by An Yu
Still hesitant, Jia Jia dropped her wine glass and walked forward into what used to be her wall painting and was now only water, and tried to touch the fish again. This time, it turned its head towards Jia Jia’s outstretched finger and lingered there for a moment. She dived into the water and swam towards the darkness; the fish followed her. As she went deeper, she noticed that it was glowing faintly, providing the only source of light in the abyss.
Once again, she lost sight of where she had come from. And there was no evidence that she was moving forward either; perhaps she was only treading water, kicking behind her, with the fish alongside. She turned around and tried to direct her body the other way, but she was not sure any more. The silver light from the fish dimmed and vanished, and Jia Jia was alone. Was she going to drown? Was she going to stay there and wait until she starved? What about the port? It must have stained the carpet. Was the floor carpeted? Jia Jia could not remember.
She closed her eyes and stopped moving.
Time passed and she heard a sound. She was leaning against the wall now. The solid surface felt like ice against her back. Tears began running down her face, warming her skin. The port was spilt on the marble floor.
The door lock turned, and Ms Wan and her husband entered.
Seeing Jia Jia crying that night, Ms Wan had been worried. Jia Jia assured her that she was simply moved by the story of the Buddha.
‘That, truly, is the power of religion,’ Ms Wan noted with profound compassion.
The next day, Jia Jia informed her real estate agent that she wanted to move out of the apartment as soon as possible. She felt liberated to find out that she did not need to stay there to see the fish and the water. As there had been no interested buyers since December, she said that she would not mind letting it at a lower-than-market rate if that was easier. According to the agent, it was better for Jia Jia to empty the apartment and move out before showing it to prospective tenants and buyers.
‘Many clients prefer homes that look newer and unoccupied,’ he told her.
Jia Jia’s aunt helped her pack. Now that Li Chang was not there, Jia Jia thought she could temporarily live with her grandmother and aunt. She had been so adamant about the move that her aunt had made no objections; perhaps she had also been feeling worried about leaving the old woman alone so often. By this time, her aunt had begun to avoid the subject of Li Chang entirely when she was staying with her niece. She would wait until she thought Jia Jia was asleep before whispering into the phone for hours with her friends. Jia Jia never probed; without Chen Hang’s connections, there was nothing that she could do to help. In fact, when the government’s anti-corruption efforts had begun a few years earlier, Jia Jia had been fearful for her own husband’s safety. Once, while she and Chen Hang were watching the morning news together, Jia Jia had made a casual, sympathetic comment about the corrupt businessmen and their families who had been forced to flee the country with their money.
‘No need for you to worry about such things,’ Chen Hang had told her. ‘I’m not an idiot like those people.’
She recalled, though, that Chen Hang had often come and gone with boxes of expensive wines or wild ginseng in the boot of his car. Last New Year’s, he had pulled out a thick crisp pile of one-hundred-yuan notes from an envelope and handed it to her, saying that it was red pocket money from a friend. She had bought a sculpture at auction with the money. It was a piece of dark green marble carved into a cubist-style figure of a woman; long and thin, with her hips slightly pointed towards the left side. The night after she brought it home, Chen Hang had not returned until the early hours. She had drunk three espressos and stayed awake past midnight, then applied a thin layer of foundation to her face and on her kite-shaped birthmark, and sat on the sofa in her black silk dress, next to her new art piece, waiting for her husband. By the time he came back, she had fallen asleep.
