The man lying in my bathroom was Little Xi’an; he’d been pestering me every day, and now he’d fainted in my bathroom after shooting up. I never used a needle, since too many people died injecting themselves with bad heroin, and there was nothing I liked less than watching people shoot up in front of me.
I was badly shaken and a little incoherent. So Sanmao’s wife came to the hotel and picked me up. She apologized for having put me in a hotel like this. Honestly, she said, I didn’t realize what a scary place this was. She told me she was going to take Sanmao up to Guangzhou for rehab, and she asked me if I wanted to go with them.
After the day Little Shanghai’s old man took Little Xi’an to the hospital, Little Shanghai and I became friends. Little Xi’an was a regular customer of Little Shanghai’s, and the man who later married Little Shanghai was a friend of Little Xi’an’s. Little Xi’an hated pimps more than anything, so he found Little Shanghai a good man, a good man who was as young and handsome as he was himself. After this man’s mother gave Little Shanghai that two thousand
yuan,
Little Shanghai left town and got married. And she never came back.
Sometime after the wedding, Little Shanghai got a phone call: I have a couple hundred thousand on me. Do you want to go away with me? Little Shanghai said, I don’t think so. My husband happens to be a friend of yours, in case you’ve forgotten. What were you thinking? I mean, why me? Little Xi’an said, I was just thinking about the old days when we used to hang out together. I think you’re a good woman, and people say you used to be supersexy. When Little Shanghai heard the words “used to be,” she cut Little Xi’an off short and hung up.
It was just a city street. But in the days that followed, I couldn’t stop thinking about that street. And while those memories tormented me, that street was still where I had grown up.
In the old days, the street was populated with prostitutes, pimps, johns, drug dealers, young girls selling flowers, beggars, and shish kebab vendors. Later on, the police descended on the place, a lot of police, and you didn’t see all those people anymore. My street was gone; those warm but terrifying sounds were gone. The stores also disappeared, and new high-rises went up on either side of the road. Their dark eye sockets came to occupy a place in my life, their lights going on, their lights going off. They were always there, in my gray times, in my brightest hours, and there was nothing that could separate me from this secret. Sometimes I suspected that this secret had robbed me of the strength to wait for the future.
I often went to the boulevard, seeking out another pair of eyes with my blue-flashing, poisoned eyes. I needed to find someone to sell me that drug; it was more important than anything else in the world. Heroin was the only thing in my life. My junkie life was simple, but at the same time it wasn’t easy.
One day I went to see Ye Meili. She liked me because Saining had left me a pile of money, and also because I was “educated.” Ye Meili said that she just liked to make friends with people like me.
Ye Meili and I found ourselves talking to Little Xi’an on the phone at the same time. We’d been in the middle of an argument. Ye Meili was angry at me for taking a particular man home with me. She said that she liked him herself, that she hadn’t planned on “doing business” with him, that she’d just wanted to have him over to hang out and party. And she’d wanted him to meet her friend, me. She said, But you had to haul off and take what wasn’t yours!
Ye Meili was shouting, And you call yourself my friend! Do you even know what a friend is?
Just then, Ye Meili’s cell phone rang, and Little Xi’an tried his pitch out on her. Ye Meili said, I can’t go with you. Don’t bother me. But someone you know is over here right now. She likes money; why don’t you ask her?
Little Xi’an told me what he’d told her. I said, If you have that much money, I’m sure you can find a girl who’s a lot more fun than either of us. Why are you asking us? Little Xi’an said, I wanted to find a woman who knew me before I had money. Ye Meili is the kind of woman who might walk out on you at a moment’s notice, but I’d be happy to be with her for as long as it lasted, and I wouldn’t be sad if she left. You’re the cultured type, plus you’re the only girl I still haven’t fucked, and now I’ve got all this cash, so what do you say you come with me? I can send you to the best rehab clinic.
My refusal was blunt. No way! I said. And then I hung up on him.
I asked Ye Meili, Why didn’t you take him up on it? He’s cute and he’s rich. Ye Meili said, Because I need my freedom. That’s why I’ll never commit myself to another man as long as I live, whether I love him or not. I don’t care who he is.
With that, she left and went back to stand on the street again. It had really made her mad when I stole her friend away, because she never spoke to me again.
