A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (10 page)

physical
 
 
adj.
1.
of the body, as contrasted with the mind or spirit;
2.
of material things or nature;
3.
of physics.

physical work

For six days now London really hot. Suddenly people almost nudes in street and sit about on grasses chatting. Mrs. Margaret changed to beige suede sandals. I can’t concentrate her lessons in the heat.

Hotness make you unhappy because you must drive van like oven.

I see you always disappear with that white van. A very old van with a side door sunken and another side door cannot close
properly
, unless you kick it violently. The front and the back windows always covered by thick dust. It is a peasant van, or a working-class van.

The van is your business method to earn money via delivering goods. You say you can get this job only because you have got a big van.

You drive whole day in that van for delivering. The goods are for somebody’s birthday, party, ceremony, wedding, or any day someone has excuse to consume the money.

You drive from 7 o’clock early morning, till late night. You drive seven days a week. Every day on the road, on those roads towards middle-class big family houses.

You come back home in the dark, without any energy left. Life suddenly becomes bit boring. I find you are a physical man, a labourer, using your hands to survive. While lots people in this world just need use fingers to earn living by clicking computer keyboard.

I never see you sell the sculptures. Nobody want buy a suffered and twisted statue, I guess. If they do, they maybe buy a female nude statue. Once I saw you were making a wooden swimming pool model, as the advertisement for Red Bull company. Another time I saw you were making a huge telephone model for Vodaphone. I heard you saying “it looks ridiculous,” “it is so tacky” while you were making these things. But you got paid. Then one day you stop getting these kinds job. I don’t know why.

“You always say physical work makes people happier, but you are not happy now.” I make some tea and salad for you. It is so late.

“I am too tired. That’s why…” You sit on the chair, by the kitchen table. You hair is messy, covered by the dust.

“Physical work doesn’t do any good,” I say.

“But at least you don’t worry about living.” You sip the tea, the tea is sucking your energy.

“For me mental work better than physical work,” I say. “Nobody wants physical work. Only you, and my parents.” I put the salad bowl in front of you.

You start to eat salad, and the room goes quiet. The white cabbage is very crunchy, and the red carrots are hard too. Your teeth are trying to grind them into pieces. Your face looks uneasy.

In my hometown, we don’t use these two words:

Physical work / mental work

All the work is called “
”—scavenge the living. Making shoes, making tofus, making plastic bags, making switches…All these works rely on our bodies. And bodies earn our living back. Now I come to abroad studying English. And I do that with my brain. And I know in the future I earn living from my brain.

You insist physical worker better than intellectual.

“An intellectual can have a big brain, but a very small heart.”

I never heard before that. Why you think of that?

“I want a simple life,” you say. “I want to go back to the life of a farmer.”

Intellectual: “
”(zhi shi fen zi)

“
” mean knowledge, “
” mean molecule. Numerous molecule of knowledge will make up man knowledgeable.

In China, intellectual is everything
noble
. It mean honour, dignity, responsibility, respect, understanding. To be intellectual in China is splendid dream to youth who from peasant background. Nobody blame him, even in Culture Revolution time and seemed these people suffered, but really was time for them having privileged to being re-educated, get to know another different life.

So if you don’t want to be intellectual, then you a Red Guard too, like Red Guards who beat up intellectuals during Culture Revolution. A Red Guard who living in the West.

I never thought I would like a Red Guard, but I like you. I am in love with you, even if you say you not intellectual.

I not intellectual either. In the West, in this country, I am barbarian, illiterate peasant girl, a face of third world, and irresponsible foreigner. An alien from another planet.

isolate
 
 
v.
to place apart or alone;
chem.
obtain (a substance) in uncombined form.

isolate

You are not at home again. You have so many social contacts, so many old friends need to see and chat, so many ex-lovers live in the same city as well, and I don’t know anybody in this country. I am alone at home. Dictionary checking, checking dictionary…I am tired of learning words, more new words, everyday. More exercise on tense, make a sentence on the past participial tense, and make a sentence on past conditional tense…So many different tenses, but only one life. Why waste time to study?

The garden outside is quiet. The leafs are breathing and figs are growing. Bees are beeing around the jasmine tree. But I feel lonely. I look that male nude statue under the fig tree. He is still facing down, like always. An enigma. Totally an enigma. Whenever I go to the modern museum, like Tate Modern, I never understand those modern sculptures. I hate them. They seem don’t want to communicate with me, but their huge presence disturb me.

The house is empty. Is the loneliness an emptiness?

I remember my grandmother always recite two sentences from the Buddhist sutras:

She explains it means the emptiness is without form, but the form is also the emptiness. The emptiness is not empty, actually it is full. It is the beginning of everything.

So far, I don’t see the emptiness is the beginning of everything. It only means loneliness to me. I don’t have a family here, and I don’t have a house or a job here, and I don’t have anything familiar here, and I only can speak low English here. Empty.

I think the loneliness in this country is something very solid, very heavy. It is touchable and reachable, easily.

The loneliness comes to me in certain hours everyday, like a visitor. Like a friend you never expected, a friend you never really want be with, but he always visit you and love you somehow. When the sun leaves the sky, when the enormous darkness swallow the last red strip in the horizon, from that moment, I can see the shape of the loneliness in front of me, then surround my body, my night, my dream.

Something missing, something lost in my life, something which used to fulfill in my China life.

We don’t have much the individuality concept in China. We are collective, and we believe in collectivism. Collective Farm, Collective Leadership. Now we have
Group Life Insurance
(
) from the governments as well. When I was in middle school, we studied
Group Dancing
. We danced with 200 students as part of the school lesson. We have to dance exactly the same pace and the same movement in the music. Maybe that’s why I never feel lonely in China.

But here, in this place in the West, I lost my reference. And I have to rely on my own sensibility. But my sensibility toward the world is so unclear.

I take out one a book from your shelf, Frida Kahlo. That Mexican woman artist. It is a picture album of her painting, her life, and her terrible illness, being disabled after the bus accidents. So many self-portraits. I thought one painter only does one of these in his life, like one person only have one gravestone. But Frida Kahlo has so many self-portraits, as if she died many many times in her life. There is one called
Self-Portrait with Necklace of Thorns
. She has the sharp and heavy eyebrow like two short knives; her eyes like black shining glass. She has the thick dark hair like a dark forest; the necklace of thorns climbing on her neck. There is a black monkey and black cat sitting on her shoulder.

The impression on her face is so strong. I learn that she had to plant metal in her body so that to support her survive from disable. I feel my heart is being penetrated by the thorns she painted. I feel painful.

When I put down Frida Kahlo, I think of you. You love the heaviness of life. You like to feel the difficulty and the roughness. I think you like to feel the weight of the life. You said you hated IKEA, because furnitures from IKEA are light and smooth.

I walk to the garden, staring at your sculptures again, one by one, carefully, attentively, thinking of you with my new eyes. That naked man, without head, stubbornly faces down towards the ground with twisted huge legs. What makes him so suffering?