Shenzheners Read online

  She looked at him, a bit flustered. “You should come visit us in the countryside,” she said. “Then you’d know what true peace and quiet is like, not to mention really fresh air.”

  He seemed flustered, as well. He gave her hand a squeeze.

  When the train neared Dorval, they both sensed that there was more to say. She said that, in all these years of travelling between Toronto and Montreal, this had seemed the quickest trip she had ever taken. And he said that he’d been in Canada five years and had never had such a deep conversation with anyone.

  “All thanks to Paul Auster!” they said in unison.” They each raised a copy of The New York Trilogy and touched spines. Then he tore the napkin in half: he left his email address on the half with the map of China, while she wrote hers on the other half. When the train came to a halt, he got up to embrace her, whispering, “Your hair is so pretty.” His unexpected adieu soon convinced her that the encounter she had just had was fate, that the last empty seat in the carriage might as well have had her name written on it.

  Twice the next week she dreamed about this fortuitous trip. In both dreams, she could only hear his weak voice; she couldn’t see his face. This seemed odd . It was without a doubt the most romantic trip she’d ever taken. She hardly ever talked to anyone on the train, let alone had a heart to heart. And she’d never talked to a Chinese person before, much less talked about Paul Auster. This trip was a probabilistic impossibility. And coincidentally, she’d just ended the longest relationship she’d had since her marriage fell apart. If she had still been in a relationship, she wouldn’t have been so curious about a stranger or let a stranger indulge his curiosity about her. These two dreams made her feel as though the trip she’d just taken hadn’t ended yet.

  On the way to and from work, and even on the job, she would suddenly hear his voice. She was expecting their conversation to continue by email. She was waiting for a note from him, had been waiting since the day they parted, assuming that when she got home she would find an email from him in her inbox. Custom dictated that he should be the one to send the first email. But when she’d waited almost a week without a word, she felt she shouldn’t wait any longer. There had been nothing customary about the encounter, to put it mildly, so she decided to send the first email. The message she sent was extremely simple. She thanked him for the happy trip, and for the “friendship” that had already “budded.” But just as she sent the message off, a message from him appeared in her inbox, saying more or less the same thing. She was excited by the serendipity and immediately wrote her reply. She said that the budding friendship between them would bloom and bear fruit.

  They soon found a rhythm for their correspondence, two exchanges of emails a week. She had a linguistic advantage and wrote longer emails. And Paul Auster was the foundation of their friendship. She wouldn’t forget to attach the latest miraculous line she’d read in a Paul Auster novel at the end of her message. In her fourth email she joked that they’d started a book club for two. And in his reply he pointed out that it was a book club in which only one author was ever read. She appreciated his understated humour. The greatest achievement of their book club was that she convinced him to try reading Auster in English. She knew she had succeeded the day he copied a sentence from The Red Notebook at the end of his email. He said it was the first “foreign” book he’d ever “chewed” through in the original.

  The next step, the next challenge, was The Invention of Solitude, which she had recommended to him on the train. He remembered her telling him it was the best essay she’d ever read about solitude. He said that his two experiences of immigration, national and international, had given him the most intimate experience of solitude. Solitude was like a lover, had a double nature, at once angel and devil.

  In her ninth email, she suggested that they meet again. His initial reply was positive and warm. He asked her when she was going to visit Montreal next and said they could arrange to meet on the platform at Dorval. Of course, it was a romantic suggestion, but she felt a platform meeting would be too rushed, and said she was willing to drive to meet him in downtown Montreal, where there were more possibilities. They could go sit in a funky local café. Or they could take a walk on Mount Royal. He was very happy at her “change of heart.” In the following emails they kept making plans, as their next meeting got closer and closer.

  She was surprised early in the morning on the day of their meeting to be woken up by the sound of someone turning off a car engine. She walked to the window and lifted a corner of the curtain. There was nothing in front of her farmhouse. It was another dream, a dream that didn’t have a beginning or a middle, only an end. “It’s just a devil, not an angel,” she said to herself, in reference to the loneliness she suddenly felt. She sat in front of the computer and wrote him a simple email, saying the best place for their next meeting was actually in her quiet farmhouse. “You could come here for the weekend,” she wrote. “You should really come explore my little world.”

  He didn’t reply to her email, for the first time. She waited and waited, reading the last message she’d sent over and over. She regretted waking up at dawn. She regretted writing him that email before she was fully awake. What was “explore” supposed to mean? What about “my little world”? She regretted her ambiguous word choice and phrasing. Then she wrote him another two emails, just to extend him an apology, though not explicitly. In the first message she said that meeting on the platform at the station was actually a good idea, because they still needed time to get to know one another. In the second message she didn’t even bother mentioning the “next meeting.” She just said it’d been a while since she’d heard from him and was wondering if he’d started reading The Invention of Solitude.

  Three more weeks passed before she finally received a reply. It was a single sentence, and it wasn’t in reply to anything she’d written. He asked her to tell him her actual address. This sudden request took her aback, but also pleased her. Her first reaction was that his request wasn’t because he wanted to send her anything, but because he wanted to appear at her farmhouse at dusk over the weekend. She didn’t reply right away. She wouldn’t want that kind of surprise. She would want to know when he would be arriving. She would need time to prepare her little world, so it would be a place where their friendship could flower.

