for Didi
I live in Guangxi where the mountains look like giants’ fingertips sticking up out of their graves, where there is always a fine watery mist feeding our crops and rotting the walls of our houses, where I am lucky not to be working the fields. I am a modern girl and have learnt to type and use the internet which I use to chat to people who will never see the material me. It’s quite a comfort at times. I work in one of the Western bars in the town and cycle seven kilometres to work in the morning and back again in the blanket of the night. My parents think I am being corrupted by mixing with the tourists and they have started to worry about my future. I tell the foreign men I am a Catholic. They understand my message and they always back off.
I am not, as you see, unaware of my power over them. I know my black eyes lure them pointlessly and that my fleshy lips speak a sensuality I cannot complete. I feel less bad because it is foreign men I do this to by my presence but, still, I wait impatiently for the dulling of my eyes and the thinning of my lips. For my sake, as much as theirs. I am not a Catholic and, although some might think I live like a nun, I could never devote my barren belly to a spiritual entity I consider to be wholly maleficent.
I know that sounds bitter, but it is how I feel and, if this is going to afford me any peace, this typing, then I should write what I feel, don’t you think? The web, and messenger in particular, has been an adventure for me. I have been flying off to all sorts of pictures of the world here in this gloomy shack that is our internet bar in our town. I can’t understand why the young boys who crowd into this dark place play the games they do on the web. They seem so closed in on themselves, so lonely and predictable to me. I have been altogether more strident in my use of the net. Maybe it’s different for girls. I seem to be the only girl who comes in here.
I spend the same amount of money on the internet as my girlfriends spend on the cosmetic accoutrements of modernity. They go to the beauty parlour next door to the internet shack and do nails, hair, hair peeling, facials, feet and one even does hot cups on her back for the spots on her face. We all think we are modern girls. Our mothers say we are, with pride and hesitation in their eyes. My friends encourage me to follow them and, in fact, I did go once and have a manicure. My fingertips were soaked and trimmed and half-moons were made to appear. I thought it strange, when the girl cut away my cuticles, how the edges of me could be cut away so painlessly. As if my shell were somehow unnecessary, a hindrance even. Over the rasp-rasp of the emery board, the madam of the shop, for that is also what she is, declared that the fingers of a woman are the doors to our sense of touch. I was tempted to laugh until I saw my girl bite her lip and lower her head further over my outstretched hand. We modern girls do things we shouldn’t in order not to have to transplant rice. I would have gone again. I liked the pink lights on my fingers and kept opening out my hands on the handlebars all the way home to see them blinking at me in the evening light. But one manicure costs three hours on the web. I had to choose. So now I meet my friends afterwards and we wander the streets together sharing our evening bread snacks at the street stalls before heading home.
It’s not as if I reject my beauty. Ever since I knew my situation I have refused to cut my hair. I can sit on my hair. I want to know I am a woman. I know, too, that I have the legs of a gazelle. I appreciate them. They equip me for my job, which I perform in a short black skirt with a saucy pinafore top. I have to leave my heels in the bar and change into pumps and slacks to ride home each night. I change in the kitchen at the back and my boss spies on me through the slats of the door. I have mixed feelings about this. He does not know I see him there. Usually I remember I have him to thank for my job, my future and for the web, but sometimes I suddenly want to drive a knife into him. Not in rage though, just in passing, throwing it into him, flit, and it’s done, just as some people discard their cigarette butts, gracefully, nonchalantly, as if they are not doing anything at all. Then the moment passes and I am dressed and gone. Maybe that is an odd response. I do not know. It is of only passing interest to me that I cannot be raped by him. I do not reject my beauty anymore than you would, but my youth is running through me like the slow flowing river that runs past our town and I do not regret its passing.
You think me pretentious. So ugly, the spurning of youth, you think? It doesn’t equate does it, that these lips that were made for kissing should be speaking like this? I can tell you that my lips are two of the softest, sweetest lips in the world. However, my lips are also an ashen promise and I cannot offer them to you. Or anyone.
I am a village girl and where I come from they call me a stone woman. I am a woman who was born without a vagina. It’s rare but not unheard of here which is why we have a name for women like me. There is nothing particularly unusual about where I come from. We are not achingly poor or fearfully oppressed, but neither do we have the franchise for all the socks in Europe in our
village factory. In fact our factory, which still belongs to us all say the women in the neighbourhood committee, produces chilli tofu in four inch jars and supplies just one big customer in Guilin, where none of us have ever been. Or rather, I should say that those from our village who have gone there, have not yet returned. Our village, though, is more fortunate than some. This is not Gansu and we have no desert. Here, near Yangshuo, we have always managed to grow enough food and recently we have all of us benefited from the beauty of our unfarmable hills. It has not, by any stretch, all been toil. Throughout our history, we have had poets and painters making our home immortal. All the public buildings I have ever been into have scroll paintings showing our hills and even the twenty kuai note depicts a turn in the river that lies not an hour from here. All the children in China learn to recite verses that speak of the beauty and mystery of our land and just ten years ago the president of the United States of America watched our cormorant fishermen on this very river. We live in a place where the land is larger, more alive and more voluble than us. This impresses me more than it impresses you, I think, because we stone women are some of the quietest in the world.
