BN 978-7-119-06356-0

© Foreign Languages Press Co. Ltd, Beijing, China, 2012

Published by Foreign Languages Press Co. Ltd.

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Created by People's Literature Magazine and Paper Republic.

Fiction

Tie Ning

Born in Beijing in 1957, now Chair of the China Writers’ Association, Tie Ning began publishing in 1975. Her most important novels are The Rose Door, Bathing Women, and Benhua Village. Her novellas and short stories number over a hundred, including “Oh, Xiangxue!”, “The Red Shirt With No Buttons”, and “How Long is Forever?”, and more than fifty collections of her stories and essays have been published. The 5-volume “Collected Writings of Tie Ning” came out in 1996, and in 2007 People’s Literature Press published the 9-volume “Works of Tie Ning.” She has won six national awards in China, including the Lu Xun Prize for Literature. Her work has been translated into English, Russian, German, French, Japanese, Korean, Spanish, Danish, Norwegian, and Vietnamese, among other languages. In 2004 the French house Bleu de Chine published two of her novels as Pile de coton and La nuit des rois.

Irina’s Hat

by Tie Ning

I stood in Moscow’s Domodedovo Airport waiting for a plane to Khabarovsk. A Russian speaker told me “Domodedovo” means “cabin.” So this airport could also be called “cabin airport.”

It was the summer of 2001.

I had been traveling together with my cousin to Russia, a ten-day trip. We both believed we were each other’s ideal travel partners. Did you ever have a middle school teacher who asked, right before holidays, what’s the shortest way to get from Beijing to London? The answer: not by plane, or the internet or what have you, but rather, with a friend. It sounds nice, but in reality, friends at the outset of a journey often become enemies by the end. When my cousin and I left from Beijing for Moscow we were still friends, but by the time we went from Moscow to St. Petersburg we were essentially enemies. The reason, well, I thought that my cousin and I would have a lot in common, both being recently divorced. We no longer had the support, or better yet the burden, of a husband, and we could curse our exes without holding back. But, shockingly, my cousin – practically on the plane to Moscow – began a new romance. Immediately after taking his seat, the man next to us, who was also a member of our tour group, began to chat her up enthusiastically. At first I thought their conversation was just aimless banter, but I soon found out that he was also unmarried. Truly a coincidence. I realized then that my cousin was a blind optimist, and that she excels at ingratiating herself to others. I’m not as optimistic. Dealing with other people, I am always quick to see their faults. If I want to be unhappy I am unhappy, regardless of the time or occasion. When I let my face droop, my skin looks like a brushed-out layer of flour paste, stiff and cracked. And when my self-esteem is low, I conversely am even more easily agitated by other people.

On the plane, I observed the man in the seat next to us with a cold eye. Immediately I discovered that the nails on both his pinkie fingers were excessively long. From time to time he would habitually lift his outstretched right pinky and brush hair back from his forehead onto the top of his head. That long, translucent, pale green fingernail brought to mind none other than the set of gold nails in foreign paintings of the Empress Dowager Cixi: strange, unclean, frivolous. Then there was that staccato laugh of his, how blaringly it breached my ear. After we checked into the Cosmos Hotel in Moscow, my patience was strained to the limit, and I told my cousin of my impression. She laughed sneeringly, “Objectively speaking, you’re not generous enough with people. Objectively speaking, he has some interesting opinions.” It was then that I discovered something new about my cousin. I realized that she had a pet phrase: “objectively speaking”. What in the world is “objectively speaking”? Who can prove that when she says, “objectively speaking”, what she says is actually objective? On the contrary, as soon as she sets that “objectively speaking” in front of a phrase, odds are she’s stressing that her opinion is overly biased. So I came to hate this pet phrase of hers.

When I was waiting in Cabin Airport for the plane to Khabarovsk, I sorted out all the reasons my cousin and I split up midway through the trip. It may have been just the guy’s overlong fingernail and my cousin’s pet phrase. Sure, these reasons seem trivial, but their very triviality was why I couldn’t just put up with them. After we arrived at St. Petersburg from Moscow, I forced myself, face drooping, to follow the tour group sightseeing to Dostoyevsky’s old residence on Kuznechny Lane. We listened to a bone-thin old docent with an imposing face tell some stories about Dostoevsky. I didn’t absorb anything from the stories, I only remember how many broken wrinkles there were on the old woman’s mouth, like a dumpling that’s been reheated over and over until the dough around the edges have shriveled. I also remember she said that one of Dostoevsky’s great-grandchildren now drives a trolley in the same district as the old residence. At this fact I felt a spark of schadenfreude: Dostoevsky is one of Russia’s greatest historical figures, and even among his descendants there’s a trolley driver. I thought of my mother, also an author, and how I wasn’t able to distinguish myself as she had hoped. Perhaps my career and marriage grieve her, but at any rate I’m still a civil servant in the capital. But I’ve never been interested in my mother’s studio or her literature, so just as I saw my cousin and her new boyfriend cozying up to each other, head pressed against head at the small sales counter in the entrance to Dostoevsky’s old residence buying bookmarks imprinted with the bust of that monumental figure, I promptly made a decision: I’d leave them and return home alone. Unable to wait until we returned to the Smolny Hotel where we were staying, I told my cousin with a superficial smile what I had been thinking. She was stunned, and then said, “Objectively speaking, you’re acting a bit like a little child throwing a tantrum. In four more days we can go back together.” But in my head I nagged, “Don’t even start with your ‘objectively speaking’.”

I wanted to fly directly back home to Beijing, but no, the travel agency said I had to exit the country the way our contract stipulated. I had to fly from Moscow to Khabarovsk, and from there board a train to cross into China’s Mudanjiang through Siberia. This was a tiresome but money-saving route, and so I was willing to follow the travel agency. On that summer night in 2001, after I had drunk two bottles of odd-tasting kvass in the dilapidated, crowded Cabin Airport, the long-awaited, run-down Ty-154 to Khabarovsk finally arrived. I followed the flow of passengers into the cabin and discovered most of them were from out east. Most were from Khabarovsk, I thought, with only a minority of Muscovites and foreigners like me. I didn’t understand Russian, nor could I differentiate between their accents, yet oddly I was able to tell the Muscovites apart from the Khabarovskians instinctively. My seat was in the back next to the aisle. It had a ready view of the cabin’s vase, alternating red and blue carpet. The carpet was already dirty, its pattern almost indistinguishable, yet the stains of liquor, soup, and meat stock showed stubbornly clear. The slow-moving, chubby, middle-aged stewardess would occasionally lend a hand to passengers, helping them close each of the overhead compartments. Her lipstick brimmed over the edges of her lips, revealing that her heart just wasn’t in it. It also sent a message to the passengers: this is a do-what-we-like kind of airplane. When you’re here, go ahead and do whatever you want. In the row ahead of me there was a man and two women, all three of them young. I’d heard them hooting and shrieking since entering the cabin. The man was clearly a Moscow nouveau riche, his face ruddy, hair clean, and fingernails immaculate and uniformly lustrous, like carefully selected seashells inlaid into his fingertips. He was holding a large-screen Nokia phone and was showing it off to the curly-haired, gaudily-dressed women flanking him. In 2001 Russia, cell phones were still uncommon. You can imagine the kind of envy this brand new phone would have inspired in these women. It seemed to make them willing to let him pinch, nip, and tweak their noses as he poured liquor, and grip their hair as he lit cigarettes. I sat in the aisle behind them, bored, as their heads twitched incessantly above me like three electric, spring-loaded Pekinese. The nouveau riche had some business in Khabarovsk, for sure. Khabarovsk was an important railway hub, port, and aviation stop in Russia’s far eastern region, with a petroleum pipeline from Sakhalin, an oil refinery, shipbuilding, machinery manufacturing and what have you. All very advanced. Perhaps he was in oil. But his business didn’t concern me, I only cared about the safety of the plane. I realized they had no intention of turning off the cell phone, so I had to ask loudly in my shoddy English. My expression must have been ghastly: the cell phone’s owner shrank back abruptly. He turned off the phone and gave me a puzzled look, as if to say, “What’s got you so upset?”

At this point the last two passengers entered the cabin, a young woman and a boy of about five. The woman was carrying no small amount of luggage, the most conspicuous being a round hatbox. The large hatbox, held in front of the other bags, was leading her forward. The woman and the boy approached me. As it turned out, they sat down in the aisle seats to my right. I saw now that she had hung the brown ribbon that bound the beige hatbox from her pinky finger. I also saw that the side of the hatbox had an illustration of a bowler the size of a tangerine. I had a lot of respect for this pinkie, acting like a hand all of its own. The hatbox ribbon hanging from her finger made her seem vulnerable but caring. She was the mother of a middle-class Khabarovsk family. They had gone to Moscow to visit family. They were returning home bearing gifts from their relatives, along with others prudently bought in Moscow. The husband was busy and couldn’t accompany them, so she had bought him a special gift: a bowler hat. I rationalized further in my mind as I watched her hastily stow the few bags she held. First, she set the large hatbox down in her seat, allowing the pinkie, now swollen and red from the weight, to carefully free itself from the ribbon’s loop. The hatbox itself seemed like a passenger who was sound asleep. She then put the rest of the bags into the compartment above her seat. Finally, she held the hatbox in both hands, looking for a stable place to stow it. However, she had already stuffed the overhead compartment full. It couldn’t hold the enormous hatbox. Still grasping the hatbox, the woman turned a circle in the aisle, hoping the stewardess could help her. The stewardess didn’t come, and the nearest person, me, had no plans to help her. What could I have done to help? Now my cousin – it’s hard to say whether she’d have made the token gesture of standing and looking for a spot. She often did that sort of thing. Just then a tall, thin man in the row in front of the woman stood up, opened the compartment above his head, pulled out a nondescript bag, tossed it on the aisle floor, and then without any explanation took the hatbox from her embrace and placed it into his compartment. At the soft thud of the compartment latch, the tall thin man faced the woman and happily spread his hands to mean, “Doesn’t this solve things?” The two then exchanged a few sentences, which I imagined went something like this: The woman pointed at bag on the ground and said, “What about your bag?” The man picked up the bag and casually placed it underneath his seat, saying, “It really wasn’t big enough to merit the overhead compartment anyway. It’ll be fine underneath the seat.” The woman gave a thankful laugh and called to her son, “Sasha!” This word I understood. Sasha was standing near the Moscow nouveau riche in the row ahead of me, gazing intently at the new Nokia. Mumbling, he unwillingly returned to his mother’s side. I guessed the woman wanted him to take the window seat, like she was intentionally keeping him away from the nouveau riche. But he wanted to sit by the aisle. Of course, in the end he wasn’t able to disobey his mother. He was a flaxen-haired, timid-looking child, with two shallow wrinkles under his large, sea-blue eyes. I often saw under-eye wrinkles more fitting for the elderly in the tender faces of some European children. It made them look melancholy, like they were wise and contemplative philosophers.

The plane took off, and I turned my head to watch the woman on my right. To my surprise, I realized that she looked familiar. It came to me – in my mother’s bookshelf there was an old book entitled The Story of Zoya and Shura. The picture of Zoya in the book looked somewhat similar to the woman sitting to my right. She had maroon-colored hair, an oval chin, and two resolute-looking eyes just slightly too close together. Zoya was a hero in the hearts of my mother’s generation, but to my generation, born in the Sixties, she was just too remote. I used to stare at her photo, but I was paying more attention to her hair. She may have been a World War Two hero, but from a fashion perspective it was her head of extremely short, curly hair that was most pioneering. I liked her hair back then, which was why I happened to remember her. I didn’t want to call this woman sitting next to me Zoya, so I came up with a new name for her: Irina. Are there Russian women with this name? I don’t care. I just thought the sound of that name would fit my neighbor. Irina. Her hair was tied in a bun on the back of her head. Her shoulders were slightly hunched, and she was wearing an overly conservative checked skirt. Her hands, a little large for a woman’s, were fair and smooth with reddened joints. Her deep brown eyes were slightly narrowed and her eyelids trembled. She wore the tranquil expression of someone waiting to return home. All of this was more like Irina than Zoya. The intercom sounded, telling the passengers the plane’s flight time would be about nine hours, and it would arrive at Khabarovsk in the early morning. In ten minutes they would be providing dinner, and liquor and other foods were available for purchase.

I hastily ate the lukewarm dinner: three slices of pickle, a few lamb meatballs, and oily borscht. I had to close my eyes and sleep for a bit. Khabarovsk wasn’t my final destination; I still had to take a night train from there. Thinking about this made my very tired. Why is it again that people need to travel?

When I opened my eyes, I noticed some changes around the cabin. Most of the passengers were still sleeping, but the change came from the seat in front of Irina’s. The tall thin man was facing backwards, kneeling and chatting with her with his elbows propped up on the back of his seat. For the time being I named him Skinny. On his thin face was a mouth of disproportionally large, white horse teeth. This position, kneeling and looking back, made him look a little servile, a little over-eager. And his clothing was also in itself a little undignified: his denim pants and jacket were slightly too small for him. He wore an excited expression, and if he were holding a rose he would have been the perfect likeness of one of those guys who propose in public parks. Although Irina didn’t look him in the eye, she wasn’t put-off. It seemed like they were discussing their impressions of Moscow, or maybe not. They spoke energetically. The stewardess didn’t come back to stop him from kneeling, but Sasha, sitting next to Irina, stared vigilantly up at Skinny, even though his eyelids were fighting to stay open. Finally, the long-kneeling Skinny caught on to Sasha’s mood, so he pressed the call button for the stewardess and bought Sasha a can of Coke and a bit of Russian sausage. As expected, Sasha’s mood lightened somewhat. With his mother’s tacit approval, he shyly accepted the gift. He held the sausage in one hand and the can in the other, unsure of which of these unexpected delicacies to east first. Skinny struck while the iron was hot. He stretched his long arms towards Sasha, in a gesture that I think was a blunt request to switch seats. He gushed over how nice his seat was. It’s so nice. And it’s on the aisle – isn’t that the spot you wanted, Sasha? Sasha hesitated, and Irina suddenly blushed, as if she and Skinny were conspiring together. Yet she didn’t rebuke Skinny’s suggestion but stayed completely silent, crossing her hands and rubbing them together. Skinny seemed to take this as encouragement. He stood and walked back, and then, gently wedging his hands into Sasha’s armpits, scooped the child out of his seat and set him into Skinny’s old seat in the row ahead. Calling it his “old seat” is perhaps quite appropriate, because it was this new seat that foretold a new stage in Skinny and Irina’s relationship. Or could it be that they were already in a relationship?

His wish to sit next to Irina fulfilled, Skinny raised one long leg and set it on the other, leaning slightly towards her. The heel on his pinched toe loafers was askew, and I could see that he was wearing a pair of gray silk socks from China, the sort that most Chinese no longer wear. In one leg there was a hole as big as a mung bean. I discerned that Skinny was not rich, and things on the plane were ghastly expensive. Yet there he was, spending money again. He even rang for the stewardess to buy Irina and himself a bottle of red wine. The stewardess brought along wine glasses and opened the bottle for them. Lifting their glasses, they looked like they wanted to touch glasses, but didn’t; or like they wanted to speak, but held back. Things between them were as stiff as a made-up bed. I watched Irina nervously press her lip to the glass and take a sip, as if the wine was actually a bowl of scalding-hot congee. Skinny took a drink, and then abruptly clinked his glass against Irina’s, like a man crashing his shoulder into another’s as he passes by – a provocation. The wine in Irina’s glass sloshed around, and she laughed at him in mock protest. I disliked this mock protest. You could tell that this was when the flirting began, or rather, when she accepted her counterpart’s flirting.

I shifted in my seat to make myself more comfortable, and perhaps also to get into a better position to watch the pair. I admit that at this point I was in a dark frame of mind, the way the general public delights in the misfortune of celebrities. Irina wasn’t famous, but I sensed that at the very least she was an upright woman, and watching an upright woman do something shameful gave me an ineffable satisfaction. I strained and squinted and looked around, hoping Sasha would see the state his mother was in. But Sasha was absorbed in his sausage; I could see his small profile from where I sat. The three electric Pekinese had slept for a while and were now waking up at the same time. As soon as they awoke they busied themselves eating and drinking. They bought practically everything there was to buy on the plane. They drank wine straight from the bottle, one per person. Now and then they would pour wine into each other’s mouths. This boorishness suddenly made Irina and Skinny appear reserved and civilized. If you wanted to, you could even say it made them seem ridiculous. As I thought about this, the glass of wine had already relaxed Irina. Irina and Skinny had begun to shift from a distanced chat to a close whisper. The bun on the back of her head was rubbing back and forth on the cloth seat covering, which was white with an ornamental pattern. Some strands of hair had fallen loose and were hanging to the side of her ear, divulging her desire. Oh yes, she wants this, I sneeringly said in my head. The scent of her desire had already permeated the air around me. It wasn’t just a subjective, imagined scent, however, but a physical odor that had drifted back from the front.

From the front of the cabin came two well-dressed gentlemen. When I shifted my gaze from Irina’s bun, I saw the two men and immediately knew the scent was coming from them – at least one of them was wearing a light Burberry men’s cologne. I didn’t know much about cologne, but the reason I was so sensitive to this cologne was because of my mother. She used the same kind. I remember I once ridiculed her: how can you use men’s cologne? My mother said: “Actually, this style is neutral, fine for both men and women.” I thought of The Story of Zoya and Shura on my mother’s bookshelf. The woman who worshipped Zoya in her youth came to love Burberry cologne in her old age. She often baffled me. And now there was really the sense that these two gentlemen had just fallen out of the sky and landed on this dilapidated plane. I thought this even though we were airborne at the time. They were young, tall, beautiful, magnificent, exquisite and statuesque. There were only two types of people made up like them: male runway models and career pickpockets who roam 5-star hotels. Their fragrant bodies passed us as they walked towards the back of the plane. In the dusky cabin, their gold bracelets and thick arm hair gleamed. They brushed past me, and in the blink of an eye they had disappeared into the cabin’s lavatory.

My dark curiosity forced me to peer back. I had to determine if one of them was waiting outside the lavatory or whether they really did go in together. I’ll stress the word “together.” The last row was empty. A stewardess was cracking sunflower seeds. Clearly she was used to this kind of behavior on the plane. Around fifteen minutes later, I finally saw with my own eyes the two men emerge from the lavatory, one in front of the other. One of them even adjusted the other’s tie, which had gone askew. On the one hand I was excited to have seen this, but on the other hand, to go so far as to squeeze two bodies into the plane’s small and precious lavatory in full view of everyone made me furious. This plane was engorged with lust, and the two men’s actions had pushed this lust to play out in bare abandon. And then this bare abandon turned into pure burlesque when half an hour later, they stood up and showily followed each other to the back, past our gaze, to squeezed once more into the lavatory.

The reason I say “our” is that when the two gorgeous men passed, Irina and Skinny also noticed them. And at this point Skinny’s right hand was resting on Irina’s left shoulder.

After half an hour, that hand had slid down to Irina’s waist.

After another half hour, that hand had had pulled itself out from between her waist and the seat, and was now tentatively placed on her leg.

It was late at night, and I was at the peak of my exhaustion. Unwilling to relax my secret surveillance, I ate some chocolate as a pick-me-up. I had actually brought the chocolate from China. Dove chocolates. In China I hadn’t found them so tasty, but in Russia I began to find all the things I had brought delicious. Sasha hadn’t slept the entire ride either, and he was looking tired. He got up from his row and went over to Irina, surely to remind her to tuck him in. But when he saw Irina and Skinny totally wrapped up in their whispering, head pressed against head, a wave of ferocity came over him and he turned toward me. Our eyes met unexpectedly and I saw a touch of indignation. In those brief seconds, he knew that I understood why he had turned toward me so suddenly, and I knew that he understood I saw what was happening with his mom. In those few seconds I imagined Sasha as a little abandoned orphan child. I am usually lacking in compassion, but in this case I couldn’t help but pass him a piece of chocolate. Despite his usual excitement at the prospect of food, he didn’t accept my gift. My pity seemed to have made him just as angry. He whirled around again and hastily returned to his seat. He sat down and closed his eyes, like a little old man full of grief and resentment.

I subtly swept my eyes back over to Irina. Her head had been turned toward Skinny the entire time. She hadn’t noticed Sasha’s arrival or departure.

After half an hour, Skinny’s hand was still on Irina’s leg – or had it moved up an inch? It was real suspense, his hand resting on her checked skirt, and it drove me to lift my heavy eyelids for fear of missing something. A long while later, I finally saw Irina cautiously lift his hand off her leg. She stood up and went to the next row to check on Sasha. Sasha had already fallen asleep, or perhaps he just faking, but this allowed Irina to return with peace of mind. Skinny’s hand quickly returned to her thigh. She glanced at the hand placed on her thigh and didn’t say another word to Skinny. She closed her eyes like she wanted to sleep, but also like she was giving him a hint: she didn’t mind the hand on her leg. The hand, as if prompted by the hint, swiftly moved between her legs, over her skirt. You could see the spasmodic tremble that ran through Irina’s body, and then she opened her eyes. She placed her hands on Skinny’s, signaling for him to move it from between her legs. Yet Skinny’s hand was stubborn, refusing to yield an inch, as if he were blaming Irina’s tacit consent just a moment ago and her sudden reneging. The two hands began to test their strength, and only after Irina exerted herself many times did Skinny relent. But just after he relented, he flipped his hand over to grip Irina’s, which she had already relaxed, and tried to place it in his crotch. I saw Irina’s hand fiercely resist, but Skinny used his resilient wrist strength, as if he desperately needed Irina’s hand to soothe all of his anxieties. The two hands competed once more, both refusing to yield. But because her strength was the lesser and her posture off-balance, she had to exert all her strength to steady her body and try to withdraw the hand held so tightly that it now swelled with blood. As their hands wrestled, their expressions suddenly turned severe. Their heads no longer supported each other, and their bodies were now rigid. They raised their heads and faced the front, as if there were some densely plotted movie playing in the front of the plane.

I was tired. I think the whole plane was tired.

And just as I was tiring, I saw Irina finally wrest her hand back from Skinny’s and turn her head in my direction. She hastily looked at me, and I calmly met her eyes, indicating that I wasn’t interested in her affairs. I heard her sigh lightly, and then she turned her head back towards Skinny. She proceeded to act apologetic, shaking out the hand that had been contorted, and then lightly placing it back into Skinny’s hand. This time Skinny’s hand didn’t turn firm. It was as if, since the two had already gone through experimentation, resistance, struggle, and negotiation, in the end they simply fled the sound and fury between them. They found their own positions and held each other, their fingers interlocked. Finally, at the tail end of the night, they fell asleep hand in hand. And it seemed like real sleep: Irina had let Skinny know that there would be no new opportunities.

We arrived in Khabarovsk. I didn’t see how Irina and Skinny bade each other farewell. When I opened my eyes, they were already acting like two strangers going their separate ways. Irina had her bags in her hands and was leading Sasha in a rush to be the first to the cabin exit. It was as if she was trying to free herself from Skinny. Drowsy-eyed passengers lined up behind her. The closest was the Moscow nouveau riche, who had turned on his Nokia long ago and was now debating loudly. Then there were the two gorgeous gentlemen. A whole night of travel had not made them look tired; quite the opposite, they were still immaculately groomed, hair neat and satiny. They perfectly resembled wax figures in a museum. Everything that happened that night seemed like a dream.

The early August morning in Khabarovsk is crisp and cold, the way it is in China’s Bashang Plateau during that season. Leaving the airport, I breathed in the vaguely spacious city air and shivered. The passengers were all deliberately ignoring each other as they went their separate ways – in the crowds dashing out of an airport, you rarely see anyone paying deliberate attention to other people. As I was urgently searching for the travel agency’s local guide, I suddenly saw a familiar object in front of me: Irina’s hatbox. It was being carried in Skinny’s hand. He walked in front of me, taking large strides like he was in pursuit of something. It came to me – Irina’s hatbox was stored in Skinny’s overhead compartment, and when she deplaned she had forgotten it.

The hatbox bought last night’s events back to life, and my curiosity was piqued. I followed closely behind Skinny, and saw him raise the hatbox, his mouth hanging open like he wanted to shout Irina’s name. Yet he didn’t make a sound. They must not have gotten each other’s names, which complicated his pursuit. But where was Irina? In the flow of people, mother and son had suddenly evaporated. I took a few more steps. Ahead of me Skinny stopped abruptly, and fixed his eyes on one spot. I stopped as well and followed his gaze: next to the parking lot a few meters away, Irina was embracing another man. Or rather, she was being embraced by another man. The man had his back to us, so we couldn’t see his face. He was around average height, sturdy build topped with a large head. He had a thick neck, muscles bulging out from the collar of his button-down. Irina had set her bags on the ground. Sasha was sticking to the side of the bags contentedly looking up at his mother and father – they were definitely his mother and father.

The scene had to be hard for Skinny. And it was just at this time that Irina happened to look up over the man’s shoulder, surely able to see the hatbox and the man who had brought it for her. Her son, high-spirited Sasha, recognized us immediately. He stared at us in distress and confusion, the man and woman from the plane. For a moment it was as if Skinny and I became a pair of co-conspirators about to spring some unexpected misfortune on mother and son. It all played out in just a few seconds, with no time to explain and no room for error. Indeed, there was absolutely no room for error. I suddenly realized that I would be the optimal person to deliver the hatbox, and I surprised myself with my on-the-spot decisiveness. With no explanation I took a quick step forward, greeted Skinny with a slight nod, took – or better said, snatched – the hatbox from his hand, and quickly walked up behind Irina’s husband. Gently, I passed the hatbox into the hand that she had draped over her husband’s shoulder. Skinny, Irina, and I had just completed a relay race between Moscow and Khabarovsk. As I passed off this last baton, did I smile at her? I don’t know. I couldn’t see Skinny’s face behind me. All I wanted to do was flee.

But I couldn’t, because of a single gesture. Facing me, he raised his head, lifted his right pointer finger, small and soft like the tip of a bamboo shoot, and pressed it vertically against his lips, as if to indicate: whatever you do, don’t make a sound. You could tell this was a deathly-serious suggestion. Neither Sasha nor I had forgotten the tacit understanding we reached in our encounter last night. This was also a gesture whose request I couldn’t disappoint, one that made me realize just how heartbreakingly naïve Sasha was. And Irina seemed for a moment to lose the ability to gesture to me and was unable to express her gratitude, not to mention show a modicum of courtesy. She just relaxed her embrace and abruptly begin to untie the ribbon on the hatbox. Only I could see that when she untied the ribbon with her two hands, she trembled almost imperceptibly. Her husband turned his head now, and was shocked to see the hatbox that had suddenly appeared in her hand. He was a kindly, middle-aged man, and his face – he looked exactly like Mikhail Gorbachev.

Irina slid the ribbon in her hand down, opened the box, and removed an exquisitely crafted, thin wool bowler. The bowler was an extreme clean gray, like the plumage of a gray dove flying in the clear sky, illuminated by the bright sun high overhead. The bowler made the Gorbachev-husband laugh in surprise – according to the usual custom, she ought to place the hat on his head, but instead she used it to engulf her own.

I say “engulf” because the bowler was bought to fit her husband’s head, and it looked like her delicate head had been swallowed up by a small pot. The bowler shielded the majority of her face, only revealing an indeterminable expression. And for a moment the bowler also covered up her decorum, isolating her from the rest of the world. Nothing was visible to her any longer, including Skinny and me. She could choose to never again exchange pleasantries with strangers or acquaintances. She didn’t even have to be herself anymore. Her husband laughed delightedly once more, probably finding some novel humor in the man’s bowler covering his wife’s too-small head. Then the family of three, carrying bags large and small, headed towards a standard-looking black car in the distance.

Actually, I’ve never thought to tell another person about what happened that night on the plane. What happened that night? Honestly speaking, nothing happened. It was the finger on Sasha’s lips and the hat covering Irina’s head that made me aware of some unspeakable confidence. When I foresaw that I would never meet them again, this trust became exceptionally solemn. Yes, in the end, people need to be needed. As the thought passed through my mind, I looked again at Irina off in the distance. The hat shifting back and forth on her head made her a comical figure, but, objectively speaking, she still looked dignified. I know I’ve just used my cousin’s awful pet phrase, “objectively speaking”. But here it seems appropriate.

I saw a pimpled Chinese youth holding a small wooden sign with my name written on it. He was my guide in Khabarovsk. I waved at him, and just like that we were connected.

Translated by Patrick Rhine

Pregnant Woman with Cow

by Tie Ning

A pregnant woman walked along the unpaved road that led from the market back to her village, leading a cow behind her.

The year had passed into late autumn, and the sun beamed its clean warmth down over the open plain. The pregnant woman let go of the lead rope, to let the cow walk at ease. Doing so also left her at ease, and she swung her sturdy arms freely. Her visibly bulging belly pushed the floral-print of her padded jacket far out in front, lending an imposing air to her stride, like that of a gallant general.

The cow and the pregnant woman kept a slight distance between them, and only when the cow struck off into a wheat field and lowered its head to munch wheat sprouts did the woman call out, “Black, get out of there.”

Black was the cow’s name, though the animal itself was light brown.

Black dawdled in the wheat field, irritating the woman. “Heeyy!” she shouted at it. On the empty plain her shouts sounded drawn-out and they carried a long way, as if she were calling to someone she knew in the distance. “Heeyy!”

Yet there was no one in the distance, so Black had no choice but to respond. It hurriedly took a couple more mouthfuls before sauntering out of the wheat field and turning onto the road.

The white gateway had already risen into view. Once they passed that, home would not be far. In such an open space, the grand gateway of white granite appeared to have descended from the sky: suddenly there it was, looming over the land, with nothing around to prepare a person’s gaze for it. Even old people who had seen it all their lives, when they caught sight of its gleaming presence under a blue sky, could not help feeling the suddenness of it.

The woman gazed at the gateway and thought-lucky that I married here. Each time she saw the gateway, she couldn’t help exclaiming this way about her marriage.

The woman came from the mountains, where life was harder than on the plain. Yet the woman was attractive. Attractiveness was wealth and gave her hope for the future. The woman’s parents could not afford to send their precious daughter to school, but they didn’t make her do heavy work, and they reserved choice bits of food for her as if they were cultivating a treasure, making it a worthy offering. They were committed to sending their treasure out of the mountains, down to the prosperous plain to see the wide world they never would. At last the woman was married off to a family at the foot of the mountains. Her mother-in-law proudly explained the prime feng shui of this place to her: it was originally the burial ground of a Qing dynasty noble, and his tomb was just north of the village. The ornate white gateway had once belonged to the noble. The woman did not know what rank the noble had held; nor did she know how far the Qing dynasty was from today, but she had seen the grave and gateway. The grave had long ago been plundered by tomb robbers, leaving a basin-shaped pit where thick brush grew among broken bricks and tiles. The woman had stood at the pit’s edge, looking at the slate-colored bricks sunken in the shadows and thought how lucky that I married here. At one time this large pit had also been a symbol of wealth, and though the treasure in it had been plundered, it was a site that had held treasure after all. The pit and gateway were the feng shui of this place, helping to ensure its prosperity.

The woman lived a carefree life in this auspicious environment and grew more attractive than ever. None of the villagers dared laugh at her blunt mountain speech. Her in-laws and husband treated her well. Her husband declared that for her sake he would take any job that paid a good wage. These days there was need for all kinds of high-rise buildings in the city, so when there was no farm work to do her husband joined a construction crew. The woman’s mother-in-law moved in with her to keep her company and boiled brown sugar with water for her to drink. The sugar water made her lips red and moist, and lent her an air of freshness. Her mother-in-law loved to boast of her to others, “You won’t find many as good-looking as this one!”

After getting pregnant, the woman was more pampered than ever, and was more inclined to go out and about as she pleased. She loved to go to the market, not to buy anything, just to look. Her mother-in-law would lead Black out for her to ride, fearing the walk would exhaust her.

Black is pregnant too, thought the woman, but she took the lead rope in hand anyway, happy to have company on the deserted road. The fact that they both carried little lives within them seemed to instill feelings of shared suffering and pride. So they set out together, their proud bellies bulging.

The woman never rode Black, but she varied her pace according to Black’s inclinations. When she first came to the plain, the woman found the views vast and spacious, but after dwelling there for some time, a certain loneliness crept in. Living in the mountains, one could never see beyond them, so the mind’s eye did not travel far. But what was at the end of the plain? She pondered as she walked, and began to think that she would never get to the plain’s edge in her lifetime. When her mood sank too far, she abruptly called out, “Blaa—ckyyy!” She drew out the sound in a way that startled the cow in its single-minded plodding. Black stopped and turned its wonderfully gentle eyes to where the woman had been, yet by this time she had walked on past. Black galumphed forward in its stiff-necked way, only to find that the woman had fallen behind. The woman chuckled to herself and softly sang out, “Blaa—ckyyy!” The two of them made an island of activity on the quiet plain. When she created a commotion, the woman felt there was more under the sun than just her and Black sauntering along: there was also her loud voice, and the ruckus being kicked up within her belly, and Black’s awkward stride.

As usual the woman was coming home from the market empty handed. Together with Black she drew near the gateway. The sun’s rays were turning softer, daubing her slightly swollen face, daubing the tip of her nose which glittered with tiny droplets of sweat. Off in the distance a few black dots appeared – children on their way home from school. The woman was tired. Every time she saw children skipping along, she felt weighed down by fatigue, a fatigue that came from her heavy abdomen. She felt that her belly was suffering with her, or that the child in her belly was suffering. Supporting herself with both hands, she headed straight for the stone stele that lay beside the road to give her belly a rest. The woman sat on the stele while Black ambled off into a wheat field.

The massive stele had belonged to that ancient noble; once it had stood on the back of an equally gigantic stone turtle, juxtaposed with the gateway in the distance. Later the stele had been toppled by a group of young ruffians from the city. According to her mother-in-law, the young people had also intended to push over the gateway, but it was too heavy, so they decided to use explosives. Her mother-in-law’s father had led a group of villagers to kneel in front of the young people and beg them to spare the gateway, but the stele was never set back upright.

The huge stele by the side of the road became a bench for passers-by to rest on, and its edges were worn smooth by the rear-ends of all who had sat there. Written characters were carved on the stele, large characters that were each the size of a mixing bowl. The woman couldn’t read, so she asked her husband what the words said. Her husband did not know either, for he had only attended three years of primary school. Her husband said, “What’s the use in knowing? It’s a thing of the past.”

The woman sat on the stele and looked once again at the bowl-sized characters, one of which was under her rear end. This time she slid aside and sat carefully at the stele’s edge. She was not sure why she chose to move aside. In the past she had always plunked herself down on top of the stele, without thinking of whether she was sitting on one of the characters. Perhaps this had something to do with the belly bulging out beneath her chest. The woman had great hopes for this belly of hers, hopes that the black dots resolving in the distance – thee children coming home from school – made concrete. The children shared a connection with the characters. Somehow the woman didn’t dare disregard them, as if to do so would be like disregarding her own belly.

The woman believed that her child would one day join the ranks of these children going off to school and coming home. Her child would surely ask her many questions, just as she had questioned her own mother. When the time came to take her child to market (the woman looked forward to this fervently), her child would surely see this stone stele; her child would ask about the words on it, just as she had asked her husband. She could not just tell the child she did not know; she did not want to let her child down, but she had no idea what the characters on the stele said. At this point the woman felt uneasy, as if the child in her belly had jumped out to demand an answer.

The children coming home from school approached the pregnant woman on the stele and greeted her according to their relationship. She called to a nephew of her own family, asking him for a piece of paper and pencil. The woman held pencil and paper in either hand and waited until the children were far away. The wait dragged on for a long while, and she felt as if she were doing something on the sly.

When the open plain recovered its original stillness, she laid the paper on the stele and began her task: to copy the bowl-sized characters onto paper and take them back to the village, where she would ask a literate elder how to call the characters by name and what each one of them meant. As she got ready to make the first mark, she realized what a difficult task this would be for her. The woman was good with her hands: her embroidery needle could make phoenix and dragon patterns come alive; she had no worries doing needlepoint or stitching shoe soles, yet she could not make the pencil in her hand do as she wished. She tried hard to figure out the shapes of the large, odd-looking characters, but the more she considered them the less they looked like characters: they were a bunch of unnamable shapes. So she turned her eyes away to look far off at the sky and mountains, at little trees dotting the broad plain; she looked at clouds scudding across the sky and the cold crows circling above the gateway. All these things distracted her, yet concentrated her energies, allowing her to pull back her gaze and settle her mind. Once again she took a careful look at the characters’ shapes, then timidly but with determination made the first pencil mark on the blank paper.

With that first mark on paper, the woman’s writing – more like sketching – was unstoppable. As she drew their shapes, she surmised what their meanings might be. Though she did not know, she could guess that the meanings were good, because each of the characters was “attractive” – she thought of the word people used to describe her. These thoughts seemed to connect her more closely to the characters, and her heart filled with a bashful delight. She was willing to describe the characters taking shape beneath her pencil as attractive. Looking at them, she could not help but marvel over what wonderful things characters were!

The westering sun sank toward the horizon; by now the woman had been hunched over the stele for a long time. The exertion of drawing had caused her to sweat profusely, beads of it soaked into her collar and trickled down between her breasts. Her face was flushed and occasional tremors shook her sturdy wrists. Yet she could not stop: her state of mind would brook no rest. In all her life she had never engaged in a task that was so tiring yet so absorbing. It seemed to take all the intelligence and effort she could summon.

At some point Black came back from the wheat field and lay down beside her. Black looked at her quietly, its haggard face the picture of placid docility, as if watching over her or giving her moral support.

Finally the woman finished her task. In the obscure light of dusk she carefully counted up the characters on the plaque: “Faithful Reverent Sincere Upright Industrious Conscientious Incorruptible Perspicuous Peaceful Great Ai-sin Fraternal Ruler Spirit Road Plaque.” And there they were on her paper: “Faithful Reverent Sincere Upright Industrious Conscientious Incorruptible Perspicuous Peaceful Great Ai-sin Fraternal Ruler Spirit Road Plaque.” She counted them again to make sure. The characters on her paper were gnarled and odd, like coiled snakes or twisted lengths of rope. But in any case they were not hand-stitched shoe soles or needlework flowers: they were characters. With them, she finally felt qualified, finally seemed truly attractive, finally dared to meet her infant face to face. This was preparation to give her child a satisfactory answer. Her child would surely grow up acquainted with many good-looking characters. Her child would surely wish many things for her, and she intended to go on improving herself, in keeping with those wishes. The woman’s child would one day leave her womb, but that character-bearing stele would stand forever in her heart. She figured that something is made to stand in every person’s heart, for good or ill. For her child’s sake, she had found a stone stele, and because of it there would be good feng shui in her heart.

The pregnant woman stowed the fruit of her labor in her jacket pocket. Massaging her aching waist, she called to Black to get moving. Through the gateway she could see cooking smoke ascending skyward from the village.

Black was reluctant to stand up right away and switched to a kneeling position, inviting its master to ride on its back.

“Blaa—ckyyy!” She called in sympathetic tones, insisting that the animal get to its feet. Instinctively she reached out a hand to stroke Black’s distended belly, soon to give birth. Black’s calf might even come on the very day of her own child’s birth. Black stood on all four legs.

The woman and Black walked together over the open plain, like two women who have thrown in their lot together. The scent of Black’s body gave the woman a feeling of warmth and security. She stroked it unceasingly, and the cow rubbed its face against her arm in return. The woman and the cow walked together over the plain, inspecting each other as they went, like two generals inspecting the plain. Nightfall was coming, but the gateway persisted in giving off a faint white glow as the woman and Black left it behind. The woman inspected the plain, the starry sky, the distant mountains and nearby trees, the birds’ nets crowning nearby trees like black hats, and even the clamorous marketplace, the pregnant cow, those good-looking but unfamiliar characters, her future child, her child’s future… She felt that these things were all indispensible, or maybe they were all she needed in life. She felt a warmth surge from the bottom of her heart and fill its chambers. She wanted to tell someone about it, to describe this fervor that came over her, yet she would never be able to describe the experience of being moved this way.

“Blaa—ckyyy!” The woman murmured the sounds in the darkness, her voice trembling slightly, like someone babbling in the midst of a happy dream.

Translated by Denis Mair

Alai

Born in 1959, of Tibetan extraction, Alai began writing poetry in 1982, but switched to fiction in the mid- to late-80s. His major works include the poetry collection Lengmo River, the short story collections Last Year’s Bloodstains and Silversmith in the Moonlight, the novels Red Poppies, Empty Mountain, King Gesar, the topographical essay collection Staircase of the World, and the essay collection So This is How We Keep Getting Richer. In 2000, Red Poppies won the 5th Mao Dun Literature Prize.

The Hydroelectric Station

by Alai

What cool guys they were!

These guys on the survey team were even cooler than the guys on the work team.

The guys on the work team were cool too, but only in their eyes. Every part of their face would smile, but they still had this self-satisfied look in their eyes. They came to Jicun, the village we were from, wearing backpacks like soldiers. After holding a meeting, they were assigned to live with poor and lower-middle class peasant households. They said, “Chairman Mao instructed us to eat, live, and labor with you, and to build a New Socialist Village with you.”

The guys on the survey team were different. They arrived in Jicun with a team of mules loaded with weird and wonderful things: canvas tents, folding cots, tables and chairs, and of course various kinds of gauges and scopes for land surveying. They appeared, took one look at our village, quite a big village Jicun was, and drove their mules around it like they hadn’t seen a thing. They looked like they’d seen the world. Like every other survey team that had ever visited, they hiked upstream and made their camp a bit beyond the mill in the grassy clearing by the woods. Most of them wore spectacles, but looks can be deceiving, and they could do all kinds of work, like cuting down small trees and binding them into frames for their tents, or digging a hole in the ground and, before you knew it, having a fire going to cook the meal, or even chopping logs of birch into posts to make a pretty fence around the camp. The guys on the work team didn’t know how to do such things. The men in the village did, but the guys on the survey team knew how to do other things too, and they had things the villagers had never seen before. They felled a stout cedar tree and used the thick trunk to put up a sturdy platform for their strange contraptions. The thing with a tail that dangled when the wind was light and whirled nonstop in the breeze was a weathervane. It showed how hard and from where the wind was blowing. They also put some beautiful glass tubes inside a crate. Every day some guy would climb up and record in a hefty book how much rainwater or dew was in the tubes, and they would stick a long, notched iron ruler into the water and note the level to see how much had accumulated or evaporated.

Then they would go climbing over hill and over dale. They would clang rocks with hammers and look at the distant mountains or the nearby river through different scopes. If the weather was good, they would set up tables, spread out sheets of paper, and start using the numbers in their book to draw graphs. The lines of the graphs went up and down uncertainly, sometimes zigzagging all over the place.

They kept themselves busy, having no time to so much as cast a glance in the direction of the village, even though it was practically next door. Occasionally their cook would come up to buy some vegetables or milk.

Maybe because those guys seemed a bit too proud of themselves, maybe because they behaved as though Jicun didn’t even exist, the grownups in our village mostly avoided going to the survey camp. But me and the other kids were too curious to stop ourselves from sneaking over and having a look. To us, everything in the camp under that spinning weathervane was new and exciting. Those cool guys let us gather outside the fence and peek in. Then, one day at the village primary school, our teacher announced that the survey team had invited all of us to visit, and would even hold a Science Day for us. On the day of the announcement, everyone kept mumbling about the Science Day or the Science Activity Day, but by the following day, those words were rolling off our tongues. But if you’d seen us – oh my god – a bunch of kids with filthy faces, scruffy clothes, and messy hair covered in bits of dirt and grass, you would never have suspected that science could have anything to do with us!

But we went anyway. The teacher made us line up in twos, with the student in front holding a red flag. He kept blowing on his whistle to lead us on our march.

One! One! One two one!

One! One! One two one!

At first, we marched in unison. Our steady steps raised dirt on the winding village road. We rounded the hill and passed the mill, but when we saw those colored pennants fluttering over the survey camp, our hearts started racing and our march quickly became a chaotic mess.

It wasn’t as if the surveyors usually kept the gate closed, but now they opened it all the way to greet a group of kids as anxious and excited as a pack of little mountain critters. That day, we watched them draw, code, and file rock samples, and we learned to use different kinds of gauges to read the levels in the rain collection tubes. There were people ready to explain things at every stop along the way, but just being able to feel things with my own hands made my heart race, and I didn’t hear a word of what they were saying. For the final activity, they arranged those folding tables in a row and had us sit down. There were peanuts and candies on the tables. Aside from a few gluttons, we weren’t brave enough to remove the pretty cellophane wrappings right there and let those colored candy eggs dissolve in our mouths. But our hands were fast enough to grab them, flicking out like the tongues of serpents and throwing back the loose sleeves of our Tibetan robes to seize the prey and jerked it back. We hid the candies, like some secret joy, deep in our robes. Those fellows just smiled.

Seeing their easy smiles, we were finally able to relax. But by this time the Science Activity Day was already coming to an end.

We lined up and marched to the sound of the teacher’s whistle – one two, one two – away from the survey camp. As we were walking by the mill, suddenly someone burst into tears. What was it? Didn’t get any candy? “No,” the child said, “I didn’t understand any of the science they were telling us about.” This struck a chord, and quite a few other kids started crying too. I was about to cry, but then I felt the candies I had hidden up my sleeve. I ate one. Suddenly I no longer felt like crying. It is still so sweet to think back to that memory!

From then on, the gates of the camp would always open wide for us whenever we appeared.

In the evening of the day we visited the camp, every kid who went on the field trip shared candy with his family. We also brought a message home: the survey team would design a Hydroelectric Station with a Waterpower Generator for the village.

Water! Power! Generator!

The waterpower generator would light electric lamps in every home.

Heavens! That was in the 1970s. That was the last survey team to come to our village. The first teams came driving teams of mules. Later, the highway came through, and two survey teams arrived driving their own army green trucks. The trucks stopped and lined up by the tents, becoming part of the camp. In the early morning after we brought the news about the waterpower generator, goods from all the households in the village were heaped outside the fence around the camp: piles of cabbages, radishes, potatoes, cured meat and fresh milk, even bunches of wildflowers and bundles of chopped wood. In those days, the relationship between the village and the logging camp was very strained. The villagers were so unhappy that the axes and saws of the loggers were quickly swallowing the forest that little things would often get blown out of proportion. The disputes were really over trees, but to this day, people still talk of ethnic conflict between Han and Tibetan people. Disputes over trees can be resolved, but an “ethnic problem” sounds deep-rooted, almost ingrained. But most of the fellows on the work team were Han! And there were Han people in the village before the work team even came. The caretaker Pockmarks Yang was Han. And the guys on the survey team who were willing to hold a Science Activity Day for the village kids were also Han. And now those same guys were even going to design a hydroelectric station for us!

What beautiful memories the survey team left behind for our village!

One day, they shouldered their instruments and trekked upstream for a few hundred yards, white wide-brim hats hanging down their backs. They drove several stakes into the ground by the river and wrote letters and numbers on all the stakes with red paint. That was to be the location of the water intake. There, they set up a tripod and mounted a magical scientific looking lens to locate the colored pennants and the long, extendable poles their teammates were setting up beside rocks or over the sparse treetops. Then they started driving stakes into the ground in a row, one after another. Having done that, they returned to the camp to do some more drafting. Meanwhile, the whole village had been mobilized to go along the stakes and pull up the weeds and hack the shrubs and the thickets of bamboo to make a pathway through the wilderness. The route went level for a while, then turned and ran steeply down to the low-lying area by the camp. Everyone understood that this was the route the water channel would follow. The village mill drew water from the river to turn the heavy millstone in the same way. Most of the surveyors were boxing the samples they’d gathered, neatly loading them onto the trucks, and dismantling the instruments they used to measure the wind and the water. Only a couple of them were still drawing plans on big sheets of paper. Bending at the waist, those guys leaned over the tables with pencils behind their ears, holding compasses and rulers of different shapes and sizes.

That day, the village grownups forgot to maintain their reserve in front of these haughty fellows and went over to the camp. But the guys on the survey team still did not seem inclined to get friendly with the villagers. They were busy with their own things. At noon, the last tent was dismantled, the canvas sheets were folded and bound with sturdy ropes, and everything was loaded onto the trucks. The trucks rumbled to life just as the hydroelectric station was coming into being on the two remaining tables. One of the tables was then folded up.

Several village bigwigs gathered around the last remaining table and listened as the only draftsman left pointed out the sluice gate at the intake, the reservoir at the end of the water channel, the hydraulic turbine well, the shed above the well, and the generator inside the shed.

The survey team left the village a hydroelectric station drawn on a piece of paper.

The trucks drove off, leaving the villagers standing in the empty camp looking at the plans for the station, unsure whether they were happy or sad.

Seeing how efficiently the team had tidied up the camp, the villagers could only sigh in admiration and say, “Damn, those guys sure have the right to be so proud of themselves.”

Other than that, they couldn’t tell what they felt.

Three more years passed, and a hydroelectric station really got built in our Jicun. And it was built, yes indeed, according to the set of plans the survey team had left behind. The shed for the generator went up right on the original camp. Water churned into foam by the spinning blades of the turbine spilled out onto the low-lying area to the side. One day at dusk, the generator operator opened the sluice gate at the river and trotted back to the shed. By this time, the turbine was spinning, the belt drive of the generator whirring, the needles on the voltmeter and ammeter trembled, then slowly rose. When the needles went high enough, the operator lifted the switch, and the village started to shine in the twilight hour.

The survey team was never to return to Jicun.

Seeing that neatly dressed, mild-mannered, yet haughty fellows had designed that power station, the villagers unconsciously assumed that only someone neatly dressed, mild-mannered, yet haughty could operate it. So when the operator, who wore robes that were neither very dirty nor exceptionally clean, lifted the switch with hands that had never written a single word and lit up the night sky over the whole village, we all felt as if we were dreaming.

It was the brightest night in Jicun’s history.

The Threshing Machine

by Alai

An engineer came down from the prefecture the year the hydroelectric station was built. Soon, he had recruited young people in the village who were fond of newfangled things. He kept them busy on the threshing floor, and he predicted that come harvest time, it would no longer be necessary for so many people to keep beating the grain, back and forth and up and down, over and over again.

They dug two deep pits in the perfectly level threshing floor, and then one day, cement appeared in the village… No, cement had already appeared when they were fixing up the hydroelectric station. The villagers already knew that the arrival of this special kind of mud meant that electric machines were soon to follow. In its invisibility, electricity was really an amazing thing. You flipped a little switch on, and the current went flying up a wire. It could dash into a light and make it shine, or into another machine and make it run. You flipped the switch off, and the current immediately withdrew back into the Mother Machine. Yes, that’s what the villagers called the generator: the Mother Machine. She let the swift current of the river swirl around inside her, turning it into an electric current. Behold, when the turbine whirled and the machine started to hum, if you didn’t raise the switch and release the current so it could flow up the wire all the way to the village to make lamps shine, loudspeakers blare, and other machines whirl, well, then that machine would behave just like a mother cow bursting with an inexhaustible flow of milk; it would start screeching and shaking all over. It might even get mad, so mad it could tear itself away from its firm cement base. A milk cow is restrained with a rope while the machine was fastened with metal screws. A cow could never break its rope, but an angry machine might snap its iron screws and wreak terrible havoc. When the station was first finished, the men in the village, pipes dangling from their mouths, tried to get a feel for “the machine’s temperament” by observing it as its workings whirred round and round. As the needles on instrument panel meters went higher and higher, the tinted electric bulbs inside the shed became brighter and brighter. Then the operator, who’d received half a year’s training in the prefecture, put on his white gloves, clutched the master switch, and said, “Go and see! The electricity’s on its way up to the village.”

Those villagers scrambled out from the shed, but from where they were standing, they couldn’t see the village up on the level ground atop the river bluff. They yelled, “We can’t see a thing!”

The operator shouted, “Get ready… NOW!” On the last syllable, he lifted the switch. Then everyone saw in the sky above the village what looked like a flash of lightning – no, it wasn’t a lightning flash, which would disappear in an instant and leave a deeper darkness in its wake. The light they saw burst forth like lightning when it first appeared, then it faded slightly, withdrawing and focusing itself until it was like a circle of light above the village. It was brightest at the center, growing dimmer as it spread out into the night. In the villagers’ experience, except for the sun or the moon on occasion, only the great spirits depicted in the temple murals wore such halos. But those halos were drawn by master painters, while electricity had mantled the village in a beautiful nimbus of light.

The villagers wondered at it a goodly while, until the operator lowered the switch and the light vanished. All they could see was a swath of darkness, and this darkness seemed all the deeper for following the light. The villagers poured back into the generator shed. Forced to hold the electric current in, the workings of that machine turned faster and faster, and its steady hum became a shriek. The whole thing started shaking violently, and the needles on the instrument panel meters were jumping frantically. The operator lifted the switch, the current raced out, and once again the village was wrapped in a mantle of glimmering light. Coming down from this climax, the machine gave a long sigh, and its fearful trembling slowly subsided.

Then someone uttered its name, “Mother Machine”, which sounded like a scientific name for a machine that made machines.

People were silent for a moment, then they roared with lively, appreciative laughter at the pun. These men kept sitting around while the operator, with a satisfied expression on his face, waxed the belt drive and used an oil can with a long spout to dribble lubricant into some little holes in the machine, until he too had nothing else to do. Someone couldn’t help chuckling again at the nickname they’d given the machine, but most people didn’t think it was that funny anymore. By that time, that machine was running smoothly, humming along almost drowsily.

The operator said, “Everyone go home and see how your houses are lit up.”

They put away their pipes and headed home. They climbed up the bluff, and at the entrance to the village, all they could see was electric light shining in the windows of every home. When they looked up, they couldn’t see the radiance above the village anymore since they were directly beneath it. They also encountered some wild animals, foxes and wolves and the like, crouching on the ground. Those curious creatures were entranced; the village had become uncanny on account of this unusual light. And because of this light, the windows of every house danced with moths and mosquitoes, many more than normal. The bats that fed on these little bugs were blinded and disorientated, crashing into one another.

Electricity had given the village an unprecedented radiance, but people were still peeved by the pits that had been dug in the threshing floor for some new machine. But there will always be new things in life, and it’s unwise for people to complain about something before they get to know it and see what it can do. This is a question of old versus new ways of thinking. In other words, it’s an ideological problem, a huge problem. So the villagers kept their feelings to themselves. The time to get the fine brown clay out from its appointed place and hammer the threshing floor until it was mirror-flat came and went, but nobody said a thing. It was the most wonderful time of the year in a farming village. The fields had been fertilized and weeded for the last time. The wheat and barley had flowered and started to ripen. Now the ears of grain, heavy and full, were swaying in the breeze. The fields were deep, viscous lakes, with sunlight dancing on their satiny surfaces. Since time immemorial, people had fixed the fences in the month of May; come August, when the autumn wind drew nigh, they would repair the threshing floor with brown clay so fine that it could be used to fire ceramic vases; and in October they would harvest the grain, dry it on tall racks, toss it down, and lay it out on the perfectly level threshing floor. The rising sun would beat down, and the hay on the threshing floor would whisper and permeate the air with its fragrance. Then men and women would line up facing one another and start swinging their flails to the rhythm of a threshing song:

Behold the pretty beak of that peacock by the stream!

Pa! Pa Pa!

Its gorgeous painted feathers are glazèd, they seem!

Pa! Pa Pa!

Flails are visible, and so are peacocks. But now something invisible, electricity, had come into being. The water turned the massive turbine, the spinning turbine made the “Mother Machine” hum – and voila! – electricity appeared. Electricity not only made lamps shine and loudspeakers boom in the village, but could also summon a labor saving appliance that meant that people would no longer have to go up and down, back and forth, over and over again, beating the hay on the threshing floor. Several huge crates covered with waterproof canvas had been carried to the threshing floor. To the side, the two pits, dug deep, now had steel bars sticking up. The engineer directed people to pour pre-mixed cement into the pits to lay a solid foundation for the new machine.

