Fat Years - Chan Koonchung [9]
“That’s great, I knew it,” she went on. “When I saw you going down the stairs, I thought to myself, Lao Chen will understand. Then I sat there waiting for you to come back up the stairs.”
In Little Xi’s mind I’m probably a reasonable, mature, and fairly knowledgeable person.
At least, that’s what I’d like people to think.
“Let’s sit down on this bench,” I suggested gently.
It seemed to work, because after we sat down she relaxed, closed her eyes, sighed deeply, and said, “At last.”
Little Xi was definitely my type. After so many years, her looks and figure hadn’t changed much, but wrinkles had begun to appear on her face from neglect. She also looked pretty depressed.
She kept her eyes closed, trying to regain her composure. I looked at her intently and I suddenly realized how much I still liked this woman. I like melancholy women.
“I don’t have anyone to talk to. I feel like there are fewer and fewer people like us … There are so few of us left that life hardly seems worth living anymore.”
“Don’t be silly,” I said. “Everybody’s lonely, but no matter how lonely you are, life still goes on.”
She ignored my banal response. “No one remembers, except me. No one talks about it, except me. Does that mean I’m completely mad? There’s no trace of it, no evidence, so nobody can be bothered.”
I was enjoying the sound of her Beijing accent.
She briefly opened her eyes before closing them again. “Well, how about it? We were such good friends. Why haven’t I seen you for so many years? What happened?”
“I thought you’d gone abroad.”
She shook her head. “No.”
“Well, it’s good that you didn’t. Now everybody’s saying there’s no country in the world as good as China.”
She opened her eyes once more and gave me a look. I didn’t really understand what she was getting at, so I didn’t react. She broke into a smile and said, “It’s unbelievable that you can still make jokes.”
I hadn’t been joking, but I immediately went along with her and smiled, too.
“You sound just like my son,” she added.
“Your son? You seem not to want to talk about him. What’s up between the two of you?”
“He’s doing really well,” she said in an ironic tone. “He’s studying law at Peking University and he’s joined the Communist Party.”
“That’s good,” I said vaguely. “It will be useful when he tries to find a job.”
“He wants to go into the Chinese Communist Party Central Propaganda Department!”
At first I thought I hadn’t heard her clearly.
“The Central Propaganda Department?” I ventured.
Little Xi nodded. “He says it’s his life’s ambition. He’s got big ideas! If you ever meet him, you’ll know what I mean.”
I was enjoying a feeling of happiness sitting there next to Little Xi. It was such a beautiful spring afternoon; the sun was so bright and warm that many elderly couples were strolling around the park. There were also a few smokers … smokers? Two of them were standing close by chain-smoking. I like to read detective stories and I’ve even written a few myself, and so this situation left plenty of room for the imagination. It could have been a surveillance scene, but as I was nothing more than a self-indulgent writer of very ordinary bestsellers, why would anyone want to spy on me? Wherever there are people in China there are smokers.
I listened as Little Xi continued to pour her heart out to me. “Am I causing trouble, making a fuss? I know it’s none of my business, but I can’t act just like nothing’s happened. How can things change just like that? I don’t get it and I can’t stand it.”
I was still wondering what had made her so upset. Her son, or the after-effects of her own nightmarish experiences?
“One day in a small restaurant in Lanqiying,” she said, looking directly at me, “I went on a blind date with one of you Taiwanese men—he was a businessman. He was a terrific talker, there was nothing he didn’t know: astronomy, geography, medicine, divination and horoscopes, finance, investments, and world politics, you name it, he just wouldn’t stop and I was bored to death. When I managed to get a word