‘It all became even worse when two of our friends gave birth at around the same time. One girl, one boy. Your mother locked herself inside the apartment for a week: she wouldn’t speak to anyone, not even to her own mother and sister. Finally, a close friend of mine at work gave me an idea. He found a doctor who agreed to tell your mother that negative moods had dire consequences on fertility and that she mustn’t allow herself to be so gloomy. That worked. The next day, as though nothing had happened, your mother began eating and sleeping normally again. She offered to take care of our friends’ babies, for which our friends were delightedly grateful and called her a kind-hearted woman. She soon became known around the neighbourhood as the childless woman who ran a nursery in her home. As a result, during the day, our apartment was always bursting with the frantic wailing or laughing sounds of children who weren’t our own. But once nightfall came, an unendurable silence fell upon our home.
‘This continued for a while. Even though the crisis seemed to be over, we both knew that there was a wound below the surface that was festering and corroding our minds, and if things continued the way they were, one day, both of us would be nothing but empty, fractured shells.
‘I suppose the other thing that became different in our day-to-day lives was that your mother began to read. A lot. She immersed herself in all sorts of books. When she started reading a book, she wouldn’t stop until she finished the entire thing. She read Chinese novels, European classics, poems, books of quotations from famous people, newspapers – pretty much anything legible she could lay her hands on.
‘One winter afternoon, out of the blue, while I was tossing some cabbage into a pan and she was reading Jane Eyre, she looked up at me and announced that she was going to Tibet and wanted me to go with her. It was impossible, I laughed. It was too far, and we didn’t have the time or money. How ludicrous. But she was entirely serious. I could tell from the way she widened her eyes and held her hands in fists. I never found out whether her decision had anything to do with Jane Eyre, though I can’t imagine how those two things could have been related.
‘Though it was not easy, I still managed to take a month off. She sold her bicycle and we used our savings to buy an army motorbike to be picked up in Chengdu. We barely packed anything, only some thick clothes, a duvet, a tent we borrowed, and some basic cooking equipment.
‘A few days before we were supposed to leave, we found out that your mother was pregnant. I felt as though everything was going to be wonderful again. Your mother, with you growing inside her, was the most prized treasure to me, and I became excessively protective. I asked an acquaintance to bring all kinds of natural supplements from Hong Kong, fearing that your mother was not getting enough nutrients. When I came home with the bags of supplements, she began to cry, saying that we needed to save money for the trip.
‘I wasn’t going to let her go to Tibet. She was far too delicate for such a journey. What if we lost our hard-earned child? Whose responsibility would it be? Did she understand how difficult it would be for us to find an adequate hospital if we were in the wild? But your mother said she knew, she knew better than anybody, and she wanted to protect her child more than I could ever imagine. But she needed the trip just as much as she needed our child, she told me. She was set in her own ways and refused to budge an inch. She spewed out a series of accusations, calling me self-centred, overbearing, ignorant and limited. She told me that I was a man without dreams and didn’t even understand hers. What was her dream? We were finally going to have a child. Wasn’t that what she wanted?
‘When she saw that I was perplexed, the exact words that came out of her mouth were these: “I must have this child, but I must also go on this trip. Otherwise, I’ll be eternally caged in this apartment, for this life and my following lives, like you, caught in the delusion that there is some sort of meaning to all this. But we live in a far larger reality.”
‘For the first and only time, I slapped her, across the face.
‘Neither of us had the heart to cook dinner that day. We refused to speak to each other. Your mother continued to prepare for the trip, though I wasn’t sure who she had in mind as a substitute driver if I insisted on staying. It turned out that the day came, and nobody showed up. She grabbed everything, including my clothes, and headed for the train station. She didn’t have a motorbike licence, but once she arrived in Chengdu, she would have ridden off regardless, with or without me. I knew her well enough. Her determination frightened me, and out of what was most likely my male instinct to protect my wife and my unborn child, I yielded and took over the luggage.
‘During our trip, we did come close to death, more than once, due to landslides or rain. Once, we encountered a wolf pack in the mountains while we were camping at night. We were terrified: we secured ourselves inside our tent and prayed for safety. Another time, our bike tumbled over while we were taking a curve, and your mother was thrown off, injuring her shoulder. There weren’t any health stations nearby but we were close to a small town. We knocked on every door, and luckily we found a man, an ex-combat medic, who was willing to help us.
‘For many nights, I watched your mother’s back as she stood ruminating in the darkness of the wild mountains, taking short breaths under a star-filled sky that seemed as though we’d be able to touch it if only we jumped. Her thoughts were silent, and I never mustered the courage to ask her about them. We didn’t fight again, nor did we talk much.
‘We never made it to Lhasa. We stopped for two weeks at a small village. It already seemed to me like we were at the edge of the world. Your mother was having severe reactions to the harsh conditions on the road, yet she continued to insist on travelling deeper into Tibet. She would hug me and say that only when she had gone as far as she could would she be able to return home with me. I didn’t question this, because I had come to see that I should never have tried to apply my understanding of things to her. She was a different human being, after all. I made up my mind to accompany her on this journey, to the very end, and then bring her back home with me. I told myself that I was being selfless, and what I was doing was for love. So I believed her unconditionally, or at least kept that facade, when she came racing back to the farmhouse, on the second night we spent at the village, and told me about the world she had plunged into.
‘She said, with her eyes wide, that she had met a creature, a man with the body of a fish, near the river. It wasn’t big but it wasn’t small either. It measured about a metre long, she told me, and it was swimming in the air, just high enough for her not to be able to reach it. Behind the creature, there was darkness. At first, the darkness resembled black curtains drawn across an unlit stage, and the creature was whirling in front of it, under the spotlight. After a moment, once her eyes adjusted, she could faintly discern the movement of water. The creature turned away from her and swam into the water behind, and your mother, fearless as she was, followed.
‘Inside, it was black and infinite, she recalled, as though she was at once trapped in the core of the earth but also floating freely in outer space. Though this was an inaccurate description, she added, because the real sensation of being in those waters was incomparable to anything else she could imagine. I prodded for more, and finally, after many stuttering attempts at giving me an answer, she arrived at the conclusion that her reality had become nothing but water. This baffled me even more.