Once the base had been poured, the engineer went back to the prefecture to take a break. People were desperate to know what the machine looked like, but it had been placed on the threshing floor under a protective canvas covering, and there were militiamen guarding it day and night. During the day it was okay – the militiamen could do some work around the threshing floor as long as they made sure no one stopped and loitered. But at night it was an entirely different situation. Pairs of militiamen had to patrol the machine with loaded rifles, bayonets bared “in order to prevent overt or covert class enemies from interfering with agricultural mechanization.” Of course, the class enemies didn’t have the guts to appear. But curious kids and blossoming maidens did, and they were always hanging around in the evening hours. Not until the sickles were brought out for the harvest did the engineer reappear to install the machine. The first day, he opened those wooden crates. Just like everything from the city, the steel components inside were slathered with a thick layer of grease. The engineer directed his handpicked assistants to wash the grease off with gasoline. They waited until the second day before mounting the machine on its cement base. On the third day, the engineer had the generator operator bring over a dedicated electrical line. On the fourth day, the engineer “took a break”, during which he enjoyed a nice fat lamb, freshly slaughtered by the production team. On the fifth day, he connected the wire to the machine with his own two hands, and once the switch on the machine had been lifted, it started running. Covered in iron teeth, a cylinder was spinning restlessly under a metal cover. Because there was no grain for it to process, the cover began vibrating so much it seemed ready to fly off, and the fine brown dust from the threshing floor went flying. The engineer lowered the switch, but the cylinder kept rotating for quite a while before reluctantly coming to a rest.

The engineer gave all the screws a final tightening with a wrench, and had everyone form a line from the pile of hay by the drying racks to the machine. This time, he stood to one side, nodded, and directed the villagers, “Begin.”

This time, it was his assistant who lifted the switch, and as the machine started to run, sheaves of grain were handed down the line and into the engineer’s hands. He fed a sheaf of grain into the maw, and fine hay started flying out the other side onto a metal sieve. As the hay was pushed along, the golden grains of wheat fell through the gaps in the sieve into a long, thin metal collection trough. He fed the machine with over ten sheaves of wheat, and then waved his hand, signaling his assistant to lower the switch. People squeezed forward to see how much grain had been threshed in such a short period of time.

The engineer clapped his hands and said, “See? That’s how you do it!”

People continued threshing the grain according to his example.

The engineer warned them, “Be careful! You must never put your hands into the maw of the machine!”

Who knows how many people it would have taken to thresh that grain, dancing their flails over the threshing floor again and again countless times. Once more the people marveled.

“What a machine!”

“Oh, electricity!”

That harvest season, the villagers only needed a little bit of time and energy to do the work that used to take a lot of people a long time. The electric current raced up the electrical cord, a wire wrapped in a rubber casing; all you had to do was lift the switch, and the machine would separate the wheat from the chaff. The villagers used the thresher for two or three years, and people would still marvel at the mystery of electricity and the immense power of the machine. A few more years passed, and many were the times when folks oiled the machine or changed a safety or something. Some folks would notice what a huge racket the machine made and reflect that threshing just wasn’t the same as in the olden days, when men and women would brandish flails and beat the grain, up and down, singing to the slow, regular rhythm of the labor. The cylinder with its metal teeth roared under its cover, and the sound of grain being separated from stalk and husk stifled any desire people might have had to sing.

With a deafening voice and immense strength, the machine cultivated an image of overwhelming might.

To feed the machine’s voracious appetite, people rushed around as if they themselves were running on electricity; if they slacked off even just a little, the serrated cylinder would rev up and the machine would start snarling, as if it were going to snap its screws and leap away from its cement base. The only way they could get a bit of rest was to lower the switch and let the machine power down. Actually, people couldn’t turn the machine off whenever they felt like it, since once it stopped operating, the pressure of the electric current in the “Mother Machine” would start building up.

So the machine could only be stopped at certain times. When those times came, the harried people could come away and lay their tired bodies down, down in the hay. The hay felt soft and warm beneath them, but the noise of the machine still echoed in their ears. The sunlight poured down upon them as they stared up into the blue. They could see the snowy peaks and the village fields, exhausted and limp after the harvest. The rhythmic cadence and the playful melody of the threshing song echoed faintly in their ears.

One day, three years after the threshing machine came to the village, the people were walking back to work after taking a break in the hay. The machine was already running when, unbelievably, this one guy was overcome with nostalgia for the good old days, and started humming a threshing song:

Behold the pretty beak of that peacock at the shore!

Its plumage shines like a vase on the floor!

Without grain to chew on, the machine began roaring at the guy, but he was still humming. The machine almost went berserk before the guy finally came to his senses. Fumbling around, he managed to feed his hand along with the sheaf of wheat it was holding into the maw of the machine. This fellow immediately fell unconscious.

Translated by Darryl Sterk

Chi Zijian

Born on the Lantern Festival in 1965, in the county of Mohe close to the Russian border, Chi Zijian began to write in 1983, and her extensive list of work includes the novels Puppet Manchukuo, Sunshine Behind the Clouds, The Right Bank of the Argun, Snow and Raven, and the short story collections Tales from an Arctic Village, The Snowy Graveyard, Travels to White Nights, Dead Streams, Washing Off the Dust of the Road, Mist, Moon and Cow Byre, and All the Nights in the World. She won the 1st, 2nd, and 5th Lu Xun Prizes, the 7th Mao Dun Prize for Literature, and the Australian Suspense Award. Her work has been translated into English, French, Japanese, Italian and Korean.

A Jar of Lard

by Chi Zijian

In 1956, I was in my early thirties and already the mother of two boys and a girl. Of the two boys, Number One was nine years old and Number Two was six. Number Three, the girl, was only three, so young that we still carried her everywhere.

I was feeding the pig one day in early summer when the village postman brought a letter from my husband, Old Pan. The Party had given all the workers at his forestry station a family allowance so that they could have their wives and children join them. He told me to wind things up at our home in Heyuan in southern China and bring the children to live with him.

Old Pan had never known his mother or father. He did have a younger brother, who also lived in Heyuan. We didn’t own anything valuable, but I gave his brother our pillows, blankets, curtains, furniture, ladles, buckets, and lamps. I sold the pig so that we’d have some money for the road. All we had left in Heyuan was the two crooked old mud huts we lived in. I fretted that they would be hard to sell, but then Big Eyes Huo the butcher stopped by. His family was well off. He wanted to turn the huts into an abattoir, and asked me if I would trade them for a jar of lard. He saw me hesitate.

“Out where Old Pan lives in the Khingan Mountains, it’s winter practically year round,” he said. “They say there’s nothing to eat but yellow beans boiled in salt. Not a shred of meat.” I considered it, then let him take me to look at the jar of lard.

It was an ice green jar. I forgot about the lard and fell in love with the jar itself: most jars are serviceable, ugly things, either muddy grey or yellow, but this jar was beautifully glazed. A foot tall and two handspans wide, its belly was rounded slightly like a woman five months pregnant. It was gold-rimmed, as though it were wearing a gold necklace. Before I’d even inspected the lard, I told Big Eyes that I would be willing to swap.

I opened the jar and took a deep breath. Only fresh lard would smell this good. I had expected the jar to be half full, but it was full to the brim: it must have held a good twenty pounds of lard. The surface was smooth and white, but I suspected that Big Eyes Huo might have poured good lard on top, and left the unfiltered dregs on the bottom, so I found a sorghum stem and plunged it into the jar, while Big Eyes stood and watched, sighing. I drove the stem in slowly, and it reached the bottom without any trouble, which meant that the lard contained no impurities. When I pulled it out, Big Eyes Huo told me that this lard had been freshly rendered from the fatback of two pigs. “Don’t let anyone else take so much as a spoonful,” he said. “You must keep it for yourself, I made it specially for you. If you gave it to strangers, you’d be letting me down.” I reassured him, and left, taking the jar with me.

So we set out for the Khingan Mountains. Number One was old enough to help, so I had him carry four bowls, a bundle of chopsticks, five pounds of foxtail millet and an aluminium can. Number Two took two cans of pickled vegetables and a stack of corn biscuits. I wove a large basket, put my own and the children’s clothes in it, and planted Number Three on top. That way I could carry the child and all our clothes on my back and the jar of lard in my arms.

We left in July, the middle of the monsoon season. Before we set out, Old Pan’s brother gave me an umbrella of wax paper. I shoved it into the basket. When Number Three was bored, she munched on it like a sugar cane.

It took us two hours to get from Heyuan to Linguang Train Station on a horse-drawn cart. We waited there for three hours. Then, as the sky was growing dark, we boarded a train for Nenjiang. The trains running north were all little coal trains, grey like a donkey that’s been rolling in the dust. On the smaller trains each row only sat two passengers, so the carriage wasn’t too full. When the other passengers saw me with the children, they helped me set the basket down, and take the things the children had been carrying. Before we had settled into our seats, the train lurched forward with a rattle.

Number Two was standing in the walkway, and when the train lurched he bumped his head on the corner of the seat. It bruised right away, and he began to howl. It’s lucky he didn’t poke his eye out, I thought later, shuddering at the close shave. Explaining that one to Old Pan would have mortified me.

I put the jar under the table. Whenever the train drew into a station, I bent down and held it firmly so that it wouldn’t topple over.

Travelling with three children is no piece of cake. Often one would be clamouring for food while another claimed to be cold and the third said he needed to pee, so I found myself taking them to the toilet and rummaging for food or for clothes all at once. At night the lights in the compartment were dimmed, and all the children fell asleep: the eldest against the window, the middle child lying on the seat, the youngest in my lap. I didn’t dare fall asleep, for fear of losing our possessions or the children, so it was a long night. We reached Nenjiang at dawn.

I followed the directions in Old Pan’s letter and found the long distance bus station. The bus to Heihe came once every three days. But we were out of luck: tickets were not cheap, and a bus had just left, so we would have to wait two more days. I was afraid that staying at an inn would prove too expensive, so we bought cheaper tickets on a pick-up truck and left the same afternoon.

The back of the truck was fenced with wooden boards about eighty centimetres high. They reminded me of pigsty fences. There were about three dozen people on the truck, all bound for Heihe. The floor was strewn with hay, which everyone sat on. They saw that I had three children with me, and gave me the best seat: at the front, where the ride wasn’t too bumpy. I was afraid that the jar would break, so I held it tightly between my legs. Seeing me with the children in my arms and the jar between my legs made people chuckle, and one man whispered to his wife: this woman must miss her man, look at how she’s squeezing that jar into her crotch. I glared at them, and they hastened to compliment me on the beautiful jar.

The trouble with an open-top truck isn’t the sun, but the rain. If it rained, we would have to spread a piece of canvas above our heads and huddle under it to avoid getting soaked. Sudden showers were no big deal, but rainstorms were disastrous, because the roads would turn to mud and we would have to stop and wait at a roadside inn.

When we left Nenjiang the sky was clear, but two hours later it was already cloudy. The road was full of potholes and the driver was reckless. My bones began to ache, and many people grumbled that they could feel their guts rattling. The clouds darkened, lightning flashed, and rain poured down before we had even spread out the canvas. I was at the front of the truck, trying to hold up the canvas and keep an eye on the children. I stood the jar to one side. If only I had another pair of hands! The truck creaked on, the canvas flapped loudly, and the river itself seemed to be raining down on us. All the passengers had crowded under the canvas. One woman muttered that the man behind her was rammed against her bum, another said the old man standing beside her had bad breath. It was mayhem; the grumbling never stopped. The women talked too much, but the hens were no better. One passenger had brought along a basket of hens, and another had a hemp sack with two piglets in it. The hens were cackling in their cramped cage, while the piglets kept scuttling about in the sack. When my eldest son saw the piglets were nudging the sack up against the jar of lard, he gave them a good kick.

Their owner got mad, and yelled: “They’re pigs, they don’t know any better! Are you a pig?” Yet my first son had a sharp tongue, even when he was a child: “A pig isn’t a man, of course it doesn’t know any better. But you’re a man! Shouldn’t you know better?” His retort made everyone huddling under the canvas laugh.

At nightfall, the truck stopped at an inn in Laogualing. I had been squatting on the edge of the canvas, so my back was drenched. When I trudged into the inn clutching the jar, the innkeeper took one look at it and decided it had to be his.

“Where did you get this antique jar?” he asked me.

“It’s just a jar of lard,” I told him.

He held it in his hands and couldn’t stop stroking it. His wife grew angry: “Will you leave off stroking that jar?”

“It’s a jar, not a pair of breasts, why can’t I touch it?”

The innkeeper asked me how much I would want for the jar and the lard in it. “I swapped it for two huts, I like it, and it’s not for sale,” I said. The innkeeper glared, but his wife smiled at me.

We waited three days at Laogualing for the skies to clear. All the inns in those days had wooden bunk beds, and each bunk could sleep about twenty people. Men usually slept on the top bunk, women and children on the bottom bunk. We slept two to a blanket because there weren’t enough blankets to go around.

To save money, the children and I ate the corn biscuits and pickled vegetables that we had with us, rather than the meals cooked in the inn. But the air grew chilly because of the rain, and I was afraid that the children would get sick, so I borrowed the use of their stove to make porridge from the biscuits and vegetables. As soon as I entered that kitchen, the innkeeper began pestering me to sell him the jar. He would pay me extra, his wife would never know. I hate a man who keeps secrets from his wife, so I told him I wouldn’t give him the jar for a mountain of gold. The innkeeper bristled, and wanted to charge me for the wood on the stove.

“If that tiny bit of money doesn’t burn your fingers, then take it!” I told him.

“Having a stubborn woman like you on my hands, that’s what would burn my fingers!” he yelled back.

With all the travellers crammed onto the beds, our belongings were piled high on the floor. As for the pigs and chickens that some travellers had brought with them, they had to be kept in the stables. All innkeepers keep horses; all children love to play in the stables. The day before we left, I went in looking for my two younger children, while the innkeeper was feeding his horses.

“Tell me which one you like, and you can have it!” he pointed to them.

“Why are you so set on having this jar?” I asked.

“A beautiful object is like a good woman,” he said, “Once you’ve set eyes on it you’ll never forget it! If only Fate had sent me a good woman. At least with this jar I’d have something to look at that I love.”

The stables were bedded with hay, so no one noticed his wife come in. She heard his words. She was a strong-willed woman. Without a word, she knocked her head against the post the horses were tied to, and fainted. Blood streamed from the gash on her forehead, terrifying all the children who were playing at catching mice.

That night, the rain stopped and we could see the moon. The next morning, before the cock had even crowed, the driver was hollering: “Time to go!” I clutched the jar and was about to get on the truck when I noticed the innkeeper’s wife standing there, grey-faced, her forehead bandaged. When she saw me, she knelt down and asked me to leave the jar behind. She said she been thinking that night: if a man likes nothing dead nor alive that he sees around him, he is living in darkness.

“I don’t want to see him go about all day with a dark look on his face,” she said, and began to cry. I was at a loss. The driver went to find the innkeeper, who was touched to find his wife kneeling on the ground and begging for the jar.

He lifted her up: “Look at you, it’s been raining for days now. What if you trigger your arthritis by kneeling in the damp? Tonight you can kneel on my belly if you want, it’s warm enough.” All the onlookers laughed.

“Pretty things bring trouble,” said the innkeeper. “You’d better take that jar with you, I don’t want it any more.” Even so, I could see the longing in his eyes.

The sky was getting bright when we left the inn. The innkeeper and his wife walked arm in arm into the house. My eyes grew moist. I’m glad I traded those huts in, I thought, this jar is something special. Everyone was glad that the man and his wife had made up. The men whistled, the women hummed and even the birds joined in.

“When they’re inside and the house is empty,” someone said, “I bet the man just takes his pants off and has her kneel on his belly.” Everyone laughed.

My younger son asked, “Your belly is so soft, how can you kneel on it?”

“Every man has a special piece of string,” answered a man with a blonde beard. “All he has to do is tie one end to a woman, and she’ll kneel on his belly, no problem.”

We all laughed even louder, but Number Two wouldn’t give up: “Tell me where that string is! Where is it?”

We couldn’t stop laughing for the rest of the ride. At noon, the truck stopped at Chao’an River, and we went into a small restaurant for a quick bite. By nightfall, we were at Heihe.

I have never seen a city bigger than Heihe. Built on the bank of the Heilongjiang, the “Black Dragon River”, it was full of tall buildings, shiny wide roads, big jeeps. I could tell that it was a rich city because there were so many people on bicycles. The women had bare legs that showed beneath their skirts, a sign that the city was liberal-minded. The ferries stopped just by the pier, and before the truck had even come to a halt I could see the passenger and freight ships by the pier.

There were two boats a week going upriver to Mohe, a big boat and a little one. The people there called the big boats “big dragons” and the little ones “little dragons” after the name of the river itself. The day we got there, a little dragon had just left and the big dragon wouldn’t be leaving until two days later. But I was happy to spend a couple more days in Heihe. Once we reached Old Pan’s place, who knew when I’d ever leave the mountains again. I wanted to store up pretty scenes in my mind so that I could daydream about them when life grew dull.

So after we bought the tickets, I took the children to the shops. I bought twenty feet of blue cotton drill and five feet of patterned plain weave cloth, planning to stitch them new clothes for the New Year. The opposite bank of the river was Soviet territory. One shop sold Soviet scarves, soft fabrics with pretty patterns. They weren’t expensive so I chose a few for myself. Then I bought a few pieces of soap and candles, spending nearly all the money I had. By the time we got on the boat, I only had six yuan left. But a little money went a long way in those days – all four of us had a meal on the boat, and it only cost us one yuan.

The big dragons were slower than the little dragons, and since we were travelling upstream, a journey that should only have taken us a day took two. But the ship was far more comfortable than the truck: it didn’t rattle, and there was a breeze. I pointed the mountains and seagulls out to the children. We watched the ship cooks catch fish. The river teemed with fish in those days: if you spread a net and waited half an hour, you’d have a basin full of fish. The children enjoyed it so much, none of them wanted to leave the ship when we arrived.

The place where we disembarked was called Kaikukang, which sounds like Kai Ku Dang, “unzip your fly.” Old Pan was stationed about fifty kilometres away. When we got off the ship, a tall man came up to me and enquired: “You must be Mrs. Pan?”

“That’s me,” I said.

“I’m Cui Dalin,” said the stranger. “Mr. Pan, our station manager, had me come here to pick you up. I’ve been waiting nearly a week now.”

“We did get held up a couple of times,” I told him. “At Laogualing it was the rain, and at Heihe we spent two days waiting for the big dragon.”

“I was planning to go back to the forestry station if you weren’t on this ship,” he said, taking the jar from me: “Good for you, bringing such a heavy jar all this way on trains and ships with the three children!”

That was my first impression of Dalin: a good talker. He said he was the communications officer for the forestry station. On the way to the guesthouse I couldn’t help thinking: “Things must be going well for Pan if he’s the manager of the forestry station. Not that he said a word about it in his letters. But that’s just like him: doesn’t tell his woman anything, whether good news or bad.”

The big dragon stopped in Kaikukang for twenty minutes and left. It had three more stops to make. We spent the night in Kaikukang, and early the following morning, we were on our way.

Dalin had a big shoulder pole with two baskets. He put Number Two in the front basket, because he said boys have tougher skin and can take the heat. He put Number Three in the back basket, because he said his shadow would shield her from the sun. Then he put all the things we had with us into the two baskets. He walked ahead with the pole across his shoulders, while Number One and I followed. I put the jar in a basket and carried it on my back, which was far easier than holding it in my arms.

Walking fifty kilometres on a straight road would take the better part of a day, to say nothing of carrying our baskets along the winding forest paths. Even sturdy Dalin sometimes had to stop and catch his breath. Every time we stopped, Number One would ask: “Are we there yet?” “It’s on the other side of the mountain,” Dalin always said, “We’re nearly there.” Back then, the mountains were lush with trees, larches with trunks as thick as buckets, and birches with trunks as thick as bowls. The birds chirped endlessly. When we were hungry or thirsty, we drank spring water and munched on popped rice kernels that we had bought in Kaikukang. There were plenty of flowers in the wood: red lilies, white peonies, purple coneflowers… Number Three liked to reach out and pick them to eat. I was afraid she would make herself sick eating strange flowers, so I only allowed her to eat the lilies. When the sweetness in her mouth attracted bees, she would shriek, waving her little hands to chase them away. Bees and horseflies are the worst forest pests, because they love the taste of blood. Those of us who were walking were mostly spared, but the children carried in the baskets were easy targets. At noon, I found that Number Two’s left eye was swollen with a horsefly bite, leaving him with one big eye and one small one. As for Number Three, her shoulders and arms were covered with little red mosquito bites. I grumbled inwardly at Pan: hadn’t he realised how hard it would be to come all this way with three children? How dare he not come himself? That callous man. When we get there I’ll ignore him, I told myself, I’ll refuse to share a blanket with him.

We dragged ourselves along until the afternoon. Suddenly, we heard the patter of hooves some distance away in the forest. Dalin put down his pole. “It’s the Oroqen hunter,” he said. Before long, a reddish-brown horse emerged from the forest, with its rider, the hunter, wearing a long robe and carrying a rifle. When he saw us, he leapt off his horse and asked us where we were going. Dalin told him we were bound for the forestry station at Xiaochahe. The Oroqen said he could take us on horseback. I asked Dalin to let the horse carry his shoulder pole, but he insisted that he wasn’t tired and that we should ride horseback. Number One was frightened, and didn’t want to get on the horse. I had never ridden a horse either, but it looked gentle and I was exhausted, so I climbed onto the horse with the jar of lard on my back. It felt bumpy at first, but then I got used to it. The Oroqen man led my horse, but when he saw that I was riding steadily, he took Dalin’s pole from him instead, saying that he must need a break. You could tell he was a good man.

Yet even the most experienced horses can lose their footing on uneven paths. After about an hour, we came to a rocky willow tree clearing. The horse tripped on a rock and swerved, and I tumbled off. I only scraped my elbow and knee, but the jar broke. When I thought about how we’d brought the jar all this way, how we were very nearly there, I cried. I felt bad about wasting good lard, but even worse about losing the jar. If only I had left it at the inn. Dalin saw that I was crying and comforted me, saying that we could save the lard by getting rid of the shards of jar. He brought tins, bowls, anything that could hold lard, and started scooping it out of the jar. When they had all been filled, I opened the umbrella that Pan’s brother had given me, and poured the rest of the lard in there. It was such a shame that the fresh lard had grass and ants swimming about inside it, but I told myself that the jar was fated to break because it was too beautiful. Beautiful things often are ill-fated.

I didn’t dare to get back on the horse. The Oroqen was apologetic about the accident. He told Number One that he could carry him in his arms on horseback, but the child was frightened and kept saying, “I’ll walk.” Then the Oroqen man wanted to put the pole and baskets carrying the younger children on the horse’s back, but they were terrified of falling off like me, and cried that they didn’t want to ride on the horse. So in the end the horse only carried the containers full of lard. The Oroqen plucked a few handfuls of grass and stuffed them between the tins, bowls and half open umbrella to stop them from clanking against each other. Every half hour, he would help Dalin carry the shoulder pole for a while.

We trudged along, stopping occasionally, until the sun had set and the moon had risen, the hares had hurried back to their nests and the owls had come out. When we got to Xiaochahe it was eight at night. The younger children were fast asleep. When Pan saw me, he joked that I was lucky to have two young men at my beck and call.

The forestry station back then only had about seven houses, with about three dozen loggers. Seven or eight of them had families who had arrived just ahead of us. The wooden hut we would live in dated back to the days of the Manchukuo State Mining Department, according to Pan. I’ll keep my eyes peeled in case we dig up a piece of gold ore one day, I said.

The Oroqen man got on his horse and rode off. I was annoyed with Pan for not asking him to stay the night. “Oroqen men aren’t used to sleeping indoors,” said Pan. “He would have turned us down even if we’d asked.”

I was so tired I thought my bones would come un-knit. After putting the children to sleep and warming my feet, I climbed onto the heated bed. We hadn’t seen each other in two years, and I had a bellyful of complaints. I had been furious with him, especially when the jar of lard broke, but just seeing him again softened my resolve. We ended up under the same blanket.

Within a few days, all the children in Xiaochahe got to know each other. Pan said that another group of loggers was coming at the end of the year, and the Party would send us a teacher then. That way Number One could go to school. Otherwise he would fall behind while living up here in the mountains.

I found a spoon and scraped all the lard from the umbrella, tins and bowls into a basin. Back then Xiaochahe didn’t have much farmland, and there weren’t enough vegetable seeds. The men had mostly planted beans and potatoes, so we women had an Oroqen hunter teach us how to pick wild ginger and celery. The men couldn’t get over how much better the food was. It gave them new energy for the mountains.

Wild vegetables are perfect for frying in lard, because they absorb oil. Sometimes we found ants in the vegetables while we were eating. They must have crept into the jar when it broke, then the greedy little things had feasted and drowned. Pan fished them out with his chopsticks, but ate them anyway. “Look at them, they’re drenched in lard,” he said. “We can’t just throw them away.”

Less than two months after I had reached Xiaochahe I was pregnant. I began to show early on – perhaps it was all the lard I’d eaten. By the time the mushrooms were ripe for picking that autumn, anyone could tell I was pregnant. The men teased Pan: “Mrs. Pan has only been here for a couple of months and your seed has already sprouted? That’s impressive.”

“Must have been the ants in the lard,” Pan said. “That stuff makes you strong!”

Winter came to the Great Khingan Mountains by October. It snowed for days and days, until the sky and ground were a blanket white. Trees and people looked black against the white expanse. While the men were away logging, we women had to cook, gather firewood, and keep an eye on the children. We looked for camphor laurels with knots in them, hacked off the branches and used them to start fires. The knots we would boil in big vats of water. They yielded an oil that looked clear as amber and gave off a sweet smoke when used to light lamps. One day, my water broke as I was extracting camphor oil. It was April of 1957: in the south, fields of wheat seedlings would be budding, but in Xiaochahe it was still freezing, and the Heilongjiang was frozen over. There was a clinic at the logging station, but the doctor could only handle minor problems like a cut or headache, she threw up her hands at anything more serious than that. The patient would have to be put on a stretcher and carried by sledge to Kaikukang.

In those days, there was nothing a woman feared more than a difficult birth – especially in remote places where human life was cheap. I should have had nothing to fear, because I had already had three children, but the baby was too big, and I was rolling on the bed in pain. Luckily it was near dusk, and the men were on their way home. The doctor from the clinic took one look at me and panicked. She wanted Old Pan to take me to a hospital right away. But getting to Kaikukang would take three hours even with a fast horse, and I couldn’t ride horseback in my state. “Why don’t we send her across the river? The Soviets have good hospitals,” Dalin said.

In those days, the very sick from villages near the Heilongjiang such as Luogu, Malun, or Oupu, were all sent across the river to Soviet towns like Kalinovka or Ushumun. Even though crossing the border was not allowed, the Soviet border guards were known to let patients through. Old Pan was a Party member and the manager of the forestry station: to play things safe in view of his position, he should have sent me to Kaikukang. But he didn’t even stop to think. He had a horse and sledge harnessed right away, found a stretcher, wrapped me in two blankets, and made for Soviet territory, bringing Dalin with him. The village across the river was called Khlep, which is Russian for bread. The Russians liked bread, and in the summer we could smell the bread baking on the opposite side of the river. Now that the river had frozen over it would be easy to cross by sledge.

As soon as we had crossed the river, a couple of Soviet guards ran towards us with guns. None of us spoke Russian, so Old Pan pointed at me, patted my big belly, and shook his head. The soldiers nodded; they understood that it was a difficult birth. One of them took us to the small but well-equipped hospital. The doctor was an old man with a white beard. He gave me an injection and did a Caesarean section, producing a baby boy who weighed about eleven pounds: no wonder I had been in such pain! Old Pan was so relieved that the baby and I were safe, he kept bowing to the doctor. We hadn’t brought any gifts when we rushed over, so Old Pan took off the watch he was wearing and gave it to the doctor, who smiled and put it back on Old Pan’s wrist. Old Pan searched his pockets, but all he could find was half a packet of cigarettes and two yuan. Chinese money would be useless to the doctor, so Old Pan offered him the packet of cigarettes. The doctor pointed at me and waved his hand, to indicate that you must not smoke in front of recovering patients.

We couldn’t go home right away because I had just had an operation, so we stayed two days. The Soviet doctors gave us food and fed our horse. The Soviet nurses brought me bread and eggs. They made the baby a present of cotton clothes with a red pattern on a blue background. I was sad when we had to leave, and kissed the nurses and doctor goodbye. The border guards had Old Pan sign a piece of paper that none of us could read, and put his thumbprint on it.

Once we were back at the forestry station in Xiaochahe, Old Pan made a trip to Kaikukang to resign his position as station manager. He said he had lacked Party discipline in crossing the border so that his wife could give birth safely. Luckily, the Party let him off with a verbal warning instead of disciplining him. He bought two pounds of sweets to celebrate, and came home in high spirits. Every family in Xiaochahe received a few sweets. We gave the boy the name Susheng, which means “born in the Soviet Union.” His nickname was Ant. Old Pan said that his seed wouldn’t have been so virile, and Ant wouldn’t have been born such a big baby, without all the ants in the lard.

Ant was the handsomest of all our children. He had his father’s wide forehead and thick eyebrows and my high-bridged nose and smiling lips. But his eyes were dark and bright, unlike either of ours, and Old Pan said they took after the ants. The people in Xiaochahe all loved him, and said he was destined to do well for himself. Everyone called him Ant.

When Ant was four, Dalin married Xiaochahe’s new teacher, a fair-skinned girl from Yangzhou called Cheng Ying. She had a willowy waist, beautiful eyes, and black braids that swished as she walked and made the young men go wild. Three men were known to be pursuing her: the other elementary school teacher, the station technician, and Dalin. In the end she chose Dalin. They said it was because she liked a family heirloom of his, a gold ring with a green gemstone.

Local custom decreed that the groom had to have a boy sleep on his bed the night before the wedding, because only then would the wedding bed be clean. Dalin and Cheng Ying both liked Ant, so they asked him to do it. Most four-year-old boys wouldn’t want to spend the night away from home, but Ant agreed happily. When Dalin came to pick him up, Ant even asked: “Am I going to sleep with Mr. Cui or Miss Cheng?” Old Pan and I laughed ourselves to tears. We told him, if you sleep with Miss Cheng, Mr. Cui will have every right to spank you!

But Ant flubbed the job: Dalin said that Ant had had a tummy ache and groaned all night until dawn. But when Old Pan went to pick him up, his tummy ache had vanished. Ant took the two yuan that Dalin had given him as a present, and proudly told his father that he had started earning money for the family.

The wedding took place one Sunday that summer. It was a big celebration, and everyone in Xiaochahe turned up. We put up tents outside and brought our cooking pots. The women cooked, the men drank, and the children ate sweets and played games until nightfall. The young men crowded into Dalin’s house to play games, and kept the newly-weds awake until dawn.

At the wedding, we saw the ring. Sure enough, it was a green diamond-shaped gemstone set in gold. That pure, unmixed green! All the women held Cheng Ying’s hand and marvelled. Some of them said it was worth a full house, some said it was worth five good horses, a cart of red pine wood, or a thousand yards of cloth. Everything worth having was compared to that ring. From then on, Cheng Ying never appeared without it. When she wrote on the blackboard her students said that her chalk handwriting sparkled with the reflected glow of the ring. In the winter, the dab of green on her fingers was like a hint of spring.

The children grew older, and more loggers arrived at the forestry station. A single male teacher came to the school, and Dalin was said to be unhappy that he was working with Cheng Ying.

A few years passed, and curiously, Cheng Ying had no children. She seemed healthy enough, and didn’t look infertile. People whispered that there must be something wrong with Dalin. One year at Spring Festival, after they had been to see Cheng Ying’s parents, they came back with assorted packages of medicinal herbs. From then onwards, the bitter smell of brewing medicine often wafted from their home. We guessed that it must be a brew for infertility. But we didn’t know who was drinking it, and it would have been indelicate to ask.

You’d think time would pass slowly in the mountains. Yet before I noticed, my hair had turned white, and Pan’s strength was not what it used to be. Even though I got pregnant twice after Ant, neither child survived. The first miscarried after three months, and the second, a girl, weighed only four pounds at birth. I didn’t have any milk to feed her, so I could only feed her sheep’s milk. She was weak and constantly ill, and died of a fever when she was three.

Later, I told Pan: “We’re getting on fifty, and we already have four children. Let’s stop here.” He agreed: “We’ve had our fair share. Let’s end on a high note.” By that, of course, he meant his beloved Ant.

Before the Cultural Revolution, Number One started a job measuring felled logs at the forestry station. Number Two loved school, so we sent him to the secondary school in Kaikukang. Number Three was in elementary school, but she wasn’t any good with books: Cheng Ying said that while the other children took five minutes to learn a new word, our child took all day. She couldn’t even read by the time she was eleven, but she was quick with her hands: she could hook curtains, knit cardigans, and cut clothes, and I figured a girl like her wouldn’t want for a good man to marry. Ant was the least trouble of them all. He was a talented, hardworking student, and kind to everyone. In the winter, when the schoolrooms had to be heated, he got up before dawn to kindle the stove in his schoolroom so that it would be warm by the time school started.

When the Cultural Revolution started, Sino-Soviet relations became strained. Pan was accused of being a Soviet spy because Ant was born in Khlep: his accusers said that his signature on that piece of paper proved that he had betrayed his country. He was removed from his post as the station manager and summoned to Kaikukang to work odd jobs at the pier. Dalin was implicated too – he was sent to Kaikukang to work at the granary. But Pan attempted to take all the blame for what happened. He said that taking me to the Soviet Union had been his idea, that it had nothing to do with Dalin, and that Dalin hadn’t signed the piece of paper anyway. Dalin should be allowed to stay in Xiaochahe, said Pan, so that he wouldn’t waste time by being separated from his wife. Everyone knew what Pan meant – that Dalin still had no children – so they sent him back to Xiaochahe. But he was not allowed to keep his desk job, and was sent into the mountains with the other loggers.

Cheng Ying died not long after Dalin returned to Xiaochahe. It was the green gemstone ring that killed her.

Ever since they were married, she had never taken her ring off. She wore it while teaching, fetching water, even washing clothes at the riverside. Perhaps having no children affected her too – she grew thin and pale. One day, she came home after washing clothes by the river and found that her ring was missing. Her fingers had grown thinner with the rest of her, and the ring must have slipped off in the soap. Everyone in Xiaochahe helped her look for it; people used bamboo baskets to drag the shallows along the stretch of river where Cheng Ying had been washing her clothes, while the best swimmers dove into the deeper ends to look. We searched for two days and found nothing.

After losing her ring, Cheng Ying was not the same person. Her gaze was vacant, and she didn’t seem to notice if you said hello to her on the street. Her voice would trail off mid-sentence in front of a room full of students. She used to be nimble-fingered: back then, her clothes were never creased, and her braids were thick and straight. Yet now her clothes were crumpled and her hair a mess. She allowed bits of vegetables to get stuck in her teeth and didn’t pick them out. She seemed to have lost a protection charm rather than a ring. People began to say that she must have fallen in love with Dalin’s ring, not Dalin himself.

One night she simply didn’t come home. Dalin looked all over Xiaochahe and couldn’t find her. Four days later, they found her decaying body caught in the willows downstream, at a place called Dead Fish Pit. Everyone said she must have drowned herself, or been swept off her feet by the current when searching for the ring. Either way, it was clear she couldn’t live without her beloved ring.

I thought of how Ant had had a tummy ache all night before the wedding. Very young boys sometimes have a sixth sense: it was as though he already knew that the wedding bed would not bring the newly-weds good luck.

Dalin’s back grew crooked. He walked around with his head bowed and spoke to no one. Only in his thirties, he looked like a little old man. A smell of herbal medicine no longer wafted from his house. I felt bad for him: he had lost his wife, and been implicated in Old Pan’s trouble. When Ant was home, I often had him chop firewood, sweep the yard, fetch water, or do other chores for Dalin. When I cooked something special, I would send Dalin a bowl. The other villagers in Xiaochahe also felt for him. People often sent him vegetables and provisions.

Ant was now a teenage boy, and he was unhappy that his father had gotten into trouble because of him. He stopped lighting the stove at school and began to play truant. Sometimes he would walk alone for miles with his red-tasselled spear to visit his father in Kaikukang. If anyone dared to lift a finger against his father, Ant said he would flay him alive. He was 1.7 metres tall by the time he was 14, weighed more than a hundred pounds, and kept a beard that made him look like a young man, like nothing could stop him. Everyone in Kaikukang knew of Ant. Even the revolutionary activists who campaigned against Pan said: you know you’ve lived a good life, if you have a son like Ant!

When Ant stopped going to school, he started working as a logger in the winters, and in the summers he worked as a raftsman on the Heilongjiang. The timber had to be sent from Xiaochahe down to Heihe, and each rafting trip took more than a week. Rafting is a dangerous job, and whenever Ant was out I couldn’t sleep for fear of an accident. There are treacherous currents on the Heilongjiang. Before every trip, I would buy the head raftsman a drink and ask him to take care of Ant.

The head raftsman was called the “river-watcher” or steersman because he was responsible for steering the raft, and the success of a rafting trip depended on the steersman’s skill. All the steersmen liked Ant because they said he brought good luck: they knew that if he boarded a raft, the river would be calm. Most rafts were thirty metres wide and more than a hundred metres long. They could hold two hundred cubic metres of timber. There were seven or eight men to a raft, and the rafts had pots and tents, so they could cook and sleep on them. The steersman said that Ant loved to stand on the raft and pee into the river. He said it felt liberating. On nights when the moon was bright, the men would sit on the raft and drink, and Ant would tell them improvised stories about heroes and beautiful girls. All the men loved his stories.

1974 marked Ant’s eighteenth year. Many people wanted to introduce young women to him, but Ant said that a man’s home is the four seas, and that having a wife would weigh him down. He went rafting again in the summer. This rafting trip changed Ant’s life.

Between Xiaochahe and Heihe the ship passes a place called Jinshan, opposite which was a little Soviet town. Raftsmen usually travel by day and tie up their raft at night, but the riverbank near Jinshan was rocky, and the steersman lost control of the oar in the strong wind. The raft spun in circles toward Soviet territory and struck the bank.

The Soviet Union had strengthened its border defences, and patrol boats nicknamed “river hares” could often be seen prowling the river. They arrived as soon as the raft had run aground. Soviet soldiers rushed up with rifles and shouted at the raftsmen. The steersman pointed at the sky, as though to explain that they had been blown off course and hadn’t meant to cross the border. Ant puffed up his cheeks and made woo-woo noises like the wind. The soldiers laughed. It was evening, and all the families in town were cooking. The breeze tasted of baked khlep. They could see several young girls weaving fishnets on the riverbank.

One girl was wearing a blue dress. She had blonde hair tied into a single braid, bright eyes, fair skin, and red lips. She had eyes for no one but Ant. The steersman knew that the Soviets liked alcohol, so he took a few bottles of spirits from the raft to give to them. In return, they asked the girls on the riverbank to run into town and buy some khlep and pickles.

Then the soldiers and raftsmen sat on the riverbank, eating and drinking together. The girl stood behind Ant, passing him bread and pouring him liquor. Ant flushed whenever he caught her eye. He liked her too.

It was dark when they had finished eating. The wind had died, the moon had risen, and the steersman was ready to steer the raft back to the Jinshan bank. The girl watched as Ant boarded the raft, her eyes bright with tears. She took a little wooden spoon from her pocket and gave it to him. The handle and back of the spoon were painted gold; two red leaves and six red beans were painted on the back. Ant took the spoon and wore it on his breast.

When he returned from the rafting trip, Ant was no longer the old Ant. He often sat idly in the yard with the spoon in his hands. Every day he found a different pretext to go to the river – to catch fish, bathe, polish his shoes. We all knew he was only there to gaze at the other side.

One day, Ant hauled in a red-bellied Manchurian trout that weighed more than a dozen pounds. It was still wriggling when he brought it home. I wanted to fry it in a sweet sauce and bring it to Pan in Kaikukang. I descaled the fish and cut it up. It had a huge stomach, a delicacy in such a large fish, and I sliced open the stomach. Something shone with a green light. There was a ring in the stomach! It looked like the one Cheng Ying had lost. I could hardly believe my eyes. I thought I must be dreaming, so I called Ant over. He took one look and said, “That’s Miss Cheng’s ring!” We put it in a bucket and washed it with soap, scrubbing away the fish oil and seaweeds, until it looked as fresh as a young bride, as beautiful as ever. If only this fish had been caught earlier, I thought, Cheng Ying wouldn’t have died. The ring had indeed slipped off her finger and fallen into the river. Ant and I wrapped the ring in a handkerchief and hurried to Dalin’s house. But he took one look at it and began to sob, “This is fate, it’s fate, I can’t keep this ring.” I thought he must be upset because the ring reminded him of Cheng Ying. “If it makes you sad, just lock it in a cupboard for now. But you can’t spend the rest of your life alone – you’ll want someone to talk to after you blow the candles out at night. When the right girl comes along you’ll see.” But Dalin was bawling like a man made of tears. He clutched my hand, saying: “Mrs. Pan, this ring has to be yours, I can’t have it. It’s fate. If it returns to my home, I’ll die!” “This ring is too valuable, there’s no way I can keep it, it’s not for me!” I told him. But Dalin knelt down and begged me to save him by keeping the ring. He was in such a state that I said, “Why don’t we let Ant keep it then. It’s finders keepers, and Ant caught the fish. He can keep it for when he finds a wife.” Ant lifted Dalin from the floor. “I like it, I’ll take it!” he said. He took the ring and put it in his pocket.

I didn’t know Dalin’s secret at that time. I simply thought that the ring reminded him too much of Cheng Ying.

I fried the Manchurian trout and braised it in a bowlful of yellow soybean paste for three hours, until the bones were crisp. Then I put it in a can and hitched a ride on a tractor bound for Kaikukang. By then there was a road between Xiaochahe and Kaikukang, which made the journey much faster – we were there within two hours. The men at the pier treated Old Pan well. They didn’t give him any strenuous jobs, and even gave him a day off to shop at the cooperatives with me. I told him about finding the ring in the fish’s belly. “Only Ant could pull that off,” said Pan. “It’s like a fairy tale, catching a fish that’s swallowed a gold ring!”

By the time I got home, Ant was already gone. He left three letters. One was to the Party leaders in Kaikukang. It said that his father had only been labelled a Soviet spy because he, Ant, was born on Soviet ground. Now that he had left Chinese soil for good and cut off all contact with his family, the Party should send his father back to Xiaochahe. One was to his brothers and sisters. It said he wouldn’t be able to fulfil his filial responsibilities, and asked them to be respectful to us and take good care of us. The third letter was to Pan and me. He said he was never coming back, and told us not to be sad and to stay well. He drew a picture of a boy kowtowing, saying that every year on the eve of the Chinese New Year, as long as he was alive, he would kowtow in the direction of Xiaochahe to wish us a prosperous year.

Ant had taken the ring and the spoon with red beans painted on it. I knew that he must have swum to the opposite side of the river. Pan was the stoic type, and I had never seen him cry. But he was devastated to lose Ant, and wept whenever anyone mentioned him. I felt as though I had been pierced by knives, but I had to pull myself together for Old Pan’s sake. “That’s fate, we had to give him back to the place where he was born,” I comforted Pan. “It had to happen.”

We didn’t dare tell anyone what the letters said. We said only that Ant had disappeared. Otherwise, Pan would be in even bigger trouble: he now had a treasonous son who had joined the enemy camp. We were petrified at the thought that Ant would suddenly be repatriated. We shuddered whenever a body was found in the Heilongjiang. Fearing that Ant might have drowned while crossing the river, we would be ill at ease until it could be confirmed that the corpse was not Ant’s. Our anxiety only subsided when the river froze that winter. Ant must have made it across safely, we told ourselves. Maybe he’s already with the girl he loves.

When the Cultural Revolution ended, Old Pan returned to Xiaochahe. By then the forestry station had been expanded into a larger base. The higher-ups sent a new manager, and wanted Old Pan to be the deputy manager, but he declined. He said he was getting on sixty and had arthritis, that he didn’t have the energy for the job. I knew that Ant’s departure had plucked the wick from inside his lamp, and that there was barely a glimmer of light in him.

Pan died in 1989. He lived to the ripe old age of seventy. Before he died, he said to me: I could do with some of that lard you first brought to Xiaochahe. I knew he was thinking of Ant, so I brought him the letter that Ant had written us. He gazed at the little kowtowing boy, smiled, and closed his eyes.

At Pan’s funeral, Dalin told me a secret that had been eating at him for decades. He said that the ring was actually mine; he had found it while scooping the lard into bowls from the broken jar, and pocketed it in a flash of greed. At first he thought I had hidden it in the jar, and didn’t dare show it to anyone. After asking me about the jar several times, he realised I knew nothing about the ring, and felt safe showing it to people. In his heart, Dalin knew that Cheng Ying was marrying him for the ring, and she actually liked the technician who was also in love with her. After they were married, the mere sight of the ring made him go weak at the knees, and he couldn’t do what a man had to do. He begged her not to wear the ring, but she insisted. They squabbled about it again and again.

“Why did you have to wait until Old Pan was dead before telling me all this?” I asked.

“Old Pan is a good man. If he were to know, the look in his eyes alone would be enough to kill me.”

Only then did I realise why Big Eyes Huo had told me not to let anyone else taste that lard. He had wanted to give me the ring because he secretly liked me. Old Pan’s brother had just come from Heyuan for the funeral, so I asked him how Big Eyes Huo was doing. It turned out he’d had a brain haemorrhage and died six or seven years ago. When he was alive, every time he saw Pan’s brother he would ask him for news of us. Once he told Big Eyes Huo that I’d given birth to a son called Ant. “At least he’s not called Bedbug,” he huffed, and went away.

Big Eyes Huo had a shrew of a wife. There was never a moment’s peace in their home. When Big Eyes Huo was on his deathbed, his wife was trying on a pair of shoes in the store. Someone told her she’d best hurry home, but she turned to the shopkeeper: “I’ll try the red pair instead! If the man dies I’ll need it to ward off bad luck, or the bastard’s ghost might come back to haunt me.”

It’s too bad I didn’t know the story behind the ring earlier. Otherwise I could have bragged to Old Pan: “See? There are other men who like me too.” But knowing Old Pan, he would only laugh it off: “So a butcher with big cow eyes likes you. What’s there to brag about?”

The year after Old Pan passed away, Dalin died too. I am alive and well, surrounded by children and grandchildren. I still think of that trip from Heyuan to Xiaochahe as the most unforgettable thing I have ever done. Everything that happened to me happened because of that jar of lard.

On summer evenings, I often walk to the border and look at the Heilongjiang. The birds that scissor in flight between the two riverbanks will be chirping. One species makes a call that sounds like “Susheng – Susheng – ” and I’ll look up. My eyesight is not what it used to be, so I can’t make out their silhouettes. But the sky itself, I can see clearly.

Translated by Chenxin Jiang

Wang Gang

Playwright and author, born 1960 in Urumqi, he drifted to Beijing, where he spent close to ten years in business, and now holds a position in the Dept. of Dramatic Arts in the Communications University of China. His works include the novels The Forbes Curse, Back of the Moon, English, Kwan Kwan Saith the Osprey, and collections such as Man in Autumn. His screenplays include “Parties of the First and Second Part”, “A World Without Thieves”, and the TV series “Back of the Moon”. In 2006 China Times in Taiwan included English in its top ten list and “A World Without Thieves” won Best Screenplay at the 42nd Golden Horse Awards, also in Taiwan. Penguin has published English in English, Italian, French, Korean, German and Spanish.

Recollections of the Hunan Cemetery

by Wang Gang

The Ürümchi of those days has faded into distant memory.

It was springtime. Father had been sent to work in a far-away place and Mother could come home only rarely. It was hard for me.

The sky always seemed grey and the weather was still freezing cold. I wept whenever I thought of my parents. “At least we don’t have to go to school,” said my brother.

Just a few steps beyond our home lay the Hunan Cemetery, full of decrepit graves of Hunanese soldiers who died a century ago. I heard that at night mysterious blue flames flared there. It was a scary place. No wonder it is said the sons of Hunan are everywhere.

The cemetery was overgrown with weeds and crowded with elm trees. Small animals and insects thrived there, and it lightened my sadness to catch them.

Next to the Hunan Cemetery stood a small, elegant building where my family used to live. In those days my parents were on top of the world and so was I. But the good times did not last. We were kicked out of that house. I was just seven and couldn’t understand why.

One of my classmates was called Loyal Gao. We were best friends. His family moved into that building after my family was kicked out. Loyal was not blessed with good looks. A huge mouth dominated his chubby face. An ear-to-ear smile appeared whenever he talked, as if he was all mouth.

Every time I went over to play at his place, his mother would ask, “Is your father allowed to come home yet?”

“No, not yet.”

“What about your mother?”

“She comes home on Saturdays to give me and my brother ration coupons for food.”

“You poor thing,” she would say. “Have some toffees.”

In those days confectioneries were rare, especially toffees, which we could only dream of. I always stole a few for my brother.

My mother was horrified when she heard I was a regular visitor at the Gao household. At first she was flustered but after a while she began to weep. “When you’re in their house,” she warned, “don’t say too much, don’t touch anything and don’t talk about your father. If Loyal insults you, don’t talk back. And even if he hits you, just take it and say nothing.”

“Uh-huh,” I mumbled.

But Loyal treated me well. When I didn’t have enough to eat he’d sneak me fried buns from his home. I didn’t have a Chairman Mao badge so he gave me one from Beijing. When he laughed, his eyes disappeared into little slits. When he looked up at the sky he’d sneeze. He really looked funny. My mother’s concerns seemed quite pointless. I thought she was being absurd.

Yes, it was springtime.

The wind whirred and colourful kites filled the sky. Icicles began to drop from the eaves. Everything was coming back to life. A faint roar wafted in from the distant wilderness.

Ürümchi does not have a unified style of its own. Everyone there had originally come from somewhere else. Soldiers, beggars, prison camp labourers, gold prospectors, volunteers to construct the border zone, loggers, and road builders, they all made this city a boisterous hub.

Birds were prolific in springtime Ürümchi. Nonstop chirping filled the trees even before the sun climbed over Bogda Peak.

Shooting birds with a slingshot was lots of fun. The sky above Ürümchi was full of sparrows in those days. I was a deadeye. A bird plummeted to the ground every time I fired, and the survivors would wail in despair. I was proud of my skill and when Mother said sparrows were one of the Four Pests, I felt heroic.

May is the best time to raid birds’ nests.

There was an abandoned stable in the Hunan Cemetery. Swallows built their nests there in the early summer, and the stable became very noisy after the chicks hatched.

One day, Loyal and I stumbled upon a feral cat plundering a sparrow’s nest. The beast leapt up to the eaves and snatched a newly hatched chick with its left paw. Just as the cat was about to devour its prey, Loyal shouted, “Bastard!” and fired his slingshot. The cat screeched and retreated in defeat.

We climbed up to investigate. A little chick cowered in a pool of blood, shivering but unharmed. “You poor thing,” said Loyal. He gently picked the chick up in cupped hands. “We can keep her,” he said, smiling his broad smile and squinting like an idiot before I could react.

“Why the fuck keep a bird?”

“You’ll see.”

We lined a shoebox with some cotton wool to swaddle the little sparrow. Her eyes were closed, her pink body shivered. She looked very cold and lonely on her bed of cotton wool. I felt sorry for her. My heart welled up with fatherly love. I had an urge to warm the bird with my own body.

Loyal and I caught lots of insects, chopped them up with our penknives and fed them to her in little pieces. We were overjoyed when she finally chirped.

Two weeks later the chick was covered in spotted greyish down. Her eyes now sparkled. Her beak was part yellow, part black, with two shiny black spots on top that my brother said were for breathing. She chirped ever so softly.

After three weeks the chick’s down turned brown. Her chirrups grew louder, and she was learning to fly. We tied a strand of white cotton to her leg to prevent her flying away.

“Let’s call her Tinkle,” said Loyal.

“That’s a girl’s name,” I countered.

“Official title: Sparrow; nickname: Tinkle,” said Loyal. “It’s a Supreme Directive from Chairman Mao.”

Tinkle became very affectionate with Loyal, most likely because she stayed in his house. She would perch on Loyal’s shoulder and gently peck his cheeks. Loyal snickered like an idiot when she did that.

Tinkle also liked to hop onto my head and tickle my scalp with her tiny little claws, and occasionally she would peck at my ear while hovering in the air, the sensation as pleasurable as scratching an itch.

By summer Tinkle had grown a lot. She cheeped her desire to take to the sky.

We tied a long string to her leg and took her to the cemetery. Tinkle flew up high, attempting to break free. We would yank the string before she got too far, fearful she would escape. It was like flying a kite. Wisps of white clouds drifted in the vast blue sky. It was a beautiful day. Tinkle longed to fly higher, and her sad cries grew louder. We felt a little guilty, but we were having fun and that was all we cared about.

Summer morning breezes in Ürümchi are cool and refreshing. A month quickly passed as we played with our bird every day. By now Tinkle was fully-grown. She had a coat of lustrous brown feathers but behind her bright eyes there was a growing sadness.

That summer I had a big fight with Loyal.

It was over something trivial. Loyal said something bad about my father so I punched him. His nose bled and he scrunched up his eyes and cried. It looked more like laughing than crying to me.

“My brother says your dad put the screws on my dad. You just wait,” I said.

After that I didn’t see much of Loyal, so I couldn’t play with Tinkle any more. I didn’t care about Loyal but I really missed that sparrow. I wanted to have a talk with Loyal but abandoned the idea when I saw his hard expression. I finally plucked up the courage to approach him at the school gate one afternoon:

“Let me have Tinkle for a few days.”

“Fuck off.”

“Fuck you. Tinkle isn’t yours.”

“She’s always been in my house. She’s mine.”

“That used to be my house.”

“Not any more.” Loyal smirked.

That ended the conversation. I stormed off in a huff and blurted out, “You just wait and see.”

Loyal turned me down every time I broached the topic of playing with Tinkle. After several futile attempts, a rage began to brew inside me. I hatched a plan.

I knew Loyal’s house inside out.

A narrow corridor led from the front door. The housemaid lived in a room around a corner at the end of the corridor. Loyal’s room was opposite the maid’s room. Tinkle was in that room.

The maid was always nice to me. “You poor thing,” she would say whenever she saw me. She knew I was Loyal’s best friend and never questioned my comings and goings.

One Saturday morning I waited until Loyal had left the house then snuck into his room to steal the bird. When I got home I was ecstatic.

I let Tinkle fly around the house while I held the white string, whooping with joy. In my ecstasy I wanted to do something creative, but I went a bit too far. I plucked two large feathers from Tinkle’s tail. She lost her sense of balance immediately, falling over every few steps. She looked miserable. It was funny at first but then I felt bad. The thought of Loyal keeping the sparrow to himself all that time made me angry. I had to take revenge.

I knew my mother would scold me if she saw the bird when she came home. After playing with Tinkle for a while I put her in a wooden box which I hid in a small cavity in the Rocks. I blocked the entrance with some stones. It was satisfying to hear the sparrow chirping in her new home.

Mother returned.

She always looked angry when she came home on Saturdays but we never knew with whom she was angry. She would often explode for no reason. My older brother and I were terrified. For us weekends were like prison time.

