Strange Beasts of China

Zhong Liang, with your grinning boyish face, your dry humour, my incorrigible Zhong Liang. If you come back, if you sit before me, quietly take my hand, and tell me everything, I’ll love you. I will love you. Never mind if I can’t love you, or I already do.

‘Will you buy me lots of brown sugar?’

‘Yes.’

‘Then I love you.’

‘You’re adorable. It makes me happy to look at you.’

‘You’re only alive for a while, but dead forever. How you live, how you die, that’s your own business.’

‘Remember the time we had together, remember that I once loved you. Then we’ll part forever.’ My mother’s words to me.

‘Do you know what fate is? Fate is nine o’clock. Eight o’clock is over, and poof, it’s nine o’clock.

Why ask, when you know the answer?’

One of us hung up, but I don’t know if it was him or me.

I don’t know when people stopped saying goodbye. Anything to cut down on phone bills.

Can humans and beasts love each other? Is it possible?’

‘I love He Qi,’ she’d said.

My mother would say, ‘The beasts all want to eat people, just as people eat them.’

Mutual destruction is the only way to survive. That’s the circle of life. That’s truth.