Lovers in the Age of Indifference

by Xiaolu Guo

  In the Olympics crisis, China today expressed its indignation and opposition to a resolution on Tibet adopted by the US Senate. According to our Foreign Ministry spokeswoman, Jiang Yu, this resolution ‘persistently favours the Dalai clique and interferes with China’s internal affairs’. Jiang urged the US to see through the Dalai Lama’s true motives, which she said were to engage in secessionist activities under the guise of religion.

  Zhang checked each word, and pondered on the article for a good while. Yes, it was a sensitive news story, he admitted. But the article was written from China’s point of view and made the government’s anti-US position clear. So there should be no problem. The Editor-in-Chief made up his mind and approved the text.

  Zhang made himself another cup of tea, then went out onto the balcony to smoke. He looked at the concrete horizon, brand-new shiny buildings shimmering in the summer-morning sun; everything in this city seemed so well organised, the highways, the streets, the car parks, even the patches of grass seemed cut straight from a map. He felt he was living among a rigid army, but there was no chance for any war to be waged. What a thought, a war! he murmured to himself. Then he remembered that Chairman Mao had said that wars are necessary sometimes. He looked at his watch, collected his thoughts, stepped on his finished cigarette and went back inside.

  Wang, a young female journalist who was in charge of the here column ‘Everyday Knowledge’, was waiting at Zhang’s desk, ready to show him a short piece:

  Beijing Morning Star

  Everyday Knowledge, here

  14 07 08

  Who invented football? The UK or China? Chinese historians agree that it was undoubtedly originally invented in China during the Chunqiu Dynasty, 3,000 years ago. It was called cu ju, and was played by eunuchs at the back of the emperor’s palace. Nowadays, the game has become global. In 2002, the People’s Republic of China’s national football team qualified for the first time ever for the World Cup, thus putting our football playing back on the world map.

  Chief Editor Zhang was happy with the little article, plus, he was always much more relaxed about the entertainment pages in the paper, where he knew it was not as easy to make a political mistake as in the news columns. Nevertheless, he readjusted a few words just to make the story a bit more interesting:

  Everybody knows that football is the world’s most popular game. But do you know it was originally invented in China, during the Chunqiu Dynasty? It was called cu ju. Thus, contrary to common belief, football was not invented in the UK. In 2002, the People’s Republic of China’s national football team honourably qualified for the World Cup. So the country that invented the game can once again finally compete among the world’s strongest teams. It is becoming clear that Chinese football has a great future and that our country will very soon become the world’s leading team.

  At that point, Jiang, a very experienced journalist who had been with the paper for a while, who was in charge of the consumer section on here, emailed Chief Editor Zhang some facts.

  Beijing Morning Star

  Business and Retail, here

  14 07 08

  It has been estimated that the consumption of moon cakes has this year risen to twice the level of last year. Although the government is checking on the high prices demanded by some independent private cake sellers, they have found that since last week early subscriptions from government work units and schools are increasing day by day. The People’s Consumption Monitoring Bureau says that the total turnover for moon cakes this year will reach 100 billion yuan. And it is believed that places like Taiwan, Malaysia and the Philippines will start ordering cakes from China too. Thus the moon cake, one of the famous products from the ancient Chinese moon festival celebration, is gaining increasing popularity and promotion around the world.

  Zhang smiled at the article – this was fine news, the only wording he needed to change was from ‘places like Taiwan’ into ‘provinces like Taiwan’. Apart from that, he was happy with the piece. He liked this kind of news: selling moon cakes, how to keep your hair dandruff-free, how to grow a cactus or how to make the washing machine save water – the more insignificant, the better. And meanwhile, he reminded himself that he must order some moon cakes for his employers, and also some to take home for his family. It was a politically correct and friendly present, better than giving people cigarettes or alcohol. Now, as he made himself his third cup of tea, and as he reached the last section of the paper to check – the Advertisement Column – he received a phone call from the Beijing Media Censorship Bureau. The man on the phone spoke in a clear and mechanical voice, as if it was a prerecorded answer machine.