But that day Mother was very happy. “Father will come for a visit in a few days,” she announced. She bought some expensive twice-cooked pork. “Tonight we’ll celebrate.” I sighed in relief, my mouth watering as if the whole world was permeated with the aroma of cooked meat.

“Your father is a good man,” Mother said. Then she began to blubber. Both my brother and I could tell her tears were tears of joy.

My brother and I stood next to the stove watching our mother turning the brown slices of pork in the wok. The clouds of smoke and steam reminded me of festive occasions in the good old days. Colour returned to Mother’s pallid face.

Just as we were about to raise our chopsticks, there was a knock at the door.

Loyal and his mother entered. Instantly, my mother was all smiles, pulling out chairs, serving tea, and being abjectly solicitous. Not daring to sit herself, she just stood to the side, smiling timidly while her guests spoke.

After Loyal and his mother departed, my mother thrashed me. She used to target my brother, never me. But that day, armed with a belt, she bawled as she whipped me.

“You little monster!” she screeched. “You’ll be the death of your father.”

I bit my lip, closed my eyes and made no sound.

That night I was in despair as I caressed my bruises. Initially, I directed my anger at the people around me, and then at Tinkle.

“Damn that bird!” I said to myself.

The Rocks were to the west of my home. It was said that Xinjiang was once a vast sea and that the Rocks formed an islet in that sea. Now the boulders of the Rocks were piled up loosely, leaving many openings through which the wind howled.

One afternoon, as the sun was about to descend from the bright blue sky, and children were frolicking in the playground next to the islet boulders – skipping rubber bands, kicking shuttlecocks, spinning tops, playing soccer and hunting games like Eagles and Chickens – I saw Loyal kicking a soccer ball and my heart began to pound.

I took Tinkle out of her box. She chirped cheerfully, thinking I was about to feed her. She spread her wings and her eyes lit up as she gazed at the sky. She couldn’t wait to fly again. I held on to the string and let her fly a few metres before reeling her back in. She seemed vulnerable, and I felt bad as I looked at her puny frame.

Tinkle landed on my shoulder, her tiny claws tickling m. Her golden yellow beak and her round little head were so cute. I hesitated in executing my plan. I released the string to let her go, but after flying around me a few times Tinkle landed on my shoulder again. I couldn’t shoo her away.

Then Loyal spotted me up on the boulders playing with Tinkle and he began to curse:

“Your whole family are bastards. I’ll get my mother to go after your mother tomorrow. She’s scared of my mother. You think you’re having fun now, but you’ll pay for this. And your father, too.”

That set me off. I became so enraged my hair stood on end. “No one can have her now,” I said to myself gnashing my teeth. “No one!”

My mind was made up: I would incinerate Tinkle like a rat. I would make Loyal cry. He would never see Tinkle again.

My heart raced. I took out a small bottle and doused Tinkle with petrol. My hands trembled. Tinkle blinked in puzzlement. “Why the fuck are you blinking?” I snarled. “No one can have you now.” I saw Loyal’s mother before me standing bolt-upright, while my mother, drenched in a cold sweat smiled pathetically, stooped over like a desiccated shrimp.

Father had to leave because of your family. Then your family took over my house. And now you think you can take Tinkle away from me?

I untied the white string on Tinkle’s leg, took the matches out of my pocket and began to strike a light.

Loyal realised what I was about to do. He started to wail. “Please don’t burn her. Don’t. You can have her. She’s yours.” Then he shouted, “Just wait, I’ll get my father to take care of your family. I’ll kill you.”

Birds don’t understand people, and naturally Tinkle did not understand what Loyal was saying. She just looked at Loyal standing below us. There was tenderness in her eyes.

Perched on high at the pinnacle of the boulders I finally lit a match. The air was still and the flame grew large. Suddenly I was scared. The match burned out but I still hadn’t set Tinkle alight.

Loyal was crying loudly, attracting a crowd of children. They all looked up at me in horror. Loyal wailed even louder. “I’ll get my father to kill your father,” he screamed. “And kill you, too.”

I was apoplectic. I struck another match. Loyal’s voice was hoarse from shouting. “Don’t, don’t,” he pleaded. “I’ll let you hit me, you can hit my mother. I, I’ll never take my mother to your place again.”

But it was too late. It’s just as easy to incinerate a bird as a rat. The match had already ignited the petrol on Tinkle’s feathers.

Tinkle shrieked as she shot up to the sky in flames. The whole sky was burning. The boulders were burning hot too. Tinkle shot towards the heavens whizzing like a meteor. The ball of flame was blood red and the sky became ashy grey. The earth was shaking, the air was burning, and I broke into a cold sweat.

Tinkle’s shrill cries drowned out Loyal’s wailing. Suddenly, an ominous mist enveloped me, and dark blood breakers crashed on the horizon.

The burning sparrow flew higher and higher, turning into a small red dot, a yellow dot, a brown dot, a grey dot… but she kept flying higher and higher, far, far away from this world, to where the air is cool and the breeze is light, to a peaceful, freer place.

Finally, Tinkle became a black dot. Her entire life force was transformed into that black dot. Like a black star – the only black star aloft in the vast blue sky – forever fixed high in the heavens.

The Ürümchi of those days has faded into distant memory but day after day, year after year, I can always see that black star, engraved eternally upon the vast blue firmament.

Translated by Martin Merz and Jane Weizhen Pan

Xu Kun

Born in 1965, Xu Kun is Deputy Chair of the Beijing Writers’ Association, and holds a PhD in literature. She has published a large quantity of work, including fiction, articles, and essays: her work is representative of both intellectual writing and women’s writing. Her publications include Hot Air, Vanguard, Kitchen, Last Tango in Midnight Square, Twenty-Two Nights of Spring, and Weed Roots. Her play “Man and Woman” was performed by the Beijing People’s Arts Theatre in 2006. She has won more than thirty prizes, including the Lu Xun literature prize, and has been translated into English, German, French, Russian and Japanese.

Visa Cancelling

by Xu Kun

1

Country B’s embassy was situated on Beijing’s celebrated Sanlitun East Street, close enough to the city centre’s Second Ring Road to see the procession of traffic and hear the din of the thoroughfare. But the diplomatic district jutted deep into a network of quiet and secluded lanes, a world unto itself. It was a haven from the clamour of the city, with ranks of grey walls and iron gates shaded by trees and protected by soldiers and barriers, rarely disturbed by pedestrians or vehicles. Only those with some foreign business to attend to had a need to visit, their cars halting briefly to unload passengers before whisking off. The embassies did not have Chinese signs, only small rectangular brass plates engraved with the scripts of their respective countries. Everything had the dignity and inscrutability befitting a centre of diplomacy.

Now the Sanlitun bar street, just a road away, was an entirely different story – as rowdy as you could take and so profane you could smell the brimstone. Throughout the day, aromas of coffee and booze mingled in the air, as if this were some foreign land. And indeed the first people to appear here were foreigners, nursing whisky at the bottom of their glasses as they whiled away idle evenings. As word of the bar street spread, tourists began to arrive, and the already narrow street became unbearably cramped. Bar followed bar, each dressed up differently – plastic mouldings, undressed timber, old cart wheels – all unique and all appearing to have been copied wholesale from the streets of Europe. As night fell, the street thronged with revellers while rock bands and lounge singers blasted their tunes out of the bars at top volume. The local residents started to form rather firm opinions on the whole affair but in the end simply moved away, renting their homes to merchants who turned former front rooms into shops selling clothing, luggage and gifts, all diverted from the export trade. The street eventually became so overwhelmingly foreign and alluring, that it began drawing daytime crowds as well. All things considered, this street of bars could rightfully be called the first sign of China’s march towards globalization!

Fan Yiding was sitting in an office car, being driven in circles around Sanlitun East Street early that September morning. The day was warm and clear, with refreshing autumn breezes – but Fan found little joy in being up so early, lost, and frantically asking the way to an embassy. Hearing it was on Sanlitun East Street, the driver had aimed for the bars, coming off the Second Ring Road and turning in again – it would be easy from there, he thought. But no such luck: Sanlitun East was divided into several side streets – East First, East Second, East Third and so on, and it was all embassies, each looking just like the next, manned by indistinguishable guards. If you hadn’t asked for directions before setting out, you had little chance of finding your way. The embassies all had flags at the gates, but in his impatience, Fan couldn’t recall what Country B’s flag actually looked like. They repeatedly pulled up to ask the guards: “Excuse me, is this Country B’s embassy?”

The ruddy-faced guards would puff themselves up: “No.” Asked where it was: “Don’t know.” And then they would wave a hand to shoo the car off, like a pesky fly or terrorist.

The driver fumed as he pulled away: “Fucking little peasant soldier bastards, the lot of ‘em! Think they’re something because they’re standing in front of an embassy!? Wastes of space don’t know where anything is!”

Fan was also angry and anxious, but he bit it back and waved a hand in dismissal: “Forget it. Just hurry up and find the place. We started early enough. Being late’ll mean trouble.”

He’d been to the embassy once before – it was, he thought, set slightly back from the road – but that was already five or six years past. He’d been dropped off by the association car that time, how was he to remember where it was!? And this driver couldn’t be expected to know the road – working for the Beijing office of a provincial government meant he knew the airport, the train station, the ministries and where the top brass lived – he’d only need to find an embassy once a year, if that.

Fan was faint and nauseous. His head was heavy, his eyes bloodshot, his face puffy and his chest terribly tight. He’d got back to China after over two weeks travelling around Europe, then flown back home from Beijing without even getting over the jet-lag. Business talks, opening ceremonies, negotiations, contract-signings – he was swamped! Then before he could even catch his breath he’d had to rush back to Beijing on the Monday redeye to come and have his visa cancelled.

It was the first he’d heard of this “visa cancelling.” Miss Lu at the travel agency had only mentioned it after everything else was finalised and he was all set to meet up with the rest of the group in Beijing. He hadn’t met the girl, the guide and translator hired for their trip, at that point. But on the phone she came across as very young and lively. After telling him where and when to meet, she got a little awkward: “Mr. Fan, there is one small matter. After we come back from Europe I’m afraid we’ll have to ask you to make a trip to the embassy to have your visa cancelled.”

“What? Cancel it? The visa?”

“Yes, to have your visa cancelled. Any group that travels to Europe on tourist visas must report to the embassy within a week of their return. You’ll have to bring your passport and boarding pass so they can verify everything, then they’ll cancel the visa.”

“Cancel my visa? What do they need to cancel it for? How come I’ve never heard of this?”

Miss Lu explained: “They’ve been doing it since September 2004, after Europe first opened up to Chinese tourists. They’re scared people will stay there and not come back to China.”

Fan was still confused: “How? Don’t you get your passport stamped at the airport when you come back in?”

“Yes, that stamp used to be enough, but not now. They won’t accept a Chinese border stamp. Some travel agencies convinced the immigration people to give them false stamps – the embassies knew that some tourists had stayed in Europe, but the agencies were showing them passports with the right stamps. And that was happening so much the Europeans don’t trust the stamps any more, they want to check the passport and boarding pass.”

“What? They’re actually doing that? Then you can just take the passport and the boarding card, can’t you? What do you need me there for?”

Miss Lu went on: “It’s a Schengen country. Once they give you a visa you can go all over Europe and that’s more responsibility. So they need to check more carefully. They don’t just cancel the visa for you, you have to go in person and let the visa official see you’re here.”

Fan started to yell: “ ‘In person’? That’s ridiculous! And what if I die? I suppose they would want to check my corpse?”

His northeastern temper showed whenever he got agitated.

Miss Lu rushed to calm him: “Mr. Fan, please don’t be angry! It’s not our fault! If you want someone to blame it’s all those illegal immigrants, ruining our reputation overseas. I heard there was one group that disappeared right after landing, didn’t leave a trace – it was all arranged in advance, obviously. So the European countries had to start this policy of verifying that everyone has returned. Japan’s doing the same, I hear, having Chinese visitors cancel visas when they get back.”

“It’s ridiculous!”

“I know, I know, it is ridiculous! Nobody wants to do it!”

“Do we all have to go? When is it?”

“Not everyone, they just picked a few. We’re a high-level business delegation, so the embassy only selected four people. With those big tourist groups they make everyone go. The appointment is two days after we get back. Because we’re getting back at the weekend you see, and they’re not open.”

“What?! They just happened to pick me? Why? So, I’d have to waste two days in Beijing hanging around waiting for them to see me? I’ve got meetings to go to, opening ceremony ribbons that need cutting. This is complete nonsense.”

“Mr. Fan, I’m really sorry, but there’s nothing we can do. They just choose people at random, we don’t have any control over it.”

“So who are the others?”

“The other three, their passports list them as from Fujian, Zhejiang and Xinjiang.”

“Oh, just us I see? None of you Beijing folk? They reckon we’re more likely to try and sneak in, do they? Not a chance, I’m not letting them get away with that. They’ll get no audience with me.”

Miss Lu was getting worried: “Mr. Fan, don’t be angry, but please do help us with this. If you aren’t there they won’t cancel anyone’s visa, they’ll confiscate all the passports and put you all on a blacklist – none of you could visit Europe again.”

“Ha! European devils are using collective punishment now, are they? It’s blatant prejudice and suspicion against us Chinese. I’m not going; they can do what they want. Who do they think they are? Anyway, I’ve been in and out of the country something like twenty times and I’ve never heard of anything like this before.”

There was a beep as he cut Miss Lu off and slammed down the phone, her tearful voice trailing behind it.

What on earth was all that about? They don’t just want to cancel the visa; they want to do it “in person”!?

Despite all Miss Lu’s explanations, Fan could make neither head nor tail of it. He was a man of standing; head of a well-known state-owned firm; a member of the standing committee of the provincial People’s Political Consultative Congress; a vice-chair of the China Association for Promoting Democracy; and head of an industry association. In government terms he ranked equal to a departmental head – a senior provincial cadre, and he’d got used to being treated as such. Met and seen off wherever he went, never having to worry about anything himself – he had people for that. Now what? He had to cancel a visa? In person? Deliberate trouble-making, that’s what it was!

He was still stewing about it a little later when Xiao Chufeng, the head of the tour group, called. 71-year old Xiao, formerly head of the industry association, was chair of the temporary committee set up to arrange their business fact-finding trip. Or at least, that’s what they were calling it, so all the bigwigs could have their state-owned firms pay for a private jaunt with government money. But he had never expected Xiao to call personally. Xiao was the most senior of the elder statesmen in their field – vice-ministerial level when he’d retired – and he was respected by all. Fan couldn’t risk slighting him.

“Miss Lu’s been telling me you don’t want to go and get your visa cancelled? Come on, it won’t take much time. And if you don’t go the whole group gets blacklisted. It’ll even affect the agency: they won’t be able to take any more groups to Europe.”

“It’s not that I’m not going, Sir,” Fan said, with all due deference. “But wouldn’t you agree, this is clearly discrimination against us Chinese? When have we ever had to put up with this before? If I’d been told in the first place, there’s no way I would have agreed to this trip.”

“I know, I know. We always used to travel on government passports, as officials, and we’d be accompanied, wined and dined, and even met by officials of appropriate rank when we got back to China. We’ve never had to put up with this kind of thing before! But you can’t blame them – it’s all those illegal immigrants letting the country down.”

“The Europeans may have their reasons, but they haven’t considered how it makes us law-abiding citizens feel. If this is the way it is, I’ll just not go. It’s too demeaning. I’ll tell the agency to refund the tickets.”

“Yes, well, you youngsters will have other chances. Not an old fellow like me. Why don’t you come along just to keep me company. We’ll have a chance to chat, you and me.”

And that put an end to Fan’s temper. These were lines to read between! Fan was not yet fifty, in his prime and with a bright future ahead of him. Xiao wouldn’t have many more chances to blow tens of thousands of yuan of government money on a tour of Europe. Fan and the others were still in their posts and could easily justify the expense to the company, but he’d heard Xiao’s costs were being covered by a firm he’d helped out on a project. Xiao still had influence though – his former assistants and protégés were in powerful posts in the key ministries and commissions. A starving camel, after all, still stands taller than a horse. Years of experience in official circles told Fan that he could not risk offending this old comrade, not under any circumstances. Fan still had ladders he wanted to climb – he was bound to need a leg-up at some point. And Xiao’s personal invitation made it abundantly clear – this was not something he could afford to turn down. If he made excuses and dropped out, Xiao and the rest wouldn’t be able to go and that would have consequences. It was not a responsibility he could bear.

Fan quickly bowed into the phone: “You’re being too kind, Sir, please, that’s too much, really. I was just having a bit of a go at the travel agency. They should have made things clear, so I could arrange my schedule for after we get back.”

Despite reining in his words, he still had anger to let loose. Once he finally got Xiao off the phone he had the head of the overseas office drop by for a major bawling out: “Look what a mess you’ve made of it all! How’ve all these problems cropped up!? What do you actually do!? Am I meant to know all this myself!? And why didn’t you tell me about it before!?”

The head of the overseas office was himself aggrieved: “But this was all done as you instructed, no? We handled everything as Xiao’s people asked, and gave the travel agency whatever they wanted.”

“So what’s all this about ordinary passports, not government ones? What’s with the tourist visas and this visa-cancelling nonsense?”

“It’s easier this way. If you use an ordinary passport you get this visa, it’s called an ADS tourist visa. It’s for groups of five or more and you’ve got to arrive and leave as a group. Then the agency can do it all for us, there’s no need to bother the government at all – as long as you’ve got the money, you can go overseas. If we use government passports and business visas it gets complicated. The civil service and foreign affairs people all have to send it up for approval. You need an invitation letter, financial guarantees from your hosts, some offices limit junior officials to one overseas trip a year – it’s a pain! Everyone else has staff that could have managed it, but Xiao’s a retiree – who’s got the time to get him through it all? Miss Lu said it was his idea to do it this way. If it’d been me we’d have done it as an official trip – it may be complicated, but we know how to do it, we know the people, it’s all smooth. Like this, with ordinary passports and tourist visas, the back and forth with all the formalities, filling in forms, proof of bank balances, copies of household registration documents and identity cards, and a sixty thousand yuan deposit… We’d have had to do all that from scratch, and it’d work out to be more trouble.”

Ah. So that was it. Things were starting to make sense. The whole bunch of them really were just along to keep Xiao company – the old boy fancied a trip out of the country, so he’d organized one for everyone. For Fan and the other younger bosses foreign trips were nothing special – they’d done it plenty and just found it exhausting. They wouldn’t bother going along unless it was a decent-sized senior delegation.

But at this point there was nothing for it. He’d only agreed to join the delegation because Xiao’s name carried clout – hearing Xiao was heading up the group and had asked for him by name he’d assumed it would be an official and reasonably high-level group and hadn’t wanted to refuse. September might be the best time for travel, but it was also the busiest time for the company and there were any number of matters that would be difficult to get out of, but there was nothing to be done and so his secretary had juggled and shuffled everything around to squeeze the trip in. And now there was all this about tourist visas and having to cancel them – in person! It was like he was a common tourist paying for his own trip! It was such a loss of face, utterly humiliating. It wasn’t just the complete waste of two days – the very idea of having to do it at all was exasperating.

But unhappy or not, he was going to have to tag along on the trip, then drag his exhausted self back to the embassy once he returned.

2

It was a quarter past ten – fifteen minutes late – by the time they finally found the embassy. Miss Lu and the three others were waiting at the gate, and Fan rushed over to shake hands, apologising profusely. They’d all had enough of each other during their two week jolly around Europe, and had parted ways in no hurry to meet again – yet here they were, reunited only two days later. It was all a bit awkward. “Detained for harassing the hostesses, Fan?” joked Ma, boss of a Xinjiang oil company.

Unwilling to let that one pass, Fan returned the compliment: “Tired yourself out in Beijing’s brothels, Ma?”

They all laughed. Ma had just waited the weekend out in Beijing rather than make the long journey out west and back. The other two said they’d also stayed put, catching up on sleep in hotel beds for the past two days. The travel agency didn’t pay for anything between returning and the embassy visit, but they all had expense accounts and hadn’t worried much about the cost of hotels or flights. But if you were paying for it all yourself, Fan thought, you’d blow your top, wouldn’t you? A complete waste of money!

Fan’s driver went off to find somewhere to park and wait for him to phone. Miss Lu led them to the guard at the gate and held out their papers. The guard opened a door in the side of the big, iron gate and let them in. A Chinese man – a junior clerk by the look of him – appeared and led them along a path through manicured lawns and flowerbeds. The garden was charmingly Chinese, with exquisitely-crafted rockeries, rounded doorways, arched bridges, winding, covered walkways and flowing streams. Willow leaves and the deep blue of the autumn sky were reflected in the ponds, disturbed only by flashes of crimson as fish played in the shadows. It was a scene to calm the mind, and Fan felt the impatience of his hurried arrival considerably relieved.

They passed the reception building at the main gate and then an odd, white, two-storey construction, before arriving at a flat-roofed, single-storey building next to a waterside pavilion. This was the visa office.

It was the clamshell shape of the white building that brought it back, that and the fig tree in front of it – there weren’t many of those in Beijing. Fan had been here before! That was the ambassador’s residence, and years ago he’d been a guest inside. It must have been 1999. He’d been a member of a high-level government trade delegation to their country and the day after they returned to Beijing the ambassador and his wife had held a dinner party in their honour.

The two countries had enjoyed diplomatic relations for over fifty years, albeit with many ups and downs at first. In the nineties, things stabilized, with high-level visits and then frequent contacts in the trade, technological, and cultural spheres. All the old colonialist nations were catching on – China’s new wealth, cheap labour, and huge market made for easy pickings, not something to sniff at. There was a rush to be the first to cosy up to China. His group that year had been a high-level trade delegation, sent over shortly after a visit to China by Country B’s vice-president.

The ambassador at the time had a passion for Chinese culture and was always happy to make new acquaintances – he’d already befriended many well-known officials and intellectuals who had visited his country. Although Fan and the rest of the delegation had been keen to get home and brush off the dust of their journey, the invitation from the ambassador was a great honour, and they thought of the dinner as a political mission – the entire delegation accepted without complaint. As it happened their flight had landed first in Shanghai, but even the two members who lived there had quietly boarded the connecting flight to Beijing to meet the ambassador before finally retracing their steps to return home.

Embassy meals are often simple, formal, stagey, and unpalatable. His gorge rose at seeing yet another spread of the cheeses, red wines, pastries, and salads that had tormented him for the last ten days. He wanted nothing more than to get the affair over with and fly home to Changchun for a bowl of rice with stewed pork and noodles.

Fortunately, the ambassador and his wife were friendly and put them at their ease, and the evening passed very pleasantly. The ambassador was a small and affable old gent with a short grey beard and the reverent gaze of a woolly sheep – not one of those tall, domineering Europeans. Fan thought he might even have a little Pakistani or Southeast Asian blood in him, and sure enough he later found out that he was one-eighth Asian. The ambassador shook their hands and toasted them, then asked after their wellbeing, and how their trip had gone, if anything had been unsatisfactory, how they had coped with the western food, and what sights they had seen. He presented them with copies of a book he had authored, while his wife showed them her treasured collection of Chinese embroideries, Peking Opera masks, snuff bottles, and fine china. The ambassador gave a speech, translated by the cultural attaché, in which he welcomed them to invest in his country and do their bit for mutual trade.

And just before they left there was a gift for each of them. That was years back though, and only the buildings were the same now. Even the staff would have changed. The same place, at just about the same time of year, but under such different circumstances – how could Fan not feel dismayed? And what happened next – how he was about to be treated – would only compound his discontent.

The Chinese clerk led them into the visa office. Inside was chaos – a fifteen or sixteen square metre room, stuffed full of Chinese people. This, they were told, was an entire tour group just off the plane, also come to have their visas cancelled. About forty of them it seemed, scruffy, grubby, half-asleep, and puffy-faced; old folk, kids, women, strapping young men, lovers, husbands and wives – the whole gamut, you could see it was a number of smaller groups from all over lumped together by their agencies. They were clearly at the end of their emotional and physical tethers, enduring one final ordeal after a marathon trip and a long-haul flight.

He sighed to himself as he took it all in. So many Chinese people had money now it seemed – a tour round Europe had to be at least forty or fifty thousand. Would he be willing to spend so much, he wondered.

Hard to say. His kind of people couldn’t conceive of paying for their own holidays.

Fan’s group were second in line and would have to wait here. The room was connected to an inner office by a door, closed, and an open window. The few chairs and sofas provided were nowhere near adequate, so everyone made do by squeezing in or remaining standing. Used paper cups were scattered willy-nilly around the water dispenser, a sign of the unruly and impatient mood of those having their visas cancelled. Two guides were taking the larger group through the process and keeping order – having them all wait their turn and keep still. But Chinese are generally unaccustomed to queuing, not to mention this group had never wanted to be here in the first place, so they weren’t listening to anyone. With adults jostling and pushing in, and kids whining, it was bedlam!

There were two windows to the inner office, but only one was open and the visas were being checked painfully slowly. The tourists complained to their guides that the staff should open both windows. One guide explained that the agency only had a single list of names and the visa officials had to go through it one by one – when they called your name you handed over your passport, the official verified your identity, signed and stamped it, then that was it.

Hearing this, Fan and the others sent Miss Lu over to ask the visa officers to open the other window for them. Miss Lu returned: “It’s no good. There’s only one person on duty today.”

So much for European efficiency. They’re no better than us, they fumed. The oil boss joked it was because the embassy was in China – they’d gone native and learned from the Chinese.

“They must have got it from you Xinjiang folk,” retorted Fan. “Dragging everything out, never less than two hours late.”

“We can’t help it,” Ma laughed. “There’s a two-hour time difference, remember.”

The group of tourists were also muttering angrily, complaining about their treatment by the Europeans. Why have them all come as a group when there’s only one person on duty?

One of their guides, a middle-aged woman with dark blemishes on her face, heard this and snapped back through buck teeth. “And what of it? You think the embassy’ll put more staff on just for you? Would you expect a hospital to call in an extra doctor just for you?”

Fan turned in shock, cursing: “What the hell…”

A plump, smartly-dressed, middle-aged man quickly put her right. “What doctors? What hospital? What does that have to do with anything? If you haven’t got anything useful to say, keep quiet!”

The guide fell silent under everyone’s angry gaze.

Damn it! Fan threw his disposable cup to the floor. He could have spat – where did they find these people? The likes of her? And she’s a tour guide, damn her!

Fan was trying to calm his temper when the other group broke out in disorder once more. The man at the front of the queue was finished and wanted his passport so he could leave. The male tour guide wouldn’t hand it over, saying they’d post them on once everything was finished.

That blew the top off the situation.

The whole crowd of them began shouting at once: “What the hell!” “The visas are cancelled, we showed our faces, what else do you want!?” “We dragged our tired arses here straight off the plane to be treated like this!?” “What right have you to hold our passports!?”

The frayed tourists had long lost all patience – and now they had something to really get angry about.

That plump, middle-aged man who’d scolded the guide was at the front of the queue when the pandemonium broke out. He could have been in Fan’s group – he was neatly dressed in shirt and tie, had the same build, and looked to have a bit of education, a bit of status. However at the moment he was yelling into the office window. “Please remember, this is Chinese territory you’re on! Chinese law is clear – nobody, for any reason, can confiscate a citizen’s identity documents. What gives you the right to confiscate our passports!?”

Now the tourists had a leader to follow, one who made sense, and they all surged forward to join in. “What right do you have?” “Give us back our passports!” Some took the chance to film the scene on cameras and mobile phones.

The female guide again failed to read the situation: “Please everyone, be quiet. You’re not allowed to shout in the embassy!”

The group turned on her with even greater wrath: “Are you Chinese or not? You’ve turned against your own kind, you’re just their lackey! You made us come here! Why didn’t you tell us about this at the start? It’s a con! You conned our money out of us, you conned us into coming here, and now you’re on their side, sucking up to the foreigners! You’re a disgrace! Pathetic! We demand our passports!”

Those who’d already had their visas cancelled joined in: “We’re not leaving till we’ve got our passports! We’ll sue!”

The others were quick to back them up: “We’re not cancelling anything! You’ll never take another group abroad, you’re finished.”

Their fury peaked. The guide’s expression vacillated between indignation and fear as she struggled to speak.

At this point the door to the inner office opened. The clerk, who had shown them in appeared followed by a tall, European woman. The clerk announced in Chinese that this was the visa officer and she had something to explain.

Fan and his group realised for the first time that it had been a woman hidden behind the window. Fan’s heart sank. He was a typical northeastern chauvinist, with no time for women – they were trouble: muddle-headed, disorganized, and always muddying the waters of reason. He hated having to deal with women. Who’d have thought a European embassy would give such an important job to one of them? He looked her up and down – tall, thin, large eyes under a wide brow, a sharp and square face. She looked smart and capable, a real tough one.

Now we’re done for, he muttered to himself.

The visa officer spoke in English and the clerk translated for her: “I’m sorry, but there seems to be a bit of a misunderstanding here. This is nothing to do with our embassy – we do not keep your passports.”

Hearing the Chinese clerk say “our embassy” got the tourists angry again. They knew he was only translating what the visa officer had said, but it just sounded wrong. They were already tired, angry and fed up – they couldn’t take any more and even a minor unpleasantness was enough to set them off.

They turned on the guide again. “So? Who is it? Who’s keeping our passports!?”

The male guide hurriedly explained. The agency needed to keep a record of the visas cancelled, but there was no photocopier here. So they needed to take the passports back to the agency, copy them, and then send them on.

The tourists weren’t having this either. “What are you playing at? Just what the hell’s going on? What else haven’t you told us? Wait for you to send it? When’s that going to be? What if it gets lost? Who is going to take responsibility for that? Less of your rubbish! We’re not leaving until we’ve got our passports!”

The guides were looking grim and lost – this had never happened before. The female guide hurriedly called the office for advice then hung up: “How about this: I’ll take the passports that have already been done to the business centre at the hotel over the road, photocopy them, and bring them right back.”

They still weren’t happy: “And how long are we going to have to wait?”

“I’ll be as quick as I can, and the sooner I go… or you all come with me. I’ll hand each one back as soon as it’s copied.”

That seemed to be the best they could do. The twenty-odd people who had already been seen trudged off behind the female guide, children in tow, leaving the rest to follow the male guide once the cancellations were complete.

Fan and his group looked on in dismay. What had become of their foreign holiday? More like some kind of torture…

3

Finally the last of the other group had been seen and cleared off and it was their turn. Fan assumed that with only four of them it’d be quicker – a few minutes and they’d be done. But there was yet more trouble to come.

Miss Lu passed the list of their names, their passports and their boarding cards through the window. Fan waited for them to be called up one by one as the other group had been – signed, stamped, done. But there was no movement from the other side of the window. Eventually the door creaked open and the visa officer came back out, passports in hand, and strode right up to Miss Lu.

This, they all thought, was not looking good.

And they were right. The scowling, visa woman launched into an aggressive interrogation. Miss Lu, however, showed no fear, answering quickly and clearly. Neither gave ground, English bouncing back and forth between them in sharp, haughty tones.

Fan actually had a decent command of English, though you wouldn’t have guessed it judging from his comfortable position in life, and his substantial, middle-aged spread. He had acquired the foundations while studying economics at Jilin University. Add in the years of trade talks and overseas travel, his government-funded MBA and a little time stolen away from other tasks for brushing up, and he could handle most day-to-day conversations. He could easily understand their argument.

“Why didn’t you get permission to change the flight you took from Frankfurt?”

Miss Lu replied in her clear English: “We didn’t change our flight. We missed it and had to take the next one.”

The visa woman raised her voice: “And why did you not report this?”

Miss Lu bordered on delivering an outright rebuke: “We didn’t ‘not report’ anything. There simply wasn’t time! We weren’t going to sit at the airport all night interfering with the other flights now, were we!?”

So that’s what the problem was.

Fan hissed through his teeth – they really were looking for trouble. They had already made fools of themselves by missing the flight, and now they were making it worse by dragging it up all over again. The European woman was sharp; she must have gone over everything with eagle eyes. And sure enough, she’d caught even a tiny discrepancy with the boarding cards.

Missing their onward flight from Frankfurt had been miserable enough. They’d flown Air China there and were to catch a different flight on to Country B. But the agency messed up and had left only an hour gap between the two flights.

Frankfurt was one of the world’s biggest airports and it might as well have been a maze – all gates and restaurants and shops, all the citizens of the world milling about being gassed by the perfume saleswomen. It was huge; there were even little trains to take you to the gates. It’d be a miracle if you didn’t get lost the first time you went there.

And Miss Lu had done just that, with them scurrying about in tow. But she’d only graduated from the foreign languages college two years ago, and this was her first time taking a group overseas – you couldn’t blame her for losing her way so far from home.

In the end they’d had to change their tickets in a panic and rush to catch the next flight. Their bags stayed in Frankfurt, somehow making it to their hotel the next afternoon. Without even a change of clothes, they’d had to start their holiday wearing the same sweaty outfits they’d flown in – that hadn’t been much fun!

And missing the plane was a bit of a blow – it wasn’t a good start, a good omen. They’d tried to buck each other up, joking that if their luggage didn’t turn up they’d get compensation – swapping their suitcases of underpants for Euros to spend wouldn’t be such a bad deal.

In all his trips abroad, Fan had only ever heard of other people having problems – missing flights or losing luggage or what have you. It all sounded rather adventurous and dramatic, while he always seemed to return home safe, sound, and bored. But now that he’d had his turn it didn’t seem so enjoyable, and he would be too embarrassed to even make a story of it.

Yet here the visa officer was unexpectedly using it against them.

“You do know the visa rules, don’t you?” she demanded shrilly. “An infraction like this could cost your agency its group visa licence.”

Although individual Chinese travellers could get a European ADS visa with relative ease, the agencies were put through a strict and complex process of registering the itinerary, the accommodation, the transportation, the parties making the arrangements, and numerous other details. Any change to these details after submission was considered a serious violation. Not taking the same flight listed on the itinerary was clearly a mistake.

But Miss Lu was truly something. She wasn’t the least bit scared, matching the visa woman in volume, as if this was just a scrappy, sibling spat. “Of course we know,” she shouted back. “It was an accident. Apart from this we did everything by the book.”

Seeing her stand up to the older and fiercer woman, Fan silently cheered her on: That’s the stuff. Attagirl! You show ‘em!

They’d all been a bit worried when they met up in Beijing and found their guide was this wide-eyed kid in jeans, even younger than she’d sounded on the phone. Was she up to it? She had to guide and translate for them – all round Europe!

Missing the plane in Frankfurt had worsened their fears. They didn’t say it out loud, but they weren’t sure she had it in her. She’d better not mess anything else up!

Fortunately the agency had arranged local guides at every stop, and they handled most of the local stuff. Miss Lu just dealt with the leftover bits and pieces, like border crossings and accommodation. And, as they got to know her, she won them over. This is a good kid, they thought. Great, even! You could tell she’d been well-brought up, she was polite and well-spoken. She’d only just graduated and hadn’t picked up any of the bad habits of the trade – she wasn’t trying to line her own pockets or get kickbacks from anywhere, she just did her job, running about, chatting, shifting luggage, looking for anything that needed doing. She was constantly taking photos for them, with a proper camera with a zoom lens. And if anyone was buying a soft drink or using a pay toilet she’d rush up to hand over the money.

Incredible, they all thought. Just think – one Euro to use the toilet, that’s over ten yuan, most people wouldn’t just pay that for you. But she didn’t mind at all. She was generous, natural, concerned for others. They might have been a bunch of corrupt and corpulent old men, but they couldn’t resist being gladdened by her cheerful innocence. Even Xiao couldn’t stop himself: “Miss Lu, you’re fantastic! Just look at you: the very picture of an upright young woman. That university of yours is doing a fine job, I can see that!”

The girl had giggled it off with a jokey reference to a Ming Dynasty official known for honesty and incorruptibility.

And now, doing battle with the visa officer, her tongue was just as quick as it was in Chinese, sticking to reason and showing no fear. Having justified the change of flights she paused, and then was quick enough to land a follow-up blow: “Remember, all the members of this group are high-ranking businessmen, company presidents, CEOs, not to mention a former vice-ministerial level official. They’re going to promote your country in China and get people to invest and do business here.”

It might well have been this last reminder that did the trick. The officer seemed to remember something (perhaps the occupations listed next to their names on the list) and didn’t argue back. She glanced over at them – suited and booted in top brands, hair combed and faces pasty, all perfectly well turned out. Not like that last group. She took her chance to back down, gave them what might perhaps have been a smile, and told Miss Lu to be more careful next time.

Then she turned and went back through her door. She called their names through the window, signed and stamped their passports and gave everyone a courteous “thank you.” The whole process took just a few minutes.

Once Miss Lu had the dozen or so passports belonging to Fan and the rest of the delegation she lead them back outside. The sun was already high overhead in the bright, blue Beijing sky. The oil boss chuckled: “What was all that fuss about, girl?”

Miss Lu was unperturbed: “Nothing, she was just saying we hadn’t taken the right flight.”

“That was great stuff, kid,” Fan praised, and he meant it. “I heard the lot, you were fantastic. Very classy, put her right in her place.”

Miss Lu laughed: “Really? I didn’t notice. We hadn’t done anything to be ashamed of, so I just explained it to her. What’s there to be scared of?”

“Quite right, quite right. I hope your university’s proud of producing graduates like you. You’re wasted as a guide – if you ever fancy a change come see me, I’ll make it worth your while.”

“I’ll do that, Mr. Fan,” Miss Lu promised, adding with a playful pout: “I just hope you haven’t forgotten me by then.”

“As if I’ll ever forget this day!”

Outside the embassy gate she had them wait a moment while she took a digital photo of their cancelled visas to print out later. No need for photocopies – they could take their passports with them.

“That’s clever,” said Fan. “Why didn’t the other guides do that?”

“I only just thought of it myself,” Miss Lu said.

Their cars were all quietly pulling up just ahead. They bid their goodbyes to each other, and then to Miss Lu, and climbed into their Audis. They’d been quietly furious in the embassy, kept hanging around like nobodies for the better part of two hours without even a drink of water, not even shown to a seat. But suddenly – just coming back through the gate into the motherland – they felt better. And more so as they settled into the back seats of their chauffeured cars with folded hands over pot bellies. That was more like it. Senses of mastery flowed back, stronger than ever.

And Fan was doing just that, reclining, relaxed, legs akimbo and hands on his belly, listening to the sound of the Audi’s tyres pulling smoothly away from Sanlitun East Street. The driver put on some music – that pianist, Lang Lang, playing Children of the Yellow River. He was a northeasterner too, he’d heard, now doing China proud on the world stage. Fan gathered his thoughts, took a deep breath and bathed himself in the music. He wanted to forget the whole unhappy affair as soon as he could, wash it from his mind. From now on he would only travel on his government passport – with an identity, with status, representing the nation. Never again would he travel overseas like this, as an individual, having to demonstrate his intent to return with tens of thousands of yuan in guarantees.

Just money – without status, without a country behind you as guarantor, as back-up – was nowhere near enough.

“Motherland” – an idea so common he’d never really thought about it. Now it seemed it had hissed red-hot into his back, branding him. He could smell the burning of scorched skin. It was time to get home and nurse these wounds.

Translated by Roddy Flagg

Feng Tang

Born in 1971 in Beijing, Feng Tang studied medicine, and is now a writer and sometime consultant for McKinsey & Co in Hong Kong. His work includes the novels All Things Grow, Give me a Girl at Eighteen, Beijing Beijing, Happiness, Oneness, and the essay collections The Pig and the Butterfly, You Live and Live, then Die, and How to Become a Monster. All Things Grow and Give me a Girl at Eighteen were translated into French by Sylvie Gentil as Qiu, comme l’automne (2007) and Une fille pour mes 18 ans (2009).

Mahjong

by Feng Tang

I: 2009 AD

Shang Shu had made up her mind: she was going to get married as soon as she could, before she became a shengnü – a leftover woman, an old maid, married to her career.

“And I’m going to marry money,” she added, “whatever it takes.” The consulting team I headed was out eating dinner, and Shang Shu made her announcement through a mouthful of Shuntak-style char-siu, the roast pork a perfect balance of lean and fatty meat.

“What do you mean by ‘money?’” Bu Youde, the newest member of our team, asked earnestly. I’d recently taught Bu that in management consultancy you needed to define everything clearly before you got started, or else everything you did would be meaningless. Say you were talking about a decline in harbor throughput: was it a year-on-year decline or a quarter-on-quarter decline? Did it include cargo containers? Or say you were going to call a girl cultured – she might play the harmonica, slam down a mean game of checkers, and write brush calligraphy beautifully, but it wouldn’t mean a thing if she didn’t know her Tang poetry.

“I mean enough money that if I want an ice cream cone I can eat an ice cream cone,” Shang Shu said. “Enough money to buy three pounds of top-grade lychees if I’m in the mood for lychees. Enough so if I see a dress I like that comes in three colors, I can buy all three without feeling it in my wallet.” She chewed a spoonful of boiled peanuts determinedly. “Mmm – the flavor of the pork just soaks right into them.”

Shang Shu was hardly old – she was born in the mid-80s – and everyone told her there was no hurry. Better to play the field for a few more years, keep her indiscretions youthful while the stakes were still low, scratch her itches and get all her kinks ironed out early.

“You know, streaking, one-night stands, threesomes, your basic Kama Sutra stuff.” Our project manager Dong Wushuang drank a mouthful of his Snow beer and gazed off toward some distant, long-vanished scene that only he could see as he thought back to the Japanese porn starlets of his youth: to Kaori Kawai, Kudo Shizuka, and Sora Aoi, and Natsumi Kawahama, Sayaka Tsutsumi, Suika Satogaeri, Hitomi Nikaido, Ai Ijima, Kaho Iida, Yuko Iizuka, Hazuki Yoshimoto, Yuyu Okazaki, Rina Okada, Moemi Takagi, Reiko Takada, Rumi Takahara, Mami Miyamoto, Tsukasa Punishi, Hikaru Coto, Yaya Kouzuki, Rie Miyazawa, Akiko Kawamura, Rio Kawai, Senna Kurosaki, Runa Akatsuki, Karen Hana, Moe Yoshikawa, Nao Oikawa, Manami Yoshikawa, Sana Yoshizaki, Sally Yoshino, Asuka Imai, Shoko Imaki, Aiko Kanazawa, Reina Shindoh, Kana Inoue, Miki Kubo, Miki Sakai, Rina Usui, Reika Kikuchi, Eri Kikuthi, Tomoko Kikuchi, Mao Tachibana, Youko Gushiken, Kawai, Konatsu Aoi, Minami Aoyama, Nozomi Ran, Nanako Satomi, Yurika Satomi, Reika Tachinbana, Ai Yatiki, Mai Suzushiro, Reiri Suzukawa, Mona Suzue, Manami Suzuki, Hitomi Ashiya, Mio Asakawa, Yoko Asou, Kasumi Misato, Ryoka Misaki, Saori Miyuki, Mizukiran, Asuka, Maya Kitani, Saori Nanami, Kanae Naito, Risa Uchida, Ami Ayukawa, Aki Katase, Asaka Hirayama, Yuuki Mehara, Yuko Maehara, Kaya Asami, Rie Asai, Rin Kwano, Aoki Rei, Shiori Aono, Aoba Miku, Chiasa Aonuma, Reiko Akimoto, Riko Akina, to Akimoto Yuna, Karen Kisaragi, and Jyuri Wakabayashi. He thought of all the dreams that had never come true, all the dreams it was too late for him to realize – but it might not be too late for the younger generation. Or so he told Shang Shu.

“I am in a hurry,” Shang Shu said. “I’m not trying to be Madonna or Hillary Clinton or Nina Wang or Lin Qiaozhi. I just want to get married and have children and raise them and get old and die happy. I want to find a man I like and be all lovey-dovey with him. I want him to play with my fingers and I’ll play with his fingers. But the way things are in China today, A’s marry B’s – I’m talking about men here – and men who are B’s marry girls who are C’s, and C’s marry D’s, and if you’re a woman who’s an A and you don’t keep your eyes open, you’ll end up a old maid before you know it. Maybe you could be mistress to an A, or paramour to a B, or mentor to a C, or the object of worship for a D, but that’s not the life I want. It’s a curse, I tell you. When we help our clients draft strategies, the key is always picking the right window of opportunity – and the window is closing for me. I’ll go to school in America, and my ambitions will take over and I won’t be able to keep myself from going into business, and I’ll dive headfirst into a few projects, and before I know it I’ll be past thirty and an old maid.”

We could define Shang Shu as an A.

She had been a small-town superstar from way off in the exotic southwest with beautifully clear Mandarin and a good head for figures, and she tested into Tsinghua University before she was eighteen. There she was the fairest flower of her department, though that particular flowerpot only had three flowers in it and the competition was not exactly fierce. She’d gone straight from college into an analyst job at a top consulting firm, where she worked on enough corporate group strategies over the following three years to give her more experience than all of the graybeards at the Tsinghua School of Economics and Management combined. No tallyman ever worked his abacus beads as nimbly as she manipulated Excel spreadsheets; no campus revolutionary ever painted big-character posters as pithy as her Powerpoints. Some of her projects had taken her to Europe, where she’d penned journal entries in Spain and picked forsythia in Greece. And now, turning her sights to the future, Shang Shu was preparing to wrap up the strategy planning project she was working on for a major northern port, go back southwest to say goodbye to her parents, and then head to Harvard Business School.

She may not have majored in the liberal arts at Tsinghua, but Shang Shu wrote heartfelt blog entries, took photographs, and knew her Tang poetry by heart. She wasn’t tall, but she had a pleasant face, a nice figure, and curves in the right places. From now until the time she hit menopause, she would always be able to go out wearing a schoolgirl outfit and no makeup and pique the interest of Lolita fetishists, and she was guaranteed to get carded any time she went to a bar in the US or Europe.

Most remarkable was how nice she was, how positive and hard-working. At Tsinghua, she’d given every student in the boy’s dormitory paired with hers an embroidered cushion. When she came to our company, she began making Thai-style rice porridge for the whole team every morning. One time we were reporting to a client on the results of the strategy we had drafted for them: our team spent the morning giving presentations, and the afternoon was given over to evaluations from a dozen or so outside experts the client had brought in. I don’t know where the client found such a bunch of useless old men and women – not an ounce of common sense between them, their heads full of just about every variety of garbage you could name: everything from Matsu, the goddess of sailors, to Li Ka-shing, the king of Hong Kong real estate, to liberating Taiwan to the financial crisis to isolationist national self-interest to international mergers and acquisitions. The worst of them actually stood there and read from his graduate thesis for half an hour. Attendants kept coming by and refilling our teacups the whole time, while I sat there smiling attentively. Five hours later, the smile was frozen there – you could have lifted it straight off my face and hung it on the wall. After the experts had finished their speeches I was invited to make a response.

“Having listened to everybody’s feedback, I think we’ve heard some very incisive, wide-ranging, and stimulating things here today, and I’m sure they’ll be extremely useful to us in our future work.” Silently I added something my mother used to say whenever my father drove her up the wall: “After all the time you’ve lived, after all you’ve said and done, how can you still be such a stupid cunt?“

Shang Shu sat there with an unforced smile all that interminable afternoon. I sent her a text message complimenting her on being so good-natured, and she replied: “Thirty years of Reform and Opening Up, with those geezers in the driver’s seat the whole time, and our fair motherland still managed to develop so rapidly. Just imagine what new heights we’ll be able to rise to once they’ve all died! That was why I was smiling.”

There are people at Tsinghua with passions for female ginkgo adiantoides and computer motherboards, and so naturally romance bloomed for Shang Shu, flower of her department. Her beau was her high school sweetheart. They came to Tsinghua together – the perfect golden couple – strolled around the campus radiating perfection, and graduated together flawlessly. Then her boyfriend left for America, where he had been for the past three years.

“I broke up with him today,” Shang Shu said.

“Why?” Bu Youde asked.

“Distance relationships don’t work. Things just don’t go right when the other person isn’t there beside you. Love is about being there for each other.”

“But you’re about to go to America,” Bu Youde said. “So you’d be together then, right?”

“But I already arrived at the conclusion that it wasn’t going to work out.”

“Why? The factors that would make it not work out are about to disappear.”

“Fine,” said Shang Shu. “I’m interested in someone else, all right? I just feel like my boyfriend is too young, too immature.”

“Why didn’t you say so? Now it all makes sense.”

“Independent thinking,” Dong Wushuang said. “Bu Youde has the makings of a fine analyst.”

Feng Mudan, one of the senior analysts on the team, chimed in. “You have to use your brain when you’re on client interviews,” she said. “Ask more questions than you think you have to, and don’t worry about looking stupid. Better to look stupid than get back to your desk and not be able to write anything.”

“Do you fall for people easily?” I asked Shang Shu.

“Very.”

“So what do you do? How do you approach them?”

“I don’t,” she said. “The feelings are like wild flowers – they’re pretty, but they mostly don’t last very long.”

“And the ones that do last? You don’t tell them either?”

“I never, ever tell them,” she said. “I just wait it out. And anyway, the guy I have my eye on isn’t around either. You know how it is with management consultants like us – we never have anything around except our computers and our underpants. Anyway, after I became interested in him, I realized I couldn’t just keep going nowhere with my ex.”

Shang Shu’s ex-boyfriend began sending her flowers by international courier service after that – fresh flowers, always in different arrangements, every three days, if not more often. “It’s the same as how my parents used to buy me treats after I got sick,” Shang Shu said. Feng Mudan bought a vase, and from then on we always had fresh flowers in our conference room. Depending on how the client was treating us that day, the team would either urge her to get back together with her ex-boyfriend or to tell her new obsession how she felt – there was no rhyme or reason to our advice; we just wanted fresh gossip. After seven or eight weeks, there was a stretch of four days in a row with no new flowers. Dong Wushuang surmised that a credit crunch must be hitting America along with the second wave of the financial crisis.

“I told my crush how I felt yesterday,” Shang Shu said. “He didn’t even answer me. I’m such a loser!”

“How did you tell him?” The team asked as one voice.

“I sent him an e-mail.”

“What did you say?”

“I said I was really busy and it had been a long day, but after the PS meeting I’d thought through one of the big problems that had been bothering me, and I was in a good mood. I checked my e-mail every ten minutes for the rest of the day, but he didn’t even answer. I’m such a loser!”

The team decided unanimously that:

The object of Shang Shu’s affections might well be someone at our company. “PS” was short for “problem solving” in our firm’s secret argot.

Shang Shu had severe emotional obstacles that kept her from expressing her feelings.

Because of the severity of this disability, our team was resolved to sacrifice what little time for sleep it had in order to draft a surefire strategy for Shang Shu to break the curse and marry her A during her two years in America. Otherwise her time at Harvard would all be for nothing.

Once again displaying a talented newcomer’s enthusiasm, Bu Youde spoke:

“The goal of our strategy is clear: marry an A during the coming two years at Harvard. Step One will be to delineate our potential market – which A’s are likeliest to marry – and to segment the market into different categories of A. Step Two will be to select our target market – which A segments will be our chief objectives. We can evaluate this in two dimensions. The first of these is the relative desirability of different A segments: for this we can refer to the wisdom of the ancients. Wang Po, the renowned Ming dynasty matchmaker, said the five words to keep in mind when ranking men were: “Pan,” “Deng,” “Meek,” “Free,” and “Donkey,” i.e. that the man should have the looks of Pan An, the wealth of Deng Tong, a meek and mild personality, free time to spend with his wife, and a dick like a donkey. The other dimension is Shang Shu’s competitiveness vis-a-vis these market segments – what killer differentiating features she offers the different A’s. Step Three will be to draft a detailed strategy and implementation plan for targeting the A’s selected in step two. Step Four will be a budget projection and comparison of outlay versus return on investment, as well as chief potential risks.”

“Let’s keep our pro bono work separate from our jobs,” Dong Wushuang said. “No need to be so serious about it – let’s go straight to Step Three, a brainstorming session to come up with differentiating strategies for Shang Shu to adopt.”

Feng Mudan kicked off the brainstorming session: “Shang Shu can play cute and innocent well enough to make A’s think she’s a B. She may want to refer to what the Japanese call kawaii – I’m sure she’ll be able to pull it off. Just make sure you always sound surprised and terribly impressed: ‘Wow, you know how to use a mouse? That’s amazing! Wow, you’re so smart! I was thinking all day and I didn’t have a single idea! Wow, it’s so big! I bet it must make all the girls just squeal!’ And so on.”

“Let’s not get trapped in conventional thinking,” Dong Wushuang said. “We can expand our scope of A’s if we think laterally. We could include men who are married but not happily married – who’s happily married, am I right? – or we could get rid of age restrictions. Say our A is five years younger than Shang Shu, no problem. Ten years younger, even better. Fifteen years older, just right.”

An hour later, Shang Shu looked on unhappily as the team achieved consensus. Her killer strategy would be to rent a bigger apartment than she needed once she got to Harvard Business School, and turn it into a mahjong parlor. After all, school was boring, especially business school, and people got lonely in America, especially in Boston. The plan was for her to keep her eyes open for the first month of classes and pick four or five men who made her heart go pitter-pat, or at least caught her eye, from among the bored and lonely. She would invite them to her apartment on the weekend to play the harmonious, patriotic mahjong that they loved so well from their dear homeland.

“But I don’t know how to play mahjong,” Shang Shu said.

“The strategy doesn’t hinge on you playing,” Feng Mudan said. “The key is for you to watch from the sidelines while presenting yourself in the best possible light. You can learn a lot about a man from watching him play mahjong. You’ll see how he handles winning and losing, how he deals with luck, how fast he thinks, whether he has poise and a sense of humor, and whether or not he’s physically strong enough to keep playing into the wee hours of the morning. His personal qualities and moral fiber will be laid bare. Meanwhile, your role will be to accommodate them. After three or four rounds, you’ll get up and slice a plate of fruit for them, or bring in four or five bowls of ice cream. When it’s almost suppertime, you’ll tell them to keep playing without you while you go to the kitchen to cook. Make sure they can smell the food, and whatever you do don’t make them stop playing. Let them come to you in their own time. After it gets late, make midnight snacks for them – shrimp wontons, sesame and sweet-rice dumplings, that kind of thing.”

“You’re going to have to know how to play mahjong, even if you don’t want to actually play it,” Dong Wushuang said. “That way you can give them compliments so apt they’ll be forced to acknowledge them. We’ll put a copy of Strip Mahjong on your computer. Take some time to learn the rules and get a feeling for the game. If you want to show off your feminine side to the fullest, go buy a mahjong set and practice until you can choose tiles by touch. Imagine: your Mr. A is just one tile away from winning the game. He’s on the edge of his seat. Three turns go by, but he doesn’t get the tile he needs. He says he’ll need to borrow your luck for a minute. You put out your hand and select a tile, hand it to him without even looking at it, and say: seven stripes wins the game. Do it on a pure suit hand with a double-kong payout if you really want to gild the lily, and I’ll bet your Mr. A will fall ass over teakettle in love with you on the spot.”

Bu Youde spoke up. “In conclusion: you’re going to have to make some changes to your courseload. Less finance, less accounting, less business law, and more cooking – Chinese food, ideally, but learn to make Western food too. And then maybe some electives – flower arranging, acupuncture, Chinese medicine… sick, far from home, men’ll be at their most vulnerable.”

“Give it ten weeks,” I said. “If nobody falls head over heels in love with you, I guarantee I’ll set you up with a job that’ll give you enough money to buy ice cream and three pounds of top-grade lychees any time you want.”

II: 2012 AD

Shang Shu didn’t marry an A after graduating, and she didn’t come to me for a job. I heard that the four men who were regulars at her Gold Maid Mahjong Parlor gave themselves mahjong nicknames – Tiles, Lucre, Pairs, and Numbers.

