“Early love affairs in China were prohibited. Even when I went to university, students sleeping together, when discovered, were named, shamed, given warnings for expulsion and black-marked in their personnel archive. ”
By Isabelle Li
An apwt publication
When I hear the sound of approaching traffic, I often think of my father. He's deaf in one ear and has lost most of his hearing in the other. I’m worried how he might cross the road, relying solely on his macula-degenerated eyes, hands clutched behind his back, holding a shabby grocery bag, on his way to the market.
I ring him on WeChat now and then, and he sends me progressive articles. After decades in politics, he still cares deeply for reform and democratisation, and is enraged by censorship. I ask him to spend more time learning Chinese medicine tips for good health and longevity, but he doesn’t believe in any of it. ‘Take some antibiotics,’ he urges me whenever I tell him that I’ve got a cold.
Seeing how we are today, it’s hard to believe that thirty years ago we had a huge falling -out. I remember his outrage, thick eyebrows twisted into a knot, face stormy dark. In my memory, the windows were trembling when he shouted at me, his body shaking. He had long stopped spanking me by then, but he would have struck me if Mum had not stepped between us when I screamed at the top of my voice: ‘What is it to do with you? It’s none of your business!’
It was the first semester of my first year in senior high. I was thirteen. A few months before then, while I was still preparing for the entrance exam, the head teacher asked if I would like to continue studying in the school. Our school was a selective in our city. There were a couple of more prestigious ones at the provincial level. If I took the offer, I’d be exempted from the entrance exam, but by doing so, I would forfeit the opportunity of trying for any other school.
We lived five minutes from the school, by foot. Before the Chemistry Tower was erected, we had been able to look out to the sports oval from our balcony. When my brother played soccer in the evening, my mother could call him home for dinner by hanging out a red scarf outside our windows. Even before I started to study there, for many years I had listened to the recorded music and instructions from the speakers, and watched the students lining up on the sports oval, exercising during the morning drill. Then an hour later, I would hear the music and instructions for eye massage. My parents valued the proximity, so when I told them about the offer they recommended that I take it.
It is hard to judge if it was a wise decision. Later on in life, I had to work doubly hard to catch up with those who had entered the provincial selective schools. But at the time, while other kids were studying for the entrance exam, I had total freedom over a long summer.
The timing couldn’t have been better, because I had fallen in love.
I had been infatuated before: the new boy with a strut who danced disco; the high-jumper with dark skin, who soared through the air in the shape of a rainbow over the bamboo stick; the boy with a streamlined body, who dived so hard that the whole pool felt the ripples and foam; another boy, who never swam but smiled at me so sweetly, sitting by the pool side.
This time it was different.
Zhong was from my sister’s year, and I had met him once at the high-jumper’s place during our winter holiday. For the spring semester, his class was moved next to ours, at the end of the corridor. Zhong was athletic, fashionably dressed, street smart. He had a slight hesitation in his speech, though not a stutter, which gave his enunciation an unusual cadence. It had started with his singing a beautiful song in the corridor one evening. I came out from our classroom to ask him what song it was. The next day he gave me a cassette. Prior to that, my family had only listened to cassettes brought home by my father. This was the first cassette that was mine. On a player the size of a brick I listened to love songs by a Taiwanese singer, straining my ears to decipher the lyrics, writing them down.
On one side of our classroom was a small window looking out to the corridor. Whenever Zhong walked by, he would look into my class, and because I happened to sit on the row in the middle of the classroom, I always met his eyes. I can recall his face framed in the window, and that carefree, yet admiring look.
While my year was preparing for the senior high school entrance exam, my sister’s year was preparing for their matriculation. As the study intensified over the spring semester, the students in both classrooms were staying back late into the evenings. Zhong started to walk me home. The five-minute walk extended to ten minutes, fifteen minutes, half an hour. One night when we were parting, he asked if he could kiss me. I slanted my head and offered him my cheek, where he imprinted his lips. I ran away, overwhelmed. The feeling on my skin lasted so long, I have always considered that my first kiss. We wrote letters to each other daily, folding them in elaborate ways, and delivered them personally.
