20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth

by Xiaolu Guo

  I watched the countless cities and small towns passing outside my train window, Lang Fang, Cang Zhou, Ji Nan, Xu Zhou, Wu Xi, Hang Zhou... I smelled the dry Hua Bei Plains, saw the muddy Yellow River, and my favourite Yangzi River. In my memory, the Yangzi was light green, but this time it was grey. Construction sites full of concrete blocks lined its banks, one after another. It seemed to me that all the rivers had become much smaller and narrower. Perhaps the next time I returned home, they would have dried up altogether like the Gobi Desert.

  Throughout the journey, I could see fireworks in the sky and hear the constant bang of firecrackers. I suddenly realised how long I'd spent in Beijing – cold, serious, restricted Beijing. I had forgotten how joyous New Year celebrations were. Was I really going home? I felt as if I were travelling through a dream.

  As I was dragging my suitcase off the train, I saw an old woman with a decayed body and awful clothes. It was my mother.

  I felt a knot in my throat. Before I could put my suitcase down, the tears started to come.

  Mother watched me. She was surprised. She had never seen me cry before. She had no idea what was going on in my heart, and in my Beijing life. She had no idea why I suddenly wanted to visit them. Neither could she have known that I'd once moved six times in one year, that on one of these occasions I'd had all my belongings thrown out on the street for not paying my rent on time.

  Mother, Mother, you know none of this.

  My parents and I sat together at the round table, having our New Year meal. The TV was on in the background and the official national Spring Festival evening show was being broadcast on the state-run channel. I realised my parents had a new, 'Future'-brand TV set. It seemed much too modern and high-tech for their house. My mother explained that they'd bought it right after they'd got my letter. She said I'd need a large TV during my stay. Oh, that TV made my heart heavy.

  It felt like a scene from a film, a typical Chinese family scene. I could almost feel the Director hovering in the background, overseeing the set-up. Father, mother, daughter, sitting together on New Year's Eve, eating and watching a famous actress singing communist songs on their newly bought TV. I couldn't care less about the show. I watched my father instead. He no longer looked like a travelling salesman. He looked old. It had never occurred to me that my father would get old. But here he was, shrinking, like all the other dried-up old people in the village. He had become even smaller than me. It clutched at my heart. I lowered my head and just kept eating the food my mother put in front of me. I lifted piece after piece into my mouth. I stared down at the bowl and worried that tears might fall into it.

  My parents said nothing. They were as silent as they always had been. Only the food kept coming: endless clams. People here believed eating clams brought good fortune. If women ate them, they became fertile. On the table there was every type of clam you could fish from the East China Sea: Razor Clams, Turtle Clams, Hairy Clams. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, I would become so fertile I could give birth to 10 children, and I didn't even know if I wanted one.

  My mother broke the silence.

  'Fenfang, have some more Turtle Clams. They're good for your blood. Do you still sometimes faint when you stand up?'

  I looked up at her, my mouth full of fresh clam meat.

  'Don't worry, Mother, that's over. In Beijing, I eat loads of strong meat. Lamb, beef, even donkey. And I eat loads of garlic too. I'm much stronger than I was before.'

  'Oh?' She looked at me. 'If you're so strong, why is your face so yellow?'

  I couldn't answer. Why was my face so yellow? Because I breathed in too much of Beijing's polluted air? Because I couldn't sleep at night? Or just because I had bad Chi in my stomach? What should I say?

  Mother, you know nothing of me.

  That New Year's Eve, I felt as though time was flowing backwards. Fragments of the past returned too easily and it felt as if I'd never left. Despite the boom that had hit the place, everything still felt as it always had been. The same old vinegar, just in a new bottle. I stood outside the house and heard an old man cough twice as he rounded the corner. The same cough I'd heard all those years ago, same pitch, same frequency, same tempo. After coughing twice, sure enough he spat. Same rhythm, same movement, same speed. Even the pitiful, insect-ravaged camellia plant was still in its pot by the door. In all those years, how could my father still not have found some way to cure that ill plant?

