Chenxi and the Foreigner (5 page)

She also knew that, while her father put up a very good pretence at being overjoyed to have his eldest daughter staying with him, she was a daily reminder of those family problems, that unfinished business. And there was nothing he claimed to hate more than a job unfinished.

Anna arrived at the entrance of the bustling market. The stench of the creek mingled with the odours of livestock and manure. She passed a weathered farm girl selling persimmons from a frayed mat and offered her a tentative smile. The young woman jumped up, grabbing a handful of the ripe fruit, and trotted behind Anna, jabbering loudly. A set of brass and leather scales was balanced on her forefinger. Anna shook her head but the woman ran back and forth, adding more and more persimmons into the metal bowl. Anna kept shaking her head and smiling. The woman, mistaking this for some complicated bargaining game, gave up with a frustrated shout.

Peasants snoozed on top of cartloads of watermelons and cabbages, or squatted beside woven straw mats where a few damaged tomatoes were displayed. School children with red scarves around their necks were chewing on long sticks of sugar cane. When they had sucked the juice dry, they spat out the woody pulp. A young man by a cart scraped off the knobbly purple skin with a huge cleaver and handed more glistening white canes to the children. The juice dribbled down their chins. Anna felt hot and thirsty, but she didn't have the courage to mime and point in front of the crowd to ask for a piece of sugar cane. Already the children were looking up and nudging each other, calling out, ‘
Wai guo ren
!
Wai guo ren
! Foreigner! Foreigner!'

She turned and stumbled through the fish market.

Fish in plastic tubs writhed and thrashed or bobbed limply in the water. A crowd had gathered around a housewife bargaining for a turtle. The turtle's legs were bound with raffia and it hung upside down from a scale-spattered fist. Its pointed head bobbed in and out of the folds of its neck like the tip of a small boy's penis.

As she passed tubs of eels, Anna stared, repulsed but fascinated: the fishmonger took them live and thrashing, pressed their heads onto a nail in a wooden board, then slit them open, and peeled their intestines from them.

The road became darker and stickier. Hunks of meat dribbled on stone tables. Carcasses with bones like mother-of-pearl hung from hooks. Old women squatted beneath them, shovelling rice into their mouths from tin bowls and waving flies from the congealed blood.

The heat suddenly became too much for Anna. Her head felt light. She shuffled forward, trying to keep her eyes ahead, but they were drawn magnetically to the festering charcuterie. She was reminded of the time in Australia with her family, sitting in the back of a hot car in a traffic jam, as they approached the flashing lights of a road accident. She willed her eyes not to turn and gawk, as all the others in the safety of their cars were doing. She told herself she didn't need that perverse voyeurism. But at the last moment, just as her father ground up a gear to pass the twisted metal and shattered glass, her eyes flicked to the side as if of their own accord. The whole scene was scorched into her mind, the black, the blue and the red.

The only thing that kept her from fainting right there in the marketplace was the thought of waking up in all that blood and filth.

When she arrived at the college grounds Anna was relieved the students weren't back from lunch. It was now twelve-thirty. She hadn't thought to ask what time the afternoon classes began. Inside the cement building it was cooler. How could it be so hot when there appeared to be no sun? Every day since she arrived had been humid, but the sun never broke through the grey clouds. And it was still only spring! Anna pictured Shanghai from above, simmering away like a pressure-cooker under its dome of pollution.

Dragging herself up the echoing stairwell, she prayed that the classroom would be empty so she could rest her head on her desk. She was now feeling ill. Perhaps she would catch a taxi to the apartment and her air-conditioned bedroom. She could even get an earlier flight home. A month was a long time to stay in a strange country. It wasn't as if she was really going to learn anything at the college. How could she when she spoke no Chinese? She couldn't even make friends. The only person who spoke English was Chenxi and he was clearly not interested in her.

That's what she would do: stay a couple of weeks and then go back to Australia and hang out with her friends until university began. She had already deferred the first year of her studies through pure indecision, fooling around in and out of sales jobs until her father suggested she come to stay with him for a while. To have some ‘serious talks' about her future.

