by Mian Mian
One of the patients got a skin infection and couldn’t work with us anymore. She sat alone on a stool, watching us work. When I walked by her, she asked me, Where did you work when you were outside? I said, What? What do you mean, where did I work? And I asked her, Where did you work? She answered, I worked at a disco, called JJ. Then she looked at me. I couldn’t tell by looking that she was sick, but she had that habit of rocking back and forth and constantly shuffling her feet.
A contingent of drug addicts was brought to the clinic in a police van, and things got a bit livelier. They’d all been forcibly committed. One of them remarked to me once, You have such good veins. I bet you don’t have any trouble at all. Just stick the needle in, and it’s instant bliss. Two new girls moved into my room, Shanghai girls just back from Japan. They were always singing Japanese songs in my room. It was getting close to New Year’s, and one day a tour bus came to pick us all up and take us to Pudong. After we got back, one of the others said to me, You know what? Life outside looks pretty good!
On Christmas we had a party, and someone ate some of my chocolate and started singing for everyone. She was the only patient who wore glasses. She was singing the kinds of Christmas carols that choirs sing. She had a beautiful soprano voice, and her real and falsetto voices blended naturally. When she was finished, I asked her, Where did you learn all these songs? She said, I’m a teacher. So how did you end up in here? I asked. I killed my husband, she said. I asked her why, and she answered, My old man was so tiny—just one squeeze and he was dead. After relating all of this to me, her expression remained perfectly calm.
I began hating myself. I swore I would never again ask another patient why she was in this clinic.
The song we sang in chorus that day was a little love song, and there were several dozen old women belting out,
Let me think of you, think of you, think of you,
Think of you one last time.
Tomorrow I’ll be another man’s bride.
I’m thinking of you deep inside.
They sang with great care and very little feeling, but it was genuinely moving. It had struck a nerve. I had not been touched like that in a long time, and I found my heart again.
Afterward I chanced to hear this popular song many times, and I found out that it was called “Words of the Heart.” Every time I heard it, I would be overcome, and I would stop whatever I was doing and listen to the song until it was over. This song reminded me of where I’d been.
The morning after Christmas, I woke up early. My nurse’s aide came into the room to take away my dishes, and she said to me, These dumplings are so good. Why don’t you eat them? Every day she asked me the same kind of question, and every day I gave her the same answer: I’m not going to eat them, so why don’t you? On this day she responded by picking up the dishes and carrying them out. Soon she returned with a mop and was about to start mopping when she abruptly leaned against the wall and blew a spit bubble. Afraid to call out, I kept one eye on her, and one eye on the space heater, worried that she might pick it up and hit me with it. Just then, one of the registered nurses passed by in the hall. I lowered my voice and said, Hey! What’s wrong with her? The registered nurse came in, took the mop and placed it in the aide’s hands, and had her grasp it tight. To me she said, She’ll be fine in a moment. Don’t worry. And a few minutes later, the aide straightened up and went back to mopping the floor, her face pale, her hair like wires. I wanted to get up and mop the floor myself, but I was afraid to move. After a little while, the registered nurse came in and said to me, She had that episode just now because she ate your dumplings. She eats your dumplings every day, but today a bunch of the other patients ganged up on her, so she got sick. In the future, if you’re not going to eat your food, please make sure you give it to someone different each time.
It was almost New Year’s, and everybody dressed up in clean clothes for visiting hours. One patient ate cake with her son. Another was talking with her husband. Another sat with her mother, who was probably in her eighties. Another patient was waiting around. All of the patients were shuffling back and forth. I sat by my bed, my hands jammed up my sleeves, my two feet rocking back and forth, left to right, right to left, and I looked at the chocolate my mother had brought for me. My mother had spent only ten minutes in my room. She said, The guard at the gate was very nasty to me. He said there was nothing anybody could do to help drug addicts like you. My mother said that now she felt like a criminal, and that she was going to have to leave soon. She didn’t want to be subjected to another lecture.
My release date was getting closer, and I was moved to the large dormitory with all of the other patients. Every night, people talked in their sleep, and I couldn’t sleep. I was always hungry, and I would get up at midnight and have some cookies while another patient watched me from under her blanket and laughed, saying, Why on earth did they move you into this room?
I went home. I said, I want to take a bath. There was nowhere to take a bath in there, and it’s been way too long since I last had a bath. Then I said, The bathroom in our house is too cold. I don’t like being cold, so I’d like to go to the public bathhouse. My mother gave me one yuan, which I told her was enough. I figured that she was afraid to give me more money than that, afraid that I would use it to buy drugs.
I was back in my old neighborhood, and now I was going back to the bathhouse where I’d often gone as a child. Wearing the wig my father had bought for me, I went into the baths. I was so weak, wheezing and gasping as I bathed, and my wig fell off. A middle-aged woman, stark naked herself, glanced first at the wig, and then at the fuzz on my scalp, before finally letting her gaze come to rest on my body.
