Tom Veber (born 1995 in Maribor) is an artist who works at the junction of theatre, music, visual arts, and literature. His poems have been published in Croatia, Hungary, Greece, France, Austria, Germany, Russia, and China. He has published two collections – The Breaking Point published in 2019 by Literarna Družba Maribor publishing house, and in Up to Here Reaches the Forest, published last year by ŠKUC – Lambda.
Ratatouille
(translated by Brynne Rebele-Henry)
After all the coincidental walks along the river Ljubljanica, the strategic ignoring at Tiffany’s* and the apple bobbing at the market, you finally asked me out on a date and then on another one. At first I didn’t really know what exactly I should think about you. You always seemed so unapproachable. Even when we were hugging tightly in the evenings waiting for the last bus, I always felt like you weren’t really with me. I wrote poetry, you wrote columns for Jana and Cosmopolitan, which I found extremely amusing, perhaps a little too much so in your opinion. And then you asked me out again that Friday. We went to Metelkova, it was raining and I wanted to dance, so we ended up at Tiffany’s again.
After a couple of hours I managed to get so professionally drunk that I successfully passed out in front of the club entrance. Your paternal instincts kicked in and you took me home, dragged me like a soaked puppy to the sofa, took off my shoes and gave me a drink of salt water. I vomited on your Persian carpet; you weren’t angry. When I finally came to my senses, I was struck by how similar you actually are to your own flat. The white plaster, the high ceilings, the chandelier and the frescoes by the arches. Lots of greenery and light, without mirrors, of course, you told me on our first date that you thought they were a big waste of space. Lots of books you’ve probably never read, beech wood and the smell of you at every turn, a peculiar mixture of patchouli and soft melancholy.
The first outlines of morning were coming through the window, but we still didn’t feel tired. You took me by the hand and led me to the kitchen, sat me down in a chair and asked me: ‘Lasagne or ratatouille?’ I smiled and jokingly poked you, “Oh, you can also cook? Ratatouille sounds great.” You could see in your shoulders that you don’t stand in the kitchen every day, and the initial confusion made you even more attractive. The sounds of stepping on tiles, lifting heavy pots and nervous sniffing echoed pleasantly through my intoxicated body. When you brought the knife down on the first onion, slicing into it raw and hard, I saw your animal side for the first time, the veins in your arms swelling so nobly that I wanted to paint and frame you.
The kitchen sizzled, the windows steamed up and my taste buds did too. You added courgettes, tomatoes and rosemary to the pot, poured two glasses of merlot and we were transported to Provence. With every breath I took, the apartment seemed more familiar and you more accessible. For the first time I saw you in a tracksuit and a white T-shirt that was getting more red stains with every second. Slowly, steam began to rise from the pot, filling the room with the smell of the familiar and the desire that we would be something more. You removed the hot pot from the fire and began to layer the vegetables on two plates with your bare hands, I didn’t mind you touching the food, I didn’t mind the streaky hair and the shallow columns anymore. I wanted to be with you, fully, with stains on your shirt, with the damp patches under armpits. You giggled like a little boy: ‘Why are you looking at me like that? Do I have something on my nose?’ You served me food and a smile full of lust, the sun rose from behind the horizon and filled the room with yellow desire.
* a gay club in Ljubljana.
~
RATATOUILLE
Po vseh naključnih sprehodih ob Ljubljanici, strateškemu ignoriranju v Tiffaniyu in obmetavanju z jabolki na tržnici si me končno povabil na zmenek in potem še na enega. Sprva nisem točno vedel, kaj bi se začel s teboj. Zmeraj si deloval tako nedostopen. Tudi, ko sva ob večerih tesno objeta čakala na zadnji avtobus, se mi je zmeraj zdelo, kot da nisi zares z mano. Jaz sem pisal poezijo, ti si pisal kolumne za Jano in Cosmopolitan, kar se mi je zdelo izjemno zabavno, po tvojem mnenju morda malo preveč. In potem si me tisti petek povabil spet ven. Šla sva na Metelkovo, deževalo je in jaz sem hotel plesat in tako sva spet pristala v Tiffaniyu.
Po nekaj urah se mi je uspelo tako profesionalno napiti, da sem uspešno zakomiral pred vhodom v klub. V tebi se je prebudil očetovski nagon in tako si me pripeljal k sebi domov, kot premočenega cucka si me zvlekel na kavč, mi sezul čevlje in mi dal piti slano vodo. Potem sem pobruhal tvojo perzijsko preprogo, nisi bil jezen. Ko sem se končno spravil k sebi, me je prešinilo, kako si pravzaprav podoben svojemu stanovanju. Bel omet, visoki stropi, lestenec in freske ob obokih. Veliko zelenja in svetlobe, seveda brez ogledal, že na prvem zmenku si mi razkril, da se ti zdijo velika potrata prostora. Veliko knjig, ki jih verjetno nisi nikoli prebral, bukov les in vonj po tebi na vsakem koraku, svojevrstna zmes pačulija in mehke melanholije.
Skozi okno so se risali prvi obrisi jutra, midva pa še zmeraj nisva bila zaspana. Prijel si me za roko in me popeljal v kuhinjo, me posedel za stol in me vprašal: » Lazanja ali ratatouille?« Nasmehnil sem se in te šaljivo podrezal » A kuhati tudi znaš? Ratatouille se sliši odlično.« Na ramenih se ti je videlo, da ne stojiš prav vsak dan v kuhinji, začetna raztresenost te je delala še bolj privlačnega. Zvoki stopicljanja po ploščicah, dvigovanja težkih loncev in živčno sopihanje so prijetno odzvanjali skozi moje opito telo. Ko si se spravil nad prvo čebulo, surovo in trdo si zarezal vanjo, sem prvič videl tvojo živalsko plat, tako plemenito so ti nabreknile žile po rokah, da bi te najraje naslikal in uokviril.
Zacvrčalo je po kuhinji, orosila so se okna in moje brbončice. V lonec si dodal še bučke, paradižnik in rožmarin, nalil še dva kozarca merlota in preselila sva se v Provanso. Stanovanje se mi je z vsakim vdihom zdelo bolj domače in ti vedno bolj dostopen. Prvič sem te videl v trenerki in beli majici, ki je z vsako sekundo dobivala več barvnih madežev. Iz lonca se je počasi začela dvigati sopara, prostor je napolnil vonj po poznanem in željo, da bi bila nekaj več. Vroč lonec si odstranil z ognja in začel z golimi rokami plastit zelenjavo na dva krožnika, ni me motilo, da si se dotikal hrane, niso me več motili štrenasti lasje in puhle kolumne. Hotel sem biti s tabo, v celoti, s packami na majici, z vlažnimi madeži pod pazduhami. Zahihital si se kot majhen fantek:« Ja kaj pa me tako gledaš, a imam kaj na nosu?« Postregel si mi s hrano in s poželjivim nasmehom, sonce je vstalo iz za obzorja in napolnilo prostor z rumenim hotenjem.
Pow Jun Kai is a cultural historian, producer and translator. His research interests lie in gender, media and technology in twentieth-century South East Asia. He is published in South East Asia Research, Transgender Studies Quarterly and Trans Asia Photography. His translation of Soon Ai Ling’s short stories are forthcoming in Chinese Literature and Thought Today and Quarterly Literary Review Singapore.
Lilac (1988) – Soon Ai Ling
If I were to see her again, I must keep her here!
The sun was setting as she walked me to the main road and sent me off. Orchard Road in Singapore was such a pretty street: multiple buildings with departmental stores; hotels interspersed among the thick shadows of tall trees; the purplish thin evening sky and its imminent darkness with a glimpse of sunlight. The street lights had yet to come on. Even though she had seen me getting onto the taxi she stood on the pavement and did not leave. The traffic light was on red and the vehicle was not moving. It was then when I noticed that she had on a turquoise belt hanging loosely on her waist over a goose yellow dress. She waved back at me sending me off with her gaze.
Her name is Lilac Yee. Her father is Yee Wenjue, a prolific master in jewelry design.
Ten years ago, my family used to run a jewelry business in Hong Kong. My father was addicted to gambling. We eventually went bankrupt and had to dismiss all of our employees. Yee Wenjue was then invited over to Singapore by Swee Heng Jewelry. As for my father, he became rather carefree–going for breakfast with a birdcage in hand, having a game of mahjong after lunch–all the while bragging about his glorious past.
I took over his brand and started all over again. Instead of real jewelry, I produced handmade jewelry. My brand name was Treasure Room.
Handmade jewelry relied on design and craftsmanship to attract customers. I therefore needed the best jewelry designers. I travelled from Hong Kong to Singapore this time around to find Yee Wenjue hoping that he would on account of our old ties lend me some support. But he declined. Obviously, why would he agree to making fake jewelry?
But I was not disappointed. I sat in his living room, staring blankly.
A while later, Yee became concerned and eventually brought out some designs, some of which piqued my interests.
These drawings were all imitations of the jewelry designs from each ancient Chinese dynasty, but they definitely did not belong to Yee’s personal style. He revealed, “these were created by Lilac. She was merely doing this for fun. She often liked to read books on ancient jewelry and so she drew these based on her own ideas. What do you think?”
“They look absolutely amazing. Where is she? I want to see her!”
After waiting for two whole hours, I finally got to meet her. She said, “Hello, Tang Shunzu.”
I proposed my ideas to her and immediately discussed her drawings with her. She stared at me with a smile in her eye and spoke without stopping, “The Dunhuang colors are most spectacular … Carving skills will definitely be popular once again and the images can be modelled after the antiquities … Transform the style of the hair pins and shape them into necklaces and bracelets … There must be a breakthrough in the cloisonné patterns. Look at this sample. We can attach stalks of lotus-like gardens on the golden cup using a series of colors: a red series, a purple series, or a blue series. Add a layer of colorful glaze and gold-plate the edges of the figures. The coloring must be done quickly and the craftsmanship must be meticulous … This is the headdress of an aristocratic woman from the Northern Zhou dynasty. I drew it out according to historical records. Don’t you think transforming it into a necklet would look great? … This earring belonged supposedly to Xie Ah Man, a court dancer from the Tang dynasty. We can just imitate it directly. What do you think?”
As I listened to her, I became perturbed. After idling for so many years, why did these inspirations appear only at this moment?
I told Lilac, “I want all of these pictures. I will sign a contract with you … I still have some decent master craftsmen in Hong Kong and they will definitely help me produce good results … I will definitely not rush through the job and seek quick success; I know art … I don’t have that much capital, but I have the budget to convert your designs into handmade jewelry… I have access to the markets in Japan and Europe and they are ordering the goods from me … These days, every girl is wearing accessories … How many people can afford to own branded jewelry? Except for the royalties or shipping tycoons, some of whom are also not wearing real ones … Our jewelry needs to have a prominent Oriental flavor. I want to make use of the jewelry advertising methods of the Western Europeans by recounting the history of jewelry in the East. It is akin to what you have told me. In the year 439 in the imperial courts of the Northern Zhou dynasty, there was a royalty with the surname Yu-Wen. His favorite concubine loved to wear this headwear that complemented her face in a classical and elegant manner, thereby becoming the court favorite her whole life … There will be a handmade jewelry exposition next year in Florence, Italy. I want to bring your jewelry designs to showcase.”
Later, she saw me off to the door and onto the car. I could not describe how she looked. As someone born with a silver spoon, I did not notice her ten years ago. She was still rather young as well. At our hasty meeting today, I also did not observe her closely. However, if I were to see her again, with or without make-up or in a dark corner, I would still recognize her. I am sure I can!
◊ ◊ ◊
When I brought the design portfolio back to the few master craftsmen in Hong Kong, especially Old Yu, they cried out aloud, “We have been imitating the foreigners these days. Why didn’t we turn around and look at our own national treasures? We are utterly useless. Useless! … What? These are designed by Old Yee’s daughter? The Yee family, their blood is thicker than ours! … The heavens cannot stop Treasure Room. I must produce all of these even if I were to grind until my eyes are both blind.”
The first batch of jewelry were manufactured. When the commercials were aired on television, they immediately became the rage in the market. The newspapers came to interview me. I knew the answers to some of their questions, but I did not reply. They probed, “these designs will sooner or later be copied by your competitors, how will you deal with it?” I flashed a smile without giving them an answer. I totally did not need to deal with this problem; experts can tell the difference.
“Your price is set in the range between the real and fake jewelry on the more expensive end. Will there be the possibility of a discount?” I had even wanted to increase the price instead.
“It is rumored that your designer is in Singapore. How do you send the design images to Hong Kong? Using a bodyguard?” Lilac used surface mail. Sometimes she only drew graphics on napkins that bear faint patterns.
“Where did your designer study? In addition to the ancient jewelry, does she know much about Chinese history? How old is your designer, more than half a century old?” God knows. She had only completed her secondary education and was 25 years old that year.
After receiving Lilac’s seventy-second blueprint, she stopped sending anything to me. I got very agitated. My father stared at me through the corners of his eyes and then walked away. I bore a certain hatred toward my father, toward Treasure Room, toward myself, feeling rather unhappy.
I wrote Lilac a few letters and finally received her reply. She had only written four words, “talent and devotion diminished”.
I showed the letter to my father, who was practicing calligraphy in the study room. Upon seeing it, he looked up and laughed out aloud. He then wrote another four words for me, “be satisfied and stop”.
I then became ashamed. What did I treat Lilac as? Damn it!
Father took out a few books from the bookshelf, including dramas, stories, legends and so on. I held up the dictionary and was surprised. My father said, “I see that many of Lilac’s drawings are derived from the texts of these dramas and stories written about the dressing of Madams and Misses … You shouldn’t underestimate this dictionary. Take a look at the entries on gold, silver, pearls and jades. Their explanations will be an eye-opener for you.”
Indeed, I flipped open the dictionary and checked the entry on “jade coin”: a beautiful, round piece of jade with wide sides and a small hole. I remembered Lilac had done a drawing in the form of a necklet. The pendant in the middle had broad sides and a small opening. With the lace passing smoothly through the aperture, the pendant was adorned with cloisonné patterns and Dunhuang vibrancy. It was round and big. When placed on the front of the neck and matched with a low-cut black dress, it appeared wild but pretty.
Then I checked the entry on “penannular jade ring”: like a ring but lacking; it is also a jade pendant, one with something lacking. I remembered Lilac had made a drawing, the style of which was the omission of a big slice. When Old Yu saw the picture, he took a while to grasp its meaning before creating a set of chain, bracelet, earrings and ring. Precisely because of the lack in one section, it appeared unique and novel.
I returned to my room and whispered to Lilac in the dark.
Comparing myself to my father, Yee Wenjue and even Lilac, I am the number one idiot.
Only then did I realize why Yee Wenjue, Old Yu and even Lilac had treated me so well. This was all because of my father. What virtue and capability do I have? Even the little accomplishments that I had were under the auspices of my father. Although he did not have anything left, his proud and upright demeanor as a jeweler remained. When I was young, I used to be oblivious to his career, thinking that it was outdated and short-lived. Therefore, I chose to study English literature. I did not care about him when he was on the decline. However he silently imbue me with the spirit rightful of a jewelry dynasty. No wonder he refused to pass the business on to others.
The next day, I approached Old Yu. I asked him a few questions because I was in Europe when my father sold the business. Old Yu said, “Yee Wenjue has been with your family for the longest time. You also know that he and your father are like brothers, one handling the designing and the other dealing with the marketing, creating a famous brand out of the Treasure Room at one time … When your father lost the business, Yee Wenjue was at his angriest. Your father kept on apologizing to him, but he ignored your father … It was inevitable since Yee Wenjue was sincere about Treasure Room. Your father was rather muddle-headed. Let me tell you, men cannot take a wrong step. Just one wrong step and everything will be ruined … When Yee Wenjue left Hong Kong that year, he didn’t inform anyone. He left without a word. That showed how angry he was.”
After that, I wrote to Lilac every day, telling her some of my trivial matters, telling her where I saw the inklings from her pictures.
Finally she replied and I heaved a sigh of relief!
When I brought along a batch of exquisite jewelry onto the plane toward Florence, I only thought about her on the way there. For this exhibition I dispatched some people to Europe to advertise the products two months beforehand. The orders were beginning to trickle in and everything had been organized accordingly. I also sent Lilac the air tickets, with which she would depart from Singapore. We had arranged to see each other in Florence. I told her that was Dante’s birthplace.
Lilac wanted me to recite a paragraph from the Divine Comedy at Dante’s former residence for her. She knew that I graduated from the English Faculty at Hong Kong University. I prepared a section but would not be narrating it in English. Instead I would be using Italian, something that she did not expect. A long time ago, I was awarded a scholarship by the Italian government to travel to Florence to research on Dante. I could recite it thoroughly even in my dreams; how difficult could it be?
It is now my turn to return the favor. Ah, my beloved Lilac! If I were to see her again, I must keep her here!
“Lilac” is reproduced with permission from Ren Ye Nu Ye by Soon Ai Ling, Copyright, 2007, Global Publishing Co. Pte Ltd.
Piyal Kariyawasam is a Sri Lankan writer, theatre activist, lecturer, and director of documentaries. Locally, he has won state awards for fiction and theatre. He has received international scholarships to U.S.A. and India. He represented Sri Lanka at the 1st China-South Asia Literature Forum, China, and at international events in Bhutan and Azerbaijan. He has published 5 works of fiction, as well as producing many theatre and audio-visual pieces.
Second Time Round, the Silver Bullets Found his Heart
Before the sudden downpour, the surroundings turned unbearably hot. The usual mild wind twisted and twirled, creating a whirlwind and lashing about. The river of dark clouds that gathered in successive waves, drifting in from the north, spread over the western horizon. Under this stormy sky, in a front room in a disorderly housing complex, he sat at the window, distressed by conflicting thoughts that flitted through his mind. The phrase he was trying to translate was stuck half way, as the inherent absurdity of language wrestled against his thoughts.
Suddenly, a deafening thunderbolt had the entire housing scheme feeling airborne before the rattling settled. Keeping his pen aside, he hastened to the inner chamber, afraid his son would awake. But the little one was sound asleep, with his left thumb completely immersed in his mouth. The father retraced his steps to the front room, seating himself again on the low chair with the armrests, and pulling the wooden board used as a makeshift writing desk, towards himself.
Raindrops the size of silver-coloured lozenges–those one got a handful of for twenty-five cents in a distant childhood–now fell rapidly to the ground and scattered hither and thither. With the falling rain, the soil turned a dark coffee-brown within minutes. The silvery raindrops gathered like glistening shards of broken glass, and in the next instant, disappeared into the coffee-brown murky waters. As the rains continued uninterrupted, small streams formed as if the broken glass had melted. Although he tried to immerse himself in work, with his head bent over his temporary desk, his pen would not move across the blank sheet any more, marking the customary letters. Meanwhile, the characters in the dictionary became more and more illegible, dancing in front of his eyes like doodles of a black ballpoint pen. As his head felt heavy with the thick air that filled the lungs and the nape of his neck ached with the pressure of his bent head, he pressed against the head-rest of his chair and stretched himself.
His view framed by the open doorway brought fresh fear to his mind. It seemed as if the deluge on the outside would inundate his quarters too. Soon enough he realized it was an instant leap in thought occurring with the sudden change in position. Nevertheless, the exterior of his congested abode was being battered by the downpour, and the waters that gushed past on the main road was now a rivulet flowing speedily to the sea. In the next instant he heard the roar of–he believed–a motorboat speeding up the river, which the snaking road was now fast becoming. He steadied his spectacles with his forefinger and peered out, somewhat baffled. The rare sighting of an old C.T.B.[1] bus–a government-owned bus from two decades ago–rattling past in a fashion alien to the surroundings, met his view. As it disappeared from his range of vision, he reminded himself that he was just an ordinary citizen struggling with a mere translation, and focused his attention on the next sentence to be rephrased in Sinhala. A few words jumped out of the mass of text on the page.
Political – patronage – criminals – police
His spectacles seemed covered in a film of vapour that drifted in from the open doorway. Removing it, he wiped it on his faded sarong, tightened into a knot at his waist. As he peered at the text once again, he clearly saw the printed title:
Political patronage of criminals and police dilemmas
With a momentary exasperation about rephrasing this in Sinhala, he placed his pen on the blank paper and sat back in the chair, glancing at the pouring rain, outside.
When one tried to define a word in translation, not one simple word, but an essay or a thesis seemed to be required to fully explain it. Even then, such meanings were foregrounded by other associations, at points ambiguous. Again and again, what arose was nonsensical uselessness or irrational contradictions.
Musing that rational thought became a sickness in itself, he placed the sheaf of paper he had been working on, the dictionary, the original piece of writing, and the pen, and balancing them on the board, lifted and re-placed the entire array on the armrest, as he got up to go into the inner room.
His son had suddenly woken up and was seated on the bed. Without doubt, the child was still in his dream world. If he was fully awake, he would have definitely come out running and started his own blabber. The father’s first thought was correct. His son turned towards him with a vacant look in his eyes and said, ‘Superman drowned in the sea,’ before lying down again. The father watched him fall asleep once more, breathing deeply, pursuing superman on his descend further down into the depths of the sea. The timepiece on the low stool near the bed indicated twenty minutes past four. The outside world was overcast. The dark rain clouds covering the sky suggested premature onset of darkness.
Why was the little one still asleep? Was he sick?
Although he felt like getting on the bed and checking the child’s temperature, he remained silently standing for some minutes.
No, it’s because of the rain he was curled up like this… If it were fever, he would whimper, would be restless and wake up from time to time…
Thinking thus, the father re-entered the room used as the parlour, sitting room and library. Amidst the various books, magazines and dictionaries strewn about on the writing table, in apparent disarray, but possessing a neatness decipherable singularly to himself, he noted the thin notebook.
Those hundred-and-twenty pages comprised his personal journal. Although the tradition of maintaining written records of life experiences was a dying art, he had cultivated this habit from about five years ago, after reading The Master of Petersburg by South African writer J.M. Coetzee. That novel based on Dostoyevsky himself and his fictitious characters, had made him appreciate the thought of keeping daily or at least occasional records, even if he never attempted to write a full-blown novel. Therefore, for the past five years he had been documenting various incidents and experiences of his life in an impromptu manner, not adhering to a rigid daily routine. Sometimes these ad hoc notes from real life had developed into fables, short stories, or film scripts.
Well, well… do I become Henry James because of these scribbles of mine? Or else Virginia Woolf or Naipaul?
Sarcastic of his own attempts at documentation and fictionalization, he continued to put down thoughts and happenings from his own life and surroundings, shrouding them in absurdities when he felt like doing so. He felt he could claim ownership of those past moments in his life by writing such stories down with his own hand. Notebook in hand, he seated himself near the window, under the descending twilight, and turned a page at random.
2005 – 12 – 21
…I can’t remember exact dates and times. However the entire sky was a deep, brilliant blue. I would sit and recite stories to myself, sometimes in a high-pitched tone. In my imagination, there was always someone listening to these tales.
One day, thaththa[2] went to the paddy field early in the morning as usual, but didn’t return even at dusk. By nightfall our house was filled with village folk of all sorts, types and sizes. Watching the women-folk cry, I too shed tears. Crying continuously, I drifted into sleep. In the dead of night, I suddenly woke up. Thaththa was seated on my swing in the garden and was staring at me. Maybe realizing that I’d woken up, he started talking.
“Stop your mutterings of stories. Or else, they will cut off your tongue – give it to the dogs. To eat.”
With those words he swung backwards on the swing. He never swung back forward. It was dark under the mango tree. I had fallen asleep on the bench under it. Dogs – dogs that eat human tongues… I sprinted into the house without turning back. Thaththa was asleep in a box in the middle of the sitting room. Villagers who had arrived from evening were dozing off on palmyrah-leaf mats laid on the ground. That night, I lost my voice. The moment I think of reciting a tale, images of all manner of dogs gobbling up human tongues, dance before my eyes…
He turned to the last entry in the book, which he realized was dated over a month ago. These last entries seemed short, cheap attempts to imitate Eugene Ionesco, Ajith Thilakasena, Samuel Beckett or Harold Pinter, by removing the inherent logic of the piece, by force. Keeping aside the book, he realized that the surroundings were immersed in darkness. A person in their right mind would not be turning pages of a book in such fading light.
As he stood up to switch on the electric light, he noticed from the open window, how the city beyond looked unusually dark. Although he pressed the switch, no light came on. He went to the door and peered out. The rain had subsided and a thin vapour was rising from the tarred road. All the houses and buildings beyond were submerged in the darkness that continued to spread. The headlights of vehicles that passed by intermittently, blinded the eye.
Where were the candles? In the drawer of the writing table, or on the spice rack in the kitchen?
Candle in hand, he re-entered the inner room and checked the body temperature of his sleeping child. It seemed normal. Aroused by the father’s touch, his son turned over.
The father took the candle with him to the front room, and placed it on the middle of the table. The positioning allowed the light to also reach the inner room. Gathering the documents and books scattered on and around the low chair near the window, and placing them on the writing table, he sat at the chair accompanying it. With the light of the candle, he could now see the subtitle of the article he was translating.
“The Culture of Untruth and a Perilous Vacuum… Hmm… this into Sinhala…”
As he was deep in thought, a wild wind blew in from the open doorway, sending a shiver down his spine, scattering the disorderly photocopied paper all over the floor and threatening the candle flame, before subsiding. He got up to collect his things, also deciding to close the door. As he reached the entranceway, he noticed a sportsbike, which would zoom past with deafening sound under normal circumstances, pass through quite sluggishly. From its rather lethargic movement, he presumed that the motorcycle would come to a halt within a couple of yards, and the anonymous rider, surely light a cigarette.
