The rain had stretched out my old leather shoes by a whole size, and my feet flopped around inside them. I kicked my CD player around with my ruined shoes. The man inside the player was too bourgeois. My CD player was skipping, and my shoes were wheezing in fits and starts.
Today, someone came from the South, someone who wanted me to pick out one of Saining’s songs for inclusion on a CD. He said, We want to do a tribute to him, and we’d like it if you could do the vocals.
The word
tribute
made me want to laugh. I said, Saining was a broken poem. I didn’t understand him. I can’t possibly imitate the face he showed to the world, or pretend to bear the scars that filled his dreams.
I didn’t tell him that I hadn’t been able to sing for a long time. After I was released from rehab, I discovered Kurt Cobain. He was already gone, and I felt a sense of sadness and loss, but that didn’t mean I understood him. Sanmao was drinking heavily, still making a living singing in nightclubs, singing pop songs from Hong Kong and Taiwan, giving his wife nothing but abuse. His wife was beautiful, and she worshiped him. She was as loyal and fragile as my little dog, Dangdang. More and more bands and stages were going over to punk, and there were more and more punk concerts all the time. The world was changing, and I felt as though I no longer had any heroes. I’d already had my Cui Jian. I was the girl who had run away while listening to the sound of Cui Jian’s voice, and even today I still felt lucky in that. I’d long ago stopped wondering about the difference between blue skies and suffering.
The streets were filled with strange faces, all saying that the man I loved had disappeared. Fire and ash can never meet, just like yesterday and today.
It had been three years since Saining left me. He was the tears I couldn’t cry, the words I couldn’t speak; he was the terror I felt at the demon face in my mirror; he was the beauty of my death, the love I’d once had and would never have again.
His disappearance had distorted everything I was and knew, and sometimes I felt as if I’d been buried alive. But I recognized that this was how my life was. I didn’t know how to talk about any kind of control (such as choosing suicide and actually going through with it), and I couldn’t turn back my spreading misfortune. I certainly lacked determination. In this meaningless youth of mine, I was the victim and the assassin; I felt ashamed and unworthy, which was why I couldn’t just end this weird trip I was on right then and there. In the end, maybe I forced myself to go on living, but it wasn’t the fear of death that saved me; it was my own self-loathing.
It seems to me that love was invented by men. I used to think of myself as a woman who wouldn’t have been ashamed to die for a man, and I saw it as a sign of my own courage and greatness. Inhabiting that man’s world turned me into a weak woman for a long time. I was so weak, so desperate for love, and, deeply aware of my own pathos, I developed a knack for displaying my self-absorption and self-pity. That was my closed, intense inner world, and I thought that it was beautiful.
Now I had come to view myself as a completely unlovable girl; but I was also convinced that the weak woman I’d been had been destroyed.
Someone came from the South, and I have to admit that it felt like an intrusion, just like hearing all of the songs from the old days, songs that stirred up my feelings and reminded me that my love had gone far away. Even the stupidest songs could break my heart.
Saining and I were like a pair of curious cats, but curiosity can kill a cat. Sometimes, in his embrace, I would joke around and pretend to be the kind of girl who would marry him on the spot. Or I might pretend that I was the kind of girl who might run off with someone else at the drop of a hat. We liked words like
elope,
which to us suggested the road to freedom. But bombs fall on the most beautiful places, and happiness will steal away.
Losing control is like a series of conflagrations, and a huge blaze had taken away my love. He was gone, my love, carried away by a series of fires. Even before our five senses and our breasts had opened to the world, it was already too late for us.
A young woman’s hands are stroking the guitar, but no matter how hard I strive for that impossible release, the scent between Saining’s fingers will always be unmistakable, a darkness I will never be able to re-create. No matter how far away I travel, he will always call to me in my ashen hours, in my moments of flashing brilliance. Turn on the light, and he’ll come to call, and he’ll tell me my raison d’être. He dogs my heels, telling me over and over, You shouldn’t be here. You belong with me because you have absolutely nothing else.
2.
It’s time for me to disappear.
