by Jess Row
I didn’t mean to embarrass you, I said. Maybe we should speak plainly. I’m not sure I understand why you asked me to come here. Did you want to find out about a job?
I wanted to talk, she said. I’ve never met anyone from Hong Kong before—just an ordinary person, I mean. I thought maybe that’s what you were.
What do you mean by ordinary?
A person who doesn’t want something.
I don’t think I qualify for that, I said. Everybody wants something. It just happens that I don’t come to China looking for it.
She stared at me for so long I shifted in my chair.
What is it that you want?
I shrugged. The same as everybody, I guess. Good fortune. More money. An apartment on the beach. A car. Good health. A family of my own.
You aren’t married?
Does that surprise you? Do I seem married?
No, she said. I didn’t think so. But where I come from you would have to be married.
I smiled. My parents are dead, I said. So no one’s banging on my door asking for grandsons.
She looked down at her hands. Close up her skin seemed thin and almost transparent, like rice paper; there were faint bluish shadows underneath her cheekbones. Does she not eat? I wondered. Or not go out in the sun?
So now we know one another’s secrets, I said, and laughed, or tried to; it sounded more like coughing. That’s a good way to begin, isn’t it? We can’t make any worse fools of ourselves.
You can leave, she said quickly. If you want to. Don’t feel obligated to stay.
Not at all, I said. But I have a question for you. Why did you want to meet here? Isn’t there someplace less formal?
I come here all the time, she said. It’s quiet. It’s clean. And there’s all these chairs that hardly anyone ever sits in. The waiters all know me—I used to work in the bar downstairs. They don’t care if I sit here for hours.
It seems very lonely to me.
That depends on how you look at it. I think it’s peaceful.
I put down my cup and studied her face, as if for the first time. To me the word peace, the word ningjing, has a very specific, private meaning: it means the sound of the sea, of waves slapping against the board underneath me, and the feeling of crossing the bay on a stormy day when no other boats are out, and the water is the color of slate, and I’m all alone underneath a ceiling of clouds. Hong Kong people don’t use this word very often, and when they do, you get the feeling they don’t know what they’re talking about.
I suppose you spend all of your free time in karaoke bars, she said.
No, I said. That’s what I was just thinking about. It’s exactly the opposite. Do you know what windsurfing is? She shook her head. I’ll show you, I said, reaching for a napkin. Do you have a pen?
So I drew her a picture of a sailboard, and explained a little bit about how it’s done, the way you stand and hold the crossbar and tilt the sail to turn, the way you feel the wind’s changes on your shoulders and calves and the back of your head. While I was talking her eyes began to flash a little, and she started asking questions. Why don’t you fall over? What do you do if the wind dies? She laughed and shook her head with exasperation, as if she couldn’t quite believe my answers. By that time it was almost five, and we both had to leave; when she asked me if I wanted to meet again I said yes, automatically, and then thought, this is the first thing that has happened in my life that I could never explainto anyone.
For the next month we met once every week, on Saturday afternoons, always at the Shangri-La. Once afterward we went down the street to a Shanghai restaurant and ate lion’s-head meatballs and Shaoxing pork. I always asked for the check; outside, so as not to embarrass me, she paid me for her half, in old two-yuan bills so soft they fell through my fingers and fluttered to the sidewalk. When I protested, the crinkles of laughter disappeared from the corners of her eyes, and she gave me a cold smile. If you want to see me, she said, you’ll let me pay my share.
But it’s ridiculous, I said. They won’t even take these at the exchange window, do you know that?
She stooped and picked up the bills, bending her knees to one side, and stuffed them into my vest pocket. Keep them as a souvenir, she said. They’re not so little to me.
I laughed, but I was the only one.
I would be the first to admit I’m no expert on love. Before Lin I’d had other girlfriends, but really only by accident, and never for longer than a few months. A secretary in another division of my company, after we met at an office party. A friend of Siu Wong’s little sister, who asked me to help her with some accounting problems. Every one of these relationships ended with some variation of the same phrase: You’re a nice man, but I don’t think this should go any further. This isn’t love. And it was true, of course: I didn’t feel anything special for any of them, not even during sex, not even at the moment of orgasm. The whole performance to me was so physical, so lacking in personal feeling, that I always felt a little embarrassed afterward and wished she would simply leave. After a few encounters this embarrassment became so strong that I couldn’t even hold a conversation, and so it ended, quickly and quietly, with little protest from either of us.
There was a time in my mid-twenties when I wondered if I was gay, or asexual, if I would be happier as a lifelong celibate or a monk. I even considered going to a psychologist to see if there was something hidden in my past keeping me from being able to love. But I never went through with it. The sad truth is that it didn’t bother me all that much. I had my friends; I had my health and strength; and I had the ocean, the waves, and the wind—the one deep love of my life, you could say. You might say I decided to let fate choose for me. Probably, I thought, I would wind up married, and a father. But not by my own efforts, not by forcing the matter.
I never once considered the danger of this kind of passivity. I never thought that love would come out of the sky when I least expected it, like a storm on a clear day, and that I would have no choice but to bow down and face it, unprepared.
