You want to send a message to this world, a concise and strong message. You don’t know why you want to do this. But I know it’s not just a whim. Maybe it started when you went back to Beijing and saw that rabbit graffiti on the postboard near the police station. You grinned, realizing you had seen it before – on walls, mailboxes, telephone booths. The ubiquitous rabbit graffiti sketched by many anonymous artists is a Beijing legend. They had been painted a long time ago. But, only at that moment, encountering the rabbit graffiti again after so many years at this postboard, you started to realize how impressive it was: the cheap black paint, the oval head, the huge pointy ears, and the sardonic laughing face all produced derision. You took a picture of the rabbit, which partially covered a slogan of the party on the postboard and uploaded it to your Instagram account. It is magical, you murmured to yourself, why do they permit a rabbit to laugh at the slogan? Why didn’t they remove it? The rabbit graffiti was everywhere in the city, but the party slogan was inviolable. It was just graffiti, but many people didn’t survive, a lot of people who opposed and made fun of the party didn’t survive.

     You were amazed at how the rabbit on the postboard survived and it wouldn’t leave your mind. In the evening, you returned to look at it again more carefully as if it had been a work of art by Michelangelo. When pedestrians grew curious about what you were doing, you pretended as if you were looking at the slogan on the postboard. Only then did you realize what it wrote: May the ideals of the Party continue to inspire generations to come.

     But you deleted your post after a few hours because it might cause trouble. You had decided that the account was not about politics at all. It had nothing to do with the Zero-Covid policy, the concentration camp in Xinjiang, or the propaganda. It was simply fun to share things about China with people who didn’t live there. The account included the scenery of the Forbidden City, bittern flapjack, and other things you love as a man from Beijing. In the past years, when you were away from Beijing for work in New York, you asked friends to send those pretty things to you and uploaded them to your account. It had a funny name, ‘BeijingOutsideTheWall.’

     Your content never caused trouble because you didn’t touch politics. However, the ban on accessing foreign websites gave you a chill of apprehension, especially now when you were back in the country for vacation and had planned to stay for a month. A friend of yours who had come back from a trip to Hong Kong told you that the policemen checked her phone after she’d passed customs, searching if she had a history of access to foreign websites such as Twitter or Instagram. It didn’t matter if she used them for political content, and even if the access was for Google, she would have to write an admission of guilt. Nobody really knew what was allowed and what was not. Maybe that’s why you enjoyed managing your account, which was completely innocent, even promoting the city. They can’t say what I am doing is wrong, you thought, it is not, right?

     The only way to expel the rabbit from your thoughts was to look for another one, a rabbit that was more pretty and more appropriate to use for your account. On the next day, you scoured almost the entire city. There were many rabbits that could’ve served your purpose: a painter produced one on a conspicuous corner of the Temple of Heaven, and another less skillful painter hid one behind a column in Chunhualou, a restaurant that had existed for more than a century. When you were editing the pictures for your account, nonetheless, they appeared to be so unattractive. They didn’t have what you were searching for– you thought it was excitement, but verily it was an appetite for rebellion. You liked its taste.

     When you woke up the next morning and checked your phone, you were astonished that the rabbit on the postboard had been posted on RED, a popular Chinese social media site. The slogan in the background, the brownish stain on its chin, and the grin which was a little more presumptuous than other rabbits all confirmed that it was the same graffiti you had come across. The post had thousands of likes– the picture impressed them as much as it did you. You were in the picture too, leaving the street, your white cap and brown Moscot glasses were caught in the refraction of a window. It could not be a mistake– someone saw you standing in front of it, took a photo of the graffiti right after you did, and uploaded it to RED.

