by Qiu Miaojin
“It hasn’t gotten that bad for me, Meng Sheng. There’s still something inside me that’s pulling me back from death. It’s not just physical instinct—it’s a conscious resistance.
“When I turned twenty, that’s when things got tough. But it forced me to fight my way out. The universe has a plan for me. . . .” I paused. The weight of shame had been lifted from my lips, and I had never been able to speak so openly before. For so long, there’d been a wall between me and everyone else, and now that it was gone, I felt like crying. “Meng Sheng, as long as there’s a woman for me to love, I’ll know I’m headed somewhere!” I stopped, and in spite of my best efforts to hold back, tears came pouring out. I couldn’t find the words anymore. I was just proud to have broken out of that strait-jacket, at least partway, though it made me sad to think of how long I had struggled inside of it.
“Come out. You have my undying respect. Plus I want to give you a hug.” From the other side of the vent, Meng Sheng stuck his tongue out at me. “Now it’s time to take a celebratory piss.” There was the sound of a zipper being yanked down. He relieved himself, whirling in a circle around the lavatory, and sending a woman running out with a shriek.
“Nothing really matters. You have to burrow deep down into the marrow of death itself, beneath the thousands of layers of this mortal flesh that can be peeled away, one after another—your ancestors, your parents, your peers, all the people who are extrinsic to you. And there, buried within, are bodily memories that are at war with your spiritual being, and those memories have to be executed at gunpoint one by one, until there’s nothing left except a worthless pile of tripe. That’s the abyss of death—and it’ll make you relish being nothing but a pile of tripe.” There was conviction in Meng Sheng’s voice.
“But Meng Sheng, every time I fight my way out, the outside world just blocks my path again. It never gets better. I’m constantly on the border of life and death, waiting for something to come along and push me over the edge.”
“Did I tell you the story of the goddess yet?” Meng Sheng sighed. “I was secretly in love with someone you might call a goddess. This was before I met Chu Kuang and around the time I’d just given up my career as a hoodlum and gone back to school. I was in the choir, and she was the conductor. I didn’t dare approach her. I knew I wasn’t in her league. For a while, I was all buttoned up, and then suddenly, the seven or eight people in our circle were like family to me. When I was with them, I got to experience what it was like to feel normal. They didn’t know the other side of me at all. I felt so innocent when I was with them. Whenever one of them brought out that other side of me, I’d feel disgusted with myself. That’s how I ended up watching the goddess fall for this other guy, another conductor.”
I closed my eyes and tried to imagine Meng Sheng’s face and slicked-back hair, those dark, penetrating eyes that could be so gentle and soulful. His forehead was broad and his cheeks angular. His features were so expressive, his face so changeable. As a performer, he was blessed with versatility. I was always taken by his charisma: It was fascinating to watch him be himself. But those handsome looks also kept his despair well hidden.
“Stupid, right? It was never love. Over time, my fixation with her got worse. I never even talked to her, but the fantasy of her grew like a tumor. I looked for her nose, her eyebrows, even the silhouette of her legs, on the face of women I saw on the street. I started to have feelings for every woman. In the end, I betrayed the goddess by sleeping with just about anything that moved.
“It’s funny, though. I tried to think about the goddess when I was jerking off in the shower. I tried a few times, but I couldn’t do it. Every time, I just couldn’t maintain an erection. If I thought about her, this person who’d never thought about me for even a second, I felt like some kind of slimy creature, slobbering all over her image, which is like. . . .” Trailing off, Meng Sheng slid onto the floor.
“I never would’ve guessed that about you.” Standing beside him, I held the door open for a long time. Courage swept over me, and I embraced him, wrapping his head in my arms.
NOTEBOOK #6
1
During the period when the crocodile lived in the teahouse basement, it displayed an impressive adaptability. For that alone, it deserved a Golden Horse Award (a Golden Horse because it was the only awards ceremony that wouldn’t make the crocodile wear a human suit and take a clear-cut stance) or a darling-of-eugenics award (it would surely inspire the development of a better diaper).
Due to its highly regimented lifestyle, the crocodile didn’t need an alarm clock to wake up in the morning. Though the basement got little sunlight, the crocodile woke up at six a.m. like clockwork. It wore a fresh set of brown checked pajamas belonging to the proprietress’s son. The sleeves and pant legs were too short. In its hand was a stuffed crocodile it had made from a dozen handkerchiefs wound together and wrapped with one big handkerchief. Every night, the crocodile clung to its toy as it slept.
The crocodile slept in a nook it had carved out among its possessions. When it woke, it would groggily squeeze its eyes shut before scrambling for the toilet in the corner, where it then sat. It took advantage of the hazy light at daybreak to crawl up to the gutter, where it rolled over on its back. Those were the only times the crocodile got any fresh air.
The crocodile had a pre-breakfast exercise regimen: It would leap up and touch the ceiling a hundred times. Fearing the neighbors might detect the presence of a crocodile, it developed a routine that could be performed in virtually any living space. With no canned crocodile food, the crocodile found a hot pot in the pantry and used it to cook up three wildly inventive meals a day.
