20 Fragments of a Ravenous Youth (12 page)

Huizi could sense I was a bit low.

'Right, Fenfang,' he said, 'I'm taking you to Jade Pond Park to see the cherry blossom.'

I just said, 'Okay.' Nothing more. Then I followed Huizi. I can't explain why, but I felt like I'd aged five years since walking into Comrade Gold's office. I actually felt lots of sympathy for the man. As I'd said to him: I understood him.

Jade Pond Park, with its famous cherry trees, was packed with tourists. You could hardly move. Parents with their children. Young people with their old parents. Visitors, officials, builders, guards. We climbed up a little hill to get a better view. The trees spread below us were like sculptures made of twisted wire, the pink blossoms were swinging in the sand-filled wind. There was hardly any scent.

I thought of Japan and how popular the cherry-blossom season is there. Then I remembered a sad story I read in the newspaper about a young Japanese girl who had committed suicide by jumping into a waterfall. In the note she left, she explained:

I don't want to lose the beauty of my youth. I don't want to see my body ageing. The cherry blossom chooses to die in one night. I want to do the same.

I looked again at the cherry-blossom trees beneath me and saw that the grass was already covered by a layer of fading petals.

'L
IFE IS JUST LIKE
those stewed pigs' trotters. Sometimes you just have to eat what you're given.'

Comrade Loaded-With-Gold's words stayed in my mind. He was probably right.

As for stewed pigs' trotters, I didn't even have those. I hadn't worked for two months. There were no frozen dumplings in the freezer, no rolls of toilet paper in my bathroom, no soy sauce or vinegar in my kitchen, no soap by the bath. I'd used everything up. Worse than that was the loneliness of it. I put the kettle on to boil. I could feel a headache starting again. This always happened when I hadn't had any coffee for a few days. I rummaged around and found a sachet of stale instant. My worst worry was what I'd find in the sugar bowl. I closed my eyes and opened the Taiko sugar tin. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, sure enough, there wasn't even any sugar in this place. Instead there at the empty bottom were two dead cockroaches, starved to death.

I sat at the table. For half an hour, I just sat and slowly drank the bitter coffee from my big cup. When I had finished, nothing had changed. But my headache was going away.

I started hunting through my clothes for money. I searched my pockets and even my winter coat from last year. The tiniest bit of loose change was enough – anything to get me through the day. Altogether, I managed to find 25 yuan.

I went downstairs and immediately tasted sand in my mouth. The air smelled dusty. I ran into the nearest store and bought one pack of frozen chive dumplings, two packs of instant noodles and a tin of sugar. Five yuan change. As I walked home, I prayed for rain to arrive to help this desert city. 'Please rain,' I murmured. 'Please rain, please rain, please rain.'

Back in the apartment, I wolfed down a bowl of instant noodles and drank another cup of coffee, with sugar this time. Then I sat at my table, contemplating my telephone. Something was bound to happen, someone had to come to save me, I could feel it. 'Please help me, please help me, please help me...' I whispered. Two minutes later, the phone rang.

Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, thank you! It was a call about money. A call from an Underground Director!

The Director introduced himself. It was such a long introduction that I almost fell asleep. He took me through the story of his struggle to be a cutting-edge artist from A to Z. In the beginning, he'd wanted to be mainstream, to be accepted by the state, maybe even get to Hollywood. But when he finished his first feature, for some reason it never got past the censors. So he changed his politics and decided to become an Underground Director. The more films he made, the more underground and angry he became.

Anyway, as I said, I was just about falling asleep when the Underground Director said he'd heard about this film called
The Seven Reincarnations of Hao An.
He said he thought Hao An sounded very underground and his seven reincarnations pretty intriguing. Could he read the script?

Could he read the script? Underground Director, you are my Bo Le and I am your horse.
1
am 1.2 million per cent happy to give the story of Hao An and his Bloody Mary Li Li to you.

The Underground Director was happy too.

'Great, great. All right, Fenfang. Come and meet me tonight. Nine o'clock. HuaiYang Cuisine on the second floor of the Jiang Su Hotel.'

