Written on Water, page 15
No wonder those who have children keep on having them. They see children as amusing little blockheads, lovable and laughable encumbrances. They fail to see what is so very frightening about children’s eyes—such earnest eyes, the eyes of the angels on Judgment Day.
Without any real credentials, we blithely make eyes such as these, their little minds capable of criticism and judgment, their bodies capable of experiencing the most exquisite pain as well as pleasure. Without credentials, we make people, and stumbling between hunger and satiety, between knowledge and ignorance, we raise them to adulthood. Making people is quite a dangerous occupation. Mothers and fathers are not gods, but they are forced into occupying a position of divinity. And even if you play that divine role with great care, even if you prepare meticulously for the arrival of your child, there is no way to guarantee what sort of person the child will eventually become. If conditions do not favor a child even before he is born, then he can hardly be expected to succeed later in life. Such are the operations of fate.
Of course, the more arduous the situation, the more apparent will become the tremendous love parents bear for their children. Either the parent or the child must be sacrificed to circumstances, and it is from this hard truth that we have derived the moral virtue of self-abnegation.
The self-sacrificing love of a mother is indeed a virtue, but a virtue only within a moral code that has been passed down to us by our animal forebears. Since even domestic animals seem to share this virtue, there’s no particular reason to be proud of ourselves on this account. Instinctual love of this sort is merely an animal virtue, not a quality that separates us from the beasts. What does distinguish mankind from the beasts are our higher degree of consciousness and higher powers of comprehension. While this approach to the question may appear excessively logical, overly dispassionate, or lacking in humanity, real humanity lies in a refusal to accept merely animal virtues as an ethical standard for human beings.
Animals possess instinctive compassion but also instinctive cruelty, and this is why generation after generation can and does survive the bloody, competitive struggle for survival. Nature is a mysterious and magnificent thing, but we cannot “rest content in nature.” Nature’s ways are shockingly wasteful. A fish will produce several million eggs, most of which will be swallowed by other creatures of the sea, only to yield a few surviving spawn that might eventually grow into fish. Why should we expend our flesh and blood in such a profligate manner? Civilized people are extremely expensive creatures, requiring enormous sums of money to be fed, raised, and educated. Our energy is limited. Our time on this planet is limited. And there are so many things that we can and should do while we are here. What on earth could induce us to produce these useless creatures, destined as they are for the evolutionary scrap heap, in such profuse quantities?
It is in our nature to want humanity to thrive and proliferate, to reproduce and to continue reproducing. We ourselves are destined to die, but our progeny will spread across the earth. But what unhappy progeny are these, what hateful seeds!
BEATING PEOPLE
On the bund, I saw a policeman beating someone for no reason save his own momentary whim. The person being beaten was a fifteen- or sixteen-year-old boy, neatly attired in a padded cotton robe and vest, with a sash around his waist. I could not see very clearly what the policeman was using to beat him, but it looked like the knotted rope attached to the end of his baton. There was a whistling sound as he bore down, striking again and again until the boy was forced back against a wall. The boy certainly could have tried to make a run for it, but he did not run, gazing instead at the policeman with a furrowed brow and squinting eyes, like a peasant in the fields who cannot quite force open his eyes against the glare of the sun. There was something like a little smile on his face. Everything had happened much too suddenly. Often, people without any acting experience cannot adjust their expressions with the necessary quickness and dexterity.
I almost never have feelings of righteous indignation. If I do not want to see something, I have a talent for not seeing it. This time, though, I kept turning back to look, with a suffocating feeling in my chest, and, with each blow, my heart seemed to recoil. When the policeman was done beating the boy, he strode in my direction, and I fixed him with a fierce and cutting stare, hoping that looks could kill and that I would be able thereby to give adequate expression to my contempt and fury, my utter abhorrence for such a leprous character. But what he noticed was only that someone had taken notice of him, and, with an exultant air, he adjusted the leather belt cinched around his waist. He was a northerner with a long face and a full mouth, and not unattractive.
He swaggered over to the entrance of the public toilet and grabbed hold of a destitute-looking man in a long robe. He refrained from beating him immediately, preferring instead to glare menacingly as he brandished his baton in one hand. Despite his surprise and fear, the man was still able to crack a joke in his local dialect: “Is it because I was about to shit in the pit, sir?”
Perhaps it was because I’ve never undergone any proper ideological training that the notion of class warfare never once crossed my mind, even at a time like this. In the fury of the moment, all I wanted was to become a government official or the First Lady. That way, I could march over and slap the policeman across the face without so much as a by-your-leave.
If this story had taken place in the fictional world of the early Republican-period writer Li Hanqiu, a Western missionary with justice on his side would have sallied forth at just this moment, or, better yet, the mistress of the police chief (who would inevitably be revealed as the bosom friend of the heroine and the hero’s sweetheart from bygone days).1 Once in a while, a touch of naiveté goes a long way, but that kind of systematic naiveté ultimately leaves a lot to be desired.