Since I had accepted the offer to continue my senior high at our current school, I was emancipated from the endless exercises and revisions, so I started to spend more time with Zhong. Although his family all worked in a bookshop, I was better read, and told him stories from My Childhood and In the World by Gorky, David Copperfield by Dickens, and Of Human Bondage by Maugham. He brought me many more books, including Dream of the Red Chamber, a Chinese literary classic. It tells the tragic love story of Jia Baoyu and Lin Daiyu, set against the rise and fall of an aristocratic family. When Lin died, I cried for many nights inside my mosquito net. I couldn’t bring myself to read the rest of the book, as if anything happening after her death was a betrayal. As Jia had abandoned his worldly life to become a monk, I had abandoned the world of the book. Zhong also gave me Tagore’s Stray Bird, which is still on my bookshelf to this day, having flown with me over half of the globe.
Our favourite meeting place was the parkland near my home with nothing but a big pit. I took the big pit for granted and never questioned what it was for. Summer in the northeast of China used to be very pleasant, before the pollution and the smog, with a kind of fresh green that is uncommon in the warm climate here in Australia. The mounds around the big pit were covered in soft grass and weeds, and since there was water accumulating at the bottom, it was a paradise for dragonflies. The area afforded ultimate privacy, and I don’t remember anyone else ever appearing in the vicinity. I would catch dragonflies while waiting for Zhong.
We didn’t go beyond kissing. Romance to me then was about music, literature, nature and commitment. The physical aspect of love seemed unfathomable, reserved for adults. Once he touched my breast. I didn’t object, but I was so startled, he never did it again.
By mid-July the exams were finished, and the students were on holiday while waiting for the results. Zhong and I rowed boats on the South Canal, visited Qing dynasty tomb sites and cycled to a reservoir so far away that my legs were sore for a week.
Early love affairs in China were prohibited. Even when I went to university, students sleeping together, when discovered, were named, shamed, given warnings for expulsion and black-marked in their personnel archive. Zhong and I were discreet, but my sister found us out. One day, I told her I was going to a friend’s place. But when I was out, my friend turned up at mine instead. When my sister asked if I had a good time, I said yes, not knowing I had been entrapped. She didn’t say anything. When the matriculation results were out, she had a long conversation with Zhong. They knew each other well from playing volleyball together. Her argument, which she told me afterwards, was that I was too young and should focus on my study; and since he did poorly in his exam and had to repeat it the following year, he should focus on his study too.
Zhong and I didn’t listen. We carried on behind my sister’s back.
When he came to look for me, he would play a harmonica in the distance. In the summer in northern China then, households would replace the inner panes of the double-glazed windows with insect screens, leave the outer panes open most of the time, and only close them if it rained. When I heard the familiar tunes of the harmonica carried by the breeze coming through the screens, I would sneak out and look for Zhong. He was usually at the far corner of the neighbouring block, perched on his racing bike. This image of him is singular in my memory with the richness and melancholy of an old photo. I remember the background of a golden, shimmery afternoon, accompanied by the distant sound of children’s laughter. Someone in the neighbourhood had started to learn to play the accordion, and I often confused it with the harmonica and was constantly on the lookout.
I sometimes visited Zhong at his home. Once, his brother came back and saw me. It was an awkward moment, but he was courteous to me and didn’t give Zhong a hard time afterwards. Only later did I realise he was a traitor.
Whenever Zhong was distressed, his eyes would lose their brightness, and his smile would become weary and dry, hanging lopsided on his face. That was how he looked when he came to tell me the bad news. His family had decided to send him away to a boarding school near the border with North Korea. There he would go into intensive preparation for the matriculation and be cut off from the outside world.
I was too young to understand the severity of the news. I naively believed that I had the stamina to overcome time and distance. To cheer him up, we went boating on the canal. It was windy and the water was choppy. I rowed downstream at a thrilling speed, but struggled with the twists and turns on our way back, so he rowed us upstream to the boatshed. We made fervent promises to each other, confident that nothing could ever keep us apart.
He left for boarding school at the end of August. Though we continued to write, I found myself missing him terribly. Through intricate channels, he sent me cassettes by Hong Kong and Taiwanese singers. My favourite was a sorrowful song about a farewell. Many years later I realised it was ABBA’s ‘Chiquitita’ dubbed in Chinese. Even today, when I hear it, my eyes well with tears.
