Braised Pork

by An Yu

  Still maddened by her agent, Jia Jia snapped at her father, ‘That was before your son-in-law died.’

  The old man sitting next to them looked disapprovingly at her. His wife signalled him with her eyes to mind his own business.

  ‘I see, was it that long ago?’ Jia Jia’s father laughed. ‘When I saw your call, I thought something had happened. Did everything go all right? You said you were moving in with your grandmother.’

  ‘Oh, sure, it was easy.’ She handed over the menu. ‘It’s really good.’

  ‘Yes! You’ve been here? They make delicious ribs. Vegetables are—’

  ‘The menu. The pages.’

  ‘What?’

  ‘The quality of the paper is good.’ Jia Jia pointed at the menu and waited for his reaction. He flipped one of the pages back and forth twice, studied the corner briefly, and lost interest.

  ‘Let me get you some starters,’ he said. ‘Xiao Fang is stuck in traffic.’

  ‘That woman is coming?’

  ‘Don’t say “that woman”, it sounds bad. You used to call her Auntie Fang Fang. She just wants to see you.’ He summoned the waitress and ordered some pigs’ ears, marinated bran dough and cucumber salad.

  Jia Jia waited until the waitress had walked away before she spoke quietly, trying to make up for her terrible attitude a moment earlier. ‘You look older. Is she taking good care of you?’

  ‘She’s found me an acupuncture doctor. My shoulder feels better now.’ He patted his left shoulder. ‘If you’re not feeling well, tell your Auntie Fang Fang, she’s done a lot of research on doctors. She’s a good woman. Remember when she used to take you fishing?’

  He continued talking about Xiao Fang. Jia Jia struggled not to listen. She searched for an appropriate moment, a small opening in his passionate monologue, to ask him about his own family: her family. What about us? she wanted to know.

  ‘… after we got married last year,’ she heard him say.

  His voice sounded distant and hollow, as if it came from the centre of an empty concert hall. Jia Jia squeezed her left wrist with her right hand and realised that she had forgotten to pull up her sleeve to reveal the jade bracelet that she was wearing. It had been a wedding present from her father. That morning, she had checked three times to make sure that she had remembered to put it on, so that when she poured tea for him, he would be able to see it circled around her pale wrist, pine green and translucent. But she had forgotten about it entirely.

  She tried to remain composed and courteous, but she must have reacted in some way; her father was looking around uneasily at the waitresses and customers who had turned to look at their table.

  ‘You what?’ she asked.

  ‘We got married in December. I’m sorry we didn’t tell you, I didn’t think it was a good moment.’

  Jia Jia searched her mind desperately for something to say, something that would not blow up this dinner, that would not drive her father away from her. But she suddenly could not stop thinking about her mother, the way she’d lain in the hospital bed, pale and hopeless like a white flower petal that had been tweezed off its stem.

  ‘Do you have Ma’s bronze dragon?’ was what she finally managed to say.

  ‘Dragon?’ he asked, still absent-mindedly looking down at the menu while unfolding his reading glasses.

  ‘Never mind.’

  Jia Jia poured a cup of tea for herself and reached for her chopsticks as the waitress placed the appetisers between her and her father. She attempted to pick up a peanut. Her chopsticks kept failing her, though she had always been skilful at using them. Beautifully elegant with perfect technique, a friend of Chen Hang had once said. What was the matter with her today? The more she dropped the peanut, the stronger her desire to pick it up. Finally, she managed to bring it to her mouth and put it in.

  Silence descended. Like a well that had suddenly gone dry, Jia Jia could think of nothing more to say to the man sitting in front of her.

  ‘I should leave,’ she said and got up from the table.

  She rushed past all the square tables, the signs for the bathroom, the round tables and the reception desk. Not once did she look back at her father, but she could see him, sitting there alone, and the old couple sitting next to him who were observing what might have been the most curious event of their day.

  Someone bumped into her shoulder, apologising. Jia Jia looked up and saw Xiao Fang. She focused on the face of this person whom her father considered to be a ‘good woman’, trying to read what was on her mind.

