5
I quickly filed for divorce.
As I packed my things, Chu Thư Ngôn still leaned against the doorway, looking down at me.
“I won’t agree to a divorce.”
“Thanh Tang, what do you even want? Haven’t I treated you well all these years?”
Unlike the men in the village, Chu Thư Ngôn wasn’t an alcoholic and didn’t hit women. He had worked his way up to become a senior executive at a major state-owned enterprise, and we had a house and a car. In other people’s eyes, marrying Chu Thư Ngôn meant I’d hit the jackpot.
At my age, asking for a divorce out of jealousy—everyone said I must have lost my mind.
My elderly mother and my son called me all night. My son urged me, at my age, not to cause a scene anymore; my mother told me to just muddle through the rest of my life.
I asked myself, too: Life was going along just fine, so why couldn’t we go on?
I told Chu Thư Ngôn, “At least take me back to my hometown one more time.”
It was the first request I’d made of him in all those days.
Chu Thư Ngôn suddenly looked up, his eyes filled with astonishment, and readily agreed.
My hometown was so remote that we couldn’t drive past the village entrance, so Chu Thư Ngôn and I had to get out and walk.
It was an old road we’d walked side by side countless times.
He had to take it to visit my family. We had to take it when we sneaked out to catch fish in the pond. He had to take it when he went up the mountain to pick flowers for me.
He even had to take it when he came to my house to marry me.
After we’d walked for a while, he suddenly began to cry and said he knew what I wanted now.
“Thanh Tang, I’m sorry. I was wrong.”
We stopped beneath an old banyan tree.
Its lush canopy spread overhead like an umbrella. The spring breeze seemed to carry the resolute voice of the eighteen-year-old boy he’d once been.
“Thanh Tang, once I’ve made something of myself, I’ll give you a good life. I promise.”
Not one word mentioned love, yet every sentence was love.
Now it had all vanished on the wind.
6
Chu Thư Ngôn and I didn’t have an arranged marriage. We’d been childhood sweethearts, growing up together from the time we were little.
We’d lain on the rooftop counting stars and talking about school and our ideals; beneath the old banyan, we ate mulberries we’d picked with our own hands.
But he was three years older than me. He got into college, and the splendor of the big city and Ôn Như Ngọc’s talents dazzled him.
He forgot about the girl back home waiting for news of him, and he forgot the promises he’d made all those years ago.
Until I, too, got into the same college. Until Ôn Như Ngọc’s parents looked down on him as a country bumpkin and did everything they could to keep them apart.
Until Grandma came to the Chu family’s home with a hoe and asked Chu Thư Ngôn’s parents what they thought.
Chu Thư Ngôn kept his promise and married me. That day, drums thundered and the road was strewn with bright red firecrackers.
Thirty years ago, at the end of the road, Grandma tried to hold back her tears and force a smile.
Thirty years later, at the end of the road, Grandma strained to rise on her toes, craning her neck as she watched for us.
Grandma was very old, but her eyes were still sharp. She glared at Chu Thư Ngôn and wouldn’t even let him inside.
With trembling hands, she lit a long string of firecrackers hanging by the door, saying she was celebrating my freedom.
Bang, bang.
Firecracker scraps filled the air, staining Chu Thư Ngôn’s eyes and mine red.
Grandma took my hand, her own trembling.
“There, there, Tang Tang. Don’t cry anymore. Grandma’s here.”
I was hardly young anymore, but in front of Grandma, I was still that little girl with pigtails and a runny nose.
I didn’t have to wait on the whole family or calmly handle the divorce. If I was hungry, I could eat; if I was tired, I could sleep.
If I wanted to cry, I could cry.
7
Grandma listened quietly as I told her everything, then stroked my head.
“My precious girl, you’ve been through so much.”
Tears welled up in my eyes again.
The mother who gave birth to me and the son who shared my blood kept telling me not to let people laugh at me, but neither of them had ever asked how I felt.
Was it exhausting to care for a bedridden person for ten years?
Was it painful to have a husband who cheated for twenty years?
Only Grandma had.
She stood up. Her tiny feet carried her slowly into the room, where she took an unremarkable tin from the faded bedside table.