Every few years our village artist apprentices an ink painter to make pictures to sell to both the Chinese and the foreign travelers who arrive here on the river boats. The most recent boy to follow this path has become quite famous, it seems. We all laugh about this as Xiao Li was only put to the brush because he was such a naughty little boy who could never be found when it was time for school and who scowled at anyone who loved him. When his father died, his mother did not know what would become of him. She came to the painter for help for the curious reason that he was the cruelest man in the village. He kept a reed switch in his hand, supposedly to control his pig, which he allowed to roam his houseand yard with human freedom. He used the switch liberally on the children of the village whenever they got in his way or just if they happened to be around when he had been drinking ‘bai jiu’. We children all knew him as ‘the bastard’. He was as fat as his pig and this made him stand out. Not many of us are fat here. The weight of his footsteps told us he was there even before we saw him and we children would warn each other of his passing. People whispered about Xiao Li’s mother they day she took him to the painter. Some said the boy would not survive there, but they were wrong. The painter looked at the barefoot rebel who would not look at him but would not look away either and put him to work making brushes and mixing paints. Before the mother had even finished her plea, a calm descended on the pair of them that none of us could explain. The ‘bastard’ and the boy worked in silence, the boy watching the artist’s hands as he worked his strokes and the ‘bastard’ gesturing with his chin when he needed more ink or a different brush. The deal was struck and Xiao Li did not even lift his head to say goodbye to his mother that first day. The mother brought food for both each day in a metal pot, which, when it was hot, she hung from a stick over her shoulder. At first the ‘bastard’ treated Xiao Li like the rest of us, shouting and flicking his legs with the switch and Xiao Li was cowed. When the painter drank, the boy would run away back home and cry and rage and chase hens and pigs with a stick like his master. But it would not last and he would hunger for the pictures again. And because the painter watched the boy and taught the boy and soon saw how he could paint, he put away the stick. First he taught him bamboo painting, which everyone said was too hard, but it wasn’t. Then he taught him landscape inks, which, again we all thought, was wasting paper and again we were wrong. By the end of the first summer we children tucked our fear inside our shirts and each
day on the way from school we would queue up outside the painter’s workshop to see what Xiao Li had been working on all day. In those days I thought ‘everything can change’.
I queued up with my friends and everyday I saw a new view, a new scene, a new window on the world. A picture that was both the world and somehow not the world. In that first year Xiao Li only worked with black ink, but his world was no less colourful for that. I only realized about the giants once I had seen the hills in ink.
I was happy for another reason too that year. There was a boy in my class who one day showed me a duck’s nest and gave me a yellow flower down by the riverbank when no-one was about. I kept the flower wrapped in paper in my boot. The boy was my own piece of sun and neither of us told. Later though I knew to flee my own people and I fled him. He left for America some time ago and they tell me now he is married to a green card lady. I don’t think about him anymore
Xiao Li was a wild one though and by the time he was fourteen he was sneaking into town at night and learning to drink and on market days, when he was supposed to mind the painting stall, he would steal away into the mahjong halls at the back of the market and waste the day pretending to be a man, earnestly following the click-clack of the mahjong tablets, cracking adolescent jokes and selling nothing. His drinking turned out to be the making of him. One night, just after the May holiday, he sat drinking with a lone foreigner. The foreigner was one of those few who had studied Mandarin in the capital and here he was looking for the real China. They stayed up all night and he and Xiao Li rode into the village the next day on the back of that man’s motorbike and they spent the day looking at pictures and drinking some more while the ‘bastard’ skulked on the side, oddly fearful of the young
blond man who could speak his language. Nothing special happened after that visit except that perhaps Xiao Li spent less time in the town and seemed to be burning up with his work. He took to colours and painted tigers and flowers and this time even his teacher thought he was moving too fast. But two years later foreigners started arriving in the village and asking for Xiao Li. At first we were confused as there are no fewer than eleven Xiao Lis here but we soon got the drift. They were all coming for the paintings and Xiao Li and his mother, and the ‘bastard’ got rich. Xiao Li said it was his friend, the blond man, who had arranged all this. We did not know how this could be so until someone noticed that all the visitors came clutching the same tourist book. They still come even now, even though there is a scroll stall in the town, which is, I think, more convenient. Every so often a foreigner will come to our village and ask for Xiao Li in faltering tones and, when he is found, the foreign guest will sit on a squat stool and sip green tea and pay a month’s wages for a single scroll.
