Banana Moon
not sure if this is the latest version...
It was the beginning of the year. The train car was sparsely filled with the people who were returning to New York after New Year's Day. Though only four o'clock in the afternoon, night had already dropped its curtain. From time to time, bright lights outside the window indicated that the train was entering a city. Then the train was back in the countryside, and dusky woods and empty fields appeared again and again. It was chilly, and the blizzard was still to come. The White Christmas I had longed for had passed in such a gloomy way.
I held a copy of The Square by Marguerite Duras, flipping through the pages absent-mindedly.
"The Breton maids, thousands of them pouring into the stations of Paris, were able to do everything.
The only concern of these people was their survival: not to die of hunger, but to sleep under a roof each night.
Besides that, from time to time, they also chatted with someone, whom they met at random, to talk about their common misfortunes and personal difficulties.”
It was not a very interesting book, telling the story of a peddler's rambling conversation with a maid he had met by chance. I yawned. The heat was turned up too high. The end of a tedious holiday and the beginning of another tedious semester bored me to tears. Fortunately, I was not close to the refrigerator, or I'd be bored into eating. So I pillowed my book on the armrest and dropped my head.
"Look at the sun and the moon! Both are shining in the sky!” I tugged Li Fang's sleeve.
“Ah, yeah.” Behind his glasses, his wandering eyes focused.
I had never seen such a spectacle at midday. The azure seawater, the white gulls that strolled on the beach and the Atlantic City casinos behind me were all dyed with a mysterious color by the discord of the scarlet sun and the pale moon.
“Can you take my picture with both of them?”
As if disdaining to answer such a question, he waved his shabby little camera in response.
As far as I knew, he outdid others who were masters of saving their physical strength. More than that, Mr. Li had many other “virtues”, like going for a walk at a fixed time of day, as had Kant, and, in fact, eating, drinking and peeing at fixed times each day. As a teenager, he had boasted that by fostering such habits he would live longer. From childhood on, he has certainly been full of great ambitions. If anyone were to jeer at those habits of his today, he would be reluctant to give any response, but the expressions on his face would say that a swallow can never understand a swan’s ideals.
We had taken our last trip in the summer before he went abroad, and we lingered in the Kunming Arboretum for five hours, a rather long time. On the train home, I dreamt of big clusters of colorful flowers. This year, we wandered around in Atlantic City for only three hours and bought only ten dollars chips. Sometimes we won, sometimes we lost, and in the end we got back seven and an half dollars for the chips we had left.Other people gambled in hundreds and even thousands of dollars. But we weren’t confident that we could lose our whole dollars in short enough time, let alone win.
I was able to notice the sun and the moon shinning together only in drowsy memory. I was still semi-conscious. If I were fully asleep, my dream would certainly have been empty.
I was lucky enough not to have fallen deeply asleep yet. After a while, “Penn Station” was announced. My university was quite far from New York City, so I had to take the bus from the station. As I followed the stream of people away from the platform, the sign for “Greyhound” caught my eye immediately. It hadn’t seemed so close to the platform when I’d made this trip before. Anyway, since it was still early, I decided to walk around the station first. Looking at the sign again, I was startled from my dream state. It was Newark’s Penn Station, not New York’s, I had gotten it wrong.
I knew a little bit about Newark. I had intended to come here by Greyhound, because Newark is nearer to Princeton. But Fang said there was a lot of crime in Newark, and, since I was arriving in the evening, it would be absolutely unsafe, even though he could come and pick me up. It was the first time he had commented on my safety, so I got the impression that this city was really dangerous.
The station’s waiting room was only about twenty-yard square in size. The hall was jammed with people, many with children. Only one woman was selling tickets. I asked the woman about the bus schedule. After thinking about the situation, I chose to stay, deciding that trying to catch the train on to New York might be even worse than just staying put. I dialed Fang’s number. As I had expected, he was out; must have been surfing the web at his lab. If he wasn’t able to sit in front of the computer for over eight hours a day, this man would fidget like a baby thirsty for milk. He acted like that during the several days I had stayed with him. It wasn’t clear what he did on the Internet all day. I had been curious about that in the past, but not any more. Occasionally, I also wandered on the Net, and felt funny imagining Fang’s pose while striking the keyboard, if I happened to come across some message like, “Why can’t I feel my girlfriend’s maidenhead after I’ve inserted my fingers?”
