The Fat Years (13 page)

I felt a little awkward as we walked down to the underground parking lot. He Dongsheng didn’t say anything and I didn’t want to start a conversation for fear of being rebuffed, so I just kept quiet.

He drove a black Land Rover SUV, a kind of foreign import that was so common in Beijing that it was quite unobtrusive. His licence plate was also an ordinary Beijing number—somebody had probably loaned him the car.

After he started the engine, He Dongsheng took a small electric instrument, like a TV remote, out of his shirt pocket. One touch and a small green light came on, and three seconds later two more green lights came on. He put the thing back in his pocket and said, “Nothing’s going on.”

I was hesitant to ask, but he came out with an explanation. “It’s an anti-bugging and anti-tracking device.”

“Who would dare to bug or track you?” I could not help asking.

“They all would!” he replied. “The Central Discipline Committee, State Security, Public Security, the People’s Liberation Army General Staff Department … There are so many organizations and so many people, who can say for sure? Who doesn’t have enemies? I monitor people and people monitor me. I know your secrets and you know mine, there’s a dossier on everybody, that’s the way the game is played.”

I was learning again. Even the Party and national leaders are afraid they’re being watched. As I fastened my seat belt, I acted so cool, pretending that I had seen it all before and nothing could shock me.

“Where do you live?” he asked.

“Happiness Village Number Two.”

He knew it well.

I asked him if he’d seen any of our Prosperous China Conference classmates. “No” was all he said.

I thought he was finished, but then he went on. “Shui Xinghua is a concerned capitalist. You know what I learned from that Prosperous China Conference?”

“What?”

“That was when I first realized,” he said, “that the intellectual elites of China, Taiwan, and Hong Kong think about things in completely different ways—their awareness, discourse, concepts of history, and worldviews are fundamentally different. And furthermore, not only do
you
not understand
us,
but
we
don’t understand
you
either, and, frankly speaking, we don’t have much interest in understanding. I mean real understanding—that’s virtually impossible. When I went to the Prosperous China Conference, I finally realized that if the intellectual elites of these three places are so different, the common people will be even more so. This was a great help to my later thinking about Taiwan and Hong Kong.”

I’d lived in all three of these places and understood what he was saying. It was rather remarkable that he had only to attend one Prosperous China Conference to pick up on this difference.

“The last couple of years the elites of Taiwan and Hong Kong have all been obediently learning from the mainland,” I said.

“It is not easy for outsiders to understand Chinese affairs,” he responded.

We must have been speeding, because just then a traffic cop pulled us over. I was thinking that this cop didn’t know what was good for him. I watched He Dongsheng bring the car to a stop while talking into his cell phone. “I’m at Gongti East Road, almost at Xindong Road—okay.”

Then he just hung up his cell phone while a very fat traffic cop asked him for his driving licence. He didn’t respond, and when the cop asked him again he simply said, “Wait a minute,” without even giving him a glance. I could see that the traffic cop was about to lose his temper, but fortunately just then he received a phone call. As the cop answered his phone, He Dongsheng started his engine and drove off. “My secretary will handle it,” he said.

I thought his secretary must have received many late-night calls like this one—then he has to clean up the mess. Being a big shot’s secretary is a hell of a hard job.

After all that, He Dongsheng didn’t say another word. I was a little bit sorry because I was enjoying his lectures. To tell the truth, I rather liked this insomniac Party and national leader.

One morning after May 1, when I turned on my computer, I saw I had an e-mail from
wudaokoupengyou,
“Wudaokou friend.” I always used to delete any e-mails from unknown addresses straight away so I wouldn’t get a computer virus, but recently I’d been opening all of them to see who they were from. As I expected,
wudaokoupengyou
was Little Xi.

She was asking me to wait for her in front of the open-air farmers’ market near Gongti South Gate.

