Beijing Comrades (21 page)

I must have fallen asleep, because the next thing I knew I was awakened by the brash sound of the telephone. It was Liu Zheng.

“Handong! Are you all right? Our Ma and Lin Ping have been looking everywhere for you! We've been going out of our minds with worry!”

I looked up at the ceiling and a wretched groan escaped my lungs. “Just tell them I'm not dead. Not yet, anyway.” I closed my eyes and hung up the phone.

The following day I went back to my mother and wife as if nothing had happened. Trying to explain to them what Lan Yu meant to me was not an option. Nor could I point the finger at them for what they had done. All I could do was pretend, just as I'd always pretended. I even went so far as to tell my mother I'd thrown the cup, not because of the fax, but because I had been angry with Lin Ping about something.

I came down with a cold and fever in the weeks that followed. None of the medicine—first Chinese, then Western—that they heaped on me helped, and by the end of the month
I was convinced that whatever it was, it was going to be terminal. Lin Ping nursed me with a kind of stoic patience, and we both took great pains to avoid any fights.

One evening, my mother asked me if I knew a boy named Lan Yu and whether I owned a house in the Northern Suburbs. I told her she may as well stop questioning me because I probably wasn't going to live much longer anyway. This stunned the poor old woman into silence.

My cold persisted for two full months before finally going away. When it did, I started proceedings for a divorce.

Twenty-Two

“Lin Ping, let's just end this. This marriage is leaving us with too much suffering. We need to get a divorce.” I was resolved to be as honest and straightforward as I possibly could.

“Has it really come to this, Handong?” she asked, tears welling up in her eyes. “Did I do something wrong? Have I treated you badly?”

“I just don't think we're happy together.”

“But that's not true!” Lin Ping cried in distress. “I know exactly what's going on. You're just sick of me! But Handong, we've only been married a little over a year!” She looked at me pleadingly.

“Lin Ping, whatever you might think about it, we have to. We just have to.” My resolve was firm and it showed in my words.

“You and I are adults, Handong. Getting married is not some kind of game. Don't you think you're being a little rash?”

“I've been thinking about this for a long time,” I said flatly. “I just don't think we can live together anymore.”

Thus ended the conversation. I knew I hadn't delivered the most eloquent case for a divorce, but I was just too tired for explanations.

In the weeks that followed, Lin Ping did everything she could to save our marriage. First, she relieved the maid of her cooking duties and began cooking herself—elaborate, multicourse dinners with soft, romantic music playing in the background. Under the glow of candlelight, she would take my hand across the table and look deep into my eyes. “I love you,” she'd say as I sat on the other side of the table, feeling too weirdly uncomfortable to eat.

She took me to a concert where she snuggled up to me on the dance floor like she had done when we first met. The show she'd chosen was a cruel irony: a live performance of
The Butterfly Lovers.
A violin concerto penned in the 1950s, the story it told had much older folk roots. In the original legend, a fourth-century girl defies feudal morality by disguising herself as a boy and pursuing study. She falls in love with another student, a boy, but he remains ignorant of her love, and, besides, the pressures of family and society conspire to keep them apart. When the boy finally learns that his friend is really a girl, he declares his love for her, but circumstance continues to deny them happiness. In the end, the lovers die of heartache and are transformed into butterflies, able at last to join each other in eternal union.

Holding Lin Ping in my arms as we danced, I remembered something Lan Yu had once told me. He said the true historical basis of the legend was a passionate love affair between two real boys, not between a girl and a boy as depicted in
The Butterfly Lovers.
It was only that the legend had been distorted over time to have a heterosexual storyline.

“Ha!” I laughed at the time. “What a crock of shit!”

Lan Yu looked at me with his big, sorrowful eyes. “I believe it,” he said.

