by Mian Mian
Today I didn’t feel like listening to rock and roll, and today the songs I asked the DJ to play for me were songs like “Flowers for You,” “The Street,” “Whenever I Walk Past That Café,” “Love Me Tender,” “Running My Hands through Your Black Hair,” “Blue Skies,” “Applause,” “A Small Town on Deer Harbor,” “Winter Rain,” “Heart of Glass,” “Johnny Come Lately,” “Sugar Pie Honeybunch,” “A Kind of Moonlight,” “Love in the Autumn,” “Sergeant Pepper’s Lonely Hearts Club Band,” “Comrade Lover,” “Clouds in My Hometown,” and “Stormy Night.”
These were the pop songs we’d listened to in the mid-1980s. A lot of them were from Taiwan, or oldies from the West. I would never have thought I’d hear them here in this rock and roll bar.
16.
I finally published my first story, in a literary magazine. I gave my first commission to my parents, and while it didn’t even come close to covering the cost of one week’s room and board, it made them very happy.
My story had been published, but there was already a pair of black scissors poised in my mind. I used to think that publication was power, you had to publish, you had to publish, and so I cut as I wrote.
As a result, the day my story came out, I was all fucked up because I couldn’t get rid of that pair of black scissors.
Writing came to me on the doctor’s orders. Really I was writing simply to gain a clearer understanding of myself. I wrote for myself, for my good friends, and sometimes for men with whom I’d once been close. As I wrote, I became more ambitious, and I wanted lots of people to read what I wrote—I wanted the whole world to see what I’d written. After the writing was done, I wanted to become famous, but was there really anything that great about being famous? I’d already imagined what that would be like. I’d set myself on this path, the path of a writer, and only now did I realize that it wasn’t necessarily going to bring me peace.
If I died, where would my soul find a home? My soul is certain to remain after I’ve died, and the soul will follow the spider’s web to heaven. But I used to think that writing was a ladder that would take me to heaven.
Lately I’ve been seized with the feeling that I’m going out of my mind, because I haven’t been able to keep bringing the world a kind of heat, and I feel as though the writing I’ve done until now has already become meaningless. Without the warmth of the sun, how can I write? My phone is ringing, and I don’t have the ability to become a professional writer, and I think that this is fate.
17.
Dusk, Kiwi’s bedroom. Cold tones, his mirror, an oval on four wheels. We bared our upper bodies, his left hand grasping my shoulder, and we leaned into each other, squarely facing the mirror. The setting sun and the rising moon touched us with gray beams of light as we sat together in front of the mirror, naked from the waist up.
Our heads were the same size, our hair the same medium length, lustrous, perfectly straight, neither too thin nor too full. We had the same long, thin faces. The same large, shining eyes, the same unstable blood sugar, the same ugly nose, the same full lips, dry and curved. The same skin tone, the same height and weight, the same prominent collarbone, the same black hair.
We swayed together in the mirror, straining our necks and staring at our expressions in the mirror, until night fell, until we could no longer discern the expressions in our own eyes when we looked in the mirror.
The year before, red had been my key makeup color, and I blended together all kinds of reds. Red represented to me the confusion of youth; it represented extremity, desire, crazy love, menace, and romance. But what would today’s theme be?
Kiwi was about to say good-bye to me. He wanted to go back to America to recharge, he said, and when he came back he’d bring some new work with him.
I said, I like you best when you’re naked and wet, but I never want to be with you again. I don’t ever want to feel that pressure and uncertainty again. So go. And I hope to God that everything will have changed by the time you get back.
We held each other. From the moment he’d first appeared, and then every time I saw him thereafter, I always had a strong desire to hold him. We often had our arms around each other. The rest of the world seemed to have gone into hiding, every pleasure seemed stale, and the two of us sat in the gloom, not speaking. I had the sense that he could see all of me, and I could see him in his beautiful but fatal flight. And it seemed that if we only held each other close, the rest of the world would be lost to us, but at least we would always have each other.
18.
