The author with his wife, Zhai Lisha, at the Longmen Grottoes near Luoyang, 1984. Courtesy of Yan Lianke.

I was promoted to the rank of cadre in late 1982, with much fanfare. The next spring, I returned home in a blaze of glory, ready to meet a mate. 

Back then, if you were still unmarried at twenty-five, people said you’d been left on the shelf. Even so, I’d never, not in my whole life, thought about what kind of person I wanted to marry. I’d never considered how love would begin, how it might unfold. Not even what love was made of or how much it weighed, what proportion of its significance was emotional or physical, or which was more important: spiritual or sensual love. Now I think that’s like asking whether planting or harvesting matters more.

After dinner one night, by the light of a fifteen-watt lamp, everyone talked solemnly about my matchmaking session the next day. My sister would clean the house inside and out, while my mother would head out first thing in the morning to buy the ingredients for noodles with ground pork. As soon as the sun had warmed the rear courtyard, my father would be banished there and wouldn’t stir an inch, otherwise he’d start coughing, and phlegm would plague him for the rest of the day.

My father cheerfully accepted his assignment. He’d already planned to hide himself away during my date to prevent the girl from finding out about his chronic illness.

I felt bad making my father stay out of sight for the sake of a potential marriage, but the thought merely passed through my mind before I let it drift away. This was a battle we had to win. Time slipped by and soon the sun was rising, dazzling as always. The earth turned at the same steady rate. The trees by our front gate and on the village green were the same as they had been the day before, and the day before that. Our family, though, might never be the same again.

My father ducked into the rear courtyard right after breakfast. Sunlight and his radio were his constant companions, like gifts from life itself, the blood running through his veins. My mother had come back with the groceries and gotten busy in the kitchen. She didn’t have enough limbs and had to borrow Fourth Aunt-in-Law’s arms and legs too.

My date arrived sometime after ten, or maybe eleven, but anyway not at noon like she was supposed to. The woman worked in the distribution unit of our town’s retail center. She “had a position,” which meant she had things to accomplish in life. She had a town hukou, and her food was provided by the state, rather than a product of toiling in the fields. We made a fairly equal match. In the journey of life, we’d ended up on the same platform, or at least we were changing trains at the same station. 

The role of the matchmaker in Chinese marriages is an easily mocked amalgamation of chicanery, flattery, and lies. Yet over thousands of years of unflagging marital history, matchmakers have played an essential role. My matchmaker, the kind of older man one called Uncle, was a cadre from the next town. More importantly, this uncle was a lover of literature who’d read many books and had published poems in Peony, the local Luoyang literary magazine. The woman he’d picked for me was also literary, and her poems had also appeared in Peony. There we were, a trio of countryside litterateurs.

“You have a lot in common, there’ll be plenty to talk about,” the uncle had reassured me.

As they approached, some local children darted into our home to yell, “They’re coming! They’re coming!” 

My mother and sister shooed the kids away. Then they were here, the uncle striding ahead with my date behind him. She stepped over our threshold without any sign of shyness, chatting away with the matchmaker about some town business. She came inside, sat down, accepted the pocket egg that my mother quickly fried for her, stirred the sugar at the bottom of the bowl with her chopsticks, and rested one foot on the opposite knee, shaking her legs. 

Watching her from one side, I felt dumbstruck. This didn’t feel like a matchmaking session—a mystical, tender, yet enormously consequential romantic encounter. She behaved as if she’d come to our home for an inspection or field study. I stood there like a visitor, like a servant, until the uncle noticed and uttered the words, “Go on, sit.” 

Then the romance began. Outside, the paulownia and elm trees were in full bloom, and the fragrance of honeysuckle wafted unconstrained through our courtyard. The chickens and ducks weren’t interfering with our date, but nonetheless my mother and sister shooed them away, then decided to go out, leaving the vast courtyard, the house, and the silence to the uncle and the woman and me. I could hear footsteps in the street outside, the faint patter of insect-gnawed paulownia blossoms dropping through the air and hitting the ground.