More than fine! I hung up. The Heavenly Bastard in the Sky never seals off all the exits – there's always a way through. In this world there must be more than 300 different ways to die, but who cares. At least I wasn't going to die of hunger.

At 8 p.m. I set out for the Jiang Su Hotel, script in hand. I could feel a fever growing in my head. My throat was sore and my ears ached. The sand storm outside felt like it was taking me over. I could hear grains of sand hitting the windows of nearby buildings and I felt as if, at this moment, my whole future lay in my hands. I was so terrified, I needed to talk to someone to get a hold of myself. I took out my mobile and phonecard, and called Ben. Thank the Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, this time it wasn't the famous answering machine.

'Ben, Ben!'

'What is it, Fenfang. I'm just brushing my teeth and I've got to be in college in fifteen minutes.'

I could hear running water in the background. I suddenly started sneezing and coughing.

'Sounds like you've got a cold, Fentang. Did you go to the doctor?'

'What?' I sniffled down the line. 'Don't be ridiculous. Chinese people can't go to see the doctor every time we have a stupid cold.'

'Well, if you won't go see a doctor, then at least buy some cranberry juice, it's good for fevers and colds,' said Ben impatiently.

'Cranberry juice? Are you crazy? In all of Beijing, you can only buy weird stuff like that at the Jian Guo Men Friendship Store and the supermarket under the China World Trade Centre. There's no way I'd be able to afford it. Thirty yuan for a taxi there to buy a tiny bottle of some extravagant American juice that will cost about forty yuan!'

Ben got impatient again. 'Whatever, just take care of yourself, Fenfang.'

'Okay, okay, I will. I just wanted to say hello to you. There's a crazy wind out here today. Sorry, I have to go now, I'm in a hurry.'

'Me too,' said Ben. 'Speak soon.'

I put my phone back in my pocket. I suddenly realised the whole business with Ben just didn't make any sense. Why did we carry on talking on the phone? Didn't we realise there were 18,400 miles between us? Couldn't we admit that we knew nothing about each other's lives? I didn't even know how old Ben was, or what his family was like, or whether his parents were together or divorced. As for Ben, he had no idea where Ginger Hill Village was, or of how I had dreamt of a different future. I felt desperate.

With so little money in my pocket I couldn't get a taxi. I had no choice but to get the bus halfway across Beijing, through Ditan to the Jiang Su Hotel. My shoes were dusty from all the people stepping on my feet as they squeezed on to the bus. My long hair was full of knots. I'd forgotten to put on make-up and I was wearing an ugly coat to protect my body from the spitting sand. I had none of the charms a woman should have when she goes out to meet a man. But fuck all that fake stuff, what did it matter here anyway? I was going to meet an Underground Director. A real one. A seriously anti-mainstream guy.

I had to change buses twice. I could feel my temperature rising. It was already after nine o'clock, but still the buses were so packed the conductor couldn't get through to collect the tickets, and kept shouting. My head was throbbing, and the script in my hand was getting crumpled. When I finally managed to extract myself from the jammed bus, I moved like an old dog. I could see the Jiang Su Hotel towering ahead of me. I was cold and hungry. Be patient, be patient, I kept repeating to myself. Soon you'll get Hao An's story made into a film and you'll earn enough money to buy hot duck soup every day.

I hurried up to the second floor and found the Huai Yang Cuisine restaurant. But there were no men on their own. I looked around and around. No sign of anything like an Underground Director. Had he left already? What if I wasn't going to get any money today? I bent over the bar, grabbed a phone and punched in the number he'd given me.

'Hey, it's me, Fenfang. I'm here! HuaiYang Cuisine on the second floor of the Jiang Su Hotel. Where are you, Underground Director?'

'I said the Jiang Su MOTEL, not Jiang Su Hotel!' he said. 'You need to take a bus a couple more stops.'

Who the fuck would put a Huai Yang Cuisine in the Jiang Su Motel
and
in the Jiang Su Hotel? Desperately, I hung up and ran back downstairs into the dark night.

