You're on the phone now not wearing anything? What kind of weirdo was this? But the conversation continued and I didn't hang up, even though by now I was covered in goosepimples.
Old Third was filling me in on details of the supporting role he was looking to fill. Female Number Three Hundred was a tall, good-looking woman who was planning to marry a short dwarf of a man (1 metre 40 centimetres) in the massive collective wedding. Everyone thinks she's crazy, but she's convinced she's found her true love. The film would contain a tender portrait of their relationship. He reassured me that the dwarf treated his future wife like a princess.
'So, Fenfang, are you interested, eh?'
'Hmmm… hmmm… hmmm.'
I hmmmed three times. What were we talking about here? A short, ugly peasant Tom Cruise marrying a Chinese Nicole Kidman?
'Does this woman have any lines to say?' I asked.
'No, no, Fenfang, the set, the scenery, the costumes, eh? They'll be so rich and vibrant that we'll be able to portray the love between the two characters without any dialogue…'
'Hmmm. Okay. Thank you, Old Third. I'll be there tomorrow.'
I hung up the phone. As I lowered the handset I could still hear his anxious voice. 'Hello? Hello?' He sounded as if he wanted to carry on talking about me not wearing anything.
By this time, I was so cold my nose had started to run. I dived back under the covers and lay there, hoping I could absorb the remnants of the night's warmth. But a few minutes later it was obvious I wasn't going to reach the desired 37.2 degrees, even in bed. I got up and dressed. I didn't brush my teeth, in case precious body heat escaped out of my mouth. I went in search of some instant noodles to warm myself up.
The name on the side of the noodle packet read: UFO instant noodles, Pure Japanese Food Company.
UFO instant noodles. My heart jumped a little – I remembered UFO instant noodles. I remembered, but what from? Who from? It was either Xiaolin or Ben. One of them had once said to me, 'My favourite fast food in the whole wide world is UFO instant noodles.' But which one? I couldn't remember. Fuck. Xiaolin or Ben? I knew it was one of them, and that it was said in bed, in the dark depths of a winter's night, when we were both starving and all the shops were closed. But who the fuck was it?
UFO instant noodles. UFO instant noodles. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, I'd have given away all my best DVDs if only I could have remembered.
I sat there staring at the box of noodles. How was it that in this cold city on this cold winter's morning I could get a telephone call asking me to play a dwarf's bride? How was it that I could sit on the floor of the 315th apartment in the Commercial Success Condominium and not remember how I got here? Where were the shiny things?
A few minutes later I took the lid off the saucepan and watched the noodles slide between the rising bubbles. Like my useless memories floating around inside my head. I poured the UFO instant noodles into a bowl. By the time I was ready to eat them, Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, they had already gone cold.
Fragment Seven
I HAD ALWAYS WANTED TO LEAVE my village, a nothing place that won't be found on any map of China. I had been planning my escape ever since I was very little. It was the river behind our house that started it. Its constant gurgling sound pulled at me. But I couldn't see its end or its beginning. It just flowed endlessly on. Where did it go? Why didn't it dry up in the scorching heat like everything else?
The river was the only thing that talked to me. My parents certainly didn't. Our house was a house of silence, just like the sweet potatoes quietly growing and dying under the black soil. Those vast, silent fields surrounded our village like a wall. They stretched across the hills and into the distance – sweet potatoes as far as the eye could see. Only the river made a noise, only the river was my friend – but, even then, I couldn't get close to it.
I used to imagine the source of the river. Some faraway, hidden cave that was home to a beautiful fairy. From there, the water flowed through our world to yet another world, a magical place close to heaven where lucky people lived, or animals perhaps – foxes maybe, or rabbits, owls, even unicorns. Wherever it was, it was not a place the people from my village could ever enter.
I was 17 when I finally left that shithole for good. Thank you, Heavenly Bastard in the Sky. Everything about that day is so vivid stilclass="underline" the stretch of the sky, the pull of the wind, the endless, tangled fields, the silent little village and how it burnt itself into my heart as I ran.
As soon as I woke that morning, I opened the creaking wooden shutters above my bed. I could see the silent patchwork of fields across the hills, and the dark sky becoming lighter, its blues and blacks fading into white. The heat was already rising, the kind of heat that kept the village still and unchanged. It weighed down so heavily that it nearly suffocated, making it hard to breathe. A person could melt in that kind of heat. Like an iceberg, I desperately feared it.
From the window, I could make out every single leaf on every single sweet potato plant. Each leaf had shuddered in the wind on any given yesterday. Each cloud drifting overhead had blown across those skies the year before. Nothing changed, and nothing could change. The world felt frozen in front of me, like a family photo trapped in a frame. This landscape had imprisoned me since I was born.
I sat by the well and combed my hair – my typical peasant girl's hair, rough and coarse like farm rope. I hated it. Every time I combed it, I pictured those indestructible weeds in the fields – weeds that, every spring, the farmers struggled to clear and that, inevitably, returned. The weeds were like life in the village. No one cared how they lived, how they died, whether they had joy or sadness. Maybe that's why they grew so tall, stubbornly trying to reach the bright sun. My hair was stubborn like they were, strong for no purpose. I sat by the well and poured water on my hair, to prevent my body from combusting in the dizzying heat.
I looked towards the yard where my mother sat with other middle-aged women… mothers, mothers-in-law, aunties, sisters. I couldn't quite make her out, but I knew where she was: she always sat in the same spot. From there, she had the best view of the sweet-potato field where my grandmother worked. The women sat and wove never-ending baskets out of dried sweet-potato stalks. Those twisted stalks in the dirt yards hooked these women together for eternity.
And my father? Absent. I think we shared the same weariness of root vegetables. He had left the village to become a salesman: plastic washbasins, cups, coat-hangers, brooms, hammers, hand-towels, screwdrivers, you name it.
My mother stared out at the sweet-potato fields with the same blank expression she had for her husband. Often I would ask her what she was looking at and she'd say, 'Sweet potatoes. In a few days, we'll need to break off the stalks and feed them to the pigs' or 'It's time to make sweet-potato flour for the Qing Ming festival dumplings'.
My mother, a sweet potato too. Stuck in the fields, waiting for the predictable rains of the Qing Ming festival.
Are you starting to see why I had to leave? Those fields had me on the verge of surrender.
If there was any spiritual life beyond sweet potatoes in the village, it was a shaky TV set, and a lone book. The television was in the village leader's house, but it belonged to everyone. Anyone could go and watch it. I first caught a glimpse of a book when my mother and I made our yearly visit to a neighbour's home during Spring Festival. It was an old, battered copy of The Adventures of the Shadow Samurai - a martial-arts favourite. The following Spring Festival, there it was again, on some other family's table. It had lost its cover, and the pages were covered with marks and scribbles. That book had been pored over by every literate person in the village – it was like the local encyclopaedia.