  ‘Jia Jia! Are you looking for the bathroom?’ Xiao Fang said. This face, too, had aged since they went fishing, years ago.

  ‘Have you, by chance, seen a bronze dragon in my father’s home? It’s about this big.’ Jia Jia held out her hands and indicated that the object was around the size of a big coffee cup. Before Xiao Fang could answer, Jia Jia found she could not look at her face any more. This woman who was here, and her mother who was gone. She lowered her head again and marched down the escalator.

  Back at her grandmother’s house, Jia Jia crawled under the bedcovers and imagined her father and Xiao Fang sitting at the round table in the corner of the Shanghainese restaurant, devouring a plate of braised pork belly. They were effortlessly in sync, becoming one another, like Leo’s parents. They were on the opposite shore of a deep river that Jia Jia could not cross, on an island that had no space for her. Tears came in waves, her throat tight with a strangling pain, and she held her left hand, still wearing the jade bracelet, over her mouth to cover any sounds that she was making.

  9

  Jia Jia woke with a fear of ageing that left her unable to breathe. She leaned over the basin and stretched the skin of her cheeks with her fingers. Her reflection exposed a few spots that were darkening. She smiled and examined the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and thought for a moment that she saw them stretching away, like grapevines. She stormed out to a nearby mall and spent over one thousand yuan on anti-ageing cream, anti-ageing serum and anti-ageing face mask. She also wanted to buy an eye mask, but finally decided against it.

  She returned to the apartment and charged past the living room where her grandmother was feeding the surgeonfish and clownfish in the aquarium. The tank was much taller than the old woman, who stood on a small plastic stool to reach her arm above the rim. Jia Jia thought about helping her. But instead she went into the bathroom, washed her face, spread half a bottle of face mask over her skin like butter, sat on the toilet seat and waited.

  For the entire night following her catastrophic meeting with her father, she had kept her phone next to her pillow, the volume turned up, and waited for him to call and take back what he had told her, as if there could have been a chance that he had lied about his new marriage. But he never did. How typical of him not to think of her, Jia Jia thought. The card that Qing had given her, from the gallery, was still untouched on her bedside table, next to the fish-man sketch. None of that – the gallery, selling paintings, her art – seemed important, and she had failed her friend, who must have tried so hard to find her a gallery that was willing to meet her. But Jia Jia felt so tired. Everything she touched seemed to bounce away from her with stronger force.

  She washed off the mask after exactly fifteen minutes and went back to her room.

  ‘The biggest mistake people make is keeping it on for too long,’ the salesperson had warned her. ‘It’ll actually extract moisture from your skin.’

  She applied the rest of the skin products to her face and felt a little more at ease. Then she directed her attention to her fish-man paintings, taking them out one by one from the cardboard box and studying them. These paintings could hardly be considered art, she decided, and took them downstairs and stuffed them into the rubbish bin outside. There was just one that she wanted to keep. It was, objectively, the worst painting in the box, but there was an honesty and plainness about it that she wanted to preserve. Perhaps it resembled Chen Hang’s sketch the most. It did not look like an oil p
ainting – it had no background and no layering, just the body of a fish in the middle of the canvas, painted in greyish strokes that looked like diluted ink. Even the outline of the body was not precisely contoured, as if the fish was somehow emerging and disintegrating at once.

  She set the painting on an easel and sat on her bed, trying to visualise its face. She could not go forward any more, not like this. She was going nowhere like this. It was as if she had begun a story with the fish-man long ago, before she could remember, something that had pushed her off her axis, something that demanded an ending now. She had to see the fish-man for herself, to be able to fill out that empty oval on the canvas. For a moment she thought she saw the oval expanding, like a hole that, if left untouched, would ultimately eat up the entire work. The more she stared at it, the more certain she was that she had to finish the painting. But the news of her father’s marriage occupied her mind, and she could not concentrate. She had to leave this stifling, yellowing room. She thought about how Chen Hang would take himself away when he needed to. She wondered if she too might go to Tibet.