Mother had given the uncle and the young woman each a plate with four pocket eggs, while I got two. Ten eggs, an offering to my romance. I can’t remember if the uncle finished his eggs, but I ate both of mine, while my date had only one before pushing the plate away. She didn’t like the earthy smell of countryside eggs, she said. As the uncle and I brought the plates to the kitchen, he said, “Look how generous she’s being. You’re an army officer, you could stand to be a bit more open.” When we got back to the living room, he claimed he had something to take care of and left me and her alone at the crossroads of fate.

Into this silence, our conversation unfolded. “You’ve had poems in Peony?”

She shot me a look full of pride.

“I’ve published a few short stories and a one-act play,” I said, trying to sound casual. “All in provincial magazines and the Wuhan-area army journal.”

“So what?” she said loudly, looking at me again, allowing her foot to sway in the air. I felt like her raised leg and shaking foot took up all the space and time, leaving me unable to say more. As if space and time were her private property, nothing to do with me. I fell quiet, but my silence alerted her: she noticed my eyes were fixed on her foot, lowered it to the floor and looked at me with an indescribable expression.

“My family is very poor,” I said to her. 

She seemed startled. “I know.”

“I suppose you haven’t heard that my father’s ill?”

“I have.” She looked at me solemnly, then abruptly changed the subject. “Is your unit going to war?”

“I don’t know.” I looked away.

Nothing more to say. My mother, my sister, and the matchmaker came back in with food for a courting couple. The first two bowls of noodles with ground pork went to my date and the matchmaker. The third bowl went to my father, still hidden in the rear courtyard. Despite the spring warmth, he had an old comforter over him. The radio at his feet was playing the Henan opera Chaoyang Village, and he was finishing my date’s leftover eggs. Grinning, he asked, “How’s it going?” I shook my head. 

“How come?” he asked. 

“As soon as she got here, she crossed her legs and kept shaking them.”

My father thought about that. “So she’s confident. She has a government job.”

“It’s because she looks down on us,” I blurted out with certainty.

He thought some more. “We don’t have to live together after you’re married. Tell her I won’t get in your way.”

I thought for what felt like a year. “We’ll see,” I said. 

A few days later, I went back to my unit. I wrote her a letter as soon as I arrived, and she replied half a month later. I wrote her again, and after twenty days received her second letter. I wrote her a third time and said, “If you think our relationship isn’t suitable, we can end things here.” 

She replied immediately. “You were the one who said it won’t work out, not me. Thank you for that!”

And so this relationship, which began with such clamor, fizzled out. A quick beginning, a quick ending, like a gust of wind across a field. 

*

The army didn’t always give you time off if your parents were ill, but if an older soldier or officer said they wanted to go home for matchmaking, they’d get approved nine times out of ten. I used my matchmaking leave to help my parents with the harvest—though, to be fair, I did also meet a date while I was home. One day, my father and I were working when a jeep pulled up not far from us, and someone came out onto the ridge between our fields, about a hundred meters away, calling my name and waving so urgently it seemed that something significant must have happened in my life or his.

My father and I froze. “Come quick! Hurry up!”

My eyes focused. The shouting man was Uncle Ji, a distant relative, who was now stamping his feet with anxiety. I dropped my thresher and hurried over to him. When I got close, he said, “Get in!” and shoved me into the back of the jeep.

Belching air, the vehicle pulled away. We left behind my father, the wheat field, the village, the streets. Swaddled in heat, silence, and sweat, I hunkered down in the ancient jeep and tried to guess what twist of my fate this portended. The man in the driver’s seat forging this new path for me was the head of our county’s bureau of commerce. The bureau head’s silence made the atmosphere so solemn you’d have thought we were on our way to an execution ground. He didn’t say a single word, and I didn’t dare to ask any questions. 

