I Live in the Slums Page 19

  She took out a handkerchief and bound the wound for her. Then she looked up, and saw the woman’s smiling eyes.

  “Woman Wang, does Little Ping bother you too much? She’s a problem child.”

  “Not at all. Little Ping is well-behaved. She’s never bothered me.”

  “Really? I’ve wanted to see what she’s like in your house, but she won’t let me.”

  “You may come over whenever you wish.”

  The smile in the woman’s eyes vanished. She looked dejected and glum. She was a conventionally pretty woman. Little Ping didn’t resemble her mother at all. She looked the way she was supposed to look.

  Woman Wang was about to leave when the woman asked, “Would you like to go and see Little Ping? She’s out in back on the croquet ground playing a game she made up. I’m kind of confused because she plays it all the time.”

  They walked to the edge of the abandoned croquet ground, where they saw Little Ping crawling on the ground. Her eyes were covered with a large handkerchief. Woman Wang searched the field with her eyes, and before long discovered the coins. Three altogether. Each one was thrown into a different corner. Little Ping was fumbling around and crawling slowly in the field.

  “See how patient my daughter is,” the woman said, distressed.

  “You’re worried about her. Why?”

  “No. I’m not worried. I just feel, I feel that the place she wants to go is so far away! Will she give up halfway there?”

  Covering her face with her hand, she ran off. She didn’t seem very happy. What was she concerned about? Without making a sound, Woman Wang was watching Little Ping. Little Ping had already picked up one coin. She knelt there and lifted it up. The coin sparkled in the sunlight; this was like some sort of ceremony.

  “Little Ping! Little Ping!” Woman Wang shouted at her.

  “Shhh. Don’t say anything. I’m working!” Little Ping replied quietly.

  Once more, she concentrated on crawling. Woman Wang left the croquet ground and went home.

  She ran into Woman Yun at the door. Woman Yun said to her, “Those people from the management council came again. I have no idea why they keep coming here. We’re all willing to be relocated—it’s just a matter of living somewhere else. Don’t you agree?”

  “Yes, that’s it. I don’t care one way or the other about moving,” Woman Wang said.

  “You don’t care?” Woman Yun raised her voice all at once.

  She glared maliciously, as if she wanted to pierce Woman Wang with her gaze.

  “I’m saying—It’s okay with me to move. These days, even the dead sometimes have to be relocated. I actually . . .” Woman Wang couldn’t go on.

  Woman Yun walked past her haughtily.

  Woman Wang remembered that she had burned documents during the night. Woman Yun had lived in this wooden building as long as Woman Wang could remember. Back then, she had been a young single girl who wore thick makeup. She lived upstairs, and no one had ever been seen visiting her. Yet surprisingly, she had so many documents to destroy. Could she just be bluffing because she felt bad about having nothing to leave behind?

  Woman Wang gutted the fish, washed vegetables, and sat down to rest for a while. Her hand brushed against her pocket: inside was something hard. To her surprise, it was a small packet of coins wrapped in plastic. She poured the coins out on the table, and found that the packet also contained some fragments of quartz. She leaned close to smell it. It smelled of sulfur. She thought back: she was certain that Little Ping’s mother was the only one who had come in close contact with her at the market. What kind of information was she transmitting? At a loss, Woman Wang made out the vague outline of quartz. In her excitement, her hands began trembling. To her surprise, mother and daughter had been colluding all along. These coins were dull, not in the least shiny. Some were encrusted with mud. They wouldn’t interest people. They were absolutely unlike the ones that Little Ping had picked up. But how to explain these bits of quartz? Maybe Little Ping’s mother had made her way into Woman Wang’s fantasy. Woman Wang remembered her pale arm and the blood flowing from her hand. She was also a woman of the Catfish neighborhood, mysterious and complicated, with a lot of stories.

  A sudden impulse came over Woman Wang. She grabbed five coins, bent over, and tossed them under the bed. The vats of kimchi all made slurping sounds, as if they were surprised.