I called Apple on the telephone. He said that he and Kiwi had gone back and taken a walk on that street. He said that the flower shop was no longer there, but that the little street itself was still there, and that things hadn’t changed all that much.
Whenever any of the three of us got together, the conversation always took a beautiful but melancholy turn, as if everyone was a poet. Apple always said that I was beautiful, and having a beautiful man praise me as beautiful invariably gave my spirits a lift. He fed my narcissism, gave me a new persona. It was a wonderful feeling, like being onstage. I thought that the force of this dream could put me on playbills all over Shanghai. I thought that he could transform my life into something new and beautiful. He fixed my awful “heroin complexion,” but he couldn’t do anything about my mouthful of stained teeth. Saining said that he actually liked my tetracycline teeth because they let him know that I was still me. My new life had lost its freshness, and my body fell into an even worse state than before. My heart was burning hot but it was dark; my love was empty. I turned on all the lights, but I couldn’t put the danger far enough away. I also wanted to get out of Shanghai for a while. What could be more wonderful than a change of scene? The day I left, I would try my best to leave my worries behind. Saining was in Japan visiting his mother, and I’d be able to stay at his little place. I wanted to go to Beijing. Shanghai was no fun anymore. Frankly, Shanghai had always been too phony, but Kiwi had a way of making pretentiousness something beautiful. My father agreed to give me money for the trip to Beijing. Maybe I would gain some new insight, and then again maybe every day would be the same. It didn’t matter. I was a woman who could never decide what to wear to parties, which sometimes reduced me to hiding behind the door in tears. But I was unafraid.
Apple said, Don’t be so depressed. As long as there is chaos, there will always be hope, hope for Truth and Beauty. We haven’t reached that state yet, but that’s only because our bodies are still here.
I said, I’m not depressed. It’s just that there are so many ideas that I’m wrestling with in my mind, and I can’t grasp them all at once. It’s just a little vacation, but this trip will also be a kind of search.
Apple said, Don’t let a man ruin your peace of mind. Unrequited love is always an illusion.
I said, I doubt it’s really about men. Even though I matured early, I was very slow to grow up, and there are still lots of things I don’t understand. The course of my growing up has been different from other people’s, but I have to grow up, right? The future is always a kind of quest, and how things end up is always something new, isn’t it?
Apple said, Be careful out there. I won’t see you off, but people like us are never really apart.
K
1.
Saining came back. His complexion was muddy, he shook all over, and whenever I swore at him, he got a nosebleed. His black eyes were just as innocent as ever, which left me feeling confused.
I reflected ruefully that Valentine’s Day and I weren’t meant for each other. But I could still secretly imagine all sorts of things. Men treated me like shit; I couldn’t think of myself as a piece of shit, though. I imagined an airplane parked in front of my house, and a man disembarked and said he would be a good friend to me, a lover.
It never crossed my mind that it was Saining I’d been waiting for! It was early in the morning, and it was raining. I opened the door as if in a dream, thinking back on those years between my nineteenth and twenty-
fourth birthdays, and remembering the many rainy mornings when I would bitterly and plaintively sing an utterly ridiculous little song: “Come back, young Saining. Oh, when will you return? Dawn may never come; come back! Come back to me.” Now, on the morning of Valentine’s Day 1997, Saining was back again, clutching in his hand a bunch of wildflowers just picked from my garden.
Come in, I said. Come in. You look like a ghost standing there. If you have bad news, I don’t want to hear about it. And if you’re in some kind of trouble, don’t expect me to help you. I can’t sleep at night, and I’ve come down with a cough. Yesterday I even felt like jumping off a building. I’m not strong enough right now to share the burden of your sorrows with you.
He said, Don’t send me away. I want to be with you. I’ve thought things through. I miss you.
I said, You’ve thought things through, have you? You asshole! I’m not your mother!
Saining said, My mother is dead.
And then a few tears fell from his eyes, rolling down his face, which was still wet from the rain. And then he started to weep out loud.
