The First Twenty Hours of Being Twenty

I

In the first second that my twenty-year-old self opened his eyes, I knew this would be another ordinary day.

But it should not have been ordinary. A number so special and round deserved the solemnity of ritual.

In the first second I opened my eyes, I was no longer the nineteen-year-old me. No longer a boy. No longer entitled to mistakes or the excuse of wild thoughts.

I had broken with the past. During that revolutionary night, a beard should have covered my cheeks and the heart should have turned hard and decisive.

Yet the instant my eyes opened, life was still so ordinary, continuous beyond belief.

You should have known, he said. This ordinariness. This failure.

He was the ghostly voice inside my skull. Consciousness emerged gradually only after his soft whisper. He was the mother of my thoughts, their metaphysical master, yet made me believe I was free.

He was right.

This ordinariness and failure—I should have known.

He was always right.

I had imagined myself at thirty-three, forty-five, eighty. I had never imagined twenty. It was too close, so close that imagination itself could not bring it into focus.

Perhaps only once, in a bookshop at seventeen, did I briefly sketch the person I might be three years later. That day, I read Françoise Sagan's Bonjour Tristesse. Nineteen. At nineteen, she had written a book like that.

Could I write a great work at twenty?

I should have known it was an impossible fantasy. Lazy in observation, reluctant to begin: how could someone like me write a great book?

At twenty, seven beginnings of novels lay in my folder, each dead without an illness.

He was right.

He also knew my cowardice and vanity. I merely refused to face such evident ordinariness.

I always tried to explain his words. Even later, when the ghost had gone far away and memory was no longer reliable, I still tried to explain him. Like humanity picking up stones beside the sea to explain the universe, like religions looking for the soul in books broken by time.

I got up and went to the sink to brush my teeth. The faucet cap fell off again. I fitted it back.

After I left, for many days after I left, it would keep falling. Unless an angry guest threw it through the window, or the hostel owner hardened his heart and replaced the sink, it would continue to fall, striking the ground with conviction every time.

The owner was a good man.

Several days earlier, I told him I would leave a week sooner. His face showed obvious pain—I would pay one week less in rent—but he did not become angry.

"I have to go to work now. I am very busy every day. I need to clean every room here by myself."

He opened his eyes wide and repeated:

"By myself!"

As though begging for my sympathy, hoping that while I pitied his hard labor, I might repent the wrong of paying less rent.

He was a strong man, much stronger than I was. He had reason to be angry. That was why I thought him good.

I finished brushing my teeth and shaved the new stubble that had barely emerged on my chin, as though someone outside would notice.

"A person must live with dignity," my mother once told me.

But if no one cared, wasn't dignity another unnecessary thing?

At that moment, a little refusal rose in me again. I hoped the ordinariness of being twenty years and one day old was crowded only inside this ten-square-meter room, while the world outside had already changed beyond recognition.

The sky was purple. Cars floated through the air.

I closed the door and walked into the world.

II

Munich's industrial district was like so many industrial districts: oppressive, rigid, no more alive for all the stories of German precision.

The city center was another scene entirely. Crowds flowed without end. Shop assistants could not keep up, and street singers were forever exuberant. Ancient churches flaunted their power in the sun. Designer jewelry flashed the smiling faces of the rich.

Like a waterfall and the low ground around it. However magnificent the waterfall, hollows will always cover the earth nearby.

I remembered my tenth birthday. Ten years had passed, and I still remembered it clearly.

On July 11, KFC called.

"Little friend, your tenth birthday is in four days. Would you consider dining at KFC?"

They remembered my birthday, I thought. So many other people did not, but KFC remembered.

I was going to have my birthday at KFC. I would tell Mom and Dad right away.

On July 15, to keep the birthday from falling flat—and still more to spare KFC any embarrassment—I scraped together several friends I did not know very well.

I waited at the entrance, anxious they would break the promise.

In third grade, the first time I arranged to see a film with a classmate, I stood outside the cinema until the film ended. He never came.

This time too, I feared no one would arrive.

"How many little friends?" Mom asked.

"Classmates," I said. I felt grown. "Four classmates."

They all came.

A KFC employee placed a golden paper crown on my head. We sat in a special birthday section, ate cake, and everyone sang.

It was a happy day.

Six years later, that KFC was demolished. Before it closed, I ate three final portions of mashed potato there.

After the demolition, where did all the cashiers behind those counters fly? What of the auntie who silently mopped and cleared trays? The employee who placed the crown on my head? The KFC sister who called me?

We had never met. Did she still remember my birthday?

I walked toward the company.

I did not smile at pedestrians, and they did not smile at me. I did not know their birthdays. They did not know today was mine.

I was content with this detachment, as though I were a complete outsider, free to move through past, present, and future.

I remembered Virginia Woolf's inspired description of a morning market. Centuries from now, weeds would cover it. Only rings on skeletal fingers and gold teeth in open mouths would remain.

How had she conceived something so brilliant? Did the beautiful sentence surge out in the instant she bit the end of her pen, or from a single thought while leaning against her chair?

In the end, she could no longer bear the torment of her mind. She filled her pockets with stones and drowned herself in a river.

The cruelty of that fairness was too exact.

Woolf was unfortunate, I thought. The world contains no fair or unfair, only fortunate and unfortunate.

I thought of struggling young people and homeless old ones. I thought of conservation of energy and the expansion of the universe.

There was never any fairness in the world, and we were already fortunate enough.

I interned at a small company. No one there appeared especially busy. Everyone seemed rather at ease.

No one knew it was my birthday, but by coincidence, no work had been assigned to me. At my desk, I finished Hemingway's The Sun Also Rises.

