Pivot Point

Short Story by Xujun Eberlein
(Published in Agni 62)

1.

The first time Lanbo asked me to wait for him, it was Su Ting’s poem that flashed through my mind: “Wait for love to walk into the sun.” I want to travel with you to every mountain every water, I told him, and he said, when the time comes, any place is a good place.

Let’s wait for a pivot point, he said. He looked as determined to survive divorce as Rambo was to survive war. “Lanbo” was the Chinese pronunciation of “Rambo.” Our mutual friend Old Brother gave him this nickname when American movies gushed through the newly opened gate of China, together with Rambo-style jackets and sand-washed Lee jeans.

Meanwhile, ashamed of a daughter yet to be betrothed at age 26, my mother begged all her acquaintances to match-make for me. I saw in her eyes the fear that I would soon be joining the large crowd of “aging youth,” a peculiar 1980s label for leftover urban women unable to find mates. During the Cultural Revolution, an entire generation had been sent to the countryside, and spent the best part of their youth in alien fields, determined not to marry until allowed back to the city. When they did finally return, the men went for younger girls, while their female peers were left to age alone. It was like the aftermath of war, except that the men were wed instead of dead.

But I never considered myself one of those women – after all, I had been in the countryside for only a couple of years, having been caught in the epilogue of that movement.

As a result of my mother’s exertions, it was not uncommon for a stranger (usually with a college degree) to intrude upon my weekend solitude. So on a Sunday morning, when an immaculately dressed young man arrived with an old man, I dutifully pulled out chairs and offered them tea in the living room, then politely excused myself and retreated to my bedroom. But the young man followed me and held open my door as I tried to shut it. “I came to see you, not your parents,” he said, clamping on. His boldness raised my curiosity. “What for?” I asked. He glanced at the book in my hand – the Chinese translation of Prigogine’s Exploring Complexity, and said, “I’ve long heard of your overflowing brilliance. I would like to have a chat with you.”

Fine then. I liked challenges from men. Our chat started easily but soon our lips became spears and our tongues turned to swords. We argued over whether Prigogine the Nobel laureate’s new theory settled the famous debate between Einstein and Bohr – about whether God played dice with the universe. When the young man left with his uncle a few hours later, he looked impressed and I’d had good fun.

I did not expect to hear from this man again, so when his remarks filtered back through his uncle to my mother and then to me, I was not at all pleased: “She is too high to reach.” Of course we all knew too well this unwritten Chinese convention, implying that I was a woman not worth dating. After all, “No talent is the virtue of a woman,” Confucius had said thousands of years ago, and no one had forgotten it since.

I was not as smart when I felt insulted. I looked up the address of his institute in the phonebook, walked to a pay phone on the street below his office building, and dialed his number. Since he had come to chat with me out of curiosity the first time, I presumed he would come to meet me this time as well. And he did come, but hardly looking as relaxed as when we’d first met. We stood on the sidewalk staring at each other, a bus passing by and bureaucratically throwing dirt on us. “What is it?” he asked. “What on earth makes you look down at me?” I snapped back. That, producing the opposite of my intended effect, cleared up his puzzlement as if I had just granted him an advantage. “I am honestly looking up at you,” he replied in an innocent and matter-of-fact manner, “but wouldn’t it be too tiring to look up to my wife everyday?” The frankness in his answer muted me. What was I doing? Begging to be his wife? Or begging him to understand a different kind of woman? Either way I was doomed to fail. In shame I turned and left. “You’ll make a worthy friend, though,” he said to my back.

At home, I looked around my simple bedroom for anything feminine– white bedspread, black-white checkered quilt, a gray calligraphy penholder and an untidy pile of books on a worn, nut-brown desk. There was no hint of gender anywhere. I sat dazed on the edge of my bed. This was the ironic side of being an educated Chinese woman. Your learnedness scared most men away. They just wanted their women cute, obedient, and good at posing.

