Chenxi and the Foreigner (15 page)

‘Look who I met at the consulate!' Anna's father called as he opened the apartment door. Laurent slunk in behind him. ‘I thought you'd be happy to see each other again!' Mr White was in high spirits. A little drunk, Anna guessed.

Laurent walked towards Anna and tried to kiss her on both cheeks. Anna cringed. ‘
Bonsoir
, Anna,' he said.

Mr White wandered off into the kitchen. ‘I invited Laurent back for a bite to eat. The
aiyi
usually leaves something in the fridge on Fridays…let's see. Yes, here we are… fried noodles! How does that sound? I just have to heat it up in the microwave…Will you set the table, dear?'

Laurent raised his eyebrows at Anna.

‘With pleasure,' Anna sneered, glaring back at Laurent.

Anna set out the bowls on the table while Laurent watched her. Mr White appeared with the noodles. He placed them on the table and put on some classical music.

‘Sit down, Laurent. Sit down.'

Anna sat on the other side of her father. She stared down into her bowl.

‘Laurent tells me he's planning on opening a Sino-Franco business franchise here when he's finished his studies, Anna.' Mr White raised his eyebrows, clearly impressed. ‘He only has one more year of studying Chinese and he'll be ready to start.'

Anna helped herself to the noodles. Laurent, realising nobody was going to serve him, took some noodles for himself. Mr White seemed to have forgotten his food. ‘I like a man who knows where he's going!' he said, winking at Laurent.

Laurent smiled back.

‘Anyway, Anna, that got me thinking. I was discussing your future with Laurent and I decided that perhaps it wouldn't be a bad thing to follow in his footsteps. Mandarin is a very useful language for business, these days. So, this is what I have to propose…' He paused for emphasis. Laurent looked into his noodles. ‘How about you staying on and studying at the university with Laurent?'

Mr White leaned back, satisfied. Laurent shot Anna a furtive glance.

‘Dad!'

‘You wouldn't have to worry about the money, dear. I'll cover that. And you could stay on the campus with all the other foreign students. That would be fun, wouldn't it?'

‘Dad!'

‘Really, I think it's an excellent idea. And it would give you both a good opportunity to get to know each other!' He winked at Laurent again. Laurent looked away.

Anna pushed her chair back from the table. ‘Can we talk about this another time, Dad?' she said. ‘I really don't think this is something we should be discussing right now!' She shook her head at Laurent.

As Anna left the room, she heard her father whispering to Laurent, ‘Really! It's impossible to get an answer out of that girl!'

She sat on her bed, trembling with fury. Once again she realised how much her father had always made all the decisions for everyone in her family. Even though he no longer lived with Anna and her sisters, her mother still deferred to him when an important decision had to be made. Worse, Anna knew she was at fault herself. Following the path her father paved for her had always been the easiest route, and she willingly chose it. Why couldn't she stand up to him? Why couldn't she tell him what she wanted to do? Was it because, if she did defy him, she would have to make all those decisions by herself?

The following morning was Saturday, and Mr White was up early to get in a half day's work. Like every Saturday, he would be back in time for a late lunch with Anna. Grateful to have the morning to herself, she rolled over to her bedside table and picked up her journal. Confusion whirred through her head. If she could just get it down on paper she might be able to order her thoughts a little.

April 30th, 1989
Chenxi—I can still feel your kiss but when I think of you it
is as if I am floating in a void. Darkness surrounds me and
all I see in front of me is your bleeding face. And those eyes
that I find so hard to read. I have never known eyes so hard
to read before...

Anna wrote into the morning. Everything that drifted through her head was transferred onto paper. As the words formed in front of her eyes, page after page, she emptied herself. In writing she could pretend her life was fiction. One great novel whose ending would write itself but which she couldn't predict.

She put down her pen only when she heard the
aiyi
unlock the front door. She stood up and stretched. Not in the mood to converse in their bumbling, improvised sign language, Anna put her journal back on the bedside table and pulled on her clothes.

When she heard the
aiyi
washing up in the kitchen, she slipped out, for a walk through Fuxing Park.

