There are a great many such contradictory and violent men, who cannot be gotten through to.

Through primary and middle school there was always a deep rift between me and those around me. At that time, our primary school grades and classes had graduated "all in one pot" into middle school. I should have been familiar with every face, but all through school I was like a newcomer. Never able to become part of the group, I had to learn to bear the feelings of rejection by strangers. But the other girls, with their hair done in braids or cut short, joined in the fun without any problems. For them, the school was their playground and their heaven, but not for me.

The pleasure of becoming part of a group is something that seems forever beyond me.

I remember very clearly the wood-grain patterns of the pale brown desks and chairs in the school, the rasping scratch of inferior chalk scraping on the blackboard, and my seat on the left side of the third row of desks from the window; and more than anything else, I remember every single humiliating incident that I endured. But I have very few memories of what went on among the students as a whole or among the little groups they formed.

Only many years later, when I read Maria Kuncewiczowa's The Stranger, did I begin to understand that you do not necessarily have to come from a strange place to be a stranger. It is only when you yourself feel like a stranger that you become one. Similarly, when you yourself feel that you are no longer a stranger, you cease to be one. This, of course, is only one way of looking at it. Another way that I look at it is that when you reach the point where you clearly understand everything going on around you, then nothing will be strange to you, and you will no longer feel like a stranger.

Thus, when I was a student, my classmates and I were strangers to one another despite our familiarity.

In fact, this phenomenon of estrangement in familiarity was to accompany me for many years to come.

In the house, in the scorching heat of summer, I usually wore just a long and very loose cotton top that reached past my bottom like a dress, so that much of my body was bare. As a result, I had plenty of opportunity to observe the physical changes I was going through. Stirred by the way Mr. Ti glared at my face and chest, I spent long periods examining myself in the mirror. To my surprise, I discovered that there really were some changes. The first thing I noticed was my breasts, which I felt were suddenly becoming round and full. After watching them for a number of days, I thought it seemed like there were lumps of dough rising in them, making them swell more every day. I also felt a faint pain there that I had never felt before.

This discovery made me feel very strange.

Just at this time Mrs. Ge, the neighbor in front of us, developed breast cancer. Some people said that she had discovered a hard lump when she was washing herself. Others said that her husband had first found it on a wet night when the mugginess and the pervasive sound of the rain wouldn't let him sleep. With nothing else to do, he started gently caressing his wife and eventually felt the irregularity. After that, she was taken to the hospital, given a number of tests, and eventually diagnosed as having cancer.

I heard my mother say that she had already undergone massive surgery, with the doctor cutting out both her breasts as if they were nothing more than persimmons on a tree, as well as most of the associated lymph glands in her armpits. And that in the oppressive summer heat, the intense pain and feeling of suffocation experienced by this woman, with her breasts removed and her bosom, flat as a cutting board, bound in bloody gauze, stemmed from mental as much as from physical pressures.

Mother also said that even though Ge was going through this suffering, she would die fairly soon anyway, because the cancer cells had already spread, though she herself did not know this.

Lying on my little bed in my room that night, I was deeply frightened by the indistinct sounds of Mrs. Ge's moaning coming from the front of the courtyard. The rustling of the trembling leaves, which sounded like it was right beside me, seemed to be responding to her cries. Filled with dread, I put my hand on my chest and started exploring.

And sure enough, I found a hard little lump just under the nipple of one of my newly developing breasts. Moving to the other one, I found a similar little lump. With this, I was overwhelmed with fear.

I tossed and turned all night, unable to sleep, imagining that, like the lady next door, I was about to die.

According to Mother, dying was a total destruction of life. There is no other kind of leaving that carries us as far away; there is no other kind of renunciation that is as final; there is no other kind of forsaking of relatives and friends that is as thoroughgoing. Death is the irreversible termination of life.

Lying on my bed, I felt like I had been forced to don long, brocade burial robes, which try as I might I could not take off. I stared through the window at a night sky that was as clear as a limpid blue pool, while my heart sent blasts of tropical heat and arctic cold racing through my veins. I didn't want to renounce anything; I didn't want to forsake my mother, nor Widow Ho, whom I liked so much. Why would I want to die? Of course, being able to get away from Mr. Ti and my father was the one thing that made death attractive to me. But still, I didn't want to die.

I didn't dare go into my parents' room to wake them, so I lay there alone, a victim of my mind's wild imaginings.

… Hearing about death was like listening to some ear-piercing musical instrument, the sound as shrill as glass or as hard as metal. With one click of the latch, the door would be shut, and I would be forsaken by the world around me.

At that moment, my corpse dropped abruptly out of the darkness onto the bed beside me and lay next to me as cold as ice. I rolled away from her and looked at her huge eye sockets in the obscuring darkness, but those despairing eyes refused to look at me. Her lips moved ceaselessly, but she refused to talk to me. She was sneezing repeatedly, but the sound was very strange. Her sneezes sounded like those of our former dog, Sophia Loren.

After a while she got so restless that she got up from the bed and started pacing back and forth in the room, like a shadow moving along a wall. Her intangible image flickered waveringly with no apparent left or right or front or back, seeming to move in a space of infinite dimensions. Whatever she wanted to see, she could see.

After strolling about the room alone for some time, my corpse came up to me. Suddenly she smiled and asked how I was. She said that she didn't like graves, that she liked to wander through cedar forests. For some reason, I wanted to reach out and touch her bosom to see if she was still breathing, but when I did so I discovered that she did not have breasts. I was filled with terror, but at the same time couldn't bring myself to ignore or abandon her…

Only when the sky began to lighten did I finally drop off into a fitful sleep.

In the morning, Mother was astonished when she came in to get me up and saw how pale and distraught I was. She couldn't understand how such a change could take place in just one night.

Putting her hand on my forehead, she asked, "Niuniu, are you sick?"

I said, "Mama, is the lady next door going to die?"

This perplexed Mother even more. She had no idea what had happened.

I said, "Mama, I'm going to die too. I've got cancer too." Then I started to cry, my tears gushing down like a midsummer deluge.

Mother started examining my breasts, and indeed found what seemed to be a hard little lump. I pulled back, saying, "It hurts."