A Quiet Winter

A Quiet Winter

Winter is always quiet and it will always happen again

在通往远大前程的路上，在每一个越来越沉默的冬天

1

It felt like daylight had come early, but only in a pale blue. There were no clouds. That heightened the effect of the sickly whiteness that seeped through the pallid sky. This was winter in the small city—a perpetual lack of sun and a blanket of white fog that turned everything into sludge. It was hard to say if the mist was formed by cool air or dirt. All I knew was that my nostrils were raw and I wished I could stop breathing until I was back indoors. I went out wrapped in so many layers that I looked like a ball. During the winter my coat rarely got washed. It had been a vibrant crimson when I first bought it. But over time the hue sank into pale red. I refused to wear calico oversleeves. I hated raising a garish yellow or sky-blue forearm in class. The sleeves always rubbed on the desk while I did homework, the cuffs turning a polished grey and black bits crumbling off at the slightest wipe. The little bits were humiliating. At 14 years old I had read that author Eileen Chang was also embarrassed by her faded red cheongsam:“The color of ground beef, I had to wear it to no end, it was as if my whole body was covered in frostbite.” I later read that once she was earning money she went to Hongkou to buy Japanese cloth for a new gown. It was printed with, “palm leaves that half hid a Burmese temple.” Wrapped in my old, greasymianyi(cotton-padded coat), I imagined that I wouldhave a day like hers in my future.

I was in four pairs of trousers, layer over layer, and the jeans couldn’t contain the gaudy edges of my woolly pants. All I could do was stretch my sweaters down in desperation. They all had warped lower hems and it looked like I was draped in piles of clown rags. My woolly pants were weaved from yarn ripped out of old sweaters. Crimson and emerald, purple-blue with some ginger-yellow, imaginative thread ends dangling all over...I was warm enough to be sure. The last bits of wool were used to knit socks that bulged in my pelt-lined boots. That style of shoe was made of brittle, fake leather and usually came in black. I liked red, but everyone said red attracted dirt, and in those days the word “like” wasn’t considered practical. The laces were long and could loop around the ankle a few times. A bit of polish gave the boots character while the iron rings in the heels thudded against the road. I’d only worn them once or twice, but the fibers of the lining had started to fall out and stick to the soles of my socks. Washing couldn’t remove them. They needed to be picked off one at a time. Sitting at school for hours, my feet would turn as brittle as the fake leather. The cold didn’t bother them when I walked home. I could only feel them hurting until they turned numb. Once home, I soaked them in a basin of boiling water. It would take a while before I cried out in pain.

I dragged my feet into the heavy blanket of fog and made a small detour toward my fourth aunt’s house. The store she ran from home wasn’t open yet and my grandmother was sitting outside the door on a rattan chair. She was a blotched grey ball, swathed in clothes that had long lost their color and long gone out of style. Her forearms were covered with grass-green oversleeves that had a duck pattern and her fat, misshapen fingers showed through the earth-red wool of her mittens. Every morning she sat like that on the rattan chair. We could never figure out at what time she woke—was it before the sky turned pale, or after?

I stepped up to the chair and asked, “Jiajia, (in our city we called maternal grandmothers‘jiajia’, I never once called her by the common title ‘waipo’), did you eat breakfast?”

“I ate a bowl oftangfan.”

“So did I. And Mother pickled some turnips yesterday; we had them with chili oil.”

“I pickled artichokes. I ate them plain, without chili oil. Do you want another bowl oftangfan? It isn’t cold yet. I made it with rice gruel.”

LI JINGRUI

李静睿

Li Jingrui first gained fame as a talented student writer in high school, then an insightful blogger under the name “Ahua’s Ithaca” (阿花的伊萨卡岛), now a popular writer and columnist. Her style is deeply realistic and her strength lies in the portrayal of the ordinary with rich and lively detail, stimulating the senses and the imagination.

“No thanks, I should get to school.”

By the time we finished speaking, the warming vapor produced by that morning’stangfanand turnip was starting to dissipate. I was glad I had a good excuse to leave. I walked into the fog toward my school. The classroom light had just come on and I could see a faint orange glow in the distance. I walked faster. Quickly, I wanted to reach that orange glow quickly. Even if the classroom was just as cold as outside, it was my future. Behind me, she was still sitting on her rattan chair, waiting for the next visitor. Maybe it would be my cousin just out of bed, or my father rushing to work, or my aunt coming downstairs to open her shop, asking her, “Did you eat breakfast?”

“I had a bowl oftangfan.”

Then she would ask them all to try her pickled artichokes, plain, without chili oil, and her piping hot, milky white,tangfanmade from rice gruel.

