Kiwi had a long-standing habit of writing down a bunch of words before he went to sleep, and it was more or less the same stuff every time, the same snatches of songs by Teresa Teng and others.
Later he would take diet pills, and after swallowing them down, he’d turn out the lights.
The sky broke with a crack, and the shattered pieces of the moon crashed down against the window. Kiwi’s eyelashes fluttered. There are some problems that the moonlight won’t let you forget. The things he always thought about after the lights went out and he closed his eyes and waited for sleep—those were the things that Kiwi had never in his life been able to unravel. No matter which of them he thought about, he always came to the same conclusion: that they were among life’s big, unanswerable questions.
The early-morning sunlight was very sweet, like vanilla ice cream lightly spread across the sky, a gentle light that didn’t stab at the eyes, but Apple couldn’t see it, because at that moment he was still asleep. He never got out of bed until the afternoon, and then he would imagine the look of the morning’s sunlight, which gave him that just-awakened feeling. That began his days.
He always felt at loose ends upon first waking up. He might decide to brush his teeth, or he might decide to smoke a cigarette or listen to some music. He always listened to the same music when he woke up: violin, Paganini. Or he might fiddle with his body for a bit and then call some friend or other so he could hear that person asking him how he was doing.
When this day began, he couldn’t see a thing that was in front of him; he needed his contact lenses. He thought that his eyes looked better with gray contact lenses. But he always stood in front of the bathroom mirror without his glasses, often wondering whether the man that other people saw when they looked at him was the same person he saw when he looked at himself. After all, other people’s eyes weren’t his eyes, and without the aid of a mirror or contacts, he couldn’t have seen himself with his own eyes.
He could spend a long, long time in the bathtub. Every day it was the same.
Water was his most trusted mirror, and gazing at the hot water that quietly enrobed him like an invisible sugar coating, he would lie back, counting his toes, often counting eleven or twelve toes floating level with the surface of the bathwater.
That day he counted and counted until he cried. The only place he ever cried was in his own bathtub; it had been this way for many years. The tears he cried in the bath weren’t in his tear ducts but in his skin, in every pore of his fingertips, knees, and heels, and between his legs. When he was in the bath, all of his pores opened up, and his tears seeped out. At first he cried out of narcissism or because he felt moved by himself, but later on he might cry for no reason. Sometimes, merely getting into the bathtub would make him start to cry. Occasionally he would turn on the tap, letting the showerhead cry along with him. He wondered, If the shower had eyes, would it be sad? And there were other times when he felt like a tisane of
pangdahai,
slowly swelling in the tub like steeping leaves, and he would stand up, the droplets of water rolling down his skin and dripping into the bath one by one. This made him feel like a towel that was being wrung out.
He felt clean.
Then he might trim his nails, eyebrows, pubic hair, and the hair around his anus.
Finally he put on his contact lenses. He liked the self he saw in the mirror—virtuous, free, clever, sensual, and young.
I used to be a lot of trouble, a serious “problem child.” I had problems because I was both ignorant and passionate. I was on fire and I let it show, and during the periods of my worst excesses, I used to say to myself, Take it all the way, take it too far. If you push yourself over the edge, things will turn out right.
I might be doing something like brushing my teeth and suddenly feel as though I just wanted to die right then, and then, as if my life depended on it, I would try to get in touch with all of the friends from my past. I often focused a lot of my energy on planning my death, but I always concluded that the desire to die was just an urge like any other. Like a common cold, it would come and go.
Because what would happen to my parents if I died? Whenever I thought about this, I abandoned my plans. In the past I’d never so much as considered other people’s feelings. Love is something that has to be learned.
I am someone who sees herself as a problem. For me, writing is a method of transforming corruption and decay into something wonderful and miraculous. I used to be the sort of person who was always on the lookout for excitement and novelty, but now I’ve somehow come to sense that if any marvels are going to appear in my life, they will undoubtedly spring from the act of writing. Actually, the prospect of marvels doesn’t really excite me anymore. I feel that writing is the only thing that has meaning for me (lately I’ve been playing that depressing game of “What is the meaning of my life?” yet again).