There were all sorts of stories about Shang Shu and the four men, and all sorts of versions of the stories – straight stories, bloodcurdling stories, sexy stories. I asked Shang Shu what the real story was. She said she’d never, ever tell.

What people knew for sure was that after Shang Shu graduated she, Tiles, and Numbers opened Four Winds Amusements in Beijing and Shanghai. They formed a strategic alliance with neighborhood residential committees to build China’s largest chain of gaming parlors. Operational cash-flow was positive within half a year; earnings (before interest, taxes, depreciation and amortization) were positive inside a year, and a private fund called Yes Capital gave them fifty million dollars in first-round financing in exchange for a 20% share.

III: 2030 AD

A petite young Chinese woman arrived at Harvard Yard that summer. She wasn’t tall, but she had a pleasant face, a nice figure, curves in the right places, and looks that would pique the interest of Lolita fetishists. She might have been one of the Chinese high school students who came for summer camp, except that she didn’t take snapshots or rub John Harvard’s bronze feet for luck. Instead, she went around asking people: “Do you know which apartment the Gold Maid Mahjong Parlor was in? Do you remember what happened to the mahjong table?”

There were all sorts of stories about Shang Xiaoshuang’s parentage – straight stories, bloodcurdling stories, sexy stories. She had asked Shang Shu what the real story was, but Shang Shu said she’d never, ever tell. What people knew for sure was that Shang Xiaoshuang’s father, whoever he was, had won at mahjong with a royal seven-pair hand the night he fathered her – but there had been at least fifty seven-pair hands won that autumn, and ten royal seven-pairs. And Tiles, Lucre, Pairs, and Numbers had each won at least one.

Twenty years later, the old mahjong table was still sitting in the apartment building’s storage room. Shang Xiaoshuang brushed the dust from it and looked at the edge of the table, where someone had scratched a shallow doodle of a chicken. What nobody knew was that Shang Xiaoshuang’s biological father, after celebrating his amazing win and before fathering Shang Xiaoshuang, had used his fingernail to scratch the picture of a chicken from one of the mahjong tiles into the table.

She drew a sheet of paper out of her backpack and consulted it. There were four rough doodles of chickens on the paper, and under each of the chickens was a label: by Tiles, by Lucre, by Pairs, by Numbers.

Translated by Brendan O’Kane

Qiu Huadong

Born in 1969 in Sanji, Xinjiang, Qiu Huadong is assistant to the Editor-in-Chief of People’s Literature magazine, and has published a dozen novels in two series. The first, which tells of life in present-day Beijing, is composed of Daytime Jitters, Noon Confessions, Flowers, and The Professors; the second of the historical novels The Telescope, Men Who Ride the Flying Fish, The City of Janaidar, Prisoners of Time and Eternal Life. He has also written a series of sixty short stories describing middle class Beijing life, under the title Locals, and a series of fifty-odd post-modern stories, Fashionistas. His work has been translated into French and Vietnamese.

Friend of the Moon

by Qiu Huadong

Sometimes in life, a thing you’re sure would never happen all of a sudden does. Yesterday, I came across a minor miracle. I had just returned home from Sanlian Bookstore after buying a bilingual edition of On Murder, a collection of essays by the English author Thomas de Quincey, and while I was carefully inspecting it and applying my collector’s seal, I discovered I had purchased a misprinted book: one printer’s sheet, a full 32 pages, had been printed upside-down. I was a little miffed at myself for not having given it a thorough once over in the store. How could I have been so careless? So this morning when I headed out, I brought along On Murder with the intent of going to Sanlian during my lunch break to exchange it. The whole morning I was busy in the office, and then just before noon, I happened to see a message on MSN from a friend, the poet and novelist Chu Chen – now a fine publisher – who wanted to come over for lunch at our magazine’s cafeteria. So I waited for him. He arrived at twelve on the dot, and then withdrew a copy of On Murder from his bag, handed it to me, and said that he was giving me a copy of his latest book.

I was struck speechless. Twenty-some volumes in the series, and he had brought over the same misprinted volume. I had not previously been aware that he had designed the series, nor had I known that he planned to give me a book from the series as a gift. Yet by a strange twist of fate, he had given me none other than On Murder! It practically moved me to tears, and we two book-lovers thought it an inexplicable coincidence. Perhaps the heavens were rewarding me for my love of books, that dwindling proclivity, and so had worked this small miracle for me.

But the story I want to tell has nothing to do with Chu Chen. The misprinted book reminded me of something that happened when I was exploring the local culture of Xinjiang’s Kanas region in August. More precisely, it reminded me of someone I met.

In August, when the Beijing heat was most insufferable, a friend and I went traveling in Kanas. I had never been to Xinjiang before, but I had learned from newspapers that Kanas was one of the most beautiful spots in China. I had already visited many of China’s most famous scenic areas, and with the exception of Jiuzhaigou, they were all heavily developed for tourism, with inevitably disappointing results. The only places worth visiting these days are the nameless peaks and rivers of Guizhou, Yunnan, and Tibet, in the less-developed southwest. China’s most beautiful scenery is hidden in tall, densely-forested mountains which, due to their inaccessibility, have remained untouched for centuries. Only recently has modern transportation allowed us to reach these places with relative ease.

At the end of August, the height of summer, Xinjiang is also fairly hot, but given the vast temperature extremes of the Xinjiang year, this was considered the best season to visit. We flew to Urumqi and then took a bus for a day, reaching Altay in the evening and spending the night in the city. The next morning we drove north toward Kanas Lake, hidden deep in the Altai Mountains. The car wound its way swiftly upward, ascending into the mountains. We crossed a stretch of the Gobi, mounted the bald peaks, traversed alpine meadows, then snaked for a time between high mountains covered in pine and birch as a blue river meandered beside the road. It was as if we were gradually being drawn into a painting. Finally, crossing a ridge, I opened a window and felt a chill gust of wind. I thought that water must be nearby. And sure enough, at the foot of a mountain under the noonday sun with white clouds drifting across the sky, lay the white-flecked blue jade of Kanas Lake. The glacial melt of the major peaks in the Altai Mountains fed the river system that flowed through the gorge, which in turn fed the lake. The relatively high level of calcium in the water turned the lake an unreal and dreamlike bluish-white.

Reaching the lakeside, I was so overcome by the beauty of the landscape before me that I leapt out of the car and ran headlong toward the water. The Kanas Lake area was indeed exquisite, sharing many characteristics with the Swiss Alps. Particularly the birch forests with their thin trunks standing straight, and their yellowing leaves rustling in the wind.

For the next two days we amused ourselves at the various scenic spots in the area. We climbed a small peak to look down on the entirety of Kanas Lake. From the observation pavilion we searched for the lake’s inhabitant, a monster called the Taimen, but found nothing. We visited a Tuvan Mongol village and watched them brew airag and roll out their blankets. We took a speedboat through the six bays of Kanas Lake and landed at the farthest shore, where we had a clear view of icy white peaks so close we could almost touch them. It is said that when Genghis Khan rode west, he crossed the Altai Mountains at this point before fighting his way through central Asia and all the way to Europe, quickly bringing an unprecedented swathe of the continent under his control.

We had planned to leave on the morning of the third day, but when the time came, I felt I hadn’t yet had my fill. That afternoon, I was a little drunk after having had a fair amount of airag at lunch, so I went to sleep. When I awoke, I discovered that my travelling companions had left me a note saying they had gone off to an inlet further down the lake.

My head ached. I went out of the lodge, which was constructed in the wooden, peaked-roof style of a northern European chalet, and went on my own toward an open area ringed by pines. It wasn’t long before I saw a black horse with neither saddle nor reins, snorting as it tossed its long mane. As it walked slowly forward, it bent its neck to graze. I went over to it, but it was wary and, although it didn’t raise its head, it seemed to know that I was approaching. When I moved fast, it moved fast; when I slowed, it slowed, maintaining a safe distance and keeping its neck bent to the grass. It seemed to pay no attention to me, but never let me get any closer, as if it were playing a game. Annoyed, I practically charged over, but flinging its hooves it galloped off into the wood behind us.

I ran after the horse with a mind to catch it. I scrambled along a slope bordered on one side by flowers in bloom. Immediately I was drawn to the wildflowers beneath my feet, bursting in a profusion of colors that dazzled the eye. Grasshoppers and crickets leaped tirelessly before me in the grass as I ran with a loping gait across the mountainside, but the horse, whose muscular hindquarters continued to tempt me, ducked into a wood. My back slick with sweat, I watched in disappointment as it entered the pine trees and disappeared.

Gasping for breath, I clambered up to a pine tree hoping to find a place to rest. There I saw a man, his face covered by a felt hat, lying on his back beneath the tree. His lips were moving as he chewed on a long blade of grass. By the look of him, he was a Kazakh shepherd taking a break.

As I was about to leave, he abruptly spoke: “Chen Lin, is that you?”

I stood still in shock. Was that Su Zuodong’s voice? So this was where he had gotten off to… I stood and watched him remove the hat from his face. Then he jumped up, flashed me a set of white teeth, and laughed. “I knew it was you from the sound of your footsteps!”

In shock and amazement, I looked him over. Yes, after several years he’d changed considerably. A beard now covered his face, thick enough that I really wouldn’t have known it was him without looking carefully. “Is it really you? Man…” I could hardly believe my eyes, but then we embraced joyously, almost ecstatically. At once I smelled on him the sheepy odor peculiar to nomadic people. Evidently he had been here for quite some time.

We found a large rock poking through the ground to sit on, and he laid out a sheepskin blanket for me. “I’ve been here for four years now. But no one calls me Su Zuodong any more. I have a Kazakh name. I’m called Aidos, now.”

I was even more surprised, and asked, “You changed your name to Aidos?”

“Yes. My name is Aidos. The name was given to me by an old Kazakh, because before I could truly become one with this land, I needed a Kazakh name. Do you know what my name, Aidos, means?”

“I don’t know. I don’t speak Kazakh,” I said, still baffled.

“It means ‘friend of the moon.’ I am now the moon’s friend.” He laughed loudly.

When he mentioned the moon, my memory sprang to life. Like a tide, memories of him surged through my mind. We were college classmates and had spent four years together. Su Zuodong was a sensitive poet, a man from Mohe, Heilongjiang Province, who had grown up near the mountains and knew well the effect nature has on man. At school, he became an active character on campus and frequently organized and took part in everything from poetry readings to dramatic competitions. But after being rejected in love – he’d fallen for a pretty girl in the foreign language department – and punished for leading a student boycott of the cafeteria, he must have been a little traumatized. He had shut himself off for a while, refusing to talk to anyone. His behavior was mystifying, and sometimes even bizarre. For example, one evening in 1990, in the spring, I was meeting my girlfriend on a hill off-campus, when I spied him in a small pine grove at the top. He was all alone, dancing about wildly with a wooden sword and shouting, “Moon! Moon! I invite you to sword-dance with me!” Another time, in our dorm, a strange feeling woke me in the middle of the night. I could dimly make out the form of a black shadow seated beside my bed. The moonlight fell strangely across his body, making his face a shadow but his body white. It was terrifying, and I was scared fully awake. “Who are you!” I shouted in fright.

“It’s me. Su Zuodong,” he replied quietly.

“What are you sitting there for?” I asked. He slept on the bed above me, so he shouldn’t have been sitting beside my bed.

“The moonlight is good here. The moonlight is good,” he murmured. Then he chuckled and climbed back into the upper bunk, and went to sleep.

In short, for whatever reason, the guy had turned neurotic, mysterious, and bizarre. These things happened pretty often with him, which made some of the girls at school wary. But his poetry kept improving, and with it, his reputation. After graduation, he was assigned to a district government office in Guangzhou. I wondered, given his behavior, how he would get by in a commercial city like Guangzhou. As time went on I heard contradictory rumors: he had committed suicide by throwing himself into the Huangpu River; he had written some brilliant ad copy for an oil company and had earned himself a million yuan. Later it became clear that he was alive and well, but his life in Guangzhou was still mysterious. He had few interactions with his classmates, and what I heard about him never seemed to add up.

Yet when I saw him several years later, it seemed that he had changed completely. This was in 1999. He had come to Beijing representing a well-known southern property developer, and as the general manager of the Beijing office, he was engaged in a number of large real estate projects. He had been set up with an immense amount of capital, which allowed him to spend lavishly, and cultivate an air of rakish exuberance. We met occasionally, but I saw him more often in the newspaper. He acquired land, drew up plans, and sold buildings with panache, working exclusively on projects in the affluent Chaoyang CBD. The commercial district, centered on the China World Trade Center, was a thicket of high rises and office buildings and boasted Beijing’s most international skyline. I knew one thing: apart from a few wildly successful developers like Ren Zhiqiang and Pan Shiyi, it took a lot more than deep pockets and impressive qualifications to get things going in a place like this, where wealth was measured by the square meter. But Su Zuodong, the old poet and neurotic, the autistic recluse and failed lover, had successfully surfed the crest of the real estate wave, managing to complete a multi-building commercial project in the very heart of Beijing. I saw him with new eyes after that, and I can’t deny that I was more than a little surprised. No one had ever expected the guy to turn into a real estate tycoon, or anything remotely similar. Several interesting stories circulated about his rapid rise. One was told to me a few years later by a friend who was a real estate reporter. He said that Su Zuodong had made a name for himself overnight by flipping properties as an agent. Then he caught the eye of the chairman of a fairly large joint stock property company who had promoted him overnight to assistant to the president, thus launching his legendary career. But Su Zuodong had never mentioned any of this during our occasional meetings. He always talked exclusively about the Beijing real estate market, and always with the same brash exuberance.

I knew there were plenty of illicit land deals between government officials and developers, and I wondered if he had done anything under the table, if he had offered or accepted bribes. But I never asked him about it. One day, he had his driver pick me up for lunch. I sat in the broad back seat of his BMW 760 as the driver headed south along the East Third Ring Road from Sanyuan to Shuangjing, and I looked out at the glittering glass scales of the curtain wall skyscrapers, the emblems of platinum-age wealth. The scene disgusted me, because I had already seen the same junk in Shanghai and Shenzhen, and in Hong Kong, Chicago, and New York, and I knew I didn’t like it. An architect once described these glass-curtain skyscrapers as “bright lights, big shitty.” But Su Zuodong loved them. He knew the name and height of every building. He could call out every skyscraper by name. “This is Fortune Plaza. That one’s the Yintai Center. It’s 248 meters tall. Oh, and that steel and concrete structure they’re welding is the World Trade Center, Tower Three. Three-thirty meters. Look, that one there is mine…” I followed his finger and saw, right between the two buildings he had mentioned, a transparent glass structure that was rising stubbornly, growing. Those buildings, the peculiar mushrooms of the industrial age, lacked humanity but possessed a seductive hallucinogenic power.

Of course, I must admit I was in awe. Su Zuodong had his finger on the pulse of the town. During his years in Beijing he conquered the city, steering a number of major development projects to success. It was miraculous. In addition, he also became my neighbor. I lived in a low-density neighborhood, and he bought a house in the neighborhood of detached homes across the road, abutting the Wenshu River. It was only a ten-minute journey by foot, so I often dropped by to hang out. But he was still on his own. He was just over thirty but had never married. Though he was always surrounded by women – most of them so beautiful they made my head spin – he did not seem to have a steady girlfriend.

“You really should get married,” I said.

“Let’s not talk about it – about love. It’s not interesting.” He said that in 2003. In his house, which from the outside resembled a whimsical children’s playground, he said to me, “All of a sudden I feel fatigued.” He fixed a piercing glance on me, but then he turned to the painting on the wall. It was a Gauguin, a reproduction of Where Do We Come From? What Are We? Where Are We Going?, which apparently was done by the inhabitants of Dafen, a village outside of Shenzhen which is completely devoted to copying world masterpieces. Hanging a reproduction of a masterpiece is a little low-class, but when I told him that, he said he didn’t care. “You know, I’ve been thinking about a question. I mean, who are we? Where do we come from? Where are we going? Yesterday on the subway I saw a man named Lu Hong. He’s taken lots of photographs in Africa. Red swaths of flamingos on a lake, herds of zebras galloping on the grasslands, elephants, tigers, lions, and crocodiles leaping before your eyes. I think I ought to change my lifestyle. I ought to be like Luo Hong, to travel and do a little photography.”

“You could take up poetry again. There’s a lot of interest in poetry among the leisure class these days.”

“I can’t write poems anymore.” He tossed me a magazine with a cover photo of Huang Shi, another real estate developer, climbing Mt. Qomolangma. In the photo Huang Shi was boldly traversing an icy mountain ridge. “Look, Huang Shi climbed Mt. Qomolangma, but you know, if he didn’t have those Sherpa and Tibetan guides, with their innate ability to dash around on snow-capped peaks, he’d never have made it. But he’s been up there, and not just once. He’s climbed lots of mountains.”

“So Huang Shi doesn’t pay any attention to his real estate business? He just spends all day climbing mountains?” I was a little skeptical.

“He’s got a lot of talented people working for him. Besides, with today’s telecommunications, even if you’re in the Himalayas, you can direct your business by satellite phone.”

“I have the sense you haven’t been in a good mood lately. You seem to have a lot on your mind.”

“I’ve been thinking that I should leave the real estate sector,” he said evenly.

Later, in the wake of the fall of a public official in charge of urban development, I began to hear rumors that Su Xiaodong had bought off a few government officials by paying models to sleep with them. Other rumors mentioned numerous illegal activities associated with his land acquisitions, and still others said that in all his projects, what he gained through corruption far exceeded what he rightfully earned. Put simply, because he had offended someone at some point, and had done some things that he shouldn’t have, his position began to deteriorate. Then, one day, he suddenly disappeared. My calls went unanswered, and when I knocked on the door of his playground-like house, there was no one there. Two months later I dropped by only to discover that the house had changed owners. He had totally vanished, and no one knew where he had gone. Then, in the summer of 2006, on a grassy slope in the Altai Mountains, I ran into him again.

He had me stay for a month. “Now is the best time to be on the mountain. It’s autumn, and everything is in harvest. Half a month from now we’ll head down the mountain to change pastures, and that’s an interesting process. I hope you’ll stay and experience a little of the great, and likely soon-to-disappear nomadic way of life. Stay.”

Seeing the enthusiasm in his eyes, I thought for a moment and then agreed. That evening I went to the lodge at the foot of the mountain and informed my companions of my decision to remain a few more days in the mountains, but they did not entirely understand. “You want to stay here? In another month it’ll be sealed off by snow.”

“Don’t worry about me. Just let me be. I want to stay here a while.”

That night I went to Aidos, friend of the moon – I felt he was, oddly, something of a stranger with that name – and stayed in his tent, where we talked through the night under the light of a kerosene lantern and a solar powered lamp. I listened in astonishment as he told the tale of his three years living in this place. He had changed his name, and had come here and had donated money to build schools in several impoverished areas, and then he had asked to become a herder. His request was permitted. No one knew his whole story, although some had asked around. He had done an exceedingly good job keeping his secret, and no one had ever learned who he was.

He said that he wanted to be a shepherd, wholly and completely. That autumn, three years before, on the side of the mountain closest to the border, he had put down roots. He bought just twenty ewes at first, and during that winter those ewes had given birth to lambs. By spring, he had a little flock of his own. Like the Kazakh shepherds, when spring turned to summer he drove his flock along the grass, letting them eat as they crossed the ridge to the summer pasture deep within the Altai Mountains where water and grass were plentiful. Along the way they stayed outdoors in temporary yurts. And thus little by little he learned the skills for living the life of a nomad, including giving the sheep vaccinations and medicated baths to prevent hoof and mouth disease and other illnesses. Herding, even in the mountains, could not be done wherever you pleased. By tacit agreement, each household had its own herding routes and general territory in the spring and summer pastures, and they seldom entered each others’ pastureland. Come autumn, when the heavy snows closed off the mountains for a time, they drove the flocks down the mountain, passing peak after peak as they descended in elevation on paths that followed traditional nomad trails, until at last they crossed a stretch of wilderness and the Gobi Desert to reach their winter pasture, a fixed spot near the county seat where a supply of winter grasses had already been prepared.

“You live this life without a partner? You don’t have a wife, or a girlfriend?” I was always concerned about his private life.

Though the light was not bright, his dark affable eyes still shone. With an indulgent laugh, he said, “It’s still just me. I’m used to it. It’s good this way. I don’t need a helper because, to tell you the truth, I don’t even have to rely on herding sheep to support myself. I’ve still got a bit saved up in the bank. But I don’t use it much. In fact, that time when I spoke to you about Gaugin, I actually had the idea of completely disappearing from the face of the earth. I’d run into a little trouble back then because I was playing too close to the edge. I was caught at the center of a web, part of a chain of interests. At first I was afraid, and then suddenly I lost all interest in that world. I felt I needed to choose another kind of life, and quick. Besides, I’d already experienced the pinnacle of success in business, so I was satisfied. I didn’t want to continue in that life. And honestly, if I had continued, I’d probably have gone to jail. So I came here.”

At his words my mind immediately jumped to this year’s recent investigations into commercial bribery and social security fund scandals, many of which involved government officials and property dealers. If he’d continued in real estate, I might have had to visit him in prison.

I stayed, and lived with him. His yurt was set up on a patch of empty ground at the foot of the mountainside, and every morning at dawn I rode on horseback with him to drive the flock up the mountain. The horse I rode was the same playful one that had led me to Aidos. It was black, and it had pretty eyes and a long free-flowing mane. It was a three-year-old stallion and its mother was Aidos’s mount. I had not ridden in a long time, so after spending the better part of a day adapting, I finally got the hang of it. There’s a technique for riding on a mountainside, and I picked up a decent grasp of it. Tending sheep seemed simple enough: once the flock was spread out on the mountainside like chess pieces in mid-game, you could ignore them.

Then he and I sat down on a rock on a small slope to watch the flock in the distance amble about, heads bent to graze. The sun rose swiftly, and in an instant everything between heaven and earth was aflame, the ground was bathed in a layer of dazzling gold. Man, tree, and rock each had their own shadow, and those shadows moved quickly. It was a great pleasure, sitting together talking about all kinds of things. He and I spoke of our many friends and classmates, but the passage of time seemed to have worn them away, so that they were no longer so clear. The feeling was one I hadn’t felt for a long time: my mind and body gradually relaxed, and the fast-paced anxiety and tension cultivated in the city went away.

For some days afterward, we rode during the daytime through the mountains and forests, chewing on naan or eating dried beef when hungry, and drinking water from his military flask or airog from a skin when thirsty. When tired, we chose a shady spot under a mountain tree and napped, listening to the insects singing their autumn lament energetically from the grass. I felt that time had changed, that it had slowed down like some sort of fluid. The clouds still moved quickly between heaven and earth, as if they were being chased, but there was little rain. Nature had brought me an entirely novel experience.

There was a saying in these parts that meat from the sheep of the Altai Mountains tasted the best because this land had been producing gold since ancient times, and the ground still produced precious metals in some places – the word Altai actually means “mountains of gold.” Hence the saying about the sheep here, “they walk paths of gold, drink spring water, and feed upon medicinal herbs.” Indeed, mountain springs were to be found everywhere, and wild fritillaries and the myriad other herbs the sheep loved to eat were plentiful. And the sheep that walked paths of gold, drank spring water, and ate medicinal herbs naturally grew fat and healthy, and their meat was delicious. Every evening, the flock needed to be driven down the mountain, and we had only to get the lead sheep onto the downward path for the entire flock to follow behind and head obediently toward the camp at the foot of the mountain. We flanked the flock on horseback until the line of sheep entered a simple-looking pen enclosed with stakes and wire. When we neared the yurt, my horse nearly took a fall because it had stepped on a vole hole in the grass. The mountains had been ravaged by voles, but fortunately my horse was nimble and I avoided a tumble.

Aidos, friend of the moon, Su Zuodong – I didn’t know what I ought to call him. I never got used to his new name, but he had, over the course of three years, turned himself into a true shepherd. Like those Kazakh shepherds, for example, he had the remarkable skill of being able to quickly count his own sheep when the flock passed by, without any error or omission. If someone else’s sheep were mixed in with his flock, he’d be able to tell immediately. In the evening, I discovered that the stars were dense in the sky over the grassland because the earth was dark, the yurts were widely separated, and only a little light seeped out of the cracks in their doors. You could hear the sound of Kazakh women frying food, and you could smell the smoke wafting by. Kazakh herdsmen were able to watch television, listen to the radio, and use solar-powered lamps and cooking equipment in their yurts. Their way of life had modernized a bit. Cooking over a wood fire had become increasingly uncommon.

At night in our yurt, under a solar-powered lamp, I saw him reading the work of an ancient Persian poet, and asked, “Aidos, Lao Su, do you still write poetry?”

“Of course. How could I not? Look at this – ” and he took out a small leather case whose edges were worn to a shine, opened it, and withdrew a thick stack of paper, which he handed to me. “I wrote all of these on the mountain.”

I took them and read them greedily. Oh, it was true, they were all poems of exceptional beauty, poems that only someone whose soul was exceptionally calm could have written, and quite different from his former style. The old stress, anxiety, and torn-up feeling was gone, and what was there were poems intimately connected to the scenery, his state of mind, and the land. I said, “Let me take some. I know editors at a few journals. Let me show them…”

He snatched the poems out of my hand, “No, no. I don’t want to publish. I’m not writing poetry for publication. I’m just writing for myself. We exist between heaven and earth, and that itself is poetry. I won’t publish poetry anymore.”

And at that moment I understood him.

Time moved swiftly, and before long many days had passed. I truly felt a reluctance to leave the mountain pasture; in the mountains, my sense of time changed, and I used the natural changes of the sun, moon, day, and night to plan my activities. Now it was turning to autumn, and the Uighur sheep traders who took the sheep down the mountain had come up driving their trucks to trade with the Kazakh shepherds. During the pasture change, shepherds would sell off some of their sheep for cash. And so the trucks of sheep were taken down the mountain and shipped to cities like Shihezi or Urumqi, or even Beijing, to become delectable additions to the table. Aidos sold off several dozen sheep and made a five-figure sum. “That’s what you’d have spent on a meal a few years ago,” I said to him.

He laughed away the question. “The feeling’s totally different. It’s totally different.”

I also saw a few traders – probably from Zhejiang or Jiangsu – who came to the Kazakh’s yurts carrying sticks to ward off the dogs and large sacks full of clothing and other household necessities to sell to the Kazakh women and children. On those occasions, with dogs barking, children running about excitedly, and women unfurling beautiful clothing, joy filled the mountain meadows. And the pristine scene filled me with joy too. However, the question that was always in the back of my mind, the thing that gave me doubts, was this: why had Aidos, friend of the moon, Su Zuodong, sought out this way of life? And how long could he remain in it?

Soon I accompanied him on the pasture change. This mode of production is an important component of the way of life of nomadic people. On the way down the mountain, I saw shepherding families and households heading one after another in an unbroken stream toward their winter pastures. The move from summer to winter pastures required a fortnight or more, and the herdsmen had to drive their flocks down the mountain before the heavy snows sealed them off. The transition was an intermittent process, since the flocks had to graze along the way to fatten up for the winter. And so from that mountain forest with its pines and clouds, Aidos and I gradually moved into a mountain pasture and then to the lowland. Before long I could see, at the edges of the lowland, lying crosswise before us, a 200 kilometer stretch of the Gobi Desert. Across the Gobi was the winter pasture where he was headed.

According to plan, the next day he and I would part ways. I had stayed here for more than twenty days, and autumn was sweeping down from the bright sky and winter would soon arrive. But I needed to know the answer, to know why he had been willing to disappear inside another way of life. Why had he wanted to change his name and become the friend of the moon? When would he reach the end of this life and return to his old lifestyle? Or, was this a lasting choice that he would never change? As we sat on the grass under a night sky filled with twinkling stars, my heart brimming with a curious emotion, I asked him these questions, and then I listened as he told me the answer:

“Why am I called friend of the moon? Because, look, today the moon is practically invisible, but where in the shining rivers and oceans of dazzling bright lights of the city night, or in the lives of city dwellers, can you see such a beautiful, stunning sky? You can’t. Maybe you could say that I want to see the stars and that is why I have come here. The past three years I’ve been quite happy, I think, and my mind is sweetly serene. In addition to the stars, I have so much freedom. I’m not lonely, like you imagine, because I have lots of friends here: Kazakhs, and the flowers and trees and rocks of nature. For instance, up the mountain every year, I can see trees I recognize from the previous year, welcoming me with new faces and new poses. And I can recognize the rocks that speak to me in low tones of things no one knows. Throughout the year the clouds drift across the sky, but do you know what? Lots of them are the clouds I’ve seen before, and they greet me happily before they float on by. The withered grass of last year blooms anew this year, and this year’s flowers are the daughters of last year’s. I recognize in them their mothers’ beauty. But I am not some naturalist, advocating a return-to-nature; my life now, to you and all the rest, is still difficult. In spring, summer, autumn, and winter I have to work for my sheep, cattle, and horses, I have to race hundreds of kilometers, and I have to pay attention to changes in the weather. If there’s a blizzard, I face enormous losses. If the flocks get hoof and mouth disease, I have to accept everything, just as all the herdsmen must. I have to prepare winter feed, and I have to prepare a lot of it. But I have moved from one way of life to another, and I have moved closer to something that my mind needs, which is to become a friend of the moon. And that is what I have become. As for when I’ll go back to the city, or if I’ll stay on here, I can’t really say. Yes, maybe love is a part of it. You know, the girl that I chased in college went to Australia and married an Australian rancher. Then the rancher died and left her with lots of cattle, sheep, and horses, and she became a herdswoman. I can’t be sure whether I still love her, but I wonder. Now I’m a herdsman too. We both tend our flocks under the moon, and I feel a longing for her so deep it is almost like breathing. But now this is enough. I cannot and will not disturb her, and I don’t wish to be disturbed. I don’t know. Have I explained myself clearly now?”

It was daylight. He and I had talked the entire night. I could not be certain whether or not I had understood, but the only answer was that he was now the friend of the moon, Aidos. He was not and would never again be Su Zuodong.

Now that it was light, he wanted to mount up and drive his flock across the two hundred kilometers of Gobi wilderness, and I had to head in the opposite direction, to the airport to make my flight. We parted with a somber handshake. “It’s a shame you can’t take the black horse with you. It really likes you. But if you come back, it can still be your mount. Remember, don’t tell anyone about me. It’s got to be a secret. Because now, and forevermore, I am Aidos, friend of the moon, and your friend as well.”

Then he got on his horse and continued on his journey, taking his sheep and horses.

I watched him leave, and repeated to myself, Aidos, friend of the moon. I watched as he gradually vanished into the shimmering mirage of the Gobi before me, vanished into an empty land. Or maybe he vanished from my own eyes as they blurred with tears.

Translated by Joel Martinsen

Xu Zechen

Born in 1978 in Donghai, Jiangsu Province, Xu Zechen holds an MA in literature. His work includes the novels Midnight Train and A Book by the Waterside, as well as the short story collections Heaven on Earth, The Human Spark, and Goshun Nur. He collaborated on the screenplay for Kids in Shanghai, which won Best Foreign Language Film at the Action On Film festival. In 2009, he was Writer in Residence at Creighton University in Nebraska, and in 2010 took part in the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program. His work has been translated into German, Korean, English, Dutch, Japanese and Mongolian.

Outdoor Film

by Xu Zechen

1

The bus had been running strong when once again it lurched, choked, and stalled. The driver loosed a string of vile imprecations then told anyone who needed to relieve themselves to get off. At each breakdown he let everyone get out and piss, men on the left side, women on the right. Amid the sound of splashing, no one spoke. The driver had it right, where do you get off being prissy when you’re on the road?

The bus had broken down just half an hour before, so no one had to piss. The few men and women who did tucked their chins down and gazed around aimlessly. A medium rain was falling. It was misty in the distance. There was no one nearby. The men stood, the women squatted. Holding an umbrella, Qin Shanyuan picked his way carefully away from the bus, suspecting his bladder might rupture if he rushed. He couldn’t make himself pee standing next to the bus and had already held it in the last four stops. There was a village a hundred meters off, its buildings, trees and bushes just visible through the rain. He needed to find a place where he could be hidden.

He had not yet reached the first of the bushes near the village when the engine started. The driver hollered, Hurry up! Hurry up! Qin Shanyuan’s groin contracted violently, and he broke out in a sweat. There was no one near the bushes. Perfect. He slowly unzipped his pants. Time seemed to drag to a halt. Calm and languorous, a single piss can be enough to transform a man’s worldview. Qin Shanyuan decided he would put this profound thought into his book. The driver was now shouting continously. Hurry up! We’re leaving! Aren’t you done yet? Are you coming with us or not? Qin Shanyuan would have liked to give him a slap but there was no way he could stop now, this seemed to be the longest piss of his life. He felt himself losing track of time.

Now the driver was yelling, We’re leaving without you! Qin Shanyuan threw an angry glance over his shoulder. Turning back his eyes suddenly lit up. A boundary stone stood next to his bush, two characters were carved on it: zha xia. Those two characters were familiar to him, particularly the way the strokes trailed off into streaks.

Back on the bus, everyone looked at him strangely. The driver snickered. Qin Shanyuan grabbed his luggage and got off. The driver stopped laughing, “What are you doing?”

“Getting off.”

“We’re not there yet.”

2

They’d been going somewhere called Hailing, a largish town, but Qin Shanyuan decided to stop here at the village of Zhaxia.

He approached the boundary stone, kicking the mud from his shoes as he walked. He squatted down and wrote the characters zha xia in the mud with his finger, then compared them to the characters on the stone. They were already different. He counted on his fingers, fifteen years! Long enough to turn every hair on your head white. He pulled out a cigarette but couldn’t find his lighter anywhere. He went through his pockets and bag – maybe he’d left it on the bus. He looked toward the village, unlit cigarette between his lips, and saw a chicken walking clumsily across the empty street, its feathers soaked by the rain. Then came a pot-bellied boy, who caught sight of Qin Shanyuan’s patterned umbrella before he saw the man beneath it. Qin Shanyuan beckoned to the boy, who wandered in his direction, barefoot, pants hanging askew from his round stomach. He also carried an umbrella. He stopped about five paces off, his big toes worming in the mud. He looked to be around seven or eight. He kept silent, staring, until Qin Shanyuan finally stood up and made a half-hearted attempt at conversation.

“What’s your name, little man?”

“Who are you?” the boy said. “I don’t know you.”

Qin Shanyuan laughed. “Who am I? Go home and ask your papa and grandpa who I am. Who is your papa?”

“I’m not telling!” The boy turned and ran, his feet flinging mud all over Qin Shanyuan.

Little shit! Qin Shanyuan suddenly remembered that that’s how he used to swear at the kids, all those years ago. He yelled after the boy, “Have you ever been to an outdoor movie?”

“No!” The boy didn’t even turn his head.

“Little shit… You haven’t even seen an outdoor movie!”

The boy looked back at him once, then disappeared through one of the gates along the road.

Qin Shanyuan picked up his bag and followed after. The roadside houses hadn’t changed: gate after gate, gate facing gate. He couldn’t tell which one the boy had ducked into. The road hadn’t changed in width, but most of the doorways were bigger and freshly painted black or white. The road had been laid with limestone flags.

Qin Shanyuan smiled in satisfaction. Years ago he’d imagined just such a black and white, damp and gentle lifestyle. In those days he’d ridden a broken bicycle along this street, worried that the dry ruts would throw him if he were careless. He hadn’t worried about hurting himself, but there would be trouble if he wrecked the machine. He’d crashed once before, here or in some other village, and still had a shiny scar on one elbow as proof. The bicycle had been fine, he’d landed on the ground while the bike had struck an unfortunate goose. The goose had died, and headquarters had paid the owner three yuan in compensation.

But the problem now was that no one was around. Qin Shanyuan looked across the shiny flagstones, trying to remember who had once lived behind which gate, but couldn’t recall a single one. His mind really was going, he thought. He’d walked this street for four years straight, but now he couldn’t remember a damned thing. He hawked, noisily. The rain was stopping, no longer pattering on his umbrella. A door creaked open behind him. He turned to look and saw an old man emerging with a spade on his shoulder.

“Grandfather,” said Qin Shanyuan, folding up his umbrella and taking out his cigarettes as he moved forward. “Do you remember me?”

The old man held a cigarette in his fingers and looked at him with his head tilted. Qin Shanyuan held his umbrella like a machine gun and struck a pose: “Rat-a-tat-tat!”

The man’s eyes widened and he said uncertainly, “Are you Qin the projectionist?”

Qin Shanyuan grinned and said, “You remember me, sir!”

The man started grinning too, then put down his spade and turned to push the door open: “Come inside!” He shouted in through the door, “Sanli, bring water!”

The old man’s son was around thirty. When he brought the drink of hot water he stared fixedly at Qin Shanyuan for a while. The old man said, “Qin the projectionist! Mr. Qin!”

Sanli smiled shyly, “I thought you looked familiar, Mr. Qin. I used to run around after you all day long.”

“Not only you,” laughed Qin Shanyuan. “You and the whole ratpack were always chasing me around, asking what movie I’d show next. Now, in the blink of an eye, you’re all decked out with wives and children.”

In came Sanli’s wife, who greeted him warmly and respectfully. She’d married in from Xiahe. Back when Qin Shanyuan was making the rounds of nearby villages she had signed up for a whole string of his films. His pleased laughter grew louder with every film title she recalled. They still remembered after all those years.

“Everyone used to say Mr. Qin is a big intellectual,” said the old man, lighting Qin Shanyuan’s cigarette. “He’ll never stay in a little place like our Hailing. And just look, you were off to the provincial capital in no time.”

“It wasn’t my choice. I go where my superiors tell me to go.”

“And what do you do there now?” asked Sanli. “Are you still showing movies?”

“Nonsense!” said the old man, glaring at him. “A man like Mr. Qin couldn’t still be showing movies!”

“I teach at a university,” said Qin Shanyuan, “and I write a bit in my spare time. It’s all the same thing, anyway, just another way to put food on the table.”

“So you’re a professor!” said Sanli. “They say on the TV that professors are all very learned, and they live well.”

“We’re all the same in the end, eat three meals a day.”

The front door opened and Sanli’s wife led a group of people into the yard. Everyone started talking at once, discussing movies, projectionists, and Mr. Qin. Some seemed to doubt that he had actually returned in person. Sanli’s wife stood in the middle of the yard and called:

“Mr. Qin, everyone’s come to see you!”

Qin Shanyuan stood in the doorway, looking at the crowd of twenty or more in the yard, men and women, children and old folks, some laughing shyly and some looking at him with curiosity. They quieted down, and then a smattering of voices rose again:

“Projectionist Qin. Mr. Qin. Shaolin Temple. Fighting North and South. Painted Skin.”

The old man said, “They all know you, they all watched your movies.”

But Qin Shanyuan didn’t recognize them – not a single one. In their faces he found not a single hint of fifteen years ago. Proud, and also grateful, he looked over those faces, more of whom were continuing to squeeze into the yard. That feeling of respect and popular support was a nice one, it reminded him of the classroom – they looked up to him like young students. It had been like that in all the villages around Hailing town. He’d always been able to tell of things no one had ever heard of, within China and abroad, of astronomy and geology. Old stories would emerge from his mouth as if brand new. He could rediscover for them facts and details long forgotten. Riding his broken bicycle from place to place, showing movies, he had assumed a certain role in their eyes. The old people addressed him respectfully as “Qin the projectionist” and told their children and children’s children to call him “Mr. Qin.” Qin Shanyuan felt pretty good back then. In the still of night, the audience scattered throughout the darkness, he was in control of a machine they did not understand, light streaming forth from in front of him, unfamiliar worlds springing onto a great canvas sheet.

Ten years ago he’d sometimes had the feeling that the beam of light and characters on the screen were shining out of his own body. He felt that only he had knowledge; that he was bestowing upon them a world full of wonder, and things of beauty. He would drift away happily amid the clacking of film running through the projector.

Qin Shanyuan saw two women in their forties standing apart on either side of the crowd. They didn’t smile. They didn’t speak. They just rocked their bodies slightly. Those forty-something-year-old bodies had changed form. Their breasts were no longer breasts, waists no longer waists, wrinkles were now advancing slowly across their faces. You could see they had once been lovely. If you looked carefully you could distinguish them from the crowd of other village women. Their foreheads were furrowed, their faces a little red.

One of them said, “Is it you?”

The other said, almost simultaneously, “Is it really you?”

They looked at each other warily, then turned their gazes away. Each had seen herself in the other’s face.

“Yes,” he replied, “I’m Qin Shanyuan.” He saw nothing in their faces but age and ruin. He could not see any connection to himself. Or perhaps there was a connection. His heart seemed to beat once or twice with uncommon strength, though he couldn’t be certain. It was impossible to be certain as fifteen years had passed, at the very least. He said to them, and to everyone else, “My thanks to all my old friends for remembering me. I’ve wanted to come back and see you all for years, but there always seemed to be a little too much to do, and I never got around to it. Thank you for coming to see me!”

That last was directed at the two women. Perhaps there were more in the crowd, who had not stepped forward as they had. The old village chief arrived. Qin Shanyuan hadn’t forgotten him. Every time he came to Zhaxia to show movies, the village chief would have dinner with him. They shook hands and exchanged pro forma greetings, saying it had been too long. The village chief said it was lucky he’d survived a bout of illness last year, otherwise he’d have missed the chance of eating again the food they’d eaten more than a decade ago. He motioned to the old man and said, “Do you remember what we ate that year, Fang? Let’s have it again tonight!”

“I still dream about it!” replied the old man. “I’ll get started now, but only if Mr. Qin doesn’t look down on my cooking.”

Only then did Qin Shanyuan remember that the old man’s name was Fang, originally a cook for the army headquarters. Over the course of four years, Qin had eaten countless meals at his table. Back then Fang hadn’t liked to appear before a group and would lay the food and drink out ahead of time.

The sky was clearing, but it was already dusk and the yard was darkening. Qin Shanyuan went in search of the two women, glancing swiftly through the remaining crowd, but they’d already disappeared.

3

Dinner was sumptuous. The food aside, it was well attended and lively, and everyone toasted him. Everyone with any position in the village was there, including a buxom, cream-skinned chairwoman – a feisty drinker – who raised her glass and said, “Drink, Mr. Qin!”

“Drink!” he responded. After two glasses in a row his head began to spin. As the fumes rose he thought, were the women here always this great?

Fang was as skilled as ever and the food was just as delicious. Qin Shanyuan remembered that Zhaxia was the first village he visited and Fang’s cooking was one of the main reasons he kept coming back. They drank and talked about the good old days: how the talented Qin Shanyuan had arrived full of enthusiasm, writing Spring Festival couplets to paste outside the army headquarters and the food processing plant; how he’d recited impromptu poetry at weddings; how, after drinking a half-liter of grain alcohol, he’d used a mangy old brush to draw the characters zha xia to be carved on the boundary stone; how he’d stood before his leaders and demanded that the villagers of Zhaxia be shown the movies they loved; and how he’d helped the old village chief write a reference letter for Xiao Bian. This last incident was already legendary in Zhaxia, and had made him something of a household name with villagers who’d never even met him.

A young man named Xiao Bian wanted a job as a temp worker at a cotton factory in the county seat, and the factory had wanted his village Party Committee to provide a character reference. The village chief was in a bit of a bind. It was a good job and there was nothing really the matter with Xiao Bian, but his record wasn’t exactly spotless. It was nothing too terrible – a couple of stolen dogs and filched chickens – but it would be improper to omit these from the reference as his seal of office would be on it. The village chief asked Qin the projectionist for advice. Qin Shanyuan had said the solution was simple, that he should write, “The comrade in question is nimble-fingered.” You couldn’t tell if it was praise or condemnation. The old village chief was delighted and put it in the letter.

Xiao Bian got the job but was fired six months later – he had the bad habit of lifting things from the factory when everyone was distracted. The owners were highly displeased and complained that the village chief had passed them a rotten egg. The chief replied that he hadn’t hidden anything from them, had he not told them that the comrade in question had nimble fingers? The factory owners turned positively purple.

The story could still provoke gales of laughter in the retelling. I really was a clever bastard back then, thought Qin Shanyuan.

Sun Borang, the former village chief, proposed the last toast. Raising his glass, he said, “Mr. Qin, have you heard the name Sun Borang before?”

“I’m afraid not,” said Qin Shanyuan, shaking his head apologetically.

“You’re an important and busy man,” said Sun Borang. “I once helped you run your movie projector. You were thirty years old, then. I was twenty six.”

“Well, thank you very much!” Qin Shanyuan said, laughing. “I used to stay up late reading, and I was always sleepy while I was showing films, so I needed everyone’s help. Thanks!”

“No need, Mr. Qin. I learned quite a bit from you. I can even work a film projector now.”

That drew everyone’s interest. Borang could work a projector? It was the first they’d heard of it. Was he serious?

“I can, and I’ll show a film for Mr. Qin. Cheers!”

Qin Shanyuan downed another two glasses.

When he stood up from the table his feet seemed to drift beneath him. He’d had too much. So had plenty of others. The chairwoman shook his hand goodbye and said with deep regret: “What a shame Mr. Qin can’t show us another film.”

“Are there still outdoor showings around here?”

“Not for ages. Folks with money play DVDs, and those without watch the TV.”

After another round of sighing over the loss of outdoor films, the party dispersed. They’d decided over dinner that Qin Shanyuan would stay at Sun Borang’s home that night. Everyone had hoped to host him, but Sun Borang announced that he would not be gainsaid. He had learned to work a projector from Mr. Qin and thus was his student in some sense. His home was large and he lived alone, there would be plenty of space.

“What about your family?” asked Qin Shanyuan.

The room went quiet. But Sun Borang gave a laugh: “My wife ran off with another projectionist, more than ten years ago.”

Qin Shanyuan glanced at the others in the room. They didn’t seem to be all staring at him.

“Nothing to do with you, of course,” Sun Borang said. “He came after you… name of Ding. That fucker.”

Qin Shanyuan let out his breath. Oh.

4

As they left Fang’s home, a small black shape materialized from the darkness around them, giving Qin Shanyuan a fright. The shape said: “My papa’s Gu Danian.”

Sun Borang grabbed the shape by the ear. “Go home and sleep!”

“I want to see a movie,” said the shape.

Qin Shanyuan knew it was the young boy from that afternoon and made a point of asking, “What’s your name?”

“I’m called Rotten Egg. My papa’s Gu Danian.”

“Get home and sleep, son!” said Sun Borang, going for his ear again.

“Your son?” asked Qin Shanyuan.

“Godson. You probably don’t remember Danian. He also helped you run the projector.”

Oh, Qin Shanyuan said again.

Rotten Egg didn’t go home. He followed along behind them and wouldn’t be driven off. Fine then, said Sun Borang, you can carry this bag. Rotten Egg took up Qin Shanyuan’s bag and followed like a silent tail. The road was a glistening black. Sun Borang suggested they take a look around and Qin Shanyuan agreed – he’d made the trip to Hailing primarily to revisit old stomping grounds.

They passed the old army headquarters and the small square where he’d shown the movies. Both had been abandoned, and new buildings and streets and white poplars had taken their place. Sun Borang pointed to a patch of lamplight spilling onto the ground from someone’s window and said, “That’s where the projector used to stand. You sat on the chair,” he said, gesturing, “and the light shone this way.” Qin Shanyuan remembered how the whole village of Zhaxia would gather before him, the lovely young girls drawing close as well, so that he could smell their warm fragrance. Their gaze would shift occasionally from the screen to him, and he would see a brightness in their eyes. They hoped for some conversation with him, or a little more than conversation. Sometimes he’d gesture to one of them, a small movement of his hand but she would catch it, and then they would leave the little square together, one after the other.

“When you were sleepy I’d help you watch the projector,” recalled Sun Borang. “Sometimes it was Danian or Wenhua or Jiangdong. If you were gone all night we’d help you switch reels, too. That’s when I learned to work the machine.”

“Really…”

Qin Shanyuan couldn’t remember what the girls had looked like. They’d become an abstraction in his memory, merely a series of adjectives: fresh, bashful, nervous, sincere, enthusiastic, full, smooth, soft… He would take them to the empty places. He’d passed most of the four years amid those adjectives. How could he have forgotten all the details of such a wonderful time?

“You never get enough sleep when you’re young – if you stop moving for more than three minutes you drop right off. It was a good thing you all helped me.”

Sun Borang said, “Let’s keep walking.”

They passed a flat area and Sun Borang asked him, “Does this place ring a bell, Mr. Qin? This was a little wood back then, with locusts and poplars, and also acacia.” Qin Shanyuan shook his head.

Of course he remembered. He often brought the girls into the wood, and in the summer, as they grappled on the ground, his hand would sometimes scrabble on the tree bark and close upon a cicada cocoon. What was the name of that girl who liked to do it beneath the acacia tree? He seemed to remember she wasn’t particularly thin. Or perhaps she had been thin.

They stopped before a great black shadow. Lit by a pool of light from another window he could see there was a section of earthen wall, less than a meter high. “When you were here this wall must have been more than two meters high, right?” Sun Borang asked.

“Over all those years boys and girls who liked to get up to no good would come here, and the wall gets shorter and shorter the more they knock against it. Now it barely conceals two people.”

“Has this earthen wall always been here?” asked Qin Shanyuan. “I don’t recall it at all.”

“In the summer rubia grows on it,” said Sun Borang, pointing at the leaves and thin stems that hung from its top. “Just like that. You must remember the rubia, at least.”

Qin Shanyuan could no longer feign ignorance. One girl had pushed him up against it. He’d leaned against the wall as they did it. He hadn’t thought of that incident for years. The rubia had left long bloody scratches on his back, though he hadn’t felt them until they’d finished, and the sweat ran down his back. “That stuff used to grow everywhere,” he said.

“You’ve got a good memory,” laughed Sun Borang. “It grew thickest here at the earth wall.”

A woman’s voice abruptly rang throughout the quiet Zhaxia night: “Rotten Egg! Rotten Egg! Come home, it’s bed time!”

“Go home, Rotten Egg,” said Sun Borang. “Your mother’s calling you.”

Rotten Egg wrapped his arms tight around the luggage and said, “I’m not going back! I want to watch an outdoor movie!”

“Watch an outdoor movie my ass!” said Sun Borang. “Where are you going to find a movie?”

“He’s got them,” said Rotten Egg, pointing at Qin Shanyuan with his chin. “They all say so.”

Amused by the boy, Qin Shanyuan teased him: “If I’ve got them, where are they?”

“I don’t know!” answered Rotten Egg, his conviction unshaken.

“Quit making a nuisance of yourself,” said Sun Borang, reaching for the bag. “Come watch one at your godfather’s house tomorrow.”

Rotten Egg wouldn’t loosen his grip. “I want to watch one now!”

His mother was still calling. Sun Borang lost his temper and snatched at the bag. “You won’t see one tomorrow either if you don’t go home right now!”

Rotten Egg slowly released the bag, and scrubbed his hands on his pants. Finally he wandered reluctantly home. Qin Shanyuan yawned as he watched the small figure disappear. “Let’s go back,” he said.

5

Qin Shanyuan was surprised by Sun Borang’s expanse of white wall. Unnecessarily large, and unnecessarily white. “Guess what it’s for,” said Sun Borang. “It’s a screen,” replied Qin Shanyuan. Sun Borang laughed out loud. “It really is you. No one in all of Zhaxia thought in that direction. They all said I had rocks in my head for making such a big blank wall.” Sun Borang drew the curtains. Two layers: red outside, black inside.

“Do you have a projector?” asked Qin Shanyuan.

Sun Borang said nothing. He unlocked a standing cabinet, and when he opened the doors Qin Shanyuan saw an old-fashioned projector, good as new. Sun Borang took it out, set it up, loaded a film reel, and turned the table-lamp down low. It began its chattering sound, and a patch of light appeared on the wall. As the reel began to roll, Qin Shanyuan couldn’t help drawing near the machine. He hadn’t so much as touched one in fifteen years and the temptation was overpowering. Sun Borang pressed down on his shoulder, saying:

“Have a seat. None of them could understand why I gave up being village chief to play with this thing. But it’s so much fun…”

He passed Qin Shanyuan a cigarette. He hadn’t seen the film before, hadn’t even heard of it. The name, translated into Chinese, was Night Song. Halfway through, the pace slowed significantly: the first half was about a woman who took a lover, and after that came her husband’s slow revenge. The husband bound his rival to a bed and wracked his nerves in a thousand ways, keeping him from sleeping. After a day and a night, the rival went mad.

“Pretty good, huh?” asked Sun Borang, passing over another cigarette.

“I can’t smoke another,” replied Qin Shanyuan. “Let’s sleep.”

Sun Borang insisted on lighting his cigarette, following which he started Night Song from the beginning. “Do you know the name Lin Xiuxiu?” he asked carelessly, as he reset the projector.

“No, I don’t.”

“Do you know my wife?” Sun Borang turned the projector’s sound off, as if they were watching a silent movie.

Qin Shanyuan stood. “Didn’t she run off with someone named Ding? It’s got nothing to do with me.”

“Yes, it does.” Sun Borang pushed him back down in the chair. “It’s got plenty to do with you. Do you remember my wife?”

Qin Shanyuan said he didn’t remember, and began to rise again. Sun Borang took a knife from his pocket and pressed it into his ribs. “Please don’t move,” he said, taking out a rope with his other hand. Qin Shanyuan didn’t dare make a move – Sun Borang had clearly planned this out in advance. “But my wife remembers you,” he said.

“I really don’t have anything to do with it, I don’t know this Ding.”

“That’s not what my wife said. She said you once took her to the little woods, and to the long grass at the foot of the wall, and sometimes just leaned her against a tree at the side of the road. She had endless praise for you, said you were the best man in the world. It wasn’t until you left that she went with that fucker Ding. She imagined that he was you, packed a bag, and left.”

“That’s slander! It never happened!” Qin Shanyuan’s chair rattled as he trembled in it.

“Really?” Sun Borang gave him an sudden slap. “I searched for three years, until I found her in Daqin town, a hundred kilometers away. She already had two children and wouldn’t come back. She was dead set on that projectionist.” As he spoke he changed the reels, skipping directly to the second half of the film. The unfortunate rival lay rigidly on the white wall, his mouth open in a soundless howl.

Under the light of the film, Qin Shanyuan’s face slowly went white.

“From the way she talked, you were quite the lover.” Sun Borang grabbed his hair. “You’re going gray – past fifty, eh?”

“Fifty one.”

“And you’ve probably enjoyed yourself in the city, too?” Sun Borang pulled his chair closer and lit a cigarette, the two of them facing the screen. “My wife had a mole on her face, she wouldn’t get rid of it when I asked her, but one word from you and she went and had it removed. Do you remember if that mole was on the left or the right side?”

Qin Shanyuan shook his head. “Let me go!”

Sun Borang stuck the cigarette he was smoking into his mouth. “Well, you must remember which buttock her birthmark was on?”

Qin Shanyuan couldn’t remember. He’d never much distinguished between the girls. He simply judged them according to the shape of their breasts and buttocks. He liked firm, full, peach-shaped breasts best of all, pear-shaped second-best; he’d only touched the droopy kind once, twice at most. He’d never made an effort to link up faces with breasts and buttocks, because it was the latter he cared about. He couldn’t remember.

“You don’t remember anything?”

“I really don’t.”

Sun Borang started laughing, a laugh that sounded like a sob. “She talked about how good you were to her, that you wouldn’t forget her even if you died, that you wished you could keep her tied to your belt all day long. That woman was a blockhead! She could tell all the scars on your body, and how you got each one. She had even counted how many hairs grew from the mole on your face. And what do you remember of her?”

