I pushed through the iron gate, the creak echoing off the stairwell's worn walls like a familiar greeting. Ahead, silhouettes of a man and a woman were inching down the stairs, leaning on each other more than the shaky handrail. The hallway's dim light seemed to soak into the man’s weathered skin, giving him a twilight glow.
I recognized the man—Old Gao, and next to him, Fangfang, her arm hooked around his. Despite Fangfang looking three times as big as Old Gao, there was something almost childlike in her dependence on him.
They both waited in place, as I slipped past with a murmured "Excuse me," barely louder than the shuffle of my feet.
The door on the second floor, perpetually left open, led me into a starkly bright world. It was a contrast to the stairwell's gloom, the kind of place that seemed too clean for its own good. Little Wei and Little Zhu were already at work, their movements a silent ballet across the checkerboard floor.
Old Meng was the calm epicenter. His phone conversation as a receptionist was a one-sided mumble that somehow felt as comforting as the worn sofa in the corner. When I asked about getting a massage, his "ah yes, no problem" was delivered with an accent thick enough to chew on. He moved to ready the bed with the practiced ease of someone who'd done this a thousand times before.
“Just now in the stairway I ran into…” I nearly brought up Old Gao and Fangfang, but then it hit me—we'd never officially introduced ourselves. Their names had just trickled into my ears from the chatter of the masseurs I eavesdropped on.
"Ah, they've gone out for veggies. After nine, the market slashes prices on leftovers, a real steal," Old Meng caught on quick. As he spoke, he stumbled over a stool—not tucked away under the bed as it should have been, but standing defiantly in his path.
"Watch out…" I blamed myself for not noticing sooner. But then, it wasn't entirely on me. The masseurs' ease with this space often made me forget their blindness.
They seemed to have tamed the space around them: the neatly hung white sheets, the dishes dripping dry on the rack, the thermos bubbling quietly on the counter. Everything stayed put, like well-disciplined guards waiting for command.
I rushed to smooth a corner of the bedsheet before Old Meng, bending down to slip off my shoes.
As I lay there, Little Wei suddenly turned his head, “Isn’t this the young lady who speaks so slowly?”
Little Wei hailed from Shanxi, about 30 in age, with a buzz cut and a big smile. His thick eyebrows and wide eyes, paired with that expansive grin, made him bloom like a sudden, awkward flower. What set Little Wei apart wasn’t just his looks but his eyes, which, unlike the others, seemed to take in everything with a clarity that belied his blind condition.
The first time I met him, I mistook him for someone who could see as well as I could. Gathering my courage, I had asked him, "Can you see?"
The room erupted in laughter. Old Gao joked, "He's a phony, sneaked in here, kick him out!" Little Wei joined in, "Guaranteed authentic, want to see my blind man's ID card?" He teased, pretending to search his pocket.
"Ah, no need, it just seems like you're looking..." I said, a bit embarrassed but smiling.
He explained, "I have retinitis pigmentosa. Can't see much in the dark, but in the light, I can make out the basics. You’re wearing a long coat, right? Hair to your shoulders?"
Later, curiosity got the better of me, and I looked it up. It turned out to be an eye condition without a cure, one that wouldn’t alter his appearance. It starts with night blindness, and over the years, vision fades away, like leaves dropping with the arrival of autumn.
"Hmm…You popped in here two Fridays back, right around nine at night. Little Zhu worked on you for a solid half-hour," Little Wei concluded his recall as if he had a calendar tattooed on his brain.
"Right, you have an amazing memory," I responded, face down on the massage bed. I hadn’t slept well the night before, and today, a migraine was doing its best to drill through my temples.
"The timer starts now, 60 minutes to go," declared Old Meng's phone.
The blind often max out the speed of their text-to-speech software, warping every message into an auditory blur. To decode it, you have to trade in some of God's other gifts—seeing, for instance.
Old Meng's hands skillfully navigated my neck and shoulders, kneading my muscles and bones with a precision that struck the perfect balance between firmness and gentleness. Those hands, weary from years of toil, resembled a carpenter's tools, occasionally creaking at the joints. Only when they were on the verge of collapse were they briefly set aside for a hasty mend, only to resume their devoted service.