Fortunately – or unfortunately – Lanbo was not one of them. “I’ve never met a woman as real as you are,” he said, fixing a long look at me until I turned away with embarrassment. “Can’t say you are really pretty,” he added, “but you surely warrant a long look.”

2.

My mother chose not to acknowledge that one hand can’t clap. When she began to view every bachelor as a suitable son-in-law, I finally had to tell her I would rather be in love with a man I couldn’t marry than marry a man I didn’t love. As if I had a choice.

My sensitive mother was at once alarmed. She asked me if there in fact was such a man; if so what man was he, a worker or a cadre? In Western terms this was equivalent to asking “Blue collar or white collar?” Until she asked, the question had never entered my mind. It wasn’t his fault that he did not have a middle-school diploma – no one in his generation did. It was the Cultural Revolution for Mao’s sake! Despite my college education, he had read many more prohibited books than I, including the black market translation of Lady Chatterley’s Lover. Once, before we became lovers, I visited the warehouse where he worked and found his boss requesting that he attend an “anti-illiteracy” class. He and I made fun of that episode nonstop until it got boring.

I was afraid my mother’s next question would be why I loved him. What could I tell her? That he could mimic Rambo as vividly as he emulated Chairman Mao and made me laugh? That I enjoyed his coarse palm stroking my bare skin in the dark?

But my mother had already wrapped her fist around the core: he was a married man. She did not say much, for which I considered myself lucky. Who’d have expected her stern face when he greeted her on his first visit! Lanbo was so embarrassed that he lost all his wit; he just lowered his head and left. I wept bitterly and refused to talk to my mother for weeks, thinking a thousand times about leaving home, but having nowhere to go. Houses were owned and assigned by the government, and for many years there had been no extra houses to assign to anyone. In the city it was not unusual for a young married couple to share a single room with their parents, each listening to every squeak from the other bed. I was the envy of many because I had my own bedroom in my parents’ house.

Thus I stayed, just not talking to my mother, while she, unable to bear my silence, cooked my favorite dishes – her way of making peace with me.

And Lanbo came again. There was no other safe place for us: the eyes of China’s masses were nets above and snares below. He knocked on the front door, not greeting whoever opened it, and kept his eyes to the floor as he sliced through the thistles and thorns of my family’s gazes. As soon as he stepped into my bedroom, he deadbolted the door. When his generous warm lips touched mine I forgot all else. Tips of two tongues twirling and thrusting, we sucked each other out of breath, letting go to take air then tightly wrapping onto each other again. We could never have enough, as if our tongues were doing the lovemaking that our bodies were not permitted.

3.

I went to see Old Brother, one of the few friends who knew about our predicament. It was in his house that I had first met Lanbo. But I could not bring myself to say anything. How could I speak such unspeakable things to a man friend?

You are being serious again, Old Brother said, I told you not to be so serious. You won’t be suffering if you are not serious. No matter how serious you are, it is nothing but an affair, a scandal.

But it is love, I mumbled.

No, it’s sexual desire, Old Brother said. Grow up, little girl. Where is your intelligence when it comes to these matters?

I will prove to you it’s love, I thought. But I didn’t say it. Instead came these words: Why can’t he divorce?

Old Brother sighed. It’s not that he doesn’t want a divorce. He can’t. Going through the divorce process is like peeling a man’s skin alive. Look around – any woman who wants a divorce can get one. Have you ever heard of a man succeeding if he wants a divorce? You think he likes to go home? After years of marriage, men have not even a tiny bit of desire left toward their wives. All are like this.

I didn’t like the word “desire”; it had a filthy sound that blasphemed love. I gaped at Old Brother, my fool’s mouth hanging open. After a while I asked if what he said was true. Yes, all husbands are like this, Old Brother confirmed. Then he added in a teasing – or perhaps truthful –tone, “It could’ve been me instead of him.”

