What would Little Xi think when she heard this?
“Come in,” I hissed.
Wen Lan strode in and I closed the door quickly after her. I knew that Little Xi would take this opportunity to get away, taking with her any misunderstandings about my relationship with Wen Lan.
“What’s wrong with you? Why do you look so shocked?” Wen Lan asked.
“How did you find me here?” I said, really getting angry now.
“Dongzhi Menwai, Happiness Village Number Two. I asked the security guard where that Hong Kong writer lives and he brought me here.”
“Do you really think I’m going to be on permanent standby for you?” I said, lowering my voice.
“What are you talking about?” she asked.
“I don’t ever want to see you again,” I said slowly, and then more deliberately, “never again.”
“What do you mean?” Wen Lan shouted at me suddenly as though she could hardly believe her ears.
“Just leave,” I said coldly, and feeling calmer now I added, “And don’t ever come back.”
“Say that again!”
“I said, get the hell out of here!” I pointed to the door.
“Fine, you’re heartless anyway,” Wen Lan said as though she had finally got the message. “But I’m warning you—you’ve upset me now, and there will be consequences.”
Wen Lan waited till she’d got to the door before she turned around and vigorously gave me the finger. I slowly replied in kind.
Paradise on earth
I shouldn’t have let Little Xi leave. I should have declared my love sooner. I regret it all now.
It’s been two weeks and there’s been no news. I wrote an e-mail to wudaokoupengyou, but there was no response. I searched the net for wudaokoupengyou, but received only a great deal of information on Wudaokou and friend. I could not find any posts by Little Xi. This was quite different from the last time, when she used feichengwuraook for her e-mail address, and her Web site name had been “If you’re not sincere, don’t bother, okay.” Now that Little Xi knows she’s under surveillance, her e-mail and her Web site are probably not connected anymore. It’s likely she used wudaokoupengyou just to make contact with me. What the hell is her current e-mail and Internet name?
It’s dawned on me too slowly, but every day since Little Xi left, I’ve realized how much I truly love her. I’d be willing to go into hell for her. But the weirdest thing is that my two-year-long feeling of happiness has left me. I’m longing for love, and now I’m no longer happy.
One day, when the Beijing air was fragrant with the scent of willow and crab-apple blossoms, I went over to Dong Niang’s house, walked dejectedly into her bedroom, took off my shirt and trousers, and flopped down on her bed.
Dong Niang started taking her clothes off in front of me. “Take everything off, baby, tonight it’s on the house.”
“Why is it on the house tonight?” I asked.
“Tonight is my last time,” she said.
“What do you mean, last time?”
“I’m leaving. I’m getting out of Beijing.”
“You’re leaving Beijing?” I sat up in dismay.
“No crying, no crying,” Dong Niang teased me. “Baby, Dong Niang has never seen you so unhappy in all these years. You’re still my fun-loving baby, aren’t you?”
“I’m really very unhappy,” I said.
“Let Dong Niang hold you,” she said.
She kissed me, but I held back. “Little Dong, let’s just talk.”
She let go of me and got out of bed. “Let me tell your fortune with the tarot cards.”
I didn’t like to call her Dong Niang. I preferred to call her Little Dong, just like when she was at the Paradise Club. When Little Dong found out that I was a writer, she asked me to recommend novels for her. It wasn’t especially necessary as she loved to read fiction, and even before my suggestions had already read many books by Qiong Yao, Yan Qin, Cen Kailun, Yi Shu, and Zhang Xiaoxian. I told her to read some fiction in translation, starting with Jane Austen. She actually read all six of Austen’s novels and she read them better than I had. After that, she read quite a few popular novels in translation. I remember asking what her favorite novels were, and she said Robert James Waller’s The Bridges of Madison County and Qiong Yao’s How Long Lasts the Sunset? Our tastes were different, but because we both liked to read, I always felt closer to her. After she left the club and started seeing her customers at home, I carried on visiting her for years, but I felt like she was still Little Dong who likes to read novels. For a while there were a number of Taiwanese customers who would play poker and smoke cigars at her place, and I joined them a few times. They talked of Dong Niang this, and Dong Niang that, until I too began to call her Dong Niang instead of Little Dong.
