K, weary of the office air thick with a mixture of dust and despair, decided to climb a mountain during the holiday. He'd heard of one on the outskirts of the city, not high, but with views said to cleanse the soul. He needed cleansing, desperately. The city felt like a vast, sticky web, and he sensed he was being slowly digested. The mountain, perhaps, was a pocket of reality outside the web.
Li Ming, an inconspicuous weed in this steel forest, contributed his sweat daily beside roaring machines, just to earn those few banknotes that barely allowed him to stand on the city's edge. His world was small, small enough only to hold the creaking single bed in his rented room, and the sweet smile of his faraway girlfriend, Mei Ling. Oh, right, and his three-year-old phone, and inside it, the Apple account that held all his hopes.
The air in the town was stagnant, as always. The dusty afternoon sun cast a dull glow on the sooty windowpanes of Wang Afu's house. Inside, the air was even heavier. Wang Afu's long sighs and his wife Li Xiujuan's silent resistance stood between them like an invisible wall.
I can't quite recall when I first chewed betel nut. It was probably sometime during a summer in my second year of high school, when the air was thick and sticky like half-melted malt syrup. A friend handed me one, his tone like he was sharing a secret weapon: "It's a pick-me-up, hits harder than caffeine." The thing was coated in a sickly sweet syrup, but inside were coarse, tough fibers. Chewing it gave a primitive, almost violent pleasure. First, a fleeting sweetness in the mouth, then astringency, and finally a burning sensation that shot straight to the top of my head. The world seemed to sharpen for a fraction of a second, then quickly blurred again, like an old, out-of-focus projector.