Candy

by Mian Mian

  Let’s go home and talk some more, OK? Saining said.

  Go home? The instant I discovered you were gone, it was like the sky came crashing down on my head. I don’t know how you can ever right a wrong like that. Even yesterday, I was still in so much pain that I didn’t want to go on living.

  Saining, you can’t know what true misery is until you’ve seen every tenderness turn to hatred.

  Saining, I asked heaven and earth for an answer, hoping they would tell me what words I had to say to bring you back to me. And here you are at last. Now what?

  I kept wanting to call you, and Sanmao too. But I just kept putting it off. I was afraid.

  Am I that frightening, Saining? I thought that no couple was closer than we were.

  Two hours later, I had Saining buy me a return ticket.

  In the waiting area, Saining stood behind me, his arms around me.

  I’m sorry, he said.

  I felt his body, his breath, the warmth of his blood, but I didn’t know if this was really my Saining or not.

  I said, It would have been a lot better if you’d actually died, Saining. I’m missing those days when I stood at the window, crying over the news of your death.

  After this, Saining called me every day, but our conversations were always rather awkward.

  Once, I said, Don’t call me anymore, but please let me know if you move. That way I can call you.

  Sanmao and I spoke on the phone several times, and we both talked about how awful Saining was.

  Once again I was convinced that, at least currently, I was a woman who had nothing to be happy for. I was looking forward to my thirtieth birthday because maybe after that some savor would return to my life.

  I wrote a song about my trip to Beijing. I played the guitar Saining had left behind and sang into Saining’s four-track tape recorder fourteen and a half times. It was a simple song, with a sweetly sentimental melody, but the lyrics were nothing but a bunch of profanity. I used the English that Saining had taught me, used the language of the bourgeoisie to curse the bourgeoisie, and while maybe there was one line that could have passed for cultured, the line that kept recurring went, “That’s just the kind of bastard he is!”

  I wrote down parts of Saining’s and my story because I felt I had to. Writing had come into my life; it was the doctor’s orders. And as I wrote, I kept hearing the words “That’s just the kind of bastard he is, yeah, that’s just the kind of bastard he is!” going through my head nonstop. I put together a bunch of literary techniques, like flashbacks, and I mixed them up with that song, and it all came out like something that might pass for pretty. My dad said, You must work hard. The effort will make you stronger. What I really wanted to get out of writing was to arrive at some deeper understanding of things; but the only thing I knew for sure was that writing had, at least for the time being, made me into a hardworking woman.

  In the end, do we lose control in order to gain our freedom, or is freedom just one way of being out of control?

  Marx really was a genius. He said that true freedom is grounded in the knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the world.

  I knew that there was a state I would never be able to attain. What is Truth? Truth is like air; I sense its approach and its presence. I can smell its breath, but when I reach out, I can’t catch hold of it. Over the years, I’ve been caught up in worldly things. How many times must I have brushed shoulders with Truth!

  I’m sensitive by nature, but I have no wisdom. I’m naturally rebellious, but I can’t stand firm. I think that’s what my problem is. I watch myself with my body, I think with my skin, I believe in the absoluteness of physical sensations. I’ve asked myself, What is it to be high? I flew as high as I could fly, and then went higher still. But having tried it, I realized that none of it could liberate me.

  And liberation and faith are alike in this respect—neither of these is a word you should use lightly.

  Fate put a pen in my hand, and my dad said, If you want to write, you don’t have to get a job.

  The sky is all lit up, and that bright sky illuminates my devastation, illuminates my prayers, and I tell myself: You can be a naked writer.

  J

  1.

  One night, Saining and I watched Leaving Las Vegas, and when it was over, we made love. He cried out as he entered my body. He said, You haven’t slept with anyone in a long time! These words cut me. We became sadder and sadder as we made love, and each of us was wrapped up in our own thoughts.

