Father said that it had never occurred to him that I might be afraid of that print hanging on our wall. Why didn’t I just look at the world map that was hanging right next to it? Or the map of China? Or my own drawings? Why did I have to look at that picture? At length he asked, Anyway, why were you so afraid of her?
Many other people have asked me this very question, and each time someone asks, I feel that much less terrified. Still, it’s a question I can’t answer. Just as I can’t explain why, from the time I was a very small child and barely able to talk, my father would have chosen to deal with my crying the way he did.
I have never actually taken a good close look at that woman (I’m far too afraid of her to attempt that). Nonetheless, my most powerful childhood memories are of her portrait.
As I grew older, certain ideas became fixed in my mind. Her eyes were like a car crash at the moment of impact; her nose was an order issuing from the darkness, like a ramrod-straight ladder; the corners of her mouth were cataclysmic whirlpools. She seemed to have no bones except for her brow bones, and those bald brows were an ever-present mockery. Her clothing was like an umbrella so massive that it threatened to steal me away. And then there were her cheeks and fingers. There was no denying that they resembled more than anything the decaying pieces of a corpse.
She was a dangerous woman. And I was often in this dangerous presence. I had very few fears, but she terrified me. In middle school history class, I was once startled to look up and find myself face-to-face with a slide projection of this painting. My throat tightened, and I cried out in shock. My teacher reacted by concluding that I was a bad student and making me stand up as punishment. Then he took me to see the assistant principal, who gave me a stern lecture. At one point they went so far as to accuse me of reading “pornography,” like the then-popular underground book
The Heart of a Young Girl.
That was the beginning of my hatred for the man who had painted her. And I started to despise as well all those who called themselves “intellectuals.” My hatred had a kind of purity about it—I would open my heart and feel a convulsive anger pulsing in my blood. I named this sensation “loathing.”
My unalloyed fear of this painting stripped away any sense of closeness I might have felt toward my parents. And it convinced me, all too soon, that the world was unknowable and incomprehensible.
Later I found the strength to deal with my fear. I found it in the moon and in the moonlight. Sometimes it was in rays of light that resembled moonlight, and sometimes I saw it in eyes or lips that were like moonlight. At other times still it was in the moonlight of a man’s back.
When it rains I often think of Lingzi. She once told me about a poem that went: “Rain falling in the spring, / Is heaven and earth making love.” These lines were a puzzle to us, but Lingzi and I spent a lot of time trying to unravel various problems. We might be trying to figure out germs, or the fear of heights, or even a phrase like “Love is a fantasy you have while smoking your third cigarette.” Lingzi was my high school desk mate, and she had a face like a white sheet of paper. Her pallor was an attitude, a sort of trance.
Those days are still fresh in my mind. I was a melancholy girl who loved to eat chocolate and did poorly in school. I collected candy wrappers, and I would use these, along with boxes that had once contained vials of medicine, to make sunglasses.
Soon after the beginning of our second year of high school, Lingzi’s hair started to look uneven, with a short clump here, a longer hank there. There were often scratch marks on her face. Lingzi had always been extremely quiet, but now her serenity had become strange. She told me she was sure that one of the boys in our class was watching her. She said he gave her steamy looks—
steamy
was the word she used, and I remember exactly how she said it. She was constantly being encircled by his gaze, she said. It made her think all kinds of unwholesome, selfish thoughts. She insisted that it was absolutely out of the question for her to let anything distract her from her studies. Lingzi believed that this boy was watching her because she was pretty. This filled her with feelings of shame. Since being pretty was the problem, she had decided to make herself ugly, convinced that this would set her back on the right path. She was sure that if she were ugly, then no one would look at her anymore; and if nobody was looking at her, then she could concentrate on her studies. Lingzi said she had to study hard, since, as all of us knew, the only guarantee of a bright future was to gain admission to a top university.
Throughout the term, Lingzi continued to alter her appearance in all kinds of bizarre ways. People quit speaking to her. In the end most of our classmates avoided her altogether.