  ‘Hello, Editor-in-Chief, we are calling to officially inform you that your newspaper will be closed from today until further notice, due to an article published three months ago. You are requested to come to the Censorship Bureau Office at 2 p.m. today for self-criticism and a detailed report.’

  Due to an article pubished three months ago? Zhang murmured to himself. Which one? He racked his mind for anything political or anti-public opinion, but with the telephone shaking in his hand he came to the conclusion that everything could be political or anti-public opinion from a censorship point of view. Daring not to ask for any specifics, he soberly answered: ‘Yes, I will be there at 2 p.m.’

  Chief Editor Zhang hung up the phone. He was paralysed on his chair for a few seconds, then he slowly drank the rest of his tea. He stood up, he tried to be as calm as possible; he said nothing to his staff. He picked up his briefcase, walked through the office, got into the lift and, stepping out onto the street, started to walk under the gradually heated Beijing morning sun.

  INTO THE WORLD

  Yujun

  WALKING IN A daze, I was captivated by a cloud speeding across the sky. My eyes blurred, my hair nearly burnt by the summer sun. I imagined myself becoming Nazha – the young god from mythical fables with many arms. I saw myself like him flying through the sky riding on a wheel of fire under each foot. Yeah, I could see myself as Nazha in this boiling hot big city. This sharp weather shocks my body – Beijing is so unlike home. I have been here six months now and the heat still pricks me. I am used to days and days of rain in my village. My friends and I munch on chillies and garlic to keep us strong; they are still sitting at home waiting for the rain to stop, while chewing on local chilli beef. And I am here in Beijing: the capital, the government buildings, the city gate, the international corporations, the grand shopping centre. The crowds and the traffic make me hazy and restless.

  I remember it took me half a day to find the scriptwriter’s house on that first morning. Big Beijing is a many-tunnelled maze and I couldn’t find my way. He lives on a brand-new suburban estate – Gathering Dragon Garden. I couldn’t believe it! – There were many guards working on the gate, and others wandering around the residential gardens in their uniforms. They spoke dialect, like me, and seemed to be doing little but making sure peasants didn’t linger by the gate. Now I walk past them every day and we nod at each other.

  I was so hot, and I sweated so much into my shirt that I felt smelly and drained. But I was immediately impressed by the scriptwriter. I felt he would teach me a lot about life. He is in his forties, I think. He wears a pair of thick glasses just like one of my old teachers at school. He’s thin and bony and his hair is closely sheared like a monk’s. Most of the time he sits at home, wrapped in his luxurious white robe, smoking non-stop and thinking hard. That first day I didn’t see anyone else, just the scriptwriter. No family, no wife, no children.

  Ning

  It’s so strange having someone around me every hour of every day. I have always lived alone. No cat, no dog, no living being has ever managed to survive under my roof. There was once a potted palm tree given to me as a New Year’s gift by a film-maker I knew vaguely; still, even that lasted only a few days.

  I have no need for a cleaner in my house – I like my solitude, I am accustomed to it. But a very important cinematographer insisted I should hire a
cheap labourer he knew. ‘You will be so glad to have him,’ he said, ‘it’s like having three or four arms.’ And I thought, but did not say: I only need one arm to write. But I finally acquiesced, much to his delight, and he added that his young peasant was very useful. Useful: that is supposed to be the most important quality for a man in this world.

  Yujun

  My first day in Beijing – madness! I felt like a young fawn in the wood – the lights, colours, noises were like rustles in the undergrowth making me dart here and there. It was too much! I remember I ran all over the city like a whirlwind. Everywhere the huge Olympics posters on the walls and everywhere the houses rising taller and taller. I wanted to see it all. But I also needed a job, I needed to be useful.

  I got so lost, I remember. Then I found myself under a large sign saying Three Treasure Film Studios. As the traffic lights changed, a flood of young men rushed across the road and into the studios. They were hassling a bearded man dressed in a long black coat holding a clipboard and looking like some powerful agent. He was choosing people from the crowd, and suddenly he turned to me.

  ‘Are you looking for work?’ And then, ‘Come with me.’ I hesitated. ‘Come on, boy! There’s plenty here will have this job if you don’t!’

