by Xiaolu Guo
In among the echoes of the mothers calling their children home, I could hear my grandmother’s voice calling to me. ‘Little Dog, Little Dog … get yourself home to eat!’
My grandmother’s voice was both shrill and mournful. It lingered like a long whistle, careening through the hills and echoing across the ocean. Like an enormous net dropped from the sky to cover both the land and the sea, there was no escaping it. I would wait for the echoes of her voice to subside, then burrow out from whatever pile of rocks or outcropping of reef I had been hiding in. As I emerged, I could see the setting sun turning the golden sea to flame, burning into it a brilliant red that was soon extinguished, as the sea and sky went ashen grey.
Barefoot, I clambered back onto the beach, leaving behind me the sea at its saddest and most mournful time of day, and began making my way towards my grandmother’s voice.
As I ascended solid ground and crossed the cobblestones of Pirate’s Alley, I knew exactly what would be waiting for me in the stone house I called home. Sitting on the old-fashioned wooden table would be the same meal that I ate three times a day, morning, noon and night: a bowl of sweet potato gruel garnished with a pungent paste of pickled fish.
4
IN THE SUMMER, the city of Beijing is like a piping-hot baked tomato. You can scarcely bear to touch anything lest your touch release the scalding liquid inside. Then there are the sounds of the city, noises of every decibel: taxi drivers cursing each other, cries of ‘Every item only ten yuan!’ and ‘Evening news … get your evening news!’ and the non-stop ding-a-ling of bicycle bells. The sounds only serve to raise the temperature even higher, turning the city into a gigantic convection oven from which the heat never dissipates.
I return home from work early to find Red in bed, reading a book. Lying there perfectly still, not moving a single muscle, as if he were loath to deplete any more physical energy than absolutely necessary, he looks a bit like a reclining Buddha. I peel off my sticky clothes and lie down next to him. With all the windows closed and the air conditioner hard at work above our heads, the room is freezing. The sweat from my body slowly evaporates. The room temperature has dropped to twelve degrees, the temperature of a cold winter’s day, but still we allow the air conditioner to continue huffing its frigid air into the room. Both of us are far too lazy to get up and turn it off, just as we are too lazy to try to warm up our bodies, from which the heat is steadily slipping away. We lie in bed holding hands and staring up at the ceiling, as if there were some fascinating long-running television drama being projected on the twenty-four storeys above.
I gaze around the room at our few sad pieces of furniture. Beneath the window stand a rapidly unravelling rattan chair and a battered desk on whose surface someone has drawn the outlines of a ‘go’ board in ballpoint pen. Upon the desk is perched an old computer, an unattractive desk-lamp and a collection of Red’s reference books. Besides the two large wardrobes we bought at a used furniture market, the only other thing in the room is our Peony-brand television set. Piled next to it is a stack of video cassettes intended for rental in the shop. When we have finished watching them, I will quietly sneak them back onto the shelves. The bed beneath us is just a mattress lying on the bare floor. People say that when you’re nearing thirty, you ought at least to have a proper bed, but since we still live in a rented flat, investing in a bed seems a bit pointless.
The only spot of brightness in our room is the curtains. They are a fiery red, the colour we imagine the sun might be, if only we could see it. Managing to catch a glimpse of actual sunlight in our flat is no easy task. By the time we wake in the morning, the sun has already passed us by. And though we may hurry through the door after work each evening, rush to set down our groceries and walk over towards the window, we always find ourselves a few seconds too late to catch its last rays.
The main room of our flat is a combination bedroom/living room. The only other rooms are the kitchen and bathroom, which connect onto the main room, and a tiny entrance hall. Taken as a whole, the place seems old. The type of old that is devoid of memory, a complete void, the sort of old that holds no hope of progress.
Nothing can ever be captured. The only thing that never seems to resist capture is the male body. Red’s body.
Once more, I feel my temperature starting to rise. I roll over languidly and begin to stroke Red’s naked body.
I’m wet again. I spread Red’s fingers, gently, and put them inside me.
