“Let me see,” I said, and abruptly walked away.
I no longer felt like looking at paintings, but I suddenly thought of three words to describe Wen Lan’s elegant manner—Baccarat-crystal chandelier.
Let me explain. There was a time when I was ready to marry Wen Lan. I had already bought an apartment in Hong Kong for us. Then I learned that she was going to marry someone else.
In the autumn of 1991, I went to the mainland to interview an old academic couple who were living under house arrest after the events of 1989. A number of their students from Beijing Normal University had come to visit them. These young people were not so selfishly concerned with their own futures as to avoid visiting their professors in their time of trouble.
The most striking one among them was Wen Lan, a senior-year student, pretty, easygoing, and cultured. She made me feel romantic.
She asked all the students to note down their phone numbers for me, and I knew she did it just so that I would be able to contact her.
I invited her out and we took a walk around Houhai Lake. Her mother was Shanghainese and her father a Beijinger. He edited a journal on theory and worked in the Central Propaganda Department in Shatan. Wen Lan loved Western literature, was concerned with national affairs, and was extremely beautiful—to me she was perfect.
“What is the meaning of existence?” she once asked me. I flailed around trying to think of something profound. Then, I remember, she quoted Jean-Paul Sartre: “We must take responsibility for our own lives.” I was in love.
I went back to Hong Kong for a few days and then contrived a reason to return to Beijing. She said she wanted to go abroad, and I screwed up my courage to ask her to marry me. She laughed and cried, and I thought she had agreed. I told her that we would have no problem living on my salary. I had permanent-resident status in Hong Kong, and she could apply to get it as well.
She asked me how long after we were married would she become a permanent resident and I told her if I got help from friends, probably about two years. During that time she could have a multiple-entry pass to live in Hong Kong for short periods, and I could go to Beijing frequently on assignment. We would be together quite often, and besides, I said, “Meeting after a short separation is like a second honeymoon.” She seemed excited and full of expectation. We said we’d get married the following summer so she could finish her studies first. I asked her if I should meet her parents and she said she’d arrange it for my next visit.
I thought I was the luckiest guy getting married to such a gorgeous Beijing woman, and she was eighteen years younger than me. After I returned to Hong Kong, I happened to see an advertisement for properties in Taikoo Shin, so I quickly placed a down payment on the apartment I’ve mentioned before, and started to build a nest for two.
After completing the paperwork on the flat, I made a long-distance call to Beijing. Wen Lan’s father answered and told me she had gone to Germany. “When will she be back?” I asked, and he abruptly replied, “After she gets married! Don’t call her anymore!”
I hurried to Beijing and phoned her classmates who’d been at the professors’ when I’d first met Wen Lan. They said they were really not close friends and hadn’t kept in touch since that night.
I remembered that Wen Lan had said her major was French, but she was also studying German at the Goethe Institute. I rushed over there to look up her records. I found out she had withdrawn from her studies. A secretary who knew her told me she was going to marry a part-time German teacher who worked at the institute. She wouldn’t tell me his name. I pushed my way into the dean’s office. The dean was a well-known China expert with a Chinese wife, so he probably had some understanding of the wiles of Chinese women. He listened very patiently to my story and said he could not give me Wen Lan’s German contact information, but he promised that if I wrote her a letter he would forward it to her.
I went into an empty classroom and sat there, staring blankly, for a long time. I picked up my pen several times wanting to write her a few words, but I just couldn’t think how to start.
Three months later I received a letter from Wen Lan. She told me she was married to a German who had been her German teacher, an executive in a German firm in Beijing, and it had been love at first sight. The two of them were living in Germany and they were very happy together. She didn’t say which city they lived in and she didn’t apologize—it was as if nothing had ever happened between us. She explained herself in only one sentence, the theme of which was that she was like a sparrow that wanted to fly away on the wind and was impatiently longing to spread its wings today, because tomorrow would be too late.
Before 1992, a mainland bride married to a man in Hong Kong had to wait two years before she was granted permanent residence in Hong Kong. (After 1992, she would have had to wait five years.) This inhuman discrimination policy was a violation of basic human rights and a disgrace to Hong Kong. If Wen Lan had married me, she would definitely have had to wait two years to live in Hong Kong, so I didn’t blame her for choosing to marry a German. I even understood why she had chosen to “ride a donkey while searching for a horse.” What I was genuinely indignant about was that she had so thoroughly misled me and hadn’t even bothered to tell me anything about her change of heart. I realized that she was a woman who cared only about her own personal advancement, and had no concern for other people.
That night I ate alone at the nearby Singapore Restaurant and read an e-book on my cell phone. I use a K-Touch cell phone. K-Touch used to be the king of counterfeit, but now it’s a famous international brand. The phone has every function you could want. The interface uses something similar to Sony technology and the functions combine all the best elements of Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle. Although I still browse in the Sanlian Bookstore on a regular basis, ever since I bought my K-Touch e-book digital phone, almost all my books are downloaded from the net. I’ve already stored the complete works of Jin Yong, Zhang Ailing, and Lu Xun on my phone.
