by Ma Jian
TONIGHT OUR CLUB IS STAGING THE MOST GROUND-BREAKING SHOW IN THE WORLD: SUICIDE! IMPORTED FROM THE HIGHLY DEVELOPED NATION JAPAN, THE ACT IS BASED ON THE JAPANESE CONCEPT OF HARA-KIRI. THE PERFORMANCE WILL BANISH ALL SENSE OF SOLITUDE FROM THE SUICIDE VICTIM’S HEART. THERE IS NOW A WAITING LIST OF PEOPLE REQUESTING TO KILI. THEMSELVES BEFORE AN AUDIENCE THAT RUNS UNTIL 1997. TONIGHT, THE ACTRESS IS COMRADE SU YUN. DESCENDED FROM A POOR PEASANT’S FAMILY, SHE IS A LEAGUE MEMBER, IN THE PRIME OF HER YOUTH — A STARTLINGLY BEAUTIFUL YOUNG WOMAN. IF YOU WOULD LIKE TO SEE THIS CHARMING LADY TAKE HER OWN LIFE, HURRY UP AND BUY A TICKET!
TICKET PRICE: I YUAN
TIME: 3 AM, JUNE 4TH
That night the club was engulfed by tens of thousands of hopeful spectators. Anyone who managed to buy tickets at the booth squeezed themselves into the crowd and sold the tickets on for ten times the price. Various impromptu street stalls sprang up on the margins of the crowd. One man selling nylon jackets held up a sign that read: IF YOU WANT TO SQUEEZE A PATH TO THE TICKET BOOTH, THESE NYLON JACKETS WILL EASE YOUR WAY, and the tracksuit tops on his fold-up table were sold in a matter of minutes. Soon customers who bought his nylon jackets could be seen swarming through the crowd like red cockroaches. Everyone squeezing out from the ticket booth emerged half their previous thickness. Five unfortunate ticket holders were dragged out from under the crowd’s stamping feet. Four of them were already dead.
Su Yun hurriedly ran through the plot of the play in her mind as she stepped onto the stage in the basketball court. The audience exploded into rapturous applause, drowning the song ‘Kill the Tiger and Climb the Hill’ that was booming from the loudspeakers. The wild tiger entered the stage on its hind legs and waved at the audience; a team of athletes then strode confidently onto centre stage, and the audience continued to cheer and whistle. The tiger soon grew tired, and had to go back down on all fours, but it still managed to raise its front paw to the audience and wave cheerfully. Su Yun was wearing a clean white tracksuit. She had attached a plastic flower behind her right ear. Her skin looked rosy against her white clothes. She looked good enough to eat. Those in the know could tell from the blue piping that her tracksuit was imported and cost at least fifty FECs – domestically produced trousers didn’t have that distinctive blue piping.
She glanced about her with a fixed smile on her face, trying to adopt the expression the Chinese women’s volleyball team wore on their triumphant return from the Olympics. Unfortunately the tiger was looking the other way, and didn’t see her confident grin. As the applause rose in a crescendo, Su Yun scanned the audience for the painter’s face. She knew where he would be sitting. The day before, she had gone to see him at the municipal museum. She gave him a ticket, and told him it was for her one-woman show. When he asked her what act she was performing, she told him it was a suicide show. He smiled and said, ‘That sounds very intriguing.’ She searched the crowd once more, and at last caught sight of his panic-stricken eyes.
‘He thinks I’m lying again,‘she said to herself, ‘or playing a game. When the tiger sinks its teeth into me though, he will feel sorry. But it will be too late. He will be upset to see my foot go, or my ear. That will bring him to his senses. The moment the tiger pounces on me, he’ll scramble over the wire cage and come to my rescue.’ She waved to him again, and he waved back. The noise of the crowd slowly died down. For a moment, she lost her will to perform, but her professional instincts took over. Twelve years of life as an actress enabled her to keep calm and move gracefully to centre stage.
