"Magic, or Something Less Assuring" by Mengyin Lin
Selected for the 2023 PEN/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers, “Magic, or Something Less Assuring” originally appeared in Epiphany’s Winter 2022 Issue. Lin was also one of four writers selected for our 2022 Breakout Writer’s Prize.
“Maybe we shouldn’t kiss in public here,” said the woman.
“Yeah? Yeah. Though I heard this is one of the more open countries,” said the man.
Waiting in line to get through customs at Tangier Ibn Battuta Airport, Ting and Si-Bo couldn’t help but overhear the conversation between the young couple in front of them. Ting had seen them on the airport bus in Madrid, kissing then, too. It seemed that, surrounded by Moroccan policemen in the arrival hall, they were finally realizing that they had arrived in a place where it was indecent to put romantic affection on public display. The crown of the woman reached to the stubbled chin of the man, a perfect height difference for her to nestle her head against his shoulder. Ting wondered if they were on their honeymoon. When she did her research for this trip, she thought Morocco would make an interesting honeymoon destination for couples who were looking for more than a torch-lit dinner on the beach and rose petals afloat in a warm bath. That kind of formulaic, frivolous staging of romance had never charmed Ting. The performative aspect of it made her uncomfortable. Her fondest memories of her relationship with Si-Bo consisted of no materialistic attributes: they were quiet, fleeting moments when it felt as if they were the only lovers alive.
The line was barely moving. Ting craned her neck to get a look at the customs booths. Out of the row of a dozen windows, only three were functioning with immigration officers behind. It was impossible not to look at the couple less than a meter in front of her. They had retreated to looking at each other now, the woman’s head tilting up and the guy’s neck bending toward her face. Ting recognized the look in their eyes. They were in love, as she and Si-Bo had once been. Only people who have been in love can recognize other people in love, Ting thought. It was like an exclusive tribe, the moment of “I see you.” One was either in or out. As if she’d felt Ting’s gaze, the woman turned to look at Ting. Ting smiled and the woman, noticing Si-Bo next to her, returned a knowing grin. Ting was happy to see other people in love, even though she had to suppress her fatalistic belief that every couple would fall out of love eventually, temporarily or permanently.
Ting and Si-Bo had never gone on a honeymoon when they married four years ago, and neither of them could remember why. They had been together for eleven years and many things had happened without logic or reason. Ting couldn’t quite put her finger on when their relationship shifted into autopilot. It had always been Ting and Si-Bo, Si-Bo and Ting, as if nothing had existed before or would change in the future. They both accepted this stasis. Eleven years was a whole lifetime when they were only thirty years old. The eternity they had spent being each other’s other half had rendered it alien, inconceivable to imagine otherwise. Ting didn’t see Si-Bo as a separate individual, but an extension of herself. And Si-Bo didn’t know who Ting was but first his girlfriend, then his wife. Even after they had walked out of the marriage bureau on a gloomy October afternoon two weeks ago, each holding a copy of their divorce application form, Si-Bo held Ting’s bag, as he had always done, because Ting had bad shoulders from sitting at her desk for long periods, and Ting reached for and pulled out the collar of Si-Bo’s pea coat, which he often left carelessly folded inward. Both of them admitted only retroactively that they had been, perhaps intentionally, overlooking the seismic reshaping and reshuffling of the psychological blocks that made them who they were, like humans who remain ignorant of the movement of tectonic plates until an earthquake demolishes civilizations and buries lives. That afternoon, they called for separate cars to take them away from their marriage. They had already confessed to their parents, who called them fools; she had already moved out of the apartment that was registered in his name. Si-Bo’s car arrived first. Ting watched it shrink smaller and smaller on the Shanghai street. She had only known this city as Si-Bo’s wife. When his car disappeared around the corner, she greeted the trees, buildings, cars and pedestrians of Shanghai as a new person, as Ting without Si-Bo.
Ting couldn’t have known that Si-Bo was doing the same, his eyes on her in the side view mirror as she shrank into a tiny black dot he was unable to differentiate from the other black dots on the sidewalk. Si-Bo thought that was the last time he was going to see Ting for a while. The next would be some time after thirty days, the legally required “cooling off period,” when they would go back to the marriage bureau to finalize their divorce. He assumed that he would not be coming on the Morocco trip, which happened to fall during this mandatory grace period. Ting had booked the trip for them almost a year ago, as soon as the government loosened the draconian quarantine measures for international traveling. Si-Bo understood that the invitation to travel with his wife, along with their marriage, was no longer valid—and Ting was still his wife, until their photos were pasted—and their names printed—on identical divorce certificates.
He figured Ting would go on her own, regardless. She had wanted to go to Morocco for so long. She had bought non-refundable, non-transferrable plane tickets at the lowest prices, paid for accommodations in advance at a discounted rate, and booked the most cost-efficient tour guides to go into the Sahara. Frugality was one of her principles. She never pursued luxury. But that was only part of why she’d planned the trip the way she did: more importantly, she hadn’t wanted to leave open any possibility of change. When she set her mind on something, she made sure it would happen. Their divorce was not going to change her mind. That much he still knew about Ting, he thought with confidence, though he couldn’t forget the way the muscles around her right eye twitched as she’d called him a stranger, over and over, in the multitude of fights that had chipped away at their union.