Anna suddenly experienced the sickening feeling of wasting time. She didn't know which felt more pointless: her ridiculous crush on Chenxi or her fruitless desire to study painting. Either way, her father wouldn't have to persuade her. She would definitely be ready to go to university next year.

7

Chenxi was pressed up against the wall. He had finished working on one part of the paper and was now on a stool reaching for the top corner. Layer after layer of brush strokes, building up a gradual blackness. Waves of grey rippling around him, a series of indentations sharpening in contrast.

In the top right corner, drips of ink bled into the porous rice paper, pale grey spatters like the speckles of a hen's egg. Below this area were dark black slashes of dry brushstrokes over wet, pointing upwards and inwards like a ragged mountain peak or perhaps even an exposed ribcage. The corner that Chenxi painted was a combination of soft grey brushstrokes and dark wet dribbles of black ink—matted hair or foliage, it was impossible to tell.

He never paused to inspect his work. It grew beneath him of its own accord, breathing, taking life under the gentle encouragement of its creator. Each stroke of the brush like the unearthing of an archaeological treasure. There was nothing familiar about his abstract melding of shapes and shades, but it was as harmoniously complete as the work of any Master, from East or West.

Chenxi stood back. Lao Li opened his eyes groggily and glanced at him from his chair tilted up against the windowsill. ‘You finished?'

‘There's someone at the door,' Chenxi said without taking his eyes off his work.

Lao Li looked over and, sure enough, the foreigner was peering in through the glass. ‘How did you know?' Lao Li said, getting up to let her in.

‘She's been there for a while. I wondered how long it would take her to find her way back.'

Lao Li unlocked the classroom door and let Anna in. Chenxi began pulling the pins out of the huge sheet of paper tacked to the wall.

‘Wait,' said Anna. ‘Can I look at it?'

Chenxi shrugged and pushed the pins back in.

Anna sat on the end of her desk. She looked at it again, without the screen of the dusty glass.

Chenxi leaned against the wall, his arms crossed tight over his chest. ‘What you think?' he said.

Anna squinted and chewed at the inside of her lip. ‘I think if you want to give the impression that the foreground is separate from the background you need to darken that circular bit there…'

Chenxi turned in surprise.

‘Or otherwise that middle strip needs to be lighter. No, I think darkening that bit would be more effective, don't you?' She looked over at Chenxi. His mouth was gaping. Lao Li was watching them and grinning.

‘Er…yes. That what I think before. I do not know if better have darker or lighter…'

‘That's only my opinion,' Anna added. ‘Otherwise, I think it's truly beautiful. It's so serene and at the same time full of energy…'

‘Serene?'

‘Tranquil. Calm. Peaceful.'

Chenxi nodded.

‘That little rippling bit over there is what brings the whole work together…' Anna went to inspect it more closely. It seemed to vibrate in front of her.

Chenxi moved towards her. He cleared his throat. ‘I not sure about this part. Maybe too much?'

Anna stepped back a little. ‘No, it's good. You've just been working on it too long. You have to put it away and bring it out again in a few days to look at it with fresh eyes. It's really lovely, Chenxi. When you work out that foreground and background bit, it should be finished. It will be completely harmonious.'

‘Harmonious?'

‘Balanced. Equal. Er…you know, like two opposites that can't exist without the other.'

Chenxi smiled. ‘You mean like yin and yang?'

This time it was Anna's turn to look puzzled.

‘Yin and yang. Night and day. Woman and man…'

‘That's right!'

Chenxi turned to Anna and for the first time looked her straight in the eye. ‘Mmm. You give me good compliment,' he said, and it seemed an immeasurable time passed before he looked away again.

Anna felt her face burning. She had reached him. She had never expected it to happen this way. Suddenly, when everything had only moments ago felt so wrong, her whole world clicked into place. She held Chenxi's gaze for as long as she dared and imagined herself pulling him into her arms and kissing his honey-smooth face all over. So this is what they mean by finding your other half in life? I am yin and he is yang. She knew now that she couldn't ignore her feelings for him. Her fatalist heart told her this was meant to be.

There was a knock at the door and Lao Li lumbered over to answer it.