He said that his mother had died in Japan, of illness. While he was in Japan, he became addicted to cocaine, but he’d stopped. He wanted to be with me. That’s what Saining was like—he did drugs whenever the opportunity presented itself. In addition to doing drugs, he also liked to take walks, and he walked all over town, walking and thinking. He lived in his own little world. He was his own best companion, and he always had been. From time to time he would think of me, need me. After all these years, his love for me was really quite simple—he always came back.
I felt like kicking this bad-luck, bad-news man right out of my life. The morning chill toyed with us. We were stuck in our own dead end. And then Saining’s nose started bleeding. Whenever he got a nosebleed, I felt even more helpless.
I said, Why don’t you lie down for a while. Let’s sleep a little. We can talk later.
The wind started to blow, and the sound of rain falling outside made us feel empty, so empty that our lives seemed on the verge of being extinguished. A thin blanket covered Saining’s lower body. He had grown much thinner. A couple of friends had been staying in my extra bedroom, so I had to sleep in the same bed as Saining. I didn’t have a sofa.
How did you get here from the airport?
First I took a cab, then the subway, and then another cab.
Do you like the Shanghai subway?
Subways are all the same. Shanghai’s is just newer, that’s all. I like riding subways; everyone is themselves down there. There are lots of people from the countryside riding the subway here, and they stared at me. Their lips were cracked because the heat was turned up too high in the cars.
They come to Shanghai looking for work. They don’t have lip balm.
The rain stopped, and somewhere outside, a crow cawed.
My father was a failure in real estate. I’m the only person living in this house now, but I like it here because it’s so damn far from the center of town.
Saining’s nosebleed stopped, but he kept fussing with his nose. I couldn’t get to sleep. I had lain awake on so many mornings; Saining had gone missing on so many mornings. He’d last disappeared more than a year ago, and I’d almost gotten married in the interim. I’d hung on to the key to his little place, but he never called me, not even once. I respected his habit of wandering off, but I can’t say that it didn’t hurt me. I wished that I could just vanish with that kind of frequency too, but I wasn’t able to. Saining’s mother was always giving him money, and he had a British passport. He could go wherever he wanted.
2.
Whenever anything happened that had to do with Saining, Hong would call me. No matter where I was, she could always find me. Hong and Saining both loved to call people on the telephone; they both belonged to that category of people who will talk on the phone until their chins are bruised. Today when Hong called, I was in the middle of giving the dog a bath. Actually, the dog used to belong to her and Saining. I thought of this dog more as a movie camera: he’d filmed the whole Saining-and-Hong story, as well as the love story of me and my wife. Now my woman was gone, because I was bad, because I only made love to her a few times in an entire year. I loved her, but I didn’t much feel like making love. I just didn’t feel like it, and I’m not interested in why. What was the point of wondering? But she dumped me because I didn’t spend any time thinking about it or trying to think of ways to solve the problem.
I’d been putting on weight, and Hong said to me, as a joke, You won’t be able to make it as a sex symbol anymore. Now you’re gonna have to learn to play.
Thank God we’re still alive. Thank God I can still earn some bread playing in nightclubs. Thank God we’ve knocked music off its pedestal. That’s what I told Saining that day.
Saining told me on the phone that he still loved that woman. He also said that he was absolutely positive he’d found the right woman. This got a rise out of me.
Many years ago, Saining and I had great ambitions and formed a band. But Hong just lolled around all day, living only for love. Now she’s a writer, and her writing has become a kind of trend, spontaneous and of the moment. Hong the writer and her imitators were overnight sensations—at least their bullshit images were. If you browse the black-market bookstalls, you’ll see pirated versions of their books displayed all together, right next to the cheap quartz watches. What I’m trying to say is that fame is a crock of shit! Other people pick out the most searing elements of Hong’s writing and turn them into badges. Then they pin them onto their own crap, and it makes them rich and famous. The papers say this kind of writing “represents youth culture in transformation.”
