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Hobby

“Thud, thud, thud.”

It was a weekend afternoon. Jiang Chijing was stirred from his afternoon nap.

These sounds weren’t unfamiliar to him. He would hear it almost every weekend; they were the sounds of his neighbour, who lived across the street from him, boxing.

Jiang Chijing sat up. He raised a hand to part a section of the blackout curtains. Warm afternoon sunlight slipped through the crack into his house, drawing a divisive line between light and darkness on his fingers.

It was normal to feel parched after waking up from an afternoon nap, and every day that he heard the boxing start, this parchedness would raise another notch.

Jiang Chijing crossed his legs and stretched his waist languidly, then slowly flipped over to pull open the bedside cabinet drawer, taking out a monocular.

The world in his eyes was instantly framed into a perfect circle, and the magnified image that entered his vision was the goose-yellow wall of a building.

Jiang Chijing lived on the city outskirts. There were no high-rise buildings, only rows after rows of small, two-storied houses. All the houses had yellow walls and brown roofs; even the architectural layout was the same, visually pleasing in their uniformity.

As such, when Jiang Chijing gazed over from his bedroom, he was directly facing the bedroom of the person living across from him.

The monocular was slightly off-focus. He calibrated it for a moment. This time, the view of the opposite bedroom fully appeared within the circle.

There was a road less than 8-metres wide separating the two-storied houses. A monocular with a 12x magnification was sufficient to clearly see every detail of the opposite bedroom.

The neighbour living across the street was a twenty-something-year-old man, about 1.85-metres tall. Similar to Jiang Chijing, he lived alone in a two-storied home.

However, unlike Jiang Chijing, he worked in the city and would leave half an hour before Jiang Chijing every day. Therefore, despite having been neighbours for the better part of a year, they had never formally run into each other.

Or, to be accurate, Jiang Chijing was deliberately avoiding him. If he ever happened to be going out at the same time as the other man, he would quietly sit inside for another two minutes and wait until he heard the roaring of the engine fade into the distance before leaving the house.

Jiang Chijing wasn’t a social recluse. It was only that he had a… hobby of voyeurism.

He couldn’t control his desire to peep into the lives of others. For example, if he passed by someone handicapped, he couldn’t help but guess the reason behind it. For example, if a colleague kept yawning at work, he would unconsciously analyse the other’s activities the night before.

Perhaps these could be passed off as having a vibrant curiosity. However, even Jiang Chijing knew that being unable to stop himself from using a pair of binoculars to spy on the opposite flat was crossing the line explainable by curiosity.

He himself didn’t want to be this way, so he had applied of his own volition to move into a sparsely populated community.

The densely packed flat across his residence turned into a solitary young man. This discrepancy greatly reduced Jiang Chijing’s voyeuristic appetite, until—

The sounds of boxing came from the opposite bedroom.

“Thud, thud, thud.” White bandaged fists slammed into a thick sandbag, the dull thuds particularly abrupt in this quiet community.

Today, this neighbour was as ‘generous’ as ever, wearing naught a single stitch on his upper body.

A vicious straight punch was thrown, rippling from the beautifully sculpted abdominal muscles to his lean arms, sending out a tremendous explosive force.

At first, Jiang Chijing wasn’t aware that the neighbour opposite who regularly clocked in and out of work on time every day actually had such a wild side. He only felt that the deeply-set features and upright posture that the man opposite had, along with the suit, gave off the impression of a social elite, conforming neatly with his aesthetic tastes.

He guessed that the man was indeed a social elite. He drove a nice car with a price tag beyond what the ordinary working-class could afford and his coffee table was densely cluttered with reports.

In the first few days, Jiang Chijing didn’t have anyone else to spy on, therefore could only devote his full attention to the neighbour living across the street from him.

However, not long later, he began to find it dreary. Apart from that man’s outstanding appearance, he was no more than another ordinary man among the masses who mechanically commuted to work every day, even causing him to lose his desire to peep in.