In the morning, the crocodile would read. It read practically anything that had letters printed on it—the labels on the goods stored in the basement, the stock lists—but what it loved most of all was Wonders of the World magazine. In the afternoon, it listened to a transistor radio as it worked on handicrafts. Sometimes it knit wool sweaters, other times it practiced the art of Chinese knotting, and still other times it assembled toy models. It sent me all these things, along with an invoice. Even if I didn’t want them, I couldn’t refuse.
At night, it watched television (on my small TV set) until ten o’clock, when it crawled back into its sleeping nook. Whenever I told it a bedtime story, it gladly tossed me a coin from its piggy bank.
“Jarman, can I write a letter to the radio station and request a song? I’m a loyal listener!”
“Sure. What name are you going to use?”
“Crocodile!”
“Oh, that won’t work. Everyone will track you down for an interview. What song do you want to hear?”
“I want to request my own ‘The Ballad of the Crocodile’ and dedicate it to Jarman.” The crocodile had a peculiar habit: It never looked at me unless it was wearing a human suit. Since it didn’t usually wear one in the basement, it faced the 8mm camera whenever it wanted to talk to me. In order to see its expression, I had to look through the viewfinder until I got tired of conversing from behind a screen, a partition that had been erected at the crocodile’s request.
The crocodile was a natural-born performer. It simply turned to the camera and said, “A medium of communication, eh? Well, I’ll be the first to have done this.” When I wasn’t around, it turned the camera on and talked to me all the same.
“Hey crocodile, where’d you hear the name Genet?”
“Ah, a book called Baby and Mother. It said there was a Frenchman named Genet who was an orphan. When he was little, he was locked up in prison, so that’s where he was raised. The other prisoners became like parents to him. Later on, when his biological mother came and sought him out, he refused to acknowledge her. The prison had become his home. After completing his sentence, he intentionally committed crimes just to get locked up again! Jarman, are you allowed to watch TV in prison?”
“You can, but there’s no way to request songs. Crocodile, do you think you’ll ever reproduce?”
&nb
sp; “How would I know? I’ve never met another crocodile before.”
2
Senior year was the last time I ever saw Tun Tun and Zhi Rou together. The entire club had gathered before the president’s departure, and the location was my fifth-floor attic residence on Tingzhou Road. More than a dozen people were packed inside my little lair playing cards, munching, chatting, drinking, snoozing. We were a lively bunch, carrying on into the wee hours. It was the coziest winter night ever.
The whole time, I watched them at the stereo, deejaying. They were Western music fanatics, these two. They huddled together on the floor, where, under the cover of their spirited discussion of the evening’s set list, they seemed to communicate with some kind of tacit understanding. I’ll never forget how earnestly they introduced every song, going on and on about its contents and the genre, or sharing little anecdotes. You could hear the excitement in their voices and see a sparkle in their eyes. It was obvious that music had kindled a fierce bond between them.
They didn’t mean to ignore the others. It was just that they’d found a warm and fuzzy place within that particular crowd. It was perhaps to be their final musical collaboration, and the last time they got along like they did in the old days.
People were dozing off. Tun Tun was playing a keyboard softly. They hadn’t seen each other in some time, and there was a visible awkwardness. They didn’t know where things stood anymore. Zhi Rou looked at Tun Tun with those intense, penetrating eyes, then turned to me. With her coat draped over her shoulders, she walked to the window and gazed at the full moon, low and yellow.
Though the years have passed, I still cherish that moment from a bygone era. Even if no one else has given it another thought, the memory is preserved inside of me. Because I was able to witness the last time that things were good between them, the picture I have of those two together heals the sorrow in my heart.
From that point on, my memories of them diverged. Whenever I ran into one of them, she would avoid bringing up the other’s name. But in time, I saw that deep down inside, each still harbored a flicker of longing for the other. And so I let my separate conversations with them become entwined in my mind, so that they lived on as a pair in my heart and continued growing up together, chatting away just like old times.
Our natural affinity was profound. We’d hit it off from the start, and even after they went their separate ways, each still gave me her pure, unadulterated trust. No matter when or where, if I was alone and I ran into one of them, she would manage to drag even the teensiest worries out of me, then we’d sit together laughing and joking around. Throughout our casual friendships, I hid how much I cared about them, though their eyes reflected the utmost warmth and tenderness, and their complete sincerity indicated that I could confide in them.
I’d only divulged my secrets to Meng Sheng and Chu Kuang, and so, after my twentieth birthday, I decided that regardless of the consequences, I would bravely approach these girls: I would drop the whole façade of being a protector and tell them how I really felt. So what if my worst nightmares came true—if they spurned me, thought I was lying and didn’t believe me, or stared at me coldly as I grew embarrassed and defensive, desperately fumbling for the right words. They had reached out to me and shown that I could trust them, forever changing my world. Now that I was on my way to breaking free of the prison I’d been living in, I was dying to be close to someone, and this was the same feeling that the old me had once extinguished in myself. And so I made up my mind that I would learn trust through a relationship in which lust had no part. First there had to be love and equality, so that the relationship would be built on pure trust.
