by Chongda Cai
I tapped into my phone, “He’s not pretending. He doesn’t know how to deal with all his dreams, his urges. . . . He hasn’t figured out how to live in the real world yet. It’s normal to have a bunch of conflicting ideas that you can’t quite integrate into a complete worldview. He’s a bit too naive. He doesn’t know who he is yet.” I deleted the message without sending it. I didn’t owe her an explanation. Wang Ziyi didn’t know who she was yet either.
My internship in Beijing was going smoothly, and I decided to volunteer to work over the holiday instead of going back home over the New Year break. I knew it would look good to the higher-ups, and staying in Beijing would let me save what I would have spent on travel expenses.
One night I got a call from my mother grousing about being home alone during the holiday. When I put down the phone, I realized that one year had officially rolled over into the next.
A bowl of instant noodles with two eggs cracked over them was going to be my New Year meal.
My phone suddenly rang again.
It was Hope.
The first thing he said was “Sorry I never called you back last time.”
“Why didn’t you come to Beijing?” I asked.
“I was broke. You know, I’m not a saver like you are. I’ve never been that careful.”
He went on to vividly narrate his saga of suspension, closing with a scene of the entire school gathered to see him off. “So I was dragging my suitcase behind me,” he said, “headed out to the front gate, and when I got out—can you picture this?—I sat myself down, right there, took out my guitar, and put on a concert. When I was done, everyone broke out cheering for me. It’s too bad you missed it.”
After that, he seemed suddenly exhausted. He sighed. “There’s something I want to tell you, but I need you to keep it to yourself.”
“What is it?” I asked.
“I think I’m sick. I keep hearing this sound in my head. It sounds like something’s crashing around in there.”
“How long has it been there? Is it from playing drums?”
“That’s not it. It started after I left school. I don’t drum anymore. I tried to get a job at a bar, but you know I can’t sing. I’m just doing my best to get enough to eat.”
I realized what was going on with Hope: his expulsion from university had been a major setback, and he was sinking further and further into his fantasy world and losing contact with reality.
“Shake yourself out of it,” I said. “Maybe I can talk to the school for you. If you get back in, you can finish out the year and start saving up money. You can come to Beijing, too.” I was trying to put him back on the straight and narrow.
He suddenly lost his temper. “Oh, is that what you think I should do? You want me down in the quarry again swinging that hammer? I can’t do it. They want to beat me because I have more freedom than they’ll ever have and they can’t handle it. We’re friends, aren’t we? You’re acting like you don’t understand me at all. I need some money from you. I want to go to Beijing. I need to see a doctor.”
I tried to empathize with him. “Hope,” I said, “I’m telling you this because you are my friend. I can give you the money to come to Beijing, but the problem is—”
He hung up on me.
His phone was powered off when I called back.
I was angry, of course, but I was also confused. I didn’t understand why I could never get Hope to see the reality of his situation.
I tried to imagine how he might be living. He had always wanted to charge forward, never willing to settle for a mediocre life. But what he never realized was that achieving dreams required lots of small, mediocre, uninteresting steps.
Hope had the creeping suspicion that he had been branded a loser. At a certain point, he was no longer able to find refuge in fantasy. He became even more anxious and sensitive. He pushed back against any questioning of that fantasy.
Maybe Hope refused to take my call because he had decided that if he was branded a loser, I must be a winner.
Other classmates weren’t sure exactly what was going on with Hope, but they occasionally passed on what little they knew. I heard that he sometimes sneaked back onto campus and started trouble, accusing his former classmates of mediocrity and messing with the younger female students. He even invited some of his former classmates out for drinks, but after that he disappeared again. He was spotted at one of the bars in town once, and another time busking on the street with his guitar.
When I still couldn’t get in touch with him, I got a number for Hope’s father from the school counselor. I wanted to convince Hope’s father to talk to his son and try to get through to him exactly how the world worked. When I got through to the rural English instructor Hope had told me so much about, I found it tough to understand him through his thick accent. He sounded like a foreigner speaking Chinese. “Don’t worry about it,” he told me. “It’s just letting off steam. Even if he ends up failing, he has to get it out of his system or he’ll wind up thinking he’s wasted his life.”
Talking to his father, I realized what was at the root of Hope’s anxiety and desperation, and why he wanted to embrace fantasy instead of reality. I was sure that his father wouldn’t be much help to him.
I wasn’t sure what to do, so I decided to call Wang Ziyi for help. “Oh yeah,” she said casually, “he showed up here a few times. He stood outside my window playing his guitar, trying to tell me he still loved me. He was drunk and wouldn’t leave, so my father called the police, and they dragged him off. He’s really an absolute—”
I knew what she was about to say, but I hung up before I heard it.
I was still worried about Hope, but my concern was quickly overwhelmed by my own daily life.
The internship in Beijing was a success, and even before I graduated, they offered me a permanent position. I had to go back to school for the graduation ceremony, and I thought I might be able to see Hope.
I went back to the dorm we had once shared and found it immaculately clean. I heard from someone else that Hope had carefully tidied the room before leaving, scrubbing every inch of it. Nobody understood why he had done it. I didn’t get it either.
