Chapter 91 (89): Covetous Pleasure

Shanghai, the foremost metropolis in the Far East, was famed the world over for its prosperity. The war had not struck at its foundations, and after the occupation it had not suffered further destruction. After all, an invader who seized Chinese land and Chinese lives also wanted the city’s wealth. And ordinary people in the markets still had to clothe themselves and eat each day, so one month after the fall of the city there was once again a slow current of life on the streets: people in the shadow of a fallen nation, subdued and desolate, resumed their daily struggles for a meal.

Yet the world beyond seemed far removed from this corner of the concession where this family sheltered. At least Tan Yang had been kept completely in the dark. Not until that day did Fangya’s carriage come to a stop before the vice-consul’s house in the concession.

Biqingtang met her on the stairs and helped her up. On the way he had repeatedly warned her, “Don’t say just anything. Talk to my little sister and reminisce, but don’t bring up the state of affairs.”
Fangya answered absentmindedly and, eyeing the house, asked, “You’ve taken to living in an American consul’s house as if by magic, Biqingtang. How did you manage that?”
“Some things,” he said with a sniff, “are worth spending money on. In this world, if you are willing to pay, some things can be done.”
She gave him a surprised glance and did not reply. He asked, “What is it?”
“You used to say no amount of money could buy everything. I’m just surprised why that changed all of a sudden.”

Biqingtang tapped the banister of the stairs. “Even if you have all the gold in the world, it cannot buy you a peaceful life of your choosing. Without that, even mountains of treasure are just junk. One day here costs as much as a silk-reeling factory earns in a month, and still I think it is worth it. Sometimes, when my head grows reckless, I even think: if this could go on for life, what does it matter if we ruin ourselves?”
Fangya was deeply moved. After a long pause, she said helplessly, “Still, Biqingtang, the war here in Shanghai will end one day. You can’t stay forever, even if you want this. Nanya wouldn’t want it either.”

Biqingtang’s face, dark and stubborn, gave a bitter smile. “Then let her not know. I have shut everyone in this apartment’s mouths, taken away all newspapers and radios, and told her the streets are in chaos and she must not go out.” He allowed himself a small note of triumph. “And as long as she stays by my side, she listens to me and believes me. She’s always done so these many years.”
Fangya climbed two more steps behind him, whispering uneasily, “You can’t hide this for life. Don’t take that chance. The later she finds out, the angrier she’ll be.”
He paused, looked at her, his face clouding, then strode on.

When they opened the door, they found Tan Yang in the bed smiling at their daughter, while Yanqin stood before her, clutching her hand and reciting in a clear little voice: “Lotus to chrysanthemum, phoenix to qilin. Dark prosperity against pure poverty… A nestful of swallows calls friends in spring; wild geese come as guests by late August. Who has ever seen Mount Tai serve as a whetstone through all the ages? Heaven and earth endure through time, yet how much dust from the Blue Sea has ever been stirred by it?”

Fangya burst into applause from the doorway. “Oh my, my clever girl, what are you reciting? It sounds wonderful—better even than that famous singer Zhou Xuan!”
Yanqin ran to her, calling warmly, “Great Auntie!”
Fangya scooped the child up and kissed the top of her head with exaggerated affection.

Tan Yang smiled to herself and cast a glance over at Biqingtang, noticing how dark and controlled his expression was now, nothing like it had been earlier. Seeing her uncertainty, he half-defensively snapped at Fangya, “Don’t keep comparing my daughter to random people, no deep reason, no shallow reason. Is my daughter some stage actress to be paraded against?”
Fangya, sensing his irritation, ignored him, set the child down, and sat on the sofa.
Yanqin pointed at the teapot on the table: “Great Auntie, have tea!”

