Emotional Curiosity
Ming is definitely sure he has fallen in love with Hua, his
very first love lost for nearly half a century, once again in their mythically
entangled lives, at first sight during a recent encounter casually arranged by
a common friend, at an age too old to enjoy the full dimensions of sexual love,
more passionately than passion itself, though separated from her afar by the
vast Pacific as well as by the vicious Pandemic, while he has been living quite
happily with his beloved wife in Vancouver, the true earthly paradise of all
Chinese diasporas as he sees it.
Yes, he is more than sure of that; otherwise, he would not have written more
than one hundred love poems (and got as many as half of them published) within
a year or so, finished drafting the second half of his long memoir n Chinese
and his first novel (a trilogy) in English respectively within three months,
and begun to turn out short stories one after another since the outset of 2022,
each inspired by and devoted to Hua; nor would he have been video-chatting
eagerly with her for nearly two hours every morning as if to recharge his total
selfhood with all the energy he needs for his creative spree on a daily basis,
nor would he have dreamed about her, about himself and about them together
every so often day and night; nor would he have been missing her so much so
that he feels every synapse of his innermost being is connected directly to
hers in almost every moment…
Of course, there are still many things he is not sure about: for example, what
is it exactly that is so special about her? Why does he find her so
irresistible? When did she begin to redevelop serious feelings for him? How
much does she love him now? Does he love Hua and his wife at the same time, to
the same extent, and in the same sense? Is his affection for Hua a “spiritual
derailment,” a case of Platonic love, or something really immoral? How should
he control, if he could at all, his clandestine relationship with Hua? Perhaps
he ought to confess their intimacy to his wife? What if his wife finds it out
for herself? But among a dozen more such questions, he is wondering, first and
foremost, why on earth he has cherished such a long and strong affection for
Hua. “Why do I love her so madly?” Put differently, “What emotional spell has
she cast over my poor soul?” Without getting a satisfactory answer to this
question, he knows he will never “die with his eyes completely closed,” just as
the Chinese proverb goes.
After doing much thinking, he finds that the best answer he can come up with
lies probably in a variety of things working together at the same time.
1/ The First-Love Complex
He certainly remembers having a close connection with
several girls in his early teens. For example, while in grade seven in Lotus
Flower Village, he somehow struck up an intimate relationship with a tall, slim
and pretty classmate named Zhou Yeqiong. He does not remember how it all began
and ended, but for half a dozen times in that school year, they did spend some
time privately after school. However, every time they joined each other on the
bank of the river running along their village, they just kept sitting together
for a while without doing anything besides listening to the reeds whistling in
the wind, or watching the stars blinking in the sky. At that time, he felt more
than satisfied with a tight and prolonged hug from the girl, and the idea of
kissing or making love with her never crossed his mind.
About three years later, at an all-school meeting held in the big auditorium in
the county town of Songzi on a mid-summer afternoon, Hua happened to come and
sit right before him on the bare floor made of hard mud. He was then 15 years
old w hile she, as he learned decades later, was only 14, and it would be a
year before she would have her first menstrual experience. “Our school does
have a really pretty girl after all,” he thought aloud upon spotting her. He
was not sure if he developed a crush on her on the spot, nor did he have the
slightest idea that she would function as the model of love or female
attraction for him for the rest of his life, but he did feel something like
sexual agitation for the first time in his life. Since then, he had become
increasingly sensitive to female beauty. People often say all Chinese men have
a serious and persistent First-Love Complex: is his lifelong emotional
attachment to Hua an unavoidable result of this very first encounter?
2/ The Love-at-First-Sight Complex
No matter what, it was that first sight of Hua that so deeply impressed on his
heart and soul that it laid the foundation for all his dreams and fantasies
about sexual love before he himself became aware of it and, not surprisingly,
every woman he was to develop a relationship with later on, including his wife,
would prove to be a version of Hua, though to varying extents and with
individual differences. No less important is the way his true feelings for any
woman down the line would originate from his first sight of her as in the case
of his relationship with Hua. For him, the first sight was no other than a
mythical seed planted in the depth of his innermost being, which is bound to
bloom at a later time.