Reordering the photocopies was not problematic. However, translating in the dim candlelight intensified the exhaustive nature of the task. After securing the photocopies with a paper-clip, he turned back to his personal notebook.
The final few pages contained various notes about daily occurrences and real-life incidents. Based largely on information published in daily newspapers, they were details that needed verification before putting them to any further use. As there was no appeal or investigative quality in them, he closed the book, laid it aside and looked again at the candle. With the door closed, it burnt with minimal motion. The rain had stopped entirely. Now, not only the sounds of vehicles from the road outside, but also the sounds from the distant roundabout, could be heard clearly.
It seemed as if someone had stepped on to the elongated concrete platform between the drain and the front door and was stamping his shoes free of mud and dirt. The next logical step should be a knock on the door. Instead, the light-bulb hanging from the roof suddenly burned bright, instantly eliminating the darkness that had prevailed throughout the evening. In parallel, the surrounding world bounced into motion, as if someone had breathed life into it.
Thinking how intense the darkness was earlier, he snuffed out the candle and entered the inner room, to switch on its light. The brilliance that suddenly spread across the room caused the little one to squint his eyes. He turned in his sleep, placing a hand across his eyes, but did not show any indication of waking up.
Approaching the table and opening the drawer, the father checked the time on his wristwatch, against the wall clock. Both clocks, in unison, displayed that an hour had passed by. An hour that was mixed with rain clouds amongst the rest of the transformations of an evening into night. Nothing had been translated. The attempts to translate only generated an illogical, hallucinatory, meaninglessness, creating a tension as if aroused from an inherent nervous disorder that had been submerged for some time.
Why was the child sleeping so long? Why did the motorbike go past the house so slowly? Did someone really come to the closed front door and withdraw? Among all this, was he not trying to translate, reports of war secrets accessible only to himself and a handful of other civilians? Were they not writings on state terrorism? Who can say that those who placed these documents in his hands would not become talkative about their whereabouts over a few drinks of whisky? If so, was not his death warrant, already issued? Couldn’t his death be orchestrated fairly easily, even through a simple road accident staged at an opportune time? Once dead, both enemies and friends will probably say… ‘But he did his job well.’
His entire body was bathed in perspiration. This time, someone certainly did step onto the concrete slab in front of the house. In the next moment, even before he could rise from the table, he heard a light kick, which flung open the door. The tall human figure looming in front of his eyes took out a pistol, very much like a toy, and released a few silver bullets. This action reduced the father into a sleeping posture with his head slumped over the table, where all his documents lay. Pulling the door firmly shut, the stranger departed, his task complete.
Although the bleeding did not make him dizzy or benumb him, he felt imprisoned in a huge empty space. When he finally lifted his head, he could see a circle of relatives surrounding him. Beyond them stood personalities he had never seen alive during his lifetime, but had got to know through diverse literary forms. Belonging to various periods of history, King Dhathusena, Subhas Chandra Bose, Christopher Marlowe, as well as those from more recent years such as Saadat Hasan Manto, Sarojini Naidu, Rosa Luxemburg. Each dressed in time-appropriate clothing and carrying travelling bags or pouches to match. Now gathered here as silent onlookers. Among those present, he finally recognized his own father. Clad in a chequered sarong and a cotton banyan, complete with a serpent-skin belt – a trademark of the mudalalis[3] of his time – he carried in his hand, another sarong wrapped in a cellophane bag. Approaching the son, the father said, ‘Lokka[4], it’s time to go…’
With his father’s own words, realization dawned on him that his body was not cooperating with the desires of his mind. The bitter truth of the uselessness of a body that cannot react to its owners commands brought a measure of heaviness to his heart, slowly drawing him into utter emptiness. As he drifted towards this void, the familiar utterance of ‘thaththa… thaththa…’ drew him back with concentrated and undivided attention. Instantly dragged into the material world and immediately earthbound, where his entire personal history was fashioned, he lifted his head and looked up.
His son who had awakened after a long and satisfying sleep had come looking for the father. As he turned to take his son on to his lap, a speeding motorbike braked to a stop, this time for certain, in front of the house. As the rider kicked open the front door, he calmly told his son, “Go to your bedroom, sonny, I’ll come soon”. Then he turned to face the rider, now stepping over the doorway.
¹
[The above is a translation of Piyal Kariyawasam’s short story ‘Ridee unnda devaniva vedunida layata’ (given below in its original version) translated from Sinhala by Gaya Nagahawatta, and endorsed by the writer.]
Cao Yu (1910-1996) was one of China’s most renowned modern playwrights, achieving literary immortality through 《雷雨》Thunderstorm (1934) and 《日出》Sunrise (1936). He continued to publish throughout the Sino-Japanese War, including a Chinese translation of Romeo and Juliet in 1943. In his later life he was known for writing the historical drama 《王昭君》Wang Zhaojun (1978), but his attempts at promoting various regional operas, and in particular his later poetry, are less discussed. This small poetic oeuvre is collected in Vol. 6 of Cao’s Collected Works. They strike a rare chord of agony and beauty and hope, and have been discussed recently by Cao’s disciple Tian Benxiang (1932-2019) in the context of a “soul ardently hoping for freedom” (渴望自由的灵魂) (Theatre Arts 2010.6; English translation forthcoming) that characterised his teacher. The current year marks the 110th anniversary of Cao Yu’s birth, as well as significant anniversaries for other playwrights and institutional directors of the early modern theatre movement in China, inspiring more wide-ranging re-evaluations of these figures’ comprehensive work, ambitions, and ideas.
The original Chinese is presented here with permission from his daughter and memoirist Wan Fang, with gratitude.
Baby-Blue-Eyes
I don’t need you calling me pretty
I don’t like you saying I look good.
I’m just an everyday flower,
Rich heart, damp petals.
You praised me as a babe,
Lifted me to the sky.
My heart moved for you,
I was forthright.
Halfway you stomped me beneath you,
Saying I was base.
Finally I understood,
You’d turned your back.
I fear your flowery talk,
Fear more when you say I look good.
I’m a stupid girl,
Whom you won’t trick again.
23/12/1991 at Beijing Hospital
Note: Baby-Blue-Eyes is a small flower brought over from Brazil, where it is found everywhere; it has the fiercest vitality, its small flowers opening in every season.
玻璃翠
我不需要你说我美,
不稀罕你说我好看。
我只是一朵平常的花,
浓浓的花心,淡淡的瓣儿。
你夸我是个宝,
把我举上了天。
我为你真动了心,
我是个直心眼。
半道儿你把我踩在地下,
说我就是贱。
我才明白,
你是翻了脸。
我怕你花言巧语,
更怕你说我好看。
我是个傻姑娘,
不再受你的骗。
一九九一年十月二十三日于北京医院
附注:玻璃翠是由巴西带进来的一种极普通的小草花,生命力极强,一年四季开着小花。
~
Gone Old
You’re no longer young,
You’re no longer a flower;
Your face has deep folds,
White hair dying your entire temples.
You sorrowfully lock your brow-scar,
And at night toss and turn, unsleeping.
Just like me you can’t sleep,
You whisper and sigh, afraid of alarming me awake.
The old man on the sickbed,
Constantly on your mind.
I shake and you’re startled –
What nightmare shocked the heart so?
You are coruscating sunset,
I am cold ice on a borderless lake;
Its cold surface reflects your face,
Vivacious fish beneath the ice are deep passion.
We’re old, both.
The cracking dawn shines on the still surface.
You’re eternally unforgettable!
One day I’ll close my eyes.
We are both night’s fireflies,
Those shining stars are us.
18/12/1995, Beijing Hospital
老了
你再不年轻,
你再不像朵花;
你脸上有深深的皱纹,
白丝染遍你的耳鬓。
你愁锁着眉痕,
夜半你辗转不眠。
你和我一样睡不着,
你低声叹息,怕我惊醒。
病床 上的老人,
时时在你心中。
我颤抖,你惊起来,
作了什么噩梦,这样心惊?
你是绚丽的晚霞,
我是无边湖上的寒冰;
寒冷的湖面反映着你的脸,
冰下活泼泼的鱼是深情。
我们老了,都老了。
残霞照着静静的湖冰。
永远忘不了你啊,
有一天我闭上眼睛。
我们是黑夜的萤火,
星星发亮的正是我们。
~
The Free Man
The thunder rumbles out the narrow valley, each wild prairie grass trembles,
I hear the wind roaring, dark clouds from the murky sky
press fiercely on my head.
Cloud stickiness distends,
That’s the dragon sticking out his long tongue, that’s his tail.
Like endless hooks hooking my eyes, heart, ears and my hands.
The earth spits fire,
My whole body burns.
The flood bursts, the downpour a pierced awl awling my back
But I roar high skywards: “Come! Torture me harder!”
The land trembles, towers, stones and cement collapse, buries my whole body.
The earth has stuffed my throat
I call high skywards: “Come, I’m not afraid, you won’t keep me down!
You’re no dragon, no match for a snake even, I won’t be bowled over!”
I’ve seen the sun, the round globe of fire rising from the horizon.
I am a human, a human not dead,
Beneath the sunlight was the earth, the free air warming me and all.
Cao Yu (1910-1996) was one of China’s most renowned modern playwrights, achieving literary immortality through 《雷雨》Thunderstorm (1934) and 《日出》Sunrise (1936). He continued to publish throughout the Sino-Japanese War, including a Chinese translation of Romeo and Juliet in 1943. In his later life he was known for writing the historical drama 《王昭君》Wang Zhaojun (1978), but his attempts at promoting various regional operas, and in particular his later poetry, are less discussed. This small poetic oeuvre is collected in Vol. 6 of Cao’s Collected Works. They strike a rare chord of agony and beauty and hope, and have been discussed recently by Cao’s disciple Tian Benxiang (1932-2019) in the context of a “soul ardently hoping for freedom” (渴望自由的灵魂) (Theatre Arts 2010.6; English translation forthcoming) that characterised his teacher. The current year marks the 110th anniversary of Cao Yu’s birth, as well as significant anniversaries for other playwrights and institutional directors of the early modern theatre movement in China, inspiring more wide-ranging re-evaluations of these figures’ comprehensive work, ambitions, and ideas.
The original Chinese is presented here with permission from his daughter and memoirist Wan Fang, with gratitude.
Cao Yu (1910-1996) was one of China’s most renowned modern playwrights, achieving literary immortality through 《雷雨》Thunderstorm (1934) and 《日出》Sunrise (1936). He continued to publish throughout the Sino-Japanese War, including a Chinese translation of Romeo and Juliet in 1943. In his later life he was known for writing the historical drama 《王昭君》Wang Zhaojun (1978), but his attempts at promoting various regional operas, and in particular his later poetry, are less discussed. This small poetic oeuvre is collected in Vol. 6 of Cao’s Collected Works. They strike a rare chord of agony and beauty and hope, and have been discussed recently by Cao’s disciple Tian Benxiang (1932-2019) in the context of a “soul ardently hoping for freedom” (渴望自由的灵魂) (Theatre Arts 2010.6; English translation forthcoming) that characterised his teacher. The current year marks the 110th anniversary of Cao Yu’s birth, as well as significant anniversaries for other playwrights and institutional directors of the early modern theatre movement in China, inspiring more wide-ranging re-evaluations of these figures’ comprehensive work, ambitions, and ideas.
The original Chinese is presented here with permission from his daughter and memoirist Wan Fang, with gratitude.
A Nightmare When Sick
In the midst of sickness, halfway through the night, with nightmares following each-other, I woke with the sound of bells from a distant twilight in my ears. I thought of Millet’s L’angélus and on how simple and how serene is the prayer of the pious husband and wife in the fields. I borrowed those bell-sounds to write down the poem below:
The evening bells at the ancient temple pass weakly to my heart.
I pick up my bald brush, but I can’t, I have no strength; I can only pray.
It is the night with the moon shining with the howl of the green-eyed wolf.
It is the rattlesnake stamped beneath wet feet hissing, it is a man with no face licking all over me, it is him saying: “You have no tongue, no hands.”
I’d plead for one breath of air.
Winds from the underworld blow in the sky’s sunk dark clouds.
A moment of cool, shying away before cruel frost hits,
A moment of cold, each parts themselves by snowy lanterns.
18/12/1988 twilight, Beijing Hospital
二人
一阵风,相会在梦中,
一阵雨,悄悄话儿起,
一阵凉,严霜未打先胆怯,
一阵冷,雪夜寒灯独自别。
一九八八年十二月十八日薄春于北京医院
~
Flower
Don’t you be afraid, flower,
I’d like to watch you,
Watch at you swerving in gentle wind,
And watch your silent tears in the spring rain.
No way I’ll pluck you like a brat,
I only want to think of you from afar.
I hope one day you’ll bear your fruit –
You started off as my rebirth, another me.
18/12/1988 before my afternoon nap, Beijing Hospital
花
花,你不要怕,
我想看你一看,
看你在微风里摇颤,
看你在春雨中无言的泪。
我决不像个顽童把你摘下,
我只想远远地把你思念。
希望有一天你结了果,
你原是我的再生,另一个我。
一九八八年十二月十八日午睡前于北京医院
~
Chrysanthemums
The winter chrysanthemums filling my view are this old friendship,
Origins in a silent place with sympathy for the heart of Heaven.
Its bitter taste in ordinary life will always be a companion,
I left new tender green shoots to recompense the sunlight.
I was a long time ill. Dean Chou Chunlin visited me again, and presented me with the winter chrysanthemums he had kept, with red and white and purple and yellow, and a solitary green chrysanthemum refracting among them, startled as a tender shoot, in reality a rare-breed, no common flower. I wrote to thank my friend and make a record of this.
1. Li Momo left me a decade ago, came back ten years later, and I can’t remember the time between. She left a little girl and came back with thin wrinkles by her mouth. She dressed more proper, had changed all her old bad habits, and drove a BMW. When I asked how much money she had now, she said, “I’m set for the next ten years.”
I suffer amnesia so can’t remember many things, including how she left. After a week of meaningless sex (in a hotel, eating a lot of random food, going to the night theatre in spurts, to test stamina) she suddenly said she wanted to take me somewhere she’d been before – a place that would help restore my memory. I asked where. “The China Arts Academy at Fragrant Hills,” she said, “They’ve got this modern building complex.” I’d never been. “You’ll understand when you get there,” she said.
She told me a story about some boy, as we drove to Fragrant Hills. The boy came from out-of-province to take the academy exam, but ran over to the wrong place. It was clearly the academy at Fragrant Hills in Hangzhou, but he went to Ningbo’s Fragrant Hills. That’s a famous seafood town rich in such produce – East Ocean fish and shrimp and mollusk. He took the bus from out-of-province and smelt a sickening fleshy smell the instant he left the station. He mistook it for a stench over the whole town, but he was standing by seafood restaurant swill, as luck would have it. People from the interior really can’t adjust to that. He looked everywhere without finding the fabled ‘modern building complex.’ He saw only row on row of restaurants and a half-finished residence that was shudderingly ugly. It had to be the wrong city. He crouched by the road and threw up loudly.
“Marco Polo had similar misfortune,” said Momo. “Calvino talked about it in Invisible Cities. For an error arising from place names, consult A Wild Sheep Chase by Murakami, which touches on the incompatibility between literature and the real.”
“Would a seafood eater have gone to the wrong academy?”
“I guess not.”
“So it’s a one-way error?”
She drove and I sat next to her. We reached Hangzhou in the afternoon. She was slightly lost and I didn’t know the roads. The BMW ran over and back across the great bridge over the Qiantang River, and I saw the Six Harmonies Pagoda three times. It was a grey day, and a Level Seven typhoon was set to make landfall on the coast. First the waters were bright, then gradually they became gloomy and sunk. Something surged in the distance.
“Looks like we’ll have to stay the night by the river,” I said.
Momo parked the car, studied the map, and opened her cellphone. She did everything herself. I sat shotgun and watched the scenery.
“There are two academy campuses – one by West Lake, one on Fragrant Hills. People do often get to the wrong place, so could you call it a two-way error?”
I had no intention of carrying on arguing with her. She was the sort of person who grew stubborn and dug in intractably as soon as she started quarrelling. But I did still mumble: “Can’t call it an error. That’s too mundane.”
The car rolled on past mountains that were a full kingfisher blue, like a painting. We seemed to pass through a scenic district, and were stuck in a few minute’s traffic by a bridge archway with railway tracks overhead, the long train whistling past like quickly drawn curtains. The empty highway was further on up. Momo said it was the right way. In the gloomy weather, the dusk arrived near imperceptibly. The colors were the same, just the shade of grey changed. The academy appeared in my sight quite unexpectedly.
“Those are the famous buildings,” said Momo. “They twist and turn inside. Take a look. Don’t they look like the apartments from when we were small?”
As the car drove nearer, cut off by deep forests, an enormous tiled building stood up lazily from the smog. Two large birds just happened to be soaring over its rooftop. When I craned forward to look, I realized it was dusk. An unknown dust was flying through the air.
The car moved forward by the college wall, and odd buildings appeared endlessly in my sight. I couldn’t get a good view of them, but they moved and turned rapidly. I watched, slightly absently. There was something I’d been through, forgotten. The shred of an experience climbing inexplicably into my mind.
Momo held the steering-wheel. We turned, and a truck entered our side-view. I heard the crisp sound of braking, reaching me at the same time as a mighty rumble. The front of the truck crashed into the left side of the BMW’s rear, like someone shoving me. I had half a head leaning out the window at the time. After that, everything goes dark.
2. I’ve known Momo for thirty years now, and I’m thirty years old this year, like she is. We were childhood sweethearts who lived in the same courtyard when young and grew up together until the year we turned twenty. So before I was equipped with powers of memory, Momo was there by my side, which makes her practically something I was born with. In thirty years she’s the only female I’ve loved.
When we were young I led her coursing through the little alleys of our hometown, looking for something called a ‘plastron.’ At that time, when people had finished eating a tortoise, they left the whole shell to sun on the balcony, waiting for the medicinal herb collectors to come and buy. I can’t remember what specific illness it treated, only that Momo’s mother had a kidney deficiency, so she whacked together some old wives’ remedy that involved boiling a plastron to make soup. We looked for that damn thing everywhere. In those days, families hardly ate tortoises anymore, and you had to be even luckier to find someone selling stolen plastrons. As soon as I saw one, either stolen or sunning on a balcony, I would seize it and slip away, legging it with Momo. Sometimes the owner would chase me, but I was never caught in the maze of little alleys. I never lost Momo either.
I didn’t know the roads then. That happened later.
3. I woke up and found I was lying in bed. Li Momo, the BMW, and the dusk had vanished. This was obviously a bed in some motel. With the window open, a large wind brewed outside and blew onto me, all of it. I jumped up, completely headache, and felt my head fit to burst. My breathing was blocked, and my mouth was parched with thirst. I panicked, but luckily my clothes were draped on the chair. I put them on and took out the phone from my jeans pocket to check the time. It was 10 a.m. This was the day following the accident.
I rang Momo’s cellphone, which was switched off. I thought again, and dialed my elder sister’s number. I said I’d been in a car crash the day before, with Li Momo, but she’d disappeared now, and I was inexplicably in a motel. I was fully confident that she’d ask ‘You’re not injured, are you?’ but what she shouted down the line was: “What? You haven’t seen Li Momo for a decade!”
In the past I had a pinpoint awareness of the roads. My talent made an even better showing in the age of stealing plastrons. We went stealing from the southeast corner to the north of the city, from the small alleys to the workers’ new village, from the bureau compound to restaurants, brimming with the confidence that no-one could get us. But then I remember being trapped by a corner of the city wall one year. The household had probably laid out a feast for guests, and tables-full of guys ran out, the maze teeming with pursuers. We were stuck in a dead-end. Then, the moment I helped Momo up over the wall, I felt something clobber the back of my head. It was like electrical circuits suddenly ripped out, and afterwards I was road-blind, intermittently amnesiac, my mind like a crashing symbol that was dead silent after. Some of the time that I experienced was inscrutably deep, like a black hole. Some was like floating wood, silently displaying an element with itself, and some was like eyebrows – because it was right above my eyes – but I needed to be against the light to see a patch or two.
Momo flew up to the roof along the alley wall. She looked back calmly as a crowd surrounded me like well-railings. This meant she couldn’t see me, but I could see her. She stood frozen in space, and even had time to smooth down her clothes.
“How come you’re messing about with her again?” my elder sister asked.
Memory like floating wood… I recalled Li Momo saying that heavy strikes might return an amnesiac to normal. I’d tried it that way many times already: people hit me with steel poles, smashed me with beer bottles, or I tripped down stairwells, or throttled myself and crashed into doorframes – all to no effect.
Like now, even though I’d been in a car accident, I couldn’t remember whether my elder sister was married or not. When she’d stopped her endlessly questioning, I went and drank some tap water in the bathroom, and finally found the red writing written in lipstick on the mirror.
I’m hanging in the college opposite!
The mark of Li Momo’s hand; the color of her lips. Floating wood memories rolled over in the waters.
4. I left the motel opposite the academy, and saw the strange buildings again. They looked like squashed pagodas from afar. When I went in I noticed that the college was a bit too big for its boots, embracing an entire hill, those odd buildings laid out around it one by one and without end. I went around twice without finding Momo, or even a generic academy student.
I was held up on campus by a security guard in a tan uniform. I stuttered an explanation.
“Ah,” he said, at once. “You’re talking ’bout that girl. She came in first thing in the morning, but I don’t know where she’s got to now.”
He was a little kid just in his twenties, with unshaved hairs above his lip that he apparently couldn’t grow into a beard. It was left very long and hung down thinly, making him look slightly yobbish.
“The Level Seven typhoon’s coming,” he said. The wind was strong, trying its hardest to rip apart the thick, low-lying clouds, as trees rattled and shook. “Hurry and find your friend,” he said. “You’ll be trapped when the typhoon hits.”
“Can I get through the road ahead?”
“Neither way’s passable,” said the guard. “Central point here’s the hill, and every campus building’s built around it. But it’s U-shaped, like a horseshoe; not round. It doesn’t connect either side, but you don’t feel that. It just cuts you off, naturally. There’s a sports track at one end, and weeds and forest at the other. It’s a layout that pretty much guarantees you won’t lose your way. Once you’ve walked on in, you’ll know. There aren’t any extra choices on the main way.”
“What about the lesser way? I heard it winds back and forth.”
“Yeah…it’s fun.”
Not necessarily, I thought… I know there’s a Fragrant Mountain for eating seafood on the main way.
“The horseshoe layout’s a maze like a ticking clock. Its layout is more artistic than round. It’s hypnotic, walking around. My daily work is tick-tocking on the main way.”
“Do you hang about where it gets more intricate?”
“Guards in tan like me only have to walk around. The winding paths inside have maroon guards in charge, and they gave the corridors inside every building to guards in this milky white…”
“The hill?”
“Nobody’s in charge of the mountain.”
“How come I haven’t seen red or white guards?”
“It’s summer vacation, so they’ve split. There’s sealed-off strips on all the buildings. All they need’s our type: that’s enough.”
When he put it that way I remembered that he was a guard, where I’d straight-up seen him as a tour guide a moment before. We were facing a pond overgrown with wormwood, with several red damselflies flying over it. When you walked upwards by the pond you found a building where layered eaves took up the entire façade, the glassy steel rubbed to a sheen, reflecting a cinder-like sky. I turned my head to look over as a burst of wind scattered the damselflies. There were no people in any direction. It was a vacant group of buildings, some like accordions, some like smashed bottles, and some like giant thunder-dragons who had stuck out their necks to pry and were frozen by a curse.
“Li Momo!” I shouted to the building. I cried again, with some despair: “Li Momo! Where are you!?”
“What are you yelling for?” said the guard, “No one’s going to answer if you yell like that.”
5. …So we ended our plastron-stealing career then, and later on (I forget which day it was), Momo’s mum died. Her sickness had dragged on for a long time, and her entire body was like a water-drugged pig. With her death, Li Momo was freed as well. When the coffin left home, they made Momo climb the wall and stand on the eaves of her own house, calling the spirit back. By local custom, that was carried out by the son, but the Li family only had the one daughter. Logically, nobody should be climbing up to call the spirit, but someone voiced the harebrained idea that Momo should take to the roof. She called out for ages, and didn’t want to come down. ‘This is ridiculous!’ they said, ‘Li Momo’s calling her own spirit out, but she’s a woman. She shouldn’t be on the roof.’
I have a clear memory of that building, Li standing at a height, the white walls already turning black, with a few frightened little men drawn on them, each person with three stalks of hair, hands with five matchstick fingers held open, some people crying, some laughing. I forget who drew that. It wasn’t me.
She was walking the roofs the entire night, onto mine, where I heard tiles break as she stepped on them. My elder sister was driven out of her mind, and swore skywards from the room opposite mine: ‘Li Momo have you lost it?’ I had stuffed a dead mouse from a trap in her drawers. She was saying that all the Li girls had weird habits: Momo’s mother liked eating wall paste, which rotted her kidneys, and Momo’s fetish was roof-walking. Saying that, she pulled open the drawers and leapt in fright at the dead mouse, fleeing out of the door like a madwoman.
