Rita Hooks
Eating Vinegar
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Sadie glanced down at her feet.
The windblown dust from the Loess Plateau, along with a layer of local coal
dust, had settled on her shoes. She watched as her husband leaned to the side
of the busy road and hopped off his bicycle. The green leaves of a bunch of
leeks poked out of a plastic bag that hung from his handlebars. In greeting,
Sadie held up a complementary bottle of black vinegar.
"Ni
hao," he said.
With her
free hand, Sadie put her arm around Heng's waist and felt him stiffen. She
pulled her arm away, remembering that she was in Western China, where a
husband and wife must keep at least a foot apart while walking out in public.
"How
was your day?" he asked.
"Terrible."
"You
must try to get along with Ma."
"I
do try. I really do. But your mother hates me."
"How
many students did you tutor today?"
"Only about five, but it felt like a hundred."
"The
students are poor, and yet their parents pay you very well."
"Yes, I know. But they use free chat to criticize me."
"You
could do with a little self-criticism."
"What do you mean?"
"You
have to constrain yourself. You're not in the U.S. any more."
"But, Heng, the students hassle me. They ask me if all American wives
have lovers and if grown kids refuse to care for their old parents."
"It's true in America that old people are put in institutions or
abandoned. Didn't you tell me about Granny dumping?"
"Yes, but that's no excuse for them to mock me. They point out how big I
am. They stare at my feet and then they giggle."
2
"So
you have big feet. You're my all-American girl."
They strolled through the work
unit to the large parking shed, where Heng and everyone else who lived and
worked at Wei Teachers College stored their bicycles. And then they dragged
their feet to the apartment block, where on the second floor they shared a
small apartment with his parents.
"We
must make this work," he said. "Or my friends and students will
laugh at me and not just because my wife has big feet."
Sadie
scowled at him.
When they reached the front door,
they ducked under a pair of Ma's underpants that were drying in the doorway
and then followed the pungent smell of garlic to the kitchen balcony, where
Ma took the vinegar from Sadie and the leeks from Heng. When Sadie offered to
help with the cooking, Ma rebuffed her.
"Maybe you don't know how," she said in the Shaanxi dialect.
It wasn't
the first time that Heng's mother scoffed at Sadie's offer to help with the
cooking.
Sadie
stood there awkwardly with nothing to do but watch Ma's small, but most
capable, hands wield the heavy kitchen cleaver — what, in America, Sadie
would have called a meat cleaver — with such dexterity that the radish and
carrot and ginger were diced into tiny, perfect cubes.
Heng
spoke with his mother, but Sadie couldn't make out much of what was said. She
heard laoshi, the word for teacher. Earlier that day, she had tried to
explain to her mother-in-law that she had been a teacher in America.
As if to
be rid of her, Ma handed Sadie a broom. It was time for the sweep of the day,
one of the few chores Ma trusted her American daughter-in-law to do. Sadie,
feeling like a big oaf, bent over the short-handled broom and grudgingly
swept the concrete floor.
The young
woman had to heed the whims of Heng's parents, and they had decided that
Sadie should not go out to work, but should stay in the back bedroom tutoring
drop-ins. There were many college students who came by to see Sadie,
believing that learning English, especially spoken American English, was a
ticket out of poverty. But, if she taught English classes at the college, it
would bring unwanted attention to the family. Heng, respecting tradition,
agreed with his parents.
3
Later that night, as they lay in
bed together, Heng said, "Let me see those big feet of yours."
Sadie
grinned and stuck out her feet. "Do you have a foot fetish?" she
asked.
He
massaged her feet as she pretended to moan with pleasure.
Playing
the hapless lover, Heng spoke Mandarin in a tone filled with yearning.
"What are you saying?" Sadie asked.
"I'm
reciting a poem."
"A
love poem?"
"Yes, from the late Song Dynasty."
"What's it about?"
"It's about a sad young woman whose feet fit in the palms of her lover's
hands."
"Why
is she sad?"
"Her
feet hurt when she dances for him."
"Bound feet?"
"Yes. That was the custom."
