A Thousand Years of Good Prayers

Love in the Marketplace

SANSAN IS KNOWN TO HER STUDENTS AS MISS Casablanca. A beautiful nickname if one does not pay attention to the cruel, almost malicious smiles when the name is mentioned, and she chooses not to see. Sansan, at thirty-two, does not have a husband, a lover, or a close friend. Since graduation from college, she has been teaching English at the Educators’ School in the small town where she grew up, a temporary job that has turned permanent. For ten years she has played Casablanca, five or six times a semester, for each class of students. The pattern of their response has become familiar, and thus bearable for her. At the beginning, they watch in awe, it being the first real American movie they have watched, without Chinese dubbing or subtitles. Sansan sees them struggle to understand the dialogue, but the most they can do is catch a phrase or two now and then. Still, they seem to have no trouble understanding the movie, and always, some girls end the class with red teary eyes. But soon they lose their interest. They laugh when the women in the movie cry; they whistle when a man kisses a woman on the screen. In the end, Sansan watches the movie alone, with the added sound track from the chatting students.

That is what Sansan is doing with her morning class when someone taps on the door. Only when the knocking becomes urgent does she pause the tape.

“Your mother’s waiting for you outside. She wants to see you,” the janitor says when Sansan opens the door.

“What for?”

“She didn’t say.”

“Can’t you see I’m busy with my students?”

“It’s your mother waiting outside,” the janitor says, one foot planted firmly inside the door.

Sansan stares at the janitor. After a moment, she sighs. “OK, tell her I’m coming,” she says. The students all watch on amused. She tells them to keep watching the movie, and knows they will not.

Outside the school gate, Sansan finds her mother leaning onto the wooden wheelbarrow she pushes to the marketplace every day. Stacked in it are a coal stove, a big aluminum pot, packs of eggs, bottles of spices, and a small wooden stool. For forty years, Sansan’s mother has been selling hard-boiled eggs in the marketplace by the train station, mostly to travelers. Sitting on the stool for all her adult life has made her a tiny stooped woman. Sansan hasn’t seen her mother for a year, since her father’s funeral. Her mother’s hair is thinner and grayer, but so will Sansan’s own be in a few years, and she feels no sentiment for either of them.

“Mama, I heard you were looking for me,” Sansan says.

“How else would I know that you’re alive?”

“Why? I thought people talked about me to you all the time.”

“They can lie to me.”

“Of course.” Sansan grins.

“But whose problem is it when you make people talk about you?”

“Theirs.”

“You’ve never known how to spell the word ‘shame.’ ”

“Do you come just to tell me that I should be ashamed of myself? I know it by heart now.”

“What god did I offend to deserve you as a daughter?” Her mother raises her voice. A few passersby slow down and look at them with amused smiles.

“Mama, do you have something to say? I’m busy.”

“It won’t be long before you will become an orphan, Sansan. One day I’ll be drowned by all the talk about you.”

“People’s words don’t kill a person.”

“What killed your dad, then?”

“I was not the only disappointment for dad,” Sansan says. Hard as she tries, she feels her throat squeezed tight by a sudden grief. Her father, before his death, worked as a meter reader, always knocking on people’s doors around dinnertime, checking their gas and water meters, feeling responsible for the ever-rising rates and people’s anger. One evening he disappeared after work. Later he was discovered by some kids in a pond outside the town, his body planted upside down. The pond was shallow, waist deep at most; he had plunged himself into the mud, with the force of a leap maybe, but nobody could tell for sure how he did it, or why. Sansan’s mother believed that it was Sansan’s failure at marriage that killed him.

“Think of when you first went to college. Your dad and I thought we were the most accomplished parents in the world,” her mother says, ready to reminisce and cry.

“Mama, we’ve been there many times. Let’s not talk about it.”

“Why? You think I toil all these years just to raise a daughter to shut me up?”

“I’m sorry, but I have to go,” Sansan says.

“Don’t go yet. Stay with me longer,” her mother says, almost pleading.

Sansan tries to soften her voice. “Mama, I’m in the middle of a class.”

“Come home tonight, then. I have something important to tell you.”

“Why don’t you tell me now? I can spare five minutes.”

“Five minutes are not enough. It’s about Tu.” Sansan’s mother steps closer and whispers, “Tu is divorced.”

