Market Street

A Chinese Woman in Harbin

Xiao Hong, Howard Goldblatt

• Publisher: University of Washington Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9780295805665
• Edition: 2
• Topic: History
• Subtopic: Chinese History
• Index: History

Back in print - Market Street

1

THE EUROPA HOTEL

SUCH a long flight of stairs, like a pathway to the stars. Actually we had only a three-story climb, but I was walking on shaky legs that would no longer do my bidding; I grasped tightly onto the bannister and forced myself to keep going. After a few steps, my hand was trembling almost as violently as my legs.

When I finally made it into the room, I crawled into bed like a humiliated child and wiped my face with my sleeve.

He—my lover Langhua (he was still my lover then)—asked me, “You crying?”

“What makes you think I’m crying? It’s sweat, not tears!”

Only after several moments did I realize how white the room was. It had a slanted ceiling and was furnished simply with a bed, a table, and a rattan chair. The table and chair were no more than two paces from the edge of the bed. Nothing could have been easier than opening the door: I needed only to reach from where I lay on the bed and push it open with my hand. Staying in this tiny white room would be like living inside a tent. My throat was parched.

“I ought to drink some water,” I said.

He became so flustered in his desire to get me some water that his eyebrows creased into an almost unbroken straight line. His nose twitched several times.

“How’re you going to drink it? What’ll you drink from?”

The table was covered by a freshly laundered tablecloth and nothing else—not even a speck of dust.

I lay on the bed feeling light-headed. I could hear him talking to the hotel attendant out in the corridor; then I heard the door close. As he walked up to the bed I assumed that he was holding a glass in his hand. But no, his hands were empty.

“What can you drink from? How about using the small wash basin?”

He picked up the newly bought wash basin from the rattan chair. Within it, under the facecloth, he discovered a toothbrush mug. He walked out with the mug in hand.

The corridor was deserted. I could hear his footsteps as he returned.

One of my hands lay on the white bedsheet as I drank the water with the other. I traced circles on the bedsheet with a trembling finger, back and forth, back and forth.

“Lie back down; you’re exhausted.”

Even after I lay back down, I kept stroking the bedsheet—an embroidered sheet so white and shiny it nearly dazzled my eyes. Not bad, I thought. We’d never had a real bedsheet of our own. He must have read my thoughts.

“I thought we’d have to sleep on bare boards,” he said. “But now we even have pillows.”

He fluffed up the pillow under my head.

“Knock-knock.” Someone was at the door. A large Russian female hotel attendant walked into our room followed by a Chinese attendant.

“You’ll be renting the bedding too?”

“Yes.”

“Fifty cents a day.”

“No deal!” “No deal!”

Langhua and I both said the same thing.

The woman gathered up all the bedding: the soft pillows, the bedsheet, even the tablecloth. She tucked it all under her arm, starting with the bedsheet, and in a matter of seconds the whiteness of the room had disappeared out the door, punctuated by splashes of color in the woman’s babushka.

I got up—rubbery legs, growling stomach, and all—opened our wicker trunk, and removed the bedroll.

The room looked as though it had been pillaged. The bed was covered with a puffy straw mat, the dilapidated wooden table was scarred with black smudges and white circles, even the large rattan chair seemed to have undergone a change in color.

We passed the time before dinner hugging and kissing on the straw mat.

We laid dinner out on the table—black khleb* and salt.

Things really started happening after dinner.

Three or four policemen dressed in black, rifles slung over their shoulders or wearing bayonets at their belts, entered the room. Right away they pinned Langhua’s arms behind his back. (He had stripped to the waist to wash up, so his arms were still wet.) The men then opened our trunk and searched its contents.

“We received a report from the hotel that you have a gun. Is that true?” asked a man with a bayonet at his belt. The man then looked under the bed and brought out a sword rolled up in paper. After unrolling the paper, he exposed the sword and shook the tassel.

“Where’d you get this?”

The Russian hotel manager, who had been standing in the doorway, gave an embarrassed wave of the hand and blushed a bright red.

The police wanted to take Langhua to the station house, and he was prepared to go with them. But he wasn’t going to go quietly.

“How come you have to carry out your searches like this? Why all the abuse?”

The police finally softened a bit and released their grip on him. He had forgotten that he was naked from the waist up—his arms were dry by then.

The incident had stemmed from earlier that day when the White Russian had come to collect the rent. The room let for two yuan a day, sixty yuan a month. We had only five yuan between us, minus the fifty cents we had paid the carter to bring us over with our things.

“Your rent—give me!” the White Russian had said. He must have known that we were broke. He agitated, seemingly afraid that we’d try to skip out on the rent. Once he had two one-yuan bills safely in hand, he had said: “One month sixty yuan. Give it tomorrow!” The rent had originally been thirty yuan a month, but he had doubled it as soon as the Sungari River threatened to overflow its banks. Gesturing with his hand, he had stared at us coldly. “You tomorrow move out. You tomorrow go!”

“We’re not leaving,” Langhua had said. “We’re staying.”

“You have to go. I’m the manager . . .”

Langhua had reached under the bed and taken out his sword, brandishing it under the White Russian’s nose.

“You get the hell out of here! If you don’t, I’ll have your head!”

The man had fled in panic and had run to the station house, reporting that we had a dangerous weapon. Since it had remained rolled up in paper, he had assumed the weapon to be a gun, never suspecting that it was a sword.

The police confiscated the sword and left, but not before giving us a warning: “If the Japanese MPs had found this, things would have really gone badly for you. They’d have said you belonged to a terrorist group. You’d have been in hot water for sure then. We’ll hold on to this overnight, and you can claim it at the station house tomorrow.”

