On the day of Jia Jia’s flight to Lhasa, she found Xiao Fang waiting for her outside the door. Her father’s wife was wearing a rose-coloured silky blouse and blue denim shorts. Her hair was straight and dyed black, held loosely together by a Burberry-chequered clip. Her deep red lipstick made her ageing lips look like dried cranberries, and the shorts were too high and did not suit her. But she had always been like a girl, stubborn and going her own way with a disregard for consequences; she had always, to herself and her family, been the centre of the universe. Now Jia Jia’s father had joined that family too.
Jia Jia lifted her suitcase down the front steps. The sky was blue towards the east, but where she was, it had turned grey.
‘Jia Jia!’ Xiao Fang removed her sunglasses and waved them in the air. ‘Are you leaving now? I asked your aunt, she told me you’re travelling to Tibet today. I’ll drive you to the airport.’
Jia Jia looked around for her father.
‘It’s just me,’ said Xiao Fang. ‘Your dad doesn’t know that I’m here. He’s old now, you know? He has constipation problems and his shoulder hurts all the time. Jia Jia, would you like to move back in with us?’
‘Move back in?’
‘We have two empty rooms, one of them has a bathroom, you can—’
‘No,’ Jia Jia said. ‘I mean, there’s no need for that, thank you. I’m living well here.’
Xiao Fang wore a saddened, grim look, like a beaten dog that had just been wronged.
She sighed and said, ‘Your aunt is going through tough times too.’
Her voice had the tone of a mother attempting to explain something difficult to her child in the least upsetting way possible. Jia Jia’s own mother had never spoken like that: she had simply laughed, cried, loved and hated with all the life in her and never sheltered Jia Jia from any kind of truth – beautiful or shattering. But Jia Jia remembered how, when she was young, she had wished that when her mother stroked her hair at night, she would whisper to Jia Jia that they were going to live as a complete family, that this woman standing in front of her now was only her Auntie Fang Fang and nothing more. Instead her mother had held Jia Jia in her arms, sometimes sobbing into her daughter’s hair, and other times rocking her back and forth with a soft, distant smile on her face. She had never attempted to explain anything.
‘My old apartment is empty,’ Xiao Fang continued. ‘If you don’t mind, you could stay there. You, your grandmother and your aunt would all be more comfortable.’
‘Tell my father to take care. I’ll see him when I come back.’
‘Think about it, for your aunt’s sake. Let me drive you.’
‘I’ve ordered a taxi,’ said Jia Jia.
Xiao Fang took the suitcase’s handle and helped Jia Jia drag it to the black Toyota that was waiting at the gate of the compound. She beamed and waved her sunglasses again before putting them on. Jia Jia thought of the way her father had lifted the corners of his lips and exposed his teeth at the table in the Shanghainese restaurant.
The airport was swarming with parents and children who were escaping the city for the summer holidays, bumping into each other and charging in all directions, like a herd that was being hunted. Jia Jia had to go through two separate security checks in order to arrive at the check-in counters.
‘When on earth are they going to eliminate these pointless checks?’ a man’s voice shouted somewhere behind her. ‘Look at that woman, she didn’t put her handbag in! This is utterly useless. And you don’t need to pay five people to look after one X-ray machine!’
Jia Jia’s phone rang. It was Xiao Fang again.
‘Are you all checked in?’ she asked. ‘What time is your flight?’
‘Around seven. I’m queuing up now. What is it?’ Jia Jia reached her hand inside her bag and fished out her identification card. The European woman in front of her hurled her backpack onto the belt and left the counter. Jia Jia handed her ID to the airline representative.
‘I’ve just transferred some money to your account. For your trip,’ Xiao Fang said.
‘I’ll send it back once I’m checked in.’
‘Just keep it, in case of emergency.’
‘I can’t keep it,’ Jia Jia told her.
‘Your father wants you to have it. It’s his money. You don’t have to feel bad, we both just want to make sure that you have a good time there.’
The clerk attending to Jia Jia handed her a boarding card along with her documents. He circled the boarding time and gate with a red pen and stood to gesture in the direction of the gates. He smiled, sat down and raised his hand for the next customer.
‘Jia Jia, let us do something for you,’ Xiao Fang continued to say. ‘We didn’t get to express ourselves in any way when your husband passed on.’
‘I don’t need the money,’ Jia Jia responded.
The queue at security snaked through the entire hall.
‘I’ll keep it for now and send it back when I return,’ Jia Jia yielded so that Xiao Fang would hang up. It worked. Xiao Fang seemed pleased.
