The next morning, Xiaowen woke me up with a phone call politely informing me that he had been waiting downstairs for twenty minutes. I apologized profusely, then showered, dressed, and met him outside the hotel, where it was chaotically loud because the Park Hyatt was situated at the intersection of two massive highways.
On the way over to the venue, I rehearsed my self-introduction in both English and Mandarin. Forty-five minutes later, Xiaowen let me know we were entering Tsinghua University, which, to my surprise, looked unnervingly similar to a typical American college campus. I felt like I recognized the buildings made of red brick, the grassy quads where students sat on picnic blankets, the walkways lined with cherry trees. Not at all the gloomy, Soviet-flavored affair I was expecting. There was something just a bit too disarmingly familiar, even midwestern, about it that put me on edge, as if I had been teleported to an alternative timeline where my parents never left China. Xiaowen parked in front of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science building, where a team of staffers was checking people in and handing out name tags.
“Hi, I’m Michael Wang,” I said to a staffer wearing a Tsinghua T-shirt.
“Let’s see,” the staffer said, scanning her clipboard. “Oh, Mr. Wang from Princeton University!”
“Well, not quite,” I said. “I wasn’t sent here by Princeton. I’m not a professor or anything. I just went there for college.”
But she didn’t seem to hear me. Her eyes filled with admiration and she lowered the lanyard around my neck like an Olympic medal. “Such an honor to welcome you, Dr. Wang!” she beamed, handing me a program and pointing me toward the entrance of the building.
Pushing my way through the packed hallways, I headed to Lecture Hall A, where opening remarks would be starting in ten minutes. When I found my seat, I was surprised to find Vivian already sitting there, wearing a simple white cotton top and light-wash jeans.
“How did you get in here? Are you volunteering?” I said.
She rolled her eyes. “Surprise, Michael. Thank you for the invite—very kind of you to squeeze me onto the list last second.”
I wanted to ask where she went after the airport yesterday and wondered if she had showed up to the conference just to see me. “No problem. Seriously, though, why are you here?”
Vivian leaned slightly closer to me and made the universal shushing gesture. “Let’s not talk about that here. Lots of people listening in this room. Wait until we’re alone.”
I felt slightly enthralled and decided to hold my questions for later. Then a young man who looked like a graduate student tapped the microphone and started introducing the conference’s keynote speaker, one Professor Liu, chair of the Department of Electrical Engineering and Computer Science. The professor sat with emerital gravitas in a folding chair a couple paces away from center stage. When he rose to the podium, many in the audience started applauding, and some graduate students even rose to show their respect. He accepted the microphone from the younger man and began to speak.
“Dear friends and colleagues,” he began. “On behalf of Tsinghua University, I welcome you to the inaugural Autonomous Driving Sinovision Conference. Gathered here today are some of the foremost scholars and practitioners in the field of autonomous driving from all over the world. I urge you to maximize your time here, because today is a serious opportunity for China to lead the world one step closer to delivering Level 5 full driving automation by 2028.
“Needless to say, our purpose today is to forge the future. But, as an academic bureaucrat, I would be remiss if I didn’t begin with a tedious rehash of the past… It may surprise many to learn that Tsinghua began not as a research university, but as a preparatory school. In the aftermath of the bloody Boxer Rebellion, the humiliated Qing government was forced to pay astronomical reparations to the foreign powers that dominated China. In 1909 the American president Theodore Roosevelt took pity on us and agreed to refund a portion of our payment. But there was one condition: that the funds be used to establish a school to prepare China’s brightest pupils for study at American universities, so that, having been Westernized, they could return home and ‘reform’ their own country. Thus, Tsinghua University was originally the Tsinghua School, built on the grounds of a confiscated imperial garden.
“This turned out to be the most humiliating concession of all. While we eagerly awaited the return of our gifted youths, many were transformed by foreign ways and never returned. Even today, how many untold thousands of overseas Chinese who went abroad for study got stuck there, toiling away unrecognized in research labs only to build the strength of a foreign nation?”
