Old Town (26 page)

2.

I
N RELATING THE
difficulties of our own generation’s lives, in the long river of history these twenty or thirty years are a mere blip of time. And in this mere blip of time how many totally different lives have we had? We have been pupae hibernating underground and we have been butterflies fluttering amid the flowering shrubs. From pupae to butterflies, from butterflies to pupae…with each bump of time we pass through an illusory and unfathomable change of human existence. It is impossible for me to say for sure whether we are pupae or butterflies.

I envy my grandparents’ and parents’ generations. They were sustained by a kind of belief their whole lives, whether it was the lifetime of pupa or of butterfly. I also envy the generation after me, the generation of Beibei and those young employees of mine. They don’t have any neat, uniform beliefs or standards. Each one fights solitary battles and takes life as it comes.

I arrived in Beijing. As I stood timidly on the railway platform clutching my university acceptance letter, at that very moment I was merely a pupa newly awakened from hibernation, excited and bewildered in this transformation of my destiny.

The waves of people around me gradually receded and I saw Chaofan…Chaofan, who had been in my every thought, day and night. He stood over there, not far away, but not close either, his arms folded. He appeared calm and self-assured, as if he were pondering some far-reaching course of action. He looked neither this way nor that for the girlfriend from whom he had been separated for so long. Rather, it was as if he had been ordered to the train station to meet a stranger and he was passively there awaiting the stranger to come forward and claim him.

When there were just the two of us left on the platform, and he walked toward me, I could see nothing in his eyes of the passion of a long-awaited reunion. For an instant, I really felt I had been a reckless greenhorn in coming here. When he reached out his hand, I thought he would take me in his arms, but instead he just bent down and picked up my baggage. It was an unwieldy roll of bedding. Grandma had been afraid that I would get chilled to the bone in freezing and snowy Beijing and had someone fluff up a cotton quilt weighing eight
jin
and a mattress weighing six. Scornfully, Chaofan hefted the weight of this roll. “Beijing’s winters aren’t a bit cold. There wasn’t any need to bring such heavy bedding.” I discovered that his pronunciation had also changed. We Old Town people can’t manage those “er” sounds that Beijingers add at the end of some words, and when we try we come across stiff and tongue-twisted.

What kind of a place is Beijing, that in only one year the Chaofan I grew up with could have changed into such a stranger?

I endured it for a long while, but finally I pricked up my courage and asked him, “Chaofan, has your heart changed? Don’t you love me now?”

He laughed as if I were an ignorant child who had asked a grown-up some impossible question. He hooked my arm into his and said, “How could I not love you? It’s just that I understand love differently now. Soon you’ll understand it differently too. You’ll realize that Old Town with all its one thousand years is simply a thousand-year-old mummy—it’s totally dead. So get a good taste of life in Beijing. It’s only in Beijing that you can say you’re living.”

The philosophy of Jean-Paul Sartre was just then all the rage on campus. The philosophy espoused by this old French guy is called existentialism, and to this day I’ve never understood what it goes on and on about or why it should have been so glamorous then. He raised the lid of Pandora’s box in the hearts of the young, and set free all kinds of passions and cravings that feasted themselves wildly like insatiable locusts.

Chaofan lent me a few of Sartre’s books, and
The Second Sex
by Sartre’s mistress, Simone de Beauvoir. Their books really are seductive and beguiling. After I returned the books to him, I never again asked such silly questions such as “Do you love me?” We devoured each other’s young and sexy bodies. Every time we met, it was like a going-away party. We imitated Sartre and his mistress and made no commitments for tomorrow.

Perhaps deep inside I am a conservative person. I had no eyes for any man except Chaofan. I frequently wandered about in the little grove of the campus by myself, all worked up, guessing whether Chaofan had other girls.

After Sartre, I encountered books that even more “departed from the classics and rebelled against orthodoxy,” as some would put it. Reading Nietzsche’s pronouncement that God was dead, I couldn’t help closing the book to deeply reflect on this. My grandfather and Chaofan’s grandfather lived for God all their lives. They were dead now. If their souls are in heaven, would they be sighing deeply at all this?