Sansan stares at her mother for a long moment. Her mother nods at her. “Yes, he’s unoccupied now.”

“I don’t know what you’re talking about,” Sansan says.

“His parents want you to go back to him.”

“Mama, I don’t understand.”

“That’s why you have to come home and talk to me. Now go teach,” Sansan’s mother says, and pushes the wheelbarrow forward before Sansan replies.

SANSAN DISCOVERED CASABLANCA the year Tu wrote a short and apologetic letter from America, explaining his decision not to marry her. Before the letter’s arrival, she showed The Sound of Music to her students, humming with every song, ready to abandon the students for America at any minute. After the letter, she has never sung again. Casablanca says all she wants to teach the students about life.

Sansan goes back to the classroom and resumes her place on the windowsill, letting her legs dangle the way she remembers her American teachers did in college. At the end of the Paris scene, when Rick gets soaked on the platform in the pouring rain, and then boards the train, a boy says, “How funny. His coat is dry as a camel’s fur now.”

Sansan is surprised that she has missed the detail all along. She thinks of praising the boy for his keen observation, but changes her mind. “One of life’s mysteries is its inexplicability,” she raises her voice and says.

The students roar with laughter. Certainly the line will be passed on, along with the nickname, to the next class, but Sansan does not care. The students, recent graduates from junior high, will be teaching elementary students after the two years of studying in the Educators’ School. Most of them are from villages, and the school is their single chance to escape heavy farm labor. English is taught only to comply with a regulation set by the Education Department; they will never understand what she means, these kids living out their petty desires.

After two classes, Sansan decides to take off, complaining to her colleagues of a headache. Nobody believes her excuse, she knows, but nobody would contradict her, either. They indulge her the way people do a person with a mild and harmless craziness, whose eccentricity adds color to their otherwise dull lives. Among the few people in town who have college degrees, Sansan is the best-educated one. She was one of the two children from the town who have ever made it to the most prestigious college in Beijing, and the only one to have returned. The other one, Tu, the childhood companion and classmate and boyfriend and fiancé at one time or another in her life, is in America, married to a woman more beautiful than Sansan.

And divorced now, ten years too late. Back in her rented room, Sansan sits on her bed and cracks sunflower seeds. The shells rain down onto the sheet and the floor, and she lets them pile up. She craves the popping sounds in her skull, and the special flavor in her mouth. It is the sunflower seeds, sweet and salty and slightly bitter from the nameless spices Gong’s Dried Goods Shop uses to process its sunflower seeds, and the English novels she bought in college— a full shelf of them, each one worthy of someone’s lifetime to study — that make her life bearable. But the sunflower seeds taste different today; Tu’s divorce, like a fish bone stabbed in her throat, distracts her.

Tu would never imagine her sitting among the shells of sunflower seeds and pondering his failed marriage, but she still imagines him on a daily basis. Not a surprise, as she promised Tu at their engagement ceremony. “I’ll be thinking of you until the day when all the seas in the world dry up,” she said. Tu must have said something similar, and Min, the only witness of the ceremony and then Tu’s legal wife on paper, hugged both of them. It was odd, in retrospect, that Min did not take a vow. After all, the engagement between Sansan and Tu, just as the marriage between Min and Tu, was the contract for all three of them.

Min was the most beautiful girl Sansan had met in college, and is, ten years later, the most beautiful person in her memory. In college they lived in the same dorm with four other girls, but for a long time in their first year, they were not close. Min was a city girl, attractive, outgoing, one of the girls who would have anything they set their eyes on, and of course they only set their eyes on the best. Sansan, a girl from a small town, with a heavy accent and a plain face, was far from the best for Min, as a confidante or a friend.

Toward the end of their freshman year, the demonstrations in Tiananmen Square disrupted their study. Min became an active protester in the Square. Miss Tiananmen, the boys voted her; she dressed up as the Statue of Liberty and gestured victory to the Western reporters’ cameras. After the crashing down, she had to go through a difficult time, being checked and rechecked; she ended up belonging to the category that did not need imprisonment but did not have a right to any legal job after graduation, either. When Min came back to school, still beautiful but sad and defeated, Sansan was the first and the only person in the dorm who dared to express sympathy and friendliness toward Min. Sansan was among the few who had not attended any protests. She and Tu had been the only students showing up for classes when their classmates had gone on a strike; later, when the teachers had stopped coming to classes, they had become intimate, falling in love as their parents and the whole town back home had expected them to.

