by Qiu Miaojin
“How’d you know I switched?” Abruptly, she broke her silence. Her eyes were shimmering with amazement, and I could finally meet them. She was now looking right at me, wide-eyed.
“Well, of course I’d know!” I didn’t want her to think I’d been noticing her. “You finally said something!” I said, heaving an exaggerated sigh of relief. She smiled at me shyly, even teasingly, and I let out a huge laugh, relieved that I’d made her smile. The glow on her face was like rays of sunshine along a golden beach.
She told me that she’d started to feel nervous as soon as I walked into the room. She wanted to talk to me, but didn’t know what to say. I pointed to her shoelaces. She gingerly leaned forward to tie them. She said when she saw me, she couldn’t bring herself to speak, and then she didn’t want to say anything, so then she just stood there. She threw her purple canvas backpack over her shoulder and crouched on the floor. As she started talking, I felt the sudden urge to reach over and touch her long hair, which looked so soft and supple. You don’t know a thing, but I figured it all out in an instant, I told her silently in my heart. I reached over and held her backpack instead, and feeling mildly contented by the closeness of its weight, wished that she would go on tying her shoes.
It was already six when class ended. Shadows had lengthened across the campus, and the evening breeze lilted in the air. We grabbed our bikes and headed off together. We took the main thoroughfare on campus, keeping with the leisurely pace of the traffic on the wide open road. I didn’t know if I was following her, or if she was following me. Within a year, the two of us would come to cherish our ambiguous rapport, at once intimate and unfamiliar, and tempered by moments of silent confrontation.
“Why’d you come over and talk to me?” In my heart I already knew too much but pretended to know nothing.
“Why wouldn’t I talk to you?” She sounded slightly irritated. The dusk obscured her face, so I couldn’t read her expression. But as soon as she spoke, I could tell she’d had a tough freshman year. There was a curious note of dejection in her answer. I already knew her all too well.
“I’m just an underclassman you’ve seen, like, three times!” I nearly exploded.
“Not even,” she said coolly to herself.
My eyes were fixed on her long skirt as it wafted in the breeze. “Weren’t you worried that I wouldn’t remember you, or wouldn’t want to talk to you?”
“I knew you weren’t like that.” Her reaction was perfectly composed, as if everything to do with me was already set in stone.
We reached the school gates, not quite sure what to do next. She seemed to want to see where I lived. The way she suggested it conveyed a touch of familial kindness, like a tough but pliable cloth whose inner softness made my heart ache. Besides, as they say, if the floodwaters are rushing straight toward you, what are you going to do to stop them? This was how she treated me, for no apparent reason. I took her toward Xinsheng South Road, back to Wenzhou Street.
“How’s this year going?” I tried to break through her gloom.
“I don’t want to talk about it.” She squeezed her eyes shut and grimaced slightly, lifting her chin in a hopeless look.
“You don’t want to tell me?” I was practically edging her onto the road. I was sure she was going to get hit by a car.
She shook her head. “I don’t want to tell anyone.”
“How did you get this way?” It pained my heart to hear her speak such nonsense.
“Yeah, well, I’ve changed.” Her eyes flickered with haughtiness, underscoring the boldness of her statement.
Her answer was so immature that I felt tempted to tease her. “Into what?”
“I’ve just changed, that’s all. I’m not the same person I was in high school.” I could detect a note of self-hatred in the viciousness of her tone.
Hearing those words, “I’ve changed,” made me truly sad. The traffic had illuminated Xinsheng South Road in an opulent yellow. We followed the red brick wall that enclosed the school grounds, pausing to lean against a railing. To our left were the city streets, whose bright lights seemed to be calling. To our right was the dimly lit campus, teeming with the splendors of solitude. There’s nothing that won’t change, do you understand? I said in my heart. “Can you count the number of lights that are on in that building over there?” I pointed to a brand-new high-rise at the intersection.
“Uh, I see lights in five windows, so maybe, like, five?” she said brightly.
Just wait and see how many there are later on. Will you still remember? I asked myself, answering with a nod.
7
The first semester she was my lifeline. It was a clandestine form of dating—the kind where the person you’re going out with doesn’t know it’s a date. I denied myself, and I denied the fact that she was part of my life, so much so that I denied the dotted line that connected the two of us and our entire relationship to a crime. But the eye of suspicion had been cast upon me from the very beginning, and this extraordinary eye reached all the way back to my adolescence. My hair started to go gray early. Life ahead was soon supplanted by a miserable prison sentence. It was as if I never really had a youth. Nonetheless, I was determined at all costs to become a person who would love without boundaries. And so I locked myself and that eye together in a dark closet.
Every Sunday night, however, I was forced to think about her. It was like a chore I dreaded. I’d resolve not to go to Intro to Chinese Lit, and every Monday I would sleep in until almost three, waking up just in time to rush to class on my bike. Every Monday after class, Shui Ling would follow me matter-of-factly back to Wenzhou Street, as if she were merely passing by on her way home. Afterward, I’d wait with her for the number 74 bus. There was a bench in front of the French bakery. Our secret little rendezvous were tidy and simple. They were executed with the casual deftness of a high-class burglary: bribing the guards with one hand, feeding a criminal appetite with the other.
