by Tash Aw
969 Weihai Lu Sold to Anonymous Property Magnate. In a deal estimated to be worth RMB 900 million, the historic building located in the prestigious Nanjing Xi Lu area of downtown Shanghai will be transformed into a civic center, with a concert hall, open-access library facilities, and restaurants. Officials from the Shanghai municipal department today confirmed that the preferred bidder had been selected only because of the exemplary nature of his charitable proposals, which would not only preserve one of the gems of Shanghai’s architectural heritage but also contribute to the community. The reputed size of the deal had nothing to do with it, Wang C. from the municipal department said. “There had been a fierce bidding war, and in fact we received a higher bid from another overseas developer for this important site. We were not swayed by money.”
His eyes began to tire from the screen of his laptop. After months of not looking at a computer, they had lost the habit of staring at bright light, and he decided to go out for a walk along the river. As he approached the foot of the stairs at the entrance to the building, he saw someone sitting on the front steps, a girl in her twenties playing with what appeared to be a stray kitten. Dressed in candy-pink pajamas, her hair tied in a ponytail by a single elastic band, she looked entirely ordinary, and Justin would have walked straight past her if not for the song she was humming—“Little Moonlight Song,” out of tune, just like the voice that had ruined his afternoons. No longer filtered through layers of concrete, it sounded purer and gentler than that persecutory voice, and he wondered if he was making a mistake—but, no, it was definitely the same voice.
“What are you staring at?” she said, looking up at him.
“Nothing. Is that your cat?” Justin said.
“No, I don’t know who it belongs to. It comes every night at the same time as I do. We keep each other company. Sometimes I feed it.”
Justin watched as the cat arched its spine and rubbed itself against her. “You shouldn’t touch stray cats like that—you never know, they might be dirty.”
The girl shrugged and continued to cuddle the cat, circling her arms around it and lowering her face to allow it to rub the top of its head against her chin. When it finally stepped off her lap, it landed on a large notebook that lay on the ground next to the girl. She picked the book up and held it to her chest protectively, though Justin wasn’t sure if she was protecting it or herself. Her eyes were red and puffy from oversleeping—something that Justin recognized at once—and her skin was dry and brittle.
“What are you studying?” Justin asked.
“Nothing,” the girl said, before standing and walking away. She went to the lift door and pressed the call button. The lift was waiting, and its flickering fluorescent bulb bathed her in harsh white light, making her seem very small, barely more than a child.
The next night Justin went downstairs at the same hour, hoping to see the girl again, but she wasn’t there, nor on the night after. Her karaoke singing had stopped too, but Justin did not feel relieved; instead, he worried that something had happened to her. He went up to her room and rattled the grille, but already he knew that there would be no answer. He began going for a nightly walk, always leaving just before midnight, feeling the first hints of summer infuse the breeze coming off the river.
Then one night she was there again, sitting on the front step, dressed in her pink pajamas, reading the notebook. She closed it when she saw him approaching.
“Where have you been?” he asked; the urgency and relief in his voice startled him. “I thought you said you came here every day.”
“Sometimes I sleep. What’s it to you?”
He sat down on the step next to her, and she did not move away.
“Why do you sit out here to study at midnight? Isn’t that sort of a weird thing to do?”
“I’m not studying. Anyway, why do you go walking after midnight? Isn’t that a weird thing to do too? Seriously, Shanghai is so full of weird people.”
A movement startled Justin—the cat, padding its way silently toward them, easing itself swiftly into the girl’s embraces. He drew away slightly. “You really shouldn’t touch stray cats in that way,” he said.
The girl laughed. “You’re scared of cats! That’s so funny.” She cradled the cat with both hands, lifting it off her, and thrust it toward Justin. “You’re weird. Even a sweet baby cat can spook you. Wah, you really have big problems, mister. Go on, try touching it.”
“No.”
“Okay, then, let it touch you a bit—see how affectionate it is!”