In fact, he had fallen in love with Hua at first sight three times in his
lifetime. If the first sight of her at the school meeting had served to awaken
sexually, he began to believe they two were meant for each other when they
happened to meet again over a year later in Mayuhe, where they were to stay
together for two years. However, he had never had a chance to talk to or even
see her, and had therefore almost completely forgotten her by then.
The third encounter took place on October 2, 2019, when he went to attend a
reunification gathering among old schoolmates. The moment he saw Hua, he found
her even more beautiful than he had over forty years ago, and fell in love with
her again right away. For reasons unknown to him, each time he saw her after a
short or long separation, he found her even more attractive than the previous
time. Was I born to love her at first sight, he often wonders. But why?
3/ The Native-Place Complex
Since ancient times, all Chinese are said to have cherished a particular
feeling for the places where they were born and bred. No matter how far away or
how long they are separated from their native villages or hometowns, they would
mostly want to return to their “roots’ like fallen leaves, especially when they
are old, either for the peace of their emotional beings or for the perfect
taste of the local foods. But for many important reasons, Ming was not really
emotionally attached to his native place; rather, he loathed it and was even
not sure which his native place exactly was. Lotus Flower Village was the place
where he lived for five years as a foster child, but it had given him only bad
memories, and Songzi, his birthplace, was no better, with its climatic
conditions being hell-like all year round, its people mostly hypocritical,
insincere, snobbish, or vulgar – though quite smart. When he grew up, he had
another two reasons to detest his native place, whether it was Songzi or Lotus
Flower Village. As if somehow deeply traumatized by his early failures to learn
English and get his poetry accepted before leaving the countryside to attend
university in Shanghai, he could not say a single English word or write a
single line of poetry, no matter how long he stayed there as a returning visitor,
though English and poetry were the two most essential elements in his adult
life: the former is the language he has chosen to make a living in, the latter
his only lifelong hobby.
However, simply because of Hua or, more exactly, because of his feelings for
her, he has recently found Songzi much more loveable than he had once thought.
Love you, love your dog, he often says to her. Since she likes the small town
very much, he has become nostalgic about it too, and all the more so now
because it is the only place where he could hope to see and spend time
privately with her, where he and she could eat what they both like most, such
as salted diaozi fish, fried green chilis, xiangzi tofu, carp fish cakes and
ciba paste.
Or, perhaps vice versa: it is precisely because he is so deeply attached to his
native place without his knowing it that he finds Hua more attractive than any
other women he has seen all over the world.
4/ The Mother Complex
Physically, Hua bears little resemblance to his mother, but they grew up in the
same cultural-physical environment, follow the same local traditions, share the
same customs and lifestyles. In particular, they speak the same Songzi dialect,
his true mother tongue. So, whenever he hears Hua speaking, even if it’s only
her breathing, he feels peaceful and comfortable enough like a happy infant
listening to the heartbeats of its mother in her arms.
At the subconscious level, simply because he has been living in the absence of
love of any kind for too long since childhood, especially love from his parents
throughout his formative years in Lotus Flower Village, and love from his wife
who seems, alas, to have been born with frigidity and insensitivity, he
desperately needs a personalized compensation of such tender feeling from a
Songzi woman, who may or may not necessarily look or act like his mother.