Continuing to massage Sadie's feet, Heng applied greater pressure. He bent
her toes way under to the soles of her feet and folded the arch.
"Ouch!" What are you doing?
"Relax. I'm making your feet smaller."
"Stop! Stop it, right now! You're hurting me."
"You're not in America any more. Something can be done about this."
"This?" she asked.
He
smiled. "Your feet may not fit in the palms of my hands, but they are
perfectly formed. You are a half-Guanyin."
"What's that?"
"A
woman with a beautiful face and natural feet."
4
He held
her feet in his hands and kissed them.
Sadie's
mind wandered as they both settled down to sleep. Back in America, when she
had asked Heng to someday show her his country, he had said, "China is a
poor, backward country. My parents live in a small, dirty room. You would not
like it."
But
Sadie, filled with curiosity about a country so far away, had been eager to
go.
In bed
beside her, Heng brought her back to the present. "Could you move those
big feet of yours over?"
"Sorry," she replied, pulling her knees up to her chest.
Xia, a young Chinese woman who
taught English at the college, had offered to be Sadie's translator. She had
earned Sadie's friendship with funny anecdotes, especially the ones about
randy old college professors. Sadie had laughed to hear about the Dean of
Foreign Languages scurrying under the cover of darkness out of the young
teachers' building.
One
weekend Heng and his parents had reluctantly agreed to allow Sadie to go into
the city of Wei with her translator to buy a pair of shoes. Traveling in the
crowded bus with Xia and anticipating a rare day of freedom, Sadie arrived
happily at the busy, market-lined streets of the city.
As they
strolled past the stalls, the peddlers cried, "Hello, Hello."
"They think you are a rich foreigner," Xia said, stroking Sadie's
ginger hair.
Live
roosters for sale lined the side of the road. Having had their feet tied,
they squawked and flapped about. And there were dead roosters for sale too,
complete with heads and feet. To Sadie, China seemed like one giant flea
market. Looking about as she walked along, she saw a bit of red silk on the
curb. An old woman had laid out some household junk on a cloth.
"Xia, let's look at the antiques."
5
"Okay."
Placed
beside an opium pipe was a small shoe, a shoe for a bound foot. Since being
in China, Sadie had seen a few elderly women hobbling on canes with their
deformed feet enclosed in simple black cotton shoes. But this was the first
time she had ever seen a shoe from old China. The hand-sewn, embroidered silk
shoe was three, maybe four, inches long. It had a one-inch heel and a toe
that curved upwards. So this was a shoe that would cover a foot small enough
to nestle in the
bowl of a
teacup, she thought.
"I
have to have this," she said to Xia.
Xia
frowned. "Foot binding is a great shame for China."
"Qing,
Xia," begged Sadie. "Please . . . help me buy the little
shoe."
Speaking
in the Shaanxi dialect, Xia asked the peddler, "How much?"
The
woman, looking at Sadie, answered, "30 kuai."
"Too
much," Xia said.
After
bargaining for quite a long time, Xia turned to Sadie, "Don't buy it.
It's too expensive."
"How
expensive?"
"20
yuan."
Sadie was
already digging in her pocket for the money.
Xia offered
the woman 15 yuan. The woman accepted.
"Xie
xie," Sadie said, delighted to have the relic as she slipped the
little red shoe into her basket.
Still
frowning, Xia asked, "Why do Americans always say please and thank you?
I'm happy to help my friend. In China we don't say please and thank you all
the time. Anyway, why do you want the shoe?" she asked. "It's way
too small for your foot."
6
"Don't start," Sadie replied.
At an open-front restaurant, Xia
ordered a pot of green tea while Sadie balanced herself on a low rickety
stool. "Xia, tell me about foot binding."
"During Liberation, Chairman Mao stopped the practice. In the old days,
parents were told not to neglect their son's studies or their daughter's foot
binding. But Mao said, 'Women hold up half the sky.' China is a developing
country. We need women workers, as well as men, to improve our economy. But,
Sadie, in your culture, small feet are valued as well."
"How's that?"
"Doesn't Cinderella win the handsome prince because her foot fits in the
little glass slipper?"