I should have finished it long ago. E lent me the book after we had known each other a month. Three years later, I had still not returned it.

But beside those memories, the book itself disappointed me. Hemingway's language was spare but lacked force. The boxing and bullfighting, painted in heavy colors, were not astonishing. Violence made them conventional.

Were critics who praised Hemingway's so-called masculine writing merely finding an excuse for their primitive impulses?

I once liked another of his books, A Moveable Feast. I no longer did.

How should I spend this ordinary day?

Reading seemed a good choice. In a café made for reading, in the university district.

The day before yesterday, I discovered a beautiful neighborhood there: the open buildings of the University of Munich, fruit sellers by the entrance, the style of Spanish streets in the red afterglow.

I had never visited a Spanish neighborhood. I knew one only from Capote's Breakfast at Tiffany's, where the heroine loses a cat in Spanish Harlem near the end.

People said the film contained Audrey Hepburn at her most beautiful. I had never seen it.

Yet at that moment, in a quiet corner of the University of Munich under the red setting sun, I suddenly thought of her.

On every day I considered important, I wanted to do something I would not regret, to give comfort to the long, nameless days ahead.

As a child, at New Year, whenever firecrackers began or people counted down together, I sat at my desk. It seemed that whatever I did in that particular instant would become the theme of the coming year.

As though I would never again waste great handfuls of time. As though life were new.

As though the gods descended only in that instant and, among the lights of ten thousand homes, saw only me at my desk, scattering their blessings without reserve.

I would read in the café I had passed two days earlier. After the sunlight lost some of its glare, I would sit on the yellow leather sofa beside the entrance.

Hot chocolate would be enough. No coffee.

By now, I had lost faith. Even the superstitions of childhood were gone.

Yet the ridiculous habits—pretending to be serious on particular days—continued. They were walking corpses without souls, moving for the sake of movement, still absurdly trying to find meaning after faith had vanished.

Yes. I would read on the yellow sofa.

I would stop at the moment I noticed night had fallen.

After stopping and before leaving, I would find meaning.

Then I would write it all down.

Call it The First Twenty Hours of Being Twenty, he said.

III

Fifty-eight days and thirteen hours later, I opened this document again.

The folder of unfinished fiction held three more beginnings.

I had returned home from Germany, then returned to America from home. I walked along streets with flowers and saw girls in groups of two and three. They had just left the gym, with flushed faces, high breasts, and long legs.

When I ate alone, I sometimes looked at my phone. When I walked, I did not look at the stars.

I had long planned for Part III to end the piece, written the next time I opened the document.

I had also imagined that these fifty-eight days—even fifty-eight years of life—would fall to the ground like a gecko's tail.

I was right. Apart from the passage of time, nothing changed.

Perhaps the human brain chose only brilliant and special days. For every other moment, it rolled a die: only sixes survived. The rest were torn away.

But the birthday did not unfold as I had imagined.

I never went to the café and naturally never sat on the yellow sofa.

That afternoon, the boss came to my office. A colleague was ill, he said, and he wanted me to run the marathon in her place.

Later, we went together to the former Olympic center. The Germans had renovated it, as they rebuilt church after church bombed during the war.

Many people came to run. The announcement said thirty-five thousand. Then rough rock music began playing.

We pressed into the crowd. A father lifted his daughter onto his shoulders so she could see the black expanse of humanity and feel the reproduction and greatness of civilization.

At last, we began to run.

I passed some people. More passed me.

Suddenly, I remembered a story. A philosophical babbler said he was tired of walking forward and now walked backward instead. He believed he saw a more magnificent life.

In the end, a car killed him.

Walking and stopping, I finally reached the finish.

It lay in the central stadium, tiers of seats spiraling around it. I felt like a shell trapped in a beach.

I saw families embrace. Friends drank in celebration.

Later, I rode alone to a steakhouse. I was the final customer. Behind the bar, a server wiped glasses one by one.

Still later, I returned to the hostel and slept.

Before sleep, I reminded myself: this was an unexpected story. It had to go in Part III.

I did not see the hostel owner on the day I left.

But on some future day, I would remember him. He was always hurried and efficient, with more work than he could finish.

It happened later, on a rainy day in Beijing. I bought fried noodles from a roadside stall. The woman there moved with the same efficiency.

She had done the work for four years, she said. The income was not high, but she was free.

I asked about her child. He had remained back home in Henan and was ten that year. She would go home to see him.

She met me with honesty. I told her nothing.

I did not say that she reminded me of a hostel owner far away, in a hostel where the faucet cap struck the floor with a clack.

Outside the brilliant and special days, moments on the subway survived in unusually large numbers, half real and half imagined.

The train was crowded, like the dark mass of people in the marathon seen through the girl's eyes, glinting with the pride of civilization.

People stared at phones or stood in a daze.

I remembered a line by the German poet Andreas Gryphius:

"What more can I say? I vanish like smoke before a powerful wind."

That was the seventeenth century. Germans faced the Thirty Years' War, bodies covering the wilderness. In the poet's world, there were only death and disappearance.

Now this subway too swayed without knowing where it was going.

The poets were gone.

Before the next stop, I thought of him again, the prophet inside my skull.

In the first second of being twenty, I heard his voice. Through these fifty-eight days, he had vanished.

Had blind conformity and unconscious arrogance covered him? Had my thought and awareness stopped growing, leaving him no reason to appear?

Or had he left, traveled far away without saying goodbye, like a friend met by chance?

Still, I hoped that when the next station arrived—when I discovered the carriage empty and stepped through the door alone, when I saw skeletons and ruins scattered like cacti across a desert—he would appear again and say:

Follow me. We are going to cultivate a new world.