I walked past street food vendors, past Beijing University students wearing thick glasses and the same Eastpak rucksacks, and past a formation of local community People's Policemen ignoring the pirate CD shop beside them. Everything was illegal, so no one could be bothered to do something legal, even the policemen. Anyway, my feet slowed at the window of an electronics store, but I didn't go in. My destination was the McDonald's opposite Book City.
McDonald's, you couldn't call it food they sold there, but they had three things you won't find in other restaurants in Beijing: 1) clean floors; 2) toilets with paper; 3) frosty air-conditioning. If you ever find yourself trying to swallow the steaming hot dumpling of a Beijing summer, make for the Book City McDonald's. It's the only place that will cool you down. When I lived in Haidian, all the locals would save money on their electricity bills by going to McDonald's to enjoy its complimentary cold air.
At the counter I ordered a red-bean ice-cream, then picked a table in the corner. Next to me was a giggling collective of teenagers, deep in conversation about TV star Little Swallow over their Big Macs. I took a lick of the beany cream, opened my Eastpak and lovingly selected one of the Duras novels.
As I was opening the book, a young man walked towards me. Long black hair to his shoulders, bony, tall. He was like Takuya Kimura – the man from the TV soap TokyoLove Story. The kind of man your eyes would automatically home in on in a Beijing crowd. He walked past me and sat at the next-door table. I had a perfect view of his broad back.
I noticed he was carrying a green Eastpak, like mine. He unzipped it and pulled out a book, as casually as if he was in his home. He breathed deeply, exhaling the pollution and tiredness of the city into bright, cold McDonald's.
Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, it was then that I saw the book he'd placed in front of him. Marguerite Duras, the same Marguerite I had in my hand: The Sea-Wall. I took a sharp intake of breath. The Big Mac teenagers had moved on from Little Swallow to King Kong and Shrek. I couldn't take my eyes off the man with the book. His long, pale fingers turned one page after another. Each motion he made was like someone in love, each action elegant, calm, tender. I stared at his back without blinking.
My mobile jumped. Ben's number flashed up, then a fuzzy long-distance echo passed from Boston (Latitude 42° North, Longitude 71° West, -4 hours GMT) through time and space until it landed at table number 8 by the third window on the north side of the Book City McDonald's (Latitude 40° North, Longitude 116° East, +8 hours GMT).
'Hi, Fenfang. How are you?'
'Fine. I'm eating red-bean ice-cream in McDonald's. It's so hot outside it's like Firehill in Xinjiang.'
'What? Fenfang, I can't hear you very well.'
'Hello? Can you hear me now?'
'Sorry, Fenfang, what did you say?'
'I said I'm eating red-bean ice-cream.'
'Fenfang, can you speak a bit louder? It sounds like you're in a busy playground with lots of babies screaming.'
'Can you hear me now? Okay. Good. I'm not in a playground, I'm in McDonald's. Listen, what do you think of this? "One day, I was already old, in the entrance of a public place, a man came up to me. He introduced himself and said: 'I've known you for years. Everyone says you were beautiful when you were young, but I want to tell you I think you're more beautiful now than then. Rather than your face as a young woman, I prefer your face as it is now. Ravaged.'" Isn't she a genius?'
It was so silent on the other end of the phone that I imagined Ben was listening carefully. Then he said, 'Sorry, Fenfang, I don't understand. Can you explain?'
'Forget it, Ben. The connection is too bad, let's just hang up.'
I was pissed off. When I looked up, the man with the long black hair had gone. He'd taken away his Duras. My Marguerite. He'd disappeared into Haidian with its huge population of young people and its rush of honking cars and bicycles.
Fragment Fourteen
I THOUGHT MAYBE I could write better if I got away from Beijing for a bit, so I travelled to Xi'an, an ancient city that was the capital of many dynasties. I stayed in the suburbs, to the east of the city, in a state-run hotel called the 'Just Like Home' guest house. Instead of signing myself in as a bit-part extra on 20 yuan a day plus a 5-yuan lunchbox, I said I was a 'Professional scriptwriter', and went around the hotel in dark glasses and a long black coat like Keanu Reeves in The Matrix, carrying my laptop.
The air in the Just Like Home guest house was stale. A dark-red carpet ran along every corridor in the building. In the daytime, the hotel was deadly quiet. There was never anyone around. Eight hundred years could have passed and still no one would have knocked on the door asking for a room. But it was different at night. At first it was as though the entire hotel slept the sleep of the dead. I would switch off my laptop, and crawl into bed with the lamp on. The mattress was unpredictable. Some nights it would stay hard; others it would cave in and I would find myself in a crevasse. Then, as I lay trying to sleep, I would hear the sound of a woman weeping. The sound would stop and then start again. It reminded me of the wailing saxophone music they used to play in Lush Life, a jazz bar in Haidian that was a favourite hang-out for foreigners. Lush Life got knocked down one or two years ago.
So there I was at the Just Like Home guest house, only a few miles away from the grave of the Terracotta Warriors. I was trying to write my script, but the noise of the night started to get to me. I began to think the hotel was a trap, a place from which people never escaped, a place where all the guests turned into dusty warrior statues. Maybe it was old Emperor Qin Shi Huang playing tricks. I was worried that I would wake up in the morning to find that I had become a dusty clay warrior too.
It might have been said that by escaping alone like this, I was not participating in the Community. That I, Fenfang, wasn't contributing to the Greater Socialist Good. But I didn't care. I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything. Yet whenever I closed the door of Room 402, opened my laptop and sat in the faded red chair, nothing would happen. My thoughts would dry up. My ideas would be impossible to pin down. Room 402 would turn into a cage, rattled by the fitful bird inside.
Every morning I would wake up and pull back the stained brown curtains. Outside was a sea of state buildings from the 1980s covered in heavy yellow dust. Okay, so Beijing had dust. But this was dust that had been lying around for 5,000 years. Everything in Xi'an was covered in dust. The houses, the people. It covered each needle of the pine trees and every petal of the red canna flowers. I could almost hear the pine trees and the flowers coughing. The first thing I'd do in the morning, I'd get into the shower. I'd try to wash away the noise of the weeping woman and the vision of dust, but it echoed in my head all day. I'd get dressed and put on my long black coat. I liked my oversized coat. It covered my body entirely, protecting me from the annoying yellow dust.