Jia Jia was one of the last passengers to board the plane. It was a habit that she had acquired from Chen Hang who despised waiting for others and so always preferred to be the last to scan his ticket. A few minutes after she had squeezed into her seat, a female voice announced the flight number and other details regarding the flight. She then repeated the whole speech in English, and finally left the passengers to talk among themselves in soft murmurs.
Grey clouds floated in the darkening sky. The ten or fifteen minutes during which the plane prepared to take off had always been the most sentimental part of leaving home for Jia Jia. Each time she boarded she would gaze out at the terminal buildings and runways from the sealed cabin, feeling melancholy.
The plane pulled away from the gate, steered towards the runway, and finally lifted off, zooming up and out of Beijing, rising above the clouds and stripping the city away entirely from Jia Jia’s vision. After that, there was no sensation that the plane was moving forward any more. It was astonishing, Jia Jia thought, how much human emotions rely on what the eyes can see. When all we can observe is endless condensed water vapour, or the horizon, or the darkness, we feel so incredibly detached from the world below us, as if all ties with our homeland have been cut. And the other passengers, in their designated seats, are just strangers in the cabin going towards the same destination only to separate again.
The hotel was hidden on a small road in the centre of Lhasa city, not too far from Barkhor Street. It was a business hotel and it seemed that nobody had put much thought into its design: a large, concrete shoebox with a dark red lid for a roof. With a dull, constricting ache in her temples from the high altitude, Jia Jia changed in her room into a long white linen dress. Out on the street, small shops of all kinds sold local produce, electronics, cigarettes. Jia Jia did not have a destination in mind, so she followed two black dogs for a few blocks and arrived at a river that she had seen from her car. One of the dogs had a limping back leg and was drinking from a puddle; the other smaller one had trotted further ahead. It had rained earlier and the bushes on the sides of the street were damp. The river flowed between bare banks, nothing but sand and stone. Jia Jia ripped two pieces of paper from her sketchbook, spread them over the rocks, and sat cross-legged.
She began to draw the fish in the water, though she could not actually see any from where she was. She imagined them matte and grey, like most of the river fish she had seen. They varied in size, but they all charged forward with strong tails, even the fingerling.
She was sketching the fins of a fish when a loud thump came from behind her, and a man cursed. She turned around and saw a scrawny, plain figure lying on his side with a green spiral-bound notebook clutched tight to his chest. A crutch had tumbled in front of him. He wore an oversized caramel shirt with a chest pocket and short sleeves, and washed blue trousers. Jia Jia hesitated before assisting the man back to his feet and handing him his crutch.
‘Thank you,’ he said, dusting off his clothes. ‘Too slippery for a crippled man.’
‘You have a Beijing accent,’ Jia Jia told him.
He drew his head back in surprise and lifted the crutch slightly in recognition.
‘You’re from Beijing too? What are you doing here?’
‘I was sketching.’
‘It’s always good to see somebody from Beijing.’ He reached out his hand to shake hers. ‘What’s your name?’
‘Wu Jia Jia.’
‘You’re an artist? I’m a writer. My name is Ren Qi. Show me your sketches!’ He moved his head closer to Jia Jia and peered down at her sketchbook. She instinctively took a small step back and he gave her a red-faced look, ashamed for his unintended act of disrespect.
Jia Jia offered him her sketches and he studied each of them intently without making any comment. She realised that he was much younger than she had initially presumed; he must only have been in his twenties.
‘Keep drawing! I’m going to sit here and get inspired,’ he finally said and slowly lowered himself to the ground. ‘Shit! The ground is wet.’
For most of the afternoon, while the sun drew an arc over them, Jia Jia drew fish and Ren Qi focused straight across the river. His eyes were narrowed into slits as if in meditation, and his index finger kept tracing characters on his lap. On occasion, he would tell Jia Jia something about Tibet. Tibet was called the Third Pole of the world. The highest freshwater lake in the world was in Tibet, but the name of it? He could not remember. Almost half of the people on earth depended on the flow of fresh water from the Tibetan plateau. If you did not know the name of a flower here, you should just call it Gesang flower. Every person in Tibet knew how to dance and sing.
‘My wife is Tibetan,’ he said. ‘I can say that indeed, she’s a great dancer and singer.’
Jia Jia laughed. ‘Are you a tour guide?’
‘Wu Jia Jia, I do a lot of research for my writing. Plus, my wife was actually a tour guide. That’s how we met. But then she gave up her job and came with me to Beijing.’
He looked across. ‘How are the fish?’
