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  Just as the sun is whimpering its way down the side of the sky, the last girl shows up. She is a model from Hong Kong who renamed herself Zi Yang, The Light. She’s got a good face, but like most girls who assume they deserve nice things, she is extremely unfriendly. Then, just as everyone is packing up to go, she emerges naked from the apartment wrapped in Gangzi’s blue bedsheet. Her waist-length black hair licks at her face, her arms gather the bouquet of fabric against her small breasts, and the sheet clings to the silhouette of her long legs. Sitting among our coffee cups and cigarettes, the rest of us hardly notice her; we smile at her but not much more.

  Not Gangzi.

  He ties his hair into a ponytail, picks up his medium format lens, and follows her onto the tile roof like a puppy. He takes her hand and helps ease her bare feet onto the chimney.

  With the sheet dripping around her, she looks ten feet tall and glorious. She lowers the sheet and ties it around her waist, covers herself with her hair, and looks away, purring like a cat, in a halfhearted bargain for attention.

  So there’s Gangzi, from whose lips escapes a “My God,” and he fumbles with filters and straps to get the perfect photo of her. The loose tiles creak beneath his feet.

  “You’re gorgeous, too gorgeous,” he said. “You should father my children or marry me, whatever comes first.”

  Sara whispers to me, “I think this is going to be trouble.” And I know just as well as everyone else that Gangzi’s falling for this girl and it isn’t going to be pretty.

  If we could grant Gangzi one wish, he’d probably wish to marry a tall girl. A very tall, very hot girl. He claims that he wants to give his children a fighting chance. Can we really blame him though? Even if he only claimed to be of average size for a man, he’s probably only five three—in the morning, after he’s taken a big breath and holds it. Most of the time the poor guy has to buy shoes in the children’s department.

  But all that is bullshit, it’s just for show. Gangzi, perpetually heartbroken Gangzi, is the only one of us who can still memorize Tang Dynasty poetry, is always the first to notice if sorrow crosses any of our faces. I guess deep down we could all see that his wants were so simple—to be loved, respected, and not tossed away, for his meager holdings on this earth. It was all the wrong in him that made him so special and we were all protective of him, ready to hurt for him like we would hurt for no one else.

  After the shoot is over, we go across town to D-22 to hear JJ’s band perform. D-22 is the first underground punk rock club literally screamed into existence by foreign exchange students in the university district. JJ is opening for Car Sick Cars whose hit song is five-minute repetitive screaming of the words “Zhong Nan Hai,” which is both the Beijing capitol building and the most popular brand of cigarettes among locals. Foreigners love it, and the audience throws cigarettes on the stage like projectile missiles.

  When JJ and his band hit the stage, it’s obvious that he’s wasted and he tips over the mike stand as he gyrates in his Adidas tracksuit. He is singing in English, “I trim girls all night long, white and black, I know how to trim those.” It’s Cantonese slang for “hit on girls,” coarsely translated into English, being yelled through a broken mike. These lyrics are new, probably bits of conversation he’d heard earlier that day, grammatically Chinese with clauses that don’t finish, lyrics that don’t make sense. We all know he kind of sucks, but so does everybody else and everyone’s liking it. The Chinese groupies who took day-long buses into the city just to see the show are thrashing their heads from side to side as if they’re saying “No no no” when they’re really saying “Yes yes yes.” JJ finishes the set by jumping off the stage and feeling up a drunken Norwegian girl who doesn’t seem to mind.

  Like everyone else I know, JJ drinks a ton. Unlike everyone else, he doesn’t seem to want to make it big. He says he just doesn’t see the use of being a hardworking citizen. I can’t argue with that. I know most ordinary people will work their whole lives at some stable job and yet they’ll never be able to afford so much as a one-bedroom in Beijing proper.

  When the next band starts plugging in their instruments, Sara goes to mingle with the Canadian bar owner while JJ joins Benji and me by the bar.