Then the weekend came and the man went down to the yard, topless, smoking as he watered the flowers. The early morning sunlight scattered on his uncaring face, and the pale golden complexion behind the mist of water gave him an otherworldly appearance.

Jiang Chijing hesitated briefly, feeling that this sensual sight was incongruent with the image of a pedestrian office worker. When he saw the man boxing afterwards, the thought that this man was more than meets the eye was further affirmed.

Before moving, Jiang Chijing had already hardened his heart, ruthlessly throwing away his beloved high-magnification binoculars. But ever since he found that the neighbour who lived across the street from him was worth studying, he couldn’t stop himself from buying a monocular again.

He consoled himself. Compared to before, he was now only spying on one person, he had already made significant improvement.

“Mr. Zheng, are you home?”

“We need your signature for the new community management plan. It won’t take too much of your time.”

The shouts of two community workers interrupted the thudding of fists into the sandbag. Still hidden behind the curtains, Jiang Chijing put down his monocular and gazed over towards the disturbance, to see that the two workers had come up to the iron fence of the opposite house.

If Jiang Chijing could hear him boxing, there was no reason that the two downstairs couldn’t.

By usual social conventions, since Mr. Zheng had already exposed that he was home, he should reasonably have gone downstairs to receive them. But when Jiang Chijing raised his gaze and looked levelly over, he saw that Mr. Zheng didn’t have the faintest intention of going downstairs. He stood in the shadows behind the window, drinking water as he indifferently watched the two people downstairs.

With that posture, he was obviously pretending that he wasn’t home. But pretending at this point was even more as if he was sending a clear signal: don’t bother me.

“Forget it, I knew it. He doesn’t care about community matters.”

“Seriously. How much time can a signature take?”

As the two workers grumbled, they walked up to Jiang Chijing’s house and pressed his doorbell.

Unlike the way they had with Mr. Zheng, it was obvious that they weren’t sure if Jiang Chijing was home, so they didn’t directly call out to him.

Due to his work at the prison, Jiang Chijing had a more stringent standard for judging good and evil than normal people. He wasn’t a patient man by nature, but to make up for his voyeuristic tendencies, he didn’t mind showing people who weren’t baddies a little more patience, thus was willing to go down and give his signature.

But the problem now was that he didn’t want to draw any attention from the man across the street.

The man’s line of sight lingered on the two community workers. If Jiang Chijing were to go over now, he would definitely enter the other’s scope of vision, whereas he himself had absolutely no desire to make his presence known to the other man.

With the door not opening for them, the two workers walked towards the next house. The boxing sounds opposite didn’t start again. The man put down his mineral water bottle and undid the white bandages wrapping his hands.

The afternoon sun was at its peak. The sunlight only reached the edge of the window, and the contrasting line between light and shadows cast squarely on his lower arm, following the circling motions of his hands, dancing across his skin.

Jiang Chijing picked up his monocular again and increased the magnification. He could see the fine beads of sweat lining the man’s arms, as well as the floating motes of dust in the daylight. His already parched throat felt like it was even drier now, and every breath brought with it a scorching ache.

He was unsure why he was never able to restrain himself. He was willing to engage with the community workers but was unwilling to bump into the man opposite, precisely because the guilt he felt in his heart wouldn’t allow him to look the other in the eye.

He knew from very early on that the neighbour living across the street was surnamed Zheng. But, frankly, even this tidbit was superfluous to him.

It was for the best that he treated the man like a male model in an erotic magazine, providing Jiang Chijing with just enough fodder for his imagination when he rested his eyes in his downtime. That aside, Jiang Chijing didn’t need any real information about him.

This was because should it traverse into reality, Jiang Chijing’s guilt would only deepen.

He knew that his voyeuristic tendencies weren’t something that he could curb overnight. So, the best solution was not to have any encounters with this man.