In all that time I never mentioned Lin to anyone. When my friends at the club asked where I was on Saturdays, I told them I was busy with an extra project at work; if Siu Wong called I said I was too tired to go out. It wasn’t simply a matter of embarrassment. Every time I imagined what I would say—She’s very nice, smart; she has a college degree, she’s really a teacher—my stomach rolled up into a tight little ball. Even so, I heard Siu Wong saying, what are you going to do next, live in Shenzhen? She doesn’t have any connections—she can’t leave. Do you think you can just become Chinese?
That was the real question, of course. In Lin’s eyes I was a nice man who wore tracksuits all the time and made silly jokes in bad Mandarin: all the rest of it, my parents, my job, my friends, were to her like shadows in a puppet show. And to me she was even more perplexing. Her parents were engineers who worked in a state-owned garment factory that made uniforms for the army. During the Cultural Revolution they were sent to the far west, to Gansu, and worked digging stones in a quarry; she was born there, in a mud hut with no running water. What could I ever say about that? All I knew about the Cultural Revolution was from movies.
In the end I did the only thing I could think of: I brought her the first volume of Dream of the Red Chamber. In the book Lin Dai-yu is the hero’s true love, a beautiful, ethereal orphan whom he is forbidden to marry, because of her poor and inauspicious background. Eventually he is convinced to marry her rival, and she falls ill and dies of grief, but that was irrelevant to me; the first part of the novel is filled with the hero’s dreams of her, and poems written in her honor. I gave it to her on a Saturday in March, and the next week it was sitting on the table by her elbow, wrinkled and dog-eared, when I came in.
Have you finished it already?
Finished it? Her eyes were puffy, I noticed, as if she hadn’t slept, and hadn’t bothered with makeup. I read it twice, she said. I think I don’t understand you.
Didn’t you like it?
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Harvey, she said, she’s an orphan. She lives far away from her hometown and she knows she’ll probably never see the South again. All around her there are fabulously rich people, but she has no money of her own. How did you think it would make me feel?
It’s a novel, I said. Not an essay on society. It’s a love story.
She pushed it across the table, and it fell into my lap. Keep your novels, she said. I have enough problems.
I turned it over in my hands: the lamination peeling from the cover, the spine folded and broken. Lin, I said, tell me what you want.
She gave me a suspicious look. You mean right now?
In the future. Tell me what you want the most.
She stared down at her hands.
Or else I don’t know why I should keep coming here, I said. What good are we to each other? You seem to think that I can’t understand you, no matter how hard I try.
It’s ridiculous, she said. You’ll laugh at me.
The waiter brought our cups of coffee; I took a sip immediately, and burned my tongue. Go on, I said, wincing.
I want to have a kindergarten. She bit down on her lower lip, scraping it with her teeth. Not work in one. I’ve done that. I want to have a private kindergarten, like they do in Shanghai and Beijing, where the parents pay. That way you can have enough blankets and cots and chairs for every student. You can do painting and music and teach English. And you can get your own cook and have decent food. Only a certain number of students admitted every year.
There’s nothing ridiculous about that, I said. How much would it cost?
She looked down at the table, a flush rising from her neck.
It’s impossible. They wouldn’t let me change my residency. And I would have to buy a new teacher’s permit—if they would even sell me one.
Are you sure of that? I wanted to ask, but something stopped me—the way her shoulders seemed to go limp, or the bright spots on her cheeks. Thank you, I said. I’m glad you told me that.
Why?
Because I don’t want to leave you.
She furrowed her eyebrows; for a moment I thought she hadn’t understood me.
We can’t talk this way. You don’t know what you’re saying.
I think we have to, I said. I don’t think we can go on this way much longer.
You don’t understand, she said. There’s no other way. There aren’t options.
Maybe we should go someplace where we can talk alone.
I live in a dormitory, she said. It’s a women-only building. If anyone saw me with you I would be evicted overnight.
Then maybe we should—
Go to a hotel room?
I don’t want to be vulgar, I said. I just want to spend more time with you.
There are places, she said, pressing her lips into a line. But you have to pay by the hour. And sometimes they don’t clean the sheets in between.
Fine. Then I’ll spend the night in a hotel, and we’ll go out together for dim sum in the morning.
She shook her head. Understand this, she said. It isn’t that I don’t want to. But in Shenzhen, if you pretend to be a whore, you are a whore. And I won’t do that. Not even for a second.
You don’t have to, I said, tightening my fists under the table. It won’t come to that.
It took me two weeks to find a solution. When I first told Little Brother what I wanted, he laughed so hard I took the phone away from my ear, and shouted at him to be quiet and get serious. Two days later, he faxed me a list of flats in Shenzhen that could be rented by the night, the week, or the month, no names taken, and no questions asked.
Don’t you have any friends in Shenzhen? I asked him the next day. I’m looking for a—a more personal arrangement.
What does that mean?
I don’t want to pay, I said. Not directly. Maybe you could give him a gift, and then I could reimburse you. But I don’t want to have to give money directly. I made a promise.
You are a strange one, he said. What kind of girl is this?
She’s very principled.
And you’re going behind her back?
There’s no other way. I’m not happy about it.
