Ran Chen - A Private Life

When I woke up, the symbolic message of the dream was obvious.

It let me see that there are no shortcuts in this world, so I started to work furiously on the material on my desk.

How ironic it was that just when I felt that every day might indeed be my last, my story had finally begun.

For an entire year I put everything into my work. I spent the greater part of every day recalling and setting down my personal history, or burying myself deep in thought. Probably because there were so few things in that apartment that had any energy or life in them, the feeling began to affect me. It felt as if my blood were congealing, and even my period was affected, the cycle getting longer and longer, my period coming later and later.

At first I paid no attention to this problem. But after a while, I began thinking that maybe, just as with mental illness, my body was signaling me that it was involved in a struggle against forces harmful to its health. So I decided to go and see Qi Luo.

By this time Qi Luo and I had become genuine friends, not just doctor-patient "friends."

He gave me a little bottle of pills with the medical name "levoromethylnorethindrone," or, in lay terms, birth-control pills.

"What kind of a joke is this?" I asked. "I spend the whole day locked up in an empty house like a vestal virgin, yet you want me to take birth-control pills?"

He laughed. "You don't understand. Aside from preventing the implantation of eggs in your uterus, they regulate your body's production of endocrinal hormones." That, I could understand.

Before I went to bed that night, I swallowed that little round yellow birth-control pill, and turning to look at my empty, guiltless bed, I couldn't stop laughing. I laughed and laughed. I laughed until tears were streaming down my face.

It seemed like that little pill did not want to do what it was told. It stuck in my throat where it jiggled about, refusing to go down, as if it were enjoying some preposterous joke.

After that, my long, arduous research began in earnest, and my dogged persistence at this endless and draining work left me exhausted.

"It's the season of love – everybody, everybody, hug hug hug… the lonely are a shameless lot." Since the beginning of the '90s, everybody in Beijing has been singing this song. You hear it everywhere you go, in the shops and on the streets.

Perhaps they have to give their lives some meaning or purpose in order to carry on.

But I have to admit, I'm without doubt one of the "shameless" ones. Rather than keeping up with the beat of the times and throwing open my door to the season of love, I find that I have closed my door even tighter. And I have a love that runs totally counter to the times – in my bathroom. To be precise, my bathtub.

In such a big apartment, such an unexpected place to find love!

It all began one day when I was having my bath. As I lay soaking in the tub, in the water's warm and eager arms, all my loneliness and fatigue melted away.

After my mother and my beloved friends left me, I felt that the bathtub and I were all that remained, but this was the first time I had lain like a lover in its embrace. In that quiet and still apartment, only it could clasp me in its arms and make me forget the past, make me forget my isolation. I leaned against the tub quietly like a thirsting plant nursing its way back to succulent life.

I lingered there for a long time, and, coddled in the languid mists, I fell asleep.

The gurgle of the drain awakened me. I must have dislodged the plug with my foot.

I raised my head and looked around. As the steamy clouds of mist dissipated, the pristine white tiles began to reappear, looking like crisp biscuits that seemed to fill the air with a fresh fragrance. With the leaky faucet, its neck solicitously bowed, drip-drip, drop-dropping like a quietly reiterated "hello, hello, hello," and the grumbly surging of the toilet tank like the hubbub of a noisy street, I could never feel lonely again. Especially with the wooden rack on the wall above the tub with all my favorite cosmetics on the top shelf and a pile of books and magazines on the bottom, so I could read while taking a bath.

What an unusual and marvelous place!

In this apartment, aside from me, it is the only thing that is still alive.

One evening, after soaking in the tub for a very long time, I felt especially fresh and relaxed. Having dried myself, I slipped on my nightgown and settled down on my sofa with a nice hot cup of Biluochun green tea.

As I drank my tea looking at the empty room around me, I suddenly felt unaccountably hungry, and I could hear the empty growling of my stomach.

But I knew that I wasn't really the least bit hungry. I had eaten a big dinner, and according to my usual pattern of digestion, I shouldn't have felt hungry again until I got up the next morning.

Nonetheless, I couldn't suppress my hunger pangs.

Through the crack in the curtains I could see all the bright lights of evening. Nightlife in Beijing has been getting more and more varied and lively. People are back into late-night dining, dancing, health clubs, entertainment parlors, and the like. I think they are probably hyper-functioning like this because their digestive systems are out of whack. I don't know.

I had left a long piece of plastic string on the tea table, the white kind that is amazingly strong. I had taken it off a large bundle of books I had picked up at the post office that afternoon.

I had unconsciously picked it up and was idly twisting it around my fingers as something stirred vaguely in my head.

Under the guidance of my subconscious, my fingers divided the string into four equal lengths, shaped them into a strong loop, and knotted the ends together securely. I then stood up and went over to the thick drainpipe that ran from ceiling to floor in the corner between my front hall and my living room. There was a black metal hook on it that looked like a thrust-out empty tongue waiting to be fed. I brought a chair over, and standing on it, I hung the loop I had made on the hook.

This series of actions was executed in a sort of dreamlike state. I really had no idea what I was about, or why.

When I had finished all this and jumped down from the chair, I looked up at what I had just done. Hanging there in front of me, waiting, was a terrible hangman's noose.

Only then did I jerk back wildly in fright.

Fully conscious again, I was appalled by my actions. Palpitating with fear, I sank back into the sofa, my eyes locked on the suicidal noose, my mind racing wildly.

If I were to go over and stand on the chair, it would be as easy as pie to slip that noose around my neck. One little kick of the chair and the whole thing would be over.

As easy as walking through a door – nothing to it.

But then I thought, what if nobody came to see me for a long time? My corpse would be hanging in the house all that time – what a disgusting scene that would be! On the other hand, it would give people a terrible fright should they come and find me. That wouldn't do at all.

I didn't want to think about it anymore.

To dispel these nameless anxieties, I turned on the stereo system. The station it was tuned to was playing that same song, "The Season of Love."

My thoughts picked up on the line, "The lonely are a shameless crowd."

I pondered it from every angle. Just why are they "shameless"? I tried a number of approaches, but I found it impossible to either validate or disprove the statement.

My Postulations

1. Only when we all hug each other are we normal. If you don't behave in this way, you're abnormal, and abnormal people are shameless.