“Where is my lover?” I asked casually.
Little Dong started to place the tarot cards, but I changed my mind. “No, no, no, no, predict something else.” I couldn’t put my fate in her hands.
I gave her another scenario, a typically tarot-card conundrum. “I’m standing at a crossroads. The first road will lead me toward a stable and a comfortable life, but I’ll never feel truly satisfied. The second road will lead me into a lot of trouble, even insurmountable trouble, but it could also lead me to find true love and the greatest happiness. Which road should I choose?”
She shuffled the cards a few times and laid them out in two rows. Then she said, “The first road is very peaceful and prosperous; on the second road, there are obstacles and many uncertainties, but there is love there.” Her answer was a complete repetition of my question.
But then she said, “These cards are about change. You’ve been on the first road for a long time. If you want to change to the second road, then you should follow it. If you don’t, you’ll regret it.” This was probably just what I wanted to hear.
“Little Dong—I still like to call you Little Dong—thank you,” I said.
“Lao Chen, this is the first time I’ve seen you in the last two years … seen your true face.”
“My true face? Wasn’t I real before?”
“Before—before you were the same as everyone else, always, always …”
“Full of happiness?” I asked, my heart racing.
“Exactly. It started about two years ago, you and all my other customers. In fact, everybody around me suddenly became extremely happy!”
“Has everybody around you changed?” I quoted Little Xi’s words.
“You could put it that way,” said Little Dong.
“But you haven’t changed, have you? Why not?” I asked.
Little Dong was quiet for a while. Then she said, “Lao Chen, we’ve been friends for over ten years. Can I tell you the truth?”
I nodded.
“You know I’m what the Hong Kong people call a ‘woman of the Dao’—a junkie?”
I was taken aback. I would never have known.
“I don’t use needles. If the customers saw them, they wouldn’t like it.”
“What kind of drugs do you take?” I asked.
“Whatever I can find that can be taken orally,” she said.
“Write them all down for me later. I’d like to know what they are,” I said with a certain caution. “Go on. What happens after you take the drugs?”
“When I take drugs, sometimes I feel really high, but sometimes I feel down, right? And sometimes I become extremely aware of my surroundings. At those times, I can see that the world has changed, that everybody around me is not quite right.”
“How are they ‘not quite right’?” I asked.
“They’re just not right,” she said, “they’re different from before, including you, Lao Chen, they’re all too … they all feel too happy. I can’t explain it, but they’re different from before. It’s not the sort of crazy high like when people like me take drugs. It’s a kind of very mild and very small high.”
I was trying hard to understand what she meant. I thought I did, but I was
not sure.
“My boyfriend and I can’t stand it,” she went on. “He’s from Australia. He used to write travel guides for backpackers and he’s been in China for twenty years. He says that the Chinese mentality transforms itself every few years. It changed in 1992 with Deng Xiaoping’s southern tour; in 1994 with economic macro-control; in 1997 with the return of Hong Kong; in 2000 when China entered the WTO; in 2003 after the SARS epidemic; in 2008 with the Olympic torch and the opening ceremony; and now again in the last five years. He says in the past the leading countries in the National Happiness Index were always countries like Nigeria, Venezuela, and Puerto Rico. Their people all reported feeling especially happy. You wouldn’t even know how far down the list China was then, but suddenly for the last couple of years China has ranked as number one. Over a billion people all report being very happy! Don’t you think there is something wrong with the Chinese? How can they be so happy?”
Being with this foreign boyfriend, I thought, has definitely given her a different perspective.