Fangya lifted the child’s face and praised her. “Call your Great Auntie. In just two months, you’re transformed—now you can recite essays and offer tea. Who taught you?”
Yanqin preened. “Mama, Mama taught me!”
“Of course. Not your father, who only spoils you blindly. Even if he means well, he has no talent for it. Look, Mama changed in just two months here.”
Her words seemed meant to repay an earlier slight at Biqingtang, but everyone caught the deeper note. Instead of anger, Biqingtang laughed aloud. His mouth smiled; his eyes watched Tan Yang with anxious, possessive urgency.

The reunion after war had brought them true happiness. When mealtimes came, Fangya got up to leave. Biqingtang did not ask her to stay and eat. Tan Yang understood: he did not want the knowledge that he had been cooking for her to spread. She also saw how that old, vain pride in him never changed in front of her—childlike, stubborn, oddly endearing.

“Fangya, it isn’t really safe out there, is it?” Tan Yang said gently. “Aren’t you afraid to come and go alone?”
After thinking for a moment, Fangya answered lightly, “Now that you are no longer in Shanghai, I kept worrying about the two of you at home, so I came to look.”
Biqingtang said proudly, “Naturally we are still here. In such a troubled age, isn’t it better to have family and a home than to roam? I’d not go to the Golden Hall of the Imperial City for it.”

As they saw her out, Yanqin asked, “Great Auntie, when will you come again?”
Fangya adjusted the ribbon flower in the braid she had tied on the child’s hair and smiled. “You miss me so much? Next time I’ll bring you sweets from Commander Kai’s bakery. Their new icing cakes are delicious.”
In the child’s excited cry, Tan Yang unexpectedly asked, “Commander Kai… in Hede Road has his shop reopened already?”
Fangya froze; everyone turned to look at one another.

That night, after Yanqin fell asleep, Tan Yang gathered up her scattered drawings one sheet at a time.
By the orange lamp light, Biqingtang stood hesitating for a long moment, then spoke vaguely. “Little sister, from Fangya’s words it sounds as if things outside may be a little better.”
She knelt on the floor, lowered her head, and said quietly, “I was going to talk with you before sleep anyway. If the situation stabilizes, we should start arranging to leave. There’s no sense in staying on in another household’s place forever.”

Biqingtang made no concession. “Even if things improve, with Japanese soldiers still around, it’s not safe for you to be alone outside. Come back to us on Fuxu Road for a while, then we’ll see.”
“No,” Tan Yang said, clutching her papers, voice strained. “I’m not going back to Bi Mansion.”
Although he had anticipated this answer, hearing her say it still unsettled him. “Fine then—not to Bi Mansion. We can buy a place. Wherever you want, any size, whatever name you like, how to furnish it—everything is yours to choose. Tomorrow, tomorrow we will start house-hunting.”
Her throat tightened and she shook her head. “No. Not a house…”
Biqingtang moved slowly beside her, in pain. “Then think of Nanya—she loves to draw. She wants you to teach her every night. Don’t punish the child…” He paused, voice rough and hard-won. “And me.”

The last three words were almost a whisper, only shaped by lips, yet Tan Yang understood clearly. As she lowered her face, she saw the drawing she had made her daughter: a small pool of clear water, tiny shrimps huddled together, happy and intimate like one family.
Her heart felt as though struck by a bar of iron hot and cruel. A sharp grief tore through her so violently she thought her insides would split. She nearly screamed, but feared waking Yanqin. She folded around her own knees and wept in a tight, shaking silence, her back trembling like a leaf in cold wind.

Biqingtang knelt and pulled her into his arms, holding her fiercely while she struggled and suffered under his insistence. His own heart recoiled in ten ways at once. True love should not become this painful, this helpless; this was not the life he had wanted to give her.
After thinking a moment, he drew a breath and, leaning close to her ear, pleaded softly, “Three days. Just three days. We stay here three more days, all right? Little sister.”
In this war, to get by had become his only skill. He only wanted, for now, to hold her and keep running from it all.

Two days later was Tan Yang’s birthday—her twenty-eighth.

