"You can work here; your Chinese is good and English is your mother tongue," Dongping says.
"She's German," you say.
"Jewish," she corrects you.
"Born in Italy," you add.
"You know so many languages! What company would not pay a high salary to employ you? But you wouldn't have to live here; Repulse Bay over on Hong Kong Island has many grand apartments on the mountains by the sea."
"Margarethe doesn't like living with bosses, she likes artists," you say for her.
"Great, we can be neighbors," Dongping says. "Do you paint? We've got a gang of artist friends here."
"I used to paint because I liked it, but not professionally. It's too late to start learning."
You say you didn't know she painted, and she immediately says in French there is a great deal you don't know about her. At this point, she distances herself but still wants to maintain a secret language with you. Dongping says that he didn't study in an art college and was not officially recognized as an artist: that was why he left the Mainland.
'In the West, artists don't need official recognition and don't need to have studied in an art college. Anyone can be an artist. The main thing is whether there is a market, whether one's paintings can sell," Margarethe says.
Dongping says there is no market for his paintings in Hong Kong. What the art entrepreneurs want are copies of impressionistic concoctions with a foreign signature for Western galleries, and these are bought at wholesale prices. He does a different signature each time and can't remember how many names he has signed. Everyone laughs.
On the first floor, where Dongping lives, the sitting room adjoins the studio, and the residents are painters, photographers, poets, and columnists. The only person who is not an artist or writer is a foreigner, a good-looking young American. Dongping formally introduces the man. He is a critic, and the boyfriend of a woman poet from the Mainland.
Everyone has a paper plate and a pair of chopsticks, and they help themselves to the seafood hotpot. The seafood isn't alive but it is very fresh. Dongping says he brought it all home just before you arrived, but now, in the bubbling hotpot, it's curled up and no longer moving. The crowd is very casual. Some are walking about barefoot, and others are sitting on floor cushions. The music is turned on loud, it is a string quartet on big speakers, Vivaldi's vibrant Four Seasons. Everyone is eating and drinking, talking all at once and not about anything in particular. Only Margarethe is reserved and dignified. Her fluent Chinese instantly makes the young American's Western accent and intonation sound inferior, so he starts talking to Margarethe in English. He raves on to her and makes the young woman poet jealous. Margarethe later tells you that the guy doesn't know anything, but he was taken by her and kept hovering around her.
One of the artists says that he had been uprooted from East Village or West Village-you don't remember which-in the grounds of the Old Summer Palace. In the name of urban beautification and social security, the place was closed down by the police two years ago. He asks you about the new art trends in Paris, and you say that there are new trends every year. He says that he does art on the human body. You know that he had suffered a great deal in China because of his art, so it is best not to say that his sort of art is now history in the West.
In the course of things, people start talking about 1997. All the hotels have been fully booked for the day of the handover ceremony between Britain and China, the day the People's Liberation Army would move in. There would be hordes of journalists from all over the world congregating here, some say seven thousand, and others eight thousand. On the morning of July 1, the birthday of the Chinese Communist Party, immediately after the handover ceremony, the British governor of Hong Kong would go to the naval base and leave on a ship.
"Why doesn't he take a plane?" It is Margarethe who asks.
"On the day, there will be celebrations all along the road to the airport, and it would be too sad for him," someone says. But no one is laughing.
"What will all of you do?" you ask.
"That day, don't go anywhere else. Just come here to eat seafood with me," Dongping says with a joyless smile. He seems to be very generous, not as rough as he used to be, and he has become wiser.
People stop joking and the music suddenly seems to be louder, and who knows what season Vivaldi has reached.
"It doesn't matter!" the American says in a loud voice.
"What doesn't matter?" his girlfriend retorts. She then rebuffs him, "You can never make yourself understood when you speak Chinese!"
After dinner, the American takes out a piece of opium the size of a fingernail to share around, but the two of you must catch the last boat back. Dongping says there is plenty of room, and the two of you can stay the night, then go for a swim in the morning. Margarethe says she is tired, and also that she will be flying out at midday tomorrow. Dongping escorts the two of you onto the ferry and, when it departs, he is left alone on the wharf, holding both hands high, and waving. You say to Margarethe that you were close friends in Beijing and had suffered together. He is a rare friend. He doesn't know any foreign languages and can't go anywhere. The police raided his home in Beijing. He often had parties with music and dancing, but the neighbors thought that there were indecent activities going on and reported him to the police. Afterward, through various strategies, he got to Hong Kong. This trip to Hong Kong is to say good-bye to him.
"It's hard making a living anywhere," Margarethe says sadly. You lean against one another by the railing on deck. The sea breeze is cool.
"Do you really have to leave tomorrow? Can't you stay one more day?" you ask.
"I'm not as free as you are."
The wind blows spray into your faces. Once again you confront a farewell, maybe this is an important moment for you. It seems that your relationship should not come to an end just like that, but you do not want to make promises, and simply say, "Freedom is in one's own hands."
"It's easy for you to say that, but, unlike you, I have a boss." She has turned cold again, like the sea wind. Above the sea is pitch-black darkness, the specks of bright light on the island have vanished.
"Talk about something interesting." Sensing she has upset you, she adds, "You talk and I'll listen."
"What shall I talk about, the March wind?" You talk nonsense and restore a nonchalance to your voice.
You sense her shrugging her shoulders, and she says it's cold. The two of you go back into the cabin. She says she's tired, and you look at your watch; there is still half an hour before reaching Hong Kong Island. You say she can lean on your shoulder and have a nap. You are also overcome by weariness.
13
March wind. Why March? And why wind? In March, on the North China plains, it is still very cold. Endless stretches of muddy marshlands and alkaline flats on the ancient riverbed of the Yellow River have been reclaimed for farmland by reform-through-labor prisoners. If there was no drought, the millet sown in winter would result in a harvest of the same amount of seed after the beginning of spring. In accordance with the newly promulgated highest instructions of the highest leadership, these prison farms were converted into May Seventh Cadre Schools, and the original prisoners and military police were sent to the desolate uninhabited highlands of Qinghai province. Hence the farms came to be farmed by purged bureaucrats and workers from the Red Capital.
"The May Seventh Cadre School is not a haven from the winds of class struggle!" The army officer from Beijing had come to convey this instruction. This time it was a purge of the May Sixteenth counterrevolutionary group that had infiltrated every nook and cranny night down to mass organizations. Anyone who was investigated would instantly be considered a practicing counterrevolutionary. The very first time he was confronted, soon after the initial period of the movement to sweep away Ox Demons and Snake Spirits, he was so frightened that he made a confession on the spot. But now he had become a fox and was capable of biting back. He, too, could bare his sharp fangs and put on a mean pose. He was not going to wait for a pack of hunting dogs to pounce on him. Life, if this could be called life, had thus taught him to be an animal. At most, he was a fox surrounded by hunters, and, if he made a false move, he would be torn to shreds.