by Meng Jin
Bo did not believe her. He did not give up. He demanded evidence.
Finally she said she was engaged to me.
It’s a lie, I said. Cautiously, I repeated my story, painting Su Lan the villain, emphasizing the naïvety and sincerity of my own feelings for her. We’re both victims, I said. Bo looked weary. I picked up his empty dinner bowl and put it in the sink. I waited for him to respond. Finally I said I’d better go. I’ll leave you to rest, I said, and turned to leave.
As I was turning the knob, he blurted out, I know why she said you.
He stared ahead, not looking at me.
It’s obvious, isn’t it? The truth is, Yongzong, I only believed her because her engagement to you was my greatest insecurity.
What do you have to be insecure about? I asked, baffled, wholly sincere for the first time that night.
Just look at the two of us, side by side. Li Yongzong: handsome, refined, intelligent, rich. Zhang Bo: the civilized farm boy. Just look at this face.
He grimaced and bared his teeth.
Who would you choose?
I have always known how my character is flawed. I cannot see people. I can look hard, I can register and even understand a person’s existence. But to see that person objectively, as she really is—
I could never see Lanlan, or Bo Cai, or anyone who mattered, without the screen of who they were to me, and perhaps more important, how they made me look. To others, to myself. Su Lan was and is still right. There is too much of me in everything I do, and this I infects every part of my being, down to the very way my eyes perceive.
That week in May of 1987, as I returned daily to Lan’s door, begging her hand in marriage, a shell seemed to harden around her skin. She rebuffed me again and again, and with each rejection she appeared more and more desirable. Each second I was away, I was sure that someone more worthy would take her. Years later, when clear skies in Beijing became rare, I would remember how the weather that week was beautiful, blue cloudless horizon and a breeze that smelled like mountains. Students lazed outdoors and bicyclists filled the streets. Lan shined with an almost alien glow. Her skin was pale, her cheeks were pink with impatience. I had to have her.
Daily I returned to her door, and daily I was ignored. I waited for her to break. I wandered the empty capital at night, unable to sleep.
On the fifth day, as I sat by the wall in her hallway, Su Lan’s roommate left the apartment. She walked past me and said, Hey, handsome fellow, give up already and marry me.
I ignored her and leaned my head against the wall.
She knelt in front of me and pinched my cheek.
Look at those shadows under your eyes, she said. You look more like a heartbroken poet every day.
I batted her hand away. She got up, laughed, and skipped down the hall singing a Deng Lijun song.
Was that how I looked to Su Lan, like a lovelorn poet? I remained sitting there after her roommate left, hitting my head on the wall. Su Lan had told me once that according to quantum mechanics, there existed a small possibility that solid matter could penetrate solid matter. Technically, if I sat there and hit my head against her wall forever, eventually, I would fall through.
I had dozed off when Su Lan opened the door. She knocked on the wall to wake me up, and then, as if I had just arrived, invited me in.
I got up, I brushed off my pants. I entered and stood with my hands in my pockets. She plugged in a hot plate and put on a pot of tea.
Her dorm was small and simple, with a bunk bed and a small table with two chairs like any other university dorm. Someone (her roommate, I assumed) had unabashedly put up a giant poster of the Taiwanese rock star Hou Dejian on the back of the door. Between the windows was a magazine cutout of the Chinese women’s volleyball team with Lang Ping front and center. There were stacks of books on the floor.
Su Lan sat on the window ledge and looked at me. Zhang Bo is too good for me, she said. Zhang Bo deserves a nice, normal woman, a woman who will take care of him and his mother and father. Not a woman like me, who is constantly running away.
I did not say anything. She continued:
You know why I went along with your stupid engagement? I knew that your mother would be dead before she discovered the truth.
She paused and walked around the room, taking out paper cups, pinching in leaves of tea, restacking her books without purpose.
You see, that’s the kind of woman I am.
Then she stepped in front of me, her mouth a hand’s length from mine.
Maybe I’m the kind of woman who deserves to be with dirt like you.
