Lovers in the Age of Indifference

by Xiaolu Guo

  Now you say you are no longer interested in any of these things: literature, art, not even history. Here in Berlin there is the concrete history of buildings and streets – the scars of history that can’t be forgotten or erased. You and I both know there is no history that can be found in Beijing anymore.

  The year I left China you were writing a novel in the style of Jorge Luis Borges, and I was finishing a script for a TV soap to make some money to move to Germany. We stole cabbages in the hutongs; you borrowed money to buy cigarettes. We went through the cruel story of youth. Then one day you took me to a dim jazz cafe near Wudaokou, called Lush Life, right next to the Beijing Language College. You said they played the best jazz in town. We were the only ones in the audience. I think that was the first time I saw a black American jazz musician. I remember asking you why they would come to Beijing. Didn’t they find life tough or lonely here? You said: they come here for the same reason that you are moving to Berlin – and will you find life tough and lonely there? I still have no answer to this question.

  After those hot-headed Beijing days, I disappeared from the country and we disappeared from each other’s lives. Shortly after I left China, I heard that the jazz cafe had disappeared too. They started demolishing all the winding streets in Beijing – the small stalls in Wudaokou, the ones that sold the cheapest chilli paste and Korean kimchi, are all gone.

  Now you tell me that you don’t like that underground world any more. Now you tell me you prefer the life you have in Beijing – the clean streets, the expensive houses, the shopping centres and the shiny office blocks – because you have become a father and a husband perhaps? Has time proved to be so powerful, has memory proved to be so forgettable? Tell me, please, I cannot believe it is all forgotten so easily. And I hope, one day, you will revisit Berlin.

  Letter to A

  Can you do me a favour, my friend? Could you look up a girl I used to know? I want you to go and see her, if you can. Her name is Chiu Chiu and her address is 10th East Cheng De Road – you know the road, it’s that one round the corner from the train station. She used to live in a hutong house, but it has been so long now.

  She is small, but beautiful, or at least she used to be. I have not seen her for many years, and much can change in that time.

  We liked the same sort of music – Miles Davis and Pink Floyd. We loved Eileen Chang’s novels, and the same sort of films – all Billy Wilder movies – laughing loudly together. We even had the same kind of gestures, and a similarly shrieky voice. We spent all our time together. It feels so strange, you know, being so intensely involved with someone and then losing them completely. In Berlin I don’t laugh the same way as I used to laugh in Beijing. I don’t laugh much now.

  I remember everyone thought she was my younger sister. She was a rebel. She had left her home town in Shangdong Province when she was just sixteen and came to Beijing to sing. At work and in bars she sang pop songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan – ‘Goodbye my love’ by Deng Lijun mixed with English words; propaganda songs too, in a Beijing Army dancing troupe. And she would even sing walking down the street – humming along to pop tunes – and in the market buying food, and on the bus coming home, and in the summer swimming in the lakes. I remember her boyfriend well – perhaps you’ll also find him there. He was Beijinese and a singer too, and had a kind face. We three used to play ping-pong together, and he was, of course, always the champion of every game. She used to stay at his place a lot – that old hutong house nearby the train station – and eventually moved in. Then one day I went to see her in that windowless home. And each time a train departed we could hear the horns and bells clanging and the kitchen table shuddered. We ate lamb hotpot seasoned with anything she could find and mix together – shrimps, squid, chicken feet, seaweed, pig intestines. We sweated so much from the food that we opened the front door and watched the snow outside gradually covering the grey city. Their house was decayed, the cement walls stained by rain, covered with a large piece of flowery cloth. Silvery grey lilies danced up the crumbling wall. Hers was the dark house of grey lilies.

