I looked for them. They parked in the corners of the net. They were fat and clumsy after bloodsucking. I aimed, clapped. The mosquito flew away. I waited, chased, waited, aimed again and attacked. I clapped one. It lay flat in my hand, bloody and sticky. The mosquito’s blood. My blood. I chased mosquitoes every night. Pinched them all to death. Bloody spots on the net pronounced my success. I played with long-legged mosquitoes. I admired the creatures’ elegance. I would allow one to land on my knee and watch it as it bit me. I watched it insert its tiny strawlike mouth into my skin, feeling its bite. I let it suck, suck to its satisfaction. Then I pinched it with two fingers, firm, and watched its dark brown blood drip.
The killing of mosquitoes didn’t put my mind to rest. My mind was no longer the mind I knew. It was no longer the perfect stainless mind. I began to have thoughts of those disgraced girls, the girls of my middle-school years. As a head of the class, I was assigned to sit by them for semesters to help them get on the right track. I was supposed to correct them and influence them. Though it was never explained to me what was wrong with them, it was known that they were called “La-Sai”-a slang word which indicated that the girls had done shameful things with men and were condemned by those who were moral. These girls had no self-respect. They were called “porcelain with scars.” No one wanted them. They looked forward to no future. They had no future. They were garbage. Placing them next to me showed the generosity of the Communist Party. The Party abandoned no sinners. The Party saved them. I represented the Party.
Sitting next to these girls for seven years, I learned how their hearts were chewed by shame. I learned to never put myself in their position, to stay clear of men. I looked up to the model women the society praised. The heroines in the revolutionary operas had neither husbands nor lovers. The heroine in my life, Yan, did not seem to have anything to do with men either. Did she too feel restless? How did she feel about her body? Recently, she seemed more serious than before. She stopped giving speeches at the meetings. She put on a long face and it remained cloudy all week. I saw her trying to talk to Little Green. Little Green reacted weirdly. She played with reeds or the buttons on Yan’s uniform absentmindedly. She laughed hysterically. Yan looked painfully confused. She shook Little Green’s shoulders. She begged her to listen. But she was talking to a vegetable.
Late in the evening after I finished sharpening my sickle, I went back to my room and sat by Little Green. My roommates were all busy. Like silkworms spinning silk, they were knitting sweaters, bags and scarfs. No one talked.
I went to sit in my net and closed the curtain. I looked at the net ceilings. Loneliness penetrated me. I was no different from the cow I had been working with. I told myself to bear with life. Every day we were steamed by the sun, kneeling on the hard land, planting cottonseeds and cutting the reeds. It dulled me. My mind had become rusted. It seemed not to be functioning. It produced no thoughts when the body sweat hard. It floated in whiteness. The brain was shrinking in salt, drying under the sun.
The cottonseeds we planted climbed out of the soil, like premature creatures with wild reeds all around them. When they first sprouted, they looked like little men with brown caps. They were cute in the early morning, but by noon they were devastated by the bare sunshine and many of them died in the evening before the fog brought them moisture. When they died or began to die, the brown caps fell on the ground and the little men bent sadly. The ones that survived stretched and grew taller. They struggled on for another day. In a week these caps came off and the little men’s heads split themselves in half. These were the first two leaves of the plants. At Red Fire Farm they never grew to be what was expected of them, because the crazy bully reeds sucked all the water and fertilizer. The reeds spread out their arms and took all the sunshine. The cotton plants would bend to the side; they lived in the shadow of the reeds. Their flowers were pitiful. They looked like pinkish-faced widows. The fruit-the cotton bolls they finally bore-were stiff nuts, thin, crooked, chewed by insects, hiding in the hearts of the plants. It was cotton of the lowest quality. Not even qualified to be rated. If some did qualify, the cotton was rated four. We would pick the bolls and put them into bags and ship them to a paper-making factory instead of a fabric-making factory.