Petty Figures.
(1) She knows how to abuse her children and her servants;
(2) she knows how to dress up for a dance;
(3) he knows how to force his attentions on a woman;
(4) she knows how to save money;
(5) she knows how to act like a lady;
(6) she knows how to hunt for a man;
(7) he knows all sorts of ways of being vicious;
(8) he knows how to be delighted with himself;
(9) she sees through everything;
(10) “But, seriously, we really ought to take this point into consideration . . .”
Pathetic Beings.
(1) Helpless;
(2) petty urbanite;
(3) an obedient girl;
(4) an obedient girl will always be good and obey, from her schooling to her marriage;
(5) she always asks you, “Do you think it’s a good deal?”
(6) a woman who’s forever passive.
POETRY AND NONSENSE
Summer days roast, one after another, strung together by a white hot thread, slender and nearly burnt through, connected only by the shrill cries of the cicadas: ji ya, ji ya, ji . . .
This month, since I’ve been ill, I’ve managed to save substantial sums of money that would normally have been used for groceries and carfare, and suddenly I feel rather well-off. I’m suffering from a less than refined malady—stomachaches so nasty that I roll across the straw mat on my bed, moaning in pain—but it is summer, and I’m idling away at home, unable to tackle anything more weighty than a few pieces on Cézanne’s paintings, some books I’ve read, and Chinese religion, all admittedly rather elegant topics. I have decided that this should be my “month of elegance,” and, continuing in this cultivated vein, I’ve started to discuss poetry as well.
I made my aunt read a famous Japanese poem, translated by Zhou Zuoren into Chinese, that goes like this: “Summer nights / like bitter bamboo/ slender stalked and close jointed / in but a moment / comes the dawn.”1 My aunt, a typical amateur intellectual, looked it over, shook her head, and said, “I don’t get it.” After another moment’s thought, she added, “Since he’s so famous, there must be something to it, no? But who knows? Once someone has reached a certain level of celebrity, they seem to have earned the right to talk nonsense.”
I was reminded of Lu Yishi.2 The first poem of his that I ever read was “Sanbu de yu” (Fish on a stroll), published in a monthly literary digest. That particular poem was not exactly nonsense, admittedly, but it was rather overdone. When the tabloids began to make fun of him on a daily basis, I laughed right along, for quite a few days on end. On this front, I can be just as merciless as the tabloids, if not more so. For instance, when I read that Gu Mingdao had died, I was delighted, for the simple reason that his fiction was so badly written.3 In truth, I never knew him, and if I had, I’m certain that there would be reasons to hold him in great esteem, because he was a model of what a writer ought to be and experienced all the trials and tribulations that writers have been known to suffer throughout history. Besides, he has passed away, so to speak ill of him seems quite unpardonable. And yet I cannot help remembering when Mingyue tianya (Bright moon horizon) was being serialized in the Xinwen bao (Daily news). I was terribly annoyed by both Sun Jiaguang, the paragon of progressive youth in the story, and the girl he was helping through school, Mei Yuezhu. Whenever Sun visited her at home, her mother would heap the table with fish and meat to express her gratitude, an extra expense that must have exceeded by many times over the cost of her daughter’s tuition. Mrs. Mei would then recount the honorable conduct of her late husband and go on to detail his many misfortunes, the minute circumstances of which appeared daily in the paper for two weeks running. And I had no choice but to read on, precisely because the novel was divided into daily installments and exercised thereby a most exasperating kind of appeal. I had a cousin who was also a reader of the Daily News. Whenever we got together, we would roundly criticize Mingri tianya, prattling on about its deficiencies even as our eyes continued to scan across the pages.
