Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth - By Xiaolu Guo Page 0,29

asking for a room. But it was different at night. At first it was as though the entire hotel slept the sleep of the dead. I would switch off my laptop, and crawl into bed with the lamp on. The mattress was unpredictable. Some nights it would stay hard; others it would cave in and I would find myself in a crevasse. Then, as I lay trying to sleep, I would hear the sound of a woman weeping. The sound would stop and then start again. It reminded me of the wailing saxophone music they used to play in Lush Life, a jazz bar in Haidian that was a favourite hang-out for foreigners. Lush Life got knocked down one or two years ago.

So there I was at the Just Like Home guest house, only a few miles away from the grave of the Terracotta Warriors. I was trying to write my script, but the noise of the night started to get to me. I began to think the hotel was a trap, a place from which people never escaped, a place where all the guests turned into dusty warrior statues. Maybe it was old Emperor Qin Shi Huang playing tricks. I was worried that I would wake up in the morning to find that I had become a dusty clay warrior too.

It might have been said that by escaping alone like this, I was not participating in the Community. That I, Fenfang, wasn't contributing to the Greater Socialist Good. But I didn't care. I wanted to hide away and write. I wanted to meet characters who would climb up my pen. I wanted to create a completely new world, inventing everyone and everything. Yet whenever I closed the door of Room 402, opened my laptop and sat in the faded red chair, nothing would happen. My thoughts would dry up. My ideas would be impossible to pin down. Room 402 would turn into a cage, rattled by the fitful bird inside.

Every morning I would wake up and pull back the stained brown curtains. Outside was a sea of state buildings from the 1980s covered in heavy yellow dust. Okay, so Beijing had dust. But this was dust that had been lying around for 5,000 years. Everything in Xi'an was covered in dust. The houses, the people. It covered each needle of the pine trees and every petal of the red canna flowers. I could almost hear the pine trees and the flowers coughing. The first thing I'd do in the morning, I'd get into the shower. I'd try to wash away the noise of the weeping woman and the vision of dust, but it echoed in my head all day. I'd get dressed and put on my long black coat. I liked my oversized coat. It covered my body entirely, protecting me from the annoying yellow dust.

In the lobby three female employees with nothing to do would be sitting at the front desk. Behind their heads were three big clocks showing the time in London, Tokyo and New York. I couldn't see why they needed international clocks since only peasants would stay at the Just Like Home guest house. Not that it was very homely. You had to be brave walking across a lobby like that, with the eyes of three women fixed on you. Especially in dark glasses and an oversized coat. I knew what would be going through their square brains. They would be thinking I was a prostitute. Why else would a young woman rent a room alone? It's not standard in China. And, in China, anyone who does something 'not standard' is immediately suspicious.

Anyway, at the door, I'd be met by the doorman, a skinny young boy all in red like a ceremonial imperial guard. Instead of opening the door, though, he would be practising martial-arts moves in front of the mirrors. Monkey Finger. Flying Limb. Double Leg Kick. Classic moves picked up from popular martial-arts films. When he wasn't busy with his routines, his nose would be pressed to the window. He'd be staring intently outside, even though there was never anything to stare at.

I'd push open the lobby doors myself and walk out into the world of dust. About 100 metres on, in the middle of all this dust, was a shabby canteen called Little Chilli Pepper. Inside was a permanent swarm of flies and three or four middle-aged men with cigarettes glued to their lips playing mah-jong. Outside was the constant rumble of