by Meng Jin
Each time I visited Beijing, I was surprised by how easily I could understand what the locals said. I had an aptitude for languages, but even so, it had taken me a good year to learn to speak Shanghainese like a local, and still I often gave myself away in an odd phrase here or there. In any other new city, I would not have so easily understood the old folks airing themselves in the street. But in Beijing, everyone spoke standard correct putonghua, which was Beijing’s local dialect as well as the official language of the country, what we heard on the radio and learned in school. How much power these old grandmas had in comparison to my own grandmother, who would never have been able to communicate so clearly with a traveling scholar.
I reminded myself that I had not come to Beijing to walk around the hutong and eat liangpi, but to find out why Su Lan had sent me that postcard. The next day, the day before I was to return to Shanghai, I tucked the card in my pocket and got on the subway.
Beida was not so impressive. Certainly, imposing. Certainly, beautiful, with its wide sweeping lawns and classical buildings. I imagined being a student here—yes, perhaps this aura of prestige would have made me feel grand. But I could see my father standing watch at every corner, measuring me against his expectations. I was from Hangzhou, from Shanghai. Surely these parks were not as beautiful as Xihu; surely this academic architecture did not match the French Concession or the neoclassical buildings along the Bund? I walked without bothering with where I was going. I had been to the campus before, visiting Bo, but had never visited a female dorm, and I had not looked to see where Su Lan’s address was on a map. Soon I grew tired. I had forgotten to eat. I was ravenous. I followed a canal onto a quiet street, walked on and on as if away from my father’s preferred future, his thwarted pride, until suddenly I saw before me, as if surging out from my visions, a placard on a building:
Zhonghua Residential Apartments, Building 6.
Wasn’t that where Su Lan lived?
I admit—I succumbed to a childish belief in signs.
I said to myself, as I often have since and sometimes still do, When you are lost, go into life and let it take you.
Perhaps this is foolish. But relinquishing agency to randomness has led me to my life today. And though I cannot say that I have no regrets, I am more or less happy, which is more than most people can say. So that morning in July, thirsty and hot, rabid with hunger, I interpreted my fortuitous arrival at Su Lan’s residence as a message from the gods.
I took the postcard out of my pocket and checked the address. I was not wrong. I walked up to the gated door and rang the bell for number 47.
Bo had not lied. Even my exaggerated imagination was a disservice to Su Lan. For I had only pictured the superficial elements of beauty—long hair, large eyes, small mouth, delicate skin—and though Su Lan possessed all this and more, a lovely face with fine, feminine features, and a small, graceful body, plump in just the right places, her beauty was much greater than their sum. In fact, if you looked closely, there was nothing particularly extraordinary about each individual feature. It was her aura, her totality, that was exquisite.
That day, when she finally appeared, she seemed to leave behind her a shimmering wake, as if each molecule were bursting into life, the very air around her teeming with the energy of invisible particles proliferating toward infinity. To say she took my breath away would be incorrect. Watching her inhabit space—beholding her—was like watching worlds unfold.
She arrived an hour after I rang her door. She wore a long pale yellow dress, high-heeled shoes, and large sunglasses, and cradled an enormous cloth bag filled with textbooks. She had not been at home when I rang. One of her roommates, a big-boned, big-faced, loud girl, had opened the door. The roommate was the type of girl one can easily see becoming a mother, yelling insults at her husband with two babes in arms. She was not unattractive, but rather, good-looking in a robust, healthy way—certainly, I immediately knew, not Su Lan.
I introduced myself. Before I could state my purpose the roommate said, winking, Ask me to marry you—I’ll say yes.
I stammered. She grinned at me with pity. Finally she said, Lanlan’s out, she’ll be back in an hour.
She gave me a look that said, I know exactly what you are, and closed the door. I walked down the stairs to wait. I thought of what to say to Su Lan when she arrived. It’s been a long time; I got your message; I’m not here to marry you. Have you eaten yet? I’m starving.
In the end I said nothing. Simply stood and stared as she approached. She stopped in front of me and cocked her head, adjusting the bag in her arms. I was standing in front of the door, blocking her way. Still I said nothing. My hand was in my pocket, fingering the edge of her postcard. I suddenly felt very foolish.
Finally she said, Do I know you?
She laughed.
Yes, I know you. You’re Number One.
I took her bag of books—if she was surprised she did not show it—happy for something to occupy my hands. I was in town for a lecture, I said, and hadn’t she said to visit, and in any case I had wanted to see the Beida campus for some time so I thought why not and what did she call me, Number One?—I scoffed—we all know you’re Number One now, just look at you—
I followed her up the stairs. A thin brown belt marked her waist, and I could see the faint line of her panties pressing through her skirt. I stared at her bare ankles against the red strap of her sandals. My voice trailed off. She laughed. She exclaimed how glad she was to see me, as if we were old friends. Her voice filled the stairwell, sweet and melodic, ringing with energy, it was saying how she never had visitors from home and today was perfect, she had finished her work early and just let her drop off the books in her room and we would head out right away.
