Chapter 11 eleven

Walker also spent New Year's Eve in my house in 1985.As if he was still a bachelor. We drank that day.He brought a bottle of foreign wine, and what I took out was "Chinese Red Grape". He was a little drunk. I couldn't help but say openly: "Walker, you can't hide anything from me anymore! What happened between you and Xiaowen? I ask you to tell me! Because I am your best friend in China, I It is my responsibility to understand!" "I really didn't expect that she would be such a woman!" Walker stared at the bottle and said, "She seriously trampled on my self-esteem and personality, I hate her! She refuses to learn anything. She Selfish. She thinks beauty is everything! As my wife, she goes to various social occasions all day long, and knows more foreigners than I do! She actually accepts gifts from other foreigners behind my back Her precious jewellery! This is more than I can stand! She's dating people, writing letters..."

"Who?" I couldn't believe it. "American." "What identity?" "reporter." "Which reporter?" Walker named a major American newspaper. "Nonsense!" I yelled, "you're lying to me! . . . " "Me?...Nonsense?..." Walker fixed his eyes on me. "Yes! That's it!" I stood up, walked back and forth in the room, and finally stood in front of Walker and said loudly, "You can't bear the loneliness of being a bachelor in China. You hope that there is a Chinese girl who can legally enter China. To sleep with you at night, to entertain you when you're bored! Now that you're bored with her, you're making up these lies to make up an excuse for you to abandon her in front of me! If you can't come up with enough evidence to back up what you say , you are no longer my friend! In my mind, you are no different from those gringos who cheat and play with our Chinese girls!..."

My son, who was building blocks on the floor, looked up at me uneasily, wondering why I was suddenly so angry at Uncle Walker. "What are you doing?! How can you talk to Walker like that?!" My wife stopped me severely. Walker stared at me blankly. "I'm sorry, I'm a little drunk." Ashamed of my faux pas, I sat down across from Walker again. "You're not drunk." Walker whispered, took out a letter from his pocket and handed it to me: "Look! Since you imagine me so bad, look! If you didn't tell me that I would never show you such a letter. My pride will not allow me to do so."

I hesitated for a moment, took it over and looked at it. It was a love letter, written by Xiaowen.On the back of their eight-inch wedding color photo that Walker gave me, there is Walker's signature, as well as hers. I recognized her handwriting on the letter.The strokes are crooked and tight, like a baby curled up in its mother's womb. The paper is full of ugly Chinese characters, full of shameless words and sentences.It was indeed written for Americans.No, an American. After reading it, I didn't know what to say to Walker for a long time, and I couldn't find words to comfort him.

My wife took the letter from me and read it.After reading it, he said angrily: "Walker, divorce! You divorced her! How can such a woman be worthy of being your wife? If you refuse to leave, we will look down on you too much!..." Walker said, "No, I can't. That's exactly what she wants me to do. As soon as I divorce her, that American will try to bring her to America. I'll be ridiculed! That American He is richer and has more status than me! This incident will embarrass my parents, and it will also affect my job search after returning to China!..." He patted the table, looking so impulsive.Both my wife and I looked at him sympathetically.

After a long silence, Walker whispered again: "Maybe I shouldn't have told her the truth." I asked: "What do you mean?" He said: "I told her that maybe the two years in China were the best two years in my economic situation in the next ten years. Because I enjoyed the treatment of an expert in China. Although I obtained a doctorate, after returning to China I have to be self-employed. If there is no place to employ me, I will become an unemployed person. So I advised her that for our future life, I should not be required to buy her so many extravagant and useless things. It was only after such a serious conversation that she made the acquaintance of the American. That's it, I told you everything as it is..."

I said, "Could you bring her over once so I can talk to her?" He said, "I can't do that. It's impossible. You're a writer, but you don't have anything in her mind." No status. She despises you as much as you despise her kind of Chinese girl. She is not interested in literature, she is not interested in any art. All she worships is money. She is only interested in society, balls, costume jewelry and Eat, drink, and be merry..." His wife couldn't help interrupting him and said: "Then there is nothing I can do about her?" He was silent for a while, and muttered to himself: "There is only one way. As soon as my contract in China expires, Just take her back to Sweden immediately. After getting rid of the entanglement of that American, she may become better..."