I could barely hear what she was saying. My sleepless self was surging awake, the hairs on my skin shaking, alive, sure that I was on the brink of life as only the very lucky few could live it.
In the weeks that followed, I opened my mother’s drawer and gave her presents to Lan, one by one. Lan accepted them without comment, and I didn’t see them again, she never wore or used or displayed them. Finally there was only one item left, a gold necklace with lovebirds engraved on the pendant. My father had given it to my mother when they got engaged.
My mother wanted you to wear this at our wedding, I said. I held out the necklace to Lan and watched it glitter in the light. I took a breath and continued: I want you to wear it too. I know I’ve said it before but let me say it again, properly, I want to marry you. I want it so much.
Su Lan was silent and still, her face thoughtful. I reached to clasp the necklace around her neck. She stepped back.
I don’t want it, she said. Stop giving me these things. I can’t handle it. I can’t—betraying my own mother is already too much, I can’t betray yours too. You have to know this, I don’t want a wedding, I don’t want your family to meet my family, I don’t want children. I don’t ever want to become a mother, I can’t bear the possibility that any person might feel about me the way I feel about my mother.
She shook out her shoulders, sharpened her face.
I’ll marry you, she said, but these are my terms.
She looked at me with composure, almost bravado, as if prodding me to protest. But I was in oblivion. Everything that had come from her mouth before the words I’ll marry you dissolved in the morning air. I stuffed the necklace in my pocket and forgot about it. Who cared about a wedding, families meeting? And children? They had not even crossed my mind. What I wanted was the woman in front of me and whatever unimaginable, brilliant life she was barreling into.
I took her in my arms, I said, Of course, anything for you.
During that time, I did not question Lanlan’s motives or doubts. I loved the mystery of her decisions—how she seemed to operate on a logic entirely her own, one as firm and true as the laws of physics she studied and tried to decode. Why had she gone along with me to see my parents? Why had she led Bo on? Why had she chosen me? None of it mattered. I still could not believe that she had chosen me, that I, Li Yongzong, had won her, that after everything, she was falling in love with me. That, that, that. Lanlan’s most distinctive, seductive quality was her ability to make you forget every question. Her presence was so exhilarating—sound, smell, taste, disturbance of air of her—that she erased the need for history. She erased even the need for the present. Her beauty was a promise, and so when you were with her it was the future that lit up, materializing endless possibilities and roads, like the network of neurons and synapses in some god’s brain.
Only much later would I realize how deliberately Lanlan had worked all her life to destroy every trace of her past. She’d studied the way Beijingers dressed and cut their hair and walked. She’d plucked her eyebrows and saved her scholarship money to buy expensive lipstick and skin creams. That was why she’d led so many men on, so she could continue to receive their gifts of nice clothing, continue to supplement her food income with meals at Beijing’s best restaurants. Later I would watch her replicate this assimilation in Shanghai. After the outburst about our mothers, she never spoke again of her family. I didn’t mention what
I had heard of them from Bo, sensing that she preferred my ignorance. When she saw the rising of a question about her past in my eyes, she cut it off, saying, You, of all people, should understand.
She knew I had not spoken to my father in years.
Once, I had countered: Even so, you have met my family. Sometimes I speak of my childhood without noticing or thinking of it. But your omission is so complete—it feels pathological.
For a long time Lanlan looked at me, her eyes burning. It was the first time in our courtship that I thought she might cry. I thought I had finally cracked her open, and at that moment, when I was still falling in love with her, or perhaps more accurately, still trying to make her fall in love with me—at that moment my heart rejoiced, ready to meet her tenderness.
Finally she spoke.
The people I knew as a child have an incredible ability to wallow in their sufferings, she said. They rehash little injustices that build up to a lifetime of irredeemable wrongs—they exploit the past to show how they have unflinchingly swallowed bitter fruit, they suffer silently until they vomit it all in a wave of sudden unburdening. I don’t want to participate in this ritual. It’s disgusting.