I let his hands guide the dance of my neural network, feeling the points of tension in my body pulse with pain before melting away like effervescence in hot water. It grounded me, more than I cared to acknowledge.
If someone were peering up from underneath the massage table at that instant, they would witness my face contorting in sync with the cadence of Old Meng's wrist movements.
Was this raw, entangled mess of flesh closer to or farther from the kind of beauty I aspired to embody?
2.
"Ow, take it easy, would you? You're turning my grimace into a permanent feature," the male client grumbled from beneath Little Wei's expert hands.
"All part of the service," Little Wei shot back, slapping on the cupping jars with a magician's flair.
"Great, I already started off ugly, and now I'm entering a whole new league of hideous."
"Well, it's not like anybody here can see you."
"Jokes aside, I've got to find a wife somehow."
"Best of luck with that."
"And you? Your turn."
"Me? Oh, same old bachelor, my friend."
"You know, you could try your luck with Russian hotties in the Northeast, right by the border. Or snag yourself a Vietnamese bride—affordable, supposedly sub, and they cook great meals..."
"If she's happy cooking for herself, that's good enough for me," Little Wei countered.
"Why not take a leap then?"
"Some things you just can't rush."
"Ouch... okay, maybe a tad gentler."
"I've been thinking, maybe I'll head south with Old Gao next year, try our luck, see what Guangdong has to offer..."
Their back-and-forth kept rolling, easy and familiar. It was like I’d accidentally walked into a living, breathing scene of a Charles Dickens’ rendition of a massage parlor—except nobody was asking for more gruel, and the only thing thick in the air was the scent of medicinal oils and the sound of banter. There I was, stealing a glance into their world through the looking glass, feeling both a part of and outside it.
Gradually, under Old Meng's skilled ministrations, the tightness in my muscles began to yield, the piercing edge of my headache blurring into a gentle lull. My thoughts, once sharp and focused, now adrift on the nocturnal current like paper lanterns dissolving into a dream.
3.
Every couple of months, Lili was swept away into the same dream—sometimes it was the Milky Way stretching across the sky, other times it was some unknown marvel. These entities, so alien and incomprehensible, enveloped her in an emotion that felt almost otherworldly.
Last week, she found herself once again wandering under that star-filled canopy in her dreams. The next morning, she shared this with Jackie, who remarked that the pursuit of such emotions might just be the most worthy human endeavor of all. Jackie then shared his own dream—a serene vision of ascending a forested mountain to a vast green plain, where a quaint university lay, stretching to the foot of a distant, taller peak.
Jackie's dream mirrored his temperament—calm and deep. Lili, however, craved something different: a kind of holy chaos in her chest, a fleeting divine revelation that faded with the break of dawn. The next day, she returned to her steel and concrete life, merging into the sea of faces at the office, her days reduced to keystrokes and screen glare. In this synthetic realm, the visceral stirrings of her heart grew fainter, leaving behind nothing but their hollowed-out shells.
She thought about how each generation had its unique burdens to bear, and wondered if this was the price her time demanded. Yet, this duty was paradoxically sculpted into a privilege—desperately coveted yet out of reach for many, which meant she ought to take care of it.
And what, then, did she become?
Her thoughts, actions, even her dreams were not solely her own. They echoed the collective psyche of those who shared her era. She was but one among many, like worker bees from the same hive, indistinct yet integral. Even this idea, it seemed, wasn’t hers alone.
How many out there can truly claim their voice as something of their own?
4.
"How many for you? I got twelve today," Old Meng asked Little Wei.
"Ten, just one more to go," Little Wei responded.
"I'm at one... plus four, and..." Little Zhu seemed to hesitate.
"Ah, make that nine and a half for you, I've kept count," Little Wei chimed in.
"Oh, aren't you something," Little Zhu giggled.
"Your brain's never been much use, better leave the counting to me and Old Meng," Little Wei teased her further.
"You're... really annoying..." Little Zhu pretended to be upset.
In the glow of these brightly illuminated rooms, their hours unfurled—segmented into halves, wholes, and one-and-a-halves. Day melded into day, often weaving into uninterrupted weeks.
What a magnificent and resilient creature is human—to confront time and mark their distinctions within it as such!
