Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [18]
Jian Lin is a workaholic, but two years ago he started a new custom. He began to have dinner with his friends and family and afterward show an old movie—on the first Sunday of every month. At first his movie evenings were very popular, but gradually his relatives cried off, and then his friends wanted to choose the films they liked before they would show up. By the start of winter, Jian Lin and I were often the only ones there.
After the first time a friend took me along, I became a regular. I had a lot of spare time, I lived fairly nearby and I loved to watch those post-1949 Chinese films. I hadn’t got to see them in Hong Kong and Taiwan, so it was a new experience for me.
I was the only one who never missed a screening. Jian and I didn’t have any connections on any other level—I didn’t want anything from him and, because I wasn’t especially important, he didn’t have to be on his guard with me; I was the best sort of person for him to have a friendly social relationship with. In the winter, when there was just the two of us, Jian would bring out a bottle of red wine—always the finest-vintage ’82, ’85, or ’89 Bordeaux. Sometimes we’d go through two bottles in one evening. The Taiwanese had started drinking high-quality red wines fifteen years before the mainlanders got in on the act, so I could join him in appreciating his wines, and I would willingly listen to him showing off the enological knowledge he had picked up in books. He had found an ideal wine-drinking partner. But whenever a crowd turned up, I noticed he was pretty parsimonious—for them, he brought out a few bottles of only ordinary vintage. This, to me, indicated our greater friendship.
The only thing that concerned me was that I couldn’t pay him back. That made me feel like a freeloading literary type. Jian Lin always served Bordeaux, never Burgundy. After looking up Burgundy on the net, I told him about it; he seemed curious and wanted to know more. I hit on a plan. When I want back to Taiwan for the Lunar New Year, I looked up my secondary school classmate Ah Yuan.
Ah Yuan is the largest collector of Burgundy in Taiwan. When the global economy hit the skids, Ah Yuan’s wealth shrunk, but his Burgundy collection was still intact. I had never asked Ah Yuan for anything before, but this time I asked him to give me two bottles of good Burgundy. He gladly told me to take a few more bottles, but I declined because of customs duties. I took just two bottles, one white wine and one red.
I sent Jian Lin a short message asking him what was showing the following Sunday. I told him I was bringing a Bâtard-Montrachet 1989 and a Romanée-Conti 1999.
When I took the two bottles over to the restaurant, there weren’t any other guests, just me and Jian Lin. He carefully examined them, exclaiming, “Great wine, great wine … Let’s open it and let it breathe.”
“What’s on tonight?” I asked while he gently poured the red wine into a crystal decanter.
It was the 1964 film Never Forget Class Struggle, directed by Xie Tieli. “Have you ever seen it?” he asked.
“Are you kidding? If I’d seen it, Chiang Kai-shek would have had me shot.”
“Those were good times, 1964,” Jian Lin said. “The Three Years Natural Disaster was over, people’s living conditions were beginning to recover, and the Cultural Revolution had not yet started. But in 1959 Old Mao was unhappy. He had nothing