I’m telling you about Xiao Li so that you will know that in our village we are not ignorant of the wider world. I may be the only one here who knows how to use the internet and so I suppose I am the only one from here who can tell the wider world about us, but I would not want you to think that we do not already know about you. We know for instance that you think us strange. I didn’t know we were strange until the boat trips started coming up in the Spring festival and in the May holiday. The sightseers looked and looked and said our houses were interesting, our streets quaint and traditional and our river picturesque. None of us knew what to make of it because these city people did not seem to be looking at our buildings or our river. They seemed to be looking at us.
We looked at you too and you all seemed so bright, so colourful, so written on. All your shirts had writing on or pictures on or both. You all looked so fat and so tired also. I know, for instance, that the pictures do not stay in your minds and that you have to save all your images in your cameras and that images and pictures are the most important things in your lives. I saw this immediately when I started to use the web. You have lives full of stills and this is why you have no grace. It’s as if you do not know how to join up the pictures in your lives. My mother says it is because you do not know how to ride bicycles. She is right in a way. I have seen you on your rented bikes traveling the country roads on your day trips here. You have so much trouble with our bikes that we have had to set up bike repair shops on all your routes to the moon mountain and the ancient bridges. You do not know how to preserve movement. You are careless and clumsy and ride over sharp stones and wonder why you have punctures. You return to your hotels filthy and sweaty and you have not discovered the grace of our bicycles and when you relax over your Tsingdao beers in our bars in the evening you comment knowingly about the poverty that denies us proper vehicles. You explain your incompetence with our backwardness.
You are strangers here and yet you see us as strange, especially here in the village. Does it seem incredible to you, the accumulation of freakery where I come from? I assure you that there is nothing unusual about us. Go to any village in China, as long as it is a few kilometres from a town and you will find what you are looking for. Your image of the real China. We are the old, the very young and the disabled. In our village we have the lot. We have a village idiot, one every generation. These are always boys. They never seem to have more than a handful of words, one mouthful. If ever you try to speak to them, you will find that they always come out with their mouthful, almost a sentence, always the same words. Sometimes they speak their words as a question, sometimes not. They know at least that they are being addressed but whatever else goes on in their minds no-one can tell. Our one, Xiao Yi, is not as useless as he seems. He helps his father with the animals and in the afternoon hangs around in the road that leads into the village. He is preternaturally scared and we use him as an early warning system for visitors to the village. When he spots a bike or a car he runs down the hill hooting, waving his arms and running with little shuffling steps as if his legs are tied together at the knees with a rope. He runs right in the middle of the path, slowing down whoever is arriving and we all look up from our work to see who is there. He is also scared of the dark and I can hear him crying himself to sleep each night. Then there are the blind old people who watch everything. They are old and blind and never sit indoors. There are three here, one man and two women. They sit out on the kerb or on the lintel of their houses, taking the air and watching with their blind eyes. The man digs little ruts with his stick as he squats on the corner of his son’s house. Each day when the rain starts one of us will lead them indoors. The path gets slippery and they might fall. We take all three down to the corn store when it is time to strip the leaves and they work faster than me despite their age. I don’t know why they are blind but I think it is something that has come slowly to them because they seem to behave all of them as if they can still see. They seek the light and they know when it is dark outside. I can tell they are friends but they do not speak with each other as far as I can tell, at least not when anyone else is around. When my mother talks to them to pass the time of day she talks to them as if they are deaf. The man has the sunken face of Lao Tse but the women just look like old women. They have matching blue shirts with little white flowers on them, like the ones the women in the neighbourhood committee wear and fat black slippers peeking out from their grey trousers. They could be sisters but I have never asked. Actually I have never really thought about them until today now that I feel compelled to stay at the computer speaking to a machine.
It is dark outside and the light in the shack is very weak. Several boys have been called home to bed and the late-nighters are settling in to look at the porn sites. They are not supposed to do this and the manager charges them extra for it. The man next to me is pretending he isn’t doing this so whenever I look up he calls up his Sina homepage, which he has minimized in readiness at the bottom of his screen. Normally I would have left by now. It is a long ride home and in the dark it seems further.
