Jia Jia searched her mind desperately for something to say, something that would not blow up this dinner, that would not drive her father away from her. But she suddenly could not stop thinking about her mother, the way she’d lain in the hospital bed, pale and hopeless like a white flower petal that had been tweezed off its stem.
‘Do you have Ma’s bronze dragon?’ was what she finally managed to say.
‘Dragon?’ he asked, still absent-mindedly looking down at the menu while unfolding his reading glasses.
‘Never mind.’
Jia Jia poured a cup of tea for herself and reached for her chopsticks as the waitress placed the appetisers between her and her father. She attempted to pick up a peanut. Her chopsticks kept failing her, though she had always been skilful at using them. Beautifully elegant with perfect technique, a friend of Chen Hang had once said. What was the matter with her today? The more she dropped the peanut, the stronger her desire to pick it up. Finally, she managed to bring it to her mouth and put it in.
Silence descended. Like a well that had suddenly gone dry, Jia Jia could think of nothing more to say to the man sitting in front of her.
‘I should leave,’ she said and got up from the table.
She rushed past all the square tables, the signs for the bathroom, the round tables and the reception desk. Not once did she look back at her father, but she could see him, sitting there alone, and the old couple sitting next to him who were observing what might have been the most curious event of their day.
Someone bumped into her shoulder, apologising. Jia Jia looked up and saw Xiao Fang. She focused on the face of this person whom her father considered to be a ‘good woman’, trying to read what was on her mind.
‘Jia Jia! Are you looking for the bathroom?’ Xiao Fang said. This face, too, had aged since they went fishing, years ago.
‘Have you, by chance, seen a bronze dragon in my father’s home? It’s about this big.’ Jia Jia held out her hands and indicated that the object was around the size of a big coffee cup. Before Xiao Fang could answer, Jia Jia found she could not look at her face any more. This woman who was here, and her mother who was gone. She lowered her head again and marched down the escalator.
Back at her grandmother’s house, Jia Jia crawled under the bedcovers and imagined her father and Xiao Fang sitting at the round table in the corner of the Shanghainese restaurant, devouring a plate of braised pork belly. They were effortlessly in sync, becoming one another, like Leo’s parents. They were on the opposite shore of a deep river that Jia Jia could not cross, on an island that had no space for her. Tears came in waves, her throat tight with a strangling pain, and she held her left hand, still wearing the jade bracelet, over her mouth to cover any sounds that she was making.
9
Jia Jia woke with a fear of ageing that left her unable to breathe. She leaned over the basin and stretched the skin of her cheeks with her fingers. Her reflection exposed a few spots that were darkening. She smiled and examined the fine lines at the corners of her eyes and thought for a moment that she saw them stretching away, like grapevines. She stormed out to a nearby mall and spent over one thousand yuan on anti-ageing cream, anti-ageing serum and anti-ageing face mask. She also wanted to buy an eye mask, but finally decided against it.
She returned to the apartment and charged past the living room where her grandmother was feeding the surgeonfish and clownfish in the aquarium. The tank was much taller than the old woman, who stood on a small plastic stool to reach her arm above the rim. Jia Jia thought about helping her. But instead she went into the bathroom, washed her face, spread half a bottle of face mask over her skin like butter, sat on the toilet seat and waited.
For the entire night following her catastrophic meeting with her father, she had kept her phone next to her pillow, the volume turned up, and waited for him to call and take back what he had told her, as if there could have been a chance that he had lied about his new marriage. But he never did. How typical of him not to think of her, Jia Jia thought. The card that Qing had given her, from the gallery, was still untouched on her bedside table, next to the fish-man sketch. None of that – the gallery, selling paintings, her art – seemed important, and she had failed her friend, who must have tried so hard to find her a gallery that was willing to meet her. But Jia Jia felt so tired. Everything she touched seemed to bounce away from her with stronger force.
She washed off the mask after exactly fifteen minutes and went back to her room.
‘The biggest mistake people make is keeping it on for too long,’ the salesperson had warned her. ‘It’ll actually extract moisture from your skin.’
She applied the rest of the skin products to her face and felt a little more at ease. Then she directed her attention to her fish-man paintings, taking them out one by one from the cardboard box and studying them. These paintings could hardly be considered art, she decided, and took them downstairs and stuffed them into the rubbish bin outside. There was just one that she wanted to keep. It was, objectively, the worst painting in the box, but there was an honesty and plainness about it that she wanted to preserve. Perhaps it resembled Chen Hang’s sketch the most. It did not look like an oil painting – it had no background and no layering, just the body of a fish in the middle of the canvas, painted in greyish strokes that looked like diluted ink. Even the outline of the body was not precisely contoured, as if the fish was somehow emerging and disintegrating at once.
She set the painting on an easel and sat on her bed, trying to visualise its face. She could not go forward any more, not like this. She was going nowhere like this. It was as if she had begun a story with the fish-man long ago, before she could remember, something that had pushed her off her axis, something that demanded an ending now. She had to see the fish-man for herself, to be able to fill out that empty oval on the canvas. For a moment she thought she saw the oval expanding, like a hole that, if left untouched, would ultimately eat up the entire work. The more she stared at it, the more certain she was that she had to finish the painting. But the news of her father’s marriage occupied her mind, and she could not concentrate. She had to leave this stifling, yellowing room. She thought about how Chen Hang would take himself away when he needed to. She wondered if she too might go to Tibet.
That afternoon, Jia Jia picked up her phone, scrolled through her contacts list to find Chen Hang’s travel agent, and was relieved that she had not deleted her number. The idea of getting away for a few days had given her some energy.
‘I want the same itinerary,’ she told the woman on the phone. ‘I would like to stay as close as possible to the hotels where he stayed, but cheaper ones.’
‘I will certainly check and see if we can arrange that,’ the woman said. Her tone reminded Jia Jia of the announcer on the subway. Jia Jia held the phone between her ear and shoulder as she scribbled with a sketching pencil into an old beauty magazine.
Day 1: Arrive in Lhasa
Day 2: Potala Palace. Johang Jokhang Monastery (walk around three times)
Days 3–5: Nyingchi
Days 6–7: Guide’s home. DREAM HERE.
Day 7 and after: TBD. Depends on fish-man.
‘I also want the same guide,’ Jia Jia said. ‘I don’t know his name though.’
‘I will check to see if he is available. Would you not like to see Namtso Lake?’ the woman said. ‘At this time of the year, it should be—’