Lovers in the Age of Indifference

by Xiaolu Guo

  I feel desperate about things with Kai, I can’t pull myself together to think about such a serious issue. I close the book, but it is so heavy that it falls into the toilet bowl. I fish it out and dry it with a towel. I try to mop the pages – but the bottom half of every single page is now stained with water – stained and soaking wet, for 428 pages, with the toilet flushing water.

  Today, we are supposed to be flying back to China. When the coach arrives at the airport, Li Kai just follows the tour guide, pulling his suitcase behind him like all the other Chinese tourists. He doesn’t pay any attention to me. Hastily, I jump into a taxi and tell the driver to drive away as fast as he can. I know everyone will be shocked to discover that I’m missing, I can picture Li Kai’s astonished face in the plane back to China without me. But then, nothing can be more shocking than what he told me yesterday. When I think of going back to Guang Xi to carry on living in a house without my fiancé, I feel there is nothing to keep me in China any more.

  Now that I’m alone and there is no guide telling me where to go and what to do in my life, I wander around with a foggy mind. Dragging my luggage behind me I arrive downtown. But I don’t understand – is ‘downtown’ the south side of the town? Does that mean the north is always up, like on a map hanging on the wall? I can’t think of a three-dimensional concrete city with only two dimensions, one up and one down. Seeing ‘downtown’ signs on every metal pole in the street only makes me more confused. Why are they there? Are they advertisements for some city development estate, like the ‘Beijing 2008 Olympics’ signs that were posted everywhere in China before the games? But why do I still care about these useless things anyway? While my mind denies my life, my eyes still absorb the world around me. This city is brand new, I’ve never, ever encountered a city as new as this one, not even in my province. Here, the buildings are made of marble, huge and tall, like respectful gravestones. The windows are all closed and there is nobody standing by any of them, not even a lonely housewife. The trees are newly planted and thin, sheer new leaves sprout from skinny branches. The only older building is a Mormon church, standing in the middle of a sharp and clean formal landscape like a set out of a black-and-white film. I drift onwards and turn into a street called 300 South Street. Even the streets don’t have proper names here – 400 South Street, 500 South Street, 600 South Street, 700 South Street. I walk and walk with only my shadow as a companion; it feels like forever. When I finally near the ‘south’, I grow desperate – the street names are now 100 E, 200 E, 300 E, 400 E … Then I spot a city map and hope to find some explanation, but it shows that the streets here go up to 2200 E Street. At that point, I feel that life is even more meaningless than yesterday when Li Kai made his announcement.

  A lonesome bench in a concrete park seems to be waiting for me. I drag myself towards it. On a nearby bench is a sad black boy eating a hot dog and staring at me. I sit down with my suitcase nestled in between my knees. I open my guidebook and read the first page.

  Salt Lake City is a logically arranged city. All the streets labelled West are west of Main Street; all the streets labelled East are east of Main Street. Similarly, all the streets labelled South are south of South Temple Street, and all the streets labelled North are north of South Temple Street.

  But so what? What’s so great about South Temple Street anyway? It then continues.

  Each block in this city is 660 feet or 240 metres long, and they are numbered in increments of 100. Using this street-numbering and distancing system, one can easily find one’s way around.

  Really? I don’t think so. I close the guidebook, and look around. There is not a living soul on the streets; even the black boy who was eating his hot dog has vanished. The only thing I can see are hotels, one after the other, lined up on 300 South Street – Hilton Hotel, Marriott Hotel, City Inn, etc., each one with marble walls and American flags blowing in the wind, welcoming invisible guests. Occasionally a doorman shows up in front of a hotel entrance, bored, waiting for nothingness. I take a breath; I feel like I too am turning to marble in front of these buildings. I feel dreadful; I walk on, pulling my heavy suitcase along the asphalt road. The only living, moving things in this world are my two feet and the wheels of the suitcase screeching grittily.

  I raise my head at the sound of unidentified noise coming from some unidentified place. The American flag is still blowing on top of the massive building. I don’t have an American passport. I don’t belong here.

