Chapter 2
He stares at the text, the ‘not the type’ and ‘good luck’ prick hard at his soul and his manhood.
It is from Serena, a 31-year-old Chinese Australian lady, whom he has known through a dating website Lucky Love and courted for quite a period.
So that was it, he is not the type of man she is looking for.
But what kind of man she is looking for?! ‘What a…!’ he curses bitterly.
A good measure of indignation is rising fast in his chest. For the moment, he has an urge to smash the mobile that carries the abominable message to him, but thinking better of it, he instead kicks the sand three times, each time with an increase of ill-directed force.
A few months ago, Bing registered as a member of Lucky Love, a dating site chiefly for Chinese residents in Australia. A guy named Regan, a bachelor, thirty-eight years old, a Chinese immigrant, a computer programmer, set it up as a free service. How and when and why an IT man came up with such a romantic idea, Bing doesn’t exactly know, but he knows Regan himself has not yet found his love through his own matching service.
Serena is the seventh girl Bing has dated if he counts correctly, and she is the first one with whom he has a proper desire to return to wedlock.
Now she says, he is not the type of man, after four appointments he has made with her. Only on the eve of the day he flew to Gold Coast, Serena proposed to him in a text message, ‘Let’s marry soon, I am very tired,’ as if she had been in a sort of hunting sport for a long time!
‘OK, in three days, after I come back from the trip.’ Bing’s answer was no less passionate and urgent than what her words had imparted to him. Whether or not this quick response was caused by his sexual desire at the time, he had not tried to analyse. The fact is, since his whimsical promise, he has felt his resolve of marrying her steadily weakening, and for the last three days, he has been neither happy, nor unhappy, neither excited, nor unexcited, constantly wondering if this is, after all, the right course to channel out his rest of life.
Indeed, after the failure of his first marriage, he had a good reason to be careful; sacrificing his freedom for a second relationship weighs heavy upon his confounded mentality.
Now she is done with him, which is not all so bad, because, unilaterally, he is rendered free from the painful decision-making. She says ‘No’, so his response to her if any won’t be otherwise ‘Yes’; but the fact of the ‘No’ being first said by her, gravely piques him. Should he have said ‘No’ to her first, he would have been just sorry and regretful, but retained his pride.
Now, Serena keeps the pride and dignity to herself, and, strange, because she says no and turns her back to him, leaving him, he sees more of her charm and believes really that she could be the best possible partner he will miss in his remaining life.
The lost is always the best, that is one of the many ironies of human nature.
With a low and disgruntled spirit, he takes off his shoes and then his socks, and then thrusts the socks into his shoes, and without taking them with him, he walks on, growing increasingly morose.
The sand is cool, tickling his bare feet, offering him the only comfort from the world.
Some weeks ago, in Lucky Love, she sent him a message with only the subject, ‘Hi I am also from Tianjin.’ Bing checked her profile, aged 29, height 171cm, working as a teller in a bank. Her selection on ‘Self Beauty Evaluation’, a profile field fancied by the Chinese IT man Regan, was ‘Average’, from the four available choices - ‘Very beautiful’, ‘Beautiful’, ‘Average’, and ‘Not Beautiful’. However, the only photo she had posted looked, in his consideration, far better than ‘Average’, for she had a smile, amiable and winning. And, the fact that she was ‘Also’ from Tianjin, suggested a favourable starting point of their potential courtship, because in the Chinese culture, people with the same origin of a village, or a town, or a county, or a city, or a province, whenever they travelled to or lived in a larger territory in the line of scale, were often grouped intimately as the ‘country-fellows’ of the smaller. And the farther back to their birth place it was, the more intimate, more brother-and-sister like they would become. It was regarded as a valuable resource, apart from family members and school classmates and workmates, in their efforts to build their social connections, or Guanxi, which, really, was a foundation for the ugly and unfair favouritism plaguing the Chinese civil society.
So after a few more offline flirting messages back and forth, he left in her inbox his mobile number, asking her to contact him if she so wished.
Next day, about lunchtime at work, he received her message in his mobile, ‘Hi Serena s here’.
He replied, ‘Hi Bing s here’, matching precisely her careless way of typing, with an intent to show a little sense of humour. ‘Good u can use mobile at work.’