  That afternoon, Jia Jia picked up her phone, scrolled through her contacts list to find Chen Hang’s travel agent, and was relieved that she had not deleted her number. The idea of getting away for a few days had given her some energy.

  ‘I want the same itinerary,’ she told the woman on the phone. ‘I would like to stay as close as possible to the hotels where he stayed, but cheaper ones.’

  ‘I will certainly check and see if we can arrange that,’ the woman said. Her tone reminded Jia Jia of the announcer on the subway. Jia Jia held the phone between her ear and shoulder as she scribbled with a sketching pencil into an old beauty magazine.

  Day 1: Arrive in Lhasa

  Day 2: Potala Palace. Johang Jokhang Monastery (walk around three times)

  Days 3–5: Nyingchi

  Days 6–7: Guide’s home. DREAM HERE.

  Day 7 and after: TBD. Depends on fish-man.

  ‘I also want the same guide,’ Jia Jia said. ‘I don’t know his name though.’

  ‘I will check to see if he is available. Would you not like to see Namtso Lake?’ the woman said. ‘At this time of the year, it should be—’

  ‘No, thank you. That’s it for now.’

  To accommodate the guide’s schedule, Jia Jia’s arrangements would not be finalised until two weeks later.

  Now that she had a plan, she felt up to going through her unread messages from the night before. Maybe her apartment had been sold at a decent, fair price. Maybe there was somebody who did not know about Chen Hang dying in that bath, or somebody who did not care.

  Most of the messages were adverts, but there was indeed a message from her agent, who urged her to ring him immediately. Ms Wan had also sent a text expressing her and her husband’s concern for Jia Jia’s health.

  ‘Whatever the illness is,’ Ms Wan wrote, ‘it will all be all right in the end. You have good karma.’

  Further down the list, amongst all the junk, she was surprised to see Leo’s name. It was a short message.

  ‘Come when you can,’ his message said. ‘I have a new wine for you.’

  Jia Jia called her estate agent first.

  ‘Ms Wu,’ he began, without giving Jia Jia a chance to speak. ‘You need to understand, I’m trying to do my job but you’re not cooperating. I was just being honest with you about your apartment’s situation, you see? Ms Wu, I’m just hoping to do the best I can for my clients.’

  ‘Are you finished?’ Jia Jia asked coldly. ‘I have a beautiful apartment in a beautiful area. And you’re telling me that nobody wants to live there? I don’t believe you. Call me when you have something new to say.’ She hung up.

  Jia Jia looked at Leo’s text again and checked the time. It was almost noon. Outside the window, willow catkins raided the air, each seed in search of some piece of soil that it could claim as its own.

  She and Leo had not spoken since the night of firework skies, in February, when it was still cold. She remembered the fireworks. How beautiful they were. She remembered how she had looked that day, in the orange dress. Immediately she felt nervous. How could she have aged so much in so little time? If she stood naked in front of Leo, would he still want to touch her? She took off her clothes and looked in the mirror. She had lost weight, making the skin on the undersides of her arms look flaccid. She ran her fingers down her neck and tried to focus her attention entirely on what her fingertips were feeling. She wanted her hands to feel in the way that someone else’s might. The skin on her shoulders was dry, her breasts were still small, her waist was thinner and her hips were less shapely than she had remembered. She pulled up a chair in front of the mirror and sat with her legs open. She traced her index finger softly from her birthmark to her pubic hair to her clitoris, and found reassurance in the softness and warmth of what she felt. She decided that her body was still desirable.

  She picked out some evening clothes and waited for the western sun.

  Leo was showing a couple to their table when Jia Jia pushed open the door. She was wearing a grey dress with a leather jacket in the same colour. She had lost weight, Leo thought. He had not known that she was coming; had not realised how much he had hoped to see her until he sent that message and began to wait for a response. Now that she was sitting on her usual stool in front of him, he seemed to miss her even more. Her hair hung loose and swayed against her back when she moved, like a calligraphy brush.

  ‘I’m sorry I haven’t responded to your message,’ she told him.

