FRAGMENT 15
The Roar Against My Eardrums
Fragment: A Voice with the Woody Fragrance of a Cello | The Pure Frequency of Flowing Blood
Time & Location: Summer 1982 · Volleyball Court, Renmin University
From Pocket Alley, through Yangfang Hutong, Deshengmen Inner Street, and the Third Ring Road, to Renmin University, was only twelve or thirteen kilometers.
During rush hour, however, it was one of the worst traffic bottlenecks in Beijing.
"Boss, it may take two hours," the driver said.
The silence inside the Lexus had nearly hypnotized me.
Before my eyes, the swaying hips on the south bank of Houhai continued to move.
Then, without warning, the volleyball court of forty years ago began to cover my vision.
The afternoon sun turned Rowan Lee's spiking form into a swan taking flight.
Many of the boys around us watched the temptation radiating from her body.
I only wanted to scan her voice.
The physiological melodies and explosions that no human ear could hear.
Yet Gao Yong's monkey-like shrieks constantly disrupted the soundscape I guarded so carefully.By then he was already my classmate.
He walked over and pinched his voice into a mock greeting.
"Hey, buddy. Still thinking about math and physics?"
My fist had already tightened into a block of iron.
Then Rowan's contralto voice arrived, carrying a faint resonance from her nasal cavity.
My fingers loosened.
Behind her, the reading room door kept opening and closing with a creak.
It sounded like her accompaniment.
Two months earlier, it was there that I had picked up a black hairpin from the ground and spoken my first words to her.
"Classmate, you dropped your hairpin."
"Oh! Yes, yes. Thank you."
Her voice carried the woody fragrance of a cello.
The letters she wrote to me were filled with tiny, meticulous handwriting.
Nothing about them suggested the six-foot-tall outside hitter of the university women's volleyball team.
Yet those gentle sentences accompanied one beautiful dream after another.
We went to Zizhuyuan Park.
The bamboo and flowers around us carried delicate fragrances.
Lotus blossoms floated across the water beside clusters of small round green leaves.
The lake seemed to be performing a nocturne.
The world had never smelled so pleasant.
Or sounded so beautiful.
As we walked along the gravel path, Rowan moved as though she were dancing.
The soft crunching beneath her feet was light and gentle.
I hesitated.
Then hesitated again.
At last, I wrapped my arms around her.
In that instant, I heard the most sacred single-track recording in the world.
The rise and fall of a young girl's clear breathing.
My body stood on the verge of exploding.
Yet suddenly, I lacked the courage to kiss her.
The moment my arms encircled that soft waist, I heard my own blood roaring wildly against my eardrums.
Grandma Yang's row of cloth buttons.
The slime-soaked red-brick rooms of Pocket Alley.
They remained a curse I could not cross.
Beneath Rowan's warm skin, waves of pure blood frequencies knocked against my soul.
I felt like a container filled with formaldehyde and corpses.
Facing something sacred while emitting foul, primitive biological noise.
The instant she closed her eyes, I gently pushed her away.
Then I began talking endlessly about academics and politics.
There always seemed to be a lump of phlegm lodged in my throat.
I asked her:
"What are you planning to do after graduation?"
FRAGMENT 16
Her Heartbeat Emptied by Astonishment
Fragment: Hormones Rising Thick in the Throat | A Bohemian Melody
Time & Location: Summer 1982 · Volleyball Court, Renmin University
She barely paused.
"Of course I'm going to graduate school, my great journalist. I don't intend to waste my youth."
I felt crushed.
I wanted to marry her immediately and spend my life beside her.
But her certainty about graduate school meant I would have to wait at least another five years before marriage.
I could not help calculating how much weight I truly carried in her heart.
The more I thought about it, the darker my mood became.
My steps faltered.
I nearly fell into the lake.
She laughed so hard she could barely straighten her back.
I turned my face toward the water.
I did not dare tell her that I had been trained, from a very young age, to be a lustful monster.
The sound of her footsteps remained slightly unsettled until she boarded the bus.
The tires rubbed against the pavement with a dry, abrasive screech.
Like steel wire dragged across glass.
Back at the volleyball court, Gao Yong hovered beside the sidelines like a Hanging Ghost trapped inside an iron loudspeaker.
His eyes never left Rowan.
His mouth never stopped moving.
Whenever Rowan leaped for a spike, hormones seemed to ooze from his throat.
"Beautiful! Absolutely beautiful!"
Only I knew that coarse, unchanging wavelength.
It had already become Gao Yong's signature back in Compound No. 7.
After we became classmates, Gao Yong took surprisingly good care of me.
Once, during a football match, an international student deliberately stepped on my head after I made a save.
Gao Yong immediately grabbed a wooden stick.
With a monkey-like shriek bursting from his throat, he charged at a Black player half a head taller than himself.
The fight ended the match.
