Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  I realized that Wenzhan and I were alike in one way at least: neither of us would ever find a place to truly call home.

  9

  Hope

  I still recall our first meeting and the way he very earnestly introduced himself: “My family name is Zhang. My first name is Hope—yes, just like the English word.”

  To correctly enunciate his name, he formed his lips into a perfectly round circle.

  I figured anyone who went around with a name like that, and who clearly understood its meaning, must be an interesting character. Hope in particular seemed to wear his unusual name like a badge of honor.

  He enthusiastically continued his introduction. . . .

  He told me his father was a remarkable man who, despite an education limited to elementary school, had taught himself English and, since he was the only person in the village with any proficiency in the language, was given a job teaching at the local school. Apart from teaching English, Hope’s father also held the post of school principal. He was a keen reader of contemporary and ancient history and kept himself abreast of current events by listening to the Voice of America. Hope told me that his father was the only man in the village who had any idea how the world worked. There was a tradition in the village of putting up in the yard of each house a sort of mosaic with glazed tiles forming the characters that signified happiness, wealth, and longevity, but Hope’s father had done something completely different: he had a local craftsman make him a map of the world.

  “The whole world,” Hope said, spreading his hands wide, then tracing the shape of the globe. “Every inch.” He looked back at me, palms up, as if he had the world balanced in his own two hands. His face glowed with an indescribable light.

  I finally realized what he had reminded me of when he had made his introduction: he looked like some government leader addressing a crowd, proudly announcing his name and explaining its meaning.

  He had arrived at university with two woven sacks, which he carried into our dormitory, one in each hand. He looked like a Shaolin monk. I could tell his clothes were new and he had gotten a haircut for the big day. The weather had not cooperated. His new clothes had started to stick to him in the heat, and his hair was already in disarray. He must have wanted our first impression of him to be of a handsome, sophisticated young gentleman. He stood in front of me as stiffly as the cowlick in his hair.

  His earnest introduction and enthusiastic greeting made me uncomfortable. That is how I always felt around people like him. I couldn’t shake the sense that I was the one who was out of line. I liked his smile, though. He had a baby face, but it had been tanned from plenty of time outside, and when he smiled, he showed two deep dimples beside his lips and a pair of tiny white canines. It was a smile that came straight from the heart.

  I thought back to my hometown. Economic reforms had transformed it from a poor backwater into a small city of unexpected wealth and prosperity. My own middle school had become the best in town. The rich people did everything they could to get their kids enrolled there.

  Those rich kids arrived at school dressed in outfits selected by their parents, their hair done up or slicked down with gel. Some of them even wore bow ties. Their parents wanted them to look like the luckiest kids in the world. The kids walked into school still beaming some residual pride picked up from their parents, but it faded quickly, replaced with nervousness, and then was completely shaken from them by the raucous laughter of their classmates when they caught sight of them. I could always sense the sound of both parents and kids finally breaking.

  There is always a standard. If you don’t know what the standard is, the harder you try, the more ridiculous you look.

  That was how Hope was, too. People like that are always fragile. They are completely pure. They don’t know how to judge themselves against the standard.

  I’m still not sure when I became so serious and sensible.

  On the surface, I seemed casual, even careless. But I measured each word before speaking to judge whether it would upset anyone. I did my best to say what I thought people wanted to hear. I tried to figure out what was expected of me. I never spoke freely for fear of being disliked by other people. But why did I care whether people liked me? Maybe it was a survival mechanism.

  After a while, I felt like I was wearing a mask. Every day when I got home, I would let out a deep sigh. I felt like an actor stepping off stage, safely back behind the curtains. When I went off to middle school and lived for the first time in a communal setting, I couldn’t dramatically enter the room and sigh, so I covered it up by sighing discreetly while wiping down my face with a wet cloth. Everyone came to recognize my daily habit of entering our room and wiping my face off. Only one of my classmates ever had the nerve to sneak up beside me and catch me in the act of sighing. He whispered to me, “I heard that. You always cover it up by wiping your face, but I know what it’s all about. You can take your mask off.” He chuckled and left without saying anything else. I had been discovered.

  The classmate who discovered my secret was one of the few students I met in my middle school years who really had something special about him. He had distinguished himself in my eyes during a meeting he had convened at the activity center to celebrate the top students in our grade. When we got there, he ran up to the lectern and said imperiously, as if announcing himself as the second coming of the Buddha, “Upholders of the dharma, I have gathered you here today to share with you that I am the one you have been waiting for. Swear to me you will stay loyal to my one truth path.” Some of the students were shocked, but most just rolled their eyes or laughed. Finally some of my classmates started tossing books at him, but he stayed in character, looming over us at the lectern, as still as a statue.

  I expected him to grow up to become a cult leader. On the contrary, though, he was the first of my classmates to get married and the first to get fat. He got a job as a biology teacher. He looked forward to the chance to dissect frogs with his class. When we had our ten-year reunion, he had completely lost any traces of specialness. He was drinking and cracking dirty jokes—completely at home in the human world.