5.
The wind, howling like a beast trapped against the confines of its cage, marks its presence with a distinctive rhythm, "boom... boom..." against the window glass.
"The wind's fierce tonight," Old Meng remarked, a note of concern in his voice,"You live close by, right?”
"Just in the next neighborhood over," I replied.
"That's not too bad then," Old Meng noted.
"Going to be colder tomorrow, dropping to more than ten degrees below," mentioned Little Zhu, rolling up a bedsheet and hugging it to her chest as her client departed.
"It's the dry kind of cold, no snow," Little Wei added, absorbed in his phone.
"Yeah, no snow last year in Beijing either."
6.
On her trek home from work, Lili came up with a peculiar tactic against the biting windchill: she walked backwards, her neck tucked in like a turtle, moving with quick, tiny steps. But not having her access card, which probably went AWOL along with her lease somewhere in her apartment, meant she often had to hang around the locked gate, waiting to tailgate someone inside.
Losing stuff seemed part of her DNA, but she’d gotten pretty good at not letting it bug her too much. She had a laid-back way of dealing with daily life, sometimes skipping the toothbrushing ritual, not bothering to shave, ignoring the latest on tax laws, and sitting out the shopping madness on Singles' Day. This deliberately nonchalant attitude had its downsides, notably those end-of-the-month moments, her cash flow dwindling, where she subsisted on a spartan diet of buns and porridge.
Her phone, buried somewhere under the bed, kept buzzing with WeChat messages, likely from her dad since she was terrible at remembering to check them. The last time he called, it was late, and his voice was thick with booze, "Just checking in on you," he said. When he heard cars in the background, he got all worried, "Why are you still out?"
"Just wrapped up a dinner party at a friend’s place," she lied, not mentioning that she had missed the last bus after her night shift and decided to hoof it home instead.
7.
"I'll fei jia (return home fat) by the 25th," Little Zhu just finished another shift, shuffling to an adjacent empty bed for a quick break. Her accent blurred her pronunciation of “fei”, meaning “fat” in Mandarin, and “hui”, meaning “return”, endearing in its quirks.
"What are you bringing home for your son?" Old Meng inquired.
"A new Huawei phone."
"Didn't you just send one back recently?"
"Yeah, but the kid turned around and gave it away."
"To whom?"
"Who else but a girl."
"Look at him, already hustling to find you a daughter-in-law at such a young age!"
"Well, he's just in junior high and I only see him twice a year. Talking to him over the phone is no use," she laughed it off.
8.
Lili last saw grandma in the summer past. Grandma’s physical state had declared a truce with most outdoor activities. Despite the stifling heat, the slightest cool breeze brought discomfort. She'd sit on the living room mat, head bowed, in a silent, stubborn resistance against temperature and time. Yet, Grandma seemed unbothered.
"How have you been?" Lili asked on her last visit.
"Oh, my life's a breeze! My day's filled with four things: listening to the radio, watching TV, eating, and sleeping," grandma laughed heartily.
On the dining table, a small pot of rapeseed, an orange, and a stack of biscuits were arranged neatly.
"Why are these here?" Lili asked, picking up the orange.
Grandma glanced at the table, lips pursed, "What do you think?"
Following grandma’s gaze, Lili saw the framed photo of grandma and her late grandpa on the wall.
"He's done with his meal; take it if you like..." Grandma set the orange back down. "When your dad's not around, it gets lonely eating by myself. So, I talk to him. 'Old Shen, you want some of this eggplant? If not, I'll eat it myself...'" Grandma mumbled.
Lili hugged grandma, the down of her grandma’s vest pressing against her, the scent of earth mingled with grease wrapping around them like a shawl.
"Back then, your grandpa used to hold you just like this. You were so tiny, perched on his lap, feels like it was just yesterday..."
Lili wanted to say something, but couldn’t make a sound.
"Hey, Lili, I know you might not want to hear this," grandma began cautiously, "but I have this wish left..."
"I know," she cut in, removing her glasses to wipe them on her shirt.
"Just be true to yourself,” grandma spoke gently, as if comforting a child, “That's all your mother would have wished for too."
