Shanghai Nobody_A Novel

by Vann Chow

  A marriage proposal these days involved at least a diamond ring on silver or gold, a bouquet of flowers and a nice romantic dinner at a fairy tale location. After she had accepted the gift, she would then bring her fiance of the moment to her parents' house, which was customary in Chinese tradition to properly ask for her hand from her father, at which point her father would without a doubt gets emotionally fired up and chase the man out of her house, asking him to never see her daughter again because he was no match for his precious daughter. The parents were of course no blood relations of hers. They were actors in her grand scheme.

  I thought my social ineptitude would hinder the development of relationship between me and these beautiful women, but turned out none of the ladies got put off by it, since they were not planning on a life long relationship with me, except when I could guarantee a lifetime of satisfaction to their extravagance and greed. They had multiple targets every time, and I was only one of them. When you had a collection of something they were more or less going to stick to the Gaussian distribution in terms of personality.

  Chapter 8: Fun and Games

  It sounded counter intuitive, but it was not an exaggeration to say that it was not too bad to be cheated by these beautiful women. Everything in this world was give and take. Scammers do not simply take something from you without giving something up. Online fraudster-dating had gained me a lot more hours of facetime with real women. And having being so much more alert than I would had been had Angelique did not completely annihilate my self-confidence about how observant and world-smart I was, I felt like if I remain attentive, I could maximize my gain while minimizing my loss. I could feign dumb and play along until the last moment. If these women were set out to deceive me, there was really no reason why I could not do the same to waste their time for some female companionship.

  I did understand that I was sampling a subset of Chinese women who were amazing in looks between the age of 18 to 32, spent an awful lot of time on their phones and playing in particular only dating apps interacting with more than one man at a time and were interested more about monetary gain than having a good time. There was very little direct contribution these encounters would make towards my long term goal of finding a life partner. However, after navigating inside scammerville for about six months, I felt like I have become a different person. I had grown. I started to see the world in different light, the same light that my parents see the world, that reality was not all fun and games. I realized that men's natural attraction to women made us such easy targets for bamboozlement, whilst women's natural attraction to men that could provide and protect, mostly manifested in terms of wealth, made them such easy targets to be exploited.

  I never thought I would have these thoughts crossing my mind. I was the epitome of all Confucius virtue --- loyal, honest, hard-working (up to a certain point), meek individual. To think of human relationship as some kind of transactions or even con games was completely foreign to fine Chinese specimen of mankind like me. Yet here I was, crunching the numbers on the balance sheet of love (I am not even sure you can call it love) --- 62 thousand yuan spent, 193 drinks consumed, 45 dinners, 41 times hand-holding, 32 kisses, 18 condoms consumed. If I were to compete against myself in the parallel universe where I try to meet girls the traditional way, I would win by a couple of trips to the moon and back.

  Thinking back to the day when my best friend showed up to our weekly coffee with his hot girlfriend, I smirked. It was about time to show him my ladies as well.

  I did not have to wait until our weekly coffee for an opportunity. His girlfriend posted on Happy Net (Chinese Facebook) that he had been ran over by a truck while he was motorcycling on the highway, something that he was not supposed to do but did regularly anyway. He was apparently lucky enough not to suffer any major injury but a concussion to his head. On the Happy Net post his girlfriend posted, he was able to sit up on the hospital bed, smiling weakly, and made a triumphant V sign with his right hand. His head was wrapped in a ball of bandages. I scrambled to the hospital while trying to call one of my many girlfriends, hoping one would be available and bring an empty soup container so I could pour some market-bought nourishing soup, a standard gift to someone recovering, in it to bring it to my friend at the hospital.

  Time and time again I was disappointed. Nobody cared. Not even when I already offered the most convenient solution of just showing up and skipping the soup. What if I pick you up? I asked Kiki, Mandy, Sarah and FeiFei. They said they were occupied and would make it up to me next time. MeiLing, YaoYao and Clarisa told me to stop calling them about nonsense and Cindy said she wanted to break up with me and hung up. Queeny seemed to have blocked my phone number all together.

  When I arrived, my best friend's parents were also in the room. They were happy to see me. After a short chat about the conditions of my friend, who needed to stay in the hospital for a few more days under doctor's observation, they asked me the inevitable --- Where is your girlfriend? Is she not coming?

  The community we lived in was huge but it can feel so small sometimes. If someone you know sees you with a girl, everyone would know about it. They might not know who the girls were, since these girls I met do not come from the same residential area by my clever design, but people would take notice of these little foreigners presence in their neighborhood, with one of their own. Their faces, their outfits, their demeanor, everything is recorded by a collective of individuals who may appear to have nothing to do with each other but turned out all be member of an unspoken society of gossipers and contributed to the gossip file with my name on it regularly. This file was passed by word of mouth from one nosy non-blood related auntie to another bored uncle (we call every one senior than us auntie and uncle even when we are not related), and eventually they would get to the people whom I really know, someone who could subject me to a level of embarrassment I disliked.