"You're right. But still that's just a fairy tale."
Sadie
took the little shoe out of her basket. As she admired the exquisite
handiwork, she thought of the lump of tortured flesh and broken bones that it
had once covered.
"It
must have been very painful," she continued. "I just can't imagine.
Is it true that they broke the toes and dislocated the heel before breaking
the arch? And is it true that it was done to girls as young as three or four
. . . a practice done for more than a thousand years?"
"Yes. How do you know so much about foot binding?"
"I
read about it on the Internet."
"The
Chinese Internet?"
"No,
back in America. But tell me, Xia, how did a woman manage to use a squat
toilet if her feet were bound?"
"She
managed."
"Yes. She had to."
"Let's go, Sadie. We need to find you a pair of shoes."
After walking a few blocks, they
came to a small department store. When they entered the women's shoe
department, Sadie was dismayed to see how small the shoes were. She looked
down at her old clunky walking shoes, which seemed enormous in comparison.
When Xia saw that Sadie was embarrassed, she suggested that they go to the
athletic store, since women athletes tend to be larger than average Chinese
women. But Sadie had already decided that she could wear her old shoes a
little longer.
7
Sadie's mother-in-law was waiting
for them when they returned. She exchanged a few words with Xia. Ma had asked
Xia how much money Sadie had spent and Xia had responded, "Not
much." All of which she translated for Sadie.
When
Sadie showed her the little shoe, Ma turned her face away and spoke to Xia
again.
"What did she say? Sadie asked Xia.
"She
said you are bad to spend so much money on junk. She's also unhappy with me.
I failed to help you buy a new pair of shoes, and instead, I let you buy a
ridiculous shoe that you could never wear."
"But
it's my money and my say."
Taking in
her threadbare clothes and thinning hair, Sadie frowned at her husband's
mother, who looked much older than her fifty-six years. Ma wore a dark blue
Mao suit, reminiscent of a time when the fashion for men and women was
indistinguishable. She wore no jewelry and did nothing to hide the bald spot
on the crown of her head. She had had a hard life. But Ma had been born after
the era of foot binding, and her natural feet were planted firmly on the
floor.
The older
woman spoke again and Xia translated. "She said you are a foreign devil
who wastes her son's money."
"How
dare she?"
"I
better go," said Xia.
"Zaijian."
"Bye."
Sadie noticed that Heng had left
his satchel with his textbooks in a corner of their bedroom.
It bulged
with students' test papers. His classes were huge, so many students who, in
turn, would become teachers themselves. Wei Teachers College prepared its
students to return to their poor villages as teachers, teachers so badly paid
that no one would want to marry them. Sadie decided to help her husband by
putting the tests in a neat pile on the desk they shared.
While
reaching into the satchel, Sadie found an old worn book hidden under the
papers.
The words
were printed in Chinese characters. As she leafed through the yellowed pages,
she came upon erotic illustrations.
Wow, she
thought. Heng has a secret stash of old Chinese porn. As she examined one of
the pictures, her eyes were drawn to the woman's feet, which were lifted to
the woman's shoulders and shod in tiny shoes. The bound foot was smaller,
much smaller, than the vulva. Sadie closed the book and put it on top of
Heng's school papers and then carefully placed the little red shoe on top of
the book. She wanted to see his face when he saw it.
Later, when Heng came in, his eyes
found the silk shoe and his book of erotica beneath it.
"Reminders of foot binding are taboo," he said.
"Why?" Sadie asked.
"Ma's right. You are a devil woman."
"Is
that why she was so angry, not so much the money, but the shoe?"
"Ma
doesn't need you, a foreigner, to rub her nose in a national disgrace."
Hoping to
change the subject, Sadie asked, "Aren't you going to tell me about your
book?"
"It's a famous piece of Chinese literature."
"What about the pictures?"
"They are Ming Dynasty woodcuts."
"You
know," he continued, pointing to the little shoe, "I lost face
marrying a foreigner, and if you go around squandering my money on objects of
shame, people will ridicule me."
"Why
do you care?"
Lighting
a cigarette, he said, "Face is important."