Representative, my ass! That’s what Hong said. She said, I’m thrilled to death that I can’t speak for anyone or anything. The window is open, and we can see the ocean outside, but our bodies are still here, inside. These times are witnessing the birth of many new things, people are abandoning the old rules, and everything’s looser.
One night in 1994, I went over to Hong’s place. I kept pounding on the door, but she didn’t come to open it. I had a feeling she was there, so I used my identification booklet to pry open the door. Hong had overdosed. She lay barely conscious, soaked in her own drool, and her labored but agitated breathing sounded like the bleating of a sheep. She couldn’t speak, but she told me with a gesture that she couldn’t move, because movement would make her breathing dangerously hard. She signaled to me: Saining has gone and isn’t coming back. What now? I don’t want to die; I want to see Saining.
While waiting for the ambulance, we communicated with signs and gestures. I could have spoken but I used my hands instead. I may not look like much, I’m small, but I’m tough and I almost never cry; but that night I cried like a son of a bitch. I told her that I still had sixty yuan in my pocket. I’m feeling bad tonight too, I told her. I miss Saining as much as you do. I thought I’d come over so we could talk until dawn, and then I thought we’d go out for tea. We haven’t gone out for tea in a long time. But I had no idea what you’d been up to until I showed up at your place tonight. I’m taking you back to Shanghai tomorrow.
I remember the way Hong’s bloodless lips contorted as she mouthed: Don’t cry. None of this will last. A new world is coming. All of our suffering and stupidity will be buried in the past.
I will never forget any of the gestures Hong made that night. Breathing raggedly, she faced the wall, signing with gestures that were at once sorrowful and fearless.
I think that that night was a turning point for Hong. She would have to write down everything about that time and place and turn it into a clear and simple story. I just hoped that she would have the strength. If she could do that, she would never have to feel afraid of her transformation into a writer.
So today I said to her, You have to keep writing! And whatever you do, make sure that what you write is close to your self, and follow your own lead.
3.
I’m as helpless as a c
hild. I’m young and sincere and unlucky. My mom liked to say that a person can only be good at one thing in life. Even though my mom was incredibly mixed up about a lot of things, she was totally right about this. I began life as a broken piece of glass. My mother took the broken bits of glass and started gluing them together, piece by piece, and now I’m carrying on this work. I think that I have the perseverance it takes to keep going. Because my love is just this, a roomful of broken glass.
Hong’s current hairstyle makes her look even more like a scarecrow. And me, I’m just a fainthearted little pigeon, flying into her open window at last. Right now she’s sleeping beside me, with a thin blanket covering her lower body. She’s become very thin. For as long as I’ve known her and been with her, I’ve felt as if I’ve had a new lover every year—but they’ve all been Hong. She was different every year. I barely had news of her for such a long time, but I still know that when we’re together, every year it will be like meeting someone new.
Truly, I can find in her everything I might ever want. But I always want to be away from her. My world is a wound-up clock, but I don’t know who it was that wound it. Maybe this is what fate is. Sometimes this clock of mine points toward Hong, and sometimes it points somewhere else. Sometimes it points toward the city; sometimes it points toward a village in the English countryside. Sometimes it points toward the eighty-eight-story Grand Hyatt Hotel; sometimes it points at a patch of flat ground. I’m exceptionally gutless. I often have to get away from the people I’m closest to, and I’ll go off by myself to someplace I’ve never been before, and then I’ll come back. This way, life is always fresh for me, because I know that there’s always something new just waiting to be discovered. It’s like gliding away, and for me it seems to be the answer to everything. Whenever I leave, I feel so real, and every time I come back I feel as though I’ve lost something.
Now, her cold, exhausted gaze chills me to the bone, and I’m afraid to take her in my arms. I don’t know where I stand with her anymore, and this worries me. I couldn’t take it if she didn’t want to make love with me anymore. I just don’t think there’s any way I could handle that. She said, The truth is, you’re not interested in me anymore. You need to go back to being like you used to, screwing around with other women. Then you’d be interested in me again.