Annie Wang - The People’s Republic of Desire

Was this the American Dream?

In the past two years, she didn't dare see Chinese people. Some of her classmates back home had already become hot artists; others were diplomats wives, but she? Apart from looking after an old man, she was only holding simple English conversations with a bunch of Mexican and South American immigrants at the local adult school.

Colorful Clouds thought and thought, and pretended to commit suicide by tying her bathrobe sash into a noose.

As she had expected, the kindhearted Brian burst in and held her back. "Don't. Don't do something stupid like that."

"How can I disgrace myself like this? How can I humiliate myself all for the sake of coming to America?" Colorful Clouds started to perform: "I want to die. I always dreamed of being a Hollywood film star and traveling the world. But I'm a child of the third world. Even in the third world, I was in the poor position of having no relatives overseas, so I had no other choice but to sell myself. I thought that by marrying old David I could get closer to my dreams. But in America, I'm just an old man's nursemaid and sex toy.

"I wanted one day to star in a movie about my life. This movie would introduce the world to my people, to our folk songs, our customs, and the village I grew up in, that old banyan tree and the big bell in our village, the girls with their silver bracelets. But now I have no self-confidence at all! My life is totally meaningless. Before, when I was in Beijing, I'd often discuss existentialism with artists, but now I truly understand the futility of life."

Colorful Clouds looked into Brian's eyes, and touched his youthful face. "I don't want to do anything wrong to your grandfather. But I am a young woman! My mistake was that I loved America too much. Ever since I was young, America was always a dream, an ideal. I am a slave to America."

Brian dried Colorful Clouds' tears. "I'm sorry. It's my fault. I shouldn't judge you. Don't say any more. It's my fault."

"No, Brian, please don't stop me. I've been in the United States for two years, but never before have I had the chance to talk about my feelings. Everything is all bottled up inside. I need to keep talking."

"All right, I'm listening to you."

"I was eighteen years old before I went to the city. At the time I had been admitted to our province's university. Our family was very poor and couldn't afford anything. When I left, my mother gave me a basket of eggs and asked me to take them to the city. The eggs were laid by our family's hen. When that hen was small, I used to carry it around like you'd carry around a small child. I caught the long-distance bus to Nanning, and then a local bus to the university. It was the first time I had seen such big roads, with so many cars – I was petrified. When I crossed the road, I was careless and dropped the basket of eggs on the ground. They all broke. Everything my family had!

"It was at university, on my city classmates' stereo, that I first heard the Beatles. Never before had I heard such beautiful music. I could listen to 'Yesterday' and 'Let It Be' a hundred times without getting sick of them. Later I also saw them on the television, with their guitars, long hair, and big boots – they were so handsome. The Beatles were the soundtrack to my university life."

"I like the Beatles too."

"At university, I was most jealous of Yoko Ono. John Lennon loved her so much, he even changed his middle name to Ono. Their documentary film, Imagine, was really great. I dreamed that, just like Yoko Ono, I could be loved by a Western man. After graduation, I drifted to Beijing. I wanted to meet all sorts of Western men. But they only wanted to sleep with me; none of them wanted to marry me. Only your grandfather, David. I should be grateful to him."

Colorful Clouds gazed at Brian's clear eyes and curling eyelashes. "I'm sorry, Brian. I am a filthy woman. I shouldn't like you. But I really do like you. I like your knowledge, your wisdom, your energy, your youth. I shouldn't. I should die." Colorful Clouds already knew that her little act had worked.

"Don't speak like that. Don't."

Colorful Clouds kissed Brian.

As she had expected, Brian welcomed Colorful Clouds' warmth. Exotic background, suffering, poverty, and her hunger for freedom and Western culture – plus her thick lips and flaming gaze, a package that definitely sells!

Colorful Clouds and Brian's unlikely affair led to Colorful Clouds becoming pregnant. This was exactly as she had planned. Because of this pregnancy, she divorced David and became Brian's wife. She didn't even have to change her married name. Colorful Clouds is extremely fond of her foreign surname. She tells me smugly, "When people see my name, they can't tell whether I'm Asian or white!"

After marrying a handsome husband, Colorful Clouds finally felt proud, and resumed contact with her old acquaintances.

Brian is a physicist. He did not make Colorful Clouds work, and wanted only that she realize her dreams of leading a happy life and becoming a great performer.

Colorful Clouds became a middle-class housewife and mother of three. She vowed solemnly to break into Hollywood. She believed that her skin color and appearance, while not sought after in China, would be liked by these Westerners.

She and Brian moved the family to southern California to help her make it in Hollywood. But after countless auditions, she never won a part. Even worse, her appearance, which she thought was so special, was common in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. She was even more common in the States than she was in China. At least in China people used to admire her Zhuang ethnic features.

What made Colorful Clouds especially unhappy was that the Chinese theater groups who visited the States had not hired her. After so many years, she appeared in only one feature movie – as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, with a total of two lines.

As time passed, Brian became disappointed that Colorful Clouds had not found work and moved back to the Midwest. He began to feel that perhaps his mysterious wife was really just mediocre after all. Colorful Clouds watched Brian rush about making a living, getting older every day. He had much less hair than before, but much more of a belly. The handsome air he had before they were married was gone. He had become a middle-aged man. The differences between the m grew greater, and they even began sleeping in separate beds. But her penchant for young men remained unchanged.

To kill time, Colorful Clouds began to hang out in the coffee shops at the University of Missouri, and there she met a lot of young men. Many of them became her lovers. Colorful Clouds had several lovers, but she still felt empty and did not know what to do with her time.

Colorful Clouds often telephoned me since I was a student there back then. She needed an audience to listen to her story – to listen to her show off, and vent, and curse everyone for her situation. She sometimes went overboard, blaming everyone and everything but herself: this girlfriend stabbed her in the back, that lover slept with her cousin, and on and on. I was like a garbage dump, taking all of Colorful Clouds' rubbish.

Colorful Clouds was a gifted liar. Her real life bore no resemblance whatsoever to the life she recounted. Sometimes she said Brian had something going with another Chinese woman. This woman, who had abandoned her husband and children in China to establish herself in the United States, was a minor actress, nowhere near as good as Colorful Clouds. Colorful Clouds plotted how to catch the adulterers in the act. Sometimes she said that her husband was the most faithful man on earth, who only had eyes for her. I never pointed out the inconsistencies in Colorful Clouds' stories. I understood that she relied on intuition. If she wanted something, she would get it, whether it was in the real world or in the world of her imagination.