by Meng Jin
It was in the midst of this restlessness that the student democracy movement began. On the streets I heard impassioned speeches, beautiful and moving phrases, words put together for the purpose of motivating people to act. In the newspapers I read furious debates. My consciousness lit up. I felt like I had when I was courting Su Lan, like my life, finally, had reached its place of yearning. The debates about the fate of the nation were more immediate and urgent than Su Lan’s physics; they were grander and more ambitious than my clinical trials, and the language that fueled them seemed inexhaustible; you could see their patterns yet be reignited again and again. Some of the protesters felt that China was on the brink of death, they protested with the desperation of believing that something great they loved was dying, weeping so with patriotism that it did look like grief. I argued against them; I thought the nation was coming alive, that all these people in the streets were not the last gasp of a dying order but rather the birth of something wonderful and new. My passion, I believed then, was patriotic and optimistic—I believed in a better future for us all.
Su Lan did not even believe in the idea of China. Not, at least, as anything more than accumulated coincidence and geography. She distrusted any notions of collectivity. She refused to engage with the protests, and I discovered that when it came to politics she responded with the same shallow dismissiveness of my relationship with science. She glanced at the political and philosophical essays and articles I was reading and summarized them crudely (so the students believe that money will solve everything; the government believes instead in power), simplifying them to the point of missing all their nuance and meaning. At last I had found a subject for which my mind was better built. This recognition drove me in deeper.
If you had asked me which one of us would have become involved in a grassroots movement, I would have said Su Lan. I was more selfish, more petty, more narrowly focused on my own comfortable life. She was the one with lofty concerns. But my instinct was wrong. Su Lan was focused on such large things—the laws that governed universes—that human behavior, even on this grand, social scale, could not move her, could not but appear trivial. This was her flaw, her strength. She was obsessed with extremes, with the very small and the very large—her mind had no room for what was in between.
We had many arguments during this time. The walls of our room were shabby and thin, and so most of our exchanges were conducted in hushed tones, short phrases whispered in the evening, lobbed across the dinner table like little darts. I can’t remember most of what we said, but one fight remains with me vividly. When I think of it, I begin to understand why I have made my life as ordinary as it is today.
Su Lan was pregnant. For once she let herself shout, and I began to shout too, both of us forgetting that we lived in a cramped building with dozens of other families. We said things out loud that should have been kept silent. With each word we sought injury and pain. The room disintegrated under their force; picture frames began to fall off the walls, books tumbled off the shelves, plates crashed from the cupboards. Su Lan stood in the midst of it, her face red, her fist clenched, her body huge and unrecognizable. I had the impression her body was bursting out of her, and suddenly everything went silent around me, though I could see she was still yelling. She was breaking, the edges of her, and through the cracks I saw something terrible, it was dark and powerful and churning, and I recognized with frightening clarity that everything I knew about Su Lan—her excellence, her beauty, her composure—was actually an attempt to control this thing.
I realized that I did not know her, and did not want to.
I left Su Lan while she was sleeping. She was in the grip of an exhaustion so deep it made her ugly. Her hand was covered in sweat. It had exerted so much pressure holding on to mine, it had lost the shape of a hand. At that moment, under the temporary relief of medication, her muscles had loosened. By instinct, I shook my wrist free. I stood up, stretched my legs, and looked around the room, seeing it for the first time as if I were a bystander, as if I had already stepped out.
We were in Beijing, in a hospital. The walls were gray with soot, and the thin white sheets covering the empty beds had been eaten through in many places by rats or moths. Though certainly clean, sterile, the tiled floor was stained with age. I remember thinking with disgust that this was a hospital in our nation’s capital, the best that any of us could do. Finally my eyes fell on Su Lan, who lay on the farthest bed from the door, flanked by IV poles. Her mouth was open, drooling. She looked, with that enormous belly, like a stranger.
After eight and a half months of pregnancy, I still couldn’t understand. She had not wanted a child. She had not wanted to leave behind any part of her biology, to perpetuate herself into the future. A perfect life, she’d said, is lived, and then it disappears. For eight months I had looked at her, blinking, unable to believe that a transformation so irreversible was happening.
I did not think. I found my legs moving—not running, not propelling me out of the room as had been my impulse for many months—but walking steadily, calmly, as if nothing of note were occurring, as if I had somewhere to be but not urgently—
I walked between the two rows of empty beds and turned out of the room, down the dimly lit hospital hall. I could hear my steps echoing loudly, filling the hall with clamor. I walked out of the front door, across the concrete lot, and through the gate.
It was dusk. The sky was smoky and pink, and I could feel night running toward me. When we arrived at the hospital, the streets had been full of protesters, and I had been impatient with the knowledge that I could not join them. My desire to be closer to the heart of the movement was why we had overstayed in Beijing. The capital was chaos, was contradiction, was pure energy that roiled the streets; I stepped onto the avenue and it was like stepping into my mind, every unspoken desire and fury manifesting in living, breathing form.