We’d gone quite a few kilometers before he turned around to say that my father had gotten word to Uncle Ji that he was concerned I’d be a bachelor for the rest of my days. Now, he said, everything was sorted. A girl who worked in a Luoyang department store was willing to marry me—I had only to say the word. Furthermore, he added mysteriously, the girl had no idea we were coming that day. We would creep into the store and he’d point her out to me. If I liked what I saw, he’d go tell her so we could meet properly and fall in love. Of course, if I said no, that might hurt her feelings.

She had agreed to our marriage without setting eyes on me.

What’s more, this girl wasn’t from our village or even from the county seat; she was from the provincial capital, Luoyang, where I desperately wanted to be. My first reaction was to look down. I had on my usual harvest footwear, an old pair of flip-flops that slipped on and off easily. How could I wear these grubby, worn-out things on a date? Meanwhile, Uncle Ji noticed that my hair was littered with wheat tassels and my face was covered in grime. “We’ll find some water and get you cleaned up.” 

Dozens of kilometers later, as we passed Longmen Hill, he spotted a mechanical pump spraying water across a field and stopped so I could wash the village dirt and exhaustion off my face, hair, and spirit. When I was done, we drove on, carefree and radiant, to the center of the known world: Luoyang city. 

Luoyang was sixty-two kilometers from my village. As we entered the city, my pulse quickened. The wide roads, the crisscrossing streets, the constant flow of pedestrians, the tall buildings—telegraph poles evenly spaced along the road, young women cycling home after work, elementary-school children holding hands to cross the road. A civilization beckoning me. There and then I decided: If this department store girl had agreed to marry me sight unseen, what reason could I possibly have to reject her? We would face the storms of existence, through thick and thin, growing old together to the bitter end. How old was she? A little older or younger was fine. How tall? An inch more or less could hardly matter. How educated? I hadn’t even finished high school myself. And even if she wasn’t pretty, how unattractive could she really be? I wasn’t going to be picky. I had nothing to worry about. 

The jeep pulled up abruptly outside a tall building. Uncle Ji got out, glanced at his watch, and said we’d arrived at exactly the right time. I stood by the side of the road while he fussed with my clothes and smoothed my tousled hair. He would point out the girl from the entrance, he told me furtively, and then he would walk in like a regular customer. Having agreed on our secret code, we strode into the department store. She was on the first floor, though I can’t remember now if she was selling fabric or clothes. This isn’t amnesia; I was just so excited and nervous that I didn’t notice (or care) what was around her, or even what she was wearing.

When a crimson flower blooms, no one cares if there are leaves around it.

She was so beautiful that I stopped in my tracks. I’d looked where Uncle Ji’s finger was pointing and knew right away who he meant. Neither tall nor short, skin a little tan, face like a ripe fruit, eyes darting around as she added up a customer’s purchases. I felt as if I’d seen her somewhere before. This instant familiarity made me believe in the mystical nature of marriage. I decided I would fall in love with her. We would get married and have kids. I would suffer the worst of times with her, all the way to the end.

Uncle Ji pointed at her for all of one second, and it took me less than a second to decide I would marry her. “See her?” he whispered. I nodded with unusual certainty. “The one in sky blue, not dark gray.” He leaned over again to murmur that marriage was the most important event in a person’s life, even more crucial than something like becoming emperor. I needed to be absolutely sure I’d thought this through. Yes meant yes, no meant no, and I couldn’t just go along because she’d said yes first.

With that, Uncle Ji melted into the crowd, leaving me lost in thought by the entrance. As he disappeared, I turned my attention and focus onto the woman, her appearance, her clothes, her bustling movements. I noticed she was looking my way, and in a panic I retreated back outside.

The sky was intensely blue, as open and clear as my heart. Life and the world were so beautiful. I felt a jolt of gratitude toward my parents for bringing me into existence.

After a bean-size segment of time, Uncle Ji emerged from the store, his face aglow. Standing on Zhongzhou Middle Road in the heart of Luoyang, with the earth and sky and trees as our witnesses, I knew this was the most consequential, solemn moment of my whole life and my entire family’s fate.

“So?” he asked.

With great confidence, I nodded.

