Outside, the predawn sky was still dark. The dozen hanging lights in the waiting room were mere decorations; the little bit of light inside was supplied by a pair of low-wattage wall lamps. The ten or so black benches were monopolized by trendy youngsters who lay there snoring and talking in their sleep, one with his knees bent and his legs crossed, his bell-bottom trousers looking as if they were made of sheet metal. Hazy morning sunlight gradually filtered in through the windows and lit up the place, and as Jintong examined the clothes of the sleepers arrayed around him, he knew that he had reentered the world in a new age. In spite of the patches of spittle, the filthy scraps of paper, even the occasional urine stain, he could see that the floor was constructed of fine marble. And even though the walls provided rest for plenty of fat but weary black flies, the wallpaper pattern was bright and eye-catching. For Jintong, who had just emerged from a rammed-earth hut in the labor reform camp, everything around him was fresh and new, completely alien, and his unease deepened.
Finally, the early-morning sun lit up the foul-smelling waiting room, and passengers began to stir. A pimply-faced young man with a mass of wild hair sat up on his bench, scratched his toes and feet, closed his eyes as he took out a flattened filter cigarette, and lit it with a plastic lighter. After taking a deep drag, he coughed up a mouthful of phlegm and spat it on the floor. He slipped his feet into his shoes and rubbed the sticky mess into the floor. Turning to the young woman lying beside him, he patted her on the rear. She moaned seductively as she squirmed herself awake. “Here’s the bus,” he said louder than he needed to. Slowly she sat up, rubbed her eyes with her reddened hands, and yawned grandly. When it finally occurred to her that her companion had tricked her, she gave him a few symbolic thumps and moaned once more, before stretching out on the bench again. Jintong studied the young woman’s fat face, her stubby, greasy nose, and the white, wrinkled skin of her belly, which poked out from under her pink shirt. With an air of impertinence, the man slipped his left hand, on which he wore a digital watch, under her blouse and caressed her flat chest, eliciting a feeling in Jintong that he had been left behind by time, and it gnawed at his heart like a silkworm feasting on mulberry leaves. For the first time, apparently, a thought occurred to him: My god, I'm forty-two years old! A middle-aged man who never had a chance to grow up. The young man’s display of affection reddened the cheeks of this covert observer, who looked away. The unforgiving nature of age spread a layer of deep sadness over his already gloomy mood, and his thoughts spun wildly. I've lived on this earth for forty-two years, and what have I accomplished? The past is like a hazy path leading into the depths of a wilderness; you can only see a few feet behind you, and ahead nothing but haze. More than half my life is over, a past utterly lacking in glory, a sordid past, one that disgusts even me. The second half of my life began the day I was released. What awaits me?
At that moment he spotted a glazed porcelain mural on the opposite wall of the waiting room: a muscular man in a fig leaf was embracing a bare-breasted woman with a long ponytail. The looks of longing on the faces of the young couple – half human and half immortal – gave rise to a sad emptiness in his heart. He had experienced this feeling many times before, while lying on the ground at the Yellow Sea labor reform camp and looking up into the vast blue sky. While his herd of sheep grazed in the distance, Jintong often gazed up at the sky, within sight of the row of red flags that marked the inmates’ boundary line, and patrolled by mounted armed guards who were followed by the mongrel offspring of army dogs belonging to former soldiers and local mutts that interrupted their lazy rounds by howling meaning-lessly at the foamy whitecaps on the sea just beyond the dike.
During the fourteenth spring of his imprisonment, he became acquainted with one of the grooms, a bespectacled man named Zhao Jiading who was incarcerated for attempting to murder his wife. A gentle man, he had been an instructor at a college of politics and law before his arrest. Without holding back any of the details, he related to Jintong how he had planned to poison his wife: his well-conceived plan was a work of art, and yet his wife somehow survived the attempt. Jintong repaid him by relating the details of his case. When he finished, Zhao said emotionally, “That’s beautiful, sheer poetry. Too bad our laws can’t tolerate poetry. Now if at the time I'd… no, just forget it, that sounds stupid! They gave you too heavy a sentence. But of course you’ve already served fourteen of your fifteen years, so there’s no need to complain about it now.”
When the labor reform camp leadership proclaimed that his time was up and he was free to go home, he actually felt abandoned. With tears in his eyes, he pleaded, “Can’t I spend the rest of my life right here, sir?” The official who had given him the news looked with disbelief and shook his head. “Why would you want to do that?” “Because I don’t know how I’m going to survive out there. I’m useless, worse than useless.” The official handed him a cigarette and lit it for him. “Go on,” he said with a pat on the shoulder, “it’s a better world out there than in here.” Never having learned to smoke, he took a deep drag and nearly choked to death. Tears gushed from his eyes.
A sleepy-eyed woman in a blue uniform and hat walked past him, lackadaisically sweeping up the cigarette butts and fruit peels on the floor. The look on her face showed how much she hated her job, and she made a point of nudging the people sleeping on the floor with her foot or broom. “Up!” she’d shout. “Get up!” as she swept puddles of piss onto them. Her shouts and nudges forced them to sit or stand up. Those who stood stretched and yawned, while those who remained sitting on the floor wound up getting hit by her dustpan or her broom, and they too jumped to their feet. And the minute they did that, she swept the newspaper they’d been lying on into her dustpan. Jintong, who was huddled in a corner, did not manage to escape her tirade. “Move aside!” she demanded. “Are you blind?” Employing an alertness tempered over fifteen years at the camp, he jumped to the side and watched her point unhappily at his canvas traveling bag. “Whose is that?” she snarled. “Move it!” He picked up the bag that held all his possessions, not putting it down until she’d passed her broom across the floor a time or two; he sat back down.