  Leo mixed and served the drinks for his other customers and stopped at the cellar on his way back to the bar. He took out the bottle of white wine that he had intended for Jia Jia, a gift from an old friend who had visited from Tokyo.

  ‘I’ve saved this wine for you,’ he said. ‘Japanese wine. You can’t find this in Beijing.’

  ‘That’s very kind, really,’ she said. ‘That you’ve kept me in your thoughts. I said terrible things.’

  ‘What are you talking about?’

  ‘To you. I said terrible things to you.’

  ‘I should be the one apologising. But never mind now, I’m glad you’ve come.’ It was true, he was delighted, and he was also truly sorry for what had happened that night.

  ‘I’ve moved out, to my grandmother’s place.’ She took a sip of the wine and Leo waited for her reaction. She seemed to have expected it to taste differently but she did not appear displeased.

  ‘What did you do with that horse painting? The one above your sofa,’ Leo said.

  ‘I took it with me. It’s taking up a lot of space. Will you forgive me for the terrible things I said?’

  ‘Perhaps I should have thought it all through before doing something so rash.’

  ‘I was happy to have met your parents.’

  The image of Jia Jia sharing those stories of her mother came to Leo’s mind – her dark eyes glowing like pebbles in a clear stream.

  ‘Your mother,’ he said. ‘Where is she?’

  Jia Jia gave the question a moment of thought. Looking away, she answered in a low voice, ‘A better place, maybe.’

  Then she seemed to remember something and reached into a paper bag that she had brought with her.

  ‘Have you been to Chongqing? My mum bought this from Chongqing, years ago.’ She lifted a small lantern out of the bag. ‘I thought it would look nice in your bar.’

  The oval lantern must have been bright orange when it was new, but the paper had turned a little browner now, lending it a more muted charm.

  ‘I can’t take it,’ Leo said.

  ‘Oh … will you not accept it then? I just can’t bear to see it hanging in my old room, so lifeless and sad,’ she said.

  A man caught Leo’s attention as he walked up to the counter. He finished his drink and put his empty glass down.

  ‘Ms Wu, good to see you here,’ the man said.

  His appearance startled Jia Jia.

  ‘I apologise for my tone durin
g our call, Ms Wu, I may have been a bit pessimistic,’ the man continued. ‘I have managed to find a tenant for you this afternoon. The rent they’ve offered is not as high as other apartments in your compound, but it’s not too bad either. I think you’d be happy.’

  ‘This is my estate agent,’ Jia Jia said to Leo.

  ‘Nice to meet you.’ The man held out his hand. Leo shook it firmly and told Jia Jia that he would keep the lantern for now, then excused himself from the conversation. He stepped outside the bar for a moment and looked up at Jia Jia’s building across the road. He counted the floors and found her bedroom window. He remembered the last time the light had been on, just over a week ago; he had wondered where she had been.

  When he returned, the agent had rejoined his date, leaving Jia Jia observing the lip prints on her wine glass.

  ‘Tell me, since when did we become such strangers?’ she said to Leo, still keeping her eyes on the glass.

  ‘We never became strangers. We always were.’ He sighed softly – a resolute, solid sigh.

  ‘I see that you’re still upset with me,’ she said.

  He imagined her in a village above the clouds, overlooking the world that he lived in. Her eyes saw everything yet focused on nothing in particular.

  ‘Do you ever feel that sometimes, when something happens to you,’ she said, her index finger tapping on the wine glass, ‘something deep inside you changes? You can’t undo it, and you wonder whether this is the person you want to be. So you just stay, contemplating whether you like your new self until something else happens to you and you start the process all over again. Ever feel that way? If I had met you before I married Chen Hang—’

  Leo dropped the dirty glasses he was holding into the sink, making a loud clank and interrupting Jia Jia. ‘Don’t you think that sometimes we just need to love in the simplest way possible?’ he said.

  Jia Jia focused her attention fully on him for the first time that night. He saw a sudden influx of emotion in her gaze. Her eyes were black, so black, and Leo thought that he had never seen such wonderful, sorrowful eyes.