by Qiu Miaojin
“That’s not how it goes. Haruki Murakami says that in the end, the king and the imperial guards all burst out laughing.”
The murky seawater seemed bottomless. Two motorcycles veered down the paved slope. Four members of a gang had pulled up beside me, only three feet away. The roar of their bikes already fearsome enough, I turned pale. They swung around and left.
Why didn’t you tell me you were running off?
Shui Ling, I have burns in two places. They were blistering, so the doctor scraped them off. . . .
You burned yourself, didn’t you. . . .
It’s so cool and lovely in Penghu. . . .
You went too far.
Sobbing. The ocean was weeping, too. Our love was still mutual.
“Tell me how you think I’m different from her.”
“You’re better-looking. She’s a little heavier, heh. But I feel comfortable with her. I like it when she touches me. It’s like we’re just having a little fun. . . .
“I’m scared of you. If you did that, I’d be completely disgusted by you.
“Oh, come on. We don’t have to talk about it if you don’t want to. I was worried you’d be like this. I don’t know why I have to take jabs at you, either. I’m afraid of stabbing you into a pulp, until there’s no more blood left. I could stab you to death and not even know it.”
“So you have to take jabs at me to make yourself feel better?”
“I’m afraid I’ll open the door and let you in. But I know you’re sleeping outside, and I can’t bear the thought of not letting you in, so I tell myself to open the door so I can prod you with a long, sharp object.”
“I don’t care. I can’t tell you not to be with someone else, so of course I have to say that I don’t care. There’s really nothing I can do.”
“I know.”
“You’re into someone else. You’re not into me.”
“I’m not into you, silly. I love you.”
Out at sea, the cobalt blue lights of a distant patrol boat were flashing. Water under the bridge, as they say. There was a growing cacophony inside my head.
“I feel so close to you right now because of our past together. But you’re acting strange and distant toward me,” Shui Ling said.
Blow after blow. She was messing with my head. Spare me, Shui Ling. It’s killing me. How am I supposed to keep from falling apart?
So I burned myself. I burned me, and I burned her, and I burned the life I hated so much. I could see the glow of warmth from a nearby log cabin.
“I feel bad for you.” She caressed my wounds. Her embrace was a farewell song—long, agonizing, and tearless.
6
Over the next two months, it happened again . . . and again.
I came back from Penghu, my strength already sapped by the grisly battle between two wounded, dying beasts incapable of licking each other’s wounds.
There was no doubt that Shui Ling was avoiding me. It wasn’t because she didn’t love me. It wasn’t because she needed space. It was because she feared that she’d smelled blood on me. She’d been deluding herself, saying our love hadn’t turned into a hunk of maggot-infested flesh when really she’d been living life to the fullest, taking this hunk of flesh that was me and kicking it out of the field of vision of her reality. She’d moved on to the next relationship, and with greater exuberance. No phone calls, not a word from her, while I wrote her letter after letter. Though I knew my love song’s days were numbered, I was determined to keep singing until my voice gave out. I was intent on starving myself while I saved my rations for her.
Stupidly, so stupidly, I assumed that she no longer felt a thing for me, that she refused to crumble, that there was nothing more to it. Clinging to the belief that we’d always be together in her heart, she began to rationalize her course of action.
Underlying that rationale were hysterical tendencies. I waited as Christmas Day passed. I waited as the New Year passed. She acted even more detached, declining my requests to meet until the chill of her indifference froze me to the core. She was entirely unconscious of it, and there was nothing I could do.
“Sorry for bothering you this late. I just wanted to give you this journal in person. Like I said before, if you don’t want me, I’ll give you my journal and go.
“This journal from freshman year is the only thing I can give you. I’m not your everything anymore, so even though I want to love you now, all I can do is give you the old me, the one you once loved.” I was in her room, kneeling at her bedside. I hadn’t slept for days, and my voice was small and quivering. It was the day after New Year’s.
“I don’t want it. I don’t want it.” There was a stunned look on her face at first. Lying in bed, she shook her head vehemently, as if unable to endure this unexpected shock. She twisted around to face the other way. Her voice was hoarse. She didn’t dare peer at me clutching my diary against my chest.
“I thought maybe the answer was in your heart this whole time, and you just couldn’t bring yourself to say it out loud. You’ve been silent toward me, and all this waiting has taken its toll on me. You left me hanging with a question in my heart. Whether or not you admit it, the answer is no, right?” I was indignant.
“Okay, okay, you’re right! You’re completely right. I’ve left you hanging!” Rolling over, she glared at me. Her eyes glinted angrily. Tears ran down her face, forming two jagged streams. “Why don’t you understand me at all anymore?”
“I understand, all right. I understand that because you loved me too much, you’ve completely changed who you are. I understand that even if I started beating you to death, you wouldn’t tell me to go. If the facts were laid out, you’d still run. You can barely make it through the day. I understand all too well that you’re scared of me. Tell me it’s not true.”
She grudgingly nodded.
