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physical adj. 1. of the body, as contrasted with the mind or spirit; 2. of material things or nature; 3. of physics.
For six days now London really hot. Suddenly people almost nudes in street and sit about on grasses chatting. Mrs. Margaret changed to beige suede sandals. I can’t concentrate her lessons in the heat.
Hotness make you unhappy because you must drive van like oven.
I see you always disappear with that white van. A very old van with a side door sunken and another side door cannot close properly, unless you kick it violently. The front and the back windows always covered by thick dust. It is a peasant van, or a working-class van.
The van is your business method to earn money via delivering goods. You say you can get this job only because you have got a big van.
You drive whole day in that van for delivering. The goods are for somebody’s birthday, party, ceremony, wedding, or any day someone has excuse to consume the money.
You drive from 7 o’clock early morning, till late night. You drive seven days a week. Every day on the road, on those roads towards middle-class big family houses.
You come back home in the dark, without any energy left. Life suddenly becomes bit boring. I find you are a physical man, a labourer, using your hands to survive. While lots people in this world just need use fingers to earn living by clicking computer keyboard.
I never see you sell the sculptures. Nobody want buy a suffered and twisted statue, I guess. If they do, they maybe buy a female nude statue. Once I saw you were making a wooden swimming pool model, as the advertisement for Red Bull company. Another time I saw you were making a huge telephone model for Vodaphone. I heard you saying “it looks ridiculous,” “it is so tacky” while you were making these things. But you got paid. Then one day you stop getting these kinds job. I don’t know why.
“You always say physical work makes people happier, but you are not happy now.” I make some tea and salad for you. It is so late.
“I am too tired. That’s why…” You sit on the chair, by the kitchen table. You hair is messy, covered by the dust.
“Physical work doesn’t do any good,” I say.
“But at least you don’t worry about living.” You sip the tea, the tea is sucking your energy.
“For me mental work better than physical work,” I say. “Nobody wants physical work. Only you, and my parents.” I put the salad bowl in front of you.
You start to eat salad, and the room goes quiet. The white cabbage is very crunchy, and the red carrots are hard too. Your teeth are trying to grind them into pieces. Your face looks uneasy.
In my hometown, we don’t use these two words:
Physical work / mental work
All the work is called “
”-scavenge the living. Making shoes, making tofus, making plastic bags, making switches…All these works rely on our bodies. And bodies earn our living back. Now I come to abroad studying English. And I do that with my brain. And I know in the future I earn living from my brain.
You insist physical worker better than intellectual.
“An intellectual can have a big brain, but a very small heart.”
I never heard before that. Why you think of that?
“I want a simple life,” you say. “I want to go back to the life of a farmer.”
Intellectual: “
”(zhi shi fen zi)
“
” mean knowledge, “
” mean molecule. Numerous molecule of knowledge will make up man knowledgeable.
In China, intellectual is everything noble. It mean honour, dignity, responsibility, respect, understanding. To be intellectual in China is splendid dream to youth who from peasant background. Nobody blame him, even in Culture Revolution time and seemed these people suffered, but really was time for them having privileged to being re-educated, get to know another different life.
So if you don’t want to be intellectual, then you a Red Guard too, like Red Guards who beat up intellectuals during Culture Revolution. A Red Guard who living in the West.
I never thought I would like a Red Guard, but I like you. I am in love with you, even if you say you not intellectual.
I not intellectual either. In the West, in this country, I am barbarian, illiterate peasant girl, a face of third world, and irresponsible foreigner. An alien from another planet.
isolate v. to place apart or alone; chem. obtain (a substance) in uncombined form.
You are not at home again. You have so many social contacts, so many old friends need to see and chat, so many ex-lovers live in the same city as well, and I don’t know anybody in this country. I am alone at home. Dictionary checking, checking dictionary…I am tired of learning words, more new words, everyday. More exercise on tense, make a sentence on the past participial tense, and make a sentence on past conditional tense…So many different tenses, but only one life. Why waste time to study?
The garden outside is quiet. The leafs are breathing and figs are growing. Bees are beeing around the jasmine tree. But I feel lonely. I look that male nude statue under the fig tree. He is still facing down, like always. An enigma. Totally an enigma. Whenever I go to the modern museum, like Tate Modern, I never understand those modern sculptures. I hate them. They seem don’t want to communicate with me, but their huge presence disturb me.
The house is empty. Is the loneliness an emptiness?
