Pauline

Ai

Pauline, Pauline. There is not a moment when I am not saying your name. As I write to you now, the bells of the millennium are about to ring. People in padded coats are holding balloons of every color in the square outside the cinema, celebrating something or other. I have heard that at the instant the year 2000 arrives, a terrible computer virus will sweep the world: stock-market numbers will fly into chaos, public systems will seize up, airplanes will fall from the sky. Everything around me will catch fire, and still I will murmur your name: Pauline, Pauline. Can you hear me in Paris? Two centuries ago, missionaries had to spend a month at sea, crossing the Arabian Sea and the Bay of Bengal, threading past islands bristling with reefs and lame peddlers at the ports hawking spices, opium, and spells, before they could reach China. I want this letter to undergo the same solemn passage, the same trials. I want you to unfold it and find every page covered with the name Pauline.

Pauline, I have left the south and come to a city in the middle of the country. The roads here are broad. Dust has replaced the fishy smell of rain, and the drivers of tractors and sedans alike are devoted to their afternoon naps. The greed of the south has not swallowed this place whole yet, though it soon will. A few days ago, a party of short, fat men came to inspect a property development, every one of them walking with his hands clasped behind his back. I have also heard that the entire neighborhood where I now live will be razed within five years, because it lies across the path of a potentially important road. I cannot bear to part with the row of poplars outside my window. We Chinese have a word for them, xiaose. It means, roughly, that their very existence is an emblem of ruins: withered, yet alive. I think of the plane trees you described in your hometown. I have never been to Paris, but you showed me photographs. The color of their leaves was as noble and unreal as your hair.

I remember every moment we spent together, Pauline. I wound a strand of your hair around my pen, as if I had plundered the skin of a canary. I remember the first time I saw you, how shy you were, hiding your blue eyes beneath your lashes, measuring every sentence for fear of giving offense. "Mr. Ai, is that right? I saw the play you directed." Everyone praised your Chinese. They crowded around you, asking how much China had changed since you first came as a girl. Now that the diligent and clever all drove cars, now that fresh French bread was no longer beyond reach in the department stores, along with African ivory and shark fin from the bays of Japan—what did you make of it all? You answered every question patiently, softly, then came over to me. "Pauline," you said, extending your hand.

In the bedroom, an electric fan drove away the damp. I wrote words on your ribs, your thigh, beside your pubic hair. You closed your eyes and guessed. "Pa... Paris." Correct. "Woman." Correct. "Passionate... love." Correct. Your senses were so keen it was as if your pores had grown eyes. Afterward, you taught me French names. Pauline. Beauvoir. Matthews. Thomas. "To-ma," you corrected me. You told me you had an uncle named Thomas. Twenty years earlier, you said, he had been one of the thirty-five Maoists on the rue d'Ulm, praising the Eastern revolution of the late sixties with such extraordinary fervor that he was willing to die for it. "Where is he now?" I asked. "Dead," you said.

You said you would love me forever, yet two years ago you left without a word. I understand. It was my fault. I should have told you from the beginning: I had a wife, and a seven-year-old son. We, too, once had happy days. She was the daughter of a workshop director at the city's steelworks; I was a poor country boy fresh out of university. In summer she wore flowered blouses, tied her hair in a ponytail, slung a black bag over one shoulder, and stood reading in the pavilion at the park. The eighties—everything was beautiful then. Then we married, the nineties arrived, and happiness suddenly became the only permitted virtue. Either you embraced a brand-new individual life, or you drowned forever in the shadow of failure. At the same time, madness began to overtake her. Pauline, what she suffered from was an illness of the age. She would go to the department store and buy an entire shelf of canned food, stack it in the living room, then hide under the dining table with her hands over her ears, muttering, "War is coming..." At night she would clutch my hand, breathing fast, and make me say I would never leave. I told her I would never leave. Then she made me say I would be faithful until death. I told her I would be faithful until death. She gave a shrill laugh, then began to cry.

Pauline, I have left that place forever now. Before I went, my wife's mother found me. She bared her body and cursed me in the dark. She said I was the mad one. She said I was shameless. She was right about everything. When I tore myself away from her, I had not even decided where to go. Pauline, every step I take lands on nothing. All these years—except for those few months with you—I have been walking through the mud of a void in free fall. So, Pauline, please let me hold on to the only love that was real. Please let me say your name again and again, or I will wander forever. Pauline, Pauline.

Madam Weng

Little Ai, winter has come, and still there is no word from you. This is the fifth winter since you disappeared. I asked someone to find your address. Do not hold it against me. What made you go all the way up there? I have never been so far north on land. Does it snow where you are? The winters must be cold. I hear a new ice age is coming and the oceans will drown us. Remember to put on another layer.