  The only thing that had changed was the river behind our house. It had turned into a pathetic trickle. The riverbed was covered in plastic bags and all sorts of other rubbish. Sewage spewed down from steel pipes hanging over the mud – waste from some factory.

  The stars shone down on me inquisitively as if we'd met before, and I knew we had. The damp night breeze was the same that had blown across my pillow as a child. I started to worry. Those old things gained shape too easily, too quickly. I worried that this place would pull me back, that it would not let me go again. I worried that my will to survive might shrink and age here. I suddenly missed the cruel Beijing life. I missed my insecurity. I missed my unknown and dangerous future. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, I missed the sharp edges of my life.

  It wasn't until the early hours of the morning that the battle of the firecrackers died down. My parents' bedroom was silent. In the dark I fumbled for my mobile and phonecard, and dialled Boston. Shit! The goddamn answering machine. I felt a wave of fear, as though I'd been abandoned. I put the telephone down and went back to my room. I threw myself on the bed. I wanted to write Ben an email. That Nirvana song came into my head: 'Where did you sleep last night?' But there was no email here and no way for me to hear his voice other than listen to his tedious message on the answering machine. Out of my window, I could see the first, faint light of the New Year in the sky. Ben, where did you sleep last night? Where?

  I lay in bed and celebrated the New Year, in silence and alone. Another 5,000 years of history were on their way.

  When I woke, the firecrackers had started up again. I walked into the kitchen where my mother handed me my first meal of the New Year – a bowl of Longevity Noodles served in a ginger and pork broth. They were hot and delicious. Suddenly I remembered the song the kids here used to sing. It went like this:

  Longevity Noodles, Longevity Noodles, can you teach me the secrets of life?

  Longevity Noodles, Longevity Noodles, why are you always so long?

  Longevity Noodles, Longevity Noodles, should I stand on the table to swallow the length of you?

  I was quiet and concentrated as I swallowed the noodles. Were they long enough, I wondered, to stretch the 1,800 miles back to Beijing?

  When I had finished the last of the Longevity Noodles, my mother was content, like any mother when her children eat the food she has prepared, particularly when it is the first meal of the New Year. She scooped another bowlful of noodles out of the pot, decorated them with dried lilies, and placed it in front of me. Now I started to feel desperate. These noodles were truly never-ending.

  After my second bowl, my mother asked me her first question of the New Year.

  'Fenfang, you said you'd been in loads of movies and TV shows, but how come we've never seen you?'

  How to explain the meagreness of the roles I'd had? How to explain the silence that was mine on screen? A shoulder here, a profile there, a face lost in a crowd.

  'Well, I guess because most of those movies and shows are only on cable channels. Yes, that's it – cable. I don't think you're hooked up for it here.'

  My mother looked at me. 'Really? Well, we'll have to see what we can do about that. Your father and I will have to buy this cable thing. That way we can finally see you.'

  I BOUGHT A NEW DVD PLAYER. It was a brand called 'Soni', but not 'Sony'. It seemed like a good-quality machine because it could play all the pirated DVDs I had. For instance, while I was eating my lunch, I could watch Martin Scorsese's Casino. Two gangsters – Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci – screaming and fighting on the tiny screen. Sometime
s I wished I was a gangster, living madly, then dying abruptly one day – shot through the heart, without any preparation. That's how I wished to die.

  Anyway, as I was watching, I was dipping chive dumplings and raw garlic into a little plate of rice vinegar. I was crazy about chives the same way Popeye's crazy about spinach. I couldn't survive if there were no chives in my food. Those grassy leaves had such a strong, special taste. Every time I ate them, I would imagine having my own little garden to grow chives in. In spring I'd gaze at their lovely pink flowers and, in summer, I'd make my chive dishes. As I was lost in thoughts about chives, the action on screen suddenly became very violent. I felt nauseous. I switched off the TV and decided to go for a walk. I swallowed my last two dumplings, and walked out.