So when he showed up at the airport check-in line next to Ting, and told her that he hadn’t been sure if he would see her there, they both knew well that it was a big fat lie. Of course if Ting had asked him to leave, he would have, but she didn’t. Since the day at the marriage bureau, he had not heard from her. They hadn’t had a reason to be in touch. It had surprised Si-Bo, once they stopped living under the same roof and carrying out their filial duty as a couple, how thoroughly their lives had operated in separate universes. Now, here they were, in this foreign airport, where the incomprehensible Arabic script unnerved him, knowing not a soul but each other. Perhaps one last trip as a married couple would make up for the fact that they hadn’t had a honeymoon. Perhaps this trip would draw a clean ending for the eleven years they’d loved each other. Perhaps, just perhaps, by slightest chance, this foreign land would rain fairy dust upon them, and turn them into the couple standing before them, who had just resumed kissing.
“Do you think couples should go on one last trip together before they get divorced?” Si-Bo whispered into Ting’s ear in Mandarin, making sure other Chinese tourists couldn’t hear him.
Ting took a step forward in the moving line as she pondered the question. When Si-Bo caught up, she said, “Like a divorce honeymoon?”
They shared a laugh. Ting didn’t hate Si-Bo. In the man standing next to her she still recognized the shadows of the boy she loved. She couldn’t withdraw the love she had deposited ceaselessly for eleven years all at once even if she tried—and she had tried. She was only repulsed by how he thought about the world, which was in every way different from how she did. Were his thoughts and his person the same thing? She wasn’t sure. She herself often had thoughts that shocked her. If she thought about stabbing someone when a knife was in sight, did that make her a murderer? If she thought about getting hit by a car when crossing the street, or jumping onto the tracks when the subway rumbled into the station, was she suicidal? No, Ting argued with herself, as she often spent hours doing. Those were transient, unpredictable thoughts, while Si-Bo’s despicable views were sustained and fully-formed. What defined a person if not these inventions of the mind? Ting could go on and on like this, exhausting herself throwing these questions up in the air and letting them linger, hovering above her like dark clouds before a storm. One day, when the clouds gathered enough substance to produce a deluge, she’d let it all fall. It was when she was soaked with exhaustion, confusion, and all the other emotions that she couldn’t individually name, which had been brewing in those clouds, that she surrendered her intellect, closed her eyes, and—against her instinct—felt. It became clear to her then. There had been only one question all along: did she still want to spend the rest of her life with Si-Bo? No. She didn’t.
The couple in front of them left the line. A moment later, it was Ting and Si-Bo’s turn. They walked up to an officer’s window and handed over their passports.
“Where are you from in China?” the customs officer asked, without looking up from his desk.
“Shanghai,” said Si-Bo.
“Xi-An,” said Ting. Hearing Si-Bo, she added, “but I live in Shanghai.”
“What do you do?”
“I work in finance,” replied Si-Bo.
“I’m a translator,” replied Ting.
“For what?” The customs officer glanced at Ting with interest.
“Books, mostly. And news articles, art catalogs, anything I can get, basically. I freelance.”
The officer wasn’t really listening. He was typing on his computer and scribbling words on papers, glancing back and forth between the two of them. He was silent for an oddly long period and Ting started to get nervous. Many years of going through US customs had made this a nerve-wracking occasion for no reason. The customs officer flipped their passports to the photo page. He looked intently at Ting and Si-Bo, as if he was trying to memorize the outlines of their features. In his pupils, Ting saw the reflection of Si-Bo and herself, standing side by side in the same way they had for their portrait on the marriage certificate, and felt obliged to provide a verbal footnote.
“We’re divorced,” Ting volunteered.
Si-Bo raised his eyebrows in protest. “No, we’re not.”
Si-Bo had turned to look at Ting but Ting kept her head straight. The smile she had put on her face was fighting to keep its shape.
“Well, yeah, not officially,” Ting said.
“Not officially,” Si-Bo emphasized.
The custom officer gave them a baffled look as he stamped their passports, one after another, and pushed them out under the windowpane. “Welcome to Morocco.”
Their guesthouse sent a driver to pick them up. Seeing Ting pointing at the frail piece of paper in his hand, he pushed himself off the column he’d been leaning against and took Ting’s luggage without a smile. Ting wondered if he was upset about their late arrival. She was oversensitive to other people’s emotions and habitually blamed herself for their unhappinesses.
“Do you think he’s mad at us or something?” Ting asked Si-Bo as they trailed the driver in the airport parking lot.
As soon as the question left Ting’s lips, she wished she could take it back. She knew all too well that it was not going to be a matter of concern for Si-Bo, who, in situations where Ting incriminated herself, always absolved himself, instinctively and effortlessly, of any responsibility. If he didn’t think he’d done anything wrong, he wouldn’t care how his actions affected anyone else. Si-Bo attributed this dissonance between them to the difference between male and female sensibilities, as though these were innate, universal traits of all men and women. Ting had told him that their differences were not between men and women, but between traditional masculinity and femininity, which were social rather than biological constructs. But men and women do have indisputable biologically differences, Si-Bo would say, and Ting would struggle to find an effective line of reasoning to dispute it. She knew that Si-Bo had eventually stopped arguing with her to appease her, and she had refuted his argument enough times that she promised herself that she would not expend her energy on it any longer. What Si-Bo thought was none of her business anymore. It was no longer her business to change him. Still, she wished she could expel the emotionally draining self-criticism that was programmed into her, that never failed to rise up and seize her whenever it could. To change that, in herself, would be enough.
“It’s part of the job to wait, isn’t it?” Si-Bo answered halfheartedly. He had other things on his mind. “Why did you have to tell the customs person that we’re divorced? He didn’t even ask.”
“Because we are getting a divorce.”
“Legally we’re still married.”
“Is that why you came on this trip with me? To remind me that we’re still, legally, married?”
