by Mian Mian
Sometimes you really scare me, he said. How can I make love to someone I’m afraid of? I share a bed with you, but sometimes I’ll be watching your face while you sleep, and suddenly I’ll get this feeling like I don’t know you at all. Have you ever had that feeling? Maybe you don’t really know yourself, either. We don’t know shit. We’re just a couple of morons.
What are you talking about? What do you mean, you don’t know me?
You can look for another boyfriend, but you won’t be able to leave me. You and I have to live together.
I realized that if I left him I wouldn’t have anything. It had finally sunk in, and I recognized that for the past several years I had been living for one thing only—gaining possession of Saining.
I didn’t know what to do. In all our time together, we’d never talked about control. Now drugs were controlling Saining. He had changed, grown moody, sometimes up and sometimes down. But the most confusing and hurtful thing of all was that he no longer needed to connect with me. He used heroin. I didn’t. We weren’t on the same wavelength anymore; we couldn’t connect. He was gloomy, antisocial, always felt cold, didn’t like the light. He was constipated, and he had no appetite for food or sex. I tried everything I could think of to attract his attention, but it only made him more irritable. He said that the truth of the matter was that he needed a life that was controlled by something, no matter how inexplicable. Anyway, his drug habit wasn’t going to drive him to steal or borrow a gun. It was just that he couldn’t live without this particular drug, at least not for now. He loved music, but love was love and nothing more. He wasn’t like Sanmao, with all of his lofty goals. Saining didn’t really have any goals; he’d never had any goal in life until heroin became his purpose, his opponent. He was pitting himself against heroin. He said it was a dangerous game, but it held his interest.
Pitting himself against heroin? That was the weirdest thing I’d ever heard.
Finally he said, You might as well give up. I’m not coming back.
I drank Black Label and soda every day, just like an old man, stupidly thinking that it made me look tough. We weren’t making ends meet, and I went back to singing in nightclubs. I bought myself whiskey to prove that I loved myself. Alcohol kept me company; I needed it to keep away my loneliness, and it gave me a sense of security. I started drinking as soon as I got out of bed. I grew increasingly withdrawn and rarely spoke. Although I almost never drank so much that I lost consciousness, I still needed to drink a great deal of alcohol every day just to keep my composure. Whenever I had too much, I would end up in the bathroom, leaning over the sink and retching, promising myself that I would never again drink that much. Once, when I’d mixed my drinks and drunk it all too fast, I vomited up a mouthful of blood. The blood I spat out was nearly black, and for the first time I found myself thinking that alcohol was evil. It had taken me a long time to come to this recognition.
Saining and I felt the pain of lovers adrift in the world. Together we moved through the shadowy landscape, each confirming the other’s existence. We had once been passionate lovers. Now we just looked at each other without interest; any supposed feelings of love seemed gradually to fade into a vague and tearful sentimentality. Neither of us cooked anymore, not that we wanted to eat anything. We were living together like a pair of hostile neighbors, and our lives took on a sordid air. The slightest thing could provoke a loud and violent argument between us. We snickered at the idea of heroes.
Our lives were crazy, and the significance of pain was lost on us.
Sometimes we became suddenly tender, and I would urge him to quit heroin and he would urge me to stop drinking, and we always spoke these words with tears streaming down our faces.
Then one day, out of the blue, Saining told me he had a gig singing in one of the newly developing towns on the outskirts of the city. I said I thought that it was too far away for him to ride the bus back and forth every day, and I suggested that he rent a place there. I added, I’m giving you two months. If you haven’t given up heroin by then, I’m going to start using it myself.
After he became a “celebrity,” we treated each other with more civility. Instead of renting an apartment in that little town, he spent four hours commuting each day. If he was using heroin, it was barely discernible, and I wasn’t drinking as much. Too often, though, we were in a state of lethargy, and for the first time I found myself thinking seriously about death. I hoped that I would die naturally, in my sleep. I felt that I’d been fortunate, I’d enjoyed my life, and I hadn’t really suffered very much. But lately I’d started to worry about money, and my desire for Saining was met with rejection, and with my boyfriend acting this way, over time I too lost interest in sex. Sometimes even bathing seemed like too much of an effort. I might as well have been dead.