As for me, I didn’t think that Lingzi had been that pretty to begin with. I felt that I understood her—she was simply too high-strung. Our school was a “key school,” and it was fairly common for a student at a school like ours to have a sudden nervous breakdown. Anyway, it wasn’t clear to me how I could help Lingzi. She seemed so calm and imperturbable.
Then one day Lingzi didn’t come to school. And from then on, her seat remained empty. The rumor was that she had violent tendencies. Her parents had had to tie her up with rope and take her to a mental hospital.
Everyone started saying that Lingzi had “gone crazy.” I started eating chocolate with a vengeance, and that was the beginning of my bad habit of bingeing on chocolate whenever I’m anxious or upset. Even today, eleven years later, I haven’t been able to break this habit, with the result that I have a very serious blood sugar problem.
I sneaked into the hospital to see her. One Saturday afternoon, wearing a red waterproof sweat suit, I slipped in through the chain-link fence of the mental hospital. In truth, I’m sure I could have used the main entrance. Although it was winter, I brought Lingzi her favorite Baby-Doll brand ice cream, along with some preserved olives and salty dried plums. I sat compulsively eating my chocolates while she ate her ice cream and sweet olives. All of the other patients on the ward were adults. I did most of the talking, and whenever I finished saying something, no matter what the subject was, Lingzi would laugh. Lingzi had a clear, musical laugh, just like bells ringing. But on this day her laughter simply struck me as weird.
What did Lingzi talk about? She kept repeating the same thing over and over: The drugs they give you in this hospital make you fat. Really, really fat.
Sometime later I heard that Lingzi had left the hospital. Her parents made a series of pleas to the school, asking the teachers to inform everyone that Lingzi was not being allowed any visitors.
One rainy afternoon, the news of Lingzi’s death reached our school. People said that her parents had gone out one day, and a boy had taken advantage of their absence. He had brought Lingzi a bouquet of fresh flowers. This was
1986
, and there were only two flower stands in all of Shanghai, both newly opened. That night, Lingzi slashed her wrists in the bathroom of her family’s apartment. People said that she died standing.
This terrible event hastened my deterioration into a “problem child.”
I quit trusting anything that anyone told me. Aside from the food that I put into my mouth, there was nothing I believed in. I had lost faith in everything. I was only sixteen, but my life was over. Fucking over.
Strange days overtook me, and I grew idle. I let myself go, feeling that I had more time on my hands than I knew what to do with. Indolence made my voice increasingly gravelly. I started to explore my body, either in front of the mirror or at my desk. I had no desire to understand it—I only wanted to experience it.
Facing the mirror and looking at myself, I saw my own desire in all its unfamiliarity. When I secretly pressed my sex up against the cold corner of my desk, I sometimes felt a pleasurable spasm. Just as it had been the first time, my early experiences of this “joy” were often beyond my control.
This was the beginning of my wasted youth. After that winter, Lingzi’s lilting laughter would constantly trail behind me, pursuing me as I fled headlong into a boundless darkness.
There was only one teacher I liked at my school. She was very young, and tall and slender. She liked to wear dark glasses, and from day to day she always had the same quiet, unhappy air about her. She taught my class just once, and before starting the lesson, she read us a poem, “I Am a Willful Child,” by the underground poet Gu Cheng. No teacher had ever done anything like this before. Those ten minutes were the only moment of transcendence of my entire high school career—the spirituality of the teacher’s chaste gaze, us listening to the poem, the classroom in the sunlight. A perfect day, a beautiful dream. Over the years, memories of that day have often come back to me, and they have never lost the power to affect me deeply. It was as though I had never been truly moved by anything until that moment.
The term that Lingzi committed suicide I dropped out of school, the only student who had ever left voluntarily. I had set myself free. I was hoping to find some other way to get into university, since I still wanted to go to college someday. But you can’t get into college without graduating from high school.
I came to a conclusion: there was too much bullshit in my life. I didn’t want anyone to bullshit me anymore, and I wasn’t going to bullshit anyone else again either.