He smiled. “I need you to say yes or no.”

I beamed too. “Yes.”

“Wonderful. I’ll let her parents know, and while I’m there we’ll fix a day too.”

And so, almost by chance and without careful consideration, the curtain rose on yet another romance. Uncle Ji and his jeep pulled away. He’d told me to wait by the department store entrance, that he’d be back very soon having “fixed a day.” 

We’d arrived at one in the afternoon and spent about eight minutes inside, but it took him a whole three hours to return. During that time, hunger came over me like a storm. I longed to grab some food from the restaurant across the road, but I didn’t have a cent on me. I sat on the curb like an abandoned child, looking up at the sky, watching the passersby. When Uncle Ji got back, I thought, the first thing I’d do is get a bowl of noodles.

At a little past four, the jeep sputtered to a halt in front of me. Uncle Ji got out. His face was green, as if he’d just been punched. He stared at the department store, at the noodle stalls next to him, at the flow of people. After a moment’s hesitation, he said, “Let’s go. We can talk more at home.”

We got in. We went home.

More than two hours later, the jeep stopped by the wheat field. The last glimmers of sunset blazed like fire. Uncle Ji was a man of few words, but he managed to say, “Let’s never mention this again.” After dropping me off, he waved at my father, who was still harvesting, and said he was busy, so he wouldn’t stop by our home. 

In 1989 or 1990, by which time I was not only married but had a child of four or five, I was studying literature at the People’s Liberation Army Academy of Art in Beijing. We visited home that New Year, and on the second day, which is traditionally when you see your relatives, Uncle Ji—long since retired—came to our home with a gift basket. 

Smiling, he told me the Luoyang department store girl had seen an article about me in the Luoyang Daily—a color photo of me beneath the headline “Luoyang District Produces a Talent”—and she’d gone round to his place to complain that he never mentioned, back when he’d first introduced me, that I was a literature lover who wrote fiction. “She and her whole family regret turning you down. Well, let them regret it!” he chortled. Only then did I find out that the young woman was Uncle Ji’s niece. The reason I’d found her familiar is that she looked a lot like his eldest daughter.

After processing this new information, I smiled awkwardly at him.

All too often, an awkward smile after something ends carries its own kind of beauty.

*

After my fiction was published and I’d been promoted, I thought I had what it took to find a city wife, but in a mere three years I’d managed only to cause hurt and be hurt in return. After getting sneered at and turned down by several city girls, I found that rejection was its own form of consolation. 

Then, in late 1983, a friend introduced me to my wife. Not only was she from Kaifeng, a city, she was more beautiful and refined than all the girls I’d previously been set up with. My hesitation was that her parents, my would-be in-laws, had three boys but only one girl. They had made it clear that, after I left the army, they wanted us to remain in Kaifeng.

All that I’d dreamed of since I was a child was of escaping to the city, but the place where I truly hoped to settle was Luoyang, not faraway Kaifeng. And so we hesitated over some things, and silently accepted others, including each other’s hesitation. One day in 1984, my brother called me at my army camp in Shangqiu to say that our father had fallen seriously ill a few days earlier. He’d summoned my brother to his bedside and told him that the asthma that had plagued him for years would make it difficult to survive the cold and desolation of winter. After a lifetime of hard work, three of his four children were married, but it pained him that his youngest son remained a bachelor.

If only Lianke could be married, he said, even if the frigid air took him from us, he’d go with a lighter heart.

My brother and I, a few hundred kilometers apart, were quiet for a while. I heard his ragged breath, sorrowful and helpless. He must be in one of the post office phone booths in Song County, West Henan. Maybe he detected the ineffectual distress of his little brother in East Henan. Neither of us said a word.

Just as it felt like the silence might explode, my brother slowly said, “Look, go talk it over with them, and if it’s possible, then you should get married.”

With that, he hung up. The click sounded like a farmer feebly driving the hoe he’d used all his life into the soil at the end of the workday. I stared at the beads of my condensed breath on the receiver, then at the summer sky and trees in the courtyard outside the window. As I left the office, the bugle signaled the end of the day, and the klaxon summoned the division’s cadres to the cafeteria. I decided to skip dinner.

