Tiao:
You’re not going to be happy to read this letter, but I must write it because you’re watching me anyway even if I don’t write it. You have been watching me all the time. A few days ago, I was on location at Fang Mountain—you know what I’m talking about, the place where I shot Hibernation. I was making love to actress so and so (she is even younger than you are, and not very well known) but I felt terrible. Maybe because everything was too rushed, and she was too purposeful and too blunt. She had been chatting me up for the last few days, not that she wanted to angle for the part of the heroine in this film—the heroine had been cast long ago. She was manoeuvring for the next role. She was hoping I’d give her a juicier part in my next film. Clearly, she has some experience with men. She is straightforward, not allowing a man to retreat, but my male vanity made me hope she at least had some feeling for me. Unfortunately she had none. She doesn’t even bother to flirt with me. To girls of her age, I might just be a boring, dirty old man, even though I’m not fifty years old yet. But she wanted to make love to me badly. I admit her body attracted me, but I kept my attitude toward her light, only kidding with her. Later I was turned on by my contempt for her but I didn’t understand why I was thinking about you at the time. It was because of you that I so yearned to get a kiss from her. Nothing else but her kiss, wholehearted, passionate, a kiss that risks a life, like the kind I want from you, although I have never got it. The only thing you granted me on that evening I can’t forget, after which I couldn’t sleep, was utmost power, the power of “not daring.”
There was nothing that I didn’t dare to do to so and so. I stopped her when she rushed to take off her clothes. I told her to kiss me and she did as I said. She pressed against my body and wrapped her arms around my neck, kissing me for a long time, often asking, “Is that enough, is that enough?” She kissed me deeply and thoroughly, her tongue going almost everywhere she could reach in my mouth, and yet she seemed distracted. I closed my eyes and imagined it was you, your lips and your passionate kisses. But it didn’t work. The more she kissed me, the more I felt it was not you. And she apparently grew impatient—it was precisely because she became impatient that I insisted on having her continue to kiss me. I held her around the waist with my hands, not allowing her to move. We two looked like we were struggling with one another. Later, everything finally went in a different direction because she snuck her hand from my neck and started to touch and fondle me. She was nervous and I could understand her nervousness. She didn’t know why I wanted her only for kissing; she must have thought it wasn’t sufficient, that the kissing alone was not going to satisfy my desire and therefore her desire was even less likely to be satisfied.
She fondled me anxiously as if to say, even though my kisses didn’t seem to satisfy you, there is something more that I’m willing to give you … we started to make love, but you were everywhere before my eyes—I’m so obscene, but I beg you not to throw away the letter. In the end I felt horrible. On the one hand I imagined it was you who lay under me, my beloved, but when I did, the guilt I felt was so strong that it kept me from achieving the pleasure I could have had. The guilt was so strong that I couldn’t tell who exactly lay under my body then or exactly what I was doing after all. Eventually I had to use my hand to … I could only get release with my own hand.
I’m willing to let you curse me ten thousand times. Only when you curse me does my empty soul find a peaceful place to go. Where can my soul rest safely? Maybe I demand too much. Why, when I kept getting those prizes I dreamed of—success, fame, national and international awards, family, children, admiration, beautiful women, money, etc.—and the rest … —did my anxiety only deepen?
I had a woman before I was married. She was a one-legged woman, fifteen years older than I was. She was a sadist. I took up with her because even though I was the lowest of the low I still needed women. Or you could say she took up with me. But I never guessed that she didn’t want me for the needs that a man could satisfy. She had only one leg but her physical strength was matchless. I certainly couldn’t match her, with that body of mine weakened by years of hard labour and starvation. She often tied me up late at night and pricked my arms and thighs with an awl, not deep, just enough to make me bleed. What shocked me even more was the time she lifted up the blanket when I was dead asleep, and began frantically plucking my pubic hair … she was crazy. She must have been crazy. But I didn’t go crazy and I think it must have had something to do with the mountains I saw every time I went out. When I stepped out of the low, small mud hut and saw the silent mountains, unchanged for more than ten thousand years, when I saw the chickens running helter-skelter in the yard and dung steaming on the dirt road, the desire to live surged in me. I developed a talent: even when she tortured me until my body was bloodstained and black and blue all over, as soon as she stopped, I could fall back asleep immediately, and without having a nightmare. But today, I have to ask myself again and again: What do you want in the end, what do you want after all?
I don’t want to pollute your eyes with the above words, but I can only ease my heart by writing to you. I have such desire to be with you, so much so that this desire has turned into fear. And moreover, I have the uncouth and unreasonable fear that you are with other men. From my own experience of men and women, I know extremely well the power you have. When we were drinking coffee at the Beijing Hotel, you probably didn’t notice two men sitting at the next table who stared at you the whole time. There was an old Englishman sitting across from our table—I’m certain he was English—that old man also stared at you constantly. You didn’t notice any of this; you were too nervous at the time. But I noticed; it didn’t take much to figure out; glimpses from the corners of my eyes were enough. I’m very sure of my judgment. You’re the kind of woman who can capture a man’s attention; there is something in you that attracts people. You have the power to make people look at you, even though you are not polished at it yet. I think you should be more aware of this: you need to learn to protect yourself. Has anyone said this to you before? I believe I’m the only one who has. You should always button up your clothing; don’t let men take advantage of you with their eyes. Don’t. Not that the men who admire you would actually do something to harm you. No, I have to admit those who stare at you have taste. They are not hooligans or perverts. And I’m more nervous precisely because of that. I don’t want them to take you away from me, though I still don’t know how you truly feel about me. I’ve said before it was very likely that I would go to your city—Fuan, that tiny grain of rice that I caressed with my fingers when I was in the States. I will figure out a way to disguise myself in the street. Someday I will do that.
Now let me talk about the book you asked me to write. I tried to write the beginning and finished fifteen hundred words. It was very difficult because I couldn’t find a direct, uncluttered tone. If the readers are kids, the writer should first get himself an open heart. My heart is open—at least to you, but not very clean. I feel very guilty and challenged by it. I plan to focus on writing the book after I finish shooting Hibernation. I’m curious to find out my potential as an author. Will you think I’m too wordy? But wordiness is a sign of aging. Do you know what else I’m thinking about? How I look forward to you getting old quickly. Only when you get so old that you can’t get any older, and I also get so old that I can’t get any older, can we be together. By that time we’ll both be so old that people won’t be able to tell what sex we are: you might be an old man and I might be an old woman. We’d lose all our teeth, but our lips would still be all right so we could still talk. The human body is so strange, the hardest things, like teeth, disappear first, but the softest things, like tongues and lips, will come along with us to the last moment of our lives …
6
One day in the autumn of 1966, Tiao, as a new student in the first grade of Lamp Alley Primary School in Beijing, participated in a noisy and confusing denouncement meeting on the school’s sports field. It was an assembly that the entire faculty and student body attended, where many desks were brought together and stacked to make a tall stage. In front of the stage, students from all grades sat on their own little chairs that they brought out of the classrooms.
It