the beauty of my youth. I don't want to see my body ageing. The cherry blossom chooses to die in one night. I want to do the same.
I looked again at the cherry-blossom trees beneath me and saw that the grass was already covered by a layer of fading petals.
'LIFE IS JUST LIKE those stewed pigs' trotters. Sometimes you just have to eat what you're given.'
Comrade Loaded-With-Gold's words stayed in my mind. He was probably right.
As for stewed pigs' trotters, I didn't even have those. I hadn't worked for two months. There were no frozen dumplings in the freezer, no rolls of toilet paper in my bathroom, no soy sauce or vinegar in my kitchen, no soap by the bath. I'd used everything up. Worse than that was the loneliness of it. I put the kettle on to boil. I could feel a headache starting again. This always happened when I hadn't had any coffee for a few days. I rummaged around and found a sachet of stale instant. My worst worry was what I'd find in the sugar bowl. I closed my eyes and opened the Taiko sugar tin. Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, sure enough, there wasn't even any sugar in this place. Instead there at the empty bottom were two dead cockroaches, starved to death.
I sat at the table. For half an hour, I just sat and slowly drank the bitter coffee from my big cup. When I had finished, nothing had changed. But my headache was going away.
I started hunting through my clothes for money. I searched my pockets and even my winter coat from last year. The tiniest bit of loose change was enough – anything to get me through the day. Altogether, I managed to find 25 yuan.
I went downstairs and immediately tasted sand in my mouth. The air smelled dusty. I ran into the nearest store and bought one pack of frozen chive dumplings, two packs of instant noodles and a tin of sugar. Five yuan change. As I walked home, I prayed for rain to arrive to help this desert city. 'Please rain,' I murmured. 'Please rain, please rain, please rain.'
Back in the apartment, I wolfed down a bowl of instant noodles and drank another cup of coffee, with sugar this time. Then I sat at my table, contemplating my telephone. Something was bound to happen, someone had to come to save me, I could feel it. 'Please help me, please help me, please help me...' I whispered. Two minutes later, the phone rang.
Heavenly Bastard in the Sky, thank you! It was a call about money. A call from an Underground Director!
The Director introduced himself. It was such a long introduction that I almost fell asleep. He took me through the story of his struggle to be a cutting-edge artist from A to Z. In the beginning, he'd wanted to be mainstream, to be accepted by the state, maybe even get to Hollywood. But when he finished his first feature, for some reason it never got past the censors. So he changed his politics and decided to become an Underground Director. The more films he made, the more underground and angry he became.
Anyway, as I said, I was just about falling asleep when the Underground Director said he'd heard about this film called The Seven Reincarnations of Hao An. He said he thought Hao An sounded very underground and his seven reincarnations pretty intriguing. Could he read the script?
Could he read the script? Underground Director, you are my Bo Le and I am your horse. 1 am 1.2 million per cent happy to give the story of Hao An and his Bloody Mary Li Li to you.
The Underground Director was happy too.
'Great, great. All right, Fenfang. Come and meet me tonight. Nine o'clock. HuaiYang Cuisine on the second floor of the Jiang Su Hotel.'
More than fine! I hung up. The Heavenly Bastard in the Sky never seals off all the exits – there's always a way through. In this world there must be more than 300 different ways to die, but who cares. At least I wasn't going to die of hunger.
At 8 p.m. I set out for the Jiang Su Hotel, script in hand. I could feel a fever growing in my head. My throat was sore and my ears ached. The sand storm outside felt like it was taking me over. I could hear grains of sand hitting the windows of nearby buildings and I felt as if, at this