I couldn’t recall which words were said in our home dialect and which in Mandarin. The heat of our argument hadn’t cooled in the least. The whole conversation could hardly come to a satisfactory end with the awkwardness of an urgent mix of our home dialect and Mandarin.
Hence our drinks were sucked dry, with a growing emotional distance between us two sisters.
Shortly afterwards, we reached the same station but took diff erent trains.
On the train, I was overwhelmed by a sketch of Mei. Her whole life was a gully. She never made a decision on her own. Even circling around this uneventful massage life was due to Ling. All her life, she had been told to do things that she had no personal opinion about but acted simply to please others. When she was little, being the eldest, she was told to help look after her young siblings. At school, she was told there was no need for her to study hard because she was not good student material. After four and a half years of partly studying and partly working on the farm, she was told to leave the village so as to melt the ice on the top of father’s mountain of debts. No sooner had the debts been mostly paid off than she was told to marry Bing. As soon as Bing turned out to be a compulsive gambler and a ruthless loser, she was told to remember the feudal morality of male-dominated society: Marry a chicken, follow the chicken. Marry a dog, follow the dog.