"Heng, what's happened to you?"
"What do you mean?"
"You're different here in China."
"Maybe I'm disappointed. I thought that after a short time you would
become an ordinary Chinese wife. If there wasn't a shortage of women in China
because of the one-child policy, I'd probably never have married you."
"Stop . . . please. Think about what you're saying."
"Can't you take a joke?" he asked, taking a long drag and letting
the smoke out slowly.
"You're joking?"
"Yes.
And stay away from Xia. She's a bad influence on you."
"Are
you still joking?"
"No.
And get rid of that damn shoe."
The next day, done with her
tutoring, Sadie stretched out on the bed. She had a little time before
dinner. On the bookshelf by the window, Sadie saw Heng's book of erotica. She
took the book from the shelf and leafed through it looking at the
illustrations. Several of the woodcuts depicted a man and a woman having sex.
Not only did the women have tiny feet, but also their legs were short,
particularly from the knee to the ankle. In one picture, the woman's thighs
were propped on the man's shoulders. Her body appeared distorted, her torso
elongated, and her legs tapered to tiny feet covered with little sleeping
shoes. Sadie smiled, thinking that the whole effect was of a Thanksgiving Day
turkey trussed for the oven.
Sadie
looked at the woodcuts, first hurriedly, then a bit slower. She sighed. How
can this be? How could something so unnatural be a turn-on? In another woodcut,
the man grasped the woman's ankles just above her diminutive feet, making her
buttocks and exposed vulva look voluptuously large.
Heng, who
had been teaching an evening class, came in. He was surprised when Sadie
pulled him down.
"What's gotten into you?"
"It's this dirty book of yours."
"Jou
Pu Tuan isn't a dirty book."
"What's the title in English?"
"Hmm
. . . something like . . . "Prayer Mat of the Flesh. The writer,
Li Yu, is a famous playwright and actor from the seventeenth century. You
could say he is the Chinese Shakespeare."
"What is the book about?"
"It's about a man who abandons the straw mat. Instead of by practicing
meditation, he decides to reach the divine by having sex with all the most
beautiful women in the Middle Kingdom."
"Wow! All the most beautiful women in China. I guess they would all have
bound feet."
"The
tiny feet promised a tight vagina. It was believed that walking on the
crippled feet strengthened the thigh muscles . . . and the muscles of the
jade gate."
"So
does our hero succeed with his quest?"
"Yes. After he has a dog penis grafted onto his own inadequate penis to
enlarge and fortify it. And at the end of the story, although it may seem
unlikely, he does become a devout Buddhist."
"A
dog penis? Shouldn't this book have been burned during the Cultural
Revolution?"
"I'm
sure many copies of it were. In fact, it's forbidden today."
Sadie and
Heng lay side by side. They had removed their clothing. Sadie glanced toward
the bottom of the bed and secretly measured her foot next to Heng's. Sadly
she noted that they were about the same size.
She
reached under her pillow and pulled out the little red shoe.
"What do you have there?" Heng asked.
Without
saying a word, Sadie put the little shoe on the end of his penis, causing it
to stand up. He danced the little shoe about, and they both laughed.
11
"I
guess you haven't changed so much after all," she said.
"Of
course I haven't changed," he said.
As the snow began to fall, Sadie
experienced the full deprivation of living in Western China. She suffered the
daily indignities of anyone living in a poor region: the filthy squat
toilets, the lack of privacy in the unheated bathhouse, even the recycled
toilet paper full of splinters and bits of plastic. She was always cold and
always hungry and had to withstand the frequent no water, no power — meyo
shui, meyo dian — days. As the winter deepened, she washed in a bucket of
tepid water because the bathhouse was always padlocked. Hoping to make her
more like the Chinese wife that his son needed, Ba had forced her to learn
how to wring the neck of a chicken and pluck its feathers.
Heng's
father had said, "If you eat chicken, you must kill chicken."
Then, one cold night, her friend
Xia knocked on the door. Tearfully, she told Sadie, "I have been
forbidden by Chief Wang to see you any more. I think Heng and his parents
asked the chief to speak to me. I have no choice but to obey, or I will be
sent to the countryside for re-education."
