10 Years later, breaking up while listening to leslie Cheung

By Jacqueline Xiong

Prose Runner Up of the Inaugural Surging Tide Summer Contest
​Selected by Angie Sijun Lou

十年後，邊聽著張國榮邊分手
​After Enshia Li

當愛已成往事
唱：張國榮

往事不要再提
人生已多風雨
縱然記憶抹不去
愛與恨都還在心裡
真的要斷了過去
讓明天好好繼續
你就不要再苦苦追問我的消息
愛情它是個難題
讓人目眩神迷
忘了痛或許可以
忘了你卻太不容易
你不曾真的離去

Bygone Love trans. Jacqueline Xiong
Singer: Leslie Cheung

Don’t bring up the past for me
Our lives have been stormy at sea
Though I can’t erase your memory
My heart’s love and hate remain to be
If we are to let the past break slowly
And continue tomorrow carefree
Please stop asking for me
Love is a difficult query
Which turns people hazy and dizzy
Maybe I can forget the agony
But forgetting you is not easy
​You’re never truly leaving

***

April Fools’, 2013. A decade after the abandonment of all artistic expression. You are deposited into a world of disquietude, confusion, and dissonance, waiting for Enya to come home. Let’s break up, you practice, but that doesn’t sound right. Instead you try 我們分手吧. It sounds better, but only in a slow, linguistic way. In Mandarin, there is none of the absolute dissolution characterized by breaking up--there is only 分手吧, a reluctant parting of hands, a goodbye.

On the thin slice of TV, rioting cymbals and paiban scurry across the stage of Farewell My Concubine. You and Enya watched this film too many times to count, the first few times with your respective families when it first came out in 1993, then the two of you together on this couch after your parents tsked and said it was too homosexual, too tragic. But even though you had to sit through the entire 171 minutes on a couch too sweaty for the summer heat, Enya liked it too much for you to turn it off. Enya has always been more transfixed by the ineffable tragedy of the film—a main character who was forced to become a Peking opera actor, a protagonist who breathed in tandem with the 旦 he portrayed on stage, a boy who blurred the lines between stage and reality until he gave up his life to find the answer.

He had a choice, you used to tell Enya during the ending theme song. She would’ve stopped crying by then. The boy could’ve disentangled himself from the story. The Hegemon-King Bids His Lady Farewell was only a play, nothing more. If he could’ve detached himself from the play, it would’ve saved him.

She only shook her head. 不瘋魔不成活. If you don’t go insane, you don’t survive.

What?

Do you see? He was mourning. He had to become someone else, someone within another story, so his grief wasn’t his own.

That’s silly, you said. Then nothing was his own—his love, his hate.

She shrugged. So maybe he had nothing, to begin with.

Now, you watch the boy’s last act as someone else. A sword flashes across the stage and leaves behind bloody blossoms on Lady Yu’s neck as she convinces herself to die for a man who doesn’t love her back. In every rendition of this play, the year is 202 BC, and Lady Yu dies for the Hegemon King. The vibrant curtains close and so does the boy’s role, but this is an opera within a movie, and so the tragedy continues. The boy is not Lady Yu but Cheng Dieyi, but he still cuts his throat for a man who doesn't love him back, on the stage he loves the most; and as the film ends, you know that ten years later Cheng Dieyi’s actor will also die, and that ten years after that, a part of you will also die.

Enya is right: it’s one life within another, one death within another, like these wooden Matryoshka dolls nestled so tightly into each other you’d think they’re one whole. Cheng Dieyi died alongside Lady Yu. Ten years later on April first, Cheng’s actor threw himself off the 24th floor of the Mandarin Oriental Hotel because some part of him had died alongside Cheng. Ten years after that, in the AC-less basement of a shabby apartment in Kowloon, you mourn Leslie Cheung and think of breaking up with your girlfriend.

The TV screen fades to black. You rewind the movie once more, waiting for Enya to come home.

你始終在我心裡
我對你仍有愛意
我對自己無能為力
因為我仍有夢
依然將你放在我心中

You live in my heart for eternity
​I still have love for you, baby
​I have no power against me
​Because I am still dreaming--
​In my heart, still loving

***

Enya is an artist, a sentimentalist, and an idealist. You think it started when her Ba chased her out of the house after finding a stash of nude figure studies in her room, all sorts of bodies and shapes that an already cheap history major shouldn’t be dabbling in. Enya said that her Ba yelled something about drawing shameful men and she yelled right back, I draw women too.

Since then, you and Enya live in the basement of an apartment on the cusp edge of Hong Kong. None of your families know— it’s a secret like the film you watch over and over again, even if you’re tired of it. Enya is an art major now and she spends days in figure studies that she sells for HK$20. You’re still staying up until 1 AM to transfer your handwritten novel manuscript to a rundown Mac that always reacts too slowly. You two are in love. Most days, that’s all that matter.
​
But some days, on the old cracked phone you got from your Ma, you still get a call here, a text message there. 什麼時候回家啊，寶貝？When are you coming home, sweetie? You have a home already, but some days you’re still depressed and turn it into art to pay rent. You think that’s what Enya does too, because artists always do something with their wounds until it’s no longer theirs. You think that’s a freedom artists have that no one else does.

You think that’s why Enya likes the movie so much—you think that’s why you hate it so much.

                                                                                                        ***

Cheng Dieyi mourns so much that you don’t notice. The only way he shows grief is through screaming—when his mother chops off his misshaped finger, when he shatters glass against the wall like sound alone can displace an opium addiction, when he shapes the cavity of his mouth for Lady Yu to reside in the hollow of his throat. He’s so silent and loud about pain that every shrill, excruciating sound he makes can be interpreted as a song; and maybe his grief does come in a song not sung by himself, but by Lady Yu.

