A woman's face丨 day and night

毕加索(Pablo Picasso)《戴淡紫色贝雷帽的女子》(1937)。 资料图

I haven't told you what she looks like yet.

A national card issued on 17 November 1972 gave me a glimpse of what she looked like at the top of the mountain. She was seventeen years old. Still, maybe the photo was taken earlier, because she looked like a girl of fourteen or fifteen. At that time, she looked a bit like her second sister and younger sister.

The girl in this black-and-white photo looks indifferent, cold, and has a desperate stubbornness. Her upper lip is thin and her lower lip is extraordinarily full. The eyebrows are curved and not particularly thick, and the right eye is a little smaller than the left eye, which is the inner eye. The bridge of the nose is not high, but it is not a flat nose, and the tip of the nose is round. The tip of her nose grew bigger and bigger as she got older, and it was the most satisfying part of her. She is a superstitious physiognologist, believing that the size of her nose can predict a person's success or failure, wealth and poverty.

"My nose is the same as Jackie Chan's!" she always says.

And ears. The height of the ears can also predict a person's success or failure. Hypertrophy of the earlobes can show blessings. She loves to look at the ears of politicians and celebrities.

Once, while watching the news on TV, she went up to look at the ears of Penang Chief Minister Koh Zi Kan and found that his ears were really large, and they were eyebrow-eyebrow.

"You can't see his feet, and his feet must be big. "She also wants to see people's feet!

There is also a black and white photo. The five girls sat in front of a wooden building that looked like a rooftop of a building. There were five other people standing nearby. All but one girl in a short white skirt wore dark bell-bottoms.

The girls sat comfortably on the wooden floor, and the boys and girls in the neighborhood also stood casually. No one looked at the camera, as if the person taking the picture was quietly capturing the group of people.

The group was like travelers on the deck of a ship, waiting to reach their destination. Flared pants and a Beatles hairstyle, a relaxed, uninhibited feeling, all this reminds me of the free and jovial hippie. What a young girl.

I saw a short-haired girl who looked a lot like my second aunt. I didn't see my mother. Is she the one who took the picture?

In another photo, she and her three girlfriends stand side by side next to a car, smiling faintly. She wore a short dark skirt that exposed half of her thighs, and her legs were slender and smooth. I've never seen her wear such a short dress.

She was the tallest girl and like me, always the tallest girl in the class.

In a color photograph that is supposed to have been taken in a photo studio, she has a Beatles hairstyle, a purple vest dress and a pair of brown sunglasses, and her legs are crossed, looking full of ambition. The teeth are white and straight, and the legs are still very slender. She grew a little stronger, and the lines of her legs were close to those of her in memory. She wears a ring on the ring finger of her right hand. Was that her wedding ring? Is she married? I've never seen her wedding ring. Now she looks more and more like my mom. I recognized her.

It's not like that younger salon photo. I didn't recognize the girl. That's a pretty delicate and elegant beauty.

Soon her wedding photos with her father appeared. This wedding photo cuts her (and his) life in half.

In later photos, she cut her hair shorter. She also got a perm, the kind of short curls that women we have there like (do they really like it?).

The girl's long black hair on the national ID card was gone. But she didn't have long hair for a long time. She said that once when she went to the toilet and her waist-length hair accidentally got on feces, she cut her hair short and never kept it long.

After giving birth to her fourth child, she began to wear glasses. She wears silver-rimmed glasses all the time. In our family, she and I were the only ones who were short-sighted. When I was in fourth grade, she took me to the Sun Life Optical Shop next door to get glasses fitted. Now my myopia is as high as 1,200 degrees. She had laser surgery a few years ago, but when the hairdresser told her to look at herself in the mirror, she said she couldn't see her face clearly.

Even though she no longer wore glasses, her sister and brother put her old glasses in her coffin.

In addition to myopia, she has a lot of physical problems. Bad stomach, bad teeth, weak heart, often corn sores on the soles of the feet, and later high blood pressure.

"Don't make any noise, I have high blood pressure and a headache!"

"He's been arguing around all the time, and the noise makes me have a headache, I can't stand it!" "My father would keep arguing in front of her for money.

One night, while sorting through her drawer, I found the health cards of the five siblings from their newborn birth and her prenatal check-up card. On her prenatal check-up card, which she was pregnant with her fifth child, the doctor said she was anemic and told her to eat animal hearts, red meat, fish, soy products or eggs every day. It was 1994 and I was about to graduate from primary school. I don't remember anything about it.

