‘Can I say a few words to him?’
‘All right. I’ll put the receiver next to his ear.’
My mother was perched beside me on the bed. She tugged the telephone lead, then shifted towards me, making the metal bedstead squeak.
Tian Yi’s nose was blocked. I could tell she’d been crying. ‘Dai Wei, can you hear me? It’s ten in the morning here… I feel so guilty. I shouldn’t have asked you to come to the Square with me when I joined the hunger strike. I’m the one who should have been shot… Do you want to hear the noises outside?’ She opened her window, and I heard a roar of cars and motorbikes and wind blowing through trees. I could tell it was a big, noisy city.
‘Did he hear it all?’ Tian Yi said to my mother.
‘Yes, all of it. It’s nice of you to still be thinking of him.’ In fact, my mother hadn’t bothered to place the receiver next to my ear, but I was still able to hear everything Tian Yi said.
‘Will you take a photo of him and send it to me? I didn’t bring any of our photographs with me.’
‘His skin is like tree bark. It flakes off in thick layers. How can I photograph him in such a state?’
Tian Yi laughed. ‘Your descriptions are very vivid, Auntie! I must go to work now…’ I knew she’d only laughed to conceal her sobs.
Her voice faded, like a torch whose batteries were dying. Underneath my pillow, I could hear Wen Niao’s watch quietly ticking.
My mother seldom brings the telephone into my room these days. Last week, she started renting out the single bed in the covered balcony to a young graduate called Xue Qin. She’s afraid he might use the phone when she’s out, so she keeps it in her bedroom most of the time. But Xue Qin has made a copy of my mother’s bedroom key. If his pager bleeps while she’s out, he unlocks her door and makes a telephone call. He has rifled through all the drawers in the flat, read my father’s journals, and taken a swig from each of the bottles of rice wine my mother keeps in the cabinet.
‘She’s got a foreign fiancé,’ my mother grumbled when she put down the receiver. ‘What’s she doing asking for photographs of you? If she’s so concerned about your condition, why doesn’t she send us some money? She’s living a nice life abroad, but she’s forgotten we helped her to get there. She hasn’t thanked us once…’
My mother flushes the toilet with some old washing-up water, then goes to her bedroom to get changed. The Yangge fan dance troupe she’s joined is going to perform at a street party to celebrate the Hong Kong Handover. I know she’ll put on a lot of make-up. I remember the colourful make-up she wore on stage. When she carried me home after a performance, I’d rest my head on her shoulders and inhale the sweet scent of her face powder.
‘Will you change the drip bag when it runs out, Xue Qin, and remember to turn him onto his side?’
‘Don’t worry, I’ll look after him. You go out and have fun.’
An hour after my mother has left, Xue Qin is still in the sitting room, drinking beer and watching television. My mother was introduced to him by the community service centre. He pays only fifty yuan a month in rent, which is very little, on the understanding that he looks after me two nights a week so that my mother can go out if she wants to.
The phone rings. My brother’s voice comes over the answer machine. He says he’s going to book his plane tickets to Beijing tomorrow and a hotel room as well. I don’t blame him for deciding to stay in a hotel. He wouldn’t want his English girlfriend to have to sleep in this putrid-smelling flat.
You wander through your cerebral cortex, trying to find the exact location of your wound.
Distant strains of a female choir waft from my temporal lobe. Their serene voices seem to float to the heavens. But the image that accompanies the music is of a dilapidated shack with a dirty grey door that has the words ELECTRICAL REPAIR SHOP painted in red on its three upper panes of glass. The threshold of the door is marked with bicycle wheel tracks. I can’t think where I’ve seen this shop before. While the choir continues to sing in the distance, the cells in which the music is stored gradually come into view. I watch them vibrate. Not having used my eyes for so many years, my auditory memories often return to me before my visual ones.
My mind has attached the wrong image to the music. I didn’t hear that song in a shop. I heard it on the radio in my dorm at Southern University. No, I heard it with A-Mei, the first time I went to her dorm. I remember looking at this girl from Hong Kong sitting opposite me and wondering what I could do to make her like me. I wasn’t paying attention to the music she’d put on, but my auditory cortex recorded every note of it, together with the noise of her pouring out tea for me and of my knuckles cracking as I closed my fist…
I try not to think about A-Mei, but I can’t stop myself, and each time she returns to my thoughts the neurons that hold information about her multiply and spread deeper into my brain. I remember one muggy, overcast day in the room we later rented in the Overseas Chinese block. She was feeling depressed. I stood at the window and watched a beggar with stringy white hair walking slowly along the street. The eucalyptus tree he passed was still damp from the rain that had fallen a few hours before. Some of its leaves shone like shards of broken mirror as they reflected the light of the sky. A-Mei looked down and said, ‘I’ve had enough of this place. Enough! I can’t take it any more.’ Then she said, in Cantonese, ‘Did you bring in those clothes you hung out on the balcony? And don’t smoke in here. I hate it. If you want a cigarette, go out into the corridor. Go on, get out. I’m sick of you…’
The love you felt for her is still buried inside you, deep within the marrow of your bones.
It’s 30 June 1997. A few seconds before midnight, Xue Qin puts down his glass of beer and turns up the volume of the television. ‘Five, four, three, two, one… Yeah!’ he shouts in unison with the crowds on the TV screen. ‘We’ve turfed those bloody Brits out at last!’
I remember picking up one of A-Mei’s newspapers and seeing a photograph of Hong Kong citizens burning copies of the mini-constitution that would govern the territory after its handover to China. ‘Aren’t they pleased that Hong Kong will be returned to the motherland?’ I said. She glanced at me coldly. ‘Pleased? They feel like a wife who’s been abducted from her husband and forced to live with a brute.’
‘At last Hong Kong has returned to the bosom of the motherland!’ the television presenter emotes. But her voice is soon drowned by the cheers of the hordes surrounding her and by the firecrackers exploding outside my window.
Beijing begins to shake as crowds flood onto the streets, screaming and cheering, their cries rebounding against the night sky. The mice under my bed scuttle for cover into the box of my father’s ashes and the other box my mother bought for mine. I can’t understand why everyone in this city is so happy. When my brother phoned up last week, he said that most people in Britain couldn’t care less which country governs Hong Kong.
Xue Qin, who was sitting on the sofa a few moments ago, is now standing beside my bed. He lifts the sheet. I can tell he’s staring at my genitals. He crunches noisily on a boiled sweet, then leans down, wraps his hands around my penis and moves them up and down. My body shakes; the iron bed squeaks. On the floor below, everyone shouts jubilantly: ‘The Chinese have washed away a hundred years of national humiliation!’