The last line seemed to strike a deeply resonant chord with the audience. For some reason, it wasn’t difficult for me to imagine that this man somehow knew my father, perhaps even sympathized with him.
“But of course, the tides of history must always revert to their natural rhythm. Our nation’s spectacular return to economic dominance has reinvigorated our universities. And so China’s wayward sons have returned from all over the world—from Australia, from Canada, and especially from the United States of America. They have come from places such as the University of Wisconsin; the University of Illinois at Urbana-Champaign; the University of California, Berkeley; and Princeton University.”
I nearly winced at the mention of my alma mater. I looked around the room, but luckily it seemed that no one knew he was referring to me.
“Let us ask ourselves why they’ve come home. Apart from the unmatched resources of our national universities, the fact is that our wandering sons have been waiting to return to native soil their entire lives. You see, something that the Chinese have always known is that patriotism, the love of the motherland, runs in the blood.”
This note released a ripple of applause that built up into a wave. Professor Liu receded slightly from the podium, smiling benevolently down at the crowd.
“Anyhow, I believe that is enough from me,” he said. “Before closing, I would like to thank our financial sponsor, Terra Cotta Capital, for their generous contribution to making this event possible. Please join me in welcoming onstage the Managing Director of Terra Cotta Capital, Bo Song.”
Now the professor made room on the podium for Bo, who strode across the stage in a blue checkered suit, suede loafers, and a Terra Cotta Capital jacket. He took the microphone and occupied the center of the stage with commanding physical presence. I glanced over at Vivian, expecting her to be proud of her high-flying uncle. At the time I thought I just imagined it, but in retrospect I am certain of what I saw: a fleeting expression of hate and fear. All the muscles in her face had clenched up, and her lips were trembling, but when she saw me looking at her, her expression transformed back into a sweet and happy smile. She patted me twice on the forearm before turning her head back toward the stage.
Bo only spoke for a few minutes—he thanked Professor Liu for his remarks and dangled the possibility of investment money from his firm to support the development of the best research ideas. After he concluded his remarks, the conference-goers, ushered by the college-aged volunteers, dispersed to the rooms where the various presentations and panel discussions were being held.
For an hour or so, Vivian and I dipped into different classrooms to check out the guest lectures. On the whole, they were rather informal and poorly attended; many of the presenters seemed inexplicably tired, even bored. One Professor Wong from SUNY Purchase, presenting his research on smart city traffic routing, ended his talk after ten minutes and left without even taking questions. Later we discovered that the real energy was in Lecture Hall B, where Bo was holding a pitch competition for student entrepreneurs. There was a QR code at the entrance because the event was being live-streamed. Teams of young start-ups had spilled out on the floor outside of the lecture hall doing last-minute preparation on their laptops and eating muffins from Luckin Coffee. It was so crowded inside that Vivian and I had to stand at the back of the room, next to the student teams that were waiting to present. I overheard them talking about the pitch in a way that made it clear that Bo, his name and his firm, carried some weight.
Bo sat in the middle of a table flanked by an associate from Terra Cotta at each side. The total prize money, I gathered, was one million RMB of seed funding, to be divided among as many teams as deemed worthy. Vivian and I watched a few of these teams present passionately about their AI/self-driving projects. At the end of each presentation, Bo asked engaging questions about technology, team, and commercial potential. There was even an interactive component, where at the end of each presentation audience members could vote on whether or not they thought a start-up deserved to get funding. On my phone, I saw that more than twelve thousand people were tuned into the live stream.
Vivian saw me reaching for a cup of Luckin Coffee and stopped me. “No, that looks terrible. Put it down—let’s go get one on campus. Come on, I know a place.”
