Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  The poster he had designed was simple. At the top of the page, he wrote, “This is a band that will change the world and transform its members.”

  Below it, he wrote some song lyrics:

  You ask me, how far do you want to run?

  I answer you, farther than the eye can see.

  You ask me, how wide is the world in which you want to live?

  I answer you, bigger than you could ever imagine.

  He knew how to play a few songs on the guitar, but he wasn’t quite sure how to form a band. I knew he had purchased the instruments following an online guide.

  The first member of the band was Little Five, a pale, skinny, bespectacled boy whose parents were government employees. He had no real musical background. Hope had spotted him the day before going to the club recruitment meeting while he was staking out a spot. Hope noticed the pale boy changing clothes. Little Five folded the clothes he had changed out of, arranging them as carefully and neatly as if he were handling blocks of tofu. He did a few hops to get warmed up, then ran onto the field. He roared hysterically. When Hope saw Little Five’s fierce expression and the veins in his neck sticking out, he knew he had to get him in the band. He rushed over to make his pitch.

  The next member recruited was nicknamed Skinny Fat. His father was a national wushu coach. He was known for his habit of commenting on the appearance of female classmates. “Her face is good,” he might say, “but her nose is too short, so the space between her nose and mouth is too big, and she’s got a nice mouth, but the balance is all off. It’s too bad, really.” Or he would say, “She’s got something special, but her legs are too short for her body. You can tell by the way she has the waist of her skirt hiked all the way up. I wouldn’t even bother trying to pick her up. . . .”

  The third member of the band was nicknamed Oval. His parents ran a convenience store. He ended up writing a bunch of songs about snacks, which he claimed belonged to the genre of lyrical materialism. “Crunchy shrimp crackers,” one song went, “your deep, vast eyes. Crisp, crisp potato chips, crumbling like your words. The vast sky, like peanut shells on the floor around you. The river keeps flowing, and the thick smell of beer rises up. . . .”

  Rounding out the group were Crook, Short Road, and Flat Nose.

  Hope had his heart set on being the group’s lead singer. That dream was shattered after the band took a trip to a karaoke booth to check their chemistry. As soon as Hope opened his mouth, his bandmates realized that they couldn’t entrust vocal duties to him. “You’ve got the complete package,” Skinny Fat said, “completely out of tune and completely unpleasant to listen to.” After that, Flat Nose took over as the lead singer. He wasn’t much of a singer either, but his particular anatomy gave him an interesting tone.

  The band got set up in the dorm room that Hope and I shared. Supposedly, they met every day at four in the afternoon and banged away until nine at night. I heard they were always battling neighboring rooms’ noise complaints, though, so the practice time was usually limited to a few hours at most. Sometimes they would even march down the hallway to get in fights with their classmates.

  I have to say “supposedly” and “I heard” because I was never around for their practices. My internship at the newspaper had turned into a part-time job. Every afternoon when I didn’t have class, I ran around the city looking for stories: retired cadres who cultivated rare orchids, an old man whose granddaughter had fallen in love with an old friend as ancient as him, an important speech by a local politician, a street fight that resulted in casualties, and plenty of traffic accidents.

  A female reporter on the staff took me under her wing, but whenever we reported from the scene of a traffic accident, she simply couldn’t handle it, especially if there were casualties. The volume of her screams was inversely proportional to her distance from the body. I was calmer than I ever could have imagined. I took everything in and jotted down notes. I didn’t mind using my pen to lift the blanket covering a body, either. I was able to keep my cool because I never took the body as a real person; it was simply another item at the accident scene. I was fine at the scene of car crashes, but when I got back to school and saw my classmates rushing around in a fog of hormones, it was harder to stay calm. I thought to myself sometimes, These people are wasting the best years of their lives. What’s the point?

  In that state of mind, I couldn’t help but find myself admiring Hope’s strange ambitions.

