Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [83]
At first he thought he would play it cool, so he wrote a post saying that he was traveling with a friend in Henan and visiting Jiaozuo to buy Chinese medicines. He disingenuously asked her if she was still in Beijing and said he’d like to meet up with her. He probably thought that she would respond to this by saying what a coincidence that she was also in Jiaozuo, and why didn’t he meet her for dinner at the Yiwan Hotel? Fortunately he didn’t send this message. Who was he going to fool? It was too ridiculous.
So he wrote a different message, apologizing for when Wen Lan had suddenly appeared, and saying he hoped he could see Little Xi. To such a message, however, she would probably just respond that it was no big deal, no need to apologize, never mind, see you sometime when we have the time. He still would not get to see her—given her assumptions about his relationship with Wen Lan, she probably would not want to be alone with Lao Chen again.
He would have to tell her the honest truth—that he had come to Jiaozuo in Wen County deliberately to see her … that he wanted to see her because he wanted to be with her. He decided it was time to declare his love. If he could do so openly, everything else could be talked through in more detail later. Some twenty years earlier, he had fallen in love with Wen Lan and she had hurt him badly. For many years after that, he didn’t dare have any feelings for anyone else. To open his heart now to Little Xi would certainly take a great deal of courage. Lao Chen sat there blankly for two hours before he finally wrote a nearly five-thousand-word post titled “A letter to maizibusi from someone who is not a stranger,” in which he poured out his thoughts and feelings in fast-flowing prose.
The first line of Chen’s letter was: “When you open this letter, I will be at the Modern Fuxi Internet Café on Yellow River Road in Warm Springs township, Wen County, Jiaozuo City …” Next he told her that after he’d met her at the Five Flavors restaurant in Wudaokou in the 1990s, he had always loved her. He’d never expressed himself at the time because she had so many male friends around her all the time and then later she had an English boyfriend. Still later, because he’d been hurt so badly he was afraid to ever try to have another serious relationship. Lao Chen described how he and Wen Lan had met, become engaged, how she’d dumped him, and how, twenty years later, he ran into her by chance as a French crystal chandelier.
Most importantly, he told her how very recently he had lost his heart to another woman whom he had not seen in a long time, how he had learned to get in touch with her, how he had waited for her reply, how they had met again, how he had lost contact with her again because of Ms. Wen’s barging in, how he had looked her up on the Internet, how he had followed a possibly unreliable lead and come to Henan, and how he had put the pieces of the puzzle together and learned that she was in Warm Springs—and that woman was Little Xi. Now he only hoped that she would give him a chance, would communicate with him, would give him time, in Henan, in Beijing, or anywhere else to prove his love. He had also brought along a friend who could help restore her memory.
Lao Chen even told Little Xi of his thoughts about death on the drive to Henan, that if he were to die in an accident, he hoped it would be while holding her hand and facing their last seconds of life together; or if he were to die a natural death, he hoped that she would be sitting at his bedside watching over him. He wanted to live out his last years with her.
Lao Chen wanted to post the letter as a comment on Little Xi’s blog, but it was much too long. He had to divide it into several smaller sections and post each one separately while leaving a notice that he had a blog on the Sina network where the entire letter could be read as a whole.
After Lao Chen had finished pouring his heart out, he sat very calmly in front of the computer and checked every