Vivian and I slipped out of the EECS building together and walked into the main quad, which was warm, sunny, and filled with trees. As we put distance between us and the looming auditorium, both my jet lag and vague feeling of worry started to dissipate. With her hair tied up, Vivian looked almost like an ordinary college girl.
“You seem like you really know your way around,” I said.
“I’m glad you think so,” she smiled back.
“Spend much time in Beijing growing up?”
“Not really. I had a boyfriend who went here, though, so I sort of know the layout of the campus.”
I looked around, searching for a believable facsimile of Vivian’s ex-boyfriend in the crowd of male students. To my relief, there did not seem to be any suitable candidates—not that I had any real clue what her romantic tastes might be. We continued our long walk and passed a couple of libraries, dormitories, and baseball fields. Then we wandered into an imperial garden overlooking a lake, where we could hear an erhu faintly playing. It was one of those pavilions made of stone and red wood, with narrow corridors that stretched across water, the sort of landscaping designed to facilitate ambulatory thoughts. Vivian and I reduced the distance between us as we made our way through the corridors, instinctively following the sound of the erhu. So this was the confiscated garden Professor Liu alluded to during his speech, the historical locus from which the rest of the still-expanding university had sprung. During that walk, the other half of that double consciousness I had been dimly aware of my whole life roused itself from oblivion and took over me peacefully. Whatever was awkward between me and Vivian in San Francisco seemed to melt away.
We sat together on a stone veranda overlooking a part of the lake that was covered with water lilies.
“It feels strange to be here,” I said. “Everything is so vivid and familiar. Like a sense of déjà vu, though I’m not sure if that’s exactly the right word for it. Maybe what I mean is that I feel like I might’ve been a student here in a previous life, not that I believe in that sort of thing.”
“If you had grown up in China, you definitely would’ve gotten into Tsinghua,” Vivian said. “Smart guy like you.”
“It was actually my dad’s dream school. I think he was just a couple points off on the national exam, so he went to another college in Beijing. And he loved that place, talked about his college friends constantly and went back a lot, for conferences like this one. Sometimes it felt like he never wanted to leave in the first place.”
“Why do you think that was?” Vivian said. I paused.
“I’m not too sure. Maybe it was because he felt like he never found his footing in America.” I paused. “To be honest, sometimes I resented that about him,” I added, stunned by how easily the confession slipped from my lips. “It was confusing. You know, for me to watch as a young kid. Always one foot back in the motherland, neither here nor there.”
“So where is he now?” Vivian asked.
“We don’t know, actually,” I said, my voice completely flat. “He just disappeared one night. Didn’t leave a note and hasn’t contacted us since then. But if he’s anywhere, I bet it’s Beijing.” I paused here for a few seconds. A small breeze rippled the surface of the water, making the lilies bump into each other. I took a deep breath and decided to continue.
“I miss him, you know. It seemed like he packed in a hurry, because for weeks after he left, I kept finding the things he left behind or didn’t have room for. I started to collect these things in a box in my room, in case he ever came back for them. The brown shoes he wore to work every day, a ceramic mug from his research lab, his trusty TI-89 graphing calculator carefully sheathed in its protective case. I even told myself he’d left these specific items behind for me on purpose, to help me find my way without him. Who knows if I ever believed that. Halfway through high school I finally moved the box of his things to the attic. It’s often crossed my mind to come out here and look for him, but something always held me back.”
“You’re here now, Michael,” Vivian said softly, leaning in a little. “That’s what matters.”
For a few seconds, Vivian and I just sat in silence on the veranda looking down at the water lilies together. With the words I just said hanging in the air between us, I was afraid to look at her, but the air was so still I could feel her breath against my neck. For years, I hadn’t come close to being that vulnerable with another person, had considered that story a shameful secret, the defect in the blueprint of my psychological makeup. My eyes were still fixed on the lilies when I felt her hand close over mine. Finally I looked at her, and found in her expression a look that dispelled all my banal and cynical self-condemnations and affirmed everything I ever secretly wished was true of myself. Vivian closed her eyes and tilted her head up. I leaned in and kissed her. When it was over, we lingered for a while and looked at each other. Then she took my hand and we left the garden together.