I mentioned nothing about getting off at the wrong station in the telephone message, but only told him, “I will call you again when I arrive.” So if everything went well, this time he would have no chance to call me an addleheaded idiot; if I did disappear, the police could trace the telephone call to Newark. As for why I got off halfway and how I encountered my accident, that would be material for a detective novel. At these thoughts, I shivered all of a sudden in the swelter of the hall.
Were it not for so many people of color, this place would have been somewhat like the train stations in China. Some people were smoking and you could smell the odor of beer. There was only one ticket window, but several lines of people twisted in front of it. All of the unoccupied seats were too dirty to sit on. Some people even stretched out on the seats. I selected one near the window and sat down with a free newspaper as my mat. The next bus would come in an hour, but the ticket agent was not sure about the exact time. Since I was already here, I had to take the good with the bad, so I returned to my Margaret Duras.
A man and a woman met on the square, and chatted about each other’s experiences, confusions, dreams or agonies; just an ordinary believable story. But it has never happened to me. First of all, I have only been to open squares in my childhood, accompanied by my parents. Seldom have I gone by myself. Second, I might chat with the old women or students I met on my way, but never with strange men, that’s for sure. And finally, I had never tried to talk with a stranger about any profoundly personal issues. Actually, after talking too much about these topics with my girlfriends at college, I had not thought of them for a long time.Weird, isn’t it? We talk about shopping, soccer, diets and the Internet, Zhao Wei’s Japanese dress[1]. But we form no habit of interpersonal communication beyond this, especially rare is discourse on our deepest beliefs or feelings.
I have the habit of taking a book with me on the road, a habit formed when I had to memorize English vocabulary. But in any case, I have a true love for books. Ten years ago, I read in order to learn how to think; but now, how to think less. Guided by the author, whether the stories were about bitterness or sadness, about rapidly climbing the social ladder or parting with a beloved forever, once I close these books I know that they are not my own business. Strangely, without a book, hidden painful feelings might surface.
But the book lying before me was not the type that stimulated me to read. It discussed trivial things at a slow pace, which lulled me into meditation.
“I was forgetting. Sometimes someone looks at you.
Yes! And comes up to you?
Yes. Comes up to you.
For no particular reason?
No particular reason. And then the conversation becomes less general.
And then?
I never stay longer than two days in any town, three at the most. The things I sell are not so essential.”
……
Suddenly somebody patted my shoulder. Raising my head, I got the feeling that the man before me had just jumped out of my book, though I had never imagined what the hero looked like. He grimaced and then grinned at me, showing his teeth.
“Honey, where are you going?”
I was too scared to remain seated. “Sorry,” I murmured and fled to the opposite side of the room, clutching my bag tightly. In my panic, I stepped on someone else’s foot. Bold laughter answered another weak “sorry” from me. The dark man, who had just questioned me, made a face to his companion, and both of them moved in front of me, fixing their round eyes directly at me, with false smiles on their faces.
I was scared. I just couldn’t help it. I wished that I could just go through these several hours in peace. What a wish!
I fled from the waiting room. Outside the door there was a second, half open, glass door. Between the two doors, the forty-five square feet was piled with several unclaimed suitcases. The side door, which should have led to the baggage office, was locked. Against it sat a man in rags.
A straggler, or a beggar?
A white man, a young man.
He looked quite rough, if not ugly. His outline was unduly stiff, which startled me and reminded me of a portrait on posters on campus of a pervert who had been exposing himself. However, this sense completely vanished, the moment he looked at me. To be precise, he didn’t even look at me, but only turned his head forty-five degrees to face in my direction. I had no feeling that his glance ever reached me. There was not even the slightest contact--a contact like the dragonfly touching the water’s surface with its tail--of our glances although we were only two meters apart.