But no one did.

It was a quiet winter. She sat in her rattan chair. A blotched grey ball.

2

She had moved to the town in the last couple of years. My grandfather died and there was no reason to leave her in the village, alone in that house. It had white walls and a black tiled roof with a narrow gutter outside the door. Amujinrose shrub filled with purplish white flowers grew beside the ditch, but back then I only knew to call them “mitanghua” after the color of the rice gruel they resembled. When my grandmother cooked noodles she picked two of them and added them to the pot. She then added dark green pea shoots and I would get a bowl of colored noodles.

A few steps from the yard there was a river bank where we washed clothes. I remember picking up the wooden mallet, beating it on slate stones and scooping up a small lump of soap to watch it melt in the water. The sunlight always made a rainbow in the suds. A bamboo forest grew along the banks and in the spring after the washing, we dug bamboo shoots. It was easy enough to fill one basket. The shoots were either stir-fried with meat or pickled in an earthen jar for the afternoon. We ate them straight. They weren’t too salty. I sat in the yard, watching my grandmother stitch soles, getting up from time to time to fish a shoot out of the jar. She grumbled that there would be nothing left for breakfast, but she never stopped me.

Sometimes the roof leaked and my grandfather would set up the ladder. His feet thumped on the tiles while she stood in the yard below feeding the chickens. She kept an eye on him right until he stepped off the last rung. They never raised more than four chickens at a time, but everyday a few warm eggs were pulled from some mysterious place. Sometimes they came plastered with chicken poo that was just as warm as the eggs and gave off a smell that I found homely. The previous year they had slaughtered a chicken to stew and its stomach was filled with strings of little eggs. A few of them had already grown half-shells, but were still a little soft. Most of them were the size of grapes and hanging on the lining of the belly. One mouthful held many. InDream of the Red Chamberthere’s a saying that only the elderly can eat the things that haven’t seen daylight. But those eggs were always divided among the children. I liked eating the smallest string.

Inside their house my grandparents burned honeycomb briquettes, but in the yard there was a stove they had installed themselves. When they hosted guests they used it with the big wok for a stir-fry or to cook rice. In the winter it was used to smoke meat and sausages. Bamboo leaves from outside were burned for fuel. Dustpan-full after dustpan-full were swept into the yard and piled into a corner. It gave me an odd sense of abundance. A huge cattail-leaf fan was used to grow the fire. Thick smoke coursed upwards, forming different images before floating to some faraway place. There was also a millstone in the yard. When the soybeans were ripe, my grandmother made her own soft tofu. At first she worked the stone herself and later her sons in law did it for her. The water that the beans were boiled in turned into a bitter milk and we all had to drink bowls of the stuff. When she moved to the city she wanted to bring the millstone with her, but everyone lived in tiny houses. Nobody had space for it and she was forced to leave it behind. If we wanted to eat softtofu we took an empty bowl out to the street. It was onekuaia serving and the chili bean sauce came in a plastic bag. The street vendors were businesspeople willing to make the extra effort, so the sauce was filled with chopped peanuts, roasted sesame seeds and fermented beans cut into the finest slivers. We all said this tofu was much better than the kind we made ourselves.

She first lived with my uncle in the city. He was her only son and beneath him was her only grandson. But they both had wives. The five of them were squeezed into a 60-square-meter apartment on the fifth floor. There were no lights in the stairwell. She had to feel along the wall to get downstairs. She rarely went out and spent most of her time on the sofa watching TV. She couldn’t read and couldn’t really understand standard Chinese. She was only able to look at the pictures or listen to the sounds—pop-pop sounds. At her house in the country there had been a black and white television, but the antenna was broken, filling the pictures with snow. But that house was spacious and received plenty of light. It took a long time to walk from the yard to the innermost room. There, the table pushed against the windowsill was covered with bottles and jars. I often snuck in to open an earth-yellow jar, dug out a lump oflaozaoand shoved it in my mouth. It was fermented sticky rice that hadn’t been diluted with water yet. It was strong and that five or eight year old version of me would get a little tipsy.

From my uncle’s, my grandmother then moved to my second aunt’s in a suburb. The house was big and they were so worried about it getting demolished that they couldn’t decide whether or not to renovate it. The frame around the door was earth-yellow and the toilet was a pitch black hole. When it was time to flush they had to ladle the water out of a bucket. That was still much better than her previous house. There the public toilet had been a 10-minute walk up a slope and the stench of pee always hit after five, so we never got lost.