One day, on impulse, I headed out to that little town on my own. I saw big posters of Saining’s face pasted up outside several restaurants. I had no idea when the pictures had been taken. He had transformed himself into a “rock star,” which was a ridiculous idea, something that the Saining I used to know would never have gone along with.
I went and watched him perform, and it seemed to me that not only was he still on the same old disastrous course, but he had become a sensationalist. Everything he did was designed to attract attention, and maybe it was deliberate, or maybe he didn’t care, and then again maybe he just had to go through those motions in order to make a living. I didn’t know, nor did I know any of the songs he was singing. The act was totally idiotic.
I didn’t know whether to laugh or cry, and the most laughably pathetic thing of all was his band. It was made up of a handful of local teenagers, no more than sixteen or seventeen years old, the sons of peasants who’d had a little land of their own and built houses during the reforms and gotten rich by becoming landlords. I couldn’t figure out how Saining had managed to set himself up as the leader of this bunch of country boys in such a short time. I understood the boys themselves even less, however. Even though their performances invariably seemed more like rehearsals than actual performances, I was charmed all the same. Where had they come from? How had they learned to play?
The band had lots of fans, young people of all descriptions. Most, like me, had ridden a long way on the bus to get there. The night was hot and humid, alcohol fumes filled the air, and Saining was leading the band, and the band was playing, and the crowd was crude and unruly, all free-floating aggression. But after the satisfaction and ennui of drunkenness had passed, everyone went away empty-handed. Because the new Saining had nothing to offer. The singing and playing were a pathetic spectacle.
I watched backstage as a few very young girls sought out Saining. They were all speaking Cantonese, these daughters of rich locals, and they brought Saining all kinds of strange and bizarre gifts. I noticed that the same handful of girls appeared whenever Saining played, and I overheard one of them saying how much she wished she could trade places with Saining’s girlfriend. This left me feeling all churned up: Girlfriend! I thought. Did she have any idea what it was really like to be his girlfriend?
I joined Saining for a late-night snack in a restaurant, and we had a big fight right in front of the band. He told me that he liked playing this kind of music. I said, You realize that what you’re doing is total bullshit, don’t you? They’ve only just started to learn about rock and roll out here. CDs are hard to come by, they have to depend on you, and you’re totally misleading them, these fans of yours, these kids. Do you realize what you’re doing? How can you do this to them?
Saining said, I’ve never tried to pass it off as rock and roll; I’m just trying to earn a living! Can you tell me what rock and roll is? Young people in this country love to talk about rock and roll, but that’s all they do, just talk, talk, talk. It’s sick!
Aren’t you one of them too? Anyway, I don’t know what rock and roll is, either. So what! Who cares if it’s rock and roll or not? What’s important is that your music has no soul. You have to stop doing thi
s; you’d be better off starving!
One day I found a poem in English written on the little blackboard in our apartment:
Please believe me,
The little stream told me,
It wanted to hold me, hold me so tenderly,
Floating free,
Falling free,
And the stream rushes on, never stopping.
Underwater, I’ll breathe in that stream, until the end of my life.
Only the stream knows how it will happen.
Please believe me,
If you don’t need me anymore,
I’ll be gone soon,
I promise you, promise
I’ll drown my body in wine.
Saining spent his days running from gig to gig without a thought in his head. He didn’t have time to think about what he was doing. That little town was a lawless place, full of all sorts of criminals, con men, and grifters, and fugitives from the North and from Hong Kong. One night, at the end of a set, a couple of plainclothes policemen went backstage and questioned Saining in low voices about whether he was carrying a concealed weapon. The poor bastard thought that they were playing a joke on him, and he laughed, saying, Yeah, and I have a pair of grenades too!