  She hesitated three days before replying. And then she wrote nothing in her message, except for her address.

  Over the next two weekends she didn’t dare to leave the farmhouse. But at the same time, she didn’t want to stay home. She kept looking out the window until she suddenly felt a bit tired of the capacious prospect. The second weekend was about to end when she decided that her reaction to his surprising request had been wrong. Their budding friendship had not blossomed. He wouldn’t appear. He didn’t want to. There was no way he’d appear. That night, before going to bed, she archived their entire correspondence, clearing his name out of her inbox.

  It was five months before she next heard news of him, by which time many things had happened. Her mother had finally passed away. Her job at the nuclear power station had ended early. Her son, who was studying international relations at McGill, had taken a year off to go to Botswana to work. And her introspective daughter had chosen to go to university in Vancouver instead of closer to home. Her farmhouse was suddenly empty. And her daily life was suddenly empty, too. What was more, ever since she’d filed their messages away, her interest in Paul Auster had waned. She only heard from the Chinese man after all these other things had happened. And it was the very last time she would hear from him.

  A notice arrived to pick up a parcel at the post office in Trois-Rivières. She didn’t initially connect it with the Chinese fellow, who had been absent from her life for five eventful months. She assumed it was from her son in Botswana, a birthday present. Or from the executor of her mother’s estate—her mother’s personal effects, perhaps. But as soon as she saw the post office empl
oyee carrying her parcel out of the storeroom, she realized who it was from. From the shape, it had to be a painting. It had to be his painting.

  The sender had not written his name or address, which made the provenance of the package all the more certain. She put the package on the seat beside her in the car. This way she could see it by looking over, as if he were sitting by her side once again. She couldn’t really remember his face. All she could remember was his weak voice and their conversation. She couldn’t figure out why he would send her a painting after five months of silence. She couldn’t imagine what it might be a painting of, or in what style he painted. It was the sort of inexplicable detail of daily life that would provide material for a Paul Auster story. If it were really a detail from a Paul Auster story, what would happen next? What kind of painting would such a sophisticated writer arrange for his protagonist to see?

  It was a nude. A model was reclining on a sofa, looking straight at the viewer. Even with her limited knowledge of art history, she thought of Modigliani’s Reclining Nude. A model in a seductive pose was nothing new. What was new was the identity of the model.

  Yes, she herself was the model. She reached out, touched “her” face and seemed to feel the warmth of his memory. A failed artist had after five months remembered the shape and the subtly changing colours of her face, from forehead to neck. She was moved, and mystified, by his memory. What she found even more mystifying was how he knew about her body, which she had of course never revealed to him on that sunny afternoon. How did he know the shape of her breasts and the line of her hips? He had painted the part below the neck not from memory but from imagination, which moved her yet disturbed her. What were his feelings when he was imagining her body? The next thought was even harder to bear. Maybe the body in the painting was also done from memory: his memory of another woman’s body, perhaps his wife’s body. An excruciating pain seeped into her heart.

  Anguished, she took off all her clothes. She seemed to see her own body for the first time. She compared the body in the painting to her own, and the burden of pain began to lighten, and kept getting lighter and lighter. She was sure the body in the painting was her own body, that this oil painting was the flower and the fruit of their budding friendship. She decided to hang it in her bedroom, on the wall by the bed. This way she could see him see her body every morning when she woke up. She held the painting to her breast, her nipples lightly pressed against it. She seemed to hear her breathing, and his breathing, too. Just then she noticed a letter stuck to the back of the frame.

  She put the painting on the bed and drew the letter from the unsealed envelope. His last letter, and his first handwritten letter, to her. “Forgive my silence.” She seemed to hear his weak voice again. “You must know how excited your invitation made me. But you might not know the pain I felt at the same time. Because it was an invitation I could not accept. Maybe you still remember, on the train, when you asked me what I’d gone to Toronto for, I didn’t reply. I went to see a famous Chinese doctor. He was my last hope, but he told me that he could do nothing for me. This is why I was unwilling to talk about “now.” My now is too fragile. Soon it will end. I am sure you remember I mentioned a sense of belonging. I meant what I said. Thank you for that remarkable trip. Thank you for giving me something to dream about, for the last time in my life. Since that day I have often dreamed of you. Even in sleepless nights, in which the pain is difficult to bear, I dream of you. The final painting of my life is a record of my dream. I call it My Little Dream World. If that’s all right with you.”

  She hadn’t cried in the longest time. Not like that. She cried and cried as she re-read the letter. Their friendship had just budded, and she still didn’t know who he was. He had not entered her little world. She wanted to know more about him, if he had a family, if he had children. She wanted to know why an original Auster would meet a translated Auster on the train. She wanted to know whether he had really entered her little world when he dreamed about it. Of course, she wanted even more to know about his now. If, at this moment, he was still alive, if he continued to dream about her little world somewhere out there in the big one.

