文/伊卷舒
The judge entered the court room in his black gown and read the verdict in a solemn voice. Tian-shang’s petition of a divorce from her husband was granted.
The court room was quiet other than sound of the people sitting back in their chairs after having stood up for the verdict. There were about 10 people in the room and all of them were family members except me.
The case had been lingering for two years, as the husband, Tong-shuan, refused to sign the documents, saying that he was dumped, because his wife and her parents were devoid of gratitude, as the parents had moved back to the city and become professors again. He also resisted the divorce because he didn’t want to lose his children. According to Chinese law, young children normally stayed with their mother unless the mother was proved to be unfit.
Tian-shang’s family – her parents, Professor Gu and Professor Huang, and her two sisters, Tian-hui and Tian-ying, did not like the idea of getting a divorce either, because a divorce was a huge disgrace to the family and condemned generally at that time in China, particularly when there were kids involved.
However, Tian-shang insisted despite of the fact that they had been married for 8 years and they had two kids, a boy called Da-bao and a girl, xiao-qing.
What was finally moved the judge was when Tian-shang was put on the stand. She tried hard to speak to the court, but only uttered two words, “Your highness, you look, and you decide.” She pulled her sleeves up as far as possible and her pants, and there were bruises and scratches on her arms, neck and legs.
Both sides of the audience were shocked, but had different responses. I heard sobbing immediately from Tian-shang’s family sitting on the right side. The family of the husband, on the left side, simply lowered their heads so as not to look up in the direction of the witness stand.
After the court was over, Tian-shang, and her entire clan - her parents and two sisters - walked quickly out of the courthouse, and went to the bus station on the sidewalk. When the bus pulled in, they took the bus and left.
I preferred to take a long walk back to the school, along the tree-covered pedestrian path beside the old city wall. I felt that I needed some quiet time to sort through the emotional turmoil that had been unfolding in the courtroom.
I had offered to come with Tian-shang and her family to the court and sit with them at the audience quarter. I had felt that I would like to support Tian-shang and her parents in the ordeal，as I was a doctorate student at the law school, so that I could provide them with legal advice. Moreover I would like to support them as a close friend of the family.
Then someone tapped me from behind. It was the Tong-shuan, meaning copper bolt in Chinese, Tian-shang’s ex-husband.
He tried to catch his breath from running, and said, “I know who you are, please tell ‘the person inside my house’ that I did not mean to hurt her. I only did it because she never gave up the idea of getting rid of me.”
I was pretty upset with the way he called her ‘inside my house,’ the traditional way to say “wife” in the villages of the southern China.
“She is no longer a ‘inside your house.’ You heard the verdict of the court.”
There was a little awkward expression on his face.
“She has a name, a beautiful name, Tian-shang. It means use the entire sky to make her clothes,” I said. I looked up at the blue sky of early spring, imagining what clothes would look like if made of cloud, wind and sunshine...
Then I looked at the man, somehow the bruises and scratches on Tian-Shang’s fine skin reappeared before me, as though the most beautiful thing was torn apart right in front of me. I felt my chest was about to explode and I wanted to yell. His very face disgusted me.
He said with a cold tone, “That is the name you people call her, but my people called her ‘the second daughter of Gu family’ when she first came to our village, then ‘inside my house’ when she married me, and then Da-bao’s mom, or Xiao-jing’s mom after we had the boy and the girl.”
I grinned, “Oh, well, whatever you guys called her. It is over. Now she is Tian-shang.”
“Younger sister,” he said. That was also a way those countryside people addressed young women.
“I know that you are some kind of a lawyer and some kind of a sister to her.” He yanked his head in the direction of the bus station, but did not give any name for Tian-shang now.
“Why did you beat her up and still want to hold onto her? You should feel fortunate, only a divorce…You should go to prison for what you did… How dare you beat her like that?”
The man turned his head down and then to the side. After keeping quiet for a few seconds, he said, “I know that you are a person ‘drinking in lots of writing ink in your tummy.’ But think for a minute from my perspective. In fact, our people did not understand why I would like to marry her either. She never smiled, barely talked, my people said that she was like a deaf and mute, a living dead. She hardly spoke to me, she would not ever look at me. ”
I was surprised at his frankness.
“Later I noticed that she could talk. In fact, she could speak in a nice voice, she spoke to my son Da-bao when he was still a baby and to Xiao-qing, the daughter. One day, I heard she was talking to somebody when I got back from work, only to find that she was talking to the little ones, though all their responses were some sound of ya-ya-ya.”
I said, “Given what your father did to her parents and her, don’t you think it was nice enough of her just not to talk to you.”
He squinted at me.
