Big Nose and Me

By Bing Wei

At 10 p.m., the restaurant at the Sheraton Great Wall Hotel was almost empty. Sean and I dined in relative privacy, contending only with the muted, deep voices of a table of Westerners in dark suits. Empty wine bottles lined their table. They stole a few glances in my direction as we sat down. I felt as if I’d entered a foreign land.

In English, Sean ordered a bottle of wine with a French name whose pronunciation challenged my ears. I defensively ordered jasmine tea. When the wine arrived, Sean poured some of the purple-red liquid into my glass.

“Let’s toast to the success of your first live interview on stage!” He raised his glass.

I thanked him and sipped a little. The heady, alien fragrance made me light-headed and scattered my thoughts. The wine tasted strong and sour. I coughed a little and had to grab for my tea. The experience of this foreign drink mixed with the aroma of Jasmin reminded me, against my will, of Brother Jun. I wanted to drive all memory of him from my thoughts, and I wished I’d ordered Coca-Cola instead of his favourite drink. But ordering the pot of tea had almost been a reflex, a necessary assertion of pride. Sitting in front of this Greek-God, this Big Nose with the bluest eyes I had ever seen, I had felt the need to appear more Chinese than usual. I needed to hide my excitement at being in his company and forced myself to appear more composed.

When the waiter handed me a menu, I discovered that greater challenges lay ahead. I had no idea what the dishes were. Sean seemed to read my mind. He explained word by word of each main course to me.

Although I hid it from Sean, the events of the day had quite extinguished any possibility of an appetite. And this on the night of my first Western dinner, a meal most of my friends would kill for. But Sean’s kindness had been touching, and I tried to show courage by ordering the most Western dish for my main course — fillet minion steak. I did not really know what it was, beyond that it would be made of beef.

I made a cheeky face at the waiter’s sceptical eyes while he took the menu back.

“Are you sure?” he seemed a little concerned.

“Yep, let me try,” I said in Chinese.

Just as I wanted to sit back and relax, I saw the army of the silver knives and forks in front of me. They were lying quietly on both sides of a round white china plate and had had different sizes. I pondered which one I should pick up first and which one should be used for which dish. Only one pair of chopsticks was needed per person for Chinese meals. Why did the Westerners have to make things so complicated?

“You were like a professional tonight.” He put the white napkin on his lap.

“Thank you for such a wonderful thought!” I tried to follow Sean’s navigation of utensil and drink, gulping down more wine. If I just do whatever he does, I shall survive my first Western dinner with the first pair of blue eyes in my life, I thought to myself.

When the steak arrived, I was a dumbfounded. I tried to regroup my thoughts, to sharpen thinking made clumsy by the red wine, and took a closer look. The steak was gigantic. It was as thick as the volume of collected works by Freud that Brother Jun had once lent me. I cut into the meat, feeling more like a butcher than a diner, and took a tentative bite. So uncooked. My tongue was numbed. The word barbarians popped into my head. I had always associated rawness of food with cave people. I tried my best, munching down the meat with my eyes closed. I ate with the same spirit with which I downed bitter Chinese herbal medicine. I chewed the accompanying roasted green and red peppers carefully. I wondered why they had to grill the vegetables so dark. My dinner was a startling contrast of vegetable charcoal and raw meat.

Try a big grin, I said to myself, attempting to imitate Big Sister’s official smile. I should show my Chinese dignity, I urged myself.

“Are you enjoying it?” The Big Nose looked at me tenderly with his smiling blue eyes.
“Yes, yes, thank you,” I replied, nodding respectfully while wiping my lips with the white napkin again and again. I stole a glance into the mirror behind Sean’s back to make sure there was no red blood or charcoal on my lips.

At the end of the dinner, Sean spread a thick layer of white sticky cream on the thin round biscuits.

“This cheese is called Stilton,” he explained, placing two pieces on my little plate. “See if you like it.”

I opened the little pocket English-Chinese dictionary he had placed on the table. It read “cheese: fermented milk.” I met his smiling moon-shaped blue eyes when handing him back the dictionary.

“Nai-lao,” I pronounced, telling Sean the Chinese word for cheese, and he repeated it well and quickly. He even had a touch of Beijing accent, which amused me. It was the first time I had ever heard a Big Nose speak my language with such a local flair.

