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contradiction n. 1. a combination of statements, ideas, or features which are opposed to one another; 2. the statement of a position opposite to one already made.
You always live in the middle of two realities. You want to be able to make the art work, but at the same time you don’t value it. You want to be away from London, to settle down in a pure and natural place, with mountain and sea, but at the same time you are obsessed to communicate with the society.
Sometimes, we go out for a walk. We walk in the Victoria Park, or we will walk from Broadway Market Street through London Fields. Your pale face is hidden in your old brown leather jacket, and your cheeks tell the pains with no name.
Sometimes I can’t help to kiss you, to soften you, to cheer you up. You walk slower than before, slow just like we are a real old aged couple. You are struggling with yourself.
“Do you want to come to China with me?” Again, I invite you. And for the last time, I invite you.
You stop walking and look at me. “Yes. But I don’t know if I want to travel anymore. I need to stop drifting.”
London Fields is in yellow grey. The maple trees are naked. No more children playing around. I wonder if I will be able to see this grass again, coming out in the next spring.
In Hackney Town Hall Library we sit and look at books.
Gustave Flaubert said, “In Pericles’s time, the Greeks devoted themselves to art without knowing where the next day’s bread might come from. Let us be Greeks!”
I close the Flaubert book, looking at you. You are reading a book with the picture of sculptures. I keep thinking about Flaubert’s words: artists should devote themself to the art, like a priest devote to God. But what is so important about art? Why it should be like a devotion?
“How come art can be more important than food?” I ask you in a little voice.
“I agree with you, actually.” You close up sculpture book. “I don’t think art is so important. But art is fashionable in the West. Everybody wants to be an artist. Artists are like models. That’s why I hate it.”
You put the book back on shelf.
“But,” I protest, “you are like a Chinese saying: piercing your shield with your spear. You are contradicting with yourself. You are making art too. So it means art is also a need, a necessary of expression.”
“Yes, but if I had better things to do I would give up making art. I would rather do something more solid.”
I’m confused.
I’d like to dedicate my life to do something serious, maybe things like writing, or painting, but definitely not making shoes. I don’t care what you said about artists. I’d like to write about you, one day. I’d like to write about this country. People say one should separate one’s real life from one’s art work, and one should protect his real life from his fiction life. So one can has less pain, and be able to see the world soberly. But I think it is a very selfish attitude. I like what Flaubert said about Greeks. If you are a real artist, everything in your life is part of your art. The art is a memorial of the life. Art is the abstract way of his daily existence.
Again the Buddhist in my grandmother’s voice tells me: “The reality that surrounds us is not real. It is the illusion of life.”
fatalism n. the belief that all events are predetermined and people are powerless to change their destinies.
A film called Saturday Night and Sunday Morning, directed by Karel Reisz at 1960s. This is the last film we will see together. This is the last film I will see in London.
The beautiful young man in the film, played by Albert Finney. He is too beautiful for a humble working-class life. He is wild, he wants to play and to have fun. But of course he is also a trouble maker. He gets bored by having an affair with a married woman, and he doesn’t want to take any responsibility. So he starts to chase young girls. But after a while he is bored again with one young girl, she means nothing to him except for her brief beauty. Womans don’t weigh anything in his restless heart. He is bored of physical work, and of unimaginative youth. He becomes frustrated because he gains nothing from searching for the excitements of life. His beauty decays. His youthful energy fades away by the end of the film.
Is your life a bit like him? Have you felt the same way as that young man felt about womans or family? I gaze at your back, your brown hair and your brown leather jacket. We walk along the night street in South Kensington. Again, how familiar, this is the place we first met. It has been one year.
We stop in front of a little corner shop to buy some samosa. The shop is about to close.
“So you don’t think he can love that married woman?” I ask.
I am still living in the film.
“No.” You take two cold vegetarian samosa from the shopkeeper.
“And, you don’t think he can love that young girl either?”
“No. None of them love each other. No love exists between them,” you comment. “They are loveless.”
I bite the cold samosa. Ah. Loveless.
“What you will do if you were the man in the film?” I don’t let you go.
“I would leave the town, just like I left Lower End Farm. Things are dead and finished in that town.”
