The Cather in the Rye

Dear Baby,

Today I was browsing on the Internet and came across a book written by one of my old internet friends LDL. LDL is a famous newspaper editor now. He wrote this book for his daughter. It is a very beautiful book, but I was having a hard time connecting this loving father with the LDL I knew. I guess everybody has to grow up, especially when they become parents. After all, it was about 10 years since I chatted with LDL and other friends in an internet chat room.

In 1999, my college days finally came to an end. I started working for an American company in Changzhou before I came to this country in July 2000. During that one year’s time, I spent all my spare time chatting online with my internet friends. We all met in a forum called "Reader’s Life." Everybody was in their mid to late 20s, intelligent, talented but extremely arrogant. Most of us were pro-western and pro-democracy, and largely affected by the 1989 incident in Tiananmen Square. Around June 4th, we became very emotional. The threads we posted were usually deleted by the Website moderators in less than one minute because of the sensitive topics, but we kept trying to post and save the articles before they were deleted. I will probably talk about 1989 in another time.

Rye is my first true best friend. At the time, I was in love with the book The Catcher in the Rye, and that’s obviously where Rye got his nickname from. I exchanged pictures with Rye before I left for America. That was one of the pictures ZB took for me. ZB is a photographer. He told me he wanted to capture the most beautiful moment of me on his camera. I don’t know if he was successful, but I did send the picture he took of me to Rye. Rye said on the forum: lala (my nickname) smiles like sunshine in California. After that, everybody started to call me Pretty Girl Lala. I met Rye in 2002 when I was in Beijing. Rye had a big party for me. When he saw me, he said I looked so different. I laughed and told him that the California sun was too strong for me. Rye is a CEO of a website now.
That year was the one of the most memorable times of my life. People who I talked to now are famous editors, journalist and book publishers. I obviously never read as many books as they did, nor was I a good writer, but I was able to pull some tricks once in a while. We used to talk to each other by writing poems. It is really not too hard, all you need to do is remember some classic lines. One night I used Ezra Pound:
The apparition of these faces in the crowd
Petals on a wet, black bough.
That was considered a classic flirt for a long time. I am sure Pound would jump out of his tomb if he knew I was using his poem in this way.

Dear baby, I will tell you more stories about them later. It’s always a pleasure to talk to people who have the same interests and passions and who are at the same intelligence level as you, but in the end, it’s very hard to maintain friends with them because when you start arguing and fighting over things, most likely over stupid things, you know the worst way to hurt each other because you are all so much alike.

Getting back to Catcher in the Rye. I remember the first day I arrived at Changzhou, a strange city with no friends and family of my own. It was a rainy day. I walked 15 minutes to find a small noodle soup restaurant around 8pm at night. I was the only customer. Everybody was staring at me as I was finishing my soup as quickly as possible. Then I walked back to my apartment. I stood at my balcony, smoking my cigarette and drinking my wine, looking at the apartment complex like 50 feet in front of me. There were hundreds of windows, all lit up so you could see people walking back and forth, and you could hear the sounds of the TV, a piano, parents yelling, kids crying. Every window was like a movie screen, showing the story of the family behind the window. As I was drinking more and more, the screens became shaky, all I could think of was the ending of the Catcher in the Rye:

It began to rain like a bastard…All the parents and mothers and everybody went over and stood right under the roof of the carrousel, so they wouldn’t get soaked to the skin or anything…. I got soaked…I didn’t care though. I felt so damn happy all of a sudden.. I felt so damn happy, if you want to know the truth. I don’t know why…God, I wish you could have been there…