The Wounded Muse

by Robert F Delaney

  “I… wound up here to be closer to movies,” Dawei says. “I was inspired by them when my parents took me to Harbin to visit my aunt and uncle every New Year. Everything about the city was exciting. So many good things in the city but nothing was as exciting as the movies.”

  He pauses, catching himself, wondering if he sounds silly. Will Zhihong see him for the fool he is, like the teachers and classmates in Harbin, the ones who never bothered to help him catch up? He steels himself for that judgement, ready to walk away because… because he doesn’t need to be out this late. Not when he needs rest.

  But Zhihong is smiling genuinely. He wants to hear more.

  “My uncle would take me to see movies. He told me they were filmed in Hong Kong. When I watched them, I got so excited that my hands would clench the armrests for two hours and my fingers always hurt the next day.”

  Zhihong laughs and Dawei feels even more at ease.

  “When things went bad for me in the northeast, all I thought about were the m…m…movies I saw there and I headed this way.”

  Memories of the times Dawei spent in cinemas with Uncle Yiming lead to another: a warm, autumn day in Harbin’s Stalin Park along the Songhua River, where he and uncle played badminton after watching a film. The park was full of families and couples bringing their kids to eat grilled corn and fly kites. Dawei and Uncle had settled onto a bench to eat the steamed buns and poached eggs Aunt Dongmei packed for them. Yiming reclined, head back, looking skyward as he smoked a cigarette. Fulfilled by another cinematic adventure and confident after beating Uncle for the first time, Dawei lay on his back, letting the dancing kites above coax him to sleep. Dawei had, for many years, recognized that moment on the bench along a river running through Harbin as his last carefree moment. He’d often run through that afternoon whenever the heat and humidity of Macau kept him awake in his bunk.

  “I don’t understand how being here, in Macau, would help you,” Zhihong says.

  This comment, so sensible, stings Dawei. It highlights his naïveté. He’d left Harbin abruptly, and with nothing, after trying to make it on his own as an unskilled construction worker. He’d wake before dawn and work well into the night. Dawei’s only break from work was during the Lunar New Year when the others would leave to visit their families and he’d stay in the grimy, unheated barracks.

  Memories of movies made in Hong Kong had sustained him for a while, standing in for all other forms of hope. Honest, strong and handsome leading men succeed; villains are vanquished; justice prevails. The stories and characters loomed so large in his mind, crowding out the reality of his life so completely that he saw no other option but to head south, to Hong Kong, where those much better realities were produced.

  On a rare day off, Dawei sold some construction tools that he pilfered from his site and bought a hard-seat train ticket for Zhuhai.

  “I was stupid,” Dawei finally says. “I thought that if I could find a way to Hong Kong, I could get a job on a set. I would figure things out from there.” He pauses. “I never even made it to Hong Kong. I made it to a kitchen in Macau. Stupid.”

  “You’re not stupid,” Zhihong says. “You’re...determined. You have more guts than I ever had.”

  “But I’m s...s...still washing dishes,” Dawei says. “I...I…” Memories and regret become entangled in his head, making him stutter more than usual. He bangs a fist on the railing to unblock his words. “What good is determination when you’re stupid?”

  Zhihong is quiet. He reaches out slowly and puts his hand on Dawei’s shoulder. “You’re not stupid. I wanted to be in movies too. I thought I’d make a good director but now I’m just a bureaucrat taking orders.”

  Dawei leans more heavily on the railing because Zhihong’s soft grip incapacitates him. No one has touched him since his schoolmates in Yongfu would huddle, arms across shoulders, for warmth or when sharing a secret, or just because that’s what school kids do.

  Zhihong’s touch is different. It liquefies Dawei’s every muscle and sinew so that the only thing holding him up is the railing. Dawei closes his eyes to immerse himself in the vibration that’s taken over. He sees rich colours – midnight blues, blood maroons and forest greens – undulating in velvety textures. And underneath this wash of physical sensations and visions, he feels reassurance. Fearing any move he makes will interrupt this energy, Dawei resists the urge to look at Zhihong. A look might clarify what’s happening between them and that’s a risk he doesn’t want to take. Eye contact might pull them into unfamiliar territory that can’t be navigated. So he remains silent, trapped in ecstatic torture, and looks over the inlet.