Sansan never thought of her friendly gesture to Min as anything noble or brave; it was out of a simple wish to be nice to someone who deserved a better treatment from life. Sansan was overwhelmed with joy and gratitude, then, when Min decided to return the goodwill and become her best friend. Sansan felt a little uneasy, too, as if she had taken advantage of Min’s bad fortune; they would have never become friends under normal circumstances, but then, what was wrong with living with the exceptional, if that’s what was given by life?

At the end of their sophomore year, the Higher Education Department announced a new policy that allowed only those students who had American relatives to be granted passports for studying abroad, something that made no sense at all, but such was their life at the time, living with all the ridiculous rules that changed their lives like a willy-nilly child. Min’s only hope for her future — going to America after graduation — became a burst bubble, and Sansan, when she could not stand the heartbreakingly beautiful face of Min, started to think and act with resolution.

“Are you out of your mind?” Tu said when she announced to him her plan — that he would apply to an American graduate school and help Min out through a false marriage. “I don’t have any American relatives.”

“Your grandfather’s brother — didn’t he go to Taiwan after the Liberation War? Why couldn’t he have gone to America later? Listen, nobody will go to America to check your family history. As long as we get a certificate saying that he’s in America. .”

“But who’ll give us the certificate?”

“I’ll worry about that. You think about the application,” Sansan said. She saw the hesitation in Tu’s eyes, but there was also a spark of hope, and she caught it before it dimmed. “Don’t you want to go to America, too? We don’t have to go back home after graduation, and work at some boring jobs because we don’t have city residency. Nobody will care about whether you are from a small town when you get to America.”

“But to marry Min?”

“Why not?” Sansan said. “We have each other, but she doesn’t have anyone. The city boys — they all become turtles in their shells once she’s in trouble.”

Tu agreed to try. It was one of the reasons Sansan loved him — he trusted her despite his own doubt; he followed her decision. Persuading Min seemed easy, even though she too questioned the plan. Sansan alone nudged Tu and Min toward the collective American dream for all three of them; she went back to her hometown, and through bribing and pleading got a false certificate about the American grand-uncle of Tu. The plan could have gone wrong but it went right at every step. Tu was accepted by a school in Pennsylvania; Min, with the marriage certificate, got her own paperwork done to leave the country as Tu’s dependent. The arrangement, a secret known only to the three of them, was too complicated to explain to outsiders, but none of the three had a doubt then. One more year and the plan would be complete, when Min would find a way to sponsor herself, and Tu, with a marriage and a divorce under his belt, would come home and marry Sansan.

It did not occur to Sansan that she should have had sex with Tu before he took off. In fact, he asked for it, but she refused. She remembered reading, in her college course, Women in Love, and one detail had stuck with her ever since. One of the sisters, before her lover went to war, refused to have sex with him, afraid that it would make him crave women at a time when only death was available. But Tu was not going to a war but a married life with another woman. How could a man resist falling in love with a beautiful woman whose body ate, slept, peed, and menstruated in the same apartment, a thin door away from him?

Sansan started to imagine the lovemaking between Tu and Min when, after the short letter informing her of their intention to stay in the marriage, neither would write to her again. She stripped them, put them in bed, and studied their sex as if it would give her an answer. Min’s silky long hair brushed against the celery stalk of Tu’s body, teasing him, calling out to him; Tu pushed his large cauliflower head against Min’s heavy breasts, a hungry, ugly piglet looking for his nourishment. The more she imagined, the more absurd they became. It was unfair of her, Sansan knew, to make Tu into a comic image, but Min’s beauty, like a diamond, was impenetrable. Sansan had never worried about the slightest possibility of their falling in love — Min was too glamorous a girl for Tu, the boy with a big head, a thin body, and a humble smile. She had put her faith in the love between Tu and herself, and she had believed in the sacrifice they had to go through to save a friend. But inexplicable as life was, Min and Tu fell in love, and had mismatched sex in Sansan’s mind. Sometimes she replaced Min with herself, and masturbated. Tu and she looked more harmonious — they had been playmates when Sansan had been a toddler sitting by her mother’s stove, where Tu had been a small boy from the next stall, the fruit vendor’s son; the sex, heartbreakingly beautiful, made her cry afterward.

