This was a warning. No sooner did he have any contact with Li Xing than they came up and growled in his ear. The idea of being treated as a spy was ludicrous, but in terms of his involvement with Li Xing, he’d probably better take the message seriously: Don’t tangle with her.
At the thought he smiled dryly. It was as if they were acting at Liu Hong’s bidding. Hands off my woman. Maybe this was the answer to the question tantalizing him: What would happen if he fell in love with a stranger, a Chinese?
He remembered something his friend Shuichi once shared with him: “To stay safe in a despotic country, you have to do two things: keep under the radar of the authorities and stay away from local women.”
Even an intrepid international scoop artist like Shuichi, who’d come unscathed through countless scenes of havoc, claimed that the night he was chased by bicycle-riding public security officials in Beijing, his heart nearly stopped. Bicycles? “That’s right, ordinary two-wheelers. But they came flying out all around me from alleys in the hutong, chasing after me with their bells ringing. It was intense, man.”
As the taxi started up again, Aki sat back, rigid with tension. Here, too, the gnarled branches of tall plane trees lining the road reached out and intertwined overhead, forming a long arch that stretched into the distance, supported by a colonnade of thick trunks mottled white and green. Peeping out from between the trees were the elegant old buildings with peaked roofs of the French Concession. A dense, scruffy crowd flowed by in the street and on the sidewalks. On wires strung between the trees, clothespins held up newspapers and gaudy magazines for sale – among them New Star, the one in whose pages Chen had read about Li Xing.
Chen slammed on the brakes, just avoiding a man who’d run out into the street, ignoring a traffic signal. Small and middle-aged, in a white, open-necked shirt, the man banged furiously on the hood and held out an index finger, pointing, while he yelled something unintelligible. The finger was aimed not at Chen, but at Aki.
Chen stuck his head out the window and bawled at him while blasting away on the horn. The man jumped up on the hood but was just as quickly flung off onto the ground. Aki looked back to see that he’d picked himself up and was again pointing straight at him.
He closed his eyes. The streets of Shanghai, once so friendly and welcoming, had been transformed. Hostility and intimidation filled them now.
They had crossed Garden Bridge and were just pulling up in front of the hotel when the oppressive atmosphere was broken by a sudden burst of rain. A haze arose from the pavement and from the surface of the river. They were caught unawares.
“It’s a baoyu!” A downpour. All around, muffled voices flew back and forth. Aki felt a sudden urge to drink with Chen tonight.
“Why not come on up, have one for the road?”
Chen again begged off. “I have to pick up Anli at the hospital.”
“Who’s that?”
“My brother’s wife.”
“Oh. Is he still bad?”
“It’s a long illness.”
After expressing his sympathy, Aki went through the revolving door into the lobby, shutting out the sound of the rain behind him.
Back in his rooms, he opened the window, and the furious sound of pelting rain returned. Thinking that this deluge might serve to contain the hostility in Shanghai’s streets, he breathed a little easier.
As he leant against the narrow cast-iron frame of the window, which reached almost to the ceiling, the part next to his bare skin felt cold. The frame had been here since 1934, when the building was erected, close on sixty years ago. Apparently, the more years that piled up in a substance, the colder it felt to the touch.
A ship’s foghorn sounded, unexpectedly loud and close. A wind sprang up and raindrops dashed against the window frame, ricocheting on into the room. The tieback on the curtain came loose and the curtain billowed out like a sail. For an instant Aki had the illusion that he was back on board ship. Where was this ship taking him?
Behind him, he thought he heard two or three light raps on the door. Hastily he closed the window and stood still, listening. Nothing.
He fell asleep on the sofa. When he first woke up, he didn’t know where he was, and his eyes shifted restlessly like a baby’s. As he was a traveller in an unfamiliar place, and as he had dozed off in the evening, it took a few seconds for him to reorient himself. It was now pitch dark, with no letup in the rain.