I remember my grandmother always recite two sentences from the Buddhist sutras:
She explains it means the emptiness is without form, but the form is also the emptiness. The emptiness is not empty, actually it is full. It is the beginning of everything.
So far, I don’t see the emptiness is the beginning of everything. It only means loneliness to me. I don’t have a family here, and I don’t have a house or a job here, and I don’t have anything familiar here, and I only can speak low English here. Empty.
I think the loneliness in this country is something very solid, very heavy. It is touchable and reachable, easily.
The loneliness comes to me in certain hours everyday, like a visitor. Like a friend you never expected, a friend you never really want be with, but he always visit you and love you somehow. When the sun leaves the sky, when the enormous darkness swallow the last red strip in the horizon, from that moment, I can see the shape of the loneliness in front of me, then surround my body, my night, my dream.
Something missing, something lost in my life, something which used to fulfill in my China life.
We don’t have much the individuality concept in China. We are collective, and we believe in collectivism. Collective Farm, Collective Leadership. Now we have Group Life Insurance (
) from the governments as well. When I was in middle school, we studied Group Dancing. We danced with 200 students as part of the school lesson. We have to dance exactly the same pace and the same movement in the music. Maybe that’s why I never feel lonely in China.
But here, in this place in the West, I lost my reference. And I have to rely on my own sensibility. But my sensibility toward the world is so unclear.
I take out one a book from your shelf, Frida Kahlo. That Mexican woman artist. It is a picture album of her painting, her life, and her terrible illness, being disabled after the bus accidents. So many self-portraits. I thought one painter only does one of these in his life, like one person only have one gravestone. But Frida Kahlo has so many self-portraits, as if she died many many times in her life. There is one called Self-Portrait with Necklace of Thorns. She has the sharp and heavy eyebrow like two short knives; her eyes like black shining glass. She has the thick dark hair like a dark forest; the necklace of thorns climbing on her neck. There is a black monkey and black cat sitting on her shoulder.
The impression on her face is so strong. I learn that she had to plant metal in her body so that to support her survive from disable. I feel my heart is being penetrated by the thorns she painted. I feel painful.
When I put down Frida Kahlo, I think of you. You love the heaviness of life. You like to feel the difficulty and the roughness. I think you like to feel the weight of the life. You said you hated IKEA, because furnitures from IKEA are light and smooth.
I walk to the garden, staring at your sculptures again, one by one, carefully, attentively, thinking of you with my new eyes. That naked man, without head, stubbornly faces down towards the ground with twisted huge legs. What makes him so suffering?
humour n. 1. an ability to say or perceive things that are amusing; 2. an amusing quality in a situation, film, etc.; 3. a state of mind, mood; 4. old-fashioned fluid in the body-v. to be kind and indulgent.
Yesterday at home we celebrate my birthday. I turn to 24. OK I don’t know when is my real birthday, but passport birthday can be great excuse to have a big Chinese meal.
It is the year of goat. My animal sign is goat too. It is my second twelth year after the year of my birth, which means I am having my most important year in my life, because it is a year I meet my destiny. My mother will say that.
We are having a hotpot birthday party. You say you never eat hotpot meal before. You say it is interesting to see people sitting around a big table and cook food from a steaming pot in the middle.
So there is about six or seven people all together. Some are your friends. Two of them from my English language school. One is from Japan called Yoko. Yoko has very slim cat eyes, and neat cut fringe covered her forehead like a hat. Her hairs has lots different colours like red and green and blue. She looks like punk, or maybe she is real punk. Another one is from Korea called Kim Yan Zhen. Kim has very pale face, and she looks whiter than any white people. These two are famous in our language school because their English is impossible. Mrs. Margaret say my English even is better than them. I think maybe because when Japanese girl speaks English, people would think she is speaking Japanese. And when Korea girl speaks English, she keeps nod her head and bow her back to show the modest, but without giving anything verbal. But anyhow, they are kind of my comrades, although Korea hates Japanese, and Japanese were not friendly with Chinese. Most important thing, they use very simple words. Yoko sits down and say, “Are we eat?” Kim Yan Zhen looks at the hotpot and asks, “Cook, you?” I like that. I like people speak that way. So we understand each other easily.
It is a meal between East and West, though three Orientals only can speak foreign language to communicate.
It is worship of eating, is the exactly word to describe this.