I stop eating samosa. One more thing I need to know: “Why you don’t want to be with that young woman either? She is young, and pretty and simple. They can be together for the rest of their lifes.”
“Because she demonstrated how limited she is at the end of the film. Remember the last scene? When they sit on the hill looking down on the suburb, and she says to him that one day they will live in one of those houses? He listens to her and throws the stone down the hill.”
“Why a house, or a home, is a boring thing?”
“Because…”
You stop. You don’t want to explain anymore. Maybe you know you are being unreasonable.
We arrive at home at midnight. The little street is dead quiet, and the house is dead cold. We are so tired; nobody wants to have further discussion. We know clearly how far we could reach if we carry on the discussion about love and life. We both give up, without saying it.
Then I realise it is indeed Saturday night and Sunday morning. A doom night and a doom morning. An absolutely doom moment in my life. There is a special delivery letter sitting on the kitchen table waiting for me. You got it this morning. My heart is racing, racing badly. No, I shouldn’t open this letter. It is from Home Office.
It is you who open it. You read it, and give it to me, without any words.
There is a black stamp on the page twenty-two of my passport, from IMMIGRATION & NATIONALITY DIRECTORATE of Home Office. It is a pentagonal stamp. Pentagon, a strange shape. Only the Pentagon near Washington has that strange shape. It is a doom stamp.
The application for my extension of UK visa has been refused.
Once you told me I am an agnostic, or maybe even a sceptic, but now I proof myself that actually I am a fatalist, like lots of Asian people are. The result of my visa application is in my expectation. Not because I am being a pessimist, just because I know there is no actual reason for both me and authority to extend this visa. I already knew this when I prepared my paperwork. I say there is no reason, I mean even you: you can’t be my reason to stay in this country. And you can’t save my life. You, a possible Anarchist, always want to be free.
I put my passport back in a drawer. I sit down, switch on the lamp and open my notebook. I look at all the words I learned in the last week. Then I look at all the words and phrases I learned since the first day I arrived in this country: Alien, Hostel, Full English Breakfast, Properly, Fog, Filtered Water…So many words. So much I learned in the passed year. The vocabularies on my notebook, day by day, become more and more complicated, and more and more sophisticated.
I open a new page, a blank page; I start to write down the film title Saturday Night and Sunday Morning. The pen holds in my hand with the anger, and deep disappointment-the anger about my fate, the disappointment about you.
“What are you writing?” You stand in the opposite corner of the room, staring at me.
I don’t want to answer.
“I know what you are writing, actually.”
You voice sounds vague. Not only vague, but also cold.
You turn your back and throw me the last sentence before we go to bed:
“AT LEAST YOU’RE STILL LEARNING A LOT. EVEN IF EVERYTHING IS BROKEN.”
You voice horrifies me.
You leave me, and disappear into the bedroom.
race n. 1. a contest of speed; 2. any competition or rivalry, e.g. the arms race; 3. a rapid current or channel.
“Life is a race against time.” My father always says so:
“Wasting time is shameful, just like leave the grain rotten in fields.”
“An inch of time is an inch of gold, but you can’t buy that inch of time with an inch of gold.”
After all these education, I believed time was the most expensive thing in the world. When I was a teenager in the middle school, I dared not waste just even twenty minutes to play around. Staring at blue sky having daydream is a fool. Sleeping on the grass under the sun is a lazy cow, without producing milk for the people. Wasting time will earn nothing back in the future. But here, in this country, people spent whole afternoon having a pot of tea, and spent hours having a piece of cheese cake, and a whole night to drink beers in the pub. If life is a race against time, why people pay so much attention on tea and cake and beer?
“You are too anxious. Try to relax. Try to enjoy life.” You say it to me, on the way back from Wales to London.
If life is a race against time, like my father and my teacher said, then life itself must be a very aggressive thing. There is no peace and no relaxation in a race. And one’s life would never win anything in the end. Because whatever effort one makes, time always parallels passing the one. The one will eventually stop racing one day, let time goes by. My father is wrong, I think. People here they don’t live like that.
And what about you, my lover? Life to you seems not a race at all. Because you already decide not living in the towns and society, but living in the nature, living with the sea and the mountain and the forest. So there will be no more social struggle to you anymore. So you can achieve peace. You talk slow and walk slow, you let the time pass by you, because you don’t want to be in a race. So you won’t lose, in the end.