We stormed Beijing. Call me Lanlan, she said as we left, gripping my forearm. Lanlan had borrowed her roommate’s camera. Before I could respond she snapped a picture of me, shouting, Evidence!
I told her it was my first time in Beijing. She did not blink, though much later I would discover that she had heard of my visits to Bo. Perhaps she forgot; perhaps she did not care—she treated me precisely as I presented myself. Not once did she question why I had come, or why I had not contacted my best friend, who also lived in the city. I took this as tacit acknowledgment of what we both understood: that her postcard had been a question, and my appearance the answer.
She was a tireless guide. You, Li Yongzong, she said, are my excuse to do every silly tourist thing I’m too embarrassed to do by myself. We went to Tiananmen and Gugong and Yiheyuan. We ran through the plazas and temples and gates and pagodas in order to see it all. That was another refrain she cried—You must see it all!—as if our failure to do so would result in a great catastrophe. I looked intently at the sights, feigning interest in order to not stare at her. Constantly I reminded myself—look away, look away.
When I slipped, I found Lanlan also looking at me. I should have been pleased. But her gaze made me uneasy. It did not seem to be a gaze of attention but of responsibility, and when I caught her off guard, I thought I saw her eyes boring into my face as if searching for something. In those moments, she shrugged, laughed, and lifted up her roommate’s camera to snap a photo of me without warning. I tried to take the camera from her, saying that I should be taking photos of her—she pursed her lips and shook her head.
She was most at ease when talking about our respective fields of study. Immediately I could tell that she was a passionate and brilliant scientist. She quickly grasped the fundamentals of my work, understanding instinctually the mechanics of the radiation technology we used for the treatment of cancers. She made guesses about how the machines functioned on an engineering level that I pretended to understand. She flattered me. Your work is human, she said when I gave a show of false modesty. Her least theoretical work, on the other hand, was research using subatomic particles, the platonic ideals of science. She said it with an air of dismissal.
I ventured: But surely there are practical applications of the
oretical physics—computers, electricity, bombs.
Yes, she said, quietly, her eyes bright. And these particles are not only used for life and death. Under the right conditions, their effects on other materials are measurable, real. We are using them to interrogate the nature of everything.
We arrived at Yuanmingyuan at dusk. Lanlan had purposefully saved it for last. The old gardens were a close walk to Tsinghua, where we would dine in Lanlan’s favorite roast duck restaurant, and where, kindly, she had arranged for a male friend to accommodate me for the night in his dormitory. I did not tell her that I already had a hotel—I did not think of any of it, my clothes, my luggage, my deposit, my train ticket for the next morning. The ruins of Yuanmingyuan, Lanlan said, were symbolic of more than just one civilization in decline, and most beautiful in the blood hues of sunset.
Something about Yuanmingyuan allowed Lanlan to take a breath. She slowed down, grew quiet. She became grounded, calm.
I myself did not think much of the place. There were gardens, footpaths, unremarkable greenery, and the crumbling stone bases of what might have once been glorious palaces but were now just large pieces of rock. After the pillage and fire a century and a half ago, the only pieces that remained were from the Western-style palaces, the bottoms of pillars and marble fountains. Intellectually, I understood the allure of these old ruins standing in the outskirts of the magnificent capital city, facing Tiananmen and Gugong and Yiheyuan, like acknowledgments of a grandeur that has since been surpassed. How ironic that the British and the French had razed our palaces to leave behind only the perfect monument of their own crumbling civilization, as all around it China surged forward into the future. Lanlan said this, and I nodded flatly. Only later would I learn, from Bo, that what Lanlan saw in Yuanmingyuan and what I could not see was precisely all that was not there: the shimmering structures of the magnificent palaces, water spraying from the fountain spouts, Manchurian emperors strolling in their silken gowns, ladies-in-waiting with their sheer summer sashes, the ghosts of the past filling every negative space.
We reached a white pavilion surrounded by a dark stone maze. The setting sun shone through the trees. Lanlan disappeared inside the maze without a word, as if chasing someone who had run inside. I followed her. Her head protruded just over the walls of the labyrinth, and though occasionally she turned to look back, I had the strange feeling that she did not see me. She continued ahead with curious determination. I wondered if this was some kind of test.
Finally I arrived at the end of the maze. Lan was standing at the point where it opened into a path toward the white pavilion. I stopped in front of her and smiled.
She handed me the camera.
Stand there, she said, and take a photo of me.
The sun’s last rays were behind us, striking her face in orange light. She did not smile. She looked directly at the lens with a cold stare, and she was beautiful.
As we left the park I asked her why she had chosen that spot out of all of the magnificent places we’d been for a photo. She didn’t respond, and we continued to walk in silence away from the park toward the restaurant where we were to have dinner. Before we went in she stopped and took my arm.
For once I was alone, she said, her eyes glittering.
She closed her eyes and turned away as if afraid she had said too much. Then she continued toward the restaurant door, laughing.
When you’re unsure of the real, she said, photographs are a way of making sure.
Bo called me.