He tried to reach his pockets and took out some money, “I made some bamboo baskets before I came here and sold them early this morning at the farmers’ market. Please pass 200 Yuan to the kids, 100 Yuan for each one. I love my kids, both of them. It breaks my heart to think that I will not see them very often. But I also know that it will do them good to grow up in the city and in the university campus. They can go to college too and get educated. That is the reason I did not even fight to keep them. My people thought that I was insane. ”
His eyes were full of water, and his hands began trembling. He got some notes of 10 Yuan, 5 yuan first, and finally some coins of 10 and 5 cents from his pockets. I noticed that his hands had gotten cuts and dirt from hard bamboo work.
Then somehow I felt sympathy for him, and took a 10 yuan note out from the pile and gave back to him, “You can buy the bus ticket back home and I will make it up for 200 Yuan for your kids.”
He looked at me in awe.
I told him, “No worries, I guarantee that you can visit your kids any time you want to. They will always be your kids, always.”
After her divorce, Tian-shang and I met each other from time to time, as she would consult me on some legal questions in regards to the transfer of residence permit for her and her kids from the countryside to the city. She also needed to find a job at the campus.
At that time, I was pretty busy with my dissertation for the doctoral program at the law school and preparation for the bar examination to obtain my lawyer’s license.
I remembered well, what had been 6 years prior to the divorce - my second year at the college - when I took Spoken English, a general education class, taught by Professor Huang, Tian-shang’s mother. Professor Huang had been very nice to me, especially when I had broken my right leg riding a bicycle. She had helped me make up classes and invited me to her faculty apartment for dumplings. I had also met her husband, Professor Gu, an economics professor.
Professor Gu said to his wife the first time he saw me, “Wow, you are so right, She looks just like Tian-shang, particularly when she smiles. She is like a younger sister of Tian-shang.”
Then both would talk about how smart and hardworking Tian-shang was, and they had high hopes for her. If it had not been for the misfortunate of themselves, Tian-shang would not have been pulled out of school and gone to the countryside with them. She would have been just like me, becoming a college student, learning to be a doctorate in law, or science, or literature…
At that moment, I became so curious about Tian-shang, who bore so much resemblance to me, and kept asking questions about her. I even felt that Tian-shang could had been my lost sister when I saw her pictures at Professor Huang’s apartment. I felt that connection instantly. Deep down in my heart, I was very pleased to find someone who was 9 years older than me, as I had been dreaming to have an older sister for my entire life.
Professor Gu started first, “When the Cultural Revolution started in 1966, I lost my job as an economist at the Ministry of Public Finance as I was put in the category of ‘Rightist’ and was expelled from Beijing, the capital of China. The village we were sent down to was the birthplace of my grandpa. And yet he left village for school in Beijing when he was 16 and lived there ever since, and my dad was born in Beijing.”
Professor Huang added, “At that time, we had three daughters, Tian-hui, 16, Tian-shang, 14 and Tian-ying, 11. We all had to go. The life in a remote mountain village was hard, we have to fetch water from the river, plant our own vegetables, raise chickens for protein. When Tian-shang was about 18 years old, the son of the local official, Tong-shuan, proposed to her. She refused. And then Professor Gu was put into the village prison and walked round the villages with a big board hung in front of his chest saying, ‘an Anti-revolutionary Gu’. They also put a tall hat over his head to deliberately humiliate him. What was even worse, the whole family was put into a broken house next to cowshed with a leaking roof.”
Professor Huang stopped for a minute. Thinking of the past made her look 10 years older instantly. She continued in a voice full of helplessness, “Tian-shang was a girl of strong will and she refused to give in. She even tried to kill herself one time, but she came to believe that she had a bigger mission in life, that is, to protect her parents and her sisters. Eventually, she agreed to marry the son. Every morning, Tian-Shang would walk quietly to the brick house, assigned to us after Tian-shang made her sacrifice. The house was close to the stream water from the mountains so that her parents and her two sisters would have an easy time fetching water. Tian-shang never knocked at the door to go inside, she just stood outside and prepared herself to go through the day, and she made her believe that her sacrifice would be worthwhile as her parents were safe and her sisters could have a normal life.”
I knew their story from that point on. In 1978 when the Cultural Revolution was over, Tian-shang’s parents moved back to the city, and the mother became the professor teaching Spoken English at the University where I attended as a Law student and the dad worked as an economics professor at the same university. The two sisters went back to Beijing, the older one got a job at an elementary school and younger one attended college to study physics.
After Tian-shang got divorced, she and her two children, 6 and 4 years old respectively, stayed with her parents. She had lots of bureaucratic processes to go through, even for a simple thing such as to send the kids to the daycare center, and to get a janitor job at the campus.
