Mr and Ms Liu

Mr. and Mrs. Liu

Ying QIAN

Mr. Liu climbed the staircases and passed through cement corridors, the most common kind one finds in apartment buildings from the 70's, where residents of the building, along the corridor, stored chairs with broken legs, plastic jars and sacks of unknown content. Rays of the afternoon sun just entered the building through the westward windows, leaving big blocks of light on the bare floor. Bathed in the warmth of sunlight, tiny powders of dust were floating with irregular energy.

Mr. and Mrs. Liu lived on the fifth floor in a three-room apartment with the family of their youngest daughter, who just bought an apartment and would move out the next week. The apartment, soon to lose the bright colors of the daughter's silk browse and her little son's bell-ring laughter, would again constitute the old couple's world in its entirety. The rooms were coated with aged white paint. Taking up the already precious space in the suite was a random collection of simple, used furniture, abandoned by the three children who moved out at different times and picked up by the old couple because "they are still good wood after all." On the back of the bathroom door, about ten half-dry towels hung like dead fishes. And the water tap from time to time made noises, though the leakage had stopped.

At the dawn of the 21st century, Mr. And Mrs. Liu's home was in a cruder condition than most Shanghainese homes. Mrs. Liu had always envied the Shanghainese wives' ability to create a nice and fashionable home on a low budget. They seemed to know how to make use of every inch of indoor space. Even if they had only one room, between the sleeping area and the guest area they would hang a curtain of beads. They would come out to meet the guest at just the right time, and the room would all of a sudden be filled with the motion and sound of a cascade of beads running into each other. Mrs. Liu found that amazing, but when she tied a bead curtain in her own home, she could not fall asleep at night. All the time the bead curtain seemed to move and make noises, even when others insisted that it should be hung perfectly still.

Mrs. Liu came to Shanghai in 1956, from a small village in the hills of Shandong. The first two years she pasted her red paper cuts on the windows. The paper cuts stayed for a while and then were eaten by the winter wind. She stopped making them in the third year, but never did she stop feeling cold. In Shandong, when it was snowing outside, the house would be warm, on the stove soup would be boiling, and the hot air would be channeled into the bottom of the bed, heat it up together with the people sitting on it, and eventually swirl out through the chimney. The bed, made of earth, would be broken apart every year for the inside to be cleaned. The black, oily residual from the smoke accumulated inside the bed would be released to nourish the fields. Arriving in Shanghai, Mrs. Liu set up her apartment without thinking about the functional division of the bedroom, the kitchen, or the living room. To her, every room was a room. It had to be used like a room-for eating, sitting, sleeping, altogether in one warm place. This warm place, however, could not be found in a Shanghai home, for no room was heated. And the bed, made of iron, was cold every night.

Mrs. Liu came to Shanghai in 1956, six years after Mr. Liu marched into this city with the People's Liberation Army. Mr. Liu became a soldier in 1946, at age fourteen, and at age nineteen he was already among many war heroes, having lost hearing in the right ear and crippled the right leg. He was injured in the battle to liberate Shanghai. Following the chaos and the explosion that knocked him out, Mr. Liu's first sight of Shanghai was a beautiful nurse speaking to him from above. She instantly realized that he could not hear properly, and leaned over to his left. Mr. Liu at that time heard, for the first time, what he called later "the softest dialect in the world."

Like Mrs. Liu, Mr. Liu grew up in Shandong, though in a different village. The family was poor, so the parents decided to pick only one out of the five children to send to school in the nearest town and Mr. Liu was the lucky one. When he finished elementary school, this fourteen-year old was already the most educated person in the village, and became an elementary school teacher himself. The Japanese came and went during his childhood years. The villagers hid in deep dry wells where sweet potatoes were stored, and occasionally a villager or two would be killed, either by the Japanese or by the shortage of oxygen in these wells. But it was easy to hide and survive in this hilly area. There, fields were greed and woods abounded. No one was in fear.