After my bath, I left the bathhouse and spent two mao on a deep-fried Shanghai-style fritter, and the sugar-coated fritter stuck to my teeth, and I thought that it was incredibly good, and so cheap too. I was ecstatic at the thought that I wouldn’t have to eat Master Kang’s instant noodles or Danone Tuc crackers from the clinic store ever again. I didn’t want to touch either of those things for the rest of my life. It seemed possible to me that I might be able to start my life over, beginning with this moment. I thought of my home, thought about how I wouldn’t have to feel cold anymore, thought about the clinic I’d just left, and reflected that I was the only patient who had got out in time for New Year’s this year. And then I told myself: Honestly, heroin is nothing but glorified shit.
H
1.
Roses have thorns, just like love. When the petals of a rose fall, they scatter one by one, like the tears of a young widow. This mournful rainy weather is sensitive, but there’s something inauthentic about it too; I’ve always felt a particular connection with it. The sound of rain is heartless, it forms a barrier between me and this world, and the sound of my lover’s singing drifts in the air. I can no longer kiss him, I can no longer plead with him, I can no longer thank him. I see my face buried under a big stone, and I want so badly to push that stone away.
The rain had stretched out my old leather shoes by a whole size, and my feet flopped around inside them. I kicked my CD player around with my ruined shoes. The man inside the player was too bourgeois. My CD player was skipping, and my shoes were wheezing in fits and starts.
Today, someone came from the South, someone who wanted me to pick out one of Saining’s songs for inclusion on a CD. He said, We want to do a tribute to him, and we’d like it if you could do the vocals.
The word tribute made me want to laugh. I said, Saining was a broken poem. I didn’t understand him. I can’t possibly imitate the face he showed to the world, or pretend to bear the scars that filled his dreams.
I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t been able to sing for a long time. After I was released from rehab, I discovered Kurt Cobain. He was already gone, and I felt a sense of sadness and loss, but that didn’t mean I understood him. Sanmao was drinking heavily, still making a living singing in nightclubs, singing pop songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, giving his wife nothi
ng but abuse. His wife was beautiful, and she worshiped him. She was as loyal and fragile as my little dog, Dangdang. More and more bands and stages were going over to punk, and there were more and more punk concerts all the time. The world was changing, and I felt as though I no longer had any heroes. I’d already had my Cui Jian. I was the girl who had run away while listening to the sound of Cui Jian’s voice, and even today I still felt lucky in that. I’d long ago stopped wondering about the difference between blue skies and suffering.
The streets were filled with strange faces, all saying that the man I loved had disappeared. Fire and ash can never meet, just like yesterday and today.
It had been three years since Saining left me. He was the tears I couldn’t cry, the words I couldn’t speak; he was the terror I felt at the demon face in my mirror; he was the beauty of my death, the love I’d once had and would never have again.
His disappearance had distorted everything I was and knew, and sometimes I felt as if I’d been buried alive. But I recognized that this was how my life was. I didn’t know how to talk about any kind of control (such as choosing suicide and actually going through with it), and I couldn’t turn back my spreading misfortune. I certainly lacked determination. In this meaningless youth of mine, I was the victim and the assassin; I felt ashamed and unworthy, which was why I couldn’t just end this weird trip I was on right then and there. In the end, maybe I forced myself to go on living, but it wasn’t the fear of death that saved me; it was my own self-loathing.
It seems to me that love was invented by men. I used to think of myself as a woman who wouldn’t have been ashamed to die for a man, and I saw it as a sign of my own courage and greatness. Inhabiting that man’s world turned me into a weak woman for a long time. I was so weak, so desperate for love, and, deeply aware of my own pathos, I developed a knack for displaying my self-absorption and self-pity. That was my closed, intense inner world, and I thought that it was beautiful.
Now I had come to view myself as a completely unlovable girl; but I was also convinced that the weak woman I’d been had been destroyed.
Someone came from the South, and I have to admit that it felt like an intrusion, just like hearing all of the songs from the old days, songs that stirred up my feelings and reminded me that my love had gone far away. Even the stupidest songs could break my heart.
Saining and I were like a pair of curious cats, but curiosity can kill a cat. Sometimes, in his embrace, I would joke around and pretend to be the kind of girl who would marry him on the spot. Or I might pretend that I was the kind of girl who might run off with someone else at the drop of a hat. We liked words like elope, which to us suggested the road to freedom. But bombs fall on the most beautiful places, and happiness will steal away.
Losing control is like a series of conflagrations, and a huge blaze had taken away my love. He was gone, my love, carried away by a series of fires. Even before our five senses and our breasts had opened to the world, it was already too late for us.
A young woman’s hands are stroking the guitar, but no matter how hard I strive for that impossible release, the scent between Saining’s fingers will always be unmistakable, a darkness I will never be able to re-create. No matter how far away I travel, he will always call to me in my ashen hours, in my moments of flashing brilliance. Turn on the light, and he’ll come to call, and he’ll tell me my raison d’être. He dogs my heels, telling me over and over, You shouldn’t be here. You belong with me because you have absolutely nothing else.
2.
It’s time for me to disappear.
With these words I put my face in the shadows, although I knew that the expression on my face was not at all convincing.