6. The guard waved towards some high point. A girl was standing on the exposed passageway between the tall buildings. You couldn’t count the number of floors from the building’s front. It was fully encased in glass, like some top-grade commercial tower in the city, there in the group of huge tiled buildings of mixed concrete and wood, like a lady in a light veil facing a crowd of armored troops. The glass curtain became invisible when you went behind the building to what was, after all, another concrete-wood building that clambered continually to a Z-shaped staircase jutting outside, gloomy like an aboveground garage. I remembered the Zhejiang townships where the buildings had all been this type since a certain year – three-floor residences with mosaics glued to the street-facing front, the backs bare-naked with bruised red bricks. It was said that every Zhejiangese bought bricks and built an apartment once they had money, stacking the bricks in this half-mansion, half-hovel style. This high tower had the same style.
“That there’s the ugliest building in the province,” said the guard, pointing.
“You should say the saddest!” called the girl. She stood atop the third floor, half probing her body out, half looking haughtily down on us.
“Have you seen a thirty-plus year old woman?” the guard asked her.
The girl pointed towards the hill: “There.” She was talking about the other side of the U-shaped road.
“The typhoon’s about to start!” said the guard, “You’re not heading back?”
“When can you get me the key?”
“That’s tricky…” As a final act, he sighed.
The girl stuck out a middle finger, struck us with a low-brow hand gesture from on high, then disappeared.
We followed the horseshoe to the south part of the hill. The wind wrapped our clothes to us, and a swathe of sunflowers went face down on the ground by the foothills.
“She’s a sculpture student. Did you get a look at that building? The one with a roof that looks like a few tiles facing the sky, lightning rod slotted dead-center. That’s the college library. You can go up on the roof, although the entrance is blocked, and the leaders have the key. She’s always wanting to get the roof. I couldn’t tell you why. Begging me to sort her out with a key…”
“Didn’t look like she was begging.”
“I know. She’s ferocious.”
7. …Many years back Momo spent long periods on the roof, like Calvino’s Baron in the Trees. She would come down when she got tired and would go back to normal, going to class as normal, dating me as normal. One day I demanded that she take me up on the roof with her. As soon as I climbed up onto the wall, I slipped down.
“The doctor says your eye membrane’s broken,” she said. “You’ve got terrible balance. You’ll have to stay on the ground.”
“What’s so good on the roof?”
“It’s amazing! You just wait down there.”
8. “What did you think of her?” the young guard asked me.
“Who?”
“The girl just now.”
“Oh…” He had brought me back to my senses. I’d sunk too deep into my restricted memory. “The wind was strong just now, and the sun got in my eyes, so I didn’t see clearly. Seems you’re in love with her.”
He sheepishly plucked off his broad-rim hat and patted himself on the head. “I’m just a security-guard, right? Obviously I’d sort her out a key, so I suppose I had the chance.”
“Girls shouldn’t go up on roofs,” I said.
9. You have to understand that memory runs off when you suffer a brain hemorrhage. During the decade after Momo vanished I searched my memories with great effort on multiple occasions. I sorted everything out nice and neatly, laid out like the internal components of a building, which I walked past time and time again, artificially arranging everything unfamiliar, fading, or fictional into a chain of memory. But on a certain day the hemorrhage would wreak havoc and the building components would get bent out of shape, and I was cast out by a giant shove. Then I toppled over outside the building. It happened many times. I lost patience and hope. I’d rather just be an amnesiac.
The security-guard’s telecom rang.
“Meeting…” he said, “You can only go there by yourself. Here’s hoping you find ‘er. Good luck.”
“No problem,” I said. “I never worry about getting lost.”
We parted at the crossroads. He followed the main path on the horseshoe, off to the comms room, while I took a side road paved in black brick.
10. …The time of the house demolitions was truly hectic. A giant character for ‘demolition’ was pasted in red ink on the front door of every household, then in came the bulldozers, and up went the men and women onto the roofs, tiles flying down like hail. They made me guard seven steel gas canisters in the courtyard; I brought over a chair and read Critique of Pure Reason while I played with my lighter, firing it up with click after click.
“Who’s this guy?” asked the demolition company man.
“He’s an idiot,” a guy answered. “Someone knocked his head out of shape a few years back.”
“I’m a university student!” I yelled, but I still got a baton to the head. Momo thought it would knock me back to normal, but sadly I just rolled about on the ground, wailing as two demolition company workers dragged me from the courtyard. Only she was left when the rest had come down, running wild on the roof like a mad female assassin, screaming with joy. The demolition people looked on stupidly.
“The girl lost her spirit a few years back,” it was explained. “She’s the idiot’s girlfriend.” They propped me up and tied me to the bulldozer, calling out to Momo through a megaphone: “We’ll bulldoze him with the building if you don’t come down!”
“Dream on!” I laughed, “She won’t be coming down.” But that was when she sprang demurely from the wall.
One moment with the bulldozer, and the apartment wasn’t an apartment, just like my memories.
11. A mad wind spun through the buildings. Some were irregular hollowed-out cavities on cement walls, like freak animal spirits. Some corridors were like the mazes I used to run through, with the gradient of time passed and no more traces of when I was hunted down, nor were there plastrons in the countless window terraces high and low, which were emptied, like when I used to seize them. I searched several times without spotting any trace of Li Momo, although I did find a vending machine. I rolled in a coin to buy a coke, and drank it, thinking Just how did she leave me?
The girl from a moment ago was suddenly in front of my eyes. “Hey! I ran into your friend just now.”
“The security kid’s gone to a meeting.”
“The typhoon’s coming…” She walked over and sat next to me. After a moment, she asked, “You guys came to visit here?”
“My friend said the buildings here would help me restore memories,” I said, “but something went wrong right in the middle. Someone rear-ended the car, and she came here to hang out by herself and dumped me in the hotel.” Seeing her confusion, I added, “Oh, right! I forgot to tell you. I’m a historical amnesiac.”
“Sounds awesome! I had a teacher who was a sufferer, too stupid to recall anything. Later they sent him to a welfare institute. You know? A mental hospital.”
“I’m not that bad. I remember more than the average person, it’s just that the order’s all messed up, like someone’s wearing their shirt on the feet and trousers on their head. Your teacher, I suppose, was fully naked in that sense. They sent me to the welfare institute before. Things weren’t too bad. The nurses were a little icy, but they figured I wasn’t mental pretty quickly, so they let me out.”
“You seem very clear-minded to me.”
“Thank you. On the borders of chaos, clarity turns out to be the easiest thing to express.”
“I’ll take you to find your friend then. You’re sure to lose your way going around mindlessly here. Obviously the pretext here is it’s best she doesn’t get lost…” I almost added, ‘When she is lost, Li Momo will climb straight up on the roof.’ But I realised further roof-talk was inappropriate, considering what the young guard had just told me about her. I also supposed Momo had probably broken the rotten habit a decade on. I hadn’t seen her straddle any rooftops, at least in the week we were having sex.
The girl led me around the teaching building which looked more like a Japanese castle hemmed in with square cement blocks.
“What do you think of the architecture here?” she asked.
“Not bad,” I said. “At least, I haven’t seen any penis-esque architecture yet.”
“Penis?”
“Yeah, like a boner. Doesn’t matter where you go, the trademark building’s always something like a boner, tall and imposing, dominating all horizontal vision. Our eye muscles just aren’t that great at measuring it up. I’d say all architects are conflicted. In a way they worry about people becoming amnesiac, and in another way they’ve got to guard against people stealing their work too easily. But a boner building isn’t an imaginative approach.”
“At least there’s an order. How about using that to restore memory?”
“A boner-style order?”
“Wow…” she sighed. “You really can talk nonsense.”
She led me winding through a cloister, and amazingly we arrived at the rear of another building – a monstrously strange building.
“It’s summer,” said the girl, “so they’ve stuck up sealed-off signs at many places. But the road’s easier to take, otherwise it’d be even stranger here. Look at the bricks. They’re all old, shipped in from the country, at least a hundred tons of them stacked up here.”
“You and that little guard are the same,” I said. “You’d both make good guides.”
“Him!” he said. “He was an examinee for the academy, but some sinister force sent him running off to the Fragrant Hills town in Ningbo on the day of the exam. It was a huge amount of stress to get him a make-up exam, but he still didn’t pass. He’d used up all his cash, so he ended up settling down as a guard here.”
“So that’s the story.” I said. “It seems he’s in love with you.”
“He wrote plenty of love letters, like someone from the last century. The guy can’t even use a computer, and he’s road-blind. Ha! Ran off to Ningbo for the exam. To think a road-blind guy like that could be a security guard. It’s unbelievable.” She pointed to a building ahead of us, broad and wide like some massive curtain. “That’s the college library. All I want is for him to get me a key for the roof, then I can go up there before graduation. Is it sexy up there? They say it’s oozing with desire…”
“I didn’t notice that. It’s just a few tiles facing the sky.”
“In cross-section it’s like a chart of female orgasms – three climaxes, arced rising, then troughing…”
“That’s an outrageous explanation,” I said.
“I’ve been learning from you,” she said. “You’re the one who said ‘Boner-style Order.’”
“Fine,” was all I could say. “Let me ask you, what does it feel like up there?”
“When you stand on the roof in good weather, you see spots of clouds like a flock of sheep in the blue sky,” Momo had told me, a few years back. “I become a herder of clouds. The world below ceases to exist.” If that was the reason, then I couldn’t figure why she always had to run like hell, when sitting on the roof would do. “But that’s what all the cloud herders have to do,” she said. “Some clouds go astray, like the sheep.”
Too romantic for me. Better to be a conscientious amnesiac, I thought. Illusions could only get me residence in an asylum.
12. After the demolition, the maze of small alleys was laid out flat. A few large lingering trees stood proudly in the mess of bricks and tiles – cultural artefacts that needed to be conserved. The swathe of tiles discomfited us. We’d lost the roof and the road. But now there was clear passage in every direction.
“All thought vanishes on the roof,” she said. “Simple as that.”
13. The typhoon winds slapped us like giant waves. I have this memory of when the typhoons used to come – the flowerpots, the tiles, and the clothes flying about the sky, and sometimes entire windows whooshed out. Even Li Momo wouldn’t be up on the rooftops on days like that. I was seeing only a pure wind then, the bricks stacked tightly on the outer concrete wall, hundreds of wooden-frame outer windows fused together in one massive façade, like a seventeenth-century warship parting the air and cutting through waves. I remember those buildings so well, shuddering in the storm.
The young guard ran over to us, hand covering his hat.
“Hey, hey!” he called, “Your friend’s up on the roof!”
“What!? What are you saying?” asked the girl.
“She went up onto the library roof!”
I sprinted ahead of them. The girl griped behind me: “I thought you couldn’t get a key? How come she got on the roof?”
“It’s with our leader,” said the guard. “Maybe she’s got some special relationship with him. How could I know?”
“Hey! I want to go up too!”
“She’s locked the door from the inside!” said the guard. “She’s locked herself on the roof.”
“Li Momo!” I yelled, running like hell.
It began to rain, the slingshot in the clouds releasing pellet-sized raindrops onto my head. The building was larger than my eyes had measured it – like the husk of a movie-theater, as I found out when I arrived – and paved excessively with bricks, so people got the mistaken impression of a bungalow. It wasn’t, actually. It was quite tall. I couldn’t see anything when I stood and looked up at the eaves, just rainwater splashing down. I stepped back and continued to call her name.
“What are you shouting for?” Momo stood at a dip in the roof – the nadir of the orgasm, in the girl’s expression – looking haughtily down on me. She was the one shouting.
“I’ve already spent an afternoon running around here!”
“Did you remember anything?”
“I’ve been trying to remember how you left me.”
“The car crashed. We went to fix it, then had a lot to drink, and got a room. I got up early, you weren’t awake, so I slipped out. That’s it. I didn’t leave you.”
“I remember the crash knocked me out.”
“You just fainted for a minute, then woke up. You drank a lot, and sang a load of childhood songs when you were drunk…” She yelled: “Looks like your memory’s still not better.”
“I mean how you left me ten years ago!” My tears were mixing with the rain.
She didn’t reply. Instead, she stood slowly and walked to the center of the roof, looking as agile as all those years ago, and vanishing fast.
“Hey!” I shouted. “I’ve remembered. That time your mother was eating wall paste, the walls at your home were identical to here!” But it wasn’t coming back. I hadn’t been as alone as I was now, even a decade ago. When I couldn’t see her I grew frantic and wound around the building.
“We’ll have to go back to where we just were,” said the girl. “You can see the roof from there.”
So we ran back with the guard. The wind was about to flutter me away, like a kite. Standing firm and gazing from afar at the roof, all we saw was a tiny clump of a shadow standing on the W-shaped slope, lightly running up to the highest point. The black lightning-rod pointed skywards.
“Awesome,” said the girl.
“I’ll get you a key, guaranteed,” said the young guard, with emotion.
“She once said the clouds were like a flock of sheep,” I said, “and she wanted to herd clouds on the roof. But they don’t look too much like sheep today.”
“Like wild horses,” said the girl. “A pack of wild horses.”
The wild horses raced across the sky over the building, on whose highest point Li Momo was standing. My phone rang. It was her. I answered it. She spoke in my direction from there on the roof: “Take a good look! Do you see? Do you remember?”
“Just what are you trying to say!?” I called despairingly at the phone…
保安向着高处挥手,有个女孩站在裸露于高楼之外的楼道上。这栋楼从正面数不清有几层,完全被玻璃包围了,类似城里的甲A级写字楼,在一组混凝土构建的巨大的瓦房之中,它像一个穿轻纱的妇女面对着一群甲士。走到高楼的背后,玻璃幕墙不见了,原来也是一座混凝土的建筑,不断攀升向上的 Z 形楼梯裸露在外,阴郁得活像一座地上车库。我想起有一年来浙江的小镇,那儿的建筑都是这个样子,三层楼的民宅,沿街的那面贴着马赛克,背面裸露着惨兮兮的红砖。听说浙江人都是挣一点钱就买几块砖头砌一点房子,砌出了一半是豪宅一半是贫民窟的风格。这座高楼也有这样的风格。保安指着它说:“全省最丑的房子就是它了。”
“应该说是最残酷的房子。”女孩说。她站在三楼,半个身子探出,居高临下看着我们。保安说:“看到一个三十多岁的女的吗?”女孩指着山说 :“在那边。”说的是 U 形道路的另一侧。保安说:“快要起台风了, 你还不回宿舍?”女孩说:“你什么时候能给我搞到钥匙?”
Zhou Jianing 周嘉宁 was born in Shanghai in 1982, and is the author of the full-length novels Barren City and In the Dense Groves, and the short story collections How I Ruined My Life, One Step At A Time and Essential Beauty. Zhou has translated works by Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
(周嘉宁,1982年生于上海,作家,英语文学翻译。曾出版长篇小说《荒芜城》《密林中》,短篇小说集《我是如何一步步毁掉我的生活的》,《基本美》等。翻译Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, F. Scott Fitzgerald等人作品)
There, there…
As soon as I turned through the airport luggage lobby door, I saw my younger cousin jogging over from the distance. He stood to attention before me like this was a rehearsal, plucked the sunglasses from the bridge of his nose and put his hands in his pockets.
“Well, hello!”
His hair had flushed out into a light blond. He wore grey-green contacts, and his face – once a pinkish white – had thinned to show sharp cheekbones. At a rough glance, he didn’t look Chinese, or really much like the young white guys in the area. Fortunately he didn’t make any note of my reservations, but instead shook his shoulders and held out a hand, taking the chance to haul up my suitcase and rucksack, then snatch my satchel and clamp it under his lower arm.
“Tired?” he asked hurriedly.
“I’m fine. The firm booked business class.”
“You’ve come at the right time. It rained all last week. Only stopped yesterday.” When he spoke he was already making big strides towards the exit, so I rushed to catch up. He was wearing a shoddy pair of skintight jeans, buckled leather shoes with pointed, stretched-out ends, and a black jacket with a glinting zipper. When he turned away, I saw the half-faded skull tattoo on the hood. He put on his shades the moment we left the arrivals hall, although it was gloomy and sunless outside. All his clothes were cheap goods he’d purchased from a wholesale market one time when he went back to China, but he never saw it as a problem. He actually delighted in his bum-like aesthetic.
“Did you lose weight?” I asked, forcing conversation en route to the carpark.
“Slimmed down just recently. First we agreed I’d take a trip home next month, then my mother said she didn’t want me to.”
“Oh…” I hesitated. Neither of us said another word.
The wind tipped people to one side of the open-air carpark in the gloomy weather. We walked for a while, then stopped before a decrepit Pick-up truck. Only a small part of the windshield was clean, and the open back was covered with a thick tarpaulin, to defend against the rain. There was a thick odor of fish and rotten vegetables. I was standing there, not knowing what to think, when I saw that my cousin had opened the door, and was nimbly placing the suitcase and bags inside. He slammed the door.
“It’s the restaurant’s loading car,” he explained. “I had a run down to the harbor this morning.”
“Oh…” I climbed in.
He looked for the parking ticket in a pile of receipts and leaflets. There was an ashtray packed full with cigarette butts. The CD-player started playing a song by Adele. As I rolled down the truck window, I couldn’t help but feel in my pocket for a cigarette, but then pulled my hand back.
“So where do you want to go?” he asked.
“You’re the boss.” I turned my head away and looked out of the window.
“The beach? Oh, no…” he paused, then added, “I’ve got an interview tomorrow, so I need to go to the city to buy an actual suit in the afternoon. We’ll go to the beach tomorrow, and I’ll take you to eat some fresh-hauled oysters.”
“I… already booked a plane ticket for tomorrow,” I muttered.
“Huh?” he said, disappointed. “But I asked three day’s break from the boss-lady.”
“I was always just going to be here for the meeting. Your mother…” The words stuck in my throat, so I had to switch tracks. “…. The family’s worried, so they helped out and brought you some good stuff. It’s all food.”
“The ocean’s at its most beautiful right now,” he said, like he hadn’t registered what I’d said, like he’d answered some other question.
We fell silent for a moment. We drove along the airport motorway for the whole journey, seeing no people – only enormous foreign-language billboards, and crowds of gulls circulating in the sky, emitting baby-like calls. It was strikingly bleak.
“What’s your interview for?” I asked him.
“A five-star hotel. The chefs in our restaurant were chatting, and mentioned that they were looking for helpers. I talked it over with the boss-lady – getting my work cut down by half. I didn’t say I wanted a whole other job. I just said I wanted to take English lessons.”
“Well, is there enough time to do two jobs?” I asked.
“There is, if I sleep a little less. What does sleep matter?”
We drove into a crowded tunnel. The truck budged forward a couple of feet, and we finally stopped. All around us were fumes, pumped out of the cars, and it became aggravatingly hot. Somewhat awkwardly, he told me that the air-con was broken. We could only roll down the windows. The temperature inside lurched upwards. Adele’s voice on the CD-player went hysterical, and I was close to choking. Even so, it remained very quiet outside. Nobody honked their horn. People reached their hands out of their cars and lit cigarettes.
My cousin was living temporarily at his boss’s house. I say temporarily, but really he’d been living there for two years. She wasn’t around now. My cousin took a sack of dogfood from the kitchen, then fetched a to-go plastic box from the back of the truck. It was packed with leftover braised chicken from the restaurant. He mixed the stuff together with fluid familiarity.
“Hardy!” he called. “Hardy!”
An old dog popped out from somewhere, had a sniff, and lazily retreated. He had no interest in strangers. He didn’t even lift an eyelid. I went to have a closer look at him. All of his fur had fallen out, grown over with scabies. He was dribbling hot, putrid, sweaty blood.
“The boss-lady’s dog,” my cousin said. “He’s almost done for.”
He led me to his room.
“Looks like he’s in real pain,” I said.
“He’s gone blind in one eye. Needs ointment rubbed on it every day.”
“Hmm-hmm…” I murmured, unable to think of anything sympathetic to say.
My cousin lived in a garage on the side of the courtyard. It was split into two rooms, with dry goods and tools stacked in the outer room, and his things in the other. It was roomy enough.
“You can sleep in my bed tonight,” he said, taking a big clump of bedsheets and covers from the closet.
“Actually, I’ll be fine finding a hotel,” I said, with a slight hesitation.
“Don’t do that. I’ve talked it all over with the boss-lady already. She’ll help me get a foldable mattress from the store in the evening, and I’ll sleep outside.” As he spoke, he opened the fridge but saw that it was empty. “I’ll head out and get something to drink. Why don’t you have a rest?”
“I’m fine, and time’s really tight. I’ll go with you.”
So he waited while I changed my clothes, and we went out together. It was a Chinese district, so once you turned the corner onto main-street, you saw Chinese character placards everywhere you looked, small clusters of Chinese talking in a verity of dialects, standing outside the little shops, or chatting on street corners. A few times, people coming our way slowed down and said hi to my cousin, who was wearing his sunglasses and had both hands tucked into his pockets, displaying a cool self-assuredness that had been absent until now.
“Someone’s got a lovely girlfriend!” the boss-lady of a milk-tea stand called to my cousin.
“She’s a friend,” he answered, without expression, like reciting some passage from a book. I gave him a look.
“Oh. No…” he went on. “This is my big sister, on a business trip, out to see me.” His face went red and his words came out in a jumble.
“Take two milk-teas!” the boss-lady said, leaning out from the booth, already sealing the cups with the packaging machine. My cousin just stood there. Then they got chatting in Cantonese. I couldn’t understand, so was forced to be a spectator. A moment later he forced a cup of warm and steaming milk-tea into my hands.
“Without the boba!” he said.
“When did you learn Cantonese?” I asked, after we’d walked a little while.
“My boss-lady’s from Guangdong, and both the cooks came with her. Plenty of Cantonese and Fukienese around her. There’s another Chinese community a few stations away, but they’re all from the Northeast there. You couldn’t take the garlicky smell.”
“You know a lot of people,” I said.
“Er, no,” he shrugged and smiled.
Eventually we stopped at a Cantonese restaurant that had a dragon painted across the entrance. It wasn’t time for lunch, and it didn’t look ready for business inside. However, my cousin pushed the door open. “This is our restaurant. Sit down, and I’ll get them to make you something tasty.”
The floorboards were sticky. A girl sat on a barstool, doodling on her phone. She lifted her head lazily when she saw my cousin. They went straight into a hushed chat in Cantonese. The girl gave me a look, titled her head oddly to one side, and then reverted her gaze. I wasn’t sure if that counted as saying hi. She had covered her face with thick powder, which made her look a little tubby, as she was very young. They huddled close and giggled at something on their phones. She took his milk-tea, not drinking from it, but nibbling on the straw.
Soon after, my cousin went into the kitchen, gave some orders, and came out carrying a flask of tea on a tray. He sat down with me. That girl had vanished.
“Girlfriend?” I asked him quietly.
“Oh, no,” he said, making that same lackadaisical expression, and continuing: “Boss-lady’s daughter.”
“You must have a girlfriend though.”
“I’ll be working two jobs soon,” he said sternly. “Where would I have the time?”
“True.”
“And don’t talk nonsense with my mother when you get back. You know –” he paused abruptly, blowing on the piping-hot tea in the flask, but didn’t carry on. I didn’t push him.
The girl came out from the back and served up a variety of steaming dishes. She took a few trips back and forth, and soon the table was fully laid. Just as I was thinking about stopping her and saying it was too much, she brought another dish – a bowl of buttered fried prawns with black pepper. My weary stomach had traveled far, but all this oily food wasn’t bringing it back to life. Disgust rose up in me instead. I called the girl to sit down and eat with us, but she answered, in the thickest accent, that she was on a diet. Her tone with me contained a mannered iciness. I couldn’t read a single expression on her face. It was the exact opposite of a moment before.
I rallied my energies and took two bites of the food, but my cousin barely moved his chopsticks. Outside, the sun had shown its face, which made the inside of the restaurant seem darker and deeper. The table itself was greasy, and the venerated Guanyin in the corner was surrounded by permanently flickering electric candles. It was like we were back in the crumbling, narrow-laned second-tier city where the two of us had spent our childhood. The light was the same back then, and everything was greasy to the touch.
The restaurant needed the Pick-up in the afternoon, so my cousin and I took the train to the city center. He sprinted to the upper-deck out of habit, and picked a window seat at the back row. They were wider than the other seats. Without speaking, he put his feet up on the seat opposite, folded his arms, and went off into his thoughts, turned towards the window. Along the way we passed some older industrial areas where the brick walls on the riverside were fully pasted with graffiti. At times we passed through residential zones with spacious supermarkets and corner churches. Other times we passed the ocean, concealed at the back of buildings, its surface revealed in white glitters between the gaps.
“Have you traveled to many places?” he suddenly asked me.
“I have.”
“Do you like it here?”
We looked out of the window together.
“It’s not bad. It’s a wonderful thing for a city to have some ocean.”
“I don’t feel anything,” he said, pouting, “I can’t stand it here. I’m bored to death.”
“But don’t you have plenty of friends?”
“They’re all customers at the restaurant. What’s can to talk about?”
“Right.”
After a moment’s thought he carried on: “But this grand hotel’s right by the ocean, in a wealthy district.”
We alighted at Central Station, bang on midday break. There were busy, bustling people all over the streets. My cousin led me on a shortcut through a public park, where groups of people were sunbathing on the edges of the grass, drinking beer. The sky was clearer and brighter than before. I stopped by a chain coffee shop, and thought I’d buy a cup. I asked if he wanted to sit together and have one, but he said no. My spirits were soothed a little by the familiar warmth inside the coffee shop – the sugar-frosted donuts spread on the counter, and warm buzz of soft conversation all around. A smoke would have made things even better. I felt my way to a wrinkled cigarette in a side-compartment in my purse, but hesitated, then pulled my hand back out. My cousin was standing by the door with his back to me, hands still in pockets, one leg sticking sideways out the door, shoulders subtly raised. A short gust blew up outside. The hem of his jacket rustled, shaking straight up in the wind, and he looked uncomfortably cold.
