Fate

By William Chen

One afternoon it was raining hard. I was resting on the terrace listening to the sounds of raindrops hitting the leaves in our small backyard.

Suddenly, I had an urge to clean up the congested storeroom next to the garage. There was just too much junk in it. I worried that some driver's careless smoking habit might start up a fire so I thought I would remove this hazard first.

I soon came upon a big bundle of old letters left in a wooden box. Those letters were sent to me some 30 years ago by a couple of old school mates and friends in China. I could not bear to treat those sentimental papers like old newsprints. As I was pondering what to do with the letters, I absently picked out a few to read.

The hot and stuffy storeroom certainly was not the right place for reading, so I went back to the terrace with a few of the letters in my hand. As I was about to put them down on the table, I saw a tiny picture of a girl which fell out of a crumpled envelope, like a small butterfly fluttering to the ground.

I picked it up and held it fondly in my hand. A wonderful surprise to recover something I had been looking for so long. This is the girl I was very fond of during my high school days in Shanghai. I did not know if it was the magical power of that tiny picture or my true feelings toward her that made me recall so vividly that fateful day some 50 years ago.

The girl in the picture was my classmate for about two and a half years before we went our separate ways in 1949. She was tall, slender, and beautiful. She had intelligent eyes and a sensual voice. She always dressed simply but chic, a real Shanghai beauty. Nevertheless, she would not give me a chance to get near her or engage her in any kind of short conversation for more than six months after she joined our school.

I was naturally curious to find out why she was so indifferent and aloof towards her fellow classmates. Only years later did I hear that she was long engaged to a famous politician's relative.

One day in front of our school gate as I was about to ride my bike home, I spotted her walking out of the school with her books under her arm. I always liked to turn my head to get a second good look at her and this time I saw two gangsters approaching her from behind, pretending to trip over something and falling upon her. They knocked her down to the pavement and her books scattered all over the place. The two gangsters went on running and laughing. I was the only one near her so I quickly went to her help.

She suffered some injuries on her knees and left elbow. She seemed dazed and shocked by the sudden attack. At first, she could not regain her balance too well, so she leaned on my shoulder. I supported her by holding her waist for a few minutes before she let go of my hand and stood on her own feet. We walked slowly and silently until we reached the nearest tram station. I helped her get on it as she had some difficulty, carrying those books under her arm.

On my way home I had all sorts of imaginations about her. I was feeling elated in a strange way about this incident. That evening I got too excited to eat my supper and went to bed early but could not sleep. I felt as if the wonderful sensation while she was leaning on my body was coming back to me again. The next morning I woke up very early and I was the first one who arrived at the school. I waited for her to show up but she did not. I found out afterwards that she had caught a fever after the fall.

She looked thinner when she rejoined our class three days later. She smiled at me a lot after the fall but she signaled to me not to talk about it. Everyday I walked her to the tram station after school, like it was routine. Ever since then, I was unable to concentrate on my studies.

Day and night, my thoughts went to her. At home, my mood was swinging like a pendulum and I secretly fell in love with her. One Saturday afternoon, after school, we walked to a nearby park. We spent the entire afternoon talking. I never got tired of talking with her. That afternoon she chose an English name for me, she called me William, and her own name was Diana.

During all those years, we had only seen one movie together at the famous CATHAY Movie Theater near our school. The movie's title was The Lost Weekend featuring Ray Milland. We also ate at a noodle shop once when she wanted to treat me for rescuing her from the fall. Whenever we were together in a public place, however, I always had an uneasy feeling.

I became overly conscious of my height, for she was a good 10 centimeters taller and she looked a lot more mature than I did. But I knew I had a soft spot for taller girls.

In 1948 China was transforming itself into a Communist country. In 1949 my father arranged for us to go to Indonesia. I was 18 years old. I would not have any means or skills to support myself if I had chosen to stay behind for that girl.

It was a very sad day for me when I had to say farewell to her and all my other friends in the class. I fought hard to hold back my tears when I held both her hands and we promised to write to each other. On my way home I could hardly see the blurring traffic with so many tears in my eyes. I received many letters and pictures of her during the first six years after our separation.