After I left school, I was introduced to a black-market booking agent, and that was how I fell into my brief career as a small-time nightclub singer. I love to sing—it gives me a kind of release. I would stand onstage, dressed up in ridiculous
1980
s Taiwan-style outfits, making a big show of acting heartbroken. In those days I drew my eyebrows thick and dark, and I liked the plaintive and torchy Taiwan pop singers Su Rui and Wa Wa.
There was a dancer in our band who was even younger than I was. He had a clear gaze and was rather excitable. The two of us were very close and used to hang out together smoking Phoenix cigarettes. He went by the nickname Bug, but he was actually quite large and didn’t bear the slightest resemblance to a little bug. Bug was a
niezhai
—a “debt of evil”—the illegitimate child of parents who’d been sent down to the countryside during the Cultural Revolution, and he didn’t have a real home of his own in Shanghai.
Once, we had to go to Xining to play a few gigs, and this put Bug in especially high spirits. He hopped down the street as if he were performing his own version of the dance aerobics we all used to watch on TV. Bug had grown up in Xining. He loved the dawn in the Northwest. Sunrise there was more luminous than anywhere else, he said.
On the train to Xining, Bug told me story after story about a friend of his in the Northwest. The friend was called Bailian, “white face,” like the villains in Chinese operas.
Everything in northwestern China was gray, everything except the sky, which was the bluest blue. I met Bailian, who turned out to be not much older than we were. His face was indeed very pale, but I was surprised that someone who had a reputation for having been in so many fights should be so good-looking. He had very dark, vacant-looking eyes and close-cropped, slightly wavy hair. I noticed that he had unusually tiny feet. He invited Bug and me to go to a dance hall with him.
It was
1987
, before there were any discos. There were just dance halls where people could go to waltz and fox-trot, people of all ages. Dance halls in the Northwest were disorderly places, and competition over dance partners often ended in brawls. This struck us Shanghainese as a real novelty.
That night Bailian had a girl with him. She had a classical kind of beauty and appeared to be even younger than I was. Right in front of us, Bailian turned to Bug and asked him to trade partners. I didn’t like this. If he wanted to dance with me, he could damn well ask me directly. Northwesterners acted very differently from us Shanghainese, I noted. But Bug happily agreed to his request, and I decided that I should give Bug some “face” and not embarrass him.
The song Bailian and I danced to was “Auld Lang Syne,” and everyone there was dancing very carefully and correctly, as if this were the door to a new life.
The day after our second gig, Bailian came over alone and asked me to go out dancing with him, just the two of us. I said, Why are you asking me to go dancing? And maybe my tone wasn’t very nice, since I was in a bad mood that day because the band leaders did nothing but argue over how the money should be divided up. Or maybe Bailian just misunderstood what I’d said. In any case, I could see that he was angry. He looked at me and said, Why can’t I ask you to go dancing? And I said, I didn’t say you couldn’t ask; I just asked you why. He said, Are you coming or not? I said, Are you nuts? Where do you get off talking to me like that? He repeated, Are you coming or not?
The whole time, Bailian’s tone remained flat and unemotional, and he didn’t raise or lower his voice. No! I said.
When Bailian had come in, I was lying on the bed in my guesthouse room, reading a book of poetry,
City People.
When I said, No!, I flung the book away.
The next thing I knew, I’d been cut by Bailian’s knife. I didn’t see where he’d taken it from, I didn’t see the blade coming at me, and I didn’t see his hand returning it to wherever he kept it. All I remember seeing was him standing in front of me holding the knife, ashen faced, looking as if he’d pulled a muscle. The really interesting thing was that he wasn’t even looking at me. He was staring out the window.
When he cut me, I went cold all over, and through the pain I was struck for an instant by the sensation that my body was separating from itself, and my spirits soared. Wave after wave of numbness hit me, spreading across my back, my mind went blank, and uncontrollable tears poured from my eyes. I started shaking, and I felt the same way I did when I read certain poems, or sang certain songs, or heard particular stories; but it was even more intense and came on more quickly.