I close the Flaubert book, looking at you. You are reading a book with the picture of sculptures. I keep thinking about Flaubert’s words: artists should devote themself to the art, like a priest devote to God. But what is so important about art? Why it should be like a devotion?

“How come art can be more important than food?” I ask you in a little voice.

“I agree with you, actually.” You close up sculpture book. “I don’t think art is so important. But art is fashionable in the West. Everybody wants to be an artist. Artists are like models. That’s why I hate it.”

You put the book back on shelf.

“But,” I protest, “you are like a Chinese saying: piercing your shield with your spear. You are contradicting with yourself. You are making art too. So it means art is also a need, a necessary of expression.”

“Yes, but if I had better things to do I would give up making art. I would rather do something more solid.”

I’m confused.

I’d like to dedicate my life to do something serious, maybe things like writing, or painting, but definitely not making shoes. I don’t care what you said about artists. I’d like to write about you, one day. I’d like to write about this country. People say one should separate one’s real life from one’s art work, and one should protect his real life from his fiction life. So one can has less pain, and be able to see the world soberly. But I think it is a very selfish attitude. I like what Flaubert said about Greeks. If you are a real artist, everything in your life is part of your art. The art is a memorial of the life. Art is the abstract way of his daily existence.

Again the Buddhist in my grandmother’s voice tells me: “The reality that surrounds us is not real. It is the illusion of life.”

fatalism

fatalism n. the belief that all events are predetermined and people are powerless to change their destinies.

A film called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, directed by Karel Reisz at 1960s. This is the last film we will see together. This is the last film I will see in London.

The beautiful young man in the film, played by Albert Finney. He is too beautiful for a humble working-class life. He is wild, he wants to play and to have fun. But of course he is also a trouble maker. He gets bored by having an affair with a married woman, and he doesn’t want to take any responsibility. So he starts to chase young girls. But after a while he is bored again with one young girl, she means nothing to him except for her brief beauty. Womans don’t weigh anything in his restless heart. He is bored of physical work, and of unimaginative youth. He becomes frustrated because he gains nothing from searching for the excitements of life. His beauty decays. His youthful energy fades away by the end of the film.

Is your life a bit like him? Have you felt the same way as that young man felt about womans or family? I gaze at your back, your brown hair and your brown leather jacket. We walk along the night street in South Kensington. Again, how familiar, this is the place we first met. It has been one year.

We stop in front of a little corner shop to buy some samosa. The shop is about to close.

“So you don’t think he can love that married woman?” I ask.

I am still living in the film.

“No.” You take two cold vegetarian samosa from the shopkeeper.

“And, you don’t think he can love that young girl either?”

“No. None of them love each other. No love exists between them,” you comment. “They are loveless.”

I bite the cold samosa. Ah. Loveless.

“What you will do if you were the man in the film?” I don’t let you go.

“I would leave the town, just like I left Lower End Farm. Things are dead and finished in that town.”

I stop eating samosa. One more thing I need to know: “Why you don’t want to be with that young woman either? She is young, and pretty and simple. They can be together for the rest of their lifes.”

“Because she demonstrated how limited she is at the end of the film. Remember the last scene? When they sit on the hill looking down on the suburb, and she says to him that one day they will live in one of those houses? He listens to her and throws the stone down the hill.”

“Why a house, or a home, is a boring thing?”

“Because…”

You stop. You don’t want to explain anymore. Maybe you know you are being unreasonable.

We arrive at home at midnight. The little street is dead quiet, and the house is dead cold. We are so tired; nobody wants to have further discussion. We know clearly how far we could reach if we carry on the discussion about love and life. We both give up, without saying it.

Then I realise it is indeed Saturday night and Sunday morning. A doom night and a doom morning. An absolutely doom moment in my life. There is a special delivery letter sitting on the kitchen table waiting for me. You got it this morning. My heart is racing, racing badly. No, I shouldn’t open this letter. It is from Home Office.

It is you who open it. You read it, and give it to me, without any words.

There is a black stamp on the page twenty-two of my passport, from IMMIGRATION & NATIONALITY DIRECTORATE of Home Office. It is a pentagonal stamp. Pentagon, a strange shape. Only the Pentagon near Washington has that strange shape. It is a doom stamp.

The application for my extension of UK visa has been refused.

Once you told me I am an agnostic, or maybe even a sceptic, but now I proof myself that actually I am a fatalist, like lots of Asian people are. The result of my visa application is in my expectation. Not because I am being a pessimist, just because I know there is no actual reason for both me and authority to extend this visa. I already knew this when I prepared my paperwork. I say there is no reason, I mean even you: you can’t be my reason to stay in this country. And you can’t save my life. You, a possible Anarchist, always want to be free.

I put my passport back in a drawer. I sit down, switch on the lamp and open my notebook. I look at all the words I learned in the last week. Then I look at all the words and phrases I learned since the first day I arrived in this country: Alien, Hostel, Full English Breakfast, Properly, Fog, Filtered Water…So many words. So much I learned in the passed year. The vocabularies on my notebook, day by day, become more and more complicated, and more and more sophisticated.

I open a new page, a blank page; I start to write down the film title Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The pen holds in my hand with the anger, and deep disappointment-the anger about my fate, the disappointment about you.

“What are you writing?” You stand in the opposite corner of the room, staring at me.

I don’t want to answer.

“I know what you are writing, actually.”

You voice sounds vague. Not only vague, but also cold.

You turn your back and throw me the last sentence before we go to bed:

“AT LEAST YOU’RE STILL LEARNING A LOT. EVEN IF EVERYTHING IS BROKEN.”

You voice horrifies me.

You leave me, and disappear into the bedroom.