  The water represents hope because it’s never fixed. He looked at it for hours when he arrived in southern China, this water that could take him away from the construction sites of the Mainland and the kitchens of Macau. It could take him even further from Yongfu village in the far northeast, where a collapsed roof on the local schoolhouse years ago started a chain of events that led him to a dead end here, on a speck of land full of casinos, mashed-up Chinese and colonial history and people looking to spend great quantities of money that seem to bubble up from invisible springs that Dawei has yet to find.

  “You’re hard working and forthright, Dawei,” Zhihong says. He’s now looking out into the distance. “If I were a director, you’d be my inspiration for the best martial arts saga ever filmed. You’d be my… muse.”

  Zhihong said muse in English. He knows that Dawei wouldn’t know about the mythological beings who, according to Western literary lore, inspire artists. “A muse is like a source of inspiration for artists. A muse helps them produce their best work.”

  The comment comforts Dawei as he keeps his gaze fixed on the water’s surface. He wants to freeze the moment and possess it, to save it inside some solid form that he can wrap up and put in this backpack.

  TUESDAY, March 26, 2007

  Jake wakes up in Qiang’s bed, alone and still in his clothes from the previous day. The sight of Qiang’s desk stripped of everything except a printer and a coating of dust just barely visible in the first light of dawn suffocates any hope that Qiang was taken in only for a warning. He doesn’t know how he’s going to pull himself up, go home to change and then head to the newsroom for another day chasing stories about currency policy rumours.

  Feeling the vibration of a city shifting into a morning rush, Jake lies under the covers of Qiang’s bed, a place where he had often imagined himself waking. But under very different circumstances. Irony weighs on him more heavily than the bed’s thick quilt. Outcomes are never what he wants or expects them to be. Perhaps everything he hopes for is unrealistic.

  The clattering of construction across the street reminds Jake that he can’t stay in bed all day. In a last attempt to escape the reality of what’s happened in the past 24 hours, Jake pulls his knees into a fetal position and buries his head in the pillow, smelling the bitter cocoa scent of unwashed hair. He puts his arms around the pillow and clutches it.

  *****

  Pacing the newsroom with a cell phone to his ear, Jake is trying to find someone who’s heard from Qiang in the past day or so. “Call back if you hear anything.”

  “I don’t know anything else at the moment.”

  “He’s been working on this documentary. The subject matter is a bit controversial.”

  “I’ll get back to you if I hear anything.”

  After all the dead ends, he sits, elbows on knees, hands clutching the phone, looking at the device with senseless anger over how much it has betrayed him over the past two days.

  Frustrated, Jake searches for the email address of a former Beijing journalist named Kendra Monahan who Qiang mentioned was acting as a collaborator on his documentary. Qiang was also assisting on a documentary Kendra is working on about the 1989 crackdown.

  Jake remembers watching Kendra at press conferences. When he started as a reporter in Beijing a decade earlier, Jake was warned to keep her in his sights and follow her as closely as the
newsmakers. She filed the fastest headlines and always got exclusives from corporate executives and government officials in attendance.

  Finding Kendra’s email address at the human rights advocacy group she now works for, Baseline Monitor, he copies the address and pastes it into a new email.

  Dear Kendra,

  I’m a Beijing-based journalist, who you may or may not remember when you worked here. I’m also a good friend of Qiang, who I understand you have been mentoring on a documentary about property development in China. His phone has been switched off ever since he interviewed a subject for the film. That was two days ago. I’ve just come from his apartment to check in on him and he wasn’t there. I let myself in with a spare key he gave me and found that his computer and external drives have been removed. Anyway, I was wondering if you could offer some advice.

  Best regards,

  Jake Bradley, Toeler News, Beijing

  +86 13696548973

  Jake reviews his email and sends it at 5:30 p.m. Kendra is twelve hours earlier in Washington, DC. He sighs and leans back in his chair, rubbing his eyes as he wonders how quickly she might respond, if at all. Perhaps the work she’s done with Qiang is over. Who’s to say whether she wants anything to do with him anymore?