He absconded once from school. I was already asleep. He threw pebbles on my window screen and woke me up. It must have been deep into the night because there was no light around us, and the air was cool. But I could make out his outline under the starry late summer sky, perched on his bike. I leaned out over the windowsill and we spoke passionately, keeping our voice down to not wake up the neighbours. When he finally left, I didn’t realise mosquitos had come in through the open screen. Because I no longer used the mosquito net by then, the next morning I counted seventeen bites on my skin. My mother felt very sorry for me. She checked the screens for holes, and then decided it was time to put back the windows.
The autumn semester of the first year in senior high school started in September. Zhong’s brother confiscated our letters and came to speak with the head teacher in charge of my new class, who had taught him in the past. The head teacher gave me a choice: either I stop the affair quietly, or he would have a conversation with my parents. I promised to stop.
But we didn’t. We went further underground by sending letters through his cousin.
Finally, my father found out. When he came into my room one evening, I immediately covered up the letter I was composing with a stack of homework. He looked at my face, and asked what I was doing. I said I was doing my homework. He tried to pick it up, and I pressed it down. We got into a tussle and he eventually pulled the pile off my hand.
‘Give it back to me!’
He took only one look and threw the whole lot on the ground. ‘Well, well, well. Now I know what you are up to! You have no shame!’ The Chinese expression is literally ‘foul without face’.
My mother came in and asked him to lower his voice. So we went into the other room, not facing the neighbouring block, and shut the door. This was the moment when he was so angry that I thought the room was shaking, or maybe I was shaking. I didn’t cry. I never do in a confrontational situation. It ended with his threatening to talk to Zhong’s parents, and my vowing to never speak to my father again.
The next evening after dinner, my mother took me out for a walk. It was autumn by then. The air was soft with the suggestion of chill. The sidewalks were covered with fallen leaves. She said I was too young to understand what love was, and how much sacrifice it required. She said I had to do it for Zhong: he had no future if he couldn’t go to university.
I guess I was more worn out by the separation than by the social and family pressure. It seemed an honourable decision to part for his good. I wept and wept, writing the final letter to him, stating all the right reasons. Zhong’s response was long and teary. But I’d made up my mind. When no one was home, I burnt Zhong’s letters at the sink and wept over the ashes.
I sulked for a long time, not talking to my father. He maintained a steely face for a while. Then he started to buy all the foods I loved, like bananas which were very expensive, and mooncakes from the South made with salty eggs. For my fourteenth birthday, he bought me poetry books that I had always wanted. I capitulated. Everyone pretended nothing had happened, and the incident was never mentioned again.
Life went on. For a couple of years in my senior high school, I fancied the class captain, who had long eyelashes and a lovely smile. I kept my affection to myself, determined not to speak with him, and indeed didn’t for almost a year. At university, I had a boyfriend who was a customs officer. We went about it secretly – the only people who knew were the security guards for his dormitory.
Zhong inaugurated a type for me: athletic, good looking, street smart, beguiled by stories. Each love affair started as a secret. I guarded it, firstly from myself, then from the object of my desire, as much as possible , and as long as practical from the public.
In my early years in Australia, I had a painter lover who had a curious tic, raising a shoulder in the middle of his speech, as if it was a substitute for an ‘ah’ or a ‘you know’. I felt compelled to mirror it, with a subtle shake of my head, or a change of my sitting position. The two of us engaged in a dance, our bodies having a separate dialogue, the tone and the rhythm synchronised. I was fascinated with his face too, shifting between a young man aged prematurely and an old man looking youthful. He painted posters for theatre companies, and developed a recognisable style with faces looking away from each other, towards the outside of the frame, randomly cut off at the eyebrows on the upper edge, or at the lips on the bottom. It was as if the viewers were looking at a scene through a window, limited by their perspectives. He lived on the other side of the continent. After overcoming the distance for a few years, I met someone else.
For a short time I had a lover whose love was free and universal. My need for privacy became an encumbrance while he needed adulation and public acknowledgement. In the age of digital media, I’ve remained faceless and disconnected. When I sensed a shift in his attention, I checked his Facebook page, and saw the photographs of his adventure with another woman, which he gladly let the world see. I couldn’t sleep for a couple of nights. Then I pulled myself together and faded out of his life.
