The Lost Garden

by Ang Li

  This letter did not reach Yinghong until years later, when she rushed home from New York after receiving the news of Father’s death. She found it in his personal correspondence when going through his things.

  Tears blurred her eyes again and again, no matter how hard she tried to stop them from falling.

  For months, Yinghong was in a state of ecstasy. Once she was back together with Lin Xigeng, she ignored all the designs and plans she had made, for she realized that he was the one she wanted, and that she actually loathed all other men.

  She made a sudden, clean break with Teddy, refusing to continue their secret rendezvous, and began to avoid him. He was so upset he threatened to make their relationship public, though in the end he did not, out of concern for his wife. Still, during their last phone call, he declared:

  “You’ll come back to me one day. I know all about women like you, sex-craved and needy, and I’m the only man who can truly satisfy you. You’ll beg me to come back.”

  Yinghong angrily slammed down the phone, but then she laughed softly.

  When she and Lin first got back together, she was able to tease him and let him have his way only within limits; she would not allow him what he really wanted. But along with the growing emotional ties from all the time they spent together, she knew she would not able to put him off for long, though she was aware that she must not let him have the one thing she had been depending on too quickly.

  She finally gave in when he insisted. Like any woman in love who had held out for a long time, she happily and willingly let him have his way, and often reminisced about the first night with fondness.

  It took not years but months before his love for her begin to fade. She soon realized that their sex life was not as wonderful as she had thought it would be. Lin lacked Teddy’s stamina and was not as considerate; it would take her a long while to understand Lin’s way with women, and she learned that there was practically nothing she could do to change that.

  At first Lin tried hard to please her, employing all his passion to work on her, the way he worked on his real estate business. Even during the deliriously happy moments of lovemaking, Yinghong could still tell that he was most sexually needy when he was confronted with an important decision or when work piled up.

  He wanted to know where she was every minute. In the same way he came up with sudden, innovative ideas, he wanted her at all sorts of unusual times and places. After a long, boring meeting or during a free moment at work, he would send his driver for her or tell her to take a taxi to have sex with him in different parts of Taipei, where he seemed to have a multitude of residences.

  Those places were usually splendidly decorated, spacious, high-rise units; it could be in the up-and-coming Eastern District or along declining Zhongshan North Road, even in an old residential area like Wanhua. It took her a while to realize that when he called to tell her where to meet, it depended on where he was having a meeting or doing something work related. He would choose the closest spot to avoid the increasingly heavy traffic in the city and save travel time for himself.

  As a man who had made his fortune in real estate, Lin appeared to have already scouted out spots separated by equal distances and reserved them as his pleasure dens in a city he had helped to build. Even after they were married, Yinghong still was not sure how many such units he had reserved in these buildings.

  But no matter which district or which floor of a new building it was, he would quickly pick a place where he’d come for daytime sex before dashing off to another meeting or business meal, or he would fall asleep as soon as it was over. It was only at night that he would come to her place, and not always for sex. Just to be able to fall asleep with you in my arms, he whispered to her, with a bashful look.

  He arrived at different times. Sometimes at three or four in the morning, after leaving a banquet he had hosted at some drinking establishment. He’d be so drunk he’d slur his words as he told her how he missed her, even though he’d been surrounded by dozens of barmaids who wanted to spend the night with him for a little extra cash.

  She was only dimly aware that cool autumn had been replaced by early winter. As the island’s economy experienced exponential growth through international trade, streets in the biggest city, Taipei, were expanded for ten lanes of traffic. In the process of making the city green, a tree called “sudden golden shower” was widely planted along these streets. A typical subtropical tree, it was not tall, with compound leaves that were thin and tender, creating a lovely sea of greenery. With the arrival of early winter, the leaves remained on the trees, while strings of yellow flowers burst onto the tips of the branches. The flowers were light yellow at first, but the cooler the weather got, the more the flowers bloomed, and more golden yellow they turned, until the tree was virtually covered in bright yellow petals. The clusters of flowers looked like a sudden shower of golden raindrops, giving the illusion that the city of nouveaux riches was paved in gold.

  In a rapidly developing city that could boast the timely planting of “sudden golden showers,” Yinghong would travel in the Rolls Royce, which was steady as in a dream, on her way to a tryst with Lin Xigeng in a unit located in a high rise somewhere in the city. She would look out the window as the car glided past densely planted sudden golden showers, bathed in the glow of warm winter sunshine. Everything was so brilliantly lit it seemed unreal.

  It was also during the seasonal change from cool autumn to cold winter that an unprecedented shift in Taiwan’s real estate market took place. Business owners, using Japan’s economic development as an example, estimated that an increase in real estate value would occur every five to seven years, and assumed that the same was about to happen in Taiwan. How big a jump and for how long, no one could say for sure, considering how Taiwan’s economy had just experienced its first prodigious growth.

