by Mian Mian
How can you say that?
Saining, you became a father at eighteen. You said the mother was a prostitute ten years older than you, you left the child with your father for a year, and then you gave him back because you did some investigating and found out you weren’t the father after all. Now you’re twenty-four, your mother is in Japan, your father is in England, and you’re on your own in China. You’re not family, and I can choose whether or not to be with you. Nobody is responsible for you but yourself. You have to learn to accept the consequences of what you do. My father taught me this.
7.
I moved in with Sanmao. This time I couldn’t tell myself that Saining wasn’t to blame.
I was like a bird perching on a rooftop; I was stuck. My self-confidence had reached a low point. Sanmao said that my problem was that in loving Saining I had forgotten myself, and that a person who doesn’t love herself is unlovable in turn. He told me, Love is something that has to be learned.
I went out every day to buy liquor, but I always threw up before I’d drunk very much. Sanmao said I was a sad and stupid girl.
Saining came to see me every Sunday night. He always brought presents, and sometimes he brought me songs he’d written while thinking about me. Saining’s response to the world around him was mystical and highly original, but he hadn’t had a decent Chinese education. There was no schooling for him at the work farm, and after he’d gone to England he wasn’t able to study Chinese, so the songs he wrote were full of wrong characters, and I was usually the only person who could decipher them and make any sense out of what he wrote. He worked hard to express his feelings in the songs he wrote about me, saying that he couldn’t bear to be parted from me. Soon he was even calling me “a woman as sweet as milk,” but then the next thing I knew he was also calling me “a cookie laced with poison.”
I asked Saining, Do you love Qi? He said, Yes. I said, What do you love about her? He said, I love her vulnerability and her selfishness, her beauty and her sadness. I love her stubbornness, I love her body, I love the way she doesn’t love people. I said, Saining, don’t I have a good body? Don’t I satisfy you? Saining said, Her body expresses so much disappointment. I’m addicted to that feeling of hopelessness. I said, Well, you always say exactly what you mean. So, do you feel the same kind of love for her and me? He said, I feel the same kind of love for everyone; I only have one kind of love. I said, I only have one kind of love too, but you’re the only person I love. There’s no one else; I love only you. But you, if you love me and everyone else the same way, then why do you feel like you have to be with me? He said, Because I need to have some connection with you in this life. And he started to cry.
He couldn’t do anything without crying. When we made love, he performed badly, often quitting halfway through. He played with my breasts until they got sore, and I was afraid that the good times we’d had in the past would never come back. This thought made me shudder. I really didn’t know what love was; I only knew that if he were to be cut out of my life, I wouldn’t be able to go on.
I tracked Qi down. I told her I could never forgive her for the pain she’d caused me and said I hoped that she would disappear from our lives forever. I said, Saining loves you, but he’ll never be able to leave me. Do you want to be in love with a man like that? Qi said, You and Saining, you’re both pathetic little good-for-nothings, just sponging off of other people. You’re useless; you don’t even understand each other! You’re a pair of idiots, and you bore me to death!
She left, and I never saw her again.
I chose a blustery and moonless night to slash my wrists. Sanmao was at work at the nightclub, and I knew what time Saining would be leaving the house where he tutored, knew that he would be coming to see me that night. So I went into the bathroom a little before I expected him to show up. And when the knife in my hand pressed against my vein and finally cut through, I felt as though this was real, and I shook and felt my body approaching a state of bliss, and I was crying. I turned on the faucet, letting the cold water course over my hot veins. I sat on the edge of the bathtub, feeling dizzy and repeating to myself over and over, If he really loves me, he’ll sense that something is wrong; he won’t be late if I’m not meant to die.
Suicide isn’t something you perform for an audience. You weren’t trying to kill yourself, and you weren’t proving how much you love me. You just wanted to be one of those stupid, crazy little whores. You’re such a bore.
These were the first words Saining said to me after I woke up.
We were both crying. Saining never cried in front of anyone but me, and I found his tears seductive.
While I was in the hospital, Saining never left my side. He got me moved to a private room, and we listened to music together, sharing the headset, one earpiece for each of us. With him beside me, I was able to sleep, even though it was very hard for us to be intimate there, even though I didn’t think that it was over yet. Sometimes I would tell myself, You’re only twenty-two years old; you should get a job. You shouldn’t depend on a man like this. You need to find your own future; this life you’re leading is keeping you from growing up.
But I couldn’t help myself; I couldn’t fight it.
The day I got out of the hospital, I invited all of the band members out to a restaurant that specialized in snake. In the middle of the meal, I said abruptly, Saining, I’ve made a decision. I want to split up with you. I want to go back to Shanghai.
No! he said.
I said, Fine, we don’t have to break up. So, you and Sanmao are always talking about how men in the Northwest like to beat their wives, right? I want you to sit right there and let me slap you on the face.
I was pointing to the center of the room, which was also the most crowded part of the restaurant, as I spoke. I’d rehearsed these words earlier.
Saining looked down without responding.
Stop it, you two! Sanmao tried to intercede.
If he loves me, he’ll do it. He asked for it.
