A Chinese Affair Read online

  Her favourite time was around noon, when the room was lit by the winter sun, the orange walls bright and warm. She thought she would cook for him and brought a recipe book. But they only had simple lunches— instant noodles with eggs, frozen dumplings, or some leftovers she brought—before they went upstairs.

  His bed overlooked the street, which was quiet during the day, although the roadsides were filled with cars parked bumper to bumper. On the rare occasions when she stayed overnight, she heard cars coming early in the morning. Some people parked in the neighbourhood and started work at six o’clock in the nearby office district.

  Lying diagonally, she studied the names of bones and muscles from a book entitled Body Atlas. She said that the body is a landscape and it is important to know the correct names of places. That it is important to know the correct names of anything, because language is all we have—words are symbols, and when symbols do not represent reality, they lose meaning, and we lose our ability to think. The genes for language emerged later than the genes for art and music, so art and music require talent, while language requires learning, she said, leaving one hand on the book, her index finger pointing to the line she had not finished.

  He studied her body, sometimes absent-mindedly, sometimes hurriedly, uninterested in names.

  She liked to bury her face between his jaw and his collarbone and inhale the smell of sun-dried leaves. She liked the outline of his lips. On some days, he forgot to shave and his face became sandy, but his mouth was always soft and moist. An oasis in the desert, she thought, or a tropical fruit with white seeds and sweet essence.

  She brought him white sheets, as she found all other colours noisy and disturbing, even the humming yellow or the sighing grey. On sunny days, she hung the blankets out. After both sides were thoroughly sunbathed, she would beat them with a bamboo stick. The heat stored in the blankets seemed to make them extra warm. She never folded the sheets or the blankets after they got up. She left the creases and turns of the soft fabric untouched, preserving the waves of their intimate moments.

  They had met at a conference where Crystal was the interpreter. By then, Lin had completed his Red Series.

  On her first visit to his studio, she said that red is the happy start of a tragedy. ‘A bride is dressed in red costume, her face hidden behind a piece of red cloth, red candles on their bedside table, fire crackers exploding, red lanterns flickering. Red is used to disguise blood. It is the colour of burns and restless eyes. Embers, burning to ashes.’

  She wrote on a piece of paper while he was working away:

  Velvet, red,

  Rose petals on piano,

  Stage curtains burying soprano’s secrets,

  Eyes peeping from the shadows.

  Dancing shoes, laces, worn by dust.

  White body bathed in red wine.

  Red spiral,

  Sink, sink, sink.

  Red velvet, new wounds, forgotten regrets.

  They had come from the same city in Northeast China, an old industrial base for coal, steel, aeroplanes, trucks, bicycles and construction materials, with tall chimneys standing out against a vast sky, releasing burning ash and black and yellow smoke.

  On her way to school, Crystal would cross a blue wooden bridge into a park that stretched along the canal. In the spring, when lilacs blossomed and the muddy canal bed was filled with dark green water, the boat shed would open with squeaky rowing boats for hire. She went to the riverbank to study English, history and geography, the subjects that required a fresh mind to memorise. She saw couples walking or sitting behind the trees and shrubs, obscured from public view. Their ages ranged from hers to that of her parents, yet they were not in school or at work. The idea of people hiding in the woods filled her with curiosity and disgust.

  In an open area further up the canal was a small playground, where she played on the swings with her friends—one sitting, another standing. She preferred to be the power rather than the weight. She would swing as hard as she could, her legs flexing, then extending, the wind whistling by her ears, the sky coming closer and retreating further, until the movements became meditative, until her friends asked her to stop. Her arms were stiff from holding on, her legs sore from pushing and her hands smelled of blood from the rusty iron chains.

  The river with polluted water winds through my city.

  Hungry and lonely people walk in slow motion,

  Speechless, tired, long-faced, the corners of their lips drooping.

  Little fairy creatures swim backstroke beneath the surface of the water, squinting in bright sunlight.

  I dreamed of you before, in those days when I pressed my nose flat to the aquarium. When the goldfish was my only friend.

  She cultivated her accent to speak like newsreaders and built up a sophisticated vocabulary. When others were awed by planes scraping the sky, she looked at their faces, thinking: One day when I’m on that plane, you’ll still be watching. Sometimes, especially when it was early evening, her eyes might be caught by the swallows singing and flying outside the classroom windows. She wondered what it would feel like to have wings, to reach the sky. But she shrugged off those thoughts and focused on her study. Every Tuesday at lunchtime she went to the broadcasting control room. There she played music that she considered of good taste, and read poetry she had collected. She could not hear her own voice through the speaker connected to each classroom. Once a crippled girl came to tell her that she’d been in tears, hearing what Crystal had read that day.

  Her school was strict about early love affairs. Students were instructed not to divert their attention to activities outside study and sport. The doorman, who stayed to guard the school at night, locked each classroom at nine o’clock and took down names of students who stayed behind in pairs. The names were given to the teachers in charge, and the students were given warnings.

