Dry Milk

by Huo Yan

  On the day that they concluded the paperwork for their new business, Auckland had its heaviest rainfall for the year. The wind that whipped up blew so strongly that John Lee’s face hurt.

  They had agreed to go to China the following month for a scoping trip. It had been ten years since he was last there, and he had no idea what to expect.

  Walking around nowadays, you see Chinese faces everywhere. This place has become Chinese. John Lee sighed. How careful he had been, thirty years ago, to try to fit in, to try and become like them.

  At the lawyer’s office, Ye Xiaosheng took out a box of business cards, already printed with John Lee’s name and position on it: John Lee, General Manager, China Dairy Products Company.

  He took out one of the business cards and put it into his pocket, thinking to show it to Jiang Xiaoyu when he got home. He thought he might show it to the woman as well, but she would no doubt let out a stupid laugh, without understanding at all the significance of this development.

  Ye Xiaosheng dropped him home. On the way, hearing Jiang Xiaoyu’s name mentioned, Ye Xiaosheng asked whether she was proving a bother at all. ‘She’s fine,’ John Lee let out. ‘She’s very sensible.’

  ‘Ah, well, that’s good then. I’d worried that a young girl like that might be a bit silly and cause trouble for you.’

  Ye Xiaosheng seemed to be aware of John Lee’s anxieties, and when they arrived, he did not ask to come in. John Lee hurried up to his house, slipping on the steps made wet by the rain. With some difficulty, he pulled himself back to his feet.

  As he turned his key in the lock, he became aware of a burning smell coming from the house.

  He rushed indoors in a state of shock. The door to the woman’s room was wide open, but nobody was there. Nor was there any trace of her in the kitchen, so he pushed open the door that led into the garden. A patch on the lawn was scorched black, and the air full of smoke. Through it, he saw the woman and Jiang Xiaoyu sitting side by side on the steps, Jiang Xiaoyu’s cheeks smudged with black, her eyes brimming with tears. She was patting the woman on her back and trying to get her to cough.

  Seeing John Lee, Jiang Xiaoyu’s tears finally started flowing down her face. ‘Uncle Lee, I’m really sorry. I didn’t look after Aunty well enough. A minute ago she just about set the yard on fire.’

  Seeing that John Lee had returned home, the woman laughed. Her face, too, was smudged in black.

  ‘What the hell happened?’ John Lee asked, trying to keep hold of his emotions.

  ‘I was studying in my room when all of a sudden I smelt something. When I came out to see what was happening, I found Aunty setting fire to a pile of paper. It was already well alight and the grass had caught fire as well. I rushed back into the kitchen to get a bowl of water. It took me half an hour to put the fire out.’ Jiang Xiaoyu hung her head again. She had seemed to be apologising for her own mistake, but John Lee knew the fault wasn’t hers.

  There was no way he could blame the woman, but nor could he go over and comfort Jiang Xiaoyu. He felt that the whole incident came about because he had left the two of them at home on their own. He pursed his lips and tried to comfort them both, the grin fixed on his face even more tragic than if he had been in tears.

  Ye Xiaosheng told him their trip to China had been postponed. The specific reasons seemed complicated, and John Lee didn’t fully understand them. In short, it seemed it wasn’t the right moment for his involvement in the business to be revealed. Some of the contacts they were to rely upon had not yet been confirmed. On the phone, Ye Xiaosheng told him not to worry. Timing was of the essence in business, after all, and as soon as the right opportunity arose, channels would open up to them and the money would flow.

  Five of John Lee’s business cards had gone from his shop. He found one of them in the rubbish bin when he was emptying out its contents. He picked it out and put it back on the table with the rest.

  He was keeping the woman beside him again. She seemed to have been calmer since the fire – which was due to an increase in her medication, he knew, but at the same time he hoped that she had also understood the amount of trouble she had caused, and would become more conscious of her circumstances.

