by Tash Aw
“Have a snack,” the man said, holding out a chicken-wing skewer.
“Thanks,” Phoebe said. She looked around her. There was no one left. Cheers went up in the stadium again—a chorus of happy people. The tune was a quick modern version of “Sweet Little Rose.” She thought about the evening she had spent with Walter, when she had taken him to eat baby lobster in the Changsha Noodle Stall and they had ridden on Yanyan’s scooter through the city. When they rode over the giant overpasses—the headlamps of the streams of cars flowing under them, over them, around them—Phoebe felt as if she were in an amusement park, on a roller coaster that made her giddy and dreamy and forgetful. In any other place, in any other time, that would have been a proper date and she would have been happy. It made her sad to know that she had not been able to be happy in a situation that was perfect for being happy.
She heard music she recognized. She turned to the skewer-seller and said, “Here. Take these. If you hurry, you might be able to catch Chang Chen-Yue.”
“Huh?” he said, staring at the two tickets.
“What? You don’t like Chang Chen-Yue?” she joked. “Take them.”
She walked down the road, the melodies from inside the stadium becoming fainter the farther away she got. The night seemed less muggy now that she was no longer surrounded by crowds. She took the metro, which was not busy at this time of the night. The coolness of the air-conditioning gave her goose pimples, and she realized her skin had become sticky from standing out in the heat for so long. She got off a few stops early and walked along Nanjing Xi Lu, past the boutiques that were now shut. She wanted to see the quiet lights, the gilding, and the clean wide pavements one last time. As she walked past the glittering windows of the shops, she remembered that she was carrying her “Journal of My Secret Self.” It did not seem so secret now that Yanyan had read it. She had wanted to throw it ceremoniously into the Huangpu River, as she had always planned to do. In her dreams, she would be rich and successful when she cast adrift the journal that contained her darkest fears and ambitions. But now that she was leaving—now that she was a failure—it seemed meaningless and empty to perform such a grand ritual. She took it from her bag and dropped it into a rubbish bin.
The same street vendor she remembered from several months earlier was still standing before his pushcart, selling his homemade CDs of Cuban music, which he played through a loudspeaker strapped to his scooter. It was the same music he was playing the night Phoebe met Walter—soft and gentle as a spring wind, drifting in the night, even though there were only a few people around to hear it. She had learned from Walter that Cuba was not near Brazil or Spain, as she had once thought. He had played her different kinds of music in his car as they drove around the city, telling her which country each was from. And once, she had twirled her torso in the way she imagined Spanish dancers might, to which he had said, “You are really too funny.”
29.
LIFE IS A FLOATING DREAM
“YOU WERE GOING TO BUY THAT BUILDING?” YANYAN SAID. “YOU?” The newspaper was spread out on the floor, and she pulled it toward her to take a better look at the small photo.
“Not me, exactly,” Justin replied. “My family.”
“Lucky thing you didn’t—it looks cheap and horrible. It’s just … a factory.”
Justin laughed. It was true that the photo did not show the building in its best light. Taken from afar, all one could see was a structure of irregular gray concrete blocks clad in wires and broken antennae. The article was not a large one, confined to the bottom corner of the newspaper, a mere whisper of the collapse of the deal to redevelop it. No reason was given for the demise of the project.
It was late at night, and they were sitting on the front steps of their apartment block, eating red-bean ice cream and groundnut mochi, a habit that had grown increasingly frequent over the summer. The nights were still warm but no longer muggy, touched by the freshness of the first winds of autumn. Before them, Suzhou Creek lay still and flat, reflecting the lights of the buildings as if in a black mirror. The days were now clear and bright, the sun high and unfiltered as it was in the Mediterranean, Justin thought. He wondered if it was always like this in Shanghai or if this autumn was exceptional; maybe he had simply never noticed it.
