Ran Chen - A Private Life

I said, "What's strange about that? My mama says that looking at a person's writing is like looking into her heart."

"Heart?" Yi Qiu thought about it, but she couldn't see the connection between written characters and the heart, and said, "Your mama's an intellectual. Intellectuals are a pain, they want to connect everything to the 'heart.'"

"But it makes sense," I answered.

"What sense? I don't think your heart is anywhere near as rigid as your characters." She opened her own exercise book and said, "Look at how round and soft my characters are. According to your mother's theory, I should bawl when I look at a falling leaf. In fact, I never cry. What is there that's worth crying about?"

Because of the weird business with the red wad of paper that had just happened, I was confused and illogical and couldn't explain myself clearly.

I said, "She doesn't mean your heart, she means your temperament; well, not really your temperament, it's… Anyway, Mama's always correcting my characters. She says people who write characters like mine will get more and more stubborn, more unreasonable… and… and…"

Just then someone outside shouted, "Yi Qiu!"

We immediately fell quiet, straining to hear who was there.

"Yi Qiu!" Again a shout. There was definitely someone outside, but I had never met anyone at her house before.

I watched with great curiosity as she went to the door.

A tall male came into the room, with black, flashing almond eyes, a lowering brow, and a narrow forehead. He was sturdy as a gatepost and gave the appearance of having an endless store of vitality.

When he saw that there was a strange girl in the room, he smiled stiffly and seemed a bit too reserved, but he looked very sweet.

Yi Qiu introduced him: "This is Xi Dawang. I told you about him." Then she pointed at me and said to him, "This is my new friend, Ni Niuniu."

He came over to me, holding out a big, raw hand. "Hello," he said. "Yi Qiu has told me about you."

I shyly offered him my hand. His palm was oily and damp with sweat.

He and Yi Qiu sat close to each other on the bed, across the table from me. Yi Qiu and I had put our homework aside, and the three of us were sitting a bit awkwardly around the table as if we were having a chat, but not knowing what to say.

He picked up my exercise book and bumbled out, "Your calligraphy is very beautiful."

In those hands of his, which had probably been carrying bricks for many years, my exercise book looked very thin and fragile. He was turning the pages with great care, one by one, as if it were not an exercise book at all but a collection of expensive silks.

"My calligraphy isn't the least bit beautiful," I said.

Without responding to my comment, he fished some tomatoes from his rather worn military haversack, and wiping them with his hands, said, "Have one, please."

Yi Qiu passed one to me immediately.

All three of us started to eat, and with the tomatoes suddenly easing the tension among us, we started to chat.

From Xi Dawang's conversation I gathered that he had been on regular service in the air force as ground crew in a small northern city, working mostly as a lineman, a ditch digger, and in a factory manufacturing oxygen. Later on, he left the force because he had developed a brain disease.

I asked what kind of disease can affect the brain.

Neither of them answered.

When I finished my tomato, I got up to go to the "sleeve" to wash my hands. I noticed that Xi Dawang was wiping the red juice off his hands on his trouser legs. Yi Qiu was going to go with me to wash her hands, but when I got up she said, "You go first. You go."

As I was washing my hands, I watched them through the gap at the edge of the curtain.

Like bolts of lightning, they were into each other's arms. Xi Dawang madly clasped Yi Qiu to him, with his thick, strong arms enclosing her shoulders, like a prisoner who had not eaten the tender breast of a fat chicken for many years and now suddenly had before him a huge portion. Yi Qiu eagerly pressed herself against him, moving her breasts against his rib cage like plump hands passionately brushing the strings of a harp.

I dragged out my washing as long as I could, then went back to my chair and opened up my exercise book as if I hadn't seen a thing.

By this time, they were sitting separate again.

For a while nobody said anything.

To lighten things up, Xi Dawang started to tell us that one evening at dusk, when he was in the air force, he had sat down for a rest on a mountain slope. Leaning against a large rock, he was idly picking some of the brilliant yellow wild blossoms of the "gold watch" flower when he noticed an owl not very far away from him devouring a marmot it had caught. Putting down the flowers, he hid himself and watched quietly. Unlike other birds, the owl has its eyes on the front, not the sides, of its head, with the feathers around them radiating outward in a circle so that it appears to have a face, though, in fact, this is not so. Eventually the owl saw him; then after they stared at each other for a moment, it disappeared as silently as a shadow. It frightened him deeply to discover that an owl can fly silently, without a whisper of sound.

Xi Dawang said that the next day he fell ill. He firmly believed that his sickness was brought on by his staring into the owl's eyes.

"When you're in the mountains," Xi Dawang said, "you live among unfettered forces, and communicate with the silent stones though they have no way to speak."

When he loosened up and started to talk like this, I discovered that there was indeed something about him that was not quite right.

His eyes were focused straight ahead, but he wasn't looking at anyone. It seemed as if he were holding a very urgent conversation with some little person inside his head. I also saw that his hand was continuously stroking Yi Qiu's waist, and that her waist was a substitute for whatever it was that was in his mind. A definite nervous twitch pulled at the corner of his mouth, as if his fingers were at that moment discovering some as yet unperfected pleasure at Yi Qiu's waist, as if his desire for this unspoken place was nerve ending by nerve ending being ignited – trapping him in the throes of sexual hunger.

Yi Qiu responded to his fingers with an unbroken thread of silvery laughter, a laughter that in fact came from that same distant and secret place, that dim, obscure place from which desire emanates. It was "that place," grinning like an open mouth, that was laughing.

I kept writing in my exercise book but couldn't stop listening to them.

Then Yi Qiu told me that she and Xi Dawang were going to the other room to discuss something personal.

The two of them got up and went into the inner room.

I was left alone in the outer room, separated from them by a wall. I suddenly felt isolated and left out of life. That inner room had an indefinable attraction that so seduced my power of concentration that it was impossible for me to focus on my lesson. But what was going on in there was really beyond the scope of my imagination, because there was little in my own personal feelings or experience that had any connection with it. That area of experience for me was essentially blank. But at this moment it was as if that room were at the center of a powerful magnetic field that had captured me in an unidentifiable tension from which there was no relief.

Finally, I could no longer control my curiosity or my "thirst for knowledge," and I crept silently over to the door of the inner room.

I listened very carefully for a while, but they weren't talking. All I could hear was a faint sound of movement.

The door to the inner room was of traditional design. Vertical and horizontal wooden slats divided the top half of the door into square panes, which were covered with a layer of white window paper that let through a yellowish light. The paper was covered with water stains, and there were many large and small holes poked in it. Because it was darker in the inner room, the holes looked like black eyes watching me.