The streets were as crowded as they had been when we arrived. But the protestors were no longer chanting or holding up signs. Now they were frantic, running down Fuxingmenwai Avenue holding large objects—wheels, wooden chairs, metal bicycle racks torn from the pavement—I followed to a bridge where a barricade grew. I pushed into the throng and met my restlessness. I confronted it, acted beside it, without needing to understand what it was.
Minutes, hours passed. How much time exactly I can’t say. All I know is that the sky grew dark then light. I walked through and among people, becoming a part of the organism that moved them. Perhaps I carried things, perhaps I ran. I remember hearing my voice in the night as a disembodied shout, loud and ferocious. I don’t know what I said. My mind was a buzzing blankness. Even when shots tore the air and the living fled, I continued to wander. It was not that I did not feel fear. Fear did not strike as I’d imagined. It did not make me hide or run or curl into myself but rather filled me with clarity. The night was serene and dark, and I was floating on a white ocean whose depths I knew were turbulent and full, and yet from where I lay I could see only water meeting sky. I recalled the day of the gaokao so many years ago, the exhilaration of believing my father dead. Around me, all was dying, but death pulsed with possibility. Now I understood: the earth could turn itself inside out, buildings could sink into the ground, men could grow wings, and none of it mattered—I was free.
Last year we sent our daughter to a prestigious boarding school where she would learn to read and write and solve mathematics problems with the children of our country’s leaders. The apartment quieted. My wife and I fell into a pattern of easy coexistence, friends who spoke to each other mostly about practical matters: the price of groceries, what was on TV, the electricity bill. Simple things—eating, shitting, sleeping—pushed life from one day into the next. I had too much time. I began to wake in the nights, intensely hungry. I got out of bed and sat under the yellow light of the kitchen, eating bread or leftover rice or whatever food we had, chewing slowly, listening to the grinding of my teeth.
One night, I heard a low tone somewhere inside the fla
t, like the drone of a cello sustained underneath a flying fugue. I walked through the living room, the bathroom, my daughter’s empty bedroom, and finally to my own bedroom, where my wife was asleep. I could not locate the source of the sound, but it grew louder and more insistent as I searched. I picked up objects and put them to my ear. They were silent. I looked at my wife’s body. She snored and turned on her side. I left the bedroom and then the flat. I went down the stairs into the courtyard, where the flickering streetlamp outside the door made the parked and hooded motorcycles look like animals sleeping in the night.
Still the tone grew louder. I walked and walked, and it continued to pursue me. The sound was inhuman. It did not vibrate and it did not breathe, and yet it had a fullness that made me think it was not merely mechanical. I walked briskly down streets that looked unfamiliar. The streets were lined with buildings, and I thought about going inside to escape the noise, but when I turned to enter I saw that none of the buildings had doors.
After walking for a long time, turning down dark, high-walled alleys, I finally came upon an old house that looked familiar. The lights were on inside and the windows glowed invitingly. I was relieved to see a door. I pushed it open and shouted a greeting, but no one responded. I went inside. A lit hallway led up a stairwell to a landing where another door stood in a rectangle of light. I opened this door too and stepped in. Finally, the noise had ceased. I breathed deeply, happy to find a quiet place where I might get a bit of rest.
The room was small and had been sectioned off into living and sleeping areas by a half-open curtain. A light bulb hung from the ceiling. I lay down on the bed and closed my eyes. The bed was hard, the blanket stiff, but it was nevertheless comforting, in the way that familiar things can be. That was when I realized—I had slept in this bed before. I sat up. I walked around the room, picking things up and putting them down. I tried to read the spines of the books on the shelves, but I could not focus the words. Still I seemed to know where everything belonged. I opened the wardrobe on the far side of the room and saw there, in the door, a person looking back at me.
It was my reflection. For many moments I did not recognize it. The mirror was thin and stained and my body was flimsy in it. I looked through the clothes in the wardrobe and discovered that they were mine. I circled the room again. I had sat in this chair, I had eaten at this table. I had paced across these floorboards listening to the neighbor’s radio. It was the room I had once shared with Lanlan. And there was our wedding portrait on the wall.
Lanlan looked young, like a girl. One day, sooner than I could imagine, my daughter would be that age. And I? In the photograph where I should have been I found instead Zhang Bo.
Zhang Bo, also known as Bo Cai, also known as Number Two. His face was handsome. A sort of goodness shone through it, making his rough features pleasing, even gentle, to the eye. I took the frame off the wall and held it in both hands, shaking it until I awoke, sweating, standing at my window in Beijing, clutching the branches of my wife’s kumquat tree.
Liya
When I met my father, I imagined, the body would respond. The senses would open, the lungs would gulp deep air. The body would feel an attraction to the one that preceded it, and move involuntarily, as a river toward an ocean.