I walked slowly out of Old Brother’s house and did not go home right away. Instead, I took the stone path down hundreds of steps to the river. On the rocky beach where Lanbo and I once sat snuggling in the dark, I sauntered back and forth. What did she look like? How did she feel? From Lanbo’s occasional words about her, she must have been a kind and obedient wife. She was a mother who loved her son more than her own life. Sometimes, with a long sigh, Lanbo would wish she were a shrew. If so, things for us would be easier, he’d said.

Perhaps she sensed something but kept silent, as a wise wife would. Perhaps she convinced herself not to believe the rumors. She could endure anything to keep her husband and her family, just as I endured the pain of our love. It is not without reason that the Chinese character for “endure” is a knife atop a heart.

At the gate of my parents’ apartment building, a figure stood in the shadows.

“I have waited for two hours,” he said hoarsely.

I wanted to collapse into his arms but I had to restrain myself. There were eyes peering from at least one window. Together we walked up the stairs, and passed through the gloomy gazes of my parents. As I closed my bedroom door behind us, my father loudly scolded my younger sister. You should have morals! You should know shame! I turned my stereo to the highest volume, but Lanbo turned it back to normal.

He sat there, stupefied. I don’t demand a divorce, I said, putting a smile on my face. I want only your love. Marriage is just paper, I don’t care. Look at the bright side – we have every weekday evening together.

I felt relieved, even a bit noble.

He grabbed me and held me so tight that I lost my breath. When he finally looked up, his eyes were glistening with tears. Then his hoarse voice again:

“I must marry you in this life!”

4.

When life began again in spring, he didn’t go home one Sunday. We climbed up a wild hill in the Southern Mountains and sat in the meadow. The blinding sunshine in this uninhabited place pleased Lanbo so much that he lay facing the sky, four limbs spread on the grass. Eyes closed, he told his “insert” stories: walking days and nights along a river to fish; lying naked on the beach under the sun when he got tired. His voice intimate, warm, and far, as if in a dream. I took out an issue of World Science from my bag - there was no more perfect moment to read.

Just when I turned the page to an interesting article, he knocked the magazine out of my hands, pulled me down on the grass, and yelled with joy, “Damn you reading at such a moment!” So we lay shoulder to shoulder on the grass and narrowed our eyes to squint at the blue sky, white clouds, and the golden sun spotting through the leaves of a big banyan tree. He asked what I was reading. Karl Popper, I said. What did that foreigner have to say? Oh why don’t you read it too, I sat up and tried to reach the magazine. He pinned my arm down. I want you to tell me, he said. Okay, the old man said science is not truth, rather it’s the ever changing conjecture of human rationality. Science advances by deductive falsification instead of verification. He turned and eyed me for a moment. So, he said, what we learned in school is all wrong? Our way of thinking is all wrong? I was surprised by his question and gave it careful thought. He was right – Popper’s theory was indeed different from the historical materialism taught. How come I felt Popper to be so naturally logical and did not even notice its anti-materialism?

Who cares about Popper or Pepper, he laughed, I’ll just think the way I do. Does philosophy serve any damn purpose? I’m better off without it! You’re sexier without it! Then with the suddenness of a thunderbolt, he sat up and kicked the magazine, which made several somersaults rolling down the hill. I widened my eyes and watched helplessly as it disappeared from sight. “It’s especially annoying when a woman talks philosophy!” he added. I was upset at first, then all of a sudden felt ashamed at the redundancy of thought.

He placed his wide callused palm on my breast. The hand paused, then tightened its grip. He glanced to the left, the right, the rear, then began to unbuckle my jeans. I closed my eyes. Tree leaves prattled garrulously, and a cool breeze gently stroked my belly.

Flap! A sound, heavy as a rock falling, shook my eyes open. Lanbo was gazing at something above, his face blanched, his fingers frozen on his zipper.

I propped my head up and turned to see a pair of big dirty bare feet on the grass.

“I am People’s Militia!” the dark-faced peasant announced, imposing his rifle on Lanbo. “Get up, go with me to the Commune!”

Lanbo got up with effort, his pant legs trembling in the wind. He said, “Listen, brother, I didn’t do anything.”

