I BOUGHT A NEW DVD PLAYER. It was a brand called 'Soni', but not 'Sony'. It seemed like a good-quality machine because it could play all the pirated DVDs I had. For instance, while I was eating my lunch, I could watch Martin Scorsese's Casino. Two gangsters – Robert De Niro and Joe Pesci – screaming and fighting on the tiny screen. Sometimes I wished I was a gangster, living madly, then dying abruptly one day – shot through the heart, without any preparation. That's how I wished to die.
Anyway, as I was watching, I was dipping chive dumplings and raw garlic into a little plate of rice vinegar. I was crazy about chives the same way Popeye's crazy about spinach. I couldn't survive if there were no chives in my food. Those grassy leaves had such a strong, special taste. Every time I ate them, I would imagine having my own little garden to grow chives in. In spring I'd gaze at their lovely pink flowers and, in summer, I'd make my chive dishes. As I was lost in thoughts about chives, the action on screen suddenly became very violent. I felt nauseous. I switched off the TV and decided to go for a walk. I swallowed my last two dumplings, and walked out.
In the street, I could barely keep my eyes open it seemed so bright. Maybe I'd been sleeping too much during the day lately, and my eyes couldn't take more than my 40-watt desk lamp. I felt like a prisoner just released after 20 years in a dark cell. After walking for half an hour, I realised that, apart from McDonald's, there were so few places in this city where you could sit down. For miles and miles there were only government buildings or Nokia factories or dirty restaurants with stinking toilets or without a toilet. This city was impossible. What did you do if you didn't want to go to McDonald's?
I decided to go to the Beijing Diplomat University where you could get free-refill lemon water in the café. One hour later, I was on my third glass. The place was full of college kids weighed down with jumbo Chinese- Korean dictionaries, Chinese-German dictionaries, Chinese-English dictionaries. You could really feel that, in the future, these kids were going to be running the world.
Reaching for my pen, I started scribbling on a napkin. Then I stopped. Napkins made me think of my friend Patton, Ben's old flatmate. Patton scribbled on napkins too. I wondered if his film scripts were any good. He made out that endless Hollywood producers were interested in turning his scripts into films, but, since everything he wrote was in English and I wasn't able to read it easily, I had no way of judging.
Patton loved Beijing. 'You know, even when a city looks hard and concrete like Beijing, it's possible to love it,' he once said to me. He also said that China was better at being American than America, so he would rather live in China. Weird. How could China be more American than America? I didn't get it. Anyway, Patton wore jackets and trousers with millions of pockets, and was often being mistaken for a photographer. He was always reaching into these pockets, and pulling out small notebooks and stubby chewed-up pencils. Using these, he noted down anything and everything that he found interesting, especially examples of Beijing slang. He loved the idea that 'Second Breast' meant 'mistress', that 'Sweeping Yellow' meant 'prostitution is forbidden' and that 'Cow's Cunt' meant 'absolutely wonderful'. He would carefully write these terms down in his notebooks and, if he ran out of pages, scribble them on napkins instead.
I liked Patton. There weren't many people in this world who could be boring and fun at the same time, if you know what I mean. It seemed to me that Patton and I were similar: bored all the time. But he knew how to deal with his boredom better. Anyway, there was nothing sexual between Patton and me. We were like the 'killers' in Wong Kar Wai's film Fallen Angels. Killers can only ever be partners or enemies. Never lovers.
Wherever you went in Beijing, you were liable to run into Patton in some café – the 6-foot man in the corner, wearing a big brown jacket with millions of pockets and tapping away on his famous old IBM laptop. And you could be sure that his laptop would be plugged into the only available socket on the wall, the cable trailing across the floor like a vine, climbing over chic Beijingers drinking their overpriced cappuccinos, intent only on reaching its ultimate destination: Patton's messy but clever brain.
I went back to scribbling on my napkin. Maybe I should call Patton and see if he wanted to get something to eat. But he probably wouldn't want to. Patton didn't eat much, or not as much as I did anyway. You see, that was the problem: not very many people ate as much food as I did. Whenever anyone had a meal with me, they ended up spending far more time and money on it than they wanted. I knew I ate too much, but I couldn't help it. I was ravenous all the time.