Sansan took up the habit of eating sunflower seeds when she could no longer stand her imagination. Every night, she sits for hours cracking sunflower seeds; she reaches for the bag the first thing when she wakes up, before she gets out of bed. She calms down when the shells pop in her brain, and is able to imagine Tu and Min in their clothes. The fact that they both broke their promises to her, hurtful as it is and it will always be, no longer matters. What remains meaningful is Tu and Min’s marriage vows to each other. She was the one to make them husband and wife, and even if they would be too ashamed to admit it to each other, she would always hover above their marriage bed, a guardian angel that blesses and curses them with her forgiveness.

What, then, has led them to end their marriage, ten years too late? Once they broke their promises to her; twice they did. With a divorce, what will become of her, when neither of them will be obliged to think about her nobleness?

WHEN THE BAG of sunflower seeds runs out, Sansan decides to go find her mother and ask about Tu’s divorce. The marketplace, the only one in town, is next to the railway station. The trains running between Beijing and the southern cities stop several times a day at the station for ten-minute breaks, and many vendors rely on these trains for their businesses.

The one-fifteen train has just pulled into the station when Sansan arrives. A few passengers show up stretching their legs and arms, and soon more flood into the marketplace. Sansan stands a few steps away and watches her mother hitting the side of the pot with a steel ladle and chanting, “Come and try — come and buy — the eight-treasure eggs — the best you’ll ever taste.”

A woman stops and lifts the lid, and her kid points to the biggest egg in the pot. More people slow down at the good smell of tea leaves, spices, and soy sauce. Some take out their wallets to pay; others, seeing more egg sellers, walk on without knowing they’ve missed the best hard-boiled eggs in the world. When Sansan was young, she was infuriated by the people who did not choose her mother’s eggs — the other vendors were all stingy, never adding as many spices and tea leaves to their pots as her mother did. But when Sansan became older, she grew angry, instead, at her mother’s stubbornness. All those people who buy her eggs — strangers that come and go and will not remember this place or her mother’s face even if they remember the taste of the eggs— they will never know that her mother spends more money on the best spices and tea leaves.

When the train leaves, Sansan finds a brick and puts it next to her mother’s stool. She sits down and watches her mother add eggs and more spices to the pot. “Isn’t it a waste of money to put in so much of the expensive spices?” Sansan says.

“Don’t tell me how to boil eggs. I have done this for forty years, and have brought you up boiling eggs my way.”

“But even if people can taste the difference, they will never come back to look for your eggs.”

“Why not give them their one chance to eat the best eggs in the world, then?” her mother says, raising her voice. A few vendors look at them, winking at one another. The marketplace is full of eyes and ears. By dinnertime, the whole town will have known that Sansan has shown up and attacked her poor mother, and children of the town will be warned, at the dinner tables, not to follow Sansan’s example, a daughter not fulfilling her filial duty, who spends money on renting when her mother has kept a room ready for her.

“Mama, why don’t you think of retirement?” Sansan says in a lower voice.

“Who will feed me then, a poor old widow?”

“I will.”

“You don’t even know how to take care of yourself,” her mother says. “What you need is a man like Tu.”

Sansan looks at her own shadow on the ground, and the fragments of eggshells by her leather sandals. The eggshells were her only toys before she befriended Tu from the next stall, the fruit vendor’s son. Tu’s parents have retired, living in a two-bedroom flat that Tu bought for them. The next stall now sells cigarettes and lighters and palm-sized pictures of blond women whose clothes, when put close to the flame, disappear. After a moment, Sansan asks, “What happened to Tu?”

“His parents came by yesterday, and asked if you wanted to go back to him.”

“Why?”

“A man needs a woman. You need a husband, too.”

“Is that what I am, a substitute?”

“Don’t act willful. You’re not a young girl anymore.”

“Why did he get a divorce?”

“People change their minds. Sansan, if you ask me, I would say just go back to Tu without questioning.”

“Is that what Tu wants? Or is it his parents’ idea?”

“What’s the difference? He’ll marry you if you want to go back to him, that’s what his parents said.”

“That would make it an arranged marriage.”