  John Lee tried to restore the garden to its former state, but the burnt outline of the fire remained visible on the lawn. He bent over to picked up a discarded cigarette butt and threw it into the bin. He didn’t smoke, so the alien object had caught his eye. He took a seat in the garden chair, staring directly at Jiang Xiaoyu’s window. He could see a dim light illuminating the room. In his imagination, she would be chewing on her pen and knitting her brow as she concentrated on her studies. He found his own eyes twitching, as if she had infected him with the problem she was working on.

  He dug his fingers sharply into his thigh. Then he heard a voice, as if blown on the wind, interrogating him: what point was there to this constant surveillance, to all his imagining? Does she see you how you really are? Can she know what is at work in your heart?

  He had no answers to these questions, and started to have trouble sleeping. He would lie in bed gazing up at the high central beam of the ceiling. It was as if Jiang Xiaoyu’s eyes appeared there, gazing down on his torment.

  John Lee was sensitive to the fact that, since he had become part of the Chinese Community Hope Association’s executive, people’s attitudes towards him had changed. He was no longer insignificant. On any number of matters, his opinion was now being sought.

  He even received intimations that he might aspire to greater things. At the meeting held to celebrate the tenth anniversary of the association, he was seated next to the cultural attaché from the Chinese embassy. She asked him a number of questions, and seemed so impressed by his answers that she told him she would introduce him to the consul general once the meeting was over. After the meeting concluded the promise seemed forgotten, but John Lee smiled at the consul general and nodded his head in greeting, as if to apologise that they had not had the opportunity to speak to one another.

  It was no longer Uncle Wang who let him know about association meetings. Now, the secretary of the association would ring him the week before to confirm the time. He, on the other hand, would only ever declare his intention to be at the meeting the night before it was scheduled to take place.

  John Lee would occasionally run into Uncle Wang at these meetings, but the frequency of their encounters fell off. He would rise to his feet in anger, then slip back into his chair, a dull look coming over his eyes like two pieces of charcoal that had been extinguished.

  He knew that their relationship, never particularly close, had ruptured completely. Once his business with Ye Xiaosheng started to take off, he thought, Uncle Wang will get even more jealous, until his resentment becomes all-consuming.

  The evening breeze ruffled John Lee’s sparse hair. It was becoming ever more difficult for him to fall asleep, and he would toss and turn all night, trying to suppress the heavy sound of his breathing.

  The knock on his bedroom door startled him. In a state of disbelief, he got out of bed, put on his cap, and went to open the door.

  Jiang Xiaoyu stood there, cowering. She looked down at her feet. She had given her toenails a fresh coat of red polish. ‘Uncle Lee, can you take me into the city? There’s something that I need to deal with, and there aren’t any buses at this time of night.’

  He patted her arm timidly. ‘You want to go out at this time of night? Don’t you have classes tomorrow?’

  She sounded as if she was on the verge of tears. ‘It’s really urgent. I didn’t want to bother you but if I don’t go into town my friend will get in trouble.’

  Now it was John Lee who was afraid. ‘Don’t get yourself all worked up. Calm down. Of course I’ll help you out.’

  Jiang Xiaoyu took out her phone to show him a message. He didn’t recognise the number of the sender, but the text read: ‘He doesn’t want me any more so I don’t want to live. I’ve got a bottle of red wine and sleeping pills. I’m going to end i
t, Xiaoyu. Look after yourself.’

  ‘This is my best friend in Auckland. I want to go and see her. I have to see her,’ she said firmly.

  John Lee pulled on his jacket and took his car keys from the table. ‘Let’s go quickly then. We don’t want to be too late.’

  The car raced through the streets of Auckland. John Lee ignored the speed limit, feeling quite prepared to receive his first demerit points. Jiang Xiaoyu sat beside him. The tragic look on her face had disappeared, and he discovered that she had put on makeup, her golden eyeshadow brilliant in the darkness. He had never been this close to her. Suppressing his uneasy excitement, he spoke up: ‘Your friend won’t come to any harm, will she?’

  ‘I don’t know.’

  ‘With a friend like you looking out for her, she’s very lucky.’

  She didn’t respond, and they fell back into awkward silence. The streetlights of Auckland seemed arrogant and aloof, each standing on its own corner, refusing to allow its light to mingle with that of the others.