They arrested him on the spot. Nobody knew which department the arresting officers had come from. I asked my boss at the nightclub for help, and we drove off to look for Saining. We searched everywhere until finally we found him at a small station house, in the Bureau of Special Cases.
On the way home, Saining bought an armload of booze. He drank and vomited all the way home, stinking to high heaven. We didn’t say a word, either of us, and the moment he set foot in our apartment, he went to dig up his stash of heroin.
Before he could stop me, I’d snatched the little paper packet from him and thrown it out the window.
I shouldn’t have bailed you out; I should have let you stay there and go cold turkey. They could have taken you to rehab and left you there for six months. I’m sick and tired of heroin. Look at you! Look at what you’re doing to yourself! I can’t stand looking at you; you’re disgusting.
Is this why you left Sanmao? Just so you could do heroin? Nothing else seems to matter to you anymore. Are you actually happy?
Don’t go back there. I don’t want you to waste your time playing that crappy music anymore. Do it for me. I don’t want to live this way. I used to be unhappy because I was worried about your being with other women, but now I worry about smack. I’m sick to death of this life we’re living.
Saining didn’t respond, and I started pounding, first on his violin and then on his guitar. Finally Saining took the strings that I’d ripped from his guitar and tied me up on the balcony while our dog howled.
Saining’s pallid face had hardened into resolve—dark, silent, and complete resolve.
He left without a word.
The noisy, crowded street lay below me. The whole world had gone crazy, and there I was, a prisoner on my own balcony, with nowhere to pee.
Seven hours later, I was listening to Saining’s incoherent apology.
Saining, I said, I’ve always thought that our being together was a good thing, something to be happy about. Even though we’ve had our problems, we’ve grown up together. But it’s getting hard to take. Because of you I peed in my pants, I’m wet, and I stink. Our lives are a mess; we haven’t made anything of ourselves. In the years we’ve been together, I’ve dedicated myself to making you want nothing but music and me. I’ve been such an idiot! Because our feelings for each other just can’t compete with heroin. And what is heroin? I haven’t a clue, and neither have you, but you pit yourself against it anyway, right? I’ve never stopped trying to make sense of things, but I just keep getting more and more mixed up. I’ve decided to move out. Even though I won’t be living here, we can still be together. But living with you is too nerve-racking.
Once again, I moved out. And this time my mind was a blank.
13.
Sanmao came back, and I talked to him constantly about all of my current troubles. Sanmao said, Reality is a wall that lies between us and our recovery. We have to bore through that wall, but music can save us.
Sanmao’s words were a perfect encapsulation of the spirit of the late-1980s underground rock scene in China. He always drew connections between music and salvation, music and destiny. This gave him a serious and responsible air.
But for Saining, music was simply a passion. It had nothing to do with salvation. Making music wasn’t going to deliver him from anything, nor was it bringing him any kind of peace. Saining thought that the only thing that could save your soul was religion, but you had to have been chosen for it. It had to be your destiny. Music wasn’t a religion. Music was a form of expression, an embodiment of the spirit, a way of life, and the most natural thing in the world.
Sanmao explained that there were many reasons that Saining had been so unhappy in Beijing. He always felt slighted, Sanmao said. But that’s nothing unusual around there. Nobody in Beijing takes anybody else very seriously. The thing is, Saining is one of those people who come back from overseas with an especially clear sense of themselves. His natural tendency is to be a bit of a loner, and in Beijing he became downright antisocial. It was the first time he’d noticed how different he was—he wasn’t Chinese, and he wasn’t Western. No one else could relate to his anger. Not many people in Beijing can afford to buy instruments, much less know as much about them as Saining does. Most of those guys can’t even afford to buy CDs. So Saining couldn’t relate to them either. And to top it all off, because he lived on a farm labor camp when he was a child, Beijing intimidates him. He thinks of it as a very political place, where everybody treats music like it’s some kind of revolution. And as for the heroin, that might have started with a relationship he had with a dancer in Beijing.
