AnYi 安亦

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Finish a story with the line, “Nothing ever felt easier to say.”

[Trigger Warnings: Violence, Abuse, Mention of Suicide, Non-Consensual

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Alumni Dinner

I was early. There was hardly any customer in sight on the seventh floor; the janitors were still working in the corners, the sound of their giant mop dragging against the artificial marble floor somewhat screechy but soothing. Three waitresses approached me at once, each with a bunch of gaudy leaflets in hand and a portable voice amplifier around their waists. They all spoke so quickly as if their rehearsed speeches were so repulsive that they couldn’t wait to throw it up on me.

Usually I would pretend to be deaf under such circumstances, and they would pretend not to notice that I was pretending to be deaf and kept talking, until I walked past that hallway and everyone would pretend nothing had ever happened. And they would go on to vomit the same speech onto other customers. That’s how you keep civilisation going. A little pretence works for everyone and everything; once you’ve discovered that hidden rule for whatever context you find yourself trapped in, that will save you a lot of unwanted trouble.

My mother, however, is an extraordinary exception to the rule. She barged out of the toilet just as I was surrounded by the leaflets and voice amplifiers. Without hesitation she marched into the group and waved her handbag like a revolutionary flag, batting the waitresses and their feigned high-pitched sweetness away with the assistance of her own thunderous rant. ‘Go away! Not interested in your discounts! Don’t follow us, do something useful with your life instead!’

She dragged me by the elbow with such force that I could feel a bruise forming in not-so-distant future. But that’s the norm with her. She seems to have an ever-lasting source of exuberance, which she endeavours to utilise on everyone else around her as well. Retirement didn’t liberate her from the work duties where she used to make moulds for cakes and order her small team around; instead, she took up ballroom dancing and organised a small troupe that won prizes in intercity competitions. Ever since the pandemic began, she quickly restored her favourite old pastime, which was moulding me as if I were some kind of jelly. My dress is always too short, my hair too curly, my bra straps too conspicuous, my walk too masculine. My uterus annoys her, because it has yet to produce a baby. Her efforts into changing those facts include buying me a dozen new dresses that are probably still trending in North Korea, throwing away my curlers and saying she thought they were broken, and sighing loudly with pointed significance whenever I take out a new packet of sanitary pads.

‘You do know if I didn’t need these there’s basically no hope for babies either, don’t you?’ I asked her once. She just sighed again. ‘But you’re not even married.’ She might as well have said, ‘but you’re not even alive’.

‘Precisely why I don’t plan to have children.’ I tried hard to follow her logic, but she discarded it quicker than I could comprehend. ‘And that’s why you need to get married.’ she would say, and this would go into a loop. The same conversation took place so many times in the past few months that I’m amazed my father hasn’t gone insane yet just from having to listen to it.

He said staying indoors for so long probably made her a little grumpier than usual. Maybe he was right. I didn’t refuse when she insisted on walking me to the shopping centre, and that was probably why.

‘So how many people are coming to this alumni dinner?’ she asked, as we finally arrived at the right restaurant and was surrounded by the right leaflet and voice amplifier. I told her it wasn’t a big group, but we had invited our old head teacher and his wife.

‘Ah, I remember him. Chen Limin, right? Taught you history, didn’t he?’

I nodded. She was still reminiscing. ‘I liked him. Such a good speaker. Didn’t he win an award in your final year? There was all the fuss about the filming and stuff. It was on TV.’

‘Yes.’ I said. ‘Outstanding Teacher of the Province in 2009. I remember that very well indeed.’

She cast a deep look at me. ‘Well, that’s good. Something to keep conversations going with. You need to talk more – be lively at the party. Mingle. You keep to yourself too much, and you don’t really do anything all day. That won’t get you a husband.’

‘Maybe I won’t need to “get” one.’ I smiled at her. She frowned in suspicion and warned me not to keep her in the dark if I was seeing someone already. I assured her with perfect peace that there was no such thing going on, and she left for her renewed dancing class, still casting doubtful looks at me as she took the escalator.

My middle school class had been talking about alumni meetings for about ten years, and none actually happened, save for small private gatherings between close friends. The pandemic was the only reason why so many of us still remained in the old city. As summer drew near, those of us who were still not called back to work finally managed to pull strings together and booked a room in a restaurant. There were about fifteen of us, plus the teacher and his wife. I hadn’t seen any of them since I left the city for university. Most of us never came back here to live, myself included.