Sadie
felt both anger and fear. "Do you think it's because you helped me to
buy the little shoe?"
"Maybe," Xia responded. "But also because I speak too freely
with you. You know, about Dean Tai and his late night hobby."
A few days later, as Sadie was
sorting laundry, she pulled a business card out of Heng's shirt pocket.
Turning the card over in her hands, she wasn't able to read the Chinese
characters but was curious about what they said. After dark, she slipped out
of the apartment on the pretense of taking garbage to the chute in the
hallway. Ugh! Rotten cabbage, she thought, as she passed the overflowing
chute on her way down the stairs.
Defying
both her husband and the Communist Party chief, Sadie ran over to the young
teachers' building in search of Xia. Holding her breath in the filthy
corridor, she found her friend in a small, dark room.
12
"You
shouldn't be here," Xia whispered.
As Sadie
held out the business card, she said, "Tell me what this says, and I'll
never come again."
Xia said,
"This place is for men."
"A
men's club?"
"Yes."
"What kind of club?"
"It's called The Golden Lotus. It's a place where beautiful women with
small feet entertain men."
"Women with bound feet?"
"Maybe."
"But
you said there is no foot binding in China now."
"Maybe."
"Maybe what?
"Maybe there are a few for rich men."
"But
Heng isn't rich."
"Eating vinegar?" Xia teased. "Don't be jealous. I'm sure it
is just a harmless fantasy."
Sadie,
already distressed, took in the stained chamber pot shoved under Xia's
makeshift bed. Her spirits fell even more when she noticed the sheets of
newspaper covering the dirty walls, the chipped jar of watery tea on the
wobbly little table, and the broken panes of glass in the one window. She
shuddered at the bitter cold that came in through the window and was sickened
by the reek of excrement that followed her in from the unlit hallway. She left
quickly, not wishing to make trouble for Xia.
Returning to her apartment, Sadie
joined her in-laws, who were watching television. They were caught up in a
soap opera. Sitting down beside Ma, Sadie took note of her feet beside the
much smaller feet of the older woman. Sadie's own mother had had large feet.
She recalled how Mom had talked excitedly about any man who happened to have
big feet. She probably had a hard time finding a man, even in America, with
feet bigger than hers, Sadie thought with a smile. And, of course, Mom had
always joked about what those big feet on a man implied.
Unable to
understand the language of the weepy drama that was taking place on the
television, Sadie free-associated. If big feet on a man imply a large penis,
then little feet on a woman . . . she suddenly sat up very straight . . . I
get it!
Oh no!
They all think I have a big one. That must be what Heng meant when he said
something about his friends and students laughing at him. She jumped up,
saying good night to her husband's parents.
Looking
away from the TV briefly, they replied, "Wanan."
Sadie usually waited for Heng to
come home before getting into bed; she couldn't bear climbing into the icy
bed alone on cold winter nights like this one. But tonight she just wanted to
hide under the covers. Keeping most of her clothes on, Sadie lay on her back
on the hard bed and pulled the heavy woolen blanket up to her nose. As she
positioned her head onto the bean-filled pillow, she easily imagined herself
lying on a slab in a morgue. The only thing missing was an ID tag hanging
from her big toe.
Listening
to the anguished cry of a rooster outside in the dark night, Sadie's
apprehension grew. The rooster was kept alive, so it would be fresh when
eaten. But it seemed cruel to Sadie to leave the rooster, with its feet tied,
on the freezing balcony. She began to doubt that she was strong enough to
endure the harsh conditions of her husband's country. And she was afraid Heng
would come to regret having married a foreigner.
A couple of weeks later, Heng said
to Sadie, "I have a surprise for you."
"A
surprise?"
"Yes, I made an appointment for a pedicurist to come by later this
afternoon."
"Why
do I need a pedicure? My feet are fine."
"I
want to treat you to a luxury many women desire. It will relax you. It is a
tradition from the days of Imperial China. The Emperor's concubines found
great pleasure in a foot massage. Now that our economy is improving, women
can once again experience long-denied luxuries."