New Year's Eve in 1985 was not at all pleasant for us.Walker left anxiously after eleven o'clock. My wife and I lay on the bed, turned off the lights, and kept talking about him and Xiaowen. His wife regretted and said: "I really shouldn't have objected to you preventing Walker from marrying Xiaowen." I did not say anything. I was thinking: money, money, money, how many Chinese girls, including young girls, have given their youth and beauty to some foreigners cheaply!Or a one-off "auction," or "retail."They seem so hurried and impatient in this kind of transaction, as if "the opportunity never comes again."They are a bit "sacrificing at all costs".In this exchange their youth and beauty are the weights, and love, if there is one, is but the scales.For money, a dancer marries a vulgar Hong Kong businessman covered in money.For money, movie stars are willing to be gringo's "kitchen lady".Maybe it was one hundred to one, and there was a Xiaowen.Playing with a foreigner like a foreigner playing with a Chinese girl!Tit for Tat?But it was unfair and unrighteous for it to fall on my foreign friend Shen Walker.

Xiaowen reminds me of "Aunt Bei" and "Woman Stirring Water" in Balzac's works, and "Nana" in Zola's works.How much foreigners get cheaply in China, how much they will pay for it someday!It's as if gunpowder was spread from China to foreign countries, and the foreign guns of the Eight-Power Allied Forces used it to invade China!It is the revenge of ideas on ideas, of ways of life on ways of life.Money—beauty can be exchanged for money, and it might as well be regarded as money—revenge on money.What a special way Xiaowen used to warn foreigners who come to China to look for flowers and willows: Beware of revenge!

Just how sad I am for Walker! The dry branches are projected on the curtain by the moonlight, like arteries, veins, and capillaries.The wild cats were scurrying around the ceiling, making frightening calls... For two full months, Walker didn't come to my house again. The last time he came, there was a twenty-inch Hitachi color TV in the car. He told me that his contract to work in China had expired.The office was very satisfied with his work and wanted him to extend the contract, but he did not agree.He is going back to Sweden, the ticket has been booked, the next day. "My only comfort is that you were my friend until I left China. For more than two years, you and my wife have always regarded me as the most welcome guest. Every time I come to your house, I experience this .In ten years, maybe I will not come to China again, this car, this TV set, let me give you a souvenir!..." He said to me sincerely.

