Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

Tong was as spontaneous by nature as Zheng. He had met his wife when he was sent to a commune in Inner Mongolia in the Cultural Revolution. He fell madly in love and they courted on horseback. It was most romantic. But the problems started in Beijing.

When they came back to the city, his wife, Ying, suddenly discovered that Tong was shorter than she was, by a good head. Other discoveries followed: the attractions of city life for instance, and the fact that her husband was not god’s gift to women, after all. She could not find a job and that bothered her too. She started arguing with Tong, until the latter, who still loved her deeply, began to feel that there must be another man coming between them. The anxiety caused by his suspicions had the effect of making him impotent. In despair, he began to tail her. Finally, his patience snapped. One freezing winter night after he had been following her for a whole day, he caught up with her and slashed her face with a knife. ‘You want to be another Carmen? Let me help you be her!’ he shouted. ( Carmen featured a lot in popular culture back then.)

However, what added to the drama was that the wife with the slashed face refused to bring charges against him. It was as if her husband had proved his love with this action. Men would never understand the twists and turns of women’s logic.

Like Peng, Tong had fled south, returning to testify for Zheng at his trial. However in Tianyi’s house, he did not get the kind of welcome Peng received. When Tong began spouting to Tianyi the kind of fiery rhetoric popular in the protests of a few months previously, Lian launched into an attack on him. Lian had had enough and, face to face with yet another ‘revolutionary’ whom he did not know particularly well, his antipathy boiled over. Only Tianyi knew Lian’s rages. Peng and Tong had never seen anything like it. Subdued by his violent outburst, they made an ignominious exit.

But Tong was nothing if not devious. A few days later, he came to Tianyi’s house again and put a photocopied document on the table. ‘Have a look at that,’ he said. Tianyi took one look and realized what it was: Lian’s ‘personal report’, written for his bosses on his return from America. He wrote that when he left China he realized how great his homeland and its Communist Party were. ‘This has spread like wildfire,’ said Tong with a sneer. ‘For the authorities, he’s become their knight in shining armour. They’ve distributed the document to every departmental Party Committee.’

Tianyi flushed scarlet with humiliation. For a whole day, she did not eat a bite of food or say a single word and, that evening, she put the Italian jewellery back in Lian’s drawer. She lay awake all night, staring at the ceiling. A feeling of utter desolation took hold of her.

Less than a month after Tianyi transferred to work at the film production company, the head of the literature department stepped down. A new man was sent to take over, one was said to have studied overseas and had a doctorate in popular communications. He was clearly not interested in being a new broom, contenting himself with calling a meeting of all the staff. He was younger than she imagined, just a year older than her. His name was Wei Qiang, and he was very tall, at nearly six foot, slim but solidly-built, with broad, level shoulders. His hair was neatly combed, he wore a baggy shirt in unbleached cotton, and he was fine-featured but with a determined look … he was just the kind of man Tianyi found most attractive.

Six months went by and Qiang, now settled in the job, set Tianyi a task: ‘Yang Tianyi, you can write a screenplay for us. Didn’t you write The Tree of Knowledge in the mid-eighties? Write a love story even better than The Tree of Knowledge , right?’ Tianyi looked at him. ‘OK,’ she said.

When Tianyi agreed to something, she threw herself into the task. From then on, she worked long hours on the project. It was exhausting, but she thought, I’m doing this for Qiang . She surprised even herself: she would never have been so passionate about it if she was doing it for herself, but because it was for someone else, even an imaginary person, she would put herself under immense pressure, working until she was physically and mentally exhausted. But she avoided close contact with Qiang, keeping her distance in just the same way as she had nurtured a silent crush on boyfriends in her youth. He’s an intelligent man, she thought, he doesn’t need things explaining to him.

Throughout her life, Tianyi had misunderstood men. She had always tried to conquer them through the beauty of her mind. She overlooked the fact that what almost all men wanted was a physical relationship.

Work threw Qiang and Tianyi together a great deal, and she could see that he was interested in her. He no doubt saw the adoring looks she could not conceal, but he pretended not to. He was married, after all, and he was her boss. All the same, he found plenty of opportunities to spend time with her. For instance, they had a friend in common, a man called Ren Dong, writer of the novel, Blame .

The first time she met Dong was at Xiao’ou’s house, but he had made little impression on her. They met again, on subsequent occasions, and she discovered that he was by no means the long-haired, extrovert yuppie he posed as — in fact he was rather shy and retiring. But he was also very amusing, always delivering high-sounding maxims and apparently convinced (this was funniest of all) that he was such a celebrity that even the country’s decision-makers were interested in him. Once he said with the utmost earnestness: ‘So-and-so says that Dong must be handled calmly and a solution must be found. You see? If so-and-so says that, then what have I got to worry about?’ Tianyi and Qiang looked at each other, then Tianyi burst out laughing, and a chuckle even escaped the normally serious Qiang. All the same, Dong reacted with the utmost gravity: ‘What are you laughing at? It’s true! You can go and check at his office, the director told me in person!’ Helpless with laughter, Tianyi said: ‘Oh, Dong, you must be the most self-deluding person on the planet!’

One of the effects of Dong’s buffoonery was to draw Tianyi and Qiang closer. Whenever he commissioned scripts, Qiang took Tianyi with him, ostensibly because ‘Tianyi knows a lot of writers.’ The real reason was that the two of them understood and were comfortable with each other.

One evening in springtime, Dong invited them out to dinner. The three of them went to a restaurant serving Demoli Fish Stew, near Beijing Zoo. A pleasant feature of this smart restaurant, with its brand-new resin-carved white chairs and tables, was that the food was served outdoors. They were well into springtime now and the breeze was soft. Tianyi felt as if her long-frozen heart had come back to life again. A few sips of red wine and she felt an uprush of heat through her body. Then she mocked herself, Spring may be the time for love, but I’m all of 37 years old! She sneaked a glance at Qiang, sitting opposite her. He was staring at her with those dark eyes, normally sardonic, but just now full of warmth.

A few days later, he called her into his office. It was a plainly furnished room, no doubt intentionally so. ‘Have you heard of the novel Old City ? It’s had a lot of media hype. Can you ask around and find out who’s publishing it and try and get us a copy. You know everyone in the literary world. Get straight onto it.’

Of course she had heard of it. Old City ’s author was the famous Yu Wusheng. There had been huge media hype even before it hit the bookshelves. For the publishers to hype up a book like this, pre-publication, was a relatively new phenomenon, and Tianyi found the whole thing strange. She never imagined that ‘media hype’ would become such a durable phenomenon in the book world, one which refused to die.