Review of Australian Fiction, Volume 2, Issue 2

by Linda Jaivin

  At Caves Books, Monkey found an English-French dictionary. On another bus, she flipped through it, mouthing words and expressions and despairing at all the tenses and conjugations. How simple Chinese seemed by contrast – grammatically, at least. She got off the bus at Wuchang Street, and climbed the narrow stairs to Café Astoria. Founded by a Russian émigré in 1949, the Astoria was Taipei’s first Western-style café. It had dark wood panelling, white plaster moulding and an almost palpable literary aura. She knew that the great Taiwan writer Pai Hsien-yung – her current favourite – had written some of his early work there, and she’d heard you could sometimes see the legendary young founder of Cloudgate, the choreographer Lin Huai-min, lounging on its plump leather banquettes as well. Monkey looked around: no one famous was there, at least no one she recognised; late afternoon and evenings were when the stars came out to Astoria. Sliding into a booth, she ordered a coffee and opened her notebook. Paris was renowned for its literary cafés. She hadn’t yet been to Paris; her notion of what they were like was one part Simone de Beauvoir and one part Toulouse-Lautrec. She wondered if Guillaume would share her enthusiasm for the Astoria. She hoped he would, almost as fervently as though she’d founded the Astoria herself. She felt faintly ridiculous. One of the things she loved – loved! – about Guillaume was his sense of the ridiculous. She really needed to concentrate.

  At a nearby table, a young man chain-smoked his way through a volume of poetry, shaking his head, whether in admiration or disapproval at what he was reading, it was hard to tell. Several older and, Monkey thought, very intellectual-seeming women, bespectacled and rake-thin with severe haircuts, compared purchases from the bookshops of nearby Chongqing South Road while nibbling their way through a mountain of pastries. A man in his late twenties wrote moodily in a journal, sipping and occasionally slurping his coffee. In the corner, a small group of people she imagined to be political dissidents conducted an intense conversation in whispered voices, every so often casting glances over their shoulders – the island was under martial law, which Monkey privately found somewhat thrilling. The PA streamed a selection of love songs by Theresa Teng, as blandly sweet as the Astoria’s famous cakes. Monkey was almost embarrassed to feel her heart respond.

  Once she finally got going, Monkey grew absorbed in her composition. It was on notions of yearning and loss in Pai Hsien-yung’s collection of stories about displaced mainlanders in Taiwan, including old Shandong soldiers with their soybean milk stands just like Lao Yu. It was called Taipei ren, Taipei people. She drank several cups of American-style coffee as she worked and, when she heard her stomach growl, ordered a salad of iceberg lettuce with thousand island dressing and a small bowl of borscht, consuming them absent-mindedly while proofreading her essay. She saw that she understood yearning more than loss. By the time she left the Astoria, the skies had opened up once more.

  * * *

  The rains, blinding, relentless, continued for two days. Whenever she was out, Monkey peered through the liquid-sheeting air hoping to see Guillaume, but the world had effectively shrunk to the circumference of her umbrella. Two days felt like two years, during which she tortured herself with every manner of doubt, minute analysis of her feelings about both Guillaume and Weiguo, and the forlorn, feeble consolation that if it didn’t work out, she hadn’t come to Taiwan to get a French boyfriend. Finally, on the third day, the rain stopped. The sun thrust its way through the clouds until the pavements steamed and the grass and flowers glistened and the whole city seemed to stretch and sigh. Her teacher let out class early so everyone could go home and air out their bedding. Monkey was on her way home when she turned a corner and there was Guillaume. Miraculeux! He flung open his arms. As she squeezed into his chest, her head felt as light as though it were filled with helium.

  They agreed to see each other that evening. She would meet him in front of International House, where he was staying until he found an apartment. It was only later, when she was getting ready, that she remembered with a jolt that on Sunday, Weiguo had proposed a meal at the markets that very night. In the days before mobile phones, Chinese people commonly employed a magnificently simple phrase that encapsulated the stubbornness, patience, and trust required by both friendship and love: bujian busan, literally no see, no scatter, a commitment to wait on the spot as long as it took. That’s what Weiguo had said, and that’s what Monkey knew he would do.