  “I am not writing for record labels. I just want to write music for the humiliated loser, the guy that gets hassled by the police, the night owl with no money who loves to get drunk,” he says. I don’t know if he knows that his description doesn’t include someone like me, but we toast to it anyway.

  We all go clubbing in Sanlitun at a place called Fiona. A once-famous French architect purportedly designed it in one hour. Every piece of furniture is a unique creation, and as a result, it looks like a Liberace-themed junkyard. Rainbow, an old acquaintance who runs a foreign modeling agency, is throwing a birthday party for herself.

  “Can you believe I’m turning twenty-nine again?” she says as a greeting while she ushers us into her private room. She kisses everyone on the mouth and presses tiny pills into our hands.

  “Oh, to be young and charming, I can’t think of anything more fabulous,” she says in her signature mixture of Chinese and English as she drapes her arms around a new model boyfriend. His name is Kenny or Benny, and he looks like a skinny Hugh Jackman. He is obviously a homosexual, but that’s just not something Rainbow has to accept.

  The DJ spins funky house tracks and the springboard dance floor floods with sweaty people who pant and paw at each other. Old businessmen drool at foreign girlfriends who lift up their skirts on elevated cages. Rainbow buys the drinks and toasts herself into oblivion, grooving around the dance floor yelling at the foreigners to “go nuts to apeshit!”

  I can’t find Gangzi or Benji, so instead I try striking up a conversation with the skinny Hugh Jackman. He asks me to teach him Chinese so I start by pointing to the items on the table.

  “This is a bowl,” I say.

  “Bowa! Ah bowl!” he says with a shit-eating grin on his face.

  “Shot glass.” I push it across the table toward him.

  “Shout place,” he slurs, laughing. “Oh yeaah, shout place!”

  It’s a good thing he’s handsome, I think. I want to leave, but I’m too high to wander around looking for my friends. I stick by the bar for a bit and talk to the attractive waitresses who swear they’ve met me before, in another city, in another life, and I am sad that they have nothing to say to me but lies.

  Beijing is a city that is alive and growing. At any given moment, people are feasting on the streets, studying for exams, or singing ballads in KTVs. Somewhere a woman with a modest salary is buying ten-thousand-yuan pants from Chloé to prove her worth. Even though I couldn’t cut it at the Beijing Film Academy, I knew the city itself was for me. The dinosaur bones found underneath shopping malls, the peony gardens, the enclaves of art—these things were all exhilarating for me. I walk through new commercial complexes constructed at Guomao, which look at once like big awkward gangsters gawking at one another, as if hesitant to offer one another cigarettes, and I think, I belong here.

  Tonight, somehow I end up crawling out of a cab to throw up by the side of the freeway. Traffic swirls around me even though the morning light’s not fully up. Then out of the blue, Sara and Benji appear, apparently because they happened to see my big head with the grooved patterns shaved into it projectile-vomiting as their cab was passing. They pat me on the back and we eat hot pot on the side of the road from an old Xin Jiang lady. I am so happy to be with them. It’s at this moment I realize that what’s going on is already slipping away, and while the cool air blows against my damp face in the taxi home, I can’t help but miss it already.

  One night, my last real girlfriend He Jing calls me.

  She says, “I’m moving to Shanghai next month, and I’m wondering if you could lend me some money to get settled. You know I’m good for it.” She knows more about me than anyone and there’s not even a hiccup of hesitation in her voi
ce.

  That’s just how He Jing did things, the girl couldn’t just sit on a chair, she had to lie in it, with her head cocked to the side and a cigarette dangling dangerously. She is a sound mixer I met at the academy and always dressed as if she had a Harley parked out back. Her playground was Mao’s Live House, where she rejoiced in the last blaze of China’s metalhead scene.

  There was never going to be a future for us, my father would never have accepted a poor musician into the family. Yet it was she who dumped me, simply saying, “I wish I could give you more, you should have more.”

  I meet her for coffee and hand her an envelope of money and she accepts it as though it’s a book or a CD. She has cut her hair like a boy but is still fiercely radiant with confidence.