Hope had taken his guitar with him, but he had unexpectedly left behind all the instruments he had collected since forming the band. He said he hoped someone else might use them, maybe someone who had the same dream as him.
I could imagine something of the conflicted emotions Hope must have felt after being forced to leave school.
When I lived there, I had always felt like my university town was particularly tiny—only one main street with smaller streets coming off it, each one devoted to its own particular purpose—but it felt massive when I was running all over it looking for Hope.
There were only a few bars to check, then the two or three music shops on Jiuyi Road. Hope didn’t have many places to hide, but I still couldn’t find him before I had to go back to Beijing.
The show must go on. The intermission ends, and the actor walks back onstage. I had to keep playing my role.
I said goodbye to my school, said goodbye to the city, and said goodbye to Hope.
Beijing truly was a massive beast. The instant the plane touched down in the city, it began to wrap innumerable tentacles around me, dragging me into all sorts of things—new challenges, fresh stories, happiness, sorrow. . . . I sank into the layers of happiness and grief. Beijing wrapped me up inside itself. That’s the way Beijing is: you can forget that the outside world still exists.
Many of my former classmates had been training to be teachers, and most had gone on to take jobs in their hometowns, but a few of them wound up temporarily in Beijing, sometimes to continue their studies, sometimes for a course. I was the only one to take root in the capital. I served as an informal welcoming committee for former classmates passing through Beijing.
I didn’t go out of my way to ask them about Hope, but they occasionally brought him up. I wasn’t that close to most of those classmates, so old time
s and people we both knew were about all we had to talk about.
I heard from them that Hope had continued drifting through life. When he finally had nowhere else to stay, Hope called his father from a pay phone and asked him to take him back.
Hope’s mother and father had a vicious argument about what to do with their son. His mother finally prevailed, though, and called in some favors to get Hope a job teaching at a small school in a village outside Sanming. His lessons ranged from language and politics to music.
I was so busy with my own life that my head felt ready to burst, but I sometimes thought of Hope. I would suddenly imagine him in the village school, leading some kids in a song. In my imagination, he had never lost his passion. He was smiling, showing his canines, his face lit up. I smiled, too, when I imagined the scene.
I felt like I could feel what he must have felt in that moment.
I put my head down and got through the next two years in Beijing. One otherwise normal night, my phone rang. The head of the student association at my university was on the line. “Any chance you can come back here this weekend? I want to take you to Sanming.”
I didn’t realize at first what he meant. “What’s going on?” I asked.
“Hope’s dead. The alumni association is planning to take a trip over there to look in on his family. Since you two were such good friends, I thought you might want the chance to see him off.”
I felt as if I had been hit on the head with a hammer. My mind went blank.
The student association head filled me in on what Hope had been up to. It was not at all what I had imagined. Hope had gone to the village and became uncharacteristically taciturn, which was not a particularly big problem, but when he did start talking, it was to tell his family about the sound in his head—like a crashing, he said, as if there were a beast locked up inside his skull. He started to get headaches late at night that accompanied the crashing sounds, and then the episodes started to happen during the daytime. He would smash his head against the wall until he was bleeding.
By the end, Hope was unable to continue teaching. His father took him to a clinic, but the doctor was hesitant to make a diagnosis.
A week before Hope killed himself, he made a final request of his father: “Can you take me to Beijing to see a doctor?”
His father refused.
The family had spent most of their savings looking after Hope. Hope’s father had lost all patience with his son.
The association head sighed and said, “We have to look after each other. Life is a long battle. He’s the first one of us to fall.”
His voice seemed to fade away on the other end of the phone until I could barely make out what he was saying.
Nobody else understood—not his classmates, not Wang Ziyi, not his own father—but I did: the monster that was crashing around in his head was a product of the fantasy world he had sunk into. He had been feeding it with phantoms all those years, until it had grown too big for his head to contain. He had asked to be taken to Beijing, and I realized it had been his final solution.
An indescribable sadness welled up in my chest. I gaped like a fish, trying to speak, but nothing would come out. I realized in that moment that after all those years of holding things in, I couldn’t bring myself to release my emotions. Even in that moment of intense grief, I was still worried about upsetting my neighbors.
During four years of university and two years working in Beijing, I had always kept myself under strict control. I didn’t smoke and I didn’t drink, and I had never found any way to vent the emotions that had built up. I kept it all inside because I wanted to maintain control. I wanted to keep moving forward toward my final destination.
But what was that destination really? Did any of this have any meaning at all?
I couldn’t answer those questions.
I still wasn’t willing to cry. I paced back and forth in my hundred-square-foot room. I sighed, deep and long, and it felt like I was finally releasing some of what had built up inside me during those years. The sighs made me feel as if I were venting some noxious steam that had filled my chest cavity. All of the things I had pushed down over the years had congealed inside of me, slowly forming into a marsh so dark and deep that it could swallow the whole world.
I realized that, like Hope, maybe Beijing had been my final solution, too.
Maybe Hope and I had the same sickness.