In his jeans pocket, he could feel his phone pressing against his thigh, more pronounced than usual; he had become unusually aware of its physical presence ever since he received a message from Leong Yinghui two days earlier. It was as if the unanswered message added to the weight of the phone, rendering it more valuable, more fragile and precious. He carried it with him all the time now, tucking it into his pocket so that he could feel its hard edges insisting themselves against his flesh, comforting in their solidity. He did not leave it on the table, and even when in the shower he made sure he did not lose sight of it.
And yet he did not reply to the message. He had found it on his phone upon waking one morning; it had been left at 1:52 A.M., long after he had gone to bed and turned the phone off. Her voice had been calm and matter-of-fact, without any trace of hesitation—in fact, it began so smoothly that he had the impression she had rehearsed the entire message before ringing him. She said simply that she had been involved in a large deal to purchase a landmark site that he might have heard of—a building called simply 969—and that she had taken out considerable loans secured on her existing businesses. It turned out—ha-ha—that her business partner had siphoned all the money from their business account. She’d woken up one day and he had just vanished, along with the money. Well, it was her fault; she hadn’t taken the requisite precautions. She had let her guard down, and you know what happens in Shanghai if you let your guard down. Maybe she was never destined to be a good businesswoman after all. She was sure that Justin wouldn’t recall, but years ago she and Justin had once said that business, when deconstructed, was philosophically unchallenging—remember that? What a joke. (Here, she half-laughed.) The mess she’d made of the deal had reminded her of what Justin and everyone else said many years ago, that she’d never understand business. He’d known her better than she thought; she realized that now. She’d spent days thinking about what kind of person she’d been back then and what she’d become. She wondered what Justin might make of her today—compared to before, she meant. (A noise—maybe a sniff, a runny nose? Her voice had begun to waver and soften.) Losing the money was painful, but what was worse was that she had been stupid, so stupid. (Here, a short pause, a muffled noise, as if she had cupped her hand over the phone.) Anyway, she didn’t mean to bore him with details of her misery. No, in fact she was going to go back to the drawing board, salvage what she could from her businesses and see what happened. She knew she really wasn’t that bad at business. Maybe not great, but definitely not terrible. She was going to stick it out in China and rise from the ashes—again. (Then came a pause in the message—so long that the first time Justin listened to it he wondered if she had hung up.) It would be hard, but that’s life. She’d experienced worse in the past, as he no doubt remembered. So, if he wanted to meet for a drink sometime, just to catch up on old times, he should give her a call. Or maybe (laugh) it would be better if they didn’t catch up on old times and simply chatted about the weather, restaurants, that kind of thing. All the best.
All the best—as if signing off on a letter to an acquaintance.
He listened to the whole message at least ten times, tracking every nuance of emotion—sadness, nostalgia, friendliness, forgiveness—and for the first time he felt an intimacy with her. In a single phone message she had opened herself up to him far more than she ever had during those years they’d spent together. The sudden closeness he felt for her frightened him, and now it was his turn to be reticent about returning her call. Half of him wanted to savor the message; the other half was terrified by it. It was thrilling to hear her say, “You knew me better than I thought.” But then he felt a raw grating in the pit of his stomach when she said, “I’ve experienced worse in the past.” T
he deliberate flatness of her voice seemed to contain an accusation of hurt that neither of them could ever forget, and it made him ashamed to think that he could have simply rung her out of the blue and imagined that she had moved on and forgotten all that had been inflicted on her. She might never realize that Justin had never been in control of his past, that he had been a mere actor playing out his role.
He remembered how C.S. had played his role too—that of the weak younger brother, so sensitive that his breakup with Yinghui caused him to fall ill with the flu for three whole weeks. He had ignored the family’s disapproval of his relationship with Yinghui—the nature of her father’s death and the attendant rumors of his involvement with the Lim family’s property business made for unwanted publicity—but when it was suggested that C.S. place some distance between himself and Yinghui, C.S. made little attempt to argue against his parents. He’d moved on—he shrugged as he explained his nonchalance to Justin; they’d gotten stuck in a rut, he wasn’t excited by the relationship anymore, he was too young to settle down. And yet, after C.S. rang Yinghui to tell her he was breaking up with her (she wasn’t in, so he left a message on her answering machine), he began to feel sick. A fever set in, and his joints felt so painful that he could not make it downstairs for meals. He stayed in his room, shivering in damp sheets, trembling every time she rang to ask for him (the maids politely told her that he wasn’t around). He felt like a real bastard, he said to Justin. He felt so bad for her—he guessed he must really have loved her after all. And yet he could not face her to explain why he had broken up with her.