I accepted his kindness, but not his car and television. I showed him my savings passbook—my savings was enough to buy three color TV sets at the time, but there were black and white ones, so I was not in a hurry to buy them. As for the car, I can't drive it, I have no place to store it, and I can't get gasoline, so it can only cause me a lot of trouble. "I'm so stupid," Walker said, "Knowing that you won't accept it, but I still..." I said: "Walker, remember two sentences, 'A friendship between gentlemen is like water', 'Don't take a penny lightly, dare not Forget a porridge'. This is the principle of our Chinese people. We must strive to maintain our national self-esteem. We not only rely on economic development, but also rely on maintaining national self-esteem to stand on our own among all nationalities in the world. Accepting your car and TV set, I will feel forever out of balance as a Chinese. I hope you can forgive me..." I gave him a pair of cloisonné vases I had bought in advance... I did not receive a letter from Walker until one and a half months after he returned to China. The letter said: I am in China, and according to the Chinese concept, I married Xiaowen.I am in Sweden, and according to Swedish law, I have divorced Xiaowen.She will live in Sweden for more than half a year, and after obtaining Swedish citizenship, she will go to the United States.Please don't worry about her situation. According to our Swedish divorce law, I will pay for her minimum living expenses within six months.She is very sociable and has started to make some new friends around her.She still has "capital".I admire her a little bit. A childcare worker in a small factory on the streets of Chongqing with a monthly salary of more than 30 yuan can go to Sweden and then to the United States without relying on power or connections. Isn’t she a little bit amazing?I don't hate her anymore.I re-evaluate her and get to know her.I think she has an adventurous spirit of a western woman.In the last century, many Westerners went to China to take risks. Now the century of some Chinese girls going to the West seems to have begun. In your Chinese words, is she considered a "strong woman"?I wish her good luck in the United States... I wrote back and said: China's current policy of opening to the outside world makes almost every Chinese yearn to expand their spiritual, ideological, conceptual, experiential and living worlds.More Chinese people have obtained honors and degrees abroad by virtue of their genius, learning, knowledge, and diligence, making the whole world believe that the general IQ of Chinese people is no lower than that of Westerners.They are really "strong men".And Xiaowen is just a commodified woman.Her adventurous spirit is therefore nothing but a phenomenon of "inflation".This kind of woman exists in China, Sweden, and the United States.There was in the past, there is now, and there will be in the future. Half a year later, Walker wrote to me from England, telling him that he was recommended by a friend to teach at a certain university in England.As a side note, Xiaowen has obtained Swedish citizenship, and went to the United States to find that American... I thought of the two sentences at the end of the book "Nana": hit Paris!Hit Paris! ... She was twenty-five years old, after all.Primary school education level, bad handwriting, no talent, only a beautiful face, only a woman's body, and then "beat" from New York to Paris, how can she get along?As a woman who regards herself as a weapon to conquer the world, she will never reach the apex of "brilliance" like "Nana". I turned out the colorful wedding photo of Walker and her, cut her with a pair of scissors, tore it up and threw it into the wastebasket. She is no longer Chinese.It is no longer my foreign friend's wife, and I have no reason to keep an "advertisement" of this "commodity" in my album. In addition to Walker, I had friendly intercourse with several foreigners: three Japanese, one American.The three Japanese are: Motoko Sato, an international student from the Chinese Department of Peking University; Hidemi Harada, an international student from the School of Foreign Languages;The American is Professor Bi Kewei, Director of the China Studies Program at the University of California, San Diego. The door is open, and in the literary and artistic circles, who doesn't have many foreign friends?It has never been my work that I am proud of.I know very well which level they should be placed in contemporary Chinese literature.What I am proud of is that in my contacts with foreign friends, I follow an old saying of my ancestors - "Don't take a piece of paper lightly".I have never made any request to my foreign friends, such as going abroad, bringing something from abroad, exchanging foreign exchange certificates...for getting some foreign goods, going abroad, or other personal interests and desires, forgetting that I should How to be a Chinese, I—a peer of the Republic, say to you loudly—I despise you all! I am a person who may make three types of mistakes in the future: I will be criticized for writing an inappropriate article; I will be fined for violating traffic rules; in the world. Even after I made these three types of mistakes, I still have to say to you - I look down on you! Alas!Oh no! stop!stop!I should stop this note here!Too much talk is bound to be lost!And I've "lost" it a few times! Not long ago, some comrades asked me to give a lecture on literature to the graduate class of the Central Party School.Ben didn't want to go.When I go to the Central Party School, do I count as someone?Is it worthy to speak?But that sincerity is hard to come by.It would be too "arrogant" to refuse flatly.I dragged it a few times, but finally couldn't.then went.Then I spoke.As a result, right and wrong arose. Someone wrote a letter to a central leadership comrade, saying that Liang Xiaosheng blatantly said that he was not a member of the Communist Party and that he would never want to join the Communist Party of China!So the leading comrades of the Central Committee instructed: Find out how this Liang Xiaosheng usually behaves?Check who "invited" him to the party school?If something happened, it should be dealt with seriously.So some investigators went to the Central Party School to investigate. What's the matter? ! After all, our party is returning to the style of seeking truth from facts.The result of the investigation - "Liang Xiaosheng's speech is basically progressive."A non-Party writer's speech at the Central Party School is "basically" "progressive", so that's fine, right?Who dares to say that every sentence he says is incomparably correct? The party's style of seeking truth from facts has protected me. Life is easy and God is hard to grow old. Counting on my fingers, I have been a Beijing citizen for nine years. In nine years our republic has been buzzing with many great changes.The gate of our Beijing Film Studio has a national-style archway.I am from twenty-eight to thirty-six.Into the bustling literary world, living in isolation, painstakingly "climbing the grid", and at the same time carved wrinkles on his thin face. Today, I am writing the final text of this essay in a garden guest house in Changping County, more than 40 kilometers away from the capital. This place is called "Hongnigou", and there is a small village nearby called "Huyu Village". It's winter.The northwest wind sprang out from the depths of the mountain, whistling violently and hissing, sweeping down the dead leaves from the branches.In the entire guest house compound, counting the waiters, there were only five or six people, a few rows of empty rooms, and the door rattled, as if haunted.The heating has not been turned on, my hands and feet are freezing in my room, and I can see my breath.On the table, a few roses are inserted into the bottle, and the buds maintain the last vitality.I cut them during the day, and I couldn't bear them to fall red all over the ground after the cold. Next to the manuscript paper was an anonymous letter with no address—transferred from the editorial department, just finished reading it. The letter said: "Liang Xiaosheng, be careful! I advise you to write less bullshit novels like "Ulcer" in the future! Using novels against us will not bring you any good results! One day we will see how we punish you!..." A letter full of threats. Not afraid.It's just a little cold. Even if it is cold, I still have to write it down. After all, we are a socialist country.Did he—they, also use a bullet in the letter to challenge a writer? Well, I will fight! My hands are shaking and my heart is cold.Not because of the cold, but because of anger... Beijing, Beijing, I call you in my heart, like calling my mother.How I want to snuggle in your arms, warm my body, warm my heart!At the same time, let me listen to my mother's heart - how it beats powerfully and steadily.The beating of my mother's heart is a lullaby to me. Also the heavy drum of our time. I seem to hear it, heavy, but how powerful! Mother, mother, I love you! we love you……