I was trying to understand Lu Xun’s essay “A Lost Good Hell,” when I received a call from Wen Lan asking me to come out and meet her. I said I didn’t have time, but she insisted, asking me to come out for lunch the next day at the Maison Boulud in Qian Men Street. It’s not easy to catch a taxi near there and I don’t have a driver, and besides I didn’t feel like accommodating that Baccarat-crystal chandelier. I changed it to a small coffeehouse in Qianliang Lane.
“Where is Qianliang Lane?” she asked.
“It’s off Dongsi North Avenue, close to your Shatan house, you must know it, right?” I said in exasperation.
She deigned to accept my arrangement—so I knew she must want something from me.
When we met the next day, just as I expected, she said, “Jian Lin and I are just good friends. He’s got a wife, you know.”
So she wanted to shut me up. She had not seen me for twenty years, and this is all she wanted to see me about. But I wasn’t really angry. I just wanted to see what other tricks she had up her sleeve.
“Jian Lin is a big real estate magnate,” I said to tease her.
“What’s a real estate magnate?” she replied. “Just somebody with a lot of money, nothing so great about that.”
What an imperious tone. Was she “riding a donkey while searching for a horse” again? I have to admit that although Wen Lan is over forty, she looks great for her age and has all the charm of a continental European woman. I can imagine that quite a few men have been captivated by her.
“Are you still living in Germany?”
She gave me a puzzled look. “I haven’t been in Germany for a long time.”
“Didn’t they tell me you married a German and went to Germany?” I alluded to what had happened twenty years earlier.
“You mean Hans?” She seemed to be scolding me for not being au courant with her activities. “We haven’t been together for ages. Germany was a stifling place, bored me to death. I went to Paris; my ex-husband’s Jean-Pierre Louis.” Seeing that I di
dn’t react, she added, “A very famous sinologist.” I was definitely not familiar with any French sinologists. “Sinologists are all insane, I can’t stand them,” she remarked.
“Jian Lin called you Professor Wen,” I said.
“Professor Wen or Dr. Wen are both fine. I received my doctorate from Sciences-Po in Paris. I’m a specialist in Euro-African affairs and an adviser to the European Union and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”
I remembered that her father was in the Central Propaganda Department—the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, either inside or outside the organization, and profiting from both.
“So then, you intend to come back home?” I asked.
“You mean, return to China?” she said with an arrogant air. “We’ll see. There are people in Europe who are waiting for me now. There’s an old aristocrat who keeps asking me to marry him. But now everybody knows that the twenty-first century belongs to China. If a particularly good opportunity came along, I might consider coming back to do something for China. For the time being, I’ll just keep going back and forth. I have a house in Paris and another one in Brussels, and I’m just now looking for a suitable place to buy in Beijing. What about you? What are you doing in Beijing?”
“I just sit around at home, and once in a while I write something.”
At that, her interest began to wane.
Then she asked, “Where do you live?”
“Happiness Village Number Two.”
“Where?”
“Happiness Village Number Two, in Dongzhi Menwai.”
She didn’t react—it was probably not posh enough for her. After sizing me up completely, her last remaining interest in me evaporated.
“Well, Lao Chen, I have to go.”
“Go ahead.”
“About Jian Lin …”
I made a gesture of zipping up my lips.
“You’re an old Beijinger now,” she said in a slightly coquettish manner, “when I return to Beijing, you’ll have to take me out!”
I almost said, “What on earth for?” but I held myself in check.
She stood up and added, “I expect you to take care of me.”
In socialist realist fiction, this is known as finishing with a bright tail. It could also be called buying travel insurance. On the one hand acting like a big important woman, and on the other hand acting like a helpless little girl, and all the time taking and taking. It’s amazing that it didn’t embarrass her to say such things.
I felt like I had already become her B-list male escort.
I watched through the window as her driver opened the door for her and she got into a black BMW. It had an armed-police WJ licence plate.
She’s no longer Chinese counterfeit goods, I thought, now she’s a genuine French Baccarat-crystal chandelier. But it doesn’t matter whether she’s a made-in-China kerosene lamp or a French crystal chandelier, she’s still on the market, always on the make, and she still has her price.
The Second Spring
Nothing happened for several days after that and no one tried to contact me. Little Xi was still on my mind, but I resisted trying to get in touch with her.
Two first-Sunday-of-the-month screenings had come and gone. He Dongsheng, the government official, was still at the screenings, but nobody else was invited, and it seemed like Jian Lin had arranged it that way just for He Dongsheng. This time, when I arrived at the usual reception room, Jian Lin had already been drinking quite a bit.
“Wen Lan broke up with me,” he said as I came in. “She dumped me,” he added with obvious embarrassment.
I could certainly relate to that—a man with a midlife crisis getting involved with a femme fatale.
I knew that a woman with Wen Lan’s good looks and culture could easily bewitch a man like Jian Lin, in late middle age with a passion for art and literature.
“Who is she with now?” I asked intuitively.
“My cousin,” Jian Lin said with a sad smile, “but this time she’s going to get the worse of it.”
“He Dongsheng?” I exclaimed.
