wasn’t a place a peddler would usually choose to set up.
Chen approached a little boy playing with an iron hoop in front of the building and was told that the dorm wasn’t only for the chemical company but for several other factories and plants as well.
It was a gray concrete four-story building that might not have been originally designed or intended to be a dorm building. The chemical company must have obtained a housing quota in the years of state housing assignments, but those rooms, instead of being assigned singly, were partitioned and then further partitioned, each into two or three, so that more employees could have something of a temporary shelter. In some cases, it had only space enough for a bed, or worse, for two beds so the space had to be shared by two single employees. Other companies had done the same with the rooms assigned for their employees.
He knew about similar arrangements in Shanghai. Years ago, he’d stayed in such a dorm room himself, albeit only for a short while.
An elderly woman standing near the door in blue-and-white-striped pajamas cast a curious look in his direction as he entered the building.
The old wooden stairs creaked under his feet as he groped his way up to the third floor in semidarkness. He was unable to find a light switch, so he felt his way along until a shaft of light from a cracked window above the landing of the third floor lit the way for him. He was able to make out a narrow corridor lined with wet clothing, stoves, vegetables, and all the odds and ends imaginable. Because of the rooms’ cramped space, the corridor sometimes became a kind of battleground among the residents, who vied for an extra square meter or two.
He finally found and knocked on the door marked 3B in fading letters.
Shanshan opened the door with a surprised smile. She was standing there in a white terrycloth robe, barefoot and bare-legged, her hair still wet, with a soft ring of lamplight in the background.
“What a surprise, Chen! Come in,” she said, reaching out her hand and closing the door after him. “But how did you find my place?”
“I remembered what you told me the day of our boat trip, ‘Mine is 3B, but it’s small as a piece of tofu.’ This afternoon, I happened to learn the location of your dorm in a pub not far from here.”
“You’re really a detective, Chen.”
She must have just washed her hair, which hung loose and shiny over her shoulders.
“Well, more like an unemployed detective,” he said smiling. “I had lunch with the director of the center, but then I had nothing else to do the rest of the day. Standing by the window, I was thinking of a poem by Liu Yong, when I couldn’t help thinking of you. The lake view is so fantastic, but what’s the point when I had it spreading out before me all alone?”
“What poem are you referring to, Chen?”
“In one of his most celebrated poems, Liu Yong put it well: ‘
It wasn’t exactly true. After the lunch, at the foot of the hill in the back of the center, he was thinking of some different lines-lines of his own. But they were evoked by thoughts of her. And he had in fact thought of Liu Yong’s poem a couple of times in connection with her.
“You’re being poetic again, Chen. You could have called me first. Not that you’re not welcome to my place, but I could have prepared. It’s such a mess.”
He smiled without making a response. It surprised him, too, that such a “poetic” role or identity came to him so effortlessly while in her company. Psychologically, it was perhaps due to his awareness of not being his true self for the moment. But then, he wondered what his true self really was. That of a Party member cop?
“It doesn’t look like a mess to me,” he said.
The room actually looked pretty close to what he had imagined it would be. It wasn’t a mess because she was unprepared, rather because of the size of the room, which was five or six square meters in all. The main furniture was an old rusty bunk bed, which occupied about half of the room. The top had become a sort of storage, like a trunk stand in a hotel room, except that instead of a trunk, all sorts of stuff was heaped up there, along with a string of Chinese sausages that were hanging from a peg in the water-stained ceiling.
Parallel to the top of the bunk bed stretched a clothesline, which was empty, except for a pair of pantyhose.
In front of the lower bed was a rough wooden table that apparently also served as a desk. Sitting on it were books, an open notebook, an unwashed bowl, a small pot on an electronic burner like the one in the sampan the other day, and a bundle of noodles. Chen saw shoes peeping out from under the bed, including the shoes she had worn for the sampan excursion. It was nothing short of a miracle that she managed to store everything in such a small cubicle.
It reminded him of his college years, when he had lived in a dorm room like this, only with three other students. At least he didn’t have to cook there, too.
He couldn’t helping taking stock of this room in detail, as it was in such sharp contrast to the Lius’ home.
“The problem with a dorm room is that you don’t really treat it as your own room, because you believe you’re going to move out one of these days,” she said, motioning him to sit on the only chair there, from which she’d had to remove a pile of newspapers. “And another problem is, believe it or not, that you might never move out.”
It was an ironic comment, possibly a witty justification of the room’s messiness, but to him, the tiny room lent an air of intimacy to the moment.
She’d been cooking in the room, and the water in the pot began to boil.
“You’ve not eaten, have you, Chen?”
It was a conventional greeting Chinese people made when running into each other on the street. It wasn’t exactly a question to which a response was expected. In the present context, however, the question meant something. So did the answer.
“No, not really.”
In the pub he’d only had the cup of beer. The other two had eaten the food on the table.
She pulled a cardboard box out from under the bed, grabbed another bunch of noodles, and threw them into the pot of boiling water.
“You know how to watch noodles?” she asked, pointing to a dented kettle on the floor. “There’s the cold water.”
It became his responsibility to keep pouring cold water into the pot whenever the water started boiling. It wasn’t difficult. He just needed to repeat that two or three times, and the noodles would be done.
She pulled out several jars of sauces, which she kept under the table, spooned a little out of each jar, and mixed them together in a bowl. She was absorbed in her work, which appeared to be an improvised concoction. He’d done similar experiments at home, tossing together whatever ingredients were available. In the somberly lit room, he couldn’t make out the labels on the jars, and he couldn’t help shifting his attention to her white thighs, revealed through the robe, which ended just above her knees.
After adding cold water and then repeating the process one more time, he began to ladle out the noodles into two bowls. She then poured the sauce on top of them. In addition, she opened a small plastic package of Wuxi gluten and put pieces of gluten onto the noodles.
So that was their dinner. She sat on the bed, and he on the only chair in the room, the noodles on the table between them.
To his surprise, the noodles were quite delicious. The meal was more agreeable than the banquet at the center. For one thing, he liked noodles. He was a gourmet when he ate out, but not an enthusiastic chef when he had to cook for himself.
It was probably the same for her. He then dismissed the thought almost instantly. She was much younger. An attractive girl like her probably had a lot of men her own age eager to invite her out to candlelight dinners. He felt a twinge of jealousy.
Or was he suddenly feeling so much older?
“Thank you. These are the best noodles I’ve had in a long time.”
“Come on. How can someone who dines with the executives of the center really enjoy a bowl of plain noodles with me?”
“It’s the truth, Shanshan. Noodles shared with you are no longer merely plain noodles.”