Whatever you say, flying fish, he said. All that salt water finally went to your head. I’ll find you something.
When I told Lin about it, at first she refused. You’re missing the point, she said. I told you already. If you pay for this, you might as well pay for everything. I won’t belong to anyone, don’t you see?
I’m not paying anyone anything, I said. Someone’s doing me a favor. There’s no money involved.
But it’s yours. It’s your friend. It’s your power to say yes or no.
Then you decide, I said. I’ll be there on Saturday. You can come or not.
That was how I came to stay at the apartment on Nanhai Lu. It was in a new building, painted white, at the end of a little strip of land that jutted into Shenzhen Bay. The rest of the strip was taken up by a hotel development that had been abandoned, leaving only concrete foundations and rusted metal prongs jutting into the sky. The apartment was on the fourth floor, and the bedroom windows faced the water; there were times when I woke up there and gazed out across the bay, forgetting where I was.
Sometimes Lin came on Saturday afternoons, left in the evening for work, and didn’t return; but most weekends she came briefly on Saturday and all day Sunday. I took things as slowly as I knew how: we watched movies on the VCD player, played guess-fingers and Go, and listened to our favorite CDs, Chopin and Faye Wong and Kenny G. She taught me how to steam a whole fish with sweet wine sauce; I made her macaroni with ham and milk tea.
It sounds ridiculous to say so—especially now—but I think of those days as some of the happiest of my life. When the door closed, Lin became a different person. She took long showers, filling the apartment with steam, and came out of the bathroom barefoot, wearing a Polo sweatsuit I had bought for her at the border. The apartment had a set of two plastic-covered couches in the living room; she liked to lie back on one and prop her legs up on the other with her eyes closed. This reminds me of home, she said. Room to stretch out. No one watching you all the time.
Take off the plastic, I told her once. The landlord won’t mind. It’s supposed to come off.
Plastic is fine. She slapped the cushion for emphasis. It’s clean. It doesn’t get wet. It doesn’t mildew.
But it’s uncomfortable. Your legs stick to it.
Don’t worry, she said softly, almost whispering. She was drifting off, as she often did; some Sundays she would nap for two hours in the middle of the morning. You know, Harvey, she said, her voice wavering with sleepiness, you’re too kind. You’re too good a person for this world. You should be more sensible.
I’m not so kind to everyone, I said. Only to you.
That’s what I mean. I’m not such a wonderful person. I don’t deserve it.
I don’t believe that.
Do you know how I got to Shenzhen? She sat up, wiping her mouth on her sleeve, and curled her legs under her. Have I ever told you this story?
No.
I bribed a transit commissioner in Zhengzhou, she said. To get a residence permit. He wanted two cases of Marlboros and a bottle of Suntory whiskey. I got fake cigarettes from a guy I knew in my college. The whiskey was the hard part. I had to save up for six months to get one small bottle.
It’s an unfair system. Why should you feel bad about that?
Not about that, she said. He was a huge, fat man—you know, so fat he could hardly fit behind his desk. His head looked like a balloon; it was perfectly round. And he had a mustache that grew black only on one side. When I gave him the cigarettes he opened the carton and started smoking one after another, at the same time he was filling out my form. He left these oily fingerprints all over it. And then, two weeks later, I heard he had a heart attack. Just fell over at his desk. And when I heard about it, I just started to laugh. I could see it so clearly. He was sucking those cigarettes so hard I thought he migh
t keel over when I was there.
She giggled a little, and covered her mouth, but not so much that I couldn’t see her broad smile. You see? she said. Do I deserve your kindness, Harvey? A man dies and all I can do is laugh.
Lin, I said, I don’t blame you. If I were in your place I would have felt the same way.
But you weren’t, she said. You’ve never had to do anything like that. Why should you have to sympathize with me? I’ve never been able to understand that. I’m not so special. Why do you have to go to all this trouble?
Maybe because you don’t want me to, I said. I had meant it to be playful, but as soon as the words came out of my mouth I realized it was the truth. You’ve had so much unhappiness in your life, I said. I don’t blame you for doubting me. But I want to understand. Doesn’t that count for something?
She shook her head. You can’t, she said. It’s pointless to try. It’s masochistic. You know that, don’t you?
Tell me to leave if you want, I said. I felt suddenly angry; all the warmth had drained out of her face in an instant, as if she had willed it to. We’re not as different as you think, I said. My parents are gone. I know what it’s like to wake up and not know whether I’d rather be dead or alive. Don’t tell me that just because I have money I’ve never suffered.
Stay, she said. She reached up and motioned for me to come to her. I sat down on the couch, and she leaned over and rested her head carefully on my shoulder. Let’s not talk, she said. Talking just reminds me that I have to leave.
But otherwise we’ll just be strangers.
We’re strangers anyway, I expected her to say. She put her hand on my elbow, as if to keep me there. In a few minutes I heard her slow, steady breathing, and realized she was asleep.
Each time she came we kissed only once, just before she left, and over the weeks the kisses became longer and longer, until she dropped her bag of work clothes and stood in the doorway with her arms around my shoulders, tears starting in her eyes.
You don’t have to go, I said. Tell them you were sick.