“My boyfriend also takes drugs,” she continued. “Once we got high and had a big discussion about Jane Austen. It was fantastic. After that we became very close. You remember that year when there was a big crackdown? When I was living in Wangjing district? I knew someone might report me to the police, so I hid in my boyfriend’s place in the diplomatic quarter. I didn’t dare go out for several weeks—otherwise, who knows if I’d still be alive today. You see, you probably don’t remember?”
“My memory of that period is very hazy …” I said.
“Today, a normal person doesn’t remember,” she said, “those of us who remember are the abnormal ones. This is why my boyfriend and I can’t stand it. For the past two years in Beijing, it’s been harder and harder finding the gear we need. It’s like there are fewer and fewer dealers. Early this year, we went to a mountainous region of Yunnan to see if things might be a little better there. We discovered that the people there were a little more like us. Of course we ran into a lot of junkies and some of them were really evil, but there were some nice ones as well. And then there were the mountain people—none of them had that small-small form of high that the plains people have. My boyfriend calls that small-small high ‘high lite-lite.’ Sometimes he exaggerates and says that everybody now looks like those happy revolutionary workers or soldiers and peasants in those Cultural Revolution posters. Living among them, you probably don’t notice it. It’s not like that just in Beijing, but everywhere we went all over the country, everybody is high lite-lite, except in those mountainous areas or far off in the Northwest. My boyfriend and I talked it over for a long time and finally decided to move to Yunnan near National Highway 320, along the border with Myanmar.” She went silent and waited for me to react.
“I know someone who feels the same as you two do,” I said. “She can’t stand high lite-lite either.”
“Really?”
“She takes antidepressants.”
“Maybe antidepressants have the same effect,” Little Dong said thoughtfully.
“Maybe so,” I said. “She is that second road I’ve just asked the tarot cards about.”
Part Two
1.
WANDERING BACK AND FORTH
The Age of Satisfaction
The Age of Satisfaction!”—Zhuang Zizhong, one of the venerable founding editors of the Reading Journal, often pondered this term. He heartily congratulated himself on having lived long enough to see this day, on having survived China’s various Ages of Trouble to bear witness to this Age of Happiness—China’s Golden Age of Prosperity and Satisfaction. He often told himself the most important thing in life was to live for as long as possible. All the other founding editors of the Reading Journal were dead and gone, and he was one of the few remaining greats. All the glory belonged to him now.
During the spring festival, the Politburo member in charge of cultural propaganda visited him at home and even brought along a CCTV reporter. Although this could not compare with earlier times when the celebrated Ji Xianlin received visits from the president, it was still a great event in the cultural and publishing world. Zhuang Zizhong was neither a great classical scholar nor a prize-winning novelist. A few years earlier, if you had heard that a Politburo member was going to visit the home of the aged founder of a scholarly journal, you would have said it was a joke. From this event, we could see how much importance this current Politburo attached to intellectuals and thinkers; this was something we had not seen since the end of the 1980s.
At the beginning of the Reading Journal New Year reception, Zhuang Zizhong modestly told everyone that all the honor was due to the Reading Journal itself. All the efforts of successive editors over more than thirty years had not been in vain, and the Reading Journal had finally received positive recognition from the leaders of Party Central. He recalled how the Party had for some time misunderstood the journal and censured it for its tone and direction, and later when they had patched things up with the Party, the latter still didn’t genuinely trust the journal. All that had changed in the last two years. First off, all the previous chief editors and assistant editors had miraculously and harmoniously been cooperating with one another. Then all the journal’s writers, who previously had held a variety of positions on how the nation should be ruled, suddenly reached a unified consensus. After the new joint editors organized a wide-ranging discussion seminar on “China’s New Prosperity” two years earlier, the Reading Journal again regained its briefly lost place as the leading scholarly journal of the nation’s cultural and intellectual world. It also came to be seen by the Party leadership as extremely important.