“No, no, another cousin. We all met at my aunt’s memorial service. Wen Lan attended the Foreign Language School in Baiduizi, and my aunt taught her French.”
“Who’s your other cousin?” I asked.
“Do you know of the EAL Friendship Investments group?”
“The one that’s involved with Wantwant Starbucks’ investments in Africa?”
“That’s small potatoes,” he said. “Think petroleum, mining, large-scale capital construction …”
“So are they also involved in the arms trade?” I asked nonchalantly.
“Of course they’re in the arms trade. Africa, Latin America.”
“What about the ‘E’ for Europe?”
“That’s Turkey, the Caucasus, the former Yugoslavia, and the former Soviet Union,” he replied.
I remembered that the EAL group’s CEO was one Ban Cuntou. “Then Wen Lan is with Ban Cuntou?” I asked.
Jian Lin nodded resentfully.
“You mean he’s even wealthier than you are?” I was deliberately provoking him now.
“I can’t possibly compete with him.”
“You mean he has more power than He Dongsheng?”
“He Dongsheng is very concerned about the nation and the people,” Jian Lin explained, “but he is only an adviser, at most like a high-level brain trust. There are many, many people who have more power than he does. He can’t even match a secretary to the Politburo Standing Committee in influence. But whether or not you have clout depends upon whether or not your faction commands power at Party Central. You don’t understand China’s state system. There are so many unwritten rules that you can’t possibly fathom. You can’t judge the current national situation by superficial appearances, and there’s no way of really explaining it to someone outside the party-government system.” Jian Lin was growing impatient as he spoke.
I am quite familiar with Jian Lin’s idea that outsiders cannot understand the Chinese government system, so I just let him go on thinking that I didn’t understand. He was out of sorts and finding me a little irritating, so I figured I’d best not say too much because I still valued his friendship, however remote it might be.
“I hope you won’t go around writing or talking about any of this,” he said very seriously.
“I don’t write gossip,” I said with some resentment.
After we finished eating, we had nothing more to say.
I was just thinking that perhaps Wen Lan and Ban Cuntou were quite evenly matched. Wen Lan ought to be pretty satisfied now. After so many years of “riding a donkey while searching for a horse,” she was probably tired. Was she really planning on becoming the First Lady of China?
When He Dongsheng came into the room, Jian Lin pointed to his own mouth to remind me not to say anything about Wen Lan.
He Dongsheng gave us a bottle of Maotai each and said, “This Maotai comes from the Party leadership’s exclusive Zhongnanhai supply, so it should be good. You can drink it without any worries.”
We thanked him enthusiastically. This insomniac national leader was not such a cold fish after all.
Jian Lin took out his crystal decanter and poured in a bottle of 1989 Château Lafite, a fine vintage. Then he put on the film: The Second Spring. It had come out in September 1975. This was the first film, after the Eight Model Plays, that was produced under the direction of the Gang of Four during the Cultural Revolution. At the time, Deng Xiaoping had returned to office, and had just traveled to the United Nations. When he came back, he said he was going to emphasize technology. The Gang of Four put out this film aimed at criticizing Deng Xiaoping, but it had still not been screened widely around the country when the Cultural Revolution came to an end.
I was quite interested to note that the director was Sang Hu. He had directed many films, including Miserable in Middle Age in 1949, New Year’s Sacrifice in 1956, and Undying Love and Long Live the Wife, both in 1947 and with sc
reenplays by Zhang Ailing, also known as Eileen Chang.
I looked over at He Dongsheng and saw that he had his eyes closed again. I realized then why he had been coming to this gathering for so many months. He usually suffered from insomnia, but when he “watched” the films here he could relax and have a good nap.
Then I looked at Jian Lin. He wasn’t watching either. He had his head down with his face in his hands. I never imagined that he could be so upset—he had really been hurt in love this time.
As the film ended and the lights came on, He Dongsheng opened his eyes and presented a long critique.
“That was then and this is now—we’ve gone around in such a big circle just to bring us back to a new stage of history where order has been restored,” he said.
Jian Lin and I listened attentively.
“Completely rejecting foreign technology won’t do, but completely depending on foreign technology is no good either. Self-reliance is relative, not absolute. A big country cannot be completely dependent on others, but it cannot be completely self-sufficient either. In Old Mao’s day, the people’s standard of living was low, and so we could be basically self-sufficient in food and consumer goods, but he wanted to be self-sufficient in science, technology, information, and energy and not ask for foreign help. He abandoned external trade and did business only with small third-world countries like Albania. He was seeking an absolute self-reliance that was ultimately harmful to our development and really unnecessary.
“During Old Deng’s age of Reform and Opening, the Americans wanted the whole world to abandon self-sufficiency. This kind of free-market fundamentalism is also unscientific—even the United States itself can’t do it. At that time we exported like crazy in order to earn foreign currency, and for a while it worked extremely well for us. But in a world where the U.S. dollar is the standard currency, in order to keep the value of our renminbi low to support our exports, we had to buy large amounts of dollars. Speaking rationally, this policy could not be sustained for very long because in the end, when the dollar depreciated and the American economy bombed, we were almost dragged down with it.
The Fat Years Page 11
