(Translated, from the Chinese, by Jeremy Tiang.)

Published in the print edition (New Yorker.)of the December 2, 2024, issue, with the headline “Paris Friend.”

Xiaoguo had a terror of thirst, so he kept a glass of water on the table beside his hospital bed. As soon as it was empty, he asked me to refill it. I wanted to warn him that this was unhealthy—guzzling water all night long puts pressure on the kidneys, and pissing that much couldn’t be good for his injury. He was tall, though, so I decided his insides could probably cope.

Even though he was a Beijinger, Xiaoguo didn’t have a hint of an accent. He told me he’d sung Peking opera for a few years as a kid, but then he got too tall and his voice broke. It was a shame because not many kids can sing Lord Guan the way I did, he said, as he shuffled a deck of cards. You need an air of dignity. Unfortunately, even Lord Guan isn’t allowed to be as tall as I got.

And so, at the age of twenty, he went to study film in France, where he lived in Versailles. Each day, he headed out with one of the school’s cameras and shot a bunch of footage, then went back to the studio and tried to edit it into sense. After doing this for a while, he began getting asked to take wedding videos for Chinese people living in France. Mostly Wenzhou people, he said. They love weddings. Perhaps because of his height, everyone seemed to think they were getting their money’s worth; such a substantial person came with an elevated point of view. One of the Wenzhou women noticed that he always captured unforgettable moments: a groom’s fleeting anxiety, a bride inadvertently revealing her hatred for another woman. Once, he even caught someone stealing a stack of red envelopes from a bridesmaid’s handbag. He didn’t raise the alarm right away, just sent the footage to the client. That’s called letting the film speak for you, he said. The Wenzhou woman was forty-seven years old and owned three antique shops in Paris. Her husband, a Korean gangster, had died of a stroke when she was forty.

She once shot someone and took a lot of drugs, he said. But she was quite healthy when I met her. After her husband died, she started running marathons. She asked me to go jogging with her once. It was raining heavily, but we set out anyway. I made it ten minutes, then I got a taxi to the end point and waited for her there. Even though I couldn’t run a marathon, she still believed in my talent and gave me the cash to shoot my first feature. She said I could do anything I liked, as long as I made a film. When her husband was still alive, they watched movies every day. Sometimes at the art-house cinema near their place, sometimes DVDs at home. Since he passed, she hasn’t seen as many. Turns out it wasn’t the movies she liked—it was watching them with her husband. I lost all the money she gave me playing cards. I made an ultra-low-budget reel of street scenes, dubbed in a voice-over, and sent it to her. Marguerite Duras made a film like that. The Wenzhou woman never responded, and I never saw her again.

As for how I ended up in a hospital room in Paris talking to Xiaoguo: two years ago, I got to know a Chinese girl on MSN who was studying in France. Like me, she was from the northeast and liked writing. After chatting for a couple of months, we realized that our parents had worked in the same factory, though in different workrooms. When she was ten, her parents had sold everything they had in S— and gone to work in New Zealand. After they got settled there, they opened a swimming school. Your father liked to swim? I asked. He learned in New Zealand so he could make a living, she replied. In the first half of his life, he was a fitter; in his early forties, he became a decent athlete.

I sent her a short story I’d been writing, and she gave me some notes. I was stunned by her Chinese fluency—she was even able to sort out some confusion I’d had with personal pronouns. How could someone who’d left China in fifth grade have kept up her mother tongue so well? I couldn’t understand it. I’d been struggling with this story for the better part of a year; it was now ten thousand words long, and I had no idea how to end it. She said, What if the girl walks into the sea and swims across the strait to a different country, where she starts a new life? How is that possible? I said. I could do it, she said. As long as I didn’t encounter any sharks or jellyfish. You could swim dozens of kilometres? I asked. Yes, she said. I can swim for a day and a night. If I hadn’t loved swimming so much, my ba would never have become a coach. I only swim occasionally these days, she added. I prefer literature. I’m writing a five-hundred-thousand-word novel. Does it need to be that long? I said. It didn’t start out that long, she said, I just kept going. If I didn’t give myself a limit, it would end up even longer. Can I see some of it? I asked. Wait till I’m done, she said. O.K., I said. Thanks for your suggestions for my story. Some of the details reminded me of our city when I was a kid, she said. You wrote about trucks full of cabbages parked by the hutongs, and people would come up with their carts to buy vegetables for the winter. I remember all that. Some people ripped the rotten leaves off the cabbages so they’d weigh less. Your writing isn’t good enough yet. If it were better, I’d help you translate it. If I manage to write another story, I said, I’ll send it to you.