10
You Can’t Hide the Ocean
I grew up on the coast, and my father once made a living as a sailor, but I didn’t see the ocean until I was six years old.
The first time I saw the ocean was on the way to see my grandmother. My mother and I were walking down a path between the villages that was separated from the sea by a thicket of sugarcane. I did not know the ocean was so close, but I knew something was shimmering through the sugarcane. I waited until my mother was distracted, then charged through to take a look.
My mother huffed and puffed after me, trying to chase me down before I made it there. When she caught up with me, she explained that it had been my father’s decision to hide the ocean from me. He was afraid, my mother said, that I would run into the water, and there was a chance something could happen to me. It was more complicated than that. My father said, “I used to like playing by the water when I was your age. I liked going out on the boats. That’s what made me try to make a living on the sea. It’s a tough life. I want something better for you. I want you to go to middle school.”
I don’t think there was ever a shortage of men like my father in Dongshi, the small town where I grew up. But for more than a decade, the town had slowly developed in the opposite direction, spreading inland as if fleeing from the ocean, which had provided previous generations with great joy and crushed them with suffering. For me, my parents’ prohibition made the ocean even more attractive.
On another trip to visit my grandmother, I took my chance. I rushed through the sugarcane. The sound of my mother in sullen pursuit drove me to race ahead even quicker. I ran and jumped into the water. I was swallowed up by the ocean. I sank into the briny embrace. When I looked up, I could see the sunlight filtering down through the water in bright, jagged shards. I closed my eyes, and when I opened them again, I was in a hospital bed.
You can’t hide the ocean. My parents tried anyway. They had their own pain, and they wanted to shelter me, out of love. When I heard the ocean crashing in the distance, I always assumed it was just the wind. When I smelled the salt air blowing in from the coast, I always assumed it was coming from the fertilizer plant. But the ocean rose and fell without me, and it kept shining, and it kept calling to me. Because the ocean had been hidden from me, when I finally had the chance to experience it, I took in every detail; I became fanatically devoted to the sea.
After I almost drowned, my father suddenly decided to take me out on a boat. It’s a frightening memory. When we got out on the water, I was seasick and kept throwing up until I was too tired even to cry. I begged my father to take me back to shore. After that time, I lost my habit of charging wildly up to the ocean. That’s not to say I was afraid of the ocean, but I knew how to appreciate it. I like sitting beside the water, feeling the breeze on my cheek, losing myself in the vast azure blue—even if you’re alone, you never feel lonely at that moment looking out on the water. When I was a bit older, I liked going out on my motorcycle and riding up the coast.
You can’t hide the ocean, and you can’t put a fence around it. The best way is to let people find their own way to appreciate it. Every stretch of sea is a different scene with its own dangers. Life is the same; desire is the same. I used to think I could control each element of my life and live by my own particular logic, to the point where I thought my self-deception was powerful enough to hide things from myself. I thought that was the best way to live. But life is like the ocean: it rises and falls no matter what.
I always wanted to live authentically and honestly; I wanted to be able to accept—perhaps even appreciate—the
ups and downs of life. I wanted to be able to live with all shades of emotion and to appreciate human beauty and ugliness in any form. I hoped to take in all of the scenery I saw along the way and express it sensitively in my writing.
I’m determined to find the perfect distance and the best way to appreciate those stretches of sea.
11
A Thousand Identical Cities
Sometime around 1998, my father took it into his head to sell our house in the village and buy a place in Xiamen. The old stone house was a couple thousand square feet, and he was planning to buy a five- or six-hundred-square-foot apartment in the city. He had watched too many Taiwanese TV dramas. Those shows all took place in the city. When he compared life in our small town to life in a big city, he always found suburban life lacking. I recall that it was a particularly rainy spring when he got the idea. When it’s hot and muggy like that, you can start to have strange ideas. A feeling of discontentment had spread through the family.
Eventually, my father decided to go to Xiamen to make more serious inquiries, and I was brought along with him. He said it would give me a chance to see life in the big city. Back then, almost everyone from our town got carsick. We didn’t have many cars, so we never got used to riding in them. For me, the trigger was the smell of exhaust. As soon as I got on the bus headed for Xiamen, I was hit with a wave of nausea. I jumped out to vomit and looked up to see a parade of cars, each with a tailpipe belching exhaust in my direction. My father wasn’t afraid of anything. He had been a sailor. He told me I’d get used to it eventually.
When I got to the city, my sensitive nose seemed unable to find any corner of the city that didn’t reek of car exhaust. Packed into a city bus, staring out at the grassy boulevards that lined the road and up at the tall buildings, I tried to work up some enthusiasm for what I was seeing, but nothing in the city seemed particularly interesting. My father did his best to pique my interest. He pointed up at a tall building and said, “How many floors you think that one’s got?” I told him I wasn’t interested in counting. He said, “You see the way they pave the roads here? That’s all brick!” I told him I’d seen streets like that on TV. He asked, “Did you see the streetlights at that last intersection?” I told him that I’d read about things like that before. I simply wasn’t interested. I already knew what a big city looked like. A muddy pond in my own backyard held more mystery for me than any corner of Xiamen.