  Woman Wang had eaten only half her meal when she heard firecrackers. It was the building whose foundation had been laid first. That building was going to transform the entire structure of Catfish Pit. She supposed that everyone here was probably paying careful attention to the noise, just as she was. But the move truly didn’t make any difference to Woman Wang—she did not belong to Catfish, nor did Little Ping’s mother. Catfish neighborhood was too narrow to hold their ambitious hearts. Watching the way Little Ping’s mother grabbed the fish in the market, Woman Wang sensed that this woman’s body contained an unusual vitality.

  Someone knocked on the door. It was probably that mason again. Woman Wang didn’t respond, and the person stopped knocking.

  The mason was quite annoying. It was best to ignore him, but it was not easy to do so. He was one of the city residents who didn’t sleep all night. Woman Wang could always sense their existence. If she hadn’t gone out that night, she wouldn’t have seen the mime performed at the outdoor snack bar. What an upside-down change was happening to this world! She had run into them by chance, yet they had been clinging to her ever since. Did this make any sense?

  After tidying up the kitchen, she opened the door a crack and looked out. That youth was standing across the street, apparently at a loss. Some people walked past him. He approached them eagerly, wanting to talk with them, but they never responded. It seemed he was not a local mason, but he didn’t seem to be a tramp, either. That night, hadn’t the light at the restaurant’s entrance been turned on for him? He wasn’t an outsider with no connection with Catfish Pit.

  Woman Wang bolted the door. She was going to take her noon nap.

  She slept under the mosquito net, her train of thought rising and falling like waves. She thought of the mason who kept moving his home in dreams: What had he been doing with the people in the bar at midnight? Woman Wang seldom went out at night. Yet when she did, just once, Catfish had revealed itself completely to her. What an exciting and boisterous nightlife there was here in Catfish: even when it was quiet, the quietness was no different from the noise. Woman Wang couldn’t help but break into laughter.

  “Little Ping, we’re all going to move into those tall apartment buildings,” Woman Wang said.

  “I’ve gone to the city several times to look at those skyscrapers.” Little Ping’s mouth twitched. “Skyscrapers aren’t interesting. But I picked up quite a lot of things in the firefighting lanes.”

  She pulled a live lizard out of her pocket and placed it on Woman Wang’s table. Then she pulled out a young sparrow and placed it on the table, too. Neither animal moved. They seemed scared out of their wits.

  “Did you pick them up in a skyscraper?”

  “I walked up and down, and then up and down again—Oh! I’ve never gone down to the ground floor. Granny Wang, what do you think the ground floor is like?”

  “I think it must have many sparrows and many lizards. Little Ping, why don’t you go down there and look? Make up your mind and close your eyes, keep walking down—and then you’re there. It doesn’t take any effort. Then you can enter the basement. Many people live there.”

  “Granny Wang, I have to go now.”

  Little Ping put the little animals back into her pocket. She looked dejected. She didn’t look at all satisfied with Woman Wang’s answer. She knew too much for her age. No one could fool her. Woman Wang looked at her. She felt a little regretful: this little girl was hard to deal with.

  Years ago, the first time the little girl showed up, she hadn’t come over for anything special, but just to eat her kimchi. At this moment, Woman Wang felt that Little
Ping was like a full-feathered bird flying up to the sky. She couldn’t help but look out at her receding back—the little girl already looked like a sexy young woman.

  EUPHORIA

  Ms. Wen sat in a dark room pondering the structure of the universe. Then she stood and opened the window, whereupon all kinds of dark shadows wandered in. The room turned half-light, half-dim. Poo, poo, poo . . . came the noises from the shadows. Ms. Wen felt herself sinking; the ceiling and four walls were scattering in all directions. Ms. Wen wasn’t suspended in the air, however. Rather, she stood firmly on Mother Earth, all kinds of things clustered tightly around her. She didn’t feel as if she was tied up, though; instead, she felt pleasantly free.

  “You’re on the second floor facing southwest. It’s the room with an apple on the windowsill. It’s a medium-size room with simple furniture and a typewriter.” The voice came from a tape recorder.

  “Thank you for telling me where I am. But who are you?” Ms. Wen was puzzled.

