Three Seasons

I. Early Spring

That early spring, Shanshan moved in.

Before then, I never paid for the heating bill. 30 Yuan for each square meter. That made almost 2000 Yuan for the whole apartment every month. As the only living thing in the room, I decided it was not worth it. 

At first, Shanshan was just one of those girls I took photos for. She would sit quietly, letting me snap shots of her eating a box of instant noodles on the heating plate against the wall. At the end of the session, the noodles turned cold. Her face was no longer enveloped in the vapor, and it suddenly seemed clearer than ever.

In focus.

She put down the box and looked up.

There was no window in the basement she lived.

She was probably the 21st or the 22nd girl I featured for the “Girls of 20 in Beijing,” a series I freelanced at a local magazine. “Young girls living their best time in Beijing is always a sensation,” said the editor. I was quite broke at that time, so I said sure.

Out of the 108 different girls I ended up taking photos for, Shanshan was the most natural in front of the camera. She was born for it. I knew that the first time I saw her. She was standing by a dim lamp-post, wearing a little black dress, which suited her very well. As she turned and led my way, under the moonlight, I saw the dress was so tight that the skin on her shoulders turned red.  

I once asked Shanshan if she was going to keep doing what she was doing.

She shrugged and lit up a cigarette. I couldn’t see her face in the smoke but I did hear her cough violently after getting choked by the smell.

It was an opened pack left by one of her costumers.

That scene never left me, and I couldn’t stop thinking of her eating those instant noodles that got all tangled up in that damp drippy dark apartment down in the basement. Perhaps all of the moisture in the air got squeezed up in that little apartment with no windows, making that early spring the driest season in Beijing. Maybe, at some point, I too felt the dryness and started to go back to the basement.   

It was the same instant noodles over and over again. The same brand, “Master Kang,” and the same flavor: hot spicy beef. The bright bold orange cover was the only thing that stood out in the whole apartment.

In that very little space, I watched her walk bare foot on cement, polish her nails in bed, comb her hair under the only lamp, and even change her clothes, to which I always avoided facing directly as a professional male photographer. There was never much talking between us. Only when it rained occasionally, there was the sound of water dripping down along the wall, leaving a big water stain. Sometimes right next to her shoes on the ground, sometimes by her pillow. But she was indifferent to me, and I couldn’t tell if she hoped I would leave or stay.

She was just one of those 20-year-old girls, among many others that I photographed, and I should have moved on a long time ago, I kept telling myself. But there was something that held me back, and I was waiting for something to happen, a sign for me to let go.

Gradually, I started to have instant noodles in that room, sitting on the heating plate by her side, watching the steam disappear in front of my eyes, and beginning to see the swollen noodles get tangled in the cold air. I got a spare key for the room even though she often forgot to lock it as there was nothing really valuable down there anyway. 

Once in a while, she would be away for a few days and then come back with some new clothes or expensive bracelets on her wrists. She didn’t look particularly happy or unhappy, and would quickly go back to her old routine.

One time, she was away longer than normal. After she left, I went down there every day, and I thought maybe she would not come back this time. But eventually, after three weeks, she did. All tired and weary, she looked sad. There was nothing new this time, except a full bag of unripe plums.

As she was changing, I saw there was something different on her back. Right below her left shoulder, there was a scar, still fresh and pink, squiggling like a worm. Before realizing, I covered the scar with my hand. I had forgotten to bring my camera with me.

She didn’t move and my hand stayed. For a long time, my palm was dry and warm until it became infected by the moist air in the room and began filled with steam and sweat. I couldn’t see her face, but her eyelashes were shaking like the wings of a butterfly.

Shortly after that night, Shanshan moved in. I never asked or felt the need to ask. First it was a pair of slippers and her pajamas, then a few clothes she needed to change, and at last it seemed only natural for her to stay rather than to leave.

It seemed something had changed between us after that night, though sometimes she would still disappear. I often woke up in the middle of the night just to check if she was there, right by my side, breathing quietly with her mouth a little pouty in her sleep.