She wrote to me once to ask if I ever received a small picture of her in a suit and long pants. I suspected that it got lost in the mail as I never saw such a picture. I never knew until this day how I came to misplace that tiny picture among all those letters in that wooden box for so long!

In 1957, her letters stopped coming to me from China. I got alarmed and I began to write to all my friends in Shanghai asking them to locate her for me. However, I received no concrete information of her whereabouts. Some said that she went to Beijing. During the early 1950s through to the 1970s, the Cultural Revolution was taking place and the feared Red Guard went on prosecuting nearly every middleclass citizen and all the rich people in China.

No one dared admit that they had a friend or a relative living in a foreign country. Many friends destroyed letters and photos sent from abroad to escape accusations of being a spy for a foreign country. In 1967, the break up of the diplomatic relationship between Indonesia and China was the last straw that broke not only the camel's back, but also our contacts from each other completely.

In the years of 1980 through to 1997 during each of my short visits to Shanghai, I asked some remaining friends about her. Every day I walked the streets looking for her. One lonely afternoon, I went to my old school. Seeing its familiar surroundings brought back waves of fond memories, that had ebbed away long ago but now they all surged back to me.

As I stood alone in front of the school gate, I could not help but remember that fateful day of Diana's dramatic fall on the pavement. I could still see it clearly and feel the pain of her body's impact on the ground, as if it just happened a second ago.

I became terribly nostalgic when I later walked towards the Cathay Theater, each step taking me back to those carefree days. Another time I waited in front of the theater pretending I had an appointment with her, but she never came. In 1993 I became desperate and I wrote from Jakarta to the People's Daily of China asking them to run an announcement for a missing person. I mentioned both her English and Chinese names and I also included a photo of her and the name of our school.

A month later, I received a reply to my announcement from a certain Mr. Chen from Beijing. At first, I could not believe that I actually received a reply to my announcement in the newspaper. It was an extremely tense moment and my hands were shaking so much that I had trouble opening the envelope.

Mr. Chen said in his letter that in 1983 he saw a distraught sickly old woman at the Xian railway station. He claimed that he had a short conversation with her. She told him her name was Zhang Yu Zheng (Diana's Chinese name), and that she was from Shanghai. My immediate reaction to the news was to fly to Xian to look for that poor girl.

Obviously, my very agitated emotions confused my judgment and impaired my rational perception of reality. I forgot completely that Mr. Chen's sighting of Diana happened 10 years ago. Could it still be possible after 10 years that she would be standing alone at that lonely station waiting for me to take her back?

I replied urgently to Mr. Chen, asking for more information concerning Diana. Mr. Chen's second letter reached me in three weeks. This time he said that Diana was murmuring to herself a lot when he saw her the first time. He thought that she might be insane and she appeared to be begging at the railway station. This shocking news devastated me; I could hear the pounding of my heart and felt the rush of blood in my head.

I thought I was going to faint. I refused to believe that she would be begging. I would never allow her to do that. Yet, during the last 40 years, I occasionally heard rumors that they had been sent to a labor camp in the countryside and that she had married a farmer out of starvation.

What did happen to that long engagement with the politician's relative? The rumors said that the would-be mother-in-law concealed the marriage and would not take her in because of her poor family background. Others said that she did get married into that family but her husband soon died and her mother-in-law forced her to leave the family. She then wandered from place to place trying to make a living.

To this day, I have no way to prove all these rumors. And I feel so painfully hopeless and helpless of finding her again. Many times, I wake up in the middle of a dark stormy night and I think of her deeply and sadly. I often pray before the Goddess of Mercy for her safety and my only hope now is for her to still be alive.

Some nights I sit up in my bed watching my wife sleeping soundly. The soft lights outside the bedroom window shine on her contented beautiful and sensual face. I hope only that happy and sweet dreams will enter into her sleep. When I met Diana in Shanghai, in mid 1947, my wife was just a small baby born into the Lee family in Jakarta. How mysterious that fate could change our lives like this. Only Heaven knows why.