This time, like a boy on his first date, he seemed wary of drawing too close.
‘Do you like art?’ she asked, handing over her sketchbook.
‘In theory, yes. I like it a lot, but in theory. Artists these days are trained to be robots. In fact, not just artists, but writers, musicians, too. Even athletes! They paint or write or play the same thing over and over again. The same birds and mountains, the same characters and stories. But fundamentally, Wu Jia Jia, we’re still human, of course, so the occasional deviations away from the mechanical become either absolutely brilliant or utterly disastrous. And we all live for those bursting moments of brilliance.’
He leafed through the book, fetched a cigarette out from behind his ear and started smelling it.
‘Well, looks like I’m mechanically drawing fish,’ Jia Jia said.
‘You know what? I think there’s something here. Something meaningful.’ He held one of the pages in his hand and flipped it back and forth. Then he ripped it out.
Jia Jia snatched the sketchbook away from him.
‘This one is the best. Keep it in your wallet,’ he said. ‘You can throw away the rest. But this one has emotion. It’s as if …’ He held the paper against the sun and thought for a moment. ‘It’s as if its little belly contains all the pride and loneliness in this world. It reminds me of my wife.’
‘Prideful and lonely. Is that what your wife is like?’
He handed the paper to Jia Jia.
‘We’re all like that, most of the time. The lonely part, at least,’ he said.
Jia Jia studied her sketch. All these years of drawing and painting: it was as if she had been playing squash, bouncing balls off a wall in an isolated room. Nobody had ever told her that her art had emotion – most of the time, her professors had said the opposite – and she was not quite sure what Ren Qi meant.
‘My wife disappeared a month ago,’ Ren Qi said. ‘She just went out to the hair salon one morning and never came back. The police couldn’t find her either. I couldn’t bear waiting at home every day, so I came here to look for her. I was thinking that maybe she’d come back to her birthplace.’
‘Was she born here, in Lhasa?’
‘No, no. She was born in this village here.’ He took out a folded map from his notebook and pointed at a spot towards the south-eastern part of the region, along the route that connected Tibet to Sichuan. ‘I’m going to go there in a few days, after I’ve met some of her friends here in Lhasa.’
The village was a small dot on a map, one among a constellation of identical dots representing the countless villages that aligned the road. Jia Jia, at that moment, envied Ren Qi his clear destination. He kept the map open a little longer and then slipped it back into his notebook. He did not ask Jia Jia where she was heading.
They parted before nightfall.
‘Good to have met you, artist Wu Jia Jia.’ Ren Qi held out his hand and Jia Jia shook it firmly. His palm was rough like ginger.
Jia Jia watched the outline of his figure as he hobbled over to a stone bridge and started to cross the river. She called out to him.
‘Can you help me?’ she shouted. ‘I’m looking for a fish-man!’
He hopped on his good leg and turned around.
‘Sure! Where do we find him?’ he yelled back over the sound of the water.
‘I don’t know!’
He held his notebook behind his ear, indicating that he could not hear her.
‘I said I don’t know! My husband knew, but he’s dead!’
‘Oh, fuck!’
Jia Jia picked up the bottom of her white linen dress and ran to the bridge. He waited in the middle, and she made her way towards him.
‘Give me your phone,’ she said, catching her breath. He took it out of his pocket and she typed her number in and saved it. ‘Here. Call me when you’ve found your wife, and then come and help me. I’ll be looking for the fish-man.’
That night, it rained again and the air smelt like clay. Jia Jia swallowed a few painkillers for her headache and waited for them to take effect. Every time she felt herself falling asleep, her own heartbeat would wake her, as if there was a little person trapped in her heart, pounding on the walls. Finally, unable to breathe in the room, she went out for a walk, dressed in her emerald silk robe. She found a corner in the hotel’s courtyard where a few thin, straight trees grew next to one another. She sat down on the rock beneath them. The rain trickled through the black umbrella of leaves and landed on her in cold, heavy droplets; a bit of rain would clear her head, she thought. The dog from the morning with the broken leg trotted past Jia Jia and looked back at her. Shivering from the cold, she smiled at the animal. It approached her, as if it pitied her. It was a skinny creature and reminded her of Ren Qi. She noticed that it was quivering, too.
‘Let’s go,’ she said.
She stood and the dog followed her to the bottom of the staircase where it spun in a few circles before lying down.
Back in her room, Jia Jia undressed and climbed into bed. The rain drummed against the windows until morning. And she lay half-awake, her heart pounding strong and fast, tapping to the rhythms of water.