Peter Liu - Watering Heaven

“One of my favorite feelings in the world is to make someone feel beautiful,” she said.

“Is that why you got into the fashion industry?”

“Either that or get an office job… and I’m allergic to offices.”

Whenever I saw her, she was wearing a different hat: a pink beret one day, an azure cap the next. She wore beanies when we played hoops, and her general zeal for winning expressed itself boldly in the lucid hues of her hats. Mahjong, jiangqi, our basketball games — didn’t matter — she hated defeat and reveled in victory. After winning each morning series, she sauntered through the subways, singing songs that had never been sung, brushing confidently past the buffet of pedestrians obsessed with their daily compulsions.

“You know what I think I deserve for how badly I beat you?” she asked.

“What?”

“Honey sprinkled on top of a garlic sweet potato filled with custard from inside, and a brownie on the side with caramel poured all over it.”

“That sounds like a recipe for a heart attack.”

“Yummy,” she answered with a mischievous grin.

She had a fierce exterior, and it was hard to imagine the night debilitating her will. But she suffered continual nightmares; she dreamed about the end of the world in a submersion of candy wrappers, and soda cans that devoured the ocean.

As soon as she nodded off, she’d grind her teeth in a quick series of stutters, little tics of motion pulsating from finger to calf. I’d hold her in my arms, thinking about what happened after we’d been dating five months.

We were meeting to watch a Chinese opera. I rushed to our rendezvous point, saw her on the other side of the street. She waved, took a step forward. At that moment, a taxi swerved to avoid a woman lugging her baby in a quick dash. And hit a motorcycle that lost control and smashed into the trashcan next to Alice.

I was unsure of what to do. She had jumped out of the way, but had tripped over the sidewalk. I rushed over, saw that she was okay, and went to the motorcyclist. There was blood all over him, but he was conscious. I dialed for emergency help.

The medics rushed everyone to the hospital. To my surprise, Alice had broken her ankle and shattered part of her knee. As she was about to go into surgery, she looked at me and asked, “How come you didn’t take care of me?”

“What do you mean?”

“You just watched when the accident happened and then you went to the motorcyclist first.”

“I saw that you were okay.”

“But you didn’t even ask me how I was.”

Before I could respond, she closed her eyes and went in for her operation. Why hadn’t I rushed to her side?

She was confined to a wheelchair for three months. When she was finally able to walk, she did so with a bad limp. If she was disappointed, she did her best to hide it. “I’m alive and my stomach is intact,” she said. “And I can still walk.” But I noticed cruel glances from people passing by, and so did she.

I tried to cheer her up by renewing our culinary excursions. At first, we faced difficulties just finding places with wheelchair access. But even after she could walk again, she seemed reluctant to go out. “I found a great Shandong restaurant, wanna go?”

“Not really. I’m pretty tired,” she answered.

“But they have your favorite kidney coriander dish and it’s supposed to be awesome.”

“I don’t wanna go in a taxi right now. It’s too far.”

Not only had her enthusiasm for food dwindled, but an undercurrent of melancholy sieved through her like sticky porridge.

She spent months in rehab. While dozing off in the hospital lobbies, she lectured me about one of her hidden passions — finance. About variable interest rates, derivatives, Bernanke’s warnings, why Warren Buffett was against portfolio diversification, and the housing crisis in America, topics I was aware of only as catch-phrases from TV. I enjoyed the lessons and she did too as it gave her an opportunity to forget about her own situation.

“You need to save, to have at least six months backed up,” she admonished me.

“Yes boss,” I answered.

After her treatments ended, we both hoped she’d make a full recovery. But her step continued to waver.

“Will I be ever able to walk again without pain?” she asked the doctors.

They weren’t sure because of further complications in her torn muscles. “You need to be active about trying to heal it.”

We did bike rides through the city to strengthen her knee, weaving into a fleet of bicycles, playing Entourage through the winding tapestry of the labyrinthine roads. Cars honked impatiently as they waded through the haphazard morass of traffic, and we imbibed the scents of burning ginseng and pork wontons from the street vendors. In the evenings, we’d hit the local gym and swim like trout, sucking up hot ramen afterwards.

“I hate noodles,” she complained.

“Then how come you always eat them?” I asked.

“I always find myself drawn to things I hate. Don’t you ever do that?”

The truth was, with every taxi ride through the city, I prayed for another accident. Not so that either of us would get hurt, but because I wanted to find some way to make up for my previous lapse.

One day, we were watching her favorite TV show, a comedy/celebrity interview/star search bonanza that usually left me cringing. An NBA player I wasn’t familiar with happened to be a guest. He did some tricks with his basketball, taking part in a dribbling competition with two teens that were China’s version of the Harlem Globetrotters.

“We should play again,” she told me.

“When do you want to start?”

“Tomorrow.”

There was drifting snow on our court the next morning, and our breath steamed out of us. We were nervous about getting caught, we argued more about the rules, and our hands froze.

Our ritual continued four times a week. Even if she wobbled as she dribbled, she was getting better, learning to adjust for the weakness in her knee, insisting on practicing at least 500 free throws a day. She fell a lot, but when she did, she’d hop right back up.

A month in, she took a particularly bad fall. I rushed to assist her in getting up. But I couldn’t help being frustrated with myself as I saw her wince in pain.

“What’s wrong?” she asked when she got back on her feet.

I turned away.

“What’s wrong?” she asked again.

“You think there’s something I could have done to avoid this?”

“What do you mean?”

“I mean during the accident…” And even though there were a million apologies I wanted to make, my well of words dried up.

She shrugged. “If you feel bad, you can buy me dinner for the rest of my life.”

“I’m being serious.”

“Cheer up,” she said. “Remember, we don’t know what this life really is. Don’t worry about it.”

“But if I had done something…”

“Like what?”

I didn’t have an answer.

She shook her head. “Did I ever tell you the story about Gumang?”

“No.”

“It’s a province where the sun never rises and the moon never sets. People there used to spend more than two-thirds of their life sleeping and dreaming. They believed the waking life was illusion and the dreams, reality. When I look in the mirror and see myself, I can’t believe this is real. But I’m alive, my leg feels a lot better, and the other night, I had a dream I became an NBA star better than Kobe, super-rich too.”

“You think that’s the reality?”

She stuck her tongue out at me. “I hope so… What about you? What’s your dream?”

“Mine?” I thought about it. “My life here in China, being with you — it all feels like a dream. I don’t want it to ever end.”