She held Grandma tighter. The radio continued its broadcast, a clear female voice declaring, "Now, let's discuss some health tips for the elderly...don’t forget to claim your free vitamins…"
Lili found herself pondering, not without a touch of irony, on the paradoxical nature of "nostalgia"—a sentiment that necessitates, rather than removes, distance. Like starlight reaching across vast stretches of time to touch us, nostalgia’s glow is felt more keenly only through a distance that must be left unclosed.
She had long moved beyond the naive belief that what she possessed would remain forever hers. Yet, she also refused to acquiesce to the art of letting go—a practice of intentional, sustained detachment that she chose to not cultivate. Like a cat chasing its tail, she opted to cling to the vestiges of sentiments.
9.
Kai never felt more beyond Lili’s grasp than he was when she last saw him three years ago, across the dimly lit confines of a whiskey bar in Tribeca.
"I'm thinking... of going back home next month." Lili’s words emerged hesitantly, each edging her closer to the brink of an ominous revelation.
"Hmm, maybe back home you'll find opportunities better suited for you. I trust your decision; you're going to do great." Kai responded, locking eyes with her, his gaze tinged with a fatigue she hadn't noticed before.
In that moment, his answer became clear to her.
She looked away, her fingers restlessly twisting a receipt. Whiskey was never her drink of choice.
"I'm planning to quit after this deal is closed," Kai revealed, gently prying the receipt from her grasp, his fingers briefly caressing hers.
"And then?" She asked, her voice quivering slightly as she met his gaze again.
"I've decided on robotics," he declared.
How had I missed this? It was so characteristic of him... She thought to herself. A wave of realization washed over her.
"Really? What's your plan?" She endeavored to maintain the dialogue, clinging to the thread of their conversation.
"I've been reaching out to a few professors. Remember George? We met him at last year's reunion. His advisor," he elaborated, shedding his suit jacket to drape it over the chair back. "I've been reading his papers, getting up to speed on the subject..." His words began to fade into a blur as a dull ache started to throb at her temples.
A memory from ten years ago surfaced, when they were both students: Morning sunlight seeped through the dorm curtains, casting a halo around Kai's freshly showered hair. He sat cross-legged in front of his computer, his voice rich with passion as he mimicked Dr. Alfred Lanning's gravelly tone: "There have always been ghosts in the machine. Random segments of code that have grouped together(…) even the nature of what we might call the soul..." Observing his side face then, she felt a blend of delight and despair, knowing even at that moment he wielded a power over her happiness.
Now, Kai’s gaze held that same mesmerizing quality, yet it seemed to traverse through her, reaching out to a distant point in the space.
"Off to conquer new worlds of geekdom, huh? Your clients will for sure be thrilled to hear that." She quipped, the playful challenge in her tone failing to mask the sadness tugging at her smile.
Once the truth had been laid bare, all else felt like mere stalling. It became apparent; she was the one asking, and Kai, examining her face where a sense of childlike earnestness flickered in the candlelight, seemed to appraise an oil painting on the verge of decay.
From the start, he had been hooked by this very look on her face. In trading their shared years for the dramatic allure of this story, he consistently emerged victorious.
"I'm sorry," Kai said, his hand enveloping hers, his fingers as precise and orderly as a row of elegantly trimmed hedge.
Even his ruthlessness had a grace to it, she thought.
Her tears quietly streamed down. She understood that her playful defiance had lost its old potency for him, its ability to wound and exhilarate in equal measure.
After all, the tenderness of a man’s indulgence is a privilege reserved for the naiveté of young love, isn’t it?
In her mind's eye, she pictured how Kai might see her now: turned away, gazing out the window, swallowing her sobs. Dark circles under her eyes and the fine lines at their corners stood out more prominently, like a balloon slightly deflated by the passage of time, its surface beginning to crease.
This surely wasn't the vision of beauty he held dear, was it?
He was a blend of intelligence and cunning, powered by an unapologetic desire for more, with even his frustrations fueling part of his ever-grander ambitions. He never viewed his achievements as endpoints; rather, when one game ceased to intrigue him, he moved eagerly to the next. Each conquest he made was like another block laid in a foundation built on solid reason, ascending waywardly towards poetic grandeur.