I wanted to visit the biggest department store, but my cousin said his friend had recommended another place, which had year-round discounts. I tagged along as we ran circles around the counters in menswear. He had to make his purchases from the tie counter and then shirts, then trousers and then shoes, so it must have looked like chaos. We swung about between two floors like a pair of headless flies. He quickly lost his usual tolerance, betraying his anxiety and misery.
“Wearing a Western suit is totally dumb,” he suddenly declared
“I like a guy in a suit,” I shrugged.
“You talk like an old lady,” he said.
“Screw you.”
“It’s the truth! Only the elderly actually like Western suits.”
“You’re so naïve.”
In the end we got it all sorted at some practically anonymous store in some corner. We were exhausted. It turned into a rushed job. I waited for him by the changing-room entrance. At one point, he stuck his head out (half of his shirt-buttons fastened) and asked if I could switch it for a size up. The polite, dark-skinned assistant had been waiting on us from the other end of the counter all this time. She passed me the shirt then turned her head silently in another direction.
He took a long time to emerge from the changing-room, shoelaces untied, wearing that suit – yes – but maintaining the stoop he wore with his jacket. He had both hands in his pockets, which made the trousers pull tight over his thighs. He stood in front of the mirror, highly embarrassed, eyes flittering from side to side, unsure where to look.
“The trousers are a little tight,” he whispered to me.
“Yes. Want to swap for the next size up?” I asked.
“Yeah. They really are a little tight…” he mumbled, looking at me, and then the assistant. When she came over to us, I realized that my cousin’s face was red all over, like he was furious at something. He took a few steps back. Meanwhile the assistant had already come up to us with the same rigid and mannered smile, giving my cousin a vacant once over, and saying, in the heavily inflected English of the place: “No’ bad at all, sir.”
“Could you help us find a larger size?” I asked. “They’re a bit tight.” I looked at my cousin. His shoulders were raised in sheer vexation, and he still hadn’t taken his hands from his pockets. It truly felt that the blame for the wrong trousers was on me.
“Of course.” Patiently, the assistant turned, and went to collect the item from the stockroom, which left the two of us stood there like lemons. My cousin took advantage of the situation to loosen one shirt button and then a second. It gave him even less association with the clothing. The mall had turned on the central-heating some time earlier, so he took of his jacket and draped it over his arm, with sweat all over the back of his neck.
He sat down next to me. “I’m a complete moron, aren’t I”
“You’re not,” I said, trying my best to console him.
“Your English is perfect.”
“Thanks…” I murmured, a little put-out. I didn’t go on.
“If the interview’s in the English, I’m a goner.”
“Did they say it would be?”
“No. But a kid got taken on last year who couldn’t do anything.”
“Just see how it goes. You’ve never had bad luck.”
“Things would be great if I could speak English.”
“Didn’t you study at a language college?”
“That wasn’t a place for study,” he said. “Pissing about in Chinatown all day, the only language I could speak was Cantonese.”
I lifted my head and scanned the room. The assistant still wasn’t back, and I was worn out. Two guys pushed open the door to the fire-exit staircase next to us, popping out for a smoke, I guessed. I could practically here the clack-click of the lighters. At times like these, I really couldn’t think what else could be done apart from going for a cigarette.
We had nothing to do, once we’d left the mall, so we casually strolled the streets. My cousin’s mood had dropped to the depths of hell. He swore like a trooper, as if the bags in his hands were dismantling his confidence. But he calmed down again after we’d conquered a stretch of road, and went on ahead in large steps and silence. I knew he was weighed down by worries – but who isn’t?
After a long time thinking, he finally opened up:
“We’ll go somewhere nice.”
“Where?”
“A casino.”
“What?”
“A gambling hall. They’re really famous here.”
“But I can’t even play cards.”
“You’re so lame. Just see it as keeping me company.” He thought a while before adding: “I have to earn back the cash from buying these clothes just now.”
I didn’t fancy going – not at all – but I didn’t want to be a sop on his mood either. So I followed him, hopping onto a bus that was stopped at the terminal station.
“Do you… go there often?” I asked.
“There was a time I did. I was so bored, there were times I didn’t want to go back to that garage once I got off work at the restaurant.”
“You must get lucky breaks, by the sound of it.”
“It’s not bad most of the time. But when I’d just got here, I lost a half-year’s tuition.”
“What did you do?”
“Held it in for a week, then just couldn’t wait any more, so I called my family and lied to them.”
“Oh …”
We fell to silence again. After a while, he spoke:
“I’ve got a bit of money now. I want to buy an LV bag for my mother,” he stumbled on, trying to keep the topic rolling, like he’d made up his mind about something. “The boss-lady’s got a load of LV bags, and they look great.”
“Ok…” I nodded, and wouldn’t say anything else. I didn’t want to look at him either. I’d gone completely soft. I had to avert my gaze beyond the window. This is how cities look almost everywhere. Gigantic billboards, and all the hotel chains you know on sight. Only here there were pigeons everywhere, and a small stretch of ocean-front in the distance. Some people were playing beach volleyball.
We got off the bus with barely a word, and I followed him. A batch of tour buses were parked by the casino, and Chinese tourists were taking group photos by the entrance. In a low voice, my cousin pointed out which ones were the northeasterners, which ones were Fukienese, and which ones were the guys from Taiwan. But as we approached the entrance he stopped abruptly right next to a pair of bouncers, turned to me, and asked anxiously, “Did you bring your passport?”
“I didn’t!” I felt my pockets, and then my back, flustered. “It’s at yours.”
“Shit… You can’t get in without your passport.” He held his forehead in his hands, with a world’s-end expression.
“Um…” All I could do was look at him.
“Forget it. Forget it. Looks like our luck’s not so great today.” He was talking to himself, but comforting me as well. The suit bag was already wrinkled, and the string had snapped as well. What a fucked-up day, I thought inside myself – and it’s far from over.
Neither of us had any energy left for walking around. I saw a fish-and-chip shop by the side of the road, so I stopped and bought us two portions and two large cokes. The young lady asked, keenly, if we wanted a supersize upgrade for free, and I said great, but the result was that the two cokes were a forearm’s length, with rainbow straws. Holding onto the comical cups like we were at a festival, we wound round to the harbor behind the casino and sat down, overlooking a bunch of brand new buildings on the other shore. We had the ocean in front of us, but it wasn’t ocean-blue. Some parts were grey, and some were dark-green. Colossal boats passed slowly before us, noiselessly.
“You like this stuff?” he asked, chewing on a chip. Somehow his tone sounded like my dad’s.
“It’s alright. I’m used to junk food,” I said, the liquid in my coke cup dripping down my arm.
“I’ve never liked it.”
“Then what do you like?”
“The cold poached chicken my mother makes. Well, old boss-lady doesn’t cook half-bad either, but she’s always playing mahjong nowadays. She rarely cooks. And there’s nothing that special, actually, about the way the chefs in the restaurant cook. They throw in too much soy sauce, and too much starch.”
“Your boss-lady really likes you.”
“A lot of customers think I’m her son.”
“Well, you always were very likeable.”
“Her daughter says I look like – ” He said a name. I didn’t catch it.
“Who?” I asked.
He repeated the name, but it still didn’t register. He was forced to take out his phone, which had a display photo of a guy with his head lowered. Probably a Korean – some celebrity I didn’t know, but obviously my cousin’s idol, since he started playing me some music on his phone. It was raucous, with a monotone rhythm going on and on. My cousin shook his knees just a little, along with the tune, then turned it off.
“Have you never heard it?” he asked.
I shook my head.
When the music stopped, the silence became harder to bear.
“I’ve got to smoke…” I said awkwardly, and pulled out the wrinkled cigarette from my purse pocket. But I couldn’t feel my way to the lighter, and I didn’t know where to search. My cousin leaned in and looked right at me. Finally, he couldn’t hold it in, and roared with laughter.
I shoved him. “What’s so funny?”
“You should’ve said earlier! I’ve been holding out forever,” he said, taking out a pack of hard-filter 555s from his pocket. He used the moment to light mine as well. There was a strong wind, so we huddled together, getting close to the seed of the flame. The lighter called out in the wind – clack-click, clack-click. I breathed in a mouthful. My hands shook a little. Once I’d spat the mouthful out I finally felt a little calmer.
“Family not on your case?” he asked me.
“They don’t know,” I told him.
“The boss-lady’s daughter smokes as well, and her family are in the dark about it, too. Sometimes we take a walk outside after dinner, and chain-smoke a fair few. Then we wind round the park at the back and take a big lap, which scatters every trace of the smell. You need two laps once the winter comes,” he said, finishing a cigarette in huge mouthfuls and lighting up another.
“Your mother…” I stabbed out a cigarette at just the right time. There wasn’t a better chance than now.
“It’d be the end of her if she knew. And, as you know, the way the situation is now, I can’t hurt her.”
“What?” My heart was thumping.
He shrugged his shoulders. “Nothing.”
Death-like silence returned.
“Your mother’s sick…” My throat had gone dry. If I missed this moment of silence I’d never get around to saying it.
“Moron! I knew that ages ago.”
“What did you know?” I asked, scared.
“That she’s sick,” he said. “I knew that ages ago. If she wasn’t, why did she force me not to come back? And then,” he carried on, not looking my way, “Then you come here on this special mission, to scout out my situation.”
“But…” I wanted to argue back, but no words came.
“Whatever I do, it’s wrong now – if I go back, and if I don’t go back… Fuck!”
“Yeah…” Right on the money, I thought.
“Is she going to die?” he asked, quite suddenly.
I shrugged. “I really don’t know. They say she’ll live many more years, if luck is on her side. But nobody can say for sure.”
“Does she know what she’s facing? Is she still hoping for a green card?” he asked, the suit bag slumped to one side at his feet. A trash-eating seagull was giving us the death-stare, eyeing our chips, which had long gone cold. We were sitting there motionless.
An enormous yacht was leaning against the harbor entrance far ahead. Now and then you could see people walking starboard.
“Look…” he said.
I followed the direction of his pointed finger to the forest of skyscrapers standing opposite. The sun had fallen back behind them by now, so we could catch the fake reflections between the glass. There were seagulls too – tiny ones, occasionally soaring across our line of sight, then gone in the blink of an eye.
“What is it?” I asked.
“That’s the big hotel I’m interviewing at tomorrow – there. That’s the rich district. They say the private beach there’s absolutely stunning, and the girls all sunbathe naked.”
“Where?”
“There,” he pointed, excitedly, half his body leaning forward. “There…”
Slightly confused, I began to pick apart the crowd of towers opposite – the enormous English lettering on the rooftops, the semi-transparent lounge bridges that ran between the buildings. Which one was he pointing at?
“Forget it,” he muttered, dropping his hand wearily.
“Is it that one?” I asked, determined to keep the topic away from his mother.
“Forget it. Don’t bother looking. There’s nothing there really,” he said with an odd earnestness.
“Right,” I drew myself in again, and nodded.
The seagull had been there around all this time, patiently walking around by our side, waiting.
“Another cigarette?” my cousin asked.
“Alright.”
So we each pulled one out. The wind was too strong. We pressed together, closely. The lighter kept up its sound, all in vain: clack-click, clack-click.
Zhou Jianing 周嘉宁 was born in Shanghai in 1982, and is the author of the full-length novels Barren City and In the Dense Groves, and the short story collections How I Ruined My Life, One Step At A Time and Essential Beauty. Zhou has translated works by Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, and F. Scott Fitzgerald.
I sighed, gently
《轻轻喘出一口气》
My mother was already out by the seashore when I woke up at midday. Before she left, she’d said, “You don’t need to join me.” She’d also poured me some hot water, sliced half an apple, and placed it on the side. Now, the part of the apple exposed to the air had yellowed.
My fierce morning migraine had now crouched behind a nerve. The time difference and the hot and cold weather had worn me down for the whole journey. I turned on the tap in the bathroom, and waited for the hot water to come glugging through the pipes. On the racks the hotel washcloth and towel were folded neatly, clean and stiff. My mother had brought her own washcloth, draped smoothly over the bars. The cloth was rough at the edges by now. There was an abruptness about it, and it was hard to avert your eyes. Not just that, but if you lifted up the hand-towel, you saw that she’d meticulously wrapped the bar with cling-film, like a replay of a zombie apocalypse, defending against any skin rotting with contact. I knew she’d brought mosquito repellent and alcohol swabs as well, stuffed into her luggage.
“You shouldn’t worry so much about everything,” I told her on the first evening, just out of the shower.
“You really can’t say for sure,” she said stubbornly. “Don’t you know that chain hotel staff clean the toilets with washcloths?”
“You believe too much of what you read in the newspapers. This isn’t some cheap chain hotel. Just look outside: that’s the ocean, right there.” I opened the blinds with the bedside remote. She went to the window, somewhat hesitantly. It was pitch black outside. You couldn’t see a thing.
“One time I was staying at a hostel, and I put on someone else’s slippers,” she said. “I got verrucas.”
“When was that? Two decades ago?”
“When I was just married. Twenty – no, thirty years ago. So what?”
“The world is changing.”
“It won’t be changing for the cleaner.”
“You think there’s too much bad in the world, that there’s danger everywhere.”
“Isn’t there? Why else would you have suffered heartbreak? I can see your heart’s broken all the way through.”
“What are you talking about? You shouldn’t watch that many soap operas.”
“I’m different from you. Look at my age. All I want is to enjoy this time in my life. You’re demanding I change something?”
“Nobody wants to change you,” I said, growing angry.
Now that she’d left the room, I could finally breathe out. My hair, washed with the hotel shampoo, was scrunched up and dripping. I opened a window, and there was the beach, far away. I could see people, dogs, islands – but I couldn’t hear anything. I wasn’t wearing clothes, which felt just right. I thought there’d be wind but there wasn’t. Still, surfers were racing across the ocean on their boards, welcoming the sudden rise of the waves, vanishing into the white foam.
I took a book with me to the hotel café. I’d wanted to read it on the plane, but in the end two ladies from Wenzhou, who ran general stores here, sat in the row behind me, and discussed the business of each Chinatown family and store. The constant up-and-down grind of their voices yanked at my nerves from the beginning of the flight to the end. Meanwhile, my mother slept by my side the whole way through, strapped tightly into her seatbelt with her eyes closed and her breath uneven. I fell into a confused sleep for half the journey, but the dryness and the din of the rumbling cabin grated on me. Luckily, I’m used to the frail emotions that come with insomnia. It’s nothing more than that immobility – bones, nerves, skin, and hair like weathered porcelain.
Now, two burly aproned ladies with their hands on their hips were leaning on the kitchen’s fire door in the restaurant to the side of me, squinting over coldly, then looking away. Since no other guests were about, I moved to the patio facing the ocean, so I could smoke as well. We were near the tropics here, and there was a huge temperature difference between morning and evening. The sun shone until it became a shaky and weighty delusion, but once covered by clouds, the ocean wind was migraine-inducing when it blew. People strolled on the beach in their sweaters. Some wore bikinis, playing stumbling games of beach volleyball in the sand.
A man pushing a cart stopped by my side, near the railing around the patio. He pointed to my cigarette packet, to ask if he could have one. I hesitated for a moment, but pulled out a smoke and handed it to him. He lit it with his own lighter. A strong wind was blowing, and he stood there clicking the lighter for a long time. Then, he leaned on the railing and took in a mouthful, satisfied. He wore a small purple sequined cap, and his face was gaunt. A long scar grinned from one corner of his mouth.
“Where are you from?” he asked.
“China,” I said.
“Oh. Beijing?”
“No.”
I wasn’t in the mood for conversation.
“I had a girlfriend from Beijing once,” he said, and then unexpectedly burst into song: “I loved a girl… She came from Beijing… She came from Beijing.”
“Right…”
“What are you here for?” he asked. “Travel?”
I nodded.
“With friends?” he pressed.
“No. With my mother. She’s down by the ocean. The sun’s too fierce for me.”
“That’s lovely, traveling with your mum,” he said, and gave a whistle. “How old are you? Twenty?”
“Heh.” I couldn’t help smiling. “That’s good to hear.”
“Isn’t it?” He smiled contentedly. “So you’re lonely?”
“No.”
He carried on as if I hadn’t spoken.
“My guitar broke, but I’ll sing a song for you now. All I can sing is Elvis. I’m old school.”
“Maybe another time.”
“Alright. Listen, I’ve got to go. Today’s a particularly unlucky day.” He pointed to the cart behind him. “You see? The plastic guitar box broke, but Paolo in the restaurant left a new one for me, so I’m off to get it.” With that, he stubbed out his cigarette, pushed the cart two steps forward, turned back, and added: “Word of warning – don’t eat the fish and chips from Paolo’s. It isn’t fresh…”
When my mother came back a little while later, two serving staff were laying the tables, setting out cutlery for dinner. I watched as she approached, coming up the beach in the tangerine cap she’d bought especially for this trip. It was wrinkled, and the style put years on her. She was carrying a bag of the same color, with a cloth instead of a leather loop, which she’d never stopped complaining about. She stomped her way across the sand, sunburned from nose to cheeks, panting, but apparently too satisfied to hold it back.
“Where did you go?” I asked her.
“For a walk on the beach.”
“For the whole afternoon?”
“Yeh. I walked across two bays, all the way beyond that reef.” She pointed it out enthusiastically. I looked, but saw nothing. “You should get out and walk around,” she went on. “Don’t always be thinking about him. Didn’t we come here so you could relax and forget what was hurting you?”
“I wasn’t thinking about him in the slightest,” I frowned. “But I am now…”
“Have you still got a headache? Such a shame. Today’s our last day, and you haven’t seen that bay.”
“Let’s just eat. I’m hungry again. Aren’t you?”
Cloaked in the warm evening sun, we walked along the beach. It wasn’t getting dark yet, so naturally it wasn’t dinner time. The little restaurants around us were cavernous when you looked inside – just a scattering of white guys sitting on outdoor chairs, drinking beers. I peered over at a restaurant with the name Paolo’s hanging from a placard, and for some reason I quickened my pace to get past it. Still, I couldn’t help turning to look at the sparkling golden fried fish and the bubbling Coca Cola embossed on the placard by the door, and a guy with a Mohican leaning to one side to make a phonecall.
In the end we found a Japanese restaurant and sat down. My mother was sick of the coarse and earthy food we’d been eating since we arrived, sick of the fried local cuisine and the overly fragrant Southeast Asian restaurants. We were like all tourists, sitting on a patio, shielded by trees, gazing meaninglessly at the people on the beach. The sunbathers rose one after the other, shuffling lazily.
Our food took an age to arrive. Finally my mother couldn’t stand the silence any longer.
“We should talk,” she said.
“We talk every day,” I said, as calmly as I could manage.
“But you’ve never told me the truth. You should have told me by now.”
“I’m not suffering as much as you imagine. I’ve already dealt with it.”
“So you’ve accepted it, just like that?” She eyed me suspiciously.
“It’s fine. He fell in love with someone else. It can happen to anyone.”
“What kind of talk is that? Have you fallen in love with someone else?” She was almost in my face now. “I’ve never heard of things like this. Never!” Her voice was loud but tremulous, as if she were close to tears. I didn’t know why she had to make such a show of suffering. In the end we turned away from each other and concentrated on the slowly dimming sky.
I didn’t say another word. When our food was served, I ate with my head lowered. With a pained expression, my mother took two bites of food and then pushed her bowl away. I didn’t look up. A fly hovered between us.
Suddenly she asked, “Did he beat you?”
“What?”
“Did he beat you?”
I pushed my bowl away too, both hands shaking. Then, I fished a handful of change out of my purse and placed it on the table.
My mother followed me out of the restaurant and onto the beach, where we walked in awkward single file. We passed Paolo’s again on the way back to the hotel. The neon sign was lit up now, and there was an alluring aroma of fried food. All of a sudden, the man in the purple sequined appeared. He was pushing his cart, practically stumbling with enthusiasm as he came towards me.
“Hey! I knew I’d see you again!” He smiled and opened his arms. There were two eye-piercing pink plastic boxes dangling from his trolley. “Paolo gave me a new box, and I got a Bruce harmonica in C as well!”
I nodded uncomfortably, not returning his smile. Then, I lowered my head and took two steps forward.
“Is this your mum?” he asked. “She’s just as pretty as you are! Hello!”
“Who’s he?” my mother asked me. “What’s he saying?” She crossed both her arms, eyeing the eccentric stranger cautiously. She drew in her shoulders, looked at me, and repeated the question, louder this time: “Who is he?”
“He’s a trash collector.”
“And what does he want?”
“Just to say good evening.”
“Make him leave!”
“He’s only trying to be friendly.”
“Make him leave. Now!” She held my arm in a death grip, gesturing to the man in a terrified motion of banishment.
“We have to go back to the hotel,” I told him.
“Of course.”
“I’m sorry…”
He stood where he was. He didn’t speak again.
Now, my mother moved with even more energy. I had sand in my shoes but managed to keep up with her. We came upon a group of youngsters emerging from a surf school opposite, wearing tight-strapped sharkskin and holding body-length surfboards. With the last rays of sunlight in the sky, the surfers sprinted past us, the guys at the front hardly able to wait to crash into the waves.
Back at the hotel, we changed into our swimming clothes, planning to go for a dip in the outdoor pool. We walked through a long corridor, where a series of tropical plants thrived in the black-lacquer air.
As we reached the pool, it started to rain. The downpour lowered the temperature by ten degrees at least, and the ocean wind was blowing in from all directions. My migraine began to reappear from behind those interlocked nerves. I had to pull my coat around me.
“Let’s go back,” I said. “It’s too cold.”
“Such a shame. It’s our last night.”
“We can have a drink at the bar instead,” I said.
“Do you drink a lot?” She looked at me, then at the pool outside, which was dancing with rain. We went back the same way we’d come, in total silence.
Finally I spoke:
“I don’t hate him at all. I just hope you can understand. You need to accept it.”
“I know. The world has changed. Customs are worse.”
“That’s not it. You don’t understand.”
“Nobody divorced in our time. People who weren’t dating could live together too. That was nothing. People need the patience for loneliness. They haven’t got it nowadays. He’ll figure it out one day. Where’s he going to go to find someone like you? That’s how it always is in the end, when people interact. He’ll work it out sometime.”
“Those are two different things.”
We’d arrived at the bar. My mother stopped and looked inside, then took a small step back.
“It’s full of foreigners,” she said.
“It’s cold, and my head’s starting to ache. I’ll sit for a while, have a glass of wine, then come straight up.”
My mother wasn’t happy. My persistence was obviously grating on her. “We’ve got to get to the airport before sunrise tomorrow…” she said.
In the end, she had no choice but to head over to the elevator.
I went into the bar and found a seat by the window. It was pitch black outside, but the ocean was right there.
The bar was so small that the seats knocked against each other. There weren’t many people in there. Sitting opposite me was an old fellow with a hot sandwich and a beer in front of him. He was on his third glass already, but he hadn’t touched the sandwich. His gaze was mostly fixed beyond the window , but he turned his head and smiled at me a few times.
I rushed to finish my glass of wine, and asked for another. The man pulled his chair over to mine, and spoke to across the table.
“Are you from China?” he asked.
“I am.”
“There aren’t many Chinese restaurants here. There’s Lee’s opposite. They do hotpot.”
“Well, that suits the weather this evening.”
“Right. Too cold! But it’ll get better tomorrow. You can go out on the sea. Have you done that yet?”
“Not yet. My mother gets seasick.”
“You’re on holiday with your mother?”
That’s not how she sees it, I thought, but nodded.
“I’ve got three kids,” the man said. “Two daughters working in the city, and a son, who’s divorced. He brought my granddaughter here for a vacation. They spend all day out at sea on the boat.”
“Where do you live?”
“I run a rental store across the road. We’ve got everything we should have, from boards to boats.”
“Do you fish?”
“Sure. Used to be a decent fisherman, but I’m tired of it now. I don’t go out on the boat anymore.”
“I see.”
“Let me take you for a meal tomorrow.”
“Oh, I –”
It’s our last night, I was thinking.
“What? Bring your mum along, or other family, if you have them here. You can tell me about your city. I had a pacemaker installed this year, so I can’t go anywhere. It pisses the hell out of me.” He swigged another mouthful of beer. I wasn’t sure if he was drunk.
He left me a phone number with a long country and area code at the front, and urged me to call tomorrow evening.
I picked up my room key and said my parting words, then went to the balcony to smoke my last cigarette of the day. The rain had stopped. The fragrance of plants had vanished from the air, and just the fishy smell of the ocean remained. The cold was fiercer. I pulled in my hands and feet and lit up. When I turned, I saw the old man sitting limply in the leather chair, eyes closed, as if he was already asleep.
“Don’t hold me so tightly! You’re yanking my clothes!” he cried into the wind.
“What?” I yelled as the wind fluttered the words right back at me.
“You’re yanking my clothes!” He turned back to look at me.
“Drive slower. They drive on the wrong side of the road here, and you’re always on both sides.”
“I’m only going sixty. Don’t argue!”
“But the wind’s so strong. My head’s killing me.”
“Why aren’t you wearing a helmet?”
