Sunken Fish - Chapter 10
For Tianma, if she hadn't insisted that my father take a concubine to prevent the family line from ending, she might have been my father's only wife.
“It was my own idea,” Sweet Mom always boasted. “I wasn’t forced to accept this arrangement, not at all.”
It was destined that Sweet Mom would not be able to have children.
Shortly after marrying my father, she contracted a skin disease, perhaps measles or chickenpox, but not as severe as smallpox. She often wept during the illness, which blocked her body's heat source, preventing her from generating enough heat to nurture the fetus. Instead, excess heat was released from her body, causing blisters to appear on her face and hands, and possibly other parts of her body as well. Time and again, we were amazed, convinced that she must have committed sins in a past life to suffer such retribution in this one.
“What small mistake did I make that deserves such a heavy punishment?” she cried, her pimples turning even redder. “I don’t have any biological children, only other people’s bastards (referring to my brothers and me).”
Whenever she ate something unpleasant, like an unripe kumquat, or was teased, her face would ooze oil, looking like a foreign map. "Do you know where India is?" we'd ask her, while struggling to suppress our laughter. To make herself feel better, she'd scratch vigorously, constantly complaining that my mother had made her so ugly. She scratched her eyebrows off, and without makeup, she looked like a nun with her head adorned with monastic vows. But unlike a nun, she was always furious.
That's the impression my mother left on me: always scratching her bald eyebrows with her sharp fingers while endlessly rambling. My brothers tried to escape her grasp. They were immune to her influence, responding with disdain and contempt. Therefore, she always targeted me.
“Let me tell you,” Sweet Mom said to me solemnly, “after you hear what I have to say, you won’t be so hurt when you hear others say the same thing again.”
Then, she told me again that my mother was as short as me, but not as short and fat as me. My mother weighed only 70 pounds when she was sixteen. At that time, my father tricked her into becoming his concubine.
Sweet Mom kept saying bad things about my mother: "Although she's pitiful, she's just too greedy. She eats too much, gets too excited, and can't control her laughter. She laughs so hard she rolls around on the floor until I have to slap her to her senses. Also, she sleeps too much and yawns all the time. Sleeping too much makes your bones weak. That's why she's so weak, like a sea cucumber out of water."
During the war, pork prices tripled, and Sweetie's mother often declared, "Although we have enough money, I'm content with just a little bit of meat, just to taste it, and I never eat more than once a week. But when your mother was alive, her eyes were like those of a wild dog, always ready to pounce on any dead meat."
Sweet Mom said that as a dignified woman, she should exercise restraint in her eating and enjoyingment, and most importantly, she should not be a burden on the family. Sweet Mom tried her best to let my father know this whenever she had the chance.
During my childhood, we lived in the French Concession of Shanghai, in a three-story Tudor-style building on Rue Massenet.
Although this place wasn't as upscale as the Soong and Kong families' Lafayette Road residences—with its villas, spacious gardens, baseball fields, and horse-drawn carriages—we were still a wealthy family. Our house looked quite impressive, even better than many multi-million dollar houses in San Francisco today.
My father's family had run a cotton processing factory and a warehouse for Chengxin Department Store for generations, which my grandfather founded in 1923. It may not have been as famous or as large as Chengxin Department Store, but the cotton it processed was of the best quality among goods of similar price, according to all of my father's foreign customers.
He was a typical Shanghai bourgeois: absolutely traditional at home, yet utterly modern in business and the outside world. Once outside, he entered another realm, like a chameleon. When necessary, he could speak foreign languages with impeccable accents—he'd been tutored. Since accents distinguished class, his English was Oxford, his French Right Bank, and his German Berlin. He also knew Latin and a little Manchu, possessing Manchu translations of all literary classics. His hair was smoothly combed back, glossy with oil, and he smoked filtered cigarettes. His topics of conversation were incredibly broad, like riddles. He was also interested in physiology and cooking, undoubtedly stemming from Chinese culinary traditions. He could discuss Versailles at length and compare Dante's *Divine Comedy: Purgatory* to the Chinese classic *Dream of the Red Chamber*. Back home, he switched back to his usual self, burying himself in old books, rarely speaking, almost motionless. Because in this house, his women respected him and served him attentively.
Foreign friends call my father Philip. My brother's English names are Preston and Nobel, which sound auspicious; one sounds like "president," and the other is the Nobel Prize, which brings immense wealth and honor. My mother chose Bertha as her name because my father said Bertha sounds like "sweet bun," while my mother is called "Little Dot." Actually, my father gave her the English name "Elizabeth," but she couldn't pronounce it correctly.
My father calls me Bibi, which is both a Western name and a shortened form of the name my mother gave me, "Bifang".
As you can imagine, we are a global family. My brothers and I have English and French teachers, and we receive a modern education. This also gives us a secret language with Sweetie's Mom, who only speaks Shanghainese.
Once, Nobel discovered that our Bedling, the cuddly dog that Sweetie's mother disliked, had left something in her room—Ilafaitlamerdesurletapis. Because the carpet pattern concealed the dog's feces, our stepmother was always baffled as to why the room reeked. My brothers loved to put unexpected things in Sweetie's medicine bottles and snuffboxes. Cacad'oie, collected from our old quills, was their favorite because it was disgusting—dirty, sticky, and a greenish-blue like bile. I laughed so hard I rolled on the floor when they told me about it. I miss my brothers so much!
My Childhood in Shanghai (2)
My brothers were often away from home because of their studies, and my mother would take the opportunity to mistreat me. Whenever I sat down at the piano, she would nag about how my mother didn't understand music, so I was musically illiterate. Once, I defended my mother and loudly told her: My father once told a guest that my mother "played Chopin's Fantasy-Impromptu with flowing grace."
"Hmph!" Sweetie's mother was quite indignant. "That's just for foreign guests. They all like to brag. Those people are shameless, ill-mannered, and don't know right from wrong. Besides, every girl can play that. If you practice a little, you can play it too."
Then she poked my head with her finger. Sweet Mom said my father didn't need to praise her because they understood each other very well: "If a marriage is happy and harmonious, there is no need for extra words, because our fate was destined from the beginning."
At that time, I didn't know how to ask her, and my brothers didn't understand what love was. Even if they did, they wouldn't tell me. So I believe a good marriage is one where the husband respects his wife's privacy. My father never interfered in her life, never went into her room, and never asked her any questions. Following Sweet Mom's logic—since they all thought the same thing, there was no need for them to talk to each other.