The Seventh Day: A Novel by Hua Yu

Author:Hua, Yu [Hua, Yu]
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9780804197861
Publisher: Knopf Doubleday Publishing Group
Published: 2015-01-12T16:00:00+00:00

Over a year ago, soon after I moved into the bedsit, there lived next door a pair of young lovers, their hair dyed in garish colors. They left early and returned late each day and I didn’t know their names and didn’t know what kinds of jobs they did. Their hair changed color practically every week: green, yellow, red, brown, multicolored—black was the only color I never saw. However their hair changed color, the two of them always had hair of the same hue—“sweetheart color” was what they called it. After a month I learned that they worked in a hairdressing salon. According to my landlord, they were not actual hairdressers, but simply hairwashers. During my third month at the bedsit, they moved out.

I could hear everything they said and did in the next room, for the wall blocked my vision but presented little obstacle to my hearing. When they made love, their bed rattled and shook and I heard panting and groaning and yelling; almost every evening the room next door would resound with tumultuous noise.

Their shaky finances often led to arguments. Once I heard the girl shouting through her sobs that she wasn’t going to go on living with a down-and-outer like him. She wanted to marry the scion of some wealthy family, for that way she wouldn’t need to work her fingers to the bone and could just play mahjong every day to her heart’s content. The guy said he’d had enough of living in penury with her—he wanted to be partner to some rich lady, live in a villa, and drive a sports car. Each went on and on describing his or her own brilliant prospects as a way of putting the other down, vowing to part company the next day, the sooner to embark on a glorious future. But the next morning they carried on as though nothing at all had happened, leaving their bedsit hand in hand, off to the salon for another long day at their tiring, low-paying jobs.

In their most heated argument, the guy struck the girl. She had been talking about a girlfriend of hers who had left the countryside the same time she did. They were from the same village, it seemed, and this other girl worked behind the counter at a nightclub. When a customer took a fancy to her, she would charge a thousand yuan for sex or two thousand if she spent the whole night with him. She and the nightclub divided the proceeds sixty-forty, sixty percent to her and forty percent to the club, and thus she could earn thirty or forty thousand yuan a month. After three years in the game, she had accumulated a number of regulars who would call her up to arrange a session, and that way she didn’t need to share her earnings with the club and could make up to seventy thousand a month. The girl said that her friend had recommended her to the nightclub and the manager was ready to interview her.

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