     You grasped a little feeling of being an artist. You enjoyed the sweetness of inspiring somebody and loathed that the post was like plagiarism to you. The profiles only disclosed the gender: the ‘somebody’ was a girl. It was the only post she had created. Nevertheless, the account name looked like a combination of her English name and birthday number. You decided to input it on other social media sites. There was a moment of scruple that what you were doing resembled stalking, but the next moment your fingers started to press the keyboard– she had plagiarized your discovery about the graffiti first. Twitter responded to the input of the combination. Of course, her account, which had hundreds of posts, was near the top of the list. The posts were about her outfits and selfies, oysters and crabs she had cooked, journals on her trip to Xinjiang, and the rabbit on the postboard. It was her joyland.

     As you scrolled down the screen, a sense of horror appeared in your mind. Many of her photos and videos were about her doing performance art for an event in Guangzhou, a city in Southern China. She had been sitting on a stage, nude, inviting each of the audience to use a red marker to draw a line that would circle her body. You questioned whether this event was legal– she could be arrested for doing it. It seemed that the government’s monitoring had failed on foreign websites. In a video, she was pushing aside her short red hair, allowing one of the audience to draw a line around her neck, and her round eyes were inviting the painter with radiance. The muscle on her arms bounced mischievously when she later put both hands on the ground, propping up her body as if she had been sitting on the edge of a precipice. It seemed that the stage was too small for her body: her round, protruding breasts; crimson areolas perfectly framing the nipples; two legs folded on the ground and feet touching each other like a meditating monk; the adorable slits beneath her both knees that separated thighs and shanks; the soft pubes in the shape of an isosceles triangle. Your imagination stopped there because you found it impossible to speculate the odor of her hair. You were sad that it depended on the shampoo.

     The next morning, you went out with a black marker to paint a rabbit in the city, partly because you still wanted a rabbit for your account, partly because you wanted to impress her and hoped she would see it fortuitously. The place you chose was in the 798 district, which you often came across during your strolls in the evenings. You thought the rusty stadium there was the prettiest building in the city. Actually, you were not sure what it was. You had named it the ‘rusty stadium’ because the shape of it was closer to a stadium than anything else. If the essence of the city could be localized in a precise spot, it would be this abandoned architecture; it was huge, old, and had been neglected for some time. The stadium was a round, prodigious metal shell entirely covered with light blue rust like a seaside fortress suffering from the shroud of moss. You ascended to the apex of it from the stairs that encircled the exterior, peeled off a layer of rust, and painted a rabbit on the coarse brown surface, the forgotten reality of the building.

     You were not a painter. But the rabbit you sketched didn’t look bad at all. It was a simple sketch you did with a black marker and resembled the rabbit on the postboard. Although nobody would ever find your drawing on this ruined giant, the rabbit in the embrace of a metallic niche had an eccentric aesthetic. You uploaded it to every social media site. A part of you wished she would see it, while the other part of you was displeased that it was not as good as the other rabbit. What was missing? You did not know. But you left something for this world. A message. A beautiful scar.

     Since that day, you began to log into VPN and check her Twitter every once in a while. You spent more time on her Twitter than your own Instagram account, which had been so important to you until now. It was impossible to learn whether she had seen your rabbit, but you wanted to know what she was doing, just anything about her. Soon her Twitter provided more surprises– a striking post appeared, more secretive than the performance art event, courageous yet perilous at the same time: a series of organized protests were going to take place in different cities in solidarity with the Sitong Bridge protest. That famous protest had happened several weeks ago, when a man called Peng Lifa demonstrated against the party by hanging banners and burning tires on the bridge. People from myriad places decided to support it– New York, San Francisco, Berlin, Beijing, and many others. She was going to join the protest in Beijing; it would be tomorrow on Sitong Bridge, the same location.

     You didn’t understand the necessity of doing such things. What could still be done when everything here was muffled, prohibited, and therefore settled? What else would they accomplish other than playing the role of activists and fighters but eventually bleeding, even to the extent of sacrifice, for nothing? But those thoughts escaped your mind soon. Immediately it occurred to you that it would be a chance to meet her, to tell her everything about you, imagining that she remembered the two of you standing in front of the graffiti together and thought about you for a moment too.