A light knock came at the door. It sounded the same as before. Hotel employees, when they bothered to announce themselves, always rang the doorbell, which had a sharp, intimidating sound. Who would knock? Director Xie? Maybe Chen had driven his sister-in-law home from the hospital and was ready now for that drink.
Aki tiptoed over and waited for the next knock to come, but there wasn’t another sound. Perhaps the knocking had been at some other door.
He opened the door a crack, and recognized the sopping wet figure of the “man” from the previous day. He let “him” into the room, swiftly closing and locking the door.
“I made it.” Li Xing was carrying a black suitcase in her right hand. Rainwater was dripping from her coat and the suitcase. “I don’t think anyone followed me.”
“Why didn’t you take an umbrella?”
He could have kicked himself for this idiotic question. Awkwardly, he fled into the bathroom and brought out all the big and little towels he could lay hold of.
“Thanks.”
Li Xing set her suitcase down and dried off her hair, bending her head to left and right. Aki took her coat and hung it on the bathroom door, then went behind the sofa to the window and looked down. At a short distance from the hotel, on the bank of Suzhou Creek, was the black Peugeot.
“Looks like you were followed.”
This was a slightly smarter remark. Yet for all he knew he might be the one the car was tailing.
With a towel wrapped around her hair, Li Xing came over and stood next to him. There it was again, that scent, so hauntingly familiar.
“See the black Peugeot down there? It belongs to the foreign affairs section of public security. It rammed my car on purpose earlier, coming back from the studio.”
Li Xing only nodded slightly, without evident surprise. A smile played on her lips.
She’s not afraid of being followed, he thought. I’m the one who’s scared. Who knows? Maybe she’s not even afraid of the people who run this country.
“Did you come and knock before?”
“No.”
Avoiding eye contact, he stared down at the suitcase on the floor, from which drops of water still trickled hesitantly.
“I’m moving,” she said
So frank and casual was her tone that Aki responded automatically, “Oh, where to?”
“Here.”
Here? he parroted under his breath, and glanced around. Then, finally, he looked her in the eye. She nodded, wide-eyed. He was left with a strong impression of eyelashes fringing dark pupils.
She turned off the floor lamp she was standing next to. Her figure floated, wraithlike. A moment later there was another click, and amid the soft, new, reborn light, she said, “I need help. Please help me. Let me stay here. I’m counting on your kindness and friendship.”
“What is this, a movie?” Shaken, he could think of nothing else to say.
“No.” She shook her head and said in a small voice, “This is real.” She used the English word. It sounded like a line of movie dialogue. Aki’s supply of words, meanwhile, was drying up. He said stiffly, “You’ll catch cold like that.”
Li Xing opened her suitcase, took out a change of clothes, and disappeared into the bathroom. While she was gone he made a pot of jasmine tea. His hands shook slightly.
Friendship, he muttered to himself, as he listened to the faint hum of a hair dryer coming from the bathroom. This is real.
And so began their strange time together under one roof.
9
Li Xing’s cricket box had contained dozens of letters �
� thirty-two from Liu Hong, sixty from her parents after they were relocated – as well as four volumes of her diary written in notebooks with ruled lines; the diary included copies of her letters to Liu Hong. All of this she’d been forced to tell her grandmother to destroy.
Sitting in her room in the studio guesthouse the day after her first visit to Waki Akihiko, she could only wonder: Had yesterday’s call home been in time? Assuming that it had, she was gripped by sadness. Losing the letters and diary showed her what a mainstay they’d been. The earth at her feet had fallen steeply away, leaving her on the edge of a void.
Was there no way to retrieve the things that had been burned or confiscated in Yangquan? Then and there, she decided to salvage what she could by writing it down again herself. From the time she was a little girl, she’d prided herself on two things: her dancing and her powers of recall – yet now, faced with blank sheets of paper on which she was attempting to recover her past, she realized that memory was of all things most fallible.
What Li Xing had in mind was more than usually difficult. She was pursuing memories not of events but of the written word, trying to summon up and recreate long passages in their entirety. Nor was that the only problem she faced: there was also outside interference.