I’m still spending my parents’ money, and I don’t know when I’ll get a job, but I do know that I am in the midst of a process of getting better and better, and I am gradually recovering my will to live.
11.
This weekend, Kiwi and I went to a moon-cake party, where most of the guests were gay men. It wasn’t the Mid-Autumn Festival, but somehow our host had happened on a large supply of moon cakes. Apple didn’t want to go; he said that they were certain to show some movie about Old Shanghai, since nowadays everyone wanted to bask in the reflected glory of Old Shanghai, for reasons unfathomable to me.
There were parties every day, but an evening spent in an old house with gardens, where people in black velvet evening gowns danced the tango—that was something different. The living room was filled with every oil painting that our host had ever painted of the lakes and rivers of the lower Yangtze, and they seemed to cover every square inch of wall space like slate-colored bricks. Kiwi and I danced and our feet flew by the slaty walls, and the scratchy and soft language of Old Shanghai was playing on an old vinyl LP, hinting that Old Shanghai, modern and disappointed, was irretrievably lost to the past. With a dignified and graceful bearing, Kiwi held my waist and whirled me around the dance floor, I saw my neck, arched to the limit like a swan’s, and when I rolled my eyes, I had the illusion that I looked like a swan spreading her wings and taking flight from the marshes.
We didn’t know the first thing about how to dance this dance; we were faking it. I imagined that Kiwi’s shoulders and skull were the lights leading me through the darkness, the three lights of Buddhism, and I felt happy. He was always like a breath of fresh air, and that night he kept on telling me how beautiful I was. He said, You can’t understand beauty until you’ve really loved.
We went from the party to DD’s. They hadn’t been in business for long, and they’d taken their name from a dance hall in Old Shanghai. DD’s was on Happiness Road, and it was the first club that played vinyl records and put Shanghai in sync with the international scene and got everybody dancing.
DD’s was the sort of place where Western guys could pick up Shanghai girls. These Shanghai girls came to hang out, and they spoke English, most of them with heavy American accents, though some had Italian accents or Australian accents, and a few of them spoke with the accent of Chinese college students. But none of them spoke with an English accent. Of the foreign men in Shanghai who could speak Chinese, most of them talked like Shanghainese girls speaking Mandarin, in a kind of flirtatious baby talk, which sounded stupid and funny at the same time. Most of the foreign men in Shanghai had high salaries and nice apartments. This made them feel very comfortable and content to be here. And most of them, when they weren’t busy making money here, were busily fucking Shanghainese girls. Most of these guys wouldn’t have admitted that they had Shanghainese girlfriends, and they liked to say things like, Whatever you do, please don’t fall in love with me; let’s just be friends. What they wanted was that bit of skin, like silky yellow satin, and the helpless-looking face of their China doll. How can friends sleep together? A lot of Shanghai girls couldn’t even grasp this idea, or maybe it was just that they couldn’t accept it. Most Shanghai girls liked men they could control; they coveted a man who would fall in love with them, and they used sex as a weapon. To them, Western men were the latest fad, a window that offered a glimpse of a new life.
Some Shanghai girls actually fell in love with foreigners, but these affairs didn’t usually end well. They blamed the foreign men for being selfish, and simpleminded to boot. Sometimes, foreign men fell in love with Shanghai girls, and these affairs usually ended badly too, and they said that it was because Shanghai girls never told you how they really felt, and they were domineering besides.
There were also foreign men and Shanghai women who got along smoothly, because foreigners are expert at oral sex, Shanghai women have tiny asses, and so forth.
There were also some who fell in love with each other, but they rarely hung out together in public places.
And then there was that handful of lonely foreign men and lonely Shanghai girls. They didn’t love anyone; they just got drunk and went home alone.