‘You’re hot,’ he tells me. ‘Your body temperature is always higher than mine.’
‘That’s because I’m a torrid zone.’
‘Torrid zone, eh? I guess that makes me the temperate zone.’
‘That’s right. You never burn too hot.’
I ask Red if he knows the difference between the torrid zone and the temperate zone.
‘The torrid zone and the temperate zone? Um … they’re separated by the subtropical zone?’
‘Wrong. The difference is, it hardly ever rains in the temperate zone. But in the torrid zone, it rains all the time.’
‘No wonder it’s always so wet …’ Red and I smile at each other. His fingers are already finding the wetness inside me.
On the wall opposite our bed is an enormous poster from the Greek film Ulysses’ Gaze, from which a black-clad Harvey Keitel stares down at us day and night. The poster is one I pilfered from the video store. With the exception of one extremely melancholy-looking middle-aged man in glasses, I never saw anyone rent the film.
When Red and I make love in this room surrounded on all four sides by high-rise buildings, on this bed separated from the basement by just a thin slab of concrete, I can feel Harvey Keitel watching us from the poster. There is something in his expression that calls to mind a father distastefully observing his daughter in a tryst with her lover, and it always makes me uncomfortable.
‘You’re like quicksand,’ Red tells me. ‘I sink right in and can’t seem to get out.’
I can feel his fingers moving deeper inside me. ‘That’s your middle finger, isn’t it?’
He seems surprised. ‘How did you know?’
‘I can tell from the length.’
‘Oh,’ he smiles, ‘so now you love my middle finger more than you love me?’
I smile as Red sits up in bed and gropes around for a packet of cigarettes and a lighter. He lights a cigarette and inhales deeply.
The room is very quiet now. I lie in bed and watch Red smoke. Torrid woman and temperate man definitely present two very different attitudes to the world. Red, as temperate man, is almost always cool and collected.
‘I like the way you look when you smoke.’
‘What else do you like about me?’
‘I like it when you’re peaceful.’
‘And?’
‘And when you’re playing Frisbee.’
At this, a look of slight pain passes over Red’s features.
‘Hm … so you like my middle finger, you like me when I’m peaceful and you like me when I’m playing Frisbee. But none of those things are really me. They’re just extensions of me.’
‘So what’s the real you?’
‘I …’ Red thinks for a moment, ‘I don’t really know.’
‘But you must know who you are, right? A hero, a nobody, a gentleman, a Mister Average, a traditionalist, a hopeless romantic, a loser? Which one are you?’
Red looks at me as he exhales. ‘You know, girl, you really have seen too many movies.’
‘I work in a video rental shop. Watching movies is my job.’
‘It’s just that sometimes I feel like everything you say to me is dialogue from some movie.’
I have no answer for this.
Perhaps because our daily lives are so depressing, Red is captivated by the game of Frisbee, that flat white plastic disc he so loves to send spinning through the air. Red has a wide variety of Frisbee throws in his repertoire. He can throw clockwise or anticlockwise, backhanded or forehanded, with a flick of his thumb and even
with the back of his hand. Not only has he mastered these and all the basic catches – the left-handed catch, the ‘pinch’ catch, the low catch and others – but he has also invented a number of unusual moves of his own, most of which he has yet to find names for. Red can play all day and never let the Frisbee touch the ground. He loves the game so much that sometimes he even plays by himself. He’ll stake out an open stretch of grass or an empty concrete rooftop, stand in one spot, and hurl the Frisbee in a perfect three hundred and sixty degree arc so that it flies right back to him. Red says that he loves the feeling of knowing that even when the Frisbee is flying through the air, it is still under his complete control. Frisbee is freestyle yet elegant, peaceful and safe, and that is why Red loves it so much.
I sometimes think Red wishes he were a Frisbee. Every day he sees people getting into the lift and ascending to his rooftop, people who are moving up in the world, while he himself remains stuck on the ground floor. If Red does believe in an afterlife, he probably wishes he could come back as a Frisbee.
