Christian Saunders writes fiction as C.M. Saunders, is a freelance journalist and editor from south Wales, United Kingdom. His work has appeared in the Fortean Times, the Literary Hatchet, ParABnormal, Fantastic Horror, Haunted MTL, Feverish Fiction, Crimson Streets and many many more. He also has held staff positions at several leading UK magazines ranging from Staff Writer to Associate Editor. His books have been both traditionally and independently published, the latest release being Tethered on Terror Tract Publishing. Christian can be found online at cmsaunders.wordpress.com and tweets at @CMSaunders01.
It is a memory that will stay with me forever. Sitting on a bench in the park eating ice cream with my lover on a fine autumn afternoon, marveling at the way the sun danced off his kind, black eyes and the light breeze tussled his hair. Overhead, birds and dragonflies swooped. At that moment, as I stared deep into my lover’s eyes, I wanted time to stop. Stop dead. And let me remain trapped here for the rest of my days. I couldn’t tell him it was over between us. Not then. I didn’t want to taint the memory I knew I would hold dear for the rest of my days.
Autumn has always been my favourite season. The weather is neither too warm nor too hot, and I love the way the landscape changes, from lush and green to varying shades of brown and yellow. Plants and trees bow to the chill of the oncoming winter, relinquishing a summer rich with life to the awful inevitability of autumn’s sweet death. But oh, what a beautiful death!
Wang Chen and I met when we were at high school. I fifteen, he a year older. I cannot believe we’ve been together for over three years now. Time moves quickly. Life is a roller coaster full of ups and downs and twists and turns. An unpredictable joy. It’s difficult to imagine taking so much as one step of this journey without him. What a barren, soulless existence it would be.
A shy girl when we met, the attention he lavished on me was wasted on one so unaccustomed to the fuss. He was the first boy to ever pay me any mind. I understood why. I would never consider myself beautiful. I would never consider myself ugly, either. I was somewhere in between. Average. Plain. A common girl. In China we have a saying. Beautiful girls are flowers in fields of grass. I was but a blade of grass.
My family is as average as I am. Never rich, never poor, anonymous members of an immense working class. Though I clearly remember the days of my early childhood when meat for dinner was so scarce that my parents fed me toad they caught in the pond at the back of the garden and told me it was chicken. For years, I thought that was what chicken tasted like. There isn’t much difference, to tell you the truth. If you’ve ever eaten toad, you would know. It’s just that toad is more watery, the meat grey and not as flavourful. There is also less of it. Often, a chicken will have brilliant white, succulent, tasty, meat. That’s the difference. Also, of course, the toad is an ugly animal. With its too-large mouth, bulbous eyes, and tough skin covered in bumps and warts. On the other hand a chicken has wings, even if it can’t use them well. Any creature with the ability to fly is beautiful in my eyes. However, whether ugly or beautiful, the end result is the same. Toad or chicken, your stomach gets filled.
I grew up an only child in Loudi, a small city in China’s Hunan province. Some girls in China grow up bathed in disappointment, their family resentful of their femininity when boys are considered the only worthy bounty of parenthood. Like a booby prize. We have less earning potential, lower career prospects, and can’t even carry the family name forward. In ancient China, when a girl got married she effectively joined another family and was disowned by her own. Even with all the government propaganda aimed at persuading the public that having a baby girl isn’t that bad, some girls never feel truly accepted by their parents and live their lives with the constant burden of being a disappointment. I was one of the lucky ones. I was never left in any doubt that my parents truly cared for me. My father used to call me his ‘little bird’.
In any case, the Chinese Communist Party’s one-child policy which was in effect when I was born was nowhere near as restrictive as outsiders were led to believe. It was mostly enforced in overpopulated cities. In some more rural regions, if a married couple’s first child was a girl they were allowed to try again, without facing the steep fines usually levelled at those who tried to flaunt the system. This was merely another form of taxation. They taxed your ability to have a family. But the real tragedy lay with those couples who tried a second time only to get another girl. Twice the disappointment and double the mouths to feed.
Some girls never recover from this crushing responsibility. Knowing that they, the culmination of their parent’s dreams, will never be able to make those dreams come true. The hardship for our parents never lessens. Without a son’s ability to earn a high salary, their old age will be difficult and torturous. Influenced by Western concepts like feminism and equality, the younger generation of women in China have learned to fight. Not with their fists, but in other, more subtle but no-less effective ways. The one-child policy created a skewed gender population, and today there are far more men than women. This has emboldened women and put them in positions of relative power. Especially the beautiful ones. But like I said, I am no flower. I am just a blade of grass.
My parents were brought up during the Cultural Revolution of the 1960’s. Times were hard, then. If you know anything about history you would know how many died from famine, disease and starvation. It stands as a black mark in China’s great history. Today, the country stands on the brink of global domination and is widely recognized as the next world superpower. But back then, Mao Zedong’s sweeping vision of Chinese society was in its infancy, and one of the world’s fastest growing populations was struggling to find its bearing, as if a country of teething toddlers gumming uncooked rice in its quest for sustenance. It was a time of hardship and adversity, the effects of which impacted Chinese culture so deeply that even now, more than fifty years later, these are two qualities very much valued in both the individual and society. There is a popular Chinese saying, chi ku, meaning ‘eat bitter,’ which reminds us of our past and tells us that in order to fully appreciate the good things in life, one first has to endure hardship.