There really isn’t anything extraordinary about Gu Mingdao’s fiction. What is extraordinary is that the mass public is able to stand such colorless idiocy. The popular success of Autumn Quince at least is justifiable.4
To speak of Lu Yishi in the same breath as the Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies fiction that he despises with such passion would no doubt infuriate him. What I am trying to make clear is that I cannot forgive Gu Mingdao for his fiction just because he is dead. Nor can I excuse Lu Yishi for some of his later works simply because he wrote some good poetry in the past. After reading “Bangwan de jia” (Home at dusk), however, I changed my mind. Not only “Sanbu de yu,” I think, but even the immaturity, venality, and pretension of his other works can be forgiven solely on account of this one poem. It has an integrity that demands that I quote an entire stanza:
Home at dusk is the color of dark clouds
wind comes to the little courtyard
finished counting the returning crows
the children’s eyes grow lonely
at dinner in my wife’s small talk
events of several years past disperse like mist
and in the blandness of the vegetable broth
I taste something of the desolation of living
All of Lu Yishi’s best poems possess this same purity, sadly lucid, sparing in their use of color, like ink paintings of bamboo. The field of vision is small, but because it’s not bound to a distinct time or place, it gains an eternal, universal quality. For instance:
once more the flurries of February snow
somber house bathes in spring chill
ah, warmth that once was, now distant
my wife’s eyes are forlorn
And then there are these lines from “Chuangxia yin” (Poem by the window):
But to speak of my
green, green
love, mirror calm
yet so very distant
a distance that
for sparrows and young crows
would be absurd
This poem is relatively long, with variations of tone that are extremely charming and supple. In “Eryue de chuang” (A window in February), there is an altogether more subtle and ambiguous feeling, a feeling unique to modern man:
The lazy westward-drifting clouds make one melancholy
trailing sorrow-laden eagles in their drawn-out wake
slowly as an unthinkable sail
as each unthinkable day
sails past my February window
To have found in one volume just a few such stanzas is already immensely gratifying. China’s new poetry—starting from Hu Shi, on to Liu Bannong and Xu Zhimo, and then even Zhu Xiang—seems to have been heading toward a dead end.5 It will no longer do to speak of our concerns in the words of the Tang dynasty, because all those words have already been said. Even when we try to express ourselves in our own language, however, something is still amiss; all in all, an exasperating state of affairs. Yet there are still some unexpectedly good poems. This stanza I came across in Ni Hongyi’s “Chongfeng” (Reunion) is really quite good:
The purple carnation you called the flower of momentary love
three years ago
the colors of summer fell limp
in the dead city
you suffered a sleepless night
colors of night surged and ebbed
words like a night train
you said
by my future grave will be night-blooming jasmine
I said why not plant a “love for a moment”?
Phrases like “momentary love” and “fell limp” sound extremely forced, but they are employed as a means of poetic economy, imparting a sense of solidity and compression, rather than a life-or-death desire to “never cease writing words that startle,” as Du Fu would have it. I especially like “words like a night train”; the metaphor sounds out intermittently, distant and bleak.
Or, later:
you were sacrificed at the altar of chastity before our generation
fatigued by the noise and the clamor
you will not see what comes later
your face obscured in silence
This last phrase is cast in the visionary mode of modern painting. I know very little about the person depicted in the poem, yet I feel that the picture looks just right: with gentle despair, she sinks slowly into the shadows, stretching her malleable white arms in an arc.
The last line of the poem is purely impressionistic, and the author himself has said that he fears it will not be understood:
you wholly possess dark-hued green
Having seen her, we may perhaps come to understand that within this limitless “dark-hued green” are concealed tranquil wounds. And yet there is a momentary uncertainty. For she is not so much a withered flower fallen from a branch as a plucked blossom embroidered on ancient silk, broken but very beautiful, broken yet necessary nonetheless.
And thus living in China has something lovable about it: amid dirt and chaos and grief, one discovers everywhere precious things, things that bring joy for an afternoon, a day, a lifetime. I hear the roads in Germany are so squeaky clean that you can use them as a mirror, that they are wide, ruler straight, tidy to a fault, and planted all along their length with towering trees. And yet I suspect that walking along such a road day after day would drive one mad. Then there is Canada, a country that in the majority of people’s minds seems to lack any distinguishing characteristics whatsoever: a formless and desolate land. And yet my aunt says it is the best place in the world, with a cool climate, blue skies, emerald-colored grass, creamy white Western-style houses with red roofs as far as one can see, each with a freshly scrubbed look and boasting its own garden. If she could choose, she would live the rest of her life there. If I were to choose, I could not bear to leave China: I’m homesick even before I leave home.
WITH THE WOMEN ON THE TRAM
Every word of what follows is true, without the slightest tailoring or embellishment, and cannot be considered fiction.1
There were two women dressed in Western style sitting on this side of the tram, probably of mixed race or else Portuguese, who looked like they were typists working for a foreign firm. The women speaking was a bit plump, with a three-inch-wide black patent leather belt cinched around her waist and a round belly below. She had slender eyebrows, bags under her eyes, and because her forehead was rather prominent, her face seemed to be divided into two distinct halves. She said, “And so I haven’t spoken to him for a whole week. If he says ‘hello,’ I say ‘hello.’” She arched her eyebrows coldly, and the upper half of her face ascended along with them. “You know how stubborn I can be. When I know I’m in the right I’m always stubborn.”
On the other side of the tram sat another woman speaking of some other “him,” only her “him” was not a lover but a son. She was a middle-aged married woman, who looked like the proprietress of a little shop. Her hair was combed back in a lustrous black bun, and a pair of fashionable red lacquer earrings dangled from her ears. The young man listening to her speak must have been her nephew. With each sentence, he nodded his head in sympathy, and then the woman would nod again for emphasis. She said: “I wanted to update my wardrobe, but he wouldn’t let me. So I told him he wouldn’t be getting any spending money from me. The other day we were on the tram, and I told him to buy us tickets. And what do you think he said? ‘Sure, I’ll buy you tickets if you give me ten dollars!’ Awful, isn’t he?”