It was early May, right after I passed the bar examination and obtained my lawyer’s license, when I went with Tian-shang to the county and the village, where she had spent her childhood and young days with so many heart-broken experiences, because we needed the signed documents from the village and local governments so that she could be allowed to transfer her residence permit from village to the city.
It was the first time for me to get close encounters with the people involved and I came to understand why she had been considered as “a deaf and mute, a living dead” by the people there. Furthermore, I could see why she had insisted to get a divorce, as she must have felt so suffocated in a place like that.
We also went to visit the house of white wall and grey bricks, close to water. We stood on the same flag-stoned road with lichen covering over. I seemed to see a girl standing there every morning and peeping inside through the crevices in the door. The very thought that her loved ones were safe because of her sacrificial offerings prepared her to get through the day, and the day after.
Tian-shang was pretty happy with a janitor’s job, as she did not have much work experience and even less of an education.
I finally earned my doctorate in law and passed the bar examination and was even offered a faculty position at the law school. I thought I could take a break and would not be so busy, and yet I became even busier as I would teach two courses and go to court as a lawyer. Once I took cases, I felt excited and made huge efforts to win. Most of the time I did win, which made me happy.
Tian-shang happened to be the janitor of the buildings of our law school, so we ran into each other often. She was a bit more talkative than before and picked up some new words used in the city and campus. I sensed that she paid attention to fitting into her new life here.
Tian-shang always wore the uniform of janitors, which was poorly designed and in a light blue color, while I had to put on well-tailored suits for courts and classrooms. We would go for lunch together at the school cafeteria, and we always heard the comments, “Wow, you two look just like sisters, except the clothes.”
One time, I said in a joking tone, “Tian-shang, I know that you like the sky-colored clothes. Don’t you want to try something else?”
She picked it up, “I have two kids to worry about. I swear that I will put both of them to college. I would use the last penny to buy them books to read. Whatever I wear is of no concern to me.”
Soon, my dad was diagnosed with pancreatic cancer, I ran back and forth between Shanghai where my parents lived and Nanjing when I stayed, which was one hour by the train.
Not long after I had got my JD from law school, my fiancé, Jia-he, broke up with me, which was quite a shock, and also sad for me.
Jia-he and I had grown up together in the university campus where our parents were friends and we lived in the same faculty apartment building. When we came to the age of going to college, he went to Beijing in the north and I stayed in Nanjing in the south.
Naturally, we would write to each other and then he decided to pursue his doctorate at the Engineering department of my school, so he moved back to the south, when I became doctoral student at the law school. When we stayed on the same campus, we got engaged. It seemed that everything had been so natural and smooth, I thought we would live happily ever after.
Then one day he came to tell me, “I thought that you were busy with your dissertation, then with your bar examination, and then with your legal cases, your clients, you talked so much more about your cases than us. Do you remember the last time we went out to celebrate? It was for you to win the case, not for the publication of my paper. I became so scared that you would forget my birthday, so I kept reminding you of the day and booked the restaurant for the occasion. ”
I was shocked to hear all of this, and asked him, “Why didn’t you tell me before? I thought that we had agreed a long time ago that you could always be frank with me and let me know what you want.”
“I thought we could understand each other without much use of words,” he looked into my eyes and said seriously.
“I have felt all along that we would be together always, we grew up together, we know each other from childhood, I never thought of a life without you being around. So I moved back to the south, though I loved Beijing very much. Just recently, after you became a lawyer and also an assistant professor, I thought about the marriage, and yet the very thought of marriage was like a cold shiver running down me. For the first time, I felt that you were far away, that we were not in the same world.”
Though I could hear, my heart was literally cut into pieces, and grilled into dark lumps. I did not want to apologize for anything that I had not done wrong. If we were in two different worlds, then we were. We had just not realized it before.
Somehow at that moment, I remembered the face of Tong-shuan, the ex-husband of Tian-shang. He said pretty much the same thing. And I did feel that Tian-shang and Tong-Shaun were people belonging to two different worlds. They looked like people of different worlds, they talked like people in two different worlds.
I had believed that Jia-he and I were lucky and happy, because we were in the same world, everything had been so compatible.
I looked at him, holding back my tears with efforts, and said calmly, “I respect your decision. We will simply call off the engagement.”
He suggested that we go to the restaurant where we had always gone and we had supper one last time, before the breakup became official.
After dinner, we took a walk in the campus, following the path along the well-maintained meadows, with the moon sending out pale light, and trees moving gently in the early summer breeze…
Jia-he walked me back to my dormitory, and said to me, “We had a wonderful evening when we decided to call off the engagement. Did you notice that you did not talk to me about your cases, your publications… we talked about ourselves, how we feel about things, we saw the newly blossomed trees, you even hold my hands like we always did when we were little …”
After the days and weeks that followed, I came to realize the gigantic hole I got stuck into and huge tunnel in which I was spinning round and round without any lights to show the exit. And yet, every morning, I had to zip myself up with uttermost strength the broken heart and empty chest hidden inside, and to go through each day wearing the smile I put up with great effort.