Later that spring, Shanshan disappeared again and never came back. Two full bags of unripe plums were all she left behind.

The apartment felt lonely and was cold again. The following summer, I rented half of the apartment to Nana, a girl who was new to Beijing.

II. Summer

I didn’t like Nana at first because she was too cheerful. Back in high school, Nana would be the one of those kids who would sit in the front row and always raise their hands as quickly as possible once the questions were thrown out. She would hand in her homework on time, get good grades in exams, and maybe even good enough to be selected by the teachers to collect assignments, though I doubted if she would be the best person. There was too much compassion in her that I could tell from the start, and she would probably let the kids, the ones sitting in the back and staring cynically at the blackboard, get away with not doing their homework.

She was the ex of a rap singer I used to photograph for the series of “Underground singers of 20 in Beijing.” Again the same editor’s idea. The rapper sang at those night bars two blocks away. It didn’t matter which one because they all looked the same and smelled the same. The pay was similar too. Before Nana graduated from an arts college in their hometown, she would take the night train to come down to see him. Usually it was morning when she got here and she would stay until he finished singing the first song at the bar before heading back to the station for another night train back to where she came. Night trains cost a lot less than normal trains, but there were still lots of people who needed to take them and oftentimes Nana would have to stand all the way back in the train for there were only standing tickets left at the box office.

Nana came to Beijing the year after she graduated and lived together with that singer before discovering he had been cheating on her. It was kind of a cliché—a widow who came to the bar very often and was quite generous with him. The widow even promised to help him produce his first music video, and he stopped singing at the bars.

Perhaps out of guilt, the rap singer gave Nana my contact info and pleaded to let her stay with me for a while. He promised that as soon as he made a name for himself, he would come back for her. In the meantime, he wanted someone who was trustworthy to keep an eye on Nana. I doubted if freelance photographers were necessarily more decent than his singer friends, but I said nothing. Instead, I reached out to Nana and asked her to come over and take a look at the apartment. Maybe, having enjoyed the warmth of the heating system, I was looking for a better excuse to pay the heating bill before winter came again.

Nana worked at an extracurricular cram school as a calligraphy teacher. She had studied calligraphy when she was little and later majored in it at college. I watched her whenever she was practicing at the dining table. The brush was held so straight in her hand that it seemed the ink on the tip would fall at any second. She looked down at the Shuen paper, so focused as if there was something behind the paper for her to look into.

She stood still with the brush standing straight in the air.

It was sacred.

From the most angular standard script to the most unrecognizable running script, Nana could easily change from one style to another within characters. As the old Chinese saying went, “the writing is the man.” I often wondered what would be the writing of Nana since all of the characters she wrote down looked like floating clouds and flowing water, so interchangeable and so intangible.

Even though the pay of the job was not good, Nana seemed happy with it. She sometimes came back with gifts from her students, a candy or a crystal marble—something that a six-year-old would deem important. She never threw them away and collected them all in a small little wooden box where there was still a photo sticker of her and the singer. They looked much younger in the picture. She still had bangs and a pony tail and his face was clean-shaven. Shoulder by shoulder, they stared into the camera with soft smiles and rosy blush. 

I saw her take it out and stare at it once, though she didn’t know I was watching.

As a decent gentleman, I let Nana stay in my bedroom, and I slept in the living room. She never complained about how small the apartment was. In fact, she even brought back small succulent plants in some colorful pots.

I told her I didn’t know how to grow them, but Nana tried to explain that they were the most popular kind of plants and weren’t easy to die. Spiny on the outside, the plants could store water inside and live a long life without much care. They were called “fleshiness.”

Of course, I didn’t believe it. But I didn’t tell her that. After all, she looked so optimistic. 

Nana was living such a simple life in a city like Beijing—leaving home at 6:30 so she could get to work at 8, coming back around 6 to make dinner, and then talking to the plants before sleep. Sometimes if I came back earlier, she would invite me to dinner, as a compensation for the rent. Of course, she didn’t know that the singer had prepaid me for the whole season.  