While Jia Jia was packing, she glanced at the sculpture forsaken in the corner of the room, trying to decide whether it belonged to her. She did not want to bring any of Chen Hang’s possessions with her, but she folded everything and stored it all in boxes anyway. She collected together the unfinished bottles of cognac; drank some and poured out the rest, watching the brown liquid drain down the kitchen sink. She stripped the sheets off the bed and thought that she had never seen anything so desolate as a naked mattress. She could hardly remember what it was like, sleeping next to Chen Hang in this bed. Since the second year of their marriage, she had often gone to sleep alone, her husband returning late and drunk and falling asleep on the sofa still wearing his coat. Sometimes, he did not turn up until the next morning, and would quickly shower and change before heading out to the office again. After the sculpture incident, Jia Jia had stopped staying up at all to wait for his return. She gave one last look at the piece, auctioned at a high price only to end up in an abandoned apartment, carrying no sentiment, far removed from its creator. Perhaps it deserved a better owner, she thought, before dragging the last box out into the corridor and closing the door behind her.
She took all her own art and clothes with her and called a van to her grandmother’s home. Chen Hang had been dead for six months, and her marriage was packed away in crates. From the van window, the streets appeared at once familiar and obscure. Looking up at the buildings, it seemed that the city she had known so well had been reshaped, rearranged somehow. Petrol fumes and the driver’s smoky body odour wafted back at her. For a while, Jia Jia watched the hanging charm with its piece of amber sway from the rear-view mirror in irregular rhythms, in different directions. After they had zigzagged through the city’s afternoon traffic and finally steered into the third ring road, Jia Jia took out her phone and dialled her father’s number.
8
When the hired van pulled up at her grandmother’s building, Jia Jia’s friend Qing was sitting cross-legged on the front steps, waiting for her, an unlit cigarette between her lips. She always rolled her own cigarettes, a European habit that she had perfected during art school.
Jia Jia had few friends she kept in touch with from those days, and Qing was one of them. Of the three roommates from her first year, Jia Jia had become closest with Qing. They had nothing in common besides their passion for creating art, but back then, that single commonality had been enough for them to spend every day together, painting in silence, until the sun had set and risen again.
Qing had short, dark brown hair that always smelt like rushes. She claimed that she had kept the same hairstyle her entire life, though it used to be black when she was younger, and that the scent came from the Japanese tatami bed that her mother had installed in her room when she was a girl. Jia Jia admired Qing’s ability to stay true to herself, to have an identity and one only. Qing’s wardrobe was filled with olive-green T-shirts and black jeans, and those things were all she ever wore, except in the winter when she would put on a black padded denim jacket.
Qing stuffed her cigarette behind her ear when she saw Jia Jia.
‘Qing’s Home Movers reporting for duty!’ She lifted her right hand, holding the neon-green lighter to her temple, and gave Jia Jia a salute.
They both laughed and proceeded to carry boxes upstairs to the second floor. Every so often, Jia Jia’s grandmother stuck her head out from the kitchen window and asked if they wanted pears.
By the time they had emptied everything from the van, night had fallen, and Jia Jia’s grandmother had settled into a deep doze that would last until four in the morning – the time she began cooking a pot of plain breakfast congee. The plate of pears sat on the bedside table waiting for Jia Jia and Qing.
Jia Jia’s childhood bedroom had been converted into a spare room. It was the only one that faced north and overlooked the main road, making it much louder than the others, which all faced the courtyard. The white walls were yellowing and so were the curtains. With the boxes piled on top of each other and filling up the room, there was hardly anywhere to stand.
‘Jia Jia, you have a lot of unpacking to do
,’ Qing said as she popped a half-moon of pear into her mouth and collapsed onto the single bed. The bed was made for Jia Jia already; the sheets were pale green and did not match with the purple-striped pillowcase.
‘Also, about what you asked me last time,’ Qing said. ‘I heard back from a gallery who told me that they’d like to speak to you. Maybe you can organise a little exhibition or something.’
Jia Jia sat down next to Qing.
‘I rang my father today,’ Jia Jia said.
Qing sat up.
‘I called him in the van,’ Jia Jia continued. ‘He suggested we meet for dinner. What’s the gallery’s name?’
‘But you never call your dad.’ Qing took a card out from her back pocket and handed it over. ‘Here. They said that you can call in any time next week.’