  She led Guillaume to the markets, running the whole way from the bus, half an hour late. Weiguo was leaning against a post, apparently oblivious, absorbed in a kung-fu novel. He greeted Guillaume without surprise, as though expecting him, and guided them in through the ‘hot and noisy’, as the Chinese called, approvingly, any place that was loud, crowded, and full of activity, towards a stand where, he told them, you could get the best oyster omelettes on the island. Lifang was waiting there and like Weiguo, cheerfully brushed aside Monkey’s apologies about running late. Lifang complimented Guillaume’s Chinese; Monkey, too, noticed how much it had improved in just a few days.

  Weiguo xihuan ni, Guillaume said to Monkey on the bus back to the university district. Weiguo likes you.

  No way! Monkey’s response rang strident in her own ears. Women zhi shi pengyou, eryi, she said, more evenly. We’re just friends.

  Xihuan, love, and pengyou, friends, were deceptively simple words. Xihuan also meant like, and pengyou could also mean boyfriend or girlfriend. It led to a certain amount of confusion even, she’d noticed, among native Chinese speakers. She wondered if she’d over-reacted. Guillaume shrugged, as if he didn’t mind either way, and began half-humming, half-singing I am the Walrus in English. I am zee eggman. She stared out the grimy window trying to sort her tangled thoughts. Had his been an innocent remark? Was he fishing for information? The language divide, on the verge of closing up, suddenly seemed like a chasm. After a silence, he elbowed her in the ribs. Qu’est-ce que c’est ‘eggman’?

  She glanced at him, embarrassed by the wetness of her eyes, and stared out the window again, blinking furiously.

  Goo-goo g’choob. He elbowed her again. She elbowed him back but continued to stare out the window, discreetly dabbing at her eyes. When she glanced at him again, he looked worried. She poked him in the ribs. He poked her back.

  Their stop was next. He walked her home, mugging and singing and generally trying to jolly her up. When they reached her place, she blurted, Wo xihuan ni. I like you. Now her eyes really were welling. In his she saw a flash of alarm, and then that same undefinable, distant expression she’d noticed before. She plunged on. Xihuanderen shi ni. The person I like is you. She held her breath.

  He took her hands and kissed them. In a jumble of French, English, and Chinese, he managed to convey that he was so sorry. He never meant to mislead her. He adored her. He’d known her less than a week and already she was at the centre of his life in Taiwan. But he was engaged. His fiancée was back in Paris, waiting for him. They had been together since lycée. He didn’t say it like this, but Monkey knew: the one he liked was her.

  Monkey, in pain, stared at her feet. Someone had spat betel nut juice on the pavement, where it left a blood-red stain. It felt like overspill from her broken heart. She looked away from it, from him, towards a distant point, her eyes narrowed. She turned and ran into her building, feeling at once overly dramatic, foolish, and helpless to stop herself. On her bed she cried, watched by her spider, who lifted one leg and put it down again, as if it were about to deliver some counsel and then thought the better of it.

  * * *

  Over the next few days, Monkey kept an eye out for Guillaume on campus, hoping to avoid him and wishing to see him in equal measure. She called Lifang and Weiguo. Their grandmother, who lived with the family, informed her that Lifang was out and that Weiguo would be staying at the barracks over the next few days. Monkey felt sorry for herself, felt like an idiot, felt exhausted by everything. She spent hours in a corner booth at the Astoria, where her moodiness made her seem like just another tortured artist,
albeit a foreign one. She wondered if she might be able to persuade Guillaume that she hadn’t meant anything by it: xihuan was just xihuan. You know, ‘like’. You didn’t think I meant… She knew he wouldn’t believe her; he would probably be kind enough to pretend he did, and that would be even worse. She also tortured herself with a fantasy parade of Parisian beauties, each one ineffably sophisticated, stylishly dressed, with a champagne laugh and a ruby pout. In her head, Guillaume made love to these different incarnations of French fabulousness, now tenderly, now passionately, now playfully – always, somehow, in a manner that was ineludibly and impenetrably French. Oh, and they had names like Antoinette and Marielle, not Monkey. She hated her nickname. It was time to start calling herself Margie. Maggie. Margaret. Margo? Nothing felt right. She wished Weiguo would call but didn’t know what she wanted to say to him.