“Um…”
“You never listen to a word I say. We should stop at the drugstore. Are you wearing sunscreen?” His voice has lowered, and he spoke kindly. He didn’t know the wind was scattering everything he said.
That was a decade ago. Us on a motorway on an island. There was a dazzling blue and gold Buddha ahead in the distance, and a crowd of irritating wasps. Things are fine now: I’ve forgotten even the name of the island. All memory trawls up are useless scraps. But anyway, I smoked my cigarette, and I sighed, gently.
~
(周嘉宁,1982年生于上海,作家,英语文学翻译。曾出版长篇小说《荒芜城》《密林中》,短篇小说集《我是如何一步步毁掉我的生活的》,《基本美》等。翻译Alice Munro, Flannery O’Connor, Joyce Carol Oates, F. Scott Fitzgerald等人作品)
Gledao sam te sinoć. U snu. Tužnu. Mrtvu.
U dvorani kobnoj, u idili cvijeća,
Na visokom odru, u agoniji svijeća,
Gotov da ti predam život kao žrtvu.
Nisam plako. Nisam. Zapanjen sam stao
U dvorani kobnoj, punoj smrti krasne,
Sumnjajući da su tamne oči jasne
Odakle mi nekad bolji život sjao.
Sve baš, sve je mrtvo: oči, dah i ruke,
Sve što očajanjem htjedoh da oživim
U slijepoj stravi i u strasti muke,
U dvorani kobnoj, mislima u sivim.
Samo kosa tvoja još je bila živa,
Pa mi reče: Miruj! U smrti se sniva.
~
安敦·古斯塔夫·马托什(1873—1914,Anton Gustav Matos),克罗地亚诗人,短篇小说家,记者,散文家和游记作家。他被认为是克罗地亚现代主义文学的冠冕人物,开启了克罗地亚通向欧洲现代主义的潮流,是有史以来克罗地亚最伟大的文学人物之一。
生平:
马托什出生在塞尔米亚(Syrmia)地区的托瓦尔尼克(Tovarnik),即今天克罗地亚的乌克瓦尔—塞尔米亚区(Vukovar—Syrmia County)。他两岁时,随其父母迁往扎格勒布(Zagreb),在那里他上了小学和中学。他打算进维也纳军事兽医大学(the Military Veterinary College)学习,但失败了。1893年他被征兵,1894年做了逃兵,他从克罗地亚逃到沙巴克(Sabac),再逃到贝尔格莱德。
1892年马托什凭借短篇小说《良心的力量》(The Power of Conscience)进入克罗地亚文坛。这本小说的出版被认为是克罗地亚现代文学流派的开端。马托什写下了关于文学创作和在不同场景中的角色模范的主张。他在给朋友米兰·奥格里左维奇(Milan Ogrizovic)的一封信中如是说道:“作为一个短篇小说家,我对诗歌天才和前辈怀有最大的感情,比如梅里美的简洁精确和莫泊桑讽刺的自然感。”
他早期的主要诗歌主题是爱和花,他把爱的抽象性和花的具体诗意符号融合起来。另一个反复的主题是死亡,挽歌的气息弥漫他的诗作,短暂经过的激烈情感,梦和现实的合流,用窒息的颜色和声音,爱的经历犹如痛苦的体验。他最好的关于爱的诗是《孤独的爱》(Lonely Love),《给孩子而不是给玩具》(To a Child Instead of a Toy),《头发的安慰》(Comfort of Hair)。
The Kawutu township government consists of a row of little red-roofed houses in the forest to the west of the village. There is nothing official or serious about it, since there are sparrows and wild pigeons all over the place. There is even a group of Gula chickens calling gula gula in the bushes right outside the window. The dudu sound of the woodpeckers comes from high in the trees, while crows take this opportunity to roam about with their hulala calls.
On the contrary, the Kawutu post office is an elegant house made of red bricks, complete with a bright yellow roof and a snow-white wooden fence. Unfortunately this lovely place has never opened its doors for business. Rumour has it that the postmaster bought a house in a more urban area and moved away with his family; since then he’s become a city man and has never returned to Kawutu, yet he is still somehow considered as the postmaster.
Aside from him, there is another staff member at the post office. He’s normally our bricklayer and handyman. From time to time (when he suddenly recalls his duty as a postman) he will deliver the mail from one house to the next. There was one occasion when he went to each household to ask if anyone would like to subscribe to magazines. We happily subscribed to two, but to this day we have yet to see any trace of them. However, you can still get stamps and envelopes from him – not in that fairytale-like red brick house, but in his own home. I went through nearly half the village one day, going through all its nooks and crannies, in order to find his abode. After I told him the purpose of my visit, he pulled up one corner of the felt blanket on his bed and searched inside with his hands for a while, eventually dragging out a stack of old newspapers in Kazakh. The government stamps and envelopes were stacked inside, along with crochet samples from his grandmother.
Though we all call it a bank, the Kawutu Bank is actually a small credit union. Located right across the road from my house, it is simpler than the government building and the post office. It’s a one-story house made of red brick with its eaves heavily covered in wild grass, and there is a small yard at the front surrounded by a short and tidy wooden fence. About a dozen tall willow and poplar trees have been planted in single file along it. The entrance archway is very short, with a copper sign hanging on the fence. A narrow gravel path leads straight to the front steps. There are a few roses scattered about, as well as a couple of tall sunflowers. A well can be found at one corner, its lip smooth and shiny, while a wooden shed at the other corner is filled with coal. Actually, it’s not much different from any other household in this area, if you were to tie up a dog inside the yard.
There are also ropes between several trees, which I assumed were used for laundry because the location has the best sunlight exposure. So after I washed my clothes I walked over and hung them on the ropes, resulting in several rows of brightly-coloured clothing drying in the sun. The garments that didn’t fit were draped haphazardly on branches. Just as I thought I’d found the perfect place, the head of the bank erupted in fury. He dragged down the bedsheet and crossed the streets, brandishing it. When he reached my house he let out a torrent of angry words. We couldn’t understand what he was trying to say, except that drying my laundry there was not allowed. This was surprising – if it wasn’t permitted, why did they put up the ropes?
Thinking back, it was rather funny that I tried to dry my underwear and a bedsheet patterned with red flowers and green leaves in front of a bank.
Given that it is such an unassuming bank, there is probably not much money available. Neither have I seen anyone who looks like a client going inside. On top of that, the few bank employees look drunk every day, and go around asking for credit at different shops. For example, Dawulie left his leather hat as collateral at our store last year, but hasn’t come back to reclaim it this winter. He’s probably in a bind: if he wants the hat, he’ll have to pay back his debts, but if he doesn’t get it back, how will he get through the winter? He’d need to spend money to buy a new one… In the end, he’ll have to spend money no matter what.
All the local children like to play in the bank yard without their trousers in summer, because a creek with lots of small fish passes through it. The trees inside grow especially well, and are perfect for climbing: the kind with lots of branches and trunks grown into curls within curls, with bulges big enough for a person to stand on while holding onto something else. As a result, they are always full of children. Whenever you call out in that direction, all the heads and eyes turn in unison. The one doing the shouting is usually the head of the bank, and the tree – that was laden with children one second ago – will drop them like fruits the next. Putong, putong. In the blink of an eye they all fall off, and leaves scatter all over the ground.
The bank is always quiet during the summer. It must be relaxing to work there; you don’t have to do much except guard the building. With all those trees, it must be cool and comfortable. My house is hot as an oven. Without a single tree around, it stands naked under the sun. Even sitting inside, our sweat drops like rain. I would go across every day to get water from the well, watching the sunflowers growing taller, their leaves becoming denser as they climb. It would have been lovely for us to live there; I love the creek, its clear water rimmed with yellow dandelions.
As soon as winter arrives, the bank employees tend not to come to work. They aren’t the only ones, though. The Kawutu business bureau, tax bureau, and town cooperatives all shut down. They’re so lucky. We often see knee-height snow inside the yard with one deep set of footprints in it. The staff who do occasionally go in (they really have no choice) use the same path, leaving behind the same set of footprints. These footprints are a fixed scene in front of the bank for the entire winter.
When the long winter finally ends after nearly six months, my mother prepares to follow the herdsmen north into the mountains. Of those doing business in our region, most will operate a roaming grocery shop with the sheep flocks. It is profitable to do business in the pasture, but we don’t have enough capital to buy merchandise to last the entire summer. With her mind set on that bank, my mother went for a loan one day.
How on earth was she able to get the loan? As far as I know, the bank only has one type – the agriculture loan given out before the spring planting – but she is neither a farmer nor a local resident; we’ve only been operating the store in Kawutu for over a year. Nonetheless, my mother was able to get it. Maybe it was because we were neighbours, and the fact that we couldn’t avoid seeing each other all the time made them embarrassed to say no.
Indeed, just because there are no customers for the entire year doesn’t mean that the bank isn’t full of noise and people on the two days when agricultural loan is accepting applications. Even before it opens in the morning, people are already waiting in line. Villagers from several hundreds of kilometres away come by (Kawutu township is very long: even though it’s only a few kilometres from east to west, it spans several hundred kilometres from north to south). The wooden fence surrounding the yard is obscured by horses, and the road outside has clumps of people engaging in heated discussions about the loan. Perhaps because this type of loan has only been around for two years, the locals see it as money distributed by the government for everyone to spend. Even if they don’t need the money, they want to get it just in case. At least that was what we gathered.
My mother asked, “Are you thinking about not returning the loan?”
Someone replied, “Why not? We will return it whenever we have the money.”
But that wasn’t the biggest surprise. The oddest thing was how my mother was able to get a loan.
She’d been standing in line for the entire morning. When lunch time came around I went to look for her. As I pushed through the crowd, I was shocked when I met a sea of heads.
When you first pass through the front door you’re forced to descend a few steps to get to the bank interior proper, which consists of a tiny lobby with a red brick floor and colourfully-foiled ceiling, and a counter surrounded by a metal barricade. Of course, I could barely make out any of these, nor the green-painted wooden windowsills, because of the crowd packed into the barely ten-meter-square space, even though I was standing at the highest point at the top of the steps. However, I could see over the entire crowd, and I searched eagerly for my mother. I couldn’t identify the back of her head amid the chaos, and had to call out several times before she finally turned around. She was waving an envelope in mid-air, pushing onward through the wave of people, trying her best to leave the counter.
That was it. She was able to get a loan of 3,000 yuan. But we didn’t pay it back for a long time. It was embarrassing.
According to my mother, the head of the bank moved away, so she had no idea who to return the money to, and no one came to ask us about it. Besides, we moved several times ourselves since then.
In the summer of 2006, we finally paid it back. One of the bank employees went to a summer ranch to visit his relatives. He got lost on the way, and ended up at our house by accident.
Ever since the pink coach started its route, we never used the minivan to go to town anymore; the fare was 20 yuan per person, but it only costs 10 yuan for the pink coach. It used to be that additional fares were charged when your luggage was slightly bigger than usual, whereas now you could load freely. Most importantly, there was suddenly a proper schedule for the coach, unlike the minivan that always had to wait until it was full, delays be damned.
‘The pink coach’ was really just a used, medium-sized coach. The driver was on the chubby side, and happy as a hippo. Whenever he saw someone running toward the road from far away, making a long trail of footprints in the snow, he would ever so joyfully apply the brake and say, “Ah-ha! Ten more yuan is coming!”
All the children inside the coach would then shriek a collective “Whoa!” – as though commanding a horse to stop.
With six of my fellow passengers and I packed into the tiny space between the engine and the front row, we were already full to the brim. However, when the coach arrived at Wanahara Village, five more people and two sheep squeezed in. By then I could hardly move my arms, which gave me a strange urge to hop on top of the two sheep. Luckily, as more and more people got on, the unheated coach began to warm up, and the few men sitting in the back row began to drink alcohol, soon moving on to cheering and singing. About an hour later they got into a brawl and the driver threw every one of them out. Finally we were able to breathe properly.
Although there were very few villages dotted along the Black River, quite a number of passengers rode the pink coach to the Qiakuertu Township every day. The coach set out before five every morning, its lonely shadow crossing the dark villages one by one, honking on the way and waking up window lamps one at a time. While the honking still echoed in the previous village, the next village was already awake, and people stood by the roadside wrapped in layers, their luggage in a big pile on the snow.
Akehara was the last village to the west along this strip, which made it the first village on the daily route of the pink coach. As a result, I was always the first to get on. The inside of the vehicle felt empty and cold, thick with the warm air from my breath. The driver would greet me in a loud voice over the noisy engine, “How are you, young lady? How is everything?” Meanwhile, he would lift up a heavy sleeveless jacket made of sheepskin from the seat next to him and throw it to me. I would catch it and wrap it around my knees.
The night was still deep and the snow heavy. Before us the Gobi Desert stretched vast and expansive, with not a single tree in sight. I had no idea how the driver kept track of the road and the vehicle on pavement without once going astray, since it was the same colour as the ground.
As the sky lit up, the coach was already packed with people, yet it remained bitterly cold. Being inside the vehicle at minus 20 to 30 degree Celsius for a long period of time had taken a toll on me. Then suddenly, out of the corner of my eye, I saw two chubby old people sitting on top of the engine cover in front of the first row, facing each other. How warm it must be! So I forced my way to the spot and planted myself in the gap between them, sitting on the luggage that was stuffed in by their feet. Feeling much more comfortable at last, I soon discovered – rather embarrassingly – that they were actually husband and wife.
This couple held hands all the way, but they had no place to put them, so they rested them on my knee. I also had no place to put my hand, so I placed it on the old man’s leg. Later on, the old man’s large hand held on to one of mine to warm it up, while mumbling something to his wife. Soon the old lady took my other hand to keep it warm. Along the way I shrank my hands back quite a few times, but the couple quickly took them again.
Despite the string of comings and goings, the coach seemed to remain full of passengers. Most of them were hitchhiking, in the process of walking from one village to another in the snow. When they saw the pink coach, they waved and hopped on. In fact, even if they hadn’t asked the coach to stop, the driver would have stopped in front of the pedestrians anyway. The passenger sitting by the door would then greet them in a loud voice, “You want a ride? Come quickly! It’s freezing!”
The number of passengers reached its peak on Sundays. They were mostly children of Han ethnicity from a village on the lower bank, going back to school in the county town, since there were no Mandarin-speaking schools nearby. They all waited by the roadsides of their villages. As soon as the coach came to a halt, a father would hop on first, fight his way through the crowd, put down the luggage, and clear enough space for his child to sit down. Then he would turn and call out loudly, “Son, come sit here,” followed by another reminder, “Son, did you bring your bread?”
Every time this happened, I always felt disappointed for the driver. He might have thought that this was a 20 yuan fare.
After the father had settled his son, he would squeeze through to the door once more and declare to the driver, “This is the money for my son’s ticket. He paid already, remember. My son is the one with the cap. Don’t forget, Master.”
“Okay.”
“The one at the back with the cap.”
“Got it.”
“Master, my son is wearing a cap. Don’t forget!”
“I know, I know!”
He was still worried, so he shouted into the pool of heads inside the coach, “Son, why don’t you jump up and let the Master see your cap?”
Unfortunately, at that precise moment, everyone was either busy getting on or off, and they were all frantically arranging their luggage. The boy tried to jump up several times, but we still had no chance of seeing his head.
“Okay, okay. No need to jump.”
“Master, my son paid already, and he is the one wearing the cap –”
“I’m about to set off. Those not leaving with us, hurry up and get off.”
“Son, I told you to show the Master your cap. Why don’t you listen?”
Then off we went again, the coach winding down the road from village to village, with passengers waiting by the roadside almost at every one of them. Some of them were taking the coach, but some just wanted to send a message, “Abudula from the fourth Brigade needs to go to the county town tomorrow. Could you pick him up along the way? His house is the second one from the east.”
Or, “Give Pahan this message: buy some celery if there is any money left. Tell him to come home as soon as he can.”
Or, “My Mom is sick. Could you get some medicine for her from the county town?”
Often there were several letters waiting to be picked up by the driver.
Although the coach was very crowded, there was a kind of order within. The first few rows were dedicated to the elderly, while the young people sat on the luggage that was heaped in the aisle. All the children sat on top of the engine cover, which was coated with a thick carpet, and leaned against each other. They might not have known one another, but the older children had the responsibility of looking out for the younger ones, even though the older ones could be just six or seven years old. I saw one of them pushing up the luggage for a three-year-old seated next to him, so that the younger one could sit firmly in his spot. Over and over, whenever the little boy took off his gloves, the older boy would pick them up and put them on him again.
There was a two year-old boy with rosy cheeks sitting across from me, staring at me quietly with his big blue eyes. For two to three hours he kept the same exact position, not moving at all, let alone crying or fussing about.
I said loudly, “Whose kid is this?”
No one answered. Only snores could be heard inside the vehicle.
I asked the boy, “Who is your daddy?”
He continued to look at me with his big blue eyes, not even blinking.
I wanted to touch his hand to see if he was cold, but as soon as I reached out, he quickly extended his arms and wanted me to hold him. A tender feeling enveloped me as he came over. He fell asleep as soon as he was comfortable, with his small, soft body leaning on my arms, his little head tilted to one side. I dared not move for the rest of the journey, afraid of disturbing the lonesome dream of the little person in my arms.
This piece is a translation of the essay《每个人心里都有个奥吉》by Lei Shurong, which was published at Alluvium across two posts on June 4th and June 11th 2018.
Everyone Knows Someone Like Auggie
by Lei Shurong
1.
More than thirty years ago, in the little village where I grew up, there was a family who had a disabled son. He was never given a name: everyone just called him “the idiot”.
The idiot was not only intellectually challenged – his face was paralysed and he was lame too. His parents had neither the money for a doctor nor the kindness to treat him well, because he was an embarrassment and a nightmare to their whole family. They fed him on leftovers. They looked at him with frosty contempt. They forced him to sleep in the dog kennels. And at every turn, they flung abuse and curses at him. In that superstitious little mountain village, people believed that a disabled child was a reincarnation of an evil spirit – a bad omen. Fingers wagged and tongues spat poison, and everyone did everything they could to avoid him. However, he couldn’t understand what was happening, and so he was always smiling and giggling foolishly, mistaking all the abuse for kindness.
Mostly, the adults were busy leading their own lives, so they left him alone. But the village children didn’t.
He had nothing to do all day, so he liked wandering in the mountains. He would pick flowers and then scatter them, or he would chase birds and butterflies, calling aloud as he went. Perhaps the other children felt that he wasn’t worthy of happiness, because whenever they saw him they would immediately give chase and beat him up. His bad leg made escape impossible, so he was often punched and kicked until he was black and blue, and the mountain resounded with his sharp wails.
Such are some of the fiercest, most profoundly affecting of my memories: a group of village children surrounded by the flowers of a beautiful spring day; in the midst of a forest redolent with summer; in the golden-yellow paddy fields of autumn; on the pristine snows of winter – chasing viciously after a disabled boy, who couldn’t stop crying.
Anyone could bully the idiot. No one protected him, and no one gave him even a shred of care or concern. No one, that is, aside from the big dog. It was a massive animal – a rangy, yellow, fierce-looking thing, and it barked incessantly at outsiders. But the dog was the only one who never turned up its nose at him. On the contrary, it was the guardian angel by his side. And it was only because of the big dog that the other children’s savagery grew no worse.
I was afraid of both of them. I was afraid that the idiot would touch my clothes with his dirty hands. I was afraid of the long, slimy line of drool that trailed down from the corner of his mouth, which was always speaking gibberish. I was afraid that his deformed face would be contagious: that it would get into my dreams and turn them into nightmares. My heart seemed to be stuck in my throat every time I went by his house.
One day, when I was walking gingerly past his door, I heard a low, deep snarl, and then the big dog leapt out at me. I was terrified, screaming and crying. I ran a few steps and then fell. I squeezed my eyes shut in despair as I waited for its teeth to close on me.
But strangely, the dog did not bite me. Instead, it made a low crooning noise and plopped its backside down onto the ground beside me. I lifted my head to look, and there he was, caressing the dog’s head, his face wreathed in a foolish smile.
That was the first time I had come face to face with him, and it was the only time I actually saw him clearly. His head was misshapen and his features horribly lopsided, but his eyes were warm and gentle, like those of a newborn lamb.
He died before he turned ten.
His parents didn’t even bury him in the family plot in the graveyard. They scratched out a hole somewhere on the mountain slopes and dumped him into it. He was like a weed: not long in this world, living out his days and dying alone. The strange thing was, even after many years had gone by and the events and people of the village were dim, mostly-forgotten memories, I still kept a crystal-clear impression of his face, and his alone.
2.
His story was a huge secret to me. I kept it buried in my heart and never spoke of it to anyone, until my son turned fourteen.
In October 2014, my son Tu Dou and I moved to Shanghai, to a tiny rental apartment. We were preparing for him to enter a high school affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music the following year, in the spring.
This was a weighty decision for my son. At fourteen, he had set his heart on becoming a pianist. That meant more than just giving up the school he liked, with its familiar teachers and students, and leaving his hometown and his comfortable, normal life. It signified a turn away from a broad, well-paved Roman road, and a turn onto a bitter, thorny, narrow path in pursuit of the arts. It was a lonely choice.
The apartment in Shanghai was old and cramped. Other than a grand piano, it had barely any furniture in it at all. That, added to the fact that we were strangers in an unfamiliar city, quite naturally left us feeling miserable and adrift. Luckily, I was offered a translation project at that point, which I accepted without hesitation. I also made a strict plan for myself: I would translate 1500 words of the book every day, come hell or high water, and I would finish it within three months. In my experience, adjusting to a new place was always a matter of having something to do. Once I had that, I would be able to adapt quickly to the new environment, and shake off the feeling of being lost and helpless.
It was only when I’d hastily turned to the first page of the book that I realised that the protagonist a disabled ten-year-old boy. His name was August, but everyone called him “Auggie”. The book’s title was Wonder.
From the very beginning, I made Tu Dou accompany me on my translation journey. I made him my first reader and called him my “assistant”. In this globalised era, the habits of little boys everywhere move largely in lockstep. In the book, Auggie is entering middle school; at the time, Tu Dou was about to graduate from it, so naturally they had a great deal in common. Thus, Tu Dou and I fell into a routine: every day, after I’d finished writing, he would automatically take my spot at the computer and read what I’d translated, checking for any common-sense errors or anything that sounded too much like something a grown-up would say. The latter was my request: Auggie was ten years old in the novel, and I wanted the translation to suit his age. I didn’t want it to sound outdated or grown-up, even though Auggie was a more mature ten-year-old than most. Tu Dou took this duty very seriously, and nitpicked his way through my work at every turn.
“You said that Auggie’s mum was ‘awful’ at fractions. You should say she ‘sucked’!”
“Auggie says, ‘Mr. Tushman’s the boss at my new school’. You could change that to ‘head’.”
“‘Only an idiot would choose leadership class’. You could try ‘only dorks take leadership’.”
Of course, my son was also deeply drawn in by Auggie’s story. On one hand, Auggie read Eragon, The Chronicles of Narnia, and The Hobbit; he played Dungeons and Dragons and was totally in love with Star Wars. Auggie was like any typical child in those respects. On the other hand, he’d had 27 surgeries since birth, over a short ten-year life. He never actually attended school. Because of his disfigurement, people gave him sidelong glances or tried to avoid him wherever he went; he was called ‘rat boy’, ‘freak’, ‘E.T.’, ‘gross-out’, ‘lizardface’, ‘mutant’, ‘diseased’. The sheer contrast was enough to tug at the heartstrings.
The translation made steady progress. And as I expected, our life in the new, strange city became easier and calmer, like a small stream converging with a far mightier river. Oddly enough, however, as the translation advanced, and as the story became more and more exciting, Tu Dou began to talk less and less about it. When we got to the chapter called “The Cheese Touch”, I realised that something was wrong. He sat in silence at the computer for a while, and then went to his piano without a word. That wasn’t normal. Typically, he would be talking my ear off about the details of the book: Darth Vader-something-something, padawan-etcetera-etcetera, Battleground-Mystic-is-this-and-that, and so on into infinity. In fact, when we got to the bit where Auggie talks about the “farting nurse” who was present at his birth, who “let out the biggest, loudest, smelliest fart in the history of farts”, Tu Dou had laughed about it for half a day. Over the next two days, as I got through translating the next two chapters, “Halloween Costumes” and “The Bleeding Scream”, Tu Dou remained silent. I checked for fever: nothing. I asked him if he was homesick: he shook his head. When I questioned him further, he finally lifted his head, and when he met my gaze there were tears in his eyes.
“Mummy, there was a boy like Auggie in our class too. Do you remember Q?” he burst into tears. “I was bad, mummy – I hate myself!”
3.
Of course I remembered Q.
He was an elementary school classmate of Tu Dou’s, with a pair of big, timid eyes. He was skinny as a beansprout, and his actions and reactions were always a beat slower than the other children. Tu Dou once told me that Q couldn’t write, couldn’t count, and couldn’t do his homework. Whenever the teacher asked him about it, he couldn’t answer either. He could only scratch at his ears and cheeks while muttering, “It’s so itchy…” over and over. Tu Dou also told me that many of his other classmates disliked Q. They found him stupid, an idiot, a blockhead, and they refused to be friends with him. I also remembered having a long, serious talk with Tu Dou, telling him that everyone was like a tree in a forest, each with its own pace of growth: some tall, some short, some quick, some slow. I emphasised to him that being quick didn’t give him the right to look down on those who were slow, and that he should try his best to help them instead. I got him to promise me that he would be kind to Q, and not mock or bully him or look down on him. In truth, as I translated Wonder, both Q and the boy from my village had come to mind several times.