As I hurried into the street, I felt my body temperature jump from 36.5°C to 37.2°C and then keep on going straight up to 39.5°C. I was having trouble breathing, it was like an asthma attack. Everything around me went blurred. I couldn't tell the difference between the Jiang Su Hotel behind me and the Jiang Su Motel ahead of me. The buildings looked the SAME, the characters on the signs looked the SAME too. The wind persevered in its howling and the moon had disappeared behind the sand swirling in the sky. It was the end of the world. I could still just about hear the latest news being broadcast via the loudspeaker hanging on the electricity pole:

Again, a violent storm has taken our city by surprise. According to the Beijing Meteorological Centre, at 4 p.m. today the concentration of sand in the city's air reached a peak of 1,012 milligrams per cubic metre. This evening a gale-force-eight north-westerly wind reached the Haidian area of the city. The storm originated in the Gobi Desert region of Inner Mongolia and will continue on its course into northern China, before making its way south...

The weatherman's last few sentences were drowned out by the sandy wind. This was Beijing. A city that never showed its gentle side. You'd die if you didn't fight with it, and there was no end to the fight. Beijing was a city for Sisyphus – you could push and push and push, but ultimately that stone was bound to roll back on you.

The wind was as solid as a pot falling on my head as I stumbled through the streets. A man trembling in the cold passed me, so I asked him the direction to the Jiang Su Motel. 'What motel?' he barked at me, with clearly no idea where the hell it was. He pushed past. An idiot. 'Life is just like those stewed pigs' trotters. Sometimes you just have to eat what you're given.' Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, I was repeating Comrade Loaded-With-Gold's words again.

The neon lights of the high building in front of me gradually focused into characters, a name, a motel, the Jiang Su Motel. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, it wasn't an illusion, I was there.

That night I sold Hao An's destiny and received 5,000 yuan from the Underground Director. As I was leaving, he said to me, 'Fenfang, I never expected you to be so young – or to have such a red face and hot hands. You look like you could play the Bloody Mary woman in your story.'

I thanked him and then I thanked him again, before I sank into the darkness of the stormy Beijing night.

T
WELVE BOXES ALL TOGETHER
, small and big, I counted.

I sat on the edge of my bed, looking around the empty room. Everything was packed, and the storage company was coming tomorrow morning. This place was half dead. A naked bulb was dangling from the ceiling. A broken plastic chair standing alone by the door. Two packets of instant noodles past their sell-by date abandoned on the table. The broom propped silently in a corner. The walls marked where I had taken down the posters. It was strange to see how memories can be packed into boxes – 10 years of living in Beijing wrapped up in cardboard. Tomorrow, all these boxes would be stacked into a warehouse. Tomorrow, I would receive a piece of paper with a number. Then I could go anywhere I wanted, travel anywhere without worrying about paying rent. That number would be my home, the digit home in my brain.

Perhaps I would go to Yun Nan in the south, and live on a mountain. I could ask the locals to teach me how to find mushrooms in the forest. Or I could go to Da Lian, the seaside town, and discover the Yellow Sea and its fishing boats. Or perhaps I could go to Mongolia, to live in a tent, look after sheep and lie in the grass looking up at the big sky. But before going anywhere, I needed to get hold of the script for a play, a play by Tennessee Williams called
A Streetcar Named Desire.
Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, I was determined to know what this Tennessee guy was all about. I wanted to see if I could find the shiny things in life all by myself. I wanted to know if I could sleep by myself and not yearn to feel next to me the warmth of a 37.2°C man. While I thought about all this, I toyed with my address book, opening it, flipping from beginning to end, and back from end to beginning.

Finally I called Huizi. He was the only person I wanted to see before I disappeared from Beijing.

'Hey, Fenfang. I was just about to call you to say goodbye! Where shall we meet?'

Silence while we both thought about this.

'Jazz Ya!' we yelled at the same time. It was the only old bar left on Sanlitun Bar Street after they demolished the whole area.