5/ The Zhiqing (Educated-Youth) Complex
As a unique sociopolitical movement in modern Chinese history, “Up to the Hills
and Down to the Countryside” occurred between 1956 and 1978. Like millions of
other educated youths of the time, Ming and Hua were forced to answer Chairman
Mao and the Party’s call to receive “re-education from the poor and lower-middle
peasants” as soon as they graduated from high school. While slaving together in
Mayuhe, the forest farm located right on the southern bank of the Yangtze
River, they shared not only the same physical but also psychological hardships
between 1974 and 1977. For one thing, they felt hopeless and futureless because
they were expected to make a living, get married and spend the rest of their
lives on the impoverished farm. If they had hoped to leave the country
permanently, they would have had to battle against one another to obtain the
recommendations from the local Party branch, cadres and peasants alike. While
such chances were very slim, the most effective way to win was to become a
Party member by outperforming all others in terms of “proletarian political
consciousness” and “actual working performance.” But without influential social
connections, no one could get enough recommendations to “return to the city”
through attending a university or getting a government job. This being so,
every youth station where educated youngsters like Ming and Hua were
collectively receiving their re-education from the locals became not only a
laboring camp, but also a miniature of the Colosseum. With the local folks as
the audience, every Zhiqing must fight to their best ability like a gladiator,
whose gladius was no other than their own willpower, determination and physical
endurance.
It was true that Ming and Hua competed with each other as with every
other Zhiqing on an individual basis; it was also true that he never confessed
his love for her, nor did she show her true feelings, if any, for him or
anybody else, but they did try to help and protect each other in an implicit
manner. For example, as the leader of the youth station, he once disclosed the
reasons why the local political authority would not easily grant her a Party
membership. Fortunately, they both survived the fights and succeeded in making
their ways out of the country: while he was recommended to attend a nationally
prestigious university in Shanghai, she got enough votes to go to a college in
Wuhan.
As adolescents sharing the same deeply felt hardships, Ming and Hua have
undoubtedly developed a special bond between themselves as Zhiqing in Mayuhe,
which is becoming closer and tighter as they engage in deeper communication.
Now, with all their hardships faded into the white pages of time, they only
remember what was sweet about the old days when they fought
shoulder-to-shoulder for their futures like two comrades-in-arms having
chemistry with each other in a real battlefield. And it is definitely this
Zhiqing complex that has intensified his affection for Hua to a significant
degree. Indeed, back in Mayuhe, Ming had to hide his affection for her even
from himself to avoid jeopardizing his future. He knew it too well then that if
the Party branch and locals had found him indulging in a romantic relationship
or “petty bourgeois sentiments” rather than fully devoted to “revolutionary
production,” they would have thwarted all his efforts to leave the country. Before
his reencounter with Hua in 2019, he did make some attempts to get information
about her whereabouts, but somehow without any success. As a result, they
remained totally lost to each other for as long as 42 years. Now becoming
reconnected finally, he just could no longer restrain himself from releasing
all the emotional intensities he had accumulated over the years.
As Hua once pointed it out to him, “Your current feelings for me results from
your Zhiqing complex, I am afraid.” Sure, at least partly!
6/ The Misconception-in-Love Complex
Unlike de Clerambault’s Syndrome, which is medically referred to as a kind of
delusional disorder, what Chinese describe as zizuoduoqing (“自作多情”) is a quite normal psychological tendency to
over-estimate one’s importance in a relationship. As such, it is not a morbid
state of mind, but an emotional inclination, which seems to be much more common
among the sensitive, the self-centered, the self-confident and/or the
narcissistic than among people with other characteristic features. As Ming
himself has admitted many times, he is particularly sensitive in emotional
matters. For example, when Hua gave him a tuner in Mayuhe in the summer of 1975
(just to help him learn to play the erhu as she explained decades later), he
over-interpreted her gesture and treasured the device as a token of love from
her. The reason for this, as he sees it now, must have been underlined by a
close interrelationship between his own deep feelings for her and his strong
(mis)belief that she loved him as well. When Hua asked him to return it
sometime in the following year, he thought she had found a new sweetheart, who
he suspected was Pan Lihao, his major rival at the youth station. Until they
found the truth eventually with the help of a mutual friend during the Chinese
Spring Festival in 2022, he had remained unaware that a part of him had been
living heavily on the delusion all the time.
