Xiaolu Guo - 20 Fragments Of A Ravenous Youth

The street was crammed with cars. It seemed ignorant still to be calling China a third-world country when there were traffic jams everywhere in Beijing. It didn't matter if it was morning or afternoon or the middle of the night, you would always find a sea of trucks and vans and cars – green state-operated cabs, crowded minibuses, private cars with their tan leather interiors and dogs on the back seat. But not only was Beijing flooded with cars, it was a city of smoke. A city of smokers. People worried about cancer, but they still kept puffing – many actively, many more passively. You could walk from North Tai Ping Zhuang over to the North Entrance of He Ping Street, and you may as well have smoked your way through two packs of Camels. You smoked the taxi driver's smoke as he spun sharply around a corner, you smoked the local party leader's smoke as he tried to establish order at a meeting, you smoked your boyfriend's smoke whether he loved you or not. Chinese-made cigarettes, foreign imports, dodgy rip-offs. The city was in a permanent fog.

The fresh air outside might have been practically nonexistent, but at least I was heading for the swimming pool. I flagged down a passing taxi and hopped in. Catching a glimpse of myself in the driver's rear-view mirror, I noticed how dry my lips were, and how grey and spotty my skin. A woman who looked like this brought absolutely no colour to a city. However long she sat in a bar or café, she'd find it impossible to engage even the loneliest bastard in conversation.

We arrived at the pool and I felt relieved. There wasn't much competition here. Just average bums and thighs. The swimming pool was a place of escape where flabby bodies bobbed up and down, a hundred metres this way, a hundred metres back. Up and down and still nothing to show for their efforts.

In the female changing room, I started to undress. The conversations of the women around me filled the air.

'My son is just like his father,' said one, her yellow bikini tight over bulging flesh. Her skin looked like dried fish, scaly and not yet pickled. 'He never does anything for me, but what can I do? He just wants to drive the car. Drive around aimlessly, just like his father. And when he's at home it's those computer games. What can you do with a child who doesn't love his mother? He should be on my side, protecting me. What if my husband had an affair? My son would side with him, and I would be left with nothing.

The red swimsuit next to her was just as loud. 'My bastard doesn't trust me. He follows me everywhere. I was in Gap trying on clothes and suddenly he was there. I went to a sushi bar to have miso soup and he sat right behind me. So I came here, to the pool, to this changing room. He can't follow me here. If he does, the pervert, I'll scream.

But it was the black bikini-top with a towel around her middle who beat them all. 'If I'm sad and feel like crying, I come to the swimming pool because if I cried at home, I'd cry and cry and be depressed for three days and three nights and then I couldn't stand it and I'd swallow a load of sleeping pills. Or drive east to the sea and just keep going straight into the water. Or walk off the edge of a cliff. So, I come here instead where there's so much water already I can weep in peace…'

These emotional buckets emptied themselves on to the changing-room floor. Heartaches ran down into the mouldy drains. I changed into my apple-green swimsuit and walked towards the pool area. I could hear the water lapping at the tiled edge.

The pool was packed. I sat on the side and dangled my feet into the water, staring into the shapeless blue liquid. Voices echoed around me, people talking loudly to hear themselves over the children splashing. The water was warm. I started to feel soothed, almost content. This always happened to me when I came to the pool. I felt close to the strangers around me. I liked to think they were here for the same reasons as me. That they were escaping their suffocating apartments, fleeing domestic arguments and newly made enemies, running from rejection and unrequited love. The water was a caress, a comfort. People felt blessed by it. I would watch the swimmers carefully, convinced they were being calmed by the shifting and chasing of the water around them. The only downside? I still couldn't swim.

I looked at the men. Tubby middle-aged men who had started to let themselves go; young men who couldn't wait to grow up; little boys who were just starting to notice women's breasts bobbing in the water around them. The big blue pond at my feet reminded me of a womb – warm, tranquil, safe. Never betraying its inhabitants.

A man with the body of a Greek statue drew himself out of the water and sat on the edge near me. Beads of water dotted his smooth chest, his rippling thighs. His face was sharp and beautiful. At first he stared out at the water, and then he turned his gaze on me. Our eyes met. My hair was dry, my skin dry, my apple-green swimsuit bone-dry. I must have looked weird to him. Quickly we both turned back to look at the water.

Kafka said, anyone who can't come to terms with his life while he is alive needs one hand to wave away his despair and the other to note down what he sees among the ruins. I thought about the diary I used to keep. I wished I still had it. By now I would have had a whole library of my thoughts to look back on. But I stopped writing it when I was with Xiaolin. He treated it as his evening newspaper. He would leaf through its pages when he was bored, looking for stories. So instead, I kept my true thoughts, desires and dreams hidden deep within. I became a person who was very good at hiding her emotions. Maybe that was why people thought I was heartless. Apparently my face often had a blank expression. Huizi, my most intellectual friend, would say, 'Fenfang, yours is the face of a post-modern woman.'

EARLY EVENING. 7.10. The sun had just sunk below a heavy concrete tower. I switched off my laptop and started circling my carpet. Stay in and sleep?Venture out? Eat something? I looked at the phone. It stayed silent, like all my best roles. I found myself standing in the kitchen. There was the remains of a bottle of Great Wall Red Wine in the fridge. I poured the wine into a glass but there wasn't enough to fill it. I suddenly wanted more, much more. On the kitchen table were two more bottles: Thousand Happiness Dry Red and Dragon White. There was hardly any wine in them either. I poured what was left into a glass, mixing them up like a vegetable soup. I took a sip. And another. It tasted terrible, like out-of-date apple juice.

Huizi once told me that, when a young person started drinking, it was a sign they were getting old. It suddenly felt very true.

As I was thinking about how intelligent Huizi was, the phone rang. I picked it up. No shit, it was Huizi.

'Fenfang, hey, where've you been? You've been missed.'

'Have I?'

'Of course. What are you doing now?'

'Me? Nothing, I'm not doing anything. But I've just started drinking wine. Maybe it'll help me sleep. You know I haven't been able to sleep for days. I only manage to drop off when everyone else goes to work in the morning. I wish I had an internal clock like other people…'

'All right, Fenfang, stop drinking,' said Huizi. 'Listen, I've just finished the first draft of a TV script – twenty episodes. I've been told I can recommend some female leads to the Director. So I thought of you. I'm with the Director right now, having dinner. Get in a taxi and come here immediately. We're at Sun Yue Dumplings on Hospital Street in Haidan. Hurry! I'll pay the fare.'

I hung up with a hundred thanks. Now I was moving quickly. I changed into something decent and sharp. A Korean TB2 skirt. A tight-fitting Double Love T-shirt. A pair of high heels I never managed to walk in for more than 10 minutes. And I pulled my hair into a ponytail. I looked like a new-generation woman. This TV Director would believe at once I was the actress he needed. Minutes later I was in a taxi on the way to Sun Yue Dumplings. Using the rear-view mirror I brushed powder on to my cheeks, added colour to my lips and darkened my eyebrows. I looked like a juicy peach ready for picking.