‘I’m not at work today.’ Her reply was immediate.
‘Oh, resting today? u just got up from bed, I suppose?’
‘No, I got up early, went shopping in the city, and came back home just now.’
‘Where do you live, Ashfield?’ Bing asked a question to which he had already known the answer from their previous website exchange.
‘Yes.’
‘So you had your lunch in one of Ashfield’s delicious restaurants?’
Ashfield, nicknamed ‘little Shanghai’ by the Chinese community, was a suburb in the western part of Sydney. Many residents of Shanghai origin were said to have thronged this suburb, about 10km from Sydney CBD. Its main two-lane street, narrow and crowded, was lined with numerous Chinese shops and restaurants.
‘No, I had lunch in the city.’
‘That was even better… in the city…’
‘You are not busy now? Be careful your boss is watching your back,’ she warned, apparently envisioning her own workplace in the bank.
‘I am my own boss most of the time in my own office.’ The answer was only partly true. Bing had his own office, but he was not his own boss, and like the employees all over the world he had to maintain his vigilance, lest the boss suddenly step into his place. ‘So how will u spend the rest of your day? Cracking melon seeds?’
‘No, not eating the seeds, feel sleepy, meet you if you have time.’
‘Have to work tomorrow?’ Bing sent, missing the one she had just passed over.
‘OK,’ she answered, but he was confused.
‘OK? or Yes?’ Bing wanted her to clarify.
‘I thought you refused to see me, because you have to work tomorrow.’ Only now, after reviewing the previous lines, Bing found the misunderstanding, which was too often caused by the modern digital means of communication. But honestly he didn’t expect her to ask for a meeting so quickly, and even less, to be initiated by her. He would assume he, the man, should take the lead in fixing an appointment.
But just the same, Bing wanted to meet her as soon as possible. However, he couldn’t make it early this evening, because he had to do a computer system-backup after work hours.
‘How about 8pm tonight?’ he suggested, thinking his scheduled job would have finished by then.
‘Too late, I have to work tomorrow. Let’s find another time.’
‘Fine, we can find a time, during the week, at latest this Saturday.’
The next morning, Bing sent her a message, proposing their meeting take place at ‘6:30pm today in Ashfield’, and got a positive reply from her a couple of hours later.
From then on, his work hours of the day seemed to wear slowly on, until the time of his departure finally arrived.
Thinking it necessary to do a bit of tuning up for a better first-time impression, he went to the bathroom, where he took off his glasses and studied his face in the mirror. For some reason, he always saw a better self-image in the mirror without his glasses on, as though the glasses, with the clearer vision, would expose the tiny scars and pores plenty in his face that he dared not to study closely. He knew very well it was a type self-deception, a type of eccentricity, but he always did it without exception.
So with his glasses laid on the vanity, he stared at his naked face and his eyes for some moments, and with a soft tissue he mopped here and there as if much dust had actually contaminated his plain features. He then threw the tissue into the bin, took another, and folded it into a square pad, put some water on it, and applied it to his closed eyes one after the other, feeling the refreshing coolness on his eyelids. This done, he proceeded to perform the similar gesture to his nose, gently massaging the full length of it, in his secret way to reduce the oil and grease that always seemed a bit too much in his observation.
The size and the length of his nose were about Chinese-average; he didn’t like it, nor did he overly dislike it, but he trusted frankly that a more prominent nose would appear more handsome in the human society. The nose, centred in one’s face, for a long time was regarded by his psycho as an important feature able to drive the performance of a character. Things like courage, power, aggressiveness, pride, dominance and bossiness, were like symptoms of a long and big and straight nose, whilst meekness, humbleness, hesitancy, sheepishness and submission were associated with those flat and modest ones. ‘There is a possibility, that if I go through surgery, I may become a man of more dominance, less self-consciousness and sensitivity,’ he thought, as he touched and pondered upon his Chinese-average nose.
After the nose, which he couldn’t be sure of its better off or worse off with his minute of facial administration, he touched the beard and moustache that seemed to have grown a little since he shaved in the early morning. Although they were also Chinese-average, the rough feeling on his finger pads gave him a better masculine confidence than what was possibly endorsed by his nose.