“I know I promised you I’d help Q, mummy, and I did – but I also made a mistake, like Jack Will, and I…”
In the novel, Jack Will was the only kid in class who treated Auggie decently. He was Auggie’s deskmate and good friend, and he became Auggie’s motivation for going to school at all. It was his protection that shielded Auggie from the hostile gazes and wagging tongues of others.
In contrast to Jack, though, there was Julian. The other kids ostracised Auggie simply because they were indifferent or thoughtless, avoiding or turning away from him. In contrast, Julian constantly thought of ways to use poisonous words and actions to hurt Auggie, and he actively plotted with others to isolate him even more.
On Halloween, due to a series of unfortunate events, Auggie didn’t wear the costume he’d planned to wear. He accidentally overheard a conversation between Julian and Jack. It turned out that Jack was so nice to Auggie not because he truly liked him, but because of an arrangement made by Principal Tushman. Jack even said to Julian, “I really think… if I looked like him, seriously, I think that I’d kill myself.” Auggie was seriously traumatised and hurt by this, and refused to go to school for a while.
So what was the bad thing that my Tu Dou had done? He told me that Q had an itchy skin condition called psoriasis, which was why he kept scratching himself. As a result, his skin was always rough and scaled all over, and it flaked off him like whole-body dandruff. That was why he couldn’t concentrate in class or finish his work. The whole class was terrified of touching him, for fear that he would infect them. It didn’t matter how much the teachers reassured the students that it wasn’t contagious. Everyone was petrified by the idea of having even the slightest contact with Q. Just like Auggie, Q had the “Cheese Touch”. He was an old moldy piece of cheese. No one wanted to sit next to him, no one wanted to partner him when playing ball, no one wanted to play games with him… They didn’t even touch the things he’d touched. When it was Q’s turn to hand out the workbooks for class, everyone refused to take them from him. Some people would grab them and rush to the window to let the sunlight “disinfect” them, and others would just toss the books onto the floor. My Tu Dou was no exception.
Q wanted to ingratiate himself with the others, so every day after lunch, he started helping them to collect their trays and plates. He was small and slow, so he often didn’t move quickly enough. As a result, some of the others would grab the plates and throw them at him, or they would hit him with their trays. Although Tu Dou never went that far, he did sit there complacently, waiting for Q to take his tray, as though it were the most natural thing in the world.
This state of affairs persisted until they graduated elementary school. Six whole years.
Six years! To be honest, I was utterly shocked. All along, I’d thought I’d understood my son: my innocent, flawless son – clear and shining like a crystal. It never occurred to me that he had any secrets. And to think: for six years, he had hidden such a terrible thing in the depths of his heart… that the shadow was of such magnitude…
Meeting my stunned gaze, he continued, slightly defensive now, “If I’d told you, Mummy, you’d have made me be friends with Q, and then everyone else would’ve ignored me. They’d have been mean to me too, and then if I told you that, you’d have come to school and made them all apologise to me and that would’ve been just the worst. Like, super embarrassing.”
I sighed. The shadow lying on my heart grew greater.
4.
In the end, I didn’t scold or blame Tu Dou for what had happened to Q. They were already three years out of elementary school, and had long since scattered to various middle schools. Even if I wanted Tu Dou to apologise to Q, we had no idea where he had gone. And besides – if we had found him, where would one even start? In any case, Tu Dou had clearly realised his own wrongdoing, and was already beating himself up about it. I figured it was enough that he would try and do better in the future.
In the meantime, the story kept progressing. I must say: Wonder was not only timely, it also covered everything that was essential and everything real. The author R. J. Palacio clearly had an excellent grasp of the psychology of little children: she understood the unique sensitivities and intricacies of their emotional landscapes, and she also knew the interpersonal web of middle school like the back of her hand. She wrote Auggie’s story in a polyphonic chorus of voices: Auggie himself narrates the first chapter, but the second chapter is turned over to his older sister Via. The third chapter is narrated by Summer – the only girl who is friends with Auggie, and the fourth chapter by Jack. The fifth chapter gives voice to Via’s boyfriend, Justin, and the seventh, Miranda – a mutual friend of Via and Auggie. The sixth and eighth chapters go back to Auggie’s point of view. Six children: each of them saw, described, and understood Auggie from their own point of view. In that way, the book brings out the different facets of Auggie’s life. It allows for a variety of analyses and understandings of what happened to him, and it helps the people and events to intersect and connect, forming a complete picture of middle school life. Almost any child, upon reading Wonder, can find a point of view that resonates.
Naturally, Tu Dou related most to Jack. In the novel, Jack is Auggie’s deskmate, friend, and protector, but he didn’t start out as a willing participant in those roles: Mr. Tushman intentionally arranges it. Jack’s relationship with Auggie starts out as a duty, but slowly evolves into real friendship. And when he unintentionally hurts Auggie’s feelings, and the two of them “break up” for a while, Jack comes to realise that he was wrong. Finally, in a later chapter, he hits Julian and thereby returns to his place as Auggie’s friend.
It was around that point in the book that Tu Dou pointed out to me that “Auggie doesn’t really exist in real life, Mummy.
“He’s born into a happy, middle-class family. His mum and dad and sister and grandma all love him lots. He’s strong and brave and clever and experienced. He’s good with his hands. He’s knowledgeable and good at writing, and he’s a nice, funny guy who has great character and learning ability. So it’s easier for other people not to care that he looks weird. Jack gets brave in the end, and knocks out one of Julian’s teeth when he’s protecting Auggie. But I think I’d do that too, because Julian’s horrible. He’s a big hypocrite and he’s a sneak and a snob. No one who’s really a good person would ever be friends with him.”
“And…?” I encouraged.
“Well, at first I thought I’d like to be like Jack, but then I thought – things aren’t really the same, so I don’t think I can. Q had a skin disease. He was a wimpy crybaby and he wasn’t good at anything at all. I just don’t think we could have been friends.
“Plus, I had a few good friends already. Some of them were Math Olympiad geniuses, some were champions for cross country, and some wrote amazing short stories. They were all cool and they were all honest, nice, happy people. I wouldn’t have not been friends with them.”
“That’s true,” I answered. “Fiction and real life don’t always match up. Auggie’s an ideal, Tu Dou. The author made him that way. He had a disability, but he wasn’t crippled. He looked abnormal, but in terms of who he was – his intelligence, behaviour, ability, and character – he wasn’t just a normal kid. He was better. And because of that, he didn’t have to go to a special needs school. He could go to a school with everyone else, even a well-known one like Beecher Prep.
“And that’s why we’re so drawn to this story. It’s about kid who doesn’t look normal wanting to enter a normal school. That creates a huge contrast. It drives the conflict. I guess Auggie isn’t just a medical marvel. He’s a literary marvel, a heroic figure. And people like reading about marvels.”
“Why would the author write him like that, though?”
“I guess she wanted to make people think. You know, if it’s this hard for someone amazing like Auggie to integrate into a normal school, what about all the other disabled kids? They probably have it worse than him. They might be in really bad circumstances or they might need special care. How bad must it be for them?
“Auggie’s a kind of dividing line,” I continued. “Above him are the ‘typical’ people, and below him are the people with special needs. We might say they’re disabled. And in reality, most of them lead lives that are more difficult than you or I can ever imagine. They might be missing arms or legs. They might be blind or deaf or dumb, and some might have intellectual or language disabilities. It might even be that one person has multiple problems.
“And these people are discriminated against from the day they’re born,” I went on, warming to the subject. “All their lives, ‘normal’ society will toss them aside. Those who are lucky will at least have their families to love and support them, so they won’t have to worry about being homeless or starving. Those who are even better off might get to go to a special needs school and learn the skills to be independent.
“But there are the unlucky ones who might have to struggle with poverty and be rejected not only by outsiders but by their own family. Like that boy in my village, the one I told you about.
“So what are we going to do, Tu Dou? Even if we can’t be friends with them, or they’re not our family, surely we shouldn’t treat them badly. It can’t be right to bully or mock or beat them, or stand by and ignore them as other people do that, no?”
“But there are lots of amazing disabled people,” Tu Dou said. “Like Stephen Hawking.”
“True. There are always disabled people who are miraculous geniuses, even among other geniuses. Their talent is so immense that it breaks through the restraints of their disabilities. And that’s when the whole world celebrates and respects them. They might even change the world, like Hawking, like the novelist Shi Tiesheng, like the blind pianist Tsujii Nobuyuki, like the Australian speaker Nick Vujicic…
“But without exception, they’ve all had to make tremendous sacrifices, and they were hugely loved by their parents. I think we could even say that the sheer size of their success is a sign of how much they suffered to get there.
“And besides,” I added, “They’re an absolutely tiny minority. They’re lucky. They’re God’s chosen few.”
“Mummy, you know that boy you told me about, in the village?” Tu Dou said. “Did you hit him?”
“No. I was afraid of him, though, so I never helped him and I never smiled at him, not even that day when he saved me from the dog. Not ever. And it’s one of the things that I regret most.”
“But if it’s not possible to be friends with them, then what should we do?”
“Actually, it’s probably enough to just overcome that feeling of fear. If you can choose not to be afraid, you might discover that it doesn’t matter if you can be friends with them,” I said. “You might not even need to help them. You just need to treat them normally. That’s the biggest kindness you can show them.”
5.
We got to Part Five of Wonder. On Valentine’s Day, Auggie’s older sister Via invited her boyfriend Justin to meet the family. Justin used to get tics when he was nervous, especially when they were at restaurants. Justin’s voice narrates: “i guess we’re all pretending not to notice things tonight. the waiter. my tics. the way august crushes the tortilla chips on the table and spoons the crumbs into his mouth.”
Tu Dou said to me that if Justin had been at his school, people would have looked down on him too. Justin was a good musician, but he had tics and his parents were separated. There was a serious lack of love in his life. These were all weaknesses, and school was like a jungle: other kids could smell weakness on you. Only the fittest would survive.
Tu Dou’s words startled me. It had never struck me before, but it was true: in a hostile environment, any one of us might be the weaklings. We could all, at any moment, encounter discrimination or unfair treatment.
In other words, we could all be Auggies. The only difference was the degree.
Tu Dou nodded seriously. “Look at Jack,” he said. In the book, Jack is portrayed as a brave little boy, but he doesn’t like going to school and gets bad grades. He has an ordinary family background. After Jack chooses to be friends with Auggie, most of the kids in class turn on him. No one talks to him. They all pretend he doesn’t exist. At one point, Auggie tells him, sardonically, “Welcome to my world!”
Yes, I got where Tu Dou was coming from: every child in the book had an imperfect life. In fact, Palacio gave them all some kind of internal lack or external flaw. Auggie and Via’s friend Miranda, for instance, is very beautiful. She becomes popular at her high school, but has to pay the price of being a liar who’s cynical about the world. Summer is almost perfect – a sweet girl, but she’s biracial, and nursing the giant wound of her father’s passing. She and her mother only have each other to depend on. Via seems to be flawless as well, but her difficulties stem from having Auggie as a brother. Since she was young, she’s withstood countless people pointing and whispering at her. All of this, including their love for Auggie and the compassion they show to the weak, would make them targets for mistreatment in a nastier environment.
“Yeah, if you say it that way, I get it,” Tu Dou said. “Remember Z, the girl in my old class? She was always eating, so she was fat. She had bad grades, and she was weird. She always lorded it over Q. She used to order him around and scold him all the time. On the flip side, other people ordered her around and scolded her, because she was fat. Everyone liked to bully her. To them, she and Q were the same.”
“Think about it,” I said to Tu Dou. “Those who are bullied aren’t just the fat kids, right? There’re skinny people, or the ones who are especially tall or short, or those who come from poor or farming families. Then there are ugly kids, kids who come from single-parent families, kids who get bad grades in class… Introverts, kids from the countryside… Basically, anyone who’s different, right?”
“Yeah,” Tu Dou said. “Actually, people discriminated against me too. Remember the year I won first prize at the piano competition? When I got back to school, some of them laughed at me. They said I was a sissy, that I wasn’t a guy, that only girls liked to play the piano. At first I was really mad and got into a fight with them. But later I realised that they didn’t understand classical music at all. They were just jealous.”
“Oh, Tu Dou! Why didn’t you tell me?”
“You can be kinda overprotective sometimes, Mummy.”
6.
One day, Tu Dou came home and thrust an essay at me. It was the writer Mo Yan’s Nobel acceptance lecture, delivered on the 8th of December 2012, at the Swedish Academy of Arts. The topic was “Storytellers”. Tu Dou had marked out two passages. The first:
When I was in the third grade, in the 1960s, the school took us to see an exhibit on suffering, and under the teacher’s direction, we were told to cry loudly. So that the teacher would see my expression of sorrow, I didn’t wipe away the tears on my cheeks. I saw several students surreptitiously rub spit on their faces, to counterfeit tears. I also remember seeing that among the sea of students – some really crying, some only pretend crying – there was one student, whose face was completely dry, who was completely silent, who didn’t have his hands covering his face. His eyes were wide open and staring at us, and they were filled with a kind of surprise, or perhaps it was confusion. After that, I reported the student to my teacher, and because of that, the school gave him a disciplinary warning. Many years later, when I expressed remorse at having told on him to my teacher, my teacher said that that day, more than ten of us had come to tell him of that incident. That student died several decades ago, but every time I think of him, I am still wracked by guilt.
And the second passage:
I was born ugly, and so many people in the village would mock me blatantly. There were a few bullies at school who would even beat me up because of that. I returned home crying, and my mother said to me, “Son, you’re not ugly – you don’t lack a nose or eyes, you’ve got all four limbs, so how are you ugly? And besides, so long as you have a kind heart and do good things, even if you were ugly, you would become beautiful. And later, when I moved to the city, there were some ostensibly highly cultured people who would nonetheless mock my looks behind my back. Some even did it to my face. But I recalled my mother’s words, and that enabled me to apologise to them with a calm heart.
As a reply to those words, I let Tu Dou read Part Eight of the translation. The novel was coming to an end, and Auggie and his entire fifth-grade class go on a nature trip. His looks draw the attention of a bunch of mean seventh graders, and Jack steps forward to defend Auggie. Three other students – originally bullies themselves – also step forward to help Jack, so there’s a fight, in which Auggie gets hurt. This unfortunate event creates a massive stir at Beecher Prep, and it makes Jack and the kids who defend Auggie into heroes.
At the graduation ceremony, Auggie doesn’t just make it to the honor roll for his academic grades, he also receives the Henry Ward Beecher medal for his quiet strength and the way it’s an inspiration to everyone. Mr. Tushman uses the commencement speech to talk about kindness, and delivers stirring, thought-provoking words. He says:
“…we carry with us, as human beings, not just the capacity to be kind, but the very choice of kindness. Such a simple thing, kindness. Such a simple thing. A nice word of encouragement given when needed. An act of friendship. A passing smile.”
7.
A while later, I was browsing online when I noticed that Tu Dou had updated his Qzone blog with a picture and some elaboration. It was a picture of a roly-poly bug that he’d found in the bathroom. Beneath it, he’d written:
I used to like cats, dogs, rabbits, goldfish, pandas, butterflies, parrots, and all the other nice-looking animals. I used to think that flies, centipedes, roly-polies and other such ugly bugs were gross. So I always killed them immediately, without any hesitation. But now I understand that even though there are higher and lower lifeforms, there aren’t any better or worse lifeforms. This little guy accidentally found his way to my house. He has his own reasons for living, so I don’t think I’m all that different from him.
When I was younger, I looked at Feng Zikai’s collection, “Protecting Life”, and I didn’t understand what he meant when he said that protecting all life is protecting one’s own heart, but now I get it. So I put this little guy into a tissue and brought him to a flowerbed outside.
8.
At the end of Wonder, Palacio added a postscript acknowledging and thanking all her family members and colleagues. After that, she thanked an anonymous individual: “Last but not least, I would like to thank the little girl in front of the ice cream shop, and all the other ‘Auggies’ whose stories have inspired me to write this book.”
I realised that this was where Wonder had sprung from, and that there was probably a moving story behind it. I checked a few overseas websites, and lo and behold:
When she wrote Wonder, Palacio was an editor at a publishing house, with two “Tu Dous” of her own. One day when she was out with her children, they were waiting in line at the ice cream shop. Ahead of them in the queue was a little girl with a very serious facial deformity. Palacio’s three-year-old son noticed the girl and began to cry in fear. The writer was horribly embarrassed, knowing that her son’s cries were hurtful to the little girl and her family. She scooped the boy up and left. Just as they were leaving, she heard the little girl’s mother say to her own children, in the calmest and friendliest of tones, “Alright, kids. I think it’s time to go.”
This real-life incident was written into Jack’s narrative, although she changed the mother to a babysitter.
When she got home, Palacio regretted her actions. She felt that she shouldn’t have left on the spot, but instead tried to deal with her son’s tears some other way. For instance, she could have taken him to talk to the little girl, or something similar. She kept thinking: how many times a day does that little girl and her family have to face this kind of incident? And that evening, she heard the Natalie Merchant song Wonder. She’d heard it before, but it wasn’t until that moment that she truly understood the lyrics:
Doctors have come from distant cities, just to see me
Stand over my bed, disbelieving what they’re seeing
They say I must be one of the wonders
Of God’s own creation
And as far as they see, they can offer
No explanation
This song became both the title and the epigraph of the novel. Palacio had been touched twice in a single day. That very evening, struck by inspiration, she began to write the book.
I told Tu Dou about this. He murmured, “Huh. So everyone knows someone like Auggie.”
9.
Three months went by very quickly. On New Year’s Day 2015, I wrapped up the translation of Wonder on time, and handed it to the publishers.
I solemnly thanked Tu Dou for being such a major part of my translation work. Throughout the entire process, we’d helped each other, and spoken and listened to each other as friends would. It had brought us safely through that terrible initial period of moving to a strange new city.
He said, “Mummy, look: Palacio’s a book editor, you’re a book editor too. She wrote Wonder for her sons and you translated Wonder for your son.
“Thank you, Mummy,” he said. “I kinda feel like you translated this for me.”
10.
That autumn, Tu Dou got into the music high school affiliated with the Shanghai Conservatory of Music, and began to pursue his dreams of becoming a pianist.
Not long after school started, he came home with a piece of news that gave me a massive shock.
It turned out that his elementary school classmates had made a chat group, and the thirty-odd students had trickled back together in the confines of virtual space. They all sent a recent photo of themselves to the group, and talked about their new schools, their new classes, their new friends. Everyone was making good progress and everyone had grown up. Everything seemed wonderful.
In the midst of the hubbub, Tu Dou had asked about Q. And then someone had added Q to the group.
What startled Tu Dou was this: what happened in elementary school began to happen all over again.
“Ewww…” someone said.
“Go away!” said someone else.
“What are you doing here, retard? Go back to wherever you came from!” The boy who said that used to be a good friend of Tu Dou’s.
“Freaks like you have no right to be here!”
“Oh my god. Idiots can also use QQ now?”
“We don’t want you here. Don’t give us your creepy skin disease!” This person was also a good friend of Tu Dou’s.
“You’re just a nightmare, you’re not a classmate of ours!”
……
Before Tu Dou’s eyes, the chat grew longer and more agitated, with exclamation points filling the screen. This was the truly contagious disease. Everyone scrabbled to kick Q out of the group, just like what had happened three or four years ago in school. But this time, Tu Dou decided to stand up for Q.
We graduated elementary school ages ago, guys! we should be more grown up!
But nooooo
we’re all still totally immature
like we’re still stupid kids
bullying other people all the time
Don’t u guys have any SYMPATHY? u think ur all so good, brave and caring and all that
@H.W. and @A. I don’t wanna be ur friend anymore! Im ashamed that we used to be friends at all!
If you don’t start learning and examining yourselves, you’ll never know what true bravery is, or what real compassion is!
Until one day someone BULLIES YOU TOO !!!
@Q. lets just leave this chat these guys arent worth it
they cant hurt you anymore
Tu Dou typed in a fit of fury.
“And then?” I asked.
“Everyone went silent. Q listened to me and left the group, and then I left the group too.”
“You feel a sense of loss, but yet very gratified; a bit lonely, and yet tragically heroic?” I asked.
“Yeah,” Tu Dou said. “It felt a bit like choosing to be a pianist. I felt both lonely and tragically heroic. Mummy, remember when I read Fu Lei’s Family Letters? I think I finally understand what he says to Fu Cong: first be a person, then an artist, and only then, a pianist.”
If this life is a performance, then surely this performance is a stage performance and not a cinematic one. For we are confronted not by the camera, but by the living audience. We act as we are meant to do, for there can be no editing. If we give a lousy performance, there is no way to take it back, because there are no additional takes for the taking. What makes life more difficult than any stage performance is the absence of a script. There is no telling what comes next and there will be no rehearsals. From the moment we are born, the curtain rises and we have entered the stage. And by the time the critics evaluate our performance and historians make their conclusions, we would have departed from this stage we call the world.
Life – what a profoundly difficult performance to give!
We are all familiar with the kaleidoscope. Our childhood days were spent looking through the mirror of the kaleidoscope at the countless, beautiful images. As we turn it continuously, the images change endlessly. But smash the kaleidoscope open, and you will find nothing but bits of coloured paper inside.
Our lives are no different.
As the wheel of life turns, many things are vibrant, and they interweave and transform. However, rend it apart and you will see that an assortment of some simple beings and some simple objects is all there really is.
Ruan Dacheng (1587-1646) is one of the great late-Ming writers, but his importance as a poet has been undervalued, almost certainly as a result of his political notoriety, which still affects views of him today. However, his outstanding contributions to drama are generally recognised and he is considered one of the leading playwrights of the generation after Tang Xianzu.
Ruan was born into a prosperous official family in Anqing on the Yangtze (now in Anhui province). He studied poetry with his great-uncle, the distinguished poet Ruan Zihua. After obtaining his Presented Scholar (jinshi) degree in 1616, he embarked on an official career, which went well until 1624, when one of the political factions of the time, the Eastern Grove (Donglin), found him to be an obstacle to their plans to dominate the triennial appraisal of officials, whereby they hoped to get their own men into power in the government. Although Ruan had previously had some links with the Eastern Grove (his father-in-law was a leading member), he was unwilling to stand aside for their convenience, and appears to have solicited support from the chief eunuch of the emperor’s court, Wei Zhongxian, or at least he was later accused of having done so. This strategy worked in the short term, and Ruan received further promotion, but after the feeble Tianqi Emperor died and Wei Zhongxian lost power, Ruan was eventually dismissed from office.
On his return home to Anqing in about 1630, Ruan – already a prolific poet – took up the writing of drama in the chuanqi (as it was known in the Ming) or kunqu style of Chinese opera, to be performed by his family’s private theatrical troupe. The play from which extracts are translated here is the first of his plays to survive. It was published in 1633 by Ruan himself, under his own ‘Hall of Chanting What is in my Heart’ (Yonghuaitang) imprint, with illustrations by the commercial artist Zhang Xiu, a personal friend of Ruan.
The immensely complicated plot of this 40-scene play, Spring Lantern Riddles, or Ten Cases of Mistaken Identity (Shicuoren chundengmi ji), can be briefly summarised as follows: a young student, Yuwen Yan, and a young lady, Wei Yingniang (disguised as a man, ‘Mr Yin’), meet while solving riddles at the Lantern Festival and exchange poems. In darkness, each mistakenly boards the other’s boat; Yuwen Yan had been accompanying his father Yuwen Xingjian to an official position in Xiang county, while Yingniang was accompanying her father to the capital. Yingniang is adopted by Yan’s parents Mr and Mrs Yuwen, but Yingniang’s father Mr Wei has Yan thrown overboard; he is taken for a bandit and put in prison, where he is befriended by a perceptive jailer, Doulu Xun. The Yuwens are misled by the discovery of Yingniang’s maid’s body into thinking their son is dead. Meanwhile, their older son achieves success but his name has been accidentally changed from Yuwen Xi to Li Wenyi, and his parents also change their surname to Li; Yuwen Xi/Li Wenyi marries Yingniang’s sister. Yan, released from prison, discovers he is believed to be a spirit; he changes his name and accompanies his former jailer to the capital (this is the part translated here), where he comes first in the examinations and is betrothed to the Yuwens’ (now the Lis’) ‘daughter’. Once he meets his prospective father-in-law, actually his real father, all is gradually revealed; in a happy ending, Yan and Yingniang are finally united.
Even at the time, readers recognised that the misunderstandings and reversals of fortune suffered by the hero Yuwen Yan were an expression of Ruan’s feelings about his political misfortunes. As his friend the distinguished Shaoxing writer and official Wang Siren observed in his preface to the play: ‘The trend of the times was misdirected, and he met with opprobrium and aroused fear and opposition, so that right and wrong changed places.’ All four of Ruan’s surviving plays, in fact, are concerned with identity and the authentic self; these concepts were of great interest to late-Ming intellectuals in general, but had a particularly personal resonance for Ruan. But despite Ruan’s serious concern with authenticity and identity, this play in particular is full of humour. The misfortunes which beset the hero as a result of others’ misperceptions of his identity – is he a scholar, a bandit, a ghost, a spirit? – combine to form such a tangle that we think it will never be unravelled, and yet Ruan brings it all to a logical and successful conclusion. Along the way we encounter such humorous scenes as those translated here.
