I was walking up the stairs, and Li Tian was behind me, giggling.
“Love you,” she said in English.
I pretended not to hear her. She had just had a couple of beers. Maybe she was just drunk, or maybe I just heard her wrong. But I was going to pretend that this hadn’t just happened.
When we got upstairs, she said to me, “Did you hear what I said?” her eyes dancing playfully, smiling shyly.
“Yeah, I heard you.”
She collapsed into a fitful of giggles.
“I said it. I said, ‘love you.’”
She kept saying the “love you” part in English. I smiled, feeling awkward.
Don’t say that. Don’t say that, I thought to myself.
“I know,” was all I could muster. It had finally happened. I couldn’t say it back. I just couldn’t.
“Am I crazy?” she asked.
“Yeah, I think maybe you’re drunk.”
A few days later, we were entwined in each other’s arms and legs, looking into each other's eyes.
There’s no reason to hold this back from her any longer, I thought to myself.
“Wo ai ni,” I said, meaning “I love you” in Chinese.[1]
She just smiled and wouldn’t say it back in Chinese. I could see the hesitation in her eyes. I knew she preferred to say it to me in English. It carried more weight for us to say it in our own mother tongues. I told myself to be patient and let her say it on her own terms in her own time.
She said it back to me in Chinese a few days later.
“Wo ai ni, Sarah.”
“Wo ye ai ni,” (I love you too) I responded in a whisper. We kissed, our tongues dancing with one another. We slept, our breath in sync, our bodies pressed against each other, our limbs wrapped around each other’s bodies, keeping each other warm from the incoming fall chill.
In September, we went to the local amusement park.
“They say in China that if you say ‘I like you’ at the top of a Ferris wheel, you’ll stay together forever,” Li Tian said, smiling at me. “I’m not saying we have to say it at the top. I’m just saying that’s what people say,” she said nonchalantly. “Maybe we’ll say it, maybe we won’t,” she said with a shrug.
We rode the Ferris Wheel then, reaching higher and higher into the sky until we could see row upon row of 20-story buildings as far as the eye could see. The high-rise apartments were skinny and anorexic looking as though they would topple over in one second if there was an earthquake, with cranes and green renovation nets outside countless buildings being constructed into the skyline’s cityscape.
When the Ferris Wheel reached the very, very top, she whispered, “I like you” in Chinese and I said it back. We touched our foreheads together first, and then our lips touched tenderly. In that moment, I felt that anything was possible. It felt like we were the only two people in the world. A wish passed from the lips and into the air, floating there and then away. My body was filled with such care and affection, like I wanted to merge with her into one being and float away into the clouds together.
We giggled watching other couples make out in the other Ferris wheel cars, and they too collapsed into hysterics when they realized we were watching them.
Below in the carnival sections, I played a shooter game and won her a prize: A pink teddy bear with a little placard that said, “I love you” in English. She giggled excitedly and said, “You’re turning me into a girl, you know?”
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