‘Thank you, Qing.’ Jia Jia studied the card. She had never heard of the gallery before. ‘So, are you still dating that guitarist?’ she looked up and asked.
‘What are these?’ Qing started removing canvases from a box.
‘Failed art. Are you still dating him? The tall guy with the purple guitar.’
‘I’m thirty-one. I’ve decided that I need to consider my future a bit more, find someone more dependable.’ She held up one of Jia Jia’s paintings. ‘You haven’t painted something so many times since university. A fish … without a head?’
‘There’s supposed to be a man’s head there.’ Jia Jia pointed to the empty oval on the canvas. ‘You know, Chen Hang was dependable.’
Moonlight shone in, revealing a thin layer of dust on top of everything: the television, the collectible book sets on the shelves, the ink painting of a red-crowned crane in the corner, the lantern hung on the window frame. Jia Jia recognised the lantern – it was one of the many things that had belonged to her mother and one of the few that were left. She had purchased it from a craftsman in Chongqing. Jia Jia’s mother instilled stories into every object that she brought home with her from her travels. She asked young Jia Jia to guess where they came from and where they would go.
Wherever they go, it will be a better place, her mother once said.
Jia Jia ran her index finger along the edge of the lantern. Where had they gone? Where was the ceramic pot from Jingdezhen? The flute from Yuping? The bronze dragon from Xi’an? The qipao from Shanghai? The roll of embroidered fabric from Suzhou?
Did things disappear one by one, or altogether? she wondered. The past seemed to have become merely what remained.
‘All these years, my father never married that new woman,’ Jia Jia continued. ‘Why do you think so?’
Qing shrugged. ‘Maybe he doesn’t want more family. I need a smoke.’
‘Not here inside my grandma’s apartment.’ Jia Jia lightly punched Qing on the arm.
Perhaps Qing was right, Jia Jia thought, maybe he never wanted a new family. Now that she had lost her own, she seemed to understand her father a little, his unwillingness to start another family, to move on so completely. From the day he announced that he was in love again, to the moment he drove his car away with all his belongings, it was Jia Jia’s mother who had been desperate to expel him from their home. Back when Jia Jia was a small child and morality was a more definite thing, she had chosen to stand with both feet on her mother’s side, offering to her alone – the only victim in her mind – all the love that her young, delicate body could possibly summon. She had ignored, forgotten, those afternoons when she observed her father from the window of their apartment, pacing around, sometimes even knocking on their door. She had forgotten that she had never opened it for him, that she had deserted him too.
Qing stood and picked up her bag.
‘Don’t you want to eat something before you leave?’ Jia Jia asked.
‘Dieting!’
Qing took her cigarette from her ear, swung her bag behind her shoulder, and waved the hand that was holding the lighter. Jia Jia observed from her window as Qing exited the building and mounted her scooter. She shouted, ‘Thank you,’ as Qing disappeared around the corner, cigarette in her mouth.
A week after her move, Jia Jia was sitting at a small, round table with four chairs in a quiet corner of a Shanghainese restaurant. A waitress in a black skirt suit handed her a menu that felt as thick as a novel.
She was half an hour early and relieved to be away from her grandmother’s for the first time since moving in. She had told Ms Wan that she was ill with a fever and could not finish the last section of the wall painting until she felt better. Instead, she had sat in her room and toiled over her own fish-man paintings in vain. The room was too small, too restricting. She did not remember it being that way. Every day, she felt as though she was in a tank of water, suffocating. Her aunt was rarely home, but in the dead of night, Jia Jia would hear her whispering and fighting with her grandmother about Li Chang.
Jia Jia studied the expertly-shot food photos inside the menu. She decided that she would begin her conversation with her father by complimenting the quality of the menu’s paper – it felt like waxed cardboard. It would be an appropriate way to praise him for his restaurant choice, she thought. She had phoned her father from the van to tell him that she was moving out. Since then, she had realised that staying with her aunt and grandmother was not a long-term solution. They had developed their own way of living together through the years without her, and in the past few days, Jia Jia had felt out of place anywhere but in her own, tiny room.