My aunt was good to my grandmother. Every day she took her for a walk around the town. Now that was a quiet place. There was only one pharmacy, one hardware store, and two or three grocers. There were two butchers where half pigs hung on steel hooks. Customers only needed to point to the section they wanted to buy and the butcher sliced it off for them. The cuts with skin and fat sold the fastest. Everyone loved makinghuiguorou. The fatty meat was first boiled then stir-fried with onions, fermented beans, and peppers. To get fish we had to travel to a market outside the town. Sometimes farmers sold frogs on the side of the road. They were captured in the fields and then strung together with hemp cord. They squatted in bamboo cages croaking and then were deboned on the spot. Their torn open stomachs were filled with little black and yellow eggs and their pink thighs were thrown into a messy pile on the ground.

At one time, my grandmother raised a pig in her yard. Every day she hiked into the hills to fill a bamboo basket with pig feed and occasionally she would gather slop from the neighbors. The pig ate and ate until the skin of its belly touched the ground. Running around in its pen it soon tore open its stomach on the floor, revealing its pink flesh and forcing her to find a plaster cast to put on it. The pig was slaughtered before Spring Festival. More than half of it was used to make cured meats that hung from beams in the house. The rest of it was cut into huge pieces and stored in the neighbor’s icebox. We ate pig’s blood cooked with chili for days. Then we ate entrails for days. All the relatives were given a plate of carrot-fried tripe. The brimming pot of heart and lung soup was divided into a number of thermoses. In the middle of the night, we carried them and pots back to the city. The street lamps glowed dim yellow and the faint odor of cooked tripe followed us the whole way.

After we left, my grandmother tidied the house sluggishly, checked on the chickens and went to bed. My grandfather would be in the other room watching snowy pictures on the TV. They had moved into separate beds years before, and then into separate rooms. The TV crackled and popped—and all returned to the quiet winter.

IT WAS 1996, WHEN ANY FASHIONABLE WOMAN WAS WILLING TO PAY EIGHT TO NINE HUNDRED FOR A REAL LEATHER SKIRT

3

Before my grandfather died he asked his five sons and daughters to come to the hospital and said, “These last few years I managed to put aside 5,000kuai. I wanted to give you 1,000 each, but your mother will eventually fall ill, so it’s not for you to share. Keep it for her. They answered him in echoes, “Of course, of course…” It was 1996, when any fashionable woman was willing to pay eight to nine hundred for a real leather skirt. The starting bet for a game of mahjong was five and losses were capped at 15. Gold was 95 a gram. One thousand kuai could just get you a thin gold necklace, with no pendant.

Two years later she really did get sick. At first it was diabetes and then there were all kinds of complications. She’d always been fat. Now she was fatter and weaker. The skin on her arms was stretched tight. Pressing it with a finger made a dimple that rose slowly. She was paranoid that her children would mistreat her and shouted to be moved to the hospital. Once there, she was paranoid about money and shouted to be taken home. The cycle continued until her body broke. She could no longer go downstairs. She could no longer get bundled up into a blotched grey ball that sat on the rattan chair. She could only recline on the sofa and it was always a long time before someone came to move her, leaving a warm dent in the cushions and a hot smell. It was always a long time before her two daughters came to bathe her. Her breath was foul because her teeth were rotting. She used the odor to isolate herself. Over time I could no longer bear getting near her and only stopped by to call out, “Jiajia!”

There were times when her condition suddenly improved and she could leave the house. One year she visited us for Dragon Boat Festival. In the kitchen she noticed a package ofzongzithat had been given to us as a gift. We forgot to steam them before the meal. While we ate, she sat on the sofa watching us silently. She told us she’d already eaten. Then she ate an apple and left, insisting on returning home by herself. After she died my fourth aunt told us that she returned that day saying we purposefully didn’t give her anyzongzi. She cried the whole night. In fact, she hadn’t eaten at all that day. We thought hard, but couldn’t remember anything aboutzongzi. In Sichuan they were made with a meager portion of sticky rice. At most they included a few red dates. Wrapped in bamboo leaves, they were steamed and eaten with sugar. Nobody in our family liked them. Thezongzishe had seen in the kitchen that day were likely thrown away.

Of course, there were things we didn’t let her eat, liketianshaobai, which was cooked with a lot of sugar. The streaked fatty meat was steamed so long it almost melted in the bowl. I could barely pick it up with chopsticks. Placing it on my tongue I couldn’t decide if it was too flavorful or too rich. There was thetiantangsoup we cooked in winter. Inside it was white wood ear, rice dumplings and fruit boiled until it was tart. The sourest pieces were from tangerines, then pears. The sweetest pieces were from light yellow apples. Eating, we ladled spoonful after spoonful of sugar out of our bowls. There were also the egg cakes sold at the market that I watched being made by the pan. When I bit into one it crumbled delicately and was so sweet it was hard to finish the second.