  “We’re doing well, you know,” I say. “Benji’s trying to get British art dealers to buy his photographs and Sara’s in talks with a Dutch museum to exhibit her media installation. And Gangzi just got published in a Finnish fashion magazine.”

  She goes, “That’s impressive, but what are you doing?”

  My throat is dry, and I’m not sure what to say, so I go, “I’m in between projects.”

  “Right,” she says, reaching over and messing up my hair.

  Gangzi’s relationship with Zi Yang isn’t exactly normal either. Two days after they met, she moved into his room and began spending all her time in his bed. It is so weird in there even the pets stay away. For one, she would walk around topless, one minute laughing, the next waking us up with bawls.

  “That girl should be taking antidepressants,” Sara said.

  In the mornings Zi Yang tells Gangzi she loves him and he believes it. In the afternoons she says he is disgusting to her and he believes that, too. “You can’t just pick and choose,” he tells us. “When you’re trying to get someone to love you, you have to take everything.” When she sleeps with him, he marvels at all the soft places on her body he can kiss. It amazes him how easily he bruises when she kicks him away.

  Gangzi’s website quickly becomes a shrine to Zi Yang’s face. She is so crazy it’s as if she stole his eyes and hung them above her at all times. Gone are all the projects he’s been working on and we hardly see him without her. It is only Zi Yang, her in the bathtub with goldfish, her on his bed with broken liquor bottles, lovingly captured and rendered over and over again.

  We send one another his links over QQ. “This is kind of obsessive,” JJ types.

  “It’s just a major muse mode,” responds Benji as he leans over to kiss Sara behind her ear.

  More than anyone, Sara is the woman who helped all of us get over our shyness with and general distrust of white people. With Sara we learned many of her American customs, like hugging, and that took months of practice. “Arms out, touch face, squeeze!” We learned that Americans are able to take certain things for granted, such as the world appreciating their individuality. That they were raised believing they were special, loved, and that their parents wanted them to follow their dreams and be happy. It was endlessly amazing.

  We also learned English. We realized how different it really was to speak Chinese. We didn’t used to have to say what we meant, because our old language allows for a certain amount of wiggle room.

  In Chinese we can ask, “What’s it like?” because “it” can refer to anything going on, anything on your mind. The answer could be as simple sounding as the one-syllable “men,” which means that you’re feeling stifled but lonely. The character drawn out is a heart trapped within a doorway. Fear is literally the feeling of whiteness. The word for “marriage” is the character of a woman and the character of fainting. How is English, that clumsy barking, ever going to compare?

  But learn we did, expressions like “Holy shit” and useful acronyms like DTF (Down to Fuck), and we also became really good at ordering coffee. We learned how to throw the word “love” around, say “LOL,” and laugh without laughing.

  That afternoon, I buy He Jing a parting present at an outdoor flea market. A guoguo, a pet katydid in a woven bamboo orb. They were traditionally companion pets for lonely old men, and the louder their voice, the more they were favored. He Jing picks out a mute one. The boy selling it to me says it will live for a hundred days.

  “A hundred days?” she says as she brings the woven bamboo orb up against her big eyes. “This wee trapped buddy is going to rhyme its own pitiful song for a hundred whole days?”

  I tell her, “That’s not so long, it’s the length of summer in Beijing. That’s the length of a love affair.” I realize I am giving away all my secrets. I think, I want to roll you into the crook of my arm and take you somewhere far and green. When she turns back toward me, I know the answer to my question before I even ask it. I realize it is a mistake, the gesture, everything about me. She isn’t going anywhere with me.

  The only thing I have to offer her is money, and she has it already. I want to tell her that there’s a lot of good shit about me that she would miss out on. But there’s no art in me and she sees it plainly in front of her. Instead I kiss her fingers goodbye. They smell like cigarettes and nail polish, and I swear I’ll never forget it.