“That’s not what I meant.”
“What did you mean, then?”
The driver arranged their two suitcases in the back of the passenger van and opened the doors to the backseat. Without waiting for an answer from Si-Bo, Ting climbed into the van. After Si-Bo followed inside and the door slid closed automatically, the quiet, liminal interior of a car, with an unsmiling, middle-aged Moroccan man sitting at the steering wheel, suddenly seemed an inappropriate space in which to continue their disagreement. Si-Bo didn’t have an answer anyway. When Ting had proposed the divorce, she’d said they were fundamentally different people. But his parents were different people, her parents were different people—wasn’t marriage about loving each other despite their differences? Ting had said “I hate you” many times, but never “I don’t love you anymore.” There was, Si-Bo believed, a distinction between the two phrases. Love and hate weren’t mutually exclusive: one could hate and love another person at the same time. At any rate they were both factually right, and Si-Bo wasn’t about to admit to Ting the last bit of hope he had hidden in the corner of his heart.
The driver didn’t speak much English, so Ting couldn’t make any progress on figuring out whether he was indeed upset. She appreciated the silent ride into the city instead. The drizzle that Ting and Si-Bo had landed in was phasing into a forceful rain. She watched the falling water soften the edges of the architecture, turning the city into an Impressionist painting. As their car wound down to the coastal boulevard, the ancient Medina of Tangier came into view, rising above the Atlantic Ocean on a hill. A jolt of excitement churned in her stomach. It wasn’t just that it was her first time out of China since the pandemic, but that she was in Morocco. Morocco! Ting felt as if she were in a waking dream.
Ting’s obsession with Morocco had started with San Mao’s essay collection Stories of the Sahara. The library at her high school in Xi’An had only one copy and it had lost its cover by the time Ting got a hold of it. She was sixteen when she read it, and, like every sixteen-year-old girl who read San Mao, she instantly wanted to be her. San Mao loved and suffered with a kind of intensity that didn’t seem to exist in the world Ting came from, where adults were trapped in the cycle of clockwork mundanity and insatiable desire to do more, make more, be more. San Mao was bohemian, worldly, deadly romantic, self-consciously confident. Ting thought if she wasn’t going to be San Mao, she was, at least, going to walk on the same sand that the wandering writer had loved.
Si-Bo had agreed to the trip to Morocco without knowing of Ting’s childhood admiration for San Mao. When he thought of Morocco he thought of the first movie they had seen together in New York. Si-Bo had long forgotten the name of the movie. Ting always picked the movies they saw; Si-Bo merely tagged along. This movie starred a pair of vampire lovers and was directed by one of her favorite filmmakers, whose name he also didn’t recall. What he did remember was that they watched it on a bright day and the whole movie happened during nighttime, which made him feel as if they were turning into nocturnal animals themselves. When they came out of the theater, he thought he was going to evaporate into black smoke under the sun. Ting loved the movie and told him that the last part of it, wherein the vampire lovers traversed the long and narrow alleys of an ancient town, had been filmed in Tangier. Si-Bo hadn’t known where Tangier was until three years ago, when Morocco changed its visa policy for Chinese citizens and Ting started talking about traveling there. Since that movie, he would occasionally end up on those cobbled backstreets in his dreams, where the sparse yellow streetlights made the darkness darker, and where someone always played a mysterious folk tune out of sight. In those dreams he didn’t know whether he was waiting in fear for a vampire to consume him or hunting prey of his own.
In the Medina, their van weaved through the chaos of traffic, cars, people, bicycles, scooters, wheeled carts, and donkeys, miraculously not running into each other, as if it was a pre-choreographed presentation. Ting rolled down the window, and the noise completed the picture: honks, footsteps, the moan of the wind, the tapping of raindrops on tin eaves, Arabic spoken so fast that it sounded like people were squabbling, merchants standing outside storefronts yelling different languages to tourists—English mainly, and French, but other languages too that she couldn’t identify. She heard a man’s voice saying “Ni Hao” right by her ear, but he must have walked by so fast that she missed the voice’s owner. And the smells. There were hints of spices, a splash of ocean mixed with damp soil and grass, and faintly fishy. Then it was getting fishier, overwhelmingly fishier. Ting didn’t realize they were passing an open-air seafood market until their van was in front of its crowded gate. She pressed the upward arrow on the window button. The moment the glass sealed the inside of the car, there was quiet again, as if they were submerged underwater.
“Look! That’s Cafe Colon, from The Sheltering Sky,” Ting called out.
Si-Bo turned his head to look but barely caught the exterior of the cafe.
“The Sheltering Sky.” Almost five years ago, four books into Ting’s career, she was invited to pen a new Chinese translation of Paul Bowles’ The Sheltering Sky in celebration of its seventieth anniversary. Too busy to read Ting’s book, Si-Bo watched Bertolucci’s film adaptation with her instead. He found it ironic that they had arrived in the same place as the protagonists in the movie, hauling their dissolving marriage with them. Now Si-Bo repeated the name of the movie, as if attempting to imbue it with new meaning.
Their car came under a big, curvy arch with a pointy center, and onto a narrow street that looked almost perpendicular to the horizon. The engine growled in frustration as it heaved them up the slope. Suddenly, the driver pulled the handbrake and the car halted on a slant. He got out of the car and, without a word, opened the door for Ting and Si-Bo. As Ting came out of the car, she saw a hand reaching above her in her peripheral vision. For a split second, with the unfriendly driver in such proximity, she was scared. Then she realized that he had simply pulled the hood of her parka over her head. It was still raining, and he didn’t want her to get wet.