A few months later, I got another call from Little Xi’an.
He said, I’m flat broke. Will you come with me now?
I laughed coldly and hung up.
5.
Little Dove, that was her name. Little Dove was a little beauty, short but voluptuous. She was the one who brought the news of Little Xi’an’s death. A child of the oil fields, Little Dove had come to this city to escape a life of poverty. She became a prostitute, but she was constantly reminding herself that Marx had said that the primitive accumulation of capital was evil. With a head full of such potent ideas, she quickly gave up prostitution.
Little Xi’an had met her the same way he’d met Little Shanghai and Ye Meili—they’d met while “doing business.”
Little Xi’an had approached her because she seemed like a bright girl to him, and what was more, she had the same humble origins he did. He told Little Dove, You can be my leader. We can struggle together against the power of the establishment.
But he was in a truly precarious situation, and Little Dove saw this more clearly than he did.
Little Dove was the one who had sold Little Xi’an the false papers he’d used when he fled to Macao. She had sold them for a high price.
Little Dove and I had also met on that street, when she was looking for customers who might want to buy false papers from her.
Little Dove asked me, What do you think Little Xi’an was thinking about at the moment he died? No one will ever know. His only mistake was that he forgot he was poor. He completely forgot. He didn’t realize how easily
400,000
yuan
could slip through his fingers and leave him with nothing.
In December of
1994
I found myself caught in the middle of a gang war. I’ll never know for sure what started all that bloody fighting, and there’s nothing I can say about it except that someone shaved off all of my hair before giving me a sharp kick in the face. Those are some pretty eyes you’ve got, little girl, he said.
It was a horrible night. My eyes had been injured, and when I went to pay the nurse, she told me that all of my money was counterfeit. When I finally made it to the operating table, the anesthetic had no effect on me because of my tolerance, and I had to suffer through the entire operation anyway. After leaving the operating room, I wasn’t allowed to leave until someone came with real money. While I was sitting and waiting, a drug dealer from the Northeast called Blackie came limping in. He’d been stabbed, and I took him to the operating room. I’d been needing a fix for a while already, but Blackie had no heroin and no money, since he’d just been mugged. Blackie and I ended up sitting there together, waiting for someone to bring us some money, but the people who’d promised to bring the money took forever to show up. I was wheezing because I needed a fix, and I was fretting about not being able to leave the hospital until after daybreak. I was going to have to go outside with my messily shaved head. I was worrying about lots of other things too, and so I sat there, crossing and uncrossing my legs, not knowing what to do with myself.
That night, I had a sudden realization of this very simple truth: heroin was a drug that brought nothing but bad luck. It was true for anybody; all you had to do was cross paths with heroin, and sooner or later you would find yourself up to your neck in bad luck, with no way out. In this respect, heroin was no fun at all.
My father came to town. Once again he sent me to a rehab clinic in Shanghai. It seemed that this gang war had been a stroke of good luck after all, because otherwise I’m sure I would have died in the South. It must have been fate.
Before I went back to Shanghai, Sanmao and his old lady gave me a whole load of hats, hats of all shapes and sizes, and Sanmao told me that he was going to go back into rehab himself. He said, I have a feeling that you’re going to get better, that we’re both going to get better. Y’know, you look great in hats!
Completely bald, with a gauze patch over one eye, and lugging seven big suitcases, I arrived at the airport with my father. I had hidden some heroin in my underwear because I knew the craving could hit me at any time. This was something my father didn’t understand at all.
As we went through airport security, I kept looking at my father anxiously and thinking, He’s such a good person, and I’m so bad.
The moment the plane left the ground, I fucking burst into tears. I swore I would never come back to this town in the South ever again. This weird, plastic, bullshit Special Economic Zone, with all that pain and sadness, and the face of love, and the whole totally fucked-up world of heroin, and the late-
1980
s gold rush mentality, and all that pop music from Taiwan and Hong Kong. This place had all of the best and all of the worst. It had become my eternal nightmare.
