I used to be rather fond of tigers. When I was a child, liking tigers was nothing to be proud of. My other friends liked Tyrannosaurus rex, Velociraptors, bombers, Rayquaza, and Resident Evil. Tigers did not deserve to be liked. Tigers were pretty useless. So what if they had evolved claws?
The tiger I liked was one I had once seen in a newspaper. That old paper from decades ago carried a piece of good news: In Qinhuangdao, cats can become tigers.
That tiger looked slightly distorted. He lay there with nothing to do, like the time we had wasted. The picture of the tiger was only the picture of the tiger in my memory. He might not have been a tiger at all, only a thing held in a permanent pose, always looking at you, making you a little sad, because you knew there were many tigers like him and he was of no use whatsoever.
Every tiger has a pattern of stripes all his own, but no one would carefully remember every inch of his skin, not even another tiger. The tiger licked his paws as though enjoying a little leisure. A tiger’s leisure always stood out, needling the nerves.
His mocking gaze seemed to say: “Bro, I’ve got it way better than you in here. All I need to do is hold one pose. Even if I hold it forever, that only proves I never waste time. I’m a tiger. I live a hell of a lot more comfortably than you do.”
The picture of the cat was still cute, like a cat freshly abandoned, beset by the whole world plus ringworm, feline distemper, and vitamin deficiencies, then frightened half to death by the cars coming and going on the road. All he wanted was to crawl under a car. That was a world of his own, like every young person’s world, always belonging to the shadow beneath a moving car. I do not mean this as some dark, anti-mainstream metaphor. I only mean that if you want a moment’s peace, you probably have to lie under a car. This cat looked sad.
Only later did I learn that cats and tigers in the newspaper were both metaphors for corrupt officials. Of course that was the answer, but by now I had no time to care. Maybe one day I would make a film about cats and tigers.
Maybe I would do it right now: start by writing a screenplay about cats and tigers. I remember studying film at some university in Sydney. Most of the class were Chinese; there were only two or three white students. At first I played games on my computer. Later I got addicted to short-form videos and never stopped watching them, not even in class. The only thing I remember is the time we did film reviews. I assumed everyone would talk about some boring Michelangelo Antonioni or Jean-Luc Godard, but the only white guy in the class turned out to be presenting Bi Gan’s Long Day’s Journey Into Night. Every Chinese student took out a phone to record him. I used to repeat after other people that Bi Gan was only a clumsy imitator of the West. Maybe Westerners did not think so. All the Chinese students laughed. A vast despair struck me. I thought perhaps I did not like tigers anymore.
Once, in the common area outside the classroom, someone walked toward me.
I imagined the tiger asking: “Why do you wear a suit to class?”
Without thinking, I would say lightly that I wore one every day. I had not dressed up for anything. It meant I was a man of taste. It meant I was a man who could open his mouth and reel off the names of countless designer labels.
“You’re so stupid. What a disgusting person.”
I was waiting for an answer like that, one that would leave me speechless.
Then I would say: “All right. I didn’t do anything to you.”
A tiger does not give up his prey easily. We can imagine how relentlessly he would go on:
“I can picture you walking down the street with both hands in your pockets, a cigarette pinched between thumb and forefinger. There are ten million versions of you inside your head, imagining how cool you are. When you walk, you imagine you’re a huge star and there is always a camera filming a documentary about you. You have to deliver your golden rules about everything around you. When you listen to music through your headphones, you imagine you’re a huge star. You imagine your influence is already so enormous that you can exist as the world’s most experimental, most avant-garde, freest, most personally expressive work, interpreted and passed down by countless people. You pretend you’re immortal—the kind of immortal whose decision to take off or keep on his hat before an aristocrat will be interpreted for its political leanings hundreds of years later. The way you perform yourself is genuinely disgusting.”
All right, if the tiger said that, he would still be useful to me. I would like that.
“Thanks,” I would say. “Want to go out for a cigarette?”
I would use that line to end it.
Maybe tobacco smells awful. I should smoke catnip.
“Disgusting,” the tiger ought to say.
But in reality, the tiger walked toward me and said: “I quite like tigers.”
“Which film are you going to talk about?” I asked.
“Luchino Visconti’s The Leopard.”
“That’s all right, I suppose.”
That was the last time I met a tiger. Now I want to make a film about tigers for my graduation project. A tiger scrolling through short-form videos seems like a very good idea. I will find the tiger who berated me last time and cast him in it.
At night, people stand in the street pretending to smoke and turn their heads only when a pretty girl walks by. I do not think there are tigers in the street.
Later, when the tiger and I had grown closer, he asked why I did not get a haircut.
“I hate haircuts. They never understand what I want.”
“Okay,” the tiger said.
That was not what I wanted to hear. How boring. The tiger ought to have said:
“That’s only because you asked for something you shouldn’t have asked for. Why not get the same haircut as everyone else?”
It made me feel that the tiger did not like me, that he was only some kind of projection involving people like me.
“No. It’s simply an aesthetic opinion.”
“Why should I have to look like everyone else? Are you singling me out?”
“You’re changing the subject. Looking like other people or not has no strong correlation with aesthetics.”
“All right, you’re right,” I said. “You tigers—why do you know so much?”
The tiger said: “Because I stand for something. I have my past, my future, everything that is mine, while you’ll only remember tigers for ten or fifteen minutes.”
If the tiger said that, my story could end. At last I could be rid of them. I would tell every tiger frankly:
I do not really like you phony tigers. You dress up as human beings in my stories and say strange things, pretending you are some kind of symbol, when in fact you are nothing. But what can I do? I only want to become an excavator, a bomber, or a loader.
I finished my screenplay. At last I got a tiger to come to the set. I had made it perfectly clear: all you have to do is sit there and use your phone. You know, it’s a tremendous satire of modern life, a tremendous satire of short-form video.
“You’re disgusting,” the tiger said. “You think you’re clever, but you make me look stupid. I don’t want to sit here playing with a phone all day.”
Then what do you want?
“I miss my claws. I had claws even when I was still a cat. I think if I had claws, I probably wouldn’t need to play with a phone, and I could slash you a couple of times besides.”
If you do that, how am I supposed to satirize our modern life?
“Maybe all we need is a few more people like you, protecting modern life while satirizing it.”
I thought the tiger made a great deal of sense, so I immediately took out my phone and spent half an hour arguing with conservative people online. The tiger filmed me. I thought I looked pretty good. The sight of me furious and flustered was quite funny. This would make a decent film. Shame we still did not get the tiger on camera.
The greater shame is that I have never met a tiger at all. Look at them over there, not moving. What is there to film, exactly?