  That night I asked myself, Out of all the times I’ve made love in the past, which one was the best? It had been a few years earlier. I asked Saining when the best time had been for him, but he didn’t answer.

  Saining often came to Shanghai to see me, and we usually got together with Bug. He joined us as we sought out the new life of Shanghai, and all of this helped me feel a bit better. Lots of video rental stands had sprung up in Shanghai; they rented Hollywood movies and movies from Europe too. I saw some good movies and some terrible movies. I filled the evening hours of my drug-free life with movies from the West.

  Bug took us to a little shop in Five Corners, out by the universities, to buy records, and we saw disks that had had notches cut into them with electric saws. Usually it was the last song that had been ruined, but the rest of the songs were still playable. There were other disks with a hole drilled in the middle, and those were completely playable, no problem. There were also tapes that had been cut, and all you had to do was buy them and take them home and stick them back together and they were fine. All of these Western recordings were incredibly inexpensive once they’d had holes punched in them. You could find any kind of good music you wanted, from the 1960s to the 1990s. Word was that these were surplus products sent by Western record companies as gifts to the children of our socialist country, but that customs had cut them, and then they’d been smuggled in. These notched and holey recordings were like a miracle, and nobody was really sure what the story behind them was. They were like a huge gift from heaven, and the whole thing was a deep mystery. At first we thought we were the only ones who knew about this wonderful stuff, but we soon learned that the same thing was going on in lots of other cities as well.

  Sick and tired of waiting, we were finally entering a new world. We were hearing music that had never been available to us before.

  Underground rock groups were proliferating in Shanghai, and some of the people that sold defaced disks got together and organized bands. Sometimes Bug and I would try to put together the money for a gig of our own. Over time, those of us who listened to hole-punched records came to be known as the Hole-Punch Generation.

  Saining and I could still listen to music, watch movies, and smoke marijuana together. For some reason, the more I smoked, the more anxious I felt. Saining said that this was just a stage I needed to get through, and then everything would be OK again.

  We did lots of things together, but we still didn’t know how to become real lovers again. We just went through the motions. His hands were always cold, and his body had lost its heat, which made me ashamed, and my sense of shame seemed to spread to him. He’d changed; he’d become ashamed. When we made love, even the air was ashamed. And the moment his lips touched me, I felt a deep sadness, a bottomless sadness. We both felt depressed. It was a sickening cycle, of sadness giving way to boredom and circling back again, until in the end we were afraid even to try making love.

  It was as though someone had filled our bodies with lead, as though we still felt and thought like addicts in withdrawal. But I assured myself that this was just part of the process.

  One day, Kiwi turned up. He was an old classmate from middle school.

  Bug tended bar at a club, and Kiwi had overheard him talking about me, so one night, Kiwi went to that club and waited for me.

  There are some people whose feelings for each other are a mixture of yearning and fear. You can easily pick them out of a crowd. Kiwi and I were like this.

  Kiwi had become an amazing
ly good sculptor when being a sculptor was still a brand-new profession in Shanghai.

  I noticed that he had full lips, just like Saining, and I had a moment of clarity.

  We came to his house, an old building on Maoming Road. In his bathroom I touched his lips and said, I’ve been longing for lips like these for a very long time.

  I kissed him, caressed him. His skin glistened, and it was enough for me just to feel that smoothness. He took his time in peeling away my clothing, and my frail body gradually lost its strangeness. His pale fingers, the waves in his eyes, his trembling lashes. His hair brushed my thighs, his lips calmed my body, and he brought me the warmth I had craved, lulled me as he moved in the space between my thighs. All of the good times I’d had many years before came back to me, and I said to myself, This is what I’ve been waiting for.

  Slowly my skin grew translucent, my entire body became translucent, and I began masturbating at night even though it confused me and sometimes even left me feeling deeply depressed.

