Her father did not move. Still holding the bowl of rice in his big hands, he listened to her.
Time either froze or passed quickly; Jia Jia thought that it could have been either. As the tears gushed out of her, she felt herself shrinking down like a bar of soap, losing her original form. She had become a shapeless and authentic version of herself. This change, she knew, was going to be irrevocable.
And then, all of a sudden, like a speeding car that had crashed into a large tree, it stopped. For a while, neither of them spoke. In that apartment, there was no tension any more, no surging of emotions; neither was there any sense of solace. What was there, under a warm light, was a meal shared between father and daughter.
When they had both finished their rice, Jia Jia looked her father straight in the eye.
‘Ba,’ she said with unwavering determination. ‘Tell me about the fish-man.’
He gazed back at her with an alarmed expression, which then morphed into a worried one that finally became composed, gentle and firm. He put down his chopsticks, reached for a box of tissues, handed this to Jia Jia, and crossed his arms on the table.
‘What would you like to know?’ he asked.
The last vestiges of nervousness had vanished from Jia Jia. Control came back to her and her mind was clear as glass. She was going to find out why her father had a fish-man figure; to proceed was as natural to her now as it was for coconuts to fall when fully ripe. She fetched the figure from her pocket and placed it in front of her father, along with the photo taken by Grandpa.
‘I found this on the shelf,’ Jia Jia said steadily. ‘I’ve seen fish-man sculptures like this at a village I visited in Tibet.’ She pointed to the photo. ‘This village.’
Her father sank back into his seat with his arms still crossed in front of his chest. For a time, nothing came out from his mouth and he just stared at the photo. Then he straightened his back, leaned forward and chose his words carefully.
17
‘If I had it my way, I’d never speak about it. These memories have been like a hole in the ground, right beneath the steps to my door. On rainy days there would be a puddle, and I’d always step around it. Sometimes, there’d be relentless storms, and I’d stay inside and watch the hole fill up and overflow. Long periods of time would also come when the hole would be dry and almost unnoticeable. And then, without warning, it would rain again. But throughout the years, I have come to accept that the world spins, one season pours into another, and the past travels full circle back to you. So I’ll tell you everything I know, Jia Jia, because I owe it to you, and to your mother. But also, more importantly, I’ll tell you because maybe then you will understand.
‘First of all, let me prelude this story by saying that I have never seen the fish-man or the world of water. As such, I do not know what it is. And to this day, I cannot say whether I’m grateful for that. But all this is not to tell you that it has no effect on me. No, no. On the contrary, my life has been governed by the world of water since the day I came to know about it, or maybe even before I became aware that it had flooded into your mother, thirty years ago.
‘At the time when I met your mother, she was struggling to become a sculptor and I was a very average man. Why, of all art forms, she chose sculpting, I do not know. How and where she learned to sculpt, she never told me either. But she had her mind set on becoming a sculptor, and no one was ever going to convince her to change. I got to know her the first week after Chinese New Year, at the Ditan temple fair. Her head popped up from the sea of people directly into my vision: she was standing on a bench, searching for a sugar sculpture stand, which I eventually helped her find. She wore a large, brown ushanka-hat that covered half of her face. It belonged to her father, she told me later, who had received it as a gift from a teacher during his studies in the Soviet Union. Your mother wore it every day in the winter, and during most of the dates we went on, I was barely able to see her properly. As a result, for a long time I had no idea what her hair looked like. But that only added to her charm and made her even more desirable.
‘I had never met anyone like her before. She daydreamed, her thoughts would often run wildly. One minute, she might be speaking about different kinds of beer, and the next, she would be reciting poetry. She was a woman who would jump into frozen lakes naked or ride her bike into the suburbs in the middle of the night. She was the opposite of me and none of our friends could imagine us being lovers. But after a few months, we got married, and she became my entire world.
‘All I wanted thereafter was to live a lifetime with her, where every day I’d return to a home that smelt like fresh noodles, and she would greet me with a face that always bloomed like a daisy when I opened the door. As long as I had her, I didn’t care about the hardships of life. She was like a pair of shoes that fitted perfectly, wrapping me up, keeping me warm. We lived in a sixty-square-metre two-bedroom apartment that was comfortably big enough for the two of us. It faced the south and kept us warm in the winter and cool in the summer. More than enough light shone into our living space during the day, and seeing the way your mother hummed different tunes and held a bottle of beer in her hand while she worked on her sculptures, I deemed that she was content.
‘But as time passed, I came to gradually forget who she was and what she wanted. Or hell, I admit I most likely didn’t even know in the first place. She dreamed of something much bigger than our apartment and our placid lives within it. She wanted to be outside. Still, she stayed with me and pretended that the life I had designed for us was the one she wanted as well. Of course, I was unaware of any of this at the time and my vision only gradually cleared later, after we decided to have a baby.
‘A few months into our marriage, we tried for a child. I can’t remember whose idea it was in the first place, but one of us must have decided that he or she wanted a child, and the other person must have agreed. It was the natural thing to do anyway. We worked on this mission for months but nothing happened. At first, we didn’t think too much about it all and agreed that luck was not on our side. We carried on with our lives. I went to work as usual while your mother stayed at home and made all sorts of sculptures. But ever so slowly, our failure to make a child began to infiltrate our lives like water seeping through walls. Your mother began to sob whenever she got her period. Although nothing had changed, the apartment started to feel empty, as if we once had a child and now the child was gone. A thick, dark cloud was taking shape and expanding, gnawing at us in our sleep. At some point, I noticed that your mother was making sculptures of children she saw out on the streets. She told me that she didn’t even remember when and why she had started doing that.
‘It was as if we had been cursed, and soon enough, the curse began to manifest itself physically. Things started to break – the kitchen light, the heater, the radio, your mother’s gold earrings, my most expensive pair of shoes. One morning, on your mother’s way to the vegetable market, the sun was shining brighter than usual, so she decided to remove her ushanka-hat to immerse herself in the warm winter day. A few seconds later, a stray dog snatched the hat from her hands and ripped it in half, right there, before running off never to be seen again. She came home and wept, forgetting entirely about the market. I had tinned food for dinner that night, and your mother didn’t eat at all. Each day she slept less and less, which put me on edge and gave me sweats and nightmares. She’d wake up at dawn and stare out the window for hours, like a floating spirit that had lost all those who had known her in her lifetime. At first, I’d get up too to comfort her, but eventually I just pretended to be asleep.