I stood in the corner of the room, alone, looking out of the windows. The streets were slowly getting busy again. Car noises mixed with cicada screeching in camphor trees makes an excellent summary of summer in the city, at least that’s how I choose to remember it. It’s always hot, always wet, the clamminess and humidity hanging onto your skin like an unwelcome acquaintance. But the streets are vibrant with greenness and every gust of wind smells warm and sweet where the camphor groves grow. I never used to care for camphor trees when I was little. They were just there, holding no special significance for me except perhaps their relation to mothballs. Those outside the window were swaying in the wind, sunlight casting a golden glow on the children running between them, stepping on the black, berry-like fruit that had fallen onto the pavement with great enthusiasm.

That reminded me of Zhu Yu. We used to walk across the school park when the camphor berries fell. I thought it was disgusting, but she loved jumping around and stepping onto them one by one, making a game out of it. She was very good at convincing me to try out whatever new idea that took her fancy, and I got dragged into this meaningless chase where we were only allowed to step on the berries, and both of us laughed as if there was nothing funnier in the world. It was incredibly silly, but in retrospect, it was probably also the happiest I have ever been.

The arrival of the first bunch of people interrupted my train of thought. It took me a while to match their faces and names, and I felt sure the process was mutual. Ten years had placed considerable change on our exterior. Lin Hong and Ge Zhenyi, with whom I had spoken with earlier on the phone, sat down next to me. I knew Lin Hong was a lawyer in Shanghai, and that Ge Zhenyi ran her own business in the same city; no other information about them was available to my mind apart from the thin thread of fragile bond that belonged to the old campus in 2009. They were very close to each other. That kind of connection was very noticeable in the way they immediately started sharing jokes and greeting the newcomers in as a duo. I started to recall how the four of us, including me and Zhu Yu, always sat together for two terms at school, and how we made two perfect teams against each other in the school debates. I was never a fan of debating, but Zhu Yu loved it; again, this was one of the examples where she just somehow convinced me with those big, pleading eyes to do try out new things with her. We were shortlisted for the National Championship in our final year, and Zhu Yu was over the moon for it. It was for that competition that the school organised a formal debate team, assigning Chen Limin as our coach. The staff meeting room was booked for our extra training sessions, and he would spend hours and hours working on how we spoke. All that projection and diction techniques – I had long since forgotten about them. Zhu Yu, however, was very good at picking up whatever the coach said. She certainly would have had a chance for the first prize had I not fallen ill the week before we were supposed to head out to Beijing. A week later, she came back a different person. Our camaraderie seemed to have suddenly vanished without a trace, and she never again dragged me out during PE for gossip or literary discussions before we left middle school.

It took her years to finally confide in me what had happened, but we had already ended up in different high schools and barely had the chance to see each other. We had already drifted apart, with misunderstandings and bitter resentment, and those years of friendship lost could never be retrieved. And just as I thought we were getting ready for a new start, Zhu Yu was dead.

I waited carefully in silence as the seats became gradually filled, trying to estimate when someone would bring up Zhu Yu in conversation. Not in the beginning, no – they were busy helping Chen Limin and his wife into the high seats. He looked sprightly for a fifty-year-old man, I had to say. At least there was no sign of receding hairline. Mrs Chen looked something familiar, and I eventually recognised her as the girls’ dormitory doorkeeper in the school. I had never known the two of them were married. Cold fear and unease coiled up in me at the knowledge.

Again, my mind went back to Zhu Yu. She was boarding in her final year and I would visit her in her dormitory sometimes. Mrs Chen – we knew her as ‘Auntie Sweets’ because she always had a handful of sweets for random distribution – she had always appeared so amiable and sweet-tempered. She would greet me in a soft voice, ‘Young lady, here to see your friend again?’ and let me in without further questioning. Zhu Yu once told me about how ‘Auntie Sweets’ would attend to the boarders’ wellbeing and have one-on-one conversations with them, if they encountered problems that they wouldn’t necessarily want to tell the teachers. I saw her talking to Zhu Yu once in her little office, after she had come back from Beijing and stopped talking to me. They stopped the conversation as soon as I got in, and Zhu Yu turned around and left without looking at me, whereas Mrs Chen handed me a couple of cheap chocolate balls and told me not to worry, and that Zhu Yu was probably just still upset about not winning the competition.

Did she know? I couldn’t help wondering while staring at her. She was still smiling her amiable smile and speaking in that soft, almost girlish voice. ‘It’s so nice to see you all.’ She was saying. ‘It must have been hard for all of you.’ her tone was naturally affectionate, almost like a mother’s – the kind of mother you only see in story books and children’s animated films, caring but not judging, gentle and yet powerful. ‘Unfortunately, I’m not gifted with Limin’s good memory, poor darlings, I’m afraid I don’t remember most of your faces…’she sounded genuinely apologetic, and that stirred a small wave of ‘That’s all right!’s and ‘But we remember you!’s around the table. I cast a side glance at Lin Hong and Ge Zhenyi, who exchanged a deep look.