  At that point, my best friend started laughing. He could only be stopped when he felt his jaw hurt since his mouth was practically wrapped shut by the layers of bandages designed to protect him from any further unnecessary damage to his head. I eyed him suspiciously as his behavior seemed to imply that he knew more than he should. To that, he simply winked back at me and chuckled to himself, as he could not really open his mouth wide.

  To his parents, I could only apologize on behalf of my non-existence girlfriend for not showing up. His dad nodded and tapped my back lightly to give me a non-verbal encouragement that seemed to say relationship was hard, or something like that. His mom, an extremely hospitable lady who loved me as if I was her own since I became best friend with my best friend and always hang out at their home, invited us, me and my imaginary girlfriend, to visit again some time soon. I was glad they did not ask for her name, because I could hardly make a choice between all of my girlfriends who were, really, not my girlfriends.

  Chapter 9: On The Way Back

  On the way back home, I decided to go see the Huangpu River. I found an empty bench that was not occupied by resting tourists and couples in love, dropped my backpack on the ground and sat there for a good hour, just looking out.

  So many skyscrapers. New ones already popped up whose names I only vaguely remembered. I used to care about these stuff, urban news, city development, interesting architecture, latest achievement of the city that I could boost on rival territories on forums. At that point, I did not even remember having checked the weather recently. So focused was I on meeting girls I was completely beside myself. Fumbling for the bottle of water in my backpack, I realized that I was still that boy who carried water bottle around from home to save money, so that, back then when I still had a saving goal, I could give my ex-girlfriend the life she wanted. I dived deeper into the backpack for my handkerchief to blow my nose.

  My life goal used to be to make my ex-girlfriend, then future-wife, and her parents happy, because seeing them happy would make me happy, and that in turn would make my parents happy. There was no greater joy in Chinese parents' eyes than
to see their grown son forms a family and builds a career. The career part was a prerequisite to formation of a family because without a good career, a regular guy like me would never have enough money for all the expenses that was required to get up to the point of forming a family, hence really happiness in a family revolves around the amount of money I had in my disposal.

  After thirty-three years, I lost my girlfriend and I was even more broke than I was when I had just broken up with her. I wasted a lot of time on women that had no interest in me and lied to myself about how I would be gaining some socializing experience from paying them for their inconvenience. I was such a loser, I was better off dead --- I thought to myself matter of factly.

  I walked up to the metal fence that barred me from the river and I thought of Qu Yuan, the patriotic poet slash court adviser that jumped into the river to his death for failing to save his master from harm. He was remembered till this day every Duan Wu festival with dragon boat races. No one would remember me. They would probably considered me a nuisance to the city, ruining the peace of beautiful Huang Pu.

  “Can you take a picture of me?”

  An American girl holding her iPhone reached out to me. I said, “Sorry...what?” I really was not paying attention.

  “Would you hold the camera for me? I would like to have a picture in front of this beautiful skyline.”

  Skyline, oh yes. Shanghai famous skyline. There were so many tourists these days along the river. I should have known what she was talking to me about without asking.

  Crazy as it may sound, handling an iPhone was a difficult task for someone who had been using Android for as long as he remembered. Occasionally I would slip into the Apple Store to play Angry Bird when I had some time to kill, but operating the iPhone camera on panorama mode did not come natural to me.

  “Xie xie nin.” She said to me in Mandarin. A lot of tourists can say thank you, but to say thank you in the polite form, this was the first time.

  “Do you speak Chinese?” I asked, in Mandarin. And she replied in fluent, though heavily accented Mandarin that she did and she was an exchange student from Harvard at the Fudan University.

  I could not help but praised her on her proficiency. She was not particularly flattered by it. She said that if I were to go to an exchange program in her home country America, I would have to speak English too. That was nothing special about her being able to speak my language. I argued that Chinese was a difficult language to learn, with lots more characters. Smiling, she retorted that I should not treat every non-Chinese as if they were idiots who could not learn the same set of characters that every children in China had to learn to make basic conversations. Embarrassed, I apologized to her for giving her compliments about her Chinese. Intrigued by her intelligence, I invited her to chat over a cup of coffee and a slice of cake, also because I was dying to get back indoors since night was falling and the temperature dropped significantly that my hands were frozen. Now that I had something else on my mind and did not want to die, I felt like I should feed my body properly to keep it alive.

  Some clients from my freelance work were non-Chinese. I had my fair share of interaction with foreigners and that was why my English was passably fluent. All the conversations I had with foreigners were however so far all business and nothing personal. This was the first time I met a foreigner whom I thought could become my friend. I was intrigued by the possibility. And to my surprised, after having been trained on numerous occasion to talk to girls by meeting them online, I was able to behave rather calmly in the presence of the female gender and not make a fool of myself. I even did the gentlemanly thing to pull out her chair and offered to buy her coffee and cake, which she refused.