She had not slept much the night before, unable to decide on what to say to her father, worrying over her decision to move into her grandmother’s home. She imagined how cramped it would be after Li Chang came back. Should she ask to move into her father’s place? He had a spacious three-bedroom apartment to himself. He was getting older, he would surely be pleased to have a daughter around to take care of him, to keep him company, to brew him some tea and chat with him at night. She had made up her mind that this time she was not going to get upset over his usual nonchalance. At the very least, she reasoned, she would have more space to work on her art if she lived with him.
She closed the menu, sipped on the Dragon Well tea that was brought to her, and waited for her father to arrive. An elderly, grey-haired couple was sitting at the table next to hers.
‘I hit my arm on something sharp last night,’ the old woman said. She looked like an older version of Ms Wan – heavy head, bony body. Even her bob haircut was the same.
‘Where?’ the old man asked.
‘In the bathroom.’
‘Are you all right now?’
‘I found a plaster.’
The waitress brought a plate of braised pork belly and carefully placed it between them. The old woman picked up a piece with her chopsticks and dropped it carefully onto the old man’s rice. She then fetched another piece and stuffed it directly into her own mouth. They both chewed.
‘It tastes good,’ she said, munching open-mouthed with difficulty, revealing the few teeth she had left.
The old man nodded.
‘Lunch was good yesterday,’ she said.
‘It was good to see the kids,’ he said.
‘Good, good,’ she said.
They stopped talking and continued to eat. Their eyes were quiet, composed, without a single trace of worry. Sometimes they looked at each other, but most of the time they looked down at their food. They seldom smiled, but through the folds of their skin, Jia Jia saw everything that she did not have. She watched them as if they were the last scene of a film, living a happy ending, entirely removed from her own reality. An overwhelming feeling of dejection rose inside her. Head down, eyes closed, she listened to their silence and yearned for it to be hers.
Jia Jia’s phone rang loudly in her bag.
‘Ms Wu, I have a buyer for you!’ Her estate agent sounded like a TV football commentator, all professional enthusiasm. He spent minutes explaining who the potential buyer was: a family of four, an agreeable couple with two children, earning a high income working for American corporations. I
t seemed as if he was trying to sell the family to her. Finally, after he was satisfied with his expository prologue, he offered Jia Jia the price.
‘That’s too low. Far too low,’ she said.
‘The market is bad.’
‘Irresponsible!’
‘Ms Wu—’
‘It has to be higher. A one-bedroom sold for that earlier this year! One-bedroom! Mine’s a four-bedroom.’
‘I understand—’
‘No, you don’t seem to. I need more.’
‘Ms Wu, it’s much more difficult to sell your apartment. I’m already trying my best!’
‘You’re not trying at all,’ she said.
Jia Jia detected her father standing at the entrance of the restaurant speaking to the receptionist. He was looking inside, nodding, and scanning the restaurant for her. The receptionist pointed in Jia Jia’s direction, and her father’s gaze followed her arm.
‘It’s much more difficult, you have to understand,’ the estate agent continued. ‘Because of your husband.’
Jia Jia refocused her attention. ‘What?’
‘It’s not good. Buyers don’t like it,’ he said.
Her father was walking towards her table now. He looked old. She had not seen him since Chen Hang’s funeral, and even then, she had not had much of a chance to study him carefully.
‘Your husband killed himself there. It’s difficult to ask for a normal price,’ the estate agent said.
‘He didn’t kill himself,’ Jia Jia said. ‘Tell me, why do you think he would kill himself?’
‘Ms Wu, I wouldn’t know.’
‘He didn’t kill himself,’ she said again, and hung up.
Her father sat down opposite her and beamed. His eyebrows were grey, long and angled upwards, like dragonfly wings.
‘I thought you were in Europe!’ he said.