I make spicy red chilli soup for the hotpot, by putting in gingers, garlic, spring onions, leeks, dried mushroom and chillis to stew the soup. After the soup becomes boiling I put in tofu and lamb. With hotpot, lamb is essential for the soup. It gives the form content. Otherwise hotpot is the interesting form of meaningless. Is a pity that you are vegetarian, and all of your friends are also vegetarians in this room.
While I am cooking the lamb in the pot, you and your friend just look at it, and put the uncooked carrots straight into the mouth. In Chinese, we say the way you cut the meat reflects the way you live. They must be timid people.
Here is the birthday gift from you. Two book. The first is The Happy Prince and Other Tales by Oscar Wilde. You say is good book for me to start with, to understand English writing easily. The second one is To the Lighthouse by Virginia Woolf. You say it can be read later on, when my English becomes very good.
Then Japanese girl Yoko gives me small little box. It is delicate, like perfume box. On the cover it says:
Waterproof Personal Massager
MADE IN CHINA
What’s this waterproof? Battery? Watch? There is picture on the cover: it is something looks like small cucumber but slightly bended.
Curiously, I open the box. It comes out a smooth plastic thing look exactly like small cucumber. On the bottom there are some buttons: on/off/fast/slow. Is it toothbrush machine? I put into my mouth, but it not fit easily. A massage machine for facial beauty? Or for back and neck aching? Maybe the instruction will tell me.
I unfold the little piece of instruction.
Natural Contours-it’s great to be a woman
Then there is a printed letter:
Dear Customer,
Thank you for purchasing your new Natural Contours massager. Natural Contours is a revolutionary approach to personal relaxation: a massager that’s ergonomically designed to fit the contours of a woman’s body. It is our goal to offer you personal products that encompass quality, taste, and style to please today’s woman.
With the move toward greater self-awareness and exploration for women, we hope this product meets with your expectations and opens up a whole new world of personal relaxation for you.
Then there are some sincere advertise on the verse of the page:
Answering the call for quality personal products, Natural Contours delivers unbeatable performance: a stylish massager with a low noise motor that provides stimulating vibration. The elegant, impact-resistant casing is ergonomically designed to complement a woman’s natural shape.
TO OPERATE: SWITCH TO “ON” POSITION
So follow this instruction I switch on the machine. It is beeping. Everybody who eats the hotpot now stops eating and look at me.
You lean to me and whisper in my ear, “It’s a vibrator. You put it in your vagina.”
Holding the vibrate, my hand is shaking badly. I switch it off. It makes me feel horrified.
Everybody in the party laughs.
“I think Asian people have a great sense of humour,” you say.
“No, we don’t,” I clarify.
“Why not? You and Yoko make everybody laugh all the time.”
“No. We Chinese don’t understand humour. We look funny just because the culture difference, and we just being too honest,” I say.
“Yes, when you say things very honest, people think you are funny. But we stupid,” Yoko adds.
“Yes, I agree.” Here comes Korea girl Kim Yan Zhen eventually. She barely speaks, but whenever she speaks she impress everybody. She seriously makes a comment:
“Humour is a Western concept.”
Is super English. I didn’t know Kim’s English improve so much recently.
Your friends look at us three Orientals, like look at three panda escape from bamboo forest.
I watch the vibrate. I want to make a comment as well: “Enjoy sex is a Western concept too.”
“That’s rubbish. Men enjoy the sex everywhere,” says Korea girl Kim Yan Zhen.
Mans look at each other.
“But, I mean, Yoko, did you give her the vibrator as a joke or as a serious gift?” you ask.
“Of course serious,” answer by Yoko. I know Yoko is serious. Oriental people are serious, even young punks.
“Have you never seen a vibrator before?” one of your friends ask me.
“No. How would I?”
“But it’s made in China,” the friend says.
“Doesn’t mean I see it,” I say. “Actually those big international co-op factories run by foreigners. And the managers employ lots cheap labours like peasants, peasants’ wives. And those womans they don’t really know what is this machine for, but they just make it, by putting every piece of spare parts together. It is like they make computers by putting pieces together, but they never ever use computer.”
Why it doesn’t say “Dildo” or “automatic sex for woman” on the box? Maybe because it made in China, not allow to say things so clearly. It might become a big scandal if somebody from his village know his neighbour making plastic cocks everyday in a factory. Or maybe these factories are secretly protected by the government. Because Chinese government say there is no sex industry in China.