  One morning when she had no classes, she took herself off to the Palace Museum. It was a fascination with Chinese culture and history that drove her study of the language; at the museum she could happily lose herself for a few hours or, with luck, find herself again. The collection of Forbidden City treasures – taken to Taiwan by Chiang Kai-shek when he evacuated the mainland in 1949, infuriating the Communists – was phenomenal, awe-inspiring. She stood before a magnificent Song Dynasty landscape painting, so absorbed in it that when Guillaume nudged her gently in the ribs, she jumped, for she hadn’t been aware anyone else was even in the room. Quelle coincidence! Her heart slammed. She let him kiss her on both cheeks and almost despite herself, felt some of her sadness melt away. Everything else aside, she’d missed him and his irrepressible jouissance.

  Neither of them ever again broached the subject of her confession or her feelings for him. She convinced herself that she’d simply misread the signals, had got carried away. He was like a brother, she told herself, like a brother and a best friend all rolled into one, except she had to admit she’d never felt such liquid yearning at the thought of any other male best friend she’d had. She just had to look at Guillaume and the world itself seemed to brighten.

  One day, passing one of the Buddhist temples that were everywhere in Taipei, she suddenly reversed her steps and entered. Buddha taught that enlightenment and happiness came only with the renunciation of desire. Self-consciously, she copied the obeisant gestures of the believers, but as much as she wished to believe otherwise, every cell of her body told her that happiness would come only with desire’s fulfilment.

  One day, at her request, Guillaume showed her a photo of Marie, his fiancée. Marie had a lovely smile, but was otherwise fairly plain, almost nondescript. In the photo she wore a sporty-looking jumper over jeans. Monkey found Marie’s ordinariness even more devastating than if she’d been glamorous and chic. But she smiled and said, Marie est très joli, and felt proud of herself for saying it.

  Monkey and Guillaume spent nearly all their free time together. She introduced him to the Astoria, where they sat across from one another with their notebooks and textbooks. He went with her and Lifang to Idea House whenever Weiguo was playing. They returned often to the Palace Museum, where they spent hours marvelling at exquisite jades and calligraphy. They went on camping trips organised by Chinese friends in Butterfly Valley (which really was full of butterflies), wading into the river with their jeans rolled up and plastic buckets in hand to catch shrimp to cook in a wok on the campfire. They went with Lifang and Weiguo to Ali Shan, Mt Ali, where they all squirmed through a ‘cultural performance’ by Taiwan Aboriginal dancers with stiff, tourist-dollar smiles, but were rewarded the following morning with the most magnificent sunrise any of them had ever seen.

  It was love as she’d always imagined it, except it wasn’t. She was deliriously happy most of the time. And then, sometimes, she cried herself to sleep. She began to admire the spider’s stolidity and single-mindedness and missed it when it went walkabout. Once she caught it eating a large cockroach, turning it in its mandibles like a cob of corn, like something out of a horror film. She could hear the crunching of the exoskeleton. She couldn’t look away, and one part of her found it beautiful. Lifang shrieked when she told her this.

  Soon after that, the spider went away, and didn’t return.

  * * *

  Lifang did not believe Monkey’s insistence that she and Guillaume were not a couple. Lifang herself was coyly denying that anything was going on with that gawky American boy, Monkey’s classmate at the Mandarin Centre. Taiwan in the Seventies felt like it was stuck in another era in many ways. Monkey found the universal craze for Nana Mouskouri among people her own age mystifying, for example. Once she went to a party where a boy strummed a guitar and sang, guilelessly, John Denver’s ‘Today’: Today while the blossoms still cling to the vine, I’ll taste your strawberries… Guillaume was elsewhere that night. When the boy asked her to dance, Monkey decided then and there that she would sleep with him, just to get some of the sexual tension out of her system. But her forwardness – and she hadn’t proposed anything outright, she wasn’t that silly – clearly rattled him, and when they stepped outside to ‘talk’, he kissed badly, with stiff lips and a hard tongue. She mumbled some excuse about having to get home and sensed he was as relieved as she was.

  Monkey tentatively befriended another foreign student, a girl from Hapsburg called Beate, who seemed both nice and sensible, and to have a good sense of the absurd. She told her about the spider, and how, in a strange way, she missed it. Beate nodded. It is natural to hold contradictory thoughts and feelings about something in your head, she declared with comforting Germanic certainty. Monkey then told Beate about Guillaume. Beate listened carefully, and then said, He is a bastard. He toys with you.