I imagined I would desire him.
I was on a train to Beijing. It was a slow train; it had dented containers and jamming windows, it matched my imagination of trains in developing Asia. When I’d arrived at the station in Shanghai, I’d had two options: the new high-speed, leaving in an hour and arriving five later, or the one I was on, leaving right away with a journey three times the length.
I could not stand to be in Shanghai a moment longer.
I did not really want to be in Beijing either.
I wanted to be nowhere, to be trapped en route, forever if I could manage it. Transit was a space free of decisions: a relief. I looked out the window at the paved roads and traffic lights falling slowly away, and was thankful for this hard plastic cushion, peeling at the edges, for the stiff springs pressing into my legs. I listened to the metal churn of the wheels. Here, I could pretend that time was suspended, and the future, always imminent, might never fully arrive.
The landscape turned gray and white. I passed muddy fields dotted with long domes of stretched plastic sheets. I passed flat huts with black shingled roofs that rose from the earth like low hills. I passed frozen ponds and patches of unmelted snow. I thought:
How thoroughly my mother has succeeded in hollowing me out.
I had always wanted to be a person who was from somewhere. Three short months ago, I had wanted it desperately. Where are you from was the sort of question you were required to answer not just because it was supposed to say something about you, but because it was supposed to be easy. Starting college, meeting classmates, roommates, and potential friends, thrilled for my chance, finally, to define myself independently of my mother, I’d replied: I was born in Shanghai. It had seemed the simplest way to convey a complicated truth. It had always felt like a lie.
Now I had the true answer to that question. According to my birth certificate, I was from Beijing.
I didn’t want to be from Beijing. I no longer wanted to be from anywhere. My desire for roots had been more than a desire for belonging. I had seen what people who were from places were like, how they glittered with solidity and substance, and I had wanted to be filled with that substance too. Now I was afraid. Like any foreigner’s my knowledge of Beijing consisted mostly of stock images—the Great Wall, Tiananmen Square, Mao waving serenely over a rapturous crowd—I was afraid of arriving in Beijing and encountering the real counterparts of these images. I didn’t want to discover that they were different from the stock images, or the same, to discover anything about them; most of all I was afraid of feeling as I had when I’d first entered the Shanghai apartment, of seeing myself inside some television or movie scene, flattened, defined by the borders of the camera’s eye.
My mother had told me, and the United States government, that I was a year older than I really was. June 4, 1989, was my true date of birth. I turned the date over in my mind. It had a familiar quality, like I had seen or heard it before, identified it as special somehow, but its significance eluded me. Perhaps the familiarity pointed to my preconscious knowledge of its truth. It made sense: I was always the smallest kid in class, I had gotten my period so late.
I pressed my forehead into the cold windowpane. I stared at the reflections of my eyes. I tried to understand why my mother would have told this lie.
An obvious answer was childcare. When I looked back at my upbringing, it was painfully clear that so much of what I had once thought special about my mother had simply been created by necessity: our closeness, our games, the hours spent at her place of work. It would have helped her tremendously if I could grow up faster, start school a year earlier. It was possible, I imagined, that she’d made a mistake while filling out one of a hundred immigration papers, and, seeing how the mistake was advantageous, let it stand.
Perhaps one mistake had led to another. Perhaps some government bureaucrat had heard her Chinese accent and written Beijing without thinking twice. Or perhaps her memory of Beijing was tainted somehow. Perhaps Beijing had something to do with my father. Yes: this suspicion was why I was headed there.
Perhaps, perhaps. My mind cycled through these possibilities, one leading only again to another, none of them satisfying, until finally, spent with unknowing, I fell asleep.
Beijing was cold. I stood in front of a twelve-story building, shivering. It was midnight or later. When my train pulled into the station I hadn’t been ready to arrive, so I’d kept moving. I walked, kept walking, six miles in the dark, until I arrived here.
The building was nothing remarkable: a concrete high-rise apartment composed of identical rectangular units. It had twelve floors and fourteen windows on each floor, one stairwell up the middle. On the long train ride I had seen similar buildings at the edges of other cities. A
building such as this could be found anywhere in China, and probably in other economically developing countries too.
Nothing remarkable about the building, no, except that its address appeared on many letters written to my mother. One hundred letters, to be exact, written between the years 1985 and 1987 and postmarked exactly seven days apart. They had been bound by a rubber band, untouched for so many years it snapped immediately when pulled. The man who wrote them was named Zhang Bo. The contents were mundane. The style was direct and dry:
A recent editorial in the People’s Daily presents illuminating statistics on inflation.
In the last week the particle accelerator broke twice.
The exam was difficult, as expected. The results are announced in May.
They were love letters. They had to be, because of their frequency and consistency, because Zhang Bo was my father. Fourteen of the hundred used the word 爱 (ai, love). Though usually 爱 was not used in a romantic context, one letter made the romantic intent clear.