Hearing such words from Fang Jing, Tiao didn’t want to label them the language of a hooligan. But what was it exactly? Should a married man with a successful career say those things to an innocent girl? But Tiao was lost then in the labyrinth created by his nonsense, as if under a spell. She strained to understand his philosophy and rise to the state of consciousness he had attained. A strange charisma came from the arrogance he projected and his domineering manner. The hints of coldness that occasionally strayed from his passionate eyes also drew her deeply in. She couldn’t help beginning to question herself just to keep up with his thinking: What kind of person was she? What kind of person might she become? What was her attraction to this celebrity anyway …?
Strangely, he did not move closer to Tiao as he talked. He leaned back instead, putting more distance between them the more he spoke. His hunger for her was not going to end in a simple, impulsive touch and physical closeness. The way he kept proper physical distance didn’t seem to be the behaviour of an experienced man who was so used to being spoiled by women.
It was not until very, very late that Tiao left the Beijing Hotel. Fang Jing insisted on walking her back to her small hotel.
The evening breeze of late spring on broad Changan Avenue made Tiao feel much more relaxed. At that moment she realized how exhausting it was to be with him. It would always be exhausting, but she would be willing to be with him for many years to come.
He walked at her left side for a while and then at her right side. He said, “Tiao, I want to tell you one more thing.”
“What is it?” she asked.
“You’re a good girl,” he said.
“But you don’t really know me.”
“True, I don’t know you, but I’m confident there is nobody else who understands you better than I do.”
“Why?”
“You know, after all, this is a matter that has been decided by mysterious powers, but you and I have a lot of things in common. For instance, we’re both sensitive, and below our surface indifference, we both have molten passion …”
“How do you know I have molten passion? And what do you mean by describing me as indifferent? Do you feel that I didn’t show you enough respect?”
“See, you’re starting an argument with me,” he said with some excitement. “Your arrogance is also coming out—no, not arrogance, it’s pride. I don’t have that sort of pride; the pride is yours alone.”
“Why is it mine alone?” She softened her tone. “If you didn’t have pride at your core, how could you be so outspoken—those words you said a little while ago at the hotel?”
He suddenly smiled with some concern. “Do you really think that’s pride? What I actually have at my core is more like insolence. Insolence, you understand?”
She couldn’t agree with him, or she couldn’t allow him to describe himself this way. Only many years later when she reflected on this did she understand that his self-analysis was really quite accurate, but she resisted him fiercely at the time. She started to tell him about all of the feelings she had for him—as she read his two letters, while she watched his movie again for fear of forgetting what he looked like. She spoke with a great deal of effort, sometimes worried she might not be expressing herself well enough with her words. When she mentioned his heavily-scarred arm in the movie, she couldn’t help starting to cry. So she paused until she could hold her tears back. He didn’t want her to continue but she insisted on speaking, not to move him but to move herself. She had a vague sense that the man before her, who had suffered more than enough, deserved everything he wanted. If he were sent to a labour camp again, she would be his companion in suffering all her life, like the wives of those Decembrists in Russia, who were willing to go into exile in Siberia with their husbands. Ah, to prove her faithfulness, bravery, nobility, and detachment, she simply couldn’t help wanting to relive the era that had tormented Fang Jing. Let an era like that be the measure of her heart—but who the hell was she? Fang Jing had a wife and a daughter.
They arrived at her small hotel while she was talking. She immediately stopped speaking and held out her hand to him. He looked into her eyes while holding her hand and said, “Let me say it one more time: you’re a good girl.”
They said goodbye and he turned around. She walked through the hotel gate but immediately came back and ran into the street. She called out to stop him.
He knew what she wanted to do, he told her later.
Now he remained where he was and waited for her to come to him. She ran over, stopped in front of him, and said, “I want to kiss you.”
He opened his arms to hold her loosely, so loosely that their bodies didn’t come close. She went on tiptoes, raising her face to kiss him, then immediately let him go and ran into the hotel.
Fang Jing could never forget Tiao’s first kiss, because it was so light and subtle, like a dragonfly skimming the water. It could not actually be considered a kiss, at most it was just half a kiss, like a flying feather gently brushing his lips, an imagined snowflake melting away without a trace on a burning-hot stove. But she was so devoted and shy. It was impulsiveness caused by too much devotion, and too much shyness that caused … what did it cause? She nearly missed his lips.
Maybe it was not only that. When Tiao ran so decisively toward Fang Jing, her heart had already started to hesitate. All by herself, she felt she had to run to this man. She responded to her own prompting in one moment, by letting her lips slip away from the unknown in the next. It was hesitation caused by fear, and caution caused by discretion.
It was the solemn and hasty half kiss, so pure and complicated, that prevented Fang Jing from returning her kiss. He didn’t dare. And when he loosely encircled her slim and supple waist with his arms, he knew his heart had been captured by this distant and intimate person.
5
The letters he wrote to her were usually very long, and his handwriting was very small. He used a special type of fountain pen to write, which produced extremely thin strokes, “as thin as a strand of hair,” as the saying goes. This sharp pen allowed him to write smaller and more densely packed characters, like an army of ants wriggling across the paper. He wrote the tiny words greedily, wrestling them onto the white paper. He used those tiny words to invade and torture the white sheets, leaving no breaks for paragraphs, and paying no attention to format and space. He was not writing words; he was eating paper and gnawing on paper with words. It looked as though he were driven to use those tiny black words to occupy every inch of the paper, to fill all the empty places on every sheet of white paper with those tiny black words, transforming pieces of thin paper by force into chunks of heavy dark clouds. He couldn’t help shouting at the sky: Give me a huge piece of white paper and let me finish writing the words of my entire life.
No one else wrote to her like that before or afterwards. Ten years later, when she read those letters with critical detachment, the patience he took in writing pages of tiny words, the vast amount of time he spent on writing such letters, the hunger and thirst with which he fought for every inch of paper with his words and sentences, could still move her somehow. What she valued was this meticulous patience, this primitive, sincere, awkward, and real dependence and love between paper and words, whether it was written to her or some other woman.
He wrote in his letter:
Tiao, I worry about your eyes because you have to read such small writing from me. But still I write smaller and smaller, and the paper gets thinner and thinner because I have more and more to say to you. If I wrote in big characters and used thick paper, it might not be safe to send it to your publishing house.