I had brought my five possessions with me: a plastic closet full of clothes, a green towel, a red blanket, a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and a folder with scripts from some of the crappy shows and films I'd been in. All my other things had been torn or smashed up by Xiaolin when he found out I was leaving. I locked the door behind me and took a look around. A family had lived there before, I could smell. Oil on the kitchen walls, some abandoned toys on the balcony. Well, I couldn't complain. I thought I could do it up a bit, make it nicer for myself.

The major drawback was the Neighbourhood Committee people downstairs. I couldn't stand them. In my village we used to call them old cocks and old hens. They would sit for hours in the dust, red armbands on their sleeves, serving their everlasting socialism. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, how I hated them – and here it was just the same. Whenever it wasn't raining, the old cocks and hens would occupy the whole yard, squatting or sitting on the ground. Instead of being Zen, they would gossip about the woman from the 13th floor who had remarried so quickly after her divorce, or the man with glasses on the eighth floor who refused the free condoms from the One Child Policy Committee, or the grey cat from Room 304 that got pregnant by the black cat from Room 805 whose owner was a Catholic. Or else they would discuss how many kilos of pak choi they would store for the winter. Bloody lot, I wished their few remaining teeth would break on frozen pak choi.

Right next to our block was the capital's recycling plant. Day and night, rattling garbage trucks brought in the trash produced by Beijing 's 15 million inhabitants. Next to the trash was the local school. Girls and boys in blue uniforms buzzed around on their new bicycles. At the first hint of summer, the pre-pubescent girls would tear off their bulky overcoats to reveal their underdeveloped chests. The boys, little emperors of their families, would show off, talking dirty and flirting in gruff, drawling Hutong accents inherited from their worker parents. The children would clamber around on the rubbish dump all day long. Their high-spirited screams and shouts were so loud they reached my room on the 12th floor. I could hardly hear myself think.

I've been blessed with cockroaches in every place I've lived in Beijing, but it was in the Chinese Rose Garden that I was truly anointed. My apartment was their Mecca. They spent the entire time multiplying. A female cockroach can produce 300 eggs in her lifetime, and it only takes a few weeks for an egg to become an adult. Cocky bastards. Every crevice gave forth a vast and mighty army of invaders, from the gas-pipe hole in the kitchen wall to each crack in the tiles. They lingered on the rims of cups, sat in my rice cooker pondering the meaning of life.

The thing about my cockroaches, they were very cinematic, like the birds in that Alfred Hitchcock film. I was under constant attack. Singled out, they were weak and destructible, but collectively they were unbeatable. Still, I wasn't going to take it lying down. Once, I was stalking an enormous one when it made a surprise move and vanished into an electric socket. There was a crackle, a few sparks, and that was the end of that. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, these cockroaches were sadomasochists, looking for the most painful way to die. Once I swallowed one while absent-mindedly drinking my tea. Traumatised, I rang the local chemist. The voice on the line was gently reassuring: cockroaches were not poisonous, ingesting one would cause me no harm. Though, the chemist added, in terms of protein they were not as nutritious as snails.

I decided I would take Ben's scarlet lily with me whenever I moved to a new place. But that was a fantasy. It just got eaten by the cockroaches. Okay, to eat the two leaves wasn't such a big deal, but what made me sad was, they ate the stem too. The stem was about 60 centimetres long and the cockroaches only two. It took them three weeks to finish it – a pretty long meal for them, considering they only live for two years.

I never told Ben his lily had been eaten in such a dreadful way, but he never asked about it anyhow. Maybe he had completely forgotten his flower.

Fragment Five

CHAIRMAN MAO SAID, 'We must be excellent at learning' and 'To adapt one's thinking to the new conditions, one must study'. He was never wrong. So, as soon as I started earning a decent wage as an extra, I decided to get myself an education. After all, a girl from the countryside needed some schooling if she was going to catch up with the city kids. Each evening I would march off, books in hand, to one of the various night schools, technical training centres and polytechnic institutes that catered for peasants like me.

In my Modern American Literature course, we had to recite Walt Whitman's Leaves of Grass. I could always recite that line: 'Have you feared the future would be nothing to you?' And I took a 'Crazy English' course, where they believed that you could master English by shouting very loudly. I enrolled in a Wubi typing course where you had to speed-type Chinese characters on an English keyboard. I even took a theory course for those learning to drive, though I didn't have a car and was totally confused by Beijing 's maze of highways and flyovers. Still, I was determined to become a real Beijinger, whatever it took. Up until I met Xiaolin, all the money I was earning went towards my re-education. In exchange, I gained a load of certificates and diplomas. These credentials demonstrated that I was a useful member of society, that I was modern and civilised. Ah, finally, I was something.

When I was with Xiaolin, I had kept these proofs of my accomplishments hidden in a box under the bed. In my new apartment I dedicated a drawer to them. I called it my Chairman Mao drawer, and a very solemn drawer it was. The Wubi typing-course certificate, the Modern American Literature Knowledge Approved certificate, the certificate for speaking 'Crazy English', the driving theory certificate… they all went into the Mao drawer. It also contained my TV insurance, my electricity account, my bank statement, my telephone bills and my virus vaccination certificate. The drawer was overflowing. Mao was choking on the mounting evidence that I was becoming someone who could contribute to the modern state. In fact, this drawer became so crucial to my official identity that, if an earthquake had hit Beijing, it would have been the first thing I saved. My microwave, my Panda 12-inch TV, my Sanyo DVD player, my rice cooker, my noisy fridge, even my Rocket-5 laptop – they could remain where they were. None of them meant as much.

The most important thing about the Chairman Mao drawer was that it drew a line between me and the immigrant workers who were only temporary residents. Educating myself had allowed me to apply for permanent citizen status in Beijing. Now I was a person with multiple skills, all of which I was expected to dedicate to building the increasingly glorious reputation of my new home.

But then a day came when I completely lost trust in my adopted city – a day when I realised that, however useful I was to it, this bastard city could still reject me. The events of that day made me want to run again.

It was going to be Ben's first proper visit to my apartment. In all the months we'd been together, he'd only ever come as far as the Rose Garden Estate gates, lily in hand. We preferred to spend time at his place. I liked waking up in his bed, pouring maple syrup on to his special pancakes that were like soft white napkins, and listening to him talk English with his flatmate Patton, who was trying to make it as a Hollywood scriptwriter. Sometimes Ben would just sit listening to his Red Hot Chili Peppers CD while reading the Boston Globe. It was all much gentler there. Even the washing machine was quieter. Also, Xiaolin didn't know where Ben lived, so he couldn't give us grief.