When Jia Jia woke, it was still dark. She sat up and swept for her slippers with her feet. They were not there. She reached a bit further but found nothing. Looking down at the floor, she discovered that it did not exist any more, and what replaced it was the surface of a deep sea, as if she was sitting on the edge of a ship watching the reflection of the starless sky in the water. The darkness rippled like silk. She lifted herself from the bed and stepped onto what used to be the floor, falling into a sudden wet chill that was surely cold water. She immediately turned to grab for the bed, but it was no longer above her. Submerged in water, she searched for anything to hold on to. She held her breath and swam, deep, deeper.
Time became indistinct and irrelevant. Jia Jia did not know in what direction she was swimming. She could not see her body. If she was travelling down, once she reached the bottom of her building, would she find the ground again? It was worth a try, she thought. After what felt like a long time, a white ray of light penetrated the water. The sun! It must be the sun rising in the distance. Refracted, the light seemed alien, as though it belonged in a different dimension, but Jia Jia swam towards it anyway, pulling at and ripping off her pyjamas, crying for help, her voice muffled.
As she was nearing the light, she spotted a small silver creature beneath her, swimming around in circles. She thought she could make out a tiny fish with a sharp tail, shining like glitter. It swam wildly – a fry just learning how to flap its fins.
Jia Jia shifted her focus back to the light and pushed towards it, leaving the silver fish behind. The light grew brighter. She rose out of the water, finding herself sitting on the floor of her apartment, naked, pyjamas in a heap, frozen to the core. The morning sun pierced the blind, the sky was a pale blue now, and a group of middle-aged women were already gathered outside in the park dancing to disco tunes.
Jia Jia’s eyes gradually adjusted to the light. She was shaking. With an automatic gesture she reached for the drawing on the bedside table. Relieved to find it still dry, she leaned her head against the bed and studied the fish-man. She saw lifelessness in its eyes, like prey that was being hunted and had already given up.
Jia Jia folded the drawing, though she was unable to erase the image from her mind. The water, what was it? She could not remember what it looked like any more, only the stinging cold that it had left on her skin. The heater must have broken during the night. A bitter chill remained. The apartment was too big. She had to move out, she decided, as soon as she could. She could not bear being alone in this place.
Jia Jia could not remember the last time she had admitted, even to herself, that she was truly afraid of something. It was not because she never experienced fear, because of course she did, but she had learned very young that her vulnerabilities would only lead to more trouble for her family: more worry for her grandmother, more tears for her aunt, more concerned late-night whispers between the two of them.
The day that her mother died, Jia Jia had just started middle school.
That evening, peeping through the door to the bedroom where her grandmother wept into her pillow in silence, her legs hanging from the edge of the bed, Jia Jia had learned to do the same.
Now she tried to get up but found herself unable to summon the energy to rise. She wrapped the duvet around her body and sat for hours on the wooden floor, wishing that the day would stop for a moment and wait for her. She closed her eyes and searched for memories of her mother. She had not done this for a long time. The memories were fragmented and faint, just as they always were. Jia Jia was sure that these memories had felt like reality once, that at a distinct moment in the past there had been an intensity and lucidity to them. But when? She could not say any more. She could not remember the details, only the existence of details.
In the afternoon, Jia Jia decided to go to her grandmother’s. She wanted a distraction, something to occupy her mind and lift her up from the floor. She got dressed and boarded the 139 bus towards Jianguomen. It would take longer than the subway, but she felt better able to breathe above ground. Jia Jia managed to find a seat towards the back, next to a mother and a girl. The mother held the girl’s schoolbag on her lap and had a few plastic bags of groceries near her feet. The two did not speak much during the journey, only once when the mother unscrewed the top off an insulated bottle, poured some warm water into it, and held it up to her daughter’s lips.
‘You need to drink more water,’ she said.
The girl, keeping her eyes fixed on a picture book in her lap, opened her mouth for her mother to feed her. When Jia Jia got off the bus, the mother and daughter rode on.
Jia Jia had grown up in a compact three-bedroom apartment with her grandmother and her aunt. It was in an old brick building, on the second floor, overlooking a courtyard. Her grandparents’ apartment had been consigned to them by their employer, and when her grandfather passed away, her aunt had moved in to take care of her grandmother. Then, when her aunt married Li Chang, he joined them too. Through the years, the courtyard had become crowded with parked cars and there were fewer bikes lying around than there had been in Jia Jia’s childhood. A group of women walked out of the front gate just as Jia Jia entered. She did not recognise them. When she was young, she thought that the families who lived in this building would never leave; they had seemed so rooted to this piece of land, as if they had sprouted from it, like trees.
Jia Jia pushed open the metal door, stamped hard on the floor to switch on the lights, and climbed up the stairs. There were more advertisements on the stairway walls, posters layering over the old ones. Someone had written ‘car rental’ followed by a phone number directly onto the wall.