The driver unloaded their suitcases and rolled them to an opening on the side of the incline. Ting and Si-Bo looked up to see the three-story guesthouse atop the hilled street, and the thirty or forty steps that led up to it. Before Ting and Si-Bo could start strategizing how they would carry their suitcases up those harrowing steps, they saw the driver hurl one suitcase over his shoulder and begin ascending the stairs, his feet stomping the storied cobblestones in a steady rhythm all the way to the top. Then he ran back down, and did the same with the other suitcase.
They met him at the top of the hill. It was hard to tell whether the drops on his face were rain or sweat. Looking at him, Ting thought of her father, who would have been around the same age, but much less brawny. Her father had been the gentlest man, and he hadn’t smiled much either. Men of his generation had been brought up to be restrained and solemn. Maybe the driver was the same. How silly of her to have misunderstood him.
“Thank you so much.” Ting couldn’t think of anything kinder to say, so she smiled at him again. She thought she saw a faint smile rising at the corners of the driver’s lips as he said goodbye, but she could have imagined it. He turned away and ran back to the car.
Ting and Si-Bo met in a small liberal arts college in Maine, where there were fewer than ten Chinese students every year. Coming from Chinese megacities, they thought that the American college town was drab, cold, and oppressively lonely. Si-Bo was a year older, though his extra year at school hadn’t earned him any more friends. American classmates considered him a reticent Chinese math nerd. They didn’t know that Si-Bo was a sunny person in his mother tongue: he hadn’t talked much in English because he had once overheard other Chinese students saying that his heavy accent embarrassed them. He understood English perfectly, but he was unable to get rid of his accent. He believed that the anatomy of his mouth was not made for that language. Ting, on the other hand, spoke English in a learned American accent and had studied literature with American classmates. Still, she was not American enough to date any of them. She didn’t know the TV shows they grew up watching, the lyrics to pop music of the aughts, the brand names of candy, beer, and cigarettes that everyone bonded over, or the flirtatious jokes with which people hit on each other. She felt so stupid when she had to ask people to repeat their questions, then say, “Sorry, I don’t know what that is,” and she loathed feeling stupid. So it wasn’t difficult for Ting and Si-Bo to find each other. They had started sleeping together during Ting’s first Thanksgiving break, when all the American kids went home. The campus was desolate and the warmest place was in each other’s beds, under each other’s covers, inside each other’s bodies. During the short time that they spent out of bed, they had gone to the back of the campus, where American couples liked to make out among a big patch of trees. In those days, the forest was theirs and theirs only. They reached their hands under layers of fabric and kissed until they couldn’t feel their noses or toes. It was one of those situations where the sum of one plus one wasn’t two: Ting’s loneliness plus Si-Bo’s loneliness equaled zero and it was loneliness no more, like some kind of magic trick. From the start, being with Ting defied mathematical rules and everything Si-Bo loved about them: their simplicity, clarity, and grace. Eleven years later, Si-Bo often thought that if there were an opposite of math, it would be marriage: messy, incalculable, and never equal on both sides.
When Si-Bo received his master’s degree, they moved back to Shanghai together. Ting always wondered whether if it wasn’t for Si-Bo, whose parents wanted their son to stay close and inherit their family business someday, if she would have wanted to stay in America? She had already started getting gigs as a translator for Chinese media during her year in New York and she loved the work. If she went back to Shanghai, she would probably get to translate books, which excited her. But she loved New York, she loved the surprises, possibilities and serendipities that the city seemed to hold for those who called it home and for those in transit. In the end, the choice wasn’t difficult, because it was impossible for her to obtain a work visa. She moved to Si-Bo’s city, into the apartment that Si-Bo’s parents had purchased for him. It didn’t take long for Ting to become enamored with Shanghai. The city reminded her of New York, the humidity in the summer air, the coffee shops in the French Concession, the storied addresses where this writer or that artist lived, and the intangible qualities of the city, unpredictable, like a temperamental person, that moved her when she least expected it.
By the time Si-Bo woke up on the couch the next morning, it was eleven, and Ting had already left for the day. When he texted to ask where she was, she said that she preferred to walk around on her own, but that they could meet for dinner at the restaurant Saveur de Poisson. Standing on their petite balcony and looking at the old cream-colored city, Si-Bo thought about what he should do. They usually went wherever Ting wanted to visit. Without her, he was clueless. He downloaded the travel app Mafengwo and swiped through the recommended destinations. The top sites were seaside spots that were too far to walk to, so he settled on a couple of places within the Medina, washed up, and headed downstairs.
On the first floor was a modest living room with three wooden tables and a kitchen that looked onto the living room through a square opening in the wall. The innkeeper Fatima was generous enough to pull out some breakfast items for Si-Bo—Moroccan pastries, olives, fig jam—that she had already put away for the day. She asked him if he wanted tea.
“What tea?” His English was rusty. He felt embarrassed uttering those rounder vowels that sat deeper in his throat than Mandarin did.
“Mint tea. It’s Moroccan special,” said Fatima, her friendly face accentuated by her blue hijab.
Si-Bo thanked her. A few minutes later, Fatima brought out a silver teapot, its body covered in curvy lines moving and crossing in relief, and its handle wrapped in a delicate piece of purple embroidery. She warned Si-Bo not to burn himself. Si-Bo said okay and let out a quiet snicker that Fatima didn’t seem to notice. Si-Bo knew that she was only being thoughtful, but he couldn’t help but feel offended. He was Chinese. Did she think he didn’t know how to drink tea? He could imagine his American classmates from college, attracted to the intricate pattern on the teapot, touching it with their bare fingers and yelling, “Ouch!” They knew nothing of tea or teapots. Their tea came in bags, the worst tea ground in the worst way.
