Becoming Madame Mao - Anchee Min [9]
I am ready to carry on the show, the girl says. I have been ready. Please, sir, give me a chance.
Thy white face doth powder spurn ... The manager recites an aria from the middle of the play.
Vermilion must yet from thy lips learn. Yunhe opens her mouth with a full voice. Flesh of snow, bones of jade, dream thy dreams, peerless one, not for this world thou art made.
When the curtain ascends I am my role. Oh, how fantastic I feel! My cheeks are hot and I move about the stage at ease. I am born for this. I let myself flow, be led by the spirit of the character. The audience is mine. A shout comes when my character is about to end her life for love. Take me with you! I hear. Take me with you! The rest of the audience follows. And then there is the sob, the whole theater. It sounds like an incredible tide. Wave after wave. Sky high. Vast, wrapping my ears.
The performance is a success. It turns out to be the best opportunity I could ever hope for—Mr. Zhao Taimo and a group of critics he had invited to review the show are among the audience. He didn't call in advance to make reservations because he was aware that the show had been slow and that seats would not be a problem.
Yunhe's tears pour uncontrollably. The heroine finally wins her lover's affection. But her tears are not for her character. They are for herself, her victory, that she had outshone her rival, that she can no longer be ignored. And that she had single-handedly made all this happen herself.
Backstage, as she is being helped to remove her makeup and costume, she breaks down again. The sob comes so suddenly, with such an overwhelming impact, that she grabs the door and dashes out.
***
The year is 1930. Right after her first appearance on the stage, the theater is shut down. And then the troupe and the school. The reasons are lack of funds and political instability. Unable to pay its debts, China submits itself to deeper and wider foreign penetration. The infighting between warlords has exhausted the peasants and months of drought have devastated the landscape. By the time Yunhe decides to pack up, everybody else has already left. It is like a forest on fire where all the animals run for their lives.
The girl has no money to flee and she doesn't want to go back to her grandparents. Her mother has never tried to find her. She doesn't let herself miss her, especially in these moments, moments when she needs a place to go and a familiar face to turn to. She despises herself when she feels weak and helpless. She pinches the little-girl-crying-for-help voice inside her, pinches it as if it were her worst enemy. She keeps pinching until the pitiful voice turns into ice drops and forms a hard crystal. A crystal that never melts.
I sell all my belongings and buy a train ticket to Beijing. I look for acting jobs. I have to try. But the city is cold to me. Wherever I go, my Shan-dong-accented Mandarin brings laughs. None of my auditions ring back. Two months later, I am completely broke. No one wants to lend me money. No one believes that I will ever have a future as an actress. It doesn't bother me at the beginning. But when I am cold and hungry, I begin to doubt myself.
The girl comes back from Beijing and consents to her grandparents' wish—she will marry. She is seventeen. The husband's name is Fei, a fan of hers when she played The Incident on the Lake. He is a small-business man. Later on in her life, she never mentions her marriage to Mr. Fei. She refuses to recall the face of the man. To her, he happened to be a rock in the middle of the river in which she was drowning. She reached for the rock and pulled herself up.
But at the wedding ceremony she is obedient. She is carried on a sedan chair and wrapped in red silk like a New Year's present. It is to satisfy her parents-in-law. They are not smiling. Yunhe suspects that her grandfather has paid money to have Mr. Fei propose.
Now she is on her own as a wife and a daughter-in-law. She feels strange and unprepared for the role. The first night is awful. The man claims his territory. She