#1 [短篇小说] Shan gui
Note: This is pure fiction.
The bus that left the city center was full of passengers, most of them blue color immigrants, because the bus headed towards a town inhabited mostly by immigrants who do low paying jobs. I was in the bus because two years' ago, I bought a moderate house in this town. All my neighbors wre immigrants, including me, but I am the only of my race. In a sense I am surrounded by the other, a unique, homogeneous race.
But today I noticed a young white guy. He was not a regular. Next to him was a young woman. The first sight of her startled me, because she looked like one of my former students, Shangui. The woman was talking with the man in an intimate way. If she were not speaking, she could have passed for my former student, but her English and her voice told me she was not. For me, her face and her voice formed a contradiction. I could not move my eye away from the couple, thought I was not staring at them. I just glanced at them from time to time. I wished she could stop talking and give me a false impression she were Shan gui.
Shan gui was not the name of my student. It was the way I called her. The name of course, was taken from poet Qu Yuan. The reason why I gave this name to her was because she came from a mountain village in the south and she was eerily beautiful.Her face was suggestive of a lovely fox. Her eyes were what the Chinese would call "apricot eye". Her hair was bright and black. It drapped over her shoulder like a waterfall of black gold.
At that time, in the 80's, I was living in a small dorm of the school. My marriage had ended in a stormy divorce. The ex-wife, I heard, was to marry someone else and move to Europe. On the day my divorce was legally finalized, there was a dance party in the hall of the school library. Dance parties were still a rarity in those days. The country was opening up, so was the school's leadership. Actually, top school leaders also came to the party. Both my ex and I showed up, as if to show to the world we did not care about the disastrous marriage. When Johann Strauss' Viennese Waltz was played, I saw Shan Gui at the corner of the hall. I invited her to the dance.
At first we just danced. I was not a good dancer, but was quite OK with the basic steps of the so called fast three Waltz. Then in the middle of it, she suddenly asked me: Are you dancing with me to make your wife jealousy? I did not know what to say. Was I? Would she be jealousy to see me dancing with a youger, prettier woman? The divorce was finalized. She had shown no signs of hesitation.Would she be jealousy now?
To Shan Gui I just said no, I was not dancing with you to anger my ex. Now I wonder if that was a wise answer. Maybe I should have said yes, I was using you to anger her and she would have felt flattered. I never knew what a woman had in her mind.
Later Shan Gui would find time to visit me. At that time, there was no guard at the entrance to the so called Teaching Zone, as opposed to Faculty and Staff Residential Zone. Students were free to go anywhere on campus, as long as they return to their dorm at light off time.
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