Recently there’d been signs that while she was off at rehearsals, someone was sneaking into her room and examining her notebooks. The guesthouse was run by a bangongshi, or general administration office. Every large workplace or work unit had its bangongshi, the primary responsibility of which was supervising the staff; it also had authority to issue work permits, which functioned as personal ID cards, as well as permits for domestic travel and so on. Anyone in the bangongshi had ready access to her room.
So when her director quietly passed on to her the news that Liu Hong was now close by, in Jiangsu, Li Xing thought hard. Needed urgently was a refuge, a place for her to focus quietly on writing and remembering. She turned her mind inside out in search of an answer, until one farfetched plan occurred to her: to move in with Waki Akihiko at his hotel.
It’s my best chance, she told herself. But would he let me do it – just to suit myself? He looked so smug and stuck-up at the afternoon rehearsal. Every inch the rich, intellectual Japanese. There in the studio, I toyed with the idea of asking him, but in the end I couldn’t bring myself even to look him in the face.He’d only say no. What Japanese man would take that kind of risk for the sake of a Chinese girl? But then, the comedian Han Langen was Japanese, and he had a Chinese lover; Waki Akihiko is his son, and I’m Han’s lover in the film… Doesn’t this make us related in a way? Can’t I somehow get through to him?…
Outside her window, fat raindrops splashed onto the ground. A ring of oleanders swayed and rustled, red flowers peering like eyes from between the pointed leaves.
She looked abstractedly around. On one wall hung the suit she’d borrowed from the costume department. He’d been so accommodating yesterday when she wore it over to his place and phoned her nainai… But would it really be safe there? Two days ago, when they took her into custody at the airport and spent all day interrogating her, they’d told her flat out he was a spy. If that’s what they thought, they’d be keeping an eagle eye on him, have easy access to his suite. All the same, she thought she’d be a little safer there than somewhere else.
Waki himself laughed off any such suggestion, treating it as a bad joke – something he could do only because he was Japanese and had never lived under an autocratic regime. The system wasn’t something you could choose, nor could you choose to ignore it. When a regime was based on constant surveillance and informing, then any foreigner who exposed himself to it the way he had would inevitably be seen from a spy-like angle. He’d be continually watched, liable at any time to be arrested as an enemy spy or declared persona non grata, to be summarily deported or locked up.
Many Chinese resented the fact that Mao Zedong, in his haste to restore diplomatic ties with Japan, had abandoned claims to war reparations. A popular-level movement was underway to push for them. That such a groundswell might serve to increase discontent with Mango and develop over time into an organized antigovernment movement, joining forces with the push for democratization, was entirely possible. In some quarters the two activities in fact overlapped.
From the point of view of the authorities, Aki’s firsthand research into ODA in China fully constituted an offensive activity by a foreigner. Surveillance of him had begun eighteen months ago.
Aki was under the impression that Li Xing had sneaked out of the guesthouse in disguise and come to the hotel unnoticed, yet actually lots of people at the studio saw her walking along without an umbrella, lugging a big suitcase, in the rain. Some were further baffled to see she was in costume, dressed not as Han Langen’s lover but as Han himself. She didn’t seem to be afraid of attracting attention – quite the contrary.
Meng, the properties man, jumped off his bicycle when he saw her and called, “Li Xing! Is that you? It’s pouring!”
“Yes, it is, isn’t it?” she returned loudly, in high spirits.
“Where’re you off to in that getup?”
“Never you mind.”
Her behaviour was eye-popping in its boldness. Yet Aki was aware that she was driven by neither love nor intrigue. Or rather it was love, he told himself reluctantly; it was all about her involvement with another man, and had nothing to do with him. His was a secondary, comic role.
Nevertheless, though nervous about this peculiar, unexpected situation, he was inclined to enjoy it, to lap up the sweet taste of adventure. Having come this far, he couldn’t turn back,
and he resolved not to do so. Not even if it meant ending up like his father.