“Because things were getting worse, you cut me off. Three people have had to suffer, and one of us can’t take it anymore. I don’t want to keep injuring myself, so now I have to make you reject me.” I spoke as if I were the one holding all the cards, but in reality, I was the vulnerable one, the one who was begging for mercy.
“Fine, I will. I’ve realized some things during this time, and it’s because you made me. But I had to refrain from saying too much. I was dying to talk to you, but I was always afraid that the slightest peep could make you run away. So I had to think long and hard about how to make sure you’d understand completely.” An expression wholly unfamiliar to me—one of rigid determination—spread across her face.
“After you came back, I thought I was treating you really, really badly, and at the same time, I didn’t know what I was doing. I took the love that I should have given to you and turned around and gave it to someone else. I opened my heart to other people, and meanwhile, I mistreated you. It was like I was debasing myself. . . .” She began to bawl.
“You don’t know it, but I have”—she paused, summoning her courage—“I have a lot of love for you! But not this you—the you from freshman year. I don’t know the exact difference, either. Sometimes I just know my love is for you, and that’s when I want to run back to you and give it all to you now. I want to love you well. But we’ve already become distant strangers. What else am I supposed to do? I have to rely on old memories in order to get along with the new you. I can’t even tell you how much you’ve changed.”
Hunched over the covers, I choked back sobs.
“Why did you have to come back? I’d already found the perfect spot for you in my heart. Why did you have to ruin it? All I wanted was a way to love you for the rest of my life!” Now that she was agitated, I knew the theatrics were under way.
“I have to jab you. I don’t want to be close to you because you’ll taint the memory in my heart. . . .” Her stare, brimming with hatred, said that she no longer knew me. “I won’t let you. No one can. It’s mine alone. You abandoned me and left me out in the cold. All I have left now is the you that I created, and it’s the best you there is.
. . .”
She let out a condescending laugh, as if to say a prayer for me out of pity. “I beseech you not to shatter it.” She sounded histrionic.
She’d shared emotions I had no idea about—so profoundly and lucidly, so poignantly, so beguilingly even! This woman was like a nautilus in her intricacies. She’d been harboring her love for me like an oyster cultivating a pearl. Yet none of that pleasure was to be mine. What was I supposed to say?
“How would I taint it?” I asked timidly, my heart sinking.
“I don’t want to see you. The two of us have to stay pure. We have to.” With her patronizing tone, she took a subtle swipe at my pride and sliced off a piece of my heart.
“Don’t be sad! I’ll always have your purity. I thought you left because that wasn’t what you wanted. Zi Ming said the only reason that someone dear to you leaves you is because they love you and you’ll always love them. That’s how it works. A long time ago, I decided I would always love you. My love is that deep. It’s funny, because I completely changed who I was in order to be more like you. You left your mark on me. Did you know that?
“But then you came back. You faced the issue of sex and didn’t want a platonic relationship anymore. You weren’t always like that, but not me. I just didn’t want to shatter the image of you that I hold dear in my heart. Then I’d really be left with nothing, and I’d hate you!” Her eyes, her expression, her voice all conveyed a rather tender form of cruelty. At last, I was meeting her destructive side head-on.
“I’ve grown up a lot. I’m not a little girl anymore. I’m talking about sex here! I was never against the idea of doing it. Anyway, she’s really pretty. When I’m with other people, a physical relationship just happens naturally. But it wasn’t like that with you. It wasn’t because you’re a girl. It wasn’t because of sex itself. And it wasn’t because I didn’t long to be intimate with you. It was you. . . .” Her eyes hardened. This conversation may well have been her most audacious moment.
“We shouldn’t talk about this anymore. There’s no way I can make you understand. You don’t know how badly I’ve been wanting to talk to you.” This was the final act in my humiliation, and it had unfolded to my surprise. It was like the removal of a parasite that had been lodged in my flesh. Though the experience would make me infinitely stronger, I also had to cry out in pain.
“I know I treated you mean. But you were so intense. Don’t you know that? You turned my world upside down. I’m where I am now because you led me here. All of this is your doing. How could you have abandoned me and left me out in the cold?” She was holding me. Consoling me.
“It’s not that I didn’t want to mend things with you. When you and I were together, I told her three times that I didn’t want to see her. If you hadn’t been so afraid of commitment, and if you’d promised not to leave me, you and I would have been together for the rest of our lives!” She wiped away my tears, and with the piousness of a devotee, she planted kisses on my eyes.
“I love her too, and she treats me well. It’s a totally new relationship where I can practice the things you taught me. She’s always there for me. There’s no reason for me to hurt her. But that’s not what this is about. It’s about you. There’s no way I can imagine spending my life with you. You need to go out and find that person in life who’s going to love you!”
The grief that had been long dormant in her now awakened, her crying descended into wailing. I could feel the pain she’d been going through.
“I can’t find that person. I can’t find that person you’re talking about who’s going to love me. I only have you.”
“You can. I know you can. You’re wonderful. . . .”
Her voice softened. Her eyes were red and swollen, and she was exhausted from crying. She wanted to listen to me talk as she lay there. I told her I was going to Europe, that I’d be her shelter, waiting for her, and when that time came, she could bring her children with her, since she always wanted to have a child of every color in the rainbow, a perfect, happy family. . . . She fell asleep with a sweet, innocent smile on her face. Every now and then, half asleep, she’d take my hand, and make me tell her that I wasn’t going anywhere.
