I didn’t want to inflict myself on the world any longer.
During the Spring Festival of
1994
, I had a foreboding that my Saining was never going to come back. This hardened my resolve. With scarcely any hesitation, I chose heroin, having been brought to that drug by Saining’s long affair with it. I said to myself, You might as well be dead; you’re finished anyway.
My asthma became increasingly serious, often landing me in the hospital emergency room. I could have an attack at any time, almost without warning, so I always had to have an oxygen bag on hand. Each day’s first suck of heroin threw me into a fit of shaking that never lasted less than fifteen minutes, but I didn’t dare lie down to sleep. Every day, as soon as I awoke, I went looking for my stash. Every day as I awoke I was transfixed by the sight of my own sweat dripping down on my quilt.
The world was vanishing right in front of me. All the better. The best thing about heroin was that it let me drift without end into a dizzying void. I was empty from the inside out. Time sped up, and life and death seemed to dangle high above my head, like two palaces, and there I was, trapped and vacillating in the space between.
Saining had often said he used heroin to help him find a “hallucinatory tranquillity.” I didn’t know what other amazing sensations he got from it, but there was nothing beautiful about my life with heroin. Heroin was a petty thief, stealing everything there was to steal until I found myself with an absolute lack, a lack I had never before experienced. This emptiness gave me a sense of balance. The only meaning in my life was that my life was meaningless. I had never been free before, because until now I hadn’t genuinely understood myself, my life, my body, my loves. Heroin and its frigid world had become the only freedom I could have.
Sanmao couldn’t help me, and in the end he called my parents, who sent me to a rehab clinic in Shanghai.
After being discharged from the clinic, I flew straight back to the South and right back to heroin. Heroin had become as natural to me as breathing. What else was there for me to do except use smack? My first glimpse of my parents had frightened me. They were too normal. I couldn’t be around normal people. They would never be able to understand the emptiness of using heroin or the terror that comes from quitting it. The days without heroin were a blank expanse. If I didn’t have heroin, it didn’t seem as if I could go on living. Life had no content, but I didn’t really want to kill myself either.
I was blind to the light, deaf to sound. I didn’t want to speak to anyone; I was hypersensitive, indolent, messy, and disorganized. My periods stopped, and I lost my appetite. Every night I watched the old black-and-white Cantonese movies they ran at midnight on TV—just the picture, with the sound turned off.
One day I realized that I had lost my voice. I would never be able to sing again for pleasure, just because I felt like it, and once again I told myself, You’re finished; you might as well be dead! And I never sang again, not even in the shower.
Ultimately, heroin brought me strength of a kind: it freed me from my need for music. When I saw that this had happened, I knew for certain that I was completely fucked up.
Blindness guides our blood, from the beginning to the end. Losing control is like a series of conflagrations. The only thing I understand is that I do not understand why our lives are destined to slip out of control.
My good friend Dalong fell in love with a prostitute, and she fell in love with him. The girl used heroin, and Dalong tried to help her quit, but eventually he started using heroin himself. Sometime after that, the girl’s father accused Dalong of kidnapping a minor, and Dalong became a fugitive. He no longer came and set up his shish kebab stall, and he stopped dropping by my place to hang out. Later I heard that Dalong had turned up dead, from some illness, somewhere on the outskirts of town. But I never believed these stories, not even for a minute.
Kitten became a legend. Carrying her packet of white powder, she lured men in and then drugged them, stealing their money. She sought them out in order to destroy them. And after each encounter, she would go home and count the money, tear up their phone numbers, and get high on heroin. The last I heard, she had been locked up in the Women’s Reeducation Center but had escaped. The center was on top of a mountain, and the authorities had closed the pass for three days while they searched for her. Discovered by a local, she’d attempted to bribe him with the five hundred Hong Kong dollars that she still had. He took the money, then took her home and raped her. He raped her all night long and then took her back to the Women’s Reeducation Center, but she didn’t tell the instructors there what had happened. After that, she jumped off a building and injured her back, and she was released for medical reasons. But she never came and looked me up, although I really hoped she would.