With a whoosh, Saining stood up while everyone looked on. Moving a stool over to the middle of the room, he sat down facing me, and before anyone had a chance to react, I had already gone over and given him a loud slap on the face.
I started to cry, and all of the shame came pouring out of me.
Many people were getting to their feet, but Saining held me tight, saying, Don’t worry about it. It’s nothing, really, it’s nothing. She’s my girlfriend, and I’m sorry if we disturbed anyone. This is between her and me.
We came back to the table and just looked at each other for a long while, and I couldn’t hear anything going on around us, because I just wanted to look at him, and to look at him looking at me.
Let’s stretch our legs, I said.
In the restaurant toilet I grasped his penis in my hand, and I suddenly felt upset when I realized that I’d hardly ever taken the initiative with him. It was 1992, I was twenty-two years old, and I was so useless. This made me start crying all over again.
A full moon was rising in the sky outside the window. I had to lock him up tight. I had the tools. I got down on my knees and started to pray. The rays of moonlight there were so hazy that I thought I was losing my mind. His flesh was soft in my hand, and I had to love it. Loving it would make it beautiful. I wanted to hold him, to squeeze him hard until I crushed him. I sucked him, sucking out his wet soul until the end, until that gateway to his life had closed. He was my one and only. I had learned how to give head, how to beg, how to pray. He had become my prey; I wanted to turn him inside out. God, how I wanted to turn all my caresses into curses and caress him all over, with limitless tenderness, until he would whisper to me soft and clear, I love you!
I swallowed, and with his semen inside me, I found myself again.
I moved back in. Once more, he and I were rushing, hand in hand, toward an uncertain tomorrow.
8.
Saining and I fell into a daily routine that continued, unchanged, for several years. We slept during the
day, rising at dusk to go out to eat. We spent our nights at home relaxing, amusing ourselves. Occasionally we might go perform, or we might go out of town on a short vacation. We always made love in the early hours around dawn. The mornings were cold, and I liked the special sense of our place in the world that I had during these times. When the light penetrated the hazy atmosphere, I could always see Saining’s hair spread out like wings on the pillow. I loved his hair; his hair was like the threads of my thoughts. Almost every morning, while it was still very early, Saining would stand by the window and play his violin. His guitar playing was spectral, plaintive, and cutting. But his violin playing was so classically pure and refined that I felt a sense of despair whenever I listened to it.
I worked for only a short time. Saining hated my singing at the nightclub, and he was always taking the outfits I performed in and cutting them up into all sorts of strange shapes, always trying to stir up trouble, always picking fights. During my brief stint as a nightclub singer, Saining would go for days barely speaking to me at all, not even when we were making love.
Saining also worked for a bit, tutoring a “problem child,” a little boy from Hong Kong named Toby. Toby had a school phobia. He had been sent to live in Mainland China with his nanny, and he spent his days at home. Saining taught him math, English, and violin and how to play soccer. Saining and Toby had met purely by chance, but they trusted each other, and I was glad that Saining was Toby’s tutor. I never imagined that many of the times when I thought he was at Toby’s, Saining was actually sneaking around with Qi.
After the business with Qi, Saining convinced Toby to go back to Hong Kong. He said he wasn’t up to the task of shouldering Toby’s problems, and besides, Toby belonged with his parents.
Saining was skipping a lot of band rehearsals, and Sanmao was furious. Sanmao saw music as a way to change his life, but Saining simply liked playing in a band for its own sake, and he didn’t have any ambitions greater than that. Saining didn’t have the same chip on his shoulder that Sanmao did; he wasn’t as worried about the fate of the nation. I watched their friendship ebb and flow, now close, now distant, in an endless cycle. Being in a band was just like being in love. Every time you broke up or got back together again, the memory of it was carved indelibly into your mind.
Sanmao said the way we were living wasn’t healthy, with Saining depending on his mother for money, and me depending on Saining for money. Sanmao said that bit by bit we were going to rot. Sanmao thought that we needed to seek out hardship, to pay some dues. But I felt that as long as I could spend my days with Saining, I would be perfectly content to rot away. Whenever Sanmao castigated us, we just giggled like a pair of fools. There was nothing he could do to us.
Saining’s mother kept on sending him money. All those Japanese yen went a long way in China, and we lived easy lives. For my part, I kept on spending Saining’s money. I didn’t want to work, since I hadn’t been to trade school and I didn’t know what kind of job I could expect to find. Wages in this town were pitifully low unless you went into some sort of business, legal or illegal, or wanted to sing in a nightclub. Of course, there were plenty of law-abiding citizens working in offices, but I didn’t know what sort of job I could look for.
Saining and I had a lot in common. For one thing, we each had our own worlds, our own mute worlds, and because of this, we respected each other’s silences. We both had asthma, both of us used to be picked on, neither of us had any grand ideals. We weren’t interested in other people’s lives, we were sensitive and self-doubting, we didn’t believe what we read in the newspaper, we were afraid of failure, and yet the thought of resisting some temptation made us anxious. We wanted to be onstage, to be artists. We kept on spending other people’s money, dreading the day when all of this would change. We didn’t want to become good little members of society, nor did we know how. Anyway, we would tell ourselves, we’re still young.