Scene 31: Disturbance in a Temple
Enter the Priest of Huangling Temple.
You have to believe that gods exist; you can’t trust that they don’t. So when someone has asked you a favour, you have to carry it out. When the Doctor of the Five Classics, Mr Li, was here recently, he handed his son’s clothes and a poem over to me, and enjoined me to display them on the Lantern Festival and the fifteenth of the last month of every year, in order to summon his son’s spirit. Now today is the fifteenth of the twelfth month. Acolytes, why don’t you bring out young Master Yuwen’s clothes and the poem and arrange them on the altar till I summon him.
Acolytes arrange clothes and poem. Priest bows.
Master Yuwen Yan, today is your birthday, come and partake of your feast.
Burns paper money.
The paper turns into white butterflies, without tears to dye them red like azaleas.
Exit.
Enter Yuwen Yan in travelling clothes with a pack and an umbrella.
Wind blowing loud,
Snow like a shroud.
The huntsman stays home;
The bird has flown.
I laugh at heaven’s lord,
This world is too absurd.
When snow has fallen on the Celestial Mountains, the wind from the sea is cold.
How many soldiers on campaign wipe their eyes to look around.
Alas, the human heart is more fickle than water.
Storms arise despite flat calm.
Since I left Brother Doulu’s house, it’s already the fifteenth of the twelfth month, and that’s my birthday: I’m twenty this year. My family are scattered, I’m all alone, and now I’ve run into this snowstorm: it’s absolutely perishing. Still, even though I’m cold and lonely, it’s a lot better than suffering in that dark dungeon. I can see Huangling Temple not far off ahead, and evening’s drawing in, so I’d better slip in there and look for the priest of the temple. After a few days’ rest and in better weather, I can hire a boat and head for Xiang township. Look,
This wretched snow freezes rivers and hills.
Sound of wind howling.
What a wind!
I’m blown along over the ground.
My umbrella spinning round.
Look,
A single spark of a lamp’s red glow.
There’s a rough fence
Shared by a shivering dog and an evening crow.
Here I am at Huangling Temple. The gate is half open, but there’s no-one around. It’s certainly not as lively as at the Lantern Festival.
Brushes snow off his clothes, puts down pack and umbrella, kneels before altar.
Oh Lord, I am Yuwen Yan, and I have come here again to gaze on your glory: I am truly reborn. Today is your follower’s birthday, I pray for your protection in the world beyond.
Gets up and looks around.
Today is the fifteenth of the twelfth month; people must be worshipping, but where has the priest got to?
Notices clothes.
What’s this? Well I never, it’s a suit of clothes. They look like mine.
Picks up clothes and examines them.
Goodness, they actually are mine! How bizarre! How did they get here?
A headscarf in Huayang style
Jacket and robe of red
This belt
I have tied myself; I know its value.
This are the clothes I took off that day on the government boat in the hope of slipping away unnoticed, but I was caught and my clothes seized, and I had no idea what happened to them.
On the boat I stripped, hoping to escape;
They swarmed around and snatched them all.
How dreadful to recall!
I know: after they threw me in the water, the people on the boat must have thought that clothes belonging to a dead man were unlucky and left them on the bank. Then the priest must have found them and brought them here for his own use. What a pity that
Water stains and muddy treads
Have blotted out the fine embroidered threads.
I’m absolutely freezing, and after all they’re my own clothes, I might as well put them on.
Puts on clothes, bows to altar.
If these aren’t my own clothes, they’re a precious gift from the gods.
Notices poem.
What’s this document on the altar-table? Let me open it and have a look. Well, here’s another strange thing: this is the poem I wrote myself and gave to that Mr Yin. How ever did it get here?
When we met in youth
Reciting verse amid the lantern-hung trees
How did the poem come to be an offering to the gods?
I suppose since Mr Yin was drunk the poem must have fallen out of his sleeve and been picked up by the priest. I dare say
His shirt sleeve let in the spring breeze;
His shirt sleeve let in the spring breeze.
I’ll just stow it away safely, and if I ever run into Mr Yin again anywhere I’ll ask him for the poem and see how he explains himself! I’ve been here quite a while now; how come nobody’s appeared? I’d better go in and call them.
An acolyte enters; they collide and fall over. The acolyte sees him and shrieks.
Acolyte:
Oh no! Burglars! He’s pinched Master Yuwen’s clothes and put them on! Reverend, hurry!
Yuwen Yan:
Where’s the priest? I’m Mr Yuwen.
Priest enters, sees him and is terrified.
Priest:
It’s not a burglar, it’s Master Yuwen’s ghost. Come on, everyone, come and chase him away.
Priests rush in, hit Yuwen with sticks and drive him away.
Quickly, lock the temple gate!
They lock gate.
Priest:
Fancy such a thing happening. Master Yuwen appeared, as large as life. It must be that because of the mystery over his death, his soul can’t rest, so he came and put the clothes on. What about the poem?
Looks for poem.
He’s taken that too.
Priests:
What a to-do
It gave us a grue
A ghost appearing and roaming free
A ghost appearing and roaming free
Donning his clothes as living men do
And snatching away the poem too
Priest:
What shall I do? His parents entrusted the clothes and poem to me; if they ever come this way again and ask to see them, they’ll never believe me if I tell them what happened. They’ll just think I broke my promise and spent their money. Acolytes, can you go outside and have a look around under the plum trees?
Acolytes:
It’s blowing a gale out there, we can’t light a lantern. It’s just coming up to New Year; all the ghosts are on holiday. Our reverend has studied magic and can cast spells, and even he’s afraid to go outside. Let’s get out of here and not wait for him to pick on us.
Close the door and recite the Yellow Court scripture
…
Never mind whether the plum trees are here or there.
Pastiche of Tang poems:
To the clear music of the jade flute the cranes pirouette
As the wind blows through high heaven the gibbons sadly cry
It must be that the soul in spring is transformed into a swallow
Which, longing for home, returns to ascend the homeward-gazing terrace.
Scene 32: Name of Lu
Enter Yuwen Yan
Indeed:
When fortune fades, gold turns to tin;
When times are awry, ghosts torment men.
Why ever did the priest think I was a ghost? I know, he must have heard that I was thrown off the government boat into the river, and he doesn’t know that I didn’t drown, so I can’t blame him. I was just going to make him a bow; who’d have thought that all his acolytes would start beating me up without giving me a chance to speak. I got such a fright that all I could think of was running away. It must be because the bad aura around my supposed death hasn’t fully dispersed. Now it’s dark and the snowstorm is severe: where can I go for shelter? I’ll just have to knock on the temple gate and explain everything thoroughly so he won’t have any doubts about letting me stay.
Knocks.
Open up! Open up!
No response. Knocks again.
Voice within:
Master Yuwen, your death was mysterious and you have a wrong to be avenged, but it’s nothing to do with our temple. Don’t make a disturbance here. We’ll burn some paper money for you tomorrow.
Yuwen:
They really do believe I’m a ghost. It’s a waste of time knocking; the more I knock the less likely they are to open up. I’ll just have to take shelter under the eaves for the night and explain to them tomorrow. Surely they won’t still have any doubts in broad daylight! But the wind’s really strong, it’s absolutely freezing. This is awful!
Shivers. Enter two beggars.
The north wind doth blow
And we shall have snow
We’ve a stoup but no wine for our cup
We’re hungry and cold
But as we’ve been told
In Maiden’s Temple a feast’s coming up
First beggar:
Mate, it’s not called the Maiden’s Temple now; since Scholar Yuwen’s manifestation it’s been called Yuwen’s Temple.
Both beggars:
In Yuwen’s Temple a feast’s coming up
So there we will go
And the folks will soon know
We’re in need of a bite and a sup.
Exeunt beggars.
Yuwen (listening):
Look at those beggars trudging through the mud on the way to some temple or other. It must be a place that offers lodging, but I’m in such a mess, I didn’t like to ask. And now there are a lot more people coming from over there.
Enter Zou Nianba and his father carrying a banner, Xu Dengsi and his wife and child, with other villagers.
When gods command
We’re all at hand
To tell fortunes and draw lots
For peace and joy
We’ve made a date
To give thanks for kind fate
We’ve made a date
To give thanks for kind fate
Through snow, through hail
We’ll never fail
To give thanks and praise.
Brothers, we’re all going to Master Yuwen’s Temple to give thanks for blessings received. It’s time we were off.
Yuwen stops them.
Friends, there’s a snowstorm and it’s night-time, where are you all going?
Villagers:
You obviously don’t know that we’ve got Master Yuwen’s Shrine here. It’s really efficacious. Whether you draw lots or do automatic writing, it’s as though he’s speaking directly to you. Today’s the fifteenth, and we’ve all received blessings from the spirit, so we’re going to burn incense to him in gratitude.
Yuwen:
Since there’s really a shrine that’s so efficacious, would it be all right if I go along with you, friends, and ask for guidance on my future through automatic writing?
Villagers:
No problem at all, but you must be sincere. Now after a few twists and turns, here we are. Is there a Taoist priestess at home?
Lots and planchette are prepared. Two priestesses enter.
Nine dots of autumn mist in the black sky
Among green blossoms thoughts of return are never-ending
We always lament that the crane steed will not tarry
And ever regret that as we approach the clouds there is still more to say
Welcome, true believers. And who is this?
Villagers:
He’s a visitor in the area; he saw us on the way so he’s come to have his fortune told too, to find out about his future.
Yuwen and priestesses greet each other.
Zou Nianba:
Your reverence, when I got home that day, my father had been released from custody; the magistrate’s court didn’t give him any trouble at all, they only gave him a small fine. Now we’ve made an embroidered banner and brought it to hang in the shrine, and here’s a tael of silver for your reverence.
Priestess:
Thank you very much.
Xu Dengsi:
When I went home last time, I followed what the spirit told me and got my wife to fetch some water from the garden pond at midnight and give it to the child to drink, and sure enough he got better. Today I’ve come with my wife and child to dedicate him to the spirit. We’ve brought two bolts of white cloth: your reverence can use it to make slippers.
Priestess:
I’m a nun, I don’t bind my feet, so I don’t need all that cloth. But your offering is accepted. Everyone, when we strike the bell and drum, pay your respects and give thanks.
Villagers bow.
Clasping the lots
Grasping the slips
Obscurity comes clear
Truth is made manifest
Alarm turns to safety
Lawsuits turn out well
Zou and father:
We present our
Colourful banner
They bow.
Xu and wife:
As husband and wife
We give our child a new name
Villagers kneel, then stand up.
Priestess:
Believers, this shows your sincere faith. This is a very fine banner. Acolytes, hang it up.
Xu and wife:
Your reverence, please choose a religious name for our child.
Priestess, placing hands on child’s head:
What a sweet child. Let’s call him Purple Protection. The presiding spirit of our temple is the husband of Our Lady the Purple Maiden, so we’ll name him Purple Protection. [Addresses spirit.] Great Spirit, Lord Yu, protect and bless Purple Protection; let him grow to adulthood without trouble and live to be a hundred.
Xu and wife express thanks. Yuwen Yan (aside):
So the spirit is really this efficacious. I’d better use a few coins from the travelling expenses that Mr Doulu gave me, not to cast lots but to request a response in automatic writing, to find out about my future career.
Looks out money and turns round.
Your reverence, I am alone and in distress, with no fixed abode, but as I’m now fortunate enough to have reached this shrine, I must have some good karma from a previous life. I have a small amount of incense money here; I would be most grateful if you would act as a medium for the Purple Maiden. If her prophecy comes true, I will return and show my gratitude.
Priestess:
Your offering is accepted, but you know the way we do automatic writing here is very peculiar; it’s quite different from other temples. There, the priestesses act as mediums for Purple Maiden, but here I act as a medium for Purple Maiden’s husband. The first answer is written with a brush suspended by a string, but if you have further questions, you know the spirit was originally an intellectual, so he’s a bit lazy, and we have to hold the brush for him to write. I thought I’d better tell you in advance; I hope you don’t mind me speaking so frankly.
Yuwen:
He’s a great spirit, of course there’s no question of criticising him.
Priestess:
All right then, sir, you pray and make your wish silently, and I’ll offer up some spells for you to request the spirit to descend.
Yuwen kneels and prays. Priestess lays out paper below the brush. Music within. Priestess recites prayer, and burns paper with spell.
Priestess:
Normally he comes as soon as you pray to him. How strange that there’s no response this time. Perhaps this woman has brought some uncleanness into the temple.
Xu’s wife:
We came to give thanks today: I had a bath first. Of course I wouldn’t bring any uncleanness.
Priestess repeats the burning of the spell. The string holding the brush is burnt; the brush starts to write by itself. Villagers kneel in amazement. When the brush stops moving, Yuwen picks up the paper and reads:
You are a man of learning.
Yuwen nods.
Teaching among the foremost.
I’ve never taught at all, it’s my father who is the Education Supervisor.
Priestess:
Father and son are one flesh, it comes to the same thing.
Yuwen continues reading:
Enduring many sorrows
And countless hardships.
Yuwen weeps.
Indeed, indeed. That’s quite right.
From now on you will escape from your toils
Your fame and glory will gradually become manifest.
I should be so lucky!
You, young scholar,
Remember my words
Far off in the future
They will come true.
Yuwen bows to express gratitude.
That’s very clear advice, thank you for your guidance. But may I request you, great spirit, to sign your noble name, so that if I do indeed achieve distinction, I will be able to inscribe a suitable document to go with the banner which I will dedicate in gratitude.
Priestess:
Sir, I explained before that if you have a further question, the spirit will write through the medium of myself and my acolytes, otherwise he can’t be bothered.
Yuwen:
As you wish.
Priestess and acolytes hold the brush and write. Enter beggars asking for food. Yuwen watches as priestess writes.Yuwen reads:
A visitor from the Isles of the Blest
A spirit from the Cave Court
Well, obviously he’s a senior spirit.
I happened to fall asleep, drunk, at a banquet of peaches
The Queen Mother of the West was enraged
The Lord of the East had to calm her down
And so I was exiled to spend a time in the world of men
Yuwen:
How remarkable, so he was incarnated to spend time in the human world, but it seems that he ascended from the world to be a spirit again. May I ask your name?
Brush moves again. Yuwen reads:
Consort of the Purple Maiden
Yuwen Yan.
Surprised, Yuwen speaks aside:
What an extraordinary thing! Can he really have exactly the same name as me? It’s a bit suspicious. Let me inquire further.
Turns and speaks:
May I ask where you were born in the human world? What sort of family were you born to? And later, how did you meet your end? Kindly explain in detail.
Priestess:
Nobody’s ever asked more than one extra question, or two at the most.
Yuwen:
I have a good reason for asking, if you don’t mind holding the brush again.
Priestess:
If you annoy the spirit, he’ll lose his temper and start scribbling.
Brush moves wildly.
What did I tell you?
Yuwen takes paper and reads quickly, gives a start.
From Wushan county
A well-born student
On an official mission to Xiang township we moored here
Viewing the lanterns I returned to my boat as the moonlight grew dim
And boarded another family’s boat by mistake
Losing my footing
I fell on to the waterside
And so it was that I was paired with a water spirit
And manifested my power
Tut tut, I must really be possessed! Here I am, Yuwen Yan from Wushan county, as large as life, wasting my time bowing down to a miserable bit of stick.
Tears up paper, kicks planchette.
This witch and her cantrips
These ghosts and their antics
Try to cheat us and fleece us
I’m Yuwen Yan
Here in the flesh
Not some Maiden’s Consort
Wielding paper and pen
Priestess, indignantly:
Everybody, you see this disreputable trouble-maker vandalising our shrine without any reason. When our holy Lord Yuwen’s body was laid out in this temple, I myself agreed with his butler that I would arrange the coffin. And not long ago, the Doctor of the Five Classics, Mr Li, undertook the burial. The spirit has been dead to the world for over a year; he couldn’t just appear in the flesh again. If he won’t believe me, fetch lanterns and we’ll drag him round the side of the shrine to have a look at the grave.
They manhandle Yuwen.
Villagers:
He’s obviously a trouble-maker. We should never have brought him here to insult the shrine.
They drag Yuwen towards the grave.
Priestess:
Acolytes, brush the snow off the gravestone. Look, everybody!
They look. Priestess reads:
‘Here lies Yuwen Yan, scholar of the Tang dynasty, from Wushan county.’ And below is a line of smaller characters: ‘Erected by Doctor of the Five Classics Li Xingjian.’
Villagers:
You scoundrel, what do you say to that?
They hit him. Yuwen calls out:
Heavens, Heavens, what can I say? Can there be such injustice in heaven or on earth? Here I am alive and well, and someone else’s body has been buried here as me. And I don’t know who this Li Xingjian is who put up the gravestone. This rotten priestess is using spirits and wonders to swindle all these people, and now they’re all beating up the real, living Yuwen Yan. Oh God, what strange events!
Villagers:
The fellow must be a madman! The inscription on the gravestone is as clear as clear, and he still tries to deny it.
An impressive tomb
An impressive tomb
A gravestone with words inscribed
Who is this addlepate
Who claims he’s Yuwen Yan
And dares a spirit to impersonate?
Two beggars:
You’re spot on, everyone.
We came with one wish
But you’ve lost us our dish
We’ll take you to court
And you’ll eat what you ought!
Villagers leave, cursing Yuwen. Beggars drag him off. Enter Doulu Xun on horseback with attendants.
The mountain pass was frozen
My horse would not advance
In clearing rain, at cockcrow, early I ply my whip.
I have spent the night here at a lodging in Huangling Post Station. There has been a great fall of snow overnight, but luckily the weather has cleared this morning, so I must be on my way.
Sounds within of fighting and cries of ‘Yuwen Yan!’
Where do these shouts come from
And cries of ‘Yuwen Yan’?
Oh, in the distance I can see two beggars dragging a man along who looks like my old friend Yuwen Yan; what’s going on?
Beggars drag Yuwen Yan on stage.
Beggars:
Sir, yesterday evening he was telling lies, pretending to be a spirit, and he prevented us getting a meal.
Yuwen:
It was you who said I was a spirit; what do you mean I pretended to be one?
Doulu approaches and shouts at the beggars:
This man’s my friend: what do you miserable beggars mean by dragging him about?
Beats beggars and drives them off. Greets Yuwen.
Brother, what’s been going on here?
Yuwen:
Elder brother, don’t let’s talk about it, I might as well be dead!
Yuwen jumps into river. Doulu seizes hold of him.
Yuwen:
I deliver up my life to the Yellow Springs
Then I will have no more troubles
Doulu holds on and questions him. Yuwen, weeping, explains:
After I left you, I ran into a great snowstorm. Yesterday was my birthday, and I was planning to go to the Huangling Temple to look for the priest whom I originally met so that I could stay there for a few days; then once the weather had cleared I could hire a boat and travel to Xiang township to find my parents. But to my surprise, when I reached the temple, they all thought I was a ghost, beat me up and drove me out. I suppose they’d heard that the Cabinet Minister had thrown me off his boat and thought I’d drowned, so they were suspicious; I can’t really blame them. But imagine this: when I got to this shrine here, where there were a number of people giving thanks for their blessings, and having their fortunes told by lots or automatic writing, I used the travelling expenses which you so kindly gave me to pay the priestess to tell my fortune, and the hanging brush wrote a paper saying that I would gain fame and fortune.
Doulu:
That’s remarkable. I ought to go and have my fortune told too, to see how my mission will turn out.
Yuwen:
What happened next was really ridiculous. I asked the spirit for his name, so that if my fortune came true I could write a document to dedicate a banner in gratitude. And whose name do you think he wrote?
Doulu:
Whose?
Yuwen:
He wrote my own name!
Doulu:
He might just have the same name as you, you never know.
Yuwen:
It got even more ridiculous: when I asked in more detail about his place of origin and family, they were exactly the same as mine. So I got upset and kicked over the planchette, and then the priestess and the people called me a trouble-maker who’d vandalised their shrine. I was furious and got in an argument with them. It really was the most extraordinary thing.
Doulu:
If that wasn’t extraordinary, I don’t know what is!
Yuwen:
When the priestess heard me arguing my case, she had torches lit and she and the congregation took me round the side of the shrine. There was a big tomb there with a gravestone on top, and when the snow was swept off so we could read it, it actually said: ‘Here lies Yuwen Yan, scholar of the Tang dynasty, from Wushan county.’ And beside this was a line of smaller characters saying ‘Erected by Doctor of the Five Classics Li Xingjian’. When I saw this I was so angry I couldn’t utter a word to ask them to investigate. I don’t know whose body has been mistaken for mine, and I can’t think what induced this Doctor of the Five Classics Li Xingjian to come and bury it and put up a gravestone. Brother, have you ever heard of such a bizarre thing, past or present? Because of the rumpus after I kicked over that wretched planchette, those beggars, who were hoping to get in on the feast, didn’t manage to get any of the food and drink from the shrine, so they’ve been manhandling me all night, and this morning they were going to drag me off to court as a trouble-maker. If I hadn’t run into you, brother, I’d have been in trouble yet again. I can’t complain about them, though: it’s all because of my terrible bad luck, which has caused me so many problems. Now I’m too ashamed to face my parents; I might as well throw myself in the river and drown rather than go on suffering in this life.
I’m like the Liaohai crane
Returning alone
The city survives
But the people are gone
Doulu:
I can’t make head or tail of this. I would have liked to take you to the magistrate and explain everything, in order to clear up your case and put right all the terrible wrongs that people have done you. But it’s nearly the end of the year, and I’ve got to get to the capital. Brother, if you’re too ashamed to go to Xiang township, the coming year is one of the big examination years; why don’t you come with me to the capital and make a name for yourself, and then you can still go and see your parents?
Next year will be
A year of great competition
We should spur on to submit three prize-winning essays
Yuwen:
Even if you’re kind enough to take me with you, I haven’t got any place there where I could submit my documents, and there’s no-one to act as my sponsor. I’m such a poor unfortunate soul, they’re bound to inquire into my origins: not only will I not gain fame and fortune, I’ll most likely be accused of impersonation. What’s more, ‘Yu Jun’ is known as the name of a criminal, and now ‘Yuwen Yan’ is supposed to be a ghost: they’re both unlucky names. The only good end I can come to is death.
Doulu, considering:
I know! We’re already sworn brothers, so you just change your surname to Lu after my name Doulu. I’ve got documents here to be delivered to the capital with recommendations for promotion for people from Zhijiang county, so if you’re included in this patronage, there won’t be any question of an investigation. There’s nothing to stop you coming with me: don’t miss this opportunity!
Yuwen, thoughtfully:
That’s a good suggestion. If I go with you to the capital, even if I’m not successful in the exam, at least it’s a trip in your company. It’s all thanks to you that I’ve gained a new life; I’ll call myself Lu Gengsheng, Born-Again Lu.
The surname Lu comes from a man of authority
I’ll take on the personal name Born-Again
Doulu prays:
Heavenly Lord, Heavenly Lord, bless and preserve Born-Again Lu. Let his troubles be over and happiness come to him, and let him now gain first place in the examinations.
Let us go to Chang’an
Leave the old for the new
And take the first place
Yuwen:
I feel deep gratitude for
The benefactor from my former life
Who has saved me again from trouble and strife
Doulu:
Attendants, take the luggage off that packhorse and carry it yourselves, and saddle up the packhorse for Mr Lu to ride.
Attendants unload luggage, Yuwen mounts.
Yuwen:
I’ve suddenly remembered that lantern riddle, and now I’ve unintentionally found the answer. How strange! It said
A mule paired with a horse
But without its other half
Sure enough, my sworn brother has changed my surname to Lu [written the same as the character for ‘mule’ but without the ‘horse’ radical]. On this journey, surely
The criminal will become Mr Nobody
Offered up to the Imperial Park
Pastiche of Tang poems:
Before I could express gratitude for his kindness, we were divided like life from death
On a chance encounter I enquired about my future course
In cold weather and evening rain in uninhabited hills
I still have someone who is ready to sing for me a song of travel
Scene 36a: Watch this Space
Narrator:
Dear audience, in this scene, the thirty-seventh, we ought to show the Third Metropolitan Graduate Li Wenyi, on his way back to court after defeating Yeluohe, passing by Huangling Temple, where he happens to meet Doulu Xun who’s there on official business. At this time Li Wenyi intends to go to pay his respects at his brother Yuwen Yan’s tomb, but Doulu Xun explains the whole story of how in fact Yuwen Yan didn’t die, but changed his name to Born-Again Lu, and has become the top Metropolitan Graduate. He gives a letter from Yuwen Yan to Li Wenyi to open in person. When Li Wenyi sees it he is overjoyed and thanks Doulu Xun; he includes Doulu Xun’s name in his report on his victory and promotes him to Usher in the Court of State Ceremonial, and they travel to the capital together. This is another remarkable sequence of events. However, the gentleman responsible for writing the script hasn’t actually written it yet.
A voice within:
Why hasn’t he completed it yet?
Narrator, striking gong:
This play is really far too complicated; he’s afraid if he wrote the script for this scene he would get into trouble.
Voice within:
Trouble with who?
Narrator:
Trouble with Chaos. So he’s leaving this bit for now, and he’ll fill it in later on.
Voice within:
How much later on?
Narrator:
All in good time; just wait till the time when his parents have reached the venerable age of 100, and then he’ll complete the old songs and write some new ones. Now would the Doctor of the Five Classics please come on stage, in order for the top Metropolitan Graduate to be introduced as son-in-law and recognise his parents. Before I’ve even finished, here comes Li Xingjian!
