Katherine Read Online Free PDF Page A

dictate that I haven’t
wu
ed enough—I haven’t understood that one’s spiritual life was meant to be lived separately from one’s practical life on earth; I was to embrace not-knowing. Still, I had no faith in what the Great Void promised. I didn’t want to live the lives of my grandmother and mother. I wanted to think and act with one hand and one head.
    *   *   *
    I studied her eyes, her pencil-thin eyebrows and velvet eyelashes. We were like fish swimming around her, smelling her and imagining how delicious she would taste.
    The men in the class were acting strange. They had a thousand questions, they were suddenly slow learners. They found excuses to ask for special attention from Katherine. Their faces turned red when they were called on to read with the teacher. They couldn’t pronounce “Mr. Brown.” They said, “Mr. Belong.” Katherine would come near and correct them. Smiling like an opening flower, she would say, “Mr. Big Lee, now watch how I move my mouth, it’s Brown, Brown, not Belong. Yes, that’s right. What about you, Mr. Little Lee, how come you’re having the same problem here? It’s Brown, not Balloon.”
    One man would always go speechless when asked a question. He sat two desks away from me. He was tall and thin, with shining black hair pasted onto his skull. A long face, a pair of slanting eyes that rode over a too-small nose, eagle shoulders, a little hunchbacked. His name was Jie-fang—Liberation. Liberation was also a borrowed worker-student. He was from the Hangchou Red Wheat Tractor Factory. Because he was an outstanding worker, the factory paid for him to go to school. I once asked Liberation whether he would go back to the factory after he finished school. “Never, never, never.” He spit the words out. I completely understood. He had paid too high a price to get out. “I have been a eunuch for too long. It’s time to be a man,” he whispered into my ear.
    Liberation gave himself an English name, Jim. We all laughed because he made the word sound like “hen” in Chinese. Liberation did not mind. He said he changed his name for Katherine’s convenience. We all knew it was a lie. He did it to get Katherine’s attention. In a way, we all wanted to do the same thing—changeour names. But really what we wanted was to change our lives by changing our names.
    There were no good English names that suited the original meaning of my name, Zebra. In Chinese, “zebra” meant “a wild character, a unique spirit.” I wondered what Katherine’s name meant in English. One of my classmates asked her. She said that it had no meaning, it was just a name. I didn’t believe her. How could a name carry no meaning? It was too important a matter to be neglected. Maybe she just didn’t want to tell us. Maybe she didn’t feel she knew us well enough to explain. I watched her more carefully still.
    *   *   *
    J im was a timid mouse in Katherine’s presence, but out of her sight he was a bold cat. He told everyone that in his last life he was an English comedian. He told us English jokes. He would explain the jokes and laugh even when we didn’t get them. We admired his knowledge anyway. One day he told us that he had learned what Katherine’s name truly meant. He said that there were two ways to spell it, either with a
K
or with a
C
, but they meant the same thing. “Catherine” was a philosophical concept meaning “the process of purifying emotion through art.” Jim also found in the dictionary a clue as to what had brought Katherine to China. Cathay, a form of her name, he said, meant “ancient Chinese poetry.” Jim believed that at some point in the future we would better understand the significance of this discovery.
    Jim aroused our curiosity. We all ran to look up “Catherine” in our English-Chinese dictionaries to see if what he said was true. We were not disappointed: “The process of purifying emotion through art.” I carefully recorded the phrase in my