"But
what about Ma? She will not approve of your wasting money."
"Don't worry about Ma."
"I
feel weird about this, Heng. Will you be here to translate for me?"
"You're
being silly. The woman is known to be gentle."
While waiting for the pedicurist
to arrive, Ma heated the kettle on the little coal stove for Sadie's
footbath. Sadie's feet had gotten dry and rough from all her walking about in
the cold. She began to look forward to the little luxury that Heng had
arranged for her.
The woman
arrived on time. She was a no-nonsense, middle-aged woman. She asked Sadie to
sit on the straight-backed chair in the kitchen, and she put a large
porcelain basin on the floor.
She
called to Ma to bring the hot water. Steam poured from the spout of the
kettle in the cold room.
Sadie
removed her shoes and socks as the woman poured the boiling water into the
basin. Sadie's feet were numb from the cold — they had been for days — yet
she refused to put her feet in the water when the woman gestured for her to
do so.
"Too
hot," Sadie said.
The woman
didn't know English, but seemed to understand. From a string bag that she had
placed on the floor, she took some herbs, crushing them with her fingers as
she sprinkled them on the water. Next, she pulled a large jar from the bag, a
jar filled with blood.
"No," Sadie said. She was frightened and her mother-in-law scolded
her. They began to argue as the pedicurist poured the blood into the basin.
All three
women were yelling when Heng came in.
"Help me, Heng. They want to cook my feet in blood."
15
"Don't be foolish," he said. "It's just pig's blood. The blood
and the herbs will soften the skin on your feet."
"Bullshit, this concoction will take the skin right off my feet."
"Come on," he said, gently dipping her toes in the basin.
The hot,
bloody water actually felt quite good. Sadie closed her eyes as the woman
massaged her feet. The numbness wore off, and the steady pressure of the
woman's strong hands calmed Sadie.
With
reddened fingers deformed from a lifetime of hard work, the pedicurist
labored on.
She
scraped off the rough spots, she pushed back the cuticles, and she cut the
nails. When she was done, Sadie admired her pretty pink toes. The woman
wrapped Sadie's feet in bands of cloth. Heng paid the woman and carried his
wife to their bedroom. He put her on the bed and unwrapped her feet.
He held
her feet in the palms of his hands and kissed them. Her feet felt tender and
she had no desire to walk on them. She lay back on the bed, pretending that
she was one of the sexy foot-bound women she had seen in Heng's book.
As the winter freeze continued,
Heng's family struggled to stay warm and to find enough food to eat. One
winter day Sadie found herself alone in the apartment. Heng had been given a
ride in the college van to a university in the capital city of Xi'an for a
math conference. And Ba and Ma had traveled by train to their home village
for the annual New Year celebration.
Left to
cook for herself, Sadie decided to buy some vegetables to add to the noodles
she had made. She put on many layers of warm clothing to go to the local
farmers' market, and she covered her face with a surgical mask, a protection
from winter germs and sooty air. As she left the apartment building, she saw
her neighbors digging up the carrots and daikon radishes that they had buried
after the fall harvest. A small piece of communal ground was made available
to the apartment dwellers to store their vegetables. Outside the college
gate, she walked down the road, where the roar of tractors without mufflers was
deafening.
16
The road
ran parallel to the Qin Mountain Range; and while waiting to cross the busy
street, Sadie gazed up at the high mountains. Heng had told her that on cold
winter days like this one, wolves came down in search of food. And the
students she tutored had told her that there were pandas and tigers up there,
too. They also told her that when a baby girl went missing, it was a panda
that took her.
She crossed
the street to the market, but there was very little to buy at this time of
year.
Looking
up at a sky obscured by dust, Sadie longed for the clear blue skies of
Florida, where she had met the handsome, young exchange teacher just a short
time ago.
Because
most of the food for the people of Wei came from nearby farms, now in the
dead of winter many of the stalls were empty. She bent to poke at some frozen
potatoes and selected a few. The farmer weighed them carefully on his
handheld scale. Up ahead she saw some cabbage, the few heads having begun to
rot and turn brown. That was all there was, so she bought one.
