My South Seas Sleeping Beauty by Zhang Guixing.;Jaffee Valerie.;

Author:Zhang, Guixing.;Jaffee, Valerie.;
Language: eng
Format: epub
Tags: LIT008000, Literary Criticism/Asian/General, HIS050000, History/Asia/Central Asia
Publisher: Lightning Source Inc. (Tier 3)
Published: 2007-02-22T00:00:00+00:00

1. The boy’s sentence is a slightly garbled version of a line, spoken by the hero to the heroine, from the eighteenth-century Chinese novel The Story of the Stone, by Cao Xueqin. The rendering here is a slightly garbled version of the translation provided by David Hawkes in The Story of the Stone (London: Penguin, 1973), 4:241.

Chapter 19

At seven the next evening, I ordered a pork cutlet that cost one hundred and fifty Taiwan dollars at Fairy Tale and took the seat closest to the stage on the left. When I sat down, two girls were performing, both singing and playing guitar, and the expressions on their faces, their stage presence, and even their voices were virtually identical. By seven-thirty, the place was packed; Saturday nights were when sad and lonely people came out in force. The cutlet I was eating was not particularly good, and the recipe was fairly simple, but I didn’t see the point in being picky. This was the only place in town where I could feed my soul; my stomach would just have to make do.

After the two girls finished singing, the audience got restless. I finished my pork cutlet and ordered a drink. My brain felt stripped of all thoughts. Two girl students were sitting on my right and were talking and laughing, their heads practically touching. Whenever I looked at them, they looked back at me. The upperclassman had given us lessons on how to pick up girls when I first moved into the dorm, and he had said that two girls were an easier target than one girl by herself.

Ten minutes is a painful expanse of time when you’re waiting for something. I was studying the poster of the prince kissing Sleeping Beauty when Keyi came onto the stage. She sat down with her guitar to the applause of the audience, and by the time she was settled waiters were already coming over to hand her song requests. Keyi put the request forms on the music stand, her fingers started to dance over the strings, and she began to sing. First she sang “The First Time Ever I Saw Your Face,” and after that her guitar moved into the melody of “Don’t Cry for Me, Argentina.” She performed all nine of my songs in one long string, serenely and effortlessly. After the last of them, “Changing Partners,” she added a tenth song, “I’m Getting Sentimental over You.” After that she had only a few minutes remaining in her set. Ignoring the request forms on the music stand, she took her bows early and then came down from the stage and walked straight over to me.

“You’ve been sitting so still. Are you asleep?” She made a fan out of her hand and waved it in front of my eyes. “Do you have anything else to do tonight?”

“Nothing. On Saturday nights I’m bored and have nothing to do. That’s why I come here to listen to you.”

“Would you go with me somewhere else to talk? It’s too noisy in here.

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