How Are You Tonight?

1

There are days when, for a few moments, you would appear before my mind’s eye. Just your face—so clear and vivid it felt as though I could reach out and touch you. The rest of the scene was a blur. It looked as if you were buried beneath ruins, like a survivor in the aftermath of an earthquake, with rubble and debris piled up to your neck.

All the while, your unwavering eyes stared straight at me. Not a word, not a sound, came from your mouth. I tried to meet your gaze, but I couldn’t. For reasons unfathomable to me, I could see your face with perfect clarity, could see you looking at me, and yet whenever I tried to return that gaze, I failed. It was there, as real as the crescent moon in the sky , and yet it wasn’t really there.

I wanted to reach out to you. I wanted to pull you out of the rubble, real or imagined, with my bare hands—and with my nails, if that was what it would take. I wanted to cup your face in my hands, to loosen you from the ruins, to bring you back to me.

But you remained silent, motionless, without the slightest trace of emotion on your face. You only stared, in silence, until I began to lose you, helplessly watching you slowly fade into some unknown corner of my memory. Only the stare remained—the haunting, unforgettable, unbearable stare.

2

You once gave me a black-and-white photograph of yourself. Or, more likely, I asked for it after seeing it in your purse, or perhaps while visiting you at home. I no longer remember which. A small, thumb-sized, one-inch portrait, the kind used on school or work IDs in those days, and even today. You looked young in the photograph, eighteen or nineteen perhaps, but even beneath all that youth there was a buried yet unmistakable air of somberness and reserve about you. Your hair was tied back for the photograph, revealing your full, round cheeks, which have become inseparable from my memory of you.

At the time I had a small collection of books, some dearer to me than others. That was where I kept your photograph. As for which particular book it was, I no longer remember. I could make a guess if you asked me, but I would probably be wrong, though not by very much, for it was a rather small collection.

Some of those books have probably been lying all these years in the storage room of my parents’ apartment, where, I hope, they still are. It has been so long since I last stepped into that dark little room, cluttered with my parents’ things and the odds and ends of my own early years.

But who’s to say? Perhaps one day, before the building is demolished to make way for new apartments, I’ll make one last trip there. And perhaps, when I pick up a book at random and give it a shake, your little portrait might fall out, driving tears from my eyes.

3

In those days, getting to your home was never a problem. Either I happened to be nearby because of my aimless wandering through the city, or I found myself standing at a bus stop somewhere within the city limits. And if I was neither nearby nor at a bus stop, but had been thinking about you all day and felt I would die if I didn’t see you that day, I simply walked across town to your house—to be with you, your parents, and your little brother, who was in his last year of junior high. The distance never mattered. Neither did the walking. Whatever shoes I wore in those days, if I should ever find them again, I’ll put them in a box and display them like sports trophies.

That was how we usually saw each other. Then one day I asked if you would like to come visit me at my home. You, the shy, reserved girl with the round cheeks, took the handwritten address I handed you, almost absent-mindedly, or perhaps you were thinking about something else entirely—one of those things girls often keep to themselves. In the end, you said nothing.

On the day I had asked you to come, I went out early and waited at the street corner where I thought I would spot you if you came. And there you were, turning the corner and walking toward me.

That was the first time I saw you from a distance. The first time I watched you walking by yourself. And what I saw filled me with quiet happiness. Not simply because you had come, but because everything about you seemed exactly as it should be: the way you walked, the way you carried yourself, even the street you were walking along, and the sky above it.

There used to be a bus route in the city whose western terminus was about a twenty-minute walk from your home. Its second-to-last stop before the eastern terminus—the railway station—was only a few blocks from my parents’ apartment. The route passed through many of the city’s old streets, some so narrow they had been built for horse-drawn carts rather than motor vehicles, with little shops lining both sides and banners fluttering overhead, just as they do in old movies.

Only recently has this episode returned to me, apparently dormant all these years. My very first thought was, You were really brave.

I say that because we had not known each other very long. Most of the time we met at your home, with your parents and younger brother nearby. And whenever we were alone, I did most of the talking. Yet most of what I talked about had little to do with the person I really was. I spoke instead about the person I dreamed of becoming, or imagined myself to be, nourished by the books I was reading at the time. You did not know very much about me, or so I believed then, and still do.

And yet, when I invited you, you came, taking what was then the longest bus route in the city. At any point along the way, you could have changed your mind. You could have begun to doubt, gotten off at the next stop, and taken the return bus home.

Yet you came.

We sat in the little room that was mine, separated from my parents’ rooms by a shared balcony. What we talked about that day I can no longer remember. Probably nothing of consequence. All I can recall now is you sitting at the desk in my room while I sat beside you. You were only an arm’s length away—the round cheeks I had grown so familiar with and so fond of, your fine dark hair, and simply the fact that you were there.

It was then, seeing you sitting so close to me, that I realized the pendulum of your heart had, at some point, begun to tilt toward me, and that you were beginning to feel at ease in my company.