I don’t know whether or not he slept with her, Sanmao concluded. But I do know that she used heroin.
After his return, Sanmao lived with Saining, and people said that they were inseparable, that they were like each other’s shadows. Saining and I talked on the phone every day, each checking in to see how the other was doing, but he was still using heroin and I was still drinking. One day I called him up and just started crying. Then he started crying too, and both of us were bawling on the telephone. We didn’t say more than a few words. He’d say, I’m so sad; and I’d say, I’m sad too.
One afternoon, I went out and bought some treats for our little dog, Dangdang. I brought them by the apartment, which had become a complete wreck. Saining and Sanmao were both sleeping, and Dangdang kept licking me. He wanted me to take him outside to play. I picked him up and wrote a few lines from Allen Ginsberg’s poem for his mother on our little blackboard.
Sanmao called up to invite me to a party. He used the Chinese word wanhui, just like everybody did back then. The English word party hadn’t become popular yet.
That was where I saw Saining, and he was the Saining I knew again. He wore a snowy white shirt and a clean pair of blue jeans, and he was standing on the stage looking uneasy, embarrassed even. In his music he was confident, expressing his dreams and ideals without ambiguity, unafraid of being mocked.
I had never thought of Saining as angry, just high-strung. He was too fragile to be angry. He knew he was fragile, and he used his vulnerability to plumb that vulnerability further. His music was a kind of prayer.
If rainy days are a sort of nostalgia
Could I take you
And engrave you on my heart?
If dissonance is pent-up grief
Would you take me
And place me in the night’s embrace?
And if I couldn’t stop sneezing
Would you say to me
You are a child of the earth
Don’t worry, it’s just a little mist . . .
Saining was like a child who had been bullied so much that he had given up on the adult world. He was born talented, gentle, and neurotic. He had his own private logi
c, and he used Chinese and Western instruments in his own way. His music had a naturally caustic quality, his guitar playing was echoey and tremulous, and his singing voice had a chilly kind of sweetness, but the most beautiful thing of all was his melodies. They were decadent and eerily beautiful. They were what set him apart from all of the other Chinese rockers.
Saining did not have a very good feel for the Chinese language, but he insisted on writing his songs in Chinese anyway. We used to write songs together, usually starting with his strumming a little tune, and then he’d tell me what he wanted the words to express. Most of his lyrics touched on fragmentary stories. He would write them out in English, and my job was to come up with Chinese words that made sense. I always felt happy whenever I watched Saining singing these songs up onstage. I felt as though he had granted me a special privilege, the privilege of being bathed with him in the bright halo of his music. I was enthralled by the extended trance of this music, and it was only then, when Saining was onstage and I was in the audience, that I understood his secret. Only then did I achieve a genuine sense of well-being.
I hadn’t been to a gathering like this in a long time. In the past I’d followed Saining around from one noisy concert to another. We’d been each other’s biggest, most loyal fans, and he’d been my guitar player too. We used the most basic setups and equipment and played for all kinds of audiences. Saining liked to watch me onstage with my long hair and short skirts, and I liked to stare at my legs swaying back and forth to the music of my own thin voice as I sang, my hair whipping around to cover my breasts or hide my cheeks, something that I thought accentuated the three-dimensionality of my features. And I foolishly thought that this helped me create an aura of mystery. In those days, performing was mostly a pretext for me to have a good time, a pleasure that was enhanced by the fact that I had an audience. Saining had a habit of buying me little silk kerchiefs; I have a large head and I wasn’t meant to wear a kerchief, but he kept on giving me kerchiefs all the same. Accessories are very important, he would tell me. Whenever I performed, I always picked out one of those little scarves and tied it around the microphone stand. I couldn’t write songs, so I sang Doors songs that I’d translated, and they lit up my hazy prayers with a power that was at once comforting and inspiring. Saining was one of the few people who understood and encouraged my strange passion for the Doors.