We made our way back to the main quad at a leisurely pace, floating through pleasant humidity and comfortable silence. The baseball fields, yogurt carts, and bicycles all glowed with the beatitude of the late summer afternoon. My head was still foggy with elation and every now and then I turned to glance at Vivian, trying to commit the moving image to memory: Vivian in her white cotton top walking with both hands on the shoulder straps of her backpack. I felt the powerful pull of nostalgia for a romantic youth I never experienced.
Finally we reached a small doorway on the edge of campus, which led down into a hip basement café. The place was quite crowded and lit up with Christmas lights. Getz/Gilberto was playing through hi-fi speakers on low volume. Otherwise, the café was filled with conversation: Mandarin, English, German, and Russian. At the counter, a male barista wearing a black T-shirt and a beaded bracelet dripped hot water into a Chemex filter. Vivian ordered a latte and I had a regular black coffee. I paid while she brought our drinks to an open table in the corner. Then I sat down next to her and we sipped our drinks for several minutes in silence.
“The time I spent in Beijing was the happiest of my life,” she said, out of the blue. I looked up at her, but her gaze was fixed on her mug. The barista (or baristo?) had drawn a foam heart in her drink, which Vivian was now absentmindedly stirring into oblivion with her spoon.
“During my senior year of high school, I went for a semester abroad at the American school here. Beijing wasn’t a popular destination for the girls I was friends with, who preferred places like London or Paris, but it was as far as my father would let me go. To be honest, I was amazed he even gave his permission in the first place, since for the first seventeen years of my life he never let me out of his sight.
“He set me up in a fully furnished apartment in Wudaokou. The place swept me off my feet. It was like a life-sized doll house that made every girlhood dream I had ever harbored come true. I didn’t want to change a thing.
“It was the first time in my life that I had ever been on my own. No guard at the compound gate keeping track of my comings and goings, no chauffeur waiting after school to shuttle me straight home. I was elated. I bought a bicycle and a Nikon camera and rode all over the city taking pictures. I fell in love with art and started spending all of my time hanging out in the cafés and galleries in the 798 Art Zone. There was a lady named Miss Liuwen at this gallery called X Wood and I begged her to give me a job, even though my father’s allowance was enough to cover my expenses.
“After Miss Liuwen hired me, I showed up at the gallery right after school at four in the afternoon on the weekdays and ten in the morning on weekends. I helped her set up exhibits, process orders, and give tours. I wasn’t very good at the tour part. Since I was so shy, I preferred being backstage. For the first time in my life, I felt completely happy. I started to wonder whether or not it could last forever.”
Here Vivian paused for a second and looked down at the mottled puddle of coffee and cream in her mug, from which she still hadn’t taken a sip. I waited, impatient for her to continue. I was enjoying this lovely story, imagining her bicycling around the city at seventeen years old.
“One day I was setting up a small new exhibit when Miss Liuwen tapped me on the shoulder to tell me that the artist himself had stopped by,” she continued. “I remember being not so impressed with this guy when I first met him, who told me in rather poor English that he was called Vincent. How snobbish of a Chinese painter to call himself that! He seemed extremely confident even though he was not what you would call handsome. He had a round face and long hair that went down to his shoulders. But when he invited me out to tea after work two days later I still accepted, even though I wasn’t sure why.
“He brought me to a beautiful park in Beijing called Tuanjiehu. We walked through it for an hour and rented a small paddleboat that we took onto the lake. I learned that he was a student in the Art Department at Beijing University, a couple years older than me, and that his parents ran a small diner in the fourth ring. He was the first in his family to go to college and had disappointed everyone by becoming a painter. After that first time, I kept seeing Vincent, who took me to all the beautiful places in Beijing that didn’t cost money. It turned out there were a great many.
