Story for performance #32
webcast from Paris at 09:43PM, 22 Jul 05

move house
Source: Steven Erlanger and Greg Myre, ‘Protests may hasten Gaza move’, New York Times in International Herald Tribune online, 22/07/05
Tags: death, travel, China
Writer/s: Ellen Zweig

I don’t want to move. I’ve been moving around for a month and a half, living out of a suitcase and I’m glad to be home. There are so many places to go, travel might become a way of life. I have to be careful.

My black cat is sleeping in a cardboard box. She likes to be confined. I look out my window, look down the street. I used to see the Twin Towers peeking out of a mist, but now there’s only the top of building number seven, the only one to be rebuilt since 9/11. In my suitcase, which I haven’t unpacked yet, I have souvenirs from my trip to China. Four leather shadow puppets, a tiny art deco teapot, silk slippers embroidered with peonies, and a cricket cage.

I’m glad to be home, but I’m already planning my next trip to Shanghai. Oh, Shanghai. It evokes the past and the future, the European buildings, the giant shopping malls, the streets lined with trees—you could almost be in Paris. I stayed in the former French Concession in a hotel that was once the mansion of a gangster named Du. Every night I dreamed of the 1930s.

I am Emily Hahn, living in Shanghai, writing for the New Yorker. I know all the famous people in Shanghai: Victor Sassoon is my lover; Zhang Ai-ling and I have coffee in a little cafe on Joffre Avenue where we talk about our writing; I go to parties with Ruan Ling-yu, never guessing that she will kill herself because of scandal. We all go to the premieres of her movies. We live a gay life, drinking and holding hands. Girls always hold hands when they walk down the street together. I can feel the soft skin and the little squeeze when we part.

Sometimes I bring Mr. Mills, my gibbon, to the parties. He has to wear a diaper because he has bad habits and people complained. Also, sometimes he takes an instant dislike to a person who enters the room. This can be very amusing. He leaps on the person’s shoulder and bites him on the neck. Mr. Mills is a large gibbon and it’s funny to see someone running around trying to force him to jump off, running in circles, screaming: ‘he bit me, he bit me.’ He only bites European men, so the women and the Chinese men laugh and continue to eat. We lick our chopsticks and take another piece of lily bulb. The soft white flesh melts in our mouths.

I don’t want to move, but the Japanese are threatening to invade the city. There’s a fear that is putting a damper on our parties. Many of my European and American friends have already left. I live in the basement of a bank building on Kiangse Road. My apartment is the center of a literary salon and one of the only places where Chinese and European writers meet. I love the sounds of the street. The fruit seller walks by. He carries two baskets balanced on a pole which hangs over his shoulders. He sets the baskets down and I see that in one he has juicy ripe peaches and in the other he has bright green lotus seed pods. He shouts out the names of the fruit and I can’t resist the peaches. Their skin peels off with no effort and their juice dribbles down my chin. I am sick with eating too many peaches. My stomach aches. Mr. Mills eats one too, finding a perch on an armoire to gloat over his peach. He has chosen the largest and ripest. If I stand under the corner where he’s sitting, I fear that the juice will drip into my hair.

I am sitting in an internet bar in Shanghai, surrounded by young kids playing video games, chatting with friends over the webcams, watching movies, sometimes doing all three at once. I’m sending emails into the past and getting stuck in the future. It’s hot and humid out, so I don’t want to move. I have a glass of tea by the mouse pad, the green leaves sunk to the bottom, and a few still float on the top. When I drink the tea, these few leaves touch my lips and I taste the bitterness.

The slow death by cancer, the sudden deaths, this is the way we move body and home in the end. The past, the present, the future, it doesn’t matter. No sense resisting. Live all the lives you can. I will be Emily Hahn in 1930s Shanghai and myself in the present in New York and someone in Paris and someone in New Delhi and someone in the many places I will never visit, because travel is my fate and my pleasure and my pain. I hate to move. I like to stay home.

Adapted for performance by Barbara Campbell from a story by Ellen Zweig.