I arrived at Jazz Ya before Huizi. It was early evening, there weren't many people around. Behind the bar, a DJ was playing cheerful Japanese pop. I sat at a table and listened to the music. For the first time in ages, I felt patient. I wasn't in a hurry. When Huizi came in, he looked a little sad. Was he sad about me leaving? I didn't ask. Without saying anything, he ordered tequila. A moment later, a glass arrived on the table. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, it was the smallest glass I'd ever seen in my life. And there wasn't much in it, either. The clear liquid barely wet the bottom.

I scanned the menu:
Gold Tequila – 30 yuan.

'Huizi, Huizi, why not just drink ten bottles of Revolution Beer? It would cost the same!'

'No, today I feel like drinking this,' said Huizi.

I had never seen this kind of drink in Beijing before. A slice of lemon perched on the rim of the glass. Huizi went through some bizarre motions. He put some salt on the back of his hand, licked it off, then grabbed the slice of lemon, sucked it and downed the tequila in one. A glistening wet mark was left on the table. Then he banged the empty glass back down.

A waitress walked past. 'Another one!' Huizi called after her.

A moment later the girl slid back with another Gold Tequila. Another 30 yuan – I did the sums in my head. Golden consumption. He performed the whole action again, salt, lemon, empty glass. Another watermark appeared on the table.

As I watched Huizi, I couldn't help thinking of a film I'd seen by Billy Wilder –
The Lost Weekend.
It's the story of a man who desperately wants to be a writer, but ultimately he's too much of a boozer to write anything. His full-time job seems to be to drink. This drunkard writer never gets further than the title on the first page:
The Bottle... The Bottle... The Bottle...
Huizi was not like that at all. Huizi knew how to write.

By now, he had finished his sixth tequila. The glass sat back on the dark wooden table beside six watermarks.

We both sat quietly and surveyed the shining wet circles. An abstract landscape. Something was in my throat and in my mind. Ever since I'd known Huizi, I'd wanted to ask him a question. It was now or never.

'Huizi, what keeps you alive? What is it that you care for in life? No, actually, that's not what I mean.' I tried to find the right words to describe what it was that really bothered me.

'Can you tell me, how can you be so at peace, steady as a stone in a forest, while I'm just nervous and desperate all the time?'

Huizi looked at me without answering. Perhaps my question was too big, too vague.

'You know what I mean, don't you?'

'Yes, I know what you mean,' said Huizi. 'But I can't answer. I don't actually know. But sometimes a very small thing can touch me for a long time. Like that poem by Cha-Haisheng, "Facing the Ocean, the Warmth of Spring is Blossoming". It's beautiful. If I don't feel all right sometimes, I will think of the ending of that poem:

Name each river, name each mountain Name them warmly Stranger, take my warmest blessings May your future road be clear and bright May you be reunited with your true love May you find real happiness in this dusty world
I
will face the ocean, waiting for spring to warm the air and flowers to blossom.

'When I think of those lines, my heart is warm,' said Huizi.

I listened in silence. Then Huizi said something unexpected.

'Fenfang, I need to tell you, I used to love you, and now... I still love you.'

The rings of water on the table glistened. I said nothing.

Huizi left Jazz Ya soon after that. It was not his style to leave so abruptly. But he said he felt drunk and he had to go. Before he left, he reached for my hand and held it hard. It was strange, I realised we'd never held hands before. His fingers were slim and long, but his palm was fleshy and warm. It was a strong feeling.

The last thing Huizi said to me was, 'Fenfang, you must take care of your life.'

The next day, I left Beijing. I bought a one-way ticket to Shan Tou. I wanted to smell the South China Sea. As I sat on the rattling train, Huizi's words echoed in my mind. They echoed through the years I had spent working as an extra, the dead years when I made tin cans and swept floors. They echoed through the streets of a forgotten village.

I am 17 and it is a sweltering summer morning. I open the creaking shutters and look out at the hills. Rows of sweet potatoes stretch into the distance. The silent fields shimmer in the heat. I contemplate the pale clouds collecting in the sky. It's time to leave. The unforgiving sun is melting my youthful body. I tell my 17-year-old self:
Fenfang, you must take care of your life.