Su Yun carried the pages to her bed and lay down. In the rehearsal room below, the art centre’s orchestra was tuning up. She lit a cigarette with one hand and continued reading the script.
LI LIAO: How can you marry him? Do you really think he’s better than me? When he stands up straight, he doesn’t even reach your shoulders. Is it because he’s got money, and his pockets are stuffed with Foreign Exchange Certificates and egg ration tickets? Or are you playing one of your little games? Is this just another act?
The orchestra below swelled in a sudden crescendo. It sounded like an earthquake. Above the roar, a soprano belted out flirtatiously: ‘The girls are as pretty as flowers. How the men love to gaze upon them! …’
Su Yun could no longer hear herself speak. She repeated: ‘Is this just another act?’ at the top of her voice, but the words were drowned by the music.
She listened to the French horns and trombones struggling to play in unison. The drums were so loud they made the floorboards shake and the old lamp on her desk flicker. She noticed an eye of the white cat in the framed picture on her wall turn from blue to red.
LI LIAO: What did I do wrong? SU SU: Don’t ask, don’t ask. [She is almost shouting now, but her expression is still calm.] We should call it a day. I stopped loving you ages ago. I only said I loved you when I was caught in the heat of the moment. It didn’t count. LI LIAO: Does what you say now count? SU SU: Yes. LI LIAO: I don’t believe you! I’ve heard you say all this a hundred times before. [They glare ferociously at one another. SU SU’s fierce expression is out of keeping with her flowery nightgown. The stagehands should prepare to turn the dials to eleven when the clock strikes the hour.] SU SU: It’s getting late, you should be on your way. [Just as LI LIAO is about to storm off stage, OLD XING walks through the door. This man is short and deathly pale. He is dressed in a Western suit and platform heels. Standing next to him, LI LIAO looks like a tramp in his tattered shirt and scruffy plimsolls. OLD XING leans down, pulls out a present from his bag and, with both hands, offers it to SU SU.] OLD XING: This is for you. It’s a pack of imported cigarettes. SU SU: Thank you. Don’t bother taking your shoes off. Come in, come in!
‘Our glorious Motherland. The place I grew up. On this infinite expanse of. .’ As the soprano paused for breath, Su Yun shouted out again: ‘Come in, come in!’ The soprano belted out a final ‘Aaaah’ as the drums rolled into a frenetic climax, then suddenly a magical calm descended upon the room — a calm similar to the relief one feels after revealing one’s naked body to another person for the first time. Su Yun lowered her voice to a whisper.
LI LIAO: So when did you accept his proposal? SU SU: An hour ago. LI LIAO: Well that’s that then. SU SU: I have the right to choose my own path in life. LI LIAO: Yes, but you have no right to lie.
‘This is not true,’ Su Yun scribbled fiercely across her script, under the words ‘I said I would marry him’.
In fact, she had never loved either of these two men. She had only got involved with them because she wanted to make the painter jealous and stir him from his apathy. But her acting skills were still quite rudimentary at the time, and she had little understanding of her role. In reality, all she wanted was a chance to flaunt her female charms and entwine men in her web of lies. In this world, lies are unavoidable, and are sometimes very useful. Men presume that women only cry when they are upset, but women know very well that their tears fall as easily as piss.
She wiped her tears dry, put her pen down and stared at herself in the mirror: a little taller than the average woman, a pair of big dark eyes that attracted the gaze of every passing man. As far as she was concerned, her beauty was only of use to men, it was a nuisance to herself (although she would have been upset if people had ceased to look at her). She knew that, from an early age, she had been forced to employ a large portion of her energies fending off the lecherous advances of her male admirers, and had consequently lost sight of the more important things she should have been doing with her life.
But writing the play gave her a sense of inner worth. As she continued to work on her script, the men in her life left her dance-floor and retreated to their seats in the corner. At last she was able to take the lead role and march forward with her head held high. She trod on air. Now, each man she encountered seemed as dull as wax. The triumphant expression on their faces after they had slept with her filled her with disgust. Love always ends in failure, she told herself at the end of each affair.
‘Who do you think you are? You wretch!’ she scribbled to herself in the margins of her script.
One night, on the back of her script she wrote a letter to the painter:
My sweetheart, the time has come for us to part. Will you ever know how much I loved you? Life is an illusion, only you are real. The one thing my suicide will prove is that I am a failure, and that I have nothing to my name. When I was with you, my hands were filled with petals of love. Without thinking, I tossed them in the air and the wind carried them away.
The characters in her play and in her life exhausted her. She tried to guess what the professional writer who was composing a story about her had planned for her future. She tried to guess what she herself had planned for her future, and who would end up killing whom. This state of being calm on the outside but restless within put her in mind of two actors she had seen swimming across the television screen dressed in heavy octopus costumes. She could sense the pain it had caused them to move so slowly and seemingly at ease. She was now living in the calm that heralds the approach of middle age. She knew that time was running out, and wished that she or the writer would quickly bring her story to an end and consign her to oblivion.
But as soon as she attached herself to her character in the play, her spirits lifted a little. She didn’t realise that writing is a meaningless act of vanity, and that she was merely patching a few people and events together in order make her life seem more interesting. She took the lead role of her play, and through her eyes, she was able see how stupid and naive men are. She wondered how these poor souls could ever hope to find a ‘graceful companion’ among a generation of women who had grown up reading Analysis of the Dictatorship of the Proletariat and The Fall of Chiang Kaishek. Today’s women are corrupted. How can you expect a girl who has grown up reading Selected Writings of Mao Zedong to be cultivated, elegant or refined?
‘Men force us to wear these fripperies,’ she wrote to herself. ‘When they fall in love, they give us jewellery, dress us up, and allow us to twist them around our little fingers. They never see the vulgar thoughts that lie hidden beneath our smiles. All my tastes and ideas are formed for their benefit. They fall in love with the woman they have created from us.’
She remembered the wolf-man featured in a television documentary. A few days after she had seen the programme, the wolf-man appeared to her again, popping up between a man and woman who were locked in an embrace. Later, she saw it peering furtively from between two brick houses, from under the brim of a little girl’s hat, from inside a bus and from behind the glass pane of a shop window. The wolf-man could only stand on all fours. She was always terrified it might appear one day between the lines of her script.
Slowly it dawned on her that her character was planning something, something she would only find out about after the event had taken place. In her script, she placed herself in situations she would never have experienced in real life (although later she realised that these situations were in fact variations of events in her past). In this way she was able to detach her spirit from her body and place it in a position from which she could learn new things about herself and discover how others behaved towards her. She was like the wolf-man, crouching in a dark corner, staring at herself.