Lion's Head, Four Happiness by Xiaomei Martell

Author:Xiaomei Martell
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9781448181308
Publisher: Random House

9

Golden Phoenix and No. 1 Middle School

THE RIVER FLOWED to the sound of music. Not far from our house, a soprano, a plump young woman, was singing by the river. Every morning, she would start with some basic scales before singing some amazing pieces, which my mother told me were from western operas. I loved her beautiful long dark hair; she looked so elegant with it hanging loose to below her shoulders. It was quite daring to wear long hair like that in our city, quite different from the plaits, pigtails or plain short hair that we had been used to, and it was certainly a new trend that I had started to notice lately. Previously, flaunting long hair loose like that would have been considered decadent and would most probably have been publicly criticised. ‘You should eat plenty of sesame,’ our neighbour Madam Jiao advised me authoritatively when I said that I envied the long dark hair.

I saw the lady every morning on the riverbank where I went to practise my English by speaking out loud. I loved the fresh air and the open space, and besides I did not feel so embarrassed at my far from perfect pronunciation, because my audience, a herd of Mr Ma’s Friesian cows, were far from critical. Grazing happily on the meadows, they would occasionally look up and stare at me, with a slight look of bewilderment. I carried on nevertheless.

Singing western songs and speaking English publicly were new things at that time, which we could not have done, or would not have dared to do, before. I had started learning English some years earlier during a visit from my uncle who lived in Tianjin, a city near Beijing. I remember him spending quite some time tuning our Panda radio, with his tall, thin body leaning against our walnut desk, occasionally looking a little puzzled. Madam Guan often complimented my uncle on his ‘western’ nose, which embarrassed him a little. She used to say that his nose, bigger and higher bridged compared to the smaller and flatter noses of most Chinese, reminded her of a handsome European she had seen in Tianjin where she had lived briefly as a young girl in the 1930s. ‘The French knew how to build nice houses, and my word, those amazing wooden staircases,’ Madam Guan used to exclaim when entertaining us with the story of her visiting, as a young girl, one of those large houses in the French Concession. ‘Mind you, the squeaking floorboards would drive me mad now,’ she often added, with a nostalgic smile, between taking yet another deep drag on her cigarette. I didn’t have much idea about what Madam Guan was talking about at that time, except that I faintly understood that under some unfair treaties, certain territories in Tianjin, a port city, had been ceded by the Qing government to the French and British around the turn of the century. As to my uncle’s nose, since I had never seen a westerner in real life, I could not really relate to what she said about it at all.

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