  And I remember she would come and find me at my art school, in my dormitory room with bunk beds for four students, where a tall chimney vomited its black smoke out of our windows. I can picture that first day she visited me so vividly: she walked in confidently, one hand carrying dried duck meat in a greasy paper wrap, the other holding a book called Existentialism or Post-Marxism or something like that. She told me it had been written by a Harvard scholar – or was he from Berkeley? I don’t remember any more, it doesn’t matter now. It was all so new to me. I asked her whether she understood this heavy Western book. And she said, Of course, I have to. You know for our diploma we had to know about Heidegger and Roland Barthes; or at least know how to spell Nietzsche or Heraclitus, or even Alexanderplatz. How ridiculous it all was. We didn’t even know where Germany was! But we were so young and earnest, so desperate to succeed. It would be good to laugh together again.

  She decided that she wanted to change her life – she saw that being a singer in a little troupe was leading nowhere. She was full of energy and plans, she wanted to go abroad, to America, anywhere in America, no matter whether it was in Wisconsin or Oregon or Kentucky. At night we would go out and listen to punk bands play in a dark underground bar in Chao Yang district. Cui Jian was singing ‘Rock and Roll on a New Long March’ in a band of long-haired guys. And she was their favourite girl. She dyed her hair red, wore a shiny top and a pair of trousers with bell-bottomed elephant feet, and danced like a mad thing right next to the stage. Was that Elvis Presley style, or Hong Kong second-hand imitation?

  Then one day I left Beijing to come to Berlin. She wrote to me: I am married, I am in Helsinki, and I miss Beijing. Her words worried me. And some months later I heard she had left Finland, where she could see the Northern Lights for half of the year. The winter evenings were too long for her, she said – through the sleepless nights she would read Chinese novels until the dawn brightened her window. Eventually she went back to her old Beijing. I hope you will find her there, if the house or the street still exist.

  Letter to W

  Sorry I haven’t responded to your letters earlier. Somehow days pass unnoticed and I move through these months blindly. You asked me to send you photos of that well. Do you mean the well inside the Forbidden City, the well in which the Emperor’s favourite concubine was drowned by the Emperor’s own mother? I remember taking those photos. I’ve enclosed all of the ones I could find – it was strange looking at them again.

  I suppose you still remember that trip we made to the Forbidden City? It felt like there was no museum in the world as empty as that one. OK, it wasn’t entirely empty, but every gallery was locked. Where are all the treasures? we asked. The guards looked at us blankly, and so you whispered to me, they’ve probably all gone to Taiwan, to Taipei’s Forbidden Palace, or maybe to the British Museum which has all the jade, the Buddhas, and the Emperor’s golden quilt.

  And like any other tourist from the Chinese provinces we took photos in front of that famous well, the Zhen Fei well. Its water seemed bottomless – I felt a rush of vertigo. You asked the guide if any tourists had fallen into it by accident. The guide promised us that it was all safely under control. We stood by the well and read out of our guidebook the story of how Emperor Guangxu’s concubine Zhen Fei was killed by his mother. A depressing story. We were standing next to each other in complete silence looking down that stone well at the scrappy autumn leaves floating on dark water.

  History is a big deal here in Berlin. The other day I was talking about the year 1900 with a group of Berliners. It was late, and we were eating kebabs in a Krentzberg cafe. I told them 1900 was the year of the Eight-Nation Alliance – Western armies entered China and Empress Cixi had to escape from Beijing in a crazy rush. They knew little about it, of course. I told them how the city was occupied, houses burnt down, citizens fled. Do you remember learning this at school? We learnt how Emperor Guangxu was in lo
ve with his unofficial concubine – Zhen Fei – against his mother’s will. Cixi left the Emperor behind in Beijing to negotiate with the invaders, and ordered for Zhen Fei to be thrown into the well. The Emperor fled, the girl drowned. My friends looked horrified. But it’s so recent, one of them said.