  I was worried about him. I was both envious and skeptical, but deep down, I wanted to see how his life would play out. What was he truly capable of?

  Watching him felt like watching God forming one of his creations. But when the realization slipped in that he was actually my friend, I had an overwhelming feeling of anxiety on his behalf.

  Three months after they started practicing in our dorm, they put on their first concert. I figured that despite all the noise complaints, they must have worked hard in the time they had. I made sure I was there to see their first performance. I was going to sit front row, dead center, and was even given a special duty: Hope gave me a bouquet of flowers, and I was supposed to get onstage at the climax of the show to present it to the band. I wasn’t particularly enthusiastic. I was worried about what people would think of me. Hope insisted, though. “You will sit in the audience, and then, when your soul explodes with our life force, you race to the stage and give us our flowers.”

  The venue for the concert was one of the school’s cafeterias. The stage was simply the space that was usually reserved for students to line up to swipe their meal plan cards. They used a PA system borrowed from the Student Recreation Committee, and the cafeteria tables provided seating. To add some atmosphere, the corridor between the main door and the serving window was hung with posters emblazoned with poetic slogans: “Can you hear the song your spirit sings?” “Squeeze every ounce out of youth, let your ignorance drain from your soul,” “Loneliness is the truth that all hearts carry.” It looked to me like something from a pyramid scheme.

  It was at the concert that I first heard the name Hope had chosen for the band: the World. It reminded me of Hope gesticulating wildly as he described his father’s map of the world.

  Despite being passed over for lead singer, Hope still had much to say, so he played the role of host for the concert.

  The instruments were arranged, colored lights lit the room, and Hope led the band members to the makeshift stage. He took the microphone and put everything into a full-throated roar: “Hello everyone! We are the World. Listen to our song!”

  Thinking back, I can’t recall the details of any of the songs they played, but everything was a cover of an old pop song with new lyrics by Hope. Hope wasn’t a skilled lyricist, but he had a talent for laying bare his soul. However, those over-the-top lyrics weren’t a good fit with the simple backing music. All I remember of the concert was Hope’s opening roar: “We are the World. Listen to our song!”

  I might not have been able to admit it at the time, but the way Hope took the stage and addressed the audience stirred something in me. It made me think. Could I strip myself of all the limitations I had placed on myself? Could I free myself of all my inhibitions?

  I wasn’t alone. The songs weren’t memorable, and the band never really amounted to much, but Hope became something of a campus legend.

  The day after the concert, people started waving to him on the way to class or calling out greetings. Word of the band even spread to the highest levels of the school: at a meeting of the Chinese Department discussing how to deal with SARS, the department head worked them into his opening remarks. “I’ve heard our Chinese Department has made contact with the World,” he said, “or perhaps it’s the other way around. I’m talking about the band, of course.”

  There was never even a hint of modesty or embarrassment when Hope received positive attention or affirmation. He didn’t strike a pretentious pose either. He simply smiled, showing off his little fangs, and said, “Yep, that was me. I’m Hope. I�
�m the World.”

  This is the way I saw it: Hope had turned his life over to chasing a dream, and whether or not he succeeded, the purity of his emotions made the feeling contagious. People believed in him, and he became the spokesperson for them and for the fantasy world he was trying to communicate to them.

  That was what I liked about Hope. I believed in him, but at the same time, I was worried that he was burning too bright, giving himself over to lighting the path for others. If he failed, the people who followed him would be disappointed—but how would Hope feel?

  Hope fell in love, just as he had planned.

  After he became a campus celebrity, our dorm room became a sort of student salon, the destination for all the notable characters at our school. As many people as were coming and going from the dorm, one of them was bound to catch Hope’s eye. After that, it wasn’t long until he hooked up with them.

  While Hope was falling in love, I found myself spending less and less time at our dorm. A story I had written for the newspaper had won a provincial journalism award, and my editor had given me even more assignments. I usually didn’t get back to the dorm until ten or so at night, but I always found the party still going when I arrived and always peopled by a new group of visitors.