I am writing to tell you something. Ten days ago, Weng Da left us. There is not much to say. She suffered badly. Her body went cold very fast. There was hardly anyone at the hospital who could help us; they were all busy elsewhere. You probably do not know that this winter an incurable pneumonia has broken out in China. It spreads quickly, and once you catch it, you cannot breathe. You do not know because you and that French whore are living so well, I suppose. Had I not already heard that she sold herself? I wondered why she had to come all the way to China to do it. Weng Da was fortunate: at least that vile disease did not torment her. Your son and I are not so fortunate. No one is here to protect us. We are waiting to die in this city.

Five days before Weng Da left, she seized my hand and said, Mama, Mama, I cannot bear it anymore. She asked when you would come back. I said, Mama does not know either. Do not wait for him. She said, I hate him. He destroyed me. I hate him. By then she had wept for so many years that a pale swelling had formed around her eyes, and she could no longer remember things. Ai Liang was only ten, yet he already knew to wipe his mother's eyes with a wet towel and pat her shoulder with his right hand. I still remember one afternoon eighteen years ago when Weng Da came home and whispered, Mama, I have met a man. How beautiful she was that day, in a beige-gray skirt and a blue-green sweater, her short hair clean and neat. Do you remember? She would sling on her little handbag, take a book, and go to the pavilion in the park. We always said Dada was beauty itself. Now that beauty has shattered. There is nothing left worth living for.

Little Ai. Were we not good to you? If we were not, would we have married our most precious daughter to a penniless country boy? We hate you now as much as we once loved you! Do you remember what you said to me that last night? You said, Mother-in-law, Weng Da has gone mad. There is no way to go on living like this. I want to ask you: why did Weng Da become unhappy? Did you ever love her after you married her? Did you love her, or did you merely want to possess her? You were always saying the age had gone rotten, that people put a price on everything. But did you not make prey of everyone yourself? Little Ai, ask your conscience. Did you love her as a person, or love that she was from the city? Did you love that French woman, or love that she was French? You know the answer in your own heart.

Little Ai, I know perfectly well that I was only another of your prey. After you married, you came into my bedroom and touched my hair, and I knew then what bitter end awaited us. Now I understand: I was born sinful, born to be tempted by this sin, satisfied by it, tormented by it. This sin was going to take from me the thing I loved most. Little Ai, were things not good between us? I never asked you for anything. Every day I only waited for you to knock on my door, even if you came merely to say hello. Was that asking too much? And on that last night, you could simply put on your clothes and leave without the slightest change in your face. When I realized what was happening, I did not even have time to button my clothes before I ran to the door and begged you. I knelt and begged you not to go. I said Weng Da would collapse. Ai Liang was only five. Your mouth kept saying sorry, sorry, while your hand wrenched itself free.

Two days ago, the factory's general manager came to see Dada's father. He is about your age. First he said that he had a daughter too and was deeply grieved by what had happened to our family. Dada's father immediately began wiping his tears. The general manager said, you are not young anymore; you have reached the age when you ought to enjoy a peaceful life. Dada's father asked what he meant. The general manager said, the factory is going to merge, and it does not need so many leaders. You are an old employee; all the more reason for you to think of the factory. Little Ai, in that moment I suddenly understood: those best at plunder are also best at deceiving themselves. Your generation spends all day making pretty speeches about fairness, justice, individual striving. It is all false. In the end you want everything except those things. But God is watching us, Little Ai. Sodom will be delivered to His judgment.

Pauline

Uncle Thomas, how have you been? I hear you have moved to a great estate near Bordeaux. Many years have passed since we last parted in Paris. I am living in China now. Do you find it funny that the dream of your youth should be fulfilled by the little girl at the dinner table who understood nothing? I was five, yet I remember it vividly. How dashing you were, in a black leather jacket, your hair combed down on either side of your ears. Papa said you belonged to the generation poisoned by the École normale supérieure, and that the whole family regretted ever allowing you an education. But the moment you came through the door, you conjured a piece of candy from behind your back for me. Then you stood in the doorway and announced to everyone, "A revolution has taken place in China. We are all going to be free!"

