When I had finished the last of the Longevity Noodles, my mother was content, like any mother when her children eat the food she has prepared, particularly when it is the first meal of the New Year. She scooped another bowlful of noodles out of the pot, decorated them with dried lilies, and placed it in front of me. Now I started to feel desperate. These noodles were truly never-ending.
After my second bowl, my mother asked me her first question of the New Year.
'Fenfang, you said you'd been in loads of movies and TV shows, but how come we've never seen you?'
How to explain the meagreness of the roles I'd had? How to explain the silence that was mine on screen? A shoulder here, a profile there, a face lost in a crowd.
'Well, I guess because most of those movies and shows are only on cable channels. Yes, that's it – cable. I don't think you're hooked up for it here.'
My mother looked at me. 'Really? Well, we'll have to see what we can do about that. Your father and I will have to buy this cable thing. That way we can finally see you.'
Fragment Sixteen
I BOUGHT A NEW DVD PLAYER. It was a brand called 'Soni', but not 'Sony'. It seemed like a good-quality machine because it could play all the pirated DVDs I had. For instance, while I was eating my lunch, I could watch Martin Scorsese's Casino. Two gangsters – Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci – screaming and fighting on the tiny screen. Sometimes I wished I was a gangster, living madly, then dying abruptly one day – shot through the heart, without any preparation. That's how I wished to die.
Anyway, as I was watching, I was dipping chive dumplings and raw garlic into a little plate of rice vinegar. I was crazy about chives the same way Popeye's crazy about spinach. I couldn't survive if there were no chives in my food. Those grassy leaves had such a strong, special taste. Every time I ate them, I would imagine having my own little garden to grow chives in. In spring I'd gaze at their lovely pink flowers and, in summer, I'd make my chive dishes. As I was lost in thoughts about chives, the action on screen suddenly became very violent. I felt nauseous. I switched off the TV and decided to go for a walk. I swallowed my last two dumplings, and walked out.
In the street, I could barely keep my eyes open it seemed so bright. Maybe I'd been sleeping too much during the day lately, and my eyes couldn't take more than my 40-watt desk lamp. I felt like a prisoner just released after 20 years in a dark cell. After walking for half an hour, I realised that, apart from McDonald's, there were so few places in this city where you could sit down. For miles and miles there were only government buildings or Nokia factories or dirty restaurants with stinking toilets or without a toilet. This city was impossible. What did you do if you didn't want to go to McDonald's?
I decided to go to the Beijing Diplomat University where you could get free-refill lemon water in the café. One hour later, I was on my third glass. The place was full of college kids weighed down with jumbo Chinese- Korean dictionaries, Chinese-German dictionaries, Chinese-English dictionaries. You could really feel that, in the future, these kids were going to be running the world.
Reaching for my pen, I started scribbling on a napkin. Then I stopped. Napkins made me think of my friend Patton, Ben's old flatmate. Patton scribbled on napkins too. I wondered if his film scripts were any good. He made out that endless Hollywood producers were interested in turning his scripts into films, but, since everything he wrote was in English and I wasn't able to read it easily, I had no way of judging.
Patton loved Beijing. 'You know, even when a city looks hard and concrete like Beijing, it's possible to love it,' he once said to me. He also said that China was better at being American than America, so he would rather live in China. Weird. How could China be more American than America? I didn't get it. Anyway, Patton wore jackets and trousers with millions of pockets, and was often being mistaken for a photographer. He was always reaching into these pockets, and pulling out small notebooks and stubby chewed-up pencils. Using these, he noted down anything and everything that he found interesting, especially examples of Beijing slang. He loved the idea that 'Second Breast' meant 'mistress', that 'Sweeping Yellow' meant 'prostitution is forbidden' and that 'Cow's Cunt' meant 'absolutely wonderful'. He would carefully write these terms down in his notebooks and, if he ran out of pages, scribble them on napkins instead.
I liked Patton. There weren't many people in this world who could be boring and fun at the same time, if you know what I mean. It seemed to me that Patton and I were similar: bored all the time. But he knew how to deal with his boredom better. Anyway, there was nothing sexual between Patton and me. We were like the 'killers' in Wong Kar Wai's film Fallen Angels. Killers can only ever be partners or enemies. Never lovers.
Wherever you went in Beijing, you were liable to run into Patton in some café – the 6-foot man in the corner, wearing a big brown jacket with millions of pockets and tapping away on his famous old IBM laptop. And you could be sure that his laptop would be plugged into the only available socket on the wall, the cable trailing across the floor like a vine, climbing over chic Beijingers drinking their overpriced cappuccinos, intent only on reaching its ultimate destination: Patton's messy but clever brain.
I went back to scribbling on my napkin. Maybe I should call Patton and see if he wanted to get something to eat. But he probably wouldn't want to. Patton didn't eat much, or not as much as I did anyway. You see, that was the problem: not very many people ate as much food as I did. Whenever anyone had a meal with me, they ended up spending far more time and money on it than they wanted. I knew I ate too much, but I couldn't help it. I was ravenous all the time.
In the end, I decided to give Patton a call anyway. Needless to say, he was in some café.
'Which one?' I asked, getting ready to go.
'The café in the Foreign Business University,' he said. 'The Get Ahead Café, have you been yet? They just opened it.'
'Get Ahead Café?'
'Yes. It's great here, they serve you free tea.'
'Sounds good. But don't you want to eat something?'
I could hear him hesitating.
'Well, I'm not in an eating mood,' said Patton. 'But if you're really desperate, we can go to a restaurant and you can eat.'
'That would be great. Do you fancy Western food or Chinese food?'
'You decide, since you're the one who's going to be eating.'
I could sense Patton was getting a bit impatient with me.
'In that case, let's go to Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' I said. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, had I been missing their spicy duck soup.
'Chong Qin Red Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' Patton tried to repeat.
'No, not Red Mountain, Gold Mountain. Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' I corrected him.
Sometimes Patton's Chinese got muddled, especially with names.
'Okay, whatever goddamn mountain it is, I'll see you there in one hour.'
I was just about to leave when I realised I would have to walk past this geeky young couple perched near my table. The two of them were all over each other, spectacles knocking together, lips glued together like sticky dates. It was embarrassing to look. I tried so hard to avoid staring that I got a crick in my neck.