  Flat screen monitors hanging from the newsroom’s ceiling show shaky footage of a suicide bomb that has just been detonated in a Baghdad market, bloodying dozens of people. It’s the top story on every network. Framed with different graphics. The BBC, GlobeCast, Al Jazeera, each one shows the same scenes of carnage with varying in and out points, zoomed in by slightly different degrees, all of them cutting away just before the debris becomes clear enough for viewers to discern lacerated body parts among the pieces of blackened and twisted debris. Local police and U.S. military vehicles kick up clouds of dust. Women in black chadors scream at the sky. With the volume turned down on all of the screens, the hum of the newsroom’s hard drives is the only sound.

  An email from Kendra arrives, breaking the silence with its ping. Jake does a double take when he sees Kendra’s name in his inbox, bold and unread, full of promise, like a Christmas gift.

  Jake,

  This is horrifying. Thank you for letting me know. I’m looking into this now, checking with my sources, and will call you as soon as I have more information. In the meantime, please check with everyone there who knows him (if you haven’t already). Do you have contact details for any of his family members?

  Kendra

  WEDNESDAY, March 27, 2007

  2:00 a.m.

  Jake snaps awake, thinking about an email from a year earlier. The email address. Qiang’s sister’s email address. It’s in the chain. He remembers the subject line: “Super low airfares!” Qiang forwarded the email about promotional airfares to second and third-tier cities like Xining, places stuck behind the development curve where little has changed since Jake first arrived in China in the early 1990s.

  Jake had taken occasional trips to places like Xining and Lanzhou to re-live, in controlled doses, the China that existed in every city when he first arrived. Places where a dozen lamb skewers seasoned with hot pepper and cumin costs only five kuai; where barbers work on the street amid hawkers selling transistor radios and alarm clocks; where shop owners in the back of their stores watch the evening news on jumpy black and white television screens and where the sprawling, state-run guest hotels have broken elevators and six metre wide corridors, threadbare carpets that buckle into tripping hazards, baijiu fumes mix with stale cigarette smoke and where and clocks behind the reception desk that show impossible times like 7:00 a.m. in New York, 3:00 p.m. in London and 3:27 p.m. in Moscow. Threatening and haunted when Jake first stayed in them years ago, these kinds of places no longer exist in Beijing and Shanghai.

  Jake took these trips as a form of time travel. Qiang had accompanied him sometimes, before he became engrossed in his documentary work. Qiang shared Jake’s fascination with China’s not-so-distant past although he viewed it through the lens of someone who had lived there. And so, he encouraged Jake to travel to the past, to take photos and come back with ideas for more documentaries.

  “Book within 24 hours and travel within two weeks and you can enjoy a round-trip airfare of only 400 kuai!”

  Jake remembers the sentence completely, as though some spirit floating above him in the dead silence of nethertime dropped it into his mind.

  Not bothering to put on boxers or a robe, Jake lumbers over to his computer in the spare bedroom, sits on the rough synthetic fabric of his office chair and shakes the mouse to bring the screen to life. He types “Super low fares!” in the search window.

  “Bingo,” he whispers as the email shows up.

  He copies the address and hits “COMPOSE.”

  “Dear Diane, 我是你弟弟的一个朋友… I’m a friend of your brother…”

  October, 2004

  “We’ve decided that the project isn’t commercially viable.”

  The first line of the email punctures Zhihong. He doesn’t bother to read any further. He should have expected this outcome. The production company seemed interested so Zhihong plied the executives with information about what their competitors are planning, the latest data on what’s playing well on the Mainland’s networks and the mood within the party.

  The production company gave Zhihong a small advance for the script. Its subplots hinted at official corruption but were subtle enough. The story runs out of sequence, requiring the viewer to put the pieces together. It wraps science fiction and history around a love story, creating an entirely new genre. Creativity that’s genuinely Chinese. Audiences are ready for this. Zhihong assured them that the project would test the broadcast bureau’s boundaries but that he could steer it through his supervisors.