“Shut up, rapist! I have been watching you from up in the tree for quite a while!”

But you jumped down a little too soon, I thought.

“He’s not a rapist,” I said. “He’s my boyfriend.” The word “boyfriend” came from my lips with euphoria. I had never had a chance to use it before.

The peasant blinked, apparently baffled by my ingratitude, and he refused to address me. He shouted at Lanbo: “Then you are a thug! No good man will do this thing in the wild. Move, go with me now!”

Lanbo fished a bill out of his pant pocket. “Brother, get some cigarettes for yourself.”

“Don’t insult me with your stinky money!” A slap hit Lanbo’s face with a crisp sound. I waited for Lanbo to strike back; instead he cupped his cheek. “I’ll go with you, but you let her go.” His voice came out with muffled heroism as he leered at the rifle’s black muzzle. He must have been picturing the torture and humiliation ahead, and himself holding my name unto his death.

“He’s my boyfriend! Are you deaf? He’s not a thug! I’m a government researcher!” I jumped up and yelled at the peasant. I took out my red work ID and pushed it into his face. “Can you see? Can you see? You insult and beat a government cadre! You are the thug!”

The peasant stared at me at a loss. I dragged Lanbo’s hand and said, “Let’s go! Who wants to talk to a thug!”

We sauntered away as casually as possible. After a hundred meters I looked back, the peasant still standing there watching us. As soon as we got out of his sight, though, Lanbo pulled his hand from mine. “Don’t let others see us like this,” he said.

He did not visit me for several days after that. When he showed up again neither of us mentioned the incident.

5.

Now we spent all our time within walls. Each weeknight between 7 and 10, Lanbo and I rendezvoused behind my bedroom door. Then he went back to sleep alone in his shabby dorm next to his warehouse while I tossed and turned in my queen bed longing for him. Each Saturday he took the long-distance bus back to his wife and son in a northern suburb, returning to work on Monday morning. We hadn’t had a night together since he broke my hymen over a year ago in a friend’s home, and our welcome there was long worn out. We couldn’t check into a hotel either - a marriage certificate and matching photo IDs were required.

So, more than anything else I wanted to have my own apartment. And as the Economic Reform unfolded, this goal – once unreachable – came within my grasp.

I worked for the Economics Research Center of the government, where I was building a comprehensive simulation model for our city’s development. Recently, for the first time in decades, our work unit had constructed a new apartment building for employees. When the assignment process for the new apartments began, a war also began. Each day a surfeit of people in their early 20s to late 40s descended on the housing office, and I found myself among them, abandoning my usual disdain for crowds.

A woman who processed data in my office was always ahead of me in line. A couple of years older and with more seniority, she too was single. “Horse face,” she was nicknamed because of her long chin. Only by smiling could she shorten her face into something close to normal, so she smiled a lot. In the housing office, though, she quarreled and begged loudly and nonstop, her chin longer than ever. When she didn’t get anywhere, she would look around to vent her frustration. This behavior became so predictable that I always managed to escape before her vulgar remarks fell on me, but a new colleague was less lucky. He had recently graduated from college, too new to have any hope for an apartment; I suspected he was only there to gain experiences for a future housing war. Horse Face jeered at him, practically neighing, and called him a “warty toad lusting after a swan’s flesh.”

After failed efforts to settle numerous fights, the authorities decided to score employees not by their age but by total working years plus marital status. Fortunately, the time I had spent as an insert in the countryside and as a student at the university counted, giving me six additional years, and putting me last on the list of lucky employees, the only one unmarried. Horse Face did not get in. It turned out that years ago she had avoided the countryside with a fake diagnosis of some strange disease, making her total working years fewer than mine. I was so thrilled at the thought of my own apartment that I woke up in the night giggling.

I told Lanbo the good news. He was skeptical. Happiness comes alone while misfortune loves company, he said, citing an adage. His words made me check back over years of my life, and I felt a bit easier when I found nothing that could be called happiness.

I went to the housing office as soon as they issued keys.