And here it comes to the fate. I met you; a man was born in the year of Rat. A rat never has a stable home, like me, born the year of the goat. Two unstable animals, two homeless things. It won’t work. It is our destiny.
In China, we say: “There are many dreams in a long night.” It has been a long night, but I don’t know if I want to continue the dreams. It feels like I am walking on a little path, both sides are dark mountains and valleys. I am walking towards a little light in the distance. Walking, and walking, I am seeing that light diminishing. I am seeing myself walk towards the end of the love, the sad end.
I love you more than I loved you before. I love you more than I should love you. But I must leave. I am losing myself. It is painful that I can’t see myself. It is time for me to say those words, those words you kept telling me recently. “Yes, I agree with you. We can’t be together.”
departure n. the action or an instance of departing.
Dear Student, Welcome to London! On finishing our course, you will find yourself speaking and thinking in your new language quite effortlessly. You will be able to communicate in a wide variety of situations, empowered by the ability to create your own sentences and use language naturally.
This is what language school leaflet says. Is it true? Perhaps. Mrs. Margaret tells me she is proud of me speaking English like this among her other students. When our last lesson finished, I finally pluck up my courage and run after her:
“Mrs. Margaret, can I ask you a question?”
“Of course you can.” She smiles.
“Where did you normally buying your shoes?”
“Where do I normally buy my shoes?” she corrects me. “Why? Do you like them?” She looks down her shoes. It is a coffee-colour, high-heel shoes, with a shining metal buckle in front.
“Yes,” I reply.
“Thank you. I bought them from Clarks.”
“Oh.” I remember there is a shoes shop in Tottenham Court Road called Clarks.
Mrs. Margaret intends to leave.
“You know, Mrs. Margaret, my parents are shoemakers.”
“Oh, really? Well, I know China produces goods for the whole world…” She smiles another time. “Anyway, good luck with your studies. I hope to see you again.”
“Thank you.” I smile to her as well.
“By the way, it is not right to call me Mrs. Margaret. You should say Mrs. Wilkinson, or just Margaret. All right?”
“All right, Margaret.” I lower down my voice.
“Bye.”
“Bye.”
I like her, in the end.
When a woman is leaving her man, when a woman finally decides her departure,
Does she still need to water the plants every day?
Does she still need to wash his shirts, socks and jeans? Check all his pockets before washing them?
Does she still need to cook food every evening before he comes back? Or just leave everything uncooked in the fridge? Like those days when he was a bachelor?
Does she still need to wash the dishes, and sweep the floor?
Does she still kiss him? When he comes back through the evening door?
Does she still want to make love with him?
Does she, or will she cry, when she feels her body needs somebody to cover it and warm it, but not this one, the one lies beside hers?
Does she, or will she say, I am leaving you, on a particular day? Or at a particular time? Or in a particular moment?
Does she, or will she hire a car or a taxi, to take all her things before he understands what’s happening?
Does she, or will she cry, cry loudly, when she starts leading her head to a new life, a life without anybody waiting for her and without anybody lighting a fire for her?
The telephone rings. The Chinatown travel agency tells me my air tickets are ready to pick up. I take all my money and I put on my coat. On the way out, I pass by your sculpture. It is nearly finished. All the pieces of the body lie jumbled at bottom of plastic bath.
I come out from the house, you are standing in the garden and watering the plants. You stand still, holding the hose, with your back towards me. The brown of your leather jacket is refusing me, or maybe avoiding me. I think you don’t want to see me leaving. I think you are angry. Water from the hose in hard stream straight on the plants. For a long time you don’t move. I am waiting. I look up at the grey sky. I want to tell you it is winter. I want to tell you maybe you don’t need to water the plants today. But I don’t say anything. I walk out, hesitate, quiet. When I try to close the garden’s door, I hear your voice:
“Here, take these.”
I turn back. I see you pulling out a small bunch of snowdrops from the soil. You hold out those little white flowers and walk towards me.
“For you.”
I take the snowdrops. I gaze at the flowers in my hand. So delicate, they are already wilting in the heat of my palm.