  Then a man at the next table leaned over and started arguing in heated German that ‘historically’ the concubine Zhen Fei didn’t drown in this exact well, it was somewhere else, perhaps not even in the Forbidden City – you would have laughed, he was so serious, so exact! I got angry – some idiot German scientifically educating me about my own country. For the confused Chinese tourists who have lost all trace of history in the Cultural Revolution what matters is only this: a beautiful concubine was drowned in a well for the sake of love, for her master, or perhaps to make history roll on like a tape recorder.

  Looking at these photos now, I want to visit that well again – stand there and look down into the dark depths – or perhaps you can do that for me? Can you check whether the well is still there, or has it been moved to make way for a shiny Starbucks cafe? I hope the water has not dried up.

  Letter to M

  Every day I realise how much I miss you. Why is our time together always about coping with the next absence? And isn’t it a joke, now that we have swapped our cities – you are in Beijing and I am in your hometown Berlin.

  Tell me, what happened the last time we met? I was there – for you – waiting at Beijing airport in the middle of the night. Your flight was delayed, and it felt like I was waiting forever. I watched so many other flights come in – couples reunited, families laughing, tired and crumpled after long journeys. And I was there, curling up my stiff body on the plastic chair for two long hours. I got up and flicked through every magazine in the shop, ate a plate of tasteless airport noodles, and then I slept again on the hard chair. Eventually you appeared, with your indifferent smile. We rode home in the taxi with your red suitcase behind us. Holding hands in silence in the shaky taxi, the highway ride felt long and the road went on forever, as long as the time we had been separated. You gazed at the poplar trees standing straight and tall on the sides of the highway, silent in the darkness. Obedient forest, you murmured. Obedient forest – is that what you think of Beijing? Did you mean the obedience of its citizens, or its government? Or every tree, building, person?

  In that red suitcase, you’d brought me an art book called Griffin and Sabine. I had never seen a foreign book before. It may have been a love story, but for me it was my first adult children’s book. I had never read a children’s book because I only ever heard propaganda stories when I was young.

  Since then I’ve often thought of Griffin and Sabine’s love – a man in London writing postcards to a woman on a mysterious island in the South Pacific. I remember wondering where in the South Pacific that island could be? In my tower-block apartment in Beijing, seventeen flights up, I stood on my bed and stared at the world map glued to my wall. I traced the green patches in the ocean of blue with my finger: was it Fiji? Samoa? Nauru? Or the Solomon Islands? Are there any mysterious islands left in this world?

  And now I am in Berlin, trying to be with you – but you are not here any more. I find myself slowly becoming like the character in Griffin and Sabine – Griffin is so lonely that he has to invent this distant woman in his imagination. All I did in Berlin in my first two years was just sit in the kitchen scribbling Chinese in my diaries, and watching the news on TV trying to guess what the reporters were saying in German. I became Griffin; Sabine is the lost me.

  Now I am in a bedroom where out of my window I can see an avenue of linden trees. Today the sky is covered with heavy rainy clouds, and the stormy wind is blowing into my bedroom, blowing my world map pinned on the wall. I am looking at the map. I want to find that city again, a city with you in it, a city full of the hopes and illusions of our youth.

  TODAY I DECIDE TO DIE

  TODAY I DECIDED to die. Friday, 3 July. There is nothing special about today, I haven’t planned a particular day for dying. And I hadn’t thought about my death before yesterday. Tomorrow is 4 July, Independence Day, as the Americans say. I only realised it this morning, when I arrived in Salt Lake City from Coalville. On every shop door there was a sign saying: July 4th, closed for Independence Day.

  It feels like everything has started to close already though: the shops are empty, the shelves bare, the streets quiet with only the hum of occasional cars under the sharp, hard July sun. Everyone is at home with the family, raising their national flag on the front lawn. So is this America then?