Although Red is not the type to complain about his lot in life, his one gripe is that neither the Olympics nor the Asian Games recognises Frisbee as an official event, which means he is deprived of his chance to be World Frisbee Grand Champion. The people Red detests most are those he considers the ‘narrow interpretationists’ of the sports world, who think of Frisbee as nothing more than a child’s game and refuse to take it seriously as a sport. Red, on the other hand, believes that Frisbee is uniquely suited to be the universal sport. That’s right, the universal sport. A simple game that can be played anywhere, any time, in any country, by rich or poor, man or woman, heavyweight or featherweight; a sport that helps to improve reflexes, speed, endurance, control, coordination and imagination, thereby creating an environment of freedom for each and every player.
Here in Beijing, Red has devised a new game of Frisbee. It is similar to American-style football in that the players must rely on speed and agility to prevent the other team from making a goal in their end zone, but each team has only seven players and the Frisbee is never allowed to touch the ground. Red is planning a city-wide Frisbee tournament that will bring people from different countries, professions and walks of life together onto the same playing field to play Frisbee according to Red’s strict set of rules. Red, the man now lying so quietly by my side, remains unshaken in his belief that there will come a day when Frisbee is finally recognised as an official Olympic event. When that day comes, Red is certain that he will become the World Frisbee Grand Champion, assuming he is still young enough to hold the title. And if by chance he is too old, well, at least he will be acknowledged as the senior statesman of the international sport of Frisbee. Red is, quite simply, a Frisbee god. No, not a Frisbee god: a Frisbee sage.
The problem is that, every time Red tosses me the Frisbee, I can never quite manage to catch it. And if you can’t even hold on to a Frisbee, what makes you think you can hold on to another person?
We lie in bed silently, completely still, holding hands, huddled under blankets against the air conditioned chill of a summer’s day, as the sky outside grows steadily darker. After a while, Red seems to fall asleep and in his slumber releases my hand. As our physical bodies move apart, Red’s inner world moves farther and farther away from me. Already I cannot begin to fathom what thoughts must fill his dreams. Perhaps he has already entered into his own Frisbee dream world, a place with green grass and blue skies, God’s own backyard. Once again I find myself alone. And, as I lie in bed, my body and my spirit move away from Red and towards the vast sea and narrow alleyways of the Village of Stone and all the people I knew there.
5
MY GRANDMOTHER AND grandfather lived at 13 Pirate’s Alley, in a three-storey stone house facing onto the street. In fact, the street number wasn’t there when I was little. I must have been about thirteen years old when the village authorities, responding to requests from frustrated employees of the local post office, finally decided to install metal street number signs on each of the houses in the village. Formerly, the sole person in charge of incoming and outgoing mail was an elderly postmaster who could recite by rote the names and locations of each and every resident in the village. When the old postmaster died, two younger men were assigned to take over his duties, but because they were unfamiliar with the layout of the village, half of the incoming post ended up being delivered incorrectly. The two young postmen finally appealed to local government officials, who decided that every lane would be assigned an official name and every house a number. In order to do this, they convened a meeting of older village residents to discuss possible street names. And so the agreed-upon names – Pirate Slayer Road, Marshy Lane, Dogfish Alley – were painted in red calligraphy on stone markers at the end of each lane. I was told that each of the names had a story behind it, some tale associated with the fight against Japanese sea pirates or other invaders, and the earliest origins of the Village of Stone.
When the time came to number the houses in our lane, we were given a metal plaque with the number thirteen, indicating that we lived in the thirteenth house from the east end of Pirate’s Alley. But, during my childhood, whenever the villagers mentioned my grandfather’s house, they would always refer to it as ‘the house without a fisherman’. And it was true. We were one of the few families in the village who were not sea scavengers. Ours was a house without a fisherman.
Our house had quite a long history. My seafaring great-grandfather had built the house so that it would face out to sea, though none of his descendants turned out to be fishermen – not my grandfather, who had abandoned his boat to sell cigarettes, not my father, who had fled the village, and certainly not myself, a young girl not even allowed on the fishing boats. With each successive generation, our family continued to renounce the sea. We must have been the most spineless family of cowards in the entire village. None of us fished and yet we still had the nerve to live in that house right beside the sea. Then again, perhaps my grandfather was right when he said, ‘Life is hard enough as it is. Best to live in safety.’ For fishermen, life never afforded any safety.