Uncle Thomas, from that moment on I loved you with such ardor. I remember every word you spoke at the dinner table. You said, "Do not imagine that the storm of '68 was an accident. By 1968 there were already fifteen hundred Maoists in France. There were thirty-five at my school alone." Papa interrupted: "Terrorists." You smiled. "To your bank, we certainly are." Papa said, "What Cultural Revolution do you think you believe in? You simply cannot bear to admit that you are colonizers and bourgeois." You wiped your mouth and answered, "Why don't you go and tell the miners in Normandy who the colonizers and bourgeois are, if you are so clever? Tell Brigitte's mother who raped and dismembered her daughter and was acquitted. Tell her that bourgeois committed no crime at all—he merely raped and murdered a poor family's little girl." Mama covered my ears. You threw your napkin onto the table and told Papa, "Brother, I am going to Normandy tonight."

We all thought you would die there. For two days we followed the newspapers closely. They said that a group of enraged Maoists had taken the mine foreman hostage and demanded justice for Brigitte and for their comrade Auvergne, who had been killed by a security guard. They also set fire to the mine's cars. Police surrounded the mine and ordered them to surrender over loudspeakers. Day and night I prayed for you, terrified for your safety. My prayers worked. Two days later, the foreman was released and no one was hurt. Our whole family breathed again. But you did not appear for many years. When I saw you next, you were a trader at Deutsche Bank. You wore an expensive suit like Papa's and had entered a different vulgar contest. At dinner you mocked Europe's counterfeit republics and the decay of its intellectuals. You asked what I had been studying lately. I told you Chinese. "Give it up," you said, almost joking. "If a revolution is not false, it is bound to fail."

Uncle Thomas, I keep wondering: why has it always been so easy for people to transform themselves, from 1848 until now? One second a Communard, the next calculating how to corner a market. One year marching against the Vietnam War, a few years later cheering for Reagan. Now I have come to China, and everything here has changed as well. People tell me they want to work for themselves. They say the individual life is the only life worth pursuing, that a new age has arrived, and everyone has limitless opportunity. And perhaps that is the truth of it: We all live inside illusions, don't we? Ours simply went bankrupt first.

Uncle Thomas, I met a Chinese man, and I told him I would love him forever. He is a theater director. He likes to write Chinese characters on my breast and the palm of my hand, and he has endless questions about Paris. He asks what color the rose window of Notre-Dame is. He asks which chanson Debussy composed. He asks why Parisian women are so fond of black stockings. He asks questions whose answers he already knows, as if I were the foreigner and my acknowledgement could grant him Paris too. I am fascinated by his blazing desire, the way it is always demanding more, but I do not know whether I love him. I put extra weight on the word and tell him I will love him forever, forever, because I do not want him to think I could not love him because he is Chinese. Papa was right. We simply refuse to admit that we are colonizers, don't we?

I am about to leave. Today or tomorrow, I will set out. Towers of Babel are rising in every corner of the world, the shadow of Paris trembling across their glass walls. I want to go somewhere that, for at least one moment, escaped the invasion of that shadow. Yes, Uncle Thomas, I am going to Normandy. I am going to Normandy to look for you—to look for the man you were when I was five, all these years after you yourself gave him up. Uncle Thomas, I will find you.

Ai Liang

Papa, today I shaved my head. The day after tomorrow, I am going south to become a soldier. It has been more than ten years since I last saw you. To be honest, I no longer remember what you look like. Grandma told me you went to a city far in the north. Then you kept moving farther north, until there was no land any farther north to go. Sometimes I wonder if you are a migratory bird whose compass has gone wrong, condemned to search all your life for colder places. Did you know the entire world is growing colder, even the equator? Grandma says we will soon die in a new ice age. Great waves will sweep us to the bottom of the sea, and we will become blocks of ice or pieces of amber.

After Mama died, Grandma became a Christian. Even in her religion, she curses more often than she blesses. She curses you and that French woman—if I remember correctly, her name was Pauline? Pauline, Pauline. A beautiful name. I do not hate her as Grandma does. I know your leaving had nothing to do with her. I suspect she had long since become an apparition in your life, and that her disappearance mattered more than her being alive. Papa, I know what apparitions look like. You are mine.

Papa, did you watch the Olympic fireworks last month? I heard they launched more than a thousand rockets from the outskirts of Beijing just to keep rain from falling on the Bird's Nest. Everyone said, what a magnificent feat of engineering: an army of men could prevent the heavens from raining; human artillery had thundered louder than thunder itself. They also said that from now on we were powerful, that Li Ning had flown into the sky and lit the torch on the summit of Mount Olympus. But I kept thinking of Mama. She was hiding under the dining table, surrounded by thousands upon thousands of tins of fish. She said, war is coming. From that moment on, I decided I would become a soldier. I have nothing to lose. I will be the first into the line of fire.

2019.10.29

(Written about 2000–08. After I finished it, pneumonia, the Olympics, and war all came around once more.)