So with a peculiar satisfaction, he brushed his chin and his upper lip for some seconds longer.
Then, he heard the door creaking; someone was just about to enter to violate his bathroom privacy. This would usually alarm him and put a quick end to any of his micro gestures in front of the mirror, and switch immediately to the more openly acceptable ones such as washing his hands, or polishing the lens of his glasses, which was exactly what he was doing before the head of the man poked into the room.
He turned away from the mirror, swiftly put on the glasses, and mumbled a low ‘hi’ to the man, one of the eighty colleagues in the company where he had worked for nearly nine years. He quickly slipped out, not even attending to the ‘Hi’ back from the man, as if the bathroom was strictly exclusive, a one-man’s facility at a time.
It was not until he was seated in his car that he realized he hadn’t even checked and touched his hair in the bathroom. However, did he have to seriously take that into consideration? Did he really believe his minute endeavours in the bathroom would effect much difference to his egotism and the level of his sexual appeal? Highly educated and rational as he had thought himself to be, he was not too stupid not to be honest with himself.
It had been a long time, at least a year he reckoned, since he last time visited Ashfield. Therefore there wouldn’t be a GPS destination record for it in his car. About a year ago he had replaced his old Toyota with a 2011 model, GPS-equipped Subaru Forester. Since then he tended to utilize this GPS facility every time he headed somewhere, to give the technology a chance to do its calculation, even if for a place he had travelled to many times before. For, as smart as it was, it would not only suggest more options than one, but more likely than not provide a route either shorter or cheaper than his own old logic. In respect to precision and accuracy, human brains do have a limit in competing with the robots, he admitted.
So he touched the screen, went through the nice feminine-voiced prompts, chose the Point of Interest, and picked anything in the suburb of Ashfield. Then, his travel companion, the amiable and lovable screen, worked out three different routes according to the quickest time or the shortest distance. The result was credibly amazing; all of the three routes didn’t match his old method of travel. But he trusted the GPS; he was not unhappy to be conditioned by the technology, even though having to discard his hard-earned experience.
While driving, he noticed the petrol light was on. He thought he might fill it up if he could find a service station along the way, or on his way back. It didn’t matter much. The distance was only 10km as indicated by the GPS.
On waiting at a traffic light, he checked the time with his mobile, and found it was already 6:20pm, so he decided it proper to let her know he was running late. He knew for certain that sending text message while the car still in motion was dangerous and illegal and criminal, but he was not so sure of this when the car had already stopped moving. Conscientiously he believed this was still wrong, but his need to give her notice was sonecessary that he chose to take the risk of being caught by the blue-shirts who, based on his previous experience, could just emerge from anywhere on the road. Through the windows and rear mirrors, he checked cautiously 360 degree for the signs of not only the blue-striped police vehicles, but anything that would unnerve him in the same manner, such as security cars, ambulances, and frightening fire engines. Not receiving any particulars of his concern, he started keying in the message letter by letter, between each he would raise his eyes to conduct his security review, to check for any alteration of the surrounding condition. He was pretty much acting like a thief stealing something, or like a long-necked crane looking up nervously for signs of predator while hunting for food on the ground.
It was such an enormous relief when he finally pressed the send button.
But his concerns didn’t end there. His phone started ringing, and the queue began moving at the green light, and he hadn’t yet hooked up his mobile to Bluetooth, which was a safer way talking while driving. He had been thinking of setting this up for a long time, yet he had never actually done it. Being a technical person for many years, he could figure this out in a matter of minutes, but just like a lazy bird forgetting about building its nest as soon as the warm sun arises in the morning, he simply permitted himself to worry about being caught by police, daring to take the risk of handling calls in the car again, again, and again.
He picked it up, and with a quick glance, recognising the caller being Serena. Nervously he pressed the green button, and started talking to her.
She was asking him about the specific place they were to meet, and then suggested a service station some distance away from Ashfield shopping centre.
‘Where is the service station?’ he asked hastily, his eyes checking about for police.
‘It is along Liverpool Street.’
‘How far is it from Ashfield?’
‘Not far.’
He was not satisfied with the ‘nor far’ answer, because there was not enough information in it.
‘Well, I don’t know, better meet you in the main street? I will call you.’
‘OK then, meet you at the entrance of shopping centre.’