  She directed him to a brightly lit street, where she asked him to drop her off. The streets near the house were difficult to access, she told him, but she could walk the rest of the way.

  ‘Are you sure? Should I wait here for you?’ he asked, only half believing what she had said.

  ‘No need. I’ll stay here tonight. I’ll come back once she’s settled down.’ Her voice took on an anxious edge, and she looked down to check the time on her phone.

  John Lee didn’t want to let her leave, but he had no alternative. He stared after her as she disappeared from sight at the end of the street.

  He was not at all tired. The streets had become busier on a Friday night than they used to be. Shops that would in the past have closed at six were now brilliantly illuminated. As he drove his little lime-green car down the road, the clumsy shapes of young people loomed into sight, and he honked his horn, wishing he could crash into them.

  He turned a corner and returned to where he had dropped Jiang Xiaoyu off. It was a bustling street, full of bars, the sound of raucous music and laughter cascading out onto the pavement. The life he had built for himself was so quiet and sedentary that he had forgotten the world contained such rhythms.

  Suddenly he thought he could see Jiang Xiaoyu, in a crowded bar, sitting alone with a cigarette between her fingers. She was staring out at the street, her neck stretched up like a proud swan.

  He was seized by shock. He must have been mistaken. He stopped the car by the side of the road and walked back to the window of the bar, only to find that the chair he thought he had seen her in was empty. The cushion seat still retained the slightest of indentations, but there was definitely nobody there. He poked his head in the door and looked around. He could see no trace of her. An attractive Chinese girl greeted him in English, but he waved her away and stumbled back to his car.

  ‘I’ve really become old. I’m losing my sight.’ He was struck by a quite unfamiliar sense of self-doubt.

  John Lee helped Jiang Xiaoyu reconnect the internet. He had no need to communicate with the outside world himself. Too much information would cloud his judgement.

  Jiang Xiaoyu no longer sat with the woman watching television. She said the internet was faster, but she didn’t invite the woman to watch with her. She stayed home the entire week, and John Lee only saw her bloodshot eyes occasionally in the kitchen. She was like a wounded rabbit, wrapping herself up tightly in a blanket and then disappearing.

  When she was on the internet, he would read in the room next door, reassured by the sound of her tapping on the keyboard. He had read the copy of The Book of Master Zhuang several times, and now he started to take down passages from the book, posting the copied texts on the glass panels in the bathroom, in the hope that she would notice them.

  John Lee had used his computer for five years before it gave up, sooner than he had anticipated. He wanted to send the professor an email, and had no alternative but to knock on her door. There were several sentences in The Book of Master Zhuang that made no sense to him, and he wanted to ask for help in understanding them.

  Jiang Xiaoyu opened the door in her pyjamas, her feet bare on the carpet, her eyes still heavy with sleep.

  ‘Xiaoyu, can I borrow your computer to send an email?’

  ‘Uh-huh. Go ahead.’

  She yawned, before getting back into her bed. Soon, she was asleep again.

  John Lee looked at her sympathetically. Her shoulders twitched in her sleep, her cheek was pressed against the pillow, hair loose and body relaxed. She looked utterly defenceless.

  He typed slowly. In his email to the professor, he wrote about the recent changes to his life. He disliked digital products, and it was as if he could foresee his own future, his shop packed to the rafters with second-hand electronic goods. Lying there, discarded, they resembled white gravestones.

  His dislike made him resist these devices with all his heart, and he found he could barely use Jiang Xiaoyu’s computer, blundering through its functions until he accidentally opened her photo album.

  The girl in the photo album was dressed in the flimsiest of clothes, her face heavily made up, her pose seductive. In one photograph she was in the bath, the white foam concealing her vital parts. Her legs were out of the tub, resting on its side, revealing the delicate soles of her feet.

  John Lee looked intently at the girl. Her eyebrows were a little like Jiang Xiaoyu’s, but he dismissed the possibility this could be the same person.

  ‘How could it be her?’ he asked himself, swivelling around to glance at her on her bed. She was sleeping so sweetly now. He listened to the soft rhythm of her breathing.