“Where are you going today?” Fatima asked from the kitchen.
“I think I’m just going to walk around.”
“Do you like sunset?”
He loved sunset, how the sun kindled the clouds. It was at once the same anywhere in the world and particular to each place, varying just slightly in indescribable, unsentimental ways.
“The best place to watch sunset in Tangier is Cafe Hafa,” said Fatima, pleased with Si-Bo’s affirmative answer. “It’s walking distance from here.”
“Great. Thank you.” Si-Bo smiled.
Si-Bo got lost in the maze of Medina for the whole afternoon, wandering into alleys connected by low arches and irrational turns, only, at the bottom of an unnamed hill, to be surprised when the landscape opened up again onto a cemetery full of trees and stray cats on one side and a white Christian church on the other. He overheard a woman with a North American accent talking about how the architecture had ended up in some famous painter’s “kaleidoscopic body of work.” When he came out of the church complex, Si-Bo stumbled upon a street market and walked through rows of farmers in big hats who sat cross-legged behind their baskets of fruits and vegetables and cast their aloof, solicitous eyes onto passersby. Then he hit a tranquil patch, and a regal, European-style chateau presented itself. He wondered if this was where Port and Kit stayed in The Sheltering Sky. He took a photo of it with his phone and continued walking.
When he felt thirsty, he stopped for some pomegranate juice for ten dirhams. The merchant, who looked barely eighteen, hand-pressed three pomegranates through the juicer and poured the juice into an actual glass—no plastic. Si-Bo thought Ting would have been thrilled about that. It wasn’t that he didn’t believe in climate change (not a phrase Ting would use, for she believed it to be something much more imminent, much more disastrous than politicians’ inaccurate, manipulative use of the word “change”). He recycled when he could. But if saving plastics, minimizing waste, or whatever Ting insisted on doing cost him comfort or convenience, he wouldn’t bother. In this moment, though, standing next to the juice cart and appreciating the flow of the crowd as his lips reddened from the sweet, acidic elixir, he didn’t mind the glass. It was the best juice he had ever tasted. Si-Bo took out another ten dirham bill and asked for seconds.
When he arrived at Cafe Hafa, around six, the open-air rooftop was packed with people waiting to be seated. The popular spot seemed as disorganized as the streets of the Medina. It took Si-Bo a while before he got the attention of a server and was led to a table already occupied by a hip Moroccan couple in their twenties. They glanced at Si-Bo in a friendly way without pausing their conversation. He noticed that the woman—similarly, in fact, to many local women here—was not wearing her headscarf. He didn’t know much about Islam, but somehow this put him more at ease. He ordered a mint tea, the kind he’d liked in the morning, and looked out at the ocean. Cafe Hafa was built against the side of a cliff and laid out in multiple levels, like rice terraces. From where Si-Bo sat, he could see the sun setting over the ocean, toward his left, and, in the distance, across the strait, the land of Spain. After hours of meandering between the walls of Medina, which always seemed to be closing in on him from both sides, this high, open vista of the ocean was a liberating change of scenery.
Ting would love it here, he thought. It was a habit of his to wish for her when he had something worth sharing: a good plate of food, a stunning view, a vision of a future he was willing to work for. If that’s not love, then what is, Si-Bo wanted to ask someone. He wanted answers. If Ting were here, maybe he’d work up the courage to have a serious talk with her again, in front of the ocean, basking in the golden glow of the North African sun. Maybe a change of heart would take a chance and pay them a visit. He took a few photos of the view, but had no one to send them to. He tried to post them on WeChat but couldn’t think of a caption, so he closed the app without saving a draft. He put his phone away and scanned the cafe for something else to dwell on: items on people’s tables, tourists taking photos of each other, white square tiles with intricate patterns, trees one level below whose species he couldn’t quite place. And then, sitting among all of these strange things, there was something familiar—or rather, someone. There, as if the magic lamp had granted Si-Bo’s wish without his asking, was Ting. She was pulling her gray scarf off her head and chuckling with two girls at her table as she ruffled the silky fabric around her neck, almost blushing. Her head had been covered; that must have been why he hadn’t seen her before. He wished he had been prepared for the sight of her. She looked happy, and it hurt him to see her happy in his absence. Si-Bo couldn’t remember when the last time was that he saw her laugh like that. She was listening intently to one of the girls; now she started speaking, too. Their conversation looked earnest.
The next thing he knew, he was tapping Ting on the shoulder. She turned around, surprised, and for a moment she looked as if she was going to say something to him, but she didn’t. Instead, she asked the girls if Si-Bo could sit with them. They welcomed Si-Bo and introduced themselves. One of them wore a blue sweatshirt that read, KANYE ATTITUDE WITH DRAKE FEELINGS.
“They go to college here. Imane is studying to be a lawyer, and Sairish is studying to be a doctor. Isn’t that amazing?” Ting said to Si-Bo, in English, as if she were their proud older sister. Imane and Sairish giggled shyly.
“That is amazing,” Si-Bo said. “What were you talking about? I don’t mean to interrupt.”
Si-Bo’s question was directed to no one in particular. Imane and Sairish seemed to assume Ting would answer, but Ting was taking a long time to sip her tea, insisting on silence.
Finally, Imane spoke. “We were asking Ting how the pandemic was like in China, because we read everything was really strict there.”