At dawn, as soon as she opened her eyes, Yanqin pressed a sweet little kiss to her cheek and beamed, “Mama, happy birthday!”
Before Tan Yang could even react, another kiss landed on her other cheek, and she caught her breath. Biqingtang stood close, smiling with familiar tenderness. “Happy birthday, little sister.”

He watched her flush with nervousness after he kissed her and draw the quilt up with shy haste. The sleepy softness in the morning, mixed with her embarrassment, made her strangely graceful; Biqingtang’s heart lurched.
His hand slipped silently beneath the quilt, resting against her arm, then traced a soft circle at the crook of her elbow. Tan Yang shivered. Her face flushed deeper. She scrambled up to ask Yanqin, “Nanya, are we going to have porridge this morning? Mama will cook.”
“How can a birthday girl get up and cook so early? The meal is already made. Change and we will eat,” Biqingtang said, staring at her face with a smile.

She did not dare look at him. Still half-dazed, she went to the washroom.
Once she shut the door and reached for her robe, she remembered she had left the garment on the chair in the front room. She had gone in with empty hands. Irritated, she turned on the water too hard and cleaned herself amid rushing noise, then moved to open the door for the missing clothes.

The door opened. Biqingtang stood at the threshold, casual as if nothing were amiss, handing her the clothing. She reached for it and tried to close the door; he slipped an arm into the doorway to block it, smiling with ill intent.
“What were you thinking, coming in in such a hurry with empty hands to change?”
Tan Yang shoved him hard. The door shut with a thud.
From the force of her push, he understood how embarrassed he had made her. So he stood back, almost buoyant. Whenever she sank into some secret reverie and he discovered it, this was always her response. Even after all these years, it had not changed.

When Tan Yang emerged from the washroom, a bowl of longevity noodles steamed on the table.
Biqingtang handed her chopsticks and half-joked, “Last year today I only ate one meal. Someone brought me a bowl in the morning and left it there. By afternoon it had gone cold and I ate it all myself.”
Then he could not keep the smile; his tone turned bitter-sweet. “At that time I no longer dared to hope I’d ever cook longevity noodles for you with my own hands and watch you eat them.”

They spent the whole day together in a strange, contented comfort. They chatted here and there. When she taught Yanqin to draw, he sat quietly nearby. When he went to the kitchen, he made her help him.

Good, easy happiness passed quickly. That night, when Yanqin slept, Biqingtang brought in a food container, lit a candle, and set it in a silver holder. He took from the box a plate of steak.

Tan Yang looked at the neatly presented steak and laughed, “Surely you didn’t cook this yourself?”
“No,” he said. “I can’t. I bought it at the Western restaurant across the street.”
“If you can buy it there, why do you still play chef every day?”
He poured red wine into a high glass and handed it to her. “I just enjoy cooking—cooking for you both. I never imagined that living in one small room, eating plain food, could be such delight.”

His words made Tan Yang’s throat tighten. “If only you had known this earlier.” Her voice broke.
For a heartbeat Biqingtang looked stunned. Then he searched her face, eyes wide. “Then now? Is it too late?”
She had no answer. Seeing tears glimmer in the candlelight at the corner of her eyes, he quickly gave her the glass and soothed her, “All right. No tears. Let us not speak of that. Today is your birthday. We should be happy.”

Without a word he drank three cups of wine in a row. “What are you doing, celebrating my little sister’s birthday and getting drunk first?”
“Self-punishment, three cups. I bought you no gift this year—my big brother’s fault.”
“Gifts do not matter.”
Hearing her, Biqingtang answered with conviction, “I feel the same. I don’t want to go out and buy a gift, because I have not wanted to be away from here for one single moment these days. I believe there is no precious treasure as priceless as this family staying together moment by moment. And I think you feel the same.”
He continued, with a kind of certainty only deep feeling gives: “Love that is true and deep needs no vulgar adornment. To remain together—that is romance enough. Such feeling cannot be understood without life’s hard schooling and time’s long sediment.”

