White Ivy(93)

“He did offer.” This was technically true.

“Really?”

“But I’ve changed my mind. I’m not going to law school anymore.”

Nan didn’t seem one bit surprised. “There’s a saying in Chinese: ‘Husband and wife are like birds in the woods, when trouble comes, they flee separately.’?”

“That’s optimistic,” said Ivy. “Did you get that one from Grandma?”

“You know what the secret is to a lasting marriage?”

“Separate bedrooms?”

Nan weighed this seriously for a moment. “No. I’ll tell you everything… Before Baba, I was involved with a young man from my village. You’ve heard the story from Grandma?” When Ivy dropped her gaze—she was recalling the time back in high school when she’d screamed, You died with that boyfriend of yours back in China, we’re just your replacement family!—Nan said shrewdly, “What did Grandma tell you exactly?”

Ivy was too embarrassed to go into the intimate details—she still felt mortified at the idea of speaking to her mother about any topics related to sex or romance—and so she summarized Meifeng’s story as, “She said she forced you two apart by sending you to live with your aunt. You never forgave her. Your boyfriend ended up dying in the work camps… someone killed him for stealing a sweet potato.” This last detail had been the source of many nightmares growing up.

Nan frowned. “That’s what she’s been going around saying this entire time? Even after all this time, my own mother still can’t understand me.” Ivy snorted but the irony went right over Nan’s head. “The truth is,” Nan went on, “I did love him for a while—Anming Wu. But it wasn’t what my mother imagined.”



* * *




“I’VE NEVER CARED that much about looks, but I was told my whole life that I was pretty. I had ideas, too, about what I wanted for my life. You have to understand what those times were like. Everyone we knew was being carted off. Relative against relative. Neighbors turning into spies. The Wus—they were a corrupt family. They bribed officials in Beijing to keep their qipao business afloat. Anming thought that made him immune to the dangers of his background. He went around talking about his money as if it were a bulletproof suit. I was young. I was taken in by his promises of a future where I would be the taitai of his family, living an easy life. Oh, I fell in love with him all right, at least the version he presented of himself.

“One night after the school festival, we were alone in the changing room, he threw himself on top of me. I tried to fight him off, but he was strong and convincing. I told myself it was all right, he loved me, he would do right by me. I was so dumb it seemed inconceivable that this was anything other than the first step to a marriage proposal.

“After that incident, I waited for his words of love and promise. I waited for months. Then one day, I was walking back from the factory and I saw him behind a tree with another girl from school. His hand was up her shirt. I saw him clearly for the first time. I realized I had been used. He never had any inclination to marry me—why would he? My parents were poor farmers, without money or connections, supporting four daughters. I had nothing to offer his family.

“I was scared out of my mind. Another woman in the village had been driven away for getting caught with a boy in the rice paddies. Her shame was known in three counties. Her father—the village butcher—lost all his customers; her mother committed suicide. I was terrified this would happen to me, and then not only would my prospects be ruined but my sisters’ as well. Also, Anming had a big mouth—look how much he bragged about his family’s secrets, their money, their government connections. I had to get him far away from me. I thought about how to do this for days, and finally came up with the solution.

“There was a staunch Communist who lived in the outskirts named Mu Xiao. She was a fanatic Mao follower desperate to prove herself to rise in rank. In an anonymous letter, I wrote down everything Anming had told me about his family’s corrupt ways—which officials they had bribed, how much money they had hiding underneath their floorboards, his family’s right-wing political sympathies, all of it. She used the letter to orchestrate his family’s arrest to get herself promoted to section leader. The Wus were sent to prison—the government officials they had dealings with were executed—and all the children, including Anming, were sent to the countryside. You could say that I singlehandedly ruined the Wus. Who knows? If not for my letter, maybe their protection would have lasted past the revolution. I was sorry when I heard he died. I cried bitterly and prayed for my soul for months afterward. But I would do it again if I had to.

“Around this time, I became aware of a boy in my aunt’s town who I knew had been pining for me. He wasn’t the best-looking man but he was smart, from a long line of scholars. His mother was a nurse; his father was the chairman of a hospital. I liked Shen Lin immediately. He didn’t speak much but he was reliable. He came to the factory every day and gave me a hard-boiled egg. I cursed him for it at first. I told him if I ate too much, I got hungrier, and he said that was all right because he would give me all the eggs I could eat, as much as I wanted. I told him I wanted twenty eggs. The next day, he came with a bag of twenty eggs. I told my mother I found the bag on the side of the road.