“And I was also asking her if China was going to find out how the virus happened,” Sairish added. “After the pandemic, I’m kind of thinking maybe I can be, what is it called…” She paused to think, but the right word didn’t come to her. “Like doctors that focus on pandemics like this. We are probably going to have more and more of pandemics in the future.” She made a sad face as if she was completing her sentence with an emoji. “And what happened in China was terrible, I’m sorry.”
Other than the occasional e-mails with foreign clients, and group Zoom calls where he only had to listen, Si-Bo hadn’t had a real-time conversation in English for many years. He wasn’t sure if he was up for broaching this topic in a language that he couldn’t command with confidence. The Moroccan girls spoke English with a certain downward intonation that must have come from Arabic, and it took Si-Bo some getting used to. Meanwhile Ting was looking at him in a way that he couldn’t instantly decipher. She probably wanted him to keep his mouth shut. But this conversation, which Ting and he had had so many times since the beginning of the pandemic, wasn’t simply between the two of them now. They were talking to these girls who weren’t Chinese. Si-Bo felt compelled to speak his mind, not just for himself, but for his country.
“The Chinese lockdown was why we had the virus for only three months, while America has been so bad for two years!” Realizing that he had raised his voice, Si-Bo swallowed and started again. “We are from Shanghai and the virus almost never made it there, not at first. Yes, then we had a few, but it was all from people coming in from other countries, and whenever there was a case it was contained right away. The lockdown and the quarantine, it was the only way, the right way.”
Ting was looking down at her lap and picking at the rougher skin around her nails. She had known exactly what Si-Bo was going to say before the words came out of his mouth. She didn’t know why she’d looked at him the way that she had. Perhaps it was a dare, to see if he would stand by his convictions in front of foreigners. Now that he had said it, she debated whether she should let it slide, and steer the conversation toward something unimportant and pleasant, or, once again, push back. They had fought over the Chinese government’s authoritarian tactics again and again, and over countless other issues: their respective gender roles, the censorship she faced in publishing, the internet bullying of a feminist comedienne, deals at his workplace that made the rich ultra-rich and worked the poor to literal death. Whether to buy from big corporations, whose algorithms exploited their employees; what, if anything, to do about the doomed planet, the omnipresent surveillance. Over Hong Kong, Xinjiang, Taiwan, over America, over Wolf Warrior, over boycotting Nomadland, over the military parade on National Day, over the disappearances of activists and journalists, over changes to the Constitution, and so on, and so on. Ting couldn’t quite pinpoint when Si-Bo had changed. No single event had altered his perspective, as in the clean narrative of a movie. At first, she’d thought Si-Bo had just been poisoned, and if she could find the antidote, if she could pull him back to her side, if she could prove to him that his sources of information were unreliable, if the people they called friends were suffering as a result of what he believed to be right, if she appealed to him as his loving wife, she could save him, save their marriage. But nothing worked. Then it had occurred to her that perhaps it was their country that had changed, but to blame the government or a certain population for their divorce was a stretch, and a dissatisfactory one at that. Then she thought perhaps that Si-Bo had been the same person all along, and it was she who hadn’t known who she married. At any rate, it was suffocating. As if someone had their grip on her throat day and night, the oxygen in her private, domestic space slowly being sucked out, indistinguishable from the repressive air engulfing the public sphere.
Fuck it. They were getting a divorce. There was no reason she should hold back any longer.
Ting glanced up at Imane and Sairish, who looked taken aback. They were looking at her, holding her responsible in some way. She said, “Remember I was trying to explain young Chinese people called ‘Little Pink’? I forgot to mention that I’m married to one.”
“Oh, I didn’t know you guys are married,” Sairish said, exchanging a look with Imane. The two girls were catching up to their new Chinese friends now.
“It’s not important,” Ting said, “because—”
“We’re getting divorced.” Si-Bo thought he might as well beat her to it, if that was what she wanted everyone to know.
“His always trying to finish my sentences is only part of the reason.”
Si-Bo wished he could make jokes in English, like Ting, who was sharing a conspiratorial smirk with the girls.
She turned to him. “See, that’s not what I was gonna say. I was saying that it’s not important because what we were talking about, the pandemic, was more important.” Ting continued the conversation in English not only for the sake of their spectators but also for the uncharitable pleasure of taking advantage of his weakness.
“You say the lockdown and the quarantine was the right way, but at what cost? You know the same things I know. A paralyzed boy was starved to death because his only caretaker was sent to mandatory quarantine. Pregnant women couldn’t get to hospitals because their residential complexes had just one suspected case. People kept getting stuck away from their homes because lockdowns happened overnight without any notice—roads closed, all forms of transportation halted. Small businesses never got any government help. Even just a few months ago, they were putting down people’s cats and dogs because their owners were forced into mandatory quarantine. What right do they have to kill those innocent animals? Not to mention Chinese overseas haven’t been able to see their families for over two years. Even if you’re recovered, they test your antibodies and make it impossible to come in. You remember what happened to Yi-Lun.” Ting turned to the girls to explain. “One of my best friends, she couldn’t even come home when her dad died.”
“That’s crazy!” Imane gasped. “And they killed people’s cats? How did the cats have anything to do with anything?”
“Animals can get sick, too,” Si-Bo said with authority.
“He doesn’t care about dogs and cats,” Ting said dismissively.
“I think humans give it to them, though,” Sairish said, picking her phone up from the table to check.
“So, you tell them, how was any of it for the good of the country?” Ting demanded of Si-Bo.
Si-Bo didn’t look at Sairish or Imane. He kept his eyes on Ting. “It was good for the health and safety of the majority of the people, people like you and me. You benefitted from it, too. Show some appreciation.”