Tan Yang closed her eyes briefly. Tears slid down her face. She hurriedly lifted her glass to hide both tears and emotion. Biqingtang teased her with a smile, “Look at that—no gift, and you cry instead? All right, if not now, then next year I’ll give you double birthday presents. Agreed?”

They kept laughing together, warm and intimate, each unwilling to speak of tomorrow, each unwilling to imagine the future.

After dinner, Tan Yang went into the washroom to wash her clothes, keeping the water a trickle and her movements gentle so as not to wake Yanqin. Biqingtang sat in the front room on the sofa watching her—watching as she wrung out Yanqin’s coat, as she smoothed his shirt to hang on a rack, then finally her handkerchiefs, both theirs, rinsed and laid side by side, sticking against the white tile wall like some dazzlingly strange modern painting, dizzying in its beauty.
Yet the one making this picture seemed even more beautiful: his face flushed with drink, vivid and tender, her expression deeply focused, and in her eyes the soft blur of light intoxication. Biqingtang straightened unconsciously, and his gaze grew warm and intent.

After she attached the last handkerchief, she returned to fetch her robe, then shut herself in again. A little unsteady from the wine, she leaned her head against the wall and slowly unfastened the ties of her cheongsam.
She had no idea that to anyone else she might have looked like a figure of deliberate seduction.

When the ties came free to her waist, a soft exhaustion overtook her. She exhaled quietly, looked up at herself in the mirror: flushed cheeks, slipped neckline, a clean oval of whitened collarbone gleaming. She turned away shyly, then looked back to find the door had opened; Biqingtang stood there, fixing on her in the mirror without blinking.
Before she could recover, he shut the door and stepped in, stopping opposite her.
“Come, let me help you,” he said, his voice low and coaxing. “Let your big brother do it.”
Without waiting for her response, he began undoing the ties, moving closer as he worked. The air carried the sweet, warm scent of her breath, like cherries. The scent entered him like a fuse striking powder, and in an instant he was all sudden flame.

He pressed her to the wall and kissed her lips, his tongue moving quickly but carefully along the corners of her mouth, slipping in to touch hers. One hand still unfastening her buttons, the other caressed the skin of her chest. Under that touch, her body blushed faintly pink. He could not bring himself to look too closely, but he felt her heat rising against him.

When he finished unfastening her clothing, he kept kissing her with fervor and tenderness, while one hand slipped into her underwear and found her breast with a light pressure. Tan Yang let out a soft, surprised cry. His tongue still in her mouth, her voice came as a buried, intimate sound. He paused briefly, then hurried to unbuckle and remove his own shirt and trousers.

When his hard length pressed against Tan Yang’s lower belly, a brief, clearing thought flashed through her mind. She turned her face away helplessly and whispered, “No… not now.”

“What do you mean ‘not now’? We’re already this far. Do you want your big brother to strangle himself?” he said, pressing again.
She hesitated and kept shaking her head. Seeing her hesitation, Biqingtang considered and then held her neck, whispering in her ear, “Just say yes, little sister. For the last time, I won’t let you become pregnant.”
At that, she started shaking. Tears spilled as she clung to his shoulders and cried, “No. Here. Not here. Not outside!”
He stood astonished for a moment, then lifted her up and laughed out in joy, “My good girl. My good girl.”

He laid her on the washstand and entered her at once. In that instant they cried out together, unplanned and the same breath. Bodies so close after two years of painful separation and loneliness fused back into one, and this union was no ordinary affair of man and woman.
After only a few movements, Biqingtang stopped still. Tan Yang held his neck and, in a tearful, half-pleading voice, said, “Enough. Stop it.” Her childlike coaxing and tenderness moved him. He closed his eyes, steadied himself, and sighed.
“It was only a moment away from making a fool of myself,” he confessed with shame. After a pause he resumed slowly. He moved with measured rhythm and depth, and after only a few more times he sent waves through her until he too came, in the end to the pleading cry of “Big brother… Big brother…”

They seemed to have reached their peak too quickly—too quickly, almost wildly out of step with measure.
Biqingtang held Tan Yang close and gently kissed her ears. Bit by bit, her body once again stirred with him; he returned, finding her repeatedly to the edge of trembling peaks, and finally, while she gasped and called him again and again, he released at last with deep satisfaction.