I am a snail, moving slowly and surely, carrying my shell on my back, willing to trade speed for safety, not minding the weight, not feeling awkward. I speak with male and female friends in a similar way. When I run out of things to say, I offer my companionable silence. I don’t demonstrate my affections openly and it’s not a habit of mine to gossip. I must guard my secrets, huddle together with my loved one, and stay low under the radar, to not be sabotaged. I’ve learnt to be vigilant, watching out for signals of danger and entrapment. The world is out there to break us apart. I fear celebrations – weddings always feel like funerals, and fireworks make me sad because I’m watching the final moment, the last fight, before the night resumes its deepest dark.
Living in the southern hemisphere, I like the second half of the year, when most people have given up. At the start of July, there is a sense of resignation in the air on Sydney streets, fewer cars, more fallen leaves. Things are on hold, waiting for the end of winter. The gym is no longer pumped with people, girls no longer have to line up to get premium spots in yoga and Pilates classes, and boys no longer have to monitor from the corners of their eyes if equipment becomes available. They go back to eating chocolates and visiting the pub.
At the entrance to the train station, a man in tweed jacket and flat cap used to play harmonica. I would give him some loose coins or a small bill occasionally. One day he played a Chinese folk tune ‘Jasmine Flower’ after my charitable gesture. It made me feel uncomfortable, obliged. The next day I went to a different station.
I dream of Zhong sometimes. In my dreams we meet at strange places that I will remember after I wake up, as if I had actually been there: a building with mosaic floors and wide staircases, dark at the end of the corridor; rooms crowded with medical equipment; sites under construction, or ruined with part of the exterior in charcoal colour. We meet secretly, to do nothing in particular.
But I hardly think of him. So it was quite a surprise that I met him again when I last visited my parents in China.
My sister, who lives in the UK, and I had arranged to go back to visit our parents together for Chinese New Year, which we hadn’t done for more than a decade. While we were there, she went to a school reunion and caught up with Zhong, who had been living in America. He asked about me. She told him I was there and gave him my details.
I was woken up by the telephone in my hotel room. ‘Hello,’ I said into the receiver.
‘Is that you?’ I heard a voice with the familiar cadence.
‘Yes, it’s me, it’s me, it’s me!’ I replied, sitting up in bed.
‘You still sound the same.’ He spoke slowly, with that unusual hesitation, marginally more after a few drinks.
‘And you.’ I lay back again.
We decided to meet for dinner the next day for the Festival of Lanterns.
During the day I spoke with my sister. She said Zhong had done very well, profiting from importing second-hand cars into the Chinese market. He had started more than twenty years ago, soon after he arrived in America. While others who lived overseas were mostly in academic and research positions or working for corporations, he was among the few who had become entrepreneurs. That just proved, she concluded, C students made the best CEOs.
Before I left for dinner, I studied myself critically in the mirror, and submitted to the fact that there was not a lot one could do about aging. I also imagined what he would look like, and decided not to have too much expectation.
The restaurant Zhong chose overlooked South Lake Park lit by paper lanterns and ice lanterns. When I got there, Zhong was already sitting in front of the Chinese windows with elaborate latticework. I called out his name. He stood up, and we threw ourselves into a tight embrace. We held on to each other for as long as we could without appearing melodramatic.
We took a close look at each other, commenting on any noticeable changes, but mostly, we were amazed at how little had changed.
‘You still have the same eyes, so intelligent,’ he said.
‘You still have the same smile, so generous,’ I said. ‘And look at your hair.’ I ran my fingers through his thick, curly hair, soft in my hand.
I took off my coat and sat down. Underneath, I was wearing a tight chequered sweater. He reached out to squeeze my biceps. ‘Now I can feel some muscles. You used to be all fat.’
‘I used to cry over failing the PE test. Now I go to the gym five times a week.’
‘It was never you, but the test, that was the problem.’
The waiting staff who had kept a polite distance came to take our order. I told Zhong I didn’t eat mammals or birds, or chilli.
‘You used to love eating meatballs.’ Before he left for boarding school, he had bought me many packets of dried beef.
‘I had a ferocious appetite back then.’ I laughed. ‘So where are you staying?’
He mentioned the high-jumper, who had become his business partner here.
‘We spoke for the first time at his place.’
‘I remember that time. But I thought we met even earlier, when you watched us playing volleyball. You were with your sister.’
