Work threw Qiang and Tianyi together a great deal, and she could see that he was interested in her. He no doubt saw the adoring looks she could not conceal, but he pretended not to. He was married, after all, and he was her boss. All the same, he found plenty of opportunities to spend time with her. For instance, they had a friend in common, a man called Ren Dong, writer of the novel, Blame.
The first time she met Dong was at Xiao’ou’s house, but he had made little impression on her. They met again, on subsequent occasions, and she discovered that he was by no means the long-haired, extrovert yuppie he posed as — in fact he was rather shy and retiring. But he was also very amusing, always delivering high-sounding maxims and apparently convinced (this was funniest of all) that he was such a celebrity that even the country’s decision-makers were interested in him. Once he said with the utmost earnestness: ‘So-and-so says that Dong must be handled calmly and a solution must be found. You see? If so-and-so says that, then what have I got to worry about?’ Tianyi and Qiang looked at each other, then Tianyi burst out laughing, and a chuckle even escaped the normally serious Qiang. All the same, Dong reacted with the utmost gravity: ‘What are you laughing at? It’s true! You can go and check at his office, the director told me in person!’ Helpless with laughter, Tianyi said: ‘Oh, Dong, you must be the most self-deluding person on the planet!’
One of the effects of Dong’s buffoonery was to draw Tianyi and Qiang closer. Whenever he commissioned scripts, Qiang took Tianyi with him, ostensibly because ‘Tianyi knows a lot of writers.’ The real reason was that the two of them understood and were comfortable with each other.
One evening in springtime, Dong invited them out to dinner. The three of them went to a restaurant serving Demoli Fish Stew, near Beijing Zoo. A pleasant feature of this smart restaurant, with its brand-new resin-carved white chairs and tables, was that the food was served outdoors. They were well into springtime now and the breeze was soft. Tianyi felt as if her long-frozen heart had come back to life again. A few sips of red wine and she felt an uprush of heat through her body. Then she mocked herself, Spring may be the time for love, but I’m all of 37 years old! She sneaked a glance at Qiang, sitting opposite her. He was staring at her with those dark eyes, normally sardonic, but just now full of warmth.
A few days later, he called her into his office. It was a plainly furnished room, no doubt intentionally so. ‘Have you heard of the novel Old City? It’s had a lot of media hype. Can you ask around and find out who’s publishing it and try and get us a copy. You know everyone in the literary world. Get straight onto it.’
Of course she had heard of it. Old City’s author was the famous Yu Wusheng. There had been huge media hype even before it hit the bookshelves. For the publishers to hype up a book like this, pre-publication, was a relatively new phenomenon, and Tianyi found the whole thing strange. She never imagined that ‘media hype’ would become such a durable phenomenon in the book world, one which refused to die.
Old City had been widely headlined in the newspapers as, ‘Ten years in the making … the modern-day Red Chamber Dream,’ and so on. Actually, in spite of the novelty of this media hype, it made little impact. Most ordinary folk just ignored it. On the other hand, the author’s name was very well-known, it almost advertised itself. His novel The Snare of Love had been adapted into a hugely popular TV series which had the entire population glued to their TV screens, handkerchiefs at the ready. All of this spurred Qiang to take a punt on Old City—he badly needed to make his mark in the company.
Tianyi had the failing common to so many women, that she would do anything for the man she loved. And she had another failing too, one few women did, and that was pride. There was no way she wanted the man to know just how much she was doing for him, as if he would respect her less if he knew. That was why she had particularly liked the story Letter from an Unknown Woman by Stefan Zweig. The heroine was a girl in her early teens whose unrequited love for a certain man lasted her whole life — the man did not even know who she was. Finally, on her deathbed, she wrote the man a letter, pouring out her feelings. And what a love it was! It put traditional love stories like The Red Chamber Dream, firmly in the shade! For a very long time, Tianyi was fixated on one-sided love, secretly convinced that it was the only true and beautiful form of love, the acme of love in fact. So much beauty and suffering emerged from loving and not receiving love in return; unrequited love gave the lover so much, forcing her to strip away the mask and expose the lies that lurked in her subconscious. That kind of beauty and suffering was absolutely authentic. As a writer, Tianyi was convinced of that. Over the years, she had revelled in the pain of platonic love, unquestioning love that asked for nothing in return. For Tianyi, the love that lived and died in her heart alone, had grown into an enormous tree, nourishing her soul, nurturing her creative urges. The trouble was that worldly relationships gave her nothing, and never would.
She did not know if she was in love again. Some vague thing swelled in her heart, swelled erratically and inexplicably until it completely took her over. Around then she received her first screenplay fee and she invited Qiang to a meal in a restaurant in Muxidi, just west of the centre of town, old-fashioned but clean. As he got off the metro, he saw her waiting for him, clearly anxious, waving a frantic greeting, anything but graceful and relaxed. She was wearing an ill-fitting crepe georgette, pale pink short-sleeved blouse, over a black skirt she was fond of. Her new glasses seemed constantly in danger of sliding down her nose and every time she spoke, she had to keep pushing them back again, a gesture that he found almost comical. Then he stopped finding her comical and began to compare her to all the glamorous actresses he was normally surrounded with. This middle-aged woman in front of him seemed to give off a wholly different aura, one that was intriguingly unfamiliar. Qiang, who knew a thing or two about seductive women, felt Tianyi lacked all seductiveness because she was incapable of dissembling, and yet was peculiarly seductive for that very reason.
She had brought some gifts for him. And what gifts! Eight weighty cans of eight-treasure rice, a Playboy T-shirt, a Reebok neck tie, an imported cigarette lighter. As she laid them all before him, he wondered if it was simply to show how grateful she was for the work he had put her way, or was there something more? The canned eight-treasure rice had just come on the market and was a luxury. She had brought such a lot no doubt envisaging how pleasurable it would be for a man living on his own, as he was, to go home and relax on his sofa, and eat a piping hot bowl of it.
Qiang could not help being touched. His wife and child were living abroad and when he was not at work, time hung heavy on his hands. He was a highly intelligent man, but he had the kind of intelligence that would never become wisdom. Wisdom required something a little bit more than intelligence, something of a different quality. A moral quality. Be that as it may, Qiang was very acute, indeed ruthless, when it came to other people’s characters. He had seen through Tianyi instantly. She might write good love stories but her knowledge of love was purely theoretical, her practical experience in these matters very superficial. She had not had many deep-going relationships, and was especially inexperienced where sex was concerned. She was so innocent, still like a girl, even though she was a mother. He had once joked that she acted as if she was suffering the pangs of first love. She was so startled that she nearly dropped her glasses on the floor. It was as if he had found that chink in her armour.