Dreaming of Fine Clothes
"The afternoons of walking around the clock tower in sunlight filtering through leaves have passed. Now it is every night—sitting in a rented go-kart, bouncing from bars to bathhouses over roads repaired with ear picks."
The phrase a classmate’s home, though utterly foreign to someone as universally despised as myself, was still something I experienced in my green years. From my limited experience, the air always seemed greasy; mothers or grandmothers—aged all the same; a rust-streaked Royal Dansk butter cookie tin, as though it had survived the Self-Strengthening Movement. Given the uniform distribution of samples, my own home was presumably much the same.
The clues of one’s life seem to have all first emerged in some particular summer. Youth is like a summer watermelon: cut open, it looks fresh and green and lovely; left too long, it swarms with flies—the maggots that have outlived adolescence. That summer, I sat on a mat spread across the floor and ate many slices of watermelon placed on that same mat. The air conditioner groaned and whirred. On the desk sat a 2008 Olympics commemorative laptop playing A Thousand Years of Frost and Snow. I still remember the China theme of Windows 7—the ancient Great Wall across rolling snowy plains, the black-canopied boats amid the sound of oars and lantern shadows. Later, I went to see them all, one by one.
The afternoons of walking around the clock tower in sunlight filtering through the leaves are gone. Now it is every night—bouncing in a rented go-kart over roads repaired with ear picks, from bar to bathhouse.
The dormitory where I now live can truly be said to have no “common people” passing through. Perhaps because of the pile of garbage heaped on the floor near the washroom, cockroaches frequently dart about—which at least gives the scene a touch of the day grows long, no one passes the bamboo fence, only dragonflies and butterflies flit about. In the corridors, people often lean against the windowsills, inhaling very cheap, low-quality cigarettes with an air of intoxicated self-satisfaction. Winter has arrived; kind-hearted classmates, after washing their feet, splash the foot-bath water onto the floor to help those who arrive late practice ice-skating. Most astonishing are the Wei-Jin literati-style gentlemen who, after using the toilet, walk out while waving their penises up and down at people, only pulling up their pants once they reach the smoking area. As for the dripping, water-stained ceiling, the electric light that never goes out—the list goes on.
It has been more than a year since I returned to Nantong. The grass will grow again next year, the wild geese will leave and return, the autumn wind will blow and blow again—but will the young master return? I still remember in ninth grade, during cram school, a classmate’s older cousin came to see her—skipping evening self-study, bringing bubble tea. Today, bubble tea has been proven to be a quasi-drug high in sugar and caffeine; I wonder how she is now. But I miss Xinnan Ying and Yixiao Lane downstairs from the cram school, the ginkgo trees of the Nantong Museum connecting to the bustle of South Street, with Nantong High School and Nantong University not far away. Ever since that elementary school summer when I rode my bicycle to visit every café in the city, it seems to have hardly changed. The weathered, mottled outer walls of the courtyard houses, the rising fragrant mist of the cafés—now twelve hundred kilometers away from me.
From now on, my soul will break over a thousand li, night after night, on Yueyang Tower.