She returned to Beijing, to the chimneys belching black smoke like giant cigarettes against the sky. In the taxi the driver asked her to guess his age. She looked at him – the skin on his hands like uncured leather, grooves etched in the corners of his eyes from a lifetime of squinting at the sun and snow. He looked forty-six but she wanted to be generous, so she guessed a decade younger.
‘Wrong!’ he laughed. ‘Thirty-two!’ She realised she hadn’t hidden the surprise on her face well enough, because he then laughed and said in Mandarin, ‘Being poor makes a person look so very much older, wouldn’t you agree?’
He stopped at her university and let her out. The young guard at the gate let her past with a slight nod of his head. She walked through the empty streets of the campus. It was the semester break and the students had all gone back to their hometowns.
The food halls were empty, so she went to the university supermarket, which sold mostly snack food. She grabbed a plastic bowl of dehydrated noodles and lined up at the checkout. Three of the young security guards were in front of her. They were handsome boys, she realised, as she looked at their faces. Each of them clutched four or five plastic bowls of instant noodles, their meals for the next two days, supplemented only with a few roasted yams perhaps, or insipid boiled corn bought from the roadside.
Now, back in her own room, she was feeling flatter and emptier than ever. It seemed that the outer edges of her sight had started to shrink, until her pupils became self-absorbed pinpoints. It was as if there were too many details in the world and she had to home in on one thing at a time or else she would go mad. Being alone in a foreign country like this had made her peripheral vision disappear.
All thought and feeling was condensed to simple words. I am well, I am hungry, I am tired, thank you thank you thank you. It seemed that nuances of feeling did not exist anymore if she didn’t know the Mandarin words for them.
But she didn’t feel hungry. It was as if desire and appetite were from the same source – which they probably were – and when one dried up, so did the other. She took to eating one meal a day, like a Buddhist monk. She just wasn’t hungry anymore, for anything.
You could have lived out the experience with him, she kept telling herself, on the overnight train, on the bus, on the road. You could have had company in China. You didn’t need to be alone.
Her parents had spent their honeymoon in the jungles along the Thai–Cambodian border, fleeing from the Khmer Rouge. For true intensity of experience you could not beat that. She was afraid of loss, and of change, and of all the inevitabilities of life. She never let relationships run their course. She didn’t want to believe that love could die.
*
Her three kindly professors took her out to lunch and commiserated over the loss of her hair. ‘She used to have beautiful braids,’ Professor Liu told Professor Hu. Professor Liu was a large-hearted, practical woman who had helped her get her meal and library cards at Peking University and settled her in.
Professor Hu, who was seventy-five and dressed like her grandfather, told her a story about when he was young. ‘A very long time ago, of course,’ he laughed. ‘I was in love with a girl who had very long hair. I tried to help her braid her hair one day, but I could not do it and messed it up terribly! It was very funny, but it was the end. Sometimes when you’re young, small things like that can end big things very quickly.’
Professor Hu asked her to visit his apartment after lunch. His wife peeled and cut up an apple. The pieces filled two small tea-saucer plates and a bowl. ‘Hu and I can’t finish one of these apples ourselves,’ she said, ‘because they are so big. So we eat bananas and save our apples for guests.’
Professor Liu said to Professor Hu in Mandarin, ‘She is so independent. She came here and didn’t phone me for help or anything after our first meeting.’
Professor Hu’s wife said something in Mandarin about how hardy and self-sufficient young foreigners were.
‘This old grandma is praising you!’ Professor Hu joked, before she left their warm apartment.
She didn’t feel too independent. There had been hours of loitering alone, feeling lost, feeling like there were feral kittens fighting in her solar plexus.
But perhaps she was.
*
They had told her back home that she would have a ‘fish out of water’ experience, but she knew that fish died out of water when their gills no longer flicked like the pages of a book. It was dead, dead, dead, and she might as well keep it closed.
It was time to return.
She arrived back in Australia on the worst day of the bushfires that had burned all through the summer, Black Saturday. The plane flew low in the afternoon, through turbulence and dense clouds. The clouds looked like the thick batter of an orange and poppy-seed cake.
When the plane landed, the passengers clapped.