Twenty fragments of a ravenous youth - By Xiaolu Guo Page 0,5

mine, his arm resting on my ribcage, his warm, hairy legs entangled with my legs. I, too, depended on him to sleep. I'd prop my toes on his ankles, and stroke his fingernails with my thumb. Sometimes, if I slept with my ear on his chest, I could hear his heart beat like a drum.

But most of the time Xiaolin was either angry or zombie-like. He was stuck in a rut. Get up, go to work, go to bed. Never any change. For every meal, the three animals and six humans in Xiaolin's family (seven, if you included me) huddled round the small, circular table in the small, square room. The food was the same, the whole time I lived there. Eight Dragons Soy Sauce with rice, Eight Dragons with noodles, Eight Dragons with dumplings. We lived so close to each other, every millimetre of the floor was used. The two cats would pee in a sand box, but the dog always shat beside our bed. He also kept making neighbours' bitches pregnant.

After three years, the grandmother was even more decrepit, and the two little sisters were getting on my nerves. There was no oxygen left in the room, I was worn out. It was like being back with the rotten sweet potatoes. I wanted to run and run and run.

THERE WERE NO CHINESE ROSES on the Chinese Rose Garden Estate, but there was plenty of rubbish. I had complicated emotions towards that place. It was like having a very ugly and smelly father, but you still had to live with him, you couldn't just move out.

In my village, the people used to say that a buffalo only remembers things for a month. I think I must be a buffalo. I've got a terrible memory. When I try to remember my time in the Chinese Rose Garden, the only thing I can see clearly is Ben. Ben, who came into my life I can't remember how. Maybe it was in a bar I liked called Dirty Nelly, or at a bookshop, the one that sells foreign books. Perhaps we got chatting when I was checking out an American comic book and he was buying the Boston Globe. He was always reading the Boston Globe. He told me that was the place he came from. I checked the encyclopaedia and it said Boston is on Latitude 42° North, Longitude 71° West, -4 hours GMT. Anyway, Xiaolin hated him. Not that there was anything between me and Ben to start with. Xiaolin said Ben pretended he was just a young student, but actually he was storing up information on the Chinese so that he could go and work for some east-coast American corporation telling them how to exploit us.

Soon after I moved into my new place, Ben came to look at it, clutching a shaking two-leaf scarlet lily against his chest. All the members of the Neighbourhood Committee gaped at him with open mouths and swollen eyes as he stood at the gate.

Ben didn't come in. He put the lily down on the ground in front of me, brushed some earth off his shirt and said, 'Fenfang, I'm worried this plant is going to die. You have to look after it for me.'

I accepted the two-leaf plant, and at the same time, I accepted Ben.

The Chinese Rose Garden Estate was just like all the other Beijing estates built to replace the Hutongs: a collection of uniform tower blocks. Although the buildings were brand new, the walls were already crumbling. They were covered with posters telling you about medication against syphilis, and scribbled ads giving telephone numbers. In the cement yards, skinny trees with pitiful leaves fought to survive. The corridors were crammed with broken bicycles. But the day I moved into that little apartment on the estate, I felt a secret joy at finally having a space of my own. I would never again have to share my space with a family or stinking animals. Never.

I had brought my five possessions with me: a plastic closet full of clothes, a green towel, a red blanket, a bottle of Head & Shoulders, and a folder with scripts from some of the crappy shows and films I'd been in. All my other things had been torn or smashed up by Xiaolin when he found out I was leaving. I locked the door behind me and took a look around. A family had lived there before, I could smell. Oil on the kitchen walls, some