I don’t remember much about that evening. Not that we drank a huge amount. We got to the point where we giggled about that middle-aged professor, his belly wobbling, shrieking vengeance into the night. But more than that, I think it was the first time at university that I felt I had made a friend. The journey home was tedious, the bus trundled its way through the city centre and towards the outskirts, and when I finally returned it was late and our apartment was quiet. Without my grandmother, it was not just less crowded, it was as though the shadows had grown longer, the late-evening stillness absolute. My grandmother’s death had created this echoing emptiness that lived with us all of the time, even when we weren’t aware of it. And none of us knew how to fill it. As I passed through the hallway, the door of my brother’s room creaked open. I glimpsed his form wrapped up in his bedcovers, his closed eyes – even larger in sleep – set into a countenance that was youthful and unblemished, and in that moment seemed to speak of absolute peace. He was not snoring exactly, he was still too young for that; however, the air flittered through his nose, making the faintest whistling sound. It moved something inside me, for he was perfect and untouched and yet the world awaited him cynical and corrupt, relentless and unending. At the core of myself I felt a swell of emotion: the need to hold back the tide, to protect him come what may, so that he could always sleep this way – a child’s way, peaceful and untroubled. And yet, despite the strength of my emotion, I was aware of its absurdity. Its futility perhaps.
I closed his door quietly, the gap narrowing to nothing.
I crept down the hall.
There was a small light coming from the kitchen. I glimpsed her silhouette by the open window, the tip of her cigarette glowing in the gloom. My mother was leaning against the sink, a glass of wine next to her. She turned a fraction, and although I was unable to see her expression, I knew she was aware of me.
‘You get back later and later, it seems,’ she said, her voice soft and sardonic. ‘It must be an exciting life you live at that place of yours.’
She never said the word ‘university’. As though naming it was somehow distasteful. As though this stage in my life was beneath her contempt. And yet I also knew that she bragged to the neighbours about my entry into Peking University.
I stepped into the kitchen.
‘Where’s papa?’
‘In his study, where else?’
She blew out smoke in a soft whispery plume. The kitchen was still warm from that day’s cooking, but a streak of stealthy cold had slipped through the open window. Outside, I could see the fading colours of the neighbours’ washing; reds, greens and blues, subdued by the night such that they were melted into gentle shadow. My mother tapped her cigarette, shedding particles of ash that fluttered out of the window into the gathering darkness below. Her eyes flitted across me, casual, indifferent, with just the slightest hint of disdain. I shifted from one foot to the other, seeking to extricate myself from her, and yet, seeing her there like that – cigarette in hand, wine by her side – it seemed to me she had a certain mysterious elegance.
She was my same mother, of course. And yet, once upon a time she would have been my age, and perhaps her thoughts might not have been so dissimilar to mine. Her hopes. I looked at her. She had always seemed old to me, but I realised then that she must have been stunning as a young woman. I knew I was ordinary-looking; on a good day, if I was lucky, someone might describe me as pretty. But she … I saw it with such clarity. Even the tiredness and disappointment that come from experience – such things had not eliminated her beauty but in some way emphasised it in hard, bitter outline.
She watched me with mirthless eyes.
‘What are you looking at?’
I stuttered. Made to withdraw.
‘Don’t be such a wet blanket. Have a drink with me.’
I glanced at her glass. The bottle stood nearby.
‘You mean the wine?’
She smiled. It was the closest her expression had come to gentleness.
‘Yes, I do. It’s not like you don’t drink when you are at that place of yours! I know you are used to it.’
There was an accusation there, but it came with none of her usual hand-wringing melodrama. Just a shrewd acceptance. She seemed different then, more real somehow.
I nodded.
She took a glass down from the cupboard and trickled some wine into it. Handed it to me and smiled, a watery smile fissured with regret.
‘You know what day this is?’
‘No.’
‘It’s your father’s and my anniversary. Twenty years together!’
‘Congratulations, mother!’
‘Thank you, daughter.’
Her voice was toneless, but she raised her glass. Sipped. Delicately as she always did. For the first time I realised she was probably quite drunk. She rarely took alcohol.
‘It is actually an achievement. Your grandmother, who you worshipped so much, was absolutely against it. She thought your father was a good-for-nothing bookworm. If she’d had her way, you and your brother wouldn’t even exist.’
My mother gave a strange smile.
I winced.
‘So why did you disobey her? Why did you marry father?’
She seemed to relax. She pulled on the last of the cigarette, before pressing the butt into the sink. She took a luxurious sip of the wine and her eyes fluttered.
‘Oh, that’s good, oh, that’s so nice.’
I waited. She focused again but she wasn’t looking at me. She was gathering her thoughts. When her voice came it was precise and careful, not slurred by drink.