In the bustling city, we often stumble upon elegant coffeehouses with their warm lights and soothing music. We step in and the cacophony of the streets are left to the world beyond the thick glass doors. We can sink ourselves into comfortable chairs, enjoy the music, and sip our drinks. All is well with the world. Yet eventually, work demands our attention. Emerging from the open doors once again, we invite the clamorous world back in.
This is the image of modern day serenity.
Not a reclusive life in the idyllic mountains and forests, far from the madding crowd. But a search for serenity, time and again, between the narrow spaces of a tumultuous world.
On the first day of medical school, a professor tells his class, “As a doctor, it is of utmost importance that you are courageous and meticulous.” Having said this, he sticks his finger into a urine sample on his desk, and puts the finger into his mouth. Then, he hands the urine sample over to the students and watches as they suppress their nausea and follow suit, taking turns to give the urine sample a taste.
Finally, he laughs and says, “Very well, all of you have demonstrated that you are courageous enough. But it’s a pity that none of you are meticulous enough. None of you noticed that I reached into the vial with my index finger, but the finger I subsequently placed into my mouth was my middle finger!”
A professor at law school tells a story during his class. Three hunting dogs chase a groundhog. The groundhog ducks into one end of a log, but what emerges from the other end is a rabbit. The rabbit dashes forward at lightning speed and jumps onto a tall tree. However, it loses its footing and falls onto the three hunting dogs that have been watching it from beneath the tree. The three dogs are knocked unconscious by the impact of the rabbit’s fall and so, the rabbit escapes unscathed.
When this story came to an end, many students wants answers to their questions. How could a rabbit climb a tree? How could a rabbit knock three hunting dogs unconscious at the same time?
“The questions you are asking are not too bad and demonstrate just how illogical this story has been”, the professor responds. “But the most important question has yet to be asked – where on earth did the groundhog go?”
A professor of art history is lecturing on the use of colours by ancient artists. By baking a shell, grinding it into a fine powder, and mixing it with glue, one is able to make white paint.
Later, the professor conducts an examination, and one of the questions was a true-or-false question.
“If you picked up a seashell by the beach, placed it in a furnace, baked it at five hundred degrees for thirty minutes, removed it from the furnace, ground it into powder, and then mixed the powder with glue, you will get black paint.”
Most of the students confidently circled ‘True’ before they had even finished reading the statement.
By paying attention to conclusions and neglecting the details, or by focusing on the details and ignoring the conclusions, people reveal a tendency to take for granted their methods of thinking when they are in a hurry and neglect to put in extra effort into verification. This is our common mistake!
Corners of Altay is a series of essays depicting Li Juan’s experiences in the Kazakh-speaking region of the Xinjiang Province in western China. In the 1990’, she and her mother, one of the few ethnic Han people living in the Gobi Desert, first operated a tailor shop, then a nomadic grocery store for their equally mobile customers. They would follow the herds in the summer, but they would fend off the winter by staying put in a temporary abode. This piece is about a pet rabbit as the season turns.
Twenty Centimeters to Spring
Li Juan
We spoke in broken Kazakh to do business with our customers, and although they only understood it vaguely, we would always achieve what we wanted. It didn’t matter that we didn’t speak their language, as long as we were able to find a way to be understood, everything would turn out all right. Otherwise, we would have to rely on imagination to guess what they wanted.
At first, I had no idea how to use imagination to help, and getting one small item sold would seem strenuous. I had to point at items from one end of the shelf to the other and from the bottom up to the top, while asking, “Is this the one? How about that? This one? That one?”
After much commotion, all the customer wanted was perhaps a box of matches worth ten cents.
As usual, my mother enjoyed handling matters based on her understanding. Although I felt she had misunderstood things on many levels, what she did based on those wrong impressions often ended up correct, so I can’t really complain much.
Now let’s talk about the snow rabbit.
It was a snowy winter’s night. Although it was late, we continued to toil away quietly while hovering around the stove. From time to time we would drift into a conversation about things that happened long ago. Suddenly the door was pushed open and someone came in with a thick cloud of freezing air and fog. We asked him what he wanted, but this gentle looking person couldn’t make himself understood after a long and convoluted explanation. We finally gave up on him and continued with our work. At last, he sank into deep thought and came up with a straightforward question, “Do you want a dzeren?”
“A dzeren?” We were surprised.
“Yes, a live dzeren.”
This time, we were even more surprised.
By then my mother and her apprentice Jianhua had begun to talk about where to keep the animal. Before I could respond, they had made up their mind that the coal shed would be the best place for it.
“What do we raise a dzeren for?” I asked.
“Who knows, let’s get it first.”
Having said that, my mother turned to that gentle looking person, “What’s your lowest offer?”
“Ten Yuan.”
We were taken by surprise for the third time, because ten Yuan would not be enough. Although dzeren literary means yellow sheep in Chinese, it is really a wild animal as beautiful as a deer, which makes it much bigger than a sheep.
I immediately joined their camp, “That’s right, after we buy the yellow sheep, I am going to ask for some feed from Ahan, because he hasn’t paid us for the flour since spring…”
Our excitement delighted the visitor too. In fact, he was almost proud of himself. Afraid that he might change his mind, my mother went to the counter immediately to get the money. She even added, “My good fellow, if you have more yellow sheep later on, please don’t forget to bring them to us again. We will want as many as possible. Don’t ever take them elsewhere. It would be a waste of time to do that, because besides us, no one else would want them…”
After paying him, all of us followed him outside for the yellow sheep.
A boy stood in the snow. His jacket bulged, and something was wrapped inside.
“Oh, a baby yellow sheep.”
The child gradually unbuttoned his jacket.
“Oh, the yellow sheep is white.”
…
This was what happened: in a snowy winter’s night, we bought a wild rabbit rather foolishly for ten Yuan. If it were other people, ten Yuan could have fetched at least three rabbits.
I started out this piece talking about misunderstandings, this was precisely the point.
Nevertheless, we had bought the rabbit and we were all enchanted by it, so there was no complaint. It was worthy of the ten Yuan we had spent! It was almost as big as a baby sheep, and therefore much bigger than the rabbits sold for three or four Yuan each. Besides, it was amazingly alive, unlike the ones sold to others, which were usually frozen solid.
It even had blue eyes. Whose rabbits have blue eyes anyway? (I learned much later that all of the wild rabbits have blue eyes. Only house rabbits have red eyes.) This species is also called the “snow rabbit,” as white as snow, so bright and shiny that if it were lying in the snow, there would be no way to spot it. However, I heard that as the weather gets warmer, the rabbit’s fur would gradually take on a muddy hue, which would blend in well with the Gobi Desert while running around.
With such a clever disguise, why did it still get caught? Perhaps it was still not strong enough. It was absolutely outrageous for people to set traps – we couldn’t help but curse that gentle looking person whenever we saw the scars on the rabbit’s hind legs, which were clamped by the trap.
We found a metal cage, put the rabbit in the corner of the coal shed, and checked on it many times a day. All it would do was stay still in the cage, forever chewing on half a frozen carrot. Grandma visited the rabbit most often. Sometimes she even stole the popcorn from the shelf to feed it. She would say to the rabbit, “Rabbit, it is such a pity that you are all alone…”
Whenever I overheard those words, I couldn’t help but feel sad. All of a sudden, I could also sense the plight of this poor rabbit, and Grandma’s situation wasn’t any better either… It was always so cold. All she could do was to put on layers and layers of clothing, which made her bulgy and bulky. She hardly went anywhere except to hover near the stove all day long. Ever since we had the rabbit, she started to make trips between our grocery store and the coal shed. With her hands holding onto the wall for support, she would walk gingerly back and forth on the same path as she moved about the icy ground. Sometimes she would cover her ears with her hands, sometimes she would hide her hands in her pockets.
How dreadful the winter was!
Yet, how lovely it was to be inside our house, so warm and cozy. Even though the coal shed was dark and dirty, but it beat being outside in the freezing cold. We were affectionate with the rabbit and fed it whatever we ate. Soon it grew fat and languid, with its deep blue eyes shinier than ever. If anyone dared to suggest stir-frying our pet rabbit and making it into different dishes, we would not hesitate to hate this person.
We loved this rabbit to bits, but we didn’t dare to let it roam freely. What if it escaped? Without any food, it would probably starve to death in the cold. Perhaps it would be captured by the villagers again. In our mind, it would have the best life in our house under our care.
We loved the rabbit so much that my mother would often stick her hands in through the openings of the metal cage to stroke it slowly. The creature would tremble slightly, burying its head deep between its two front paws, while the long ears drooped down flatly on the ground.
There was no way for it to hide from us, because there was nowhere to go. But we didn’t have any bad intentions, and how could we have made it understand?
As time passed, the weather gradually got warmer. Although it was still cold, the worst part of the winter was behind us. To our surprise, we noticed some muddy furs on the snow white rabbit! Apparently, it could detect the arrival of spring much more sharply than we did.
Then one day, we discovered that this depressed rabbit had escaped and we were sad and surprised at the same time.
But how did it escape? Where could it have gone? After all, there was snow everywhere in the village; there were people and dogs everywhere; where could this rabbit go to hunt for food?
We searched around in the vicinity of the yard, until it took us far away from the house, but there was not a single trace of the rabbit. For a long while we would search anxiously in the snow piled high on both sides of the road whenever we went out. We even put some cabbage in an obvious place in front of our house, hoping that the rabbit would find its way back. Days passed, and no one had the heart to clear it away even though it had turned frozen solid.
Meanwhile, the empty metal cage continued to occupy the same spot in the shed, as though it were waiting for the rabbit’s return – as though it would one day reappear inside the cage, just as mysteriously as its sudden disappearance.
Then the rabbit really did appear inside the cage again…
It was about a month after it went missing. We had taken off our thick jackets and walked about light-heartedly, awakened to the thoughts of accomplishing a plethora of things. We took down the felts and the plastics covering the windows, rolled up the heavy cotton curtains hanging on the doors, and stored them underneath the beds to be used next winter. We even cleaned up the coal shed and straightened the pieces that had fallen off.
Then we saw the rabbit again.
Let me point out that the metal cage remained by the foot of the wall in a dark corner all this time. One would have to stare at it for quite some time in order to see any movements. If it were a rabbit with snow white fur, you would be able to spot it right away. Yet, we had been going back and forth for several days, before we realized that there was something alive inside. Still, I wasn’t sure, for it could have been something dead. It was curled up in the far end of the cage. And when I looked at it some more, I was able to make out its form. “Isn’t that our rabbit?” What used to be a coat of thick and smooth fur was by then thin and scattered. It was wet and dirty, and I couldn’t even make out its face.
I am usually afraid of dead things, but I worked up the courage to touch the rabbit with my hands. Its body was a bag of bones and nearly given up. I had no idea whether it was still alive because there was no sign of the rabbit breathing. I grew even more scared, for I believed that a creature about to die can be scarier than a dead one. As death descends on it, its soul is probably at its most volatile and most vengeful. I ran away quickly and told my mother, and she rushed back to take a look.
“Wow, why did it come back? How did it come back?”
From afar, I watched as my mother carried that creature, our rabbit that went missing a month ago out of the cage. She fed it some warm water by wetting its mouth, enticing it to drink, after which she succeeded in getting the rabbit to take the leftover rice porridge we cooked that morning.
I wasn’t sure how she was able to revive that snow rabbit. I didn’t dare go through the process with her, because watching alone was scary enough. I have little tolerance for death, especially those dying around me. It makes me feel guilty.
Fortunately, our rabbit won the battle and survived. Then it got stronger than ever before. By May, its fur had changed completely into the muddy color fit for Gobi and it hopped around inside the yard, chasing after my Grandma for food.
Now, let’s go back and find out what happened exactly. Since the metal cage we used to cover it only had five sides (which meant that the bottom side was empty), and since it was close to the wall, the rabbit simply started digging a secret cave. It was a rabbit after all, an expert at digging holes. The dark shed was filled with loads of random things, but who would have known that there was actually a hole behind the cage? We’d always thought that the rabbit escaped through the biggest opening between the two metal bars!
The hole dug by the rabbit was rather narrow, about the width of one’s upper arm. I put my arm in but couldn’t reach the end, so I took a hook used to clear the stove, but even that failed to reach the end. Finally, I used a wire and made a more accurate measurement. It was over two meters long, heading east towards the front gate. If the rabbit had dug another 20 centimeters, it would have reached the outside world.
That was unimaginable! When we sat around our table having a warm meal, when we finished a day’s work and began to fall asleep, when we once again found delight in new and fun things, discovering happiness as a result, that rabbit was busy digging alone in the underground, enduring hunger and cold, digging bit by bit with the same movement – the movement towards spring. For an entire month, there was neither day nor night for it. I had no idea how many times the rabbit had to confront its own mortality during that month. It had probably realized the impossible nature of getting out alive, but it continued to sense the approaching spring, however dire the circumstances might be. For that month, it would sometimes slowly crawl back into the cage, looking for something to eat within its confine. But there was nothing, not even a drop of water, except for a layer of icy frost on the wall. So all it could do was to climb up the metal bar and chew on the cardboard box on top of the cage. We discovered much later that the bottom part of the box, wherever it could possibly be reached by the rabbit had been chewed off. It was also eating pieces of coal that had dropped inside the cage. In fact, when it was found, the rabbit’s face and teeth were pitch black. Yet, we remained ignorant about the whole thing. It was only at the brink of its death, that we discovered that the rabbit was there all along!
Everyone says that rabbits are timid. But as far as I know, they are brave animals. They face their death without fear, even when captured or trapped. When our rabbit escaped into the hole, despite the hunger and dire circumstances, it remained calm and collected in the face of death. When confronted with life’s many changes, it trembled and struggled perhaps not entirely out of fear, but because it didn’t understand what was going on. What does a rabbit really know then? In a way, all of the creatures of this world exist beyond our comprehension. They elude us, and the communication between us was nearly impossible. No wonder my Grandma would say, “Rabbit, Rabbit, you are such a pity…”
How lonely our lives can be even if the spring has already arrived. Our rabbit, on the other hand, is joyfully running inside the yard, its two front paws holding onto my Grandma’s shoes, chewing and biting them like a puppy, as though it had forgotten everything. Compared to us, it seems much more adept at leaving the bad memories behind, and therefore much more capable of experiencing the deeper joy of life.
I have strolled in the gardens of the capital’s titled and wealthy, and seeing what is collected there – not one rare plant or stone from distant borders across the seas is lacking – only the bamboo cannot be had. We south of the Yangtze cut bamboo for kindling; for the garden we also purchase rare plants and stones from abroad, some spending countless sums for a rock, a fortune to buy a single flower, all without regret. Yet if there is bamboo standing in the midst some would hack it away saying, “This will not occupy my bed of flowers and stone“. But if in the capital people are able to obtain a single bamboo, then the sum of several thousands is not regretted, ever knowing that upon the first frost or snow it will wither and die. Men greatly prize the fragile and unobtainable, yet those from the south would even mock them saying, “So the people of the capital prize our firewood”. How sad! Rare plants and stones are indeed prized by those of the south and the capital, but were their place of origin plumbed and men from those distant borders across the seas look upon them, I believe they would think those less wondrous than the bamboo south of the Yangtze. And in faraway lands across the seas perhaps no place grows bamboo, so I believe those strangers upon suddenly seeing bamboo would invariably prize it more greatly than those living in the capital, and both would laugh without end. It is commonly said, “A man away from home is worthless, a thing away from home is precious”. In view of this, how can there be constancy among people’s likes and dislikes?
My uncle, a gentleman holding the Guanglu position, cultivates a garden on the banks of the Jing stream, everywhere planting bamboo and not other trees. Among the bamboo a small pavilion is set to pass moments of leisure with guests reciting verse and singing within. On occasion he spoke to me, “I can not strive with those of influence in the surpassing of plants and stone, yet only by gathering what is native to this place I need not labor and my garden flourishes thusly; I am complete. In this way I am styled Master of Bamboo Rill. Nephew, you should write down such words for me”.
I replied, “How in fact are you unable to compare with the influential by conveniently gathering what is native to the land? It is not that you alone have a deep affection for the bamboo, but rather are unwilling to pronounce so to others? Long ago men discussed the bamboo, considering that being void of pretty color and fragrance it was not liked; and as its wondrous strangeness is unequal to stone, and its guiling beauty and charming delicacy unequal to the flower, yet it stands forth as a gentleman of pride and independence, aloof from the vulgar. In this, from antiquity to the present, an absolute few have known how to appreciate the bamboo.
And those of the capital, how can they understand and value bamboo, merely wanting to use it as they would a rare plant or rock to vie in display of wealth? Thus as people from the capital prize it, and people south of the Yangtze denigrate it, their failure to understand the bamboo is one and the same. You sir, grew up surrounded by sumptuous circumstance and are able not to become dissolute in its midst; fine clothing, stables, squires, maidservants, singers and dancers, all those things many wealthy men greatly desire you deny; especially do you steadfastly refuse reckless intercourse with others. In manner stern, aloof and unique, for this do you take pleasure in the bamboo, and all those many things that men fancy and like cannot by nature stand among the bamboo! Even if bamboo were not native to this place, you sir would do utmost to gather it here and then take pleasure in it; you, sir, by might can gather together strange plants and stone yet your pleasure would not be found in their midst.
How sad! Before, the bamboo could not be taken from the south but taken now because is it prized. I have thoughts upon thoughts on this.
It is not how high the mountain, if there be spirits within fame follows. It is not how deep the water, if there be dragons within wonder follows. In this mean abode, only my self graces it. Traces of moss cover the steps green, grass shows green through the hung screen. The learned are here for talks and laughter, no unlettered folk come and go. I can play simple melodies, read the scriptures. No strings or flutes troubling the ear, no papers tiring body and soul. Here is as famous men of integrity passed simple lives in mean places far apart.*
So did Confucius ask, “ In what manner is this mean?”
Liu Yuxi (772–842)
*As Nanyang’s (Henan) Zhu Gelu and as distant Shu (Sichuan) in the West, Yangze’s pavilion.
The bare paddy field buried in deep snow is an unknown field
The wind of memory blows over the piled snow
The snow drifts
The snow slides
Some more snow falls, some more wind blows
And the drift is shaped into an elephant ear
Now a young elephant has strayed from the herd
For the stray elephant
the snowstorm slowly begins to draw his body
Some more snow falls, some more wind blows
Following the body the snowstorm outlines the trunk
Ahh- finally
a distress signal is sent out in a low voice
But the wind roughens and blows up the snow
the painstakingly stretched trunk is erased
the body is erased
only one ear is left
The wind blows, ho ho, from the river surface
in the valley twisting
and playing with the elephant
You know, though, one ear to listen is enough
I now touch my own ears
A countless number of ears are asleep
in the deepest place
The forgotten ears
For my stray ears
the snow storm begins to mold my ear
Thus some more snow falls
Thus some more wind blows
~
2.
カヤパの庭
今夜、鶏が鳴く前にあなたは三度わたしを知らないと言うだろう マタイ二十六章
ゆうぐれの窓から
ぼんやりと椿の花を見続けると
心の底までのぞき込まれていると思う日がやってくる
赤い花の芯にとらえられ つつぬけにのぞき込まれてしまう
誘われるままに樹の下をくぐり敷石を横にたどり裏口から
あの人が裁かれているというカヤパの中庭に入る
大祭司カヤパの庭にも椿の花がいっぱい咲いていて
わたしが葉と葉の間から見ていると
「何をいっているのかわからない」と一番弟子の男が否んだ
二千年前の炭火が赤く燃え 裏切るもの死刑を望むもの
しもべや女中が集まっていた
またしても「そんな人は知らない」恐れて誓う声がした
遠く波打つガリラヤの湖から一匹の魚が泳ぎ去った
わたしが赤い花をのぞくと 男の涙がこぼれそうだった
こんなところに誰がつまずく石を置いたのだろう
三度目の声がまたしても
「その人のことは何も知らない」と言うと
追い打ちをかけるように女中が
[この人はナザレ人イエスと一緒だった]と言った
それはわたしの声だった わたしはそこにもいたのだ
静かなゆうぐれに包まれると椿の花がまっ赤に咲いて
ぼんやりしていると 鶏が鳴いて男は外に出て激しく泣く
いつのまにか二千年はあっけなく過ぎて
そのまま赤い花の形をして地面に落ちるものがある
罪も弱さもそのまま受け継いで
わたしはカヤパの庭を行ったり来たりしている
Caiaphas’ Courtyard
Verily I say unto thee, that this night, before the cock crow, thou shalt deny me thriceMatthews 26
Out of the window of twilight
I gaze blankly at the camellia blossoms
There comes a day the camellia sees
through to the bottom of my heart
Caught by the core of the red blossom
through and through I am seen
Being led I stoop under the branches
and step into Caiaphas’ courtyard from the back gate
where he is said to be judged
The high priest Caiaphas’ courtyard is also
filled with camellia blossoms
I watch from the space between the leaves
He denied, saying, I know not what thou sayest
Two thousand year old charcoal burns deep
who betrays and wants death
a crowd of servants and maids gathered
And again he denied with an oath, I do not know the man
A fish swims away from the far away heaving lake of Galilee
I look inside the burning
and see his tear about to overflow
Who left a stumbling stone, here?
For the third time I hear the voice, saying, I know not the man
Another maid said unto them that were there,
This fellow was also with Jesus of Nazareth
That was my voice;
I was there, too
Camellias, wrapped by the dusk, open their crimson petals
I am lost in thought; the cock crow, and the man goes outside,
cries out
Unnoticed, two thousand years have passed
Unchanged, something in the shape of a red flower
falls onto the ground passing on
Sins and weaknesses
I go to and from Caiaphas’ courtyard
~
3.
オブジェ
かつて 父たちが植林し造林につとめた杉山に分け入っ
たことがある 天に垂直なその杉の木に絡みついたカズ
ラを切るのだ きつく巻きついた紐状のものを力ずくで
引っ張る 細い毛根がびりびりと剥がれる 引きながら
解きながら木の周りをぐるぐる回る 解くと締めつけら
れた跡がケロイドのようだ
わたしは 解いたカズラを束ねて 一つの輪に編んで行
く 最初の輪につぎつぎ絡ませ 縄目を作り隙間を埋め
ながら 偶然にゆだねてオブジェを作る 壁掛けを作っ
ていく 隙間には野の花と杉の実とカモガヤの野を飾る
と 朝と夕を加え小鳥も加えることになって ドライフ
ラワーの壁掛けとなる やがて乾いてくるとピソンの川
もユフラテの川も流れはじめる 浅瀬の葦の間にきのう
誘われた聡い蛇のことばを置く これがわたしの園であ
る それを玄関に飾る 誰にも気づかれない わたしだ
けのオブジェの中で わたしは いまだエバのままであ
り 出る時も入る時も 魂のありかをとわれつづけてい
るように思う
(Miho Kinnas’s translation of an essay by Akira Kisa, Where Bibliobattles Are was published in Asian Literary Journal Cha in June, 2017. More poems by Ikuko Tanaka in translation can be found at Poetry Kanto.)
Todd Boss attends to how a poem happens. Hence, Motionpoems emphasise movement and kinaesthetic action. His work is also about facilitating meaningful encounters with art[1]. “Constellations” is no exception.
An emphatic voice gives chase to an elusive and energetic star, but only manages to catch a glimpse of it. An apostrophe, short but forceful.
The poem attempts to capture a sublime encounter with a single gesture, somewhere between the impermanence of a shooting star and the constancy of a constellation. An encounter so elusive and fleeting, we can only gesticulate about with language.
To translate this poem on its terms is to appreciate its inherently performative nature—a mimesis demonstrating the temporal nature of an aesthetic encounter. Something that can only be performed, but not fixed, with words. Something impossible without an intimate reading.
An adequate translator is foremost an adequate reader. Reading is more than just understanding the signification of words, but also how they dance and contribute to a dynamic whole. Imagery, form, rhythm and rhyme. These are some of the poetic elements that require breaking down and reconstruction in the target language. Reconstruction because there is no natural or necessary equivalence between languages and their respective cultures. Translation is reading is rewriting.
The original has a lot of style. We have on page, a river of words gushing with too much force. A voice breaks the surface, now and then, when it can; the tone imploring, and desperate. Words are ejaculated, spat in passion. These exclamations are followed by long dashes of silence—as the voice succumbs to the drag of undercurrent emotions precariously balanced between ecstasy and hysteria. The lines of the poem look like an afterimage, a blur of motion. Just like an encounter with the ephemeral.
The river of words flows east, and arrives at a place where they can drop vertically down. In Chinese, words can cascade and fall. Much like stars. They are also complete and whole on their own, not just an assembly of letters. They now hang better in the sky; this being one of the low-hanging fruits. I hang the words up like stars, and build a constellation. Joining them dot-to-dot, I trace their intractable paths in this alternate linguistic universe, probing for my reclusive rocket.
Reclusive rocket. How does one ignore the sweet sounds of alliteration? I took the bait. More than just a falling star, I add the sense of a lone ranger travelling through endless space. Alone. Aloof. I allow some words to break out from the safety of the constellation, with one that ends up alone. Empty. Drawing nothing.
I ask myself if this is too much, but decide no. After all, Boss writes for the displaced[2].
Lian Hai Guang is currently a postgraduate at Nanyang Technological University’s (NTU) Masters of Translation and Interpretation (MTI) Program, located in Singapore. He can be reached at lianhaiguang@gmail.com.