I always like to browse around these farmers’ markets. The north China seasons are quite distinct and have different fruits and vegetables. You can see this most clearly in the farmers’ markets—not to mention that the produce is far fresher than in the supermarkets. Farmers’ markets make me feel more like I’m making contact with the common people. You can’t avoid making contact with them when people crowd around you, pushing and shoving. If you block their path, those big Aunties and Uncles will push you right out of the way with their bags full of vegetables.

That day, as I waited, I was getting a little worried. Little Xi was already over half an hour late. The Beijing administrative authorities are not especially reasonable and would allow this farmers’ market to stay open only until ten a.m. It was almost that already when I heard Little Xi call me. “Lao Chen!”

I turned around to see her smiling and looking quite happy. “You made it!” I said.

“I’m here!” she answered.

She was carrying a canvas bag. “Wait here while I go in and buy some vegetables.”

“No, I’ll go with you.”

At ten minutes to closing time, the market was extremely crowded. I followed behind Little Xi. When she moved I moved, and when she stopped I stopped. I felt like I was always rubbing against her and I was conscious of her scent. But she was absorbed in haggling over prices, making her selections, paying and receiving change, and then shouldering her way through the crush of people on to the next stall. The ten minutes flew by quickly in this way and I felt a kind of unself-consciousness that I had not felt in a very long time.

In the e-mail Little Xi had said that she wanted to come to my place and cook me a meal, and that was something I was very much looking forward to.

“All we can eat today are vegetables and fruit,” Little Xi said as we left the market.

“That’s fine by me,” I said.

“You have rice at home, don’t you?” she asked.

I told her that I did.

I actually hadn’t had any when I received her e-mail, but then I’d rushed over to Carrefour’s and bought rice, cooking oil, spices, chicken, beef, and lamb. I even bought some kitchen utensils. I guessed that Little Xi would want to get some vegetables at the farmers’ market.

“Were you worried when I made you wait?” she asked.

“Not really,” I lied.

“I had to get rid of those guys who follow me,” Little Xi said with a marked change in tone.

On the way, she told me all the many things she had done in order to see me. A few days ago she’d been all around looking at houses as though she were intending to move. Finally she found a small furnished room in one of those old dilapidated 1970s Soviet-style block buildings. This morning she’d met with the landlord, moved a trunk full of things in, and paid the rent. Then she took a canvas bag and said she was going shopping.

She figured that one of the two men following her would remain behind to talk to the landlord about installing a bugging device while she was out. It was because her previous landlord suddenly changed his attitude toward her that she learned she was being followed and listened in on. The second guy might not follow her either, because she had just paid the rent and would be coming back from the supermarket soon. Even if he did follow her, there were two entrances and exits to the Jingkelong supermarket, so she could still give him the slip. But she had always pretended that she didn’t know they were watching her, and so they were not especially vigilant.

The more she talked, the more alarmed I became. I thought perhaps she was being oversensitive or overimaginative, but then, she really could be under surveillance. Didn’t I see those smokers that day in the National Art Museum garden?

“Are you certain no one is following you?”

She stopped, turned to look behind her, and to the left and right. “You see, nobody there.”

We were standing on the wide-open Xindong Road and saw there was no one in sight. I felt quite ashamed. Little Xi had gone to so much effort to see me, but I was worried only about her getting me into trouble.

“What’s wrong? Relax, there’s no problem,” she said.

“Little Xi, what are you going to do?” I asked as we stood there on the pavement.

“I’ll certainly do
something,
” she quipped. “Let’s see, maybe I’ll leave Beijing this afternoon.”

I stopped for a moment, expressionless and a little stunned.

“You want to eat, or what?” she said with a grin.

We started walking again toward Happiness Village Number Two.

It was a warm spring day and the air was filled with the scent of locust-tree blossoms. They gave off a powerful, sensual aroma that made me feel an intense love. All I wanted to say was “Little Xi, let’s be together, let’s stop tormenting ourselves, and let’s just have a good life together.”

But I didn’t dare say it. I didn’t have the guts.