  In the street, I could barely keep my eyes open it seemed so bright. Maybe I'd been sleeping too much during the day lately, and my eyes couldn't take more than my 40-watt desk lamp. I felt like a prisoner just released after 20 years in a dark cell. After walking for half an hour, I realised that, apart from McDonald's, there were so few places in this city where you could sit down. For miles and miles there were only government buildings or Nokia factories or dirty restaurants with stinking toilets or without a toilet. This city was impossible. What did you do if you didn't want to go to McDonald's?

  I decided to go to the Beijing Diplomat University where you could get free-refill lemon water in the café. One hour later, I was on my third glass. The place was full of college kids weighed down with jumbo Chinese– Korean dictionaries, Chinese-German dictionaries, Chinese-English dictionaries. You could really feel that, in the future, these kids were going to be running the world.

  Reaching for my pen, I started scribbling on a napkin. Then I stopped. Napkins made me think of my friend Patton, Ben's old flatmate. Patton scribbled on napkins too. I wondered if his film scripts were any good. He made out that endless Hollywood producers were interested in turning his scripts into films, but, since everything he wrote was in English and I wasn't able to read it easily, I had no way of judging.

  Patton loved Beijing. 'You know, even when a city looks hard and concrete like Beijing, it's possible to love it,' he once said to me. He also said that China was better at being American than America, so he would rather live in China. Weird. How could China be more American than America? I didn't get it. Anyway, Patton wore jackets and trousers with millions of pockets, and was often being mistaken for a photographer. He was always reaching into these pockets, and pulling out small notebooks and stubby chewed-up pencils. Using these, he noted down anything and everything that he found interesting, especially examples of Beijing slang. He loved the idea that 'Second Breast' meant 'mistress', that 'Sweeping Yellow' meant 'prostitution is forbidden' and that 'Cow's Cunt' meant 'absolutely wonderful'. He would carefully write these terms down in his notebooks and, if he ran out of pages, scribble them on napkins instead.

  I liked Patton. There weren't many people in this world who could be boring and fun at the same time, if you know what I mean. It seemed to me that Patton and I were similar: bored all the time. But he knew how to deal with his boredom better. Anyway, there was nothing sexual between Patton and me. We were like the 'killers' in Wong Kar Wai's film Fallen Angels. Killers can only ever be partners or enemies. Never lovers.

  Wherever you went in Beijing, you were liable to run into Patton in some café – the 6-foot man in the corner, wearing a big brown jacket with millions of pockets and tapping away on his famous old IBM laptop. And you could be sure that his laptop would be plugged into the only available socket on the wall, the cable trailing across the floor like a vine, climbing over chic Beijingers drinking their overpriced cappuccinos, intent only on reaching its ultimate destination: Patton's messy but clever brain.

  I went back to scribbling on my napkin. Maybe I should call Patton and see if he wanted to get something to eat. But he probably wouldn't want to. Patton didn't eat much, or not as much as I did anyway. You see, that was the problem: not very many people ate as much food as I did. Whenever anyone had a meal with me, they ended up spending far more time and money on it than they wanted. I knew I ate too much, but I couldn't help it. I was ravenous all the time.

  In the end, I decided to give Patton a call anyway. Needless to say, he was in some café.

  'Which one?' I asked, getting ready to go.

  'The café in the Foreign Business University,' he said. 'The Get Ahead Café, have you been yet? They just opened it.'

  'Get Ahead Café?'

  'Yes. It's great here, they serve you free tea.'

  'Sounds good. But don't you want to eat something?'

  I could hear him hesitating.

  'Well, I'm not in an eating mood,' said Patton. 'But if you're really desperate, we can go to a restaurant and you can eat.'

  'That would be great. Do you fancy Western food or Chinese food?'

  'You decide, since you're the one who's going to be eating.'

  I could sense Patton was getting a bit impatient with me.

  'In that case, let's go to Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' I said. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, had I been missing their spicy duck soup.

  'Chong Qin Red Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' Patton tried to repeat.

  'No, not Red Mountain, Gold Mountain. Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' I corrected him.