  ‘But where to?’ I could hear my voice sounding nervous and high. One of the other men answered me. ‘To move props for a film – we get fifty yuan and two meals a day.’ Luck has fallen on my head, I thought, and today I am a lucky man.

  Ning

  The young peasant Yujun was three hours late the first day he came to see me. He spluttered and apologised and stood awkwardly in my hallway, so shy he didn’t know where to put his feet and hands. He was wearing an orange T-shirt, as if borrowed from a university student; his blue jeans hung loose on his boyish hips, and the lace of his left trainer was untied and trailing along the floor. I nearly told him to do it up.

  As we walked around the flat he stared, bewildered, at my grand writing table, his lovely face utterly confused. It made me smile, but I said nothing. I don’t think he understood my job at all. He started to sneeze – perhaps the old books and the dust didn’t suit him? My house is littered with rotten manuscripts and half-drunk bottles of gin, and it reeks of that intoxicating mix of musty paper and tobacco tang. I just love that smell.

  Initially I gave Yujun only menial tasks. He cooked and swept and wiped and washed and scrubbed. At first I was worried he would dislodge my many piles of half-finished drafts of scripts and muddle them up, or clear my stacks of old papers into the dustbin. And for those first few days we spoke very little; I liked it like that – there was nothing to be said, as far as I was concerned. But then when he started to call me Script Master, I felt uneasy.

  ‘Don’t call me Script Master,’ I would tell him, sighing, ‘really I am quite pathetic.’

  ‘Pathetic?’

  Yujun seemed baffled, and smiled childishly. ‘But how can someone who has written all those stories be called pathetic?’ I had no answer for him.

  Yujun

  That first day Script Master gave me a brief tour of his house. He was quiet – so quiet! I felt like my footsteps were a giant’s feet tramping around after him. He showed me the large living room where he spent most of his time. The sun shone so brightly that day and in between the curtains I could see thousands of specks of dust in the air. And there were so many books! I had never seen so many books. It’s like living in the National Library! The four walls were completely covered by bookshelves. I also spied an antique typewriter tucked away in a corner: I looked at it in admiration, trying not to inhale the thick dust on its surface. In the centre of the room was a table so gigantic it took up half the space.

  I felt uncomfortable circling the grand table in the middle of the room. Back then it almost scared me – it was so imposing, like the emperor’s golden throne. On the table sat a silver laptop with a stack of beige machines behind it: printer, scanner, telephone and fax machine. Tall piles of bound manuscripts were scattered all over the table – I strained to read the titles: Death by Radiation, The Garden of a Dunce, My Life as a Light Bulb Salesman, A Modern Romance – Love of Money, Sensations in Criminal Investigation, and Trust Me, I’m a Policeman. And each was numbered: Draft 3, Draft 4, Draft 5 and so on. I wanted to read them all, but I was there to work, I was there to clean his windows, mop his floor and empty his rubbish bin. I knew my place; I was just a young peasant. I didn’t have the time or the nerve to sprawl on the sofa and read. Anyway, I wasn’t sure I could understand the ideas he wrote about.

  This was a totally different world compared with my last job on the filmset: here was a place of silence. The Script Master seemed to dislike speaking, but his face was so expressive that I got to know him just by watching. I started to recognise his behaviour and habits: I knew that when the skin between his eyebrows sagged he was not to be disturbed; when his cigarette didn’t leave his fingers, he didn’t want to eat. His concentration was amazing – I could hardly believe that one man alone could write so many words! Definitely something my thick thumbs couldn’t do. I started calling Ning ‘the Script Master’ after a few days and the name stuck.

  Ning

  I observe this stranger: always wearing his worn loose blue jeans and always smiling. I wonder if he has a childhood sweetheart in his home town. Perhaps he is even engaged to a village girl. Perhaps she is waiting for him to return one day, or maybe his heart will swell in this huge smoky city, and he will never want to return. All that’s waiting for him at home is a plate of tofu and hard farm work. He seems a happy and simple boy, but I wonder if one day he will grow as old, grey and disillusioned as me.