Later, when Su Lan was my wife, I would often be reminded of the crouching insecurity I had occasionally glimpsed in Bo. It was all rather simple, now that I think of it, the simple insecurity of being born poor. Today, it is clear this was the real reason she chose me over Bo: she was too recognizable to him. It did not matter that he alone, precisely because he had seen every part of her, could truly know her and thus truly love her. She did not want to be known, or perhaps, even, to be loved. She wanted more than anything to amputate that past from her self, to be accepted as the person she’d created, for her lover not to love her, but to make her someone new.
I visited Beijing; she visited Shanghai. She completed her master’s and started her doctorate at Fudan University. With her infallible charm, she convinced the people in her danwei’s housing department to move us up the waitlist, and got us a couple’s housing assignment that had just opened up in the city center. We moved out of our shared dorms into a room in the old city. It was small and dirty but at least we didn’t have to live with roommates like some other newlyweds we knew. We forgot about Bo. By the following autumn, just four months after Lanlan invited me inside her dorm, we had filed for our marriage papers. There was no ceremony. We went to the municipal offices and completed the required physical examinations and paperwork. Afterward, we took wedding photos at a studio and had steaks at a Western restaurant by the Bund. We carried our few possessions into our new home. Lanlan lit up and I flew around her, exhilarated, like a moth charging toward the brightest of flames.
The other day, I was staring out of my office window when I thought I saw Lanlan walking down the street. It was mid-afternoon. I was translating a popular detective novel by an Englishman that would soon be made into a movie. I tapped my pen on the windowsill and looked at the young woman as she rounded the corner. She wore a simple black coat and walked with her head down. I could not see her face clearly, but for a moment I was struck with a feeling of recognition so strong that I almost ran outside. It was only after the woman disappeared that I realized Lanlan must have aged by now, that she, like Zhang Bo, like me, would be old.
Was that you? I realize I don’t even know if you are a boy or a girl—a man or a woman, perhaps, by now—if you are dead or alive. I look at the year and subtract: if you were born and survived, you would be seventeen years old, just old enough to pass for your mother, if you had been a girl.
I am not cruel. I do think of you sometimes—often. I haven’t forgotten that I made a child with Su Lan, even if when I think of her, the image that comes to mind is always from a time before the idea of you existed. When I try to remember what she looked like during the months she was pregnant, I am met with a black fog of shapes and sounds. My mind leaves the small room where we lived, leaves that stinking alleyway, so old and poor, which she treated like some kind of palace, and memories of the outside world—the city, the protests, the energy, the colors and noises of the streets—rush in.
Some years ago, I encountered again the image of my second face. I was not Li Yongzong anymore. I was married again. My wife, six months pregnant, was going through old drawers and cabinets, cleaning out our apartment in preparation for the arrival of our child, when she came across a faded and expired government identification card—the very first document that bore the name I use now. My name.
She held it up with a perplexed smile.
You looked so different when you were younger, she said, turning the scratched plastic to the light.
When I saw what it was I snatched it from her, replacing as quick as I could my expression of terror with one of embarrassed surprise. Is that so? My thumb pressed into the face, a smudging motion remembered instinctively. I peered at it in mock inspection. That’s funny, I said. I think I look exactly the same. I laughed. I guess that’s just getting older, I said.
I wasn’t lying. Later that night, after my wife had fallen into deep sleep, I retrieved the card from the trash and looked at the photograph by lamplight. Indeed, when I imagined my face, this was the one I saw: it looked more like me than my own reflection in the mirror. I remembered the first time I had seen it, bloodied and pressed against asphalt, attached to a body that was already going cold. Even then I had recognized it as my own. I stood over the image of my dead self, rotting on the ground, and felt the heat of blood in my hands, the slick of sweat down my back—every sensation of life—as an incredible gift. A few steps away a wallet lay open, its contents strewn: cash, coins, a newspaper clipping, this card I now held in my hand.
I dropped it back into the trash. Pushed it in deep. I tied up the plastic bag and took it down to the dumpster.