Nana was not a great cook, but the stir fry she made was above average. She cut the meat and the green peppers into such small and thin slices that it was hard to differentiate whether it was meat or pepper that I was eating.

The dish was oilier than it needed to be. But because of the extra oil, the sliced meat was soaked with chilliness of the green pepper and became extra hot. I would often end up eating way more rice and feeling heavier down in my stomach. But it was a good weight to have.

I asked her where she learned to make the dish.

She didn’t tell me at first. Only until later did I learn that it was the singer’s favorite.

It was a few months ago when she was still looking for jobs after settling down in Beijing. Everyday, she would rush between interviews when he stayed at home, dividing his day between trying to catch up some sleep and writing new songs. By 6 or 7 at night, she would hurry back to make a meal before he went out to sing at the bar. There was never enough money when she went for groceries, so, as time went by, she learned to go to the market after 6, right before it closed, when she would get good deals without much bargaining needed.

As the only child in her family, Nana had never even touched a pigskin or fish scales before. But now she could cut up a fish without blinking her eyes.

She knew that he rarely got full. But there were only this much of vegetables and this tiny tiny chuck of meat lying there. What she could do with that? Then she thought of adding more oil. Not only did it add to the hotness, but it left some sauce at the end for him to mix it up with the rice. She was always glad to see him clean up the plate without wasting even one drop of the oil left.

Days went by, and by the time I started to notice there was not much oil in the dishes, spring was long gone. Nana stopped checking her wooden box or taking care of the plants. She seemed all closed up in her own world.

That’s when I knew it was all over.

By the end of the summer, Nana left. She took most of her belongings but left behind something as if she did it on purpose. When I went to see the singer and gave him the little wooden box, I watched this guy, who had a tough look with all of those different colors of tattoos on his arms, start to cry like a baby in front of me. On his left arm was a little writing brush tattoo that had red blooming roses twined around. The red was fading.

I was not particularly interested in watching any man break down, so I left. The box was almost empty except for that photo sticker. Perhaps she couldn’t rip it off from the box, so she abandoned them altogether.

Shortly after, the rapper started to sing again at those bars. Mostly heart-broken songs. Afterwards, he would get all drunk. That’s what I heard. 

By the time of fall, when I was cleaning the apartment for Ping-ping, I saw the plants, the “fleshiness,” forgotten at the corner by the window. It looked okay, still spiny. So I guess Nana was right, but I watered it anyway.

III. Fall

Ping-ping called me right before September ended. She said her landlord needed her to pack up before October and she needed a place to stay. As an old good friend, I agreed to let her stay with me, though temporarily.

When I saw Ping-ping at the door, I almost couldn’t recognize her. She was still so lively when I saw her only a year and a half ago. But now she looked barely alive. She seemed to have all withered up, gone with all the summer greenness. The leaves had just started to turn yellow and red. Fall was always the most beautiful season of Beijing, though Ping-ping clearly didn’t belong to that picture.

Her business of building a homestay hotel from an old abandoned two-storey house in the city had all fallen apart. Besides a pile of building materials and those twelve print pictures that I had taken to document her transformation process, there was nothing to prove even the existence of her hotel. Ping-ping had the idea of having a whole wall at the entrance just for these print pictures, so everyone who came in would know and appreciate the house more during the stay. She said she would print my name on that wall too, so maybe some day when someone big walked in, they would see my work, and then we would both be famous and successful. Six months away before that wall could be completed, she was requested to leave for the new governmental house demolition plan.

The plan was kept as a secret for a long time, even though there were rumors about relocating people in that old district of the city to the suburbs. But there were always rumors in Beijing and no one knew which ones to believe. Even if the plan was the one to believe, no one thought it would come so fast, including Ping-ping. She had signed a twenty-year contract with the local government just a year ago, but still she couldn’t get any compensation because of the relocation since she was not the actual owner of the house.