Then he draped his suit jacket over her shoulders and lifted her from the washstand. Sitting on the toilet lid, he set her in his lap. He looked at the little pearl strand at her throat and kissed each bead one by one. His light stubble brushed her skin and made her shiver. As he kissed, he murmured endearingly, “My treasure, my darling heart…”

From the corner of his eye he noticed the green jade bracelet on her wrist. In these days she had gained a little weight, and the bracelet looked especially lovely against her rounded wrist. Bypassing thought, he took her hand and kissed it hard, his tongue sweeping from the cool jade to her warm arm.

Tan Yang opened her eyes and looked at that jade bracelet—the translucent, moist-sheen bracelet she had worn for years. She had been given it by her father on her tenth birthday; years ago he had had to sell a fine, productive plot of fields just to afford it.

At that thought, a cold chill passed through her from core to skin. She pulled her hand back sharply, left Biqingtang, slipped off his jacket, put on a robe, and fled the washroom as if to escape. She fell onto the bed.
Biqingtang, taken aback by this sudden change, straightened the room as best he could and brought a warm towel. At her bedside he spoke softly, “Little sister, come on, let’s wipe off the sweat and sleep better.”
She turned away and pulled the quilt around herself, as if she could not hear.

Biqingtang bent, lifted the edge of the blanket. The room was dark, lit only by distant washroom light, and it showed Tan Yang’s face wet with tears.
He tried to wipe them with the towel, but she pushed it away. He sat back on the sofa with hesitation, and as he leaned against the backrest, it struck him suddenly—the bracelet had belonged to her before he ever met her. He had always thought she cherished it because the jade was fine. But she had kept it because that beauty came from her father’s devotion, and if one thinks of what her father owned then, how dearly he loved her to place such a treasure on her child wrist.

To be loved by blood, by friendship, even by love—these seven passions and desires all rise from what came before. Because of one’s past, one becomes oneself, with all one’s character and feeling. We are human; we live in the present and look toward tomorrow, yet we cannot sever the past. To live as if one has no past—no kin, no old companions, no roots—might pass for a few days, perhaps months. Over an entire life, it is a fable.

Tan Yang did not sleep that night. In the past, when they had lived together, after loving closeness Biqingtang always held her and only then would they sleep deeply, shoulder to shoulder. This time, sweating and spent, she lay alone in the damp cold of the bed, shivering. She did not dare to think of the years he had given her, years of apparent contentment and care; she could not bear to think of the earlier years, too, when her father had filled her with untroubled happiness.

When dawn was still gray, she finally drifted into a half-sleep. She dreamed of the year she first went to private school. Through careless trickery when practicing copying characters, her father had made her kneel in the study and struck her hands with a feather duster. It was a vivid childhood memory because he had never struck her before or since.
In the dream he shouted, “If you’ll cheat just to write one character less, will you run off stealing and slinking when you grow up? Not knowing a thing, no manners—if I cannot even teach you how to be human, then I am unfit to be your father.”
He lifted the feather duster high. Tan Yang, eyes wide, looked up as it came down. She screamed, “Father, I was wrong! I won’t do it again!”
She woke to that frightened cry in her own dream-speech. Biqingtang hurried to her side. “Little sister, wake up. Don’t cry. It was just a dream!”
She opened her eyes and saw him in the dim room. She cried harder.

He had heard her cry as clearly as in the dream, and now did not know how to comfort her. He returned to the sofa and sat with a bleak stillness, voice small and colorless, “It is not me…”