I have something to confess, he said.
I did not want to talk to Bo. It was almost midnight, I was exhausted, I wanted to sleep. But the night watchman had stood at my door expectantly. He’d come all the way up to the fifth floor to tell me of the call; he expected me to take it.
After I returned to Shanghai, to my patient load and a stack of mail, two envelopes of which were letters from my father I had not yet opened, I felt as if I had woken from a spell. I busied myself with returning to a normal state; I remembered the way I had behaved in Beijing and especially the things I had felt as an aberration of extraordinary stupidity.
I put Lan out of my head. The whole exchange mystified me. Now I feared that she had run into Bo and told him everything.
A confession! I said to Bo, trying to sound enthusiastic. Go on.
He paused.
I’m in love.
Yes, so you told me, on the banks of fair Xihu, I said.
I tried to tell you.
So what then? Does she love you back?
Perhaps.
He delivered this verdict as if it were a death sentence.
Congratulations, comrade!
What was Bo doing, calling me to chat about his love life in the middle of the night?
Look, Bo, I said when he didn’t respond. That’s fantastic. Good for you.
Bo, are you still there?
He was still there. I could hear his breathing.
Finally, he said, The girl is Su Lan. We’ve been involved for—for quite some time. I wanted to tell you at Xihu, but I thought you would laugh at me.
He took a deep breath.
Look, I don’t know why I want your approval. I want you to meet her. She’s changed. I mean it, I’m not just saying it so you won’t laugh at me.
Go on, I said. I kept my voice even and slow.
Tell me everything.
Did I remember the girl he had mentioned at the lake? Lanlan, Lanlan, it was Lanlan. Lanlan, he called her, as if her name belonged to him alone.
He had run into Lanlan his first year of university, at an outing arranged by a mutual friend. Already she looked very different. She had loosened her hair from her braid and let it grow long, with bangs that framed her face. She was dressed stylishly, not in those tubu she wore all through high school. Her lips were painted, her brows drawn. Bo had not recognized her until she came over to greet him.
Their hometowns were in the same cluster of mountain villages east of Dongyang, and so they began to take the train together to go home for the holidays, both traveling in the hard-seat section, where usually there were no seats at all. On the twenty-plus-hour rides, they played cards and ate sunflower seeds and talked about everything. It was on the train that Bo learned Lan had never had a father. Her family was her ancient grandmother and her aging mother. Their poverty was exacerbated by loneliness. She had no siblings, no aunts or uncles. The relatives on her father’s side never spoke to her. Perhaps they blamed her mother for his death.
Something happened when they got on the train. It was as if they had shed their Beijing lives and left them hanging on hooks. In the city, they were both pretending not to be peasants. And yet after they stepped off the train in Yiwu, said goodbye, and boarded their respective buses, they began to pretend again, this time to be people who had never left. To their illiterate mothers they spoke tuhua, chatting in the village dialect about the crops and gossiping about people they’d forgotten. They pretended not to notice the dirt and the flies, the everywhere smell of sewage and manure, the cheap gaudy clothes of the villagers who were slightly better off. Since leaving for high school, those train rides between Beijing and Yiwu, sitting next to Lanlan, were the only time and place Bo felt like a full person, not bifurcated into his farm-boy self and his educated self. Lanlan alone could see all of him.
Bo could not know if she loved him back, but he was certain that she understood this feeling of bifurcation, that the train rides were for her too a place of wholeness. Affectionately, she called him Gege. She, an only child who never had a blood brother, who admitted to him that she had a hard time making close friends, spoke to him like he was family. No one looks out for me as you do, she’d said to him. He began to imagine that they were returning to the same place, that he was taking her home to present to his parents as his future bride.
When he sat down to write his first biaobai, declaring blankly the nature of his affections, he felt that he was simply giving words to what they both already knew.
He wrote fluently, and by the time he put down the last word and signed his name, he had fallen even more deeply in love with Lanlan. He read over the letter. Suddenly it seemed woefully inadequate—he tore it up and started again.
She never responded. He continued to write her letters, not knowing what else to do. He hoped to show her that he could not be made ashamed of his love. He hoped to prove his sincerity, his seriousness. She stopped accepting his invitations to go out. When it came time to take the train home together for the new year, she wrote him a curt note saying that he should not buy her ticket—she would not be returning home that year as she had too much work in Beijing. Bo resigned himself to the fact that she did not love him. He continued to write her, as a friend, hoping that they could at least keep that. Then Jing contacted him, asking for his assistance planning the high school reunion. He threw himself into the silly logistics, trying to forget about Lanlan.
At the reunion, he wore a mask of joviality. He was certain that she had not come because she wanted to avoid seeing him. He tried to tell me, but he could not spit out the words.
But after the reunion things took a turn. When he returned to Beijing he discovered that she had written him. She called him her good friend. She regretted not making the reunion. They began to see each other again. She did not mention his love letters, but she was warm and available to see him. She called him Gege. She let him pay for things. Once he had taken her hand to cross the street and she had turned to him and smiled.