The Logic of Leverage
Chapter 20. Discovering old shadows in new rooms. An exercise in Black Heart accounting and a courageous change of course. Shanghai, 1997.
Chapter 20: The Logic of Leverage
English (Deutsch unten)
Yin moved to Shanghai, and we began the daily routine of being husband and wife for the first time since picking up our marriage certificates on the 清明 Tomb Sweeping Festival eighteen months prior.
The friction started almost immediately. It wasn’t the long hours I spent at work that caused the problem. It was a simple imbalance of needs that we hadn’t yet learned to understand and manage. I had few expectations for our marriage, but Yin had a specific list of what she required from living as husband and wife. Since we were both new to the city and lacked a social circle, she looked to me to fill every gap in her existence. She expected me to be her social life, her entertainment, and her primary mood regulator. Since leaving London, I had grown accustomed to the reflective quiet of living alone. Now, the constant pressure of her emotional demands felt stressful. Claustrophobic.
Within a few months, Yin was spending most of her time in the guest room. One evening, I walked in and found her sitting on the windowsill of our twenty-fourth-floor apartment. The window was wide open. Her legs were dangling over the edge, swinging out into the smog. When she turned to look at me, her face was a strange collage of anger and grief. I didn’t recognize her.
“Shall we go and have dinner at the Sichuan restaurant downstairs?” I asked. I kept my voice flat and calm, the way you might talk to someone standing too close to the abyss.
Her face twisted into a wide, mirthless grin. She swung her legs back inside, climbed off the sill, and fell onto the bed with a laugh. “Leave me alone,” she said. “I’m having fun.”