4

It’s that time of day again, sweetheart. The sun is setting, the wind has calmed, and high in the sky I can see the first stars beginning to twinkle.

How are you tonight? You look so pale. I wish I could do something to help. Maybe one day I’ll find a way to release you from the darkroom that is my memory. When that day comes, and you’re finally free, like a butterfly fluttering and testing its transparent wings, seeing the light again after so many long years, I’ll be happy at last. I’ll also be devastated. But most likely, I’ll simply feel helpless as I watch you flutter away, take to the air, disappear into the distance, and never return again.

But until then, I’ll enjoy your company.

I just thought of something the other day—a question I never got to ask you. I know you had only recently finished high school when we met. But where did you go to school? I don’t think I ever asked you. And what about primary school? Did you attend school in the city, or back in your father’s village of Lumeiyi?

In junior high I had classmates from different ethnic groups. They spoke both Han Chinese and their own native languages. Earlier still, when I was in primary school myself, I spent two summers in a Yi village, helping my father with household chores so that he could work in the fields. Many of the villagers were bilingual too, and spoke both languages fluently.

Were you bilingual too, my pale one?

It’s a pity we never talked about that.

Memories work in peculiar ways. They puzzle us. At least, they puzzle me.

Even now, I can still clearly remember your mother’s voice, the unmistakable accent of someone whose native language was not Han Chinese. But hard as I try, I cannot recall yours.

Was it because you were a person of few words? Or because you were reluctant to chime in while I was talking—which I did quite a great deal—for fear of interrupting me? I don’t know. But somehow, your mother’s voice has remained with me all these years, while yours has slipped away.

5

The Cadre School where I once worked was just next door to your father’s home village, and I wonder whether you ever walked by it on those occasions when you returned from the city for holidays or special occasions. Your village and the school were within walking distance of each other, and they shared the same landscape: rolling hills, low pines, stubborn thorn bushes, and exposed red earth. You must have walked those hills, just as I once did. Maybe not as much as I did.

And that reminds me of another question I should have asked you, but somehow never did. Were you born and raised in the village? Or were you born there, but raised in the city, where your father held an administrative job? Or—and I have a feeling I wouldn’t know what to make of the answer if it should turn out to be true—were you both born and raised in the city?

That would make you a Lumeiyi girl only in name…

Wait… wait…

Something is happening.

I remembered it.

Your voice.

It just came back. You had just come back. Your voice had just come back—soft, warm, intimate. That’s how you always spoke, as though you were chatting with a close friend sitting beside you, crochet in your lap, knitting needles in your hands. That’s how you spoke to your parents. And that’s how you spoke to me.

But all this time, I thought I had forgotten what your voice was like.

6

Rain came today. Heavy, steady, nonstop, endless. It rustled on the roofs and rushed through the gutters. The rain just kept coming down until your heart gave out. But still it kept on falling. The grass was wet, the trees were wet, the sky was wet. Across the valley, the hills merged into rising steam and fog. The whole world was gray.

I wish to tell you something I have only recently realized, after forty years: how much you, and meeting you, meant to me. And how much I wish I could tell you that. But I have no way of getting that message to you. I cannot do it through WeChat, because I don’t have your contact. I cannot do it through other social media, for the same reason.

I suppose I could play the messenger myself, go looking for you, and hand you that message in person. But even if I could, the building where your home once stood must have been gone for many years. As a last resort, I could ask the Bureau of Civic Services for help. But even then, I still might not be able to find you. For what kind of bureaucratic system, even a benign one, one designed to serve the people, would still have a name like yours in its records?

Come to think of it, how did you get away for so long with a name like that? Through childhood, through school, and into early adulthood. Did the other children turn their heads every time they heard your name called?

7

Evening’s here. How are you tonight, my pale one?

They say today’s a holiday. There’s going to be a fireworks display by the river tonight. I was asked if I’d like to come. No, I didn’t want to go. I was simply too tired, feeling ill all over. In the end, I was the only one who stayed behind.

I dragged myself to the couch, lay down, pulled a pillow close, wrapped my arms around it, and shut my eyes. I did not want to move, too tired even to keep my eyes open. It was the kind of weariness a person feels after days spent waiting for the return of a missing loved one. I knew what it was, for I had experienced it before.

It was called love-sick.

Whoever coined the term deserved a Nobel Prize in both medicine and literature, for this is what being in love really is. Millions of people suffer from this illness every year, at least once in their lives. The words mean exactly what they say. You become sick because of love. You’ve lost your appetite. You don’t feel like doing anything. Your room isn’t cleaned. Dirty laundry lies all over the floor. You don’t want to talk to anyone. You have that distant look about you. Above all, all you want is to wrap yourself in a bit of rag, lie there, and be miserable.

I’ve not experienced this for a very long time. Not ever since that October day when I saw you walking down the street, by yourself, under an October sky.

To be continued.