I felt as if I were one of those stiff nuts. Instead of growing, I was shrinking. I resisted the shrinking. I turned to Orchid. I was thirsty. Orchid was eager to make friends with me. She invited me to sit on her bed. She chatted about patterns for knitting. She talked nonstop. She told me that it was her fourth time knitting the same sweater. She showed me the details of the patterns and said once she finished it, she would take it apart and reknit it, using the same yarn over. She said knitting was her biggest pleasure in life. She must knit. Nothing else interested her. She fixed her eyes on the needles. She did not go beyond that. Her moving fingers reminded me of a cricket chewing grass. I stared at the yarn being eaten, inch by inch. I suggested we talk about something else-for example, opera. She refused to hear me. She kept talking while her hands were busy working on the sweater. The cricket chewed the yarn, inch by inch, hour after hour, day in, day out. I began to talk about the opera. I sang “Let’s Learn from the Green Pine Tree on Top of the Tai Mountain.” Orchid dozed off. She slid down into her net. She snored, loudly. She made me want to murder her. Imagining this was how I would have to live the rest of my life drowned me in madness.
I saw Yan setting out alone for the fields in the late evenings carrying a jar. One day in heavy fog I decided to follow her. I waited in the sea of reeds. She came, carrying a brown-colored jar. She sought something at the root of the reeds. She was trying to catch poisonous water snakes. She was quick and nimble. She put the snakes in the jar. I followed her. Mile after mile. Led by the myths she radiated. I hid and smelled the reeds, the sea, the fog and the night. I followed her the next day. Miles in the reeds. My sleep got better. I was curious about Yan’s intention, her reason for risking her life to catch the snakes.
It had poured all day. We were ordered to wait in the room until the sky cleared up. As I sat, I prayed to the god of weather to have the rain last as long as possible. Only when it rained were we allowed to rest. When it did rain, I would be so relieved. I would run out of the room, raise up my face, stretch my arms toward the sky to feel, to taste and to say thank you to the rain. I would let the rain pour on my face, sink into my hair, go down my neck, waist, legs, my toes.
As I sat by the window, I got lost in my thoughts, staring at the willow tree. The rain turned to mao-mao- yu-“cow-hair rain,” as the peasants called it. I stared at a window opposite mine. It was the window of the room of the company heads. Yan’s window. The window intrigued me. I often wondered how the people lived behind that window. I knew them well in uniforms but not in their mosquito nets. What about their nights? Were any of their nights like mine?
The opposite window opened. I backed myself into my net. I watched through the curtain. It was the commander. She stuck an arm out. She was feeling the rain. She raised her chin toward the gray sky. Her eyes shut. She held that pose. It was such a private pose. Between her and the sky. Was she feeling the same way I was feeling: lonely and depressed? After Little Green went mad, my worship for Yan had turned sour. My sorrow for Little Green had transformed itself into anger toward Yan. I decided that Yan was no longer worth my respect. She was the murderer, although so was I. But she did it intentionally, and that was unforgivable. I executed her decision. Yet there was a stubbornness that grew inside of me. I found myself refusing to think that Yan was not worthy of my respect. For some strange reason I felt that I still needed Yan to be my heroine. I must have a heroine to worship, to follow, to act as a mirror. It was how I was taught to live. I needed it the same way Orchid needed knitting, to survive, to get by.
I developed a desire to conquer Yan. More truthfully, to conquer myself, because Yan symbolized my faith. I wanted her to tell me what it was that drove her to take such cruel action against Little Green; I wanted to tear away her Party secretary’s mask, to see what was inside her head. I wanted her to surrender. I was obsessed.
She suddenly turned toward my direction and stopped. She saw me staring at her. She put a finger into her mouth and whistled, Yan, the commander, whistled to order everyone to get back to work in the fields. She whistled. She drove away my thoughts. She closed the window without a wave of her hand, a word, a nod, a hint of anything.
The rain had stopped. The sky was loaded with heavy dark clouds. The clouds looked as if they were about to fall upon our heads. The clothes I put out to dry before going to bed were wet and muddy. I took them down from the string and put them on, then dragged myself to the field.