All news of Kitten had come to me through Dalong, and after he disappeared, I didn’t hear about her again. None of my old friends came by to see me. I kept thinking I would see them again, and I kept hoping because the street I lived on was still there. Who could have guessed that I would never see any of them again?
The most shocking thing was that Sanmao, who had never given up trying to get me off heroin, started using it himself. Sanmao’s wife told me that he had actually started using after Saining had gone away. We love our men, she said. But our men don’t love us, so they feel bored, and when you’re bored, what else is there to do but take drugs?
Sanmao’s wife asked me not to have anything to do with him for a while.
I often thought that if Saining, Sanmao, Dalong, Kitten, and I could all get together and do heroin once, all together, it would be wonderful, and it might make heroin a little more interesting, or meaningful. Or it might make it even more meaningless—who knows?
I didn’t see any of my friends anymore. I didn’t sing anymore. I was twenty-two years old and dead on the vine.
What else was there to do but take drugs? My life was skidding into darkness at high speed, and I couldn’t stop it, no matter how hard I tried. You could buy needles at any of the little shops in the street below, at any time of day or night. Each and every one of us who lived on that street had been absolutely convinced that we could never become junkies. But we all succumbed in the end. We could never be sure if the heroin we were taking every day was really heroin or not. But our lives had been completely transformed, until we were living like vampires.
1.
Little Xi’an, that was his name. At twenty-one, he was working as a bouncer at a nightclub in the South and had blocked a knife meant for a patron. That cut had changed his life. He was transferred to an illegal gambling den, where he served as the watchman. Born into hardship, he could now wear the best blue jeans, visit prostitutes, and eat red apples every day. He could also send money back home. He considered himself lucky. His job was to monitor the doorbell. When the bell rang, he had to look through the peephole to see who was there, and if it was someone who belonged, he would let them in. But if it was an outsider, he had to question them at length while at the same time signaling the people inside. Each day, huge sums of money traded hands as people’s faces told the ever-changing story of their wins and losses. He took home lots of tips, and sometimes a guest would toss him a whole stack of bills.
One day he was inspecting his knives. He kept them in drawers at the club, five knives in five different drawers. He’d never had to use them, but every day before the gambling den opened, he would check his knives. On this particular day, he opened one of the drawers and found that it was filled with money. The money had been wrapped in newspapers, and he knew that this was the cash they used to open up the gambling house. They’d always kept it in the safe; what was it doing here today? He made a rough count of the bundles and counted forty, give or take, and each bundle must have held ten thousand
yuan.
All in all, from the moment he discovered the money, packed it into a duffel, stepped into the elevator, rode down, stepped outside, and got into a taxi, roughly fifteen minutes elapsed. As he later told Little Shanghai, he did all of this without a moment’s thought, because people in the gambling den were fond of saying that money wasn’t something you earned, it was something you got for yourself. All of the people with money that Little Xi’an knew said the same thing, so Little Xi’an believed it.
He took the cab all the way to Guangzhou, or maybe it was Zhuhai, and he checked into the best hotel in town. He thought he ought to shed his old identity completely; he thought he needed a companion, a woman. After some consideration, he made a phone call. He called at least four girls, but each one of them had some excuse or other and turned him down.
The last thing I heard was that he’d been caught by some thugs who’d been sent by the boss of the gambling den, and that he’d been shot and killed. But by the time they’d got to him, he was broke.
Not long after that, the gambling parlor was shut down, and everyone who’d worked there dropped out of sight. I never saw any of them again.
2.
Little Shanghai was her name. Like Dalong, she came from the poorest section of Shanghai and was nothing like Qi, who’d lived on Huaihai Road in the French Concession. Little Shanghai was simpleminded, had never been to school, liked men, liked to sing, and was a very dedicated and hardworking prostitute.