“Nonsense. We’ve seen you two grow up together from the beginning,” Sansan’s mother says. “Even in arranged marriages, people fall in love.”

Sansan feels a sting in her heart. “Sure, people fall in love in arranged marriages, but that’s not the love I want.”

“What do you want, then, Miss Romantic?”

Sansan does not reply. A romance is more than a love story with a man. A promise is a promise, a vow remains a vow; such is the grandeur of Casablanca, such is the true romance that keeps every day of her life meaningful.

Neither of them speaks. Sansan watches her mother pick up the fresh eggs with the ladle, and crack the shells carefully with a spoon so that the spices will soak the eggs well. When her mother finishes, she scoops up an egg and puts it into Sansan’s hands without a word. The egg is hot but Sansan does not drop it. She looks at the cracks on the shell, darkened by the spices and soy sauce like a prophet’s fractured turtle shell. When she was younger, she had to beg her mother for a long time before she was given an egg to eat, but when Tu was around, her mother always gave them each an egg without hesitation. Sansan wonders if her mother still remembers such things, the nourishing of their relationship long before she and Tu became lovers.

A FEW MINUTES pass, and then, across the street, two jeeps stop with screeching noises. Sansan looks up and sees several cops jump out and surround Gong’s Dried Goods Shop. Soon the customers are driven out the door. “What’s going on?” the vendors ask one another. Sansan’s mother stands up and looks across the street for a minute, and hands the ladle to Sansan. “Take care of the stove for me,” her mother says, and walks across the street with a few other curious vendors.

Sansan watches her mother pushing to the front of the store, where the cops have set up red warning tapes. She wonders why, after forty years in the marketplace, her mother is still interested in other people’s business.

Ten minutes later, her mother returns and says to the vendors, “You’ll never imagine this — they’ve found opium in Gong’s goods.”

“What?”

“No wonder their business is always so good — they add opium when they make their nuts and seeds so people will always want to go back to them,” Sansan’s mother says. “What black-hearted people they are!”

“How did the police find out?” the vendor across the aisle asks.

“Someone working in the shop must have told on them.”

More vendors come back. Sansan listens to them talking about Gong’s opium business, her palms wet and sticky. She was planning to go to Gong’s to buy more sunflower seeds before the end of the day; even the thought of the sunflower seeds makes her eager to go home and hide herself in a pile of cracked shells, letting the taste on her tongue take her over and carry her away to a safe place, where she watches over Tu and Min serenely. Is that what she is living on, a poisoned food, a drugged dream?

Sansan’s mother turns to her. “But let’s not talk about other people’s trouble. What do you think of the proposal, Sansan?”

“To marry Tu? No, I don’t want to marry him.”

“You’ve been waiting for him all these years. Don’t be silly.”

“I’ve never waited for him.”

“But that’s a lie. Everyone knows you’re waiting for him.”

“Everyone?”

“Why else do you never get married? Everyone knows he did this horrible thing to you, but men make mistakes. Even his parents apologized yesterday. It’s time to think about forgiveness.”

“What’s to forgive?”

“He had you, and then left you for another woman. Listen, it would not be that bad a thing if you went back to him. As the old saying goes—what belongs to someone will belong to him eventually. ”

“Wait a minute, Mama. What do you mean he had me?”

Sansan’s mother blushes. “You know what I mean.”

“No, I don’t know. If you mean sex, no, he’s never had me.”

“There’s nothing to be ashamed of. It was understandable, and it was nobody’s fault.”

Sansan, for the first time, understands the town’s tolerance of her, a pitiful woman used and then abandoned by a lover, a woman unmarriable because she will never be able to demonstrate her virginity on the snow-white sheet spread on the wedding bed. “Mama, I have nothing to do with Tu. We never had sex.”

“Are you sure?” Sansan’s mother asks, hopeful disbelief in her eyes.

“I’m a spinster losing my mind. If you don’t believe me, why don’t you ask the town to vote on my virginity?”

Sansan’s mother stares at her for a long moment, and claps her hands. “That’s even better. I didn’t know you loved him so much. I’ll go talk to his parents tonight, and tell them you’ve kept your cleanness for him all these years.”

“I did nothing for him.”

“But why wouldn’t you get married, if he never had you?”