Qin Shanyuan began to feel that if he didn’t say something, he’d end up like the poor slob in the film, going mad in the chair where he sat. “Now I remember,” he said, “she liked to bite my tongue and hold on.”

“Go on.”

“She liked to do it standing up.”

“What else?”

“She…” the rope felt like it was sinking into the flesh of his wrists. “She liked doing it under the acacia trees.”

Sun Borang turned his face, and another slap came with no warning. “She was allergic to acacia, even the smell made her itch all over.”

“So I’m remembering wrong. What do you want from me?” Qin Shanyuan’s brain had stopped working. “You won’t believe that I don’t remember.”

“I can’t believe it. She raised such a ruckus, insisting on following even a man like Ding – just because he was a projectionist too. She had no idea you didn’t have the slightest memory of her. I always felt sorry for myself, a man whose wife ran off with someone else. Turns out I should have felt sorry for her. She threw away everything she had – what did she really want?”

“Women, you know… They don’t really think, there’s nothing you can do. It’s not worth a broken heart.” He kept it up: “Brother, let me go and let’s have a drink together. A few drinks and we’ll forget all about women.”

“You shut the hell up!” Sun Borang leaped up from his chair. “Fifteen years… I’ve been waiting for fifteen years! When I saw those figures behind the wall, I knew what I had to do. What right did you have? You simply washed your hands of us. I’ve always been waiting. I thought you wouldn’t come, but now here you are. Good! I’m glad you’re here!”

“What are you going to do?”

“Just like that,” Sun Borang pointed at the images on the wall.

Qin Shanyuan knew he would meet the same fate as the rival in the film. He regretted seeing the boundary stone, regretted ducking into the bushes to piss. What the hell was he thinking? Come to think of it, his bladder was desperately full.

“Could you let me relieve myself?”

“Relieve yourself? Take a piss? You just hold it for now.”

“I can’t, brother, the old prostate won’t let me.”

“Serves you right, Mr. Qin. Just piss where you are, then.”

“That’s no good either… If I were able to piss in front of others I would never have come to Zhaxia.”

Sun Borang gave him a look, so he told the story of how he’d arrived, hoping it would win Sun’s sympathy. If a single piss was enough to change man’s worldview, it was certainly enough to end his life.

“That’s perfect – I won’t need to do a thing. I’ll just keep you awake. Start holding it!”

Qin Shanyuan was on the verge of tears. He felt he was swelling up like a balloon, and it was starting to hurt. “What time is it?” he asked.

“Never mind what time it is. You just stay awake.”

Sun Borang kicked his leg, and Qin Shanyuan felt a pain in his groin – even the smallest jolt was like an earthquake. He heard a rooster crow, and then two, then three – a host of roosters. It must be around two in the morning.

“If you don’t let me go I’ll start screaming!” he said.

“Go ahead,” said Sun Borang, weighing the knife in his palm. “Didn’t learn anything from the movie, did you?”

Qin Shanyuan shut up immediately. The rival in the movie had screamed, and was stabbed in the thigh. So long as he didn’t lose his mind, he could contain all his screams and prayers in his own throat.

“But I really do have to pee.” He was starting to sweat. That was what Sun Borang wanted. If you’re afraid to piss your pants, I’ll take them off for you. “No, please don’t!” Qin Shanyuan didn’t think he could handle that. He’d hold it for now.

Sun Borang started Night Song over again – he liked the chattering of the film reel. He gestured to Qin Shanyuan to watch it again. He would stay awake with him. He saw that Qin Shanyuan was trembling and shuddering continuously on his chair, its legs rattling against the floor. Qin Shanyuan was soon soaked in sweat. “Let me go,” he said. “I need to pee.”

“Go ahead.” Sun Borang went to the bathroom and on his return continued watching Qin Shanyuan sweat with great interest. Qin Shanyuan’s voice grew fainter and fainter – it hurt just to speak out loud. He didn’t think history had taken as much time to progress from primitive society to socialism. Time was killing him.

Another round of rooster crows. Sun Borang was getting sleepy. He found a bottle of liquor and ate meat with chilli sauce until his head was also slick with sweat. Qin Shanyuan no longer trembled. He sat like a sculpture with his eyes wide open, his only movement a liquid that ran from his eyes in drops – just thinking of the word “tears” made his bladder hurt the more. He slowly closed his eyes and floated upwards, effortlessly riding the wind. He watched himself pass through fifteen years, transparent as a dreamscape, then back to black, white and gray Hailing town. He rode a sturdy Forever brand bicycle helter-skelter, bearing his projector and film canisters to Zhaxia. The snow-white canvas was raised and stretched, and women began to drift in from all directions, like a good scent on the wind. They had beautiful breasts and buttocks, and they wanted to follow him into the fumbling darkness of the wood, or behind the wall, or even just to a tree by the side of the road. He saw a naked girl, slender and seductive, in profile to him, and knew that there was a mole somewhere on that face, that on one of her buttocks there was sure to be a birthmark. He could see nothing from where he stood, however, and she did not turn to him. Why wouldn’t she let him see her clearly? The wind picked up, and he was gone.

Sun Borang had drunk half a bottle of 112-proof liquor and eaten his fill of meat. Hiccupping, he told himself he mustn’t sleep, mustn’t sleep, but he slept anyway. As his eyes began to close, the film was still playing. He looked at Qin Shanyuan’s posture in the chair with dissatisfaction.

6

Someone seemed to be knocking on the gate of the yard. Sun Borang woke for a couple of seconds, then feel asleep. When he was again awoken it was by a loud thump. He dragged himself up by the back of his chair to go open the door, a little figure toppled inside and he grabbed it fast, it was Rotten Egg. He’d fallen asleep standing up, and the thump had been his head dropping against the door. He’d come knocking before the sun was even up but had gotten no response, and so had crawled over the gate into the yard, then fallen asleep standing against the door. Sun Borang slapped his cheeks lightly. The day was already bright. The sun had risen over the east end of Zhaxia.

“I want to watch an outdoor movie!” said Rotten Egg.

“All right, kid,” said Sun Borang. “We’ll watch an outdoor movie.”

He led the boy inside. The film had stopped long ago, and Sun Borang restarted it. The reel began to chatter, but nothing appeared on the wall. “I can’t see anything.” said Rotten Egg. He ran to the curtains and pulled them open, and the sunlight washed into the room like water. The shapes that had just appeared on the wall vanished once more. “Where’s the movie?” asked Rotten Egg. “Where’s the outdoor movie?” Then he noticed Qin Shanyuan sitting on the chair, head lolling.

Qin Shanyuan’s eyes were shut tight, and he didn’t make a sound. He was tied bolt upright in the chair. “Where’s the movie?” Rotten Egg asked. Qin Shanyuan didn’t answer. Rotten Egg nudged his foot, then noticed a pool of liquid spreading under Qin Shanyuan’s chair. Something still dripped slowly from his pant leg. Rotten Egg looked at Qin Shanyuan, then looked at Sun Borang, then suddenly shouted:

“He’s pissed his pants!”

Translated by Eric Abrahamsen

Sheng Keyi

Born in 1973 in Yiyang, Hunan Province, Sheng Keyi moved to Shenzhen in 1994. She has worked as a stockbroker, civil servant and magazine reporter/editor. She began publishing fiction in 2002, and his output has included the novels Northern Girls, Death Fugue, In Praise of Virtue and Milk and Water, and the novella and short story collections The Can-Do Book, Warm-ups, At the Farewell Ceremony and An Inexperienced World. She has been translated into English, German, Korean, Japanese and Dutch. She now lives in Beijing.

Fishbone

by Sheng Keyi

A dozen people surrounded a table piled with dozens of dishes. I raised my wine glass, making the rounds to toast each guest in turn. I felt like the lazy Susan rotating at the table’s center. To tell the truth, throughout the whole routine of toasting, my mind was on the platter of steamed fish. At first, it was still piping hot, shallots covering its white flesh. By the time I’d offered my respects to the third person, the other diners had already brutally swept the shallots aside. Or perhaps someone had taken a special interest in the shallots and, like an animal stuffing itself with grass, gobbled them up. Everyone’s chopsticks flashed chaotically, crossing like swords, frantically picking up bits of meat and stuffing them into their mouths and washing it all down with alcohol. In their bellies, the meat soaked in the wine, while the precious Mandarin fish lay riddled with gaping wounds. I was, painfully, left only with scraps. My eyes, bloodshot with the excess of alcohol, could only turn to the fish when I gulped down each cup. To be precise, they were glued to the curve of its fin, for that was my favorite part of a fish.

When I finally finished my dutiful toasting, I slumped heavily back into my chair. The others all seemed to be discussing the mayor’s affair with a woman at the local television station. They laughed knowingly. In the midst of their mirth, I reached out resolutely with my chopsticks, going straight for the plate of fish. I quickly transferred the back of the fish, abandoned by the rest but long coveted by me, to my own territory. As a show of courtesy, I turned it over in my bowl a few times, then brought it to my longing lips and popped it into my mouth at last. It was no longer hot, and the room-temperature of the fish allowed me to quickly satisfy my hunger. My teeth and tongue worked with meticulous care, anxious to send the meat along its journey down my throat. I devoted all of my energy to the eradication of meat from this ridge of bone. While my tongue and teeth were fully engaged, cooperating to remove a small bone from the meat, I heard my boss mention “Zhang Lixin.” Zhang Lixin. That’s me. I immediately stopped chewing. A smile filled my face as I looked at my boss. At the same moment, I felt a small bone slide down my throat, slipping away as lightly as a feather floating on the wind.

If I had immediately given a harsh cough, perhaps the fishbone would have been dislodged. But of course I could not cough. In the first place, I was too likely to spew the residue of fish meat from my mouth right onto my boss, practically spitting in his face. The embarrassing repercussions of such a circumstance would be humiliating and potentially disastrous. Furthermore, I really did not think the fishbone had slid too far down my throat, since I had not swallowed. And finally, I had experience with fishbones trapped in the throat, and knew that if I just swallowed a spoonful of rice all would be fine, as if nothing had happened.

I smiled at my boss, preparing to offer a flattering word, when I suddenly felt a prick, causing extreme pain in an area about the size of the point of a needle. I could not tell whether the feeling that followed was an impulse to cough or to vomit. I covered my mouth. The sight of a forty-year-old man with tightly pursed lips must have been quite comical. I covered the lower half of my thin face with one hand, and with the other waved an apology to the guests seated around the table as I walked quickly and calmly to the washroom.

They thought I was drunk.

I closed the door to the men’s room, stuck out my tongue, and coughed. I gasped and gagged so hard that tears began to fill my eyes. Flushed, I faced the toilet. My stomach turned, and its warm contents rushed into my throat, gurgling into the toilet bowl. I pushed the button to flush. The toilet considerately swept away the first fruits of my retching. It was the fish I’d just eaten, along with several cups of rice wine, a couple of mouthfuls of rice, a few peanuts, and a chicken’s foot. When I’d finished vomiting, I put my fingertips into my throat, trying to locate the fishbone. I intended to squeeze it between my fingers and extract it. Bad idea. A new torrent of vomit began. My hands gripped the edges of the toilet bowl. My face must have looked like an elderly man’s withered backside. In the second round, I lost the lunch I’d had at Great White, one of the city’s most upscale restaurants. Delicacies such as shark’s fin soup and bird’s nest rushed out. As the flavor of the bird’s nest erupted from me, I regretted the loss. I had hoped to greet my wife and child with kisses that tasted of shark’s fin and bird’s nest, but I’d lost it before I’d even had a chance to go home. Now, if I announced to my wife that I’d had lunch at Great White, there was no way she’d believe me, and all my evidence was there in the toilet bowl. Dejected, I turned and sat on the commode. I swallowed desperately, but could get no relief from the spur stuck there. It responded warmly, reminding me of its presence with a sharp prick. I thought back to the unlit corridor in the office where, after hours, I’d embraced the office typist Zhao Yanling. Even the saliva sample I’d taken from her was in the toilet bowl now.

But my extensive efforts in the washroom only seemed to have lodged the fishbone all the more firmly in place.

When I got home, my son Dian Dian was already asleep, and my wife was watching a TV soap. The words “Episode 33” appeared on the screen. My wife, once something of a beauty, had formerly worked as a salesperson in a department store owned by a textile company. After some corruption scandal, however, the store went bankrupt. As a result, my wife was now a stay-at-home mom. She was five years younger than me, and very energetic – particularly so since her dismissal. In the past, I would take the initiative to stir her up several nights a week. Now, she was the one who mercilessly tormented me every single night.

“You’re still up?” I asked casually. I knew any nonsense would invite even more nonsense from my wife.

“Oh, so you didn’t forget us entirely! Look at how miserable you are, can’t you just come home early after work?” Sure enough, she was in a scolding mood. Reproof was how my wife chose to express her concern, love, and resentment, but I was often in some confusion as to which it was she wished to express. I was becoming more confused all the time, not knowing in such circumstances whether I should be pleased, happy, or angry with the reproof. In this particular case, for instance, my wife’s voice was a jumble of emotions, all mixed together.

My face must have reflected my bewilderment. My wife stood up and looked at me in surprise. She was a head shorter than me, a thirty-five-year-old matriarch. Her face was beginning to show signs of age spots, making her look dull even under the incandescent lightbulb’s glow.

“Yes. I was tortured all day at work, and then came straight home to be tormented by you too. My whole life is one huge frustration!” I wanted to voice all of these complaints to my wife, but the pain in my throat was excruciating. I swallowed carefully. The fishbone was still stuck. Zhao Yanling’s face, with all the purity of her twenty-two years, flashed before me. Frowning, I swept my gaze absently over my wife. After being laid off, she had become more sensitive. Not only was her sex drive operating in high gear, but she was also very alert to the slightest sign of disparagement from me. The expression I wore as I looked her over was the sort that was sure to provoke a fresh attack. I quickly changed it to a smile, reached up and pointed to my throat and said, “I swallowed a fishbone.”

My wife’s enthusiasm was completely unexpected. First, she cracked my mouth open and then, standing on her toes, peered inside. There was not enough light, so she took out a small flashlight and put it practically into my mouth, but still she couldn’t see anything. She brought out the leftover cabbage she’d cooked for dinner and, handing me a pair of chopsticks, said, “Don’t chew. Just swallow!” Obedient as a dumb beast, I followed my wife’s directions. I formed the vegetables into a ball and stuffed it inside my mouth. Like a snake devouring a frog whole, I worked my jaw relentlessly, struggling to swallow. My eyes grew so wide I felt the eyeballs would pop right out. When I had it halfway down my throat, I began to regret it. How had I gotten into such a predicament for the sake of a tiny fishbone? Now I would be hard put to either advance or retreat. My wife was so eager to help me swallow it that as she watched, helpless, her own inconspicuous Adam’s apple pumped frantically up and down in sympathy. Her concern moved me. Putting forth an extra measure of effort, I finally succeeded in getting the clump of vegetables down.

“How’s that? Any better?” my wife asked, bouncing up and down.

It seemed the spur was gone. I tried to swallow. Sure enough, it was gone. I gave my wife a smile of gratitude. Filled with pride, she said softly, “Take a shower and go to bed.” I looked at the clock on the wall. It was nearly midnight, later than I had realized.

This time, my wife’s attempts to pique my interest were unsuccessful. Or rather it was I who failed. As my breathing became heavier, I discovered that the fishbone was still in my throat, causing unbearable pain. It distracted me. I scrambled to one side and twisted my neck to see if I could detect the little thorn’s location. I was determined to cough it out, so I left the bed and walked to the balcony. Facing the hazy night sky, I opened my mouth wide, stuck out my tongue, and released an earth-shattering burst of strange sounds. My wife cried from the bedroom, “What are you doing? Do you want to wake the whole city up? One night in bed and everything will be all right in the morning.” My wife was frustrated – her desires unsatisfied – as if the bone were caught in her own throat. I almost felt she was speaking to herself. I closed my mouth and stopped gagging. I couldn’t let my efforts to destroy the fishbone affect everyone else’s life. So I went to the washroom and contorted myself into all sorts of odd positions, but getting rid of that damned fishbone, like all my recent efforts to climax with my wife, just wasn’t happening.

I went to the kitchen and fixed some instant noodles, a hasty attempt to satisfy my appetite before washing up and trying once again to get to sleep. When I had gone back to bed, I could still feel the bone’s pressure against the flesh, blocking my throat like a huge stone. I tossed and turned, and found that only by lying on my right side could I get some relief and forget the bone for a moment. But lying on my right side meant my back was to my wife. Getting angry, she rolled over with a hmph!, turning her back to me. I was too tired to bother about her, wanting a bit of peace so I could fall asleep, ensuring that I could go to work tomorrow refreshed and ready for whatever Zhao Yanling felt like getting up to. Recently, that girl had driven me to distraction. I wondered whether that feeling would end the same way my wife said the fishbone would: “One good night in bed and everything will be all right.”

The water treatment company where I worked was located on the outskirts of the city, about a thirty- or forty-minute bus journey away. Sleeping on my right side all night had left me achy. I got up late, and by the time I arrived at the office, numerous trivialities were awaiting my attention, like arrangements for the Party’s “July 1st” activities, the benefits payments to be made this month, and a project report that needed the final touches applied. Working in adminsitration was tiresome.

Zhao Yanling, who had been in front of her typewriter for some time, smiled gently when she saw me come in, then turned back to the rhythmic tapping of her work. She was not especially pretty. Aside from her fair and supple skin, she couldn’t compete with my wife. The fingers at the end of her porcelain-white hand leapt over the keyboard so quickly my eyes could barely keep up. Zhao Yanling was the lone soldier under my command in this company. I nurtured the illusion that we were dependent on one another. Her meekness made me want to hold her. Her long hair was as soft as her temperament, unlike my wife’s dry, wild crown.

Intermittently, I emitted strange coughs. Each time, Zhao Yanling looked back at me with a highly-gratifying expression. I thought she must also be reliving the taste of my saliva, looking forward to the time when I would transfer some more of it into her mouth. Being a girl of keen senses, however, she eventually picked up on the fact that my cough was a bit out of the ordinary. She said, “Mr. Director, sir, do you have a sore throat? I have some Golden Treasure lozenges. Would you like one?” Zhao Yanling was the only person who ever referred to me as the director. When she did so, it was the only time I realized I had any status at all. I shook my head uncomfortably. Zhao Yanling firmly placed the pack of Golden Treasure lozenges in my hand.

“There’s a fishbone in my throat. A lozenge won’t help.” I decided to tell her the truth. She was the second person after my wife to know about my dilemma.

“And you didn’t go immediately to the hospital? Be careful! It could lacerate your throat.” Her concern seemed a bit over the top. I knew she just wanted to frighten me.

“It’s nothing serious. It’s just uncomfortable. Don’t go around telling everyone in the office about it,” I requested. “It’s embarrassing.”

Zhao Yanling nodded uncertainly, then said, “I think you’re making a big fuss over nothing. You’ve just got a fishbone caught in your throat. You haven’t done anything to be ashamed of!”

After lunch, as I lounged on the sofa letting my food digest, I engaged in private battle with my fishbone, armed only with a toothpick and a glass of water. For now, the pain from the fishbone was a little milder. I sat pondering its existence. I wondered how deeply it had pierced the skin, how hard it was, how persistent. I wondered why it had chosen to dwell in my throat, how long it intended to stay, and whether it planned to move down into my intestines and pierce them too. Or perhaps it was like Zhao Yanling said: the bone would rip my throat to shreds. I flipped through the newspaper and thought of taking a nap on the sofa. Zhao Yanling came in carrying a cup. The smell of vinegar came in with her.

“Sip this. If you can lean your head back and let it flow straight down, that’s best.” She handed me the cup, and the vinegary smell assaulted my nose.

“What is it? It stinks!” I twisted my head away. The fishbone pricked me again.

“It’s vinegar. It’s an old trick I learned from my mother. It can soften a fishbone,” she said firmly.

“Oh, I’ve never liked vinegar. If only your saliva could soften it up,” I said playfully. I was about to pull her into my arms but she pointed anxiously at the open door.

She continued to urge me to take a sip, practically forcing me. It would’ve been an insult to her earnestness to refuse. I took a tiny sip and inclined my head, looking up at the shiny white ceiling panels. The noxious sour smell filled my nostrils. It was awful, worse than taking medicine. I’d never drunk so much vinegar in all my life. It set my teeth on edge, stinging my tongue until it turned numb. As the vinegar flowed over the spot where the fishbone was stuck, I felt the flesh tingling, and thought that the skin there must already be torn. Before the procedure was even halfway completed, I could stand the smell of vinegar no longer, nor could I swallow it. But to be honest it did seem to help. My throat relaxed for a moment. When I swallowed, the spur seemed softer. An appreciative smile spread across my face, and I turned to Zhao Yanling. She lowered her head and said, “Drink some more in a while. One good night’s sleep and everything will be all right.”

Everything would be all right after a good night’s sleep. Zhao Yanling sounded just like my wife.

I felt like I was faced with a lazy Susan full of food, turning about. The dish that finally stopped before me was the one I least wanted: the weekend. But while I could do without the weekend altogether, my son and my wife loved its flavor. They started looking forward to the weekend on Monday, thinking of the zoo, the mall, the playground, the cinema, or McDonald’s. They felt compelled to fully enjoy modern life, while I would follow them here and there, endlessly twirling like a gyroscope from one activity to the next. After three good nights’ sleep, the fishbone was not, as my wife and Zhao Yanling had said it would be, alright. Now, it hurt even to speak. Of course, this could only be counted a minor disturbance. For many people, it would simply be something to joke about. Even my eight-year-old son laughed at me, wondering how such a big grown up could get a fishbone caught in the throat, showing just how greedily I’d gulped down my food as I ate.

Really, the pain in my throat was not so severe as to require a trip to the hospital. The best way to deal with it was to avoid talking, and when I spoke less, I came across as more grave. As we walked along the road, my wife and son talked nonstop. In everything, they had the final say, with me only nodding occasionally to show that I was still present and attentive. My reticence to speak did not have much effect on my wife and son’s mood. This gave me some comfort, allowing me space to enjoy – if I may say so – the fishbone playing havoc with my throat. After drinking Zhao Yanling’s vinegar, it seemed the spur had changed positions, moving slightly lower as if even more determined to test my resolve. I coughed softly, and it pricked me. Though I no longer held out any hope of dealing with this bone just through coughing, I was sure it would eventually make its own way down my throat bit by bit as I swallowed, slowly eroding away. It was like having a piece of meat stuck between the teeth. You could use the tongue to keep poking at it, but no matter how much effort you put into it, it never budged. Then, somehow or other, you’d finish a meal and find it had suddenly disappeared.

The past few nights my wife had not disturbed me, nor did I take the initiative to start anything, and so we passed the days peacefully. But I felt that she was not her usual self, as if she had something on her mind. She secretly rifled through my briefcase, picked up the clothes I’d worn and smelled them, turned my pockets inside out, checked my cell phone’s address book, and asked me about all the newly added female names. Who were they? What did they do? How did I know them? I answered each question in turn. I said, “Your hubby’s not young anymore. He’s got neither power nor prestige. You can relax. Women look down on him. And as long as he has you, he is satisfied.” But mature women never give ear to such cajolery, and so I was constantly under her surveillance and subject to sudden interrogations. Thank God, Zhao Yanling was the one person she overlooked. So, in answer to my wife’s questioning, I could boldly swear, “There is absolutely nothing going on between me and any of those women.” To tell the truth, up until that point, I’d only exchanged kisses with Zhao Yanling. Whatever might happen next was a question best left for later.

On this particular weekend, my son needed to write a composition. My wife, however, decided we should first go to Sea World, then do a bit of shopping. I acquiesced. After all, she held the purse strings in the family, so who was I to argue? Sea World was located in the suburbs, and it took us over an hour to get there on the bus. It was crowded, even more packed with people than I had imagined it would be. We joined the flow of human traffic and bought our tickets, then made our rounds touring the park. Later, at my son’s request, we stopped at McDonald’s for lunch. My wife insisted on going out for a bowl of noodles. My throat was in no condition for eating anything dry or hard, so my son relished his meal alone. As long as our boy was satisfied, my wife and I could not feel we hungered for anything. All the same, my wife couldn’t help thinking of the half kilo of pork and the bunch of vegetables she had in the refrigerator, and she had it in mind to prepare that for our evening meal, making up for any lack we might feel now. I mutely agreed. Faced with a wife so capable in handling all the household affairs, what was a man to say? But actually, I had an ulterior motive behind my ready acceptance of my wife’s plan: I was afraid that if I ate anything, whether hot or cold, it would cause further pain in my throat. If I suffered every time I swallowed, there would be no satisfying my hunger, and I might as well go without. So, even though the restaurant was just a few steps away, I was determined to put up with a rumbling in my stomach as we walked along the sidewalk.

After lunch, we turned to shopping. My wife selected a sports shirt for my son, then began trying on clothes for herself. I could see that the marathon weekend was moving into the final sprint. As I sat on a small bench in the clothing store waiting patiently, I received a call from Zhao Yanling, and I’m sure you can guess what she called to ask. That’s right. “How’s the fishbone?” That’s what she said.

“Oh, it’s alright. Much better,” I answered, feeling an indescribable sensation of sweetness.

My wife tried on three blouses and had just about decided on the most expensive. Five hundred! She was reluctant to part with the money.

The shopkeeper was a woman, older than my wife. The smiles she’d worn up until this point faded, like a Sichuan opera performer changing masks. Her eyebrows, eyes, and mouth all began to droop suddenly. I felt her contemptuous stare turn toward me as she began to speak. “You have to buy this now. We don’t allow trying on items from our high-end range!” As soon as she spoke, her new mask came to life.

“Who says I have to buy it? What kind of crazy scam is this?” my wife retorted, not to be outdone.

“See for yourself! Can’t you read? No trying on high-end clothing!” The shopkeeper pulled out a small white card attached to the blouse, with clear black lettering on it.

“What does that prove?” my wife snapped. “I didn’t see it. When I went to try it on, why didn’t you speak up then?”

Now it was my wife’s turn to glare at me. I knew that she’d met with trouble and was hoping I would stand up for her. But this was women’s business... and with my throat... what could I say? I felt they both had valid points, I muttered, hoping to smooth things over, but ultimately I didn’t move a muscle. My throat throbbed, and I was hungry. Agitated, I looked to the street, waiting for them to finish their quarrel so I could go home for dinner.

But it was not a minor problem. One wanted to sell, and the other didn’t want to buy. The two women pulled and tugged at each other, finally breaking out into a real fight. They pushed and shoved until they ended up right in front of me. The shopkeeper’s words seemed to be especially for me: “If you don’t have money, don’t try on the expensive clothes. Don’t even lay a finger on them! Why bother coming into the shop at all?” The woman, intent on provoking me, carried on, “If people like you come in here and paw at my merchandise, and even try it on, how am I supposed to sell it to anyone else?” I could tell the shopkeeper’s anger was directed at me. She was clearly hoping to incite me so that she could pry five hundred yuan from my fingers, then force us to take a garment that might not be worth even half that.

“At first, I wanted to buy it, but with your attitude, forget about it!” My wife moved to one side, becoming a bit unruly herself. The shopkeeper’s whole body was shaking, and their arms came so close to my head that their sleeves flapped against me. The women’s bellies pumped under their clothes as they puffed with the effort. I swallowed, stood up indifferently, and walked straight out of the shop, away from the two entangled women.

Outside the shop, at the corner about five meters away, I lit a cigarette. Before I’d had my third puff, my wife tore away from the other woman and came outside. She took the other woman’s hostility onto herself, and she aimed it right at me. She did not say a word to me, walking past without the slightest glance in my direction. I was like her trailer, following her wherever she went, gliding silently along in her wake.

Each time I met Zhao Yanling, the first words out of her mouth were questions about the fishbone. At those moments, having a fishbone caught in my throat seemed a stroke of good fortune. I, or at least my bone, was always on her mind. It was heartwarming. Because of the bone, things between Zhao Yanling and I rapidly heated up. She was no longer restrained. She boldly took the fishbone to heart, devoting herself energetically and lovingly to my problem. She even openly said that she was crazy about my pained, somber expression.

“You’re not very happy at home, are you?” she pressed. I had never actually thought about it. The way I saw it, it was just the way things were. Only after getting the fishbone caught in my throat did I realize that life could be so sweet and colorful.

Zhao Yanling and I had traded saliva on several more occasions, the longest lasting about five minutes. I found that her body gradually responded to it, and she took more initiative. She seemed determined to bring this to a fairy tale end by softening the fishbone with her saliva. During our exchanges, my throat did not hurt at all.

My sudden taciturnity surprised my colleagues and led them to believe I had suffered some blow. I said I was unwell, but could not tell what exactly was wrong. I was in some discomfort, but it was not serious enough to be called an illness. Anyway, a forty-year-old man with a fishbone caught in the throat could only feel ashamed. This was to be a secret between Zhao Yanling and I, adding a new depth to the private joy and understanding we quietly shared.

The manager Mr. Shi, concerned about my unusual behavior, called me into his office under the pretext of talking about work. In the course of our talk, he mentioned that the basic problem was that my enthusiasm for the job had dropped off dramatically. My work was coming along slowly, and a few of the projects I had in hand were being neglected. Finally, Mr. Shi turned conspiratorially and asked in a low voice, “Having problems at home?”

I waved him off and, putting all my effort into answering in an equally soft voice, said, “Not at all.”

Mr. Shi was not pleased. Moving a little closer he said, “As your friend, I’m concerned.”

I nodded vigorously. I put my hand to my throat, as if I could pluck the words out from my vocal chords, but failed to utter a sound. This made me look arrogant.

Although Mr. Shi was younger than me, he occupied a higher post. He stood, back straight, and cleared his voice. In a serious tone, he added, “It’s not good to bring your personal problems to the work place.”

I continued to nod my head. Frowning, I said: “I won’t.” Mr. Shi’s face fell, and he politely asked me to leave his office.

I suddenly realized that the problem was becoming rather complicated. I couldn’t go on like this all because of a fishbone. I had to go to the hospital. There, I would queue in the waiting room, make payment, and solemnly tell the doctor about the tiny source of this crisis in my life.

On the afternoon of the sixth day, I went to a small clinic near my office where there would be less people and I’d save time. I randomly pulled a white-coated young fellow aside and said, “What department do I see for a fishbone?”

A strange look crossed the young man’s face. Then, in a flash of understanding, he said: “We’ve only got a dental department here. Maybe they can help.” He pointed down the corridor. As I turned at the end of the cramped hallway, I realized that the clinic was made up of four consultation rooms and two waiting areas. The door was open, looking like the entrance to a bedroom. A white curtain hung across the doorway with huge red letters printed across it in an arc: Dental Department. I lifted the curtain and stuck my head in. I saw another room inside. I stepped in tentatively, and there saw the dentist sticking something into a patient’s mouth and prodding about.

“What seems to be the problem?” The fat little woman asked, taking her eyes off her work to look at me, putting a stop to my snooping.

“Fishbone. Fishbone...” I said hoarsely, pinching my throat with two fingers.

“Oh? When did it get stuck?”

“Five or six days ago.”

“Ah! Then it’s too late.”

“What?”

“If you had come in right away we could have helped. But now that it’s moved deeper into your throat, you’ll have to go to a hospital’s ENT ward.”

“Oh. Then I don’t need an appointment. If I wait a few days, it will just take care of itself, right?”

“It’s your body. It’s up to you to take care of it,” she said, returning her attention to her work.

The doctor’s tone made me think the situation might be serious. Feeling unsettled, I went to People’s Hospital. There were crowds everywhere, people standing in long queues at evaluation counters, payment counters, and pharmacy counters as if the whole world had suddenly fallen ill. At the ENT ward, I waited impatiently for those who had arrived before me to vacate a seat. As soon as one was available, I pressed myself into the still-warm spot, where I sat devoutly facing an elderly man in scrubs. The old man asked me several questions about my struggles with the fishbone over the past few days. He seemed to me like a reporter, asking very detailed, critical questions. He mumbled as he recorded my answers, and after a moment, led me into a small room. He was holding a small strip of steel, and he wore a light on his forehead, like a coal miner. “Open wide,” he said. “Say aaaaaaaah.” The bulb was very bright. The old man’s eyes were cloudy. My teeth began to ache. I spread my lips as wide as I could, but made no sound. I felt the cold steel against my tongue, along with the warmth of the bulb.

“No bones. There are some slight lacerations. Looks like some anti-inflammatory drugs should do it. Get a good night’s sleep, and everything should be alright in the morning.” The old man enunciated his words and held his pen in an odd grip as he flourished it across the page, writing my prescription. Get a good night’s sleep and it would be alright in the morning. That’s what he’d said. He was a doctor. I shouldn’t doubt the doctor’s words. At the very least, they should be more reliable than the words of the two women in my life.

The doctor removed the steel strip from my mouth. I definitely felt better after hearing his diagnosis. I should have come to see the old man earlier.

As I sat on the bus on my way back to the office, I really was feeling much better. I hummed a popular tune called “The Dancing Girl”. I was enjoying the scenery outside. When the bus passed by a line of high-end boutiques, I saw a woman standing in the gap between two mannequins, one in a red dress and one in black, apparently waiting to try on some clothes. As the bus moved forward, the perspective changed. I looked back and I saw, standing behind the mannequin in black, a man in a brown jacket. His hand was on the woman’s face. The curve of the mannequin’s arm blocked the man’s face from my view, and I could not see him clearly. When I looked back again, I could not see the pair at all. But that woman, she really looked like my wife. On the other hand, my wife would never shop at such a high-end boutique.

I did not expect to find further trouble awaiting me at the office. But as soon as I entered, Zhao Yanling anxiously told me, “Mr. Shi’s looking for you. He’s been here several times!”

Only then did I realize that I’d been out for half a day. “What does he want with me? Why didn’t he call my mobile?” I asked myself. After grabbing a quick drink of water, I went straight to the manager’s office. He was not there. After an hour, Mr. Shi finally came back and seated himself at his huge director’s chair, looking quite smart in his brown, well-pressed jacket. He looked at me languidly. Without saying why he’d been looking for me, he went over once again all the things that needed to be done at the office. He obliquely asked me my whereabouts in the morning.

“I went to the hospital.”

“Someone sick?”

“I’m not feeling well.”

“What’s the problem?”

“The doctor said it’s nothing.”

“What do you mean? Do you take me for an idiot?” As Mr. Shi’s face fell, he rose from his seat.

“I’m telling the truth. Mr. Shi, don’t… get the wrong idea.” I quickly stood up too.

But it was too late. Mr. Shi already had it firmly in mind that I took him for an idiot. He would not accept any explanation I had to offer. Even if I opened up my mouth and let him look down my throat, telling him all about the fishbone, he would think I was trying to make an even bigger fool of him. Anyway, the old doctor had already concluded that there was no bone, and was now an accomplice in the whole affair. I very much wanted to make a clean breast of it with Mr. Shi, but I had always disliked him. He had never treated me like an office director, and I felt there was no reason to think of him as my leader. Now that there was no fishbone, an end should be made to the matter. Whatever I could say would be of no use anyway.

Our backsides rose and fell above our seats in tandem. He was taking a phone call now. Bored, I began fidgeting with my fingers, bending them then straightening them out, looking about here and there. Mr. Shi’s bookcase was filled with antiques, stones, and other knickknacks. The clock in the shape of the Statue of Liberty standing by the window was at least as tall as I was. There were only about ten employees in the company, five of whom were temporary staff like Zhao Yanling. Anyway, for me it was a steady job and a steady income.

Mr. Shi spoke leisurely on the phone. The other party was trying to persuade him to have dinner, and he was carefully explaining why he could not go. I patiently endured his hypocrisy, doing finger exercises to alleviate the boredom.

“Something else on your mind?” he asked as soon as he’d finished his phone call and turned his attention to me.

“I… me?” I stood up abruptly. I was not so much afraid as angry. I made a fist, straightened my fingers, and made a fist again. I really wanted to use that fist to strike his desk and shout: “Damn it!” But I suddenly felt the fishbone pressing at me from deep inside my throat, giving me a rude prick.

“Fuck you!” My fingers clutched my throat.

“What did you say to me?” Mr. Shi’s eyes narrowed.

“Me? I wasn’t talking to you,” I replied. Inside, I was cursing the old man from the hospital. The fishbone was clearly still there, even though he’d said “no bones.” I didn’t realize that I had cursed aloud.

Ever since the dispute with the shopkeeper from the women’s clothing store, my wife had completely ignored me. My son, having witnessed my weak behavior and escape tactics, also stood against me, full of contempt. Of course, my son still had a child’s logic. He felt I was indifferent toward him, as well as his mother. When we had come home after our outing that day, my wife failed to make the good dinner she’d promised. Instead, she made a big fuss over the whole incident. She felt I was lacking in manliness, and that I had behaved like a stranger. Seeing someone bully my wife, I had shown no concern, leaving her to fend for herself. She was furious, and seemed to write off all the effort I’d put into building this family.

I said: “Wasn’t it easier to resolve things without me there? I would’ve just caused more trouble if I’d stayed. And anyway, my throat hurt so much I couldn’t talk.”

My wife, rolling her eyes so that all I could see were the whites, said spitefully, “Don’t go using that fishbone as an excuse again. You’re useless!”

I knew what my wife was referring to. She meant that she could no longer stand to lie next to a man who was no better than dead. If I were really dead that would have been one thing, but I was still breathing, yet had been unable to get it up for days, proving myself completely impotent. Hearing my wife curse my impotence was as unbearable as having the fishbone caught in my throat. I gave her a slap, a ringing one. She came at me, roaring like a lion. Tears flew from her face as she clawed at me with her sharp nails. “Don’t think I don’t know! Even a rabbit knows not to nibble the grass around its hole, but here you are messing around with your office staff. You are shameless!”

For a moment, my wife and I were in a deadlock – our quarrel had been injected with some real venom. Feeling I should take a stand of some sort, I caught both of her hands and, shaking her, cried: “What? What did you say?” I tossed her onto the bed like a sack of straw. There was a bang, and the bed collapsed. My wife, lying amidst the rubble, burst into tears. “Who’s been telling you this sort of nonsense? Huh? Tell me!” I hoisted her back up and turned her so that the light fell on her face, as if I could find an answer there. But then a wave of depression overcame me, and I released her. My throat hurt. I was done with this game. What my wife said was not wrong. I was nibbling at the edge of the grass with Zhao Yanling – even though I hadn’t succeeded in doing anything but exchanging saliva so far. But it was a secret that only God knew, aside from me and, of course, Zhao Yanling. So how did my wife come to find out?

I jerked my wife away from the bed and said, “Go somewhere else and finish crying. I’ll fix the bed.” She pushed my hand away fiercely, went into my son’s room, and slammed the door shut. This had been our conjugal bed for many years, and just like that, it had collapsed. I felt a sudden urge to laugh. In fact, I was already laughing so hard I shook. I pulled up the sheets and put them to one side, then pulled off the Simmons mattress. I discovered that the frame had been loose to begin with, and had completely given way under the force of my wife’s fall. I wondered whether the two of us had been too enthusiastic in our romps there, or if the frame was just of poor quality. There was an accumulation of rubbish beneath it. Besides a few dead mosquitoes and cockroaches, there were numerous condom wrappers, as well as one of my socks that had disappeared. I called to my wife, but she did not respond. I had to clean up the mess alone. Mixed in with the odds and ends I swept out from under the bed was a business card: Water Treatment Company - Manager - Shi Tong. I pondered. When had Mr. Shi given me his name card? I could not remember.

Because of the old doctor’s words – “Get a good night’s sleep and it should be all right in the morning” – I had an unusual night, filled with anticipation. After taking the anti-inflammatory medication, I drank a bit of water and quietly watched TV. No one fought with me over what channel to watch. Since my wife had felt the full weight of my hand on her, it seemed she had finally found a reason to leave me. In what appeared to be a pain-free process for her, she packed up her things and left. I guessed she’d gone back to her parents’ home to rid herself of my very scent, so that she could move happily along her way. My son locked himself in his room and did not come out. I knocked on his door, but he did not respond. I was too tired to care. I thought that if we could just get through the night, things would be fine. At around ten, I went to bed, hoping to get an early start on the good night’s sleep, after which everything was supposed to be alright. To tell the truth, I could not be sure whether the fishbone was still there or not, whether I’d lost the ability to feel that delicate area with any accuracy, or whether it might have already grown soft. Sometimes, it seemed there was something there. But then, after careful inspection, it seemed there was nothing.

The first thing I thought of when I woke up in the morning was the fishbone. I cleared my throat, swallowed, then swallowed again. The bone was still there! Plain as day, and part of it seemed to be lodged in the flesh. Despairing, I turned over, sat up, and swallowed a couple of times in quick succession. The impression was not as clear this time. I could only say that my throat was sore in a certain area, but I could not locate the bone. It had been another scam! My anger boiling, I put in an appearance at the office, then hastily made my way to the hospital’s ENT ward to find the elderly doctor again, as if the bone stuck in my throat was a responsibility that old man couldn’t shirk.

The elderly doctor took twice as long to check this time as the previous day, then gave me his brand new diagnosis: No fishbone.

“Can’t be. I know it’s in my throat.”

“When you come to a hospital for a consultation, you should trust the doctors. Have some faith in modern medicine.” The elderly doctor was quite patient.

“I only know that the fishbone is stuck in my throat. You really can’t see it?” I couldn’t stand the lifeless, mechanical manner this old man had used when he said, “No fishbone.” He sounded like a computer recording. “I think you’re going blind. You ought to retire.” I tried to suppress my fury.

“Perhaps you need to be checked for other types of illnesses?” the sinister old doctor suggested.

“What did you say?”

“There’s no fishbone. I recommend you check for other illnesses.”

Stubborn old fool. Unable to control myself, I brought my fist to the doctor’s face, surprising even myself. I saw the old man, chair and all, topple over, blood flowing from the corner of his mouth. Slowly, he pulled himself up as I stormed out.

All the way back to the office, my fist was tightly clenched. My rage must have been written all over my face, judging by the strange gazes I saw turned on me by those I passed. But I didn’t care about that. If I continued to be ruled by the fishbone, I was done for. I didn’t know what to do.

When I got back to the office, Zhao Yanling said that Mr. Shi was waiting for me. Silently, I passed by the fair Zhao Yanling, then resolutely turned and walked into Mr. Shi’s office at a quick pace.

“You’re looking for me?” I put on a sober face and approached the manager. His imposing air was as empty a refrain as, “Get a good night’s sleep and everything will be alright in the morning.” I’d slept many nights, and I was still carrying on as before. The fishbone was still there, my wife was still leaving me, and I was still only exchanging saliva with Zhao Yanling. I decided to take a stand there and then, against Mr. Shi, and against the fishbone.

“You know about the meeting this afternoon?” Mr. Shi lit a cigarette.

“No, I don’t,” I said severely.

“Oh. You weren’t in the office. Here’s the situation. The meeting is to determine who will take your place as director. Be at the meeting. That’s all.” He pinched out his cigarette.

I’m standing inside my throat. It’s like an empty tunnel, or a natural cave. I hear water flowing in the dark. I can see the fishbone, like a tree, rooted firmly in the soil of my throat’s flesh. I yank it out. Its roots are as lush as Zhao Yanling’s hair. Now I imagine putting my hand down my throat and very skillfully extracting the fishbone. I’m thrilled to see the root of the little rascal that’s been torturing me. It must be fine as a hair. Saliva would be enough to stick it in place. Like a mosquito’s sting, it can pierce the pores and suck out the very lifeblood. When it’s soft, no one knows where it’s hiding. When it’s hard, it makes me want to tear out my own throat. This insignificant thing, sometimes hard sometimes soft, made a mess of my life. I was soft, and after getting the fishbone caught in my throat, I couldn’t even imagine getting hard again. I was always a little limp with my wife, as with Mr. Shi, and I didn’t dare be hard with Zhao Yanling. So I went quietly along, hoping a good night’s sleep would make everything alright. But now I knew it was all a load of crap. Ever since I got the bone caught in my throat, I’d had no desire to eat fish. I was no longer a fish-eater. If I didn’t want to eat fish, that was fine, but the trouble was that not eating fish wouldn’t solve the problem of the bone already caught in my throat. And, even if I never again sampled other fish in the sea, I couldn’t stop others from doing so.

When I got home after work, my wife was already there, hanging around. It seemed she’d just gotten home. She was taking the clothes out of her bag. She was calm and casual, and seemed to be in good spirits.

“The fishbone’s gone now?” she said coldly. Not waiting for an answer, she pointed to the sofa and said, “Let’s talk.”

“You... where did you go?” I wasn’t certain she’d gone back to her parents’ after all.

“I want a divorce. I’ve thought it over.” My wife ignored my confusion, as if there was already nothing between us.

“Why are you making such a fuss? You’re scaring me,” I said, laughing. So, my wife wanted a divorce. Where did she get the nerve?

“Who’s making any fuss?” She pulled out a piece of paper and slapped it onto the coffee table. I picked it up and had a look. It was the divorce papers. There were only two stipulations: One, she got custody of our son. Two, the house was hers. She did not want anything else.

I was stunned. Aside from my son and my house, what else did I have? My hand went to my throat, and a cooing sound like that of a dove escaped from me.

Translated by Shelly Bryant

Zhang Yueran

Born in 1982 in Jinan, Shandong Province, Zhang Yueran began writing at the age of 14, and completed a graduate degree in computer science at the National University of Singapore. Her published work includes the short story collection The Sunflowers Were Lost in 1890 and Ten Love Stories, the novels The Distance from the Cherries, The Narcissus Has Carried the Goldfish Away, and The Promise Bird, and the photo-journal Red Shoes. As editor of the NEWriting anthology series, she has become one of the most influential young writers in China. In 2003 she took second prize in the 5th Singapore Tertiary Chinese Literature Awards, and in 2004 was named Best Newcomer in the Chinese-Language Media Awards.

A Thousand and One Nights

by Zhang Yueran

1

The first time I saw Du Zhong was July last year, in an old factory building. He was squatting in amongst piles of antique furniture, measuring the width of a pearwood side table with a measuring tape; a narrow face the colour of tree roots, an ugly, stripy short-sleeved shirt, and a pungent smell of sweat wafting from its wide sleeves. Ten blackened toes poked out of his sandals, each with dirt lodged beneath the toenail. He looked like a loser. He was a loser. Only when he stood up did I realise quite how short he was, and heavy like a steelyard balance.

“Have you come for a sandalwood table? You’ll find someone in the first room on the right.” He didn’t even look up. Afterwards I learned that he’d assumed those bright red toenails in black strappy sandals couldn’t possibly be looking for anything he had. He was already too old to be looking at women, forty-plus years had taught him that at least: never covet what doesn’t belong to you. It only makes you more jealous.

I told him: “I’m not here to buy furniture.”

He didn’t reply.

My father was, at that moment, in the room closest to the entrance showing his friend some items he had just purchased. The furniture was old and had taken a beating over the years, so father had asked one of the men to do some restoration. He was showing off his knowledge of antiques, and specifically about how he had bought an antique official’s chair for one hundred thousand kuai that was now worth two million. I was sick of hearing him talk about it, so I slipped away.

I walked down a dark corridor, lined on both sides with square rooms. For some reason the workshop reminded me of a medicine cabinet I had often dreamed about. It was made up of lots of small drawers, each with its own small label covered in tiny characters. I seemed to be playing hide and seek with someone, so I climbed up onto the cabinet, opened a drawer, and climbed in. Every drawer housed its own story, or maybe other people’s dreams. I hid inside and watched the action playing out before me. After some time I began to join in, forgetting that this was someone else’s dream, and that I had my own. Just as everything was becoming real, just as I was starting to feel happy, someone jumped out from behind me and said: “Aha! Caught you at last.”

I’ve had this dream at least ten times since I was a young girl, and every time I’d wake up crying. And yet, I never seem to be done with it.

It was in the last room at the end of the corridor where I’d met Du Zhong. The air was filled with the singing of cicadas, the afternoon’s sinister sun was blocked at the door, the air was filled with moths and swirling dust.

By the time I emerged, Father and his friend were already waiting in the courtyard.

“We missed you,” Father said, with a hint of worry in his voice.

“Where could I have gone? I just took a walk around.”

They were in a rush to go somewhere else but I was obviously tired, and indicated that I didn’t want to leave. Father finally agreed to let me stay, saying he would be back in a moment to collect me.

“Stay here. Don’t go running off,” Father instructed me.

“She’s twenty,” Father’s friend chuckled as he walked to the exit. “You treat her like a child.”

“You don’t understand.” He seemed to want to say more but stopped himself, turning instead to look back at me as he twisted himself into the car.

That day I ate lunch with Du Zhong and the others. The men were embarrassed to be bare-chested and so pulled their sweaty shirts back on, and spent the lunch speaking with uncharacteristic caution. He only looked up at me after someone told him that I was my father’s daughter. My gaze had long been fixed on him, making him slightly panicky. He must have been quite flirtatious when he was young, but he had gradually given up on those thoughts as he got older. After he finished eating, he fished a packet of Camels out of his bag, lit a crumpled cigarette, and placed it between his oily purple lips.

I recalled a set of divination sticks Father had mentioned, and asked one of the men to let me take a look at them. The set was made of a beautifully-carved bamboo tube which held a bunch of long, thin, ebony strips, each overlaid with a heavy fate. I took the tube in both hands and shook them gently. They made an even sound.

“Do you believe in fortune telling?” I asked.

“I’ve never really had mine told,” he replied quickly. “Well, I once went to see a face reader. He was supposed to be good, but after looking me up and down for ages he left without saying anything. My future seemed to scare him.” He laughed dryly. He was missing his two front teeth, giving him a pained look.

“I can tell your fortune,” I said, looking him straight in the eye. “I can tell you everything that is going to happen to you.”

“Using those?” he asked, pointing at the bamboo tube I was holding.

“No, another way.”

“Yeah?” He looked interested. “Go on then.”

“I will, but not today.”

2

Du Zhong wasn’t originally a cabinet maker. It’s hard to say what he did originally, he did a bit of everything, but probably not much of what he should have. Decades after arriving on this earth and he still hadn’t found his place. By now he was too old and had to live on others’ goodwill. In this respect he was quite lucky, he happened to bump into an old friend right when he was at his most desperate. If it hadn’t have been raining that day, and Father hadn’t had an accident on his way to the airport, he would have never taken a taxi. And, out of all the thousands of taxis in this city, my father hailed his. He recognised my father at once but didn’t say anything at first, not until they were waiting for a particularly slow red light when he couldn’t help himself from turning around to look. He smiled at my father, and said a few words in their Loufeng dialect. Eventually my father recognised him, and was surprised to see that even after all these years he still hadn’t got himself a set of false teeth.

Du Zhong and my father had known each other ever since they could remember. When they were teenagers Du Zhong was a gifted go player, which was a sure sign of intelligence. Father always felt ashamed in comparison. But luck was forever against the prodigy, while by contrast everything seemed to go Father’s way, or at least, he had a particular gift for seizing opportunities. Now, thirty years later, Father was gratified to see Du Zhong so down on his luck. What he did next proved to be one of his few bad decisions.

They chatted happily, talking of old times. Old feelings flooded over the two men. Once they arrived at the airport, Father paid the fare and asked: “Do you want to come and work for me?” Du Zhong said yes. He may not have gushed with gratitude, but nor did he make grovelling excuses for his present situation; he had been receiving help for years now and he knew exactly how to make the giver feel satisfied. He indicated that he no longer wanted to work as a taxi driver. “I’m not young anymore and my prostate gives me constant trouble, I can’t hold on for long periods at a time without a toilet stop.”

Father understood, though he had originally intended to have Du drive the company car – now he couldn’t think of anything else suitable he could do. Eventually Father thought of the antiques workshop. He had spent much of the last few years collecting antiques, and at one point thought he might as well make a business of it through restorations and reproductions. Business had grown steadily, so he bought an old disused factory to turn into a workshop, and hired more men. Du Zhong was brought in to help run the day-to-day operations. Father came once to visit him and took him out to lunch, after which they played a couple of rounds of go. Did Du like it there? He said that he did, but he was obviously lying. He didn’t know himself why he was staying on. Perhaps he was waiting for an opportunity, even if he couldn’t say what it was.

3

I came back a few days later to collect a decorated screen for Father that had just been repaired. Du Zhong saw me out and loaded the screen into the car. It was the hottest time of the day, and the sunlight splashed on the car like boiling oil. I didn’t leave at once however, and he didn’t go back inside either. We were in some sort of stalemate. I recalled that he had mentioned a reservoir nearby, so I told him I wanted to go see it. We walked in the direction of a dense wood. The reservoir was beyond it, but we never made it that far.

We sat down. Then we lay down. He peeled my clothes off.

I peeled him. I stripped away a layer of skin the colour of pickles, preserved by age, and took a step closer to his memories.

I can tell people’s fortunes from their bodies. His hippocampus was like a medieval town perched halfway up a mountainside, reached only by a rugged path, enveloped in foul weather.

The first stretch of the road was deserted, the mud dried hard as armour, without a single blade of grass. People say that memory fades with middle age, but it’s rare to see something as bleak as this. Enervated, I carried on along the road. There is no scenery; it is a roll of empty videotape. If he could only dream, it would at least let me rest my feet for a while.

As I was on the verge of despair a small house appeared up ahead. Naked concrete walls glowed an inviting red. I rushed over to it and pushed at the door. It was small, with mirrors facing each other on the walls. There was a thick curtain in front of me, and sounds coming from behind it. I walked towards it across mounds of cut hair.

The room contained a single bed, Du Zhong and a woman. A naked bulb hung from the ceiling, puffing and panting as it swayed. I was just about to push the curtain aside to leave when the woman said:

“So you’ve come, girl.”

I stopped and looked at her. She looked at me. She seemed friendly. I went back through the curtain, but didn’t leave. I was tired, so I pulled up a hairdresser’s swivel chair and sat down.

After a while, Du Zhong came out, and looked at himself in the mirror over my head.

Then the woman emerged and sent him outside. Somehow she knew that I was thirsty, and poured me a glass of water. I bent over it and saw a moth struggling on the water’s surface.

“Do you know me?” I asked as I sipped the water.

“What’s the matter with you? Haven’t you been here many times before?” She stroked my head fondly.

“I’ve never been here before.”

“Oh, really?” The woman was a bit disappointed. “I don’t think I could be mistaken.” She pulled out a hairclip and stuck it between her lips, gathering her wild curly hair and twisting it around her finger before pinning it in place.

I looked at her and muttered: “If I’ve been here before, what was it for?”

“How do I know? You always stand at the door, looking in. I never know what it is you’re looking at.”

“Nothing.” I leaned over my glass, removed the moth and drank it in one gulp.

“Hey,” she said, regretfully, as she sat down. “Is looking really more fun than doing?”

I wanted to say no, but I couldn’t explain what I was doing there, so I replied: “Sometimes. Maybe.”

She shook her head, looking anxious. After a pause she said, “If you can’t get it yourself don’t think someone else will give it to you.”

She was peeling an apple as I left. I didn’t say anything, but rather pushed the door open and went out. She looked out at me through the window, hurt, before lowering her head. She placed the piece of apple she had just cut into her mouth, and chewed silently.

I was nearly back on the road when something pulled me back. A spasm. I composed myself and looked over. It was Du Zhong’s face. He was climbing down from on top of me, his face covered in sweat. I flicked the liquid from between my legs. I was thirsty.

He sat up, shrinking along with his penis. Flustered, he lit a cigarette: “If your dad found out he’d butcher me. I was planning to grow old at that workshop.”

“I’ve got some money,” I said, thinking.

“Money your father gave you in a red envelope at Spring Festival?” He laughed bitterly. “Aren’t you still in university?”

“I can trick some more out of him.”

“Don’t underestimate him. Your father can be cunning.”