She took a deep breath, then commenced the act she had decided upon in consultation with the club’s manager. As the song ‘The Peoples’ Liberation Army and the People Go Together Like Fish and Water’ started to play, she began a mime of washing the clothes of the beloved PLA soldiers. Half her mind was focused on the mime, the other half on the tiger. She knew that after she had hung the laundry out to dry, she would have to dance back to the army barracks, and the tiger – that ‘class enemy’ with the face of a man and the heart of a beast – would leap out from the bushes and dig its teeth into her. After she had died, the tiger would be caught and arrested. But on its way to the local police headquarters, a heroic PLA soldier would rush over to avenge her death by plunging a bayonet into the tiger’s back. Marking the spot where Su Yun had been devoured, the soldiers would erect a heroine’s plaque then sing ‘The Internationale’.
As the plot raced through her mind, her steps became increasingly confused. Soon she looked like a Japanese puppet, bobbing up and down to the music’s cheerful beat. Her gestures for rinsing the clothes were not in the least convincing. The script specified that she should now lift her skirt, dunk the clothes into a pail of fresh water and beat them with a stick as fiercely as the fictional hero Wu Song battled with the tiger in the famous episode from Outlaws of the Marsh. Unfortunately, the tiger before her misinterpreted her gestures as signs of aggression, and let out a horrific roar. She was aware she would have to improvise much of the action, because she hadn’t had time to meet the tiger before the show, let alone conduct any rehearsals.
She skipped across the stage with tiny steps (which had once earned her the second prize in a local dance competition), moving closer and closer to the tiger. She gestured to it to circle her, but the tiger was panicked by her sudden movement and jumped three steps back. When the music blared out again, she took it as her cue to break into a song that expressed her joy at cleaning the clothes of the beloved Peoples’ Liberation Army. She planted one foot in front of the other and wiggled her hips up and down. A fire exploded in her chest. ‘Why is it taking so long?’ she asked herself, determined not to look behind her to check what it was doing. ‘Paper tiger!’ she cursed. Then suddenly, without any warning, the tiger pounced forward, and well before it was planned for in the script, clamped its jaws around her chest.
The audience noticed two little horns sprout from the top of Su Yun’s head, and watched her use them to try to fend the beast off. The people in the front rows could even hear her struggling to keep to her lines, squealing: ‘The uniforms of our comrades, the PLA soldiers …’
The tiger continued to lash out at her as she tried to prise from its jaws the uniform she was washing. Even the music that heralded the arrival of the beloved PLA soldiers did not deter the beast. The terms of the contract stipulated that the tiger was legally permitted to devour every part of her. The tiger attempted to clamp its jaws around her skull, but her two horns got in its way, so it decided to leave her head alone for the time being and start tucking into one of her arms. During this moment of respite, Su Yun craned her neck down through the space between the tiger’s legs, and stared at the audience who were now howling with terror. The leg that wasn’t crushed by the tiger’s weight could still move freely. She lifted it in the air and gazed at the line of English words printed down the side of her tracksuit bottoms: WHEN YOU GO ABROAD, BE SURE TO WEAR WHITE! THEY SAY THAT THE STREETS IN FOREIGN COUNTRIES ARE AS CLEAN AS PUBLIC GARDENS. Very soon, only her horned head could move – every other part of her was crushed under the tiger’s weight.
She met the tiger’s gaze. Had the beast not smeared blood over her eyes, she would have been able to see very clearly the beautiful markings on its face, which were much more vivid than those on the toy tiger that hung on her wall (a birthday gift from an old boyfriend). The tiger stared at her eyes as it bit into her flesh. To her surprise, she quite enjoyed the sensation of being chewed; she had never experienced the feeling before. The audience screamed in horror. The tiger wiped its bloody mouth across her chest, then looked up and glanced at the commotion breaking out in the stalls. Su Yun took advantage of this pause to twist her head round and look in the painter’s direction, but unfortunately her pathetic little horns obstructed her view.
Assuming that she was attempting to escape, the tiger dug its claws into her again and blocked the air from her nose and mouth. ‘I love you, my darling,’ she murmured to the painter. ‘Now you know I wasn’t lying.
I want to start my life over again.’