  “I’m your friend. You don’t have to know my name, because we’re in touch with each other only inside this building. This has nothing to do with the outside world.”

  These words must have been recorded in advance. How odd! Now she was going to do some deep breathing exercises. Each time she inhaled, the shadows also rapidly flew into her nostrils, and her body sank continuously and slowly. During this process, Ms. Wen always wanted to know where she was—Where was she in this “cosmic building”? Was she facing west? But the recorder wouldn’t respond to her questions very often. So she was puzzled most of the time. It was okay to be puzzled, but she did long to be oriented. The answer would come from the recorder sooner or later. When it came, it always happened unexpectedly, and it made her feel fantastic. She loved what was going on inside the cosmic building. The walls and ceiling had scattered—Wasn’t that true? The voice from the recorder made it clear that she was in a “medium-size room” located “on the second floor,” “facing southwest.” These descriptions couldn’t indicate any place outdoors. But she also kept sinking; she couldn’t remain inside a room. It was really hard to decide where she was. How wonderful to be in this delicate uncertain state! Maybe she was simultaneously in both the south and the north, but the announcement was always clear, making her feel that she could depend upon this reality.

  Years earlier, Ms. Wen had looked forward to this kind of exercise. She had looked forward to being in a large building of uncertain design and groping her way into a strange room. But this had come about only in her old age. She had now done this many times. The more she exercised, the more the building expanded—that is, there were more and more strange rooms and floors. It was almost impossible to figure out which room or floor one was in, or where the corridor led, or where the entrance could be found. Once, she had groped her way to the end of a corridor. As she hesitated to take the next step for fear of stepping into emptiness and falling, the corridor turned again. And so she involuntarily entered a windowless room that was terribly small—only one square meter. The moment someone closed the door behind her, it became unbearably stuffy. She wanted to leave, but the more she struggled, the smaller the room became. The four walls pressed in on her, and she dozed off in terror. She slept standing. Finally, at dawn, she heard the voice from the tape recorder say, “This room is in the southwest corner of the seventh floor. It’s a storeroom.” Just then, Ms. Wen discovered that she was standing in the corridor; on her right was the staircase going down.

  There was no elevator in this building; Ms. Wen found it exciting to climb the stairs late at night. Once, she recalled, she had alternately climbed and rested until at last she had climbed twenty-five stories. The twenty-fifth was apparently the top floor; the corridor extended in all directions. It was like a gigantic tower. The faint light glimmering above seemed about to be extinguished. When she steeled herself to open the door to the roof garden so that she could go outside and look around, she found that there was no roof garden. Instead, there was a staircase continuing to go up. A little afraid, she closed the door and turned around, intending to go down the stairs. But she couldn’t find the down staircase. No matter which direction she took, when she reached the end of the corridor, she came to the up staircase, as though being forced to continue to climb up. Ms. Wen sat down on the wooden bench in the corridor to nap for a while. A noise awakened her: someone was coming down the stairs with slow, heavy steps. It was an old man, wearing a tartan duckbill cap. He walked over to her, and looking into her eyes, he said, “It’s always heartwarming to run into old friends in foreign countries.” She knew she had answered him, but she didn’t remember what she had said. They walked to the end of the corridor, and as they rounded a corner, they exited the building. Ms. Wen looked back. The only thing behind her was an average-size six-story concrete building. The roof was slanted and covered with ornamental tiles. The old man left in a taxi. Ms. Wen wanted to go back inside and look around, but someone had closed the main door and was locking it from the inside.