In the end, I decided to give Patton a call anyway. Needless to say, he was in some café.
'Which one?' I asked, getting ready to go.
'The café in the Foreign Business University,' he said. 'The Get Ahead Café, have you been yet? They just opened it.'
'Get Ahead Café?'
'Yes. It's great here, they serve you free tea.'
'Sounds good. But don't you want to eat something?'
I could hear him hesitating.
'Well, I'm not in an eating mood,' said Patton. 'But if you're really desperate, we can go to a restaurant and you can eat.'
'That would be great. Do you fancy Western food or Chinese food?'
'You decide, since you're the one who's going to be eating.'
I could sense Patton was getting a bit impatient with me.
'In that case, let's go to Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' I said. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, had I been missing their spicy duck soup.
'Chong Qin Red Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' Patton tried to repeat.
'No, not Red Mountain, Gold Mountain. Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant on the Third North Ring Road,' I corrected him.
Sometimes Patton's Chinese got muddled, especially with names.
'Okay, whatever goddamn mountain it is, I'll see you there in one hour.'
I was just about to leave when I realised I would have to walk past this geeky young couple perched near my table. The two of them were all over each other, spectacles knocking together, lips glued together like sticky dates. It was embarrassing to look. I tried so hard to avoid staring that I got a crick in my neck.
Spectacle Boy: What blood type are you?
Spectacle Girl: Type B.
Spectacle Boy: That's a selfish blood type.
Spectacle Girl: But you said I was nice and sweet.
Spectacle Boy: I do think you're nice and sweet.
Spectacle Girl: But now you know my blood type. You still have time to reconsider your position.
Spectacle Boy: I don't regret anything.
Spectacle Girl: If that's what you want, we can go our separate ways when we leave this place.
Spectacle Boy: I told you, I don't regret anything.
I took a deep breath and dashed past them to the door.
'The Theory of Relativity!' announced Patton as soon as he arrived at my table at the Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant. He took off his multi-pocketed big brown jacket, and put his famous laptop on the table.
'Theory of what?' I had no idea what he was talking about.
'Einstein,' said Patton. 'The Theory of Relativity. So, last month I told my girlfriend to come back and live with me. But now, of course, I want to leave her again. I can't do my own thing any more. I have to switch off the light before midnight so she can get her sleep, and I have to wake up before nine to clean the kitchen and take a shower. When I lived alone, I didn't give a damn about dirt – my own, or the kitchen's. It's like being a married couple, it bores me to death. But it's all my fault – I was the one who asked her to come back because I was scared of being lonely.'
'But, what's this got to do with the Theory of Relativity?' I was confused.
'Don't you think that is the Theory of Relativity?'
'Sounds more like the Theory of Independence,' I said.
'Whose Theory of Independence?'
'Oh, I don't know. Maybe that American President's. Didn't he write some Theory of Independence?'
'Okay, Fenfang, let's have some beer.'
But I didn't feel like having beer, somehow beer doesn't make people happy.
'What about having some sake?' I suggested. 'Sake is light, it makes you light-hearted.'
'Shit, that's way too expensive. Let's have beer, and we'll make it the cheapest one too – Revolution Beer.'
I nodded and Patton ordered us two Revolution Beers in his formal Chinese.
'What happened to that wild ex-boyfriend of yours?' he asked as he lifted the bottle to his mouth.
I thought about Xiaolin and felt like it was a story from a previous incarnation. Since I moved to Haidian, I hadn't heard from him. He didn't know the phone number of my new flat, and I had changed my mobile. My nights were no longer interrupted by the ringing of the telephone.
Without answering, I changed the subject.
'Listen, Patton, you're American. What do you know about Tennessee Williams's writing technique?' I asked.
'You want to know about Tennessee Williams? Jesus, he's as old as a dinosaur, I must have read him when I was twelve.'
