Katherine Read Online Free PDF Page B

referred to anything exotic that way. She caught everyone’s attention but Lion Head’s. Jasmine looked at Lion Head with a pitiful expression. She was staring at him so hard that her O-shaped mouth looked like the spout of a teapot.
    Jasmine looked timid but she had the heart of a scorpion. She was “retired” from the military. She was supposed to be a radio engineer but she knew nothing about radios. I tried to befriend her until I learned what happened to a fellow student. A male classmate once was joking with her and called her “Bird Brain.” The next day she had her father send this man to a remote rehabilitation camp on the charge that he had “humiliated and attacked a Party member.” I was afraid of people like Jasmine. Others said that Jasmine was really as soft as she claimed to be. Today she was soft because Lion Head was nearby. How could you forget someone was capable of such cruelty? You don’t send a person to die just because he stepped on your toes.
    Jasmine buried her head in her text before Katherine could ask her her opinion. Katherine sighed and said, “Well, I suppose, I have a lot to learn about the inner workings of the Chinese mind.”
    *   *   *
    L ion Head made a big fake nose from flour and put it on during the class break to imitate a western weatherman giving the weather report. He had us rolling on the floor with laughter. Katherine was watching him too. She seemed amazed. Lion Head had always beena fast learner. He told us that when he was ten years old he was sent to a special school to study Russian, French, German, and English because he had a “red” background—three generations of pure proletarians. He grew up by the sea. He loved water and the open air. He ate live lobsters and crabs and never got sick.
    Lion Head made everyone in the class uncomfortable. His mind was too slippery to grasp. Except Katherine. She adored him. Smiling, she told him that his English was too good for the class. He said he didn’t mind; he just wanted Katherine’s permission to sit in. He worked for the government’s foreign policy office. He was the district Party secretary’s number-four assistant. It was a
xian-zhi
position—a no-job job—like many in the government. He couldn’t care less about it as long they paid him his salary. He was even paid to go to school. He came because he liked to chat with foreigners whenever he could to improve his English.
    Lion Head and Katherine always had energetic conversations going at break time. The class would surround them while they talked to practice listening comprehension. We grew jealous of Lion Head. He stroked Katherine with his wit. He made her laugh. Most of the time we didn’t understand what they were laughing about, but we laughed with them so as not to appear stupid. Somehow they knew that and it made them laugh even more.
    *   *   *
    T hrough Lion Head we learned more about Katherine’s purpose for visiting China. Katherine was here to teach English, but she was working on a book as well—a research study on Chinese women in the eighties. She explained to us that it was part of her dissertation for her Ph.D. degree in America. She was “playing piano for the cows”—we had no idea what a Ph.D. degree was, not to mention a “dissertation.” She said that it didn’t matter whetherwe understood the American educational system. She just needed to talk to people.
    She loved to talk to strangers on the street. She was open and trusting. She was foolish. I predicted that she would get hurt by saying the wrong things to people and then she’d get reported. She didn’t seem to care. Her Chinese was getting better every day. Every Chinese word she pronounced sounded funny to me, the music off. Still, I liked her confidence, the confidence to confront, to learn, to tackle, and to get her way.
    I corrected her accent once when she pronounced
bi-zi
—nose—like
bie-zhu
—crippled pig. She asked if she could pay me to