Ran Chen - A Private Life

So I said it again, much more emphatically. "I really have thought about it a lot. It's pointless to continue living."

There was a long silence, then finally Mother said, "Really? So you've made up your mind?"

I nodded my head decisively and said, "Yes!" as great big tears tumbled from my eyes.

My mother was very well read and not your ordinary woman at all. When I said these things, she didn't get alarmed or flustered and try to dissuade or urge me in any way, or stop me, as most mothers do with difficult children. She was wise enough to know how to handle a "problem child." Again, she considered this for a while; then, with a look of having thought it through and made a decision that was a counterpart to my own, she said, "Mama loves you very much. You know that. But if you've decided you want to die, then nobody can stop you. China 's such a big place, and we can't put a lid on the Yangtze River and the Yellow River. But Mama would miss you terribly."

It was my turn to be surprised. Mother's words completely stymied me. How right she was. There was no need to mention the Yangtze or the Yellow River, even the little canal outside our front door had no lid. Death was as easy as that. I didn't say a word.

I never mentioned it to Mother again.

By this time, with me hanging on to Mother and pulling for dear life, afraid that she would collapse at any moment, we had made our way down one more floor.

I quickly saw that the smoke was already thinner and the heat no longer so intense. The farther down we got, the easier it was to breathe.

All of a sudden it came to me: we had passed the floor where the fire was. As if we had just been rescued, I exclaimed to Mother joyfully, "We're safe, we're going to make it. We're almost out of it."

Naturally, when we went down another floor, the air gradually cleared, and the stairwell's feeble lights flickered and gleamed. At last Mother stopped and took several deep breaths. Then she spoke.

"The ninth floor," she said, "or maybe the eighth."

My guess was the same, it was probably the eighth or ninth floor.

Finally, we were out of the building, and standing there in the rushing wind on that late winter night, I saw that there was already a dark press of people gathered around. Some who had fled from their beds with no time to dress were standing there shivering, wrapped in their quilts. Whole families huddled together, their teeth chattering. Because we always went to bed very late, Mother and I both had sweaters on, but each gust of wind left us feeling like we were wrapped in nothing but a thin sheet of paper. Like countless icy worms, the cold penetrated deeper and deeper into our bones.

I started looking for Ho in the crowd. One after another the frightened, unsettled dark faces passed across my field of vision. This crowd of people that had fled from the thick smoke of death now stood numbly looking up at our building, trying to see where the fire was.

When I couldn't find Ho, I started to get anxious, realizing that the fire might well have started on her floor. When I thought of her lying on her bed in those plain green pajamas, my mind erupted suddenly into flame.

Then, the wavering bleat of their sirens adding new confusion to the scene, the fire engines raced up. The crowd, the trees, and the building were now all bathed in a brilliant orange glow. The sky flashed with the uncommon blue of diamonds, like the eyes of so many corpses floating in the darkness of heaven, their cold lips caressing the earth.

We were immediately ordered to move back 200 meters to an empty place on the side of the street away from our building. I was in the middle of a group of men who wanted to go back into the building to look for family members, or particular things that they had left behind. They struggled to get to the building, but they were kept firmly back. We were so crowded together that we couldn't move.

I looked up, praying fervently, Let her be safe, let her be safe, all the while shaking uncontrollably.

By this time, two firemen were climbing up the wall with the aid of ropes to rescue whoever might be in the apartment where the fire had started. I focused all my attention on them. I watched those two small, flamelike, greenish shapes dart up the wall like a pair of salamanders. In no time at all, they were at the ninth floor. At last, at the place I was most afraid they might stop – Ho's balcony – half suspended in space, using metal hooks to secure themselves, they flipped over the railing into her apartment.

My heart contracted violently, as if I had suffered a blow from some sharp weapon, and the blood in my veins congealed into silence.

There was no denying it. The fire was in Ho's apartment.

I stood there transfixed, until an uncontrollable wailing burst from me.

Just as the valves on the fire hoses were opened, I gave way to a flood of tears.

Eventually, they got the fire under control. Water from the upper floors poured down the stairwell and flooded out of the main entrance. Then two firemen bearing a stretcher emerged.

That naked pink corpse, or better to say that vaguely human-shaped lump of flesh, moved slowly toward us.

The crowd stirred.

A fireman shouted, "Is there anyone here from apartment 905?"

Ho's apartment.

My head and feet felt distorted, my eyes burned, my hands were like ice. I kept trying to bring myself back to my senses. I was hallucinating. None of this was real. But Mother was with me, holding me, her hands gripped tight around my shoulders.

All of it, everything before me, was real. I knew it.

When the stretcher moved across the street toward us, a great roaring filled my head and then began to die away, as the people around me, the street lamps, and our building began to sway.

Things started to blur; the noise around me faded. Then the world went black as I collapsed on the street.

The roar of the demented wind screaming Ho's name blotted out the clamor of that scene. The crowd of people had fled the roar; only Ho was there, floating in a dazzling circle of light…

Much later, long after that disastrous fire, I heard a silly but upsetting rumor that it was caused by Ho's faulty refrigerator…

These have been days that I do not wish to remember. Everything has been changing too quickly. With every day, I become more substantial; with every day, this world is less so.

I am at a doorway. If I pass through, perhaps I can be young again – yet I know I can never be young again…

How that stray bullet came to find me, penetrating my left calf and exiting without my feeling it at all, remains an unsolved riddle.

It was late one evening in early summer. I was on my way to see my mother, who had been confined to the hospital because of a partial malfunction of the left chamber of her heart.

It was strange that this shady, cool street directly behind Tian'anmen Square, which for many days had been part of a boiling ferment of debate, was now suddenly deserted and quiet. I was rather puzzled. How could that tangle of traffic and press of crowds simply vanish into thin air?

My senses sharpened. I could hear in the distance a strange, clanking sound, the rumble of wheels, and what sounded like exploding fire-rackers. At the corner two or three hundred meters in front of me, lying there like the carcass of a huge dead horse, was what appeared to be an overturned object blocking the road. All around it, I thought I could make out the wavering shapes of people, but I couldn't be sure. Farther away, a corner of the descending night sky suddenly darkened as if it were preoccupied with plotting some secret.

Then I heard an angry sound like the snort of a wild boar hang briefly in the evening air at the same moment that I felt something hard strike the calf of my left leg. It felt hot, numb. I struggled to keep standing. It seemed as if suddenly my leg had been wrenched away from me, was no longer mine. Feeling no pain at all, I looked down curiously. A thick red liquid was running down the left leg of my trousers onto the street.