‘All right.’
Lucky he didn’t see any cops around at the last moment. And, relieved and feeling safe as a well-behaved citizen, he was not hassled by any mobile disturbance for the remainder of journey. Maybe his life was just too dull and insipid, and really needed some risky excitement to ruffle his monotonous routine. During his nine years of driving experience in Australia, he had been once caught and fined $210 for using his mobile when driving, and twice fined for speeding, and a number of times for unauthorized parking. Whenever he had a fine to pay, which was ordered by the coercive and forceful Australian law of infringement, it was just like sucking his blood, so painful that during at least one week that followed he had to be unspeakably miserable. The feeling of loss, of being ripped off, was very great; it would have to be alleviated by sharing the bad news at once with any friends and colleagues he could grasp at the first opportunity. And many a time, people would be able to recite their even sadder and heavier fines to him, which would serve him well in his pain-lessening process. It seemed to him the emotional cost resulting from the fine was disproportionately much bigger than the monetary loss. Oh, what an irony of human nature!
The car park was about a hundred meters along at the rear of the railway station. It was a safe guess one could find a space at this time of a Tuesday evening. For this reason, Bing was ready to express his sincere gratitude to Ashfield council for providing a parking area for visitors. Parking was another car-related headache of his urbane life, in addition to the dread of being caught by the police on the road. Paying a parking toll was okay, but Bing had never felt comfortable squeezing into the tight slots along the street. Allowing the people, no matter how much outward patience their stern faces may have shown to him, to watch and evaluate his reverse parking skills, in an air of seething sullenness or smirking underlines, was unbearable. Actually, in such rare occurrences in his desperate efforts to park along a busy road, he had often had to leave the damned place abruptly, after one or two failed attempts to fit nicely in the slot. Maybe, he really needed a longer and harder nose for the courage and fortitude to do this type of task under the spectators’ scrutiny. But maybe not, he often observed many small-nosed people parking slowly and calmly and selfishly into a tight position, despite a lengthy queue already built up due to the blockage.
As expected, there were plenty of vacancies. He parked in one of them; the positioning margins were acceptable if not perfect. He lifted the button to close the windows, then turned the key to shut the engine. The car was uttering a few last grunts like a pig. After gathering his three essentials – wallet and mobile and keys with him, he stepped out of the car, closed the door, and at once felt joyfully happy, for he was finally rid of the troublesome vehicle business, and was able to walk with his long legs, to feel more of an active person rather than a dumb, constrained robot-like driver.
The road he was walking on was Brown Street. There was a dentist’s surgery on the left, where he caught his reflection in the glass window. Deliberately he slowed his steps and peered at his figure in the mirror in a quick and furtive manner, combing his hair with two strokes of his fingers. It was not too bad an impression as a shape in his regard.
He thought he was ready.
However, he didn’t have to feel excited or nervous; after all, he had experienced dating six girls in the last three or four months. Serena couldn’t be much different from them; in other words, his desire to have a second meeting with her was very unlikely if not impossible, based on his empirical statistics. In her profile in the web site, she gave herself an ‘Average’ in the beauty index, rather than ‘Beautiful’ as even many plain-looking members could have claimed to be. Her one ‘good’ photo could be just misleading. How much could he expect from an ‘Average’? If she had a low estimation of her own attraction, she, in reality, could only be worse. She was one of those girls born after 1980, a single child, presumably a spoiled ‘little king’ in a Chinese family, heavily pampered by her parents as well as her grandparents. Therefore, her vanity and self-centred assurance must be second tonone. If she was ‘Beautiful’ in the public eye, she would most likely have labelled herself ‘Very Beautiful’.
How about internal beauty such as the Chinese traditional virtues or qualities or intelligence? Well, internals are of course very important, but one won’t discover them until it is too late, until after many years of suffering from, say, a failed marriage. So, good looking is still the main thing, at least for most network-dating adventures, because literally and at least initially, no reference from friends or relatives regarding the cherished wifely merits is available.