I remember when I was in high school, she was suddenly admitted to the hospital. She felt sick and her chest tightened. Maybe there are other uncomfortable places, I just don't know. She spent two nights in the hospital. When I got back to school, my biology teacher asked me if she was in menopause, and I didn't know how to answer.

I was sad and dazed. I was still deeply touched by that word. Menopause。 The biology teacher is a Malay woman who uses English to describe "menopause". It was a new word I had just recognized, so new and new to me. I can't imagine that my mother has gone through menopause. Her aging and death were something I never thought about.

She was forty-four years old. Am I about to go through menopause?

Along with those cards was her passport. It shows that her height is 168 cm. I always thought she was a little bit taller than me, or at least as tall as me.

A solo photograph taken 23 years ago. In the summer, she went to Taiwan to attend her eldest daughter's graduation ceremony. Her eldest daughter was the first college student in the family, and she was very proud. She didn't have the opportunity to go to college, not even middle school, which is the regret of her life. It occurred to me that she had bought a pair of white canvas shoes many years ago in order to attend night school with her friends. She was also very excited.

In the photo, she is wearing her daughter's bachelor's robe, holding her daughter's bouquet of white roses, and standing by the stone fence with a smile on her face. It's as if she's the college student who graduated. She wore those square, silver-rimmed glasses, and she looked exactly like I remembered.

Then her appearance changed. By the time I got back to Ura, she was very thin. Only forty-seven kilograms. That's the weight that has been built up with all the effort. Dr. Vina said she had to weigh forty-seven kilograms to start chemotherapy. Her breasts were gone, her eyes were heavily puffed, and her hands were as hideous as a bird's claws. What hasn't changed is the big nose and thin lips.

During her first chemotherapy treatment, she was still able to smile calmly at the camera. A confident look. During her second chemotherapy treatment, she covered her face with a thin towel. She was sobbing softly, not wanting to see the world. I couldn't see her face.

The most heartbreaking thing is the face that Natsuki captures. It was the third chemotherapy and the last time I saw her real face. It was the saddest of faces.

Since then, her face has become unreal. I looked at her face through the eyes of others from afar. I look at the photos sent by my family, look at the photos I took with Natsuki in the past, and save them.

She's skinny and dry. She's more resentful and helpless than she was a month ago (did she know she was going to die?). Her calves and feet were black and swollen, and her gray, chapped skin reminded me of the huge, declining white rhinoceros I had seen at the Beijing Zoo years ago. She often sat on her back and asked Yuni to feed her. A month ago, she still had the strength and heart to eat independently and still be able to do a lot of things.

But by that time her feet and abdomen had begun to swell. Her lower body was also getting drier and drier due to frequent diarrhea and washing. One night, she asked me to apply ointment to her. She turned her back to me and asked me to take a closer look at her bare lower body. After a moment she turned around again. I did. I was a little embarrassed, but I was curious about what was in front of me.

When she goes out, someone will stare at her. Her father said her appearance was terrifying.

In the last few days, she lay in bed more and more like her mother. It was as if a thin, shivering rat was trapped in an iron cage.

But I'll never see her future face again. She was forever stuck at sixty-three.

I looked at her last face at her funeral. My sister chose a pink-purple floral shroud for her, which was her favorite color. The forehead band and emerald necklace make her look like an old lady. Is this an attempt to create the impression of the end of life?

The body transporter opened the glass on the coffin, and the mortuary asked me to touch her face. I put my hand on her left cheek and then on her chest. She was as hard as a piece of cold steel. But her lips were red, as thin as before, her eyes were gently closed, and she looked even more sleepy and restless than before.

Don't worry about anything more.

Now, when I look in the mirror, I see that the tip of my nose is getting rounder and rounder. Sometimes Natsuki would say that I looked a bit like her when I was asleep.

When I looked at her picture for a long time, I felt in a trance because her face in the photo was not the same as I remembered. Is this really her? My sisters and I feel the same way.

Amazingly, as the days went by, her face returned. Not just her face, but her voice came back. She used to be silent in my dreams, but now she can speak.

No one could stop her from talking.

Lin Xuehong

Editor-in-charge: Xing Renyan