I couldn’t remember, but I had known of him and watched him at sports carnivals and competitions many times.
‘What sweet memories!’ he marvelled. ‘Tell me what you do nowadays.’
I told him I had a PhD in statistics, and worked in quantitative analytics. My services are generally in demand in this age of big data.
‘You were brilliant at maths. I used to call you Little Abacus, remember?’ I had forgotten. But now I remembered.
Zhong had developed a few lines of business: cars, wines, and an immigration agency. ‘I’ve become who I am because of you,’ he said. ‘When we were together, I’d be happy doing anything, a volleyball coach, a school teacher, or working at the bookshop. The pressures from my family meant nothing to me. But when I received your last letter, I was heartbroken. I thought since I had nothing left, I might as well make something out of myself.’ So he immersed himself in studying, got into the provincial sports institute, and went to America before he finished. ‘I never finished college. I’m just not cut out to fit in to any sort of institution. But I’m so happy you have a PhD. I’ve always been proud of you.’
The food was very nice, fresh and delicately made. For dessert, we had glutinous rice balls with red bean filling, the house special for the Lantern Festival. ‘This is also what the bride and the groom would eat on their wedding night,’ he said. ‘You know back then, I had so wanted to marry you.’ He told me he was now married with two kids.
I told him I had never married. ‘I’m just not cut out to fit into a marriage.’
‘You don’t like housework. Had you married me, we would have had a domestic helper.’
After dinner, Zhong and I walked on the snow clad streets arm in arm, making up for what we had never done before. I felt I was thirteen again, full of stories to tell. And he was still the good listener who never failed to be surprised by drama or touched by poignancy.
The park was divided into various sections named after major Chinese cities: Shanghai, Nanjing, Suzhou, and so on. All roads were lined with red lanterns, with auspicious words written on the outside: ‘may all your wishes come true’; ‘prosperous and satisfactory’; ‘family reunion’; ‘fine flowers and a full moon’. We looked up to the sky and found the full moon just managing to shine through the smog.
The ice lantern section contained ice sculpted towers with multi-coloured lights inside, some of them twinkling. People were taking photographs of themselves and their children. It was crowded and we were constantly jostled. We held hands, and he took my hand into his pocket to keep it warm.
As we walked out from the other side of the park, it became quiet. The willows bent their bare branches low to the ice lake that reflected the red lantern lights. I felt a sudden melancholy. He was also silent.
At the entrance to my hotel, he told me he was leaving the next day, early in the morning. We embraced for the last time.
‘I haven’t told you,’ he said, stroking my hair, ‘I have a daughter, and I named her after you.’
He watched me going through the hotel’s revolving door, before turning away. I watched him hailing a taxi, his figure handsome as I had remembered, his athleticism visible in every gesture.
My father fell for my mother at a young age, yet he objected to my falling in love at a similar age. It no longer matters if he was right or wrong. Gone are the days I would take seventeen mosquito bites for love, though my life has been shaped by that year of a long summer.
I think of my father when I hear noises, air conditioning units, power tools, lawn mowers, people talking on their mobile phones on the buses, and I imagine his world, now muted and contemplative. I’m very much like him physically. I notice that my hearing has started to deteriorate, particularly for low frequency sounds. One day I’ll be just like him, guessing what others say, and getting tired from the guesswork. The world moves towards you, and if you don’t keep walking, you’ll be swept away, he often said.
Outside the station, the man in tweed jacket has returned, playing his harmonica. I give him some money. He nods his head graciously. Before turning the corner, I seem to hear again the sweet tune of ‘Jasmine Flower’.
Isabelle Li is a Chinese Australian writer and translator. She has published in various anthologies and literary journals in Australia including The Best Australian Stories, Southerly, Westerly and UTS Writers’ Anthology. Her collection of short stories A Chinese Affair was published by Margaret River Press in 2016. Her prose translations have appeared in Sydney Review of Books and her poetry translations in Mascara, World Literature and Works. Her Chinese translation of Sebastian Barry’s novel The Secret Scripture is published by Zhejiang Literature & Art Publishing House. Isabelle is currently studying her Doctor of Creative Arts at Western Sydney University.
The banner picture of China is by Sam Bayle and is downloaded from Unsplash.com