“Please just take it away.”
The girl giggled as she returned the cat to her lap. A gust of wind caught the pages of her notebook and blew it open. On the front page, in boxy handwriting, someone had written: “Journal of My Secret Self.”
“Is that your diary?” Justin asked.
“You are so rude and nosy,” the girl said, pulling the book away. “It’s not mine. It’s my roommate’s.”
“You’re one to talk—why are you reading your roommate’s secret diary?”
The girl shrugged. “She has an exciting life. She goes out all the time. Now she even has a rich boyfriend. When I read her diary I feel excited too, as if her life is mine. I used to go out a lot, to the cinema, music concerts. But it’s been so long, and now I am scared. I don’t dare go out anymore. This is as far as I want to go.”
Justin noticed a cut on the cat’s paw; where it had rubbed against the girl’s pajamas, there were small dark streaks of blood.
“Hey,” the girl said, as if remembering something important. “Do you have any ice cream? You live here, don’t you? I don’t know why, but I feel like some ice cream.”
Justin shook his head. He did not want to admit that he had nothing in his fridge but a lump of rancid Australian butter. “But I could get some for tomorrow. If you’re here again, that is.”
“Really? Promise?” When she smiled, her face seemed to change shape entirely, an effect that disconcerted Justin. It transformed her from a young woman into a child, not even a pubescent teenager but a shiny-faced, unquestioning child. And suddenly it felt important to keep the promise he had just made. He did not know why he was providing a solemn undertaking to buy ice cream, why he was taking the trouble to ask what kind of flavors she liked, why he was pretending to share her love of red-bean ices when he didn’t even like ice cream, why he cared about what was written in that diary or if her roommate’s life was heading for disaster, why he was concerned that there were two hapless girls from the provinces who thought that the rich men they were going out with were going to leave their wives and marry them. These girls knew nothing; they had not seen the world. They were so young that they thought the world was made of pop concerts and ice cream and baby cats and pink pajamas, but now they were beginning to taste the bitterness that life offered. He did not want that to happen, but he could not prevent it.
“Okay, then, I will get red-bean ice cream,” he said.
The next evening, they sat eating ice cream, still in the same spot on the front step of the building. She told him her name—Yanyan—and when he said his name, she repeated it several times, delighting in the novelty of the English sounds. Just-ying was how she pronounced it, the two syllables infused with rise-and-fall tones of Chinese, transforming his name into something unfamiliar and wonderful. He had never thought of his name as anything but perfunctory, never thought anyone would find it amusing. He listened as she told him about herself, patiently taking in the details of her life. He was a good listener. Often, he had found himself deep in conversation, enjoying what was being said, and suddenly the other person would stop and say, “You know what? You’re such a good listener.” He was never quite sure that it was a compliment—he had often taken it as a euphemism for “being boring,” for being someone who absorbed rather than illuminated. And yet now it did not seem to matter. Yanyan needed to talk; she needed him to listen; she did not require him to participate.
And so on this and many subsequent
nights, sitting on the front step of the building, he learned that she was from a village in Fujian province, that she had worked in the office of a company producing health-food supplements until she got fired a year ago. It wasn’t her fault, she hadn’t done anything wrong, but the company had started exporting to the United States, and the authorities there had found some contamination in their products and the whole company had to shut down. She did not know why, but she had taken it really badly—“broken confidence” was how she put it. She had always been a delicate person, even as a child; she was too much of a dreamer. She’d read an article about alien abductions in Hunan province and, for a while, she was convinced that it had happened to her in her childhood—it was the only way she could explain the white light that came to her in her sleep sometimes or the feeling that she had left part of her body in another place far, far away. Now she couldn’t face going out of her room; some days she didn’t even get out of bed. The outside world scared her; just sitting on the front step of the building like this was a big deal. Life had become much better since her roommate arrived—she paid the rent and bought nice food. But.
“But what?”