My parents are farmers of sorts. We don’t own our own land, instead working someone else’s rice and potato fields, which makes them even lower on the social scale than farmers. Peasants, some might say. But they are happy peasants and I love them dearly. Despite their lowly stature my parents always did their best to provide for me, even going without in order to give me what I wanted. My dream is to one day become self-sufficient, and gain the ability to look after myself so I won’t have to always ask them for money and things they don’t have. I feel I owe my parents a debt of gratitude.
Modern China is expanding, modernizing and accumulating wealth at a rate never seen before in history. This applies mainly to the large, thriving cities like Beijing, Shanghai and Guangzhou, but there is a knock-on effect that impacts every level of society, down to the most isolated rural villages and everywhere in between.
When the Hunan provincial government wanted to trade land located around my hometown of Loudi to developers, they first had to buy it from the people whose families had owned the plots for generations. My parents and I, along with many other families, were forced to relocate, and as compensation the government gave each family a brand-new three-story house in another part of the city and a lump sum which amounted to around five years earnings for most of us. It was more than enough to pay for my education.
The relationship between parents and child in China may be different than in most parts of the world. Our parents give us the gift of life, and look after us when we are too young to look after ourselves. In return, we look after them when they are old and sick. It is not unusual to find three generations living together in a single abode, especially in the countryside. You might say that our parents look upon their offspring as a kind of insurance policy. By ploughing money into an education for their children, the parents are, in effect, investing in their own future. With good grades from good schools their child can find a good job, and the wealthier they become, the more comfortable a lifestyle the parents can have when they reach retirement age.
This can be a huge burden. College and university campuses are rife with stories of students who buckle under the pressure. One bad exam score can lead a student to the roof of a tall building on campus, and from there their swift descent to death mirrors their family’s hopes. Most large educational establishments in China have to contend with several student suicides every semester. These unfortunate deaths are routinely covered-up so as not to bring the university any negative publicity. The victim’s family doesn’t mind the cover-up. In some cases they even condone and participate in it themselves, so as not to bring shame upon themselves for raising a failure. Face, and the perennial fear of losing it, is another vital component of Chinese culture.
Many times I have thought I would rather die than live a life without Wang Chen. At times I even contemplated suicide. But I cannot leave my parents. With no siblings to share the burden, they are counting on me to make their elder years bearable, if ‘comfortable’ is beyond me. Besides, I am not brave enough to take my own life. I wonder what those unfortunates must think the moment the flame of their life is snuffed out. Do they have any regrets? I suppose they must. We all suffer the crushing weight of regret. But most people find the strength to push the regret aside, rationalize it, and carry on.
Just carry on.
I remember the first time Wang Chen talked to me as if it were yesterday. I saw him striding toward me across the playing field during an after-school basketball match. I was convinced he would walk right past on his way to a prettier girl standing somewhere behind me. But he stopped and asked me for my phone number. The elation! I thought he was so strong, so brave to do that. Only much later did he tell me that he had first noticed me several months before and it took him that long to pluck up the courage to speak to me. He sent me an SMS that same evening…
HELLO BEAUTIFUL GIRL, WHAT ARE YOU DOING?
Beautiful girl? Was he really talking to me? Nobody ever called me beautiful before.
Even so, I ignored the message. As is my want. Oh, how I ached for him, even in those early stages. But I had to play the game of love. If I had replied to his message right away he would think I was easy, or desperate, and he would lose any respect he had for me. Dating in any culture is a fickle business, but in China it’s often less about what you say, and more about what you don’t say. We like to maintain an air of mystery, plant a seed in someone’s head and let it slowly grow, watering it and caring for it, until it consumes them and all they can think about is you. It takes time. Chi ku. Eat bitter.
Wang Chen probably sensed how much I wanted him. So he played the game, too. He sent me messages every morning and every night for a week, even knowing he would get no response. Eventually, when my instinct told me a sufficient amount of time had passed, and when I could stand it no longer, I replied.
I AM FINE THANKS, AND YOU?
We exchanged messages for two months before we finally saw each other again walking home from school one afternoon. He always maintained the encounter was a happy accident, but I suspect it was more by design. Or am I just deluded? Love does that to you, it makes you irrational. Makes you doubt what is real, and blurs the line between fantasy and reality.
One chance meeting gave breath to an unlikely relationship, crumbs of sustenance to two starving birds whose atrophied wings gained strength and soon gave flight. Afterwards the messages increased in volume, and the boy himself encroached more and more upon my thoughts as our lives became entwined.
Wang Chen, Wang Chen, Wang Chen.
When you first meet somebody and start a relationship with them, the person you are seeing isn’t real. It’s a representation of what that person thinks you want to see. Likewise, you alter your own personality to fit the idea you think they may have, or alternatively fit the image you want to portray. Only later, much later, do the real people come to the surface. I wanted to know everything about him.