  The conversation put her in a funk. She wasn’t sure what she wanted to hear, but that wasn’t it. Was it really possible that people were equipped to hold contradictory thoughts about spiders but not the opposite sex? She didn’t know the answer. She hadn’t seen Weiguo for a while. In a casual manner, she asked Guillaume what he thought of Weiguo. He said he liked him very much. And, he repeated what he’d said that fateful night, ta xihuan ni. He likes you. She just rolled her eyes. I think I’d know by now.

  Because Monkey had never told Lifang about her crush on Weiguo, Lifang did not have any reason to disguise her excitement when one day she greeted Monkey with the news that Weiguo had a girlfriend.

  Great, Monkey said, neither quite meaning it, nor as upset as she expected to be at such an announcement. Who is it? Anyone we know? Lifang named one of the few girls who were part of the campus folk scene. Monkey knew the one. She’d been impressed with the girl’s poetic lyrics, her husky voice, waist-length hair and the modish, brown velvet jumpsuit she wore while performing. Monkey thought, I don’t have a right to feel sad. She told Lifang she was happy for him and another little stone clattered onto the pile weighing down her chest.

  Monkey was soon coming up to the end of her year abroad. If she was to pursue her studies at a postgraduate level back home, she needed to get some applications in pretty quickly. Otherwise she had to find a job, though what all this Chinese study had prepared her for she couldn’t say. Chinese speakers weren’t exactly in demand in Australia outside of the intelligence community. Even though Deng Xiaoping had just taken over Beijing, promising ‘modernisation’ and an ‘open door’, it was hard to see that Communist China could ever offer any serious long-term career prospects.

  She was curious about what was happening in China, though, and frustrated with the way the Taiwanese government censored all the news about it, even cutting out articles in foreign journals like Time Magazine and stamping the words ‘Commie Bandit’ over photos of Chinese leaders. Taiwan was experiencing some electrifying developments of its own: the first democratic elections in decades, and the shock of abandonment by the U.S. (which was breaking relations with Taipei to establish them with Beijing), among other things. But Monkey was beginning to find it all a trifle parochial. She had cherished every minute of her time in Taiwan, and was genuinely b
roken up about the prospect of leaving all the people and places she’d come to love, but she also knew she didn’t want to stay there forever.

  Her literary composition teacher assigned the class a short story called Kugua, Bitter Melon, about a woman whose husband had betrayed her. The woman had a peculiar, highly disciplined way of eating, taking only a mouthful or so of any dish. Experience, pleasure and knowing were all contained in the first bite. After that came only greed, desire and indiscipline. Monkey didn’t understand this story; it puzzled her, and she spent hours at the Astoria agonising over her composition.

  When Guillaume told her that he was leaving the following week, a few weeks ahead of plan, Monkey was taken aback. His mother was having an operation back in France, nothing very serious, but he wanted to be there. There was a goodbye dinner with all their friends. Weiguo came with the jumpsuited singer, who told Monkey that Weiguo had told her a lot about Monkey and, although she’d seen her at Idea House, she was delighted finally to meet her properly. Monkey liked her, and was pleased she did.

  The following evening, a subdued Monkey accompanied Guillaume on the bus to the airport. After he checked in, they went to the restaurant for iced coffees, sitting numbly side by side on an upholstered bench. She had so much she wanted to say. Instead she sank into grieving silence, smiling bravely each time he elbowed her in the ribs or did something to try to make her smile. But he wasn’t displaying his usual ebullience either. Several times, she blinked away tears, but she was no longer afraid to show him. Too quickly, the time came for him to go through to the gate. He picked up his heavy old leather suitcase and hitched his satchel over his shoulder. The airport PA played music between announcements; Tony Bennett was crooning ‘The Shadow of Your Smile’, the notes tinny as they echoed through the departures hall. Shuffling towards the gate, they walked so close together that every so often their shoulders or hips bumped. As they passed a little corridor, with some mops and buckets at the end of it, Guillaume stopped, dropping his suitcase. Taking her hands, he pulled her wordlessly into the corridor.