A Birthday Party

The roads are all iced up now. It's getting really, really cold. A kind of cold I've never been confronted with before. Wet hair freezes into icicles. A runny nose becomes two tiny green glaciers on your top lip. Your ears throb and ache for hours if you go outside without your woolly hat. You lose sensation in your fingers and toes, despite fleece-lined boots and ski-gloves, after ten minutes of exposure. Sometimes I awake cold and never really warm up at all, just muddle through the day with a cold, frozen grin, that melts away when I get back to my room.

Last Sunday, the day after our break-up, I had been invited to Cindy's 18th birthday party. I had a shocking hangover, after a binge at the Gong Da university bars and clubs the night before. The last thing I remember was dancing round a pole, falling off the stage, lying on the floor giggling and wailing. I wasn't in a celebratory mood when I woke up that morning, to say the least.

Cindy sits quietly at the back of my PET1 class. Like almost all her peers, she's an only child. She wants to go abroad to study hotel management. She lives with her parents in a small but neat apartment in the Gong Da district, a stone's throw, I noted from the taxi window, from the clubs and bars I'd been making an arse of myself in the night before. Shoe-horned into the little flat were: Nancy and Kitty, from PET1, three students from PET2, the mother, an aunt, and a jug-eared cheeky little boy whose parental origin I never worked out. Cindy's aunt prepared the food while her mother conducted the proceedings. Her father, an engineer, was working late, and would join us later. I was the guest of honour, it seemed, and treated like a king.

Oranges were peeled on my behalf. As soon as I'd sucked my way through one carton of yoghurt, I was given another. I was fed pine nuts, peanuts, sunflower and melon seeds, then shown around the tiny place as if on a museum tour. The living room was wooden-floored, with a narrow kitchen and balcony off to the right. Apart from the table and chairs waiting patiently for our party, two wooden armchairs sat squat and stately either side of a black and red wall hanging with the Chinese character fu, which means good luck and fortune in the future. Cindy explained her father had bought this in Beijing, especially for her parents' wedding. I was asked to pose in front of it for a photo, one hand touching the picture, the other hand on my heart; this would bring me good luck in money and love. The irony didn't escape me, but I gamely kept in place my frozen grin. Cindy's room was smaller than my prison cell at the college, but tidy and warm, in girlish pastel colours, soft toys and teddy bears annexing the large bed, in the corner an expensive computer. I gave Cindy her birthday present, a calculator that told the time in ten different countries, and she giggled with glee and kissed me on the cheek.

Dinner was incredible. The highlight these huge, boiled bones with tiny tender scraps of juicy meat, from which you sucked the marrow out of with a straw, and a delicious local dish called suan cai, a mouth-wateringly bitter combination of starch noodles, sour cabbage and tiny bits of fried pork. The father, a wiry, talkative, beaming man who obviously doted on his only daughter, came back and we got stuck into the beer. Did a fair few gan bei's (which means you have to empty your glass) and began to feel better. The family started singing songs and, not wanting to be rude, I sang Happy Birthday, Floo'er o' Scotland, and Yesterday, the Paul McCartney song, which nearly stuck in my throat. After all that, I went home with half-a-dozen yoghurts, having to turn down an oft-repeated offer of a huge bag of egg fried rice, not wanting to seem greedy, as well as an open invitation to come back any time. This raised a smile from the cynics in the 5th floor lounge.

'You'll be married off to her soon, if you don’t watch yourself.'

This really wasn't funny. However, I felt a kernel of warmth inside me that didn't dissipate for days. Last night, in the taxi on the way to the bar, I looked out at the monotonous breeze-block Gong Da buildings, these massive soulless dwellings of thousands, and I realised that, in any strange city anywhere in the world, this faceless, uncaring façade can be instantly erased by imagining a family like Cindy's inside them. A city is not the sum of its outward appearance. For if Shanghai can be compared to a beautiful lady with bright make-up and dazzling clothes, or Beijing as a stunning, traditional woman in qi pau dress, then Harbin loses in comparison, looking more like a wrapped-up worker struggling through the freezing night. But this is all cosmetics. The heart of a city is its people, who live and work and love there.

Looking out of the dirty taxi window I could see, in my mind's eye, Cindy with her mother and father: true, generous people, filling their hard-earned little space in this world with love and light. The tower blocks, the icy cold, the darkness, all vanished for an instant.

The Crash

I remember in our first meeting with Karen, we'd been told to watch out for The Crash.

