Jia Jia agreed and laced up her trainers in preparation to leave.
‘Mr Du has a wonderful singing voice,’ she said to Ms Wan on her way out.
‘Did he sing for you? He used to sing at home from morning to night until we had our second child. It was too loud for me. I prefer a quiet environment.’ Ms Wan rubbed her neck and winced. ‘I must be getting old. Even on warm days like today, I still always feel like there’s wind blowing on my neck.’
She wrapped a blue scarf around herself and escorted Jia Jia out the door.
11
On the day of Jia Jia’s flight to Lhasa, she found Xiao Fang waiting for her outside the door. Her father’s wife was wearing a rose-coloured silky blouse and blue denim shorts. Her hair was straight and dyed black, held loosely together by a Burberry-chequered clip. Her deep red lipstick made her ageing lips look like dried cranberries, and the shorts were too high and did not suit her. But she had always been like a girl, stubborn and going her own way with a disregard for consequences; she had always, to herself and her family, been the centre of the universe. Now Jia Jia’s father had joined that family too.
Jia Jia lifted her suitcase down the front steps. The sky was blue towards the east, but where she was, it had turned grey.
‘Jia Jia!’ Xiao Fang removed her sunglasses and waved them in the air. ‘Are you leaving now? I asked your aunt, she told me you’re travelling to Tibet today. I’ll drive you to the airport.’
Jia Jia looked around for her father.
‘It’s just me,’ said Xiao Fang. ‘Your dad doesn’t know that I’m here. He’s old now, you know? He has constipation problems and his shoulder hurts all the time. Jia Jia, would you like to move back in with us?’
‘Move back in?’
‘We have two empty rooms, one of them has a bathroom, you can—’
‘No,’ Jia Jia said. ‘I mean, there’s no need for that, thank you. I’m living well here.’
Xiao Fang wore a saddened, grim look, like a beaten dog that had just been wronged.
She sighed and said, ‘Your aunt is going through tough times too.’
Her voice had the tone of a mother attempting to explain something difficult to her child in the least upsetting way possible. Jia Jia’s own mother had never spoken like that: she had simply laughed, cried, loved and hated with all the life in her and never sheltered Jia Jia from any kind of truth – beautiful or shattering. But Jia Jia remembered how, when she was young, she had wished that when her mother stroked her hair at night, she would whisper to Jia Jia that they were going to live as a complete family, that this woman standing in front of her now was only her Auntie Fang Fang and nothing more. Instead her mother had held Jia Jia in her arms, sometimes sobbing into her daughter’s hair, and other times rocking her back and forth with a soft, distant smile on her face. She had never attempted to explain anything.
‘My old apartment is empty,’ Xiao Fang continued. ‘If you don’t mind, you could stay there. You, your grandmother and your aunt would all be more comfortable.’
‘Tell my father to take care. I’ll see him when I come back.’
‘Think about it, for your aunt’s sake. Let me drive you.’
‘I’ve ordered a taxi,’ said Jia Jia.
Xiao Fang took the suitcase’s handle and helped Jia Jia drag it to the black Toyota that was waiting at the gate of the compound. She beamed and waved her sunglasses again before putting them on. Jia Jia thought of the way her father had lifted the corners of his lips and exposed his teeth at the table in the Shanghainese restaurant.
The airport was swarming with parents and children who were escaping the city for the summer holidays, bumping into each other and charging in all directions, like a herd that was being hunted. Jia Jia had to go through two separate security checks in order to arrive at the check-in counters.
‘When on earth are they going to eliminate these pointless checks?’ a man’s voice shouted somewhere behind her. ‘Look at that woman, she didn’t put her handbag in! This is utterly useless. And you don’t need to pay five people to look after one X-ray machine!’
Jia Jia’s phone rang. It was Xiao Fang again.
‘Are you all checked in?’ she asked. ‘What time is your flight?’
‘Around seven. I’m queuing up now. What is it?’ Jia Jia reached her hand inside her bag and fished out her identification card. The European woman in front of her hurled her backpack onto the belt and left the counter. Jia Jia handed her ID to the airline representative.
‘I’ve just transferred some money to your account. For your trip,’ Xiao Fang said.
‘I’ll send it back once I’m checked in.’
‘Just keep it, in case of emergency.’
‘I can’t keep it,’ Jia Jia told her.
‘Your father wants you to have it. It’s his money. You don’t have to feel bad, we both just want to make sure that you have a good time there.’
The clerk attending to Jia Jia handed her a boarding card along with her documents. He circled the boarding time and gate with a red pen and stood to gesture in the direction of the gates. He smiled, sat down and raised his hand for the next customer.
‘Jia Jia, let us do something for you,’ Xiao Fang continued to say. ‘We didn’t get to express ourselves in any way when your husband passed on.’
‘I don’t need the money,’ Jia Jia responded.
The queue at security snaked through the entire hall.
‘I’ll keep it for now and send it back when I return,’ Jia Jia yielded so that Xiao Fang would hang up. It worked. Xiao Fang seemed pleased.
Jia Jia was one of the last passengers to board the plane. It was a habit that she had acquired from Chen Hang who despised waiting for others and so always preferred to be the last to scan his ticket. A few minutes after she had squeezed into her seat, a female voice announced the flight number and other details regarding the flight. She then repeated the whole speech in English, and finally left the passengers to talk among themselves in soft murmurs.
Grey clouds floated in the darkening sky. The ten or fifteen minutes during which the plane prepared to take off had always been the most sentimental part of leaving home for Jia Jia. Each time she boarded she would gaze out at the terminal buildings and runways from the sealed cabin, feeling melancholy.
The plane pulled away from the gate, steered towards the runway, and finally lifted off, zooming up and out of Beijing, rising above the clouds and stripping the city away entirely from Jia Jia’s vision. After that, there was no sensation that the plane was moving forward any more. It was astonishing, Jia Jia thought, how much human emotions rely on what the eyes can see. When all we can observe is endless condensed water vapour, or the horizon, or the darkness, we feel so incredibly detached from the world below us, as if all ties with our homeland have been cut. And the other passengers, in their designated seats, are just strangers in the cabin going towards the same destination only to separate again.
The hotel was hidden on a small road in the centre of Lhasa city, not too far from Barkhor Street. It was a business hotel and it seemed that nobody had put much thought into its design: a large, concrete shoebox with a dark red lid for a roof. With a dull, constricting ache in her temples from the high altitude, Jia Jia changed in her room into a long white linen dress. Out on the street, small shops of all kinds sold local produce, electronics, cigarettes. Jia Jia did not have a destination in mind, so she followed two black dogs for a few blocks and arrived at a river that she had seen from her car. One of the dogs had a limping back leg and was drinking from a puddle; the other smaller one had trotted further ahead. It had rained earlier and the bushes on the sides of the street were damp. The river flowed between bare banks, nothing but sand and stone. Jia Jia ripped two pieces of paper from her sketchbook, spread them over the rocks, and sat cross-legged.