  I get on the first bus I see – I don’t care where it is going. After drifting along the highway for an hour, I arrive at a tourist resort in Utah. This is the mountain of Wasatch – an Indian name, so the driver announces. I get off the bus with a group of fat white tourists, and hear them say that many rich people have their holiday houses here. Leaving my luggage on the bus, I walk towards the hill and get on a cable chair which will carry me up a 6,000-foot high mountain. Fifteen minutes later, I find myself sitting in the middle of the sky, the purring cable chair slowly pulling me towards the summit. The valley underneath my feet is green and mysterious, the little villas and holiday houses, with their large private swimming pools, elegantly poised on the mountainside – a perfect vantage point to make the most of the surrounding view. People must be really rich here, and I think again that there is absolutely no similarity between this state and my province of Guang Xi. As I fly higher and higher in the cable chair I grow nervous, I can’t bear to look down. The wind lifts my trousers, tearing my hair and my flimsy shirt in all directions. Then, right on the top of a deep valley, the cable’s regular humming stops, the chair freezes in mid-air, and so do my nerves and blood. The wind is blowing the whole valley below my body. I feel like weeping aloud.

  Then, as I lift my head, sitting alone in the opposite cable chair facing the valley, I see a man, his chair rocking back and forth in the silent wind. He stops just ten metres away from me. Holding the metal bar in front of his chest, he looks like some statue hanging in the sky. And then, when our eyes meet, only then, I realise that he looks exactly like a film actor I have seen so many times. We both stare at each other, and I’m no longer scared to die alone in the sky. My mind suddenly starts to move fast. I see a sequence of moving pictures with Robert Redford in it – The Horse Whisperer, in which Tom the cowboy talks into a horse’s ears and then the mother of the injured girl falls in love with him. Or, the gangster partner of Paul Newman in The Sting. Or, the British hunter who made Meryl Streep fall in love with him in Out Of Africa …

  A shake from the cable; we start moving again, and the Hollywood films disappear. As our hanging chairs cross in silence, I lock my eyes on the man opposite. I cannot believe my eyes, it is Robert Redford himself! Only a bit older, his hair a bit greyer. Now I remember – it said in my tour guide that Robert Redford lives in Utah and he has a villa on the mountain. It must be him! While I’m staring at the figure in the sky, Robert Redford and I pass each other, in silence. Only the sound of the wind. The sound of the wind without Indians and Mormons.

  *

  Standing on top of the mountain, I look down at the world below like a saint studying the tiny living beings on earth. It’s cold and deadly silent here; I feel lonely. The loneliness hits me, and eats me slowly. This moment is worse than any second and any minute in my life. I think of Robert Redford, then I think of Li Kai in the aeroplane to China. I think of people eating, sleeping, moving or arguing in this world. I feel an urge to run away from here. I raise my feet and I step onto the long and silent grass. I walk towards the world underneath me.

  FLOWER OF SOLITUDE

  1. Houyi

  AT THAT TIME, the universe had two different worlds – the Earth, where the Mortals lived, and the Heaven where the Immortals reigned. At that time, the mountain was scarlet red and the sea flowed with the colour of blood. At that time, the animals crowded the land so much so that the humans had to fight for their space.

  At that time, the greatest quality a man could have was to be the best archer. And at that
time in those distant ancient days, on the red earth, there was a great archer named Houyi.

  With a large bow on his shoulder, Houyi walks rapidly on the wild grass like a leopard streaking through the forest. He heads towards the village of White Elephant to help the locals shoot the wolves – the carnivorous wolves who have recently stolen several babies and left a bloody trail on the path to the woods. No animal, wolf, bull or lion can outrun Houyi’s arrows. Houyi is indeed the master of all archers within the kingdom.

  The sun burns above the pine trees, and beneath them Houyi sweats like a young bull. He washes his face in a stream at the foot of the hills, drinking in the clear and sweet water from the mountain. He bites into the sour fruit from a wild pear tree, spitting the hard skin onto the grass. He is a man with rough temper; his young beard is thick and strong, always flying in the wind. And with his great silver bow against the arrows on his back, even tigers fear him and slink from his path.

