The People’s Republic of Desire

16 It's Not a Fairy Tale

After marrying a handsome husband, Colorful Clouds finally felt proud, and resumed contact with her old acquaintances.

Brian is a physicist. He did not make Colorful Clouds work, and wanted only that she realize her dreams of leading a happy life and becoming a great performer.

Colorful Clouds became a middle-class housewife and mother of three. She vowed solemnly to break into Hollywood. She believed that her skin color and appearance, while not sought after in China, would be liked by these Westerners.

She and Brian moved the family to southern California to help her make it in Hollywood. But after countless auditions, she never won a part. Even worse, her appearance, which she thought was so special, was common in Southeast Asia, especially Thailand. She was even more common in the States than she was in China. At least in China people used to admire her Zhuang ethnic features.

What made Colorful Clouds especially unhappy was that the Chinese theater groups who visited the States had not hired her. After so many years, she appeared in only one feature movie – as a waitress in a Chinese restaurant, with a total of two lines.

As time passed, Brian became disappointed that Colorful Clouds had not found work and moved back to the Midwest. He began to feel that perhaps his mysterious wife was really just mediocre after all. Colorful Clouds watched Brian rush about making a living, getting older every day. He had much less hair than before, but much more of a belly. The handsome air he had before they were married was gone. He had become a middle-aged man. The differences between the m grew greater, and they even began sleeping in separate beds. But her penchant for young men remained unchanged.

To kill time, Colorful Clouds began to hang out in the coffee shops at the University of Missouri, and there she met a lot of young men. Many of them became her lovers. Colorful Clouds had several lovers, but she still felt empty and did not know what to do with her time.

Colorful Clouds often telephoned me since I was a student there back then. She needed an audience to listen to her story – to listen to her show off, and vent, and curse everyone for her situation. She sometimes went overboard, blaming everyone and everything but herself: this girlfriend stabbed her in the back, that lover slept with her cousin, and on and on. I was like a garbage dump, taking all of Colorful Clouds' rubbish.

Colorful Clouds was a gifted liar. Her real life bore no resemblance whatsoever to the life she recounted. Sometimes she said Brian had something going with another Chinese woman. This woman, who had abandoned her husband and children in China to establish herself in the United States, was a minor actress, nowhere near as good as Colorful Clouds. Colorful Clouds plotted how to catch the adulterers in the act. Sometimes she said that her husband was the most faithful man on earth, who only had eyes for her. I never pointed out the inconsistencies in Colorful Clouds' stories. I understood that she relied on intuition. If she wanted something, she would get it, whether it was in the real world or in the world of her imagination.