A Concise Chinese-English Dictionary for Lovers (23 page)

departure
 
 
n.
the action or an instance of departing.

departure

Dear Student, Welcome to London! On finishing our course, you will find yourself speaking and thinking in your new language quite effortlessly. You will be able to communicate in a wide variety of situations, empowered by the ability to create your own sentences and use language naturally.

This is what language school leaflet says. Is it true? Perhaps. Mrs. Margaret tells me she is proud of me speaking English like this among her other students. When our last lesson finished, I finally pluck up my courage and run after her:

“Mrs. Margaret, can I ask you a question?”

“Of course you can.” She smiles.

“Where did you normally buying your shoes?”

“Where do I normally buy my shoes?” she corrects me. “Why? Do you like them?” She looks down her shoes. It is a coffee-colour, high-heel shoes, with a shining metal buckle in front.

“Yes,” I reply.

“Thank you. I bought them from Clarks.”

“Oh.” I remember there is a shoes shop in Tottenham Court Road called Clarks.

Mrs. Margaret intends to leave.

“You know, Mrs. Margaret, my parents are shoemakers.”

“Oh, really? Well, I know China produces goods for the whole world…” She smiles another time. “Anyway, good luck with your studies. I hope to see you again.”

“Thank you.” I smile to her as well.

“By the way, it is not right to call me Mrs. Margaret. You should say Mrs. Wilkinson, or just Margaret. All right?”

“All right, Margaret.” I lower down my voice.

“Bye.”

“Bye.”

I like her, in the end.

When a woman is leaving her man, when a woman finally decides her departure,

Does she still need to water the plants every day?

Does she still need to wash his shirts, socks and jeans? Check all his pockets before washing them?

Does she still need to cook food every evening before he comes back? Or just leave everything uncooked in the fridge? Like those days when he was a bachelor?

Does she still need to wash the dishes, and sweep the floor?

Does she still kiss him? When he comes back through the evening door?

Does she still want to make love with him?

Does she, or will she cry, when she feels her body needs somebody to cover it and warm it, but not this one, the one lies beside hers?

Does she, or will she say, I am leaving you, on a particular day? Or at a particular time? Or in a particular moment?

Does she, or will she hire a car or a taxi, to take all her things before he understands what’s happening?

Does she, or will she cry, cry loudly, when she starts leading her head to a new life, a life without anybody waiting for her and without anybody lighting a fire for her?

The telephone rings. The Chinatown travel agency tells me my air tickets are ready to pick up. I take all my money and I put on my coat. On the way out, I pass by your sculpture. It is nearly finished. All the pieces of the body lie jumbled at bottom of plastic bath.

I come out from the house, you are standing in the garden and watering the plants. You stand still, holding the hose, with your back towards me. The brown of your leather jacket is refusing me, or maybe avoiding me. I think you don’t want to see me leaving. I think you are angry. Water from the hose in hard stream straight on the plants. For a long time you don’t move. I am waiting. I look up at the grey sky. I want to tell you it is winter. I want to tell you maybe you don’t need to water the plants today. But I don’t say anything. I walk out, hesitate, quiet. When I try to close the garden’s door, I hear your voice:

“Here, take these.”

I turn back. I see you pulling out a small bunch of snowdrops from the soil. You hold out those little white flowers and walk towards me.

“For you.”

I take the snowdrops. I gaze at the flowers in my hand. So delicate, they are already wilting in the heat of my palm.

epilogue
 
 
n.
a short speech or poem at the end of a literary work, esp. a play.

epilogue

Day 1

It’s a big aeroplane, with so many seats, so many passengers. Air China, with the phoenix tail drawn on the side. This time, it takes me east. Which direction is the wind blowing now, I wonder? Coming to England was not easy, but going back is much harder. I look at the window and it reflects a stranger’s face. It’s not the same “Z” as one year ago. She will never look at the world in the same way. Her heart is wounded, wounded, wounded, like the nightingale bleeding on the red rose.

The lights are on again. A Chinese steward smiles at me, and serves my second meal: rice with fried pork and some broccoli. It is hot, and sticky. As my body slowly digests the rice, I understand, deeply, in my bones: we are indeed separated.

People say nowadays there are no more boundaries between nations. Really? The boundary between you and me is so broad, so high.

When I first saw you, I felt I saw another me, a me against me, a me which I contradicted all the time. And now I cannot forget you and I cannot stop loving you because you are a part of me.

But, maybe all this is just nonsense, Western philosophical nonsense. We can’t be together just because that is our fate, our destiny. We have no yuan fen.

