The Train to Lo Wu - Jess Row [32]
I never once considered the danger of this kind of passivity. I never thought that love would come out of the sky when I least expected it, like a storm on a clear day, and that I would have no choice but to bow down and face it, unprepared.
In all that time I never mentioned Lin to anyone. When my friends at the club asked where I was on Saturdays, I told them I was busy with an extra project at work; if Siu Wong called I said I was too tired to go out. It wasn’t simply a matter of embarrassment. Every time I imagined what I would say—She’s very nice, smart; she has a college degree, she’s really a teacher—my stomach rolled up into a tight little ball. Even so, I heard Siu Wong saying, what are you going to do next, live in Shenzhen? She doesn’t have any connections—she can’t leave. Do you think you can just become Chinese?
That was the real question, of course. In Lin’s eyes I was a nice man who wore tracksuits all the time and made silly jokes in bad Mandarin: all the rest of it, my parents, my job, my friends, were to her like shadows in a puppet show. And to me she was even more perplexing. Her parents were engineers who worked in a state-owned garment factory that made uniforms for the army. During the Cultural Revolution they were sent to the far west, to Gansu, and worked digging stones in a quarry; she was born there, in a mud hut with no running water. What could I ever say about that? All I knew about the Cultural Revolution was from movies.
In the end I did the only thing I could think of: I brought her the first volume of Dream of the Red Chamber. In the book Lin Dai-yu is the hero’s true love, a beautiful, ethereal orphan whom he is forbidden to marry, because of her poor and inauspicious background. Eventually he is convinced to marry her rival, and she falls ill and dies of grief, but that was irrelevant to me; the first part of the novel is filled with the hero’s dreams of her, and poems written in her honor. I gave it to her on a Saturday in March, and the next week it was sitting on the table by her elbow, wrinkled and dog-eared, when I came in.
Have you finished it already?
Finished it? Her eyes were puffy, I noticed, as if she hadn’t slept, and hadn’t bothered with makeup. I read it twice, she said. I think I don’t understand you.
Didn’t you like it?
Harvey, she said, she’s an orphan. She lives far away from her hometown and she knows she’ll probably never see the South again. All around her there are fabulously rich people, but she has no money of her own. How did you think it would make me feel?
It’s a novel, I said. Not an essay on society. It’s a love story.
She pushed it across the table, and it fell into my lap. Keep your novels, she said. I have enough problems.
I turned it over in my hands: the lamination peeling from the cover, the spine folded and broken. Lin, I said, tell me what you want.
She gave me a suspicious look. You mean right now?
In the future. Tell me what you want the most.
She stared down at her hands.
Or else I don’t know why I should keep coming here, I said. What good are we to each other? You seem to think that I can’t understand you, no matter how hard I try.
It’s ridiculous, she said. You’ll laugh at me.
The waiter brought our cups of coffee; I took a sip immediately, and burned my tongue. Go on, I said, wincing.
I want to have a kindergarten. She bit down on her lower lip, scraping it with her teeth. Not work in one. I’ve done that. I want to have a private kindergarten, like they do in Shanghai and Beijing, where the parents pay. That way you can have enough blankets and cots and chairs for every student. You can do painting and music and teach English. And you can get your own cook and have decent food. Only a certain number of students admitted every year.
There’s nothing ridiculous about that, I said. How much would it cost?
She looked down at the table, a flush rising from her neck.
It