“Please, Justin, you go,” he’d mumbled into his blanket. “Just tell her anything you want. Blame it on the family—anything.”
And so Justin had driven over to Angie’s, knowing he would find Yinghui there, even though the café had ceased operating for some weeks. The shelves, chiller cabinets, and refrigerators had been stripped bare, and the light fittings had been removed. There were a couple of plastic stacking crates with pots and pans in them lying in the middle of the floor. What remained of the furniture had been pushed against one wall, but the space it created made the café look smaller rather than bigger. The only decorations that remained were the meaningless signs that she and C.S. had had lovingly painted and hung: ALL GREAT NOVELS ARE BISEXUAL. In the middle of the damp, airless space sat the long gray sofa, which C.S. had occupied virtually every night since the café had opened. It was the only thing that had not moved in the café.
Yinghui was sitting cross-legged on the sofa, poring over some papers containing lists of numbers. She leafed through them, occasionally going back to one. It was obvious to Justin that she did not understand what she was reading. There was music playing from a portable stereo set at her feet—the Tom Waits CD that she and C.S. liked so much.
“Need some help with those figures?”
She looked at him and shook her head. She held his gaze, as she always did—that calm, expectant seizing of his attention, waiting for him to say something. But it was she who spoke first. “Don’t bother,” she said, smiling. “Nothing you say will make sense to me. I will never understand anything you tell me. So please don’t speak to me again.”
He stood there for a few moments while she continued to read through the papers. She did not meet his eyes the entire time he delivered the speech he had prepared—about how he was genuinely sorry about what had happened, that it was difficult for C.S. too, that their family was not an easy one to grow up in, that they, too, lived with certain pressures. He had planned a lighthearted joke or two to show his human side, make it seem less painful for her. But the timing was wrong, so he left them out, merely delivering the salient points as quickly as possible: the apology, the finality of C.S.’s decision, the lack of any malice or ill-feeling at all toward her.
As he stood there looking at her on the sofa, the music on the stereo seemed the only thing alive in the concrete space. The late-night bluesy tinkling of the piano made him wish he were somewhere else, in a smoky bar in a cold country, where he would step out into the street and find it snowy and calm, the sky indigo-colored with the promise of dawn.
She was now sitting with her feet up on the sofa, one knee raised, the other stretched out. Her head was still bowed over the papers on her lap, but he noticed, as he was leaving, that she had closed her eyes.
Those expansive qualities of time again: He knew, even then, that those moments would fill the canvas of his memory and seem longer than they actually were. He had once heard Yinghui and C.S. arguing about memory: What we retain in our minds is not necessarily what matters the most, C.S. had said; we are conditioned by our times and the petty pressures of the world we live in to hang on to certain images and feelings, things that are ultimately trivial. The passage of time exaggerates these fragments of memory, he said, accusing Yinghui of being juvenile and girly. If you pine for a long-lost love years later, he argued, it is just sentimental fluff, not really love at all. But Yinghui had not agreed. If someone really matters to you, if you really really love them (she’d clenched her fists as she said this, holding them tightly under her chin as if grasping something precious), the memory of that person would always be true and clear; she didn’t care if people thought she was soppy.
“Hello, sir, what are you thinking about? Your eyes have gone blank,” Yanyan said as she finished the last of the red-bean ice cream, her spoon scraping against the cardboard tub. “I hope you’re not dreaming of that stupid building. If you ask me, it’s a wreck and you were lucky you didn’t buy it. Fate was kind to you.”
Justin eased the phone from his pocket and looked at it cradled in the palm of his hand.
“Oh, I see, it’s that woman you were telling me about. Are you going to call her back?”