It was a melancholy face, a silhouette of a Greek statue. He had bushy eyebrows and deep-set eyes, but an empty stare. The corners of his mouth curved tightly downwards. Melancholy, I used this word instinctively. Actually, my first feeling about him was handsome. Only a handsome face could hold such profound emotion.
He had a can set out before him. Time has brought great changes to the world. This same time last year, people seemed to have extra money in their pockets. The year before last, the Christmas dishware was replaced after its first service. The unwanted new tablecloth with strawberry patterns was put away and a new one with cartoon patterns was bought the next day. Not long after that, recession, unemployment, and the collapse of the stock market, became constant topics of people’s conversations. Santa Claus’ sack turned into the beggar’s hat on the streets. The outstretched hands were neither senile nor frail; on the contrary, beggars were more likely to be strong men, instead of weak women or the old. I could never understand such a mystery.
To withdraw or not to withdraw? I was a little hesitant. Was I going outside? A cold wind was blowing in.
He suddenly murmured something.
“What?” I was not sure he was talking to me. Often there were beggars panhandling money from me on street, but I had never tried to listen to them.
He shook the coins in his can, and said, “Miss, I’m finished work for the day.”
Still not looking at me, he only stared into his tin. A boy’s special naughty smile emerged on his face. His long, curly eyelashes added innocence to his pale face.
I guessed he might be even younger than me. A wanderer? With such a thought, I seated myself beside him on some abandoned cardboard.
Oddly, I felt relaxed now.
This place, between the two doors, was quite good in fact: not too hot, no unpleasant smell and some fresh air. Only then, did I thoroughly wake up from the mistake of getting off at the wrong station.
Would Fang still question me for calling him halfway? Being such a nerd as he was, he had the urge to probe deeply into everything. He always treated me as if I was “presumed guilty”, which was going to allow him to infer that I must have gotten off at the wrong station. But the question was: would he interpret my telephone message as a problem? I could not remember clearly how long it been since he had treated me and all my actions as problems. Furthermore, for a very, very long period, he had not discovered any problems in this world—not in our daily routines nor in our various feelings, the only exception was his research.
I was the same. I had for a long time not considered him a problem, either. Leaning against the wall, I heard myself sigh.
Over ten years ago, when Elder Brother Fang was a flagman in high school, he delivered the weekly propagandist “speeches under the red banner”. At that time, this guy could spout and argue endlessly with his classmates, teachers and even my father every day. I was not totally clear about his words, but his eyes, his bright eyes, clearly revealed to me that he was right. Like a loyal Party Member, I had never had any suspicion of him. But after a short time, he would deny what he said.
“Didn’t you say last time…?”
“I didn’t. ”
“You did.”
“You must have misremembered. I said…”
“I haven’t. You said…”
“…even if I have said so, my silly little girl, everything is changing. Why not view things with a developing vision? ”
Or something like, “Don’t believe in everything I say. You must also learn from me how to doubt. ”
Until one day, on one summer night when frogs were singing, we had a rather long and meaningful conversation on campus. He informed me that, practically, as a scientist, he believed in materialism and science; but substantially, for the most part he was an agnostic. To me, he spoke of quantum mechanics, the universe, human history and the damned Incompleteness Theorem of Gödel—“damned” was my idea. So the world and our existence were uncertain, merely a probability distribution. So there was no distinction between “true” and “false”, there wasn’t even a clear definition of “non”. Any theorem that we believed in and depended on was not self-contained. And the future was not a given future, but a “construction” (only God understands)…He also mentioned philosophy. Before he became a graduate student, I was still in high school. During those years, we communicated only by letters. When had he started reading Western philosophy? I had no idea. He had previously looked down on these books. At that time, he felt it enough to study phenomena. Philosophy, he said, would only make the clever ones stupid. He recommended that I read Camus’ The Outsider, for instance, since I had never read pure theories. I raised my eyebrows and showed him a “My God!” expression. I knew Camus said that suicide was the only serious philosophic problem, a conclusion which made people depressed from the very beginning. Then Fang asked me to forget all about it and not to bother to read it anymore. For the thousandth time he then talked again about his mentor who jumped off a building. But every time it was a taboo for him, as well as the university authorities, to talk in detail about why this middle-aged, promising professor did that.