Looking closely, it seemed to be an old mooncake tin.
“Chu Thư Ngôn won’t agree to divorce you because he’s trying to trick you into thinking no one in your family will stand by you.”
Grandma said, each word deliberate:
“He may have power and connections, but he’ll still have to ask whether this old woman agrees.”
She opened the tin, its paint peeling.
Red five-pointed stars glittered in the light.
One medal of military merit after another lay quietly inside that unremarkable mooncake tin.
Each one told of the highest honors earned in those years of bloodshed.
I stared in disbelief.
Grandma was a country woman with tiny bound feet, so unsteady she could barely walk. How could she have so many medals of military merit?
8
Grandma’s name was Tưởng Mãn Xuân. She was born in a remote village during the Republican era, where neither new ideas nor war had made an impact. The village still considered bound feet beautiful.
Grandma had a rebellious streak from birth. To escape having her feet bound, she even climbed a huge banyan tree and went hungry for two days and nights.
“Would you… like some?”
When Grandma was so hungry she nearly fainted, she heard a clear voice. Looking down, she saw a young man holding a handful of ripe mulberries and gazing up at her.
The wind rustled the branches and leaves above, and dappled light shimmered through them, hazy and indistinct.
That was my grandfather.
In the end, Grandma couldn’t defy her parents. They bound her feet, breaking her fair, delicate feet into a triangular shape. Every step brought bone-deep pain.
When she grew up, she married my grandfather as she’d hoped. In that backward village, the husband plowed and the wife wove, and they raised a family.
The times were chaotic, and eventually the war reached the village. The men from every household went off to the front, and my grandfather was no exception.
After that, every household wore mourning.
New ideas came along, too.
Grandma became close friends with “Cô Phí,” an independent, free-spirited woman.
And so, still dressed in mourning, Grandma slung a rifle over her shoulder and set off unsteadily for the front.
Together with her fellow countrymen, Grandma drove out the Japanese devils. Of their small unit, she was the only one who survived.
And with those tiny feet, less than four inches long, she endured the pain as she climbed over snowy mountains and crossed grasslands, traveling more than twenty thousand miles.
Wearing the shackles of the old era, she stood against its dark gates and brought the light of a new China.
After the war, Grandma kept only the medals of military merit that bore witness to her bloody years of fighting. Then she returned to her village and became an ordinary farmer.
“Grandma must risk her life to defend her country, without caring about fame or fortune.”
9
I stared at Grandma, stunned.
Though old and frail, her back—having endured a hundred years of darkness—remained straight and proud, never bending.
How could I use my little love to tarnish the glory of her past?
But Grandma didn’t care. All she knew was that her granddaughter had been bullied, and she had to use the proof of the blood she’d once shed and the risks she’d taken to win justice for her.
“Tang Tang, do you know Auntie Phí?” Grandma said, each word deliberate. “I want you to be free.”
I shook my head. Looking at Grandma’s tiny feet in their reddish-brown cloth shoes, I suddenly thought of that red handbag. I’d seen it a long time ago.
We ran into Chu Thư Ngôn outside a restaurant in the mall.
A group of people stood behind him, all looking successful. Among them was the owner of that red handbag.
They saw Grandma and me, too. One of them quickly noticed Grandma’s tiny feet and joked:
“I never knew Director Chu had a remnant of feudalism in his family.”
Chu Thư Ngôn’s face immediately darkened.
Wearing a perfectly tailored qipao, Ôn Như Ngọc took a packet of tissues from her red handbag and handed it to the speaker. Gently, she told them they still had food on their mouth after eating.
Chu Thư Ngôn and I both looked at her gratefully.
As I turned to leave, I could feel someone’s scrutinizing gaze following me the whole way.
When we got home, Chu Thư Ngôn and I had a huge fight.
“Good thing Như Ngọc helped smooth things over today.”
“Don’t bring Grandma here so often from now on. She’s a relic of the old era. She should just stay quietly in the village.”
At the time, I was so angry that he looked down on Grandma that I didn’t notice how intimately he addressed Ôn Như Ngọc.
Looking back now, I realize the signs between them had been there all along.
But my grandmother had clearly been a victim of the feudal era. Why did they look down on her like that?