‘Your father seemed to be part of a world which was amazing to me. He had ideas. Big ideas. I never went to university, but there was a time when I wasn’t so different from you. You might not believe it. But it’s true.’
She looked at me and in her eyes there was a strange sense of appeal that I’d never seen before.
Her focus shifted. Her voice softened.
‘He wasn’t the best-looking of men. He wasn’t even all that charming. But there was … there was something kind about him. Which I liked. Because that meant something. Especially given how cruel men can sometimes be.’
A shadow crossed her face.
She brightened.
‘So I fought for him. At the time it was all I could do, I guess.’
She stared out over the rim of the glass, looking back to a time in the past which I could only dimly perceive.
She smiled. She looked guileless, beautiful.
‘You know, every year on our anniversary, he used to buy me a posy of cherry blossom and he would enclose a short poem. The poem was always bad, clunky – even I could see that. But it was sincere.’
I found myself smiling too.
‘Do you know what he got me this year?’
‘No, what?’
‘Nothing.’
She turned away, took another sip of her wine.
‘I know not everything is his fault. God knows what happened to him in that place. During the Cultural Revolution. But if he had just been a little more … if he could just have fitted in a little better …’
Her words trailed away wistfully.
I looked at her. I felt a surge of compassion. I concentrated, trying to get what I wanted to say just right. My voice came soft and low, but with conviction, I believe.
‘I think what you and father have achieved is very significant. I don’t think love is just about romance and poetry. It’s about holding yourselves together, even through terrible times. I hope that Gen and I enjoy something of what you and father have shared.’
She looked at me for a few seconds, almost thoughtfully. And when she spoke, I heard the words, but didn’t take them in at first.
‘You stupid, stupid little girl,’ she said softly. ‘What do you know about anything?’
I heard a wheezing sound then. And I realised the noise was coming from my own throat. I blinked at my mother. But her image had blurred. I turned away and stepped out of the room.
And then I stopped. I wiped my eyes. And I took a couple of deep breaths.
I walked back into the kitchen.
She was pouring the last drops of the wine into her glass. She turned to me again, her expression still sharp with contempt, but tired too.
‘If you are going to have some kind of tantrum, now is not the best time. Your brother has already done that once today and I am exhausted.’
I walked towards her. My hands were shaking. I was looking her in the eye. I hardly ever looked people in the eye. She looked away, then glanced at me again.
‘You … you must have … surely there must have been some time when you did. When you actually did.’
‘When I did what?’ she said, sighing quietly in exhausted exasperation.
I looked at my feet as I finally said the words.
‘There must have been a time when you … loved me. When I was very small perhaps …’
My mother’s expression seemed to ossify, the irritation frozen faintly on her lips. She looked at me for a few moments longer, and blinked as though confused. She glanced back at me again, and something rose up in her, and I saw the tears fill her eyes. Then she turned away and walked past me. I turned on the tap, rinsed the sink. From somewhere outside I heard the noise of a couple, two people, arguing or perhaps just talking, their indistinct voices wafting up through the darkness. I closed the window. Turned off the light. Left the kitchen and went to bed.
. . .
It was early December when I next heard Gen speak. The weather was colder now, but that made the gathering in the Triangle that bit cosier; students huddled together, sharing thermoses of whisky and mulled wine, and the atmosphere, as ever, was jovial. And yet, a mood of greater seriousness had begun to intrude. The ‘lights out’ policy – which Gen had made a name for himself by protesting against – was due to kick in on the tenth of that month. The ability of the students to make a difference to our own living situation was being tested for real, and in a few days we would know if any of our speeches or protests had succeeded in repealing the hated initiative. But, for the time being, there was a sense of optimism and anticipation, and when Gen stepped onto our clumsy makeshift podium, his smooth austere features were ruddy in the dark. He was applauded. He nodded his head bashfully a couple of times and then raised his hand in a brief, elegant gesture. At once the smattering of people was subdued. He seemed so much more confident now.
‘Our university is not just a place for education. After classes some of us may take in a film, or have a stroll in the park of an evening. Some of you – dare I say – may even repair to one of the local bars to partake in some less “wholesome” entertainments!’
His face was knowing and at the same time kind, an ironic smile playing on his lips, and a ripple of laughter at once ran across the small crowd. I felt myself laughing too. Before, Gen’s speaking had been forceful and effortlessly logical, but now he was using humour to create a light-heartedness that hadn’t been there before. At which point the casual playfulness of his words sharpened into something more serious.
‘And yet, wherever we go – cinema, park, bar – we all come back to this place. The university. We go back to our dorms, if only to lay down our heads. And that’s the point. The university is not just a place for education. For us, it is also a home. The university is not a parent or a politician, and still less a dictator. It is our communal home. A place where we live together as one. And every man should have autonomy in his own home. That is the most simple and honest of all human rights. And that is what we demand, nothing more, nothing less!’