“It didn’t take long for me to fall in love with him. Through him, the world rearranged itself within the viewfinder of my camera, which always found him at the center. After just two weeks, he brought me home to meet his parents, loving, good-hearted people who cooked delicious food for me. We basked in the privacy of my apartment, often passing entire days there talking, drinking wine, listening to music, and making art. But the whole time there was something in the back of my mind, a terrible thought never left me alone: this couldn’t last forever.
“We started to run out of time. I was due to return to Hong Kong in a few weeks, and who knows when I would have the chance to come back to Beijing again? Still, Vincent never gave up hope. Until almost the very end, we were inseparable. He wrote me a love letter in the form of an oil portrait, and I cried because it was too large to take with me. He said he would call me every day and save up all the money from his painting to visit me. And I believed every word. That’s why I decided to sleep with him, on a warm spring evening only two weeks before my last day in the city.
“After that night, I didn’t hear from Vincent for several days. I was confused and anxious—I found myself questioning my memory of the past few weeks, wondering if he had only wanted me for my body this entire time. The blissful freedom inside of me congealed into an insert solitude. At the gallery I became listless and quiet, and only Miss Liuwen took note of the change that had come over me.
“It was Miss Liuwen, finally, who told me that Vincent had been expelled from Beijing University for sexual misconduct, and then asked me, in the most concerned of tones, whether he had ever gotten carried away around me. As soon as she started telling me, the room started to spin. Had there been someone else? I fled the gallery and called Vincent a dozen times. When he didn’t pick up, I rode my bicycle to his parents’ house, but his sweet mother wouldn’t even let me in the door. I sat on the steps outside and waited until dark. When she finally came back outside, it was with a bowl of porridge and to tell me in a shaking voice that Vincent wasn’t here and could never see me again.
“The very next day, my father came to help me pack my things, almost an entire week early. The moment he stepped inside, I intuited what he had done from the cold fury in his movements. In my state of grief I had made no attempt to clear the apartment of the evidence of Vincent’s presence. I watched as my father swept a few paintbrushes, photographs, even a man’s T-shirt into a black plastic bag with complete detachment. I went into my bedroom for a final moment of privacy and collapsed onto the bed. I looked at the clock and registered that it was just past four in the afternoon. Then I saw something so devastatingly obvious it froze the blood in my veins: the lens of a tiny camera, just between the numerals ten and eleven.
“I found more cameras everywhere. Embedded in a painting in the living room. Buried in a fern in the kitchen. There was even one in my bathroom, facing out from the curtain rail. All the memories I had of spending time with Vincent replayed in my head, only this time through the grotesquely inverted perspective of the camera lenses. So he had been watching this whole time. Suddenly it occurred to me that the live footage being captured at that moment would show me discovering the cameras. I listened to my father in the next room. I threw up in the toilet.
“My father brought me back to Hong Kong, where I finished high school, and then I left for college in England. We never talked about what happened, and I never took another lover.
“In spite of all this, the time I spent in Beijing was the happiest of my life. I still remember the quiet joy of afternoons spent setting up exhibits in the gallery, wandering through the alleyway neighborhoods, taking photos of things I might never see again. Since Vincent disappeared, I’ve often thought of moving back here. I visit from time to time, as much as it brings back painful memories, because I can’t help myself. But the prospect of starting another life here by myself feels overwhelming. In the end, though, nothing scares me so much as the thought that this is the only place I can be happy.”
With that Vivian finished her story and looked up, her eyes wide with anticipation, and I suddenly realized I was the only man who had ever heard this story. Her knuckles whitened over the handle of the mug and now she sipped the long-cold beverage quickly, glancing up at me. It felt strange seeing her so vulnerable.
But surely it wasn’t just sympathy she wanted, I considered, but something more tangible… yes, it was unmistakable, what she wanted was a companion to start a new life with, in Beijing. Maybe, I thought—and this was a dangerous thought that lodged into my chest like shrapnel—I could be that companion.