After getting to know one another better, each persevering through those awkward moments of initial contact and picking our way through the minefield of a blooming relationship, we found we had a lot in common. We liked the same TV shows, the same music, and shared a penchant for wildlife and the outdoors. Best of all, when we made each other laugh, it was effortless. It was almost as if we were two missing pieces of a complex puzzle that, once discovered, completed the picture.”
It wasn’t too long before we arranged our first date, dinner at a local fast food restaurant followed by a walk in the park. During the walk I let him hold my hand, but it was another full month before we kissed. I’m a traditional girl, remember. But if only I knew then what I know now, I would never have wasted so much time dithering.
Wang Chen’s family background was similar to mine, minus the new house and pay-off from the government, and that was down to simply living in the wrong part of town at the wrong time. Who was to say that in five or ten years his neighbourhood wouldn’t be earmarked for development? But by then, of course, the money would come too late to send Wang Chen to university.
By the time we left high school his fate was sealed, and despite achieving high grades in every subject he took, when he was put to work in the fields. It made no difference to me. I didn’t care what he did for a living. Then, my mind was too narrow to think much about my future. I was blinded by the present. All that really mattered was that Wang Chen and I could be together, share the same hopes and dreams, and nurture a mutual desire to carve out a future together. We talked about leaving Loudi and joining the southern migration in moving to a larger city. Shanghai, maybe. Changsha, or Shenzhen. Even Beijing, though I knew deep down that moving to the capital would forever be beyond our means. Like most young people we weren’t sure where our future lay, just that it lay somewhere else.
We shared our first kiss standing next to the lake at sunset. He would never admit as much, but I know Wang Chen planned it that way. It was too picture-book perfect to be pure luck. We were enjoying the way the last of the fading light played on the surface of the water and talking about poetry, when he took my face tenderly in his hands and gently, confidently, lowered his strong lips onto mine. His merest touch took my breath away, and I often thought afterwards whether he had practiced on watermelons beforehand. That lucky fruit!
It was another year before we were formally introduced to each other’s parents. We took our time with that, even hiding our relationship from them for a while, though I hated keeping it secret. I knew my parents would just say we were too young for such frivolities and I should concentrate on my school work instead. But to my surprise, when we finally were introduced we both passed the myriad unspoken and unseen tests, and our respective parents were happy to let us continue our budding romance.
At least, on the face of it they were. Little did I know that even then, forces beyond our control were conspiring against us. Although they said they thought Wang Chen was a nice boy, my parents made it known that they wanted me to do better. They always want better. My parent’s ambitions were being projected onto me. Onwards, ever upwards, toward the sky.
There was a friend of my father’s from the same part of town who had a son, named Gao Tao. The name means ‘tall and strong’. When they received the payout from the government Gao Tao’s parents sent him to Germany to study to become a doctor. Now, he was in his last year of medical school. When he graduated he planned to stay in Germany for five years or more where the salary for a doctor is much higher than in China, before returning to settle in the Motherland. It seemed a good plan. Gao Tao would be able to afford to send money home to his parents and build a life for himself. As a doctor, no less.
After a family meeting, to which I was not invited, it was decided that Gao Tao and I should marry, and I was to move to Germany to birth his child and help him manage his busy life. Yes, just like that.
Of course, I protested furiously. I stomped my feet and cried. But what can I do? Stay in Loudi and be with Wang Chen, against my parent’s wishes? Or should I give up everything I have ever known and move to another country to marry a man I had never even met?
Should I choose love over security? To do so would be very selfish of me. I have to consider not just myself, but my parent’s future. And also the quality of life my own child (children?) will be able to have. People often say that Chinese society is interdependent, rather than independent, with everyone relying on everyone else. Now I can see it is true. Everyone leans on each other. It makes the fabric of society strong.
To outsiders, the concept of arranged marriages may seem odd. Too controlling, some say. No respect for free will. But the truth is, by taking the responsibility of finding me a husband my parents are relieving me of the greatest pressure of all. I can see that now, and I must never forget that they only want what is best for me.
So what of Wang Cheng, you may wonder. Well, when I told him he cried. Then he got angry and called me names. In three years I had never seen that side of him before. He was always so placid and mild-mannered. I told him to move on, find another girl, start afresh. He is still young, strong and handsome.
But I know he will never forgive me for what I am about to do. I only hope this yearning for him fades. I think it will. At first I was reluctant to give him up, reluctant to leave China. I was scared and hesitant, my mind filled with doubt. Now I accept how lucky I am. I have a future away from the fields and the life of peasantry waiting for me. There is no place in my world for love. Love only hurts. It distracts you from your true purpose.
How ironic that I should spend so much time and energy learning English, then move to Germany. I suppose I will have to learn German now. At least it will give me something to do to pass the time. As my departure date looms I find myself wondering… do they eat toads in Germany? It tastes similar to chicken. It’s not as delicious or fulfilling as that plump bird, but it will do. If you’ve ever eaten toad, you would know.