“It smells like the fermented tofu my Granny used to love for breakfast,” I commented, attempting to make a cultural connection. I didn’t want to be rude by saying it smelt foul and I couldn’t possibly eat any. Neither could I blurt out a deeper truth that I was still terribly upset about Brother Jun and Big Sister tonight. I thought I was now becoming an adult: inscrutable and polite, never telling the whole truth.

I felt happy anyway about the dinner although I was unsure if this feeling owed more to the sour wine or to Sean’s pleasant company. I was also proud at having passed this foreign challenge to my Chinese pallet.

“Ah, so there might be many connections among our cultures,” he replied so positively that it was almost annoying. He told me of his intense interest in music, especially opera. He also played a little piano, he said.

“Does everyone play piano in the West?” I asked, remembering for the first time in years Mother’s German piano, and then slipping recklessly into recall of its being hacked into pieces by the Red Guards.

Tears suddenly welled up in my eyes. I could hardly speak. I gulped down more wine to cover this accidental uncorking of the past, but it was too late. My thoughts ventured to the sadness of my turbulent childhood, to my life shared with Brother Jun and Big Sister. To the disappointment of his marriage proposal to Big Sister. To all those sad losses, to the opportunities for love that once seemed to be so easily within reach.

I began to feel a little dizzy.

“Is the wine too strong for you?”

“Not really. I enjoy it.” I wondered what it would be like when he sat in front of a piano. He was a large person with very long fingers, longer than the keys. Would the keys be too short for his fingers? This funny image seemed to bring me back to the moment.

I tried to make a smile.

“What are you smiling about?” His hand reached for mine. His gentl grip was comforting. Yet it lacked the electric spark pf Jun’s touch.

“I’m smiling about my ignorance about the West,” I said, withdrawing my hand.

“Well, my ignorance of China is profoundly greater!” his moon-shaped eyes grew rounder.

Such humility. Such an arrogant big Greek-God looking nose.

“Tell me about yourself so I can get to know China a little better.” He took my hand again.

I let myself relax in his warm grasp, and I started to describe how we had started learning English with sentences such as: Long Live Chairman Mao and We Love Beijing Tian’anmen. But we’d never been taught anything about how English-speaking people lived.

I also told him about going to Big Sister’s private tutoring and hearing her vocal training. I told him how Big Sister used to carry me to hospital and take me to see our parents in their separate labour camps. I told him about Brother Jun teaching me calligraphy by holding my hands while I worked with a sheep-fur brush pen.

I took my hand out of his and wrote down my name in Chinese.

“That’s beautiful,” he said, picking up the paper, lifting his glasses to look closer.

“Can I keep this?” He was almost pleading.

“Certainly.” I was flattered. He told me that he had tried to learn to write the characters because he was a visual person, trained in fine art, painting and sculpture before he went into to architecture.

Another artist, I thought. “Are you colour-blind?”

“That’s a peculiar question to an artist.” He said.

Then I started telling him all about Brother Jun’s colour-blindness and how I had realised it on the day Mao died, when we watched the colour television in his house and how I had been in love with him all these years and it turned out that he loved my Big Sister instead.

“How very interesting, Ling-ling,” Sean said. “Tell me more about yourself and what you want in your life.” I had been saying so much about Big Sister and Brother Jun, but I had no practice in revealing my own life.

“I never knew how to talk about myself.” I sighed, “I only know how to keep a diary about my thoughts.”

“A writer?” Sean’s moon-shaped blue eyes was filled with tenderness.
Silence fell.

“Perhaps you could write a book, then,” he suggested, pulled my hand into his gigantic palm again.

“A book?” I repeated in surprise, pushing away the cheese plate with a frown, forgetting the properly inscrutable Chinese manner, feeling completely natural with him.

For the first time, silence had the warm taste of a palm, instead of the lack of sound.

(Bing Wei, was Born in Shanghai, educated in England and having worked in London and Hong Kong in media production and marketing, Bing Wei started her writing career early. At the age of 15, Bing first published a short-story in Chinese in Shanghai. Three years later, she published a novella in the World Journal (Hong Kong) Literary Supplement. Her published list soon increased to around twenty-pieces of writing in both in Chinese and in English. They came in the from of prose, poems, short stories, film criticism and essays and appeared on magazines and literary journals in Singapore, Hong Kong and England. Bing recently completed a 400-page novel in English and is at the stage of locating a publisher. Above is one chapter of the novel, presenting the start of a cross-cultural love relationship.)