Shenzheners

by Xue Yiwei

  She noticed that she didn’t look upon him as a student, and soon realized that his reason for seeing her had nothing to do with Faraday’s law of induction. He did not seem to have a reason.

  She barely opened her mouth. She focused on what he was saying, and he spoke very fast.

  Sometimes he was incoherent, his thinking full of violent swerves and huge leaps. Most of the topics were unfamiliar to her. He talked about a poem that Auden wrote about Macao and about Gertrude Stein’s apartment in Paris. He talked about Marina Ivanovna Tsvetaeva’s exile and suicide.

  She never thought that her mediocre apartment would be the setting for a chaotic discourse on such unfamiliar topics. It seemed to open a door in her heart, to arouse expectancy in her. Her curious gaze roamed over the emotional, voluble speaker before her. She was no longer treating him like a student. When her father called from Nanjing—an unwanted interruption—she frowned. Her father asked her what she was doing. She said she was having a conversation with a friend.

  One week later, the student sent her a short letter. He thanked her for treating him as a friend; for “positioning” their relationship in that way, forbidding distance from existing between them; for making time stand still or cease to have meaning. He said he would curl up in the pauses in time and observe the spiritual light of language or silence. At the end of the letter, he attached a poem, which ended with the following lines:

  On a river in the night

  Words throb starlight

  The oars of life

  Splash sadly meaningful sighs

  As if the flow of time

  Is an imminent catastrophe.

  This was the first letter she had received from him. She was not in the least surprised to receive it, because she had entered the same river in the night on the evening of his first visit. She had felt subtle emotions.

  That evening, they’d passed through a poetic fantasy for about four hours. After he left, she calmly cleaned up the room. She seemed to see the trace of his lips on the teacup he had used. She felt embarrassment grip her heart. During his eloquent monologue on poets and poems she had become utterly absorbed in his lips, which in their opening and closing were not only deeply poetic, but also faintly erotic.

  She put the teacup down. She did not know what to do. She felt tired. She had a shower and sat down on her bed, a bit lost. She did not want to read. She just felt like lying down. But when she reached out to turn off the light, she heard a tapping at the door.

  Again she felt embarrassment take hold of her heart.

  The tapping stopped.

  She sighed. Her cosy room felt empty, for the first time. She turned off the light and lay down. Her mind was a mess, and she had lost the ability to think. All she could do was feel. Her body was like a starlit river on which a little rowboat gently rocked. She felt the leisurely movements of the oars, their melancholy striking of the surface of the stream. Like a cry in the night. She wiped away the beads of sweat on her breast that had suddenly formed, and quietly asked the endless night, “Am I old? Am I old? Am I old?”

  Once again she started to look forward to class. But in class she was no longer just teaching physics. She started to care about the expressions and responses of the boy who had come to see her. She spent a long time preparing the lesson on Faraday’s law. She hoped her explanation would satisfy his uncommon desire for knowledge and open a portal into his heart. She even hoped that he would notice and take satisfaction in her attire and body language. She felt bad about herself, as if she were a terrible actress trying too hard to please the audience.

  One day, he spent the entire class gazing out the window. She felt guilty, not knowing whether she had made some sort of mistake.

  After class, she wanted to go and ask him why. But she was afraid her concern might make him uncomfortable, might disturb the pure poetry of his mind. She knew how fragile his spirit was. She did not dare invite him to her apartment again. She was afraid that he would not be willing. Or that he would be willing.

  The evening of his visit replayed in her mind, over and over again, which scared her. She was frightened of the throbbing starlight, of the sad, meaningful sigh. She was afraid of a recurrence. But she had to do something for him, because the next week he was the same. He just kept looking out the window, dazed, dim-eyed. She wanted to make him happy, as on the poetic evening in her room.

  She still had not figured out how to make him happy when one night he came to her door again. He said he was just passing by and asked if he could come in.

  She felt awkward because she had already changed into her nightgown. But she could not repress her excitement. She let him come in, and he sat in the same spot.

  But this time he just sat there without saying anything.

  She wanted to get him to speak, remembering how talkative he’d been the last time. She asked him if he’d been reading any interesting books, but he sat there unmoving, not saying a word.

  She asked him whether he had written any new poems, but he remained rigid, silent.

  She longed to ask him why he kept staring out the window in class. She longed to ask, but did not ask.

  She suddenly thought of a Sunday in the bookstore when she saw a collection of short stories by Gertrude Stein. She told him she had found the stories hard to understand.

  Still no response.

  She didn’t know what other topic of conversation might arouse his interest. She was discouraged.

  Right then, she noticed her History of Western Aesthetics textbook on the shelf. She talked about her professor, describing his manner and his life and then mentioned what he had said about the ideal woman, leaning on the wall in the hallway that day during the class break.

  The phrase seemed to have touched a nerve. The expression on his face was one of pain. He raised his head for the first time since he had sat down and looked at her with agonized eyes.

  She felt uneasy. She felt as if his gaze might somehow lift her nightgown. She crossed her arms over her breasts.