  One autumn afternoon, when the heat subsides, Houyi manages to shoot three wolves in the forest. The first two are killed instantly, the third one is wounded and saved for the autumn sacrifice. The villagers celebrate their hero. Some thank Houyi with gifts of corn and fish, others offer smoked pork. Loaded with food, carrying his magnificent bow, Houyi leaves the village.

  Houyi’s young wife, Chang’e, is alone at home. Gathering silk from cocoons, she prepares to weave winter clothes for Houyi. Wilted and desolate, she feels lonely after marrying her husband, yet she is only fifteen years old. Houyi is just three years older than her, but he is never at home, he is a wild man who loves to make war with nature. And now Chang’e has been chased and won by him, there is nothing left to be done. With love absent from his mind, he spends his days hunting the forest animals. His young wife has no one with whom to share each passing day except an old magnolia tree standing outside her bedroom window. Chang’e often contemplates its thick leaves and white flowers. She feels like a silent and faint petal of a magnolia flower, waiting for the seasons to bring her back to the earth, yet she herself has no weight and no power.

  Every night, Houyi the archer falls asleep straight after supper. His breath is solid and deep, yet as she lies beside her husband Chang’e feels her motionless life wending its way towards a slow death. She sees the shape of her own death as beside Houyi’s earthy body. The shape of death, like an ink blot, expands and seeps into the clear area, and eventually swallows the whole visible space, leaving only blackness.

  2. Chang’e

  Before marrying Houyi, Chang’e was a flower picker in the king’s palace. The king was very old. His kingdom was in the southern part of Han China, a land whose tribes ceaselessly fought each other. When Chang’e turned twelve years old she became a servant for one of the king’s wives, and had to look after a garden where three jasmine trees grew. Her job was to pick the white flowers of the jasmine trees before they bloomed, then soak them with iced sugar in a jade jar. After a few days the king’s wife would drink the sugared jasmine tea to cure her weak lungs.

  Each jasmine flower in that garden grew only one single petal, a white petal in the shape of a heart. They were very fragile. As soon as the slightest wind blew, the petals would fall from the trees like snow. Chang’e had to pick the flowers before the wind came. Day after day Chang’e’s young heart endured the monotony of her caged life.

  One day, as Chang’e left the king’s palace to go to the market to buy sugar, she bumped into a strong handsome man with a great silver bow. Chang’e and Houyi fell in love at first sight. Before long she left the king’s jasmine garden, and became the wife of the great archer. Being a young wife, Chang’e raises silkworms under the mulberry trees, cooks rice and soup on top of a pile of chopped tree trunks, washes clothes in a nearby river. She knows the archer loves her, but her lonely heart drifts inside her empty chest. She feels love for him, but somehow it fades away, little by little, each night while Houyi sleeps. She doesn’t know what she lives for any more. She feels again that she is back in the old king’s jasmine garden, under the same burning sun, raising her tired arms, picking each delicate flower, for no purpose from one day to the next.

  3. Wu Gang

  At that time, above the great Chinese sky, there was a Heaven, where all the Immortals live. The Emperor of Heaven had the power to decide who could live there, and who could not.

  Yet for Wu Gang, the impulsive Emperor of Heaven made a different decision. Wu Gang’s fate was to abide forever in the limbo between the Immortal and Mortal worlds. He became the gatekeeper of the South Heaven Gate – the only passage from Earth to Heaven.