  I couldn’t help but wonder what had happened to him. I had been drinking, so I was bold enough to ask him in a conspiratorial voice, “You were the only one who knew my secret. How’d you turn out like this?”

  “I was just joking around,” he said, laughing.

  He saw the disappointment on my face and became solemn: “Honestly, I couldn’t tell you. Maybe I should never have let myself change. But now I don’t even know if that was the real me or this is the real me.” The way he looked at me gave me goose bumps. He patted me firmly on the shoulder. “What’s wrong? You scared? I’m just messing with you.”

  In fact, I couldn’t tell the difference between his truth and his jokes. The chasm between what he had become in reality and my own fantastical expectations of him was simply too vast. But I always believed that people create fantasy worlds for themselves and others. Everyone has a number of fantasy worlds stored in their heads, and I knew he must be the same.

  I tried to stay vigilant about the thin barrier between the imaginary and the real. The real world is the only one that can be said to truly exist, but there is always the risk of sinking into untimely fantasy.

  On meeting Hope that afternoon, I got a hint as to what kind of fantasies he kept stored in his head. He thought of his arrival at university as his first step into the larger world. He thought he was opening a door to infinite possibilities. He thought when he spoke everyone in the world would hear him.

  I couldn’t help myself—I had to tell him, “When you introduce yourself to the other students, it might be better if you keep all that stuff about your name to yourself.”

  “Why?” he said. He turned to face me, and I saw that he was completely baffled by my advice.

  “Well, because . . .”

  I couldn’t bring myself to say it. What I wanted to tell him was, that’s not the way the world works.
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br />   He went ahead and did it anyway.

  When we had our first party, he had a few drinks. Those were probably the first drinks of his life.

  When people get a bit of freedom, the first liberty they always exercise is freedom of speech.

  His face was flushed red, and he had started to slur his speech. He had launched into his self-introduction again and gotten to the part where his father had a map of the world made. Perhaps it was the liquor, but he was particularly animated. He rose to his feet and spread his arms wide. “It was this big,” he said, “the whole world.”

  Everyone started to laugh.

  I don’t know if it was because he had been drinking or because he simply lacked any conception of ridicule or mockery, but his classmates’ laughter only served to encourage him. He started singing an English song, something like Emilia’s “Big Big World,” and when it was over, he once again took to his feet, proclaiming his vow to live a beautiful life: “I want to fall in love and lose my virginity as soon as possible. I want to start a band and record an album as soon as possible. I want to publish some poems and put out a collection as soon as possible. I promise that every minute of my life will be magical, and I want to start now.”

  I suppose the way Hope saw himself, he was a gifted orator channeling Martin Luther King Jr. But I was unimpressed. What a lame imagination, I thought, like something you would find in a middle school textbook.

  Gossip about Hope began to circulate through the school. He didn’t seem to care. I wondered, did he realize that people were making fun of him, or did he think everyone was amazed by him?

  On his way to the school cafeteria, I saw some classmates giggling viciously behind his back. Hope didn’t seem to understand their intentions.

  Hope rushed over and put his hands on their shoulders and said, “You want to get to know me, brother? Tell me your name. Let’s get to know each other.” The classmates had no idea how to respond and hurried away. But some people were even more brazen. When they saw Hope coming, they would shout, copying a line from a popular manga, “We must stay hot-blooded!”

  Hope responded with dead seriousness, yelling back, “We do it for youth!”

  I felt embarrassed on his behalf.

  I don’t know whether I was worried about Hope or simply curious about how he was going to handle his newfound infamy, but I started hanging out with him.

  I was as pragmatic and anxious as ever. I started to calculate how much time in a day I needed to sleep and how much time I could spend studying, balancing that against what kind of grades I could get and what kind of internship I might be able to get myself into. . . . When everything was totaled up, I decided I didn’t have enough time. I knew this was a dangerous experiment that would change the course of my life. Since my father had his stroke while I was in high school, most of my savings had been spent, so I knew I had to get a job as soon as I left university. I felt like I was at the controls of a rocket, soaring upward while still trying to make the minute calculations to keep everything on track.

  Hope had the opposite approach. It wasn’t that he had nothing to worry about; he simply had no idea what he should be worried about. He had no interest in taking a pragmatic approach to planning out his life.

  Hope joined the guitar club. It made sense; he wanted to start a band. And he joined the street dance club and the tae kwon do club, too. He even shared with me a fantasy of wearing a tae kwon do outfit during sex. He said it loud, as if he didn’t care who could hear. His mind was full of strange fantasies at that time. He thought joining the street dance club or the tae kwon do club represented some kind of cosmopolitan youthful rebellion. He even joined the poetry club.

  He dragged me along with him to the club meetings. This was all part of the plan he had proclaimed at the party: to live his life beautifully. I realized after attending a few of the meetings with him that the guitar club might as well be called the “pretending to play guitar club,” and the same went for the other clubs. They were meant for people who wanted to hang out with other people interested in pretending to street dance or pretending to do tae kwon do or pretending to write poems.