“Yes, but he spoils me.”

Du Zhong seemed to believe me and relaxed. Exhausted, he lay down and fell asleep at once.

I thought about it. If I asked my father to give up his precious official’s chair in exchange for a moment of my pleasure, he would. But he would never understand why I do this for pleasure. At least find it in something of beauty, he would say. That’s just what he’d done. Each of his lovers was younger, more beautiful than the last. But he has never really derived true pleasure from them. Other people think he’s happy, that’s enough for him, that’s what makes him happy.

Du Zhong was lying beside me like a trickle of foul water. When I was little, when my father had nothing but time, he used to take me to a reservoir on the outskirts of the city to fish. The water was filthy and full of silt. Father told me that the plumpest fish live in water like this. By now he would have forgotten he’d said that, but I still remember.

I turned to face Du Zhong. The desire that we’d exhausted seemed to have returned.

4

During those few short minutes of meditation, I fell asleep and had a dream. It was a desolate dream, and I was running. Just as I was about to wake up I thought I wasn’t dreaming, but making love to Du Zhong. I opened my eyes and there was no one, only the ceiling above me, as high as the sky. Grieved, I sat up.

“You fell asleep,” the yoga teacher laughed. She approached, carrying her tape recorder.

All four people reflected in the mirrors were me. Everyone else had long since left.

I rolled up my mat and left. The yoga teacher gave me a glass of water.

“Drink some water. Your lips are so dry.”

I drank it.

“How do you feel?” She had already changed out of her yoga clothes, and had covered up her beautiful frame. Becoming instantly ordinary.

“Pretty good.”

“See, your body’s starting to get it.”

“Is it true that once you get to a certain level you can leave your body?”

“Of course.” She walked over and switched off the studio light.

“Where do you go when that happens?”

She thought for a while before answering: “You go outside of it, somewhere else.”

“What does it feel like?”

“When it happens you’ll know.” She laughed at me. Deep lines appeared on her face, turning it into a wind-dried specimen. Suddenly I felt sorry for her; she must need to take her clothes off to make a man fall in love with her.

As I wasn’t answering she continued: “Why do you want to leave your body? Yours is such a nice one,” she stroked my shoulder, evaluating my young body, decades younger than hers, and continued with a hint of envy in her voice: “You have to learn to love it.” She’s always telling us to let ourselves experience love: love nature, love all animals, love ourselves. Just thinking of it made my skin tingle.

“Let’s go,” I said.

We said goodbye downstairs. I watched as she melted into the twilight crowds, her footsteps as heavy as anyone else’s. I thought to myself, she can’t leave her body for even a second. If she did, she would have nothing.

5

I continued my yoga practice, but never went back to class. During those afternoons and twilights I was elsewhere. As was my body.

Du Zhong and I shuttled back and forth between ancient cabinets, chairs and tables, coupling in cobwebbed corners. He prolonged our foreplay on purpose, kissing my neck and earlobes forcefully, leaving behind a trail of hot spit. He must have thought I had fallen in love.

I continued my travels on that road. I met the prostitutes again. They mustn’t have seen me, otherwise they would have cried out. No one would give me a glass of water.

Again I encountered the prostitute I’d met first. The second time she hadn’t wound up her long hair and she looked a bit younger. She was also carefully applying red lipstick. I felt overjoyed and smiled at her. But just like the others she cried out, pushed Du Zhong away and sat up in the bed: “Who are you?”

I fled as fast as I could.

I returned to the road and continued walking. I started crying. Maybe I was feeling sad about that young girl. Did she know that years from now she’d still be here, selling her flesh? That tiny room was like a vending machine. But this sadness wasn’t necessary. We didn’t know each other, or perhaps I was sad because we didn’t know each other. When she was nice to me it confused me, but I was nothing more than a stranger to her, even when she made me feel that we were close. Our feelings cancelled each other out, as if we’d never had them at all. I told myself: it’s right not to develop feelings, there’s no such thing as emotion, it’s just something that gets written down and then rubbed out and all that’s left is a white sheet of paper. After articulating that thought I just stared blankly ahead. The world was twitching like an eyelid. I’d stumbled across some hidden truth. I was excited and fidgety and hardly dared to continue thinking about it.

Du Zhong’s oily face suddenly reared up. He extended his fingers and wiped the tears from my cheeks. “You’re crying.”

I didn’t speak, but picked my clothes up and put them on. He held me from behind. If I had had any strength or courage left in me I would have shaken free. But I didn’t. I looked down at the coarse arms wrapped in a circle around my body. I didn’t shrug him off, just to make sure I was still alive.

6

A long summer like a pool of lifeless blue water reeking of bleach: the only way I had of resisting that dreamlike feeling was to jump back again into the foul water.

As I moved forward, his memories became populated and lively. Those scenes felt close to me, like the world seen through the eyes of a child. Yet I was still seeing from a distance, without drawing close. Since the time I cried over the girl I had decided never again to talk with anyone I met on the road. I can’t leave any trace, because I don’t exist. I began to feel extremely lonely, just as I did in real life. I don’t know why, but that loneliness made me feel safe.

Not long after that, Huiling appeared. I could see her face clearly, there was no doubt she was an important character in the story. She was the same age as Du Zhong but had lost much of her good looks; she was gaunt and tragic. The last time they met was at sunset in the gardens of some apartment complex. Du Zhong was angry and pointed at her, shouting and cursing. She remained silent and expressionless throughout the whole encounter. He grabbed her as if he meant to pinch her into ash. The poor woman suffered in silence, she was too scared to make a sound.

He only let go once his strength was spent. She stared at him blankly for a while, before running away in panic. Her drooping breasts flapped wildly, and she shouted back without turning: “Let me go!”

Du Zhong stood still and did not give chase. This moment in time was drawn out, as if it would fill up the rest of his days. I wanted to stop him from continuing down the road, but viscous time wrapped around my body, making it hard to walk. I could only sit down and suffer with him. It felt like we were attending a memorial, everywhere a thick, distressing atmosphere of death enveloped us.

I kept reminding myself this had nothing to do with me.

7

I continued on and their story began to surface. They had met over twenty years previously, and encountered each other again at the age of 43. There seemed to be some past entanglement between them, but though it weighed heavily on their hearts neither of them broached the subject.

Seeing his desperate straits, Huiling often assisted him. He seduced her, and eventually won her. Huiling met him behind her husband’s back; they were wild together in bed.

He tried to force Huiling to divorce, but she refused. He visited Huiling’s husband in private and revealed the affair. Huiling’s family were thrown into chaos, never to recover. In the end Huiling did divorce, and sought refuge in his arms.

The memories of that night are also viscous. Huiling dragged her suitcase, its wheels broken, up to the sixth floor and knocked on the door. He opened and Huiling fell into his arms, sobbing loudly: “I don’t have anything left. Only you.”

He stood, unmoved. A cigarette burned a cold light in one hand.

“I lost everything a long time ago.” He pushed her away and drew on his cigarette.

Huiling stared blankly.

“And all because of you.” He laughed coldly. “So, think about it, how could I possibly want you?”

The woman shook her head in pain. “I know you’ve suffered terribly… But I really was scared to death…”

“Scared to death? So that makes it okay that you framed me?”

“Framed you? I didn’t frame you…”

“You said I raped you.”

“Wasn’t that the truth?” The last word made her convulse.

“Yu Huiling, don’t play dumb. You arranged to meet me that day! You offered, I accepted. Why won’t you admit it?”

“Oh my God! How can you turn black into white? Don’t tell me you actually believe that?”

“What do you mean believe? That’s what happened!” Du Zhong was shouting. “Why can’t you admit it? You think I’ll turn you in?”

The woman was so angry she was shaking. She took a few steps back: “What’s the point of twisting the facts like this, you’re lying to yourself.”

“This is too funny. Who exactly is the one lying to themselves? How can you do it so shamelessly?” Du Zhong was roaring so loudly the windows in the corridor were shaking.

“You’ve gone mad, Du Zhong.”

She bent down slowly, picked up her suitcase and started to walk back down the stairs.

“Get lost!” Du Zhong stamped his foot and called behind her.

And that was how they parted. But Du Zhong never imagined that Huiling would remarry her ex-husband so quickly. He interfered again, causing the scene I saw in the garden outside Huiling’s building. By this time Huiling had already denied all her feelings. She saw that he was just trying to get revenge. Eventually, he gave up, and his life came crashing down around him.

8

My head hurt for days after emerging from that memory. I couldn’t do anything apart from sleep. As I drifted in and out of consciousness I thought over the scene of their argument in the corridor. Both spoke with conviction, as if neither were lying. But there could only be one truth… Or maybe there were two truths. Maybe Huiling was lying to herself, maybe she had quietly distorted the facts without herself knowing it. I wanted to believe Huiling’s version, but if she were telling the truth then Du Zhong would have to be exceptionally deluded. He seduced Huiling, forced her to divorce, then cast her aside, all in revenge for having been framed. Huiling hadn’t framed him, there was conclusive evidence. But his hate was so real, I couldn’t believe it was faked? I desperately wanted to be able to go back to that memory and see for myself.

When he was 42 he lived with a widow. After three months she cleaned up his meagre savings and left him.

When he was 38 he learned to drive and worked for Seafood Inn delivering goods in a small van. His earnings were just enough to cover his vices: cigarettes, alcohol and cheap prostitutes.

When he was 36 he was released from prison. He worked for a friend in a small restaurant. He was fired for taking liberties with the boss’ wife.

When he was 33 Li came to visit him in prison, bringing the divorce papers with her. Soon she’d found Thunder a new father.

When he was 32 he fell out with his business partners. They ganged up and forced him to take permanent charge of the most dangerous stage of shipments. Six months later the truck was intercepted by the police and he was put in jail.

When he was 28 he went south with some friends and started smuggling cigarettes, earning himself a considerable lump of cash. Business went well for a while. He bought a colour TV, a fridge, a motorbike. He started wearing a western-style suit for the first time.

When he was 27 his son Thunder was born.

When he was 26 he got married. His wife’s family scraped together some money to buy the couple some ash-wood furniture.

When he was 23 the neighbourhood factory closed down and he spent his days roaming the streets, picking up odd jobs when he could. Li, who lived in the same building as him, had returned from the city. She was the nearest girl, so he started pursuing her.

When he was 22 he started working for the neighbourhood factory, sewing hemp bags and transporting them in a cart to the warehouse.

When he was 21 he contracted hepatitis in prison, and was released early. The commune wouldn’t have him back so he went to the city. His aunt’s family were occupying his grandfather’s old house, so he constructed a simple wooden shack in the courtyard.

When he was 18 he was convicted of rape.

Before that he’d met Huiling in the village where they grew up. He plucked up his courage and wrote her a letter asking her to meet him that night in the wheat field… After trudging my way back through the layers of time I finally arrived at the memory of that evening.

The memory of that evening gives off a mysterious scent. The sky was towering, the stars numerous and bright. The dew seemed to be fermenting into wine, and a few deep breaths were enough to make you drunk.

They met in the wheat field. They hadn’t yet made each other out in the darkness before their bodies were entangled and they were struggling to the ground. An exposed body part. Neither thought it inappropriate, it was just as it should be, they were melting into the nature around them. They were groaning, their groaning quickly turned into howling. Was this what really happened? It was so intense it obscured the judgement.

I have never seen such hungry bodies, it was like they wanted to swallow each other, they had to, it was the only way they could fill the black hole of their desire. No, those holes could not be filled. They just kept eating each other, sucking blood, gnawing bones, annihilating each other’s existence. It was nothing like making love, but more like a battle to the death. If someone pulled them apart at this moment it would kill them. I feel sorrow, almost suffocation, I’m desperately trying to open my mouth and take in air. But I’m not breathing, I’m howling, just like them. My body is rocking violently, as if it wants to break into pieces.

I almost suffocate. I lean against a tree and gasp for air. I am happy, happier than I’ve ever been before. Yet it is such a lonely happiness.

In the distance a ball of light was dancing fretfully. Footsteps dense like drops of rain were approaching. I see a group of people approaching, their torches sweeping the field like machine guns. They are shouting angrily, but they are actually happy, happy that they are about to extinguish this greater happiness.

But I can’t see or hear the two of them. They have sunk into each other’s bodies, so deep, as if at the bottom of the sea. I am calling out, telling them of the approaching danger.

“Stop! People are coming!” But I am also hidden somewhere deep, my voice is closed inside my body, not even I can hear it. My body is writhing like an electric eel, faster and faster.

I can’t see them clearly anymore. The world is spinning in front of my eyes. The stars in the sky are smashing to the ground like meteors. Everything has gone mad.

I can feel people sweeping towards me like a tide. The two of them are still locked together, they can’t be parted. If they were it would kill them.

Suddenly, a bang! The back of my head is hot, my body stops still. A large wicker basket drops down on top of me. A light is shining in my face. The happy people have formed a dense mass around me. All I can see through the cracks in the basket are the dark shadow of a hand holding a stick and a proud grin: “Aha! Caught you at last!”

Translated by Anna Holmwood

Liu Cixin

Born in June 1963, Liu Cixin is a senior engineer with the China Power Investment Corporation and is a leading exponent of contemporary science fiction. He won China’s Galaxy Science Fiction Prize every year from 1999 to 2006, and was named Best SF Writer at the 2010 and 2011 XINGYUN Awards. His novels include the Three Body trilogy, which brought Chinese science fiction onto mainstream bestseller lists for the first time, as well as Ball Lightning, The Supernova Era, The Cretaceous, and The Devil’s Building Blocks. His short story collections include Vagabond Earth, End of Time, Micro-Epoch and Wearing Her Eyes.

Taking Care of God

by Liu Cixin

1

Once again, God had upset Qiusheng’s family.

The morning began very well. A thin layer of white fog floated at the height of a man over the fields around Xicen Village like a sheet of rice paper that had just become blank: the quiet countryside being the painting that had fallen out of the paper. The first rays of morning fell on the scene, and the year’s earliest dewdrops entered the most glorious period of their brief lives. But God had ruined this beautiful morning.

God had gotten up extra early and gone into the kitchen to warm some milk for himself. Ever since the start of the Era of Support, the milk market had prospered. Qiusheng’s family had bought a milk cow for a bit more than ten thousand yuan, and then, imitating others, mixed the milk with water to sell. The unadulterated milk had also become a staple for the family.

After the milk was warm, God took his bowl into the living room to watch TV, neglecting to turn off the gas stove.

When Qiusheng’s wife, Yulian, returned from cleaning the cowshed and the pigsty, she could smell gas all over the house. Covering her nose with a towel, she rushed into the kitchen to turn off the stove, opened the window, and turned on the fan.

“You old fool! You’re going to get the whole family killed!” Yulian shouted into the living room. The family had switched to using liquefied petroleum gas for cooking only after they began supporting God. Qiusheng’s father had always been opposed to it, saying that gas was not as good as honeycomb coal briquettes. Now he had even more ammunition for his argument.

As was his wont, God stood with his head lowered contritely, his broom-like white beard hanging past his knees, smiling like a kid who knew he had done something wrong. “I… I took down the pot for heating the milk. Why didn’t it turn off by itself?”

“You think you’re still on your spaceship?” Qiusheng said, coming down the stairs. “Everything here is dumb. We aren’t like you, being waited on hand and foot by smart machines. We have to work hard with dumb tools. That’s how we put rice in our bowls!”

“We also worked hard. Otherwise how did you come to be?” God said carefully.

“Enough with the ‘how did you come to be?’ Enough! I’m sick of hearing it. If you’re so powerful, go and make other obedient children to support you!” Yulian threw her towel on the ground.

“Forget it. Just forget it,” Qiusheng said. He was always the one who made peace. “Let’s eat.”

Bingbing got up. As he came down the stairs, he yawned. “Ma, Pa, God was coughing all night. I couldn’t sleep.”

“You don’t know how good you have it,” Yulian said. “Your dad and I were in the room next to his. You don’t hear us complaining, do you?”

As if on cue, God began to cough again. He coughed like he was playing his favorite sport, with great concentration.

Yulian stared at God for a few seconds before sighing. “I must have the worst luck in eight generations.” Still angry, she left for the kitchen to cook breakfast.

God sat silently through breakfast with the rest of the family. He ate one bowl of porridge with pickled vegetables and half a steamed bun. During the entire time he had to endure Yulian’s disdainful looks – maybe she was still mad about the gas, or maybe she thought he ate too much.

After breakfast, as usual, God got up quickly to clean the table and wash the dishes in the kitchen. Standing just outside the kitchen, Yulian shouted, “Don’t use detergent if there’s no grease on the bowl! Everything costs money. The pittance they pay for your support? Ha!” God grunted his acknowledgement.

Qiusheng and Yulian left for the fields. Bingbing left for school. Only now did Qiusheng’s father get up. Still not fully awake, he came downstairs, ate two bowls of porridge, and filled his pipe with tobacco. At last he remembered God’s existence.

“Hey, old geezer, stop the washing. Come and play a game with me!” He shouted into the kitchen.

God came out of the kitchen, wiping his hands on his apron. He nodded ingratiatingly at Qiusheng’s father. Playing Chinese chess with the old man was a tough chore for God: winning and losing both had unpleasant consequences. If God won, Qiusheng’s father would get mad: You fucking old idiot! You trying to show me up? Shit! You’re God! Beating me is no great accomplishment at all. Why can’t you learn some manners? You’ve lived under this roof long enough! But if God lost, Qiusheng’s father would still get mad: You fucking old idiot! I’m the best chess player for fifty kilometers. Beating you is easier than squishing a bed bug. You think I need you to let me win? You… to put it politely, you are insulting me!

In any case, the final result was the same: the old man would flip the board and the pieces would fly everywhere. Qiusheng’s father was infamous for his bad temper, and now he’d finally found a punching bag in God.

But the old man didn’t hold a grudge. Every time, after God picked up the board and put the pieces back quietly, he sat down and played with God again – and the whole process was repeated. After a few cycles of this, both of them were tired, and it was almost noon.

God then got up to wash the vegetables. Yulian didn’t allow him to cook because she said God was a terrible cook, but he still had to wash the vegetables. If they weren’t washed by the time Qiusheng and Yulian returned from the fields, she would be at him again with another round of bitter, sarcastic scolding.

While God washed the vegetables, Qiusheng’s father left to visit the neighbors. This was the most peaceful part of God’s day. The noon sun filled every crack in the brick-lined yard and illuminated the deep crevasses in his memory. During such periods God often forgot his work and stood quietly, lost in thought. Only when the noise of the villagers returning from the fields filled the air would he be startled awake and hurry to finish his washing.

He sighed. How could life have turned out like this?

This wasn’t only God’s sigh. It was also the sigh of Qiusheng, Yulian, and Qiusheng’s father. It was the sigh of more than five billion people and two billion Gods on Earth.

2

It all began one fall evening three years ago.

“Come quickly! There are toys in the sky!” Bingbing shouted in the yard. Qiusheng and Yulian raced out of the house, looked up, and saw that the sky really was full of toys, or at least objects whose shapes could only be toys.

The objects spread out evenly across the dome of the sky. In the dusk, each reflected the light of the setting sun – already below the horizon – and each shone as bright as the full moon. The light turned Earth’s surface as bright as midday. But the light came from every direction and left no shadow, as though the whole world was illuminated by a giant surgical lamp.

At first, everyone thought the objects were within our atmosphere because they were so clear. Eventually, humans learned that these objects were simply enormous. They were hovering about thirty thousand kilometers away in geostationary orbits.

There were a total of 21,530 spaceships. Spread out evenly across the sky, they formed a thin shell around Earth. This was the result of a complex set of maneuvers that brought all the ships to their final locations simultaneously. In this manner, the alien ships avoided causing life-threatening tides in the oceans due to their imbalanced mass. The gesture reassured humans somewhat. At least some evidence, that the aliens did not bear ill will towards Earth.

During the next few days, all attempts at communicating with the aliens failed. The aliens maintained absolute silence in the face of repeated queries. At the same time, Earth became a planet without night. Tens of thousands of spaceships reflected so much sunlight onto the night side of Earth that it was as bright as day, while on the day side the ships cast giant shadows onto the ground. The terrifying sight pushed the psychological endurance of the human race to the limit, so that most ignored a new strange occurrence on the surface of the planet, and did not connect it with the fleet of spaceships in the sky.

Across the great cities of the world, wandering old people had begun to appear. All of them looked alike: they were ancient, had long, white hair and beards, and wore long, white robes. At first, before the white robes, white beards, and white hair got dirty, they looked like a bunch of snowmen. The wanderers did not appear to belong to any particular race, as though all ethnicities were mixed in them. They had no documents to prove their citizenship or identity and could not explain their own history.

All they could do was to gently repeat, in heavily-accented versions of various local languages, the same words to all passersby:

“We are God. Please, considering that we created this world, would you give us a bit of food?”

If only one or two old wanderers said this, then they would have been sent to a shelter or nursing home, and treated like the homeless with dementia. But millions of old men and women all saying the same thing – that was something else entirely.

Within half a month, the number of old wanderers had increased to more than 30 million. All over the streets of New York, Beijing, London, Moscow… the old people could be seen everywhere, shuffling around in traffic-stopping crowds. Sometimes it seemed as if there were more of them than the original inhabitants of the cities.

The most horrible part of their presence was that they all repeated the same thing:

“We are God. Please, considering that we created this world, would you give us a bit of food?”

Only now did humans turn their attention from the spaceships to the uninvited guests. Recently, large-scale meteor showers had been occurring over every continent. After every impressive display of streaking meteors, the number of old wanderers in that region greatly increased. After careful observation, the following incredible fact was discovered: the old wanderers came out of the sky, from those alien spaceships.

One by one, they leapt into the atmosphere as though diving into a swimming pool, each wearing a suit made from a special film. As the friction from the atmosphere burnt away the surface of the suits, the film kept the heat away from the wearer and slowed his descent. Careful design ensured that the deceleration never exceeded four gs, well within the physical tolerance of the bodies of the old wanderers. Finally, at the moment of their arrival at the surface, their velocity was close to zero, as though they had just jumped down from a bench. Even so, many of them still managed to sprain their ankles. By now, the film around them had burnt away, leaving no trace.

The meteor showers continued without stopping. More wanderers fell to Earth. Their number rose to almost one hundred million.

The government of every country attempted to find one or more representatives among the wanderers. But the wanderers claimed that the “Gods” were absolutely equal, and any one of them could represent all of them. Thus, at the emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, one random old wanderer, who was found in Times Square and who now spoke passable English, entered the General Assembly Hall.

He had clearly been among the earliest to land: his robe was dirty and full of holes, and his white beard was covered with dirt, like a mop. There was no halo over his head, but a few loyal flies did hover there. He shuffled his way to the round meeting table with the help of a ratty bamboo walking stick, and lowered himself under the gaze of the leaders. He looked up at the Secretary-General and his face displayed the child-like smile particular to all the old wanderers.

“I… ha… I haven’t had breakfast yet.”

So breakfast was brought. All around the world, people stared as he ate like a starved man, choking a few times. Toast, sausages, and a salad were quickly gone, followed by a large glass of milk. Then he showed his innocent smile to the Secretary-General again:

“Haha… uh… is there any wine? Just a tiny cup will do.”

So a glass of wine was brought. He sipped at it, nodding with satisfaction. “Last night, a bunch of new arrivals took over my favorite subway grate, one that blew out warm air. I had to find a new place to sleep in the Square. But now with a bit of wine, my joints are coming back to life… You, can you massage my back a little? Just a little.”

The General-Secretary began to massage his back. The old wanderer shook his head, sighed, and said, “Sorry to be so much trouble to you.”

“Where are you from?” asked the President of the United States.

The old wanderer shook his head. “A civilization has a fixed location in her infancy. Planets and stars are unstable and change. The civilization must then move. By the time she becomes a young woman, she has already moved multiple times. Then they will make this discovery: no planetary environment is as stable as a sealed spaceship. So they’ll make spaceships their home, and planets will just be places where they sojourn. Thus, any civilization that has reached adulthood will be a star-faring civilization, permanently wandering through the cosmos. The spaceship is her home. Where are we from then? Well we come from the ships.” He pointed up with a dirt-caked finger.

“How many of you are there?”

“Two billion.”

“Who are you, really?” The Secretary-General had cause to ask this. The old wanderers looked just like humans.

“We’ve told you many times.” The old wanderer impatiently waved his hand. “We are God.”

“Could you explain?”

“Our civilization, let’s just call her the God Civilization, existed long before Earth was born. When the God Civilization entered her senescence, we seeded the newly-formed Earth with the beginnings of life. Then, the God Civilization skipped across time by traveling close to the speed of light. When life on Earth had evolved to the appropriate stage, we came back, introduced a new species based on our ancestral genes, eliminated its enemies, and carefully guided its evolution, until Earth was home to a new civilized species, just like us.”

“How do you expect us to believe you?”

“That’s easy.”

Thus began the half-year-long effort to verify these claims. Humans watched in astonishment as spaceships transmitted the original plans for life on Earth and images of the primitive Earth. Following the old wanderer’s direction, humans dug up incredible machines from deep below Earth’s crust, equipment that had through the long eons monitored and manipulated the biosphere on this planet.

Humans finally believed, at least with respect to life on Earth, that they really were God.

3

At the third emergency session of the United Nations General Assembly, the Secretary-General, on behalf of the human race, finally asked God the key question: why did you come to Earth?

“Before I answer this question, you must have a correct understanding of the concept of civilization.” God stroked his long beard. This was the same God who had been at the first emergency session half a year ago. “How do you think civilizations evolve over time?”

“Civilization on Earth is currently in a stage of rapid development. Barring some natural disasters that are beyond our ability to resist, I think we will continue our development indefinitely,” said the Secretary-General.

“Wrong. Think about it. Every person experiences childhood, youth, middle age, old age, and finally death. The stars are the same way. Indeed, everything in the universe goes through the same process. Even the universe itself will have to terminate one day. Why would civilization be an exception? No, a civilization will also grow old and die.”

“How exactly does that happen?”

“Different civilizations grow old and die in different ways, just like different people die of different diseases or just plain old age. For the God Civilization, the first sign of her senescence was the extreme lengthening of each individual member’s lifespan. By then, each individual in the God Civilization could expect a life as long as four thousand Earth years. By age two thousand, their thoughts had completely ossified, losing all creativity. Because individuals like these held the reins of power, new life had a hard time emerging and growing. That was when our civilization became old.”

“And then?”

“The second sign of the civilization’s senescence was the Age of the Machine Cradle.”

“What?”

“At that point, our machines no longer relied on their creators. They operated independently, maintained themselves, and developed on their own. The smart machines gave us everything we needed: not just material needs, but also psychological needs. We didn’t need to put any effort into survival. Taken care of by machines, we lived as though we were lying in comfortable cradles.

“Think about it, if the jungles of primitive Earth had been filled with inexhaustible supplies of fruits and tame creatures that desired to become food, how could apes evolve into humans? The Machine Cradle was just such a comfort-filled jungle. Gradually, we forgot about our technology and science. Our civilization became lazy and empty, devoid of creativity and ambition, and that only sped up the aging process. What you see now is the God Civilization in her final dying gasps.”

“Then… can you now tell us the God Civilization’s goal in coming to Earth?”

“We have no home now.”

“But…” The Secretary-General pointed upwards.

“The spaceships are old. It’s true that the artificial environment on the ships is more stable than any natural environment, including Earth’s. But the ships are older than you can imagine. Old components have broken down. Accumulated quantum effects over the eons have led to more software errors. The systems’ self-repair and self-maintenance functions have encountered more insurmountable obstacles. The living environment on the ships is deteriorating. The amount of life necessities that can be distributed to individuals is decreasing by the day. We only barely survived. In the twenty thousand cities on the various ships, the air is filled with pollution and despair.”

“Are there no solutions? Perhaps new components for the ships? A software upgrade?”

God shook his head. “The God Civilization is in her final years. We are two billion dying men and women each more than three thousand years old. But before us, hundreds of generations had already lived in the comfort of the Machine Cradle. We forgot all our technology long ago. Now, we have no way to repair these ships that have been operating for tens of millions of years on their own. Indeed, in terms of the ability to study and understand technology, we are not even as capable as you. We can’t even connect a circuit for a light bulb, or solve a quadratic equation…

“Finally, one day, the ships told us that they were close to complete breakdown. The propulsion systems could no longer push the ships near the speed of light. The God Civilization could only drift along at a speed not even one-tenth the speed of light, and the ecological support systems were nearing collapse. The machines could no longer keep two billion of us alive. We had to find another way out.”

“Did you ever think that this would happen?”

“Of course. The ships already warned us two thousand years ago. That was when we began the process of seeding life on Earth so that in our old age we would have support.”

“Two thousand years ago?”

“Yes. Of course I’m talking about time on the ships. From your frame of reference, that was 3.5 billion years ago, when the Earth first cooled down.”

“We have a question: you say that you’ve lost your technology. But doesn’t seeding life require technology?”

“Oh. To start the process of evolving life on a planet is a minor operation. Just scatter some seeds, and life will multiply and evolve on its own. We had this kind of software even before the Age of the Machine Cradle. Just start the program, and the machines can finish everything. To create a planet full of life, capable of developing civilization, the most basic requirement is time, a few billions of years of time.

“By traveling close to the speed of light we possess almost limitless time. But now, the God Civilization’s ships can no longer approach the speed of light. Otherwise we’d still have the chance to create new civilizations and more life, and we would have more choices. We’re trapped by slowness. Those dreams cannot be realized.”

“So you want to spend your golden years on Earth.”

“Yes, yes. We hope that you will feel a sense of filial duty towards your creators and take us in.” God leaned on his walking stick and trembled as he tried to bow to the leaders of all the nations, but he almost fell on his face.

“But how do you plan to live here?”

“If we just gathered into one place by ourselves, then we might as well stay in space and die there. We’d like to be absorbed into your societies, your families. When the God Civilization was still in her childhood, we also had families. You know that childhood is the most precious time. Since your civilization is still in her childhood, if we can return to this era and spend the rest of our lives in the warmth of families, then that would be our greatest happiness.”

“There are two billion of you. That means every family on Earth would have to take in one or two Gods.” After the Secretary-General spoke, the meeting hall sank into silence.

“Yes, yes, sorry to give you so much trouble…” God continued to bow, while stealing glances at the Secretary-General and the leaders of all the nations. “Of course, we’re willing to compensate you.”

He waved his cane, and two more white-bearded Gods walked into the meeting hall, struggling under the weight of a silvery, metallic trunk they carried between them. “Look, these are high-density information storage devices. They systematically store the knowledge the God Civilization acquired in every field of science and technology. With this, your civilization will advance by leaps and bounds. I think you will like this.”

The Secretary-General, like the leaders of all the nations, looked at the metal trunk and tried to hide his elation. “Taking care of God is the responsibility of humankind. Of course this will require some consultation between the various nations, but I think, in principle…”

“Sorry to be so much trouble. Sorry to be so much trouble…” God’s face was filled with tears, and he continued to bow.

After the Secretary-General and the leaders of all the nations left the meeting hall, they saw that tens of thousands of Gods had gathered outside the United Nations building. A white sea of bobbing heads filled the air with murmuring words. The Secretary-General listened carefully and realized that they were all speaking, in the various tongues of Earth, the same sentence:

“Sorry to be so much trouble. Sorry to be so much trouble…”

4

Two billion Gods arrived on Earth. Enclosed in the suits made of special film, they fell through the atmosphere. One could see the bright, colorful streaks in the sky even during the day. After the Gods landed, they spread out into 1.5 billion families.

Having received the Gods’ knowledge about science and technology, everyone was filled with hopes and dreams for the future, as though humankind was about to step into paradise overnight. Under the influence of such joy, every family welcomed the coming of God.

That morning, Qiusheng and his family and all the other villagers stood at the village entrance to receive the Gods allocated to Xicen.

“What a beautiful day,” Yulian said.

Her comment wasn’t solely an expression of her feelings. The spaceships had disappeared overnight, restoring the sky’s wide open and limitless appearance. Humans had never been allowed to step onto any of the ships. The Gods hadn’t objected to that particular request from the humans, but the ships themselves refused to grant permission. They did not acknowledge the various primitive probes that Earth sent and sealed their doors tightly. After the final group of Gods leapt into the atmosphere, all the spaceships, numbering more than twenty thousand, departed their orbit simultaneously. But they didn’t go far, only drifting in the asteroid belt.

Although the ships were ancient, the old routines continued to function. Their only mission was to serve the Gods. Thus they would not move too far. When the Gods needed them again, they would come.

Two buses arrived from the county seat, bringing the one hundred and six Gods allocated to Xicen. Qiusheng and Yulian met the God assigned to their family. The couple stood on each side of God, affectionately supported him by the arms, and walked home in the bright afternoon sun. Bingbing and Qiusheng’s father followed behind, smiling.

“Gramps, um, Gramps God.” Yulian leaned her face against God’s shoulder, her smile as bright as the sun. “I hear that the technology you gave us will soon allow us to experience true communism! When that happens, we’ll all have things according to our needs. Things won’t cost any money. You’ll just go to the store and pick them up.”

God smiled and nodded at her, his white hair bobbing. He spoke in heavily-accented Chinese, “Yes. Actually ‘to each according to need’ fulfills only the most basic needs of a civilization. The technology we gave you will bring you a life of prosperity and comfort surpassing your imagination.”

Yulian laughed so much her face opened up like a flower. “No, no! ‘To each according to need’ is more than enough for me!”

“Uh huh.” Qiusheng’s father agreed emphatically.

“Can we live forever without aging, like you?” Qiusheng asked.

“We can’t live forever without aging. It’s just that we can live longer than you. Look at how old I am! In my view, if a man lives longer than three thousand years, he might as well be dead. For a civilization, extreme longevity can be fatal for the individual.”

“Oh, I don’t need three thousand years. Just three hundred.” Qiusheng’s father was now laughing as much as Yulian.

The village treated the day like it was Chinese New Year. Every family held a big banquet to welcome their God, and Qiusheng’s family was no exception.

Qiusheng’s father quickly became a little drunk with cups of vintage huangjiu. He gave God a thumbs up.

“You’re really something! To be able to create so many living things – you’re truly supernatural.”

God drank a lot too, but his head was still clear. He waved his hand. “No, not supernatural. It was just science. When biology has developed to a certain level, creating life is akin to building machines.”

“You say that. But in our eyes, you’re no different from immortals who have deigned to live among us.”

God shook his head. “Supernatural beings would never make mistakes. But we made mistake after mistake during your creation.”

“You made mistakes when you created us?” Yulian’s eyes were wide open. In her imagination, creating all those lives was a process similar to her giving birth to Bingbing eight years ago. No mistake was possible.

“There were many. I’ll give a relatively recent example. The world-creation software made errors in the analysis of the environment on Earth, which resulted in the appearance of creatures like dinosaurs: huge bodies and low adaptability. Eventually, in order to facilitate your evolution, they had to be eliminated.

“Speaking of events that are even more recent, after the disappearance of the ancient Aegean civilizations, the world-creation software believed that civilization on Earth was successfully established. It ceased to perform further monitoring and micro-adjustments, like leaving a wound-up clock to run on its own. This resulted in further errors. For example, it should have allowed the civilization of ancient Greece to develop on her own and stopped the Macedonian conquest and the subsequent Roman conquest. Although both of these ended up as the inheritors of Greek civilization, the direction of Greek development was altered…”

No one in Qiusheng’s family could understand this lecture, but all respectfully listened.

“And then, two great powers appeared on Earth: Han China and the Roman Empire. In contrast to what had happened previously, the two shouldn’t have been kept apart and left to develop in isolation. They ought to have been allowed to come into full contact…”

“This ‘Han China’ you’re talking about? Is that the Han Dynasty of Liu Bang and Xiang Yu?” Finally Qiusheng’s father heard something that he knew. “And what is this ‘Roman Empire’?”

“I think that was a foreigners’ country at the time,” Qiusheng said, trying to explain. “It was pretty big.”

Qiusheng’s father was confused. “Why? When the foreigners finally showed up during the Qing Dynasty, look how badly they beat us up. You want them to show up even earlier? During the Han Dynasty?”

God laughed at this. “No, no. Back then, Han China was just as powerful as the Roman Empire.”

“That’s still bad. If those two great powers had met, it would have been a great war. Blood would have been spilled.”

God nodded. He reached out with his chopsticks for a piece of beef braised in soy sauce. “It could have. But if those two great civilizations, the Occident and the Orient, had met, the encounter would have generated glorious sparks and greatly advanced human progress… If only those errors could have been avoided, Earth would now probably be colonizing Mars, and your interstellar probes would have flown past Sirius.”

Qiusheng’s father raised his bowl of huangjiu and spoke admiringly, “Everyone says that the Gods have forgotten science in their cradle, but you are still so learned.”

“To be comfortable in the cradle, it’s important to know a bit about philosophy, art, history, etc – just some common facts, not real learning. Many scholars on Earth right now have much deeper thoughts than our own.”

For the Gods, the first few months after they entered human society were a golden age, when they lived harmoniously with human families. It was as though they had returned to the childhood of the God Civilization, fully immersed in the long-forgotten warmth of family life. This seemed the best way to spend the final years of their extremely long lives.

Qiusheng’s family’s God enjoyed the peaceful life in this beautiful southern Chinese village. Every day, he went to the pond surrounded by bamboo groves to fish, chat with other old folks from the village, play chess, and generally enjoy himself. But his greatest hobby was going to folk opera. Whenever a theater troupe came to the village or the town, he made sure to go to every performance.

His favorite opera was The Butterfly Lovers. One performance was not enough. He followed one troupe around for more than fifty kilometers and attended several shows in a row. Finally Qiusheng went to town and bought him a VCD of the opera. God played it over and over until he could hum a few lines of Huangmei opera and sounded pretty good.

One day, Yulian discovered a secret. She whispered to Qiusheng and her father-in-law, “Did you know that every time Gramps God finishes his opera, he always takes a little card out from his pocket? And while looking at the card, he hums lines from the opera. Just now I stole a glance. The card is a photo. There’s a really pretty young woman on it.”

That evening, God played The Butterfly Lovers again. He took out the photograph of the pretty young woman and started to hum. Qiusheng’s father quietly moved in. “Gramps God, is that your… girlfriend from a long time ago?”

God was startled. He hid the photograph quickly, and smiled like a kid at Qiusheng’s father. “Ha… Yeah, yeah. I loved her two thousand years ago.”

Yulian, who was eavesdropping, grimaced. Two thousand years ago! Considering his advanced age, this was a bit gag inducing.

Qiusheng’s father wanted to look at the photograph. But God was so protective of it that it would have been embarrassing to ask. So he settled for listening to God reminisce.

“Back then we were all so young. She was one of the very few who wasn’t completely absorbed by life in the Machine Cradle. She initiated a great voyage of exploration to sail to the end of the universe. Oh, you don’t need to think too hard about that. It’s very difficult to understand. Anyway, she hoped to use this voyage as an opportunity to awaken the God Civilization, sleeping so soundly in the Machine Cradle. Of course, that was nothing more than a beautiful dream. She wanted me to go with her, but I didn’t have the courage. The endless desert of the universe frightened me. It would have been a journey of more than twenty billion light years. So she went by herself. But in the two thousand years after that, I never stopped longing for her.”

“Twenty billion light years? So, like you explained to me before, that’s the distance that light would travel in twenty billion years? Oh my! That’s way too far. That’s basically goodbye for life. Gramps God, you have to forget about her. You’ll never see her again.”

God nodded and sighed.

“Well, isn’t she now about your age too?”

God was startled out of his reverie. He shook his head. “Oh, no. For such a long voyage, her explorer ship would have to fly at close to the speed of light. That means she would still be very young. The only one that has grown old is me. You don’t understand how large the universe is. What you think of as ‘eternity’ is nothing but a grain of sand in space-time.

“Well, the fact that you can’t understand and feel this is sometimes a blessing.”

5

The honeymoon between the Gods and the humans quickly ended.

People were initially ecstatic over the scientific material received from the Gods, thinking that it would allow mankind to realize their dreams overnight. Thanks to the interface equipment provided by the Gods, an enormous quantity of information was retrieved successfully from the storage devices. The information was translated into English, and in order to avoid disputes, a copy was distributed to every nation in the world.

But people soon discovered that realizing these God-given technologies was impossible, at least within the present century. Consider what would happen if a time traveler had provided modern technological information to the ancient Eyptians, and you will have some understanding of the awkward situation these humans faced.

As the exhaustion of petroleum supplies loomed over the human race, energy technology was at the top of everyone’s minds. But scientists and engineers discovered that the God Civilization’s energy technology was useless for humans at this time. The Gods’ energy source was based on the principle of matter-antimatter annihilation. Even if people could understand all the materials and finally create an annihilation engine and generator (impossible to realize within one generation), it would still have been for naught. That was because the fuel for these engines, antimatter, must be mined from deep space. According to the material provided by the Gods, the closest antimatter ore source was between the Milky Way and the Andromeda Galaxy, about 550,000 light years away.

The technology for interstellar travel at near light speed also involved every field of scientific knowledge, and the greater part of the theories and techniques revealed by the Gods were beyond human comprehension. Just to get a basic understanding of the foundations would require human scholars to work for perhaps half a century. Scientists, initially full of hope, had tried to search the Gods’ materials for technical information concerning controlled nuclear fission, but there was nothing. This was easy to understand: our current literature on energy science contained no information on how to make fire from sticks either.

In other scientific fields, such as information science and life sciences (including the secret of human longevity), it was the same. Even the most advanced scholars could make no sense of the Gods’ knowledge. Between the Gods’ science and the humans’ science there was still a great abyss of understanding that could not be bridged.

The Gods who arrived on Earth could not help the scientists in any way. Like the God at the United Nations had said, among the Gods now, there were few who could even solve quadratic equations. The spaceships adrift among the asteroids ignored all attempts at contact from the humans. The human race was like a group of new elementary school students who were suddenly required to master the material of a PhD candidate, and were given no instructor.

On the other hand, the Earth’s population suddenly grew by two billion. These were all extremely aged individuals who could no longer be productive. Most of them were plagued by various diseases, and put unprecedented pressure on human society. As a result, every government had to pay each family living with a God a considerable stipend. Healthcare and other public infrastructure were strained beyond the breaking point. The world economy was pushed to the edge of collapse.

The harmonious relationship between God and Qiusheng’s family was gone. Gradually, the family began to see him as a burden that had fallen from the sky. They began to despise him, but each for a different reason.

Yulian’s reason was the most practical and closest to the underlying problem: God made her family poor. Out of all the members of the family, God also worried the most about her. She had a tongue as sharp as a knife, and she scared him more than black holes and supernovas. After the death of her dream of true communism, she unceasingly nagged God: before he came, their family had lived so prosperously and comfortably. Back then everything was good. Now everything was bad. All because of him. Being saddled with an old fool like him was such a great misfortune. Every day, whenever she had the chance, she would prattle like this in front of God.

God also suffered from chronic bronchitis. This was not a very expensive disease to treat, but it did require ongoing care and a constant outlay of money. Finally, Yulian forbade Qiusheng from taking God to the town hospital to see doctors and stopped buying medicine for him. When the Secretary of the village branch of the Communist Party found out, he came to Quisheng’s house.

“You have to pay for the care of your family God,” the Secretary said to Yulian. “The doctor at the town hospital told me that if it’s left untreated, chronic bronchitis might develop into pulmonary emphysema.”

“If you want him treated, then the village or the government can pay for it,” Yulian shouted at the Secretary. “We’re not made of money!”

“Yulian, according to the God Support Law, the family has to bear these kinds of minor medical expenses. The government’s support fee already includes this component.”

“That little bit of support fee is useless!”

“You can’t talk like that. After you began getting the support fee, you bought a milk cow, switched to liquefied petroleum gas, and bought a big new color TV! You’re telling me now that you don’t have money for God to see a doctor? Everyone knows that in your family, your word is law. I’m going to make it clear to you: right now I’m helping you save face, but don’t push your luck. Next time, it won’t be me standing here trying to persuade you. It will be the County God Support Committee. You’ll be in real trouble then.”

Yulian had no choice but to resume paying for God’s medical care. But after that she became even meaner to him.

One time, God said to Yulian, “Don’t be so anxious. Humans are very smart and learn fast. In only another century or so, the easiest aspects of Gods’ knowledge will become applicable to human society. Then your life will become better.”

“Damn. A whole century. And you say ‘only’. Are you even listening to yourself?” Yulian was washing the dishes and didn’t even bother looking back at God.

“That’s a very short period of time.”

“For you! You think we can live as long as you? In another century, you won’t even find my bones! But I want to ask you a question: how much longer do you think you’ll be living?”

“Oh, I’m like a candle in the wind. If I can live another three or four hundred years, I’ll be very satisfied.”

Yulian dropped a whole stack of bowls on the ground. “This is not how ‘support’ is supposed to work! So you think not only I should spend my entire life taking care of you, but my sons and my grandsons should support you for ten generations and more!? Why won’t you die?”

As for Qiusheng’s father, he thought God was a fraud, and in fact, this view was pretty common. Since scientists couldn’t understand Gods’ scientific papers, there was no way to prove their authenticity. Maybe the Gods were playing a giant trick on the human race. For Quisheng’s father, there was ample support for this view.

“You old swindler, you’re way too outrageous,” he said to God one day. “I’m too lazy to expose you. Your tricks are not worth my trouble. Heck, they’re not even worth my grandson’s trouble.”

God asked him what he had discovered.

“I’ll start with the simplest thing: our scientists know that humans evolved from monkeys, right?”

God nodded. “More accurately, you evolved from primitive apes.”

“Then how can you say that you created us? If you were interested in creating humans, why not directly make us in our current form? Why bother first creating primitive apes and then go through the trouble of evolving? It makes no sense.”

“A human begins as a baby, and then grows into an adult. A civilization also has to grow from a primitive state. The long path of experience cannot be avoided. Actually, humans began with the introduction of a much more primitive species. Even apes were already very evolved.”

“I don’t believe these made-up reasons. All right, here’s something more obvious. This was actually first noticed by my grandson. Our scientists say that there was life on Earth even three billion years ago. Do you admit this?”

God nodded. “That estimate is basically right.”

“So you’re three billion years old?”

“In terms of your frame of reference, yes. But according to the frame of reference of our ships, I’m only 3,500 years old. The ships flew close to the speed of light, and time passed much more slowly for us than for you. Of course, once in a while a few ships dropped out of their cruise and decelerated to come to Earth so that further adjustments to the evolution of life on Earth could be made. But this didn’t require much time. Those ships would then return to cruise at close to the speed of light and continue skipping over the passage of time here.”

“Bullshit,” Qiusheng’s father said contemptuously.

“Dad, this is the Theory of Relativity,” Qiusheng interrupted. “Our scientists already proved it.”

“Relativity my ass! You’re bullshitting me too. That’s impossible! How can time be like sesame oil, flowing at different speeds? I’m not so old that I’ve lost my mind. But you! Reading all those books has made you stupid!”

“I can prove to you that time does indeed flow at different rates,” God said, his face full of mystery. He took out that photograph of his beloved from two thousand years ago and handed it to Qiusheng. “Look at her carefully and memorize every detail.”

The second Qiusheng looked at the photograph, he knew that he would be able to remember every detail. It would be impossible to forget. Like the other Gods, the woman in the picture had a blend of the features of all ethnicities. Her skin was like warm ivory, her eyes were so alive that they seemed to sing, and she immediately captivated Qiusheng’s soul. She was a woman among Gods, the God of women. The beauty of the Gods was like a second sun. Humans had never seen it and could not bear it.

“Look at you! You’re practically drooling!” Yulian grabbed the photograph from the frozen Qiusheng. But before she could look at it, her father-in-law took it away from her.

“Let me see,” Qiusheng’s father said. He brought the photograph to his ancient eyes, as close as possible. For a long time he did not move, as though the photograph provided sustenance.

“Why are you looking so close?” Yulian said, her tone contemptuous.

“Shut it. I don’t have my glasses,” Qiusheng’s father said, his face still practically on the photograph.

Yulian looked at her father-in-law disdainfully for a few seconds, curled her lips, and left for the kitchen.

God took the photograph from Qiusheng’s father, whose hands lingered on the photo for a long while, unwilling to let go. God said, “Remember all the details. I’ll let you look at it again this time tomorrow.”

The next day, father and son said little to one another. Both thought about the young woman so there was nothing to say. Yulian’s temper was far worse than usual.

Finally, the time came. God had seemingly forgotten about it and had to be reminded by Qiusheng’s father. He took out the photograph that the two men had been thinking about all day and handed it first to Qiusheng. “Look carefully. Do you see any change in her?”

“Nothing really,” Qiusheng said, looking intently. After a while, he finally noticed something. “Aha! The opening between her lips seems slightly narrower. Not much, just a little bit. Look at the corner of the mouth here…”

“Have you no shame? To look at some other woman that closely?” Yulian grabbed the photo again, and again, her father-in-law took it away from her.

“Let me see…” Qiusheng’s father put on his glasses and carefully examined the picture. “Yes, indeed the opening is narrower. But there’s a much more obvious change that you didn’t notice. Look at this wisp of hair. Compared to yesterday, it has drifted further to the right.”

God took the picture from Qiusheng’s father. “This is not a photograph, but a television receiver.”

“A… TV?”

“Yes. Right now it’s receiving a live feed from that explorer spaceship heading for the end of the universe.”

“Live? Like live broadcasts of football matches?”

“Yes.”

“So… the woman in the picture, she’s alive!” Qiusheng was so shocked that his mouth hung open. Even Yulian’s eyes were now as big as walnuts.

“Yes, she’s alive. But unlike a live broadcast on Earth, this feed is subject to a delay. The explorer spaceship is now about eighty million light years away, so the delay is about eighty million years. What we see now is how she was eighty million years ago.”

“This tiny thing can receive a signal from that far away?”

“This kind of super long-distance communication across space requires the use of neutrinos or gravitational waves. Our spaceships can receive the signal, magnify it, and then rebroadcast to this TV.”

“Treasure, a real treasure!” Qiusheng’s father praised sincerely. But it was unclear whether he was talking about the tiny TV or the young woman on TV. Anyway, after hearing that she was still “alive” Qiusheng and his father both felt a deeper attachment to her. Qiusheng tried to hold the tiny TV again, but God refused.

“Why does she move so slowly in the picture?”

“That’s the result of time flowing at different speeds. From our frame of reference, time flows extremely slowly on a spaceship flying close to the speed of light.”

“Then… can she still talk to you?” Yulian asked.

God nodded. He flipped a switch behind the TV. Immediately a sound came out of it. It was a woman’s voice, but the sound didn’t change, like a singer holding a note steady at the end of a song. God stared at the screen, his eyes full of love.

“She’s talking right now. She’s finishing three words: ‘I love you.’ Each word took more than a year. It’s now been three-and-a-half years, and right now she’s just finishing ‘you.’ To completely finish the sentence will take another three months.” God lifted his eyes from the TV to the domed sky above the yard. “She still has more to say. I’ll spend the rest of my life listening to her.”

Bingbing actually managed to maintain a pretty good relationship with God for a while. The Gods all had some childishness to them, and they enjoyed talking and playing with children. But one day, Bingbing wanted God to give him the large watch he wore, and God refused. He explained that the watch was a tool for communicating with the God Civilization. Without it, he would no longer be able to connect with his own people.

“Hmm, you see? You’re still thinking about your own civilization and race. You’ve never thought of us as your real family!” Yulian said angrily.

After that, Bingbing was no longer nice to God. Instead, he often played practical tricks on him.

The only one in the family who still had respect and feelings of filial piety towards God was Qiusheng. Qiusheng graduated from high school and liked to read. Other than a few people who passed the college-entrance examination and went away for college, he was the most learned individual in the village. But at home, Qiusheng had no power. In practically everything he listened to the directions of his wife and followed the commands of his father. If somehow his wife and father had conflicting instructions, then all he could do was to sit in a corner and cry. Given that he was such a softy, he had no way to protect God at home.

6

The relationship between the Gods and the humans had finally deteriorated beyond repair.

The complete breakdown between God and Qiusheng’s family occurred after the incident involving instant noodles. One day, before lunch, Yulian came out of the kitchen with a paper box and asked why half of the box of instant noodles she had bought yesterday had already disappeared.

“I took them,” God said in a small voice. “I gave them to those living by the river. They’ve almost run out of things to eat.”

He was talking about the place where the Gods who had left their families were gathering. Recently, there were frequent incidents of abuse of the Gods in the village. One particularly savage couple had been beating and cursing out their God, and even withheld food from him. Eventually the God tried to commit suicide in the river that ran in front of the village, but luckily others were able to stop him.

This incident received a great deal of publicity. It went beyond the county, and the city’s police eventually came, along with a bunch of reporters from CCTV and the provincial TV station, and took the couple away in handcuffs. According to the God Support Law, they had committed God abuse, and would be sentenced to at least ten years in jail. This was the only law that was universal among all the nations of the world, with uniform prison terms.

After this, the families in the village became more careful, and stopped treating the Gods too poorly in front of other people. But at the same time, the incident worsened the relationship between the Gods and the villagers. Eventually, some of the Gods left their families and other Gods followed. By now almost one third of the Gods in Xicen had already left their assigned families. These wandering Gods set up camp in the field across the river and lived a primitive, difficult life.

In other parts of the country and across the world, the situation was the same. Once again, the streets of big cities were filled with crowds of wandering, homeless Gods. The number quickly increased, like a repeat of the nightmare three years ago. The world, full of Gods and people, faced a grave crisis.

“Ha, you’re very generous! You old fool! How dare you eat our food while giving it away?” Yulian began to curse loudly.

Qiusheng’s father slammed the table and got up. “You idiot! Get out of here! You miss those Gods by the river? Why don’t you go and join them?”

God sat silently for a while, thinking. Then he stood up, went to his tiny room, and packed up his few belongings. Leaning on his bamboo cane, he slowly made his way out the door, heading in the direction of the river.

Qiusheng didn’t eat with the rest of his family. He squatted in a corner with his head lowered, not speaking.

“Hey, dummy! Come here and eat. We have to go into town to buy feed this afternoon,” Yulian shouted at him. Since he refused to budge, she went over to yank his ear.

“Let go,” Qiusheng said. His voice was not loud, but Yulian let him go in shock. She had never seen her husband with such a gloomy expression on his face.

“Forget about him,” Qiusheng’s father said, carelessly. “If he doesn’t want to eat, then he’s a fool.”

“Ha, you miss your God? Why don’t you go join him and his friends in that field by the river too?” Yulian poked a finger at Qiusheng’s head.

Qiusheng stood up and went upstairs to his bedroom. Like God, he packed a few things into a bundle and put it in a duffel bag that he had once used when he had gone to the city to work. With the bag on his back, he headed outside.

“Where are you going?” Yulian yelled. But Qiusheng ignored her. She yelled again, but now there was fear in her voice. “How long are you going to be out?”

“I’m not coming back,” Qiusheng said, without looking back.

“What? Come back here! Is your head filled with shit?” Qiusheng’s father followed him out of the house. “What’s the matter with you? Even if you don’t want your wife and kid, how dare you leave your father?”

Qiusheng stopped but still did not turn around. “Why should I care about you?”

“How can you talk like that? I’m your father! I raised you! Your mother died early. You think it was easy to raise you and your sister? Have you lost your mind?”

Qiusheng finally turned back to look at his father. “If you can kick the people who created our ancestors’ ancestors’ ancestors out of our house, then I don’t think it’s much of a sin for me not to support you in your old age.”

He left, and Yulian and his father stood there, dumbfounded.

Qiusheng went over the ancient stone arched bridge and walked towards the tents of the Gods. He saw that a few of the Gods had set up a pot to cook something in the grassy clearing strewn with golden leaves. Their white beards and the white steam coming out of the pot reflected the noon sunlight like a scene out of an ancient myth.

