The Fat Years

said they were really not close friends and hadn’t kept in touch since that night.

I remembered that Wen Lan had said her major was French, but she was also studying German at the Goethe Institute. I rushed over there to look up her records. I found out she had withdrawn from her studies. A secretary who knew her told me she was going to marry a part-time German teacher who worked at the institute. She wouldn’t tell me his name. I pushed my way into the dean’s office. The dean was a well-known China expert with a Chinese wife, so he probably had some understanding of the wiles of Chinese women. He listened very patiently to my story and said he could not give me Wen Lan’s German contact information, but he promised that if I wrote her a letter he would forward it to her.

I went into an empty classroom and sat there, staring blankly, for a long time. I picked up my pen several times wanting to write her a few words, but I just couldn’t think how to start.

Three months later I received a letter from Wen Lan. She told me she was married to a German who had been her German teacher, an executive in a German firm in Beijing, and it had been love at first sight. The two of them were living in Germany and they were very happy together. She didn’t say which city they lived in and she didn’t apologize-it was as if nothing had ever happened between us. She explained herself in only one sentence, the theme of which was that she was like a sparrow that wanted to fly away on the wind and was impatiently longing to spread its wings today, because tomorrow would be too late.

Before 1992, a mainland bride married to a man in Hong Kong had to wait two years before she was granted permanent residence in Hong Kong. (After 1992, she would have had to wait five years.) This inhuman discrimination policy was a violation of basic human rights and a disgrace to Hong Kong. If Wen Lan had married me, she would definitely have had to wait two years to live in Hong Kong, so I didn’t blame her for choosing to marry a German. I even understood why she had chosen to “ride a donkey while searching for a horse.” What I was genuinely indignant about was that she had so thoroughly misled me and hadn’t even bothered to tell me anything about her change of heart. I realized that she was a woman who cared only about her own personal advancement, and had no concern for other people.

That night I ate alone at the nearby Singapore Restaurant and read an e-book on my cell phone. I use a K- Touch cell phone. K-Touch used to be the king of counterfeit, but now it’s a famous international brand. The phone has every function you could want. The interface uses something similar to Sony technology and the functions combine all the best elements of Apple’s iPhone and Amazon’s Kindle. Although I still browse in the Sanlian Bookstore on a regular basis, ever since I bought my K-Touch e-book digital phone, almost all my books are downloaded from the net. I’ve already stored the complete works of Jin Yong, Zhang Ailing, and Lu Xun on my phone.

I was trying to understand Lu Xun’s essay “A Lost Good Hell,” when I received a call from Wen Lan asking me to come out and meet her. I said I didn’t have time, but she insisted, asking me to come out for lunch the next day at the Maison Boulud in Qian Men Street. It’s not easy to catch a taxi near there and I don’t have a driver, and besides I didn’t feel like accommodating that Baccarat-crystal chandelier. I changed it to a small coffeehouse in Qianliang Lane.

“Where is Qianliang Lane?” she asked.

“It’s off Dongsi North Avenue, close to your Shatan house, you must know it, right?” I said in exasperation.

She deigned to accept my arrangement-so I knew she must want something from me.

When we met the next day, just as I expected, she said, “Jian Lin and I are just good friends. He’s got a wife, you know.”

So she wanted to shut me up. She had not seen me for twenty years, and this is all she wanted to see me about. But I wasn’t really angry. I just wanted to see what other tricks she had up her sleeve.

“Jian Lin is a big real estate magnate,” I said to tease her.

“What’s a real estate magnate?” she replied. “Just somebody with a lot of money, nothing so great about that.”

What an imperious tone. Was she “riding a donkey while searching for a horse” again? I have to admit that although Wen Lan is over forty, she looks great for her age and has all the charm of a continental European woman. I can imagine that quite a few men have been captivated by her.

“Are you still living in Germany?”

She gave me a puzzled look. “I haven’t been in Germany for a long time.”

“Didn’t they tell me you married a German and went to Germany?” I alluded to what had happened twenty years earlier.

“You mean Hans?” She seemed to be scolding me for not being au courant with her activities. “We haven’t been together for ages. Germany was a stifling place, bored me to death. I went to Paris; my ex-husband’s Jean- Pierre Louis.” Seeing that I didn’t react, she added, “A very famous sinologist.” I was definitely not familiar with any French sinologists. “Sinologists are all insane, I can’t stand them,” she remarked.

“Jian Lin called you Professor Wen,” I said.

“Professor Wen or Dr. Wen are both fine. I received my doctorate from Sciences-Po in Paris. I’m a specialist in Euro-African affairs and an adviser to the European Union and the Chinese Ministry of Foreign Affairs.”

I remembered that her father was in the Central Propaganda Department-the apple didn’t fall far from the tree, either inside or outside the organization, and profiting from both.

“So then, you intend to come back home?” I asked.

“You mean, return to China?” she said with an arrogant air. “We’ll see. There are people in Europe who are waiting for me now. There’s an old aristocrat who keeps asking me to marry him. But now everybody knows that the twenty-first century belongs to China. If a particularly good opportunity came along, I might consider coming back to do something for China. For the time being, I’ll just keep going back and forth. I have a house in Paris and another one in Brussels, and I’m just now looking for a suitable place to buy in Beijing. What about you? What are you doing in Beijing?”

“I just sit around at home, and once in a while I write something.”

At that, her interest began to wane.

Then she asked, “Where do you live?”

“Happiness Village Number Two.”

“Where?”

“Happiness Village Number Two, in Dongzhi Menwai.”

She didn’t react-it was probably not posh enough for her. After sizing me up completely, her last remaining interest in me evaporated.

“Well, Lao Chen, I have to go.”

“Go ahead.”

“About Jian Lin…”

I made a gesture of zipping up my lips.

“You’re an old Beijinger now,” she said in a slightly coquettish manner, “when I return to Beijing, you’ll have to take me out!”

I almost said, “What on earth for?” but I held myself in check.

She stood up and added, “I expect you to take care of me.”

In socialist realist fiction, this is known as finishing with a bright tail. It could also be called buying travel insurance. On the one hand acting like a big important woman, and on the other hand acting like a helpless little girl, and all the time taking and taking. It’s amazing that it didn’t embarrass her to say such things.

I felt like I had already become her B-list male escort.

I watched through the window as her driver opened the door for her and she got into a black BMW. It had an armed-police WJ licence plate.

She’s no longer Chinese counterfeit goods, I thought, now she’s a genuine French Baccarat-crystal chandelier. But it doesn’t matter whether she’s a made-in-China kerosene lamp or a French crystal chandelier, she’s still on the market, always on the make, and she still has her price.