Whenever I went to DD’s, I always sat in a high spot so I’d have a good view, and I watched the foreign men and the Shanghai girls, and there were also a lot of nice-looking Japanese exchange students. Everyone was pressed together and dancing. People who were tense about their jobs and people who were slackers all came here, and they all had empty, expressionless eyes, but the scent of semen was in the air. I rarely danced, since I had no feel for the music here. I liked underground music better—it could open up my body. The truth is that the Chinese acquire an underground sensibility while they’re still in the womb, only nowadays everybody thinks they’re white-collar workers.
Everywhere you look you see mirrors and red velvet. That night, Kiwi sat with me the whole time, watching. There were too many people, the air was terrible, and Kiwi kept on fanning me with a fan.
When it was time to go home, Kiwi said, Let’s go to your place tonight!
We walked down the street, and Kiwi said, This town is too silly. At any hour of the day you can find all kinds of people in the street just doing their thing. I said, The Bund is nice, but there are so many homeless people hiding out there that it makes me feel funny.
I didn’t have the kind of mirror he needed at my apartment, so we didn’t make love. We just lay together, arms wrapped around each other, talking.
I said, You know, sweetie, you’re like a novel, with all your plot twists, always leading me down some new path.
He said, That makes me feel good.
12.
Kiwi said that under most circumstances, when he’s with a man who genuinely likes him, he can’t think of anything but holding him in his arms. He said that if he could take Apple in his arms, the moment Apple smiled at him would definitely be the most wonderful moment.
Kiwi wanted something to happen between him and Apple. It even seemed to me that he couldn’t let go of any of the old high school friends he was apt to run into. He’d changed.
The second time the three of us met was at my place. I was feeling low that night, and a little jealous, and I brewed pot after pot of coffee, popped batch after batch of popcorn. I couldn’t get a word in, the two of them talked nonstop, and every word they said was sexually charged. I wondered what they would talk about if I weren’t there. Would they sleep together? Women are soft, and men are hard, and Kiwi said that there was really no contradiction between these two pleasant sensations. When men got it on, it was definitely more like animals wrestling with each other. Men had to have a better idea of what felt good to other men.
I couldn’t stop staring at Apple’s hands. He was diminutive in every respect, except for his hands, which were rather large, with long, slender, pale fingers. I was entranced by those two massive hands, which had opened up in me a new lyrical world. At one time, all of my fantasies about men had been projected onto those hands. I was so young then. Many years later, Apple said to me, Do you know what makes us so beautiful? The fact that we’ve both been hurt very deeply, and neither of us trusts men. Both of us love men too much. We drift rootlessly like duckweed. But the most important thing we share in common is that we’ve both come back to life after being as good as dead. Life has been hard on us.
But now here he was, sitting in front of us and telling us precisely what kind of man he needed. He had to look piratical, with a pipe dangling from his lips, but God forbid Apple should ever smell tobacco on his breath. He should be extremely rational but have a good sense of humor, and he should be an older man, and so on. There was no mistaking the fact that the person Apple was describing had nothing in common with the mushily sentimental Kiwi. Apple explained to us that the kind of romance and madness he related to was bone dry.
Once again, Apple reminded us that we had to consider the legal issues that might affect our video project. He said, What I mean is, this is a problem we ought to be thinking about.
13.
Apple said that they had seen each other between our first and second meetings. They had embraced. Apple had been filled with excited anticipation, but much to his surprise, he’d felt calm the moment he put his arms around Kiwi. Everything suddenly felt very distant. Apple said to me, If I could ever be freed from my burdens, I know I’d finally be at peace!
Apple had definitely had a childish crush on Kiwi. He liked staring at Kiwi’s shoulders, and for the longest time he hadn’t wanted to get out of the bed where Kiwi was lying, and he’d placed Kiwi’s undershorts beside his mouth. He’d felt that the moment Kiwi left him, the dark night would descend on him like a shroud.
They had gone to the Bund together that day, and Apple had brought along a bag full of kumquats, and the seventeen-year-old Kiwi was wearing a pair of coffee-colored shoes. Kiwi had said to him, Friends are one of the most important things in life, and you’re one of my four closest friends. These words made Apple very happy.