It also earned him disciplinary punishment.
Whenever Rowan practiced, I sat in the stands.
The campus loudspeakers often played Dvořák's Symphony No. 8.
Its Bohemian melodies suited her perfectly.
After a spike, Rowan landed.
Large beads of sweat rolled down her translucent neck and disappeared into the mystery of her jersey.
She looked at me.
Breathing hard.
A victor's arrogance glowing in her eyes.
"Hey, Bai Ying."
"What do you see?"
The answer escaped before I could stop it.
"Your pelvis produces almost no lateral oscillation when you land."
She froze.
Her heartbeat emptied itself in pure astonishment.
A half-second void opened inside her chest.
Laughter erupted around us.
Ha ha ha.
Ha ha ha.
The laughter of humanities students, mixed with dry frequencies of self-importance.
"A perfect answer to a gravity-and-acceleration problem. Absolutely perfect."
I muttered the words and lowered my head.
Ignoring the puzzled looks of her teammates, Rowan walked over and crouched in front of me.
"My little scholar," she said softly.
"Are you trying to tell me I'm beautiful?"
"According to the laws of physics, you're exceptionally beautiful."
Silence.
Her face darkened.
Then she smiled.
She gave me a light push.
"Go get some rest."
Gao Yong appeared as if he had fallen from a tree.
Silent.
Sudden.
A thread of phlegm hung in his voice.
Pretending not to notice, he brushed against Rowan while she wiped away sweat.
"That white hair of Bai Ying's will always look fake, no matter how hard he dyes it black.
He's a part worn down by the friction of history.
He isn't light.
He's shadow.”
His voice carried a lazy magnetic vibration.
And a sticky undertone from deep in his throat.
“Oh? He was born with white hair?"
Rowan's handkerchief froze in midair.
I had not yet walked very far.
I wanted to turn around.
To tear apart the mouth that had exposed my secret.
But my legs refused to obey.
They kept moving forward.
FRAGMENT 17
Infrasonic Resonance
Fragment: A Nearly Imperceptible Click of the Tongue | An Infrasonic Resonance Carrying Destructive Force
Time & Location: Autumn 1982 · Gao Residence, Compound No. 7, Beijing
Rowan had never known what I looked like before I dyed my hair.
Until my third year at university, I had never altered the color of my white hair.
Nor could she have known that, because his father's rank was not high enough, Gao Yong had never enjoyed the privilege I took for granted—free haircuts at the government compound barber shop.
His father had no access to the imported Japanese hair dye kept there either.
I still remember the first time Gao Yong stared at my black hair.
The sound he made was almost inaudible—a tiny click of the tongue.
Who could have imagined that such a minute flicker of jealousy would pry open the sealed world Rowan and I once shared?
Before Gao Yong took Rowan away, there had been little reason for hatred between us.
His father had humiliated mine countless times, but after 1980, the government's campaign for "Emancipation of Thought" had encouraged the younger generation to forget the blood debts of their parents' era.
My father rarely mentioned the persecutions he had suffered during the Cultural Revolution. Instead, he threw himself into work with remarkable energy.
In two days, I would become a journalist.
At that moment, I was crouching beneath a stand of cypress trees inside Compound No. 7, using the crow-like hearing I had been born with to sample, in real time, the soundscape inside the Gao residence—a world filled with the scent of rosewood furniture and the strains of a serenade.
My heart hammered against my throat.
Then I heard Rowan's voice.
The cello had become a sparrow's cry, splitting apart little by little beneath the combined pressure of alcohol and power.
Then came the frequency that finally drove me beyond reason.
Pop.
Gao Yong unfastened the first plastic button on Rowan's blouse.
There was no coercion. No violence.
Only a slow, deliberate invasion—charitable in appearance, joyful in its cruelty.
I heard Gao Yong's dry hands close around living flesh.
Skin sliding against skin produced a sticky, sizzling friction.
His counterfeit breaths of passion sounded like the clipped grunts of a wild dog.
Boom—
The White Crow within me mutated completely.
Its response to the theft of a mate was far more violent than any human emotion.
It was instinct.
A law of nature that recognized only destruction.
The world collapsed inside my ears.
I surged to my feet as if preparing for flight.
From the depths of my throat erupted twenty-three years of accumulated fury—a subsonic resonance carrying raw destructive force.
The power hidden within me exploded without restraint.
My father's discipline was gone.
Only the uncontrollable self remained.
“Ekhsig—Qini—Arakh!"
Dust rolled from the roof.
Chunks of plaster loosened and fell.
Leaves abandoned their branches.
The world froze inside the deepest chamber of my rage.
The Gao family's maid was the first to run outside, nearly stumbling.
An old man thrust one leg through the doorway, then immediately withdrew.
Gao Yong's mouth hung open as if a tooth were being ripped from his jaw.
Clutching at his face, he backed into the shadows beneath the eaves and collapsed onto the ground.
