True, they did make a few lacklustre attempts at persuading me to stay, but they practically formed a guard of honour to escort me off the premises to the accompaniment of fireworks and drums. Never in all my ten years of teaching had I witnessed such a stunning act of bureaucratic efficiency. All three levels of bureaucracy had accepted it, and made the necessary arrangements before the day was through.
The head of the faculty, the dean of the college and even the president of the university himself had all received my letter of resignation with trembling hands as if it were a gift bestowed from heaven. She would have kneeled at his feet if she’d had to! She threatened to drag me to the university president’s office and plead for him to take me back. My mother’s performances were first rate my talent for theatrics must have been passed down in the womb. I mumbled my explanations while she, in response, shouted until her throat hurt, all the while beating at her chest.
My ageing mother was the last to find out and she took it the worst. ‘You can’t resign! You can’t take early retirement! Don’t be so reckless!’
Privateeyes review free#
I was saying goodbye to the old me, the sissy I was throwing off the shackles and cutting myself free from the world to live life as I wanted to live it.ĭrop out? Quit the complex entanglements of life? Was I crazy?
Privateeyes review full#
Never again would I wait, so full of expectation, only to end up empty-handed, or seesaw back and forth in indecision. Never again would I let myself be suffocated and squeezed so that the blood no longer pumped in my chest. Scream and howl at tempests, or choose to retire quietly from the public eye? I’d chosen the latter.
Privateeyes review cracked#
This time, however, I was determined to play the hero and play him well: a lonely, cracked boat on a vast ocean letting in more water than it can hold back.įor the most part life is completely mediocre. I’ve spent years in the theatre so I’ll admit to having a penchant for creating movies in my head, ones with chillingly bloody scenes that take place in majestic landscapes and follow the trials of a bumbling young hero. I’d had no weapon to defend myself, only a puny torch. When the moment arrived their blades pierced my heart and there they left me, lying in a pool of my own blood. The moon hung high and bright, and there I stood, alone in the wilderness, my flowing white robe fluttering in the wind as those philistines crouched in the bushes, clutching their swords. I tried to swat them away in vain.īut I deserved it and, anyway, I was used to mass condemnation. As expected, the objections came swarming at me like hornets whose nest I had disturbed. I was waiting for the right moment to tell my friends and family. I had let the idea of becoming a private investigator brew for six months before acting on it, much like a prisoner planning his escape. Otherwise, they were mostly used as toothpicks. The more I played with them the prouder I felt, and before long I’d used up two boxes, not because there was a stream of people requesting them or because I was on the streets handing them out to motorists stopped at traffic lights, but because I’d shuffle them like cards while waiting for clients, or flick them like martial-arts weapons across the room. I hung out a sign and had some business cards printed, one side embossed with my name in Chinese and the other with ‘Wu Chen, Private Investigator’ in English. Once packed, my meagre belongings were barely enough to fill a small van, and so I passed through the gloomy Xinhai tunnel to set up shop as a private investigator in Wulong Street, a godforsaken place of unmarked graves that not even the birds would deign to shit on. I distanced myself from the theatre circle where I’d made a sort of name for myself and began refusing invitations to drink and play mahjong with the lecherous pigs I had come to call my friends. After I left my teaching job I faded out of my marriage, which really existed in name only, and sold the flat in Xindian.
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