She felt the tiger tuck into the area below her waist. Since she was unable to move, she hoped the tiger would first pull out her guts so as to cover up the parts that most attracted men’s attention. She shook the animal’s blood from her face, then lifted her head, hoping to catch a glimpse of the sky outside the window. The trembling horns on her head made her seem quite animated. Instead of the sky however, her eyes fell on the words of the red banner hanging from the chairman’s podium: UPHOLD THE FOUR FUNDAMENTAL PRINCIPLES, CONSTRUCT SOCIALISM WITH CHINESE CHARACTERISTICS. Then, seated below the slogans, she saw the painter, utterly motionless, staring blankly at the stage.
‘I love you,’ she said to the tiger, without a hint of sarcasm. A second later, the remains of her dismembered body went stiff.
‘May God have mercy on us,’ the writer says. Every sin has its retribution.’
‘We all receive our just deserts,’ the blood donor adds. ‘But I hope we get ours in this lifetime.’
‘Were you in the audience when she committed suicide?’ the writer asks, straightening his back.
‘When who committed suicide?’
‘That woman.’ The writer can’t bring himself to say her name. His square living room looks like a junk shop, with his belongings heaped along the walls. The furniture includes two chests, the revolving chair, plastic stool, a fold-up table donated by the Writers’ Association, and a pair of armchairs. To give the room a neater appearance, he has pasted sheets of blank manuscript paper over the tears in the wallpaper left by the previous occupants. The only picture on the wall is a pencil sketch of a young girl that an ex-girlfriend of his gave him. Looking at it now, it strikes him that the picture is not as good as it once seemed. He thinks that if there were a woman in the room now, and a few more pieces of furniture, it might feel a little more comfortable. He leans over and puts a new tape into his cassette player. Verdi’s Requiem fills the room, the soprano’s voice soars to the ceiling. He slumps feebly back into his chair. ‘That woman,’ he repeats, turning the volume up a little.
The blood donor gets up and paces the room. Perhaps he has eaten too much. When he straightens his back he looks a little taller. ‘Do you think you and I really understand each other?’ he asks.
The writer glances at the blood donor and says: ‘We understand each other better than we could ever understand a woman.’ He leans over, turns the volume down again and sighs: ‘A man whose heart has been wounded should take care in his relations with women.’
‘It was stupid of me to propose to her.’ The blood donor sucks on his cigarette then flicks the ash into a cup.
‘I still don’t understand why she went off with you,’ the writer says. ‘She and I were far more compatible. We shared the same interests and tastes. We even looked alike. But look at you - you’re short and bald, you have no education, no manners …’
‘It’s history now. Put it behind you. We’re friends aren’t we? What do women matter? They just want a man to lean on, they don’t mind who he is. Only friends care about a man’s quality. Women are products of their environment. They want to pity the unfortunate and sponge off the rich. Together, we satisfied both these needs for her.’
‘You mean to say you fulfilled her material needs and I fulfilled her spiritual ones,’ the writer replies.
The blood donor crushes his cigarette out and lowers his head. ‘What do you think drove her to it?’ he asks.
‘It amazes me that she managed to live so long. How did she survive all those years?’ The writer then wipes the grease from his hands, and says to himself: We grew up in a spiritual vacuum, cut off from the rest of the world. A wasted generation. When the country started to open up, we were the first to fall. Foreign culture is the only religion now, but we have no means to understand it, or appreciate its worth. Half a century has gone by, and suddenly we find ourselves in the forest of modern life without a map or a compass. How can a society numbed by dictatorship ever find its way in the modern world? We are unable to think things through for ourselves, we have no reference points, we feel lost and out of our depth. We put on a show of superficial arrogance to hide our low self-esteem.
The two friends stare at the empty egg shells and discarded bones on the table. Every time this moment arrives, they realise they will both have to retreat to the corner of the room and take their places in the two old armchairs.
‘Why do you insist on writing about a real-life woman?’ the blood donor asks. ‘It would be much easier to just make one up.’ He rises to his feet, picks up the bottle of wine and takes it with him to one of the armchairs. There are still a few drops left in the bottle. The writer sinks into the other armchair, and they both lean their heads back against the wall. When two men are alone together, they often adopt this casual position to try to overcome their fear of intimacy. Without waiting for his friend to reply, the donor adds: ‘I know you can’t get her out of your mind. That slut. She deserved to die.’