Did she know? They must have been wondering the same. Ge Zhenyi was about to say something, but Lin Hong stopped her. They whispered for a minute between themselves, and Lin Hong shook her head. Ge Zhenyi turned to me.

‘Are you all right?’ she was still whispering. ‘Big day, isn’t it?’

‘I’ve been looking forward.’ I replied. Her face brightened up. ‘That’s the spirit.’ she clasped my hand under the table. ‘We’re all in this together.’

Grief hit me in that moment, almost choking me. I couldn’t stop thinking about Zhu Yu, this bright-eyed girl who had the most annoying habit of tricking you into doing things you never promised. She liked classical poetry and modern art, was afraid of cats but loved dogs, enjoyed summer more than winter, and knew the most empowering way of saying ‘we’re in this together’ whenever we faced problems that seemed like the end of the world at fourteen. Zhu Yu was the sort of person what would truly feed you hope when you were left in despair and drag you out of the cave with her. But I wasn’t there when her world really ended; nobody was. Her body was found in the school pond in May 2012, three years after her world had shattered into broken pieces of secret. I was never told the full story, but even a glimpse of that ugliness was enough to linger in my darkest dreams for the rest of my life. Zhu Yu’s secret became my secret, its heaviness eating into my soul and making it bitter. I was a coward for many years, escaping from the city as soon as I could and never coming back. I had been avoiding my mother’s chatter like a bad disease, but she was right about many things. I’d forgotten what I sought in life. I wandered in many places but could never settle. As for friends, I made few along the way. Lovers were even rarer, and I always hated them afterwards. I walked in the night alleys like a typical failure amongst rebels; drifting apart from the main road but never truly brave enough to face my own choices. My colleagues described me as timid and overcautious; my parents believe I’m an outcast wasting away my youth with no good reason. Sometimes I would unconsciously start mimicking Zhu Yu’s smiles and expressions, but those feeble attempts were nowhere near enough to retrieve her once zealous charm. And my mind would always go back to her, her body small and helpless, in that meeting room and in that pond; her voice muffled and unheard. And I would think we were all murderers with silence. The summer in the city, with its car noises mixed with cicada screeching in camphor trees, had long since been given a nostalgic glow and stored in the deepest back of my mind. I had lost her and myself in those summers.  

However, such as fate would have it, summer in 2020 brought along so many unexpected turns in the road. I squeezed Ge Zhenyi’s hand in return. She and Lin Hong had called me just before lockdown lifted in April. That was when I knew what felt like the bigger part of the puzzle. For Lin Hong and Ge Zhenyi, it meant years of internal struggle followed by therapy; for many others, the stories had their variations, but I recognised the greyness of the core.

I watched Chen Limin smile like a real scholar at the other end of the table. He was witty as ever, trying to liven up the atmosphere with his ever-updated storage of jokes and small talk. ‘How are your kids?’ he would say. ‘Are you planning on getting married any time soon?’ the caring tone was almost convincing. ‘Is that the photo of your daughter on your phone? How adorable! Takes after her father, surely!’ The tenderness sickened me. The rest of us probably resembled stones more than anything else. I took a big gulp of wine as I watched Lin Hong stood up for the final round of toast, her address curt and precise. I watched Chen Limin go pale under the accusations, as Ge Zhenyi stood up next and made her point. One by one they followed. Lawyer, accountant, researcher, chef, entrepreneur, artist, housekeeper, security guard, architect, doctor, estate agent, secretary, unemployed. Helpless teenage school pupils. Fragments of the past merged themselves into one broken piece, thrown at his face.

‘You have ruined so many lives.’ said Lin Hong, her voice low and trembling. ‘You will do no more of this.’

I watched as Chen Limin go paler and paler, as if glued to the chair. I watched Mrs Chen raise her hands in protest, ‘But you have no evidence!’ And then Chen Limin turned to me, the only person who hadn’t spoken. His lips were quivering. He reached out his hands.

‘You don’t believe what they just said, do you? There is no evidence – it’s just misunderstandings – you know I’ve always been a good teacher to you, haven’t I?’

I looked carefully into his face, taking in all the panic and desperation with an eerie sense of satisfaction. I stood up and walked to his side. His face started to turn blue and his breath was coming in small gasps. Mrs Chen started screaming, but Ge Zhenyi quickly silenced her.

‘You are dying,’ I said. ‘I would suggest you think of your last words carefully.’

‘It’s a lie – ask someone else! Save me! I never did – ask your friends!’

‘You can soon ask Zhu Yu herself. Do you still remember her?’ I was amazed at how cold and steady my voice came out. His eyes widened; immediately he began to choke.

I smiled and leant closer.

‘Fuck you and all your ancestors, Mr Chen.’

Nothing ever felt easier to say.