“But she has secrets,” Yanyan said. “She shares a lot of intimate secrets with me but not the most important ones.”
“Why?”
Yanyan sighed and laughed, as if explaining a simple idea to a child. “Because she wants to leave, but she doesn’t want to upset me. That’s why I have to read her journal—to know what is going through her mind. So that I will be prepared for the day she moves on.”
“Has she written in the journal that she’ll be moving?”
“No”—Yanyan shrugged—“but everyone does eventually. You can’t stay in a city like Shanghai forever. You will leave too, and so will I.”
It was true, Justin thought; he had left messages with estate agents who were now ringing back with proposals of swanky places in Luwan and Xuhui, where all the foreigners lived. All he had to do was return their calls and in a few days he would have a new apartment. He hadn’t mentioned any of this to Yanyan, but, then again, she hadn’t asked.
“So, tell me something about yourself,” Yanyan said. “You don’t speak much.”
“There’s nothing to tell,” Justin said. “My life is very boring.”
“I think you have a lot of secrets.”
Justin laughed and stood up. “If I had a secret journal like your roommate’s, it would be empty.”
11.
INQUIRE DEEPLY INTO EVERY PROBLEM
WHAT THE NEWSPAPERS CANNOT FIND IS THE MISSING PIECE of the puzzle: What was Gary’s life like before he moved into his uncle’s dismal house on the outskirts of Kota Bharu? Who was Gary’s mother, and what did she do? Was he already a miscreant at the age of nine or ten? Was he abused at a very young age? The trail has run cold, and it seems there are no more answers to be found in that rather depressed part of northern Malaysia. The out-of-town journalists who have been there for a couple of weeks are now beginning to tire of the second-rate hotels, where the AC breaks down twice a day and the combination of Islamic laws and lack of development means that there are no cool bars, no fancy cinemas, no dancing, little alcohol, and certainly no girls. Besides, the TV channels have moved on from Garygate, as someone has called this episode; they are no longer interested in him.
Maybe if they could track Gary down and get an exhaustive interview with him, in which he recounted every detail of his life and then broke down in tears while apologizing for his misdeeds—maybe then the story would be complete and his life could be restored. But Gary is not available for interviews. His record company says that he is in a period of self-reflection. According to most bloggers, this probably means he has had an overdose, but by now even the cheapest tabloid newspapers do not have the enthusiasm to speculate on Gary’s fate.
For once in Gary’s brief, glittering career, however, the press release is true. He is indeed thinking about himself. Not because he wants to but because he is barricaded in his hotel, immobile, for the first time in years. No meetings to attend, no chat shows, no dance rehearsals with girls dressed as sexy extraterrestrials, no recording sessions that last into the early hours of the morning. Trapped in his hotel room, he looks out at the Shanghai skyline, at the ribbons of elevated highways unfurling into the distance, at the brilliant gilding of Jing’an Temple amid the blue-glass and chrome façades of the office blocks, at the crowds of people hurrying along the streets, distant but still close enough for him to pick out individual details in their clothing: a scarlet raincoat, a Burberry scarf, a yellow satchel. Everyone hurrying to or from somewhere, every life full of something about to happen, everyone looking forward to the next heartbeat of their existence.
But not him.
He keeps the TV on the Discovery Channel, for he finds it soothing to have a backdrop of constant motion, of constant savagery. Killer whales devouring seals, snakes swallowing pigs. He sees a shot of a lizard eating another lizard that looks identical, only a bit smaller. But the bigger lizard can’t quite manage it—the smaller one keeps wriggling out of its jaws, its hind legs jerking as if electrocuted. Gary does not know why, but he starts to laugh. Many of the things he watches on TV seem comical to him nowadays.
