He followed despite my command. I bought some bandages and snacks at a store, tossed him scraps while I sat on the curb and cleaned my arm.
The dog nibbled on his food, sidled next to me. I stared at him, found myself in a talkative mood. “I went on a trip to Asia to change everything about myself, but even after it was over, I felt like nothing was different. It’s bizarre because everyone’s treating me so differently. But I don’t feel different inside.” The dog stared blankly, tongue sticking out. I thought of an old tale I’d heard in China. During the life of every wolf, they’d become a human for one day. They’d live, sleep, eat, shit like a human. Afterwards, they could either go back to the pack, or change into a dog and serve humans, understanding how lonely mankind truly was.
“What was your day like?” I asked.
A Beijing Romance
I. Temple of Cats
There was something terribly unromantic about falling in love in Beijing. And yet it was the most romantic city I’d known. Several million people were squeezed into the metropolis that was undergoing constant surgery on its ruptured streets, a gallery of stenches from boiled pigeon to fried pig feet wafting through the polluted oblivion of its emblazoned skies. The face of modernization effused proudly from the immense skyscrapers and shopping malls tag-teaming across the shoebox landscape. Somehow, beneath the grandeur of it all, there was love: strident, audacious love showing its face as both quiescent and clamorous. Affectionate couples went on their first date to McDonald’s; a young man prepared a picnic for his wife at Beihai Park; a desperate teenager asked a girl out forty times before she relented. I met Faye through a friend and the first thing she said was, “I collect stray cats and make them fat. They love kung pao fish and spicy chicken,”
“Aren’t you supposed to feed them cat food?” I asked.
“If you had to eat vitamins your whole life, would you like it?”
I suggested she give them milk instead of water.
“Cats like milk?” she asked, astounded.
“I thought that was common knowledge.”
“I’ve never heard that. I thought milk made them sick…”
“No no, it’s the opposite — they love it.”
“In Chinese culture, the blue cat god is in charge of fortune. You make a cat sick, you have bad luck the whole year.”
“I’m willing to take that risk.”
She laughed and I started talking about an opera without music, conjectured about the possibility of recreating the Aurora Borealis using only sound, wondered at the implications of a world without smell. She was intrigued, told me about the genealogy of her woes, the birth of bliss, the tidal wave of circumstance that rendered her fragile in the face of desire. I bought her five cocktails and tried to kiss her. She blew vodka-breath in my face and said, “Only if the cats like your milk.”
She gave me her phone number and after we sang our hearts out at the personalized karaoke station of KTV, I asked, “Are you busy this weekend?”
“Very. I won’t have time to do anything.”
I ignored her and called her for a date. Surprisingly, she agreed. We went to the most posh restaurant I knew in Beijing, the Blu-Lobster, renowned for serving lobster-themed dinners.
“There’s something I should tell you,” I said before our ten-course meal started.
“What?”
“I head back for America at the end of this week.”
“For how long?” she asked.
“Indefinitely. I signed a contract for a job that starts in a week.”
She stared at me, confused. “What was the point of asking me out, then?”
I twisted my lips, trying to find the right way to explain. “Do you think there’s a minimum amount of time to fall in love with someone?”
“Don’t tell me you’re already in love with me,” she said.
I laughed. “I just don’t want time to hamper our possibilities.”
She played with her napkin. “You’re either really confident, or misguided about the kind of girl I am.”
“Neither, actually. But let’s enjoy dinner, see how it goes. Afterwards, you can leave if you want and never call back.”
She glanced at me. The waiter served the lobster bisque soup.
“You’re lucky my cats loved your milk.”
II. A Beijing Taxi
Our second date took off like a Beijing taxi with broken brakes. We skidded down the raucous, car-infested streets, brakeless in the advent of a fleet of blind truck drivers who weren’t paying attention to the streetlights. We fought about everything that morning: my past girlfriends, her past boyfriends, little annoying quirks that already got on her nerves. I was convinced we were doomed. Then we spent the evening in joy, discovering an exquisite restaurant that cost less than three dollars, finding an acrobatic show that used dental floss to balance, discussing how different fashion would be in a world without hair.
Faye was a beauty among beauties, but she didn’t wear her beauty like those who vaunted it. She was a Mandarin lioness with her fierce brown eyes and billowing lips that sparked incendiaries rather than words. Her gait was starkly unfeminine, impatiently brisk and abrupt in its efficiency. She wore jeans and t-shirts, disdaining dresses and the charades of courtship with their peacock superficialities.
“What were your relationships like in America?” she asked.
I thought about how almost every girl I met came with cartloads of baggage and a hurdle of impossible expectations. Now, I was the one carting distrust and suspicion, heaps of cynicism about the whole facade of romance.
“What about you?” I asked.
She was the opposite, someone who’d resisted the weaker, easier path of disillusionment. The flaring conflagration of her love was so pure and simple, even the sun would have been burnt by it.
Sunday morning, I felt ill. The bull entrails and the deer blood soup from the night before had wreaked havoc on my belly. Faye bought me rice porridge and cooked ginseng soup in my hotel, regaling me with amusing stories from her childhood. Monday came and she called in sick to take care of me (she was a producer for an outsourcing company that built computer joysticks).
She mixed the ginseng into the tea, took my temperature. “Didn’t realize you had such a weak stomach. I would have picked a more foreigner-friendly menu if I’d known.”
“Let my stomach adjust,” I protested. “Then I’ll eat anything you can.”
“You sure about that?”
“As long as it’s not tiger penis or pigeon brain.”
“But I love those!” she said.
“Uhh, hold on a sec, I need to use the restroom again…”
While retching into the toilet, I thought about the fact that there were no seatbelts in a Beijing taxi. You could either refuse to ride or leap in, hoping that it didn’t crash. If it did, well, you could console yourself with the fact that at least you had a good time.
III. Hahahahahahaha
Our first few days together forced us to create a new language. Even though she spoke perfect English, Mandarin was still her native language. I spoke broken Mandarin that was barely decipherable and always elicited confused are you stupid looks from bus drivers and store clerks. So it wasn’t that unusual for our conversations to break down into a series of sounds, some guttural, others hieroglyphically primordial, especially when we were tired: Ku ku keh keee. Heheheheheheeee. Ummm, oohh, umm, uh huh, uh oh. Ayyyaaaaaiiiiiiiii. Quuu!!!