  Motionless and empty, Wu Gang leans against the South Heaven Gate, reminiscing over moments of his past life on Earth. He was once a woodcutter in a bamboo forest. Each morning he woke to the sound of birds, washed himself in a blue lake, and then spent his days chopping down trees for his tribe. He was happy with his life. Somehow the Emperor of Heaven judged Wu Gang to be no ordinary man, but rather the most trustful person on earth. So the Greatest Mind chose Wu Gang to guard the heavenly gate, and ever since then Wu Gang has been living in this void. He misses his homeland and using his solid axe on solid bamboo, better than this heavenly axe he is forced to wield. He misses the smell of the earth after thunderstorms and the sound of the river flowing behind his bamboo shed. Now he is in limbo, an interim space, and a lifeless zone where the earth ends and the unreachable Heaven begins. He is in a world where there is no sound, no colour and no weight. Only Wu Gang’s axe has a firm shape. He can see his body but can’t feel his own weight. The people chosen by the Emperor of Heaven to become Immortals merely pass through Wu Gang’s gate. No one has ever stayed with him to talk of Earth, and besides, there is no concrete space by that gate where one could rest. Wu Gang lives in a flow of air, from which he can only contemplate the Earth through the ethereal clouds. He is the loneliest being in the universe.

  *

  One day, through deep layers of clouds, Wu Gang’s eyes catch sight of the beautiful Chang’e while she is standing under a jasmine tree in the king’s garden, the jasmine blossoms raining down like snow in the wind. Chang’e leans by the tree, gazing at those petals falling all around her. Rays of light caress her hair and neck. The gatekeeper is stunned by her delicate beauty. He starts to mutter to himself, wishing he could become her companion, to comfort and embrace her through life. But how? He is no longer a man of flesh, he is only half-man half-spirit, without weight or gravity.

  Every passing day Wu Gang watches the jasmine garden from the high and distant South Heaven Gate. The lonely man rests against the gate with his humble axe, his half-life seeming a little less empty, until one day Chang’e disappears from the jasmine garden. He looks for her with his half-human eyes, but his sight has lost its power in the overly crowded human world. He cannot see even a trace of her among the mist, rain and smoke, among the shoulders in the market, the feet on the bridges, the hats in the fields. Heavy-hearted, he thinks that in her earthly life, she must have become someone’s wife, now living under a roof, cooking for a family. Thinking of such a life, his heart turns cold as his vision of the earth becomes blurred. From solitude his heart grows as hard as a granite stone, he can no longer feel the tender emotion that once possessed him. The day goes on, the night slips away. Wu Gang senses something sorrowful in the world beneath him, yet this sorrow is lost in the thin air and he no longer recognises human emotion.

  4. The Hottest Day

  Then one day the earth becomes unbearably hot. It’s so hot that the hills of the Gobi Desert burn like a volcano. The bamboo forests in the southern hemisphere are dry and dead from lack of rain, the pinewoods in the north are burnt into black ashes. Even the old king breathes his last on that day. When the people learn that the old king has died, the whole kingdom cries out in desperation.

  But Houyi the archer raises his dark eyes towards the sky. His eyes are as sharp as the arrow on his bow. Through the floating clouds and formless wind, he sees seven suns hanging
in the sky. In ancient time of legend, the Heaven Bird was transformed into a blazing sun, created to shine upon the earthly world. At that time, there were seven Heaven Birds living in the sky and they were the playthings of the greatest Heaven Emperor. At that time, each sun bird was only allowed to come out from the Heavenly Empire once every seven days. But on this hottest day, the suns disobey their master and appear in the sky together, unaware of the enormous damage they are doing to the earth. The great archer Houyi cannot restrain his anger any longer, furiously he draws six silver arrows out of his leopardskin sack. Whizz, whizz, whizz … one after another, he shoots down six suns, each in one strike!

  The hills of the Gobi Desert suddenly stop burning, the bamboo forests in the south are immediately awash with rain and the pinewood fire gradually abates. Men and women in the fields recover from their terror; tigers and lions emerge from their deep caves and roam again on the plains.

  The following day, the people unanimously agree to elect the great archer Houyi the new king of their country. With Chang’e he moves into the old king’s palace. And now Chang’e is back in her one-petal jasmine-tree garden where now all trees belong to her and all the servants have become her servants. She doesn’t have to make jasmine sugar tea for another woman any more. Instead King Houyi orders magicians and herbalists from throughout the land to hunt down rare herbs with which to make the elixir of longevity. For many centuries experts have tried to find the secret recipe for this potion, but with no success. Nevertheless, each new king orders his people to continue to make this magic powder. The great archer wants to be immortal, as all previous kings of the land.