If you come to our village over the hills from the town at first you will only see the bend in the river and the small pagoda on the bank. It will take you a few more minutes to spot the village itself because although the banks of the river rise up swiftly away from the water, so that the pagoda rises up on a slight elevation, the village itself behind it is built in a dip between the river and the hills. From the north it is quite hidden from view. The village was rich during the Qing dynasty. It was a stopping off point on the river trading route, which is why all the important buildings are by the river. The temple is just behind the pagoda and there are the remains of an ornate stairway leading down to the landing point on the river. Only the tourist boats land here now. We no longer trade on the river. The Qing dynasty buildings are all made of stone and form the two main streets of the village. Then at the road end of the village we have the new houses, some of which have electric light and television. These are made from the red brick and the smartest ones have been covered with white tiles. The men often go and work for a time in the brick factory on the other side of Yangshuo and only come back to help with the rice. These men have effectively left and they return intermittently if at all and when they come they find it hard to look in our eyes. If I didn’t know better I would think some of them are ashamed of us and of their roots. The brick mill is a wide, red dusty place. There is no colour there and the job of each man is the same, to replicate eternally the small baked squares that we are now so hungry for. The work is hard, dull and ugly. The men miss the river and the lush fields of the village and, if they are ashamed, it is of their need for currency and the pull of the modern. Eventually they all come home to fetch a wife and this is what my mother hopes will happen for me. My friends and I want to have the things that can be found in the towns and so if these men have a little money they seem like a good prospect. My friends don’t come to the internet bar and they do not see what the men are gazing at on the screens.
Coming into our village in the middle of the day could I suppose make you think we are all strange. During the daylight hours the only people at home are what you see, the old, the very young and the disabled. Is it not the same for you too? You are so visual. You cannot imagine us really and you think you perceive all there is here. The women on the neighbourhood committee have had postcards made to educate you all. The postcards are all of village festivals and party award ceremonies. They did this because one woman said that the foreigners think we live in the stone age, whatever that means. She said we had to show that there are all sorts of people living here and that we have the benefit of government. My mother said that we should not display ourselves like this, that even in the stone age, whenever that was, we had not lived like that, but then she was voted off the committee and the postcards were made and the women take it in turns to sit at a small table outside the temple selling entrance tickets and joss sticks and the postcards. The postcards get damp with the daily rain and they soon cease to look new and expensive and no-one wants to buy them.
When I am taking my nightly trips on the internet I have to keep asking myself what it is I am looking at. After a while on the shopping sites it looks to me as if all the clothes are the same and yet there is price tag that tells me they must all be different. The dress code, as you call it, is indecipherable. I don’t mind this. I like clothes. I like the way they can change a person but the sites have nothing to do with me and I am amazed at the complexity of your image culture. It is all the same to me. There is a billboard up on the road a couple of kilometres outside the village. It is huge and on it is a huge smiling face. A blond girl with plastic teeth holds a bottle of yoghurt and smiles and crinkles her big blue eyes. I wonder who she is and whether she drinks yoghurt. I bet she has not tasted anything as fine as the goat yoghurt we have here. And she should know it tastes better in a grey ceramic pot and that the plastic pots in the supermarket leave their plastic flavour. But maybe that does not matter if you have plastic teeth.
There’s a girl in my village who is an albino. She is weak with it, the strength washed out of her like her colour. Her lips are hard to find. Her name is Huang Hua, yellow flower, and recently I have become her friend. She is younger than me and has not left the village, though she should be at school. Her mother does not want her in school, does not want her to realize yet the cruelty of the world. It will come to her sooner rather than later. I have been researching her sickness as well as mine on the net.
I have discovered you can be anyone you want on the web. I can be anyone I want. I do not have to be the stone woman. I can be like you all out there in the wider world. At first I loved this and joined lots of chat rooms, being whoever I wanted to be. Sometimes I was a man. Once I was a mother, but no-one spoke to me. I guess mothers do not have much time to chat on the web. For a time I felt freed from my body and even that I could choose my body. But when people replied to me it did not seem that they were speaking to me at all. It ceased to be amusing when I finally understood that the internet was anonymous and that the companies only give us login names to make us feel like people, well at least like people who are blond and blue eyed and who drink yoghurt out of plastic cups. I did find out one thing though. I found out that in America they can cure women like me and that in America they do not call us the stone women. In America I think things do change.
Huang Hua tells me one of the women from the neighbourhood committee takes her each week to the Matsue temple and makes her bow and pray. Each year on her birthday that same woman gives her incense to burn and puts a few jiao in the collection box, which is normally for the foreigners to put money in when they take photographs in the temple. The girl has never thought to ask her why she does this. Huang Hua looks like a Westerner I tell her, despite the fact that she still has Chinese eyes. Huang Hua is the reason I will not return to this internet bar and why this is my only letter to you. It’s not a great change but it does mean that I will be able to have more manicures. The wider world is not so very colourful. I come from a village where even the blind can see and you live in a world that is too full of images and none of them are me. You see, in Huang Hua I have found my image and I know I am a modern woman. I will adopt her as my twin. I will help her and she me. She can be my image. People will stare at her and see me and you will know to shrink from us both. Even here in my stone world, things change.
Stone Woman was originally published in the Spring 2008 edition of The Mississippi Prize Review, pp113-125.