The rest of the week, we barely spoke. She was an apparition seen only on Mondays. On Mondays, she would appear like the answer to a dying man’s prayers—roses in hand, draped in white muslin, barefoot and floating, come to grant me a reprieve. In a primal mating dance, eyes closed in rapture, she scattered rose petals into the wilderness. Roses every week and she didn’t even know it, and it was amid roses that it seemed I might live after all. I reached for those roses, and for a new life, only to discover a glass wall. When I extended my hand, so did my reflection. When Monday ended, the glass that stood between me and my reflection thickened.
The room on Wenzhou Street. Elegant maroon wallpaper and yellow curtains. What did I even talk to her about in there? She sat on the floor, in the gap between the foot of the wooden bed frame and the wardrobe, with her back to me, almost silent. I talked non-stop. Most of the time it was just me talking. Talking about whatever. Talking about my horrible, painful life experiences. Talking about every person I’d ever gotten entangled with and couldn’t let go of. Talking about my own complexities, my own eccentricities. She was always playing with something in her hands. She would look up at me in disbelief and ask what was so hard to understand about this or what was so strange about that. She accepted me, which amounted to negating my negation of myself. Those sincere eyes, like a mirror, hurt me. But she accepted me. In my anguish, about every third sentence out of my mouth was: You don’t understand. Her eyes were suffused with a profound and translucent light, like the ocean gazing at me in silence, as if it were not necessary to speak at all. You don’t understand. She thought she understood. And she accepted me. Years later, I realized that had been the whole point.
Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean’s yearning.
8
> I am a woman who loves women. The tears I cry, they spring from a river and drain across my face like yolk.
My time was gradually consumed by tears. The whole world loves me, but what does it matter since I hate myself? Humanity stabs a bayonet into a baby’s chest, fathers produce daughters that they pull into the bathroom to rape, handicapped midgets drag themselves onto highway overpasses to announce that they’re about to end it all just to collect a little spare change, and mental patients have irrepressible hallucinations and suicidal urges. How can the world be this cruel? A human being has only so much in them, and yet you must learn through experience, until you finally reach the maddening conclusion that the world wrote you off a long time ago, or accept the prison sentence that your crime is your existence. And the world keeps turning as if nothing had happened. The forced smiles on the faces of the lucky ones say it all: It’s either this, or getting stabbed in the chest with a bayonet, getting raped, dragging yourself onto the highway overpass, or checking into a mental institution. No one will ever know about your tragedy, and the world eluded its responsibility ages ago. All that you know is that you’ve been crucified for something, and you’re going to spend the rest of your life feeling like no one and nothing will help you, that you’re in it alone. Your individual circumstances, which separate you from everyone else, will keep you behind bars for life. On top of it all, humanity tells me I’m lucky. Privilege after privilege has been conferred upon me, and if I don’t seem content with my lot, they’ll be devastated.
Shui Ling, please don’t knock on my door anymore. You don’t know how dark it is here in my heart. I don’t know who I am at all. What’s ahead of me is unclear, yet I must move forward. I don’t want to become myself. I know the answer to the riddle, but I can’t stand to have it revealed. The first time I saw you, I knew I would fall in love with you. That my love would be wild, raging, and passionate, but also illicit. That it could never develop into anything, and instead, it would split apart like pieces of a landslide. As flesh and blood, I was not distinct. You turned me into my own key, and when you did, my fears seized me in a flood of tears that soon abated. I stopped hating myself and discovered the corporeal me.
She didn’t understand. Didn’t understand she could love me, maybe that she already did love me. Didn’t understand that beneath the hide of a lamb was a demonic beast that had to suppress the urge to rip her to shreds. Didn’t understand that love, every little bit of it, was about exchange. Didn’t understand that she caused me suffering. Didn’t understand that love was like that.
She gave me a puzzle in a box. She put the pieces together patiently, one by one, and completed the picture of me.
9
“I’m not coming to Intro to Chinese Lit next week, but I’ll be there the week after,” I said.
Shui Ling and I took the number 74 bus together at seven in the evening. She was headed home and I was going to private tutoring on Changchun Road. We sat together in a double seat; she had the window and I the aisle. She was wearing a white scarf. With the window halfway open, she rested her head on the ledge, her body tense, her eyes fixed on some far-off point in the dusk. Her isolation was apparent. I felt the distance between us.
“Okay,” she answered in a tone that showed her waning enthusiasm. I wanted to leave, and she knew it.
“You’re not going to ask me why?” I felt a twinge of regret. I was hesitant to be on my own.
“Fine. Why?” she asked me indignantly, with her head turned to conceal her wounded pride.
“I don’t want to have a steady relationship with anyone. I’ve gotten used to seeing you every week, and I can’t handle being tied down like this. It’s a bad pattern that I have to break,” I told her guiltily.
“Okay. Whatever suits you.” She turned away again.
“Still mad at me?” I felt sorry for her.
