作者有話要説：When we are born,we cry,that we are come
To this great stage of fools.
Most people learn their first lesson about relationship from their friend other than their boyfriend or girlfriend. Especially for girls, they were sensitive and vulnerable. I remembered being upset and tearful for no reason when I was in sixth grade. The changes in my body like period had worn me out completely, and since then, I never stopped learning to control my mood. It’s ok to be a woman, but it’s not ok to say it was your hormone that’s talking when you are under the cloud and say terrible things to other people.
If I told you I was in a good frame of mind when I run into Gabrielle Wong on my way home from grocery shopping in Shenzhen, I would be lying.
God knows I could do without the shabby clothes I was wearing. And I didn’t think I did myself much favor by hiding my swelling, reddish eyes under a pair of huge grandmother glasses. Couldn’t actually get away with being “just got out of bed”, since my hands were tied up with four plastic bags that consisted of stuff weren’t urgently needed. How did even recognize me? Did I look this bad when I was in secondary school? My sweet lord, I wished I could just go home and flushed myself in to the toilet.
But life doesn’t stop just because you’re on your bad hair day. I put on a perfect smile and waved nervously at her. Man, she looked good. I couldn’t bring myself to face her right now, so I pretended I was in a hurry and screamed out my number over my shoulder as I rushed to the bus, I even made her promise to call so as to show my hospitality. See, I’m a chicken.
Gabrielle and I started to hang out a lot from the end of second grade in junior high. She’d always been a social raconteur. In her own words, she’d established a philosophy of sociality since the fifth grade in primary school. To be fair, it took a lot more than an easy-going nature to become sociable. You’d got to fight for it.
We both took creative writhing class then. We never really wanted to be a writer, in fact, we considered writer as one of those jobs that drove you crazy and finally left you with no choice but commit suicide. Yet, we spent every weekend in different high-class coffee shop discussing the next assignment topic and of course, gossiping about other people’s business, but we kept the latter only between us. First rule to become a successful social climber is to know when to shut up, since you never know who’s going to sell you in.
“I saw Mr. Tang and his wife in the department store on Saturday. He thinks he looks young! I mean, he was trying on a light blue shirt while he said to his wife: ‘I don’t think I look a day past thirty-five.’ I nearly fell onto the floor by laughing too hard!”
Gabrielle recalled the whole thing without moving her eyes away from the door, just in case someone thinner or prettier walks in. This, in my opinion, almost never happened. I was just about to confide in her that I might be having a crush with the boy sitting next to me, when suddenly she purred, grabbed my arm violently and yanked me across the table. “What is he doing here? There! My father!” she gasped.
I turned and watched him approaching a table with a beautiful lady already sat in it. I supposed that woman was not Gabrielle’s mother by the look of her: her face was flushing with anger and embarrassment; I could hear the sound of her nails clawing on the leather sofa.
“Emma, let’s go somewhere else.” She stood up and marched ahead of me. For a second there, I thought about saying something like “let’s take you home” or words of comfort. As it was, I didn’t of course. What’s the point of taking her home? This wasn’t the first time and certainly wouldn’t be the last. She’d confided me that her parents were on trial separation for many years, and only stuck together for her sake. She just couldn’t stand her father making a fool of her like that in front of her friend. Being her best friend, I know her well enough to say less than an hour, she would revive to her normal like nothing happened.
Gabrielle was a sort of person who would find it extremely hard to find a confidant even she was just a 16 year old kid. She sometimes wore me out with her constant demands for attention and other times ignored me like I was just another acquaintance. But when I tried to do the same to her, she got so upset that I never dared to do it again. She confided almost all her family secrets to me, I felt good at the beginning as it did a lot to my vanity. But after a while, things started to get too much when she told me about how her father had always hated her and even tried to suffocate her to death when she was little. But I was only a kid, I didn’t know any better than she did. Her friendship became so demanding for me I could hardly breathe. But ironically, she was the only one who’d got me.
Maybe, that was what scared me the most.
She had a great sense of humor and was really smart too, I thoroughly enjoyed having idle chit-chat with her, but honest self-revelation and sharing intimacies that are essence of a lasting female friendship had never been my gig. I longed to be open and share innermost thoughts and problems to someone, but I always backed off before I even got to the point. Funny enough, I used to despise friendship that was solely about celebrity gossip, songs, films or love crushes. I considered it as naïve and stupid. But as I grew up, I’d come to realized that you could do just fine without a confidante but not several “acquaintances” that, you could just showed up and tagged along.
My relationship philosophy used to come from her.
As far as she was concerned, a woman should be decked out in stylish clothes, nose up in the air at all the guys and never depends on men. Her mother imparted the whole “men-are-suckers” theory to Gabrielle when she found out her husband was having an affair with another woman. Gabrielle was only 5. It wasn’t much to my surprise; Gabrielle despised men and admitted to me she would be the last person on earth to get married. She used to say to me: “You don’t know what the hell you’re letting yourself in for.” I wasn’t very convinced. From my past experience, a person said such a thing had a perfectly good chance to be the first bride among her friends. But I agreed with her to a point that the whole marriage business could never stop. When you are married to a guy, you think you are willing to do everything for him, like to have his children and suffer morning sickness; probably 7 years and two little monsters later, that handsome man of yours would’ve watched the weather lady on TV more often than fixing his eyes on you; and one day, another sleepless night, you find yourself sleeping beside a man you don’t recognize.
