by Meng Jin
I’m going to ask her to marry me, he said. I can’t wait anymore. Isn’t it the right thing to do, if I want it so much? I want it desperately. What do you think?
My mind was spinning. What a story, I said, in order to say something.
I wanted to shout at Bo: I just visited Lanlan, I received her parting kiss on my cheek.
But if his story was true, then I had made a fool of myself.
Look, I can’t tell you what to do, I said.
Did I have to tell him anything?
Of course I’d be happy to meet her, I said. I picked my next words carefully:
You know, she actually sent me a postcard after the reunion, inviting me to visit. It’ll be a good excuse.
She sent you a postcard too?
What, did you get one?
Yes, after the reunion. That was the letter that made me hope again.
She probably sent one to the whole class, I said dismissively. As I said it, my confusion cleared: yes, of course, she had sent the exact same postcard to the entire class. I recalled the words in the letter as plainly as if staring at my own reflection in a mirror. How impersonal they had been! Besides my address, she had not even written my name! To my dear classmate. How could I have read it as a confession of love?
On the other end of the line, Bo berated himself, talking backward and forward, saying at one moment that Lan loved him and at another that of course I was right—
Think, Bo, I said, and the bitterness in my voice surprised me. What did she say on the postcard? I asked. To my dear classmate? Did she even address it to your name?
Bo let out a howl.
Look, Bo Cai. I’m sorry about all this but I have to go to sleep. I’ll talk to you later.
I hung up the phone and leaned against the wall of the booth, breathing hard. Finally I walked back up the stairs to my room. The night watchman who’d roused me was dozing in his chair.
Later that same week, I received a thick envelope in the mail from Lan. Inside were the photos she had taken of me, twenty in all. I searched for a note and found nothing. I rifled through the photos. She had not included the one I had taken of her.
What was she playing at? I fumed. And yet, even as it infuriated me, the idea that Lan was playing us impressed me, it made her even more desirable.
In her photos I looked dazed, aloof, grave. I’d had portraits taken before, but these were different. I had never understood before why people called me serious, why they assumed I possessed some inner integrity. Now I saw that I had the bearing of an intellectual, a face that looked thoughtful. I was pleased with how I had turned out under Lan’s lens, pleased that she had taken these photos, developed them, and seen them.
Finally I turned to my father’s letters. They were terse and thin, lacking details. They said my mother was sick. They said that if I wished to call myself a son I should come home. I crumpled the letters and threw them in the trash.
I looked through the photos again. I thought of Bo.
Everything made me seethe.
Dearest Lanlan,
How about a trip back to Hangzhou with me before the summer ends?
I’ve got two first-class train tickets on the fast train from Shanghai. There’s also a ticket enclosed here for you to come to Shanghai. I’ll meet you at the train station on Wednesday, two and a half weeks from today. I hope to see you there.
Yours,
Li Yongzong
I wrote the letter quickly, not thinking, not reading it over, and threw it into an envelope. I stuffed one of the pictures Lan had taken of me into the envelope as well—in it I stood with the crumbling columns of Yuanmingyuan behind me, looking introspective. I bought an overnight fast-train ticket from Beijing to Shanghai, sealed and sent the letter before I could rip it up.
Two Wednesdays later, I took the bus to the train station after work. There was traffic, and I arrived fifteen minutes after Lan’s train was due.
The station teemed with travelers and vendors who swarmed to serve them. People crowded around the rickshaw taxis with bags, haggling, while others slurped bowls of noodles in street stalls or lifted their pants legs for a shoeshine. Feet and motorcycles and buses raised up dust, thickening the dusk. I made my way through the crowd, looking for Lan. I circled the station three times before I saw a young woman in a wide-rimmed hat sitting in the waiting area with her head lowered. She was wearing a black dress with little white flowers and red sandals—Lanlan’s red sandals. As I approached I saw that she was reading.
I stood in front of her and coughed.
She looked up.
My mother once told me that Chairman Mao studied in loud public spaces, she said, closing the book. I have no idea if it’s true, but I always thought it was a nice idea.
Yes, I said. I was smiling stupidly. I tried to look serious, as I had in those photos.
She showed me what she was reading. It was a scientific journal in English. Can you read it? she said.
Physical Review Letters, I wanted to say, but I could not get any words out of my mouth.
She stood up and touched my arm.
Are you hungry?
Yes, I said again, and followed her to a stall outside, where we joined the other weary travelers on the benches with bowls of steaming soup.
Su Lan behaved so naturally that I began to wonder if there was something wrong with me. Was it not strange that I had appeared in her city and that she had appeared in mine, that we suddenly wandered about like a couple after seven years of knowing each other and not exchanging a word? Was it possible she was silently thinking what I was silently thinking?
She accompanied me back to my dorm, where we spent that night—she asleep in my bed, I awake on my roommate’s bed—before leaving for Hangzhou. She did not mention Bo. When I finally asked her why she had come (a week later, on the way back), she pulled out her train ticket from Beijing to Shanghai and pointed at the price. Fifty yuan, she said. What a waste of money it would have been. That’s it? I said. She turned back to her magazine.