With these words I put my face in the shadows, although I knew that the expression on my face was not at all convincing.
Many years ago, I was a child like a blank sheet of paper, and I was exceedingly good at dispelling my anxieties by losing myself in reverie. My life had been changed by one terrible event, which had hastened my slide into the muck of being a “problem child.” My sense of my own weakness and powerlessness was absolute. After I grew up, I became a singer, although fame and fortune eluded me. My voice, with its intimations of weariness, brought lonely people together amid all the confusion, like long-lost friends. And it made weak children who were having fits of temper go and comfort each other. The woman with the sandpaper voice, that’s what my boyfriend called me. This bemused man, gentle as water, had once brought into my life the warmth I’d always yearned for, and he shrouded my sense of security in shadows. I was his smiling girl, his dazzling peach blossom.
The man I love has disappeared! I had never tired of crying out.
He was destructive and irresponsible; he’d hurt me, there was no question.
My face was ice. It was unreal and about to collapse. My prized miniskirts were threadbare, as worn out as my skin. I was a Playboy Bunny in a Santa Claus hat; I was a bucket the bloody color of raw meat. I was here, I was the shadow on the wall, and the shadow on the wall was mine. I couldn’t erase my shadow. I’m a complicated girl, but my tears were simple and straightforward. My gaze is immaculate, but I’ve never experienced a sense of my own purity.
Loneliness, apathy, misery, helplessness, depression, and self-loathing—all together they combined to form my shame, my shame, my shame. I constantly felt ashamed.
In the winter of my twenty-fifth year, a naked purity I hadn’t been looking for came to me in a flash. There was nothing for me to do anymore but leave a pretty corpse. My dead body, I despised the thought of my own dead body. I felt it was my responsibility to deal with my own corpse.
Monday morning, my bronchial tubes went into violent spasms.
The sun has risen,
Leaving the darkness behind.
The sun was so warm, and life was so beautiful; “My lover’s scent is in the air.”
One Monday morning, my elaborate plans for a “natural gas incident” were foiled by my father’s unexpected return. He knocked down the door, and the next thing I saw was a pool of my father’s blood.
Once again there was an ambulance in front of our building. A medic ordered my father to hold up the oxygen bag with one hand while helping to support the stretcher with the other. The sound of the medics’ voices as they criticized my father for moving too slowly stabbed at my ears, and the sight of my father’s old and haggard face sent me into unconsciousness.
I picked up the phone. It was Saining. Saining on the phone, saying, It’s me, Saining.
Not long after that, I was in the coffee shop at the Capital Airport, looking at my famous Saining. He still looked the same, with the same long hair, fawn’s eyes, and full lips. His hair was a mess, and although it was very cold outside, all he was wearing was a black sweater.
He had seen me first and called out to me. Then he’d walked over. I couldn’t believe it was true. We stood there like a couple of oafs who didn’t know what a hug was.
I thought it through, and I decided I should get in touch with you.
Why?
It was time, that’s all.
But why did you leave in the first place?
I just wanted to go away, and I thought it would be good for you to do the same. That’s how it seemed to me at the time, anyway.
Who are you living with now?
I have only one girlfriend. You.
Well, I slept with lots of other men. But that’s all it was, just going through the motions. And I used heroin too—it was just something I did. But it made trouble for a lot of other people, and it didn’t do that much for me, not really. I always thought there should be something special between me and heroin, but there was nothing, and I didn’t have you either.
Maybe we were just meant to be a couple of good friends who got together to do drugs.
Is that what you think? You think everything would have been different that way? Have you ever wanted to do drugs with one of your relatives? Say, with your aunt? After you got off, you’d just sit around bullshitting together? Now, that would be scary! It just doesn’t interest me anymore. I’m sick and tired of heroin, sick and tired of that pointless crap.
I’ve been traveling around. I went to a few countries, did some odd jobs, and took all kinds of drugs. But I quit heroin. There are some drugs that can change your entire life, and there were times I didn’t have any idea where my life was going. Those were the moments when I felt your presence. You came to me like an angel, and said to me, You fucked up. You have to stop doing heroin.