  By autumn, the trees shiver off their leaves and Zi Yang, too, becomes frigid and bored with Gangzi. Our old friend Xiu Zhu comes back from “studying” abroad in Australia. She is a rich girl who looks like a rich boy. She has a crew cut, taped-up breasts, and an Audi TT, which she drives with one muscular arm on the steering wheel. Within an hour of meeting Zi Yang, we can all tell that she is stealing her. By the time they finish their first cocktail, Xiu Zhu is already whispering English love songs into Zi Yang’s ear.

  We see less and less of Gangzi after that. He still hangs out with both of them, going to lesbian lala bars and getting hammered. The girls hold hands and laugh while he drinks whiskey after whiskey. He mournfully watches them kiss as if he’s witnessing an eclipse. A group of confused lesbians politely ask where he got such a successful gender reassignment surgery and he drinks until he passes out.

  For my part, my father stops writing me emails asking about my well-being and just sends me a plane ticket. I don’t tell anyone, but I go to get my visa picture taken. The agency makes me take my earring out. Within the hour, the hole closes and now it’s just a period of time manifested as a mole.

  In winter, Zi Yang moves back to Hong Kong and breaks two hearts. Shortly after that, Gangzi packs up his things as well. He tells us that under Beijing, beneath the web of shopping malls and housing complexes, lay the ruins of an ancient and desolate city. And beneath that there are two rivers, one that flows with politics and one that flows with art. If you drift here, you must quench your thirst with either of its waters, otherwise there is no way to sustain a life.

  “I realize there is nothing for me here,” he says, “no love, not for a guy like me. It’s waiting for me back in Wenzhou, that’s where it must be.”

  He sells his cameras, his clothes, even his cellphone.

  “I don’t want to leave a road to come back by,” he says.

  We all take him to the train station where he is leaving with the same grade-school backpack he arrived with. It’s as if a spell has broken and suddenly we feel like jokers in our preripped jeans and purple Converses. We remember years ago, after having borrowed money from relatives, those first breaths taken inside that station. How timidly we walked forward with empty pockets and thin T-shirts. We had been tu, dirt, Chinese country bumpkins. And now one of us was giving up, but what could we have said to convince him he was wrong? What could have made him stay?

  Everyone on the platform has his or her own confession to make, but when we open our mouths, the train arrives, just in time to keep our shameful secrets to ourselves. Someone is about to give away the mystery of loneliness and then the train comes. A reason for living, the train comes, why she never loved him, the train comes, source of hope, train, lifetime of regret, train, never-ending heartache, train, train,
train, train, train.

  Afterward we huddle inside the station’s Starbucks, quietly sipping our macchiatos. Our cigarette butts are swept up by street sweepers whose weekly salaries probably amounted to what we paid for our coffee. The misty mournful day is illuminated by the pollution that makes Beijing’s light pop, extending the slow orange days.

  Out of nowhere JJ says, “I’m not sure if I actually like drinking coffee.”

  Sara says something about leaving soon to go home, and from the look on Benji’s face it is clear to me that this time she might not be returning.

  I want to say that I might be leaving, too, but instead I focus on an American couple sitting across the room from us. The woman holds in her arms a baby who doesn’t look anything like her. They are an older couple, ruddy-cheeked and healthy, and they order organic juice and cappuccinos in English. As we sit together in those chairs, their Chinese baby starts screaming and banging his juice on the table. The couple is starting to look despondent. The woman catches us staring, and the four of us look encouragingly at the baby. It’s going to be okay, Chinese baby. You’re a lucky boy. Such a lucky boy. Now please, please, shut up, before the Americans change their mind and give you back.

  We somehow finish the Brass Donkey video and it’s a semipornographic piece of garbage that gets banned immediately, of course. The band is happy because they’re stamping “Banned in China” on their CDs and are being invited on a European tour. Without telling my friends I go to the embassy to pick up my visa, secretly building the bridge on which to leave them. As I get out of there, I push back swarms of shabbily dressed Chinese people just trying to get a glimpse of America, and it makes me feel lightheaded with good fortune.