'So you mean he already died?'
'Oh, ages ago. He choked on a bottle top.'
'He did what?' I was horrified.
'Yes, a disgraceful way to die. He was a very sad man. He was an alcoholic and a homosexual, his lover died long before him, from cancer. He lived almost completely alone for his last twenty years
Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, I didn't want to hear depressing things about Tennessee Williams. I wanted to hear about his Streetcar of Desire, and his method for writing first drafts. And if this Williams guy's life was really as tough as Patton made out, I wanted to discover that fact for myself.
I broke off the conversation and turned my attention to the menu. Summoning the waitress, I ordered us the spicy duck soup hotpot. There would be tons of chillies and garlic in the broth. Patton and I could enjoy torturing our tongues instead of dwelling on the sad life of Tennessee Williams.
Almost immediately a large, steaming pot arrived. We began sweating like the soup in front of us, and Patton started taking off layers of clothes until I could see his chest hair through his thin, damp shirt. I did the same, and kept stripping until there was nothing reasonable left to take off. The other customers just stared at us.
With his face red and dripping wet, Patton said, 'Fenfang, I have a great idea for a script.'
'Oh? Has it got anything to do with drinking duck soup?'
Patton nodded. 'Yes, definitely. It starts like this. Two aliens arrive from another planet to study humankind. They land on Beijing 's Third Ring Road, take a look around, and transform themselves into an American and a Chinese scriptwriter. They're starving, so they head for the nearest restaurant, the Chong Qin Red Mountain, and order spicy Ma La hotpot. The food is so hot that they start removing bits of their equipment, until they realise they've become the centre of attention. Suddenly they get worried that their true identities might be discovered.
'And then?'
'I don't know, I haven't got that far yet. But anyway it's about these two aliens at the Chong Qin Red Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant, trying to bring some civilisation to this earth.'
' Not Red Mountain, Gold Mountain,' I said. My mouth was stuffed with seaweed and duck. But even as I was swallowing it, I still felt hungry, even when the food dropped into my stomach.
'I've been watching loads of DVDs recently,' said Patton. 'Every night actually.'
'Me too. It's the most popular leisure activity in China at the moment, don't you think?'
'God knows. Anyway my favourite movie last week was The Sixth Sense. I loved the twist at the end, when you understand that Bruce Willis was dead all along…'
'What?' I shouted, choking on a piece of duck. 'I thought Bruce was alive! How could I have missed that? Maybe I was in the kitchen cooking dumplings, or in the toilet.'
Patton seemed upset. 'How can you watch a film like that? Chinese people are terrible movie-watchers. My girlfriend is the same. She'll chat on her mobile during the most dramatic scenes. We watched The Blair Witch Project together. It was unbearable. Do you know what she was doing during the closing scenes, the most intense part of the film? She was on the phone to her auntie in Three-Headed Bird Village, Hu Bei province! Then, afterwards, she had the nerve to keep asking me what happened. It drives me crazy. To be honest, I think one of the reasons I tried to split up with her was because she just doesn't know how to watch a film.'
'Patton, you Americans take watching films much too seriously. It's like going to church for you. For us, going to the cinema is just the same as going to the market to buy cabbages.'
Patton didn't answer back. It seemed like he'd given up.
After that, we didn't talk much. We just stared at the steam rising from the bubbling hotpot. Some families had flooded into the restaurant and occupied all the tables. In the back room, a woman sang karaoke in a horrid voice – Sandy Lam's 'I Love Someone Who Isn't Coming Home'. These days, most big restaurants have karaoke in order to attract customers. The Chong Qin Gold Mountain Ma La Hotpot Restaurant offered free karaoke if you ate two ducks. Anyway, everyone was screaming around us, but Patton and I were as silent as two pieces of tofu. We didn't know what else to talk about. As soon as we left the dreamworld of films, we both became boring and ordinary people again.
Perhaps we should just sing karaoke.
I looked at Patton. He was as frustrated as me. I noticed the empty bottles on the table.
'Right, Patton, time for another Revolution…'