On the train to Hangzhou, I apologized for not planning time to show her around Shanghai as she had done for me in Beijing. I said, perhaps too forcefully, You’ll have to come another time.
The train ride was four hours. Lan had never ridden in the soft-seat section and asked to sit by the window. It was a good excuse for me to lean over her to point out a landmark or new development. We chatted about stupid things and played a few rounds of cards. When the food cart came, I asked Lan what she wanted and she shook her head.
Now I’ll have to guess what you like, I said. See what you’ve done?
I bought more snacks than we could conceivably eat. She reached for the simplest, cheapest item, the bag of sunflower seeds.
She was impossible to read. She had brought with her a small bag holding one change of clothes and two books: the Physical Review and a Chinese-English dictionary. She seemed equally content talking to me or reading or sitting in silence. She did not ask about plans but seemed happy to follow where I led. Yet her passivity did not make her seem stupid or even passive. Rather, in her every gesture—even when she simply sat—I saw a quiet intentionality, as if she alone had found that elusive greater purpose for which we were all searching. I felt this acutely, the presence of some drive or meaning justifying her existence. It was at once comforting and unsettling.
How did I feel about her? Even now, it’s hard to know exactly. I was energized, yes, but I was a vector with only direction and no substance. I wanted her to love me, but I couldn’t tell you why, exactly. I drove ferociously toward my target, toward Lanlan. I went blindly, convincing myself of many things.
We caught up as if we were old friends. My work bored me, but to make myself interesting to her, I spoke about treatment advances in my field. I told her about the lecture I had attended in Beijing, the introduction of new cancer detection and treatment machines. Again she was fascinated by the idea of radiation treatment, that we could weaken or even destroy an
illness inside a person without cutting open the exterior. How miraculous and counterintuitive science could be. This was what she was interested in too: how light, or particles that behaved like light, shot through our world, touching everything and changing its properties without our even noticing. You know, she laughed, in many ways physics has saved me. What do our petty pains matter in the face of—she paused—the laws of thermodynamics, say, or the law of gravity. She spoke so sincerely that she became almost vulnerable, like a child who must be protected from her curiosity.
As a theoretical physicist, working primarily with numbers and other invisible entities, she admired people like me, whose everyday work had a real impact on the lives around us. But she had chosen physics for its beauty and incomprehensibility, not because she wanted to change the world.
Or maybe I believe that thinking hard enough can change the world, she said. Again she laughed at herself.
She explained how recently she had developed a sort of scientific crush on massless particles.
Most people who have some understanding of modern physics think that relativity is the final word, the last frontier, Lan said. But there is something about relativity—gravity and light, mass and speed at enormous scales—that is fundamentally more intuitive than quantum mechanics. Yes, our perception of mechanical laws, of space and time, is slightly off—more than slightly off when we are talking about the very large and the very fast. But with simple logical deduction, our perceptions can be shifted, and indeed, the human mind opens quite naturally toward those shifts. We are amazed, we are dazzled, we open our mouths in awe, but we are not dumbfounded. The behaviors of photons, electrons, and quarks, however—these particle waves, these vibrating infinitesimal particulars—
She paused. For a moment she had lost herself.
They defy any concept of sense, she finally said. Of reason and experience. And of course—they are too small to even conceive.
As we talked, an uncomfortable realization crept into me. Su Lan was a real scientist. I, on the other hand, was a mere practitioner. Even after I earned my degree, I would just be a competent person who did what he was told to do. I had no passion, only ability. Did Bo love his work? He must, I thought angrily. Here, so many years later, was the true reason I had given up those top spots to Zhang Bo and Su Lan. Because unlike Bo, unlike Lan, I was smart only to show that I was smart, not for a greater purpose, not to become something. I would never be like Lanlan, who fed off knowledge as if it were the only thing that could keep her alive.
In the last month, Lanlan had made a breakthrough in her research. Her face broke into childlike excitement as she spoke about a professor from an American university who would visit their department the following month on a scholarly exchange. The journal she had brought contained an article of his concerning high-speed ion reduction that used methodology she thought could be applied to her own research. She was determined to read it in spite of her lousy English, so that she could discuss it with him when he arrived.
Do you ever want to study in America? she asked.
I’ve never thought about it, I said honestly. But you have?
She shrugged. It was fine to keep doors open, she said. She commented on her poor English language skills again. I’ve been reading this for an entire day and I’ve only gotten through a page, she said.
At the time, I had thought of my aptitude for languages as an extension of my aptitude for anything that could be studied. Only much later, when I began to translate little things here and there for some easy income, did I realize that I felt comfortable inside foreign languages like I never had in medicine. Entering into a strange grammar, surrounded by strange sounds, my mind opened in ways that I could not conceive while living solely in Chinese. It was intensely intimate and freeing, this temporary escape, like walking into someone else’s home and finding that everything has been made just for you. I offered to help Lan, and for the rest of the train ride we read the article together, I helping her with simple words and syntax, she explaining the physics. I nodded along, pretending to understand.