  It was a varied crowd: chatty classmates who wanted to pepper Hope with questions about the meaning of life; people with piercings and sleeves of tattoos who aspired to drag Hope into some badass enterprise with them; nerdy students that everyone avoided for fear of being dragged into a dull conversation, who timidly asked if Hope was interested in taking part in their experiments; and a number of hangers-on who wanted to talk Hope into some music industry project. . . . They all had their own private dreams and fantasies, but they were never prepared to carry them out. They were “still laying the groundwork” for such and such a project or “just waiting for the right time” to pursue whatever dream. Their pitch to Hope was always the same: “You should do it first!”

  They circled around Hope, as if waiting for him to save them. They reached out to him, trying to get him interested in their own schemes and dreams. The school’s rule was lights out at ten, but that didn’t put an end to the gatherings. The darkness seemed to encourage people to open up even more. It was when the lights went out that everyone seemed to abandon rational thought and give in to fantasy. I was often startled awake by someone shouting something like “We owe it to ourselves to achieve our dreams” or “You’re only young once!”

  Hope would answer them with even more enthusiasm, saying, “You’re absolutely right!”

  I was burning the candle at both ends, trying to keep up with my schoolwork and the job at the newspaper. I was getting sick of the passionate nightly colloquies. When final exams approached in my second year, I decided it was time to rent a room off campus.

  Hope felt like I was abandoning him. On the day I moved out, he cautiously asked me, “You don’t believe in me anymore or what? Is it just too noisy for you?”

  Hope could accept the latter but not the former.

  I did my best to explain the situation—all the extra work at the newspaper and how important it was for me to get a good night’s sleep—but he still seemed to be seeking my approval. Perhaps he wasn’t sure exactly how to get it, since he just asked me again, “You still believe in me, right?”

  “Of course,” I said.

  “So you’ve still got my back, right?”

  I knew I could end up going back and forth with him all day, but I suddenly came up with a way to cut the conversation short and maybe even earn a byline. I could imagine the headline: “The Passionate Youth Behind the Campus Band.” I decided an interview with him would provide some nice background for the story. I asked Hope if he was up for it. “I want other people to hear your story,” I told him.

  At first he seemed stunned, but then he smiled, showing his canines. “Really?” he asked. “I’d love that.”

  After that, my transition out of the dorm was smooth. When I left, Hope took brush and ink and produced a poster to hang on the door. It read, “Spirit Quest Pavilion.”

  The next time I heard from him was three days after moving out. My phone rang at two in the morning.

  “What are you doing?” he asked.

  I knew there was something on his mind. “What is it?” I asked.

  “I just did it. . . .”

  I knew he wanted to tell me that he had gotten laid, but I wanted to get off the phone. “Good night,” I said.

  “Don’t hang up,” he yelped anxiously. As I reached for the button, I heard him screaming on the other end of the line: “This is what it means to be young! I’m doing something meaningful.”

  I only spent as much time on campus as I absolutely had to, but even still, I heard highly exaggerated accounts of Hope’s exploits: he had run through three girls in one week, he got in a brawl at a restaurant, he took over the lectern in a literature class to sing one of his own compositions. . . . There was also an incident in which he kissed a male classmate. A group of people was watching. He responded as he usually did: “I want to experience everything life has to offer.”

  The school counselor finally couldn’t take it any longer. He decided to call Hope’s family. The phone rang way off in his mountain village, and Hope’s father picked it up. When the school counselor briefed the rural English instructor on the conduct of his son, Hope’s father started to laugh.

  I figured it must be a case of Hope’s father hoping to live vicariously through his son. His dreams had never been realized, but perhaps in his son they would be.