  “No, don't do that.” She said. “I can get my own,” and she gave me a smile. So we took turns buying our merchandise.

  When we finally both settled down on the opposite end of the coffee table at Starbucks I had learnt, from the shouting barista that her name was Marvey.

  I asked her why she decided to come to China, out of all of the places in the world.

  “China is fascinating. Everything is so different from where I came from, and so much history. And I love the sound of your language. It made me a more elegant person I think. I felt like my manners are adjusting to the sound of my voice when I speak in Mandarin. Every time I speak, it is like I am reciting poetry. I wish I could stay here longer.” I told her that I never felt that way about my own language.

  The disappointment came in quickly after her promising opening introduction. She also had a boyfriend who came to China to join the same exchange program with her. It was a no-brainer for her to join him.

  As to the whereabouts of her boyfriend, she said she had no idea. He had not been picking up his phone the whole day today, but that was not unusual she said. Sometimes he needed his privacy and she respected it. Especially in China, she said, where he had lots of friends from his childhood and could easily make new ones, he became harder and harder to reach every day because he had so many engagement apart from school. The more she tried to justify his ignorance, the sadder I felt her voice became. If it was melodic like poetry at the start, now it turned into a recital of an obituary.

  Three months into the exchange and she still did not have a proper panorama of herself and her boyfriend in front of the Bund. She thought today was the day but then she said apparently not, with a feeble smile.

  I asked her about her boyfriend. He was a Chinese American who looked nothing Chinese to me and more American than an average American I envisioned in my head, consulting knowledge of how they look after watching years of American TV series. From the picture of him she had as a wallpaper of her smartphone, he was a tall and beefy guy. His built was reminiscent of the blue genie from Aladdin, huge head, even huger body. The width of his upper arm muscles seemed to tell stories of men whose neck he wrung in combat. I felt my neck hurt just looking at them.

  For whatever reason, I told Marvey that I could be their photographer next time when they come out to the Bund for their panoramas. To boast my photography skills, I showed her the photo albums I had uploaded three years ago onto Flickr which had now twenty thousand or so views.

  “Yes, that would be wonderful!” she said to me, smiling brightly while being fascinated by my stills of autumn scenery around Shanghai.

  “I want to have a selfie with you,” she said, and before I could answer, she snapped the photograph with the front camera of her iPhone. The sudden flash dazed me but this was the first time I took a photo with a foreign person. Also the first time that a girl posted a photo with me on social media without hesitation. “Sorry! I can't wait to show off my new Chinese friend,” she smiled apologetically.

  To get a copy of the photograph, I “climbed” over the firewall that blocked Facebook and signed up for an account. Marvey became my first Facebook friend.

  Chapter 10: Foreign

  Marvey had seen through me. Perhaps it was the ogling that I inadvertently did whenever we hang out together with her female friends. She knew I want nothing more but to get to know them so she would bring me along whenever there were some exchange students gathering. She said it would do the group good to hang out with local Chinese during their times in China, instead of simply sticking to each other and learnt everything about the rest of the world but the Central Kingdom. I could not agree more with her determination to integrate. I could use some practice for my English as well. I was not planning to stay in China forever, although this was nothing more than just a thought.

  Her friends were not all from North America. Majority of them were from Europe, one from Africa, two from South America, and three from Japan. I was most attracted to Marvey's best friend in the group. Her name was Erika, and she was from Switzerland. Her unmistakably French accent was extremely intriguing. Most of us, not just me, had to pay extra attention to what she said before we could really understand every word, despite her best effort to speak English, or sometimes Chinese. Perhaps it was be
cause of the extra effort that I paid to discern her words that also made me pay her a lot more heed than the others. She was tiny by European standards, her head coming only up to the start of my neck. Her looking up at me with her big round light brown eyes could completely soften my heart, even when she was saying something that no Chinese girl would say, such as telling me straight on that the grandma who tried to squeeze herself on to the crowded bus was a bitch, or that the professor who gave them two assignments to complete by the deadline of Saturday midnight was a slave driver.

  I was exhilarated that she chose to confide in me these profane thoughts. Maybe because she knew I would not reprimand her for her lack of manners, as my level of English would not allow me to do that just yet even if I wanted to. And many nice minutes passed by as we, together with the group traveled to various parts of Shanghai on weekends, exploring the city that I grew up in with a fresh pair of eyes.

  Marvey's boyfriend Zhi seldom showed up. The usual excuse was that he knew the city like the back of his hand already since he had lived here till he was six year old and did not require to be showed around again by me, an amateur guide. As a fellow man I knew what he was up to. He was otherwise occupied and he also valued spending time doing something else than spending it with Marvey or their classmates, so much that after six months of Marvey's exchange program, they barely got any photo together anywhere, let alone the Bund.