  She saw tears in his eyes. He started to cry.

  She wasn’t sure how to react. She knew he had much richer feelings than she. She knew that his sensitive nature might magnify or diminish the significance of each and every word or phrase, leading him to feel desperate and isolated. But she did not know why he would start sobbing. She immediately explained that she had always found her aesthetics professor’s definition of the ideal woman hard to swallow. She said she was not willing to be that kind of woman, that she found the very notion contemptible.

  Her explanation made him cry all the more.

  She didn’t know what to do. She eased herself closer to his side. She felt he was a child again, a child with a wounded heart. She wanted to hold him gently, to let his head rest on her bosom, to calm him down. She hesitated, did not act. She was afraid her affection might hurt him even more. She reached out with her right hand, wanting to rest it on his shoulder.

  She didn’t expect he would push it away, stand up, and run out the door.

  Again, she didn’t know what to do. She felt an ache in the depths of her body. She covered her nose with her right hand and walked to the window, where she could just make out his distant form in the drizzle. Guilt tore painfully at her heart. She berated herself for reaching out to him. She blamed herself for mentioning her teacher’s conception of the “ideal woman.”

  She lay down, sensing suddenly that she had now passed through two of the life stages described by her professor. Her reckless first romance had ended, and her tempestuous affair was stillborn. She was painfully aware that her dull marriage would never start, so that she could never become this woman. She still felt like her body was a river, trembling in the night. But the lost rowboat had turned into a dead leaf at the mercy of her trembling. A leaf without memory of time. It was so light, she could barely hear its undulating whisper on the water’s surfa
ce.

  The next day, a young woman was waiting in her office. She was extremely beautiful, overwhelmingly so. The woman said she wanted to talk to her. “I know all about you two,” she said.

  “What do you mean by ‘you two’?” she asked, not understanding.

  “You and my son,” the woman said.

  The physics teacher was shocked. She had not expected the boy to have such a young mother. The mother might even be younger than she was herself. Nor had she expected the mother would be so stunning. She wondered whether it was lucky or unlucky for a fragile spirit to have a mother of such crushing beauty.

  “What happened between us?” she asked.

  “He told me everything,” the mother said. “You shouldn’t have treated him like that.”

  “How did I treat him?” she asked, not grasping the mother’s meaning.

  The mother shot her a harsh glare and seemed about to reply, but then changed her mind.

  The teacher fixed her eyes just as intensely and stared right back.

  “He’s just a child,” the mother said.

  What had he told the mother? “I think maybe there’s been some misunderstanding,” the teacher said.

  “You should have taught him the laws of physics, not talked about poetry.”

  “He’s the one that talked to me about poetry. What he wants most is to become an immortal poet.”

  The mother seemed to turn into another person, though her look did not soften. Her aggressive bearing was now veiled by sorrow. “He’s still just a child,” she said, her voice quavering.

  “His vain desire to become an immortal poet proves it,” the teacher said.

  “But because of you he has lost,” the mother said in a trembling voice. She did not want to say more. What else could she say?

  But then she added, “He came home very late last night. Soaking wet, from head to toe.” The teacher felt the same ache from deep within her body she had felt before the mother arrived. But she did not want to let the mother see her discomfort.

  “He still has a high fever,” the mother said. “The doctor says”—she did not want to say anything more, but then she continued—“I asked him where he went. He wouldn’t tell me. But it wasn’t hard to guess,” the woman said. “Two weeks ago he told me he was in love with somebody. He also told me who that person was.”

  The teacher felt the urgent trembling of the dry leaf floating on the water, as if a wind had blown in from deep within the night. She turned her head and saw two dead trees and a grey sky.

  “I don’t want him to see you again,” she heard the woman say. The voice seemed to come from far away, from outer space.

  His reason for dropping out of school was that he was emigrating to New Zealand with his parents. Around Christmas, she received a letter from him in Auckland. He said that he had inadvertently mentioned her to the mother, and confessed how he felt about her. He had never expected the mother to get so angry, it was the angriest he’d ever seen her. She had said that love was the most sordid feeling, that she felt ashamed of him. She said if he kept on like that, she would rather die right before his eyes. He had been severely depressed. He never thought his perfect love would call forth such a violent reaction.

  This explained why he had been staring out the window in class in the weeks after their first meeting. But it still didn’t explain his own violent reaction, when she told him about her professor’s view of the ideal woman.

  On the second week into the new term, she got another letter from him, which he described as his “last word.” He wanted to explain why he ran out the door crying that night. He said that, by her professor’s definition, his mother was an ideal woman. He knew that many people thought little of her. One of his uncles had even said that she was the vilest woman in the world. But he himself loved her, a lot. He said that his love for his mother would be a lifelong spiritual support for him, that no one could take her place in his life. He also wrote that his mother was extremely complicated. Some of her experiences defied his understanding, though his incomprehension did not detract from his love for her.