The students broke into applause. I was busy scribbling down an approximation of what Gen had said. Fortunately he was not a verbose speaker – and at the end of his delivery, he walked off the stage in the same way he might have strolled in the park, absent-minded almost, as though oblivious to the applause. And I felt that same wave of longing. He was everything I was not and yet longed to be. He walked through the world with a nonchalance, as though he fully belonged, with an insouciance, unconscious and automatic. Gen had a breezy ability not to register the judgment and disapproval of others. He had got even taller since we had been at university – his frame even more gangly and awkward – and yet he had a charisma that was somehow weightless. I wondered if he himself was even aware of it.
The next speaker had nothing vaguely resembling charisma. She was a mousy little thing, even smaller than me. She wore huge black-framed glasses which sat on her face like a great contraption. Her squeaky voice halted and stuttered as she summoned up the strength in her tiny body necessary to maintain it, to project it outwards. But as absurd as she appeared, the other students regarded her kindly, for there was a feeling of solidarity that day.
‘I would … I mean I hope to … I mean I just wanted to regale you with some lines from a favourite poem of mine. It is from a great poet whom I am sure many of you already know: Sándor Petőfi. The lines read:
Life is dear, love is dearer,
Both can be given up for freedom.
She blinked out at her audience, and even in the evening gloom I could see her eyes were glossy with tears. I felt embarrassed for her, aware of her ridiculousness. The university bureaucracy might have acted in a haphazard and authoritarian manner in trying to impose conditions on the students, curtail their activities, have them all in bed by ten. It was, of course, outrageous and paternalistic. And yet the appeal to life and love and the sacrifice of both in response? That was surely absurd.
The young woman adjusted those heavy-set glasses on a face that seemed oppressed by them. She started to speak again in that same high-pitched stutter.
‘I … very much appreciated the comments the last speaker made …’
She nodded in Gen’s direction. He was standing a few feet from me, and he smiled, a small benevolent smile.
‘And yet, I think … I mean I would suggest … there was more he might have said. He used the word “autonomy”. And I … of course I agree wholeheartedly. But “autonomy” on its own is an abstraction. Yes, we would all like this thing, but we must be much more concrete.’
Her voice had grown shriller, but at the same time more confident.
‘We can only achieve “autonomy” if we have a political and social system that might facilitate it! In practice, autonomy means democracy. A working, functioning political democracy! That is what we lack. That is what we must fight for, as a genuine, concrete demand.’
Some of the students looked a little uncomfortable. But the slight young woman dug her heels in, becoming even more animated. She came down the steps rather awkwardly before ripping a poster from the wall.
‘Look at this,’ she said, stabbing her finger furiously. ‘This is a poster that the university administration has posted, here in our Triangle. It reads: “Too many cooks spoil the broth! In a country as populous as China we need a strong patriotic government, and we need you, the people, to preserve the peace!”’
Some of the students murmured to one another.
‘Don’t you see what it’s saying?’ the young woman squeaked indignantly. ‘It is nothing short of an advertisement for dictatorship. Communist parties all over the world say the same thing, as if they have been programmed in advance. Individualism must be destroyed in order to achieve unthinking consensus, and anything else – anything against the government line – is contrary to the nation!’
Now the other students were shifting and murmuring. Many looked uncomfortable. I felt their discomfort, for this kind of talk was extremely radical, extremist almost. But she was so far gone that she didn’t seem to pick up on the mood of the crowd.
‘The last speaker spoke of “autonomy”. But he provides no blueprint by which such a thing might be realised. The only way we can do this is to create a system that will give us autonomy, here in the university but also in the country as a whole. We need to fight for a national democracy where every voice can be heard!’
Some of the students were listening attentively, others had begun to talk among themselves, and a few had turned away, pretending she wasn’t even visible to them.
The speaker started to panic. She began to stutter her words again, in desperation this time.
‘I am just … I … just … needed to … listen, all I am arguing is … please, I won’t take up too much … time … just that …’
The discomfort of some of the students morphed into something else. As her voice rose, the more shrill and desperate it became. The first giggles rippled across the crowd. Then sniggers. She looked out at us for a few moments longer. She looked as though she had been slapped. I felt some sympathy, because at that moment she seemed entirely alone despite the fact that she was surrounded by people. And yet she had brought it upon herself with such desperate and extreme polemic. She turned and ran from the stage.
I looked to the side to find Gen.
His lips were curled in a strange smile. I don’t imagine he thought anyone was watching him. And as beautiful as I found his features, in that moment there was something grotesque about them.
Someone hit the button on a radio, and music started to play. The mousy young woman was at once forgotten as some of the students began to dance. The tension had evaporated. The politics were out of the way. Now the drinking could begin.