At one point, I felt that I understood the reason Tian-shang had stood in front of her parent’s brick house years back, just to prepare herself to meet the hours and routines of each day.
I stayed in my office day and night, and on weekends. I was afraid to go back to my dormitory, then the empty room and old stuff would remind me of the days when Jia-he was still there.
One evening, as I worked late in my office on a paper, Tian-shang knocked at door and came in with some home-made food.
She said, “I saw your light still on, and brought you some dumplings my mother cooked.”
I was about to cry when I found the dumplings were still warm.
“I feel like dying,” I told her.
Tian-shang looked into my eyes and held me close to her, “Sometimes, it is a thousand times easier to die than to live. At my most difficult time in the village, I thought of death constantly, then one day I realized that death was something we all have to embrace anyway, so why not try to live for the time being, and see what could possibly happen between now and our very end. ”
“Have you found the wonders of life along the way?” I asked.
There was a light shining in the eyes of Tian-shang, and I caught some excitement and expectation. “What are the good news?” I was curious.
“Oh, I have started to paint now,” Tian-shang told me with some shyness. “As I saw the two little ones drawing and painting, I thought I would like to try it too. Amazingly, Professor Zheng, the chair of Art Department, believes that I am gifted in the area. I can go to his studio once every week for his instruction.” There was so much pleasure and pride in Tian-shang’s voice and her whole face lit up.
I looked at her in awe, “Wow, do you realize how much painting has changed you?” I could not help exclaiming.
“Come, come with me.” Then she took me to the janitor’s room at the corner of the hallway. Among the mops and cleaning utensils, I saw oil paintings on canvas stretched to the handmade wooden frames. The paintings had bright color, bold strokes and artistic forms.
I became speechless. They were simply so good.
Tian-shang said, “I draw the sun, the moon, flowers and trees…Each one becomes a piece in my new world, and they all stay. My world is no longer only two colors - black and white, darkness and emptiness, but full of life and beauty.”
One year after that, when passing by the art museum of our university, I saw a huge flag hung from the top of the building. In big letters, the sign went, Solo Show of Artist Tian-shang Gu, May 1st to September 30th, 1988.
The reception of the art show was quite a success, the showrooms were full of people, in colorful clothes and in pleasant spirits. The lights were directed at the art works, and even the drawings looked so wonderful compared to the time I saw them at the janitor’s room.
I ran into Professor Huang, Professor Gu and two children when I walked in, and saw Tian-shang was busy greeting visitors and answering questions. She looked exceptionally handsome in a dark blue dress, as if the layers of blue colors painted and sunk to that depth of hues, just like her life. Each struggle and hardship she had been experiencing accumulated, bit by bit, her attitude towards life, - strong-willed and persistence.
I looked at the pieces and they were colorful and expressive. The strokes were wild, and forms were well-rendered. Instead of brushes, she had used knives very often. The oil was thick on the canvas and impressed people with strong power and affection.
The biggest one right in the middle of the showroom was an oil painting on canvas called In Front of My Parents’ House. A young woman in a sky-blue shirt and two pigtails stood on a stone-covered road, in front of a countryside house. She held her fist tight and bit her lips hard, and her facial expression seemed lost and puzzled, and yet determined and ready to take action. She stared inside the house with affection and eagerness, but had no intention to knock at the door.
There were other ones also quite impressive, a garden full of flowers and different colors and in blossom, kids playing in the green meadows and bathing in the sunshine. A young woman standing by the window looking at the top of a maple outside, she seemed to be exhausted and indifferent, and had taken off her suit as though a soldier unloading his armor when the battle was over. I could see myself in that young woman and somehow understood the words of my ex-fiancé, Jia-he.
Professor Zheng chaired the opening ceremony of the art show and highly applauded the uniqueness and achievement of Tian-shang’s art works, saying that he had never seen anyone as determined to use painting as a language to express herself, her feelings, desires and expectations. And she got responses as people, by looking at her painting and drawings, understood her, communicated with her and appreciated her tremendously.
I saw in all of Tian-shang’s art pieces the long path of her hard journey, her indomitable spirit and unremitting heart. With the strokes, color and forms, she would never again be a “deaf and mute, a living dead”. Instead, she had become the master of her own will and her own fate. She would never be pushed round and put down.
Tian-shang now could use the entire sky to make her clothes. The clothes would be any color and any design absolutely of her choice and to her will, and hers only.
（照片为手机作品。文章为伊卷舒原创，请勿转载）