The fashion for school children in Shanghai that year was yo-yos. A group of ten year olds with red faces and red scarves stood in a circle, their hair sweaty on their foreheads, practising their tricks. These were fat children, under-exercised and overfed, spoilt boys with no siblings to attract attention away from them in a family of doting parents, grandparents, uncles and aunts. One stopped his yo-yo in mid-swing and grunted to his friend, ‘
Wai guo
ren
!' His friend looked up.

As Anna approached, the boys drew into a line and began a low earnest chant: ‘
Wai guo ren. Wai guo ren. Wai
guo ren.
'

Encouraged by Anna's frown, and with the excitement that comes from being in a group, the boys called louder: ‘
Wai guo ren! Wai guo ren!
'

Anna passed, and the boys closed in behind her. Ten-year-old boys who like to pull the legs off crickets for fun, ten year olds with nasty laughs. Behind her, the chant grew louder, ‘
Wai guo ren
!
Wai guo ren
!
Wai guo ren
!'

She walked faster, pretending not to hear.

Leaving the park and the boys behind, she walked down a street she hadn't taken before. It was a side street and quiet compared to the roar of Huai Hai Lu. She stopped at a shop on the corner and a procession of curious onlookers gathered and pushed from behind to see what she would buy. The shopkeeper was embarrassed and got up reluctantly from his stool in front of the television. He called his wife out for a look. Anna tried the little Chinese the
aiyi
had taught her.

‘
Wo yao mai
…' she began, but she didn't know the word for grapes, so she pointed to a small green bunch hanging in front of her. The crowd behind her howled with laughter.

‘
Wo yao mai
…
wo yao mai
…' they mimicked. ‘She wants to buy grapes!' they shouted at the passers-by who hadn't stopped yet. ‘The foreigner's going to buy grapes!'

The shopkeeper thrust the grapes at her, and Anna held out her purse for him to take out the money. A toothless old woman, shoving among the crowd at Anna's elbow, pushed the shopkeeper's hand away and took some coins from Anna's purse to give him. He grumbled to the old woman but she snapped back and prodded at the sign beneath the grapes with a brown fingernail.

‘Thank you,' Anna said, smiling at the old woman. She popped a grape into her mouth. The woman's eyes flashed and she shrieked at Anna, shaking her head and her hands. Anna spat the grape out. The woman pulled the bunch from Anna's grasp and plucked a single grape. Methodically she peeled the skin with her stained fingertips, pushing the shiny bald fruit towards Anna's mouth when she had finished. The crowd behind her was still tutting at Anna and shaking their fingers at the unpeeled grapes. Anna ate what was left of the grape, thanked the old woman again, and tucked the rest of the bunch into her bag. She turned to walk away but the crowd was thick around her. They shifted a little to let her push past.

Anna arrived back at the apartment to find her father sitting at the table, reading. The dishes from breakfast lay all around him.

‘Hi,' he said coolly, peering over the top of his glasses. ‘Where have you been?' He pulled out a chair for Anna.

‘Didn't the
aiyi
finish cleaning today?' Anna said, stacking the dishes. She took them to the kitchen and ran water into the sink. Her father came in behind her.

‘I sacked her,' he said.

‘Oh? I must admit I didn't find her that conscientious.' ‘I caught her looking through my papers. I've suspected her for a while. The consulate's lining me up with a replacement next week.'

‘Why would she want to be looking at engineering contracts?' Anna joked. She turned off the water and reached down into the bottom cupboard for a pair of rubber gloves.

‘I have some very important documents here,' he said, offended. ‘There may be many other companies interested in seeing them.'

‘Sorry Dad,' Anna said. She remembered Laurent, convinced that he was being spied on, and wondered if living in Shanghai encouraged paranoia.

Still, she was glad the
aiyi
seemed to have preoccupied her father for the time being. She didn't feel in the mood for any more lectures about her future.

Anna took three pieces of white bread and some cheese on a plate and slipped out of the kitchen to her room. Without the
aiyi
, there was no chance of her father organising a meal.