  He stretched out a hand, thinking to stroke her forehead, as if to make up for his momentary misgivings. His hand froze in the air above her head. He dared not lower it.

  After heavy rain, Auckland’s winter was fast coming to an end.

  John Lee took to rising earlier and earlier in the morning to get breakfast ready, mixing the woman’s medicine in her milk and then spending a long time convincing her to drink it. Jiang Xiaoyu went on a trip to the South Island, and the house took on a quiet air again, the rooms echoing with only one set of footsteps.

  He renewed his habit of spreading out the newspaper and turning immediately to the death notices to scan the lists for any names he knew.

  On his first glance through, he missed the name of Wang Jun, perhaps because it was so common. The second time, however, he noticed the name ‘Jim’ in brackets, and made an unconscious connection.

  It had been more than a month since he had been in contact with Uncle Wang. John Lee tried to remember when they had seen each other last. A couple of weeks earlier he had overheard him speaking with a crowd of middle-aged women at some event or another. They had been laughing at his name. ‘John Lee. Neither Chinese nor European. Only a real alien would take a name like that.’ He hadn’t bothered to interrupt them and justify himself. He dismissed the incident with a weak laugh and resolved to avoid having anything to do with him in the future.

  He stared in alarm at the name in the death notice. He picked up the phone book and found Uncle Wang’s number. He had tried to contact Uncle Wang only on rare occasions, and his hand trembled as he entered the number. His heart beat faster. ‘Poor old Uncle Wang. Fancy dying so young.’

  Nobody picked up at the other end.

  His sense of foreboding grew stronger. He dialled the home of the association chairman. It was the first time that he had taken the initiative to contact him.

  ‘Hadn’t you heard? Old Wang was murdered by his European son-in-law.’

  ‘How could that be?’

  ‘The newlyweds never got on well. On one occasion, when an argument became heated, Old Wang stepped in to protect his daughter and he hit the husband. The man got drunk and went crazy, and murdered Old Wang. It was all over the news. You didn’t see it?’

  John Lee slumped back in his chair, holding onto its arms so as not to collapse completely. He c
ould never have imagined Uncle Wang would come to such an end. The details of the man’s face were etched in his mind: slightly askew, the stubble on his chin always looking a bit dirty. His mind fixed on the memory of Uncle Wang turning to him arrogantly to declare that he was soon to become a New Zealand citizen.

  John Lee’s thoughts turned the inevitability of his own mortality. When he had moved to New Zealand, he imagined that he would be able to delay the pace at which death would come upon him. Once he had stumbled by mistake into an Auckland cemetery. The majority of the inscriptions on the gravestones were of people who, he calculated on his fingers, were well over eighty when they died. Thereafter, John Lee had felt quite justified in treating death as an abstraction. Yet he could not forget completely the shock he had experienced upon seeing the death of the director of the library where he had worked. In his last moments, the director’s cheeks had flushed an unusual red, and blood had trickled from his trousers, merging with the black of the ink on the books and blurring the patterns on their covers. John Lee knew he avoided the issue of death. He had not returned to China when either of his parents died.

  Jiang Xiaoyu rang from the South Island, to say that her trip was to last longer than expected.

  John Lee put the receiver down silently. The room was terrifyingly quiet. The woman no longer watched soap operas on the television, and spent her days sleeping instead. When she was awake, she did no more than sit staring at a corner of the room.

  He hugged her. ‘Why won’t you talk with me?’ he entreated her.

  She remained unmoved. She no longer had that stupid smile on her face and her eyes seemed always anxious.

  Her blankness annoyed him, and he dug his fingernails into the palm of her hand in the hope that she would let out a sound. She cried out in pain, but quickly retreated into passivity. It was a long time since he had heard her loud, foolish laugh. Her emaciated body shrank back into the sofa like a coil of rope. The sight of her forced a shiver out of John Lee. He hadn’t realised that she had become quite so thin. She had lost entirely the characteristics of womanhood, and her skin had turned a waxy yellow, the wrinkles around her eyes now forming a permanent parabola. She had wrapped herself in a loose pullover she stretched down to cover her knees.