  That evening she sat in front of the computer reading all the email messages they had exchanged, and then sentimentally called up a map of China. She found the place he had lived in for ten years, China’s youngest city. Reading about the city, she was surprised to discover there was a nuclear power station there, built with French assistance, that was advertising for a position in language training for technical personnel; they were looking for an English-French bilingual familiar with nuclear technology who could serve as a foreign-language teacher at the station. A job opening on the other side of the world was like that empty seat on the train. She felt a powerful pull. She pulled up her CV from the hard drive.

  Getting off the plane in Hong Kong, she felt she had made the wrong choice. The humidity hit her right away—very unpleasant. What with the crowds and the towering buildings, she felt for the first time in her life like she was floating along, rootless. On the train into the People’s Republic of China, faces pressed close, all Asian. But nobody wanted to talk to her. And she didn’t want to talk to anyone. The flood of heads at the border checkpoint suddenly made her feel the fatigue and loneliness of the journey. She never expected she would be confronted with such a busy scene. She was just a country girl used to fresh air and capacious prospects. Waiting in line, she wondered if she would stick it out for the two years of the contract.

  That was only the beginning, for once she was living in the city, she faced a flood of requests for her time. Nobody believed she was the mother of two grown-up children. Nobody believed she was a country girl who’d never seen the world. She rode her bike to work. On weekends she ran and worked out by the sea. She was a dedicated teacher. She was patient with her students. Of course her slim figure and deep blue eyes didn’t hurt. All of which made the city curious, and curiosity led to requests. Almost every day she was asked out to dinner by people she knew, by complete strangers too, even if she’d told them she wasn’t particularly interested in eating out. Lots of foreign-language teachers at primary and middle schools wanted her to “engage in dialogue” with their students after hours. As did the parents. An art school wanted her to model. A television station asked her to appear on a show. An exercise club wanted her to give demonstrations. Most persistent was a real estate developer who kept calling her, over and over, inviting her to his seaside mansion to “coach” him in English. She often didn’t know how to deal with China’s demanding courtesy.

  One experience left her wary of divulging her nationality. As soon as people found out she was from Canada they would ask if she knew about Bai Qiuen and Dashan. She was tired of it. She’d heard about the Canadian surgeon Norman Bethune, known to the Chinese as Bai Qiuen, who had died in 1939 for Mao’s cause and became a household name during the Cultural Revolution, but it was only after arriving in the city that she heard about the Canadian celebrity Mark Rowswell, who was known as Dashan, or “big mountain,” for a role he had played in the 1980s in the most popular TV show in China. Who cared about Bai Qiuen or Dashan when the person who’d brought her to China was Paul Auster, an American writer very few people in the city knew about?

  The demands the city made on her made her more and more homesick. She often dreamed of the simple little farmhouse on the other side of the world, dreamed of the row of Paul Auster’s complete works on the shelf, dreamed of the capacious prospect from her kitchen window, dreamed of the snow and cold of winter, dreamed of the peace that went hand in hand with well-being. The nuclear power station was pleased with her work and wanted to keep her on for another two years. They even proposed doubling her salary. But she replied without hesitation that she just wanted to go home.

  Before leaving, she accepted an invitation from a television station for an interview. The interviewer’s first question was why she had chosen to come to the city to work. Her unexp
ected reply, that it had to do with an oil painting, made the interviewer extremely curious. His second question was what the painting was of, and the third came while she was still contemplating how to answer the second: “Was it an oil painting of the downtown cityscape?” “No,” she replied. “It’s a portrait.” The interviewer was even more curious. He asked if it was of someone famous or just an ordinary person. She replied that it was an ordinary person. “How could a portrait of an ordinary person attract a country girl from Canada to come halfway around the world to China’s youngest city?” he asked, looking right at the camera.

  “Actually, it wasn’t a portrait,” she corrected herself softly.

  The interviewer turned to look at her. “Then what was it?” he asked with the greatest seriousness.

  She blinked, so bright were the mercury vapour lamps in the studio. “It was a little dream world,” she said.

  The Peddler

  I would think of him wearing his watermelon peel hat, a Chinese skullcap, even while solving linear equations. In a city where hardly anybody wears a hat, even in winter, his bewildering headwear always stood out. When school got out at noon, students would swarm around him. He would hunch over his two polyester bags to protect them, as they contained the two items on which his livelihood depended: popcorn and the sticky rice sticks the worst students called stun guns.

  In Chinese class, however, my mind never wandered, though not because I enjoyed standing up and reciting the lesson, as our teacher made us do. I always hated that. It wasn’t because I was ashamed of my accent in standard Chinese either; most of my classmates had worse pronunciation than mine, not to mention my teacher, a lady for whom even vowels were a challenge. She would read double vowels as single vowels, so that ku zi de kou zi—or buttons on the pants—sounded like ku zi de ku zi—pants on the pants. This seemed like a reversal of the rhetorical strategy of synecdoche he had learned about—when a part stands in for the whole—because the whole (ku zi) now stood in for the part (kou zi). I found this reversal fascinating, even in my dreams.