Finally, when my brain was too exhausted to absorb more information, he looked at me and said, “You have experienced and witnessed too little to understand this.”
I had always been his good student. Moreover, I was growing. So at that time, I seemed to understand more than ever before. Yes, I was old enough not to take his omniscient, weather-beaten and pessimistic tone seriously. Men, especially his type, always seemed to reflect deeply. Actually I understood all that he said, but I would rather remain silent and not let him know how much I understood. I smiled cunningly at this thought.
The moon when I was nineteen… I thought I understood his theories better. Afterwards, I announced these same grand ideas to several friends, although he might have updated them by that time. As far as what the new ideas could be, he did not mention it. I had wanted to ask him, but didn’t know how, and so I finally decided to drop it. Helplessly, I watched him sailing into the fog.
The guy beside me counted the coins in his can. He put a couple of big ones into his pocket, and with a tinkling sound, threw the rest back into the can, and put them out again.
“Hey, I’m outta here. But I just wanna know, you got any change?”
I shrugged, patting my pocket, “No, I am a very poor student.”
I smiled, for I had never, even in my country, chatted with a beggar.
“OK.” He didn’t sound disappointed.
I had a sudden desire to talk to him. I had not spoken with anyone seriously for a long time. This guy was a stranger, a man, a native and a beggar, there was a chasm between us. But did I even have a common language with the man who had grown up together with me and who knew the same people I did, did the same things, went to the same university and moved to the same country as I did?
“Have you gone to college?”
“Are you a native of this state? ”
“Do you have brothers and sisters?”
“Why are you here, and where are you going? ”
“Have you ever played the harmonica in the subway?”
“Have you got a place to sleep at night? Is it the government house beside the square? ”
“Have you ever talked to the homeless girls at the Square? Umm, have you ever had a girl friend? ”
……
But my words were choked off, I merely watched him take out a knife and trim off the edges of the can.
The knife had a black handle and the blade was longer than his fingers. It seemed to be quite sharp, or the can was very soft. With just a slight cut, a circle of metal dropped off. He was still not satisfied, though his tin was much shorter after several cuts. Didn’t he expect that one day it could be filled with coins?
I watched him so long and so directly that I felt I was being impolite. Fortunately, he didn’t notice me. I still couldn’t find a topic to start. I let it be, then, and I took out my book again, though it was rather dark.
I had forgotten where I stopped reading. The hero wandered everywhere, just filling his stomach. He saw no hope for the future, but was content with his life. The heroine had a specific goal – marriage; to marry the one who would like to marry her, but she was confused about her future. Such a dialogue could take place between any two people in the world, regardless of race, profession, gender or age, and could become a story. A thousand dialogues about life, fortune and future could happen in thousands of squares, but it was more or less the same, wasn’t it? Some people persisted in trivial details, in life and in its hows and whys. Others were indifferent to everything and would say nothing. I had thought it was too hard for one to be indifferent, before he or she experienced some big risings or fallings, comedies or tragedies. Actually it was not so hard.
I felt I could be more indifferent than my father, but he enjoyed life more than I did. During the Cultural Revolution, his home was searched and his belongings confiscated. He was then forced to go to the countryside. He made his living as a porter in his thirties, and he wrote his graduate thesis with me on his back. I even envied his miserable existence. His struggle for life had a reference point, thus it was meaningful. The catastrophe of his time distracted his mind, so he had to rack his brains just to survive daily life. Because of the unfairness of his society, he could blame everyone and everything, but himself, he didn’t even need to think about metaphysical issues. Sometimes I felt that my father was too naive. The distribution of houses by his organization made him angry all the time, even though he was already in his fifties and owned a four-room condo. I regarded this unfairness as a normal phenomenon. Corruption and cliques were inevitable in society. I didn’t believe in any absolute fairness, democracy, equality or freedom as long as human beings were involved. The only thing I believe in was myself.