Her first boyfriend made her go through two abortions before he finally dropped her. She tried to commit suicide, and it was the kind of suicide where she really did want to die, but he still didn’t want her. All she wanted was a man—a real boyfriend. Another man came into her life. He was older, and his face bore what looked like knife scars, and you could tell at a glance that he had a bad stomach. He had no eyelashes. He said he was in the woolen sweater business in the South; he said that he wanted her because she was only nineteen, because she was pretty.
She felt loved, and it made her lose her head. He bought her many nice things, although the truth was that there was nothing she lacked. Her parents had opened a small business, and she was the youngest child in the family, so she didn’t need money. What she didn’t have was love, and that was what she wanted.
One day he told her he wanted to take her to Guangzhou—just for fun, he said. He said that he was going to a trade show there. And so she went, after saying good-bye to her parents, went with him to a guesthouse in Guangzhou. The guesthouse was frequented by drug addicts, pimps (what the Shanghainese called “chicken heads”), counterfeit-watch makers, and drug dealers. All of the rooms seemed to be connected, and there were lots of people crowded together in these rooms, and many of the floors were covered with bedrolls. Little Shanghai’s boyfriend said to her, I spent fifteen years in prison, so you’d better do as I say, and I’m telling you I want you to be a “chicken.” I know everything there is to know about your family, and if you refuse me, I’ll make your lives a living hell. I’ll tell everyone you’re a whore. But if you do as I say, I’ll protect you. I’ll find a good place for you to do business, and when you’ve earned enough, we can go back to Shanghai together. We can set up a business of our own and get married.
A lot of men from Shanghai brought their girlfriends here on exactly this pretext. These men all dressed alike, in double-breasted suits the same pale green as pickled vegetables, all with identical gold-colored buttons. Each of these men in suits had spent a decade in prison, and each one of them had a face that betrayed a bad stomach. Even though all of the girls were marketable, not every girl who’d been convinced to sell her body would succeed at it. You had to have a natural talent, a vocation for selling your body. Some girls were born with the ability to sell their bodies, and some were not. The Shanghai girls these men scouted out were hungry for prestige, highly marketable, and yearning for a man they could depend on. Little Shanghai was no exception, and she couldn’t escape, and that was how she entered a life where day becomes night and night becomes day.
He brought her to a restaurant here in this city, where they watched the other men’s women picking clients, making lots of money, and referring to their own pimps as their
laogong,
their “old man.” This brought out her competitive nature. Three weeks later she had gone to work.
Every night we watched her riding the hotel elevator, up and down, up and down. There was an illegal gambling parlor in the hotel basement, and where there’s gambling, there are prostitutes. It’s a custom in Guangdong: when you’re done gambling, win or lose, you call a prostitute. Otherwise it’s bad luck. Little Shanghai in the elevator, a condom hidden in her underwear, kept a running tally in her head. Each john was equal to five hundred
yuan.
She had a good feel for numbers, but money left her cold, and after every trick she went back to the room she shared with her
laogong
and turned the money over to him. She never saved any money.
That elevator was her world, and I remember it as the window on her life. She always wore a red short-sleeved wool sweater; she called it her uniform. She would stand in the corner of the elevator, right by the buttons, as if she were the elevator girl. She had soulful black eyes and a man she called
laogong,
and she thought she loved him. She had given him her heart. All she had wanted was a man, and now all she wanted was him. She would do anything for him, and besides, now that she was a prostitute, nobody else would ever want her anyway. Her love was in her heart, not in her body. She had always been that way. The man who was with her right now was pathetic, and the one before him hadn’t been much better, but it didn’t matter.
Every kind of prostitute worked in this town. There were streetwalkers standing by the road; there were girls who only worked in hotel rooms, girls who plied their trade in nightclubs, and call girls who wouldn’t go out unless they got a phone call. There were the girls who lived off of a few wealthy patrons (not that they considered themselves prostitutes), and there were others who slipped past immigration to Hong Kong and Macao and only worked there. Little Shanghai was one of the less expensive prostitutes, one of the ones who turned many tricks each night. She was only a little more pricey than the girls on the street.