  Yujun

  In Ning’s house every object seemed to hide a secret from me. The first time I opened the curtains the Script Master’s throat crackled oddly – I didn’t know what I had done wrong. But I remember looking round in astonishment; ever since then I have kept the curtains drawn.

  Even now after I’ve worked for him for a few months, I still study the master’s behaviour: I notice how he winces at the slightest noise, like the flush of the toilet downstairs, the sizzle from a neighbour’s wok, or the chatter of the bored guards outside the window. All these sounds distract him from his thoughts. Some days I wish I could grow wings and float silently around the house. And on other days I wish he would notice me or we could sit and drink tea and smoke his Camels together, or he would finally talk to me.

  Ning

  One morning I broke the eternal silence that exists between Yujun and myself and started talking to him. He looked surprised, but pleased, I think. I said: ‘When I was your age, I read a lot,’ and, ‘I studied away from home and then came to the city to work.’ On our first day Yujun had told me that he comes from a small village in the mountains where his family make tons of tofu to sell at the local market; he told me about their feet crushing the soya beans on the bare ground, the juice from the beans seeping out and running in little streams. I can barely imagine what that must be like. We are so different; there are chasms in our silence.

  Yujun

  I respect the Script Master’s lifestyle: most nights I stay until he goes to bed, then I tidy the living room. Every second meal, I cook spicy Sichuan cuisine with lots of red chillies – my home town style. And my master seems to really enjoy it! I have started to feel that the Script Master’s home is mine too. Sometimes, I pick a book from the shelf and read. I remember once I chose a book called The History of Sexuality written by some foreigner, but I couldn’t understand a single thing. There was a photo of the author on the cover – he wears a leather jacket and thick black glasses but has no hair. Another time, I selected a book called Emperors: The Unofficial Story. What I read stunned me: I would never have thought that our revered emperors would do such things with boys.

  Has my head got hazy and my brain grown bigger since my arrival at the Script Master’s house? I’m sure it has: I was born a peasant, and according to my family book, eighteen generation
s of my ancestors have been peasants. But now I feel like I could maybe change my fate by staying with this man and learning from him and his books.

  It was the same every day from the moment I started working for the Script Master. But then one day my master talked to me properly for the first time. He spoke slowly and it almost seemed like he wasn’t talking to anyone in particular. I didn’t know what to say! He told me about his childhood – I had guessed that my master came from a city family and always wondered if he could imagine what life is like when you grow soya beans on a mountainside for a living, like my family have been doing all their life. As we talked it also seemed to me that my master’s life was not real. He told me, ‘I like to live in my mind.’ For me the mind is not a real place, but I have always remembered that sentence.

  Ning

  Sitting on a chair, writing day and night, is like being in a coma. The body becomes imprisoned by thoughts, the outside world cannot enter. I have been in this coma ever since I decided to write. I used to have a pure vision of writing: once I only wrote poems, but the publishers turned them down and I never saw my poems in print. Then I started writing martial arts novels but I could never believe in them enough to get more than halfway through; and ever since I have written only for others. I have seen through the fantasy of love; I know now that love can only exist in stories. Although my body is aching for another person’s warmth, my mind is clear and cold.

  Yujun

  About a month ago the Script Master came to talk to me while I was making his lunch. He lent me a green bicycle and asked me to deliver some manuscripts for him. From that day on I cycled a lot, carrying large volumes, picking up newspapers for him and seeing all of Beijing on my wheels – I am becoming Nazha. I even rode down to the bottom of the Great Wall.

  Then one day last week everything changed. He talked for hours on the phone that day, seething with anger. I had never heard him speak so much or shout with such ferocity. I knew that my master was in trouble. From the kitchen, I could hear his chair thump down on the rug at the end of each sentence. It sounded like he was arguing about his script. I soon realised that the target of Ning’s tirade was a producer. My master was cursing the producer, calling him an ‘uncultured’ man. He shouted down the phone. ‘You’re a piece of shit. We all know how you used to drive about in your “Get Rich” taxi. You know more about horseshit than you do about films – every script you touch turns to pig piss,’ and so on. I was so shocked – I’ve never heard Script Master using such language before.