Thirteen hours later, we touch down in Beijing. I spend day walking around the city. The sandy wind from the Mongol desert drags through bicycles, trees, roofs. No wonder people are much stronger and tougher here. The whole city is dusty and messy. Unfinished skeletons of skyscrapers and naked construction sites fill the horizon. The taxi drivers spit loudly on to the road through their open windows. Torn plastic bags are stuck on trees like strange fruits. Pollution, pollution, great pollution in my great country.

I call my mother. I tell her I have decided to leave my hometown job and move to Beijing. She is desperate. Sometimes I wish I could kill her. Her power control, for ever, is just like this country.

“Are you stupid or something?” she shouts at me in the telephone. “How will you live without a proper job?”

I try to say something:

“But I can speak little bit English now, so maybe I can find a job where I use my English, or perhaps I will try to write something…”

She strikes back immediately: “Writing on paper is a piece of nothing compared with a stable job in a government work unit! You think you can reshape your feet to fit new shoes? How are you going to live without government medical insurance? What if I die soon? And what if your father dies as well?”

She always threatens to die the next day. Whenever it comes to this deadly subject, I can only keep my mouth shut.

“Are you waiting for rabbits to knock themselves out on trees, so you can catch them without any effort?! I don’t understand young people today. Your father and I have worked like dogs, but you haven’t even woken up yet. Well, it’s time you stopped daydreaming and found yourself a proper job and a proper man. Get married and have children before your father and I are dead!”

As I keep silent and don’t counter her, she throws me her final comment:

“You know what your problem is: you never think of the future! You only live in the present!”

And she bursts into tears.

Day 100

During my year of absence, Beijing has changed as if ten years passed. It has become unrecognisable.

I am sitting in a Starbucks café in a brand new shopping centre, a large twenty-two-storey mall with a neon sign in English on its roof:
Oriental Globe
. Everything inside is shining, as if they stole all the lights and jewels from Tiffany’s and Harrod’s. In the West there is “Nike” and our Chinese factories make “Li Ning,” after an Olympic champion. In the West there is “Puma” and we have “Poma.” The style and design are exactly the same. The West created “Chanel no. 5” for Marilyn Monroe. For our citizens we make “Chanel no. 6” jasmine perfume. We have everything here, and more.

At night, some friends take me to a Karaoke. The place is not made for me. It is for Chinese men who seek freshness when they have grown tired of their old wives. In empty rooms, young women in tight miniskirts with half naked breasts wait for loners to come and sing. The dim rooms remind me of the pubs in London: smoke, leather seats, low tea tables, loud voices and crazy laughing. I sit and listen to men singing songs like “The Long March” or
“
The East Is Red.”

I feel out of place in China. Wherever I go, in tea houses, in hotpot restaurants, in People’s parks, in Dunkin Donuts, or even on top of the Great Wall, everybody talks about buying cars and houses, investing in new products, grabbing the opportunity of the 2008 Olympics to make money, or to steal money from the foreigner’s pockets. I can’t join in their conversations. My world seems too unpractical and nonproductive.

“But you can speak English, that alone should earn you lots of money! Nowadays, anything to do with the West can make money.” My friends and my relatives keep telling me this.

Day 500

I think I have received your last letter. The last. It arrived a month and a half ago and there has been nothing since then. I don’t know why.

I think maybe I will never go back to England, the country where I became an adult, where I grew into a woman, the country where I also got injured, the country where I had my most confused days and my greatest passion and my brief happiness and my quiet sadness. Perhaps I am scared to think that I am still in love with you.

But all these thoughts don’t matter too much anymore. Only sometimes, when I am alone in Beijing in my flat, an obscure night, noisy construction sites outside my window, I still can feel that pain. Yes, the geography helps a lot. I know the best thing to do is to let each other go, to let us each live on a different planet, parallel lives, no more crossing over.

Dear Z,

I am writing to you from Wales. I’ve finally moved out of London. The mountain behind my stone cottage is called Carningli. It is Welsh, it means Mountain of the Angel…

I brought some of our plants and the old kitchen table here. I think the sunflowers are missing you. Their heads have bowed down in shame—as if they have been punished by their school teacher—and their bright yellow petals have turned deep brown. But I think your little bamboo tree is very happy because we have had Chinese weather for the last month. Last week I planted some climbing roses outside my cottage because I thought it would be good to have more colours around.

Every day I walk through the valley to the sea. It is a long walk. When I look at the sea, I wonder if you have learned to swim…

Your words are soaked in your great peace and happiness, and these words are being stored in my memory. I kiss this letter. I bury my face in the paper, a sheet torn from some exercise book. I try to smell that faraway valley. I picture you standing on your fields, the mountain behind you, and the sound of the sea coming and going. It is such a great picture you describe. It is the best gift you ever gave me.

The address on the envelope is familiar. It must be in west Wales. Yes, we went there together. I remember how it rained. The rain was ceaseless, covering the whole forest, the whole mountain, and the whole land.