Turning
back, Sadie spotted a bright red color that was in stark contrast to its
monotonous gray surroundings, reminding her of a happier time at a market
when another bit of red had caught her eye. As she walked closer, she saw
that it was red meat. She was shocked to see the unmistakable canine teeth in
the animal's skull. The farmer had hacked most of the meat away; a few bits of
remaining flesh gave the skull its crimson color.
A
butchered dog?
Questioning what her eyes saw, she barked at the man, "Ruff, ruff?"
He nodded
with a big smile, hoping that the foreigner would buy his dead dog.
After arriving back at the gate of
the college and wishing to delay her return to the empty apartment, Sadie
walked toward the drab classroom building. Built in the Soviet-style, it was
all right angles. Knowing that classes were over for the day and missing
Heng, she decided to visit his room. There was nothing on the first floor of
the rectangular building except the bottom of the staircase and an icy wind
that had blown trash into the corners of the lobby. Climbing the stairs,
Sadie carefully stepped over medallions of frozen phlegm, containing green
and red swirls like diseased holiday décor, which the students and professors
had spat out. As she reached the first landing, Sadie saw the mops and
smelled the urine that the student cleaners used to disinfect the corridors. Through
the open windows at the back of the building, Sadie could hear from below the
clatter and whirr of roller skates. She had watched the students at their
leisure once before as they skated listlessly round and round the fenced-in
rink, the rusty, sagging fence almost as joyless as the somber-faced
students. She recalled how one of the students had teased her when she had
said something about fun, asking "What is fun?"
17
Grasping
the sooty banister as she continued up the slippery stairs, she was thankful
for her sturdy walking shoes. On the fifth floor, she entered the hallway
that led to Heng's classroom.
Shoving
the heavy door open, she choked on the black smoke that filled the room. The
windows along the front of the building were open and smoke billowed in from
a construction site below. Sadie glanced at the wooden desks, where the
now-absent students sat two by two, with their pencil boxes and fingerless
gloves, and at the cracked blackboard and the broken bits of chalk. So this
was Heng's world, she thought and felt a pang of tenderness. The same student
who had asked about fun, had also asked, "What is love?" She had
felt at the time that the student suspected a certain American arrogance in
Sadie's confidence that both fun and love existed at all. There wasn't much
to see in the simple classroom: portraits of Marx and Engels hung above the
blackboard.
Leaving
Heng's room, Sadie turned in the opposite direction of the stairs and headed
toward a small outdoor balcony. She was pretty high up and once again gazed
at the snow-covered mountain range. The very top was hidden in clouds. The
sky was a gray glare that hurt her eyes, and there were no birds. She
wondered if it were true, that all the songbirds had been trapped and eaten.
And she couldn't see the hermits that she had been told lived up in the
foothills of the mountains. But once, along the road that led to and from the
market, she had seen a tall, thin man with Western features wearing shredded
rags, rags so shredded that they looked more like hair, like the hair of a
golden monkey that was also said to inhabit the nearby mountains. At the
time, she imagined that the man was a Qinling hermit, who had, as she had, come
from far away.
She
shivered in the cold, overcome by a desperate loneliness. She leaned over the
crumbling balcony and looked down into the street. She thought of how
casually the Chinese spoke of the many young women who had jumped from a similar
height. "Woman's brain disease," they had said matter-of-factly. A
graceful flow of villagers moved along the street, some on foot, some on
bicycles, some on tractors, some pulling carts filled with old junk or a
crippled elder, and one pulling a giant pig. Sadie thought of Heng, how he
was one of so many and how small his part of this big country was. As she
peered over the edge she thought for a moment that she saw him, but it
couldn't be him. Heng was in Xi'an. The man she saw rode a Flying Pigeon bicycle
with a petite woman riding sidesaddle on the rack behind him. The woman, her
long black hair and yellow scarf flowing behind her, seemed to look up at
Sadie and laugh. For a moment, Sadie saw Heng as he was meant to be, coupled
with a heavenly-mandated Chinese wife. Her dry throat and burning eyes,
aggravated by the thick smoke, nudged Sadie down the long staircase and back
to the apartment.