Putting more white cabbages into the hotpot, I can’t help thinking about those womans waking up early every morning to make vibrators. I am seeing them leaving behind their unemployed bad-temper husbands and poor children to sit on production lines and make vibrators. And those peasant womans will never use the vibrator in this life. All they want to know is how much they will earn today and how much money they can save for the family.
I put back this plastic cucumber into the box. When I leave it on the oily table, I see the warning from the side of the box: Clean with washcloth and mild soap.
migraine n. a severe headache, often with nausea and visual disturbances.
Another hot day. You left home in the morning with your old white van. I went to school and I had an exam on vocabulary. The exam went OK. I think I gain more English words since I have been lived with you. Mrs. Margaret praises me. She said I a fast learner. She doesn’t know I have been living with an English man every day and night. Soon school will end for summer holidays. My parents not expect there be so many holidays when they paid this school.
I come back home in the evening and switch on BBC Radio 4. I know my listening comprehension still bad. I hear Six O’clock News, then The Party Line: comedy about a frustrated MP. I don’t understand English comedy.
I am waiting for you to be back.
You come back home almost ten. You hug me with a cold wind. You look so frail. You look painful. You say you got two parking tickets today, one is forty pounds, another one is sixty pounds. You say you were fighting with the traffic policeman who is a black. You say why black people they are so kind and friendly in Africa, but are so rude as long as they live in London. You say London is a place sucks. You say London is the place making everybody aggressive.
You say you got strong headache again, and your whole body aches as well.
I make you some tea. Your favourite peppermint tea. (On the tea bag it says: produce of Egypt. I thought English people they produce their own tea.) I poured the boiled water into the pot. It is an old teapot in brown colour. It is ugly. You say you used this teapot for almost ten years. Ten years, you never break it. Is unbelievabal.
You drink the tea and you stare at the steam from cup.
I give you a painkiller pill. You take it. But you look worse. You move your body to the bathroom. You throw yourself up.
It is unbearable. I hear your pains, through the closed bathroom. It feels like you are throwing up all the dirts from your body, all the dirts from the sick world.
The running tap is being switched off. You come out from the bathroom, with a pale face.
“I never had headaches before I came to London. My body was so healthy when I lived in the country with my goats, and I was just planting potatoes. Since I moved here I’m struggling all the time. My body is in misery. That’s why I hate London. Not only London, all big cities. Big cities are like huge international airports. You can’t have one moment of peace here, and you can’t find love and keep it.”
But what about the love between you and me? It happen in the big city, a very big city, London, a very international place, like airport. Can you keep that love? Can we keep it? I ask myself, in my heart, touching your hair. There is something shaking inside me.
Now you lie down on the bed, your body is hidden in quilt. Your quilt is so heavy, and the texture feels very rough. Not right for this hot weathers. It must be with you for many many years, and it must be from somebody else-you never buy beddings. When I saw your quilt and sheets the first time, I just know you lived long time on your own without a woman. A house has a woman will definitely have a soft and cosy beddings.
Feeling your body is shivering in pain, I can’t leave you there. I take off my clothes, and I lie beside you.
“Will you have sex with me?” you ask me, with a weak voice.
“Why? Do you want?” I am very surprised.
“Hmm.”
Your hand still presses your head where is the pain from.
“If I come it helps me forget about the pain and fall asleep,” you say.
“But what if nobody beside you or you don’t have a lover when you are very ill?” I am shocked.
“Then I would do it with my hand. Like I did before you came into my life.”
I don’t know what to say anymore.
Touching gently your little bird, I move my fingers. I can feel your pain directly. Your pains is like electric current transfer into my finger, then my palm, then my body, then my head. I become shivering with my anticipation, for that I want cure your pain.
You face look relieved, but your breath becoming much heavier. Your little bird gets harder in my fist. I don’t feel sexy at all; all I wish is to stop you suffering.
“Are you ready to come?” I am holding you.
“Yes…” you say, enduring the great pain of climax.
Your body is shaking. Then the sperm comes. My hand is completely wet. It jets, again and again. The milk. It must be bitter milk when a person is suffering. It is the milk of love, my love to you, but it is also the milk of pain, your pain in your life.
Your breath calms down. You are leaving your pain.
We lie still, without moving even for one centimetre. We are just like your still statue. The sperm on my palm is drying. You fall into sleep. I can feel every single pulse on your wrist. I can feel every single beat from your heart. I breathe in your breath. I inhale your exhale. It is being so long that we lie here like two statues. I look at your face, for so long. I even can see your death. The shape of your death.