After the police left, we put out the lamp and locked the door. Light from the street lamps shone in through the window—a cold, subdued light. We fell asleep. As we slept, our thoughts kept returning to the Chinese policemen—how superior they were to the Japanese MPs.

Dawn broke on our second day, the second day since we had been kicked out of the home of a friend.

---

* The Russian generic term for bread.

2

A SNOWY DAY

I HAD slept round the clock. Now I was wide awake. Darkness slowly engulfed our little room. I had awakened with a sore back, sore shoulders, and a growing hunger. I got out of bed, lit the lamp, and sat back down on the edge of the bed for a while; then I moved over to the rattan chair, where I straightened my hair and rubbed my sleepy eyes. I was feeling melancholic and sort of empty, almost as though I had been transported to the depths of a coal mine, all alone and without even a lantern to light my way down. Small though the room was, I had the sensation of being in the middle of a vast deserted public square. The walls enclosing me seemed farther away than the heavens themselves; I was all alone, completely cut off from the outside world. It all boiled down to this: I had an empty stomach.

Street noises streamed in through the window, but the corridor outside our third-floor room was deathly still. My attention was riveted to the sound of footsteps every time someone passed down the corridor. Leather-soled shoes resounded past my door, followed by even louder taps from the high-heeled shoes of a woman in a hurry. Occasionally, groups of people—men and women—clattered down the corridor past my door. My ears pricked up at every sound that came from the corridor, but I didn’t need to open the door; I knew without looking that Langhua still hadn’t returned.

The window was high up on the wall, like in a prison cell. I raised my head to look out the window at the swirling snowflakes falling outside the building. Some of them stuck to the windowpane, melting on the glass and forming rivulets of water, turning the window into a mass of meandering, aimless streaks.

Why did snowflakes dance in the air? How meaningless it all seemed. It dawned on me that I was just like those snowflakes, leading a meaningless existence. I was sitting in the chair, empty-handed, doing nothing; my mouth was open but there was nothing to eat. I was exactly like a completely idled machine.

A noise in the corridor startled me. If I’m not mistaken, that’ll be Langhua! The muffled footsteps of someone wearing cloth-soled shoes drew up to my door. I nearly leapt to my feet. I was so worried—poor Langhua! He’s probably freezing out there. I’ll bet he hasn’t brought any bread back with him. I opened the door, and was face to face with the hotel attendant.

“You want dinner?”

“How much is it?”

“Sixty cents a meal or fifteen yuan a month.”

I shook my head without a moment’s hesitation. I was afraid he might bring the food inside, make me eat it, then force me to pay for it. After he walked off, I gravely closed the door. That simple action cut me off completely from the laughter of other rooms, from the aromas of other people’s food. I was isolated from the rest of the world by a single closed door.

Only the sound of Langhua’s crepe-soled shoes scraping along the doorsill brought my fantasies to an end—the tray in the attendant’s hands, meat cakes, roasted sweet potatoes, thick slices of spongy bread . . .

Langhua’s thin jacket was drenched, his pant legs were all wet and muddy, and the soles of his shoes were so full of holes that his socks were soaked.

He lay down on the bed to get warm, covering everything but his feet with the quilt. I wiped the frozen mud splotches off his feet with some rags.

“Hungry?” he asked me, as he lay there stiffly, sort of like a simpleton.

I was nearly in tears. “No,” I said, keeping my head so low that my face nearly touched the soles of his frozen feet.

His clothing was soaked through, so I went out and bought some steamed buns. We sat at the table, which was bare of everything but our steaming toothbrush mug. The mug kept us company as we ate the steamed buns. When they were gone, we looked hungrily at the few remaining copper coins.

“Had enough?” he asked me.

“Yes,” I said. “How about you?”

“Me, too.”

Someone began playing a concertina in the next room. Was it a tune dedicated to the misery of life? It was such a mournful tune!

I opened the little window by standing on the table. That little window was our sole link with the outside world. Through it we maintained contact with the skyline—roofs and chimneys—the falling snow, the dark, floating, moisture-laden clouds—street lamps, policemen, hawkers, beggars . . . The streets were noisy and bustling.

We could no longer hear the concertina in the next room.

3

HE GOES JOB HUNTING

HE was a freezing, starving dog!

There, at the head of the stairs, at the farthest end of the corridor, his wet cap disappearing around the corner, his shoes trailing wet, muddy tracks on the highly polished floorboards.

It was still early in the morning, before the sun had begun sending its rays down the length of the corridor. But already many of the doors were adorned with rings of khleb. The milkman had very gently placed steaming bottles of snow-white milk in front of the doorways. It was so tempting. I could almost smell the khleb—I could almost believe that one of those fat rings had been placed right under my nose. I was growing desperate after too many days of having too little to eat. My capacity for food had already shrunk considerably. With no money to buy anything, I was being tyrannized by those unattainable rings of khleb.

The hotel began to stir as guests stepped out into the corridor and called for the attendants; doors opened, doors closed, wash basins were filled with water. Foreign women wasted no time, starting their day with their loud talk and high-pitched laughs. But my little room was so poorly lighted that even the flying specks of dust were invisible; it was so quiet that the table was about to fall asleep in the corner of the room, along with the rattan chair; it was so quiet that the ceiling seemed as high as the heavens themselves. Everything was utterly distant from me, as though it were repulsed by my very existence.

Langhua still hadn’t returned by afternoon. I stood in the doorway several times and watched some of the foreign women walk downstairs in their red skirts and blue skirts—proud smiles adorning their lipsticked mouths, their high-heeled shoes making crisp tapping sounds on the steps. Dark-faced and bony-figured gypsy women with long dangling earrings were escorted upstairs by moon-faced and bearded men—these odd-looking couples were pr...