My voice—or rather, the merged voice of myself and the White Crow—had torn through the human mind's armor.
One might have called it Mongolian throat singing.
It seemed to descend from the horizon itself.
Or perhaps it was better described as the Crow's Sword of Sound, plunging from the sky.
Rowan emerged from the Gao residence.
There was not the slightest hesitation in her stride.
Her breathing still carried the fading resonance of her earlier moans.
She lifted her chin.
Her fingers slid through her long hair.
Then she bent and climbed into a battered Beijing 212 jeep whose body rattled in every direction.
The streetlights dimmed.
Gao Yong followed behind her, still resembling the monkey he had been as a child.
The Pierre Cardin logo on his suit sleeve was beginning to fray.
That furtive hand fumbled with a loose button, trying to force it back through the hole.
The scraping sound reminded me of Grandma Yang undressing herself.
FRAGMENT 18
The Heavy Scent of Perfume
Fragment: The Soundscape of a Paris Fashion Show | High Frequencies Carried by High Heels | The Sinister Rustle of Ten Thousand Bamboo Leaves
Time & Location: Autumn 2002 · Champs-Élysées, Paris | Winter 1992 · Bamboo Garden, Beijing
In a distinctly Chinese corporate coup, I was stripped of my positions as President and Chief Executive Officer.
Not long afterward, I went to Europe alone.
Charles de Gaulle Airport was chaotic.
After a long struggle to find a taxi, I headed straight for the Marriott on the Champs-Élysées.
At dusk, I sat at a table by the street.
A plate of oysters.
A plate of shrimp.
French fries.
A Coke.
I took out a Seven Stars cigarette and was about to light it when a heavy cloud of perfume drifted over from the next table.
It was Chanel No. 5 lingering on a French woman.
Not nearly as wild as the scent Rowan carried ten years earlier.
The next morning, I wandered through the École des Beaux-Arts de Paris without any destination.
Rowan had once told me she studied there for a master's degree in art history.
She never mentioned anything else about the place.
The day we met again ten years earlier had been too short.
I only had enough time to store her audio.
Eight o'clock that evening.
After a gathering with former classmates, Rowan arrived at Bamboo Garden as promised.
I remained seated behind my desk.
I did not stand up.
My expression was difficult to describe.
Perhaps anticipation.
Perhaps happiness.
Certainly a little awkwardness.
"You're still the same."
Those were the first words she said when she saw me.
She seemed about to reach out her hand.
Then withdrew it.
"May I sit down?"
The voice was unchanged.
Still carrying the woody fragrance of a cello.
Still rolling upward from deep within her chest.
Primitive.
Heavy.
When she unfastened the buttons of her black coat and settled gracefully into the chair opposite me, an overwhelming scent burst into the small room.
Dense.
Warm.
Powdery.
Alive with body heat.
Suddenly, I felt hungry.
The atmosphere between us remained much as it had been in Zizhuyuan Park years earlier.
Neither of us guarded against the other.
She spoke quietly about her years in Paris.
About graduate school.
About the fashion world.
I hardly listened.
I studied her face instead.
The angle formed by her jawline and the bridge of her nose gave her the look of a Greek sculpture.
Photographers at the time had a phrase for it:
"exceptionally strong bone-shadow definition."
I wanted to touch that face.
But she could not hear the request inside me.
She spoke casually about Paris, fashion shows, and life among artists.
I was curious about her relationships during those years.
Yet what filled my ears was something else entirely.
The soundscape of a runway show inside the Carrousel du Louvre.
The high frequencies of camera flashes.
The metallic ringing of hangers striking one another.
The distant roar of industrial blowers backstage.
Her deep-set eyes rested on me through a thin layer of mist.
My thoughts drifted elsewhere.
To a chair.
To a woman ten years older than Rowan.
To the eyes of a large cat.
Rowan never mentioned Gao Yong.
I knew they had married in Paris several years earlier.
I knew Gao Yong had placed an expensive diamond ring on her finger during the ceremony.
Now I saw no ring.
Not even the faintest trace a ring might have left behind.
Only the ordinary micro-vibrations of her finger joints.
Silently, I said to her:
Although you are married.
Although I no longer ache for you.
Although I know that pulling you into my arms and making love to you would be nothing more than an improper fantasy.
I still like sitting quietly across from you.
In Bamboo Garden, once part of Kang Sheng's former residence, the sinister rustling of countless bamboo leaves slowly turned all those self-indulgent "althoughs" into cigarette smoke drifting from my mouth.
"Shall I drive you home?"
I asked the question without much sincerity.
I was embarrassed by my aging Santana.
"Thank you.
But there's no need.
I can call a taxi myself."
When she left, her high heels struck the stone path with crisp, impossibly high frequencies.
Outside the courtyard, a Toyota Crown taxi started its engine immediately.