‘That’s a terrible thing to say.’ A look of rage flashes across the writer’s swollen face.
‘You two had broken up by the time I started going out with her. Or at least, you were having arguments all the time.’
‘Is that what you call breaking up?’ The writer remembers the day Su Yun told him she never wanted to see him again.
‘Of course, I’ve always said it’s best to break up with women gradually. After she dumped you, I advised you to stay away from her, but you continued to see her on the sly. That’s how things were. We were all to blame.’
‘So, what do you think is the best way to break up with a woman then?’ the writer asks with a smirk. In his heart he knows that Su Yun’s only motive for getting involved with them was to make the painter jealous.
‘You should take her to a concert, or to the cinema.’
‘Yes, but most of us can’t manage that.’ The writer looks away and thinks to himself: Su Yun and I were both following paths that were contrary to our nature, and in the end we had to return to the place we started from. Men keep their jealousy hidden, but women need to act it out. Was it us who destroyed her? Did she really exist? My memory of her is like a shard of broken glass that reflects back to me the occasional spark of love. ‘Did you think she was pretty?’ he asks after a long silence.
‘No more pretty than any nice-looking woman you see walking down the street,’ the blood donor says, lighting another cigarette. ‘Women are very pragmatic. If you notice one standing before you with a cold, blank look on her face, you should leave her at once.’
‘Her eyes never lied,’ the writer says. ‘Women’s eyes only light up when they want you. Once they’ve got their hands on you, the light starts to fade.’ The writer looks as though he has just emerged from a dark study. His eyes are glazed. The blood donor is used to this distracted manner of his. ‘There’s nothing so ridiculous as thinking love can be eternal,’ the writer adds. ‘Eternity is a bronze statue caked with green rust. Eternity is death.’
‘We delude ourselves into thinking love will make us happy,’ the blood donor replies. Suddenly the lights go out. In the dark, the men are like two smoking radio sets. The one on the left continues: ‘We divide women up into the beautiful and the ugly. We only ever fall in love with a face.’
‘So you really loved her then …’ The man on the right sounds as dark and hollow as the wall behind him.
‘I loved her in a different way from how you did. She said I was able to give her things you never could.’
‘What things?’
‘Do you have a motorbike? Do you have tickets for next week’s concert? Do you have FECs? Can you take a woman into a hotel where foreigners stay? You have probably never even stepped inside the Friendship Store. Your year’s salary isn’t enough to buy one pair of Italian shoes. But look at me! Not only can I go into the Friendship Store and look at those Italian shoes, I can buy them with my own FECs. What do today’s women want? The answer is everything that you don’t
have.’ The voice on the left sounds as gravelly as a rusty bucket. ‘Look, this cigarette lighter of mine is imported,’ he adds, flicking it on with a ttssaa.
Four balls of light gaze at the foreign, blue flame. Then suddenly the flame goes out.
‘How much did that cost you?’ the voice on the right asks.
‘It’s filled with gas. If you meet a woman who smokes, just light her cigarette with it and she’s yours.’
‘We should think of women in the same way as we think of cigarette lighters,’ says the voice on the right. This lighter of mine is too old, he thinks to himself. It’s time I got myself a new one.
The two shadows fall silent in the black room. The darkness drags them back to their memories. A picture of the actress flashes before their eyes, or through their bodies.
The one on the left says: ‘Sex is a good thing. It turns love into an action.’
‘I don’t think women attach more importance to sex than men. They are emotional creatures. If they feel no affection for you, their bodies become as hard as wood.’
‘Not everyone can see things like you do. But if I could write, I’m sure I’d be a better writer than you. I know about the real world. You just write in order to fill your inner void, you have no experiences to draw from. You see life in terms of tragedy and myth. You are obsessed by your fear of death. But death is something everyone has to go through, there’s nothing particularly interesting about it.’
‘Corruption and secrecy have become the only laws in this country.’
‘You could never keep to those laws,’ the one on the left says. ‘You just shut yourself up here, living in fear, blaming everyone else for your troubles. You would never dare jump into the thick of things and try to change your life, or to strive by any means possible to save yourself.’