李一

---- Translated by Huo Jing

(1)

I lit a cigarette in the kitchen. The haze of smoke, spinning about the window and along the blinds, like a dancer, swirled higher and higher, then quietly took a bow and disappeared, leaving the light, dim and shadowed, quietly awaiting the next dancer to start.

I kept my lamps off. As usual, the light was from the outside; Not quite as usual, today it came with the noise of rolling wheels.

With a hunch that some new tenant was moving in, I watched across the blinds.

And, I was right, -- after a few seconds, a tall young man came into my sight. He looked about twenty-four-ish, in long sleeves, dress pants and leather shoes. This outfit was quite out of the ordinary; obviously, he was a new comer to the city, most likely, a new comer to the states.

A large green suite-case in his left hand and a black one in his right, the young man stopped at Room 104, but he did not open the door. Instead, he was staring across the hallway, hesitating, which I knew exactly why.

Across the hallway, in Room 103, lived Uncle Ton, a tall, skinny, middle aged man. Uncle Ton, although so addressed, was actually only in his 40s, “Uncle” being more or less a nick name. Calling him “Uncle” was not way off, but it felt like a joke every time we said it.

At this time everyday, to relieve the nicotine urge, Uncle Ton would sit at his door, smoke loudly and gaze around with squinted eyes. He looked too cold and distant for people to even say ‘Hi’, which was how I felt when I first came here. Probably the same thing happened to the new comer.

The young man did not utter a word, got his keys and opened the door. At the moment he turned on the light, a ‘guilty curiosity’ came to my mind, -- I wanted to jump in front of him and watch his face….. As I expected, he stood there in total shock, as if frozen by Médousa. Well, I knew this ‘shock’ also, because I had seen this very Médousa myself.

The city was divided into halves, bordered by the street line of Blues Street. To the east of Blues lived the white, to the west the black. This division of east vs west and white vs black was sad, because as Blues divided them, it also separated bright from dark, hope from despair. My apartment was 311 Blues Street, right on the line of division.

It was an old building from the 60s, with shiny white paint covering the ruin underneath. Only some broken red bricks, exposed at the corners, gave away all years the building had gone through. To live in here, no lease was required. The rent was so cheap that no one could argue for anything from the landlord. Naturally, the place was dirty and sloppy. I couldn’t recall since how long ago this place was dominated by Chinese people; or should I say, after natural selection, only Chinese could bear with such bad conditions? When I said this, my heart ached, but it was absolutely the truth. When the night fell, the shiny cover of white paint would turn into a color of dark grey mixed with hard blue, which was in tune with the blues singing in the neighborhood, forming some sort of bizarre peace and harmony. Dark grey and hard blue, sloppy and guilt, empty and desperate, all survived here and found what they deserved. Old, shabby, plain and tedious, this place embraced some different individuals, who stayed quiet at night. If you tried to watch them, from here, there, or far away, you couldn’t tell any differences. Perhaps, the dark grey and hard blue tone portended a dark and hard passage, for each and every one who lived here.

I could totally imagine what the young man was facing in Room 104, – dirty floors, cracked walls, a messy kitchen, broken curtains, empty lamps and disgusting odors… It was even worse than the worst dorms in China. The moment of revealing felt like falling – ‘THIS is the United States in all my dreams?’

The young man was actually calmer than I thought. After a brief shock, he moved his luggage in, without complaining at all.

‘How do you like it? Satisfied?’ Old Dong in Room 105 walked by, car keys in his hand. Needless to say, he was the middle man for the new comer’s apartment.

‘It’s alright. Thank you, sir!’ The young man said.

“Don’t mention it. I live across the hall from you. If you need anything, just knock.” Old Dong went back home and shut the door.

To me Old Dong was a closed book. Almost 50 years old, Old Dong held a decent job at a research institute of the university in town, but he never seemed to care, as though he was always idling around. My first impression of him was warmhearted and helpful, but with time, I felt that he was not accountable… This might come from Uncle Ton, because whenever we mentioned Old Dong, Uncle Ton would shook his head and warn us: ‘Old Dong is no good, don’t get close to him…’ Yet why was Old Dong no good? He would never tell. Meanwhile I heard from the ladies in the neighborhood that Old Dong making use of Fa Lun Gong, the infamous anti-socialist religious group, as a political shelter to get his green card. I doubted this was why Uncle Dong called him ‘no good.’

Talking about Fa Lun Gong, to my great surprise, the fine looking girl in Room 101, named Ling Fang, about twenty-seven, was a dedicated follower. She spoke her anger towards the Chinese government all the time, at least once or twice every ten sentences. Before I left China, I had never interacted with any people from the Fa Lun Gong group.  Nonetheless, once for a while I ran into some in the United States. They were mostly warmhearted people but never stopped preaching their beliefs. I had a buddy who was also a Fa Lun Gong follower. He used to help me a great deal when I was new to the place. He would drive me around for errands, while playing sermons of Fa Lun Gong in the car over and over, which was like a band tightening my head and gave me migraines. However, whenever thinking of him, all I had was still gratefulness. For Fa Lun Gong’s sake, he was very close to Ling Fang. Even though later he moved to another city, they kept correspondences, leading to another coincidence. In Room 206, lived anther girl, named Ling Fang as well, with the same spelling but different Chinese characters. In the US, their names were both Ling Fang. Careless postmen often mistook their mails, which should not be a big deal except the two girls now could peek into each other’s secrets. (For our story, let’s spell Ling Fang in Room 206 LING FANG.)