Actually, the only thing I doubted was also myself. Having been in the world for over twenty years, I suddenly found that I hadn’t made any choices on my own. I had only given in to inertia, step by step, to my present situation. And now, the inertia that had impelled me to my choices was diminishing —I seemed to have discovered a so-called a kind of freedom. But social inertia became stronger and stronger, pushing me along. I had no reason to resist it. I hadn’t found a better way. Actually I hadn’t tried the alternative. If I had, then I could only blame myself were I not able to achieve the goals that were set for me. But did I really care?
These thoughts were just boring me, these absurd and naive thoughts.
Meaningless…
“You’re Chinese?” He suddenly asked, looking at the book in my hand.
“Yeah, Mainland China.” At school, I had gotten into the habit of identifying myself this way.
“Zhong Guo,” he said those words in Chinese, “My ex-girlfriend was also a Chinese.”
“Really? Where? Where is she from?” I got a little excited, as if I had heard an old friend’s name.
Lifting his head, he emitted three magical words:
“Ma An Shan.”
What a small town, and so near my hometown! She must be a native Chinese!
Were it not for a university classmate from Ma An Shan, I might have had no impression of this little town at all. My memory of this girl was still vivid, who, with her little pony tail, was unwilling to line up behind me during military training. After two days later we got know each other, she sang a children’s ballad to me: “Friends we are, overcoat we share. In the daytime it’s mine, in the evening it’s your time to wear, I wear it in the winter, in the summer it’s your turn to wear.” I just couldn’t bear her innocence.
When he mentioned a girl from Ma An Shan, I felt that it was the girl I knew. Was it because the place was too strange to me? What a lovely girlfriend for him.
“Now she…?” I was curious, but didn’t know how to continue.
“She’s got married to an old guy.”
What a story. She married for a U.S. green card? His family was against the marriage? Or they just played a game of love?
He lowered his head, hands buried in his hair.
“She jilted me. She jilted me.”
A bus pulled up, followed by a crowd of people from the waiting room. I got up and took a few steps, but it wasn’t the bus for New York. I went back and sat down again. Maybe I would have to take a midnight bus, if it was delayed. Surprisingly, I was not worried at all.
His hair was quite long and dirty, but not greasy enough to form little curls. He had aristocratic fingers, long and thin. Maybe he had even been to college. Maybe they had been schoolmates. Who knows? These American kids got everything so easily, and then they forgot to cherish it. It was as if the players were eliminated from a game whose rules were too simple. No one could say why. I would despise his being down and out, if it was because of a girl. What had Fang promised to me? Hadn’t I overcome all the obstacles on my way here? For the past two years, staring at the steel wire bunk above me, I waited every night for the day he would pick me up at the airport. Everyone would see me, and I’d walk out of the airport with my head held high. That would be my day.
He hadn’t come to pick me up. The airport was chaos. The school bus picked us up. No one noticed me, but I was not disappointed, either.
Last summer holiday, after Fang left my home, Mom held my hands, looking at me with a smile, and then turned to Dad and said,
“Women from our family share the same fate, to marry a poor professor.”
Vanity! The intellectuals’ vanity! Self-satisfaction. Artificial pride! Snobbery!
“Who said he would be a professor?”
“Oh, he is going to Silicon Valley?”
Mom also knew about Silicon Valley? Huh, as if she found a gold mine. I dare say that she had indeed been uncomfortably nervous for several days before Fang visited us. And now, she could set her heart at rest. I remembered she also did so after my entrance examination for college. From that time on, I was fully formed in her eyes.
Why have I never disappointed them?