“I don’t know.”
Yanyan stood up and yawned. “Just remember, women don’t hang around waiting forever, you know.”
Long after Yanyan had left, Justin remained sitting on the steps, staring at the empty street and the recently planted sycamore saplings, each one supported by a low wooden tripod. In the distance he could just make out the tops of the towers of Pudong. There were faint trails of summer clouds around the peaks of the buildings, visible only because the light from the towers made them glow white against the night sky. The view had not changed since he’d arrived in Shanghai, Justin thought: It was comforting in its predictability. He liked that there were things in the world that never altered their form or habit; that way, he could measure himself against them and would always know where he stood, would always know if he was moving or rooted, like those silent, immutable buildings.
He looked at his phone again. He had already added Yinghui’s number as a favorite contact, ready to be dialed whenever he wished. He had not known when that would be—a couple of weeks, a few months, a year? Perhaps never. He wondered if she had changed, wondered if he would be as tongue-tied with her as he had been nearly twenty years ago.
He stood up and went inside, waiting patiently for the slow, cigarette-smoke-filled lift to arrive. When he was back in his apartment, he made himself some green tea, which he drank with the last of the mochi snacks he had bought for Yanyan. He gazed at the view of the skyscrapers that had kept him company throughout the last nine months. It was true, he thought: Each one of them had its own personality, its own imprint of life. They were not at all alike, not what their perfunctory daytime selves suggested. And when he had finished his tea, he picked up the phone and began to dial Yinghui’s number, even though it was already very late in the night.
30.
THE JOURNEY IS LONG
AS GARY TAKES THE STAGE FOR HIS SOLO SET, HE FEELS VERY calm, knowing that the four songs ahead of him will go well. Sometimes he just knows that a performance will go smoothly—that he will find his range and pitch from the first note and that his voice will be strong and clear, rising from his belly to his throat, velvety in texture. His nerves have been helped by the fact that he has already been onstage this
evening, to sing a duet with Tsai Chin—they sang “Neverending Love,” one of the songs his mother used to sing to him, sometimes pretending that his mother was Tsai Chin. So for Gary it felt at once strange and touching that he should not only be singing a song with Tsai Chin but that she should be so maternal and protective of him. She had helped him get over the shock of being in front of a large audience once again, holding out her hand to him several times so that he would quite literally have something to hang on to. There had been an audible gasp when she beckoned to the wings and Gary appeared, walking unsteadily to join her in the middle of the stage. The audience was astounded to see him again after months of seclusion, and he knew that there was an element of shock involved in seeing him pale and thin, his hair shaved like a soldier’s. His voice, too, seemed richer and sadder than it once was; but it was indeed Gary, just as the posters had hastily announced.
Now, as he stands alone on the vast stage, staring out at the audience, he finds that he is still perfectly at home appearing in public. If he is calm, it is because he has no fear of his audience. He realizes that he had always been intimidated by his audience—not by the people but by what they expected of him. Every time he took to the stage, he felt the crushing weight of their demands—that he be beautiful, romantic, energetic, outstanding. But he no longer has a need to pretend; everyone has seen who he really is.
The darkened stadium is filled with people waving colorful fluorescent batons slowly above their heads as the music begins—the first strains of a song Gary has written himself. He sings in Minnan hua, the dialect of his mother, of his youth, an earthy, rustic language that some would call coarse. Maybe this is why it suits the song so well; maybe this is why it suits him so well, Gary thinks, for, after all, he is just a rough country boy. Maybe everything the papers said about him all those months ago is true. No one else in the audience can follow the words; no one sings along. Singing in his mother tongue reminds him of the quiet solitude of his childhood—of the long hours he spent sitting on the porch of his village house, watching the rain falling late in the afternoon, hoping it would end, though often it would last until nightfall, hastening the arrival of darkness. He feels, for the first time in a big concert, that he is alone in the auditorium, but it is a loneliness that feels calm, as it did many years ago, when he was still small. Only he can fully appreciate the quality of his voice filling his lungs, filling the vast space above him.