We arrived in Hangzhou in late afternoon. The platform was uncharacteristically empty and pink dust hung over the sky. I swept the unopened snacks into my bag, picked up Lan’s satchel, and stepped into the aisle. On the platform I turned around and found Lan still standing by the train, staring at the place where we had been sitting. Our sunflower seed shells were piled on the table next to the window, and two young women edged sideways into our former seats, holding their bags out before them.
The train’s whistle blew and it began to chug out of the station. I took Lan’s hand and led her off the platform. I hailed a taxi and gave the driver my home address. I rolled down the windows.
Only then, with the car zooming toward the center of town, the dusty hot wind slapping our faces, exhaust billowing out behind us, did I find the voice to say what we were doing. Shouting over the engine and the wind, I said, My mother is sick. We are going to see her.
In his letters, my father had written simply that it was my mother’s desire to see me. He had put it specifically in those terms. My mother desired to see me and he was writing for her, as a gesture of husbandly duty. The second letter had been identical to the first, except that instead of my name, it was addressed to her negligent son.
The truth was I did not think about my mother often. She quietly kept the peace, moving between my father and me, making it possible for us to coexist, giving us both her care and attention without taking sides. Today, looking back at the young man I was with the eyes of a father, I can see so clearly his foolishness, how lazily he conceived of his mother’s existence. When he considered her, he considered only a vessel for his and his father’s wills. He didn’t see how well she knew them both. She’d made her presence so inert that it was like that of air, so when he was forced to turn his gaze toward her, he struggled to see anything.
The taxi slowed. I recognized the stores lining the sides of the main street, the restaurant at the corner of our xiang. I told the taxi to stop at the side of the road. Down the narrow lane jammed with parked bicycles and cars was the door to my parents’ house.
We walked past the open dish room at the back of the restaurant. Gray water poured onto the cracked pavement; dish suds mixed with oil. At the corner, trash spilled out of a dumpster, watermelon peels scored with bite marks protruding from red plastic bags. I suddenly felt embarrassed. In childhood, my home had seemed large and opulent.
I’m afraid it’s not much, I said to Su Lan.
She looked, as always, as if she were taking everything in, even the sparrows pecking at rice grains on the curb.
Don’t apologize, she said.
No, I just mean—
Your eyes have gotten bigger, that’s all.
I nodded, my face turned hot.
Well, here it is.
I banged on the metal door. There were shouts and footsteps and the door swung open. My mother gasped and took me in both arms. I stood stiffly and tried to remember if she usually embraced me. I stepped back to take a good look at her, as if with my medical degree I should have been able to see what was wrong. But she just looked tired. She nudged her head and said, Yongzong, who is your friend?
I followed my mother’s gaze and saw Lanlan, standing behind me, her beauty like sunlight one could swim in, and I was surprised. I had not forgotten she was there, but I had forgotten how beautiful she would look to my mother.
I said, Ma, this is Su Lan, my fiancée.
That evening, my mother’s illness was not mentioned. My mother moved about as she always did, cooking and cleaning and being hospitable. She had felt that something special would happen today, she said; that morning she had purchased a big fish at the market. She called my father and told him to pick up some spiced beef on the way home. At dinner I looked between my father and my mother. Had they agreed not to speak to me of it? Was it possible that my father was lying, using his woman’s life to manipulate me?
&n
bsp; Su Lan did not deny our engagement.
My mother was exuberant.
How hard it was for me to really see her. Her hair had gone entirely gray and her body was thin and small. But the version of her I had known as a child surged over these superficial elements. It was only when I noticed the sagging skin around her eyes that I realized: to a stranger on the street—to Lanlan—my mother must have looked old.
We ate. Su Lan complimented my mother’s cooking. I bragged about Su Lan.
Su Lan is a Beida graduate, I said. My father glanced up.
She’s a master’s student there now, I continued. She’s going to America to study with a famous physics professor.
America? my father said. Your English must be very good.
Not as good as Yongzong’s, she said.
A pity, he said, America wouldn’t want Yongzong.
Yongzong’s field is growing very quickly, she said. He was smart in picking his specialty.
Please, I picked randomly, I said.
It’s good to have a doctor in the family, Lanlan said, especially one working in Shanghai, with important connections, like Yongzong.
My mother coughed. For a moment no one spoke. I swallowed but before I could say anything, my mother said, Where is your family from, Su Lan?
Shanghai, Lan said. My father owns a line of designer shoe shops on Nanjing Lu.
She gave me a look that said: I can tell better lies about myself, if that’s what you want to do.
The next morning, after my father left for work, I took Lanlan to Xihu. I asked my mother to come but she said, No, no, you lovebirds go alone. My father had arranged dinner at a new restaurant down the street, she needed to invite my sisters and tell them I was home.