Our house was identical to the others in the village in that it was a sturdy little fortress with tiny windows, cramped and narrow but built to last. The adults in the village said the houses had been designed this way to repel Japanese sea pirates and other plunderers. The walls were built from greenish chunks of stone piled one upon another. None of the stones was the same shape. Some were large, some small, some rounded and some square, but they seemed to fit together perfectly. They had been brought down from the mountaintop on shoulder poles. The men who blasted the stone from the hillside came to the mountain fleeing famine in other parts of the country. The explosives they used were generally very crude and home-made, so many of them were killed in accidents. These men led a life of hardship in much the same way that the sea scavengers did. The difference was that, once these men had managed to earn some money blasting rock, they left the Village of Stone and returned to their home towns to live out their remaining days in peace.
My grandfather’s second-floor room had a small window that had been cut out of the stones in the wall. Though the window was tiny, it afforded a view of the sea. When my grandfather ate his meals, he would often stand at the tiny stone window with his bowl and gaze out to sea. Although the window was not much more than a peephole, it did admit the ocean breeze. My grandfather would stand in the breeze and stare for a long time at the churning waves of the sea. It was as if he were seeing an ocean that belonged to someone else.
One other thing about my grandmother and grandfather. They despised each other.
It had been decades since my grandparents had truly lived together. They had shared the same room until my father was born but, after that, they slept in separate rooms. In fact, they hardly spoke to one another. My grandmother had been brought into my grandfather’s house at an early age, as a child-bride. Her home was a mountain village several hundred kilometres from the Village o
f Stone. Besides four or five date trees, a sweet potato patch and a small group of mud-walled houses it contained nothing of note. When my grandmother was twelve years old, she bundled up her few possessions in a strip of cloth and left her home, journeying east on foot for three days and three nights. By dusk on the fourth day, she had finally reached the foot of the mountains near the Village of Stone. As the smell of raw fish wafted up into the mountains and grew more pungent, my grandmother crossed through the last mountain pass, surmounted the very last peak and caught her first glimpse of the sea being turned to gold by the dazzling rays of the setting sun. Gazing at the fishing nets filled with glittering silver fish that had just been dragged onto shore, she must have believed that she would never again suffer from hunger. However, she never had the chance to live the life of a fisherman’s wife she so dreamed of. My grandfather had only been at sea for a few years but had already encountered several devastating typhoons that ripped his sail, smashed his prow and eventually ran his fishing boat aground. The wreckage of his boat languished on the beach for years until he decided to sell it to a local youth looking for work. After this, my grandfather lived a safer and more carefree life ashore, selling cigarettes, alcohol, vinegar and other daily necessities, from which he managed to make a modest living and support the wife who had come to him without so much as a dowry to her name.
My grandfather had always looked down on my grandmother. He had never liked her – not on the day she arrived in his household as a child of twelve, not when she was a grown woman, not when she gave birth to my father at the age of eighteen, not when my father left the village for good, not even when she was a toothless old woman with white hair. As a child, I never understood why. I imagined all sorts of stories – a love affair with a girl in another village perhaps – but the real reasons were beyond me. My grandparents’ inner feelings were a bottomless sea: cold, unfathomable, deathly still, frozen solid. Year after year, my grandmother refused to speak, as did my grandfather. Our little three-storey house was a silent, gloomy place. The only noise was the sound of doors turning on their hinges as they opened and closed. It was the sound of loneliness, the sound of unhappiness. For as long as I can remember, my grandparents had lived only within the tiny spaces of their own private hearts. Although they occasionally brushed past each other on the stairs, they never interacted. This lack of connection naturally led to a series of misunderstandings, suspicions and hateful jealousies that accumulated over the years. Stored in the separate camps of my grandparents’ hearts, these grievances grew into a lasting enmity.