Qiusheng found his God, and said stubbornly, “Gramps God, let’s go.”

“I’m not going back to that house.”

“I’m not either. Let’s go together into town and stay with my sister for a while. Then I’ll go into the city and find a job, and we’ll rent a place together. I’ll support you for the rest of my life.”

“You’re a good kid,” God said, patting his shoulder lightly. “But it’s time for us to go.” He pointed to the watch on his wrist. Qiusheng now noticed that all the watches of all the Gods were blinking with a red light.

“Go? Where to?”

“Back to the ships,” God said, pointing at the sky. Qiusheng lifted his head and saw that two spaceships were already hovering in the sky, standing out starkly against the blue. One of them was closer, and its shape and outline loomed huge. Another behind it was much further away and appeared smaller. But the most surprising sight was that the first spaceship had lowered a thread as thin as spider silk, extending from space down to the Earth. As the spider silk slowly drifted, the bright sun glinted from its different sections, like lightning in the bright blue sky.

“A space elevator,” God explained. “Already, more than a hundred of these have been set up on every continent. We’ll ride them back to the ships.” Later, Qiusheng would learn that when a spaceship dropped down a space elevator from a geostationary orbit, it needed a large mass on its other side, deep in space, to act as a counterweight. That was the purpose of the other ship he’d seen.

When Qiusheng’s eyes adjusted to the brightness of the sky, he saw that there were many more silvery stars deep in the distance. Those stars were spread out very evenly, forming a huge matrix. Qiusheng understood that the twenty thousand ships of the God Civilization were coming back to Earth from the asteroid belt.

7

Twenty thousand spaceships once again filled the sky above Earth. In the two months that followed, space capsules ascended and descended space elevators, taking away the two billion Gods who had briefly lived on the Earth. The space capsules were silver spheres. From a distance, they looked like dew drops hanging on spider threads.

The day that Xicen’s Gods left, all the villagers showed up for the farewell. Everyone was affectionate towards the Gods, reminding them of the day one year ago when the Gods first came to Xicen. It was as though all the abuse and disdain the Gods had endured had nothing to do with the villagers.

Two big buses were parked at the entrance to the village, the same two buses that had taken them here a year ago. More than a hundred Gods would now be taken to the nearest space elevator and ride up in space capsules. The silver thread that could be seen in the distance was in reality hundreds of kilometers away.

Qiusheng’s whole family went to send off their God. No one said anything along the way. As they neared the village entrance, God stopped, leaned against his cane, and bowed to the family. “Please stop here. Thank you for taking care of me this year. Really, thank you. No matter where I will be in this universe, I will always remember your family.” Then he took off the large watch from his wrist and handed it to Bingbing. “A gift.”

“But… how will you communicate with the other Gods in the future?” Bingbing asked.

“We’ll all be on the spaceships. I have no more need for this.” God said, laughing.

“Gramps God,” Qiusheng’s father said, his face sorrowful. “Your ships are all ancient. They won’t last much longer. Where can you go then?”

God stroked his beard and said calmly, “It doesn’t matter. Space is limitless. It’s the same wherever you die.”

Yulian suddenly began to cry. “Gramps God, I… I’m not a very nice person. I shouldn’t have made you the target of all the bitterness I’d saved up my whole life. It’s just as Qiusheng said, I’ve behaved as if I don’t have a conscience…” She pushed a bamboo basket into God’s hands. “I boiled some eggs this morning. Please take them for your trip.”

God picked up the basket. “Thank you.” Then he took out an egg, peeled it, and began to eat, savoring the taste. Yellow flakes of egg yolk soon covered his white beard. He continued to talk as he ate. “Actually, we came to Earth not only because we wanted to survive. Having already lived for two, three thousand years, what did we have to fear from death? We just wanted to be with you. We like and cherish your passion for life, your creativity, your imagination. These things have long disappeared from the God Civilization. We saw in you the childhood of our civilization. But we didn’t realize we’d bring you so much trouble. We’re really sorry.”

“Please stay, Gramps,” Bingbing said, crying. “I’ll be better in the future.”

God shook his head slowly. “We’re leaving not because of how you treated us. The fact that you took us in and allowed us to stay was enough. But one thing made us unable to stay any longer: in your eyes, the Gods are pathetic. You pity us. Oh, you pity us.”

God threw away the pieces of eggshell. He lifted his face, trailing a full head of white hair, and stared at the sky, as though through the blue sky he could see the bright sea of stars. “How can the God Civilization be pitied by Man? You have no idea what a great civilization she was. You do not know what many majestic epics she created, or how many imposing deeds she accomplished.

“It was 1857, during the Milky Way Era, when astronomers discovered that a large number of stars were accelerating towards the center of the Milky Way. Once this flood of stars was consumed by the super black hole found there, the resulting radiation would kill all life found in the galaxy.

“In response, our great ancestors built a nebula shield around the center of the galaxy with a diameter of ten thousand light years so that life and civilization in the galaxy would continue. What a magnificent engineering project that was! It took us more than 1,400 years to complete…

“Immediately afterwards, the Andromeda Galaxy and the Large Magellanic Cloud united in an invasion of our galaxy. The interstellar fleet of the God Civilization leapt across hundreds of thousands of light years and intercepted the invaders at the gravitational balance point between Andromeda and the Milky Way. When the battle entered into its climax, vast numbers of ships from both sides mixed together, forming a spiraling nebula the size of the Solar System.

“During the final stages of the battle, the God Civilization made the bold decision to send all remaining war ships and even the civilian fleet into the spiraling nebula. The great increase in mass caused gravity to exceed the centrifugal force, and this nebula, made of ships and men, collapsed under gravity and formed a star! Because the proportion of heavy elements in this star was so high, the star went supernova immediately after its birth, and illuminated the deep darkness between Andromeda and the Milky Way! Our ancestors thus destroyed the invaders with their courage and self-sacrifice, and left the Milky Way as a place where life could develop peacefully…

“Yes, now our civilization is old. But it is not our fault. No matter how hard one strives, a civilization must grow old one day. Everyone must grow old, even you.

“We really do not need your pity.”

“Compared to you,” Qiusheng said, full of awe, “the human race is really nothing.”

“Don’t talk like that,” God said. “Earth’s civilization is still in its infancy. We hope you will grow up fast. We hope that you will inherit and continue the glory of your creator.” God threw down his cane. He put his hands on the shoulders of Bingbing and Qiusheng. “I have some final words for you.”

“We may not understand everything you have to say,” Qiusheng said. “But please speak. We will listen.”

“First, you must get off this rock!” God spread out his arms towards space. His white robe danced in the fall wind like a sail.

“Where will we go?” Qiusheng’s father asked in confusion.

“Begin by flying to the other planets in the Solar System, then to other stars. Don’t ask why, but use all your energy towards the goal of flying away, the further the better. In that process you will spend a lot of money and many people will die, but you must get away from here. Any civilization that stays in her birth world is committing suicide! You must go into the universe and find new worlds, new homes, and spread your descendants across the galaxy like drops of spring rain.”

“We’ll remember,” Qiusheng said and nodded, even though neither he, nor his wife or father or son, really understood God’s words.

“Good,” God sighed, satisfied. “Now, I will tell you a secret, a great secret.” He stared at everyone in the family with his blue eyes. His gaze was like a cold wind, and caused everyone’s heart to shudder. “You have brothers.”

Qiusheng’s family looked at God, utterly confused. But Qiusheng finally figured out what God meant. “You’re saying that you created other Earths?”

God nodded slowly. “Yes, other Earths, other human civilizations. There were three others besides you. All are close to you, within two hundred light years. You are Earth Number Four, the youngest.”

“Have you been to the other Earths?” Bingbing asked.

God nodded again. “Before we came to you, we went first to the other three Earths and asked them to take us in. Earth Number One was the best among the bunch. After they obtained our scientific materials, they simply chased us away.

“Earth Number Two, on the other hand, kept one million of us as hostages, and forced us to give them the spaceships as ransom. After we gave them one thousand ships, they realized that they could not operate the ships. They then forced the hostages to teach them how, but the hostages didn’t know how either since the ships were automatic. So they killed all the hostages.

“Earth Number Three took three million of us as hostages, and demanded that we ram Earth Number One and Earth Number Two with several spaceships each because they were in a prolonged state of war with them. Of course, even a single collision with one of our antimatter-powered ships would destroy all life on a planet. We refused, and so they killed all the hostages.”

“Unfilial children!” Qiusheng’s father shouted in anger. “You should punish them!”

God shook his head. “We will never attack civilizations we created. You are the best of the four brothers. That’s why I’m telling you all this. Your three brothers are drawn to invasion. They do not know what is love or what is morality. Their capacity for cruelty and bloodlust are impossible for you to imagine.

“Indeed, in the beginning we created six Earths. The other two were in the same solar systems as Earth Number One and Earth Number Three, respectively. Both were destroyed by their brothers. The fact that the other three Earths haven’t yet destroyed each other is only due to the great distances separating their solar systems. By now, all three know of the existence of Earth Number Four and possess your precise coordinates. Thus, you must go and destroy them first before they destroy you.”

“This is too frightening!” Yulian said.

“For now, it’s not yet too frightening. Your three brothers are indeed more advanced than you, but they still cannot travel faster than one-tenth the speed of light, and cannot cruise more than thirty light years from home. This is a race of life and death to see which one among you can achieve near-light-speed space travel first. It is the only way to break through the prison of time and space. Whoever can achieve this technology first will survive. Anyone slower will die a sure death. This is the struggle for survival in the universe. Children, you don’t have much time. Work hard!”

“Do the most learned and most powerful people in our world know these things?” Qiusheng’s father asked, trembling.

“Yes. But don’t rely on them. A civilization’s survival depends on the effort of every individual. Even the common people like you have a role to play.”

“You hear that, Bingbing?” Qiusheng said to his son. “You must study hard.”

“When you fly into the universe at close to the speed of light to resolve the threat of your brothers, you must perform another urgent task: find a few planets suitable for life, and seed them with some simple, primitive life from here, like bacteria and algae. Let them evolve on their own.”

Qiusheng wanted to ask more questions, but God picked up his cane and began to walk. The family accompanied him towards the bus. The other Gods were already aboard.

“Oh, Qiusheng,” God stopped, remembering. “I took a few of your books with me. I hope you don’t mind.” He opened his bundle to show Qiusheng. “These are your high school textbooks on math, physics, and chemistry.”

“No problem. Take them. But why do you want these?”

God tied up the bundle again. “To study. I’ll start with quadratic equations. In the long years ahead, I need some way to occupy myself. Who knows? Maybe one day, I’ll try to repair our ships’ antimatter engines, and allow us to fly close to the speed of light again!”

“Right,” Qiusheng said, excited. “That way, you’ll be able to skip across time again. You can find another planet, create another civilization to support you in your old age!”

God shook his head. “No, no, no. We’re no longer interested in being supported in our old age. If it’s time for us to die, we die. I want to study because I have a final wish.” He took out the small TV from his pocket. On the screen, his beloved from two thousand years ago was still slowly speaking the final word of that three-word sentence. “I want to see her again.”

“It’s a good wish, but it’s only a fantasy,” Qiusheng’s father said. “Think about it. She left two thousand years ago at the speed of light. Who knows where she is now? Even if you repair your ship, how will you ever catch her? You told us that nothing can go faster than light.”

God pointed at the sky with his cane. “In this universe, as long as you’re patient, you can make any wish come true. The possibility may be miniscule, but it is not nonexistent. I told you once that the universe was born out of a great explosion. Now, gravity has gradually slowed down its expansion. Eventually the expansion will stop and turn into contraction. If our spaceship can really fly again at close to the speed of light, then we will endlessly accelerate and endlessly approach the speed of light. This way, we will skip over endless time until we near the final moments of the universe.

“By then, the universe will have shrunken to a very small size, smaller even than Bingbing’s toy ball, as small as a point. Then everything in the entire universe will come together, and she and I will also be together.”

A tear fell from God’s eye and rolled onto his beard, glistening brightly in the morning sun. “The universe will then become the tomb at the end of The Butterfly Lovers. She and I will be the two butterflies emerging from the tomb…”

8

A week later, the last spaceship left Earth. God left.

Xicen Village resumed its quiet life.

That evening, Qiusheng’s family sat in the yard, looking at a sky full of stars. It was deep fall, and insects had stopped making noises in the fields. A light breeze stirred the fallen leaves at their feet. The air was slightly chilly.

“They’re flying so high. The wind must be so severe, so cold…” Yulian murmured to herself.

“There isn’t any wind up there,” Qiusheng said. “They’re in space, where there isn’t even air. But it is really cold. So cold that in the books they call it absolute zero. It’s so dark out there, with no end in sight. It’s a place that you can’t even visit in your nightmares.”

Yulian began to cry. but she tried to hide it by saying, “Remember the last two things God told us? I understand the part about our three brothers. But then he told us that we had to spread bacteria onto other planets and so on. I still can’t make sense of that.”

“I figured it out,” Qiusheng’s father said. Under the brilliant, starry sky, his head, full of a lifetime of foolishness, finally opened up to insight. He looked up at the stars. He had lived with them above his head all his life, but only today did he truly see them. A feeling he had never had before suffused his blood, making him feel as if he had been touched by something greater. Even though it did not become part of him, the feeling shook him to his core. He sighed at the sea of stars, and said:

“The human race needs to start thinking about who is going to support us in our old age.”

Translated by Ken Liu

Jin Renshun

Born in 1970 of Korean extraction, and now living in Changchun, Jin Renshun has published the novel Spring Fragrance, the short story collections Cold Front of Love, Moonlight, Oh, Moonlight, One Another, and The Glass Café, and the essay collections Like a Dream in Broad Daylight and Poisonous Beauties. Her work has been translated into Japanese, English. German and Korean. In 2010 she attended the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program.

Skylark

by Jin Renshun

Each day at dusk, from six to eight, the third table by the window was reserved for Kang Joon-Hyuk. Occasionally he brought friends – perhaps employees – with him, but mostly he came alone, magazine in hand, to read a few pages before the dishes were served. He and Chun Feng spoke every day, but nothing beyond her asking what he’d like and his ordering of dishes, followed by a few pleasantries of the “Thanks,” “You are welcome” sort.

One day Chun Feng forgot to put the “Reserved” sign on the table. By the time she realized her mistake, the table was occupied by two middle-aged women who chatted nonstop from the second they walked in. They ignored Chun Feng’s apologies and requests.

“This is where we’re sitting,” they said. “We’re not going anywhere.”

While another waitress handled their order, Chun Feng went outside to wait for Kang Joon-Hyuk. “I’m really sorry,” she bowed to him, tears spilling forth. “It’s all my fault.”

“Did I cause you any trouble?” he said. “You stood in the wind for so long, for such a little thing! It’s me who should apologize.”

Entering the restaurant, he said to the proprietress, “The service here is really impressive.”

“The customer is god,” she said, smiling. She personally brought Kang Joon-Hyuk to a relatively quiet spot. Eyeing Chun Feng approaching with the menu, she told Kang Joon-Hyuk, “Chun Feng is a university student. She only works after classes.”

When Chun Feng brought Kang Joon-Hyuk his order, he asked about her school and her field of study, and whether she liked them. As they talked, he had to crane his head halfway, and she had to stoop a bit to answer him. Feeling a bit silly, he threw her a smile, and lowered his eyes to his food.

A few days later, the arctic currents brought heavy snows. Chun Feng was waiting for the last bus when a silver Audi stopped in front of her. Kang Joon-Hyuk opened the door, calling to her, “Let me take you home.”

“No need,” Chun Feng waved the offer away. “But thank you.”

“With this much snow, the bus won’t be on time,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “Come on in.”

The car’s interior was like a warm and cozy room. Only then did Chun Feng notice that her hands and feet were frozen. The cold crackled through her joints like electricity, leaving them numb and tingling. Shivering a little, she said to Kang Joon-Hyuk, “Sorry to trouble you.”

“It’s nothing,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “Is your work hard?”

“It’s not bad,” Chun Feng said.

“A relative of mine runs a restaurant like this in Seoul,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “Some college students also work there, even two Chinese students. They all complain how hard it is.”

Chun Feng said she started the job the previous summer. The restaurant faced a square with fountains; at six each afternoon the fountains began to spray, accompanied by music and lights. They set up places for coffee outside, the plastic-resin furniture brightly colored, a fresh bouquet and fishbowl on each table. As part of the cityscape, the outdoor seating was often photographed for local papers. She was shocked to see her own picture in the newspaper for the first time.

“It’s really fun chatting with you,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said when Chun Feng got out at her campus. “Oh yeah, wait a minute…”

He opened the glove compartment, took out a small bag, and handed it to her. “A friend gave me this little gift, but it’s something for women, I…” He spread his hands.

“I couldn’t accept this,” Chun Feng pushed it back.

“Just think of it as doing me a favor, all right?” Kang Joon-Hyuk stuffed it into her hands.

Back in her dormitory room, Chun Feng saw the word “Dior” printed on the bag. In it was a bottle of limited-edition perfume labeled “Addict 2”. A Chinese label was glued over the perfume case’s French inscription, the characters arrayed like a poem.

She held the perfume bottle under a lamp and studied its pink color. Silver sequins sparkled on the bottle, as though an endless fine snow were falling in the little world inside. She sprayed it once; countless fragrant particles danced around her body, swirling into her with each breath, down to the bottom of her heart, and soaking her in sweet scent.

Reciprocating for the perfume, Chun Feng gave Kang Joon-Hyuk an apple when he came for supper the next evening. She opened the apple like a teacup before him. The hollowed-out fruit was filled with diced pear, orange, hawthorn, kiwi and apple coated in honey.

Gazing at the apple, Kang Joon-Hyuk was quiet for a long time.

A week later, Kang Joon-Hyuk took Chun Feng for steak. The waiter who served them was a middle-aged man with a serious look on his clean-shaven face. He wore a black suit with a white shirt, his back bolt upright. He extended both arms to Chun Feng as if preparing to waltz. At Kang Joon-Hyuk’s gentle prompting, Chun Feng took off her jacket and handed it to the man.

The waiter held Chun Feng’s cotton-padded jacket like a matador, retreating two steps before turning to leave. Chun Feng followed him with her eyes. How ugly her jacket looked – after several washes, its red color seemed like old paint beaten down by unrelenting sunlight. The black and white scarf she’d knitted herself hung over the jacket like a person hiding her head in shame, exposing only a lock of hair.

“I’ve never been in a restaurant so fancy,” Chun Feng said to Kang Joon-Hyuk.

Her mind was still on the waiter. She knew how waiters gossip behind a customer’s back.

The waiter soon returned, softly requesting their order. He laid the menu before them as if it were some important document.

While reading the menu, Chun Feng stole a glance at the waiter, wanting to know if he was judging her jeans and knock-off Nike shoes.

“Perhaps he has noticed my perfume,” she secretly guessed. She hoped so. The perfume was the only thing doubtless presentable on such a luxurious occasion.

Kang Joon-Hyuk ordered a number of dishes, asking Chun Feng’s opinion out of courtesy: “Is that all right?”

“Of course,” she smiled.

The steak was wonderful, its grilled fragrance almost dizzying.

“No wonder people burn incense to worship the Buddha,” Chun Feng said. “The pleasures of scent go straight to the heart, far beyond just satisfying the appetite.”

“You are so adorable,” Kang Joon-Hyuk was amused. He hesitated before saying, “Your boyfriend must be infatuated with you.”

“I don’t have a boyfriend.”

“How come?” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if a hundred men are after you.”

“What are you talking about?” Chun Feng flushed, “I’m only an ordinary girl.”

“You’re gold,” Kang Joon-Hyuk looked into her eyes, as if stressing some truth. “I can’t believe none of the men around you see this.”

Chun Feng chuckled. She had indeed once been pursued: they ate hamburgers and drank Coke at KFC, and chatted about Hong Kong movies and Japanese manga. On the way back, he had boldly taken her hand, his sweaty palm damp and sticky. She let him hold her hand for a little while and then drew it away.

“Is there a man you like though?” Kang Joon-Hyuk asked.

Chun Feng liked Pei Zicheng – she liked him so much that flowers bloomed grasses grew nightingales sang butterflies danced bees hummed, all in her chest. But so what? Half of the women on campus liked him. She’d never dreamed that his eyes would pick her out from several thousand girls.

“Our gym class once had a yoga teacher from India,” Chun Feng said, gesturing with her hands. “His skin was dark, eyes big, eyebrows curled upwards, his body as flexible as dough – he charmed us all.”

“A man described as a doll,” Kang Joon-Hyuk laughed. “Don’t know if he’d be happy or sad to hear that.”

When they were leaving, Kang Joon-Hyuk said to Chun Feng, “Next time, you take me someplace you often go to eat, okay?”

“You wouldn’t be interested in the places only poor students go,” Chun Feng said.

“Don’t underestimate me,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “I was once young, too.”

Chun Feng brought Kang Joon-Hyuk to a barbecue place by her campus gate. Its name, “The White House”, amused him: “What powerful backing!”

The tables and chairs were wooden, worn from use, with filthy seat pads wrinkled like rags. The customers were mostly students. A few men who looked like migrant workers were also there, drinking beer without glasses, straight from the bottle.

“When you toast with beer bottles, it has to be bottleneck to bottleneck. It’s called ‘slit-throat friend’,” Chun Feng told Kang Joon-Hyuk. She went to some lengths explaining the ancient story behind the term “slit-throat friendship”.

“A fascinating story,” he said. “Could we have a bottle as well?”

Chun Feng asked a waiter to open one, used a tissue she brought with her to wipe the bottleneck clean, and then passed it to Kang Joon-Hyuk.

At first Kang Joon-Hyuk ate little. Slowly he got used to the environment, and then ate several skewers of unpeeled baby potatoes. He asked what Chun Feng’s parents were doing, whether she had siblings. Then another question: “What is your dream?”

“I want to be an Olympic champion. I’m good at ping pong, swimming, and Chinese chess. If I weren’t born in this small place, if I’d had the chance to get into a sports school when I was seven or eight, and met some famous coach, I could very possibly have become an Olympic champion.”

He took her joking seriously. He listened carefully, nodding, “That’s quite possible.”

It was Chun Feng who felt a bit embarrassed. “My real dream?” she paused to consider, “is that some mysterious people at a mysterious organization somehow take notice of me, and choose me out of the millions. One day they come to me and say, ‘Please follow us’, so I follow them. Then I begin a completely different life, a legendary life.”

“What kind of legend?”

“I will only know when the time comes.”

When they returned to the car, before he started the engine, Kang Joon-Hyuk kissed Chun Feng. She sat hard against the seat, motionless. His kiss was warm and lingering, the residual taste of beer and gum on the tip of his tongue.

Kang Joon-Hyuk invited Chun Feng for tea at his residence. He lived in a split-level apartment with a view of the river. The river was covered in a layer of ice, the remnants of snow here and there resembled an ink painting.

Kang Joon-Hyuk gave Chun Feng a tour. The house was large and neat. He said a part-time worker came to clean three hours a day.

“Empty as a cave.” Kang Joon-Hyuk led Chun Feng upstairs. “Just after I moved in I had to sleep with the lights on.”

On the nightstand in his bedroom was a family photo. His wife had slender eyes and light brows, a woman seemingly kneaded from snow. Their son was Chun Feng’s age, half a head taller than Kang Joon-Hyuk, wearing a look of impatience. Their daughter was a replica of her mother. A big smile narrowed her eyes to cracks and unabashedly exposed her braces.

“Her name is Yeon-Hee,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “I once asked her, you are so ugly, what man would want to date you? She said casually, well, I can always have cosmetic surgery.”

After the tour, they went downstairs to have tea. The apartment used floor heating; with that, plus the sunlight through the floor-to-ceiling window, it was at least 28 or 29 degrees in the room. Even a sweater was too much, let alone a cotton-padded jacket.

“I have only men’s shirts,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “Would you like to change?”

“No need.” Chun Feng took off her jacket.

The delicate sweater she wore underneath was a gift Kang Joon-Hyuk had given her a few days before. As with the perfume, he had removed the price tag. The garment was a sensation in her dorm – every girl had tried it on.

Kang Joon-Hyuk put out a blue-china tea set on the coffee table. He carried the kettle over and adeptly washed the tea set inside and out. “To make ginseng oolong tea, the temperature of the water is especially important. Only high temperatures can free the spirit of the tealeaves.”

His choice of words made Chun Feng laugh.

Kang Joon-Hyuk poured the tea, calling Chun Feng’s attention to its golden tint under the rays of sun. “Isn’t it beautiful?”

Chun Feng said yes.

Kang Joon-Hyuk drank a bowl of tea and sighed contentedly. Under the sunlight his real age became evident: half of the new hair was white at the root. The skin on both his cheeks and hands was slack, but his fingernails were groomed neat and clean.

“Did you have to move here because of work?” Chun Feng asked.

“That’s indeed what I told my wife, I even put on a painful face and claimed to have no choice.” Kang Joon-Hyuk laughed. “In truth though, I’m happy living here. I don’t have to eat healthy vegetarian meals every other day, no one yells at me when I watch football games on TV, no one tells me how stupid I am to see horror movies, on Sundays I don’t have to dress up like a bridegroom and sing hymns in church, I don’t have to attend a big family gathering twice a month, and I don’t have to discuss my children’s schoolwork with teachers every month. When I’m drunk not only do I not have to shower or sleep on the sofa, I can throw myself in bed fully dressed as I please.”

Chun Feng waited for him to mention her, but he didn’t. So she said, “My winter break starts next week. When I go home, I can stay in bed until my mom comes to spank me, I can have fun in my sister’s flower nursery, I can play games with friends in internet bars all night, until I’ve got panda-circles under my eyes, then I go home to listen to my mom scold me while I fall asleep. I also often go drinking with high school and middle school friends, then karaoke after drinking, and every time someone sings themselves hoarse. Oh yes, we often light fireworks by the river, too.”

“People light fireworks here as well,” Kang Joon-Hyuk pointed outside the window. “One night there was a sudden explosion, I thought there’d been an accident. I ran to the window and saw fireworks shooting up like water fountains from the snowy ground…”

Chun Feng glanced unconsciously out the window and discovered that, as they’d drunk tea and chatted, the sun had slowly turned golden red. It was as if a huge and soft carpet had been partially dragged away from beneath their bodies by an invisible hand.

Turning, her eyes met his.

“I will miss you when you’re gone,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said.

Chun Feng’s heart jumped. She tried her best to smile naturally: “I will miss you, too.”

“It’s not the same,” he said slowly, as if his statement itself were shaking its head. “They’re two different kinds of feelings.”

The next day, Kang Joon-Hyuk again invited Chun Feng out. They drank two bottles of red wine during dinner, and he opened another when they got home.

The heating in his apartment was too powerful. They had just walked through the housing estate’s yard, their scalps still numbed by the freezing air, and in a moment they were covered in fine drops of perspiration. Before going upstairs to change, Kang Joon-Hyuk pointed to a paper bag on the sofa and said he’d also bought her a set of leisure wear.

“The room really is too hot,” he said.

A moment later he added, “I didn’t mean anything.”

Chun Feng giggled.

He laughed, too.

Chun Feng took the clothes to the downstairs bathroom. She saw herself in the mirror, cheeks rosy, mouth curved, wearing only underwear. She saw herself in the bloom of youth. Kang Joon-Hyuk had once lamented, “You are only twenty-two; the whole world is yours!”

The clothes he had bought her were Indian style, fat lantern pants with a halter top, exposing the navel. There was also a wrap, but she did not put it on.

When she came out, he was already downstairs. The moment his eyes fell on her, it was as if he smelled a most pleasant fragrance.

“Thank you,” Chun Feng spread her arms and spun around.

Kang Joon-Hyuk gave her a smile and went to get ice from the refrigerator. Chun Feng discovered another family photo in a corner of the living room. It apparently had been taken during a family outing; the four of them smiling brilliantly, even the son. Kang Joon-Hyuk’s wife wore a straw hat adorned with a small bouquet of wild flowers. Her smile did not look as tender and innocent as it did in the photo Chun Feng had glimpsed in the bedroom. She now looked more like a general, calm and confident, with hidden ferocity.

“Drinking red wine in the deep of night always gives me the illusion,” Kang Joon-Hyuk poured into the tall wineglasses, “that I’m drinking blood.”

He drew her to sit down, looking into her eyes: “I am very sober right now. I’ve thought through everything I want to say. I hope you’ll listen carefully…”

Chun Feng’s body went limp, as if she was treading on clouds, but her mind was very clear, as though a video camera was recording everything before her eyes – every scene, every move made, every word spoken. She knew this moment would forever be engraved in her memory.

After the winter break, when school started again, Chun Feng had changed so much that she was like a newly-transferred student. Accompanying her change of clothing and appearance was a rumor that her mother’s house and its surrounding land – not a small plot – had been acquired for airport construction and her family had received several million yuan in compensation, a meat pie fallen from the sky.

The previous semester, Chun Feng had had to do work-study, but now the school dormitory was nothing more than a chicken coop from which she flew to live in her own house. Not only that, she also owned a car, a red Polo, with its headlights decorated like a woman wearing eye-shadow.

Although she drove a car to school, Chun Feng remained low-key at social events and polite to teachers. Perhaps aware of her new star status, she had a ready smile for everybody. In the days leading up to the school’s 50th anniversary celebration, she participated in volunteer activities.

Pei Zicheng also attended those activities. One day he sat by Chun Feng, and together they put various kinds of souvenirs into paper bags stamped with the school anniversary logo. Then Kang Joon-Hyuk phoned.

“There’s nothing in particular. I just miss you,” he said. “Do you miss me?”

“I do! So much I can hardly remember what you look like,” Chun Feng said.

“Little fox!” Kang Joon-Hyuk laughed. “We’ll see!”

Putting down the phone, Chun Feng saw Pei Zicheng staring at her. He threw her a smile: “Our cell phones are the same kind.”

Chun Feng looked. So they were! Both were Anycall chocolate series. Hers was cream, Pei Zicheng’s was black.

Chun Feng’s heart pounded noisily. A moment earlier when she had picked up a notebook and her hand unwittingly touched Pei Zicheng’s, her heart had already jumped. Actually, as soon as he had sat down beside her – no, as soon as he had appeared at the door, absent-mindedly looking around – her heart was already in turmoil.

They had boxed meals for lunch. Pei Zicheng was surrounded by a ring of girls; Chun Feng sat alone by a window, eating an apple she’d brought with her. Kang Joon-Hyuk phoned again to discuss what to do for supper. The longer they lived together, the more clingy he became, though in the past he’d said he hated the way his wife kept phoning him about nothing.

Kang Joon-Hyuk said he and his wife were once deeply in love. She was at odds with her parents for years over the marriage. Their love was like dry kindling meeting a raging fire. His burned out first. His wife’s burned slower because she shed tears easily, and it was a few more years before her love turned completely to ashes. Those were painful years. Sometimes, waking up at night, he’d find his wife sitting beside and staring at him, questioning, “Who are you really? What gives you the right to hurt me so much?”

He had never expected it, either. His marriage oath was to treasure her like his eyes all his life. But after two children, everything about her that had bewitched him vanished. She turned into an ordinary housewife who took care of husband and children.

During the first few months of living with Kang Joon-Hyuk, Chun Feng was on tenterhooks whenever the doorbell rang. She worried his wife would mount a sudden attack. If she caught them, would she shout hysterically and throw dirty curses? Would she hit her? Which side would Kang Joon-Hyuk take?

But she never came, only calling occasionally.

During spring break, Kang Joon-Hyuk went back to Korea once. He returned in a bad mood. Chun Feng thought his wife had found out, but later she understood that Kang Joon-Hyuk had learned that his wife had opened a yoga sauna with a partner. The partner was a single man, a former gym couch ten years her junior. The way he clung to her was like son to mother. Seeing such a muscular man constantly whining almost made Kang Joon-Hyuk puke, but his wife smiled the whole time, very much enjoying the vulgar affection. When he pointed it out, she rebuffed him with a disdainful look: “If we really had something to hide, would I have let you meet each other?”

Even disregarding the man, the yoga house bothered Kang Joon-Hyuk. She’d decided on such a big investment by herself, even eloquently reminding him that the money was an inheritance from her parents, and she could spend it however she liked – not to mention she had kept half of it for their children’s education fund.

“So be it,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “She has her future, we have ours.”

The day before the school anniversary, the volunteers worked until nine in the evening. The campus dining room prepared a special meal for them. Chun Feng said she didn’t want to eat, she was going home. Pei Zicheng, too, said he had things to do. “Could I get a ride?” he asked her.

Quite a few girls turned their eyes to Chun Feng. “Okay,” she said.

“Special meal,” Pei Zicheng snorted in the car. “You could wring half a plate of oil from each dish.”

“You’re awfully picky, for a man,” Chun Feng said.

“A man needs to eat well all the more. Turn left at the next intersection,” He stretched his arms, hands locked together. He was tall, and his limbs seemed to reach out of the car. “I know an awesome place, their grilled beef tongue has no equal!”

The place was in a back street not far from Kang Joon-Hyuk’s office. On its door hung two drum-shaped white lanterns with red-blue taegeuk patterns. They lifted the door curtain and a sweet voice came from inside, “Welcome!”

The place was small, but clean. The thin slices of beef tongue shrunk on the grill with a shivering sound, as if they feared the cold.

“I brought my mother here once,” Pei Zicheng said. “She said any cow whose tongue was grilled like this must have said something it shouldn’t have while it was alive.”

Later he asked Chun Feng, “Are you always so quiet?”

“I’m worried about saying something wrong,” Chun Feng pointed to the grill pan, “and turning out this way.”

“The most romantic thing I can think of is to tell lies with you,” Pei Zicheng laughed. “Let’s end up that way together. Before we’re eaten, we can chat in the grill pan, say goodbye, and see each other again in the next life.”

Chun Feng lifted her eyes to look at him. His eyebrows were bushy and black, his double-layered eyelids unusual. His eyes were so bright that they drew out her soul like magnets.

“Who else have you brought here besides your mom?” Chun Feng put a slice of grilled beef tongue in her mouth.

“You.”

“Besides me?”

“Why are you asking this?” Pei Zicheng glared at her, leaning forward.

“Oh, I’m just… asking randomly.” She was a bit embarrassed, her body ducking back from his. “There are always so many girls around you…”

“Those weedy girls,” Pei Zicheng snorted. “I can’t deal with them. ‘Wildfire never consumes them, always reviving in the spring breeze…’” He quoted an ancient poem.

They laughed together.

It was near midnight when Chun Feng got home. She used her key to quietly open the door, and was startled to see that the kitchen was brightly lit. Kang Joon-Hyuk, wearing an apron, was carrying a pot of something to the dining table. Steam and the aroma of food filled the house.

“You’re back!” Kang Joon-Hyuk said smilingly.

“I thought…” Chun Feng was caught off guard. “Didn’t I tell you I’d work late? You should have gone to bed.”

“I just wanted to give you a surprise.” Kang Joon-Hyuk came to hug Chun Feng.

“I’m very dirty,” she jumped aside, wagging a hand at him. “I’m going to wash first.”

She went into the bathroom, washed her face and hands, and lifted her hair to smell it. She made sure all was well before coming out.

While they ate, Chun Feng felt Kang Joon-Hyuk’s eyes were like a vacuum, sucking in every trace on her body.

“Why are you looking at me like that?” she asked.

“Don’t bite your chopsticks when you talk,” Kang Joon-Hyuk stretched his hand toward her, but stopped half way. “They might stab your throat,” he said.

His nervousness made Chun Feng laugh.

Only when she went to bathe did she finally relax. She filled the tub with water, closed her eyes, and let herself sink. The scalding water made her tremble. Her mind went back to an hour or two earlier, when Pei Zicheng almost tore the clasp of her bra. He even turned on the light to admire her underwear, pointing to the lace and saying with a snicker, “I guessed from the start you were secretly a sexy girl, cold outside and hot inside.”

She was so embarrassed and annoyed that she bit his shoulder hard, like branding a steel stamp onto his bronzy skin.

Chun Feng finished her bath and went to the bedroom. Kang Joon-Hyuk put down the novel he was reading, his eyes following her. “Look at you…”

“What?” Chun Feng looked at herself.

“So young, so beautiful,” said Kang Joon-Hyuk yearningly. “I’d exchange all I have for what you have.”

He drew Chun Feng into his embrace. She dodged backward: “I’m really tired today…”

“I know how to make you relax.” He sat up, removed her bathrobe, and massaged her shoulders. “You are only a volunteer, do you have to work so hard…”

“Your skin is so moist.” After massaging her for a while, he slid his palms flat along her skin. His lips approached hers: “I missed you all day.”

Chun Feng turned her face aside.

“What’s wrong?” Kang Joon-Hyuk gently pulled her back. “Why are you crying?”

“…You are falling in love with me,” Chun Feng sobbed. “You fool!”

“How rude!” Kang Joon-Hyuk laughed. “How dare you talk to me like that!”

“You really are a fool,” Chun Feng raised her voice. “It is very dangerous to fall in love with someone!”

“You’re quite right,” Kang Joon-Hyuk said. “Especially with a little fairy like you.”

“Be as rough as you can,” Chun Feng turned and pulled Kang Joon-Hyuk toward her. “Like I was your worst enemy.”

While Kang Joon-Hyuk was attending a meeting at headquarters in Seoul, Chun Feng went with Pei Zicheng to the suburbs. On the way, Kang Joon-Hyuk phoned, “You aren’t home?”

“I’m going to the bookstore,” Chun Feng said. “Buying books and looking for DVDs.”

“Alone?”

“Of course not. I’m with the most handsome boy on campus.”

Someone was speaking to Kang Joon-Hyuk on the other end. “I’ll call back later,” he hurriedly hung up.

“It’s my mother,” Chun Feng said to Pei Zicheng. “She worries about me being on my own, and calls me all day.”

“I worry, too. How about I move in with you?”

“My mother would kill you.”

They arrived at a place called “Hanging Kettle” and bought tickets. The area stretched out of the Changbai Mountains like an arm. The night before it had rained. The trees were a lush green, filaments of white fog drifted between them. The air was chill, and their skin felt as if it were coated with iced wax. They walked along a stream, sometimes on this side and sometimes that. Several dozen trestle bridges marked their path, each one unique. When the stream ran into steep rocks, it formed a small waterfall, leaping down amid splashing white foam, as if numerous cats were jumping. Many rainbow trout swam in the water, their orange scales mingling with rippling reflections, it was quite dazzling.

“Don’t you want to take a picture?” Pei Zicheng asked.

“They’d all be dead in a picture,” Chun Feng said. “They’ll always swim if I don’t take one.”

“That’s how you make me feel,” Pei Zicheng held Chun Feng’s hand. She lifted her eyes to him. “You’re always swimming around, you can’t be grasped, always poised to run away.”

His words stunned her; for a while she was speechless. She lowered her eyes to look at their intertwined hands; they were like two halves of a snap button meshed together.

At a pavilion along the path, Chun Feng took a traveling thermos and two glasses out of her backpack, as well as cushions wrapped in a plastic bag. They sat down, and Chun Feng took out tealeaves and snacks. “Oh my God,” Pei Zicheng feigned horror.

The last time, when Chun Feng came here with Kang Joon-Hyuk, his biggest regret was that he couldn’t drink a cup of tea while inhaling the clean fragrance of the trees and watching the rainbow trout swimming in the stream. “If I had a cup of good tea, this moment would be perfect,” he said longingly.

Chun Feng’s tealeaves were from Korea, brought back by Kang Joon-Hyuk. His hometown was itself a tea village. “This is called ‘bird-tongue tea’,” Chun Feng told Pei Zicheng. “A friend who knows tea says that, when you drink ‘bird-tongue tea’ for the first time in spring, when your tongue recalls the fresh and tender flavor of plants, it’s like you can hear skylarks singing in the forest.”

Pei Zicheng took a sip, and looked up at the treetops. Raindrops hung like crystal beads strung into chains, sagging with their own weight, as if they would fall to pieces any moment.

“Drinking tea like this,” he chortled, “it’s like we’re an old couple.”

“You think it’s funny?” Chun Feng was a bit annoyed.

“We’re practically senile,” Pei Zicheng said. “Don’t you think?”

Chun Feng sneered. “Do we have to run three thousand meters around the playground every morning to be youthful?”

“I’ll tell you what’s youthful.” Despite the tourists passing by, and Chun Feng struggling like flopping fish, Pei Zicheng dragged her into his lap, his ensnaring arms immobilizing her, his eyes approaching her eyes, the tip of his nose against her nose. She made several attempts to speak, and each time his lips sealed hers.

Unable to break free, Chun Feng closed her eyes, letting Pei Zicheng draw her out one mouthful after another, until she was empty.

When Kang Joon-Hyuk returned from Seoul, he’d become taciturn.

He would sit on the sofa for long stretches, not reading, not watching TV, not looking out the window, not even looking at Chun Feng, as if he had gone back to his days of being single. It made Chun Feng uncomfortable. He was so quiet that any sound she made seemed rude.

“What’s wrong?” she asked him.

“Nothing,” he said.

“Is something troubling you?”

“Life is always troubling.”

That night she made a move to embrace him. He held her in his arms, but nothing further. Chun Feng panicked. The body she snuggled with was like a piece of cast-off clothing; she didn’t know where the real man had gone.

Chun Feng was increasingly certain that Kang Joon-Hyuk knew about her relationship with Pei Zicheng. One day while she was eating hotpot with Pei Zicheng, a middle-aged man a few tables away kept taking her measure. She was not wearing her contacts, and she thought the problem was with her strapped vest. She didn’t realize he was a friend of Kang Joon-Hyuk.

He knew everything, but he said nothing. “Maybe,” Chun Feng thought, “he’s waiting for me to talk about it first, or to move out.”

But Chun Feng didn’t know where she would go. Back to the school dormitory? There was only half a month left before summer break. Besides, how would she explain it to Pei Zicheng?

Now Pei Zicheng always called her “wife” in front of others. He phoned her at midnight – Kang Joon-Hyuk was out at a social engagement – and asked her to drive to “The White House.” When she arrived, she found that his “extra urgent” request was that she drive him and three other boys home.

The four big boys almost burst her car. Their unfinished bottle of Korean Soju was passed around like a relay baton. They gossiped about another girl who had a car, “Driving during the day, being driven in the night.”

Their laughter was like a tsunami, crashing against her. No matter how fast she drove, she could not leave it behind.

The last boy she sent home was Pei Zicheng. In front of his building, he said to her, “Just wait here. If my parents are asleep, I’ll text you, then you come up quietly.”

“Okay,” Chun Feng said.

As soon as he had gone into the building she drove away. In the deep night’s streets, she was all tears and drove the car like a pinball. Arriving at her housing estate, she wiped her tears and looked around the parking lot. Kang Joon-Hyuk’s car was not there. She let out a sigh of relief, went upstairs, and opened the door. Inside was all dark. Not in the mood to even take off her shoes, she slumped onto the foyer floor.

Her cell phone rang. It was Pei Zicheng.

“You can come up now,” his lowered voice sounded ridiculous, “902. I’ve unlocked the door.”

“I’m already home,” Chun Feng said.

“Why did you go home? Didn’t we agree?” Pei Zicheng said. “Just come back. It only takes a few minutes with your car.”

“What am I to you? A chauffer? Or a prostitute?” Chun Feng heard her voice echo in the room, tinged with frost. “I’m not going to your house, I’m not going anywhere. I only want to be in my own home.”

“Who treats you like a prostitute?” Pei Zicheng’s tone had changed, too. “If you were a prostitute would I let you come to my house?!”

Chun Feng put her phone on the floor. Pei Zicheng’s voice bounced up like a ball. “What’s wrong with you?! There’s nothing I hate more than girls who throw tantrums.”

“I don’t want to talk to you anymore.” Tears covered Chun Feng’s cheeks. She bent her head to shout at the cell phone: “I’m turning the phone off…”

“Turn it off and we’re finished,” Pei Zicheng said coldly, stressing each word. “Don’t say I did not warn you. There is no turning back once the arrow leaves the bow!”

“Let’s not turn back then,” Chun Feng said, “let’s just finish.”

Chun Feng not only switched off the cell phone, she also pulled out the battery and threw it away. Her hands wet from wiping tears, she looked out the picture window. The moonlight was bright and pure, the broad leaves of elephant-ear reflecting it like a mirror. Kang Joon-Hyuk not so much sat up from the long sofa as walked out from the mirror. His face, first hidden in the darkness, slowly emerged. Chun Feng was dumbfounded.

They stood opposite each other. Chun Feng waited for his questions, curses, even blows from his fists. But Kang Joon-Hyuk went upstairs without a single word.

Chun Feng turned up the backpack she had brought when she first moved in. She searched both upstairs and downstairs, but could not find or think of anything that belonged to her. All her old clothing had been thrown out with the trash. The skin-care products were newly bought. She suddenly realized that she’d been living like a baby in Kang Joon-Hyuk’s place.

She found the perfume, the first gift from Kang Joon-Hyuk. She sprayed it once every few minutes. The room was filled with the assailing fragrance, so thick it might condense into dew.

“It’s midnight and you’re still not asleep,” Kang Joon-Hyuk appeared on the stairs. “Did the perfume bottle break?”

His tone was gentle. For a moment Chun Feng didn’t know what to do. She lifted the perfume bottle and sprayed it at him once. “Does it smell nice?”

He took a deep breath and sneezed twice.

“Go to sleep.” He began to walk toward the bedroom.

She didn’t move. He stopped after a few steps and turned, throwing her a look. “Why don’t you come?” He took her hand and led her into the bedroom.

At first they lay back to back under separate covers. A while later he turned to ask her, “What are you mumbling?”

“I’m reciting the label of that perfume,” she said. “Crisp, clean notes of bergamot, grapefruit, and orange mingle with fresh floral notes and ripe fruits, soothed with warm sandalwood and white musk…”

“You silly,” he laughed.

“That bottle of perfume,” she asked, “was it really a gift someone gave you? Or did you buy it just for me?”

“What’s the difference?”

“What do you think?”

“Just go to sleep.” He turned his back on her again.

“No one’s ever treated me as nicely as you,” Chun Feng said to his back. “It’s my fault that we’re breaking up. I deserve all your scorn and punishment. Really.” She pushed at him from behind, shaking his arm. “Yell at me. Hit me. Please. It will make me feel better when I leave tomorrow.”

“Stop messing around,” Kang Joon-Hyuk turned and caught her hand.

Chun Feng started to cry, at first quietly, then letting go, ignoring all. Her tears and snot made a mess of Kang Joon-Hyuk’s pajamas.

“Alright, alright, let’s make peace.” Kang Joon-Hyuk pulled her into his arms with a long sigh. “You are young, I won’t bully you. But you also shouldn’t bully me because I’m old.”

Translated by Xujun Eberlein

Tsering Norbu

An ethnic Tibetan, Tsering Norbu has a BA in Tibetan Literature from Tibet University, and now serves as Deputy Editor of the journal Tibetan Literature. His short story “A Sheep Released to Life” won the 5th Lu Xun prize, while “Charisma” won Best Work in the 2011 People’s Literature competition. His work has been translated into English, Korean, Japanese, Uyghur and Mongolian.

A Sheep Released to Life

by Tsering Norbu

You are bone-thin, eyes deep-sunken, your clothes rags and tatters, and you have aged so much I am left dumbfounded.

Turquoise-beaded braids wind at your temples. You reach out an arm like a withered tree-branch, and with the rough pad of your finger stroke the lines of my cheeks. My lips part just the slightest; I am heart-sore to the uttermost. “How did you come to be so?” I ask in sorrow. Tears well up in the cavernous black depths of your eyes; your reply is tremulous. “I am in Hell, suffering torment without end.” You slip out of the sleeve of your chuba robe and lift up your under-smock. Holy Founder Buddha! They have gouged out your two breasts. In the fleshy mess of the open wounds maggots writhe and crimson drops of blood ooze forth. The stench of putrefaction assails my nostrils. It wrenches my heart and my tears fall down for sorrow. “You are living still in the human realm. Pray for me and help me redeem the karmic sin I made, so I might enter the flesh again and be reborn sometime soon.” Still sobbing, I clasp tight your ice-cold hands and place them to my breast, wanting to warm them with the pounding of my heart. “I must go, the cocks will soon be crowing.” There is fear and panic on your face. “This is the city, no-one here keeps chickens any more. You’ll not hear any cock crow.” I hardly speak these words when your hands in mine melt away, and then all of you is gone, like the scattering of a mist.

“Sangmo––” I call out to you.

The sound of my cry starts me out of my dream. I am drenched in a cold sweat. I open my eyes. A heavy darkness enfolds me and I can’t see a thing. My heart is racing. I sit up and turn on the light. In the glare of the electric lamp, the traditional chest, television, thermos flask and wooden bowls come to life and fix me with bold stares that set me ill at ease. Flustered, I get an unbearable pain in my stomach. I press down on my belly with my hand and gulp roughly for breath. In a little while, the pain eases away and I return to fretting on my dream.

You have been dead these twelve years, twelve years in which you have yet to be reborn. This not something I ever imagined could come to pass. After you departed this human realm of clamour and strive, I carried on going out every day to make kora circuits as I always had, still made obeisance to the Buddha on feast days, continued to give offerings to monks and beggars. Surely none could say I have not done enough. Leaving you still suffering all this time has been a source of great unhappiness for me. This morning I will go to the Jokhang to burn sur offerings for you, then to all the smaller temples and light votive lamps, to help you get reborn soon. I no longer feel in the slightest like sleeping, so I pull back the curtain and look out. Outside, all is pitch black. Reflected in the glass of the window is a gaunt and wizened face, ugly and old. This is me as I am now. I am so close to death that each night when I lay down to sleep, whether I wake again the coming morning is not for me to know. I am all alone in this world, without ties or concerns, waiting for that day when death takes me in its sudden way. I look up at the clock on the wall. It is still only five in the morning, more than two hours before daybreak. I get up and wash my hands, then draw the first water of the day from the tap and replenish the water offering at the little shrine. I light incense and place my hands together in prayer, asking that the Three Jewels open their heart of compassion and guide you back to be reborn again soon.

I pack my satchel with votive lamps, khata offering scarves and clear grain liquor and set out. I make the Lingkhor circuit by the light of the street lamps. All along the way I am passed by light-treading elderly believers, counting off their rosaries and chanting scripture. This is a time free of the clamour of broad day, and bar the occasional speedy passing of a motor vehicle, all that can be heard is the murmured chant of prayer drifting through the air. Ah, this is the time when men are closest to the spirit world, when the human heart can become pure and clear and all the words of prayer pour forth from the deepest places. Look up ahead at that white-haired old woman, making full prostration at each step along her way, look again, see the old man turning his mani hand-prayer-wheel, a cheerful Pekinese following him at heel, the tinkling of its collar-bell accompanying them as they go. These scenes calm me, and I see the slight glimmer of hope. Listen, Sangmo, as I walk I will pray to Guru Rinpoche Padmasambhava, the Lotus-Born, and ask him to guide you onto the path to rebirth. I speak the words of his mantra and his many names.

Look now, the sky has begun to show the faint pale of dawn, and before my eyes Tse Potala now rises. On the Tsekhor circuit around the foot of Marpori, the Red Hill where the palace stands, there is already a continuous stream of people turning the prayer wheels. The sound of their invocations and the smoke of the offered juniper branches drift softly up into the vault of the sky. A row of golden prayer-wheels lines the foot of the perimeter wall and they creak as pilgrims turn them. I am tired after the walking, and sit on a stone bench by the pool in the park at the Lukhang, residence of the Naga serpent-lords. I watch the hurrying passers-by and see the piety on their faces. Sitting here, I think of you, think what a blessing it is to be alive, that I have the opportunity to atone for the karmic sin you made. Should death come swift and sudden I will feel no dread. In the limited span of this life, I have practised the wisdom the heart will need when the time for death comes. Death cannot make me sorrowful or afraid. It is merely the conclusion of the process of one life, not a final end. The soul will continue to be reborn in the cycle of becoming until the illusions of the Two Hindrances are cleared away and full wisdom is attained. My thoughts begin to quicken and race again, but then their train is broken by the cry of a gull.

Now Tse Potala stands wreathed in the full glow of morning; time is getting on and I must make my way to the Jokhang to make obeisance and burn sur offerings.

In the great hall at the Jokhang, monks dip their bamboo pens in gold paste and write your name on a slender strip of red paper, then take it to be burnt in offering in the golden censers before the image of Shakyamuni, the Founder Buddha. In the rising smoke, I fancy I see your wan and contorted face. My chest tightens and I am almost too choked to breathe. “The sur offering has been burned, now pray with sincerity before the Buddha,” a monk says to me. One hand pressed to my constricted chest, with the other I hand the monk a votive lamp, then I climb the zinc-lined steps to offer a khata scarf to the Buddha. I press my forehead against the right foot of the Buddha-rupa and pray for you.

Next I make my away around the other temples all about the city, offering grain liquor and paper money to the Dharmapala, fierce Dharma Protectors. By the time I have made offerings to every last one of them, it is almost noon. Only now do I realise I am hungry and thirsty, so I head into a tea-shop where they serve sweet butter tea. There are many tourists in the tea-shop, dressed for casual comfort and laden with all sorts of bags. One of them, a young girl, comes to sit beside me and begs to have her photograph taken with me. I agree with a smile. The different groups of tourists are still happily chattering with each other as I finish my tea and quietly slip away.

Leaving the tea-house, I make my way into the deep shade of a high-walled alleyway, where I come across a man from Gansu Province. He has a goatee and wears the round white skull-cap of the Hui Muslim people. He is leading four sheep. I suppose he must be a butcher. As the man from Gansu brushes past me, one of the sheep plants its feet and will not go on. It turns to me and bleats, a plaintive and sorrowful sound. I look at the sheep’s face again and am filled with a sense of familiarity, as if I have known it for a long time. The man from Gansu tugs the beast forward for all he is worth, and the sheep, with tear-filled eyes, is dragged on. I am struck by an odd impulse and without pausing to think, call out to the man. Surprised, he turns to look back at me. “Are you taking these sheep for slaughter?” I ask, stepping over to him. “Is there a problem with that?” The man from Gansu’s reply is cautious. I hang my rosary around my neck and squat down to stroke the sheep that had just called out. It is shivering all over, its eyes filled with sadness and fear, and it is dropping a constant stream of dung pellets. I am moved to a powerful pity by the terror the beast is clearly in. I will buy this sheep marked for slaughter, as a way to atone for the sins of Sangmo. “How much?” “What?” The man from Gansu is a bit confused by my question. “How much for this sheep?” I ask again. “I’m not selling.” “I have to buy it. I will release it to life.” At first, the man from Gansu looks at me in astonishment, then he falls into thought. The full brightness of the sun is shining on his face so that it glows with ruddy vigour. He speaks. “I respect your intention and I don’t want to make any money out of it, so just give me three hundred and thirty.” I am delighted that he has changed his mind, and immediately take the money out from a pocket and hand it to him. The man from Gansu tucks the bills into his own pocket and places the tether in my hand. He leads the other sheep away.

“You and I have a karmic connection, sheep. The reason I have released you to life will be the merit you accumulated in some former existence bearing its fruit.” It comes naturally to address the sheep as ‘you’. You ignore my words, bleating instead at the disappearing forms of the other sheep. The man from Gansu doesn’t even turn to look, and at the end of the alley he and the sheep disappear from sight. I feel sorry for these lives that will be taken so soon and lift my rosary from around my neck and pray for the other three sheep. You and I are drenched in golden sunlight, but the rays are not able to dispel the shadow in our hearts. “I only had enough money to save you. Think instead on the days ahead and how we will get through those,” I say. You lift your head and I see your eyes are filled with limpid tears. I squat down again and stroke your thick-wooled hide, which is here and there matted with straw and grit. Most strangely I mix up you and Sangmo in my mind. I can smell the scent of her on you, that mixture of sweat and hair. My senses are pricked by a smell I have not known in so long, so that I feel a great tenderness towards you. I bury my face in the thicket of your coat and weep for joy. In the shady hollow of the alleyway you and I embrace, and I sob my happiness at this resolution of a karmic destiny set down in a world beyond our own.