She knocked on the door and her aunt greeted her.
‘Look at my new aquarium!’ her aunt said. She slanted her body so that Jia Jia could squeeze past the shoe cabinet and into the room.
There was a large aquarium in the living room, standing more than a head taller than Jia Jia. Different species of fish swam inside, eyes big and round, lost and disconcerted. But even with so many fish, the tank looked oddly vacant.
‘Did you get any coral?’ Jia Jia asked, putting down her bag on the sofa.
‘It’s coming tomorrow,’ her aunt said, proudly looking at the tank as if it was her child.
Jia Jia’s grandmother was shaking her head as she walked, with tiny steps, out of her room.
‘We’re just a normal family living in a normal apartment,’ her grandmother said, her voice raspy with mucus, and her face scrunched into a displeased expression. ‘Jia Jia, your aunt has a new idea every day, always trying to go with the trend. Look at how much space this thing is taking up!’
‘Li Chang’s at a meeting right now,’ her aunt said to Jia Jia, ignoring the old woman. ‘He and I have been working on a film project. Once I get my share of the money, I’ll try to get you a nice little apartment, and an aquarium just like this. It should be a big sum this time.’
Jia Jia’s aunt sat down and began rinsing and sterilising teacups with boiling water.
‘The apartment you’re in now is too big for you. You should sell it and invest in our project,’ she continued. She picked three cups out with a pair of wooden tongs. ‘Last night your uncle and I stayed at the Four Seasons to celebrate this film deal. More than one thousand yuan a night! Li Chang and I thought the lobby was so beautiful. Too bad it’s winter, otherwise we would’ve had a drink on the terrace.’
‘I thought you were opening a restaurant?’ asked Jia Jia.
‘We figured it’s better to do something Li Chang’s good at,’ her aunt explained. ‘The restaurant idea was a little foolish.’
Jia Jia’s aunt had never been able to earn the life she wanted with her various business ventures. Chen Hang used to criticise her approach: he would flip his hand in the air, shake his head and declare that Jia Jia’s aunt had set her sights too high, that she was too eager, that she idealised money too much. You won’t earn money by obsessing over it, he would say, while he cracked a nut. But had he not been the same?
‘How about you, my dear, what are your plans?’ Jia Jia’s aunt looked up from her tea set at her niece.
‘I’m looking for somebody to rent or buy my apartment. Auntie, I think I should start painting again,’ Jia Jia said. ‘Sell my paintings.’
‘Oh, get yourself a stable job,’ her grandmother said, walking slowly behind the table to sit beside her daughter and making a shuffling sound with her slippers. She had been wearing those yellow polka-dotted slippers for more than ten years at least, and when the problems began with her knee joints, she had sewn fabric to the soles so that she could move more easily by sliding her feet along the floor. ‘You should’ve listened to me,’ her grandmother added with a sigh.
Jia Jia remembered, of course she did: she remembered her grandmother telling her to study something that would give her more job security. An ‘iron rice bowl’, her grandmother had called it. She breathed in deeply, knowing that there should not be any more debates over this matter, and that the old woman had already been through too much in her life. Anything coming out of Jia Jia’s mouth, should she allow herself to open it now, was going to be too spiteful. So she said nothing. She had to control her temper. She could not allow her aunt and grandmother to detect the faltering feeling inside her.
‘Let me ask if Li Chang has anything for you,’ her aunt suggested.
‘Make sure that it’s proper work and that they won’t cheat her,’ Jia Jia’s grandmother said.
‘Ma,’ her aunt began again. ‘I know you don’t like Li Chang, but he knows a lot of wealthy people who might like to order some art from Jia Jia.’
‘I won’t intervene any more,’ her grandmother said with a forlorn expression. ‘I don’t know how the world today works. But having a practical skill is the safest bet. Look at you and Li Chang, still living in my apartment. He should have his own place by now.’
Then she rose from her seat to start cooking dinner, shaking her head as she slid away.
‘Stay for dinner, Jia Jia,’ her aunt said.
*
Just after nine p.m., Jia Jia roamed into Leo’s bar. She did not speak at first: there was too much on her mind for it all to be organised into words. It had hit her, upon walking out of her grandmother’s door, that she no longer had to abide by rules made by anybody else. She was not a child any more, and her grandmother’s opinions, no matter how strong, were confined behind that door. She could walk anywhere now, answering to nobody. She had the opportunity to pursue her art, without Chen Hang there to tell her how bad it looked to others. It made her want to get a nice glass of champagne.
She called Leo over.
‘A glass of the best champagne you have, please,’ she told him.
‘This one?’ He opened the menu and pointed it out to her. ‘It comes by the bottle usually. But I can give you a glass. Looks like you’re in a celebratory mood today.’
‘Oh, let’s have the whole bottle then!’ She laughed and tapped her finger on the name of the champagne.
