Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

The literary world adores newcomers, and of course that included Xi. Once Tianyi’s article was published, and some laudatory reviews, Xi ascended to the pinnacle of the pyramid that was the world of letters. But Xi, however brilliant, was comparatively new to all this and was forever calling on Tianyi to help her sort out this or that. Xi was child-like in her ability to enjoy herself and forget her worries. Once, Xi got very drunk at a meeting of the Writers’ Association in some enterprise. On their way home, the boss of the corporation made a pass at her. Tianyi, sitting in the front passenger seat of the car, happened to turn around and was aghast: she could see quite clearly the man’s hand kneading Xi’s breast and Xi’s hand had a firm grip on his prick. Tianyi instantly felt she wanted to stop playing this game.

Then a letter arrived from Tianyue in America. She needed her sister’s help, she wrote, for an old college friend, Ke. Tianyue had met him again just before she left, he was now the CEO of a big company. And he was in trouble. Could she do a horoscope reading for him?

Ke turned up that very day in his Ford car, an impressively tall figure who greeted Lian enthusiastically and shook him by the hand. The pair began to talk of the old days, when they were in the Red Guards together, in the rebels’ faction, all the people who ranked above and below them. Lian, of course, had ranked below Ke.

There were few top-class places to eat back then, but without further ado, Ke put Tianyi, Lian and Niuniu in his car and drove them off to the Hong Hong Gourmet Emporium, the most famous restaurant in town and virtually inaccessible to ordinary folk. He ordered platefuls of delicacies like braised shark’s fin with rice and puffer fish. Tianyi was mortified when Niuniu demolished the lot, and then asked for more but Ke ordered another portion without hesitation. Tianyi secretly wondered whether she would have to pay the bill for her greedy son.

Ke did not beat about the bush: he needed Tianyi do a reading for him from the I Ching. Tianyi felt she was nowhere near good enough but the more she demurred, the more the other two told her to stop being modest. They had every confidence in her, they insisted. And so she agreed. She was always anxious not to let people down and put her best efforts into readings although she really was only a beginner. Nevertheless, the results sometimes astonished her. Take Ke for instance, she knew almost nothing about him but as soon as she cast the trigrams, everything became clear: Ke was currently facing a crisis and needed to get as far away as possible. When she told him, he fixed her with an intense stare, and was silent for a long time.

Soon after, Ke decided to quit and go to America. ‘Do you want to come?’ he asked Tianyi. He made it sound it sound as if they were popping off to somewhere in Beijing. She nodded. And a month later, she bought her air ticket. It was all extraordinarily simple. She thought of all the rushing around she had had to do a few years before, to get her passport. It dawned on her that everything had its time. No matter how hard you tried, if it was not the right time for something to happen, then it would not. And when the time was right, then things went through quite naturally.

Ke may have been a tall man but he had over-indulged and put on so much weight that his belly was as distended as a tin drum, on which he liked to sign his name. Ke was a great joker, so a dozen hours’ flight time would not be so unbearable. Her sister was a lucky woman, Tianyi thought.

What really occupied her mind however was this: finally, she could see Zheng again! She had just heard from Peng that Zheng was through the worst of his ordeal — he had secretly been released and was in America.

T ianyi’s first sight of America was Alhambra, Los Angeles County, and the first thing she noticed was the sky. It was the kind of azure that she remembered from her childhood, the sky of autumnal Beijing. An azure she had not seen for a very long time. This heart-warming sight immediately put Tianyi in a good mood. All thoughts of jetlag disappeared, and she felt she had shed years from her age.

However, what happened next was puzzling. Ke took her to visit his younger sister, but there was no sign of the sister and her husband (later she discovered he was actually just her boyfriend), even though they searched the whole house. All they found were some frozen leek dumplings, jiaozi, which Ke cooked for the two of them. When he saw Tianyi’s expression, he said: ‘It’s just a stopgap. When they get home, we’ll have a proper meal.’

But his sister, Mei, and her boyfriend were home very late. They had a little boy with them, Xiongxiong, Mei’s child with her ex-husband. Tianyi was surprised at Mei’s frosty welcome: Tianyi herself got a casual greeting while Mei ignored her brother completely. Even more astonishing, Ke, prone to swaggering and blustering in China, was as meek as a lamb here, bustling in and out of the kitchen as instructed and making dinner for the whole family.

When dinner was over, Tianyi presented the small gifts she had brought and Ke put a stash of American dollars into his little nephew’s hand. This at least brought a smile to Mei’s face. Ke had arranged for Tianyi to spend the night in a nearby guesthouse run by overseas Chinese. It was unimaginably shabby but she did not care. Nothing could dampen the excitement that bubbled within her. The next morning at nine o’clock, the phone rang — it was Ke inviting her for breakfast.

She was amazed that they were to eat an authentic Guangdong-style breakfast, and plenty of it, since Ke had ordered a lot as if to make up for the deficiencies of yesterday’s dinner. They had a leisurely meal, talking as they ate, and gradually Tianyi came to understand Ke’s problem. He had been drawn unwittingly into a property scam, he said, though Tianyi was sceptical that he was quite as squeaky clean as he was making out.

Ke gave her a few hundred American dollars so she could sign up for visits to Disneyland, Hollywood and San Diego. He told her these were all must-see places for anyone visiting the area, but he had been several times and did not want to go again. So Tianyi joined a tour group of local overseas Chinese and went off to enjoy herself — and enjoy herself she did. Everywhere there were dazzling colours and for someone like her who was so sensitive to colours, it was heaven! In front of a little wooden house in Disneyland was a mass of pink blossom, so perfect she thought the flowers must be fake. She touched the petals and was astonished to find they were real! She was delighted. It was a very long time since she had seen such gorgeous colours. How did the shrubs cope with air pollution, she wondered? Such brightness was in glaring contrast to anything back home.

There was a kind of simplicity in people’s expressions too, a transparency. It was nothing like the look in people’s eyes in China, a mixture of ignorance and cunning. Here their expressions reminded her of her childhood; that was when she had last seen such eyes, such expressions, or felt such an atmosphere in China.

Attracted by the deep blue waters of the ocean at San Diego, (and forgetting her US visa was single-entry), she boldly attached herself to a tour group going across the border into Mexico. Now she was in another country. She lingered over the displays of crudely-made but exotic souvenirs, caught up in her bargaining until imperceptibly the sun began to set over the mountains. Suddenly, she seemed to hear Ke’s voice in her ear: ‘Whatever you do, don’t cross the border, or you’ll be in big trouble. Your visa is single-entry.’

She was appalled. Clutching her bag of eclectic purchases, she looked hesitantly at the ill-marked border. There were only two Mexican guards standing there, and they looked half-asleep. There was nothing for it, she would just have to put a bold face on it. After all, she had done that plenty of times in her life. Nonchalantly, she strolled back over it. She was stopped by one of the Mexicans. She imagined the corpulent, dark-skinned guard suddenly turning fierce, and reaching out that dark-skinned, fleshy hand and, for an instant, she trembled all over. Then she realized that no one was paying the slightest attention to her and, concealed behind some much taller people, she simply slipped back past the border post. How casual these border crossings were, she thought to herself. She almost laughed as she remembered how difficult it had been for her to obtain her passport to leave China.