The last song on the album ended and chatter once again filled the space of silence that the music had left. I squeezed Vivian’s hand under the table. Her fingers were cold, which inexplicably made me think of this Vincent and imagine his ghost sitting invisibly, mournfully in the empty third chair next to her, opposite to me. I felt the sting of jealousy and wondered how I could ever warm a hand that longed for another. How could anyone compete with a memory, a ghost? I looked at Vivian, and she returned my gaze with an intensely searching expression. I furiously turned over the verbal possibilities in my mind, trying to gauge the emotional yards between us, find the necessary space for a declaration. I was sure that Vivian could observe this process taking place in my head, as if it were transparent, because all the while she sustained the silence of expectation that finally reached an unbearable boil. In retrospect, this must have been the moment it became clear to her that she had me in her dominion.
“You don’t have to start over here alone,” I said.
Vivian’s eyes, now trembling with hope, emboldened me to continue. “I don’t have much in savings, but I can earn enough to support both of us by freelancing. I’m sure I can find a full-time job here as well. We could start a new life in Beijing… together, if that’s what you want.”
Vivian clasped my hands in hers, which were suddenly warm and ready, and pulled herself close enough that I could hear her staggered breathing—it was a quick, springy motion, almost like a pounce. And I her grateful prey.
“Is that what you want, Michael?” she said. “To be here with me?”
“Yes, it is. I’m certain.”
“But won’t you miss America? Your apartment and your friends?”
I catalogued the things I would leave behind–my loft, the furniture, my job, and Daniel, and Lawrence–and found that they had no weight in my heart.
“I’d make sure you were never lonely,” she continued, in an anxious tone that made my heart ache. “I can show you so many beautiful places in this city and we could explore the rest together. We could make our own, private world. And you’re so brilliant that I’m sure you’ll make your own fortune in no time at all.”
My own fortune, in no time at all—was there anything I couldn’t accomplish with Vivian by my side? My heart beat with a manic exuberance and I held her hands tighter.
“Yes, I’m certain,” I said, this time more boldly. “I’d do anything to make and keep you happy.”
A soft, almost tearful smile played on Vivian’s face and she blinked slowly, twice. Then a more serious expression settled in and she said: “If you want to be with me, then you have to be with me fully. There would be no going back.”
“Ever?” I said, caught a bit off guard.
“No, not ever,” she said. “What I mean is that I’d need you to be really be here. No living between two worlds. I couldn’t bear it.”
Of course, I thought of my nervous father and his black suitcase, always ready to be packed at a second’s notice. “No living between two worlds,” I said finally. “I’m ready.”
Vivian sighed and closed her eyes, looking relieved. We stayed like that for a minute or so, basking in the warmth of our mutual understanding. When she opened her eyes again, there was something sharp and urgent in her voice.
“Two weeks. That’s how long I’ll need to make some final arrangements at home. It should be enough time for you to quit your job and pack your things. We’re running out of time and I think you have to meet Bo soon. In two weeks exactly I’ll call you in the morning and we’ll meet here, okay?”
“Okay,” I said simply, and nodded in amazement, which was all I could do. Vivian got up from her seat and I understood that I shouldn’t follow her outside. We exchanged a hurried kiss in the middle of the café, and she whispered “two weeks” into my ear, before looking once more into my eyes and walking away. I counted the steps she took to cover the short distance to the door and disappear onto the street, and felt strangely moved, filled with passionate devotion and the exuberant certainty of our promise.
I checked my phone and saw that I had a message from Bo asking where I was and decided to head back to the conference. On my way there, the words two weeks were still floating breathlessly on my tongue. The only thing that slightly bothered me was—how did Vivian know I had to meet Bo soon? Was I only imagining it, or had something hard and determined entered her affect at the last second, just as she slipped away?