If she were to support herself with her art, she wanted to feel free to walk around her home in an oversized T-shirt, face unwashed, hair trimmed short. Though even there, she imagined someone who would provide her with comfort regardless and bring her food from whichever restaurant she desired in that moment, even if it was on the other side of town. Yes! She would make new memories with someone else, memories that would give her a home and fuel her work.
Leo returned with the bottle and opened it discreetly, releasing a soft hiss. He poured a glass out for her – cool, golden.
‘Do you like art?’ Jia Jia asked.
‘I’ve always been more into music.’
‘Will you write a song for me then?’ She laughed.
Usually she was courteous with her laughter, but she wanted to be flirtatious, playful. She could not remember the last time she had expressed herself like this, not with a reaction to something but with an initiation. Leo smiled back to match her. His laugh was almost a chuckle.
‘Have you ever written songs for your girlfriends?’ she asked.
‘Once, for my most recent ex. But she didn’t like it.’
‘Tell me about her.’
‘Well …’ He searched for a succinct way to answer a broad question. ‘She was like a bad hangover.’
‘So she gave you a headache.’
‘Many. Bad ones.’
‘Did you understand her? I mean, did you really understand who she was and why she did what she did?’
‘Just because you understand someone doesn’t make them any easier to deal with.’ He placed the bottle in the ice bucket and draped a napkin over it.
Jia Jia considered that for a moment. ‘I never understood my husband,’ she said.
‘Was he a complicated man?’
‘Oh, not at all. He grew up in a poor but normal family, worked hard, did well in business, married me, and then died. Sounds like a simple life, right? But I didn’t even understand his simplicity.’
‘Is that what you want? Simplicity?’
‘I’m not sure any more.’ She took a sip of the champagne. The bubbles were intense at first, like a loud chord at the beginning of a symphony, but almost immediately afterwards, harmony came to the tip of her tongue.
He gave her a questioning look, requesting an elaboration.
‘It’s like I’ve been walking up the walls of a tower my whole life,’ she explained, putting the glass down. ‘My body parallel to the ground, and then, the world turns and I’m standing straight up, and the tower is lying flat on the ground. Everything is now distorted but my head is up again, I’m walking forward. But the truth is, I don’t even know which way is up. Do you understand what I’m getting at? The champagne is good, very good, I must tell you.’
Before Leo could answer, some other customers walked in, and Jia Jia gestured to him that it was all right to pause their conversation. It was a party of four: two men and two women. Both men wore suits beneath their overcoats, one grey, the other navy; they had taken their ties off after work. The smaller of the women removed her fur coat and revealed a colourful halter top with a low neckline. She was loud. Before she even sat down in her seat, she had announced that she was a lawyer.
‘Those boys didn’t have a chance against me,’ she bragged. ‘I don’t care if you’re fighting in front of the club, but if you’re going to punch my friend in front of me, then you’re being foolish. I made sure that the kid got the sentence he deserved.’
‘He was pretty young though, right?’ the other woman asked.
‘The kid was eighteen. Drove a Maserati.’ She took out a thin cigar. ‘His parents came to apologise and asked to settle. “We’re so sorry, our boy needs to be taught a lesson,” was what they said to me. So I responded, “Perfect, he’s getting the correctional education he needs.”’
She laughed loudly.
‘You should’ve seen their faces!’ she added.
And then they all laughed and ordered their drinks. Leo returned and quietly asked Jia Jia whether the loud group was bothering her.
‘Quite the contrary,’ she whispered back. ‘Let them talk, they’re funny.’
*
Jia Jia was still sitting in her seat when the bar closed. The four had left and the woman had never managed to light her cigar. Leo had remained occupied for the rest of the night, concentrating on making his cocktails. Jia Jia would occasionally observe his fingers while he was working: he was quite average-looking, but she found a certain appeal in the way he moved his hands. He must be a committed man, she thought, so dedicated to what he loved to do. His movements looked effortless – the kind of ease that was only attained after years of practice.
He cleaned up the last table and returned to the counter. Then he moved Jia Jia’s bag and sat on the stool next to her – a surprising act of intimacy from a man who sustained a polite distance from others. Jia Jia turned her stool to face him.
‘I’ve finished with the bottle. It’s about time for me to go,’ she said.
‘Stay for another drink with me.’ He reached over the counter for brandy and two glasses.
They drank in silence.
‘Do you think I’m beautiful?’ Jia Jia asked.
‘You’re like water. Your beauty is soft and quiet.’
‘Will you stay with me tonight then? It’ll be a good memory, I think, for us both.’
The pavement was wet with melted snow and parts of it were freezing over again as the temperature dropped. Leo closed the bar and the two of them walked in the direction of Jia Jia’s apartment. The cleaner air from the day was gone now, and the city hid behind its mask.