When you left me, Saining, you had the option of going just about anywhere in the world, but me, I couldn’t go anywhere. There was nowhere I could go, nothing I could do. My voice was ruined. I’ll never be able to sing again. Do you realize what that means? Who ever said we had to stay together? We split up. We split up, and my vocal cords are shot, and there’s no fixing them.
There wasn’t much to our conversation. Anyone looking at us would have thought that things were pretty good between us, as if we were completely removed from our shared history. The winter sunlight of Beijing, with its quality so unique to this place, poured over our bodies, and when I looked around this city, a city we’d once yearned for more than anything in the world, I saw that particular sunlight illuminating our personal disaster.
Who could ever have imagined that Saining would reappear like this, out of the blue? Once again, it was fate. My perverse destiny! I couldn’t take my eyes off him, kept staring at his dewy eyelashes. Abruptly he lifted his head and looked at me, and his eyes had not changed at all except for the fresh dark circles beneath them. We drank the nearly undrinkable coffee and watched the crowds milling around us, and it seemed that all of these people led lives that were more substantial than ours.
Let’s go home and talk some more, OK? Saining said.
Go home? The instant I discovered you were gone, it was like the sky came crashing down on my head. I don’t know how you can ever right a wrong like that. Even yesterday, I was still in so much pain that I didn’t want to go on living.
Saining, you can’t know what true misery is until you’ve seen every tenderness turn to hatred.
Saining, I asked heaven and earth for an answer, hoping they would tell me what words I had to say to bring you back to me. And here you are at last. Now what?
I kept wanting to call you, and Sanmao too. But I just kept putting it off. I was afraid.
Am I that frightening, Saining? I thought that no couple was closer than we were.
Two hours later, I had Saining buy me a return ticket.
In the waiting area, Saining stood behind me, his arms around me.
I’m sorry, he said.
I felt his body, his breath, the warmth of his blood, but I didn’t know if this was really my Saining or not.
I said, It would have been a lot better if you’d actually died, Saining. I’m missing those days when I stood at the window, crying over the news of your death.
After this, Saining called me every day, but our conversations were always rather awkward.
Once, I said, Don’t call me anymore, but please let me know if you move. That way I can call you.
Sanmao and I spoke on the phone several times, and we both talked about how awful Saining was.
Once again I was convinced that, at least currently, I was a woman who had nothing to be happy for. I was looking forward to my thirtieth birthday because maybe after that some savor would return to my life.
I wrote a song about my trip to Beijing. I played the guitar Saining had left behind and sang into Saining’s four-track tape recorder fourteen and a half times. It was a simple song, with a sweetly sentimental melody, but the lyrics were nothing but a bunch of profanity. I used the English that Saining had taught me, used the language of the bourgeoisie to curse the bourgeoisie, and while maybe there was one line that could have passed for cultured, the line that kept recurring went, “That’s just the kind of bastard he is!”
I wrote down parts of Saining’s and my story because I felt I had to. Writing had come into my life; it was the doctor’s orders. And as I wrote, I kept hearing the words “That’s just the kind of bastard he is, yeah, that’s just the kind of bastard he is!” going through my head nonstop. I put together a bunch of literary techniques, like flashbacks, and I mixed them up with that song, and it all came out like something that might pass for pretty. My dad said, You must work hard. The effort will make you stronger. What I really wanted to get out of writing was to arrive at some deeper understanding of things; but the only thing I knew for sure was that writing had, at least for the time being, made me into a hardworking woman.
In the end, do we lose control in order to gain our freedom, or is freedom just one way of being out of control?
Marx really was a genius. He said that true freedom is grounded in the knowledge of the intrinsic nature of the world.
I knew that there was a state I would never be able to attain. What is Truth? Truth is like air; I sense its approach and its presence. I can smell its breath, but when I reach out, I can’t catch hold of it. Over the years, I’ve been caught up in worldly things. How many times must I have brushed shoulders with Truth!