My nurse’s aide came in and asked me what I wanted to eat that night. She said, Here are some New Year’s sesame-and-rice dumplings in syrup and some Master Kang’s instant noodles. Then she said, Do you want to wash your face? Do you need me to get you some hot water? I opened my eyes wide and looked at this person at my bedside, a woman in her forties, with prominent cheekbones and a ruddy complexion. Dressed in a maroon cotton blouse and pants, she looked like a factory worker, and I said, Why are you my nurse? And how come everyone here except me is wearing the same clothes? She said, Because I’m a patient too. I said, You’re in rehab too? Her lips slowly parted to form a grin, and she said, You don’t know what kind of hospital this is? I said, What do you mean? This is a rehab clinic, isn’t it? She started to rock from side to side, and then she leaned forward and said in a confidential tone, We’re all mental patients who have done something wrong. I said, What? Mental patients? What did you do? She looked me in the eye and said, I killed my old man’s father. I said, You killed someone? Why did you kill him? Because he was always yelling at me, she said, so I put insecticide in his soup.
My crime was that I was dependent on drugs, and I was my father’s nightmare. First I’d spent all my energy trying to get love and alcohol, and then I’d laid my body down on the altar of heroin, and I had always known that this meant I was lonely and crazy. My father had brought me here only this afternoon, but my reactions were noticeably slow because I was already on medications, and I suspected that my mind was not very clear, but I was still capable of being frightened by what I saw. I thought that the Communist Party (and that included my father) was pretty intense, putting drug addicts who were trying to clean up in here along with homicidal maniacs so that we could all be cured together. Anyone who could overcome her habit in a situation like this wasn’t likely to want to start using again. When I compared myself to the other patients, I felt ashamed of what I’d done, because I had already begun to feel a sense of shame. Heroin had made me stupid. When I’d checked in that afternoon, I had wondered why I was the only person in my tiny room and why there were so many people in the big room outside. I’d wondered why all the drug addicts in Shanghai were so old.
During the most unbearable seventy-two hours, the doctors didn’t try to use shock treatment on me, because of my serious asthma. They put me on some kind of drip, which made me really high, and every now and then, when no one was looking, I managed to speed up the drip. Every day my nurse’s aide helped me use the bathroom, wash my face, and brush my teeth. She also swept the floor of my room.
Once, when she was helping me to the bathroom, one of the other patients said to me, Look at yourself! Look at the mess you’re in. When you get out of here, you’re not going to start using drugs again, are you?
The room was huge, and it had another very large room within it, which was the dormitory where the psychiatric patients and forcibly committed drug addicts slept. There was a sea of beds, each one covered with a snowy white blanket. The rows of blankets looked like racks of magazines, and they reminded me of the plain white covers of the underground art magazines in Beijing. The sinks and toilets were in another room, where it was always dark except for a filament of moonlight. Even sunrays looked like moonlight there, and it was as cold as a refrigerator. I was in the smallest room, equipped with two sets of bunk beds. This was the room for drug addicts who had come voluntarily.
The pale winter light was sometimes shot with lemon yellow, and the patients played cards or sat in the sun and picked apart rags. They passed the time of day, occasionally chatting with the doctors, their voices like those of little birds. I watched them from my room, and it all looked so peaceful. After lunch they would sing songs together, in a chorus, since this was a required class. They sang old songs like “The Light of Beijing’s Golden Mountains Shines Everywhere.” They also sang popular songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, like “Grace in Motion” and “Thank You for Your Love,” which came in with the steady stream of new drug addicts entering the clinic. They wrote them down on the little blackboard so that the other patients could learn them. After singing practice, they lined up for their medications, and then they took their midday naps.
I sat like an idiot, pumped full of medications, and the patients were there playing cards in the sunlight, and the big doors were bolted shut. Losing control of your life was this simple, and here it was, laid out plain and clear, like winter in the city, icily harboring its murderous intentions. My mind was empty, and I don’t think that it was just the drugs. After I’d given up my habit of using heroin many times every day, I honestly didn’t know how I was going to fill up my life. After they took out my drip, I ventured into the main room and sat in the sun. Just then, another patient came up close beside me and bumped into me, saying, Give me a cookie, OK? Her gaze was focused on some other place, but from time to time her eyes darted back to me, looking for a sweet. A lot of patients watched as I handed her a cookie, but they quickly looked away. Suddenly I became aware that all of the patients shared a habit of rocking their bodies back and forth, rocking back and forth and constantly shifting their weight from one foot to the other.