“Yes. You’re selfish.” She had turned her back to me, but her reflection in the glass revealed her loneliness and dejection.
“How am I selfish?” I tried to make her say what was bothering her. It was so hard to get her to talk.
Finally, after thinking for a long time, she aired her resentment. “You don’t want to have this . . . bad pattern . . . but what I am supposed to do, now that I’m used to it?” Emerging from her silence, she could be rash with words, though she normally spared me.
“What are you used to?” I pretended not to know. “You know what I’m talking about.” Her fragile voice was especially attractive whenever she was angry.
“No, I don’t know.” Whenever she divulged her overwhelming feelings for me, it was always bittersweet.
“That’s a lie. I’m the same as you . . . I’ve gotten used to seeing you every week, too.” She spoke timidly, not because she wasn’t supposed to have such feelings but because she was telling me about them. Because femininity meant having to hide one’s true feelings.
“That makes it even worse. You shouldn’t get used to it. After Chinese Lit ends, we’re not going to see each other anymore.”
“Why can’t we see each other?” she asked instantly, as if asking for the solution to a math problem.
“Because there’s no reason for us to see each other. Besides, I’ll run off one day, and that’s when you’ll really feel bad.” For the first time, I had spoken aloud my true feelings toward her, and my words were a slap in the face.
“I still don’t understand. Whatever suits you.” She gave up all resistance.
10
Mauvais Sang is a film. Not another Godard movie. A more youthful French film. Its male protagonist is built like a lizard and clearly has traces of crocodile in his blood. All the other men are short and stout and bald. They’re all ugly old men in this film, aside from this sight-for-sore-eyes of a young Adonis in the lead role. The director is a contemporary master of aesthetics.
“I must ascend, not descend,” the protagonist declares. As he nears his final moments, the female lead embraces him from behind, and he resists. It’s moving beyond words. He closes his eyes with a dramatic flutter and utters his last words: “It’s hard being an honest child.” After he dies, a hideous old man squeezes a single blue tear out of his closed eyes. There’s essentially no way the lizard can be honest. Even as it rolls over and turns its white belly up, it must take its hidden tears for its lover to the grave. The lizard has a good name: Loose-Tongued Boy.
Betty Blue is another film. It’s relatively institutional fare. A French film made for a young mainstream audience. Just how is it made for them? There are only two colors, blue and yellow, which makes things easy to remember, and aside from the two protagonists—a man and a woman—there’s no one else on earth. Time glides by in the film without so much as half a struggle or a long conversation. Anyone with eyes, even if they’re color-blind, can sit with popcorn in one hand and soda in the other, and leisurely watch the whole thing. Fair enough.
The best thing about the entire film is when the main couple’s friend, upon hearing news of his mother’s death, lies in bed paralyzed, and other people have to dress him for the funeral and tie his necktie, which is adorned with naked ladies. The tears streaming down his face make you want to explode laughing. The female protagonist, Betty, says, “Life always had it in for me.” She gouges out her own eyes and is sent to a mental institution, where they strap her to a bed. The male protagonist says, “No one can keep the two of us apart.” He disguises himself as a woman in order to sneak into the institution, and with a pillow, smothers Betty to death. At that moment, his face, exquisitely white, radiates a ghastly feminine beauty. The director uses a crazy love to curse the hand of fate. Fair enough, though the last bit will make you gag on your popcorn and soda.
The first film is nauseating. So is the second film.
The difference is, the first film is sincere in its approach. From the beginning, you know that it’s nauseating. The second film is deceptive in its approach. It tricks you into thinking that you’re not on the road to nausea, un
til the very end, when the truth becomes clear.
“Nauseating is nauseating. Try to be the most honest child you possibly can,” says Mauvais Sang.
“Who says you can’t get away with a naked-lady necktie?” says Betty Blue.
11
Meng Sheng. Did I ever truly love this man? I don’t know the answer to that question. I attended an arts camp in December 1987, in the town of Danshui. After I’d introduced myself in a fiction workshop, he stood up in the front row, walked back to where I was seated, and knelt down in the aisle next to me. The frivolous grin on his face hinted at an unusual astuteness beneath the surface.
“I’m a year older than you. I go to the affiliated high school. Next year I’ll be at your school. Just hearing the few words you said, I felt as though you were the only one worth listening to. All that other garbage makes me sick. Coming here was a real waste of my time.”
This pompous fool spoke as if no one else were around us. My heart was filled with utter disdain. I felt like scoffing but managed to indulge him with a smile nevertheless. After crouching for a while, he impulsively launched into a set of squats, as if it were some form of self-amusement. Though he was an archetypally beautiful boy back then, he was also not exactly what you would call a boy. I sensed he had the power to lead others astray, and this power was in part what kept him young. Apart from that supremely cheeky grin, there wasn’t a whiff of boyishness about him.
“What are you doing? Scurrying away like I’m a skunk. . . . What’s so important?” As I walked out, he followed right behind me. Even as other people were trying to talk to me, he stood there impudently, blocking the way. I was losing my patience.