  That building was on the same street as her home: it was a place for senior citizens’ activities. But not many elderly people went there for recreation. After Ms. Wen retired, she had asked her neighbors about this. They had told her, “It’s really stuffy inside, not suitable for elderly people.” But after going there just once, Ms. Wen was captivated by this building—especially the room for chess and card playing. That spacious room had an unusually high ceiling. Usually only two or three people were playing chess. By afternoon, no one was there. And so Ms. Wen made a habit of going there in the evening. It was a few months later that the metamorphosis of the building occurred. A wall and ceiling disappeared. When Ms. Wen looked up, the stars were visible. There was a design in the starry sky. She heard a deceased cousin laughing beside her: “This pastime belongs to you alone.” These words gave her goose bumps all over, but they also heightened her curiosity. From then on, she went to the senior citizens center every few days. Later this became stranger and stranger. The oddest thing was the time this six-story building turned into a bungalow shaped like an octopus. In the center was an immense hall, surrounded by numerous endless walkways. On either side of the walkways were rooms that looked like offices. Ms. Wen experimented: each walkway tempted her to take an infinitude of walks, but after walking for a while, Ms. Wen became afraid. Then she returned to the hall in the center. A transformed building was so dangerous and yet so alluring! The most interesting thing was that when she walked on the concrete walkway, she could hear a shadow play being staged somewhere. It was just like those she had seen as a child—striking the gongs, beating the drums, acting and singing. It was so exciting. Still, Ms. Wen didn’t like to walk straight down without looking back. This was not only because she was afraid, but also because she thought doing so was beneficial.

  A former colleague ran into Ms. Wen coming back in the evening and began talking with her.

  “Ms. Wen, you enjoy exploring by yourself,” she said.

  “Um. What do you think of this structure?” Ms. Wen felt cold sweat running down her back.

  “I can’t evaluate it. That’s too risky. You’re really a brave explorer. I admire you! Wasn’t this senior citizens recreation center constructed just for you?” The colleague’s tone was enigmatic.

  “But in the daytime, other people also go in,” Ms. Wen argued.

  “Others? They don’t count. They just go in, chat for a while, and then withdraw.”

  After they parted, Ms. Wen was astonished to realize that this colleague really understood the situation. Maybe she was also paying attention to the same thing? If so, could one say that this senior citizens center had been built for this colleague, too? This ordinary, six-story gray structure attracted no attention on the street. Every morning, a janitor opened the main door and cleaned all

  the rooms, as well as the corridor and staircase. Because this building had only one staircase and twelve apartments, the janitor would wrap up her work by noon. The main door stood open.
The female janitor, wearing a rat-gray uniform, always waited until late at night to lock up. The next day she reopened it at dawn. Ms. Wen wondered why she would rush over here late each night to lock up. Ever since her colleague had pointed out that this building had probably been constructed for her—Ms. Wen—Ms. Wen had grown more suspicious. Could the janitor be leaving the door unlocked for her? This thought horrified her.

  In the past few years, Ms. Wen had become more and more composed. She thanked the sinking exercise for this. That was because as soon as her body sank downward, her thoughts rose—as free as a bird flying in the sky. At such times, her misgivings about the janitor also disappeared, even though she had met her once late at night and been subjected to her questioning. The more she performed the sinking exercise, the more adept she became—almost reaching the point where she could sink or rise just by thinking about it. At the beginning, she had done this by herself, and the exercise had also been restricted to the room she was in—usually the one for chess. Later, after all the walls and ceilings had scattered, when she came and went and whirled freely in midair, it seemed the whole building became transparent and was an extension of her body. She carried this intangible building everywhere she went. In other words, the very existence of this building depended upon her. When she wasn’t thinking about it, the building disappeared; and when she gave it all her attention, the structure once again appeared clearly. This pastime was great fun. One time, she even ran into her son Feng in the corridor. Her son was wearing mountaineering clothes, as if he were going far away. “Feng, were you looking for me?” “Yes. They said that you were climbing up. I, too, want to enjoy the scenery up there, and so I came here. But how high is it? I can’t see it.” “Who can see it all of a sudden? You can experience it only while you’re climbing. Let’s turn to the right. There must be a roof garden in front of us. Oh, this side is the left, this side the right.” “In this kind of place, Mama is still hanging onto her senses. That’s really impressive.” Before she realized it, Ms. Wen had walked out the main door with her son. That’s all Ms. Wen could remember. Later, her son admitted to her that he had been terrified by the height of the transformative building, and had wanted to give up. Then he took hold of Ms. Wen’s arm as they went down. After this, Feng didn’t bring up the incident again. Maybe he thought it better not to speak of it.