Listening to the mournful cadence of the melody, I pictured Lan Yu's face as he told me this story, so sincere, so earnest. I thought about the butterfly lovers. The way they were forced to say goodbye to each other, the way their love was so powerful that they were able to defy death itself. My eyes filled with tears. Maybe I believed they were two boys, too. I raised a hand behind my wife's back to dry my eyes.

Four weeks later, I received a memo from my finance manager notifying me that my wife had transferred ¥300,000—the maximum amount she could authorize by herself—from the company account. She was acting fast, and I knew I had to do the same. When I got home that evening, I told her we weren't putting off the divorce any longer and that I was filing the paperwork the following day. After the inevitable fight that ensued, I sat up in bed reading the paper while she combed her hair at her vanity table.

“Handong,” she started, “are you doing this because of a man named Lan Yu?” Her back was to me. I looked up and our eyes met in the mirror.

“What are you talking about?” I scoffed.

“Humph!” she grunted, shifting in her seat so I could no longer see her face in the mirror. “Ever since we started dating I've always known I had a rival, but never in a million years would I have imagined it was a man! How did I end up in this ridiculous position?” She was talking more to herself than to me.

Lin Ping put her hairbrush down and turned to face me. “Look,” she said. “I care for you, okay? I don't mind that you
have this . . . this . . . psychological disorder. I can forgive all that, and I'll do whatever I can to help you get over it. But to think that you actually want to divorce me!”

That was too much. “Save your speeches,” I said. “Since when have you been so selfless? If you don't ‘mind' this, it's because what you do ‘mind' is my money. If I was some penniless bastard, you'd be out of here in a second!”

“Money!” she screamed, standing up from the table. “Everything is money to you! You think the whole goddamn world is after your money. So I've taken your money, but other than that, what else have you given me? What have you ever given to me as a man, as a husband? I've given you every ounce of love that I can, and that's all I ask in return. Can you give me that for once in your life? Can you?” Lin Ping seethed with anger. It was the first time I had ever seen her lose control in front of me.

“When have you ever cared about me or what I want?” she continued, tears streaming down her cheeks. “You can't even do the simplest things for me! When I asked you to go down south to visit my family with me, you said you didn't want to go because you weren't used to the weather. The
weather
! When we got married and my parents came all this way for the wedding, all I asked you to do was take one day of your precious time to show them around Beijing, and you wouldn't even make time for that! But me with your mom? I go to her house every weekend, I sit and talk with her, I take her out shopping . . .” She covered her face with her hands and sobbed.

“I love you, Handong,” she said, gaining composure and staring at me defiantly. “No matter how many times you break my heart, I just keep hoping that a woman's love—
my
love—can move you, make you feel something, anything. But you? What sense of responsibility do you have to me, to this family?
Everything you want me to do, I do. I go out with you and your associates to your stupid social events. Do you think I actually enjoy them? I don't want your money, Handong, but what else is there for me to take from you? You don't even act like a normal man when it comes to our sex life! All I ask of you is to be a husband—nothing more, nothing less.”

She broke down crying again. It was ages before she finally stopped. “Handong,” she continued weakly, “if you would just love me, I wouldn't care how poor you were. I'd stay with you forever.”

“But some of the things you've done have gone too far,” I said somberly.

“So you admit it,” she scoffed. “You hate me because of the fax. Well, that's nothing. You know what your mom wanted to do? She wanted your sister to go over to the Public Security office to have that little piece of shit arrested. Aidong was so angry she just about did it, too.” Lin Ping's eyes burned into me. I looked away.

“How do you even have the nerve to sit here like this?” she continued. “If you're so convinced you've got justice on your side, why don't you look your mom in the eye and admit it? Why don't you confront her about the fax? Why don't you tell her and Aidong off for what they've done?”

“But it was your fault for telling Ma to begin with!” I yelled. “If you hadn't told her, she never would have known.”

“Handong!” she screamed. “If you don't want to get caught doing something, then don't do it! I mean, how long did you think you could hide this? If you knew what you were doing was wrong, then why are we to blame for trying to help you?”

