Eating Vinegar

Sadie glanced down at her feet. The windblown dust from the Loess Plateau, along with a layer of local coal dust, had settled on her shoes. She watched as her husband leaned to the side of the busy road and hopped off his bicycle. The green leaves of a bunch of leeks poked out of a plastic bag that hung from his handlebars. In greeting, Sadie held up a complementary bottle of black vinegar.
     "Ni hao," he said.
     With her free hand, Sadie put her arm around Heng's waist and felt him stiffen. She pulled her arm away, remembering that she was in Western China, where a husband and wife must keep at least a foot apart while walking out in public.
     "How was your day?" he asked.
     "Terrible."
     "You must try to get along with Ma."
     "I do try. I really do. But your mother hates me."
     "How many students did you tutor today?"
     "Only about five, but it felt like a hundred."
     "The students are poor, and yet their parents pay you very well."
     "Yes, I know. But they use free chat to criticize me."
     "You could do with a little self-criticism."
     "What do you mean?"
     "You have to constrain yourself. You're not in the U.S. any more."
     "But, Heng, the students hassle me. They ask me if all American wives have lovers and if grown kids refuse to care for their old parents."
     "It's true in America that old people are put in institutions or abandoned. Didn't you tell me about Granny dumping?"
     "Yes, but that's no excuse for them to mock me. They point out how big I am. They stare at my feet and then they giggle."

<  2  >

     "So you have big feet. You're my all-American girl."

They strolled through the work unit to the large parking shed, where Heng and everyone else who lived and worked at Wei Teachers College stored their bicycles. And then they dragged their feet to the apartment block, where on the second floor they shared a small apartment with his parents.
     "We must make this work," he said. "Or my friends and students will laugh at me and not just because my wife has big feet."
     Sadie scowled at him.

When they reached the front door, they ducked under a pair of Ma's underpants that were drying in the doorway and then followed the pungent smell of garlic to the kitchen balcony, where Ma took the vinegar from Sadie and the leeks from Heng. When Sadie offered to help with the cooking, Ma rebuffed her.
     "Maybe you don't know how," she said in the Shaanxi dialect.
     It wasn't the first time that Heng's mother scoffed at Sadie's offer to help with the cooking.
     Sadie stood there awkwardly with nothing to do but watch Ma's small, but most capable, hands wield the heavy kitchen cleaver — what, in America, Sadie would have called a meat cleaver — with such dexterity that the radish and carrot and ginger were diced into tiny, perfect cubes.
     Heng spoke with his mother, but Sadie couldn't make out much of what was said. She heard laoshi, the word for teacher. Earlier that day, she had tried to explain to her mother-in-law that she had been a teacher in America.
     As if to be rid of her, Ma handed Sadie a broom. It was time for the sweep of the day, one of the few chores Ma trusted her American daughter-in-law to do. Sadie, feeling like a big oaf, bent over the short-handled broom and grudgingly swept the concrete floor.
     The young woman had to heed the whims of Heng's parents, and they had decided that Sadie should not go out to work, but should stay in the back bedroom tutoring drop-ins. There were many college students who came by to see Sadie, believing that learning English, especially spoken American English, was a ticket out of poverty. But, if she taught English classes at the college, it would bring unwanted attention to the family. Heng, respecting tradition, agreed with his parents.

<  3  >

Later that night, as they lay in bed together, Heng said, "Let me see those big feet of yours."
     Sadie grinned and stuck out her feet. "Do you have a foot fetish?" she asked.
     He massaged her feet as she pretended to moan with pleasure.
     Playing the hapless lover, Heng spoke Mandarin in a tone filled with yearning.
     "What are you saying?" Sadie asked.
     "I'm reciting a poem."
     "A love poem?"
     "Yes, from the late Song Dynasty."
     "What's it about?"
     "It's about a sad young woman whose feet fit in the palms of her lover's hands."
     "Why is she sad?"
     "Her feet hurt when she dances for him."
     "Bound feet?"
     "Yes. That was the custom."
     Continuing to massage Sadie's feet, Heng applied greater pressure. He bent her toes way under to the soles of her feet and folded the arch.
     "Ouch!" What are you doing?
     "Relax. I'm making your feet smaller."
     "Stop! Stop it, right now! You're hurting me."
     "You're not in America any more. Something can be done about this."
     "This?" she asked.
     He smiled. "Your feet may not fit in the palms of my hands, but they are perfectly formed. You are a half-Guanyin."
     "What's that?"
     "A woman with a beautiful face and natural feet."