Sometimes she would get upset and abandon her bowl before it was finished. Sitting in the yard she half pretended to wipe tears from her eyes and said: “What a miserable life this is. I gave birth to five children and I’m not even served a piece of meat.” We giggled and continued eating, slurping down our sweet soup then pouring ourselves bowls of chicken and kelp broth with floating lumps of grease. It was if we were watching some badly produced local TV drama. When the whole family was together we played mahjong with her. The starting bet was onemao. She was a terrible player, oblivious to opportunities while discarding tiles that allowed us to win. She would lose one or twokuaia game, her face darkening and threatening to shed tears. But those were rare times. We were never all together. Everyone was too busy. At the moment, the instant, there was always something more important, more urgent. Outside the mahjong table, where just a fewkuaiwere won or lost, everyone had a future.

Eventually she stopped wiping her tears and her appetite, especially for sweet and oily foods, faded. She returned to the hospital, then returned home. Moving back and forth, the 5,000 kuai my grandfather had left perished.A few family members started to put more money aside, but nobody was that wealthy. Everyone started to look forward to the end in a haze, refusing to believe their own thoughts. The guilt caused us all to care for her with surprising patience. But by then it was just a body that we were fussing over. Her spirit had already departed. It was unclear when, or to where. Maybe she inhabited the wool slippers she had last knitted for me. I carried her in those slippers from that small town with me, thinking that I would wear her during these long winters for the rest of my life, but now I’ve already forgotten during which of my moves she disappeared. I lost her and it wasn’t an accident.

It was her body that we clung to now. She struggled to take pointless medicine. She struggled to keep her eyes open all night. Then she struggled to breathe, grasping the fantasy that she would survive until the next winter, even though it would be just another quiet winter.

4

I remember these things vaguely and there are no specific details that come to mind—the contents of our conversations have been lost. There is one thing that I can be sure of. I was sure I said, “Jiajia, I got the city’s highest score on the last test,” or, “Jiajia, I cut my hair short. Isn’t it pretty?” and, “Jiajia, did you take your medicine today?” But the voice that continued those conversations is missing. I can’t hear her answering me from this pale imaginary world of words.

The last uncertain detail that I can think of is right after passing my university entrance exam. They carried her to my celebration. I was wearing light blue trousers and a white tank top. Clinking, cheap, multicolored earrings dangled from my newly-pierced ears. I tossed my hair, mingling energetically, speaking loudly with all the guests, eager to abandon it all behind: the filthy river water, my dilapidated hometown, an embarrassing past. Senile, to a level that made her barely visible, she sat in the crowd smiling stiffly. After lunch she was carried home to rest. I probably should have said something to her, but that’s also irretrievable now. That night while my mother shuffled the red envelopes I’d received and counted the money inside, I suddenly asked, “Didjiajiacome for the dinner as well?”We were all confused: she must have come, otherwise who had cooked for her?

She truly did leave us one winter. I was in my university dormitory when my mother called weeping. The family’s hazy, cruel wish came true, but nobody wanted to accept it. It was as if accepting it was a crime. A strong wind blew outside. I burned one of my English notebooks for her and took a mournful pose. A few months later I broke down crying in a cafeteria. Tears dripped into my aluminum tray. I only ate one of those four-kuai-and-five-maosweet and sour ribs, but I can remember the fragrance, her fragrance. It doesn’t stop at this pale imaginary world of words.

It’s a filthy and freezing Beijing winter and I’m reading Herta Müller’s essay “Different Eyes Sit in Every Language”. Outside my window, dense smog swallows everything. Beijing looks no different than that small city in the fog years ago. But there is no blotched grey ball sitting on a rattan chair, looking into my eyes. I finally recalled those moments where she was missing. Those memories are exactly like these smoothly written lines, where a pair of cold eyes is sitting, and behind them another pair, asking a question I must answer. On the road to the future, why does life fill itself with goals while losing the details, in every, ever more quiet winter.– TRANSLATED BY NICHOLAS RICHARDS (芮尼克)

Author’s Note:“The Quiet Winter” is the first piece in my short story collection Small Town Stories, set in a small town in Sichuan based largely on my own experience growing up there. I wanted to write about my deceased grandma, and her dismal, lonely life in a seemingly nonchalant air and, furthermore, what I abandoned on the rushed road to the future. Just like the end of the story, life fills itself with goals while losing the details. I wish this were no longer the case, but I know that the winter will stay quiet and it will always happen again.