My mother does not reproach me when I confess that I have resigned from my job, but she is very upset when I tell her about my divorce. So for her sake, I pretend to the neighbours that I am still married. My father urges me to stay in Qingdao and find proper employment. He has some contacts in the printing trade and suggests I start a small publishing company. I tell him I am planning to find a job at Shenzhen University, then settle down and get married — so there is no need for him to worry.
When I sit on the sofa I can hear the clock turning back twenty years and start ticking again. But my childhood memories no longer tug at my heart. They lie quietly on the bookshelves or under the bed. That piece of wood wedged under the leg of my parents’ bed is the lid to my old pencil box. I remember holding it over my penis one day in the classroom when Rongrong was sitting next to me, and whispering to her, ‘Go on, have a look. Boys can piss standing up, you know.’ She leaned her head on the desk and I slowly pulled the lid away. The rusty metal leg pins that memory to the ground.
Although I grew up in this house and this town, I feel they have both moved away from me. I can no longer find my place here. The more I retreat into my past, the more dislocated I feel. The person I was and the person I am are two quite separate people.
Three days later, I catch a train to Hangzhou, desperate to see Wang Ping. I pick up a note from her at her office and join her at her parents’ house in Zhenhai. The house sits on the edge of a cliff with views onto the open sea. Fishing boats chug over the waves below leaving trails of smoke in the air. Two tall parasol trees shield the sunlight from the yard. The mother puts up a camp bed for me in the damp kitchen, next to a vat of pickled vegetables.
Wang Ping and I spend every day together, walking along the beach and talking, and my feelings for her grow like the beans her mother has left to sprout in the pot by the kitchen stove. I like to see her face change when she laughs. Her expression is usually blank, but she has a sweet little nose that makes her look amusing and intelligent, and detracts from her vacant eyes. Only once, when she discusses her plans to study abroad, do I see her eyes flutter with life briefly, like a bird trying to land. She is very quick and capable. When two policemen come to the house one night to check my identity papers, she sees them off with a few polite words and they never bother me again.
I finish writing a story about a scene I witnessed as a child, and I give it to her to read. In the 1960s, Qingdao fishermen were ordered to abandon their petty capitalist trade and devote their lives to studying Mao Zedong thought. They soon could not afford to feed themselves. One day they were so hungry they swam to a seaweed farm run by the local commune and stole handfuls of kelp that had drifted through the nets in a storm. Militiamen spotted them as they were swimming back, caught up with them in rowing boats and beat them with wooden oars. Some of the men were pulled aboard and tied up with ropes, but most were beaten so badly their stiff bodies were just left to float on the water. The men were stark naked. The wives who were waiting with their clothes on the beach looked on in horror and screamed.
Wang Ping puts the manuscript down and says, ‘Your writing is too coarse. Whenever I look at the ocean again, I will see a mass of white corpses. Disgusting!’ She often drops a few words of English into her speech, knowing perfectly well I don’t understand them.
When I mention that Lingling has asked me to help with an exhibition on the minority ethnic groups of Yunnan Province, she says, ‘Who wants to go to an exhibition like that? Yunnan is such a dirty, backward place. Do you know that most American families own two cars these days?’
I look at her clean, white ears and say, ‘Yunnan has the most diverse population in China. Each minority has its own unique language and culture, and the lives they lead are much more interesting than the American lives you dream about. There is more to China than communism and the Han Chinese. If you don’t understand your own country, you will feel lost when you go abroad.’
She tells me about an exhibition on American domestic appliances that she reviewed last month in the Hangzhou Daily. She rhapsodises about the miraculous technical advances, but her descriptions of electric kettles and formica worktops leave me cold.
One afternoon, when the people next door are quarrelling, and babies’ screams mingle with smells of powdered milk, Wang Ping’s mother leaves us alone and goes to buy some meat at the market. The sea breeze in the yard tastes salty and sour. When I step into the room my eyes meet Wang Ping’s gaze. She has washed her hair and has a towel wrapped around her head. Time condenses. I move towards her and take her in my arms. And suddenly, for some reason, my mind flashes back to when I was fourteen and was touched by a man with big, rough hands. I had gone to visit my brother in the countryside, but he was away the day I arrived, so I stayed with his neighbour, and that night the bastard slipped under my quilt and rubbed me until I went soft.
When Wang Ping walks me to the Zhenhai train station, a soft rains starts to fall. It reminds me of the time I walked Xi Ping to the station before she left for the shoot in Guangxi. Sometimes memories can make life seem very sad.
‘Promise to send me a letter when you reach a city.’ Wang Ping’s hair and shoulders are damp. Her white ears look empty.
Time Is Money
‘Guangzhou in June is as hot as a burning wok. The people who live inside it either fry to a pulp or jump for their lives. No one looks at you in the streets. No one even looks at the sky. All eyes are fixed straight ahead. Everyone rushes about, shouting Hurry, hurry! as if it were the last day of their lives.’
Lingling frowns when I finish speaking. ‘You northerners are too slow. If everyone in China was as lazy as you the country would be finished. China’s success springs from Guangzhou’s hard work. This city is the dragon head of reform, China’s gateway to Hong Kong.’
‘The only thing this city has produced is a mountain of consumer goods. Where are the thinkers? The artists? Guangzhou people know only how to make money, spend it and die. What is the glory in that? I saw a big banner on the streets today that said TIME IS MONEY, EFFICIENCY IS LIFE.’
‘Shut up, you northern twit.’ Lingling is angry. We are sitting in the shade of a hut that doubles as my bedroom and the exhibition headquarters. During the last month we have built a small Yunnan village in a corner of Guangzhou’s main park. The site has a food alley, two exhibition rooms, four straw huts, and is surrounded by a tall bamboo fence. Now that the electricity and water is finally installed, we are practically self-sufficient.
In the evening, I sit on my camp bed and deal with my post. Yao Lu’s letter upsets me. He says the friend who was developing my films has been arrested and his shop ransacked. The pictures I took in the north-west are lost for ever.
I whisk the mosquitoes from my face and open a letter from Fan Cheng. He has just returned to Beijing after nine months in Xinjiang. He says he is fed up with his job at the tax office and has sent an application to the Shenzhen government for the post of resident writer. I write back, urging him to make up with Chen Hong.
She is a fine woman, and still loves you very much. . I seem to be entangled myself, with a girl from Hangzhou. I would like to stay close to her, but in my restless state it is impossible to form a stable relationship. . After Hangzhou, I spent a month in Shaolin Temple, climbed Mount Huang, then followed the coast down here to Guangzhou. . Now that you have finished exploring the deserts of Xinjiang, come and visit the cultural desert here. The south is another country. You will like it. Hong Kong seems just a stone’s throw away.