Miss Zhong

Miss Zhong totally disagreed with many of my thoughts. For this, we often argued fiercely, and at the end of each argument, she would always say resentfully that what I believed was not only unreasonable but also immoral; she would also threaten me with a breakup, saying that it’d be unimaginable for us to stay together if I continue to think this way.

This line always marked the end of the argument, because it set me into pondering what exactly I was defending and whether it was worth losing Miss Zhong, such a convenient body and such a familiar soul. By this time, I’d doubt if my belief was even meaningful, if it only brought damages to my life and the relationship. Perhaps one should choose what they believe in according to their living conditions, especially the mental needs of the close ones they rely on.

For example, Miss Zhong hated it when I talked about air crashes. She agreed that they were unfortunate but insisted that talking about them all day was inauspicious and caused unnecessary mental pressure. She hated it even more every time before we boarded a plane, I deliberately pointed to the engine and said to her, “Our survival will be totally determined by this iron box. If it crashes…” I never finished the sentence because at this time Miss Zhong would pinch my mouth with her hand angrily and forbid me to continue. She thought we should only obediently line up, get the tickets checked, board the plane, find our seats, put our luggage, fasten seat belts, watch safety demonstrations, eat airline meals, take pictures of the scenery outside the window, and sleep. After getting seated, if I insisted on talking to her about famous air crashes, such as the Urberingen mid-air collision, where two planes collided at an altitude of over 30,000 feet due to errors by the air traffic controller, she would go “shut up” and repeat her physical censorship. Well, I guess at least she had best intentions. At least she hoped we could land safely so that we could check in at a hotel and spend our nights together there, all as planned. Thus, I stopped my chattering and started to caress her body slowly, which was usually stiff because of anger, and she would deliberately block me with her arms. But these wouldn’t last for long. As long as I kept caressing her, she would always subdue and snuggle up obediently, with at most some muttering.

However, my talking about air crashes was but a minor crime to her. My world was all too dark and evil, and in her words, I was “too pessimistic”. She couldn’t understand why I should always look at the most unbearable side of things. I often said, “Do you know that many people died from famines and that was not a long time ago?” She said, “Yes, I know these events. They are miserable, that’s true; but we are living a happy life, aren’t we? We have food to eat; in fact, we can not only enjoy our meals but travel by air on weekends. Why won’t you believe the world is getting better?” I said, “Will there be one day when we have nothing to eat and starve to death?” She looked at my face as if it was written in Greek and answered almost without hesitation, “How come that’ll ever happen?” At this moment I noticed a trace of disdain in her eyes. I didn’t know what such disdain meant at first, but later I did realise that she thought I was unqualified as a man, who was supposed to be a striving breadwinner. At least she was striving enough not to tolerate her partner thinking about starving to death all day. She never believed her efforts would be fruitless; she couldn’t accept my attempts to question the logical proposition that “hard work leads to success” because her entire life was built on this proposition. Her future was almost by definition happy and prosperous because she was by definition hard-working. As a result, she thought I wasn’t ambitious enough and therefore unqualified as her partner, which by her definition was her future husband.

But I think she totally misunderstood me. I never thought of giving up working for a better life, not for a minute. But I always thought, many of those who died in air crashes and famines were also hard-working during their lifetime. The two disasters which ended their life and rendered all their efforts futile were vastly different, but the underlying absurdity was quite similar, and they both reflected the utter fragility of human existence. Or even, a plane as a mechanical structure was designed based on scientific principles and a society as a distribution strategy was designed based on certain doctrines. Human survivals depended on these complex human designs, but when the designs failed in the face of a brutal and much more complex world, lives were inevitably lost. I thus felt that humans were essentially limited and that human existence itself was a misfortune. If hard work could change anything, that would mostly be attributed to serendipity the world happened to grant us. Perhaps in essence, we were all doomed to fail…

How could I tell Miss Zhong about all this? She would only say I thought too much. She even advised me to see a therapist; she said this several times with a firm tone. I had no idea how much patience she spent putting up with me, but I gradually realised that perhaps my revelation of my thoughts itself was some cruelty to her. Perhaps she had her reasons in thinking that way. Perhaps what her twenty-year life experience told her was to believe in a better tomorrow, because such a belief had brought her more benefits than others. Perhaps it was difficult for anyone to build a worldview for themselves, and any worldview was flawed, imperfect, and unable to withstand questioning but simply conveniently used for one’s life. If she was lucky enough to always face a benevolent world, at least one not as dark and evil as I thought, or at least one without air crashes and famines, then her worldview, however naive and primitive it was, needed not be criticised or upgraded. Even if she was not lucky enough, the specific misfortunes that lied in store were unpredictable, and thus I never knew in advance what philosophy I should help her prepare. Perhaps she would need different principles in the face of different kinds of misfortunes, and these could only be obtained from her own experience in this absurd world. Then, who was I to instil what I thought was right in her mind?

But I had a problem myself. Such a problem might be something I was born with, or it might be due to my early experiences. No matter what, it was an unalterable fact, just as the millions of facts in this world created by God. This problem with me was that I couldn’t stop telling what I believe, especially to those I felt close to. Despite the arguments, Miss Zhong and I often made love and we both enjoyed it, and my animal instinct made me feel close to her, which forced me to reveal more about my worldview and which led to more arguments, as she never agreed with my thoughts. So, I often felt that despite our physical compatibility and some superficial matches in our life, Miss Zhong and I were living in completely different spiritual worlds. Others couldn’t relate to me if I tell them such feelings, because all my friends believed we matched each other well. I even felt that Miss Zhong could never relate to this as well, because perhaps the whole time it wasn’t that she disagreed with my thoughts but that she completely ignored it. Perhaps the arguments were nothing but a game to her and she was never serious about them. Perhaps she never believed that I believed what I said, and she considered all my words as joking and grandstanding. Her rebuttals or disdain might be just instinctive actions of her sensitive character and they might be totally inadvertent, just like how she cried hard over the cliches of TV shows. All her tolerances might mean nothing to her, because she was so hard-working that she had long been used to dispelling all kinds of pain, including the pain of hearing unpleasant words from her partner. Perhaps to her, my words and her rebuttals were more like conversations between an unworldly child and a patient mother, and I wasn’t a thought criminal but an ungrown bud. Her solid confidence in her worldview made her believe that I would one day think and speak the same as she did, through our every altercation and every intercourse.

Writing to this point, I can’t help but think of our trip to Beijing. I walked to Tiananmen Square with Miss Zhong. The place was crowed that day and we had to wait in a long line for the security check. There were armed police standing guard. We opened our bags and showed layer by layer to the inspectors. After being allowed entry, we walked towards the Tiananmen Gatetower. On the other side of Chang’an Avenue, Mao’s portrait hung high in the centre of the gatetower, facing south; on this side, Sun’s portrait was propped up on the ground of the square, facing north. Miss Zhong saw the two leaders she had always admired and was excited beyond words, taking photos through gaps between the crowd. But I couldn’t imagine, over the traffic-flowing and overly wide Chang’an Avenue and over all the historical events that passed here like a river, how Mao’s Hunan dialect and Sun’s Cantonese could talk to each other. The two leaders couldn’t leave but keep silence whilst being revered by the crowd, concealing all their thoughts forever. Suddenly, I felt that the fundamental difference despite superficial harmony between Miss Zhong and me was akin to the two portraits. I sighed slightly, took her soft and unfamiliar hand once again, and walked with her towards the underground tunnel.