As she
unlocked the door, she no longer believed that Heng was attending a two-day
academic conference. During her walk through the frothy mud that had been
whipped up by the many feet that had taken the path before her, she had
remembered the business card that she had found in his pocket and convinced
herself that he had gone to The Golden Lotus. And he was probably, right now,
in the arms of another girl, a Chinese girl with exquisite feet.
After
making a pot of tea on the little kitchen balcony, Sadie spotted the meat
cleaver. She picked it up and ran her finger lightly over the blade. She
located the whetstone and slowly and methodically honed the blade. The rasp
of metal on stone filled the silence of the small, empty rooms. She then
wiped the dust off the carving board. As she chopped the potatoes and cabbage
for her solitary dinner, she became more and more wretched as she decided
that her lanky body could never compete with the delicate beauty of a Chinese
woman's body. Wind came through the old window frame, mimicking the wail of a
hungry ghost. Or maybe it was just another rooster crying out into the cold
night from a neighbor's balcony.
Going
into the main room, she put her pot of tea and a cup on the dining table,
which was pushed up against Ba and Ma's bed. She went back to the balcony and
returned with her simple meal. As she took a sip of tea, she glanced at Ba's
cabinet and recognized the green bottle of liquor that was saved for special
occasions. She took the bottle out and set it on the table. She then went
into the bedroom that she and Heng shared. She rummaged in the back of their
wardrobe until she found the shoe that she had hidden from her husband.
Returning to the main room, she put the shoe in the center of the table.
Pushing the teapot away, she poured herself some liquor and toasted the shoe,
"Ganbei! "
In
return, the shoe seemed to mock her as if it could speak: "You cannot
fit in me, you foreign devil. You'll never fit in." And then Heng's
words from a night not too long ago came back to her. Squeezing her feet
until they hurt, he had said, "You're not in America any more. Something
can be done about this." She went out into the hallway and dumped her
supper into the garbage chute. She had lost her appetite but had come up with
a plan.
19
Sadie
recalled the day when the pedicurist massaged her feet in the water that Ma
had heated in the kettle. Tonight in the cold kitchen, she missed the warmth
of the other women's bodies. On the floor beside her feet, her big hideous
naked feet, Sadie had piled strips of cloth that she had torn from an old bed
sheet, emptying the bottle of mao-tai as she worked. The liquor gave
her courage, and along with the extremely cold temperature on the balcony, it
helped to numb her feet.
Sadie
hammered two large nails into the carving board, one on the right side and
one on the left. She cut two pieces of string, knotting each piece onto a
nail. With two more pieces of string, she bound the first four toes of each
foot, leaving the pinky toe unbound. Sadie lifted her long leg and placed her
right foot on the carving board. She tied the other end of the string that
was knotted to the right nail to her right pinky. Even though some Americans
like to say, "It's all good," the Chinese know better, she had
concluded. They are resigned to taking the bitter with the sweet. Likewise,
she had accepted her fate to suffer the bitter, to eat the vinegar. Having
cut up many a chicken that she had killed, she had learned how to use the
cleaver. Ba had taught her well. Toe bones can't be much different from
chicken bones, she thought. She pulled her pinky toe as far away as possible
from the bound toes and gripped the sharpened cleaver.
"Eat
vinegar!" she shrieked. The cleaver came down so hard the little toe
flew away.
Sadie's
long body crumpled onto the concrete floor.
She
pulled herself up, knowing that her job was only half done. She wrapped the
wounded foot loosely in a strip of cloth. And as the pain throbbed in her
right foot, she repeated the process on her left foot and crumpled again. But
she did not pull herself back up this time.
Sadie woke up in bed to find her
feet now tightly bound. She was filled with shame; she had done something
irrevocable. Ba and Ma hovered over the bed. When they saw her eyes open,
they motioned to Heng, who had been standing at the window, watching his
neighbors coming home from work with their plastic bags of tofu and onions,
and their bottles of black vinegar.
20
He went
to his wife and, looking into her strange blue eyes, said, "Thank
you."
Source:Shortstories
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