“I didn’t want other people to sacrifice their lives for mine. But there wasn’t anything I could do about that, was there? That’s the whole fucking problem, isn’t it? That’s why we’re getting a divorce. At least I can decide what to do with my own fucking marriage. And please don’t talk like you and I are the same. It’s obvious we’re not.”
Nobody, not even Ting herself, could have foreseen the segue into the topic of their marriage. Imane and Sairish defaulted to awkward speechlessness, looking far out at the horizon.
Si-Bo spoke again. “So you’d rather be in America and get COVID, then? You think they care about people like you? Maybe you forget what it felt like to live like second class citizens, but I haven’t.”
“You always ask me that, as if it’s even a logical question. Whatever America does or doesn’t do is beside the point. Neither China nor America has to be right, or better. America is also fucked up, just in a different way.”
“Exactly. Our system proved to be the greatest at reacting to national emergencies like this pandemic.”
“You’re ridiculous. Everything with you is about how our system is superior, how we won the war against COVID. It’s like the whole country has amnesia. What about Wuhan? They knew it for more than a month and told no one. We still don’t know how many people died. Nobody talks about it. It’s all victory, celebration, the greatest people, the greatest country. Aren’t you sick of it?” Ting felt a soreness climbing up to the top of her nose, and she breathed in to let the fresh air wash through it. She was not going to cry. How had her sunset with mint tea and sweet Moroccan girls at Cafe Hafa, where the Beatles and the Rolling Stones had once sat and chatted about sex, drugs, and rock ‘n’ roll, turned into this?
The sun had dipped under the horizon while Si-Bo and Ting were not paying attention. Now the clouds stirred, gently as a strawberry milkshake, as the sky darkened by the minute. Everything in sight was losing definition.
Then Si-Bo spoke in Mandarin, almost startling the girls. “Ting, why can’t you just love your country? Why do you have to hate it so much?”
“I don’t. You know that. Love and hate are not mutually exclusive.”
“You hate me. You’ve said so.”
“I hate how you make me feel. I hate that I feel the most alone when I’m with you.”
“What you said about hate and love not being mutually exclusive—does that also apply to us?”
“I don’t know.”
Ting didn’t think there was anything else for her to say. She wasn’t going to say “I don’t love you anymore” as if she were the heroine of a melodrama. It wouldn’t be accurate, either. It wasn’t that she didn’t love him anymore: it was that she couldn’t. She could only imagine that Si-Bo felt the same.
Si-Bo stood up, freeing both of them.
Not long after Si-Bo left Cafe Hafa, Ting apologized to Imane and Sairish, and left, too. She went to Saveur de Poisson, as planned, and had a big Moroccan dinner on her own. When she came back to their room, neither Si-Bo nor his suitcase was there. She fell into a coma-like slumber and woke up the next morning in the same clothes that she’d worn the day before, which now smelled like salty sweat and smoked fish, cooled anger and expired sorrow.
On Ting’s last day in Tangier, she took a day trip to the dreamy blue village Chefchaouen, where she ran into to a group of local women drumming and singing in the street, in celebration of something, the exact nature of which she never came to learn. She sat in the village square listening to the afternoon call to prayer emitted from the mosque’s loudspeaker. That night, she rode an overnight train to Marrakech, the starting point for her journey into the Sahara. The rhythmic clickety-clack of the old train wheels rolling over the rail joints kept her up all night. Lying awake in the faint, flickering beams of lamps along both sides of the track, Ting admitted to herself that, everywhere she’d gone, she’d wondered if she would see Si-Bo. For all she knew, Si-Bo might already have gotten on a flight back to Shanghai. She didn’t know what difference it made, him being in the country or not. She had planned to travel all by herself in the first place. But now that Si-Bo had come and gone, it was as if he had left a dimple on her heart that she couldn’t fill with anything else. It was not even that she actually wanted to see Si-Bo, or that she minded roaming solo. It was that the circumstances under which Si-Bo had left seemed imperfect, unfinished somehow. She felt abandoned, though she understood none of what had happened as abandonment. They’d spent a precious decade with each other—if not the most precious decade of their lives. Didn’t they deserve a proper farewell?
The sun in Marrakech burned Ting’s skin in a way that was unfamiliar to her, but she managed to find shade under the wooden canopies that hung over the souks. As she was driven through the Atlas Mountains to the Saharan village of Merzouga, the sun got lower and harsher, the air thicker and dryer. It would take two days to get to her camp in the desert, and the tour guide, Reda, with whom she had been in contact before the trip, brought his friend Simo with him. They spoke Arabic to one another and she couldn’t understand a word of it. During the first hours, it crossed her mind more than once that they could easily drive her to a remote place—the whole drive looked remote—and rob her, rape her, and/or kill her.
Then they started talking to her. They were both twenty-nine years old. Reda was from Merzouga, so he liked driving tourists into the desert: he got to see his parents and stay in his childhood house. Simo was Berber. Reda had brought him on the trip to show him the route and scenic stops along the way, so Simo could start driving tourists on his own soon. It was a profitable gig if one liked driving and meeting people from around the world. Ting asked them questions about Morocco, Islam, and the history of the Berber people; they asked Ting about her school days in America, her work as a translator, and if she was married. Ting decided to tell them that she was, and felt the two men treating her differently afterward—with more respect, perhaps. Si-Bo was there, protecting her, without physically being there, without even knowing. He would be happy to know that, she thought. How sad it was, being a woman in a man’s world, but she was relieved to feel safe. Fortunately, Reda and Simo didn’t probe further into her marriage, so she didn’t have to make up any lies. The three of them stuck to less personal topics. It felt good to talk about, think about, anything else.