Chenxi turned back to the wall and pulled the pins out of his work one by one. He rolled the paper up and put it under his desk. Not once did he look at Anna.

The short moon-faced boy entered. Sensing something different in the room, he looked around suspiciously, then walked over to drag an easel from a corner. Lao Li came to attention, jumped up and did the same. Anna stood, but Lao Li signalled for her to stay put and brought her over an easel. He smiled at her.

‘
Xie xie
,' she tried.

‘
Bu yong xie
,' he answered, this time without laughing. ‘You're welcome.'

Lao Li set up Anna's easel with paper, and when he noticed she had no charcoal he fetched her some of his own. Chenxi busied himself with his own easel, but Anna noticed that he glanced over from time to time.

After the other students had arrived and set up their easels, Teacher Dai walked in with a young peasant woman. She was wrapped in a blue and white batik robe and blushed when she saw Anna. She whimpered something to Dai Laoshi, all the while staring at Anna like a frightened animal, but he patted her shoulder, and sat her down in a large cane chair.

‘She do not want take clothes off with foreign devil in room!' Chenxi whispered mischievously. ‘She's from the countryside. She maybe never seen foreign devil before. She think you eat her...how you say?...inside spirit.'

Soul, Anna thought to herself, and to Chenxi said, ‘Tell her I've drawn lots of nude models in Australia.'

Chenxi smiled and nodded, but didn't translate. Anna didn't mind. She felt they now shared a secret bond that excluded the rest of the class. The thought of it sparked through her like electricity.

She was touched at how mature the boys were with the model. She looked around and saw they had all begun to draw the peasant woman with her dressing gown on. Obviously if the model wanted to stay fully clothed then there was no debate. So Anna began to draw. She hadn't drawn anything for months now, since the end of school, and it took her a while to warm up, but before long her hand loosened, and once again seemed to move of its own accord.

By Anna's third sheet of paper, the young model had fallen asleep in the thick heat of the classroom. Her head lolled to one side and the top of her gown had fallen open, revealing a small creamy breast. Her long hair fanned across her pale chest, black against white. Anna was shading the ripples of the young woman's ribs, when she felt the teacher come up behind her and click his tongue in approval and surprise. She was pleased with how the drawing was coming along.

‘Mmm...
Bu zuo
!
Bu zuo
!' he muttered before moving on.

‘He say, “not bad”', Chenxi whispered from behind his easel.

‘Not bad?' Anna raised her eyebrows, disappointed at the teacher's modest praise.

Chenxi chuckled. ‘In China, teacher never say very good. He just say, not bad! If your teacher tell you
bu zuo
, you are very happy. Only ninety-year-old Master can be
hen hao—
very good! You like all foreigners. Too proud!'

Anna frowned. She wasn't used to this sort of criticism. Unable to hold back her curiosity, she inched over to see Chenxi's work and was struck to discover how ordinary it was.

‘It shit!' Chenxi scoffed.

She had to admit he was right. Especially after what she had witnessed only half an hour earlier. The drawing had no feeling. The proportions were perfect, everything was in the right place, but the woman in the picture could have been anyone. She had no warmth, no distinguishing features, her face was a blank mask, her body that of a statue. Anna was reminded of propaganda posters of happy workers from the USSR in the 1950s. Strong, healthy-looking people, but all identical. Man, woman and child, all done to a formula.

Anna strolled over to where Lao Li was working. Identical. The same picture, just from a different angle. Moonface's picture was much the same again. All perfectly produced factory-line drawings. And the teacher walking around behind them, nodding approval or straightening up a few lines here and there.

The studied unity was sinister. This wasn't a coincidence. Was this a forced style, a compromise? Were the students told to paint this way, or did they merely anticipate what was expected of them?

Looking at Chenxi now, his face vacant as he worked on his sketch, she wondered if she really had glimpsed into who he might be.

Riding home in silence on the back of his bike, Anna thought about how she could ask Chenxi the questions that crowded her mind. As he dodged through the traffic, she pictured them sitting on the ivory silk couch in her father's quiet apartment. She would make him tea and they would sit and chat. They would get to know each other, maybe kiss.