I lived in Beijing for a period but, unlike Chaofan, I couldn’t categorically say that Old Town was a lifeless old mummy. I missed Old Town’s warmth, its fragrance, and its moods. I missed those childhood days that he and I had spent together.

I suspected that all those books and theories were just gimmicks that he unsuccessfully tried to hide behind. He had changed. That melancholy, concentrated gaze that once so intoxicated me just to think of it, now became evasive, drifting, and projecting the lost bearings and desires of a provincial youth in the big city. When I listened to my professor analyze the lust-driven youth, Julien Sorel, in
The Red and the Black
, I would think of Chaofan.

But I loved him just the same. Just have him appear before me and my reason would totally collapse. I couldn’t imagine losing him. My principles and basic standards kept falling back in complete retreat. I even put up with his endless love games with different girls, since that’s the way Sartre and de Beauvoir had been. They had tolerated each other’s lovers.

Memory is like a virus-infected computer that can no longer form complete pictures. It’s also like an exposed film on which the slightest trace of image has disappeared.

Cut that exposed film—the story’s male and female protagonists have already become an unhappy couple. One summer we were at an open-air café next to the Bay Bridge. I held a thick stack of bills in my hand: Beibei’s school tuition and living expenses, entertainment and travel outlays, dental bills for her braces. At the time, this little bit of money was a mere drop in the bucket for me. But I had crossed the Pacific Ocean to find him and demand repayment of the advances he had gotten from me. Over the many years that he had spent filling in with various bands, he hardly earned a cent and he was without any fixed place to stay. I felt not the slightest sympathy toward him.

“Your daughter…I’ll put it this way, it’s like Beibei and I have no blood relationship. I am just the hired nursemaid or the home tutor.”

“Your daughter’s underbite is serious. She needs a year of teeth straightening. Each month her braces have to be changed and this costs quite a few hundred dollars.”

“I’ve got no money,” he said. “So just let the teeth of a poor man’s daughter stay the way they are. Please tell Beibei that her father in America is a poor artist, and not to think that there’s gold lying all over the place here.”

I said, “‘For thirty years fortune stays east of the river, then thirty years to the west of it’—every dog has its day. Everyone now knows that there’s no gold just for the taking in America, but maybe there is in China now. You ought to go back and take a look at the friends we were close to before. See what kind of a life
they’re
leading.”

Even though I was taking my adversity with a smile as I led the aristocratic life-style of a single person in Beijing, I only had to think of him and I would be filled with resentment and grievances. Many times, I’ve had my head turned by the success of my “great achievements.” At this point, though, if I looked back I would see only my own pain. With a great effort I held my tongue, and swallowed the sharper words I wanted to come out with:
You are one total loser of a man, an irresponsible wrecker. You’ve wrecked Beibei’s and my happiness. You also wrecked your own future
.

He slouched in his seat the whole time, his eyes wandering everywhere but at me. Indeed, I was the last person he wanted to see. The bills in my hand and the resentments in my heart were his golden headache headband.
³³
To see Beibei he had to meet with me. And he loved Beibei a lot.

“I’d like to have Beibei come live with me. As long as I’ve got something to eat she won’t starve.”

I laughed coldly and pointed to a tramp sitting by the water. He had just taken out a piece of sausage from his jacket and was feeding it to his dog. “You want to make Beibei lead your bum’s life, just like that dog?”

He turned around and stared at me. “I never thought you’d change like this. The lowest lowlife’s got more class than you. I’ve got to think up some way to take back my daughter. I can’t let her have bad influences like you in her life!”

And then he dropped a few dollar bills and left in pompous anger.

As I watched him go off, an aching emptiness and desolation overcame me. My work has taken me everywhere and I’ve had lots of experience with people. I had supposed that never again could a man hurt me, but every time I met with Chaofan, I got hurt, badly hurt.

3.