At twenty-two, Enya does not mourn. She says it’s too public of a display, and that mourning is something stitched together of constituent sadness and rage, and that if you remake it, it goes away. She heaves old heavy canvas onto the couch and rolls new acrylic over the paintings that her Ba slashed with a kitchen knife. She says to you one night, Sometimes I think storymaking is insanity.

You remember: 不瘋魔不成活. So it’s survival?

She is quiet for a heartbeat. Could be.

What’s the difference, you say. Then, because the radio is still buzzing on some old Leslie Cheung song: I think you’re getting a little too crazy about that film.

Do you think it’s tragic too? She asks. You shrug.

We’re storymaking all the time. Nothing too tragic about us.

But he’s so tragic, she says. We can do whatever. But he only has one other person to be. It’s one person or nobody.

You make yourself emotional, you tell her. She looks at you absently, like you’re just another character study of hers, like you’re someone in a painting or a black-and-white movie or even a memory.

He only has one other person to be, she insists. Lady Yu has to love the Hegemon King, so he has to love Duan Xiaolou, who plays the king. Isn’t it tragic that he only has one other person to love? And the sad part is because Duan Xiaolou doesn’t have to be someone else, he doesn’t love him back.

Annoyed, you say, Can you stop talking about that film?

She closes her eyes for a moment and opens them again. You’re right. Slowly, she reaches to the bedside table and turns the radio low, until it’s only a teeny buzzing through the papery walls. We should go to sleep.

總是容易被往事打動
總是為了你心痛
別留戀歲月中
我無意的柔情萬種
不要問我是否再相逢
不要管我是否言不由衷
為何你不懂
只要有愛就有痛

The past and I are always touching
​For you, I am always hurting
​Don’t linger over years of our passing
​Or my tenderness before our parting
​Don’t ask me if we’ll be meeting
​Don’t ask whether I’m honest or lying
​Why are you not understanding
​That if we’re loving, we’re hurting

***

You don’t like Cheng Dieyi, but you like Leslie Cheung. On the radio, you pretend not to listen to his old songs, but you listen to them late at night more times than not. Unlike Cheng, Cheung is a real person— used to be, anyway, before he became a splatter of greasy blood and flesh at the bottom of a Hong Kong hotel.

Enya has always been too consumed with storymaking that she’s a little like Cheng Dieyi: loving you because you’re the only other person for her to love outside of her unspoken grief. Every time she rewinds Farewell My Concubine, she loves you more. Holds you closer like she’s afraid you’ll disintegrate into shadow. Sit side by side with you on the couch until your bodies are touching, flushed in the gooey, pooling summer shelter. It’s almost like a possession—storymaking until you’re only a story, until your feelings are no longer your own but a product of your ideal creation.

It’s almost like the way your Ma asks you, every other day after you told her you won’t be going home: 你真的喜歡她嗎？Do you really like her? 這種關係不會長久的。This kind of relationship won’t last. 兩個女生有什麼好交往的？What kind of relationships can two girls have? Questions you can’t answer, because for others, between you two, love is not a feeling but a fancy.

You’re here, you want to tell Enya. But you’ve never quite had that way of hers— remaking reality until it bends to her will. You can never reconstruct a new world aside from what you have. Your first time watching Leslie Cheung on stage, you were sitting with your Ma and Ba on the tattered couch in your old Beijing home, crunching on kuaci and sesame candy. While your mother tsked and your father left for another plate of kuaci, you watched as Leslie Cheung become Cheng Dieyi and Lady Yu, fitting into one shell after another so effortlessly, it was like he was unraveling layers of himself to the world. He did have something of his own, you thought. The process of becoming someone else but keeping your own grief.
​
Your grief isn’t like Enya’s— it does not change. But grief always stays. You won’t want it to leave. Somedays you’ll be so full of unexpressed love, you’re as light as a bird; some days you’ll flail and choke when it has no place to go but to writhe and crash inside of you. And when it shatters, the little pieces of grief don’t go away, either; they trickle into that empty hollow in your heart where your love is until they blow up into one enormously injured, bleeding thing. From that point on, with these shards wedged forever in your chest, you’ll be prepared to injure.

It’s like a contagion, these shards. You stick a hand into your solar plexus and twist, the way you would remove the pit from a ripe avocado until the fragment vomits itself with a sighed pop. It glitters in your hand like a stone someone plunged deep into the sea. And because it will no longer be yours after the breakup, this enraged grief, you set it aside to where Enya usually perches on the couch, knowing that when she opens the door and sits down, it will become part of her as well.

​有一天你會知道
人生沒有我並不會不同
人生已經太匆匆
我好害怕總是淚眼朦朧
忘了我就沒有痛
將往事留在風中
為何你不懂
只要有愛就有痛
​有一天你會知道
人生沒有我並不會不同
人生已經太匆匆
我好害怕總是淚眼朦朧
忘了我就沒有痛
將往事留在風中

One day you will know
​Life without me won’t be altering
​Life is already running, running
​I’m so scared of always crying
​There’s no pain in forgetting
​In the wind, no pain in leaving
​Why are you not understanding
That if we’re loving, we’re hurting
​​One day you will know
​Life without me won’t be altering
​Life is already running, running
​I’m so scared of always crying
There’s no pain in forgetting
​In the wind, no pain in leaving

***

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Jacqueline Xiong is a Chinese-American writer from Houston. Her fiction has been nationally recognized by the Scholastic Art and Writing Awards and can be found in Waxwing Journal, Sine Theta Magazine, and elsewhere. She enjoys composing music, putting together Spotify playlists, and tweeting chaotically at @jacquelanx.

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