Chapter 4

Chapter 4

In the evening, Ge Wei set up a copper hotpot in the small courtyard to welcome our two guests who had traveled a long way. Steam from the pot filled the air as Tang Jing and Lu Ning ate with gusto, but my mind was hopelessly stuck on the man’s body from Wild Mountain.

“Sister Mei, you look preoccupied,” Ge Wei said, handing me a dish of dipping sauce.

I came back to myself and forced a smile. “Just thinking about how to film it so the footage comes out nicely.”

“Just do things the way you always do. What we want is something real and natural,” Lu Ning tried to reassure me.

“Yeah, yeah,” I replied uncertainly.

None of us were especially close, not even me and Ge Wei. Yet in the swirling steam, it felt as if we were old friends reunited after years apart. Still, my thoughts wouldn’t behave, always being dragged back to that body in Wild Mountain.

Maybe it was just another unrelated death? Life and death are common enough. But the police said the body was found inside that abandoned, unfinished building in Wild Mountain.

The location matched, but the gender didn’t.

Where was her body? She couldn’t have just left on her own. Was that man’s death an accident, or was it intentional?

My thoughts were a tangled mess. I tried to press them down with alcohol, lifting my glass again and again, pretending to be having a good time.

During dinner, Tang Jing asked about my relationship with Ge Wei, and he let them guess.

Brother and sister? Mother and son? Or… a couple?

The guesses got more and more outrageous, so I quickly cut in, saying we were just employee and boss. If there was more to it, he was my benefactor-when I had nowhere to go, he gave me a place to stay.

Ge Wei laughed and said I was the guesthouse’s lucky charm. Ever since I moved in, business had been much better.

“Boss Ge, are you married?” Tang Jing asked.

“I am. My wife’s about to give birth. We bought a house in the county. She stays there most of the time, and I just go back and forth,” Ge Wei said.

“Congratulations!” Tang Jing toasted him.

“How come I’ve never seen Sister-in-law at the guesthouse?” I asked, genuinely curious. Pregnancy is the time when a woman’s emotions are at their most fragile, when she needs her husband most. But as far as I could remember, except for New Year, Ge Wei rarely went home. For some reason, when he talked about his pregnant wife, I didn’t sense any joy-if anything, I caught a faint, hard-to-notice sense of aversion.

He didn’t seem to like children; the clues were always there. The guesthouse hardly hosted guests with babies or toddlers, and pregnant women were no exception. I vaguely remember a pregnant woman coming by-though there were empty rooms, Ge Wei found an excuse not to let her stay.

But how could anyone dislike their own child?

Maybe I was reading too much into it.

“She came once after the guesthouse was renovated, but she had a miscarriage and almost something worse. She insisted the place was bad luck for her. People from small towns can be pretty superstitious, so she never came again.”

So that was it. The reason sounded a little forced, but it was plausible enough.

Maybe it was the alcohol, but the two young filmmakers got curious about my past. They asked where I was from, if I had children, and why I was single. Questions that might have felt rude somehow became natural in the flow of conversation over drinks.

I waved them off, my breath thick with alcohol. “My past is pretty ridiculous.”

Ge Wei said, “That’s not ridiculous-it’s experience.”

Tang Jing and Lu Ning chimed in, saying all the suffering and absurdity was behind me now. Those stories made me more three-dimensional, more interesting-maybe even easier for people to relate to.

I couldn’t resist them, or maybe I was under some spell. Finally, I nodded. “All right. If you can use it as material, I’ll talk. Maybe some young women will take it as a warning and not go down the same road I did.”

Soon, a camera and light stand appeared at the table, the dark lens aimed right at me.

The alcohol and the night made me want to pour my heart out, or maybe, at that moment, I wasn’t really myself but a giant Shadow Person. She was telling her story, not mine. The joys and sorrows of the past had already been swallowed by time, but now, through my lips, they slowly spilled out again.

My name is Diao Hongmei. After the New Year, I’ll be forty-three. I was born on the border of two provinces, in a place called Bei Village. My parents died young, so I followed my grandfather’s shadow puppetry troupe from village to village, performing at weddings and funerals, living off the kindness of others.

I never went to school or held a textbook, but there was an old master in the troupe who taught me to sing opera. To learn opera, you had to learn to read. For a long while, I thought every story in those scripts was real-history, the past, nothing made up.