And her? She wandered through the labyrinth of life with a mind that fluttered like a moth against the glass, seeking the light of deeper truths yet finding herself trapped within the confines of her own reflections. Where he moved with the might of a pirate ship cutting through the sea towards its next port, her course was a poem composed in the whispers of the wind, her ambitions not carved in stone but sketched in the sand, vulnerable to the tide's whims. Each day she spent was a delicate balance between being and becoming, held back by her clinging to the unseen and the unsaid.
In the past, she used to reassure herself that her bond with Kai was blessed with a sense of higher purpose, rendering it immune to the conventional metrics of love, the typical tug-of-war of give-and-take. This conviction allowed her to move past Kai’s neglect of her inner storms, his inattentiveness to her everyday life's minutiae, his easy laughter with the curly-haired intern as he escorted her back home, and even, his ultimate choice to walk away from her.
She used to reassure herself that after seeing through to Kai's core—his honors and his shames, after seeing through to how his feelings for her had slowly soured like fermenting tofu over the years—she could attain a glimpse of a more profound love for him, a glimpse of the kind of truth she stole from her dreams.
10.
Craning my neck, I glimpsed through the massage table's hole, trying to locate the source of the squeak let out by the room’s door. Something had gently pried it open—a little yellow puppy, fur fluffy, standing on tiptoe, surveying the room with wide-eyed wonder. What had drawn this little explorer here?
Everyone paused, their ears perked, waiting to discern what came next. Then came the soft patter of steps, tap-tap-tap, getting closer, stopping just shy of the inner room.
“Probably just a small critter,” Little Wei guessed.
“Sounds like it,” Old Meng nodded.
That reminded me of the time I came in weighed down by my backpack, loaded with books, a laptop, and my hefty water bottle. As I slung it over my shoulder to leave, Old Meng, from his perch at the front desk, called out, “That sounds heavy. Careful not to drop the thermos.”
His comment made me smile, surprised at his keen hearing—the ability to tune into and understand the gentle whispers of life could well offer a magic that the bright hues of the world cannot rival.
“It’s a dog, a small golden retriever.” I finally revealed the answer to the whole room like a game show caster.
Our eyes locked, and for a moment, it was as if I’d plunged into a cool, clear spring through the puppy’s eyes. Around me and the puppy, a hush fell, two currents meeting in stillness. I dove deeper, the water filling my senses, cleansing everything in its path, a lifetime washing over me in an instant.
But then, as quickly as it had come, the moment of stare-off ended. The puppy turned its head and padded away, slipping through the door gap, its inspection complete.
“Neighbor’s dog, huh…” Old Meng chuckled.
“I had a dog once, a long time ago.”
“When was that?”
“Oh, more than thirty years back. I was running a small shop back in my Hebei hometown.”
“What kind of dog?”
“A local mutt. But a really good boy.”
“Really?”
“Yeah, when I still had a bit of sight, I’d smuggle salt on my trike in the dead of night, and he’d trot along behind, keeping pace…”
Laughter filled the room. My eyes drifted shut again.
11.
As a little kid, Lili would chase after her dad's bike, feeling the touch of the wind playing with her hair, cloaked by the warm sheen of the setting sun. She would race by familiar sights—the tethered rooster, the ever-still figure of the local madman by the garbage bins, the bike repairman absorbed in his work—all the while wrapped in a daydream.
Back then, Lili had many dreams. She thought time would always treat her kindly.
Anqi's storytelling attempt began' as soon as she learned to arrange symbols into patterns, whether they be words, images, or gestures. As a native Chinese speaker, she considers her English writing voice as a needle weaving the disparate and frayed threads of the pan-immigrant experience, word by painstaking word, into patterns of lives caught in between--never quite here, never quite there, but occupies a special diasporic enclave, beyond the confines of dominant geopolitical discourse, all the way reaching into the overlooked, often disorienting nuances of the human condition.
In Anqi's Venn diagram of meta-narrative, three circles overlap in descending order of personal importance: people (the cosmic tragicomedy's protagonists), art (attempts to decipher said tragicomedy), and technology (the perpetual plot twist).
Most of her opinions are subject to change but the feelings always remain.
She writes The Aftertaste (a Substack newsletter). She also has a personal website.