Many years ago, I was a child like a blank sheet of paper, and I was exceedingly good at dispelling my anxieties by losing myself in reverie. My life had been changed by one terrible event, which had hastened my slide into the muck of being a “problem child.” My sense of my own weakness and powerlessness was absolute. After I grew up, I became a singer, although fame and fortune eluded me. My voice, with its intimations of weariness, brought lonely people together amid all the confusion, like long-lost friends. And it made weak children who were having fits of temper go and comfort each other. The woman with the sandpaper voice, that’s what my boyfriend called me. This bemused man, gentle as water, had once brought into my life the warmth I’d always yearned for, and he shrouded my sense of security in shadows. I was his smiling girl, his dazzling peach blossom.
The man I love has disappeared! I had never tired of crying out.
He was destructive and irresponsible; he’d hurt me, there was no question.
My face was ice. It was unreal and about to collapse. My prized miniskirts were threadbare, as worn out as my skin. I was a Playboy Bunny in a Santa Claus hat; I was a bucket the bloody color of raw meat. I was here, I was the shadow on the wall, and the shadow on the wall was mine. I couldn’t erase my shadow. I’m a complicated girl, but my tears were simple and straightforward. My gaze is immaculate, but I’ve never experienced a sense of my own purity.
Loneliness, apathy, misery, helplessness, depression, and self-loathing—all together they combined to form my shame, my shame, my shame. I constantly felt ashamed.
In the winter of my twenty-fifth year, a naked purity I hadn’t been looking for came to me in a flash. There was nothing for me to do anymore but leave a pretty corpse. My dead body, I despised the thought of my own dead body. I felt it was my responsibility to deal with my own corpse.
Monday morning, my bronchial tubes went into violent spasms.
The sun has risen,
Leaving the darkness behind.
The sun was so warm, and life was so beautiful; “My lover’s scent is in the air.”
One Monday morning, my elaborate plans for a “natural gas incident” were foiled by my father’s unexpected return. He knocked down the door, and the next thing I saw was a pool of my father’s blood.
Once again there was an ambulance in front of our building. A medic ordered my father to hold up the oxygen bag with one hand while helping to support the stretcher with the other. The sound of the medics’ voices as they criticized my father for moving too slowly stabbed at my ears, and the sight of my father’s old and haggard face sent me into unconsciousness.
I
I picked up the phone. It was Saining. Saining on the phone, saying, It’s me, Saining.
Not long after that, I was in the coffee shop at the Capital Airport, looking at my famous Saining. He still looked the same, with the same long hair, fawn’s eyes, and full lips. His hair was a mess, and although it was very cold outside, all he was wearing was a black sweater.
He had seen me first and called out to me. Then he’d walked over. I couldn’t believe it was true. We stood there like a couple of oafs who didn’t know what a hug was.
I thought it through, and I decided I should get in touch with you.
Why?
It was time, that’s all.
But why did you leave in the first place?
I just wanted to go away, and I thought it would be good for you to do the same. That’s how it seemed to me at the time, anyway.
Who are you living with now?
I have only one girlfriend. You.
Well, I slept with lots of other men. But that’s all it was, just going through the motions. And I used heroin too—it was just something I did. But it made trouble for a lot of other people, and it didn’t do that much for me, not really. I always thought there should be something special between me and heroin, but there was nothing, and I didn’t have you either.
Maybe we were just meant to be a couple of good friends who got together to do drugs.
Is that what you think? You think everything would have been different that way? Have you ever wanted to do drugs with one of your relatives? Say, with your aunt? After you got off, you’d just sit around bullshitting together? Now, that would be scary! It just doesn’t interest me anymore. I’m sic
k and tired of heroin, sick and tired of that pointless crap.
I’ve been traveling around. I went to a few countries, did some odd jobs, and took all kinds of drugs. But I quit heroin. There are some drugs that can change your entire life, and there were times I didn’t have any idea where my life was going. Those were the moments when I felt your presence. You came to me like an angel, and said to me, You fucked up. You have to stop doing heroin.
When you left me, Saining, you had the option of going just about anywhere in the world, but me, I couldn’t go anywhere. There was nowhere I could go, nothing I could do. My voice was ruined. I’ll never be able to sing again. Do you realize what that means? Who ever said we had to stay together? We split up. We split up, and my vocal cords are shot, and there’s no fixing them.
There wasn’t much to our conversation. Anyone looking at us would have thought that things were pretty good between us, as if we were completely removed from our shared history. The winter sunlight of Beijing, with its quality so unique to this place, poured over our bodies, and when I looked around this city, a city we’d once yearned for more than anything in the world, I saw that particular sunlight illuminating our personal disaster.
Who could ever have imagined that Saining would reappear like this, out of the blue? Once again, it was fate. My perverse destiny! I couldn’t take my eyes off him, kept staring at his dewy eyelashes. Abruptly he lifted his head and looked at me, and his eyes had not changed at all except for the fresh dark circles beneath them. We drank the nearly undrinkable coffee and watched the crowds milling around us, and it seemed that all of these people led lives that were more substantial than ours.
