‘Merry Christmas,’ he said, taking a canvas from her hand and replacing it with a glittery, silver bag.
‘Oh, thank you. I didn’t know you celebrated Christmas.’ She had not bought him a present. In fact, she had not even been aware of the date. She had planned to spend the morning going to the 798 Art District, to the gallery where she had worked for a few years after university – and where in fact she had first encountered Chen Hang – to see if she could find a job of some sort that could pay the bills.
‘I don’t,’ responded Leo. ‘I don’t like foreign holidays. But it’s a good occasion to give you this.’
She opened the bag and saw a photography book titled The Sea. True to its name, the book was a collection of shots of tall ships riding against stormy waves, solitary lighthouses, and boundless seascapes that almost looked like oil paintings.
‘This is beautiful,’ said Jia Jia, closing the book and storing it on the shelf, next to Chen Hang’s collection of photography books. She walked over to Leo and held his hand. ‘What do you think, shall we go to 798?’ she asked. ‘For an exhibition? Perhaps a coffee?’
The exhibitions in Beijing were rarely much good, but she felt compelled to celebrate Christmas with Leo now that she had accepted a present from him. After breakfast, she tried to decide on what to wear. She must not dress too casually, but overdressing would attract too much attention. She put on a dark blue polo-neck and some black tailored trousers.
On their way to 798, she began dreading seeing her old colleagues, especially since she was going with Leo. She had not been back to the gallery since her husband’s death, and she did not want to spend the afternoon hearing condolences.
Jia Jia had met Chen Hang during her first week there as a receptionist. He had called in one day to visit the owner and had given Jia Jia his business card before leaving. At the time, she had not had many friends there: the manager was older and married to her university roommate’s brother, and the other younger employees had boyfriends their own age, many of whom had careers in art as well. Once she started dating Chen Hang, her colleagues distanced themselves from her, as if she belonged to a different category of woman: the practical kind who did not care for romance. She had never really minded this impression – she did not see it as shameful – but going back on a date with a man her own age would confirm to her colleagues that their idea of romance had been the correct one. They would think that it had taken her husband’s death for Jia Jia to understand something they had known all along. That, to her, was more humiliating. So she guided Leo elsewhere.
They headed towards UCCA, a bigger gallery that seemed to be popular that day. The entrance was packed with young couples and parents who wanted to educate their children. There was a large banner outside with a portrait of a middle-aged man, an artist who worked with ink on paper. From the photo, no one would have ever guessed that the man was a painter: with his white shirt, brown blazer and cropped hair, his appearance resembled that of a businessman or a politician.
The gallery was as lively and crowded as it could get. People lined up side by side, moving along the walls from painting to painting like students waiting for food in a canteen. Every picture was largely the same but with slight differences in composition. Each one had a woman and some animals in it. Sometimes the women would be looking right, and other times they would be facing left with the same expression of indifference. The cows, the sheep, the birds and the rabbits in the paintings, however, always stared straight at the viewer.
After the exhibition, Jia Jia and Leo spent the rest of that afternoon setting up his bar. They did not talk much, and when he made any remarks about the exhibition, about how wonderful it was, she disagreed with most of them. When the bar opened, she said that she was tired and walked home alone. They had forgotten about the coffee.
Back home, Jia Jia placed the fish-man sketch next to a blank canvas and studied it. She wanted to paint it. Her idea was that the experience of reinterpreting Chen Hang’s sketch as her own art would give her a clue or two about the fish-man and her husband’s dream in Tibet. She had often done this when she found it difficult to relate to a piece of artwork – she would reproduce it onto her own canvas, and through this, understand what that piece meant to her.
The sketch looked easy enough to copy. After all, it was only the face that was intricate; the body could have been drawn by a child. She sketched the outline of the fish-man onto the canvas with a pencil. The light was shining from the upper-left corner, so she briefly shadowed out parts on the right side. She stepped back and observed the proportions – about a third for the head and the rest for the body. She would have to decide on the colours of the fish and Chen Hang’s drawing gave no help there. The silver fish from the deep sea came to her mind. It was a good start, she thought. Next, she had to mix the paint for the background. She began with a vibrant blue, like the shallow parts of the ocean on a sunny day. It was challenging as always – the colours came out artificial, like food colouring. She put her brush down and imagined the sea in a transparent blue, constantly changing in hue when the waves moved in soft, quiet beats. She added some yellow to her paint and spread it neatly around the fish-man. Dipping a smaller brush into silver paint, and then mixing it with some grey, and finally with a dab of dark, muted green, she painted its body. She wanted it to be like Chen Hang’s drawing, rough and unfinished, so she left it at the blocking stage and avoided adding too much detail.
Jia Jia was unable to paint the face. That part of the canvas, as if rejecting her, erased all the outlines and colours from her mind. Whenever she looked at the empty face of the fish-man, it was as if she had forgotten how to paint. She did not know where to put the eyes, what colour the lips should be, how much space the nose was supposed to occupy. Sure, she could measure out the proportions from Chen Hang’s sketch and transfer it to her own canvas, but she had never liked to work that way. Even though she was copying, it still had to be her painting.
In the days following, she painted more. She took out six canvases and painted different versions of the fish-man. Sometimes she began with the body; other times with the face. But whenever she directed her brush to the empty oval where the face was supposed to be, her mind went blank, and she could not recall what kind of an expression the fish-man wore.
Only at night, when she lay in bed, would its face finally come to her, lucid and precise. She would jump up, go to her canvas, pick up her brush, and all the images would evaporate from her mind again. Once, she looked through the photography book that Leo had given her, but quickly remembered that it was entirely filled with landscape photos. Had someone given this collection to her when she was younger, it would have helped her tremendously. But now, it was not what she needed. She needed a face.
It was not until a cold and brisk January night, two weeks after the exhibition, when Jia Jia needed to step away from her paintings, that she made her way to Leo’s bar again.
‘I tried to call you,’ said Leo as he watched Jia Jia sit down in her usual seat. ‘How are you?’
‘Oh, I’m doing well. I was away for a few days,’ she lied.
Why did people ask each other how they were? Jia Jia wondered. How are you was a question that most of the time resulted in an untruthful response. She could not tell Leo that she was not well, not really. It was a dreadfully lonely experience to be asked, as if she were being given a small rock to step on to cross a deep, rough river.