  Lin’s real estate business was also entering a new era. He worked day and night, gathering nearly every one of Taipei’s competent brokers to talk about possible sales or joint developments with landowners. Accompanying these brokers, who chewed betel nut and wore plastic sandals, he would go to restaurants with bar girls and get so drunk he could barely stand. These people could call to wake him up in the dead of the night or early morning if it was about a piece of beautiful land.

  They talked about land as if it were a living thing; in particular, they sounded like they were discussing women, not only using similar terms, but also insinuating something erotic.

  “Square and proper, such a pretty piece.”

  “Skinny and slender, but with a good style.”

  “With land like this, you have to ‘possess’ it right away.”

  Lin needed large amounts of cash to buy land and build on it. So he took bank loan officers to bars, where they flirted with the girls and followed the custom of taking them out. Of course, construction company owners who wanted his business, building-material salesmen who wanted to sell him material, and brokerages who wanted to promote the units also frequently invited him to banquets. Everyone did their best to flatter and fawn over him, and they went only to bars or restaurants with girls.

  Then Yinghong began to notice the difference in bed.

  At first, when she gave in to him after she could no longer put him off, he would spend time kissing and touching to arouse her, which was not new to her, though it still gave her indescribable pleasure. His foreplay, like his professional strokes of genius, frequently brought her unexpected stimulation and increased her sexual appetite.

  But when they really got down to business, his actual performance paled in comparison with foreplay, which could be controlled by his wit, experience, and competence. At moments like this, he would look frustrated but would tell her, in his usual boastful tone, that when he was younger, he often had sex with several women in a single night. Sometimes the women were all there together; sometimes one would arrive right after another. There were times when he did not sleep a wink; he had just started his business, and could last nearly
an hour with no problem at all. And now?

  “Maybe I overdid it when I was young,” he said, dejected, as he continued to please her in his own ways.

  He did not want sex with her too often, and, unlike Teddy, he could not keep at it for very long, but Yinghong never felt unfulfilled. Her love for him made his every touch feel like an electric shock; every contact had an effect like fireworks or a lightning strike. Even she was surprised at her ability to adapt, but she was so madly in love that she rarely reflected upon the differences between the two men.

  As cool autumn turned into cold winter, endless rain started up again in Taipei, as usual. At its worst, it could rain day and night for weeks on end. It rarely stopped throughout the winter, and sometimes even lasted into late spring, followed by the “plum rains.” These were usually just drizzles, but they went on and on, the raindrops forming a gray curtain to shroud the Taipei Basin. Compared with stirring earthquakes and typhoons, which could level the island, the rain had an everlasting, stubborn quality, a kind of entanglement that would end only in death.

  With continuous rain adding to the humidity, the island seemed to be wet everywhere and everything took on a mist. No one noticed how the flowers disappeared from “sudden golden showers” along the roadsides; like their name, they vanished after a sudden shower, leaving behind a verdant canopy that looked even greener in the rain.

  I almost immediately sensed the change in him. Now he was always in a hurry and seemed perfunctory, no longer taking time to please me. He still kissed and touched me, but he looked hurried. He would quickly get what he wanted and fall asleep as soon as it was over. Obviously, he too noticed the difference, for he looked abashed and defended himself in a somewhat uncertain tone:

  “The doctor told me, three minutes. If I can do it more than three minutes, it’s not premature ejaculation.”

  He repeated that to reassure himself, but after a few times he stopped bothering to explain.

  A terrifying fear rose from the bottom of my heart; it gripped me and refused to let go.

  What came to mind right away was that there was another woman. I suffered the same sort of pain and dismay as the last time he left me. But this time, with the intimate relationship between us, the thought of him with another woman brought me a strong and totally unexpected desire that gnawed on me daily amid jealous rage.

  I could not keep from thinking that he hurried away from my body in order to satisfy another woman and make her moan with pleasure beneath him. I also realized that whenever I did not know where he was, whenever I felt his detachment, my doubts, worries, jealous anger, and pain would surface to highlight his recent perfunctory performance and hurried behavior. And the feeling that I had not been truly satisfied for a long time intensified and appeared nakedly in my body.

  The desire felt like a burning, shuddering sensation, accumulating and swelling somewhere inside, refusing to be eliminated. It pestered me day and night, complaining loudly that it had not been satisfied; it was a stubborn desire that went beyond pain. However, because of our intimate contact, the desire was concrete and solid evidence that we’d been together, and it continued to bring me basic faith and comfort.

  It was clear to me now that the fear of pain from this love would not drag me down and make me cower and wait passively, as it had the last time; instead I knew it would make me fearlessly fight for what I wanted.

  And all this, I told myself, was because of my abiding love for him.

  Zhu Yinghong began to work on the people in Lin Xigeng’s office.

  She worked on them not to ingratiate herself. Lin was given to parading their relationship at the office and among close friends. “She’s from the Lucheng Zhu family,” is how he usually referred to her. “Her uncle is chairman of the board of Huatai Trust.” Yinghong knew he hoped to benefit from this connection.

  Her focus was on Lin’s personal assistant, the director of the accounting office, and his driver, making sure they received special treatment because of her. She had a way of letting them know that she cared about those who worked for Lin, for she was, after all, the young lady from the Lucheng Zhu family.