“You are not on the list,” the clerk said as he checked for my name.

“I am. The last one.” I smiled.

He looked again carefully and shook his head. He showed me the list. In place of my name was that of Horse Face.

“But her score was lower than mine!” I cried.

The man patiently took more papers from his drawer. Before he finished checking the scores, to my astonishment, two people walked in hand-in-hand: Horse Face dressed in bright pink, and Warty Toad in a western suit. Horse Face grinned like a blooming flower as she generously stuffed a handful of Double Happiness candies in my pocket.

It turned out that the two had gotten their marriage certificate the day before, raising Horse Face’s score above mine.

On their moving day, I stood in a far corner outside the new building, watching Horse Face and Warty Toad quarrelling and transporting furniture to the apartment that would have belonged to me, daydreaming the freedom that my own space would have brought, while silently cursing their dirty strategy. It would be too late when they found out how difficult it was to get rid of a marriage certificate, and that would be their punishment.

I angrily added a housing parameter to my simulation model. If I’d been alone, I would have chewed and swallowed the bitterness myself, then forgotten about it. Now I turned to Lanbo for consolation, calling and asking to meet him at my home right away. I had never before asked to see him during the workday. He slipped out of his warehouse and came to me. What happened? he asked. Nothing, I said, but could we have a night together? How about tonight? We haven’t been together for a long time, have we? My voice shivered.

I want to be with you too, he said, and held my face in his palms; but we have no place. You know we have no place to go.

Could you please find a place? Please?

He sat down and his head slumped. You know I can’t find one, he said. We can never have unrestrained sex in China.

My tears came without warning. I cried so hard that the sky darkened and the floor sank. He sat with no words for me. When I had cried myself out, he told me to take care, and went back to work.

6.

Then came a pivot point.

My parents, who were always traveling on business when I was little but never again after I grew up, went to visit my older sister, who lived with her husband in a neighboring city. That gave us three full days. Lanbo and I took sick leave from work, and we brought in plenty of food so we wouldn’t need to set foot outside. We planned to ignore any knocks on the door.

The first night it took him several hours to overcome his humiliation before he could undress in my parents’ house. Faint sounds next door and footsteps upstairs alarmed him even though the door was bolted from the inside. All the while remaining dressed, he held my nude body tightly in his arms. Vast heat from his chest penetrated his clothes and enveloped me, his prickly chin pressing against my soft cheek. His palms roamed my body, sometimes gentle, sometimes uneasy, until his strokes lulled me to sleep. I curled like a kitten against his broad chest. In the middle of the night he attacked me with colossal emotion. Half asleep, half awake, I lifted my face to the almost unbearable pleasure. Even with my eyes closed in the darkness I could feel his, bright and shining. His male softness and rudeness poised in the rise and fall of his body. I told him I wanted to die at that moment; in such pleasure, death did not seem frightening. Don’t be silly, he said, smiling. I murmured, then let us do it all night, and he laughed quietly.

The next day we stayed in bed except to fill our empty stomachs and to go to the bathroom. The second night was just as joyful, and smoother, but hard knocks on the door early in the morning scared us witless. We were frozen until I recognized Old Brother’s voice and reluctantly opened the door. He walked to Lanbo and said venomously, “You really are here! I’ve looked for you everywhere! Your wife is in the hospital! In critical condition!” He threw these words at Lanbo without looking at me, as if to avoid something.

Lanbo quickly dressed and left with Old Brother, saying little, shooting me a glance I could not decipher.

He disappeared for two weeks. When he was not with me I thought a lot – mostly about whether his wife would be all right or not, or rather, whether she might die. I could hardly tell if I was hoping for or afraid of her death. It was a very long two weeks.

When he finally showed up again, he said simply, “She’s better now.” He told me she had appendicitis, though I hadn’t asked. Then he sat numb like a wooden log, no words and no movement, for some while.