  Sometimes Patton's Chinese got muddled, especially with names.

  'Okay, whatever goddamn mountain it is, I'll see you there in one hour.'

  I was just about to leave when I realised I would have to walk past this geeky young couple perched near my table. The two of them were all over each other, spectacles knocking together, lips glued together like sticky dates. It was embarrassing to look. I tried so hard to avoid staring that I got a crick in my neck.

  Spectacle Boy: What blood type are you?

  Spectacle Girl: Type B.

  Spectacle Boy: That's a selfish blood type.

  Spectacle Girl: But you said I was nice and sweet.

  Spectacle Boy: I do think you're nice and sweet.

  Spectacle Girl: But now you know my blood type. You still have time to reconsider your position.

  Spectacle Boy: I don't regret anything.

  Spectacle Girl: If that's what you want, we can go our separate ways when we leave this place.

  Spectacle Boy: I told you, I don't regret anything.

  I took a deep breath and dashed past them to the door.

  'The Theory of Relativity!' announced Patton as soon as he arrived at my table at the Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant. He took off his multi-pocketed big brown jacket, and put his famous laptop on the table.

  'Theory of what?' I had no idea what he was talking about.

  'Einstein,' said Patton. 'The Theory of Relativity. So, last month I told my girlfriend to come back and live with me. But now, of course, I want to leave her again. I can't do my own thing any more. I have to switch off the light before midnight so she can get her sleep, and I have to wake up before nine to clean the kitchen and take a shower. When I lived alone, I didn't give a damn about dirt – my own, or the kitchen's. It's like being a married couple, it bores me to death. But it's all my fault – I was the one who asked her to come back because I was scared of being lonely.'

  'But, what's this got to do with the Theory of Relativity?' I was confused.

  'Don't you think that is the Theory of Relativity?'

  'Sounds more like the Theory of Independence,' I said.

  'Whose Theory of Independence?'

  'Oh, I don't know. Maybe that American President's. Didn't he write some Theory of Independence?'

  'Okay, Fenfang, let's have some beer.'

  But I didn't feel like having beer, somehow beer doesn't make people happy.

  'What about having some sake?' I suggested. 'Sake is light, it makes you light-hearted.'

  'Shi
t, that's way too expensive. Let's have beer, and we'll make it the cheapest one too – Revolution Beer.'

  I nodded and Patton ordered us two Revolution Beers in his formal Chinese.

  'What happened to that wild ex-boyfriend of yours?' he asked as he lifted the bottle to his mouth.

  I thought about Xiaolin and felt like it was a story from a previous incarnation. Since I moved to Haidian, I hadn't heard from him. He didn't know the phone number of my new flat, and I had changed my mobile. My nights were no longer interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.

  Without answering, I changed the subject.

  'Listen, Patton, you're American. What do you know about Tennessee Williams's writing technique?' I asked.

  'You want to know about Tennessee Williams? Jesus, he's as old as a dinosaur, I must have read him when I was twelve.'

  'So you mean he already died?'

  'Oh, ages ago. He choked on a bottle top.'

  'He did what?' I was horrified.

  'Yes, a disgraceful way to die. He was a very sad man. He was an alcoholic and a homosexual, his lover died long before him, from cancer. He lived almost completely alone for his last twenty years

  Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, I didn't want to hear depressing things about Tennessee Williams. I wanted to hear about his Streetcar of Desire, and his method for writing first drafts. And if this Williams guy's life was really as tough as Patton made out, I wanted to discover that fact for myself.

  I broke off the conversation and turned my attention to the menu. Summoning the waitress, I ordered us the spicy duck soup hotpot. There would be tons of chillies and garlic in the broth. Patton and I could enjoy torturing our tongues instead of dwelling on the sad life of Tennessee Williams.

  Almost immediately a large, steaming pot arrived. We began sweating like the soup in front of us, and Patton started taking off layers of clothes until I could see his chest hair through his thin, damp shirt. I did the same, and kept stripping until there was nothing reasonable left to take off. The other customers just stared at us.