The Pidgin Warrior by Tianyi Zhang

Author:Tianyi Zhang
Language: eng
Format: azw3
ISBN: 9781911221098
Publisher: Balestier Press
Published: 2019-07-15T04:00:00+00:00

8

In Love, Forget Not the Path of Good

Why dintcha come to my place? I toldja to come! Tonight’s the Woman Warrior of National Salvation!””

“Uh, I don’t know the way.”

“Why didn’t ya just call a rickshaw then? Today you kin come over to my place… my house and eat, whadya think? I’ll eat with ya!”

And who is this speaking a mouthful of perfect Mandarin Chinese?

The Woman Warrior of National Salvation, Miss He, He Manli—Mary Ho!

The man is our great warrior, Mr. Shi Zhaochang. Miss He had come to Shi Zhaochang’s home and dragged him off, hailing a couple of rickshaws to take them back to where she lived.

They sat next to each other. There were men and women coming and going in the room. Their faces looked more or less the same to Shi Zhaochang. The men all wore suits that started coming out in the first year of the revolution, some of them even carried those foreign guitars. The women were showing a good deal of leg, with heavily powered faces, running back and forth belting out:

“The deep chill is such a joy! The deep chill is such a joy!”

There were a few men playing music in the lower-floor guest room and the women were warming up their voices. While Miss He was chatting with Shi Zhaochang, she would occasionally shout out, “Wrong! You have to wait half a beat!”

Shi Zhaochang didn’t know what to do, his whole body was trembling. Even his tongue was trembling. Whenever he spoke, he stuttered.

The Woman Warrior of National Salvation held a lit cigarette. She only puffed at it once or twice before stuffing it in Shi Zhaochang’s mouth. He started, afraid that she was displaying more of her gongfu, but: so very soft.

He took a drag and looked at the paintings on the wall. They were all of foreign women, three quarters were nearly flashing their butts and the other quarter were—Ah, wearing stealth suits!

“Those women, those… Those are all Women Warriors? Foreign, right?”

She barely took a glance at them.

“Sure!”

“So many… So many…”

Suddenly she sat down on his lap. Suddenly her right hand hooked around his neck. She faced him: there was only an inch between their faces. As she opened up those painted-red lips to speak to him, a scent of sandalwood competed in his nose with a scent of something like dead rat.

“You got a lover?”

“What?”

“Do you have a girl that… that loves ya, that’s it. You’re…”

“I certainly don’t… I certainly don’t…” He sputtered a long while. He tried to tell Miss He about looking for a Woman Warrior with whom he could do good deeds.

“Well, ain’t I a Woman Warrior of National Salvation? We’ve gotta save the nation!”

Her meaning was perfectly clear: She was that Woman Warrior. He must go with her. The disaster was that he couldn’t come up with a single sentence to say. His locked-up mouth just wouldn’t work. He looked at her face, looked and looked until one sentence burst out:

“How old are you?”

What a shock: She hadn’t had anyone ask her age since she’d been a kid.

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