“Do you want me to tell you the truth?” He lifted his eyes, stared at me, and, not waiting for my answer, said, “I must tell you…Who else can I tell otherwise? I must tell you this…”

Then he said:

“There was a moment, by her hospital bed, I wished her to die…but only for a few seconds, I swear…” He grabbed his hair with one hand, crying out lowly like a wolf:

“My heavens, what man have I become.”

His words emptied a bottle of five spices in my stomach. I did not know what woman I had become either. I did not know what was changing us.

That was how the pivot point passed. Life went on as usual after that: he still spent every weekday evening with me and went home every weekend.

And I gloomily added another parameter, the stableness of family, to my model.

7.

A philosopher friend came to say goodbye to me after being accepted by a small university in the U.S. to study for his Ph.D. He was the one who’d once asked my motivation for living. His was responsibility, he said, and I said mine was curiosity. Paradox! He’d warned, using a word that we mathematicians try hard to avoid. You are longing for tomorrow, but you should be rejecting tomorrow. You say you want to live and yet you are looking to death? Doesn’t tomorrow mean one day closer to death?

During his visit he told me a true story that went like this:

A man stood managing his breathing in the exercise of qi gong. In the half-ring of spectators surrounding him were white-bearded scholars, government officials, newspaper reporters, authoritative experts, and skeptical scientists.

Not far from the man was a solid brick wall.

The man started to walk toward it. Unblinking gazes followed his steps. He walked forward slowly and continued through the bricks.

"What did you feel when you went through?" an expert asked. The man said he saw tiny cracks that expanded wide enough to let him in.

My philosopher friend was a steady, taciturn scholar. He was there in the half-ring of spectators. I asked him if he really believed what he saw – an apparently redundant question.

He explained that in the “super-functional” man's space – a space overlapped with ours, the man’s thoughts controlled material; in our space it was the opposite. “Our mind is the prisoner of our body,” he said in his deep voice.

Later I would be bewitched reading a story about Wittgenstein. The world-famous philosopher once asked his students, “What would we say if I walk through this wall?” The students thought he was really going to do it, but of course he didn’t. He couldn’t. The question I had was, did my philosopher friend know this story about Wittgenstein before he witnessed a man going through a wall? If so, did Wittgenstein’s words impact his belief in what he saw at a subconscious level?

I told Lanbo the story about the super-functional man, careful not to use any philosophical terms. He said, “Nonsense. Walls just can’t be walked through.”

It was that simple and factual.

What was I in? A crisis that was neither war nor earthquake but an impasse where all was well and nothing could be done?

8.

So we waited for another pivot point. Each evening we met, we kissed, we quarreled, we chatted, we cried, like a true couple, except for the one thing that couples do. Yet I was so accustomed to his presence in my life that if he did not show up in the evening, I could not get any work done the whole next day.

I waited with him from winter to spring, from spring to summer. Winter had long gone, spring no longer returned, fall was here again; still he had not said anything to his wife.

One night in my bedroom we watched a movie on TV about a man living with a wife and four concubines in the 1920s. Lanbo commented with envy, “What a comfortable life!” “Not to me,” I said. He quickly changed the topic, and that raised my suspicion.

I designed a simple psychological test in my mind, then tried it on him.

“If the two of us run into a natural disaster on a mountain, like an avalanche or mudslide, what would you think first?”

“That won’t happen.”

“What if it does?”

“Run. One gets away, good. Two get away, better,” he said with no hesitation, then asked me with alarm, “What would you do?”

“I want to be with you, alive or dead.”

“Woman,” he said.

“I am just a supplement in your spare time, right?”

He didn’t answer. Storm clouds accumulated on his face while I asked again, spellbound.

“Ask such annoying things and you want me to come again?” he said, and took to his heels. His hand stopped on the doorknob. Then he turned to face me. “Am I really as bad as you thought?”

“Let’s run away,” I begged.

“Are you being impractical again?” he asked. “Where can we run? Besides, I don’t want to run. We can only wait, let time arrange everything.”

