Starry Night
Li: What is it?
Me: A big piece of dough.
Li: Really?
Vincent: Do not listen to him. Obviously, it is a circular motif on the ceiling.
I made a business trip to Istanbul for a regional conference in December 2015. As a representative of a Chinese NGO, I was expected to contribute ‘innovative’ ideas to a new APP — if I could be categorized as an APP — developed to collect reliable data on IDU communities in a few Asian and African countries. Before the meeting started, I had a free Sunday. With my colleague, I wandered in the city center visiting historic sites. The entire city looked gloomy under the metal grey sky, with the savage wind blowing southwards from the Black Sea — I was reminded of Nabokov’s memoir Speak, Memory. Around noon, in an hour or so, several middle school students stopped me and engaged me in a conversation in English. “How strange of that!” I thought to myself. At that time, I lived in Kunming in southwestern China. On weekends, in the neighborhood close to Cuihu Lake, I often saw primary school students enter street cafés looking for their targets: Western-looking foreigners, with white skin and blue eyes. And those kids, usually accompanied by one parent, followed a standard procedure. Firstly, they located a café on Wenlin Street frequented by Westerners; secondly, they took a few seconds to summon the courage to approach a ‘friendly-looking’ foreigner based on their discreet judgment; and at last, they started asking questions in simple English. It was part of their coursework and they were required to collect the interlocutors’ signatures. Most of the conversations functioned like a one-way street. I mean, the kid shot questions on the table, with carefully studied pronunciation, but he didn’t bother to listen to the answers. Or, was it too difficult for him to understand ‘real’ English with accents? I wondered how much information a student could glean from those encounters, but he was relieved that the work had been done.
On the coast of the Bosphorus, those English conversations were all the weirder. I was not a “Westerner” — if they had truly wanted to practice English, they should have found someone else. Looking back now, I think I have found a concrete reason to justify their choice — Westerners looked similar to locals. Among all the people roaming about on the streets that day, I had the most distinct appearance. If they could converse with me, it surely had to be done in English. One kid approached me on his own, and on other occasions, they came to me in a group or accompanied by a supportive parent. All of them spoke so softly that I could barely hear them. However, without repeating their questions in a louder voice, they simply showed me the piece of paper where all the questions were listed. For the interests of time, I answered those questions briefly one by one and they seemed to be very satisfied with such an interaction, though there was no real dialogue going on.
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It was late afternoon when I entered the imposing Blue Mosque. The setting sun gave everything a yellowish hue, and the inner square of the mosque was teeming with visitors. Before long I was spotted by another schoolboy with an earnest face. This time, the boy seemed more serious about his task, as he was determined to hold a real English conversation without resorting to his written notes. When the dialogue was concluded, I felt as if I had eventually finished my homework (“Go out and talk to at least five elementary school students in English!” my teacher commanded.). Therefore, to avoid further contact with strangers most of whom greeted me with Konnichiwa, I retreated from the main square to a corner of a long corridor providing shade to worshippers and visitors, looked up, and took a picture of the motif on the ceiling.
I quickly shared this photo in a semi-dormant WeChat group with only three members, followed by a short exchange recorded at the beginning of this essay. Vincent was the guy who created this group on a whim and named it ‘Amazing Friends’ — a very tacky title. I got to know him half a year ago, through a popular social media platform named Douban. At that time, I had been working as a manager of a project whose aim was to serve HIV patients living in southwestern China for years; in the middle of developing some publicity materials, I was desperate to find a graphic designer. Such responsibilities always weighed heavy on me. First of all, the pay was not good enough to attract good designers; secondly, even if I could find one, it would be difficult to cooperate with him since my colleagues tended to raise suggestions at the last minute — and I was stuck in the middle ground. Thirdly, the topic of HIV was sensitive in China, and most people would never in their wildest dreams touch on such a topic, let alone get involved in related projects.
