Afterwards

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epilogue

epilogue n. a short speech or poem at the end of a literary work, esp. a play.

Day 1

It’s a big aeroplane, with so many seats, so many passengers. Air China, with the phoenix tail drawn on the side. This time, it takes me east. Which direction is the wind blowing now, I wonder? Coming to England was not easy, but going back is much harder. I look at the window and it reflects a stranger’s face. It’s not the same “Z” as one year ago. She will never look at the world in the same way. Her heart is wounded, wounded, wounded, like the nightingale bleeding on the red rose.

The lights are on again. A Chinese steward smiles at me, and serves my second meal: rice with fried pork and some broccoli. It is hot, and sticky. As my body slowly digests the rice, I understand, deeply, in my bones: we are indeed separated.

People say nowadays there are no more boundaries between nations. Really? The boundary between you and me is so broad, so high.

When I first saw you, I felt I saw another me, a me against me, a me which I contradicted all the time. And now I cannot forget you and I cannot stop loving you because you are a part of me.

But, maybe all this is just nonsense, Western philosophical nonsense. We can’t be together just because that is our fate, our destiny. We have no yuan fen.

Thirteen hours later, we touch down in Beijing. I spend day walking around the city. The sandy wind from the Mongol desert drags through bicycles, trees, roofs. No wonder people are much stronger and tougher here. The whole city is dusty and messy. Unfinished skeletons of skyscrapers and naked construction sites fill the horizon. The taxi drivers spit loudly on to the road through their open windows. Torn plastic bags are stuck on trees like strange fruits. Pollution, pollution, great pollution in my great country.

I call my mother. I tell her I have decided to leave my hometown job and move to Beijing. She is desperate. Sometimes I wish I could kill her. Her power control, for ever, is just like this country.

“Are you stupid or something?” she shouts at me in the telephone. “How will you live without a proper job?”

I try to say something:

“But I can speak little bit English now, so maybe I can find a job where I use my English, or perhaps I will try to write something…”

She strikes back immediately: “Writing on paper is a piece of nothing compared with a stable job in a government work unit! You think you can reshape your feet to fit new shoes? How are you going to live without government medical insurance? What if I die soon? And what if your father dies as well?”

She always threatens to die the next day. Whenever it comes to this deadly subject, I can only keep my mouth shut.

“Are you waiting for rabbits to knock themselves out on trees, so you can catch them without any effort?! I don’t understand young people today. Your father and I have worked like dogs, but you haven’t even woken up yet. Well, it’s time you stopped daydreaming and found yourself a proper job and a proper man. Get married and have children before your father and I are dead!”

As I keep silent and don’t counter her, she throws me her final comment:

“You know what your problem is: you never think of the future! You only live in the present!”

And she bursts into tears.

Day 100

During my year of absence, Beijing has changed as if ten years passed. It has become unrecognisable.

I am sitting in a Starbucks café in a brand new shopping centre, a large twenty-two-storey mall with a neon sign in English on its roof: Oriental Globe. Everything inside is shining, as if they stole all the lights and jewels from Tiffany’s and Harrod’s. In the West there is “Nike” and our Chinese factories make “Li Ning,” after an Olympic champion. In the West there is “Puma” and we have “Poma.” The style and design are exactly the same. The West created “Chanel no. 5” for Marilyn Monroe. For our citizens we make “Chanel no. 6” jasmine perfume. We have everything here, and more.

At night, some friends take me to a Karaoke. The place is not made for me. It is for Chinese men who seek freshness when they have grown tired of their old wives. In empty rooms, young women in tight miniskirts with half naked breasts wait for loners to come and sing. The dim rooms remind me of the pubs in London: smoke, leather seats, low tea tables, loud voices and crazy laughing. I sit and listen to men singing songs like “The Long March” or “ The East Is Red.”

I feel out of place in China. Wherever I go, in tea houses, in hotpot restaurants, in People’s parks, in Dunkin Donuts, or even on top of the Great Wall, everybody talks about buying cars and houses, investing in new products, grabbing the opportunity of the 2008 Olympics to make money, or to steal money from the foreigner’s pockets. I can’t join in their conversations. My world seems too unpractical and nonproductive.

“But you can speak English, that alone should earn you lots of money! Nowadays, anything to do with the West can make money.” My friends and my relatives keep telling me this.

Day 500

I think I have received your last letter. The last. It arrived a month and a half ago and there has been nothing since then. I don’t know why.

I think maybe I will never go back to England, the country where I became an adult, where I grew into a woman, the country where I also got injured, the country where I had my most confused days and my greatest passion and my brief happiness and my quiet sadness. Perhaps I am scared to think that I am still in love with you.

But all these thoughts don’t matter too much anymore. Only sometimes, when I am alone in Beijing in my flat, an obscure night, noisy construction sites outside my window, I still can feel that pain. Yes, the geography helps a lot. I know the best thing to do is to let each other go, to let us each live on a different planet, parallel lives, no more crossing over.

Dear Z,

I am writing to you from Wales. I’ve finally moved out of London. The mountain behind my stone cottage is called Carningli. It is Welsh, it means Mountain of the Angel…

I brought some of our plants and the old kitchen table here. I think the sunflowers are missing you. Their heads have bowed down in shame-as if they have been punished by their school teacher-and their bright yellow petals have turned deep brown. But I think your little bamboo tree is very happy because we have had Chinese weather for the last month. Last week I planted some climbing roses outside my cottage because I thought it would be good to have more colours around.

Every day I walk through the valley to the sea. It is a long walk. When I look at the sea, I wonder if you have learned to swim…

Your words are soaked in your great peace and happiness, and these words are being stored in my memory. I kiss this letter. I bury my face in the paper, a sheet torn from some exercise book. I try to smell that faraway valley. I picture you standing on your fields, the mountain behind you, and the sound of the sea coming and going. It is such a great picture you describe. It is the best gift you ever gave me.

The address on the envelope is familiar. It must be in west Wales. Yes, we went there together. I remember how it rained. The rain was ceaseless, covering the whole forest, the whole mountain, and the whole land.