The moment Ting knew they were officially in the Sahara was unmistakable.
“Here we go. As-Sahra!” Reda declared. Their four-wheel Jeep leaped off the gravel road and started swimming through loose sand.
Ting bounced up and down in the backseat, but smoothly, not in the jerky way one does when one hits a speed bump on a city street. She felt adrenaline bubbling in her body, making her nervous, and almost confusing her, but exhilarating her all the same. It was all warm sand, as far as her eyes could see, infinitely flat, infinitely edgeless, and the heat waves vibrated, boiling up in the space above the ground.
“What does Sahara mean?” she asked Reda and Simo.
“It just means ‘desert’ in Arabic.”
“Really?” Ting always supposed the word Sahara meant something grand, something profound, something that would give her life new perspective. Now that she thought about it, the meaning of words was often transformed when they were adopted by other languages. It happened all the time.
“There are no marks or anything here.” Ting looked back to see the shallow prints left by their rugged wheels, destined to disappear in minutes. “How do you know where we are going?”
“No need for marks. I grew up in this desert,” said Reda, unfazed.
“It’s like you have a superpower,” said Ting.
The two boys cracked up, gleefully repeating, “Superpower!”
Ting closed her eyes, swaying with the car to keep her balance. The dryness in the air was already baking her throat.
Camp was a few tents standing firmly in the middle of the desert. Reda told her that the people at the camp would take her on a camel ride in the afternoon, and that dinner would be included. He made a joke about how she wouldn’t have anywhere else to eat. He and Simo would pick her up tomorrow morning, after sunrise, and drive her to Fez. Before he drove away, he reminded Ting not to forget to look at the stars at night.
Ting settled her luggage in her tent and waited in the back of the camp. High dunes rose in the distance. It was difficult to gauge how far they were.
“That’s Erg Chebbi,” the camp attendant told her.
“Erg?”
“Like a sea of sand dunes,” he explained, his right hand tracing the curves of the dunes in the air.
“It’s beautiful,” Ting said. “Is there anyone else coming on the camel ride?”
“Yeah, we have three other guests. They went to Merzouga village for the market. An Italian couple, and a guy, Chinese. They should be back soon.”
“A Chinese guy by himself?” Ting had to ask. “What does he look like?”
“About my height. Quiet guy. Very nice. He’s here for two nights already.” The camp attendant squinted, trying to recall if there were more details that he could share. “He really love our shepherd. We got a puppy here a few months ago. I let him feed the dog every day.”
Si-Bo was about Saïd’s height. But would he get along with a dog? Ting couldn’t be certain.
When Ting heard a car approaching, she hurried to the front of the camp, so that when Si-Bo got off the car, Ting was there waiting. He had expected to see her today, but he hadn’t prepared what to say. He walked toward Ting and she walked toward him.
“I wasn’t sure it would be you.” Ting stopped before him at arm’s length. They didn’t hug. “You don’t like dogs.”
“I never did, but guess I do now. People change.”
“What are you doing here?”
“You think I would abandon you just like that?”
“You didn’t abandon me.”
“I wanted to get out of Tangier, and I knew you were coming to the desert. I thought it might do me good, clear my thoughts a little, so I came early.”
“It’s surreal, isn’t it?”
They looked around, as though, in each other’s presence, they were seeing the desert for the first time again.
“You coming on the camel ride?” Ting asked in a cheery tone.
Ting, Si-Bo and the Italian couple wrapped their hair and covered their faces as instructed, straddled their gentle but inscrutable camels, and set out toward the dunes.
The camp attendant led the caravan on foot. They trekked for a while, then got off at the bottom of a high dune and climbed up to the peak. The Italian couple sat down and leaned into each other. Ting and Si-Bo planted themselves away from the couple, each hugging their legs into their chests, taking care to leave a virtuous distance between them. The sun was setting over the rolling hills of sand.
“So did the desert help you clear your thoughts?” Ting asked.
“I don’t know yet.” Si-Bo paused for a few seconds before speaking again. “It makes me feel very small. Maybe a lot of the things I cared about don’t matter as much as I think.”
Si-Bo didn’t know what, exactly, he was referring to. It was just a feeling. Ting nodded, not knowing what he meant, and not wanting to know more. In this moment, sand was all they saw; silence was all they heard. Nothing else mattered, and there was nothing more to say. It was as if they had finally reached a tacit understanding. Tonight they would gaze at the stars. Tomorrow they might fight like there was no tomorrow. In three days they would be back in their homeland. In another fifteen, they might meet again at the marriage bureau, and go home with their divorce certificates. A year or two after that, they might lose touch. In thirty years, they might start asking themselves if there was any meaning in fighting with anyone. In fifty years, they might forget each other’s names and the name of the country where they once rode camels in a great desert. Or none of that would happen, not in the way they expected, because life wasn’t like that. Here and now, they were Si-Bo and Ting, Ting and Si-Bo, watching the daylight pass over the Sahara, to the other side of the world.
Born and raised in Beijing, Mengyin Lin is a Chinese writer living in the US. Mandarin is her mother tongue and she writes in English as her second language. She holds an MFA in Fiction from Brooklyn College where she won the Himan Brown Award and a BFA in Film from New York University. Her fiction is published or forthcoming in Epiphany, Joyland, Fence, and Pleiades; her nonfiction can be read in the New York Times. She is the winner of the 2023 Pen/Robert J. Dau Short Story Prize for Emerging Writers and 2022 Breakout Writers Prize. Her work has been supported by Tin House Summer Workshop and Soho Fellowship.