  During summer holidays she organised students to play volleyball. She would arrive first, at four o’clock in the morning, warming up by playing against the side wall. She smashed the ball, which hit the ground, the wall, then bounced back, and she smashed it again, listening to the rhythmic sounds and their echoes. The others arrived and they played for hours until it was time for breakfast. By the end of the summer holiday, the players had become good friends, some about to leave the school for university, others still having a few years to go. On the eve of the autumn semester, they met for dinner near the school. The days had become shorter and the evening came earlier. They lingered in the schoolyard after dark, saying goodbye to each other, to the holiday and to the summer.

  She had heard of Lin’s school two kilometres from hers, infamous for harbouring delinquents. In the winter evenings, suspicious-looking students congregated at the Korean noodle house next to the grocery store where she was sent to buy minced pork and roasted peanuts. She could still smell the beef sizzling with chilli paste, and the smoke of burnt fat. There were some girls among them. They teased each other and burst into fits of laughter, cigarette butts flickering, beer bottles clinking. She never looked at their faces. She had plenty of homework and revision to do. She carried her purchases in front of her chest, walking briskly towards the west, towards the setting winter sun, so intensely pink above the violet clouds, which surely must signal a brilliant, although unknown future.

  Lin said he had never been one of those. He was a quiet boy who evaded the school bully by drawing. He drew continuous images in the top right corners of schoolbooks. When flipped quickly, the page corners showed animated figures like a cartoon film.

  Lin’s patron was a boy wearing a helmet. When that boy was small, his family had lived next to the railway. One day, when he and his sister went to collect water from the well, someone threw a rock from the passing train. The rock hit his head and broke a hole in his skull. His father worked in the steel factory and made him a helmet to protect the soft spot. He became a notorious fighter in the district. He would shout, ‘I died once, so who am I afraid of now?’, and charge to the opposing
crowd, no matter how many boys there were, brandishing a shiny chopper that he claimed was handmade by his father, using the best steel in the country.

  The helmet boy protected Lin. While his gang collected money from other students, they spared him. The money was collected as a protection fee, as the gang would fight with other gangs from outside the school. At the beginning of each semester, the helmet boy asked Lin to draw in his schoolbooks—boxers fighting, monks practising martial arts, or dancers, when disco became trendy.

  For himself, Lin drew a clown juggling various items. In the early days the clown was juggling balls, then he was juggling knives, then he was blindfolded while juggling knives on a unicycle. Eventually he had the clown on stilts, neatly taking up the narrow space of the page margin, juggling toads, or using a magic wand to lead butterflies into different shapes.

  One day when the helmet boy was drinking with his mates, someone came looking for his best friend. The helmet boy said, ‘He’s not here but I’ll come with you.’ The next morning he was found beaten to death, frozen, dumped next to a pile of Chinese cabbage, his steel helmet smashed out of shape.

  Lin lost his patron, but he had grown up by then, and was accepted by Luxun Academy of Fine Arts, where he met his future wife. He told Crystal his wife was from the south and her favourite fruit was lychee. He drew on the corner of her recipe book. It was a sketch of Crystal holding a rose, starting with her profile. She slowly turned to face the front, then smiled, the corners of her eyes curled up, and the rose slowly opened.

  When she could get away from home for longer periods of time, she took him to a swamp to see the mangroves. Few people visited the reserve on a winter’s day, except some tourists who’d read from a travel guide that the boardwalk was one of the locals’ best-kept secrets. The swamp smelled like animal enclosures, and it was full of life. She explained to him how mangroves survive an environment with a high concentration of salt. He was impressed by the submerged roots sticking out from the mud like the air pipes for snorkelling. They tasted the salt that had been expelled from the leaves. The setting sun cast long shadows over the twisted figures of the mangroves. She thought of them as the suffering souls of handicapped dancers, and the boardwalk the road to hell.

  He painted on her body. The nipples, the centres of flowers. The ribs, the feather-like fronds. The navel, where the two branches meet. The pubic hair, the roots. He used a paintbrush to sketch the outline and used his fingers to smear the paint. Her body was covered by native plants. Sitting on the leather couch in emerald green, she blended into a lush landscape. Her head leaned back so her face was not visible. On the front of her long neck was a red parrot. She felt she was death, hidden behind life. She did not want a copy of the photograph he took.

  She was not counting the days, but she knew that when spring arrived, he would be leaving.

  He had difficulty finishing the White Series. There is no white, he said. A white surface reflects the neighbouring colours. To start, he painted a magician holding a covered box, his right hand raised high, releasing the last one of a thousand doves into the evening sky, their wings reflecting a pink sunset. He said he had to go to Russia and stay there for the winter. He had an invitation from an art institute in St Petersburg. He said he would spend some time at home in China before flying to St Petersburg on the day of the Mid-Autumn Festival.

  Wake me up; wake me up on the cold morning.

  Cats’ footprints in new snow.

  Quiet streets.

  Dry branches cracking.

  You were there, as I wandered through the city of a white dream.

  They never said goodbye. They went to the small market next to the church the day before he left. She noticed new leaves on the deciduous trees, freshly washed by the overnight rain, bright and shiny in a misty morning. He bought a pair of earrings for his wife, in the shape of teardrops. She bought a soft toy, a laughing kookaburra for his unborn child.