Little Xi worked quickly and skillfully in the kitchen while I stood beside her, clumsily assisting. She’d taken off her jacket and I could see the uneven scar tissue on her shoulder where she had been hit by the army jeep. She really is a good person, despite her drawbacks, I thought to myself.

“Lao Chen, our old friends have all changed now,” she said suddenly while she was chopping the bok choy.

I remembered that she had said something similar that day in the park. So I asked her, “How have they changed? Tell me how.”

“They’ve become … they’ve all become very satisfied,” she said after a short pause. “Lao Chen, are you satisfied?”

I felt she was testing me, so I asked her, “Little Xi, why are
you
so dissatisfied?”

This really was our conversation.

Little Xi paused, expressionless for a moment, and then challenged me in turn. “Lao Chen, do you remember how it felt back then? When you were here, in 1989, when I had the old restaurant in Wudaokou with my mother? And later in the 1990s, when we opened up the new restaurant—do you remember what we talked about? Do you remember why we were angry, why we struggled, what our ideals were? Do you remember, Lao Chen?”

And I asked her back tenderly, “Little Xi, why can’t you forget? This is a different age.”

She looked at me with an expression of vague disappointment, and after a while she said, “I’ve already forgotten too much. When I was locked up in that mental hospital for so long, I forgot so many things. I don’t want to forget anymore.”

Just as I wanted to ask more questions, Little Xi seemed to want to drop the subject. “Let’s just eat lunch,” she said, and lowered her head to continue chopping the bok choy.

When lunch was served, Little Xi was still relaxed, but she had already come to a conclusion about me—I was one of those people around her who had changed.

Just before eating, she took her medicine and told me quite frankly, “It’s an antidepressant the shrink gave me, but I don’t think it does any good. When I finish this batch, I’m not going to take any more.”

I told her how good I thought her shredded potatoes with chili peppers and bok choy with vinegar were. She said it was really great to be able to cook me a meal. But really, I sensed that she was saying good-bye.

At the kitchen table, I decided to make a final attempt to redeem myself in her eyes. I now had an idea of what she was thinking. She was feeling that everyone around her was different and she was the only one who was still angry. I sounded her out. “You know, Little Xi, some people are better at pretending about life, and pretending is a good way to protect their real selves.” When I saw her eyes light up, I knew I’d hit on something.

“Obviously, if you pretend for a long time, then you’re not going to be able to distinguish between what is true and what is fake,” I continued. Little Xi listened quietly.

I followed this line of argument, making it up as I went along. “Lu Xun said that some people are nostalgic for a ‘lost good hell’ because there’ll always be a bad hell that’s worse than that lost good hell. That goes without saying. But between a good hell and a counterfeit paradise, which one will people choose? No matter what you might say, many people will believe that a counterfeit paradise is better than a good hell. They know perfectly well it’s a counterfeit paradise, but they don’t dare expose it. As time goes by, they will even forget that it
is
a fake paradise. They start arguing in defense of this fake paradise, asserting that it is actually the only paradise. But there’s always a small number of people, even if they are only an extremely small minority, who will choose the good hell no matter how painful it is, because in the good hell at least everyone is fully aware that they are living in hell.”

I wasn’t sure what exactly I was trying to say, but the more I spoke, the more I felt I was making good sense. Little Xi listened attentively. On the mainland, if you mention Lu Xun, a writer some liken to Dickens or even Joyce, it will strike a chord with people of a certain age and education. At the very least, what I said had brought Little Xi closer to me.

She looked thoughtful for a while before asking, “Are you saying that I’m too nostalgic for my lost good hell, and therefore I’m refusing to accept our counterfeit paradise?”

“I’m talking about two choices,” I answered rather disingenuously.

“Between a good hell and a fake paradise—which one would
you
choose?” she asked.

She had gone straight to the heart of it. She had asked the key question, and I had to be particularly careful. I wanted to bring us closer together, so I equivocated. “Perhaps … if necessary … I’d be willing to try considering the good hell.”