For the next few days I observed my wife. Did she seem colder, wary? I thought I saw her watching me from the corner of an eye. I felt a familiar mounting anxiety: the walls of a shared home closing in, the swelling of a new life preparing to enter an already shrinking space. I told my wife I had to travel for work. I packed a small bag. I left.
I found myself in Shanghai. For years I had not set foot in my former city. I wandered the streets with the same aimless desire that had once driven me to Beijing University’s campus, to Su Lan’s student dormitory. Before I knew it I was standing outside the building where we had lived. I didn’t know what I wanted, if I hoped to see Su Lan and confront her, if I needed her blessing or her curse.
I went to the building many times that week, never going inside. I stood underneath our former window, blinking—I could not see clearly—it took only a few minutes for me to lose courage. When the fog finally cleared, on my fourth or fifth visit, I looked around the old longtang and saw that it was even smaller than I’d remembered. In fact the whole neighborhood had been deemed such an eyesore that it was marked for demolition. Many buildings had already been torn down. It was clear that Su Lan no longer lived here, that no one lived here. Each morning, in this alleyway that once had been clogged with residents, I was the only person in sight. The demolition symbol on the wall of the building, painted in crude red, was a plain sign of my stupidity. Of course Su Lan had moved on. She had always been better than me; who was I to think I could have anything to settle with a person like her, who had certainly found her way to much better and brighter things, who was probably in America, rich and successful, whose name if I opened Physical Review Letters today I would undoubtedly find. Perhaps one day I would see her face again, but it would be in the newspaper, as she accepted some international prize or achieved some other entrance into collective historical memory. I heard a noise in the building. It seemed to come from the second floor, from behind the dark window of our old room. I ran from the neighborhood. I returned to my wife in Beijing.
Less than a year after Su Lan and I married, she got pregnant. Around that time, I was growing increasingly bored with medicine. I had gotten to a point where I was
a fine doctor, but it also meant the work was repetitive and easy. More and more I felt like an assembly line worker in a machine. Su Lan had suggested that I try medical research, and I followed her suggestion. At first it was exciting to learn new techniques, the rules and logic of clinical trials. I felt the joys I always felt when faced with something new and strange, with discovering I could understand it. It was like learning a new language, you plunged in and searched for patterns, a neat structure from which all else could easily be deduced. In medical research the pattern had to do with zooming out, then in, then out again. First you established a treatment problem in global terms, quantifying it (the number of people affected by such-and-such disease), then honed in on your specific interest, invented a rigorous way to test various treatments, gathered data, and from that data, drew lines from the minute and specialized numbers to the large issue from which you began.
More exciting than learning research techniques, however, was coming home and discussing what I had learned with Lanlan. She listened attentively, she got excited with me, she asked questions that illuminated approaches I had not seen, which helped me to advance with more speed and virtuosity. My superiors praised me, my wife was proud of me. I started to feel not just like a technician but like a scientist, someone like Su Lan, who was making a difference in her field.
The feeling did not last long. This has always been my problem: once I get the gist of something, I get bored, I move on. During the gaokao I’d lost the discipline to keep at a subject until I achieved perfection, regardless of how much it interested me. Soon Su Lan’s interrogations began to irritate me. It became clear that she was more passionate than I was about my own research; our discussions sparked new ideas in her mind even as they remained dull to me. I began to feel—correctly, I still believe—that if Su Lan were to decide to drop physics and become a doctor she would soon outstrip me. She had more interesting questions. She was able to turn simple formulations in a way that revealed their complexity, to come up with hypothetical scenarios that pushed the boundaries of the structures we’d set. When she repeated back to me things I’d said, her paraphrases were more elegant, more succinct, and I wondered why I had blabbered on for so long when I could have just said that. In the shadow of her mind I again felt the uselessness of my pursuit: I was not a scientist, like her, I could never have her passion, her creativity, her sharpness and intuition. I withdrew, I stopped talking to her about work, I began to spend more time outside the house, inventing excuses. Often I simply went alone to a café or bookstore to read. Only once or twice did I end up in bed with another woman, and when it happened, I was surprised by how easy it was, how interchangeable these bodies were with the body of my extraordinary wife.