When I bring you back to the compound, the neighbours all look at me in surprise and the children gather round excited to stare. “Is this your sheep, grandpa?” “Yes, it is mine.” “What does it eat?” “Grass and vegetables.”

In the afternoon, I sweep clear a space below the window for you, throwing away a whole heap of junk that I have not previously been able to bring myself to part with. All the time you keep me fixed in a puzzled gaze, your pink nostrils giving the occasional twitch. I tell you, “I’ve cleared out a space for your own little den. This is where you’ll live out your days from now on.” You hear what I have to say, but just keep your eyes fixed on me as before. I assume you have not understood my words.

Time races onward, carrying the sun over the mountains to the west. The first thing to do is go and buy you something to eat. It’s evening, so there is a crowd of people from Sichuan setting up stalls selling vegetables in that lane that runs between the Barkhor and the mosque. I buy ten pounds of cabbage from one of the stallholders and ask for some bruised and broken-off leaves too. When I get back home, I chop them up and feed them to you. How elegant you seem, your head lowered, nibbling one delicate mouthful after another. From time to time, you look at me with those bright eyes of yours. The look in those eyes has softened, but there are still occasional flashes of hesitancy and fear. I laugh at you in my contentment. How I like your white fleece and that pair of soulful eyes. Sheep, because of you I entirely forgot my afternoon’s drinking. The afternoon has gone by in the twinkle of an eye, not like before when time would drag so slowly I was at a loss what to do with myself.

My sleep this night is most uneasy, my mind forever turning to you. I wake three times and each time I go to the door and look out at you. And each time you are sleeping soundly, your body huddled down on the ground, your head tucked back to your chest – to look at you like this is to feel a tender affection. The way Sangmo lay as she slept was very much the same. How much the two of you resemble each other! I squat down beside you and stare at you for the longest time, my heart content and filled with gentle warmth.

When I wake the following morning, folk are already up and about out in the compound yard and I can hear the chatter of children making their way off to school.

I have overslept and I scramble out of bed as quick as I can.

When I unhitch your tether and make to lead you off on a circuit of the Lingkhor, you start to bleat and set your four hooves firmly against the stone flags of the yard, drawing yourself back, away from me. Neighbours who have come out in the yard to draw water see what is happening and come over to help me by giving you a push. You are powerless against our combined efforts and have to follow on behind me. We make our way through the back streets to the banks of the Lhasa River. Its azure waters accompany us on our way, and a light wind stirs my white hair. As we start out over Chokpori Hill, you turn stubborn on me once again and will not climb the steep slope no matter what. Some people who had been turning prayer wheels come and push you from behind as I pull hard on your rope from the front. The stalemate goes on some little while and I am drenched in sweat from head to toe. You have spent pretty much every ounce of energy I have. My weariness turns to anger and I shout at you, “If you keep this up, I’ll give you back to that man from Gansu.” A look of fear passes across your eyes, then you lower your head and will not look at me again. “Don’t get het up, it’s the first time you’ve brought it on a kora circuit and it’s likely a bit afraid.” “Let it have a bit of a rest. We’ll help you.” “It’s afraid – see – it’s trembling all over.” Half a dozen people crowd around and begin a discussion of our plight as we stand on the narrow path that leads up the hill. There is the soft snap of the prayer flags as they flutter in the breeze and the tip-tap of the mani-stone cutters sitting cross-legged by the path as they carve their mantras. One old lady takes a ready-rolled ball of tsampa from her pouch and offers it up to your mouth. Your wet nostrils give a flick, then you stick out your tongue to lick at the ball of roasted barley. “Poor sheep, your life has been released. No-one is going to hurt you and there’s no need to be afraid.” The old lady strokes your head as she speaks. Then she pats you lightly on your back and you set off obediently up the hill. I scramble up to lead the way with your tether. Behind us, the drone of chanting starts up again.

Before long we arrive at the tea house at the Tsamkhung Nunnery. I tether you by the doorway and ask the staff to feed you some greens. They fetch some cabbage-leaves from the kitchen and take them out to you. One of them comes back in and asks me if I am taking you to release you to life, and I tell her that your life is already released. “Well then, you ought to tag its ear or put a paint marking on it,” she says. “Oh, I know that, but I’ve only just bought it, plus I don’t know how to do the tagging.” “If you bring it tomorrow I can tag its ear for you,” an old fellow drinking tea pipes up. He’s wearing a phulu wrap and has a white beard that reaches down past his collar. “That’s too kind of you, thank you so much,” I say in gratitude. He tells me he is a dab hand at tagging sheep’s ears, and they don’t feel the slightest bit of pain. His confidence sets me much more at ease about the business. “Give me your bag, I’ll puts some cabbage leaves in it for you.” One of the staff takes my satchel off to the kitchen.

I shoulder the bulging satchel and lead you off past the gate to the Ramoche. The shops lining the street are open for business and a cacophony of piped music rises to the heavens; now and then I hear shopkeepers calling out their everything-must-go price offers. The idea comes to me to take you into the Ramoche temple so you can pay your respects to Jowo Mikyö Dorje, the rupa of Shakyamuni brought to Lhasa by Songtsen Gampo’s Nepalese wife. Hopefully this will help you win a better life for yourself in your next rebirth. We make our way through the wreaths of juniper smoke and enter the main gate of the Ramoche, and you look about in wonder. A monk stops us, not wanting to let you into the temple as he says you’ll make the Buddha-hall dirty. I plead with him, telling him that I only bought you yesterday and that I am going to release you to life. In the end he agrees and lets you in. I remind you to make proper obeisance to the Buddha and put all your heart into your prayers. You follow on behind me obediently, your gaze resting now on the compassionate features of the sacred Buddha, now on the fierce visages of the Dharmapala Protectors of the Buddha Way. You show a kind of timid piety, slightly bowed and treading lightly. I can see in your eyes that you are an intelligent beast, and I trust that if you stick with me you will accumulate plenty of merit. As small acts of merit accumulate they become great merit, and ultimately you will earn great rewards because of it.

The pair of us sit for a while in the courtyard of the Ramoche, resting in the warm sunshine. The air is filled with the scent of juniper smoke and butter oil, and from time to time there is a steady beating of drums. These take our minds far from the clamour and bustle to a place of stillness. “You know you sheep and your cousins the goats are good sorts, don’t you?” I ask, “Back when Songtsen Gampo built the Jokhang, the goats earned the greatest merit by carrying the earth used to fill in the lake it was built over. They still make offerings to a goat there in the temple to this day.” You listen to what I have to say, then lower your head and rest it on my thigh. I scratch your chin and your eyes narrow in pleasure. I can see you are quite filthy, your fleece almost black with dirt. I will give you a wash when we get back home.

You stand obediently under the water pipe, the silver stream spattering off your back in a shower of pearlescent drops then running away down the drain. Barefoot, I soap you down, my fingers working into the thicket of your fleece from your nape right down to your underbelly. I can sense through my fingertips how good this makes you feel. I turn the tap on again and as the bright water flows through your fleece it turns turbid. I apply soap again, then give you a second rinse, and you are now white like falling snow, so white that it almost stings my eyes to look at you. Ah, a dozen years past, when Sangmo was still alive, this is how I would wash her hair. The white of the skin at her throat also stung my eyes in the sunlight. Those sweet days had left my memory for the longest time now, but at this moment it seems I have found that feeling once more. We sit down under our window and I comb out your fleece for you. You nuzzle in close, rubbing your head against my chest. Your curly horns hurt a fair bit when they bump against my spare old flesh, so I have to stop you. I go inside to fetch butter oil and rub some into your horns, which makes the pattern of lines stand out sharp and clear. Having you here with me now means that there are always things for me to be doing and someone for me to care for and worry about. Bit by little bit, it brings Sangmo back to life in my mind’s eye. I won’t do as I used to anymore, spending every afternoon at the wine shop drinking myself half into a stupor. Now I must think of you, and it occurs to me that it is time to feed you some hay.

I have a fierce thirst on me, so I take a plastic jug and go to buy some barley beer. Back home, I sit on a low wooden stool, then cloaked in the rays of the setting sun, I drink and look at you. You stand in front of me, looking back with the same warmth and shyness in your eyes that Sangmo often had. The look strips away the accumulated weight of the years in my heart and turns it softer and more gentle. And then there is this beer, which turns so sweet when it hits my belly. How come it never tasted so good when I drank it before, I wonder? Perhaps it is because of my change of heart, I cannot say for sure. I drink it down in swigs, the savour spreading from my taste buds to my brain, until I am entirely suffused with the sweetness.

I sleep soundly this night, and no dreams come.

Both your ears are pierced with a steel needle smeared in tea oil, and two red ribbon tags are tied through the holes. Now you are even more eye-catching.

Sangmo, so that you might soon come into the flesh and be reborn again, I will take this sheep to make kora each and every day. I think of the sheep now as you.

Sangmo, you no longer appear in my dreams, I don’t know how things are with you now, but if you can, come to me in my dreams one more time.

Now people see me out with the pristine white sheep every day, making our kora circuit of the Lingkhor. The red ribbons through your ears and the red dye marks on your spine ridge make it clear to all who have eyes that you will live out your days in peace and ease, until your time for old age, sickness and death comes upon you.

I’ve been leading you around the Lingkhor circuit for almost a month now and you have become familiar with all the things found along the way. Starting today, I will no longer lead you on a tether; we will walk together on our kora. I shoulder my satchel, in which I have packed my tea-bowl and some fried dough. I count off my rosary with my fingers. I walk a few paces then stop to see if you are following close. When we have to cross a main road I do lead you, in case you get hit by a truck or car. I meet plenty of familiar faces along our way and you stand beside me when I stop to chat. The people who know me say all sorts: “Nyantra, this is a wonderful act of goodness you have done and you will get karmic reward for it.” “This sheep understands the ways of humans!” “Nyantra, you should hang a bell around its neck so you don’t have to keep looking back for it.” “This sheep is truly blessed to have met you.” It brings me great contentment to hear these things they say. I have always thought that you came to be because of a karmic connection created in a previous life, otherwise why that dream of Sangmo, then meeting you that day unexpectedly? Such things are not coincidence.

We go into the tea house at the Tsamkhung. You push your way through the door curtain and crawl under one of the tables. “Wait outside – you, you’re not allowed in here,” I call out at you. You huddle up tight under the table and pay no attention to my shouts. The people drinking their tea give a knowing smile. “Let it lie down there, it’s not like it’s taking up anybody’s place,” says one of the teahouse staff. So I stop trying to shift you and instead get my tea bowl out from my satchel and set it down on the table. Then I take out a handful of fried dough, which I crumble and feed to you. You curl the bits of dough into your mouth with your tongue and crunch them with your teeth. As I drink my fill of the sweet butter tea you lie quiet and still, your head turning one way then the other as you watch the people come and go. “The Hall of the Protector Trinity on the south side of town is being repaired at the moment and I hear they’re short-handed. Anyone who goes to help out is sure to accumulate great merit,” says a middle-aged man to the tea-drinker sitting beside him. His words set me astir, thinking what a great opportunity this is and that I will go and volunteer there. I tip away the dregs of tea from my bowl, wipe it clean with a towel and pack it away in my satchel. The moment I stand up, you clamber to your feet too, alert to my movement, and we leave the teahouse together and head out into the bustle and roar of the street. You no longer pay any mind to the hubbub around you, your only thought being to follow along by my side. We make our way through the busy alleyways back to our compound.

I tether you up below the window, take some hay from a sack and put it in an old washbowl that is losing its enamel. I take another bowl and fetch you fresh water from the stand-pipe. You look at the two bowls but show no sign of being hungry or thirsty, though there is a look of tiredness in your limpid eyes. You bend your knees and settle down on the ground, your ears gently flicking. I can tell you are very tired, so I let you rest a while. I go inside and take off my shoes, then remove the dripping wet sole linings and set them to dry in the sun on the windowsill. I sit down cross-legged on the bed. I am thinking about how much money I ought to donate to the Hall of the Protector Trinity in Sangmo’s name and how I might go about persuading them to let me work on the building repairs. All Tibetans know the story of Jetsun Milarepa taking the translator Marpa as his guru, in atonement for all the killing he had done as a young man. He paid for his sins in the bitter hardship of labour, gritting his teeth and carrying on even when the sores on his back ran with pus and the soles of his feet were cut to shreds, and at long last he achieved the Great Realisation. So that Sangmo might go to a better place, I will donate five hundred and work for a month, which should lessen the burden of sin Sangmo bears. As I ponder this, night has fallen unnoticed and darkness now envelops the compound. Tomorrow will be an early start, so it is time I went to sleep.

I am started awake by a flurry of kicking at the door. I sit up and call out to ask who is there. There is no more banging at the door, outside, all is still. I can’t think who could be knocking so early – could perhaps one of the neighbours have taken ill? I call out again as I turn on the light. The thumping starts up again, this time even more frenetic. I push my legs into my trousers and quickly make to open the door. Pulling back the door curtain, there is not a soul to be seen in the light spilling out from indoors. But looking down, there you are, leaning against the door frame. You tilt back your head and bleat. All my anxiousness is gone in that instant – so it was you battering at the door, wanting me up and us off to make our kora. There are curses for you on my lips, but inside I feel much more happy. I go to replenish the offering water at the shrine and light some incense. Then I feed you some hay, and we set off to make our circuit. Under the street lamps, the concrete pavement reverberates to the clatter of your hooves, and it forms counterpoint to my chanting. What a harmonious accord it all makes. As we are passing Kundeling Monastery, a fine drizzle begins to fall and we quicken our pace, looking for somewhere to shelter from the coming rain. The rain becomes heavier, driving down with a loud patter, and puddles begin to form on the pavement and in the roadway. My shoes are becoming waterlogged and I can see your fleece is sodden through. From up ahead someone calls us over, “You can get out the rain over here!” We dash across to the entrance to a restaurant and shelter under the eaves of the doorway. There are already half a dozen other people keeping out the rain there, most of them also out to make a kora circuit. Probably because of the chill, you force your way into the midst of the huddle.

A young man standing farthest in gives you a kick. You don’t react in the slightest, but it is more than the old lady standing to one side can bear to see, and she curses the young man. “Can’t you see this is a released-to-life sheep? And you go and kick it – you’re no better than a beast yourself.” The young man seems ready to talk back, but the other morning pilgrims also start to admonish him. Seeing the fix he’s in, he runs off into the rain, continuing to wherever he is going. “These young folk, not an ounce of compassion in them, they live like beasts themselves.” “Probably been drinking all night and only just going home. I could smell the stench of booze on him.” “Each generation is worse than the last.” We stand idly under the doorway, listening as they vent their spleen, and hoping the rain stops soon. Half an hour or so later, the rain lightens and we continue on our kora.

We are soaked right through by the time we arrive at the Hall of the Protector Trinity. I search out the monk in charge of the repairs. I give him my cash donation and ask if he will let us work on the site as labourers. He agrees to the request without demur, and adds, “As well as a midday meal we also provide tea twice each day.” I am delighted at the news and spend the rest of the day busy at shifting earth and mixing cement. You, though, I tie up beside the steps up to the Protector Trinity hall. When I get home I stitch up a cloth bag-roll for you, and the following day you carry loads of soil or sand back and forth. The monks say, “This sheep is giving us a living re-enactment of the building of the Jokhang!”

We work as volunteers at the Hall of the Protector Trinity for twenty-three days. There is nothing we can do to help with the work that comes after, which is a matter for the artists who will be painting the murals on the walls. On the fourth day after we stop working there, the monk in charge of repairs at the Hall sends another monk to see us. He arrives pushing a handcart laden with six sacks of fresh hay and some sarira herbal pills. I do as the monk tells me and soak the pills in water. On auspicious days we drink a few mouthfuls; sometimes, I use this holy water to rinse your eyes.

Each morning you kick at the door to wake me, then we set off with you in front and me following on close behind. If I run into someone I know, you just keep on going until you find a suitable spot, where you stand and wait for me. When we get to the tea-house, you wriggle your way under the table that is our usual seat. As soon as the other tea-drinkers see you they grab up their tea bowls and go and sit somewhere else, making room for us. They all know you now.

In the early part of the night I see Sangmo in my dreams again. You are walking along a narrow mountain path wreathed in mist. The look on your face is tranquil and serene and your pace is steady and unhurried. Then you become a little indistinct, seem to transform into some other person. I smile, the white of my teeth showing in the world of dreams. This feeling of joyousness wakes me from my sleep. I sit upright in bed and set to working out what the dream means. It seems to me that you have left behind the torments of hell, something attested to by the calm composure of your expression. When you turn indistinct in the latter part of the dream, it is telling me that you have come into the flesh again and have been reborn. I am excited at this thought and no longer have any thought of sleeping. Later in the night I am wracked by pains in my stomach. Beads of sweat ooze out on my forehead. If I am in this sort of pain, I think, there is no way I will be able to make a kora circuit today. So what can I do with you? But then I think, these stomach pains will most likely last not more but an hour or so and then it’ll be all right. I get up and take some tablets of Tibetan medicine for the stomach, then get back under the covers. When you begin kicking at the door, the aching is still there in my gut and there’s no way I can move with it. You kick harder at the door, so I have to struggle up. I open the door and take your tether off. “I’m ill,” I tell you, “You’ll have to make the circuit on your own. When you’re done, come straight back.” You lift your head to stare at me, waiting for us both to head out together. I have to lead you over to the compound gate and then I try to push you out. You look back at me, confused. I shoo you on with a wave of my hands. At last you understand what I am telling you, and turn and make your way off up the alley with a crisp clatter of hooves, until you go out of sight at the far end.

I go back to bed and wait for the pain to subside.

The light of the sun creeps across the windowsill, and lying in my bed I begin to worry about you. The anxiety is so strong it burns and even makes me forget the pain I am in. I get dressed and head out to look for you. The pain has me breaking out in a sweat and I can’t even drag my feet forward, so I sit down at the compound gate, leaning my back up against the gatepost. The pain goes down a little, and as my gaze drifts over to the far end of the alley, the dazzling white of your fleece emerges into view. You walk towards me unhurriedly, stopping from time to time to look all around. I am so delighted to see that you are able to make kora all by yourself that tears come. I struggle to my feet and wait for you to come close. I lead you back in, tether you under the window and get some hay for you to eat. Another wave of heart-stopping pain comes over me and I have to crouch down and press down with my hand on the spot that is hurting. “What’s wrong, grandpa Nyantra?” “Get to hospital and get checked out!” “Your face looks a fright. We’ll take you to hospital.” The neighbours gather round and insist on taking me to hospital. I am powerless to resist them and so have to go with them for a check-up. The doctor there wants me to stay as an in-patient and says I’m not at all well. I insist that I cannot stay and say I’ll be fine if they just give me a pain-killing injection. The neighbours still think I ought to stay in hospital and say they’ll take turns bringing me all my meals. I’m most grateful but I cannot stay in hospital. The doctor summons some of the neighbours out of the room, and when they come back in, their expressions are stiff and forced. I can see from their looks what sort of state I’m in. This must be something incurable. “Doctor, I’m all alone in the world, just tell me exactly how sick I am!” I plead. “You’re over-tired and you need to stay here until you get better,” the doctor replies. “Just tell me the truth, I could see in my neighbours’ eyes just now that there’s something seriously wrong with me.” The neighbours try to say something that will make me feel better, “Don’t get carried away, you’re not seriously ill, you just need to stay here for a while.” “Let me have a look at your notes, doctor. Even if the news is the worst, I’ll take it calmly.” The doctor’s eyes turn to the neighbours, they look down at the floor and no-one says a peep. “I have no children so I have to make these decisions for myself. Show me the notes.” At a loss for what else to do, the doctor hands me his notes. Stomach cancer. The two words leap off the page at me and I shudder inside. I think that if I’m not long for this world, what will happen to you, a sheep with its life released, if I die? My concern for you complicates the way I feel and I become less certain about what I should do. It turns out that, face to face with death, I can’t manage to be entirely without care. I fix the doctor with a stare and ask, “How long will I be able to last?” The doctor replies, “It’s hard to say for certain. If you take your treatment you live a lot longer than if you don’t.” I simply can’t stay in hospital. If I do they’ll be pumping me full of drugs every day and I’ll waste what little time I have left in the sick-house. I’ll never make a kora circuit again or pay obeisance to the Buddha, and long before my body fails my spirit will have shrivelled up and died. “Doctor, just give me some painkillers today, then I can get home and sort things out there and come back tomorrow to stay in hospital.” I tell the doctor a lie so I can get away from there. The doctor no doubt sees through my little trick and offers me some advice, “Don’t play games with your life.” I have to make all sorts of promises before at long last I am able to leave the hospital.

Seeing the neighbours supporting me back home, the sheep is quick to its feet and comes over to me. Tears for my own uselessness are suddenly flooding my cheeks, and this old face of mine is dripping. This is the way I carried Sangmo back from the hospital, so she could draw her last breath in her own home. It’s not good for me to be weeping like this; the neighbours will think it’s because I’m afraid to die. They push you aside and usher me into my room. I see your moist eyes and head hung down. The neighbours gather round me, advising me to go back and stay in hospital the following day. Some dash back to their own homes and return with eggs, butter oil and beef. They also promise that they will feed and care for the sheep whose life has been released. Those words are dear to my heart and go a long way to lessening the trepidation that has been troubling me. The neighbours worry that I must be tired and one after another head off back to their own homes.

I close the curtain and turn on the light. My stomach still aches a little. I bring you into the room and then sit myself down on the bed. You lie down at my feet, your head raised and eyes fixed on me. I lean forward and give you a scratch. You narrow your eyes in contentment. “I don’t know when death will come, but while there’s life in me, I’ll take you to do plenty of good deeds, so that you can dispel any evil karma in you and come back to something better in your next life. If I do die, the neighbours in the compound will care for you in my stead until you too get old and die. You and I have been continuing a karmic connection from a previous life in this one, and that will carry on in our next lives or some other future rebirth.” My words to you are quite emotional. You seem to understand what I am saying. You stand up and place your front hooves on my legs. Your eyes are filled with tears. I throw my arms around your neck and weep for all I am worth. The moist rush of your breath at my ear reminds me of Sangmo’s breathing and calms me. “When I pray that sentient beings be kept from famine, flood, fire and war, be free of the sufferings of sickness, I shall also pray that you are reborn to a family with wealth and place, that in your next life you have parents who are kind and loving, that you encounter the incomparable Buddha-dharma…” I say a whole lot of things to you, as if I really am going to be dead tomorrow. Only when the sound of dogs barking comes from outside do I realise that it is already late and that we should take our rest. I lead you back out into the yard and tell you to get to sleep as soon as you can.

I don’t go back to the hospital. I am gripped by a sense of urgency, and from that day forward take you to make obeisance at all the main temples. On auspicious days, we go to the wet market and buy several dozen pounds of live fish, which you carry on your back to some distant stretch of the river-bank, where we release them. The released fish swim happily out of the plastic bag, slip into the river weeds, and with a flick of their tails are gone. We save hundreds of lives from the brink of death, freeing them from fear and despair to a new life in the bright blue water of the river. You and I gaze at the clear water of the river, the blue of the shy and the white of the clouds are reflected upon it. A soft breeze raises ripples on the surface of the water, and the sky and clouds begin to sway and shake. The branches of the willow trees are set dancing with a soughing rustle. The grass on the river bank is a lush emerald sward, with here and there a butterfly in sprightly flutter. You and I feel fresh and clear and are filled with tenderness and pity. I cross my legs, take out my flask of chang barley beer and sip at it slowly. The rosary turns quickly through my fingers, the beads giving off a light clack as they strike each other, a sound which sets my heart at ease. You have your head down, nibbling leisurely at the grass, though from time to time you prick up your ears and stare vigilantly as some motor vehicle speeds on its way past. Before the sun has set, we make our slow way home.

In the late summer this year, the tulku incarnation of Tsomoling Monastery is lecturing on the dharma. When I take you along to hear him, the monastery yard is packed full with people and we squeeze ourselves into a corner. As the Tsomoling incarnation expounds, you lie peacefully with your ears pricked up, your gaze now and then drifting over to the throne where the tulku sits. When you get tired of sitting, you head off to the back of the crowd and wander about for a while, but not long after you come back to my side. People are astounded when they see you do this and it arouses their compassion. In the days afterwards when we go to hear the dharma talks, many people bring you fresh hay and vegetables, which they set down in front of you. They pat you on your back and tell you that because you have a karmic bond with the Buddha-dharma, you will surely be rewarded. The monks of the monastery are especially kind to you, and let you into the temple halls to make obeisance, circumambulate and turn the prayer wheels. They also present you with red ribbons to hang in your ears.

Our days are constantly filled, you and I, and in no time at all it is mid-autumn. All this time, although my stomach has been aching it has not been as bad as it was before. Sangmo, you have not come to me in my dreams again, and I hope that you have already entered the flesh and have been reborn as a human being. Although I am less troubled by thoughts of Sangmo, I find my concern for the sheep whose life I released growing by the day. I worry that after I die there will be no-one to care for you and I fear you may be mistreated or driven out of our compound. These troubling thoughts are forever turning round in my mind and they encourage me to do all I can to keep on living for a few more years. Each day I pray to the Triple Jewel that I might linger in this world of men just that little longer. Now we have come to the mid-autumn season I want to take you to circumambulate the Lingkhor kora by prostration. When I tell you of this idea your eyes seem filled with longing. I sew a new cloth bag-roll for you and make a canvas apron for myself. With this, our preparations are complete.

It is not yet light but the darkness is in steady retreat, slowly giving way to a pale grey. I make a prostration with each step forward, so my progress is very slow. You amble beside me, turning to look at me from time to time. In the left side of the bag-roll on your back I have packed some tsampa and a flask of tea; on the right are cabbage and a plastic bottle of water. By sun-up, we have prostrated our way to the southern end of Stone Lion Road. A big coach drives past then pulls up at the side of the road. A group of tourists, Chinese and foreign, get off. When they spot us they come crowding over and there is the clicking of cameras. I prostrate myself, get up, take two paces then begin the process again. You follow beside with your load on your back. The tourists give us money, which I accept and thank them for with my hands pressed together. We will donate the money to a temple when we get the chance. We leave them behind as we continue on with our prostrations. My only prayer is that the Triple Jewel will let me live a little longer, so that I can keep you company for a while more.

We eat our midday meal by the road-side. I sit cross-legged on the pavement, take out cabbage from the bag roll, break it into pieces and feed it to you. You are so hungry, you finish it all in just a few bites. I put the whole cabbage down in front of you and start pouring tea and rolling balls of tsampa for myself. Passers-by seem compelled to turn and look at us, then they hurry away. I feed you a few balls of tsampa, then pour some of the water into a plastic bag and let you drink your fill. We lie down together in the shade of the trees and rest. Because of the speeding traffic and stream of people, it’s not possible to completely relax, and the clamour sets you all on edge. We set out on our prostrations again. The fierce sun has the sweat running down my back, and the heat coming off the concrete slabs of the roadway scorches my chest. But what does any of this matter? We continue on with our prostrations.

The following day, we begin again from the place we left off the previous evening. I see there are a number of people alongside us also making a prostration kora. From the way they are dressed, they seem to have come from Kham far away to the east. We make our way forward to the scraping sound of prostrations, on through the breaking dawn. The morning sun rises and golden light pours down upon us. In an instant, the road ahead is a-glister. The white of your body moves forward through this field of golden light, and against it you appear still more pure and bright, like a white lotus in full bloom, unmarked by the mud and dust of this world.

Translated by Jim Weldon

Poetry

Zhai Yongming

Born in Chengdu, Sichuan province, and a graduate of its University of Electronic Science and Technology, Zhai Yongming still lives and writes there. Her first poetry collection, Women, was published in 1986. She has published seven more collections of her poetry and six of essays and articles. Her work has been translated into English, French, Dutch, Italian, and German: these include the German Das Kaffeehauslied, the French La conscience de la mort and the English Changing Rooms.

In Ancient Times

In ancient times, I could only

write you letters never knowing

where we’d be

when we met again

Today I flood your inbox

with a crowd of stars They’re all input using five-stroke

They stand up running for your sake

They moor somewhere in the sky

Not that I care

In ancient times the mountains were an unbending presence

When the green waters collapsed drunkenly at their feet

there was nothing we could do but cup our hands together in farewell

knowing that someday we would meet again

Today, you fly back and forth across the sky

rushing constellations fill the sky bumping into you like a tender spot

like countless patches trying to block

a blue screen but without hysterics

In ancient times how many poems would people write

before they could become Laoshan Daoists walking through walls

moving through air moving through a glass of Bamboo Leaf Green liquor

catching hold of you But most of the time

heads cracked open and bleeding they fall to the ground, never to rise again

Today you’re dialing a mobile number

sending out thousands and thousands of scents

flooding somebody’s own bodily scent

When part of it trembles the whole world shudders

In ancient times we weren’t like that at all

We simply rode shoulder to shoulder dozens of miles on horseback

When our earrings jingled you smiled

Heads bowed we rode on for dozens more miles

Translated by Andrea Lingenfelter

The Chrysanthemum Lantern is Floating Over

Chrysanthemums float by one by one

in the night in the surrounding stillness

Among layered voices of children on the riverbank

chrysanthemums fade fade into bird shadows

Children float by carrying lanterns

In their soft chorus of song

there is no fear no joy no sorrow

There are only chrysanthemum lanterns the paleness of chrysanthemums

the redness of lanterns

A young maiden also floats by carrying a lantern

A young maiden and her servant

both have their hair twisted in buns

Their magnificent outfits are just

silk streamers and clasps

Are just pendants earrings and hairpins

clinking and clanking as they walk along

The young maiden and her nursemaid

are both rich in experience

They’re both leisurely seeking

to face the moon at midnight

Maidens are gentle lanterns are gentle

They’re floating… floating…

They transform an ordinary evening

into an extraordinary dream

Every night

chrysanthemum lanterns float by

A lantern bearer roams around the horizon

His syncopated footsteps

make it hard to chase after him

Children grow up following him

This is a story of a lantern in the deep blue sea

If I sit on the floor

I will fear that strength

I will fear the shadows of chrysanthemums light people

I will make syncopated clink-clank sounds

in my room

If I sit on the sofa or the bed

I will enjoy myself

I will feel myself slowly become translucent

slowly change color

I will fill with smoke all night, then

leave the ground, rising

Translated by Jami Proctor-Xu

In Springtime

In springtime, when a treeful of fake flowers blooms red like a drunk’s face

I long for tradition Those real mountains

real waters realistic paintings of real birds and flowers

Those colors that gave young girls beautiful complexions

were derived from plants Their beauty

breathed with spirit

Sleeping in the mountains also became a tradition

like the practice of a yogi

Thinking of that Master in the mountains

waking washing toiling

born to poverty

disconnected from all dynasties

In any life there’s bound to be a recluse heart

one meets in certain poems

in paintings

in lotus leaves or among schools of fish

Nursing a sense of antiquity I can’t shake

I use a brush: broken brushwork, dry brushwork

Splintered brushwork, parched brushwork

can’t prop up this inner lethargy

When paper and ink follow the heart

they fly onto a section of landscape

Translated by Andrea Lingenfelter

Letters from a Past Dynasty

— letters from a woman poet, Qiu Yanxue, of whom nothing is known

After finishing the ever unfinished task of housework

I write letters to a scholar in a future dynasty

After teardrops have speckled the rice paper

it becomes a painting Then touched with ink

it paints bold bamboo broken branches and plaintain leaves

Leftover ink grows rank in the stone my family berates me

When given leisure, my languid footsteps follow my mood

After finishing the ever unfinished task of housework

I write letters to a scholar in a future dynasty

Writing on fans writing on white silk

writing on rice paper writing on silk handkerchiefs

Writing, it becomes so precious

The breath of each stroke moves in my body

What will the next dynasty be like? I do not know

What will paper be like in the next dynasty? I don’t know that either

Writing will no longer be precious in the next dynasty I do know that

It has to do with the national mood

It has to do with dynastic progress

It has to do with the body politic

After finishing the ever unfinished task of housework

I write letters to a scholar in a future dynasty

I want you to remember the writing of an obscure woman poet…

just as I want you to remember my death

I want you to know it —

just as you know eternity

I am completely alone just as, when you are reading, you too

are completely alone

This is the power of writing and reading

After finishing the ever unfinished task of housework

I write letters to a scholar in a future dynasty

Silkworms spin their silk which is spun into thread

When there is thread there will be cloth

Tiny brushes and ink are swept away by autumn winds

and then there will be tiny Chinese characters I use them

knowing that hundreds of years from now you too will use them

I control them, creating a sense of euphoria in your brain

Like an orb of blue light it draws your

attention a psychedelic cloud

propels you endlessly forward and closer

Viewed from the vantage point of eternity

you begin to know me, know my dynasty

its water and soil its climate

its clear and mild landscapes

its cool and quiet books of poetry

its wars and beacon towers

It perished due to the climate perished due to the soil

Perished because the people rose up

The Submarine’s Lament

starting work at 9 a.m.

I ready my coffee my pen

poking my head outside to check on the latest

typhoon warning

whether I need it or not

my submarine is always ready

its lead gray body

hiding beneath the windless surface of a shallow pool

at first I wanted to write this:

currently the war hasn’t touched us

currently curses are taking a different tack

from my listening post I hear

the gentle rush of silvery fragments

crimson shellfish still catch my fancy

in the tumult of world events it flushes a deeper red

and we eat it the hand grasping the data shuttles back and forth

when I start writing I see

cute little fish encircling the shipyard

state enterprises are going under what’s more

there’s economic panic next door and those

whores with stylish painted faces

these volatile receipts encircle

my shallow pool

so this is what I write:

let me see

where should I launch my submarine this time

in whose veins will it weigh anchor

the starstruck, the hipsters, metalheads in discos

analyzing the periscope of writing

alcohol, nourishment, calories

like prepositions, pronouns, exclamations

sealing up portions of my skin

submarine it will plunge to the bottom of the sea

urgently but it’s diving for nothing

no longer subject to orders

I’ve written this before, and I’ll write it again:

it doesn’t add up

you’re still building your submarine

that memorial to war

that tomb of the war dead lying dormant at the bottom of the sea

but it grows ever more distant over time

in its self-imposed isolation

you can see for yourself:

that now I’ve built my submarine

and yet where is the water

it’s lapping over the world

and now I must create water

and fashion an elusive ideal

for the lament that lies in everything

Translated by Andrea Lingenfelter

Han Dong

Born in 1961, Han Dong is the most representative poet of the “Third Generation” movement, and an important writer of New State fiction. His work includes the poetry collections Dad Looks Down on Me from the Sky and Relearning the Human, the novels, Banished!, Me and You, A Small Town Hero Strides Forth, Screwed and His Love Drives Me Crazy. He has won the prize for Best Novel in the Chinese-Language Literature and Media Awards, and been long-listed for the Man Asian Literary Prize. These poems appear in A Phone Call from Dalian, Selected Poems of Han Dong, ed. Nicky Harman, Zephyr Press April 2012.

Someone in a Riot of Stones

Someone in a riot of stones. Someone

Like that, a riot of stones like that

Crawler, one hugging the ground

Slowly moving, even an unmoving lizard

Athlete leaping amid riotous stones, or

Stone falling down on stones

It’s not the one at the foot of an enclosure

The one before the neat and orderly brickwork

Stops right there when we stare

Transfers one stone’s warmth to another

Its shape is six stones overlapping

Now, as if craving rainwater, crawls

Onto the picture

There Is a Darkness

I notice the forest’s darkness

Darkness with a difference

Darkness like a square, in the forest

Darkness made by four people walking off in four directions

Darkness between the trees but not inside the trees

Darkness rising spreading through the sky

Darkness not of underground rocks that share everything

Darkness that weakens lights scattered evenly

Across a thousand miles to their lowest glow

Darkness gone through turns of endless trees, not vanished

There is a darkness that forbids strangers to enter at any time

If you reach out a hand to stir it that is

Darkness in a giant glass

I notice the forest’s darkness though I am not in the forest

Mountain People

As a child, he asked his father

“What’s beyond the mountains”

His father said “mountains”

“And beyond beyond”

“Mountains, more mountains”

He made no sound, looking into the distance

For the first time, the mountains made him tired

He thought he couldn’t get out of the mountains in this life

The sea was there, but far away

And he could only live a couple dozen years

So before he’d get there

He’d die halfway

Die in the mountains

He felt he should set out together with his old lady

His old lady would give him a son

And by the time he died

His son would have grown up

And his son would have an old lady too

And his son would have a son too

And his son’s son would have a son too

He stopped thinking

His son made him tired too

He only regretted

His ancestors hadn’t thought that way

Or the one to see the sea would have been him

Of the Wild Goose Pagoda

Of the Wild Goose Pagoda

What do we really know

Many people come rushing from afar

To climb up

And be a hero

Some come a second time

Or even more than that

People not pleased with themselves

People grown stout

They all climb up

To be that hero

And then they come down

Walk into the road below

And disappear in the blink of an eye

The real gutsy ones jump down

Red flowers blooming on the steps

Now there’s a real hero

A hero of our time

Of the Wild Goose Pagoda

What do we really know

We climb up

Look at the view around us

And then come down again

Translated by Maghiel van Crevel

A Phone Call from Dalian

A phone call from Dalian. It wasn’t even

A former lover. It was pointless. The call

Simply gave her phone number. A woman

Made me think back to a type of face popular three years ago.

She was just married, in a new house smelling of fresh paint

Which went perfectly with the stately furniture

(Including the phone she’d personally picked)

Was it perhaps just from curiosity (like a young cat)

That, as she fiddled with her husband’s possessions, she happened

To dial my number?

Were Dalian’s ancient waves lapping outside her window?

Was there that rock, still insisting on

Its stirring image? If, many years later — but not too long

She were to call again, from middle age, she would certainly

Have learned about life. Thirty years later

There would just be waves, in my right ear

I would not even hear her harsh, she-animal breathing.

Translated by Nicky Harman

Gregorian Chant

The singer sings outdoors

In a cold, high place

Like a pine tree that offers up

Its leaves

He sends the songs upwards

Head thrown back

Chanting and chanting

Into rows and rows

Of sturdy pine trees

Translated by Yu Yan Chen

Night Flight

I travelled with a friend in the clothing business

He to replenish his stock, and I to attend a literature conference

Walking across the tarmac at night

We approached the aeroplane of childhood

Night light, a gentle rocking like a cradle

The window resembles a blackboard

Daubed with stars by village children

But now we are in the clouds or beneath the waves

A stewardess smiles from a glossy magazine

A ringing that is not a class bell

Yet a soft light shines down for reading

Obedient pupils are confined to their seats

And wait for their meal in a distant kindergarten

From boarding school there soon comes the sound of chewing

My left ear hurts; punishment for my refusal to listen

It has affected my brain, and made me sick of politics

But now that we are free of our parents

We have decided for ourselves to entrust the future

To a dangerous game for adults

Let’s put our faith in the top physics student!

The one who came first in math that year bought insurance for us

The one whose body was as light as a sheet of paper

Is taking us flying now

Those who became our faithful wives

Are still subjected to our arrogant gaze

Translated by Tao Naikan and Tony Prince

Shen Wei

Born in 1965 in Huzhou, Zhejiang province, Shen Wei moved to Xinjiang in 1988 and is now Editor-in-Chief of the literary journal The West. He has published the poetry collections, Linger an Instant, The Depth of the Heights, My Dust My Way Ahead, Piqan Piqan, and Xinjiang Poems, the collections of critical essays Noontime Poets, Rubaiyat: Daybreak on the Turret, as well as The Xinjiang Dictionary, Kashgar, The Wonder of Plants, and the handbook, A Feast of Xinjiang: Independent Travel in the Hinterland of Asia. He has won the Lu Xun Prize, among others.

Tuyugou Village

Village in a valley. The hillside is a graveyard

Year by year the village shrinks, day by day the graveyard grows

The village is below, in the deep shadow

The graveyard is above, under the intense sun

In the vineyard the villagers pick fruit, bustle about

When they raise their heads, they gain from the dead

an angle from which to look down at themselves, a pair of eyes

A Region

Central Asian sun. Roses. Fire

Looking out on the Arctic Ocean, that sheet of whitened blue

That person nearing dreams: an unknowable region

Birds, one, two, three, fly past afternoon sleep

Three Women Collecting Trash

They appear at sunrise

The dim light conceals their outsiders’ accents

Three of them, each one carrying a braided bag

at least twice as big as they are

filled with cardboard boxes, old newspapers, worn out leather shoes

a few shriveled apples

one little bag of wormy rice

They laugh and talk in low voices

their evasive gazes flicker over the ground

because this isn’t their hometown

A hometown of three barren years is still a hometown

In the Women’s Federation courtyard, an older one

picks up a pretty hairpin

and fastens it

on the head of the youngest

City of Mixed Blood

Let me write a bit about this city of mixed blood

for eight whole years, it fostered my patience, my frontier temperament

for eight whole years, with fire in summer, with ice in winter

in these two ways it remolded my spirit

It’s called “the beautiful pasture”

the green grass grew crazily into clusters of buildings

each yurt suddenly swelled into a city

with cars of every color driving on the streets

a herd under the whip like sheep

bodies are draped with the dust of each time’s darkness…

It is far from the ocean, far from the tide beating the shore

another kind of tide beats at me —

hot blood, thick blood, pure blood, muddied blood

where the big cross and the little cross meet, they blend together into

the same type of honest blood

Now, I stroll into a group of people

I want to remember every pair of moving eyes —

the flickers and stares of those blue flames

whether Han, Uighur, Kazakh, or Mongolian,

all brothers and sisters in time

their eyes closed by the same dusk

and woken by the same dawn

From the Little East Gate to the Second Road Bridge, from one kind of flourishing

to another, my comprehension refuses the clamor

but I remember the sound of the drum, that thump thump thump from the city’s chest

is a strong real heartbeat. And also —

the floating scent of cumin, bringing the screams of roasted meat

the scream of a kebab on the fire is a lamb

screaming on the fire, it’s a hundred lambs screaming on the fire

— how many lambs have been buried in the tomb of man’s appetite

“Ah, rest in peace,” I pray quietly

Along the Silk Road came

guests from the east, dignitaries from the west

they want to stop for a while in Khan Tengri

to see how the flocks of pigeons surround the wheel of a Muslim new moon

from their mouths comes a coo-cooing eulogy

as though they have long ago learned the Koran

Summer, please pick roses from the city outskirts

to present to the capital’s most beautiful women

but there are too may beautiful women, it’s overwhelming

so disorienting that the roses are wasted

Winter, I decide to grab onto your soul

slow down time’s pace, to stop it on paper

I want to use burning verses to attack a heavy snowfall

and each day on the dining table, I want one

traditional dish: potatoes, cabbage and turnip

forming a simple reason for gratitude.

Let me write again about those all-night gatherings

when liquor wakes the sprites in the brain

and disturbs the demons in the bones.

Once, when the genius Cheng Wa wantonly blasphemed the holy spirit

I poured a half bottle of Yilite liquor on him

to open a bloom of liquid flame

how can the holy spirit be blasphemed? See how the pious Christian Da Ke

controls his inner anger

This city is already tainted with a touch of loneliness

the emptiness of play and ecstasy of pain

I say: “Let’s go.” It starts off into the future

pushing aside sunlight, sandstorms and the infrequent rain

in the eternity of time the desert

appears and then disappears like a mirage

throwing a measure of truth into my poetry, replenishing my voice

For eight whole years, I, an outsider, loved

this city of mixed blood, this city that poured in new lifeblood for me

I began to put down roots, though my vision

often rose above the eagle’s wings

higher even than Mount Bogda’s dazzling snowcaps…

Translated by Eleanor Goodman

Chun Sue

Born in Beijing in 1983, Chun Sue dropped out of high school to become an independent writer. She is a poet, representing the generation of writers born in the 1980s, and her published fiction includes Beijing Doll, The Joy That Lasts for a While, and Raise Your Head and See the Big Dipper. She has also edited Selected Post-1980 Poets.

Last Night I Dreamt About Gouzi

He was in the middle of a crowd

Showing an apologetic smile

his signature smile

as if he had let someone down

When I woke up

I saw a picture of Gouzi and his son

already a grown boy

looks like him, but it’s not him

Gouzi still seems an observer

as if he didn’t have anything on him

yet he has his son beside him

not nothing

The Queen of Singing KTV

Give me a fag

to light the haystack

I blow out white smoke that curls

and turn to go back in

I am not used

to this quietude

Nothing has changed

and memories have solidified

into a picture frame

Once

My eyes were so big

and the people around me so young

then I turn

to walk into the night

Or to the bathroom

I Am Just a Girl

I am just a girl, who

cries at movies and music

enjoys vanity

and other illusory feelings

wears perfume every day

sinks softly onto bed sheets soft as velvet

and trembles, writes poetry

that is perhaps only affected emotion

I clench my teeth until I bleed

the more blood the better

What else excites me these days

My eyes grow long

My face turns yellow

I’m turning into someone who never knew me

Perhaps this is the real me

I want to start a war with fate

Which means I won’t do anything real

I wonder myself what change there will be

And if I can accept the person that I become

Taking Off Again

1

Squatting in the bathroom on the plane

I observe my face

two new pimples like twin tombs

buried on my chin and left cheek

hair recently dyed blue

some bright blue streaks

the rest closer to metallic

blue

2

Afraid to sit on a plane

Not afraid of death

but each time

on the airplane

I lose control

for half an hour

or a few hours

My mood

unbelievably depressed

I remember a series of tragedies from my past

I can’t control my tears

they don’t stop

The longer I sit still

the more I think about

unable to control my anxieties

I cover my sobbing face with the blanket

I want to die

I want the plane to stop

So I can die

but because the plane won’t stop

I feel even more anxious

and want more than ever to die

3

Judgment day

is perhaps a little like my international fight

In my mind I am

foolish, sad, no road to travel down

at the same time, though I can’t admit it

I’m lonely

I hate myself

I decide to ask for a bottle of red

to anaesthetize myself

I drink the whole bottle

and ask for another

I don’t believe

I can’t get drunk

4

Calm at last

I accept that I am ordinary

Of course

there will be pain

but why can’t I be like others

and bear the pain

Who do I think I am

All of a sudden

I feel much better

I realize that pain exists

I measure the weight of my pain

slowly tasting it

just as I carefully tasted this wine

Translated by Alice Xin Liu

Translators

Eric Abrahamsen

Eric Abrahamsen is a translator and publishing consultant who has been living in China since 2001. He is a co-founder and manager of Paper Republic, and the recipient of translation grants from PEN and the National Endowment for the Arts. His most recent translation is Wang Xiaofang’s Notes of a Civil Servant, to be publishing by Penguin in 2012.

Alice Xin Liu

Alice Xin Liu was born in Beijing but left for London at the age of 7, returning when she was 21. She is a graduate of English Literature, Durham University UK, but her Chinese cadre grandparents were the main force behind her real education. Now, still an enthusiastic reader of Chinese, Japanese and English fiction and poetry (especially the work of Haruki Murakami), she has translated poems by Sen Zi for the Copper Canyon Press/NEA Chinese poetry anthology Push Open the Window. She is now working on The Letters of Shen Congwen for a Chinese publishing house.

Denis Mair

Denis Mair, American poet and translator, is a co-translator of Frontier Taiwan, an anthology of new poetry from Taiwan. His versions of works by Chinese poets have appeared in Literary Review, Chicago Review, Trafika, Kritya, Melic Review, Poetry Sky, Point No Point, The Temple, and other journals. His book of poems, Man Cut in Wood, was published by Valley Contemporary Press. He has taught Chinese at University of Pennsylvania and Whitman College.

Darryl Sterk

Darryl Sterk is a literary translator and scholar of contemporary Chinese language, literature, and film, especially from Taiwan. He took classes at the Graduate Institute of Translation and Interpretation at National Taiwan Normal University and received his Ph.D. in East Asian Studies from the University of Toronto in 2009. He has a particular interest in primitivism, which is to say romantic modern or postmodern ideas about indigenous peoples.

Brendan O’Kane

Brendan O’Kane graduated from Temple University with a degree in Asian Studies, and now serves as an adjunct instructor in literary translation at IES Abroad at Beijing Foreign Studies University. He lives in Beijing with his wife Song Li and two cats who are also occasionally the bosses of him.

Eleanor Goodman

Eleanor Goodman writes fiction, poetry, and essays. She also translates ancient and contemporary Chinese poetry. Her work has appeared widely in journals such as PN Review, Los Angeles Review, Acumen, Cha, and The Best American Poetry website.

Chenxin Jiang

Chenxin Jiang studied literature at Princeton University. She recently received a 2011 PEN Translation Fund grant, as well as the 2011 Susan Sontag Prize for Translation, an award made each year to one translator under the age of 30. Her translations have been published in Poetry London, World Literature Today, Hayden’s Ferry Review, no man’s land, and Words Without Borders. Chenxin is a 2011-12 candidate in the British Centre for Literary Translation’s mentoring scheme for emerging translators. She lives and works in Shanghai.

Anna Holmwood

Anna has been working as a literary translator since 2010. Her first novel translation, Ai Mi’s Under the Hawthorn Tree (Virago) was published in January, and she has just finished a second novel, Heihe’s Black Flame (Groundwood Books). She was chosen for the British Centre for Literary Translation’s first mentorship scheme in 2010 and is part of a mentorship scheme for young Swedish to English literary translators, translating a play by August Strindberg to be published by Norvik Press.

Martin Merz

Martin Merz took a BA(hons) in Chinese at Melbourne University and continued language study in Taiwan. He received an MA in applied translation from the Open University of Hong Kong in 2009. Martin translated the modern Peking Opera Mulian Rescues His Mother, which has been performed in Hong Kong and London, and recently Christmas Eve by Li Er for Makedo Publishing.

Joel Martinsen

Joel Martinsen is managing editor of Danwei.org and a science fiction fan. His translation of an excerpt of Liu Cixin’s Ball Lightning was published in the December 2009 issue of Words Without Borders.

Jim Weldon

Jim Weldon is from the north of England. After leaving secondary education, he worked for a decade in unskilled and semi-skilled jobs. He then went to SOAS, under the University of London, to study Chinese. Upon graduation, he volunteered at a rural development agency implementing projects in southwest Sichuan. He then worked for an independent social development research journal in Beijing. Jim also undertook various translation projects, and when his post at the journal came to an end, this became his full-time occupation. He has translated literature, social science papers and monographs, journalism and art criticism.

Patrick Rhine

Patrick Rhine graduated from Williams College with majors in Chinese and art history. He went on to study literary Chinese at the Mandarin Training Center in Taipei. Under the auspices of the U.S. State Department’s Fulbright program, Rhine also researched contemporary art history at the China Academy of Art in Hangzhou. He is currently based in Beijing, where he writes for the contemporary Asian arts publication Art Radar. He also works in freelance art criticism and translation.

Maghiel van Crevel

Maghiel van Crevel is Professor of Chinese Language & Literature at Leiden University, and an internationally recognized expert on modern Chinese poetry. He has published extensively in English, Dutch and Chinese, for specialist and general audiences. His scholarly books include Language Shattered: Contemporary Chinese Poetry and Duoduo (1996) and Chinese Poetry in Times of Mind, Mayhem and Money (2008).

Nicky Harman

Nicky Harman has been translating for twelve years. Her work includes Gold Mountain Blues by Zhang Ling (2011), Flowers of War by Yan Geling (2012) and Han Dong’s Banished! (2009), which was longlisted for the Man Asian Literary Prize. She also translates regularly for Chutzpah literary magazine. She has been Translator-in-Residence in a London arts centre and is active on the Chinese-to-English translators’ website, Paper-Republic.org.

Ken Liu

Ken Liu (http://kenliu.name) is an author and translator of speculative fiction, as well as a lawyer and programmer. His fiction has appeared in The Magazine of Fantasy & Science Fiction, Asimov’s, Clarkesworld, Lightspeed, and Strange Horizons, among other places. He lives near Boston, Massachusetts, with his wife, artist Lisa Tang Liu. They’re collaborating on their first novel.

Jane Weizhen Pan

Jane Weizhen Pan is a professional translator between Chinese and English. Jane and Martin Merz co-translated Wang Gang’s English, published by Penguin in 2009, a seventeen-century opera by Li Yu, subtitles of movie The Piano in a Factory, Table d’Hôte, an excerpt of Murong Xuecun’s Most People Died of Greed, for Asia Literary Review. Jane recently translated The Magician of 1919 by Li Er for Makedo Publishing. Her current project is translating a puppet show script adapted from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland into Mandarin and Cantonese.

Roddy Flagg

Roddy Flagg accidentally moved to China after graduating in something entirely irrelevant, and surprised himself by ending up earning a living translating Chinese and running websites. He left China after ten years and is now living in London, where he continues to surprise himself.

Andrea Lingenfelter

Andrea Lingenfelter is a poet and translator of poetry, fiction and occasional film subtitles. Her translations of works by Zhai Yongming and other poets have appeared in a number of anthologies and journals, including Push Open the Window (Copper Canyon) and Frontier Taiwan. She is the translator of the novels Candy, by Mian Mian, and Farewell My Concubine, by Lilian Lee. The Changing Room, her book length collection of translations of selected poems by Zhai Yongming, is forthcoming from Zephyr Press. She currently lives in Northern California.

Shelly Bryant

Shelley Bryant divides her year between Shanghai and Singapore, working as a teacher, writer, researcher, and translator. She is the author of two volumes of poetry, Cyborg Chimera and Under the Ash. Her third volume of poetry, Voices of the Elders, and her travel memoir The End of the Line are slated for release in 2012. Her current projects include writing an updated guide to the city of Shanghai for Urbanatomy and translating Sheng Keyi’s novel Northern Girls for Penguin Books. Shelly’s poetry has appeared in journals, magazines, and websites around the world, as well as in several art exhibitions, including dark ’til dawn, Things Disappear, and Studio White • Exhibition 2011.

Editorial Board

编辑/人民文学杂志社
Editorial Department: People’s Literature Magazine

主编/李敬泽
Editor-in-Chief: Li Jingze

副主编/宁小龄 李平
Deputy Editors: Ning Xiaoling, Li Ping

主编助理/邱华栋
Assistant to Editor-in-Chief: Qiu Huadong

顾问/刘宪平 邵东
Consultants: Liu Xianping Shao Dong

英文审定/徐明强
English Reader: Xu Mingqiang

编辑总监/邱华栋 周晓枫 艾瑞克
Editorial Directors: Qiu Huadong, Zhou Xiaofeng, Eric Abrahamsen

本期英文执行编辑/刘欣
English Managing Editor, current issue: Alice Xin Liu

本期中文执行编辑/马小淘
Chinese Managing Editor, current issue: Ma Xiaotao

编辑/杨泥 徐则臣 曹雪萍 莫楷
Editors: Yang Ni, Xu Zechen, Cao Xueping and Canaan Morse

协作/翻艺文化资讯有限公司
With Paper Republic Limited

平面设计/北京午夜阳光平面设计公司
Layout Design: Beijing WYYG Graphic Design

设计总监/王焱 010-85301701
Art Director: Wang Yan 010-85301701

发行总监 / 王志山 010-65030264
Director of Distribution: Wang Zhishan 010-65030264

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