  We always made love the same way. His used his mouth to give me pleasure, and I had to kneel beside him, my back to the mirror, thighs straight, twisting at the waist, with my arms hanging loosely at my sides. And he looked at the reflection of my back in the mirror and masturbated. I admired the way he masturbated; I thought that here was a man who really enjoyed playing with himself, and I watched him watching me in the mirror, with his left hand circling up, and his penis like the slash of the moon, because he needed to have me watching him in order for him to come. Watching him ejaculate sometimes made me tremble. But for the sake of his pleasure, I had to remain perfectly still until his cries of joy had completely subsided.

  The sound of his voice when he came seemed to come not from his body but from the world of his dreams. The colors of the night made my breathing ragged, and we kissed, our bodies pressed close.

  One night, after we’d made love, he blurted out, Did you know I was the boy who gave that girl those flowers?

  He had his back to me, and I couldn’t tell whether he wanted to talk about it some more or just wanted to say that much, but I was upset.

  I said, Really?! Did it make any kind of impression on you?

  He was silent.

  Afterward each of us lit ourselves a cigarette. A while later, the telephone rang. As I looked out the window at Shanghai at night, I took in this news about Lingzi.

  When Kiwi got off the phone, I said, Do you remember how I used to sit in the classroom, trying to figure out which boy had given Lingzi the flowers? I used to wonder, What is he thinking right now? I suspected each and every one of you boys in turn. And then I was struck by the sense that I could be sure of nothing in the world except for the food in my mouth. For a long time I wore that red waterproof sweat suit, with the two white stripes on the sleeves. It’s still hanging in my bedroom closet. I love that outfit, no matter how silly it might seem. I love it because it’s the symbol of my freedom, of my self-determination.

  Kiwi said, I didn’t think much about it at the time. Suddenly I’d learned that she was mentally ill. She was sick, but her illness had nothing to do with me.

  Then he changed the subject. He seemed very cruel to me. All these years it had never occurred to me that it could be that way, and hearing him talk like this left me feeling unsettled.

  2.

  Kiwi and I often wandered around the city, sometimes stopping off at one of the restaurants that had been opened by Westerners. Sometimes we stayed at home, drinking, listening to music, or watching TV. Sometimes we made love in front of the mirror, and it gave us a nice feeling. Actually, I thought up some other ways for us to make love, but Kiwi said he liked making love to me this way because I myself had said that I’d been missing lips like his for such a long time. He said that those words were what had attracted him to me.

  Our attraction was mutual, and it was mysterious. I told myself that there were some things I didn’t have to try to make sense of, especially because I was usually wrong. He and I couldn’t even exchange ordinary pleasantries without feeling depressed, so we never talked about our pasts. He didn’t know anything about my past, and he never asked.

  One day I was feeling unsettled, and I shouted out right in the street, Love me! You’ll never find another lover as good as me.

  Alcohol was all around me, drugs were all around me, music was all around me, and men were everywhere. I was losing my bearings.

  My mood was like my lover’s hair. Love, for me, was partly a mood, just like that ultradopey bullshit music that I sometimes liked to listen to. That kind of music made me jumpy, but when I felt tense, I felt happy. When I felt tense, I also had to have chocolate. My youth wasn’t over yet; fate wasn’t going to abandon me. My youth and my nerves were as intimate as each other’s shadows. And my lover’s hair and I were also as intimate as each other’s shadows. I was destined to eat chocolate forever, and every piece of chocolate I had ever eaten would live forever in hallowed memory!

  Kiwi came up with a weird idea. He wanted to find a professional cameraman to videotape us making love. He said he wanted the video to be an investigation of the zeitgeist, presented in a form that would genuinely move people, a piece that incorporated faces and limbs. I thought his reasoning seemed a little dubious, and I figured he was looking for titillation, and you could film something private like this on your own. But Kiwi stubbornly insisted that he wanted a professional videographer. He said that he had been studying color and the subtle relationship between color and light. I thought he was too pretentious for words.