The door was wide open now. I sat gazing at the moon. The misshapen, yellowy moon, as if it was frozen and shrunken in the winter sky.
“That crooked crescent! It firmly suggests, the full moon which embraces the perfect future.” Who said that?
A poet! A poet could be emotional, neglecting common sense. Obviously, the full moon would soon be misshapen again. Where is the logic in that?
I imagined the moon as butter, or pale margarine, frozen, which would only melt after the sun rose.
Thinking about that, I felt hungry. Fang had stuffed something in my bag when he sent me off, though I said it was not necessary.
“Have you been to Ma An Shan? What’s it like? Near the Yangtze River?” The young man asked me mindlessly.
He must have missed his ex-girlfriend very much to be questioning a stranger about her like that.
Someone told me, “I have been in love, so I know what it is.” I have seen enough people in love to recognize it. I found a banana and a grapefruit in my bag. Fang always advised me to eat a banana when traveling. It easily stops your hunger and you don’t have to wash your hand before you peel it. But I disliked its sweet and oily taste. Banana became my food choice only after I came to the States, where I found them big and cheap, suitable for poor people. Actually the sour, sweet grapefruit tastes much better. But only God knew why he put that in my bag. He seldom did anything unexpected.
I took out both of them, “Pick one.”
He looked at them for a while, then said with a cunning smile, “Ladies first.”
OK. It was not possible to just eat the grapefruit now. I had to give my banana to this gentleman.
He thanked me and took it, but seemed not eager to eat it. Instead, he waved the banana against the sky, pointing to the moon like a kid watching stars, and said,
“The banana moon.”
“What?”
“The Banana Moon. A little picture book. The banana moon, chocolate house, the blueberry sea.. Haven’t you read it? My favorite book.”
“You mean everything is edible?” I tried to analyze his psychology.
He smiled, but said nothing. Watching the moon, he began to peel the banana. The milky white meat appeared, soft and sweet. I could almost feel and taste it in my mouth.
“I’ve got a knife.”
“Ah, no, thanks.” That dirty knife. Plus, I’d discovered that Fang had cut the skin of the grapefruit to make it easy to peel.
Mom had praised Fang’s skill in cutting grapefruits. He could cut the skin open without touching the pulp. It wasn’t hard, but you had to be careful. Anyway, wasn’t everything Fang did perfect in my mom’s eyes? So I often asked him to precut my grapefruits for me in front of her, a chance for him to show off.
Pulling the skin aside, my mouth watered. “Puuu… ” I broke open the grapefruit. The pinkish pulp was then in my palms. I suddenly remembered an image from a poem, “Where dainty fingers tear apart fresh oranges.”
I smiled.
To see a world in a crescent of banana,
And a heaven in a grapefruit,
Hold infinity in the palm of my hand
And eternity in an hour.
“Wouldn’t you lend me a dime?” A crooked-back old woman walked towards me from the street corner.
I shook my head out of habit. Wait. I had a dime. For the first time in the States, I opened my purse for a beggar.
“Are you silly or something? A one-hundred dollar bill in your purse and where are your credit cards? ” Looking in my purse, Fang’s voice echoed again in my ears.
I smiled while shaking my head, and turned my purse over to find that dime.
Just at the flash of that moment, a hand snatched my purse.
“Ah,” I grabbed him by his shirt before he could run out of the corridor.
Another hand waved with a knife.
I let go of him. I could see a straight cut on the smooth and round nail of my middle finger, with dark red liquid bleeding out, forming a stream and flowing along the back of my hand.
“Fine hands tear the fresh orange open.” For no reason, I recalled that poem again.
I knelt down, pressing my middle finger, as if this action could prevent the irresistibly acute pain from reaching my heart.
People were circling me.
The figure rushed across the street. Before he disappeared, he turned to face me.
Our eyes met.
The moon witnessed it: this was not an illusion.
[1] Zhao Wei Japanese incident: Zhao Wei, a popular TV actress, was scorned by millions of Chinese since she wore a wartime Japanese flag as her skimpy dress.