Xiaobin Xu - Crystal Wedding

In any case, this investor had now brought a lawsuit against Ke’s company. In Ke’s view, the only way of clearing his name was to find the official concerned. Tianyi felt a flicker of doubt — she had never been quite convinced of Ke’s probity. Not so Tianyue. Like so many women, she was completely blinded by love and insisted Ke was innocent. Ke spent that evening puzzling over the draft of a fax to send to his company in Beijing. He kept scratching words out and re-wording it, convinced it was full of mistakes. Tianyi could see that Tianyue could hardly keep her eyelids open and offered to draft the fax herself. Ke was sceptical that she had any talents in this direction but, by this stage, his options were running out. And that was how Tianyi did her bit to push her sister into bed with Ke. Once she had finished the fax, she got washed and went to bed herself.

The next morning, she was startled awake by Ke’s shout of amazement. He had seen the fax lying on the table.‘Ai-ya! I’ve met plenty of women in my life but I’ve never met one as clever as this! Tianyi, however did you think up such an amazing ruse?’

Tianyi looked in confusion at the happy couple and for a moment did not reply. Then she saw Tianyue’s jealous look and realized that the fax she had written last night had been of considerable help to Ke. But Tianyue was far from grateful. She was extraordinarily pig-headed, and it was this determination in her which made up for her natural deficiencies. From then on, she spent every evening drafting and re-drafting for Ke, until finally Ke said: ‘Good, that’s enough.’

Tianyi was well and truly on her own now. But the news of her success at Salt Lake spread fast and she began to receive phone calls from other universities asking her to lecture. Since she had forgotten almost all the English she ever learned — it was so poor she could scarcely even manage to ask the way — could she travel on her own? She soon overcame her doubts; you hardly needed any English to move around freely in America. It was even easier, she felt, than moving around the country she had grown up in.

The first stop was Rocky Mountain University where she had been invited by a celebrated American sinologist. The professor had taken a Chinese name, Zheng Miaowu, and spoke excellent Chinese. Tianyi arrived, wearing a black woollen skirt under a dark blue-and-white batik cape that she had bought in Yunnan, and a Japanese necklace made from pieces of wood that tinkled pleasantly. The professor told her visiting lecturers came in three price tags; for instance, Wusheng, the author of Old City, did not get the highest fee when he came to talk. He told her she should take the highest fee she could, and so on. A great many people came to listen to Tianyi, far more than at Salt Lake, and Tianyi knew this was down to the prestige of her host. As before, she talked of women writers in China, taking pains to say nice things about her young friend Xi and her cohort of writers and equally carefully avoiding mentioning herself. She was to learn, many years later, that in this way she had sent her listeners off to the pinnacle of the pyramid that was the world of letters (Xi) while she found herself left far below. It is a truism, however, that people habitually find it convenient to forget the people who have boosted their careers, and so it was with Xi.

It was the Easter holidays. After the lecture was finished, half a dozen Chinese students offered to take her around. There was the university’s ‘golden couple’, the boy apparently of Malay extraction, the girl with a slight limp. Tianyi immediately took to the girl who, she felt, looked positively angelic and put all the other students in the shade.

The pair took Tianyi around the Rocky Mountain University Museum and it was only because they were determined to see all four of the vast exhibition halls that they saw the most marvellous exhibit of all: in the very last room, one complete wall was hung with four long black dresses. They all gasped at the same moment. It seemed almost unimaginable that four black velvet dresses could have such an unsettling effect.

The dresses were pegged high up on the walls and their hems trailed right down to the smooth floor. Each one was so long that the pure black velvet lengths were like four eerily silent dark cascades. The effect in this great space was utterly mysterious and reduced them all to silence. What a pity they had no camera with them, the girl lamented. In fact, Tianyi had a camera but you were not allowed to use flash in the museum and she only managed one dim image.

They had a rice and omelette for dinner. It was Easter so you had to have something with eggs in. The omelette, golden yellow, was covered in a layer of tomato sauce. Tianyi found it delicious, and ate with a good appetite. She had had a very good appetite this trip, enjoying everything people cooked for her, the way a child does.

By way of a thank-you, Tianyi got out some presents and presented her host with a cloisonné egg, appropriate for Easter she thought. It was skilfully engraved but the professor did not appear to appreciate it. She could not help remembering something rather astonishing that he had said that evening. ‘Do you know who the best woman writer is in China?’ he had asked. ‘Lu Bei!’ he had answered himself. Tianyi was startled, until she remembered that Lu Bei, who wrote low-grade political novels, was the professor’s partner. Well, he was a human being too, wasn’t he? It was not too surprising.

Tianyi did not get her pictures developed until she was back in China. The four dresses hung side-by-side in one photo, but the mysterious atmosphere, and its eerie power, were entirely gone, developed away in the processing.

Professor ‘Zheng Miaowu’ was a powerful figure at Rocky Mountain University and the news of the success of the lecture he had invited Tianyi to give quickly spread to the East Coast. Invitations from Pennsylvania and Maryland Universities followed in quick succession. In the blink of an eye, it seemed, she had become a travelling scholar. She travelled, she lectured, she earned a fee and that paid for the next leg of the journey. Most importantly, she was coming ever closer to the man she loved.

Finally one day she arrived in New York. As soon as she could, she took a boat trip and sailed under the huge hand of the Statue of Liberty. Looking up at the statue from below made her suddenly want to weep. She remembered reading a poem about it many years before: Give me your tired, your poor, Your huddled masses yearning to breathe free, The wretched refuse of your teeming shore … Send these, the homeless, tempest-lost to me. The Statue, so familiar from photographs and painting, from her imagination and her dreams, finally appeared before her eyes. The oddest thing was that the fact that its colossal size in no way intimidated her the way Buddhas in the East did. Instead, it gave her a feeling of warmth and security.

Behind the State of Liberty lay New York, with its legendary sights: the Rainbow Room atop the Rockefeller Centre, Madison Square Gardens, Saint Patrick’s Cathedral, Brooklyn Bridge and the Metropolitan Opera House, the splendour of Manhattan and the poverty of the Black areas, the yuppies, the rock singers and the punks, the gays and the migrants, people of every race and colour, the inherited rivalries, the dirty streets, the subways covered in graffiti, and the crime.

As far as Tianyi was concerned, the most important place was the Metropolitan Museum of Modern Arts. It was not only the paintings that she longed to see, it was also the place where she had arranged to meet Zheng.

When Zheng, an expat for five years now, appeared, she felt oddly calm. It was as if they had only parted yesterday. Of course, it dawned on her later, this was because their spirits had never parted, not for a single day.