In front of him, little windows announce themselves on the screen of his laptop, popping into existence like beautiful, short-lived nighttime flowers. These are the numerous online chat programs he is on—about half a dozen at once. Most of the time he doesn’t bother to look at the messages, which are greetings from total strangers who don’t even know who they are writing to. They don’t care—they are all lonely and in need of someone to chat with. Everyone uses a false name, hiding who they truly are, just as he does. The only thing on display is their solitude.
A small chat window with a girl’s face on it pops up with a bright bling. Gary has seen her before. It is rare to see a photo of a real face on these chat sites. The last time Gary saw it, he decided that it must be a fake—no girl would place a picture on the Internet that showed her smiling straight into the camera. The photo was taken in a public park, not in a studio, and the girl in it was not even dressed up or prettified in any way. He thought it must have been a stolen image—someone playing a joke, so he took no notice. Her message this time is the same as the last time: sassy and challenging. Hellooooo, anyone out there? Any human being, alien, even a talking monkey would be okay!
Yes, it must be a fake, Gary thinks as he clicks on the window to close it. Besides, he is bored of these chat rooms now, bored of inventing stories about who he is, bored of lying about his age, job, hometown—bored of the flattery and flirtation, the banality of the chat that is always the same and never goes anywhere.
Around him: an orchid in a stone-gray bowl, beige-and-black furniture—the same room for over two weeks now. Near the door there are two trays piled high with dirty dishes and glasses, unfinished food clinging to the white porcelain. He does not call for anyone to take the things away, because he is ashamed of being seen even by the humblest cleaning girl. He does not want to know that she is sneering at him, sniggering with her friends down in the kitchen below. Every few days he waits until 3:00 A.M., when even the lifts are silent, and then he pushes the trays out into the corridor. He collects his food in this way too, emerging swiftly to draw the tray into his den when he feels there is no risk of being seen, like a rat darting back into its burrow. For several days, therefore, while he gathers the courage to open his door and place the dirty dishes outside, the remnants of his meals sit in a pile, reminding him, just as his agent does every so often, that unless he gets some work soon, there will be no more money to pay the bills.
This is the reality of his life as it now stands: dirty, unchanging, helpless. There is nothing new or interesting for him to contemplate in his minimalist, sullied cell; he has exhausted all the possibilities of his life, cannot even look ahead into the future as those people down on the streets can. And so the only thing that can occupy
his thoughts is the past, not because he wants to think about it but because he has run out of options. If the newspapers could see his past, maybe they would look more kindly upon him. But maybe not. Maybe they would see his childhood as a source of shame and ridicule, something else to make fun of.
He lived with his mother in a rural town called Temangan. If a town as small as Temangan were capable of having outskirts, the newspapers would probably say that he lived there, where the low rows of shophouses and cheaply built houses bled into the countryside, fading into the thin jungle that stretched for miles until the next town. There was something ridiculous about country people like them and their neighbors trying to become modern city folk, saving up their money for a scooter, then a car, and dreaming of a job in the capital down south. Now that he has traveled so far in life, he can see just how futile that dream was, how justified those sophisticated cosmopolitan people were in laughing at their aspirations, because it was clear that they could never change their lives.
His father had walked out on them not long after Gary was born. “Don’t go looking for him,” his mother had once said. “It’s not worth it.” It was a superfluous thing to say, because Gary never had any curiosity about who his father was. When, recently, some of the newspapers cited a lack of a male authority figure as the cause of Gary’s delinquency, he had laughed. He was timid but self-contained as a child. Those who are born into a life of solitude learn to enjoy the space around them, he thought; they learn not to question the lack of love in their lives.
His mother never learned to embrace this loneliness; she had been married, she had had a husband, she had known love, and—above all—she had grown accustomed to having someone around her. Now she resented life, not because of her circumstances—“Look at me, I’m just a washerwoman,” she would sometimes joke, half bitterly, half blithely—but because of her solitude. The failure of her potential was reflected not by what she did for a living but by her aloneness. Life had taken away her companion, and even as she encouraged her son to forget his father, she could not let go of him.