  They had loved napping together in the afternoon. But she could not fall asleep that day. She sat up, holding her knees, looking out the window. There were not many cars on a Saturday. He reached out his hand, feeling the length of her spine.

  She gathered her stuff, the recipe book, some loose papers with her scribbles, and a cashmere shawl she used to wrap around herself when the weather was cold.

  He walked her to the bus stop.

  The driver did not see her at first, so the bus pulled up beyond the stop. She ran and got on in a hurry. She stumbled to the end of the bus, but he was no longer there. Then she realised he was next to the bus, on the side of the road in front of a stone wall, waving.

  When the bus turned at the street corner, he was still there, probably unable to see her, as it had started to rain.

  Will she see him again? she often wonders.

  One day, when she walks down the street, meandering through the market, looking aimlessly at the stalls, a painting might catch her eye, then a familiar shoulder, an indefinable movement that is noticeable only to her. The crowd between them will flow like black water. He will feel uneasy and sense that someone is watching.

  He will stop his conversation and look in her direction, and she will realise it is not him. It is someone with a different face, and even the shoulder is not right. She will walk away with sadness and gratitude, as if an instrument in her heart has been accidentally touched by a strange finger.

  Or it is him. When their eyes meet, there will be a shower lit by the morning sun. Every drop of rain will become liquid gold. They will sit together on the stairs in front of the church, hand in hand, watching the magic slowly unfold.

  Velvet, gold.

  Sand dunes, the waving shape of a lover’s body.

  Time passing through my fingers.

  Have we met before?

  A blond boy is practising baseball in the autumn wind, a branch in hand, his body spinning, striking the falling leaves.

  Golden afternoon sunshine. A toddler is running a Z line, looking over her shoulder, racing her own shadow, laughing.

  I must have known you since I was younger, even younger.

  A Fishbone in the Throat

  After scrubbing the bathroom floor he packed all the equipment into the car, and as usual sat on the kerb in the shadow of a gum tree. It had taken longer to clean the Red House without the other cleaners, and only now did he realise how hungry he was. He untied the red plastic bag. Tightly packed in a plastic box was roast pork with steamed rice.

  From the time his wife took up Falun Gong, she had stopped cooking meat. Once he tried to cook pork stew at home. His wife and daughter closed the bedroom doors and opened the living room window and the balcony door to get rid of the smell. After he had washed the pot, his wife soaked it in detergent and scoured it as if to remove a layer of the steel. Now he went to a local restaurant to buy takeaway lunches before starting the day, usually while the other customers were still having their breakfast. He did not mind Cantonese food, although he would have preferred the home-cooked northern style chicken-and-mushroom stew, or diced pork with broad noodles.

  The late afternoon sun was warm, a blue vapour rising from the moist leaves after the drizzle. A magnolia tree was in full bloom in front of the Red House. Many of the large flowers had fallen, their thick petals spread out on the fresh green lawn like a pink reflection of the tree above. Two parrots perched on the white picket fence, preening themselves from their fluffy orange chests to their green tails, wings opening and closing, necks twisting and turning. Two flowers unfolding in a hundred ways.

  No. 2’s house was the last job of the day. He had driven the two helpers back to their homes before coming over, so he could have a private conversation with No. 2, who had been absent from the last three training sessions.

  He felt a sharp pain in his right knee. The cartilage must have become as thin as an old sole, from years of fierce training and competition, and the recent endless squatting and kneeling. He had not applied his knowledge of professional sports t
o his cleaning job— no warming up, no attention to posture. The increase in heart rate and blood supply, and the stimulation of muscles and nerves should be reserved for the volleyball court. He tried to ignore the pain, like a nearly asleep person covering his ears to block out the humming of a mosquito.

  He had studied to be a teacher of Physical Education in the Northeast Normal University in China, where he met his future wife, who was studying to be an English teacher and was a member of the Communist Party. One day she twisted her ankle, and when she leaned on him while hopping on one foot, he realised she was vulnerable. In the tree-lined South Lake Park, he asked her to marry him.

  He was more confident when he was working as a professional coach. He belonged to the AMAs crowd, a nickname for the athletes, musicians and artists, known to be unruly in behaviour but admirable in style. Walking on the street in the brand-new sports gear provided by the Provincial Sports Society, together with his mates who were equally tall and athletic, he used to feel that life was a permanent sports carnival and they were at the forefront of the parade.

  He also had more time back then. As the coach for the provincial girls’ junior volleyball team, he worked mostly in the evenings and during weekends, except on school holidays, when he worked intensively and took the team to tournaments.

  He remembered his hometown in the north: grey buildings bearing permanent stains from rain and melted snow dripping on the exterior walls; balconies enclosed by different types of glass, with women’s skirts and underpants and men’s oversized factory uniforms hanging on the clotheslines; iron-barred windows, children’s bored faces looking out from behind. He rode to the market for fresh meat and vegetables in the morning, then caught up with friends to play mahjong during the day. They took turns to host the game. His days were filled with the clattering of mahjong tiles, the sizzling of stir-fry, pop songs from the radio playing listeners’ choices, and endless sports programs on daytime television.