The BATHING WOMEN
TIE NING
Translated by Hongling Zhang and Jason Sommer
Three women
Thirty life-changing years
The dawn of a new China
Displaced from Beijing as a result of Mao’s Cultural Revolution, sisters Tiao and Fan live in the small town of Fuan. Their childhood consists of daily denouncements, cooking from Soviet Woman magazine and searching for the elusive red lipstick worn by women from the capital.
Their lives are irrevocably changed when they witness the death of their baby sister, Quan. It a death that they could have prevented; a death with the power to destroy their family.
In the China of the 1990s, the sisters lead seemingly successful lives. Tiao is a children’s publisher but struggles to find love. Fan has moved to America, desperate to shun her Chinese heritage. Then there is their childhood friend Fei: beautiful, flirtatious and outwardly ambitious.
As the women grapple with love, rivalry and past secrets will they find the freedom and redemption they crave?
‘As this spirited quartet chase their dreams against a backdrop of shifting cultural values, the novel – a million-copy seller in China – blends romance and feminism to paint an intimate portrait of these women’s ambitions, appetites and rivalries’ Daily Mail
‘The Bathing Women possesses a gentle humanity that makes a refreshing change from the raucousness of recent work by Tie's male peers … an acute, sympathetic observer of Chinese society’ Guardian
‘Intelligent and evocative writing … about the shaping effect of deprivation and how people may still draw reservoirs of love and kindness from these voids’ South China Morning Post
‘[A] fascinating story of sisters growing up in the shadow of the Cultural Revolution’ Good Housekeeping
‘If I were to pick the ten best literary works in the world of the past ten years, I would definitely rank The Bathing Women among them’ Kenzaburō Ōe, Nobel Laureate
‘Tie Ning’s unique novel about three Chinese women and their struggles In today’s fast-changing China is as gorgeous as the Cezanne painting the novel takes its title from’ Xinran, author of The Good Women of China
‘A probing and gracefully written portrait of an extended Chinese family, related by blood and mystery, in which the author explores areas of human behavior traditionally considered off-limits: the intimate and sexual lives of ordinary Chinese women’ Hannah Pakula, author of The Last Empress
Table of Contents
Chapter 1: Premarital Examination
Chapter 3: Where the Mermaid’s Fishing Net Comes From
Chapter 5: The Ring is Caught in the Tree
Chapter 7: Peeking Through the Keyhole
Chapter 9: Crowned with Persian Chrysanthemums
Chapter 10: The Garden in the Depths of the Heart
Tiao’s apartment had a three-seater sofa and two single armchairs. Their covers were satin brocade, a sort of fuzzy blue-grey, like the eyes of some European women, soft and clear. The chairs were arranged in the shape of a flattened U, with the sofa at the base and the armchairs facing each other on two sides.
Tiao’s memory of sofas went back to when she was about three. It was in the early sixties; her home had a pair of old dark red corduroy sofas. The springs were a bit broken, and stuck out of their coir and hemp wrappings, pressing firmly up through a layer of corduroy that was not very thick. The whole sofa had a lumpy look and it creaked when people sat down. Every time Tiao hauled herself onto it, she could feel little fists punching up from underneath her. The broken springs would grind into her delicate knees and sensitive back. But she still liked to climb up on the sofa because compared to the hard-backed little chair that belonged to her, it allowed her to move around freely, leaning this way and that—and being able to move freely this way and that makes for comfort; ever since she was small, Tiao pursued comfort. Later, and for a long time, an object like a sofa was labelled as associated with a certain class. And that class obviously wanted to exert a bad influence on the spirit and body of the people, like a plague or marijuana. Most Chinese people’s behinds had never come into contact with sofas; even soft-cushioned chairs were rare in most homes. By then—probably in the early seventies—Tiao eventually found a pair of down pillows in a home that only had a few hard chairs. The down pillows were from her parents’ beds. When they weren’t home, she dragged the pillows off, reserved one for herself, and gave one to her younger sister Fan. They put the pillows on two hard chairs and settled into them, wriggling on the puffy pillows, pretending they were on sofas. They enjoyed the sheer luxury of reclining on these “sofas,” cracking sunflower seeds or eating a handful of hawthorn berries. Often, when this