A lightbulb had gone on in my head: I had to take responsibility for my state of misery. This was a major turning point, my first step in learning to open up. This elementary move may have come intuitively to others, but I had to learn how to get around in the world without the same sense of sight, and my white cane had just found that first raised dome on the pavement.
These two girls matured into beautiful, loving women, each leaving her own messy trail of complicated relationships with men along the way. Though they never saw each other again, both remembered that the first person they had ever fallen in love with was a girl. Emotions may have been pure and genuine in their salad days, but even back then, they’d known that it would never work out. In the years that followed, each started to gravitate toward men, never again exhibiting an interest in women.
One night, I ran into Zhi Rou near the underground entrance to campus.
“Hey, don’t you recognize me, Lazi?” Holding a bouquet of flowers, she stood blocking my route home.
“I was wondering who that was! You change your hairstyle at least once a month. I thought, Who’s that standing in front of me, calling my name? How am I supposed to recognize you?” I said, reeling from shock.
“Okay, enough chitchat. I’m about to run to the recreation center to deliver some flowers. It’s for this guy who plays the cello.” She winked at me mischievously. “Quick—give me your phone number. I’m guessing that you’ve moved recently.”
I nodded happily, reciting the string of digits.
“You don’t even have to think about it! There’s an entire column of all of Lazi’s numbers in my address book.” Chiding me, she jotted down my number.
“What do you want my number for, anyway? You’ve never called me before.” We stood there at the entrance as people came and went around us, like a couple bickering in public. She leaned back against the fence along the road. Since I’d last run into her, her hair was shorter and permed. Her dress, made from a coarse khaki cloth, was loosely cut and hung to her knees, and underneath she had on a pair of striped tights. Even with their flowing silhouettes, her ensembles exuded a comfy, laid-back womanliness—though it also seemed as if she didn’t want to be seen as feminine.
“I really did call you before, though. Once it was early in the morning when I had nothing to do and thought of you. And one time recently, it was because my older sister was suicidal right after a breakup. I did my best to keep an eye on her the whole time, but she tried to hang herself twice. Really!” Her vulnerability was so beguiling that she instantly won me over. There was even sadness in her smile.
“Fine. I’ll walk my bike and come with you to the rec center, and we can keep talking.” Our encounters were always rushed, with each of us checking out the other as we caught up on those odd occasions. This girl stirred the most intense emotions in me. She was like family, and I felt like telling her that she could overcome any challenge, that I completely understood her.
The two of us had a certain rapport. There was an unspoken understanding that we would never cross over into the reality of each other’s lives, and our friendship took on a profound weight because of it. Careful to limit our interactions to chance encounters, we felt free to show affection and to speak whatever was on our minds, and those moments contained the makings of a great friendship. Never knowing when or where we’d see each other again, I was moved at our every parting. It wasn’t because we found relationships burdensome that we maintained this kind of distance; rather, it was a distinct reserve on her part that guarded her from needing anyone else too much. Because we often shared our most heartfelt emotions, I knew that she respected me, that I was like an older brother to her. We saw eye to eye on the important things in life, but she wouldn’t get close to me out of a desire to avoid dependency.
“Lazi, what did you say about how people have to change themselves?” Zhi Rou asked me loudly. She’d dragged me inside the recreation center, where she presented her cellist friend with the bouquet, and now we sat under the portico at the entrance to the Literature Department building.
“Well, it depends on what you’re trying to change, if we’re talking about breast enlargement or liposuction here.”
She glared at me as she searched my pockets for a cigarette, then offered me a sip of her beer. Leaning against a column, she exhaled smoke and said coolly,
“Lazi, can you believe that last night I broke up with a guy who didn’t understand me at all? Can you believe that I went out with this guy for a full year in the first place? Every Sunday night at eight, he’d turn on the TV, and sit there and watch Diamond Stage. Not that it was because of that garbage, but I couldn’t stand it. He couldn’t sit through anything for even an hour, except a Jackie Chan movie. He thought about only one thing: his chemistry textbook.
“He was smart. He was a fine writer with nice penmanship, and he was good at the piano. But to him these parts of himself were trivial, things he’d do once in a while just to show off. He was not only utilitarian-minded but complacent. Every second of his life was planned out, including the time he spent with me. What he really needed was a wifey. In his mind, that was love. He cared about me. He was never fickle when it came to practical things. After a long day of studying or working, he’d want me there to make love, and as soon as he satisfied himself, he’d fall asleep. I guess that part of him wasn’t so developed. Ha!
“When I told him it was over, he thought I was crazy, and as usual he got his way. It dragged on for a long time, Lazi. I didn’t want to be alone. I was afraid no one would want me. How desperate is that? Yesterday I saw my sister acting suicidal, and it scared the hell out of me. I wondered if I’d become like that too. I rushed to his house in the middle of the night, climbed over the fence, and took back the letter I’d written him. I cried as I burned it. It was like chopping him to pieces. I feel so much better now that I realize how much I resented him. How did I get this way?” Her voice cracked, and her laugh revealed a mix of sadness and delirium.