In a couple of minutes I will find it out, he thought, while waiting for the pedestrian lights to turn green. He leant against the traffic pole, listening to the dull, lazy yet restful chiming - the special audible signal for red-light waiting in the city. He wondered why China hadn’t adopted a similar sounding system in its traffic control. In Australia, in the cities he had ever lived in or visited, the traffic crossings with pedestrian crossing lights all had this special sounding device, with its frequency matching the two modes of lights. The sound was very sweet, almost like a Chinese monk knocking at a wooden-fish. As soon as the light turned green, the seemingly sleepy monk would suddenly double up the speed of his knocking, the pedestrians would then become highly motivated, called as if by an affectionate grandmother to take a safe and quick chance at crossing. With it, even a blind person would have no problem crossing the street; or maybe it was indeed the purpose? Very likely, he thought.
As he mused in his waiting, a number of other pedestrians joined him, each of them pressing hard onto the waiting-button on the pole, but he didn’t think it would make any difference, since he had already pushed it more than once for the same signal to be validly recorded in the system. When the light finally turned green and the monk’s knocks quickened, he strode hurriedly across the road to arrive safely on the sidewalk of the Hume Highway, which was a long, long road winding through the larger part of southern districts. And, thinking his target was now drawing nearer and nearer, he paced his steps a bit faster, and began to assume consciously a younger and more gallant appearance compared to his previous somewhat nonchalant disposition.
The shopping centre, of which entrance he was to meet the girl, was somewhere in the middle of the blocks. Along the way, he saw many lamps or neon signs, in both English and Chinese, still but colourful, either hung overhead or edged the shop doors and windows. Groceries, real estate agents, and mostly restaurants, ranging from hot-pot, noodle house, Shanghai Special, Sichuan Numb and Spicy, Southern Chinese, Northern Chinese to the so-called Chinese BBQ, where the bodies of chickens and ducks dangling upside down behind the glass windows, were packed tight on both sides of the street. And, people, the majority of whose faces had a version of Chinese, were treading along with their hands full of plastic bags or free in their slacking idleness. On the street, cars, many cars, sedans, wagons, trucks, were crawling along. And, there, a car was actively doing the reverse parking, but he was not interested in evaluating the driver’s parking skills; he had a better thing to do.
Then, a man, in ragged clothes, but not appearing as much as a beggar, came to block his path. As a kind person he thought himself to be, he stopped to pay a polite attention to the intruder, whose words were rather inarticulate.
‘What did you say?’ Bing asked in a raised voice. The man was evidently encouraged by his question, stated clearly his purpose, ‘Do you have two dollars?’
Here it was - a common occurrence in Australian streets. He had dealt with them before; at first he wondered why they only asked for exactly two dollars, unlike the beggars in China, who would never state a precise quantity. Wasn’t it obvious in the begging business that more was always better? But then, after thinking about it, the two-dollar ask was actually a smart tactic adopted by Australian beggars. First, it was only two dollars, if you didn’t give it to them, you might suffer from a bad conscience; second, it was only two dollars, he was not at all greedy but hungry or thirsty for a moment, suggesting they were actually decent and dignified, and might perhaps refuse any extra if more was given than just two dollars.
So, although he was quite sure he didn’t have coins in his pocket or in his wallet, he still made a gesture touching about his hip-pocket for possible sign of coin, before pulling his wallet out for a five dollar note and giving it to the man, who received the money only with one hand, and muttered a series of nodding thanks while stepping out of his way.
As he was prepared to rush a bit to make up for the incidental delay, he heard the SMS from his mobile. He opened it, it said, ‘I am here.’
So she was there, waiting for him.
But when he reached the entrance of the shopping centre, he searched about and couldn’t find a female figure that represented the mental image in his mind.
She was here, but where was she? He wondered, still looking around. Then he called her, and she said she was in the toilet, and would come up immediately.
She must be looking into the mirror in the toilet, he guessed, as he threw his eyes to the direction inside the door where a toilet was supposed to be. And the ground he was standing on happened to face a wall of stainless-glass of a high building, so in a way he was also checking himself in a mirror.
He was not too excited, but still he took a little opportunity to give himself a final touch. He straightened his back, brushed his hair with his hand, took off his glasses, rubbed his eyes, replaced his glasses, and then finally rested his hands in his pant pockets, waiting.
He was more than ready, he thought.
In another second, she came out of the sliding door of the shopping centre.
-- End of Chapter 2---go to Chapter 3
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