  The entire country at the time was on a track of rapid urbanization, and it seemed as if everyone wanted to get on board with the new cosmopolitanism, even if all they were doing was pretending. Perhaps the best way to describe those clubs he joined where everyone was pretending was collective hypnosis. The club members wanted to join the cult of modernity and worship at the altar of the fashionable.

  Being taken prisoner by a fantasy is absurd, especially when it differs so wildly from what is taking place in reality.

  I had set a goal for myself of scoring high enough to get a scholarship for both semesters. That was how I paid for my living expenses. I got a job and managed to save about three thousand yuan. My plan was to save up enough to carry myself during an internship at a newspaper. Internships were unpaid, but they were the perfect opportunity to experience something real: real human affairs, real life, the real world. I wanted to bring myself into closer contact with what was real.

  Hope and I lived our lives as we thought they should be lived, and we rushed off in opposite directions.

  It was no easy feat, but I eventually secured an interview with a company offering internships. Hope came with me to the interview. On the way back to school, I expected him to congratulate me, but instead he shook his head ruefully and said, “My father told me a story once that he heard on Voice of America. There’s a guy fresh from an Ivy League school who shows up at a Fortune 500 company hoping to get a job. The CEO asks him, ‘So, what did you do in your freshman year?’ The guy answers that he buried himself in his books and didn’t look up. ‘What about your sophomore year?’ the CEO asks him. The guy tells the CEO that he started an internship. ‘What about your junior year?’ the CEO asks. The guy starts telling him about a business plan he wrote up as a way to get ready for the business world after he graduated. And finally the CEO asks him, ‘So you’re saying you wasted your youth?’ The guy shakes his head no. ‘Have you sowed your wild oats?’ The guy shakes his head no again. The CEO dismisses him, but before leaving he says, ‘The problem is you haven’t even lived yet, so how do you expect to offer anything to my company? You’ve got your diploma, but you haven’t done a single course in the school of life. Go out there and live, then come back to me.’”

  I knew what he was driving at, but honestly, I was skeptical as to how much truth there was to the story of the CEO and the graduate. Hope took it as the gospel truth.

  The moral of the story was about discovering how the real world works, but Hope himself had no idea what the real world even was.

  I didn’t bother poking holes in the story, though. Maybe I was waiting for someone to prove to me that there was another way to live, a way that lay beyond my imagination.

  When Hope didn’t get any pushback from me, he boldly went on. “I want to start a band,” he said. He had all the confidence of youth, and maybe he wanted to show off to me.

  A short time after I arrived at university, a Taiwanese café chain opened a site near our school and visited the campus to look for staff. They had three requirements: a dignified bearing, the ability to hold a conversation, and basic stipulations about physical attractiveness, which was referred to euphemistically as “regular physical appearance.” The salary was a thousand yuan a month and the shifts were flexible, so students could fit the work into their class schedule. When Hope marched off to the interview, he dragged me along with him. I arrived to see a gaggle of other students also hoping to be hired by the café. Sucking in their guts and talking to each other in syrupy, affected tones, they looked more like they were auditioning for a play than hoping to get a job making coffee.

  He barely managed to convince the hiring manager that he met the first two requirements, but when it came to the third, there was no way to bullshit his way through it. I heard the sound of things crashing around inside the café and then Hope sc
reaming, “Fuck that, five foot five!” The hiring manager had produced a tape measure and found Hope lacking. Hope lost his temper and started cursing him out. He emerged from the café laughing and dragged me along behind him saying, “Screw it!”

  Hope didn’t get the job at the café, but he was suddenly busier than ever. He was usually gone from our shared dorm room by the time I got up, and he didn’t get back until after I was asleep. A collection of musical instruments suddenly appeared in our room. When I finally saw him again, I noticed that he had lost weight and his dark tan had deepened. I asked him what he was up to, but the only response he would give was a sly smile. Finally, by chance, on my way to the quarry behind the school to interview someone else, I caught sight of Hope. He was swinging a hammer over his head and bringing it down on a massive rock.

  I was shocked. I ran over and said, “You really got yourself into it this time, huh?” He was drenched in sweat and had a towel wrapped around his head like a farmer.

  “I don’t want to live in their fuckin’ world. They think this’ll stop me? Those people might be sophisticated, but they’re afraid of their own shadow. I can be sophisticated when I want to, but I can get down and dirty when I need to. I can stoop lower than them.”

  He gave his usual hearty laugh.

  When you encounter obstacles and find yourself too weak to overcome them, you risk becoming an object of ridicule; if you can work your way through it, people begin to idolize you. That wasn’t how I always thought, but Hope changed my mind.

  Hope had begun collecting instruments over the final semester of his first year, and at the start of the second year, he created a poster to recruit band members. He went down to the club recruitment meeting and started yelling about his band.