We knew that there were lots of people just like us, but we still felt especially lucky to have found each other. The two of us shared joy and gloom, vulnerability, humor, and shame. Every day we watched each other fall asleep.
Sometimes I thought that the love that Saining and I had was a kind of poison, for as we lay together in the soft depths of the night, the quiet and tranquillity left us speechless, left us never wanting to awaken.
9.
The street outside our apartment windows was the most famous street in town. On either side it was packed with unbroken rows of shops and big all-night restaurants. Every evening, as night fell, the street filled with throngs of women. They came from every corner of China, some around my age, some much younger, some much older. Their eyes followed the slow-moving stream of vehicles that drove by, tracking each car, while the men in the cars stared back, because some of those cars might stop for these women. The make and model of a car (they were afraid of military or police cars), the way the driver spoke, these were the keys to whether they would stay or go. People around there called them “chickens” or “roving orioles.” The streetwalkers were the cheapest and most miserable of the prostitutes, but they also had the most freedom. Most of them also used heroin. They didn’t have to worry about losing their looks and being cast aside, since anyone could work this street, no matter how ugly she was. Of course, they had a higher chance of being hauled in by the police here, and a higher chance of running into hassles like customers who wouldn’t pay. The town’s highest concentration of beggars gathered around these women, as did a crowd of pimps, drug dealers, young flower-selling girls, and shish kebab vendors. For years the Public Security Bureau had been trying to control this avenue, and they’d even held rallies there where they’d meted out justice. Occasionally a police vehicle covered in wire mesh would drive by, and you could see little clumps of people scattering in every direction, accompanied by the sound of the girls’ screeching. Diagonally across the street from our building was a big movie theater, a theater that doubled as a place of business for the sex trade, mostly blow jobs or what they called “airplane rides”—hand jobs. Each contingent of cops had its own jurisdiction, so whenever the police showed up on the street, everybody ran into the movie theater, and whenever police appeared at the doors of the theater, everybody ran out into the street. Sometimes it didn’t take anything more than for a van carrying frozen pork to drive by, but if even one person appeared to break into a run, all the others would take to their heels.
Everyone on the street spent their hours scurrying back and forth. Every night things got lively. And when the darkness fell away and the sun came up and penetrated the shadowy recesses of the endlessly cruising cars, you could always see a few girls still standing around, junkies who hadn’t done enough business. This was the street where Saining and I lived, in a big apartment building, and I often stood on the balcony watching it all, until, over the course of a few years, it became a nightly ritual.
10.
Rock groups started cropping up in Beijing, and from time to time some of the embassies hosted underground rock concerts.
Saining and his band went to Beijing. While he was away, I went back to Shanghai. From there I planned to travel up to Beijing so that Saining and I could celebrate my twenty-second birthday together.
On the phone, Saining told me that he was going to be out at the Great Wall doing performance art on the afternoon when I was to arrive. I said, I’m coming just to see you, but you couldn’t care less. Since when are you so interested in performance art? And what is performance art, anyway? He said that he had to go, that he was already committed, but that looking at the times, he was absolutely certain he would be able to meet me at the airport. I said, At five or six in the evening the roads in Beijing are bound to be jammed. He said he could guarantee that he’d be there for me on time. Lastly, he said he missed me.
The next day I waited at the airport for four hours. By the time Saining showed up, I was a wreck.
When I saw who he was with, the situation quickly spun out of control. The
guy he’d brought along was someone who had stolen money from Saining in the past. He went around telling people he was a Buddhist, and while he clearly knew a lot about Buddhist teachings, he still struck me as a very immoral person. On top of this, I thought he treated Saining badly. Saining appeared to be well aware of this person’s faults, but he nonetheless treated him better than he treated me. I was certain that he was the one who had dragged Saining into the performance art piece. Beijing was full of slackers like him.
I wanted to go to the most expensive place in Beijing for dinner, and Saining took me to Wangfu, where I ordered the priciest champagne on the menu. I was drinking on an empty stomach, and the alcohol hit me fast. That person I despised just sat off to the side, eating and going on and on about his lack of interest in me. After I’d had a bit to drink, I started berating Saining. He argued back. A lot of people were looking at us, and a waiter came over to intervene. The waiter said, He didn’t do it on purpose; he didn’t mean to. Saining said, You see? Even he can tell I didn’t do it on purpose. When I heard this, I picked up my bottle of birthday champagne and broke it over Saining’s head. Shattered glass went flying, and champagne sprayed everywhere.
The police showed up, and Saining dragged me into the elevator, where I started hitting him. We got out of the elevator, and Saining carted me outside and pushed me into a car. The door closed behind me. I felt like killing him.
I have never genuinely wanted to kill someone. Except for that night.
I pictured him sitting beside me, pictured him breathing his last breath right before my eyes, and my entire being was focused on this fantasy. I wanted to kill him. I thought of all the times he’d hurt me, and I started shaking. I took a penknife out of my makeup bag, imagining that this small but very sharp knife could kill someone. Just then, that son of a bitch got into the car. If I was going to kill Saining, I had to do it now.