I put down the book and leave it for my future reading.

I am being caught by the word “identity crisis” on The Times. I write it down into my notebook. I always want to find this word, now here I encounter it. Now I want think about my own identity, in an intellectual way.

My mother told me: “Your skin too dark and your hair too thin. You don’t look like me and your father at all. You are like your barbarian grandmother!” She said to me: “Look at your big feet. A real peasant’s feet! Nobody will want marry you.”

I hated her, and I wished she could die immediately.

But she is right about this: so far nobody really wanted to marry me.

When I was in middle school, my schoolmates always laughed at me. So I spend time on reading to avoid talking to them. I read Snow White And Seven Dwarfs in Chinese, and I saw my mother is as evil as that stepmother queen. But I didn’t have a snow-white skin and I was just a peasant girl. So there was no prince will come save me and that’s my destiny. Being a teenage I was dying to run away from my hometown, the town which my mother always beat me up and blamed me for everything I have done wrong, the place without my dream and my freedom.

The day when I arrived to the West, I suddenly realised I am a Chinese. As long as one has black eyes and black hair, obsessed by rice, and cannot swallow any Western food, and cannot pronounce the difference between “r” and “l,” and request people without using please-then he or she is a typical Chinese: an ill-legal immigrant, badly treat Tibetans and Taiwanese, good on food but put MSG to poison people, eat dog’s meat and drink snakes’ guts.

“I want to be a citizen of the world.” Recently I learned to say this. I would become a citizen of the world, if I have a more useful passport. Ah Mrs. Margaret, that conditional again!

anarchist n. 1. a person who advocates the abolition of government; 2. a person who causes disorder.

anarchist

“What is Anarchist?” I raise my head from Guardian.

We are in “First Choice,” a cheap greasy spoon, forty pence for a cup of tea. We like this kind of places. They don’t ask us leave if consumption less than £1 after one and half hour. I love east London.

You have an Earl Grey tea, and I have coffee. Liquidish eggs flow everywhere on my plate. Kids nearby are crying-two crying baby with one fat mother, no husband again.

Frown gathers on your forehead.

“Anarchists? Anarchists don’t believe in government. They think society shouldn’t have a ruling government. That everybody should be equal,” you answer, slowly.

“Sound like Communist,” I say.

“No. Communists believe the working class can control the power of the whole society, but Anarchists don’t believe in any power. They are very individualistic, whereas Communists believe in the collective.” You stop describing, as some working class man looks at us, stop biting his sausages.

My interests being aroused. I want to discuss more. You are my academy.

“But sounds Anarchist is the end of the Communist, or the advanced Communist. Is target or triumph of the Communism revolution is that, through the revolution wiping out the difference of the classes and eliminating the ruling government. No country boundaries. So the world can be equal. Am I right?”

“Maybe.” You open another page of paper.

“So are you an Anarchist?” I am not giving up.

“I was an Anarchist. But not anymore.” Now you give up your paper, and answer me seriously. “Most Anarchists are in fact bourgeois. They don’t really want to give up any advantages. They can be very selfish. I don’t think I am that kind of person now. I want to give up material things, and live the simplest possible life.”

The simplest possible life is the most complicated thing to achieve I say to myself.

“So who are you?” This time I really want to know.

“I don’t know. Maybe an atheist. I don’t believe there is a god living in the sky. I don’t believe in Capitalism, but I’m also not convinced by Communism, the way it is now.”

“So do you believe in anything?” I ask.

“Hm,” is your only answer. “What about you?”

“Me? I do believe there is a kind superpower control all our life. It is also the power above the nature. And this superpower human being cannot really do anything to change it.”

I look outside of the window, and I am sure right now in this very right moment there is a mysterious superpower above us, above our cheap café and above our silly conversation.

You point the ad of Donnie Darko in the paper and ask me: “Have you seen this film? The teacher in it says to Donnie: ‘You are not an atheist, you are an agnostic.’ I think you are an agnostic too.”

“What is agnostic?” I am searching my little Concise Chinese-English Dictionary in my pocket.

But after we both look at the dictionary up and down there is nowhere we could find the word agnostic. Maybe this is the word not important to Chinese. Or there is no agnostic in old time of China at all. Or maybe it is a very capitalism word that’s why the authority censored it?

“An agnostic is someone who believes in a spiritual world, a metaphysical world. But he hasn’t found what he should believe in yet…”

“Wait, what is ‘metaphysical’?” I open my notebook.

“Metaphysical means not physical, not real…” A pause, you say: “but I think you might be a sceptic.”

“What?”

Again, I pick up my dictionary and open it immediately. I am in a hurry to learn. I am in a hurry to understand all these words!

While I am burying myself in the sea of words in the dictionary, you say, “Honey, your English is good, but not that good. I have to say.”

The working class man in the nearby table chews his kidney pie, looking at me with enormous wonder. I think I make his day.

hero

hero n. 1. the principal character in a film, book, etc.; 2. a man greatly admired for his exceptional qualities or achievements.

You feel happy again, your mood is like English weather.

You are in the peace, like the fruit tree without flowers in the garden. You are happy because you start to make a new sculpture. So now dirt and mess everywhere in the house. It is like living in a construction site. Clay and plaster and wax and water. Your happiness is from your own world, from your physical object, from the molded male head, male arms, male leg, male attraction…Your happiness is from your masculine world, and in that world you feel everything is under the control.

Your sadness actually is nothing to do with me. Your stress is not really from me. It is from your masculine world, because you don’t feel satisfied with your life as a man. And you might think I am an obstacle in your life. You think your sadness caused by our relationship, by love prison. It is not true. Your happiness and your sadness is from the world that you fight with yourself.

My love to you is like a lighthouse, always searching something special about you. And you are special. But I don’t know if you think me in the same way. You always say things like these to me:

“How did you burn the rice again? A Chinese woman shouldn’t burn rice, you eat it everyday.”

“I spend more time with you than with my friends. Why do you still complain? What else do you want?”…

It seems you don’t treat me as a special person in your life. You treat me as one of your friends. And there is a line you draw between you and me. There is a limit, from your heart, from your lifestyle, which makes love feels like a friendship. You live inside of me, but I don’t live inside of you.