Sansan does not reply. She wonders how much of the gossip about her lost virginity burdened her father before his death. She wonders why her mother has never confronted her all these years; but then, how could her mother, a proud yet humble woman of tradition, ask her daughter such a thing when they have never talked about sex in her family?

“If you can’t answer the question, it’s time to make up your mind,” Sansan’s mother says.

“My mind has been made up all along. I won’t marry Tu.”

“Are you going crazy?”

“Mama, why do you want to be the best egg seller in the world?”

Sansan’s mother shakes her head. “I don’t know what you’re talking about.”

“Mama, why do you put more spices in?”

“If I’m telling people I sell the best eggs in the world, I have to keep my promise.”

“But nobody cares about it. You’re keeping a promise that matters only to you.”

“Don’t talk to me like that. I’m an illiterate. Besides, what has that to do with your marriage?”

“I have my own promise to keep.”

“Why are you so stubborn? Do you know we’ll both end up as crazy women if you don’t get married?” Sansan’s mother says, and starts to cry.

ANOTHER TRAIN PULLS into the station with a longwhistle. Sansan listens to her mother chanting in a trembling voice, and wipes a drop of tear off. Indeed she is going crazy, hurting her mother so, the only person who loves her despite who she is. But she has no other choice. People in this world can discard their promises like used napkins, but she does not want to be one of them.

A man enters the marketplace, in a dirty shirt and jeans and carrying a shapeless bag. He hugs the bag close to his body as if it were a woman. Sansan watches the man sit down at the open space between the two stalls across the aisle from her mother’s stove. He takes a flattened cardboard box and a knife out of the bag, the kind with a long and sharp blade that fruit vendors use to cut watermelons. Then he takes off his shirt, points the knife to his left arm, and with a push, carefully slices open his flesh, from the elbow to the shoulder. He seems so calm and measured in his movements that Sansan and a few other people who have noticed him all watch with quiet amazement. The man dips his index finger in the blood, checks his finger as if he is a calligrapher, and writes down the words on the cardboard box: Give me ten yuan and I will let you slice me once wherever you like; if you finish my life with one cut, you owe me nothing.

The man has to shout out the words twice before more people gather.

“What a crazy man,” an old woman says.

“An inventive way to beg, though,” another woman says.

“Why not just begging?”

“Who’d give him money? He’s a strong man. He should be able to find some work.”

“Young people don’t like to work now. They like easy money,” an old man says.

“What’s easy about hurting oneself?”

“Hey, what’s your story?” a young man asks. “Don’t you know you have to make up some really good tragedies to beg?”

People laugh. The man sits quietly in the middle of the circle, the blood dripping from his elbow onto his jeans, but he seems not to notice it. After a while, he shouts the words again.

Sansan’s mother sighs. She fumbles in her cash box and then walks to the man. “Here is ten yuan. Take it, young man, and go find a job. Don’t waste your life with this nonsense.”

“But there’s no job to find.”

“Take the money then.”

The man holds the blade between his two palms, and offers the knife handle to Sansan’s mother. “Here you go, Auntie.”

“Why? I don’t want to cut you.”

“But you have to. I can’t take your money without you cutting me. It’s written here,” the man says.

“Just take it.”

“I’m not a beggar.”

“What are you, then?” someone in the crowd asks.

“An idiot,” someone else says, and people break out laughing. The man does not move, still holding out the knife for Sansan’s mother. She shakes her head and lets the bill drop onto the cardboard. The man returns the bill to the foot of Sansan’s mother, and sits back at his spot.

Sansan picks up the bill and walks to the man. The man looks up at her, and she looks into his eyes. Without a word, he puts the knife in her hand. She studies his body, the naked skin smooth and tanned, and the wound that’s quietly bleeding. She touches his upper arm with one finger, testing and calculating, and then moves her fingertip to his shoulder. The man shivers slightly as her finger traces his flesh.

“Sansan, are you crazy?” her mother says.

The man’s muscles loosen under her caressing finger; after all these years, she finally meets someone who understands what a promise is. Crazy as they may seem to the world, they are not alone, and they will always find each other. Such is the promise of life; such is the grandeur. “Don’t worry, Mama,” Sansan says, and turns to smile at her mother before she points the knife at the man’s shoulder and slices, slowly opening his flesh with love and tenderness.