  Lin’s drivers seldom stayed for long; he often entertained at bars late into the night and had to race to a construction site in central Taiwan at eight the following morning. Most drivers could not keep up with that kind of schedule; they complained that the boss could catch up on sleep in the car so he didn’t care how late he stayed at the bars. The salary they received wasn’t high enough to risk their lives on the highway.

  When one of the drivers quit, Yinghong, using Xigeng’s safety as an excuse, replaced him with a young man who had just been discharged from the military, a country boy Mudan had helped her find in Lucheng. With the assistance of the director of accounting, who had just written off a large sum of unaccounted-for money with her help, Yinghong slowly increased the driver’s salary to an amount he could not possibly get anywhere else. Back when few private drivers in Taipei wore uniforms, Yinghong took it upon herself to design a simple uniform in a dark color and teach him protocols befitting a chauffeur.

  In the end, everyone was happy. At first, Lin didn’t know how to deal with a driver who knew the proper etiquette, but his flair and his confidence—he was, after all, paying the man—quickly led him to act as if he’d been using a driver like that all along. Sometimes he even used his driver as an example to criticize other drivers’ lack of manners. Yinghong now had Xigeng’s whereabouts under total control, unless, of course, he took the company car or hailed a taxi.

  She was aware that, except under extraordinary circumstances, Lin was too impatient to wait for a taxi or for his assistant to arrange for a company car. His conceit and arrogance would not allow him to scheme to avoid her tracking; besides, he was convinced that he could handle her even if she knew what he was up to.

  “Women. They’re all alike,” she could almost hear him say.

  From the driver, she learned that Lin had no steady female companion over a period of time, though sometimes he took one of the bar girls to a hotel after a banquet.

  “They left the hotel quickly,” the driver would say.

  Little by little, she got to know everything regarding his daily schedule and activities. It was apparent that, in order to avoid potential problems, he would not take any of his one-night stands to any of his apartments throughout the city. She was aware that men in Lin’s position did not casually show their business cards at entertainment locations, for they would not want the girls to call them. What she had to watch out for were the women he took to the apartments.

  Cold and unending rain is typical of winter in the Taipei Basin. Blooms on the “sudden golden showers” had turned into the proverbial yellow flowers of yesterday. On the rare occasions when the rain stopped for a day or two, the sun would show its elusive face only in the afternoon, and it usually had to peek through cloud layers. It was at such a time that she made an important decision—to resign as special assistant to the chairman of the board at her uncle’s company.

  The rise in real estate value was cyclical, and everyone knew that the next upward trend was on the horizon. At each new project, model houses would be crammed full of brokers and buyers who were serious about purchasing; there was no need to advertise or to populate construction site shows with pretty, scantily clad girls. The sales prices might even jump several times a day, so if a buyer hesitated for even an hour, the new price might have increased by a factor of ten. Too rich for your blood, please feel free to leave, because there are more buyers waiting to take your place, since no one can predict how much the price will increase by that afternoon.

  At first Lin promoted several sites that had been planned for quite some time, which led the other construction companies to follow suit. But when the real estate business turned white hot, Lin decided to halt most of the sales, despite the puzzling looks from others. Knowing that another rise was just around the corner, he was going to wait until prices surged before
selling the remaining units.

  That presented him with some uncommonly free time, just as the island’s trade-based economy took off and the real estate business enjoyed an unprecedented boom. He played a few rounds of golf before complaining about too much free time. Yinghong saved the day with a timely suggestion for him to run for the Construction Guild directorship; he agreed, under the urging of friends and with the support of his staff.

  In order to mediate the intricate interpersonal relationships among factions and smooth over the election process, Yinghong convinced Lin that she should begin working in his company as his special assistant. Naturally, he was aware that, once she was in his company, there would be another pair of eyes watching him, thus decreasing his personal freedom. But the title of guild director apparently was more attractive than anything else; with that title, he knew that he would be seeing the genesis of a new business.

  Yinghong also began to accompany him to the endless banquets for guild members, as well as for officials assigned to supervise the election. There had been no change in entertainment and banquets among Taipei’s businessmen; it was still the same formula of a relatively early dinner, during which they drank and fooled around. The real pleasure was still visits to bars, including piano bars, where they drank, played finger-guessing names, sang karaoke, danced, and flirted. As usual, the presence of “girls” was what made these outings lively. As the nights wore on, the men would take the “girls” out for a snack before making individual arrangements. A “short stay” at a hotel cost five thousand NT, while eight thousand would get her to stay the night; this was the origin of “long eight, short five.”

  With her family connections, Yinghong was able to host banquets that drew important government officials and heads of major enterprises, though she knew that without Lin Xigeng, she alone could not have managed the invitations so easily.

  She was particularly adept at mixing politicians with businessmen, knowing that the best way to make connections was to bring people with different needs together so they could exchange interests to achieve mutual benefits. She understood the intricacies of nouveau riche social circles.