There was no telling when a hotel employee might come barging in on them, so Li Xing kept up her male impersonation for the time being. With no particular business to attend to, without even knocking, hotel staff would bring out their long, heavy iron key – unchanged from sixty years ago – and rattle it in the keyhole. For anyone on the inside, this was unnerving. After opening the door a third of the way, they would call out politely, “Xiansheng?”
Aki decided, instead of dinner on the eighteenth floor, to go down to the snack bar in the lobby and pick up some instant ramen, crackers, and chocolate. That was all there was.
When he got back, Li Xing had changed into a shirt and a pair of his linen trousers, and was settled on the sofa. Dinner promised to be a meagre affair, but the combination of the things he’d bought and her own contribution of Yin Dan’s jasmine tea made for a surprisingly pleasant meal. In the relaxed atmosphere of the room, she told him her reasons for imposing on him like this.
“Xingxing,” he said eventually, “you can only go on pulling the wool over people’s eyes here for a day and a half at best. You don’t need to write out your diary right now, do you? Why not wait till the movie’s finished, when your time is your own again and you can go wherever you want?” He said this pretending to believe her explanation, which he found only half convincing.
“No.” She turned pleading eyes on him. “It has to be now. I’m afraid that if I don’t do it now, I’ll never be able to remember anything at all.”
Her upper body swayed on the sofa. Aki got up and looked down out of the window. No sign of the Peugeot. Behind him, he sensed her getting up, moving off. He swung around to see her standing by the door, suitcase in hand. In a firm, almost harsh tone of voice, he said, “Stay here. You can use this desk all you want. And take the bedroom. It’s yours. I’ll sleep on the sofa.”
For a fleeting second, he imagined her running toward him and throwing herself into his arms, but that of course didn’t happen. It was another man she had come here for.
10
The next day, Li Xing could not get out of bed. Due to her soaking in the rain she’d caught a cold and was running a fever. This morning the Peugeot was gone from its spot below the window. After straining to lift the receiver of the bedside phone, she had production manager Yu
Ming paged, and then explained that she wanted to be excused from the day’s rehearsals. As shed gone missing only recently, Yu Ming asked her where she was.
“I’m at Mr Waki’s place in the Broadway Mansions Hotel,” she answered boldly.
Her voice carried as far as a surprised Aki in the anteroom.
Yu Ming told her to get better soon and hung up. Then she turned to assistant director Gao Yong, who had just walked into the room, and whispered, “Xingxing’s taking the day off with a cold. Want to hear something interesting? She’s dumped her boyfriend for a Japanese moneybags. She’s such a sweet-looking thing – you never can tell about people, can you? It goes with being an actress, I guess, that sort of cheek. People will talk, but I doubt if she’ll end up committing suicide the way Ruan Lingyu did.”[1]
When he returned to Studio Four, Gao Yong passed the news on to the crew. The director had not yet arrived.
Meanwhile, Li Xing swallowed some Japanese cold medicine Aki gave her and slept for a couple of hours before getting up. Her fever had gone down. She changed into a bright orange dress, abandoning the masquerade, and with visible pleasure tucked into a sandwich Aki had ordered from room service. A maid came in, her presence giving Aki the jitters, but Li Xing lost no time in smoothly engaging the woman in familiar conversation.
Then she made a pot of Yin Dan’s tea, and the two of them drank it together. Notebook and ballpoint pen in hand, she indicated the wicker chair by the window and asked, “Would it be all right to move that chair into the other room? I don’t think I’d be able to relax at the desk.”
Aki immediately picked up and carried the chair into the bedroom, setting it down between two windows.
“There you are.”
“Thanks.”
When she sat down, the chair creaked pleasantly. Yesterday’s rain having cleared up, the sky over Shanghai was serene and blue for the first time in a while. Li Xing quietly spread out the notebook in her lap and, with an occasional glance at the portion of sky visible through the windows, set to work on the recreation of her lost letters and diary.
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