I
F
C
HRYSANTHEMUM INVITES
me to have dinner with her, it means that yet another man has been put out to pasture. The moment that Chrysanthemum fails in love—though she claims not to believe in it—she becomes like a bug that has lost all its internal heat. Even in Beijing’s summer heat, which gives most people rashes, she would scrunch up her shoulders and hunch over like she was warding off the cold, the very image of some pathetically delicate and sickly person. It’s true that ending an affair of the heart is a lot like undergoing major surgery. The man who gets her all worked up then becomes a tumor that’s got to be cut out at all costs. The tumor’s excision drains her of all vitality and she usually needs about three months of careful recuperation to regain it. After those three months, she would again enter all-ablaze into another foray of love.

Normally before dinner, we take a cup of coffee or some other drink. As always, she carelessly stirs the coffee, or whatever it happens to be, with a little spoon, heaving one sigh after the other. “There’s not a single man worth loving.” Lately she has come out with an updated version: “There’s not a single man worth going to bed with.”

The first time I met Chrysanthemum was at a business dinner. After all the food and drink, a group of us set off for a cabaret. While the men were busily cuddling and hugging the gorgeous hostesses, the two of us made an unobtrusive and embarrassed retreat. At that time, Chrysanthemum was in a “recovery period” from a particularly bad wounding. She invited me to have coffee at the revolving Western-style restaurant on the top floor of a hotel. I thought she wanted to talk about our business collaboration but, surprisingly, she launched right into an attack on men. Her sharpness and candor produced a good feeling in me in spite of my surprise.

Along with the updated theory, Chrysanthemum also updates her action. She was already impervious to sword or spear, as if she had girded herself with helmet and armor. As usual, she sat facing me, twirling her coffee. Before saying anything, she laughed and raised her chin in a silly grin. “The moment I woke up there was still a man’s warmth beside my pillow, but I already couldn’t remember what he had looked like!” As she saw it, there were only two kinds of men: those who were worth going to bed with and those who weren’t.

Chrysanthemum is like a blurry mirror. Although there is some degree of exaggeration and distortion, I can make out my own image in it. And so, for this very reason, it was “love at first sight” between us and we became the best of true and trusted friends.

Leaving Beijing is to leave the magnetic field and momentum of our lives. It’s like walking off a movie screen and sitting down in the dark with the viewers on the other side to watch a series on urban women. A lust-filled city and lust-driven women…so many of the details give me goose bumps. As they run wild and hit rock bottom in their search for happiness, as they laugh uproariously and endlessly over their coffee, their scars show through all the makeup.

This woman from Old Town is more than equal to the task of drifting with the tide. But somewhere within she keeps the clear-sightedness of the outsider. At some deep level of her soul there hides a small-town girl who loves to dream. Who had sat at the ancient Eight Immortals table, gazing out foolishly at the rain-soaked streets. And just as in the past, she spins romantic dreams of innocent love and longs to be with her beloved from the days of their childhood games right until white-haired old age.

The wrist of the hand holding Chrysanthemum’s little spoon that’s stirring the coffee forever bears a three-inch-wide silver bracelet. Under the bracelet are three lines of scars, like three little worms flat on their bellies. They are a souvenir of her one brief marriage. She shakes her head as she laughs about the past. “Can you believe it? I was still a real virgin when I got married!” This is as ridiculous as those old wives who even now hoard their grain and pork ration coupons. It was quite by chance that she met the man who made her die a living death. Now she shakes her head more fiercely. “It was really just too ridiculous…to end up being ruined by such an utter bore!” In order to erase history’s branding from her wrist, she has searched everywhere for doctors and medicines, and over the past few years has spent incalculable sums. But she is still going to have to keep relying on the silver bracelet which, “the more it conceals, the more it reveals.”

But, for such women, isn’t all that letting go and gaiety perhaps just a futile attempt at covering up?

I hear the heartbeat of that half-grown girl from Old Town. She is not happy. Since leaving Old Town, she has lost the happiness she had. She is full of anger and resentment at the man who brought her out of Old Town and onto a road of no return.

Why is it that every time I meet with Chaofan I am always so strong and aggressive? Why can’t I just express a woman’s tenderness and longing? Why can’t I release that Old Town girl imprisoned within me, and weep and moan for those trampled and violated feelings?

Right now, I can feel my own weakness. My hardened heart is like a lump of ice in the sunlight, rapidly melting away.