I had nothing more to say. There was nothing inside me but rage.

“I have done no wrong,” Lin Ping said, raising her chin
righteously. “As your wife, I will do whatever it takes to protect my husband and family.”

That was more than I could take. “What you did could make a man take his own life!” I screamed. “Don't you fucking get it?”

“Oh, don't make me sick!” she jeered. “What
man
? A grown man coming after you like that for absolutely no good reason—what kind of man would do
that
? Besides, people like that? What difference does it make if there's one less of
them
in the world?”

I wanted to smash her pretty face in, but didn't. I had never hit a woman before and wasn't about to start.

“Shut up. Just shut up. You got your Â¥300,000. I'll give you two hundred more and it'll all be over.”

Lin Ping turned to face me with a sudden steadiness in her voice. “And you're not afraid I'm going to tell people?”

I looked at her with daggers. “Do
not
underestimate me,” I said icily. “Try it and you'll see who gets ruined in the end.” I stormed out of the bedroom, slamming the door behind me to go sleep on the couch.

A long period of silence ensued on the other side of the bedroom door, then more crying. Finally, Lin Ping rushed out of the bedroom and into the living room.

“A million!” she screamed. “That's not too much for you!” She returned to the bedroom and slammed the door shut.

Thus went my first, short-lived marriage—down in flames. But just as Lan Yu had said: Where there's a loss, there's always a gain. Going through a charade of a marriage followed by a very real divorce made me confront something I'd never been able to, but which I had known all along. I finally admitted to myself that I was gay.

The news of my divorce shocked everyone I knew, but apart from Liu Zheng not a single person tried to talk me out of it. Not even my mother made any effort to interfere with my decision. Still, I could tell from the way she looked at me that she was in deep distress about recent events. “Further down the road,” she assured me, “you'll find a more suitable woman.” But I knew that no such woman existed.

A few months before the divorce, there was another guy I'd begun sleeping with. He had a different alma mater from me—I can't remember what it was—but he, too, had been a Chinese lit major. He now worked as a newspaper editor. He liked to tease me by saying I had somehow managed to graduate from one of China's top universities without actually learning anything. He was short, but very cute—one of those “cool” types who wore contact lenses because he didn't want to mar his handsome face with glasses. Four years younger than me, he seemed the perfect match in every way. We only got together a few times, but even in those fleeting moments we always had a great deal in common and never ran out of things to talk about. And yet, despite the mutual attraction, I always kept a certain distance. I wasn't ready for something new, and my emotions were too vulnerable from the chaos in my life. I told him a little bit about my relationship with Lan Yu. His advice? Let it go and move on.

The truth is, that guy was my only confidant, the one person in my life who knew anything about what I was going through. I knew he wanted to take things further after my divorce, but I told him there was an emptiness where my heart had been, an emptiness that wasn't going away and which nobody could fill. He was disappointed, angry even, but he finally said he understood. Eventually, we broke up, and I never made an effort to find another friend. The loneliness I felt during the final
months of my marriage was at times unbearable, but isolating myself both emotionally and sexually was the path I chose.

At that juncture, my way of dealing with the pressures of life was to throw myself into work. If I was honest with myself, I had to admit my involvement in the joint-venture cosmetics factory wasn't working out. Operations management simply wasn't my strong point. I decided to let the factory go and focus on my real calling: trade and commerce. By chance, I stumbled across an excellent investment opportunity, but it was one that required a massive investment of capital. I began poking around to raise funds.

I became a drifter after the divorce, sleeping some nights at my mother's, other nights at my office, at Ephemeros, or at the long-term rental at Country Brothers. Most often, however, I slept at Tivoli. Legally speaking, it was no longer mine, but it was where my heart dwelled. It was Lan Yu's. It reminded me of him. Though I was unable to find him, I refused to believe he was truly gone, and each night before bed I looked toward the front door hoping that one day I would see him step over the threshold. I was waiting for a miracle.