I took a long shower after he left, examining myself closely for the first time. I carefully massaged every part of my body, knowing it was as graceful and beautiful as ever. The body was still young; getting old was my heart. At this moment I felt, not just thought, that human life is such a rare thing, a treasure. But only if I could spend it in a style of my own choosing could I say I was treasuring it. I saw such a lifestyle like the horizon— the harder I walked toward it, the further it receded.

The latest parameter I added was for lifestyle choice.

9.

As colorful lines folded and unfolded on my computer screen, forming grotesque shapes, my tapping on the keyboard became nervous and errors occurred more frequently. My heart pounded in anticipation. Following my clicks, the curves changed; regular oscillations gradually became irregular and unpredictable. At last, the entire screen was a fantastic, unrecognizable chaos.

Success!

I found several parameters whose smallest changes were magnified by the system to the extent that chaos ensued. My model revealed the stochastic nature of a social economic system, as well as its causes. For the first time in China, human behavioral factors were introduced into an economic model. A myriad of choices, the number of people making choices, and the coordination of these choices eventually led to the system’s high unpredictability.

To my surprise, my simulation model was admired and loudly praised even before its official review. What’s more, a few reformists in the city government who advocated complete open-market economy regarded my model as scientific proof of their opinions, which showed how much the politicians knew about science. The mayor, a relatively young reformist leader in his early fifties, even received me in his office and promised to help me obtain a significant scientific award. He asked my age, which reminded me I was one day short of thirty. Good, good, the mayor said, the age of standing. His juggling of allusion did not impress me. Everyone knew the saying from Confucius: “Standing at thirty, unconfused at forty, knowing destiny at fifty.”

“Young intellectuals are our Party’s treasure; we must take care of them well.” After giving instructions to his male secretary, who faithfully nodded while taking down his boss’s words, the mayor turned to ask if I had any personal requests.

I said I wished that unmarried and married women had equal rights to an apartment.

“You don’t have an apartment?” The mayor looked surprised. “My apologies,” he said seriously. “An outstanding comrade like you deserves special consideration. We will resolve the issue for you. Believe in the Party!”

I felt more detached than I would have expected. It was Saturday morning. Lanbo wouldn’t come to me today.

I returned home to find a letter from my philosopher friend, urging me to go west. Intelligent women like you have better lives here, he wrote. There is this school called MIT, the best science school on earth. You should try to get in at any cost.

That didn’t sound appealing to me. Restarting life in a foreign country at thirty? And what about Lanbo?

Really, it was quite funny when I thought about it: “go west” is a folk adage meaning “go to die,” as Buddhists believe Paradise is in the west, which one can only reach in the afterlife. I placed the letter under my table lamp.

I was tired; I wanted to take a nap. Then I remembered tomorrow.

I had forgot to tell Lanbo about my birthday. Men don’t remember things like this. Maybe, just maybe, he would make an exception and spend this weekend with me?

I rolled off the bed and threw on a jacket. I ran out the door and down the stairs.

I hoped he was still in his office. At the public phone desk in a small retail store I dialed once, twice, and again. The cold metal dial was getting warm; still no one answered at the other end. The only sound was the stubborn long “du--, du—”…

I dragged my legs home. So he had left in the morning. He was already there by now, with his good-tempered wife and adorable young son. Tonight, he would attend to her lovingly.

My room was empty and cold. I couldn’t bear it. I walked down to the street again, hoping to absorb some warmth from the bustle of the crowd.

Row upon row of retail clothing and merchandise stores were all piping music into the street to attract customers. The reform and the opening-up policy had made everyone thirsty for money. The entire city seemed devoted to private business now. I idled away my time here and there. Above a theater, a giant ad for the Russian movie “Moscow Doesn’t Believe in Tears” bore down on me. Hanging on the sides of many store doors were opposing couplets written on scrolls of red paper, manufacturing a holiday atmosphere. It took me a few moments to remember this was September, 1987, and the 66th birthday of the Party was coming soon. What was there to celebrate?

At 2:30 pm I called again from another public phone. The familiar voice spoke after the first ring. For a moment all my misgivings gave way to joy.