In their small room, Chenxi waited for his mother to return, with a live fish or a bag of dumplings in her basket for them to share. Before him, on the table where they ate and worked, lay the painting he had been working on. He squinted. It was getting dark and he stood up to turn on the lamp. The painting was finished. And Chenxi was pleased with it. He would give it to Anna when he saw her next.

21

‘I have something for you,' Chenxi whispered to Anna as he passed her desk. Anna looked up at him in surprise. She had been concentrating so hard on her painting that she hadn't noticed him come in. It was Monday morning. Anna had been worried about him all weekend. Apart from a dark ring around his left eye, Chenxi's face had almost healed, but he had worn his hair down to cover the neat bandage on his forehead. Anna felt a rush of tenderness towards him.

‘I meet you at your apartment after class,' he said.

Anna nodded.

The morning was tedious. Anna glanced towards Chenxi several times, hoping for a secret look, but as usual, and as if nothing had ever happened between them, he spoke to her only to translate something important the teacher said.

At one stage, Lao Li caught Anna gazing at Chenxi. He stared at her. Anna put her head down again and tried to concentrate on her painting. She was working on another copy of a fan on silk, this time a bird and flower composition, but somehow it lacked the interior force of the landscape she had painted on her own that Saturday morning.

They ate noodles together at lunchtime with Lao Li, as they always did. When Chenxi's leg brushed against Anna's under the table, she looked at him to see if it was a sign, but his head was bowed over his bowl of noodles.

For the afternoon class they again had a model. This time it was an old man in a loincloth. No matter how Anna worked, she couldn't seem to capture his sagging face. Normally this task would have been easy for her but having Chenxi in the room was too distracting.

Finally it was time to return home. Anna sauntered out in front of Chenxi, while he packed up his brushes. She met him at the bike shelter. Even as he unlocked his bike he only glanced at Anna, waving and calling to students all around him as they wobbled off home.

Anna followed Chenxi as he rode out the front gates. For an instant, she held her breath and waited to see if he would turn left in the direction of her apartment, or right, the direction of his own home. The secret message whispered to her that morning seemed now merely a dream. He turned left, and she sped to catch up.

Chenxi rode fast, as always. Anna concentrated all her efforts on keeping up with him, never quite reaching his side. It was only as they passed the music conservatory and rounded the corner into her dead-end street that Chenxi slowed, allowing Anna, breathless and sweaty, to draw level with him.

She wheeled her bike next to Chenxi as they passed through the high black gates of the apartment block. The gatekeeper's hawk-eye was fixed upon them.

‘Here,' said Chenxi when they were seated on her father's ivory silk couch. ‘Something of me to take home with you to Australia.' From his shabby backpack, he drew out a roll of newspaper and handed it to Anna. She pulled her legs up underneath her and crossed them ceremoniously before unrolling the paper.

Inside, delicately painted on a long piece of silk, sat a woman on a golden throne, hands resting in her lap. Her emerald and sapphire robe fell in luxurious folds over her knees and into the landscape, the fabric itself patterned with mountainous peaks, spiralling clouds and valleys, until it was impossible to decipher where the woman's body ended and where the landscape began. She wore an ornamental headdress, like that of a Chinese empress. But the hair that escaped from beneath it was fair and curling instead of shiny black.

When Anna looked at the tiny face under the white powder and red painted lips, she recognised it. She saw herself reflected in the brilliant blue eyes and knew the face was her own.

She rolled the painting back into its newspaper shell and stood up to place it on the coffee table. She turned back to Chenxi, then knelt on the carpet in front of him and looked up into his eyes. She kissed them, those expressionless eyes that had troubled her for so long. Chenxi did not move. Anna kissed the bridge of his nose, and waited. She began to tremble. Closing her eyes she brought her mouth close to his, not quite touching. There she waited, breathing the same air, until Chenxi kissed her.

He tasted warm and sour and smelled like cinnamon and the feel of his skin was softer than she could have imagined and so different from anything she had known. He seemed to be waiting for her lead, so she took his palm and placed it against her ribs, underneath her shirt. There it slid upwards and she shivered as he explored her breasts and wondered how different she felt to him. He drew back and played curiously with one of her long curls, and she, in turn, ran her hands through his long black hair, surprised at how coarse it was after the softness of his skin.