     Despite the foreseeable danger, the next morning you ventured to Sitong Bridge. You decided to arrive a little late, thinking that by then the protest would be at its climax, so she wouldn’t notice you awkwardly searching for her. You thought you would stand behind her through the event, and when it was over, she would turn around and spot your white cap and brown glasses. ‘Hello.’

     But she was not there when you arrived. You realized in an instant that you had come too late. There were only policemen at the scene, sirens hovering in the air, and you caught an unpleasant glimpse of patrol wagons leaving the place– perhaps at this very moment she was looking at you helplessly through the enforced window of a wagon. You didn’t have to guess what had happened a few minutes ago. The scared eyes, cuffed wrists, and unskillful curses still lingered on the bridge. What a tragedy, you thought, that it happened because of Peng Lifa’s crazy behavior weeks ago, a man whom she had never even met. You tried to imagine what he had done to send such a strong message to her with the red characters on the prodigious banner and the black smoke rising to the zenith. You didn’t know whether to fear his power or to admire his courage. It was as though the bridge was an avatar of Lethe in the human world, where they had crossed for the price of imprisonment, and from where you found your life outwardly the same yet irrevocably changed.

     You came home in despair, which made you start to miss your parents who had retired and been living in their hometown. You knew nothing about imprisonment and feared to learn about it. Her Twitter no longer had any updates, but the photos and videos from the past were still there. They proved her existence. You couldn’t sleep and watched again the video in which she was doing her performance art; you watched it every day, and there was no other way for you to live. In a reverie, you were holding the red marker with a trembling hand. Where did you want to start? A warm, soft feeling was in your hand. It could be the marker, but you wanted it to be her finger, too heavy for you to hold, and too light not to. You swept the redness across a nipple, heard her faint groan, and continued the line to her back. The thin red line was embracing her for you, and only your art and her art met each other at this moment. The marker traversed the other side of her neck, coming back to her bosom, and your trace completed a circle on her body, so she couldn’t get away. Her colors were coming closer to you, enveloping you. That streak of red from your trace on her, the soft lustrous yellow of her skin, and her unfathomable pupil black– all submerged you. You wanted to say something and feared you would. You didn’t want to distract yourself from her art.

     You think it is a whim that you want to send a message to this world, a concise and strong message. But I know it is not just a whim. It comes to an end in New York. You are back to work as a dentist but live like a phantom in the shell. There is more graffiti, but none is about a rabbit. You can’t resist the temptation of drawing a rabbit and painting it in red– you want the rabbit to resemble her. Unfortunately, there is no place appropriate to bear the weight of it. The walls are either too dirty or too clean; the districts are either too academic or too lively. Above all, New York is not where she lives.

     In the evening, when you are leaving Hudson Yards from another unfruitful trip to look for a location for the rabbit, you encounter a scene that is very familiar to you, or, technically speaking, familiar to your imagination. A group of Chinese people are gathering beside the Hudson River. While walking to the subway station, you make out the Chinese consulate beside the riot– it must be another protest in solidarity with the Sitong Bridge protest. From a distance, you see the banners, the costumes mocking the party, and a Uygur who is calling attention to the genocide happening in his hometown. But what stops you from walking away is a balloon that has the printing of the party leader’s mug shot, enwrapped with myriad red yarn like a sweater. The red lines hang in the air like a metaphysical prison.

     So now you know a part of me is here too. I am afraid that our meeting is too late to allow us to get to know each other. But what else can I do as an underground performance artist but give them a little inspiration? Outside the window lies the Forbidden City, but inside my cell there is only death awaiting me. I want to remember many things, which I would like to bring with me to utter disappearance, including our encounter in front of the rabbit on the postboard. When I am a little tired of recollections, I begin to imagine many things, including your life, imagining that you have seen my Twitter account, imagining that you can live in a place where the totalitarian government can’t touch you, that you want to send a message to the world as much as I do. My people are now asking you to join them. Say yes and go ahead, you have an important message to tell, or you can just tell this story of us.