“The mayor promised me an apartment,” I said.

“Yeah, right,” he said.

I paused. “Could you stay here tonight?” I asked softly. “Tomorrow is my birthday.”

He was quiet.

“Please?”

“Sorry. No. Don’t be too selfish. I try very hard to please both…Hello? Are you there?”

I was quiet.

“Hello?”

“Why not?”

“You know I’ll be back Monday. All right?”

“How about Sunday night?” I backed up a step.

“Can’t say. But don’t feel bad. Actually, you can compute this for yourself – I have been spending far more days with you than with her.”

Slowly I put down the phone.

He wanted me to calculate the days? The store clerk stopped me as I was walking out. “Four fen!” she demanded. I dropped a handful of coins in her palm without counting.

So many people in the streets. From time to time a lone woman my age or slightly older – an aged youth – drifted toward me. More often I saw young couples with little boys. My gaze followed the boys long after they passed.

Counting who had gotten more days? I thought my reeducation had ended in the 70’s. I thought love was so different from politics.

I wandered around until after seven. It was getting dark. By the time I got home, my parents were having supper. My younger sister was out with her boyfriend. My mother said they had waited for me for quite a while and she had kept my meal warm in the wok on the stove. “Come on quick, have supper with us,” she called. My heart softened a bit. I said I had eaten, and walked into my bedroom without another look at them. I bolted the door from the inside and turned on my stereo: Shostakovich’s Seventh Symphony, music both uplifting and heavyhearted, as if he had written it just for me.

Next to the stereo, the neat pile of pages reminded me of the review meeting next week. Somehow, thinking of my model made me feel a bit reluctant to part from this world. But I quickly overcame this weakness.

The simplest way was to use the electrical outlet where my table lamp was plugged in, though I had to be very gentle – avoid making any noise that might frighten my parents. Even over the sound of my stereo, I could hear their small talk at the dining table.

I unplugged the lamp and measured my two little fingers against the holes in the outlet. Seemed the right size.

I stood and tried to think of anything I might need to take care of. Nothing came to mind. All right, I said to myself.

As my fingers touched the black plastic shell of the bell-shaped outlet, a thought floated into my mind. Since there was such an era as now, when stupid and pretentious women were the happiest, if only by chance, there should be another era in which a woman like me could have a good life. Yes, there would be such an era. There had to be one.

This thought delighted me so much that I withdrew my arms and grinned. Immediately I saw my slightly open mouth and happily curved facial lines in the mirror. My expression was inconsistent with the seriousness of whatever I was trying to do. Like I would be able to wait for that era to come! I closed my lips tight and knitted my eyebrows together, remembering Lanbo’s comment that I looked prettiest when I wept or frowned. But I had no desire to weep right now. I was thinking only of how thrilling a motion it would be when my fingers, one from each hand, poked into the two black holes. In one move, just one move, the disordered electrons would form an orderly current between the positive and negative ends, with blue sparks starting from one finger, flowing through the heart, and closing the loop at the other finger. Then the oblivion of the west. The whole process probably would take less than a second, although I didn’t know that for sure. Very simple, wasn’t it? Just that simple like my first night with him, a moment I had regarded in the past as the most important, but hadn’t it just passed in a blink?

Right at this moment an uncontrollable desire throbbed from my lower body and surged up. My nakedness coincided with a man’s so tightly there was no layer of air separating us. His powerful male end erected passionately in my unselfish and joyful containment – I wanted to go mad I wanted to cry I wanted to die. No moment ever provides higher satisfaction than this. The simplest, most primitive satisfaction. The man’s face was an unknown one. But did that matter?

As I reached toward the outlet, my last worry was whether 220 volts were enough. In a clumsy move I knocked the unplugged lamp from the table and it clattered to the floor. My philosopher friend’s letter was exposed where the lamp had been.

Go west.

Go West?

(Published in Agni 62, Fall 2005)

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Photograph by Xu Ruo-feng