When Mr. Liu became a teacher, the grassroots of the communist party had already grown in Shandong's villages. At fourteen Mr. Liu vaguely longed for happiness, but he could not really put the longing into words or designs other than, like everyone else said, to have his own land and sit with wife and kids on a warm bed. Prospect of this sweet life came, almost unexpectedly, with the opportunities offered by the party and the army, yet it seemed like a fragile flower fluttering in uncertain winds. The nationalist and the communist armies fought back and forth. And villagers said among themselves, "We should fight to protect our land because this is a good thing that we have got." There was not much difference between fighting with iron guns and plowing with iron tools. The villagers said, "Show 'em that we Shandong has the most warm-hearted and fearless people with straight-guts." And even the women nudged their men, "Look, our neighbor joined the army. What a brave man."

Mr. Liu did not finish teaching the first semester. He and his uncle joined the army together, and the whole village saw them off with songs and flowers adorning their chests. He followed the army from village to village, and was surprised to find that most villages already knew about the people's army and welcomed them. This was the work of the underground party network, which had established presence in almost all villages. And the army itself was a good army. When they rested in villages, the soldiers helped the villagers to work the field, clean the yard, and they fetched water from the nearest river and filled every home's water tank. At night soldier were not allowed to sleep on the only bed the villagers normally had for the entire family. They slept on haystacks, on hard ground, in the courtyard. The smell of hay and the vision of a whole skyful of stars had visited Mr. Liu's dreams to this day.

The villagers liked the army and the young men in the army received gifts from the young girls in the villages they passed through-eggs, embroidered needle-thread-pocket, knit-grass shoes with thick bottoms made out of layers of cotton cloth. Where the army fought, everyone in the nearby villages pooled their food and water, moved the injured from the battlefield, and some followed the army carrying simple coffins so that no dead body would be dishonored. Mr. Liu received a pair of shoes with the best needlework anyone could find. What was more magical was that after his first injury, either by accident or by design, he was taken to the house of the girl who sewed his battle shoes. The rest happened so naturally, like when one went to sleep one would naturally smell the scent of hay.

Mr. Liu's troop eventually went outside of Shandong. His was the first battalion to enter Shanghai and liberate it from the Nationalists, subsequently the first generation of cadres running the new Shanghai included many Shandong people like Mr. Liu, who, after recovering from his second injury, was sent to a party cadre school to study machineries. The beautiful nurse and Mr. Liu exchanged a few letters, but there was so much work for Mr. Liu to do. He was so immersed in building the new Shanghai that when he eventually had a break and went to visit the girl, the girl's family had already disappeared-"moved to Hong Kong with their gold," the servants said, as if the girl were the trickiest capitalist. Mr. Liu was frightened. He for the first time in his life fell into a sensation that twisted his Shandong straight guts. He did not look at another woman for the next seven years. He visited Shandong at the end of his seventh year working in Shanghai and with little difficulty found the girl who gave him the pair of shoes. She was already married and then widowed, had a two-year-old daughter. Mr. Liu said to her, come to Shanghai with me.

"Shanghai!" The future Mrs. Liu pondered. Life had made so many turns for her lately that she had thought nothing would take her by surprise any more. But now her water tank was filled. The moon went swimming in it, a small bright circle. "Shanghai," she stood in the courtyard, amazed.

"Sweet water there?" Finally she asked. "Lots." The re-appeared man said, "The Suzhou Creek, the Huangpu River. Lots." So she packed that night.

The couple now lives in the Xu-hui District, in the heart of Shanghai. Together they have lived here for 44 years. Mrs. Liu's eyes have gone half-blind. When the two of them go to the vegetable market together, the husband would hold the hand of the wife and lead the way. But now they are home, they are not going anywhere. The afternoon sun and Christmas music from a nearby shopping mall have entered the room through the windows.

(The author is a freelance writer based in Shanghai.)