At twenty-nine, I decided I wanted to live like a carefree girl. The resolve came absurdly late. In a year I would turn thirty—officially old, according to a rule with no rational basis but enough force to make me nervous. I looked around and concluded that everyone else seemed happier than I was, even people whose circumstances were no better. This made me anxious and, at the same time, indignant.
Why? I wasn’t doing badly. But I knew that conclusion was shaky. By height, looks, education, talent, income, I sat somewhere in the lower-middle of the crowd. Whenever I tried to locate myself in the world, I remembered a note from a middle-school lesson on social pyramids: most of us live on the bottom layer, one centimeter above the ground.
When I felt especially low, I called W. She had it worse. I had known her for ten years, and for eight of them she had been the mistress of a businessman. Not in the last two years—he had divorced, and they were officially living together.
But if you think W having a boyfriend and I having none made me feel small in front of her, you’d be wrong. The businessman was refusing to marry her. After paying a huge price for his divorce, he had discovered that what he loved was perhaps not W but the feeling of being in love—in other words, he wanted to keep playing. I suspected W knew this perfectly well and would not admit it now.
Lately W and I talked about Y, because Y’s situation was worse than either of ours. Y’s husband was a habitual cheater. Three days before the wedding, six months after it, during Y’s pregnancy, after Y gave birth—he cheated without tiring. Y never divorced him. “She says she can’t bear to leave the child,” I sighed.
“Her life would be much better if she hadn’t married him, don’t you think?” W offered cautiously.
“Of course.” As I agreed, I thought that W was also leaving herself a back door.
We left the café feeling a little better than when we went in. But back home that night I felt terrible again. I had seen a post: “What makes a master’s-degree-holding Party member kowtow at Baiyun Temple until his eyes go black?” A woman had gone through endless trouble to buy an apartment. To complete the transfer before new property rules took effect, she had resorted to superstition. She was miserable, but the replies were full of envy. She had an apartment! And she had managed the transfer before the deadline. Never mind that her decision had cost her extra money and kept her awake.
Before bed I had a realization: the game of comparing miseries cannot really satisfy anyone. As long as you compare, you will always feel wronged. At least my sleep was better than most people’s. When my eyes went black, I told myself.
Then, just as I resolved to use willpower to stop comparing, something else pushed me lower.
W asked me to go with her to try on wedding dresses. Her boyfriend had finally proposed, I assumed. On the day, he did not appear. “He’s too busy,” W said. “Besides, I want to surprise him.” To keep the surprise from becoming a shock, I sat in a high-end bridal shop while W spun in front of me in dress after dress. Ladylike, sexy, avant-garde, simple, luxurious, rhinestones, pearls. I had known W for ten years and had never seen her so radiant. She was beautiful enough to make me jealous. The saleswoman saw it too. Here was a woman of taste and means who, for some reason, was determined to spend heavily on a wedding dress. She kept repeating, “It’s once in a lifetime! It must be perfect! Look at this one—doesn’t it resemble the dress from Diana’s wedding?”
By the twentieth dress I could not take it. I texted Y to call me. “I’m not at the office... What? I have to go to the printer’s right now?” I barked into the phone and gave W an apologetic gesture.
I fled the bridal shop and did not want to go back to work. Half my desk was covered in things to handle, but I had already asked for leave. And the weather was good. PM2.5 seemed to have been sucked away by a giant sky vacuum; the sky was the pale blue of a Miyazaki film. To the café, I told myself.
It was my favorite café. The coffee was not good, but it was cheap. The homemade cookies tasted decent but once broke a tooth I had just had repaired. Still, an afternoon alone there was one of the few truly carefree moments of my life. Alone—except that day someone sat down across from me.
“Hello.”
I looked at him. I didn’t know him.
“Don’t remember me?” He smiled pleasantly.
“May I ask who you are?”
“We’ve met. You forgot?”
When I clearly looked confused, he raised a hand and tapped his forehead.
“Oh... sorry, I still can’t remember.”
He laughed softly. “Two years ago, at a party, someone walked into a glass wall.”
That did ring a bell. “You walked into it?”
“No, no, no.” The string of English gave him away: his Chinese was better than his English. I remembered—Japanese people always sound odd speaking English. He was the Japanese man who had given first aid to the person who hit the glass wall.
“You had a boyfriend then.”
“You had a girlfriend.”
The conversation began in a faintly melancholy key, because now we had nothing—and were five years older.
The Japanese man—Watanabe—said he had just come back from Afghanistan. Afghanistan, so he was a seasoned backpacker. There he had met a girl, fallen for her, and proposed. She refused: the trip was over; she was going home to northern Europe.
“Don’t you want to go back to your hometown?” he asked.
He shook his head. “No. You?”
I chewed my straw and thought. “Me neither.”