  Zhihong bet that, if treated right, the story would draw an audience large enough to keep the money flowing, sponsors beckoning and the ideologues at bay. Full payment for the screenplay was supposed to follow but that wasn’t the main goal. Zhihong was supposed to get a role as consultant and production assistant once production began. He would cut his ties to the bureau and eventually sit in a director’s chair.

  But the entire plan has dissolved. After clinching a mini-series deal with CCTV-5, the production company promptly lost interest in Zhihong’s project.

  He doesn’t tell Yue Tao. She’s already angry. Just off the phone with a colleague, his wife has just learned that the Education Ministry plans to cut bonuses in exchange for more annual leave. She squeezes white lotion onto her hands and rubs it into her shoulders and neck as if what counters the dry Beijing air will also be a salve for her indignation.

  “They’re giving us only half of the bonus we’ve gotten in previous years,” she tells Zhihong. “We can’t plan for anything if they’re not consistent.”

  Yue Tao snaps the lotion cap shut. She then brushes her hair aggressively, puts it up in a red plastic clip and strategically arranges a few ringlets that fall to her shoulders. She buttons up a white blouse with eggplant polka dots and slips into a black skirt. The skirt and blouse bunch together under her belt, exaggerating the frailty of her build.

  “What do you expect?” Zhihong asks, placing some clothes into a small suitcase which sits on a chair by their bed. A pair of casual shoes, then underwear and finally a couple of polo shirts. “They want us taking more time off so we can travel and spend more of our money.”

  “How will we spend more money if we’re making less of it?” Yue Tao asks. She stops and turns to Zhihong. “Will they do the same to yours?”

  “How would I know?”

  “You know what this means, right?” Yue Tao says, now staring directly at him.

  She doesn’t usually stare dead on. She finds distractions, something other than the person she’s speaking to because her left eye deviates outward, a defect that forced her to endure endless taunts when she was a child. Zhihong understands the psychology behind her reluctance to make eye contact and has never made an issue of the habit.
He also knows that the taunts meted out in her earlier years stiffened her resolve to succeed, to prove she’s as worthy as anyone with the regular looks. When Yue Tao does look directly at him, or at anyone, the matter is urgent.

  “We won’t have enough for the down payment. Now we’re going to have to look for a place that’s further outside.” She pauses. “We may need to start looking outside the Fifth Ring if we want something with a second bedroom.”

  Zhihong lays his toiletry bag on top of the clothes he’s arranged in the suitcase. “If we need to go further out, we will,” he says, quietly, measuring his words.

  “Tian! We’re getting shut out of the housing market and you don’t seem to care,” she snaps.

  Zhihong doesn’t respond because Yue Tao has made this accusation many times. He doesn’t care.

  Yue Tao approaches him with clenched fists braced uselessly by her sides. “It doesn’t seem to matter to you, does it?”

  “It doesn’t. No.”

  Zhihong looks at her left eye, her vulnerability, and then back down at his packing.

  “It doesn’t matter to me at the moment. The studio said they’re not interested in my film anymore. They got their mini-series deal with CCTV and now they’re not interested in the film, which makes me a fool. This is what matters to me right now.”

  Yue Tao looks at him silently and Zhihong doesn’t know whether to hope for a renewed attack or for her to stand down. Standing on a precipice, where the mix of fear and vertigo scrambles rationality and makes free fall look like relief, he’s lost the ability to modulate emotion. This might be the moment that ends their marriage.

  “What?”

  Zhihong doesn’t answer. Having to say it again will only intensify the pain he’s trying to kill. He turns back to his suitcase to finish organizing its contents. He closes it and starts pulling the zipper around. It gets stuck around the third corner where the items are protruding most. With his teeth clenched, Zhihong tugs and yanks at the zipper. Yue Tao moves toward him and he fears that, if she mentions anything about apartments or bonuses or careers, all of the exertion that he’s putting into the stuck zipper will all at once be redirected at his wife. So he stops yanking the zipper to calm himself.