I looked up at the vast dome of the heavens, then at the plains of East Henan beyond the red brick wall. I reached into my pocket for my wallet, a sheet of folded cardstock, and counted my money. Then, without even going back to my dorm to get my stuff, I walked through the main gate of the camp. Toward the train station. I was getting married.

I was heading to Kaifeng, where I would say to my hesitant, accepting partner: Please marry me. I have to get married by the end of this year! That’s what fate has arranged for me. My father’s fate has decided mine. I wanted to tell her: If you say yes, we’ll be like any other husband and wife in the world. If you refuse, let’s part like a scattering flock of swallows, each flying in our own direction, and everything that passes between us will be no more than a random encounter in the street. 

Sprinting all the way, I managed to catch the bus. At the other end, I ran to catch the one o’clock train. Back then, the trip from Shangqiu to Kaifeng took about three hours. I bought a standing ticket and remained on my feet all the way. I can’t recall what anxieties filled my mind as we sped through the wide, sandy plains of East Henan, nor whether I had any thoughts about hunger, poverty, escape, and struggle as we passed by the dunes of Lankao County, pillowy as steamed buns. I arrived in Kaifeng. There was the hutong with the Temple of the Chief Minister, as described in The Water Margin, and I waited there in the sunset for my sweetheart to return from work.

When she showed up, I would reveal my cards and lay out my proposal before her.

There she was, on her bicycle. Spotting me at the hutong entrance, she froze for a second, abruptly braking. As if nothing was out of the ordinary, she asked, “Are you in town for work?”

I stood in that hutong, a couple of paces from her, and told her, as I’d planned, that my father was ill; I wanted to get married; this was all for his sake. She stood facing me. Between us was her bicycle, ready to advance or retreat. I searched her face but couldn’t tell if she was shocked or uneasy, happy or troubled. She worked at Kaifeng’s electric vehicle factory, where she excelled as a lathe technician. Her gray-blue uniform blended into the dusk sky. We stood there for a while. Eventually, she said with great propriety, “I need to go home and talk it over with my parents.”

She left slowly, pushing the bicycle ahead of her as if it were the unknowable future, walking rather than getting back in the saddle. I watched as her shadow stretched dozens of paces ahead of her, and I called out, “I’ll wait here for your answer!”

I don’t know if shouting after her could be considered coercing or threatening. She turned back to look at me, not nodding or saying anything, then walked away with deliberate steps.

I had a meal that served as both lunch and dinner at her street corner, on Chuigutai Road. It took me more than thirty minutes to pay for a ticket, stand in line, collect my large bowl of stewed noodles, and grab a window seat. By then, she’d come back and was standing in the doorway searching for me. She hesitated a moment, blushing, then told me that her parents had agreed: We could get married, and if my father were to die, my mother could live in the city with us, so we’d be able to take care of her. 

Without waiting for me to respond, she looked left and right, then turned to go. Having said her piece, she hurried away from that small roadside restaurant. Crystalline tears streamed from my eyes as I gazed down the narrow, mottled hutong, watching her departing form, full of thanks and affection for our fate, hers and mine. 

We were married on National Day that year, October 1, 1984. That winter, not long after our wedding, my father left us and this world that he had always cherished, just as he had foreseen.

I’ve gained so much from being married to her. As for what she’s gained or lost, how she’s benefited or missed out—she has never spoken about these things.

From Yan Lianke’s The Women, translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang, to be published by Verso on October 27. 

Yan Lianke is the author of more than fifteen novels, as well as the memoir Three Brothers, translated by Carlos Rojas. In addition to The Women, his novel The Family Plot will be published by Grove in 2027, also translated by Jeremy Tiang. His Art of Fiction interview appeared in issue no. 256. 

Jeremy Tiang is a novelist and playwright who has translated more than thirty books from the Chinese.