What was so bad about home? Nothing. It was beautiful. But people who drift outside too long find it hard to go back. Living abroad was lonely, but returning home made loneliness even harder to bear.
“Dinner together?”
“Why?”
“For lost youth. For everything we’ve lost.”
“That’s not a good enough reason.”
“For the fact that we can still meet here.”
“Let me think...”
My phone rang. The office: go to the printer’s now. Something wrong with the cover. Big problem. Before I got up, he took out his phone. “Give me your number.”
“Give me yours. I’ll call you.”
“No.” He insisted. I wrote my number on a napkin.
It was eleven at night when I got back from the printer’s. My phone showed twenty missed calls from W. I called back.
“Did you buy the dress?” Deep down I was relieved I had not lied to her. I also realized I hoped she would do better—even better than me. It didn’t matter.
W was silent for a long time. Then she burst into tears. “We broke up.”
“Broke up?”
“We broke up yesterday. He said he doesn’t want to marry me. That’s why I went to try on dresses. I couldn’t accept it. I just wanted to see myself in a wedding dress.”
So she hadn’t bought one. I thought of the saleswoman with sympathy. W cried for half an hour. In that half hour she said nothing, just cried in varying rhythms and pitches, looping. In ten years I had never seen her cry like that, but strangely, I did not think she was all that sad. She was releasing tears that should have been released long ago. So I said nothing comforting. When she finished, she hiccuped a few times, seemed about to say something, and didn’t.
“Get some sleep.”
“Yeah.”
She hung up. Watanabe’s call came immediately.
“Your line was busy,” he said, sounding nervous. “I thought...”
“I wasn’t avoiding you,” I said tiredly, without bothering to soften it. “But we can’t have dinner now, can we?”
“Why not? Do you have a kitchen?”
“Yes.”
“An induction cooker?”
“No... What are you planning?”
Half an hour later he arrived with everything for hot pot: an induction cooker, his own slippers, onions, konnyaku noodles, enoki mushrooms, shiitake, grilled tofu, garland chrysanthemum, beef slices. “I just suddenly wanted hot pot,” he said, dumping it all into the pot. “Do you have eggs?” I found the last two in the fridge. I wanted to scold him but did not know what to say.
“How old are you, this year?”
“Thirty-three.” He looked puzzled. “Why?”
“Thirty-three, no car, no apartment, no girlfriend, no proper job, drifting around the Third World all day—don’t you feel guilty?”
“No.” He shook his head. “On a night like this, eating hot pot together—don’t you feel happy?”
Happy? I fished out a piece of tofu. It had been boiling a long time. When I bit into it, hot juice shot out and numbed my palate. Was this happiness? I froze. As the numbness faded, pain flooded in and traveled quickly from my palate to my eyes. Before I realized I was crying, I had been crying for several minutes. He stared at me. When our eyes met, we both understood: at this point, there was no other way to end the evening decently except to sleep together.
When I woke, he was busy in the kitchen. The smell of hot pot hung in the air. “I cooked noodles in the hot pot broth,” he said. “We didn’t eat much last night.” How to explain it? We ate noodles in silence. Supposedly Japanese people make slurping sounds when eating noodles out of politeness—he didn’t.
“You don’t make noise when you eat noodles.”
“In some places, making noise eating noodles can get you shot.”
“Really?”
“I’m lying.”
More silence. Sleeping together and then eating breakfast—what did it mean? Perhaps nothing. “I’m going to Brazil tomorrow,” he said. “The ticket is booked. For Carnival.” He looked at me nervously. “I’ll call when I’m back... You won’t change your number, will you? Hmm?”
The noodles left me warm. It had been a long time since breakfast had tasted that good. So eating good hot pot was a kind of happiness—no matter how late it came, no matter how fleeting. We went downstairs and out to the street together. I was going to work; he was heading toward another happy place. Would he come back? Panic filled me. I could only say, “Don’t feel burdened.”
“What do you mean?”
“Don’t call just to spare my feelings. Or anything.” The panic grew. “I’m fine. Or think of it this way—this is the beginning of another great friendship.”
He smiled. “Casablanca.”
“You know that movie!”
“It’s my favorite.” He seemed relieved, for some reason.
“Goodbye.” He smiled. “You think too much, don’t you?”
He looked handsome when he smiled, hardly like a thirty-three-year-old. He had been to many places and would keep walking lightly. His shoulders were easy, his back straight. Watching him go, I felt an inexplicable warmth. My phone buzzed. W: “I think this outcome is a good thing. Don’t you?” I replied: “Yes.” Then I thought and added: “You’ll meet someone better, won’t you?” Traffic blared around me; the world was as noisy as ever. “Hey, you!” He had turned around ten meters away. “Don’t change your number!” he shouted. In the middle of the city, the shout was oddly clear. “I won’t!” I shouted back.