For the past three years, I have kept telling Hua that we are never in the limelight in this world of red dust, not even for a fraction of a second. The only exception was the vague possibility that certain readers of my love poetry may have recognized my relationship with her as extramarital, but they would probably take it as an inspiring romance rather than condemn it as a moral crime.
Each time I asked Hua about her worries, she said what she was most afraid of was our affair being found out by her husband, my wife, or anyone else who happened to know both of us.
“Not exactly,” I said. “Your most deeply-rooted fear is no other than the loss of your ‘face’ when people know of your unfaithfulness. To me, this is part of the human nature, but to you, infidelity, as people call it, is morally wrong and thus socially fatal, especially in old age.”
“Whatever you have to say,” Hua has told me again and again, “I just cannot stop worrying, not even for a single day.”
To help deflate her hidden fear, I assured her that nobody around us had actually paid any attention to our emotional lives. While all our mutual acquaintances in China were English illiterates or had no access to my English writings, my family and friends outside of China never showed any interest in what I had written and published.
“So long as we kept our relationship strictly under the rug and always acted like two old zhiqing comrades, the cat will never be out of the bag,” I said.
“How about Za?” Hua asked. “As your former fiancée now living in Holland, she must’ve been your most loyal fun.”
“I doubt she’d be so nosy as to search for me online.”
“Put in her shoes, I would, out of curiosity, if not of concern.”
“Sooner or later, you could tell this by yourself,” I replied. Having paid a visit to Za’s mother and had a long chat with the couple several nights before, I was sure that Za hadn’t the slightest idea about what had been going on between Hua and me in recent years.
The opportunity propped up when Za invited me for a dinner with her husband Wei and a couple of our mutual friends shortly after I moved to a rented room in Songzi. To show my appreciation of their kind offer, I insisted that I treat the couple to the famous local hotpot of the Du rooster instead.
Around eleven thirty on October 17, Pan arrived at the restaurant first, then followed by Za, Wei, Hua and Wang in sequence. Once seated around the table in a small but cozy private dinning room, we began to enjoy the local gourmet foods, chatting and laughing excitedly.
It was the most special party I had ever hosted or attended. For one thing, all the attendants had a close relationship with me. While Za was once engaged with me, her husband Wei had been not only one of Hua’s unprofessed admirers but my closest associate in the Mayuhe Youth Station, who succeeded me as the youth leader after I left the farm for university.
As the host, I started by thanking everyone for coming. After proposing a toast to our own health and longevity, I declared the Za couple as my main guests, while Pan, my best zhiqing friend, and Wang, Wei’s relative, were our main “accompanying guests,” as the local custom would have for every dinner party like this one. On the surface, I put much emphasis on my gratitude to Wei for his friendly support while working at the Mayuhe Youth Station, as well as for his effort to fulfill my wish to hold a grand gathering to celebrate the 50th anniversary of its establishment. But in the depth I hoped to extend my ‘regret’ to Za, the only attendant who was not from our Mayuhe station, for having broken up with her in 1981 because I found it neither viable nor desirable to live a married life with her in Wuhan back then. Though I said nothing to this effect, I had mentioned this to her on several occasions. This regretful feeling she and I were ready to understand without having to exchange a single conspiratorial glance. During a Tête-à-tête, I once told her that if I had married her, I would have been able to enjoy much more spousal love and support. In return, she had admitted to me in a proud tone that each time when asked how she would compare Wei and me as her man, she would say, “Either’s fine to me!’
As for Hua, I re-introduced her to the party as my newly found relative. Hearing this, Za felt quite surprised, while Pan asked, “How’re you actually related?”
“Hua’s mother’s mother and mine came from the same Zhang family living beside the high school in Jieheshi, the townlet between Songzi and Weishui Scenic Park,” I explained. “But because all our grandparents died long ago, I’m not sure if I’m her uncle by blood.”
“Or I’m Ming’s aunt,” Hua corrected me in a teasing voice.
“So you’re distant relatives,” Wang pointed out, “just like Wei and me.”
Since our parental families originated from the same small place, it was not surprising that we were somehow related, but we all wished to have discovered our relatedness sooner.
As we kept eating, drinking and talking, Za appeared to be particularly high-spirited and asked me if I and my wife had already retired in Vancouver and when we two would visit Europe as tourists. Realizing this as an excellent opportunity to sound out if Za had any updated knowledge about my literary endeavors or, rather, if she happened to know my true relationship with Hua through my English writings published online, I asked her if she knew I had been busy writing not only poetry but fiction during the past few years.
“So, you’re writing novels now?” Za asked in a voice carrying a strong note of amazement. “All I know is, you have published a lot of poetry.”
“Have you read any of my writings online?” I asked further. In so doing, I hoped that Hua would get an answer for herself about whether Za was aware of our affair, since she was the only person among all our mutual acquaintances that might happen to know our secret through my publications in English, which were readily accessible online to anyone who could google outside of China.
“Nah. Except when doing some online reading in Chinese, I seldom turned on my computer. You know how poor my English is,” Za replied, more to Hua’s satisfaction than to mine.
“Our English is not good enough to read any literature,” Wei confirmed, “though we two do have a quite good working knowledge of Dutch.”
“Way to go!” Hua exclaimed. “Having lived in Melbourne for so many years, I’m still an English illiterate.”
From Hua’s response, I knew she was more than delighted to realize that neither Za nor Wei was capable of discovering our infidelity even if they had had such intentions. Seeing how relieved she was from her great fear, I had a strong whim to pinch her right thigh under the table. Dressed in black in mourning for her late mother, Hua looked particularly decorous and graceful today. Since her husband joined her for her mother’s funeral, I hadn’t been able even to take a walk with her, much less enjoy intimacies of any kind. However, probably because she wanted to avoid any suspicion, she deliberately sat much closer to Wang, her neighbor on her left side, thus making it impossible for me to reach her without being noticed by Pan, who sat right beside me.
When we turned our attention to one another’s family situations, we congratulated the Za couple on the success of their outstanding son, a highly accomplished young surgeon in Rotterdam, who married a beautiful Dutch girl and had three sons within five years.
Beaming with smiles, Za told us several anecdotes about how she had brought up his son. Each time she recalled something to her own credit, she would look at Wei’s response. Her carefulness and sensitivity reminded me of Kang, our mutual friend’s comment, “Za doesn’t have much status at home, because she earns little money in Holland.”
Though I fully understood that everyone’s social status was determined by their economic basis, there should be equality within the family. In Za’s case, her relationship with Wei was based apparently on money instead of love. A marriage of convenience in the first place, I thought.
When we began to see Pan’s family photos on his cellphone, we all felt amazed at how well his wife carried her years and how she had become an online influencer in her own right. More impressive were his daughter and grandchildren who looked much more handsome than he was. Though he was both ugly and poor as he himself had often said, his wife and daughter thought highly, and took good care, of him. This fact made me feel particularly envious, resentful and puzzled at the same time. In comparison with him, Ping and even Wei, I had been striving really hard to bring wealth and fame to my family and, as a father and husband, I had done my very best to protect and look after them, but I never felt respected, much less cared for, within my own family.
No matter what, by the time we stood up and got ready to leave the restaurant, my old flames must both have come to their conclusion that the jig is not up yet.
Author’s note: This prose work is inspired by Helena Qi Hong (祁红)
Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17) and 2149 other publications worldwide. A poetry judge for Canada’s 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began writing and publishing fiction in 2022, his debut novel DETACHING, ‘silver romance’ THE TUNER and short story collection FLASHBACKS available at Amazon.
You can find more of Yuan’s work here on Ink Pantry.