We made our way to the East Slope bar. Again, Gen was surrounded by celebrants. I felt my head spin. I clutched the paper in my pocket. I thought I had documented what he had said almost perfectly, and even though he was swarmed by admirers, I felt myself light up inside, because I was the one whom he had trusted to record his words. And I was certain his speeches should be recorded for posterity.
I was lost in my thoughts when I felt a brief touch on my hair.
Gen was looking at me.
‘Do you wanna get out of here?’ he asked, his eyes tired but smiling. ‘It’s been a long day!’
I think there was no cocktail, no drug, no experience, which could have given me more pleasure, more delight, than seeing him in front of me, touching me gently, asking for my acquiescence. The joy was so great all I could do was nod.
I followed him back to the dorm, where we sneaked into his room once again. He poured us a couple of whiskies. Outside it had started to rain.
I took out my paper.
‘I think I managed to get everything,’ I said softly. ‘It really was … I mean what you said … it was genuinely very …’
I chuckled in embarrassment. He smiled too. I felt as close to Gen as I had for months.
‘I’m sorry,’ I said, ‘I’m speaking like an idiot. But I want you to know what you said today really meant something. Not just to me … but also to the people out there!’
I placed my record of his speech tentatively on his desk.
He smiled in embarrassment, but he seemed relaxed and content. I could feel everything about him, even without touching him, and this too gave me a pleasure that was beyond erotic. It made me feel more than myself.
He glanced at me, then glanced away.
‘You are, as always, too, too kind. I … don’t think what I said was all that great. I think I just said what everyone else was thinking …’
His voice trailed away.
‘Perhaps the ability to do that is a gift in itself,’ I piped up brightly.
‘I don’t know about that.’
He gave a sudden adolescent giggle.
‘But whatever else, at least I wasn’t as bad as that … that stupid bitch who followed me!’
This crude utterance was so out of keeping with the tone of the speech he had made on the podium and the delicacy with which he had spoken to me when he invited me back. Perhaps I couldn’t keep the shock from my face, for it was one of the few times he retreated.
‘No, I am sorry. That was a hideous thing for me to say. But you have to understand …’
He looked at me as though everything in the world depended on my judgment. And he spoke with great conviction.
‘You have to understand. That someone … like that … with those kinds of far-left views … Maybe they mean well. But when they talk about radical democracy – well, you must see how that turns out! It’s the key to undermining our own political system, to letting the West in through the back door, for us to end up being dominated and controlled by the United States. I always wonder with people like that. If they hate China so much … why don’t they just go and live in the US?’
‘No, no, I agree. I don’t know what she was thinking. She was so weird, right?’
He nodded his head and grinned.
‘She was … so friggin’ weird.’
We looked at each other for a few moments, smiling.
‘Are we being unkind?’ Gen asked, still grinning.
‘I don’t think we are,’ I said with a giggle.
In that same moment, the door to his room burst open. A pretty girl stood there, laughing vivaciously as she saw Gen. ‘Hey, I just wondered if you wanted …’
Her face fell as she saw me. The tone she had used with him, so intimate, so soft and playful, at once became polite and cautious.
‘Ah … I’ll come back later. It’s … not important.’
I remember her eyes. They were beautiful, eloquent in a way my own unremarkable eyes could never be.
Gen’s face was turned upwards, frozen for a few moments.
I knew that they were together. I knew in that second, seeing her face, and then his – I knew it with absolute certainty. And yet I fought the knowledge down.
‘A friend of yours?’ I tried to make my voice light.
He didn’t say anything. It was as though he didn’t want to admit any connection, but didn’t want to deny it either.
Tears filled my eyes. I didn’t want them to, but they did.
He looked at me.
‘Hey, look …’
I didn’t want to let him finish that sentence. I felt a rush of desperation. It didn’t matter about her. The only thing that mattered was him and me. For once I would be the bold one. I moved close to him, I put my hand on his crotch, I told him that it was okay, that I was ‘cool’ with ‘it’, that I understood him – or words to that effect. I don’t remember now. I only remember that it was like something was dying inside me. And I felt the desperation of loss.
He pulled my hand away. Without looking at me, he hissed sharply:
‘You know that you mean a lot to me. But you can’t keep doing this.’
My cheeks were wet with tears. I couldn’t help it. But I held down my sobs.
His voice became softer.
‘We need to live our own lives. It’s not normal for people of our age to be so intense!’
I got up. I couldn’t look at him. I shuffled out of the room. He didn’t try to stop me.
It was odd in a way. When the worst thing happens, there is sometimes a little relief. As devastating as it is, it can provide a type of clarity. I knew now that Gen was with someone else. I wondered if he’d had full sex with her, or whether he just had her touch him with her hands down there in the way I always had.
I suspected they had had proper sex. It was something I couldn’t quite imagine, and yet I couldn’t stop picturing it. The girl I had seen at his door was so much more beautiful than me, and clearly so comfortable with him.