Since then, he has been trying hard to find a cultural equivalent in English to
describe such delusional indulgence, but surprisingly, no native speakers or
writers of English or online source could offer him a set phrase, and the
closest word he has dug up seems to be “erotomania,” which, like “de
Clerambault’s Syndrome,” is far from an accurate description. After consulting
several exceptionally talented translators in addition to some bi-linguists of
the highest caliber, he realized there is no such equivalent in English at all,
and the best translations they could render is “delusional fancy as someone’s
love interest,” “emotionally self-flattering” and “misconception in love,”
depending upon the specific context. They say “benign erotomania” might convey
the basic meaning more accurately, but it sounds quite weird to people with
little knowledge about the psychiatric condition. And this linguacultural
difference keeps him wondering: how come such emotional tendency is so common
among Chinese but not among English speakers?
Thinking along this line, he wonders if his affection for Hua may well have
been an unconscious projection of his own delusional fancy as her love
interest, or may it not?
7/ The Retirement Complex
Both in their mid-sixties now, Ming and Hua are living a very happy retired
lives on opposite sides of the world. Though they have been enjoying a good and
stable relationship with their spouses, they are acutely aware of their other
halves being their closest relatives rather than true soulmates. Of course,
they are fully prepared and actually content to live as they have always been
doing so until their last breaths and have no intention to usher in any
dramatic change to the final years of their lives, but Ming tells Hua aloud
that “we old people are still as capable of and as entitled to love as the
young!” He has repeatedly emphasized that love cannot merely keep people young
in their hearts, but also enable them to wear their years better and live a
healthier life. Hua agrees with almost everything he has to say about their
secret relationship, but she just cannot forget the cruel fact that they are
really too old to love each other like the young. As a well-respected grandma,
she hates herself becoming a laughingstock of her family, friends and old
acquaintances in any sense; nor could she really bear to make her proud husband
a poor cuckold. For her, spiritual derailment is excusable, web affair is okay,
platonic love is worthy of experiencing, even a kiss or hug is acceptable, but
no fancy stuff, no “breast-playing,” no lovemaking, while sex, especially
penetration, is already out of question anyway.
However, as Hua struggles to hold herself back in the development of their
relationship, he finds her all the more attractive. From their daily
video-chats, he has noticed, to his happy surprise, that she has little grey
hair, her face shows no wrinkles, her skin looks no less sleek, smooth or fair,
and her body remains as shapely as a young model; in other words, besides
having a sunny personality and a good sense of humor, she has been wearing her
years so well that she still boasts all the physical features of a gracious
38-year-old lady rather than an old vulgar Chinese dama with two grandchildren.
Most astonishingly, she functions perfectly well even in a sexual sense though
her menstruation ceased more than 15 years ago. During some recent dirty talk,
he has learned she sometimes experiences orgasms as if in a wet dream. “You are
such a living Xishi in my eyes,” he often tells her. “A woman out of a million,
a real stunner!”
But would she be ready to have sex with him when they meet again? He has told
her many times that he is too old to satisfy her even if she would. Such being
the case, how far should he go along with her then? Must he put out his own
passion before it becomes a forest fire?
“I am really afraid,” Hua has reiterated. “How would people look at me? A
really bad woman!”
“But why should we care about what others may have to say? Why care about all
the rest of the world?” He keeps asking her back. “How many more years or even
months can we expect to live? Why not love while we still fortunately can?”
Probably you are right! Hua sometimes agrees.
* *
*
While biding their time to join each other in body as in
spirit, Ming just cannot stop searching for the ultimate truth about why he
loves her in such a morbid manner, but the more he tries, the more he becomes
confused and confounded. Perhaps he is either a unique victim fated to suffer
from the Hua-Complex, or a common guy who has simply been in desperate need of
love since childhood. Or, in a larger sense, is it all because he is living an
aesthetic rather than an ethical life as Breton has defined the terms?
He is never sure, nor does anyone really care.
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note: Inspired by my first crush, this story is my second short story, which has been nominated for the pushcart prize twice.