  My name is Zhang Yi, and Li Kai is my boyfriend, actually my fiancé. We got engaged in January, in Red Peach Park in our home town, and had a beautiful tea ceremony with all our family members. A week ago we flew from our province of Guang Xi with a guided tourist group to the state of Utah. We live in a very poor province, near the southern border of China, which the local authorities managed to make a sister province with Utah in the USA. But no one, including me, had even heard of Utah. And I really can’t find any similarities between my home in Guang Xi and this big dusty flat place. We don’t have cowboys or doughnut shops on the highways. All we have are a few pandas in our local zoo; the rest of our province is taken up by construction sites. Anyway, that’s not the story I want to tell you. I want to tell you about Li Kai. He seems to know almost everything there is to know. He studied hybrid plantation initially at college, then did computing for his MA. In my father’s words, he is a promising young man who knows the future of both agriculture and industry. At least we definitely won’t starve in our life together.

  This is our first time abroad. We studied the map of Utah endlessly before leaving China; and reviewed it again in the aeroplane as we looked down at the landscape below, starting to appear through the clouds. Our tour guide announced that we would walk on the Great Salt Lake, and climb up famous mountains, listen to country music in local bars, eat traditional American food and drink coffee at petrol stations in polystyrene cups. We thought we would meet the real old Americans: Indians, we were told – what a strange word to use for Americans, we thought, since India lies right next to China.

  Our one-week tour didn’t disappoint. For the first three days, we were very excited and behaved like real peasant tourists from China; we stayed in a posh hotel at the bottom of a mountain, walked through a quiet valley along a river, and saw the famous Great Salt Lake. It was enormous, as big as the sea, gulls flying above the blue water exactly like in the picture in the brochure.

  But after three days, Kai’s enthusiasm faded away and he fell into a state of melancholy. He didn’t speak a word to me, from breakfast until supper. This was not normal. Usually, Kai is a light-hearted person – he likes jokes and funny films, detective stories and sport; and I thought he liked travelling. But he stayed in the tour coach all the time, gloomy, not even coming down to take photos. I began to think that he didn’t like America. Or maybe he hated eating sandwiches every day – surely he too was depressed by those strange leafy salads without any meat in them. Or perhaps he was missing our little house in Guang Xi. He behaved like this for the rest of the trip. On the last day of our tour – yesterday morning – he woke up, brushed his teeth for a long time, standing at the window staring out at the dusky blue American hills in the distance where Indians might have lived once. Then, still holding the toothbrush in his hand. And then, all of a sudden, he told me this: he had another woman in Shanghai. He didn’t think our marriage would work. Furthermore, he said, after this US trip he was going to move to Shanghai to be with that woman. I’m in love with her, Zhang Yi, not with you, he said quietly. I’m sorry.

  These are the exact words he spoke, standing by the bathroom door. He was so far away. I felt as if he was talking to me standing on a distant mountaintop opposite our hotel room.

  Then last night my stomach began to ache. We slept together in the same bed, in the same room, exactly as we had done before. There was no breeze. No air came
through the window, and we felt suffocated.

  Suddenly, two wolf-like dogs are barking and running at me, and I see policemen following behind the dogs. It’s all a blur. I am running my soul out – fast, faster, to get away. I sit up in bed; it is very dark. Kai is lying next to me, but facing the other side of the room. I can’t make out if he is sleeping or thinking. I look at my watch; it is two in the morning. I feel unbearable. I get up, leave our bedroom and start walking around the dim hotel. This wooden house hotel is owned by a rich Mormon, and as I wander around late that night I see dozens of depressing paintings of Jesus on the wall – so many of them! We even had three Jesus paintings in our bedroom. The rest of the pictures on the walls are family photos. Mormons seem to have huge and healthy families – each photo was crowded with people, perhaps no one has died to make space for the younger people. And in the toilet, placed on a little table near an arse-washing seat, I found a black book entitled Book of Mormon. I didn’t know whether this was compulsory reading for all Mormons, just like Chairman Mao’s Little Red Book used to be for all Chinese people. I open the book at the introduction and read: ‘We invite all men everywhere to read the Book of Mormon, to ponder in their hearts the message it contains, and then to ask God, the Eternal Father, in the name of Christ if the book is true.’