As luck would have it, Vincent responded to my post with enthusiasm, and we quickly started working together on different tasks. In my view, he was the kind of partner that everyone would like to work with. He was patient, careful, and dedicated. Whenever I raised a suggestion or felt a need to do a new version, he responded very positively, although it meant sometimes he had to work at night for urgent but small changes to the original design. When I had some free time in the office, I would talk to him about our lives in Kunming as waidiren. He was from a small county in northern Jiangsu, and was doing a degree in animation. It was summertime, and he was about to enter his last year at university. The expectation of graduation loomed large, as the feeling of uncertainty frustrated him all the time. He liked Kunming. However, he did not think he could establish a life there. By Chinese standards, Kunming was a small city; besides, there were no true opportunities for people like him who wanted to pursue a career in fashion design. He had been entertaining the idea of finding a job in Shanghai for a long time, and he told me that he appreciated all the practice opportunities he had acquired. Not only could he make some pocket money, but also he was able to hone his professional skills. Two years later — a year after his graduation — we would be dining together in a Yunnanese restaurant in downtown Shanghai, reminiscing our lazy days when we whiled away hours with a cup of coffee on Wenlin Street lined with ginkgo trees. But during that summer of 2015, everything remained uncertain to him.
Kunming time was not steady. More often than not, Kunming homecomings jarred me greatly — Kunming was not my hometown, yet I was more familiar with it than any other city in China. If one waidiren lived long enough in Yunnan, sooner or later he would feel stuck, stripped of motivation to step out of his comfort zone (he will probably become an imported jiaxiangbao). For the following autumn and winter in 2015, Vincent and I followed a boring but soothing pattern: we would start with a cup of coffee in Prague Café or Salvador’s, and then take a walk around Cuihu Lake, all the way to the city center; after that, we would part our ways at a metro station called Dongfeng Square. We did that twice or three times a month, the pattern of which was constantly interrupted by his assignments or my frequent business trips to other towns in Yunnan. In retrospect, I can’t remember what information we exchanged during those long, hypnotic afternoons; we seldom talked about our respective hometowns, nor did we speak of our families. Sometimes, we didn’t talk at all — just being there without worrying about our work or future was a good escape from everyday suffering. Unfortunately, this ‘group therapy’ for both of us didn’t last long since he had to leave for Shanghai to make a living. After he settled down in Shanghai, we didn’t talk to each other very often. He worked long hours, which was within expectation; and he had to move home frequently, which was quite unexpected. For several weeks, he lived with a colleague temporarily before finding a new apartment in the suburbs, far from the office where he worked. But, despite living a difficult life, he was rather optimistic about the future. He kept saying that, if I ever wanted to go back for a visit, I would always have a place to stay.
Gradually, without any deliberate arrangement, we were only able to learn about each other’s current situation from updates on Path, a social media platform popular in the circle of my friends and acquaintances. The last time I contacted him was in late January or early February of 2021, I asked him how he was faring — I assumed he was doing well because he even kept a cat — and whether he planned to go back to his hometown to spend the Spring Festival, but I never got a reply.
Vincent gave me the impression that he was a slow-to-warm-up person, but in the meantime, he was not afraid to talk to strangers in public. He claimed to have social anxiety disorder, but there was a ‘social butterfly’ living inside him. Otherwise, how did he manage to make friends with Li? The legend had it that further back in time, in 2012 or 2013, they were on the same coach from Lijiang to Zhongdian and neither of them booked a hotel room in advance. When Vincent heard Li make phone calls he decided to intervene, and thus began the friendship. There was a Chinese saying, ‘There is no story without coincidence.’ Li’s hometown was Changning, where I worked as a volunteer for a peer-education project. And her favorite uncle, Dr Li, was a good, joyful man who helped us a lot, making our lives easier in Changning. (One day in the future, I will share those beautiful memories about Changning.)
People always say a life journey is just like a train trip. Many accompany you for a certain period, but you can only get to your terminal station alone. The WeChat group existed for only a year, and after the summer of 2016, none of us bothered to say anything anymore. Vincent’s life in Shanghai became stable and he felt there was no need to mention his drudgery at all. Li travelled frequently for her job as a piano player. And me? I was still stuck in Kunming.
It was Li who told me the news of Vincent’s sudden death via E-mail in late 2021 or early 2022. Upon hearing this tragedy, I checked his WeChat page and found an obituary posted by his parents. And in the comment section, they thanked us for our concern and reminded us that we should take care of people around us. (A few months later, I enquired about Vincent’s death to another friend, and she told me at the beginning of 2021 Vincent said he felt ill and was then hospitalized. Nobody would expect him to struggle in the ward for half a year and lose the battle in the end.) In her E-mail, Li added, “Vincent will be remembered as a good person.”
Dedicated to Vincent Wu (1991 to June 4th, 2021)