Zhuang Zizhong had made ten national policy suggestions concerning China’s New Era of Prosperity:
a one-party democratic dictatorship;
the rule of law with stability as the most important element;
an authoritarian government that governs for the people;
a state-controlled market economy;
fair competition guaranteed by state-owned enterprises;
scientific development with unique Chinese characteristics;
a self-centered harmonious foreign policy;
a multiethnic republic ruled by one sovereign ethnic group of Han Chinese;
post-Westernism and post-universalism as the nation’s chief worldviews;
the restoration of Chinese national culture as the world’s unrivaled leader.
All these positions, now firmly established principles, seemed like perfectly unexceptional common sense. But why did the Reading Journal have to argue them for so many years before reaching a favorable consensus? No matter what, Zhuang Zizhong believed, Reading had now received positive recognition from the Party, which meant he had the Party’s affirmation of his own devotion to the Party and the Nation. Zhuang Zizhong felt that to be the greatest achievement of his later years.
Now he was sitting in his wheelchair as his new young wife wheeled him toward his new car. Ever since the Politburo member had visited him during the Lunar New Year festival, it had been decided that he should be provided with an official car and driver. One of the official duties of this chauffeur is to drive Zhuang Zizhong every Saturday afternoon to browse around the Sanlian Bookstore.
As Zhuang Zizhong came out of his house, Lao Chen, the Taiwanese writer long resident in Beijing, had just walked out of the Happiness Village Number Two compound and begun his daily afternoon stroll to one of the three nearby Starbucks coffee shops. Since it was Saturday, the Sanlitun Swire Village and the Dongzhi Menwai Ginza Starbucks would definitely be too crowded; his only choice was the Starbucks in the PCCW Tower Mall of Plenty on Gongti North Road. He could only hope that all those white-collar yuppies would be in the gym and not at Starbucks occupying all the comfy chairs and surfing the net, using up all the wireless connection points.
The only unusual thing that day was that, in contrast to the previous two years, Lao Chen was not very happy as he left his house. His feeling of happiness had deser
ted him. You could even say that as Lao Chen came out the door, he was feeling pretty miserable.
Ever since Little Xi had left his Happiness Village apartment, Lao Chen had not felt good. And Little Dong’s departure from Beijing had only made him feel worse.
A few days after Little Xi had left, Lao Chen went to Wudaokou to visit Big Sister Song. He carefully chose ten o’clock in the morning, when the talented young Wei Guo would probably be in school. He wanted to ask her if she’d heard anything from Little Xi. Lao Chen approached the back door of the Five Flavors restaurant and skulked around, trying to avoid being noticed until Big Sister Song came to open up. He was wearing a beige trench coat of the sort worn by the Hong Kong comic actor Ng Man Tat when playing a private detective, or Law Kar-ying in the role of a sexual deviant, a flasher. Obviously, Lao Chen was not at all thinking of himself in this light. In his mind, when he put on his trench coat he looked more like Hollywood tough guy Humphrey Bogart or the author Graham Greene. Because of this misperception, when Lao Chen nervously showed himself to greet Big Sister Song, she screamed in fright.
After calming her down, Lao Chen asked if she knew any way to contact Little Xi. Big Sister Song pulled a note out of her coat pocket. “I just knew you would come by. A while back when I could still send her e-mails, Little Xi asked me if she should see you, and I told her she should. After that, she didn’t tell me whether she’d seen you or not. Two days ago, I got this text message. I don’t know where it was sent from, but I copied it down because I had this feeling you’d turn up here.”
“What do these letters mean?” Lao Chen said, looking at the note with four Romanized Chinese words—mai zi bu si.
“I don’t know,” said Big Sister Song.
“Did Little Xi send this to you?”
“Definitely, she must have.”
Lao Chen was only half convinced by Big Sister Song until she took his hands in hers, bent her knees in a half bow, and implored, “Lao Chen, you have to save Little Xi, you have to save her.”
The Fat Years Page 13
