Striking the Balance

Not far from the station was Porcelain Mouth Street,Tz’u Ch’i K’ou, whose clay was famous. She walked north up the street, then turned off onto one of thehutungs, Peking’s innumerable lanes and alleys that branched from it. She was learning her way through the maze; she had to double back and retrace her steps only once before she found theHsiao Shih, the Small Market.

Another name for that market, less often heard but always in the back of everyone’s mind, was the Thieves’ Market. From what Liu Han had been told, not everything in the market was stolen goods; some of the trash so loudly hawked had been legally acquired but was being sold here to create the illusion that the customer was getting a bargain.

“Brass plates!” “Cabbage!” “Chopsticks!” “Mah-jongg tiles!” “Noodles!” “Medicine to cure you of the clap!” “Piglets and fresh pork!” “Peas and bean sprouts!” The noise was deafening. Only by Peking standards could this be reckoned a small market. In most cities, it would have been the central emporium; all by itself, it seemed to Liu Han as big as the camp in which the little scaly devils had placed her after bringing her down from the airplane that never landed.

In the surging crowds, she was just one among many. Anonymity suited her. The kind of attention she got these days was not what she wanted.

A man selling fine porcelain cups that certainly looked as if they might have been stolen saw her, pointed, and rocked his hips back and forth. She walked over to him with a large smile on her face. He looked half eager, half apprehensive.

She made her voice high and sweet, like a singsong girl’s. Still smiling, she said, “I hope it rots off. I hope it shrinks back into your body so you can’t find it even if you’ve tied a string around its tiny little end. If you do find it, I hope you never, ever get it up.”

He stared at her, his mouth falling open. Then he reached under the table that held his wares. By the time he’d pulled out a knife, Liu Han had a Japanese pistol pointed at his midsection. “You don’t want to try that,” she said. “You don’t even want to think about trying that.”

The man gaped foolishly, eyes and mouth wide and round as those of the goldfish in their ornamental ponds not far away. Liu Han turned her back and walked away. As soon as a few people got between her and him, he started screaming abuse at her.

She was tempted to go back and put a bullet in his belly, but shooting every man in Peking who mocked her would have wasted a lot of ammunition, and her peasant upbringing made her hate the idea of waste.

A minute later, another merchant recognized her. He followed her with his eyes but didn’t say anything. By the standards she’d grown used to, that was a restrained response. She paid him the compliment of ignoring him.

Before, I had only Hsia Shou-Tao to worry about,she thought bitterly.Thanks to the little scaly devils and their vile cinemas, I have hundreds. A great many men had watched her yield to the desires of Bobby Fiore and the other men aboard the airplane that never came down. Having seen that, too many of them supposed she would be eager to yield to their desires. The little devils had succeeded in making her notorious in Peking.

Someone patted her backside from behind. She lashed out with a shoe and caught him in the shin. He howled curses. She didn’t care. Notorious or not, she refused to vanish into a hole. The scaly devils had done their best to destroy her as an instrument of the People’s Liberation Army. If they succeeded, she would never see her daughter again.

She had no intention of letting them succeed.

They had made her an object of derision, as they’d planned. But they had also made her an object of sympathy. Women could tell that she’d been coerced in some of the films the little devils had taken of her. And the People’s Liberation Army had mounted an aggressive propaganda campaign to educate the people of Peking, men and women alike, as to the circumstances in which she’d found herself. Even some men were sympathetic to her now.

Once or twice, she’d heard foreign devil Christian missionaries talking in their bad Chinese about martyrs. At the time, she hadn’t understood the concept-what point to suffering when you didn’t have to? These days, she was a martyr herself, and exploiting the role for all it was worth.

She came to the little stall of a woman who was selling carp that looked like ugly goldfish. She picked one up by the tail. “Are these fish fresh?” she asked dubiously.

“Just caught this morning,” the woman answered.

“Why do you expect me to believe that?” Liu Han sniffed at the carp. In grudging tones, she said, “Well, maybe. What do you want for them?”