  The counselor eventually tracked me down, hoping I could offer Hope some advice. He knew I tended to be more forward thinking than Hope. “We’ve all been young, of course,” the counselor said, “but there are limits. You’ve got a good head on your shoulders. You know what it’ll mean for him to have those sorts of things on his public record. It could have a negative impact on his future. He’s disconnected from reality. He has to know reality will catch up with him in the end.” I knew the counselor had Hope’s best interests in mind, but I also knew my words would fall on deaf ears. The only reason Hope and I had ever been friends was because we were complete opposites.

  Hope once again surprised us all.

  He abruptly calmed down and turned down the volume on his life. Nobody could have expected that a girl had flipped the switch. Her name was Wang Ziyi.

  Like Hope, Wang Ziyi was something of a campus celebrity. The reason for her notoriety was not any innate charm or great beauty. She was famous because of her father. Rumor had it that he was secretary-general of the city’s Municipal Party Committee. This was never actually confirmed, but even professors deferred to her.

  For all Wang Ziyi’s notoriety on campus, nobody seemed to know her well. She was often referred to as simply “the daughter of the secretary-general.” She seemed to hold herself above her fellow students, and she often tilted her head in a way that made it appear as if she was purposely avoiding meeting anyone’s gaze. Hope and Wang Ziyi seemed to be products of two different worlds. Where Wang Ziyi came from, people of her generation were waiting to inherit power, either directly from their parents or from the families they had married into. To her classmates, there was something old fashioned about people like Wang Ziyi, but that didn’t stop them from envying her identity.

  Despite all that, Wang Ziyi became Hope’s girlfriend.

  At first the romance surprised me, but I eventually came to realize something about Hope. Some people make a breakthrough into a so-called new world, but they always end up looking back, and when they do, they realize that they are still judging their new reality by the rules they used to live by. Even if you fight your way into a new reality, you are always bound by the rules of the old. Nobody understood that about Hope. He couldn’t lead them into a new reality because he was still tethered to the old reality. I suppose even Hope might not have realized it.

  There was an easy explanation for Hope and Wang Ziyi
getting together. Hope thought he could use her to prove that he had given up his old reality, and Wang Ziyi was with him as an act of rebellion against the reality she lived in. Wang Ziyi was even more of a rebel than Hope was, in fact—but maybe most of the people that visited the Spirit Quest Pavilion were more rebellious than Hope, or they understood what freedom really meant.

  The love affair exposed another side of Hope to his classmates. The flow of visitors to his dorm slowed to a trickle. Those who stayed away might have whispered things about staying away because of a fear that the crude decadence which had infected Hope—passed on from Wang Ziyi and her old-fashioned world—might be contagious. But perhaps deep down they realized it was Hope that was the source, not Wang Ziyi.

  Around the time Hope and Wang Ziyi got together, I realized that I had my own admirer. Her name was Zhang Jingyi. She came from the same world as Wang Ziyi: her father was the director of the Municipal Bureau of Culture. She collected clippings of the poems and short stories I had published in the newspaper’s literary supplement.

  I had only just settled into my rented room when she showed up uninvited. She didn’t say much, but I noticed her eyes darting around, scanning the small space. She didn’t stay long but then returned that afternoon with a quilt, a mosquito net, a pillow, an incense burner, and a fountain pen. I didn’t know what to say. It was too late to refuse, though, and I could only watch in silence as she began putting each item away. She seemed to know exactly where each thing belonged.

  She sat down and began talking. She told me her father always advised her to find a partner with talent. Her father’s rationale was that a potential husband’s background was secondary to his potential. “He told me that was the best way to start a family with a future,” she said. “Being able to pick a man like that is an important ability for a woman.”

  I realized what kind of person I was dealing with. Even though I had always been pragmatic and calculating, constantly concerned about my future, I somehow still resented that side of me. If I had been as coldly calculating as I sometimes aspired to be, I would have snatched up Zhang Jingyi in an instant. She was a good girl, not spoiled, modest, traditional, and focused on building a family. But hearing those words come out of her mouth, it all sounded so foreign to me. I awkwardly showed her the door.