  He had given up poetry. “Next to an ideal woman,” he explained, “all poetry is shallow.” That’s how he ended his letter. In the body of the message, he wrote that he wanted to return to the world of science, to rational thought. He would not write to her again. He hoped that in three years he would be able to transfer to the School of Medicine, en route to a career in surgery. He wanted to become a celebrated surgeon.

  The Dramatist

  Every morning at 10:20, he walked to the eastern edge of the community garden to stand before the row of two-metre-tall pine trees. Rain or shine, never missing a day, he stood there for about fifteen minutes, his head slightly down, his hands hanging by his sides. He closed his eyes, but—judging from his slightly pained expression—he was not practicing Qi Gong. It was silent prayer.

  The neighbours called him a weirdo. But I felt that weird was the wrong word for him. From the start, I felt that eccentric would be more apt. He did not seem to belong to our community, or even to this city, however demographically complex it is. He was the most eccentric person I’d ever seen.

  Except for his dependable daily appearance at 10:20 every morning, he hardly ever emerged in public. And when he did surface, he had different effects on people. On the one hand, he always greeted his neighbours with a friendly nod, which seemed easygoing of him. But he never talked to any of them, nor would he allow them any opportunity to speak to him, which made him seem aloof. He’d been like this for almost three years. Nobody knew where he was from. Nobody knew why he was living here (and by himself). Nobody knew whether he would stay here.

  His identity had unexpectedly been revealed only three weeks before. I had been resting in the hallway between classes, flipping through a newspaper someone had left on the tea table in the teacher’s room. Inside, I found a full-page interview with him. I had never been much interested in drama, but it turned out I was familiar with the names of two of his masterpieces. The introduction to the newspaper interview said that both these plays had been translated into Japanese, Italian, and German, directed by famous directors, and performed by famous actors. It also said they had had rave reviews everywhere they were staged.

  I don’t remember how I got through the next class. All I could think about was getting home as soon as possible to tell my family and our neighbours about my accidental discovery.

  Eventually, the bell rang to mark the end of class, and the city bus delivered me to the entrance of our community. I ran up to the first neighbour I saw, who was choosing mangoes from the fruit stand outside the little supermarket. I stopped in front of him, excited and out of breath.

  Strangely, he did not seem the least bit surprised at what I told him. I hadn’t needed to say anything, I realized the whole community already knew the weirdo’s identity.

  The picture that went with the interview must be a recent photograph, because it was the way he looked now. The dramatist was shown in front of a bookcase, sitting proudly in a swivelling chair. There was a hardcover edition of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare behind him, the same as the one in our school library. Had he tilted his head slightly to the left, he would’ve blocked it. That was the only English book on the shelf, but it echoed the Shakespeare T-shirt he always wore—the only shirt he ever wore. There was a quotation, probably a line from one of Shakespeare’s plays, inscribed on the shirt, just above Shakespeare’s bald head: “No way but this.”

  Before going to sleep, I took a close look at the photograph and then reread the interview word by word for more information. The image of the dramatist, who stood at 10:20 every morning in front of the row of pine trees in silent prayer, kept appearing between the lines. Had the interviewer been one of our neighbours, he surely would have asked why he only came out at that specific time, and what he was praying for.


  The first interview question was why the dramatist had announced his retirement three years before, when he was not yet fifty years old. Such an opening was no doubt intelligent and effective, because it would attract the interest of readers both familiar and unfamiliar with his work.

  The dramatist’s reply was simple and candid. He said that his passion for composition had already been exhausted by the drama in his personal life.

  The reporter seemed to grasp his meaning, because he then asked the dramatist to explain.

  It was obvious the man did not like this topic of conversation. He answered cursorily, saying that his life had been full of tragedies.

  The reporter was not deflected and kept asking whether his personal tragedy was the true reason for his sudden retirement and retreat into a hermitic life.

  The dramatist liked this question even less. He adopted a self-deprecating tone to point out that he had now begun accepting interviews, so how could anyone accuse him of being a hermit?

  Thus ended the wrangling over private matters. But this brief tension in the interview raised many questions in my mind: What kind of tragedy was it? Why had the tragedy prompted the dramatist to retire? Why did he choose to live in isolation in this of all cities? And, why had he chosen to reveal his identity now, after living like a hermit for almost three years?

  These questions made me want to approach the dramatist myself. He was not only the first celebrity I’d ever seen in person, but easily the most eccentric. I could not imagine how anyone could do the exact same thing at the same time and place every single day for three years. And I couldn’t understand how anyone could greet his neighbours with a friendly nod, and yet refuse to talk to them or get close to them. I wanted to talk to him. I wanted to become friends with him.

  I was sure, though, that he would spurn me if I were to take the initiative and walk up to him, I knew the best approach would be to let him take the initiative. Which is to say, I had to think of a way to attract his attention and make him curious about me. I thought of Shakespeare, or more specifically of The Complete Works of William Shakespeare. I really didn’t like the inscrutable Englishman one bit. I still had not forgotten the Shakespeare course we were required to take in university, which I barely passed and would have failed without a make-up exam. But Shakespeare would be a bridge between me and the eccentric, of this there was no doubt. He would come to me.