It was the last time I saw her. Her long, soft locks spread underneath the covers, her pale blue kimono pajamas, her slender, well-proportioned figure, her mildly weathered skin, her distinctive light scent, her beautiful tear-stained face, those two piercing eyes that were now shut, and those hands that couldn’t bear to part with my journal. Happy New Year.
Those were the things I took. I gently turned the doorknob and closed the door behind me. Stepping into the light of dawn, I left once and for all. Realizing I’d forgotten my glasses, I walked the streets like a blind man early that morning, trying to feel my way back. I wanted to go home. Home. . . .
NOTEBOOK #7
1
There are many important images in my mind that were captured at strange twists and turns, during the passage from one stage to the next, accumulating a weight I never expected. But I never did say goodbye or thank you to all the people in those images. With a stiff upper lip, I stood back and watched as they slipped out of my life.
2
There are three people I have to write about in this journal. These three are from my final year in college—a stage of my life I call the eruptive phase—and all of them profoundly shaped who I am today. Each had distinguishing qualities that influenced my life’s direction, and I saw in each of them a certain majesty. During that time of intense bonding, it was their influence which made me realize that romantic love was not the only thing that brought an individual closer to others, nor was it a matter decided by fate. There are other, essential experiences that ought to come first, for one must be capable of being touched, of embodying the innocence that forms the basis of compassion . . . and of showing a heart that cries out in pain that genuine suffering deserves no less than the dignity to go on living.
Meng Sheng. Half born of malice, half of goodwill. Half sincere, half put-on. This freewheeling lunatic became a close friend of mine after Shui Ling and I went our separate ways for the second time. To this day, I’ve never understood what his true motive was—because while he saved me from my self-destructiveness, he also pushed me toward total depravity.
I was determined to transform myself into a real girl. At Tun Tun’s encouragement, I made a big decision: I wasn’t going to fall in love with another woman. This time, I was going to make a clean break with the past and pursue a normal happiness.
For my entire life, I had been inherently attracted to women. That desire, regardless of whether it was realized, had long tormented me. Desire and torment were two opposing forces constantly chafing me, inside and out. I knew full well that my change of diet was futile. I was a prisoner of my own nature, and one with no recourse. This time, however, I was determined to liberate myself. Convinced that it was possible to change, I went about it all rather nonchalantly, and during that phase, I basically behaved as if I had sold my soul. I felt no personal attachment to anyone. Nothing fazed me. Once I shed the overwhelming burden of my sadness, I felt as light as a feather. In my mind, I had been given a mandate: I would live as I pleased and let myself do whatever I wanted.
And so I became dissolute. In my total hedonism, I explored all possibilities, however transitory. I went out every night and hung out at restaurants, clubs, bars, a new friend’s place. At the same time, I invited the advances of men, resorting to the most blatant and dubious means to lure them.
Meng Sheng was among my partners. My feminine clothing, speech, manners, and hair tossing were plainly intended to attract a man, and he was perceptive enough to notice my transformation. Yet he didn’t ask questions, and instead he adopted a chivalrous attitude toward me. Every few days he’d see me, and I’d be waiting for him, as if we were dating. In my heart I was hoping I’d find a guy to fall for soon, yet Meng Sheng treated it like a big joke, like we both knew it was a charade. Only much later, when I recalled the
look in his eyes and the words he said, did I realize that no matter what his real motive was, he had tried to love me.
“Hey, if you don’t meet the right guy, you can always call me up,” Meng Sheng said. He dragged me to campus on my birthday, saying that in honor of the occasion, he’d take me out for a celebratory round of drinks.
“Meng Sheng, do you think I’m changing in order to find a man?” It was the first and only time in four years that I’d spent my birthday with someone. In fact, when Meng Sheng suggested it, I felt grateful.
“I don’t buy any of it. You people are ridiculous, wasting your energy trying to improve yourselves. What good does it do? You all think I don’t try hard enough, and that’s why I’m such a failure. But what do you know? In order to save my own life, I had to muster a hundred times the strength that any of you have. Hell, I can’t even exert myself anymore! Do you know how psychology defines ‘helplessness’? I like you the way you are right now, being like, Who cares? and seeing how bad it gets. The best is when things get so bad that I actually feel something. That’s when I reach self-understanding,” Meng Sheng said, laughing. He’d written me a song as a birthday present.
“Seriously, though, don’t die before me. If you did, I’d be even more bored than I already am. You have to go on living for me.” He solemnly placed his hand on my shoulder, his emotions genuine, and we bonded in a profound moment of mutual understanding. Then, he added, “Really, you should let me make love to you just once. It’ll be your birthday present.”
“Okay!” I merrily agreed. In that instant, we abandoned all inhibitions and sentimentality, yet it was anything but an act of debauchery. He wanted to give me a gift that was hard to come by, pure and simple—and what I got was the experience of absolute trust.