For most of the time after Ping-ping’s arrival, she stayed in bed, spending day and night staring at the ceiling. I tried to encourage her to eat more, and once even made her some oily pork green pepper stir fry, but she was getting thinner and thinner, like a piece of paper. She didn’t respond to most of my questions as if she didn’t even hear me.  

If there was anything that would cause some reactions from Ping-ping, it would be Big Huang, the orange fat cat that she had picked up outside of the hotel she was building. It was a small kitten the first time I met him, and now he had already grown out of my imagination. I even suspected that Ping-ping had been feeding him her own food this whole time. He was growing like a balloon, bigger and bigger, while I could see Ping-ping getting smaller and smaller.

Perhaps Big Huang also felt his owner had been moody; he would stick around her all the time, eating, sleeping, and even pooping. Because I didn’t have any cat food at home, I was being creative with the recipes I got online and trying really hard not to make things worse.

One time, I mixed up some small chunks of fish with rice for Big Huang because that was what we were having that night. As usual, Ping-ping didn’t have much and returned to her meditative mode in bed right after. When I came to check in with her later that night, I found some uneaten fish lying on her palm. I was not even sure if she noticed it since she had already fallen asleep. As I was about to throw it away, I felt something scratching my leg.

It was Big Huang.

I showed him the fish in my hand, and he picked it up with his mouth, and went to sit back down at the corner of the room. His two front legs made a circle around the fish as if he was trying to protect anyone from touching it so he could wait for Ping-ping to wake up and give it to her.

He was just lying there, placing his face against the floor and wagging his tail. Maybe he was happy that he could do something for Ping-ping.

This went on for a while until, one day, Ping-ping got up from bed. Maybe she got tired of staring. After all, it was a small bedroom with a small ceiling. Or maybe all the leaves had turned red, as if there was something burning outside the window. Or maybe Big Huang had brought enough food of his own to push Ping-ping out of the bed and get her own food.

Whether it was because of none or all of the reasons above, she was getting better. By the end of the fall, when the leaves all reached the peak of their colors, flaming in the sky like they had burnt out the very last bit of themselves, Ping-ping also got some color on her face.

She said she was planning to go back home.

“It’s been ten years since we came here for college and I have had enough,” she said. 

It seemed as if yesterday when Ping-ping and I left for Beijing. The whole village came to send us off at the train station as we were the only two who got into a college in the capital city of China. Back then, neither of us would have even thought of the possibility of sticking in Beijing for another six years after graduation. But everything seemed possible and reachable when we were young, and we thought of nothing.

Ping-ping left before December came. She said she couldn’t stand Beijing’s winter anymore. Before she got on the train, she stopped and looked back. At first I thought she was looking at me, but then I realized it was Big Huang that she was looking at.

“You want to hold him one more time?”

“It’s fine. As soon as I find my own place, I will come back and get him.”

Big Huang wagged his tail as if he thought it wasn’t a bad idea.

After Ping-ping left, Big Huang stopped eating for a few days. I was worried at first, but then I thought he was too big as a cat anyway, so a little starving might actually do some good.

When he started to eat again, he barely chewed but swallowed everything in the plate as if he could eat the whole world. I got him canned cat food now, even though I sensed that he preferred to have some fish that I cooked for myself since he always jumped on the table and stared at me whenever I had that. It made me wonder if he learned that trick of staring from Ping-ping.

The winter came a little earlier that year and it started to snow in early December. One day when I got back home, I received two big jars on which wrote “Shanshan homemade plum wine.” All the plums had shrunken and turned brown. I picked one drunken plum from the bottom of the jar and enjoyed the bitterness of the wine spreading on my tongue with a slice of sourness that was unique to the fruit itself. 

I started to pay the heating bill so Big Huang could get heat from somewhere else in the apartment besides my belly. From time to time, I would water the fleshiness whenever I remembered. I never really worried too much about it, since I knew it would continue to live and grow, in its own way.