From the scripts, I learned lessons and how to be a person. There was loyalty and treachery, good and evil. The stories twisted and turned, but most of the time, “good and evil always get their due, it’s just a question of sooner or later.” “Even if families are worlds apart, lovers can still end up together.” There was injustice in the plays, and innocent people died, but by the end, “their deep grudges were always avenged, and the wicked met a bad end.” Good people “value and keep their promises, and those who are true to their word are rewarded in the end.”…
This is all what I learned from the old plays. I truly believed that the ways of the world, and how days should be lived, would follow their stories.

In our village, girls marry young; by sixteen or seventeen, most are already mothers. It’s nothing unusual. Before the official age, you can’t get a marriage certificate, but as long as there’s a wedding feast, people see you as a proper couple. To our villagers, the opera troupe is a lowly business. Even if a shadow puppeteer hides behind the Liangzi, never showing their face, they’re still just an entertainer-not quite clean.

I put off marriage until I was twenty-two. I ended up marrying a village teacher. He’d had a wife before, but she hated his poverty, abandoned their young son, and ran off with another man. No respectable family wanted their daughter to marry in and become a stepmother. He was widowed for two years before asking a matchmaker to bring up the idea to our opera troupe. My grandfather figured: a teacher might be poor, but he has sense; he can’t have a bad temperament. As long as both spouses pulled together, life could be good.

So we accepted the betrothal money, and I moved to his house.

No matter what, he was my man now. I tried to be as virtuous as the heroines in the old plays, carefully tending to father and son. The child was sensitive, worried that if I had a baby of my own, I would treat him differently. His father doted on him, asked me to promise-right in front of the boy-that I’d never have children, that I’d be his only mother in this life.

I got an IUD and kept that promise for over ten years. But then, that woman returned. He brought her back home, saying that she was the child’s real mother, and needed to be cared for. Maybe blood really is thicker than water, because the boy started getting close to her too. They looked just like a real family of three, while I was suddenly little more than an eyesore.

I thought about divorce, but overheard him make a vow to her: that he’d only ever married her, and that marrying me was just for someone to look after their child. We’d never even had a proper wedding banquet. As for that marriage certificate, he took me to the city years ago, behind my back, paid two hundred yuan, and secretly bought a fake one.

“She and I aren’t husband and wife. In a few days, I’ll kick her out. Then we three can finally live together as a real family.”

“No. She can’t leave. She sings at weddings and funerals-she brings in money, and always brings home some leftover dishes from the hosts. The boy needs nutrition… Keeping her around is useful.”

That night, the two of them held each other and schemed about how to wring me out-how to make me willingly keep supporting their entire family.

The man who lived with me for a decade even said: “She’s a fool. Don’t be tricked by her last name ‘Diao’; she’s anything but crafty. She’s soft as butter. Easy to control. If she won’t cooperate, we can always feed her some opium. Once she’s hooked, maybe she can even use her body to earn money-for us.”

I burst into tears, but didn’t dare make a sound, biting through my own lip. I always thought I’d treated that father and son well, poured my heart into caring for them, never complained-but I never imagined I’d been nothing but a pawn in their schemes for over ten years. To them, I wasn’t family. I wasn’t even a person.

Really, some people are just born wretched-like a dog you can never tame.

My grandfather passed, the opera troupe changed managers, and no one cared whether I lived or died. No one would stand up for me, seek justice for me. That’s when it hit me: the story in a script is just a script. Real life is real life, and the two could never be the same. I clung to my promises, only to end up a laughingstock, as lonely as anyone could be.

Night deepened. The soup in the bronze pot gurgled and boiled. I looked towards the camera lens, as though staring into my own muddied, shadowed past.

This towering Shadow Person had finished her song. Three viewers watched with tearful eyes and soft sighs.

I knew then: they had entered my play.

“And after all that-did you ever think about getting revenge?” Tang Jing asked, sniffling, voice thick with tears.

“I did. I wanted to set the house on fire and go down with them. I even thought about poisoning their food, sending them straight to hell,” I replied, my voice flat, like I was only a detached observer. “But he did say one true thing: even if my surname’s ‘Diao,’ I’m not crafty at all. Besides, why should I risk my life over a bunch of bastards? I’ll just wait and see what comes of them.”

Ge Wei filled my cup to the brim with liquor. “Sister Mei, it’s all in the past now.”

“Mm. Mm. It’s over.”

That night, I drank until my mind went numb, sinking into a tangled springtime dream.

“Sister Mei, Sister Mei-”

Dry lips were met with something soft and moist. A cold hand snaked into my collar. I panicked, twisting away, trying to flee from this dream.

But if it’s a dream, why run?

“Sister Mei, Sister Mei, let me love you-let me take care of you.”

Someone called to me, promising to bring me joy. My dream spun wild and chaotic-and so I let it.