  It seemed to me that he was trying to create something out of nothing, and that he was being a little selfish besides. But no matter how hard I tried to think of a way out, I couldn’t find an excuse to refuse him. It occurred to me that maybe I’d been waiting to fall in love with him, and that this might have been the reason I was humoring him. These thoughts brought on an upwelling of the sweetest mood. My frail spirit shook, and my heart was no longer such a desolate place.

  My one condition was that I would choose the cameraman. I looked up Apple.

  Apple was an old classmate of ours. I told him that Kiwi had returned from abroad, and I told him what Kiwi had been up to lately and about Kiwi’s and my relationship. I gave him lots of details, and Apple was intrigued. When I was seventeen I’d had a crush on Apple, and later on I’d found out he was gay. We’d always kept in touch, and he was the first person I’d looked up after coming out of rehab. He’d taken me to Huaihai Road, where we wandered through the new department stores, and he’d told me about all the latest trends. He might finger a piece of clothing and tell me something like, This is plastic. It’s from England—plastic-coated fabrics are in right now. He took me to clubs, took me to the clubs with live bands. That little town in the South really didn’t have much in the way of clubs with live music. Whenever there was something fun going on, Apple took me there. He gave me new clothes. And we spent a lot of time in his beautiful kitchen, investigating new recipes.

  Shanghai had been completely transformed. It was no longer anything like the old Shanghai. It was becoming more beautiful and more hollow all the time. Fortunately I had Apple and Bug; otherwise I wouldn’t have been able to form a relationship with this new city.

  I started to like Shanghai, to like all those new names with foreign words mixed in. Some of the foreigners hosted lots of parties, but the air at those parties was both sweet and false, as if everyone had become white-collar workers overnight, and there were models, singers, and local artists, the genuine and the fake, and I didn’t really know what I was doing there, in the midst of all of that. Everyone was speaking Mandarin or English; nobody spoke much Shanghainese.

  So Saining was like a friend from another world entirely. I didn’t want him spending a lot of time in Shanghai, nor did I try to conceal my relationship with Kiwi from him.

  Saining said, I love you, and that’s never going to change.

  The problem is that I don’t feel any desire fo
r you anymore. Without desire, how can I feel sexy? Plus you’ve never once said I was pretty. You don’t really feel any desire for me either.

  Don’t be silly. I still want to sing for you. How could I not desire you?

  Heroin, stupid, shitty heroin. If you took all the heroin I’d sucked up and lined it all up, it would be as long as the Great Wall of China. Asthma attacks, hiding out in garbage heaps with rats scuttling about and waiting for drugs, getting mixed up with all kinds of people and all kinds of narcotics, having my hair shaved off, and once, while I was trying to get away from the police, I stuffed those drugs up my crack—I was so scared, so fucked up, I even stuck the little knife I used to cut up the powder into my crack as well. I’m saying all this just to scare you. I want you to be scared. What I mean is, the thing that you don’t seem to understand at all is that stuff like this has completely wiped out any desire I ever felt for you, or what you represent. I need an entirely new life.

  Apple agreed to videotape Kiwi and me. Apple had become a conceptual artist, one who made all kinds of video projects.

  I felt that Apple was the best choice of a videographer. He was a professional, as Kiwi had wanted. Because he was gay, I wouldn’t feel too inhibited in front of him; and because he and I went back more than a decade and truly cared about each other, I believed he would be discreet and keep our secret. He was also a little bit eccentric and a little bit crazy, and I was curious to see what kind of vision he would come up with.

  We needed to schedule the taping soon, and Kiwi was constantly pressing me to commit to a date. It used to be that whenever we saw each other, we never had time to say everything we had to say to each other. Making love was only one part of our relationship. But now we spoke much less. And sometimes he had a look on his face that suggested he was losing control. Once, while he was watching me in the mirror, he started to cry, and on another occasion he buried his head in my chest and said, I love you; don’t leave me. I became aware of a combined sense of happiness and unease that is difficult to describe, and I began to feel lost.