'For the first two weeks to a month everything's so new, so exciting, you don't have time to physically adjust. You're just too busy, too blown-away by it all. Then you go through a sticky period when it all catches up with you. Then, at around the two-month point, you have The Crash. You get sick. Depressed. You miss home. You're exhausted. You're lonely. It sucks.’

I've had mine early.

Something had been wrong for a while. First, my girlfriend's computer wasn't working, then her college's too. Then, when she did contact me, her emails or phone calls were as cold as an ice lantern: you know there's a light inside, but you can't feel the warmth. She ceased to use the words essential in a relationship such as 'need', 'miss', or 'love'. She never asked how I was doing, and at the time I really wasn't doing too well. So I started telling her quite graphically how I was. I told her all about my Crash. I gave her all the details. Not trying to goad her into caring for me, more like trying to find out just how much she'd stopped caring.

I didn't ask for sympathy, just told her the facts: food poisoning, exhaustion, culture shock, isolation. In her replies to me she never showed any sign of concern. It was as if she were saying, 'Well, it was your decision to leave me and go to China. It's not my fault you're having a tough time'. True enough, but she didn't seem to realise I was having a tough time because I could feel her love for me slipping away by the day, and she didn't even want to talk about it.

She phoned on Friday and, somehow, was put through to my boss's office. He came in looking none too pleased to be carrying out my secretarial work, and told me there was a girl on the phone for me. Eyebrows rose in the teachers' office. She'd phoned to tell me that she wouldn't make our now not-so-regular Sunday phone call, as she was going clubbing in London. Had a semi-domestic in front of Charles. We resolved to sort things out on Monday morning but, after three almost sleepless nights, I couldn’t get through. Got up early Tuesday morning, Monday night her time, phoned, got through, ran into a wall of ice. Told her I missed her. Silence. Told her I loved her. Silence. Asked her why she couldn't reply. Silence. I hung up.

Got sick again during the week, and she didn't express one iota of concern. The only email I got was this:

'Hi,

I'm very tired because I've just finished a major report. My new horse is being a real sweetie at the moment. Getting on really well with her. Speak to you Sat.'

Which could be translated, or analysed, something like this:

'No 'dear' - I'm not going to say anything that might incriminate me later-

I'm very busy, so not going to spend a long time on this email. In fact, I haven't the time for you any more. I'm now talking about my horse as a defence mechanism. It saves me from having to talk about myself or my emotions. Anyway, I love my horse more than you. Face the facts. Speak to you Sat. so don't expect me to bother to get in touch until then.

No 'love', for the same reason as no 'dear'...

This was a reply to an email I'd sent telling her about my being off work with food poisoning and exhaustion.

When Saturday's call came around, she immediately adopted a cold tone of voice that suggested she didn't want to be there. She never asked me how I was. As an unsubtle icebreaker, I said:

'Look, I need to ask you something. I need to get this off my mind. Do you want out?'

'I don't know,' she replied.

I was practically spoon-feeding her an exit-plan, suggesting to her what I thought she wanted to say, but she couldn't admit it and I, stupidly, selfishly, didn't even realise that she might have been acting like this because of me, for me.

'What d'you mean you don't know?' I shouted down the phone. 'It's a simple enough question. A yes or no answer will do.'

Then it all, finally, came out.

'I don't know, Ross. Really. I just think... I just think that we're drifting apart, moving on with our lives. You sound so confident and happy in China [sic], and I'm beginning to feel the same in England. Everybody's been saying to me that I'm back to my old, confident best. I've got my sparkle back. And it sounds like you have too [double sic]. I just think that we're no good for each other anymore. I'm no good for you. We're just making each other unhappy now. We're changing, becoming different people, stronger people...'

'But but but that doesn't mean we can't be strong, change for the better, then sort our relationship out this time next year. Just because I'm becoming a stronger person out here doesn't mean I don't need you.'

I imagined her, long hair, bright smile, laughing at something.

'But, by the time you get back, we'll have changed so much it won't be us anymore.'

'That could be a good thing.'

'I don't think so.'

'You've obviously been thinking about this a lot.'

A loaded question.

'A bit.'

'So why the fuck didn't you talk to me about it? Why didn't you tell me you were having doubts, instead of giving me the cold shoulder treatment?'

‘...’

'Well, it'll be the last time.'

A silly thing to say. It was her dumping me, after all.

'I know it will be,' she said.

'I just wish you'd told me sooner.'

'I'm telling you now.'

'Is there someone else?'

'Of course not.'

And suddenly I was five thousand miles from home, alone.