Written on Water, page 3
I like writing by way of equivocal contrast because it is relatively true to life. In “Love in a Fallen City,” Liusu escapes from her corrupt traditional family, but the baptism of the Battle of Hong Kong does not transform her into a revolutionary. The Battle of Hong Kong does affect Fan Liuyuan in the sense that it steers him toward a more settled existence and finally marriage, but marriage does not make him a saint or compel him to abandon completely his old habits and ingrained tendencies. Thus, although Liusu and Liuyuan’s marriage is healthy in some ways, it remains prosaic, earthbound, and, given their situation, it could be nothing more.
There are very few people, after all, who are either extremely perverse or extremely enlightened. Times as weighty as these do not allow for easy enlightenment. In the past few years, people have gone on living their lives, and even their madness seems measured. So my fiction, with the exception of Cao Qiqiao in “The Golden Cangue,” is populated with equivocal characters. They are not heroes, but they are of the majority who actually bear the weight of the times. As equivocal as they may be, they are also in earnest about their lives. They lack tragedy; all they have is desolation. Tragedy is a kind of closure, while desolation is a form of revelation.
I know that people are urgent in their demand for closure and, if they cannot have it, will be only be satisfied by further excitement. They seem to be impatient with revelation in its own right. But I cannot write in any other way. I think that writing in this manner is more true to life. I know that my works lack strength, but since I am a writer of fiction, the only the authority I have is to give expression to the inherent strength of my characters and not to fabricate strength on their behalf. Moreover, I believe that although they are merely weak and ordinary people and cannot aspire to heroic feats of strength, it is precisely these ordinary people who can serve more accurately than heroes as a measure of the times.
In this era, the old things are being swept away and the new things are still being born. But until this historical era reaches its culmination, all certainty will remain an exception. People sense that everything about their everyday lives is a little out of order, out of order to a terrifying degree. All of us must live within a certain historical era, but this era sinks away from us like a shadow, and we feel we have been abandoned. In order to confirm our own existence, we need to take hold of something real, of something most fundamental, and to that end we seek the help of an ancient memory, the memory of a humanity that has lived through every era, a memory clearer and closer to our hearts than anything we might see gazing far into the future. And this gives rise to a strange apprehension about the reality surrounding us. We begin to suspect that this is an absurd and antiquated world, dark and bright at the same time. Between memory and reality there are awkward discrepancies, producing a solemn but subtle agitation, an intense but as yet indefinable struggle.
There is an unfinished sculpture by Michelangelo, called Dawn, in which the human figure is only very roughly hewn and even the facial features are indistinct. But its expansive spirit symbolizes the imminent advent of a new era. If such works were to be produced today, one would be entranced, but none exist, nor indeed can they exist, because we are still unable to struggle free of the nightmare of the era.
And it is this era that constitutes my artistic material, one for which I believe the technique of equivocal contrast is appropriate. I use this method to portray the kinds of memories left behind by humanity as it has lived through each and every historical epoch. And by these means, I provide to the reality that surrounds me a revelation. This is my intention, although I do not know if I have accomplished it. I am incapable of writing the kind of work that people usually refer to as a “monument to an era” and I do not plan to try, because it seems that the concentration of objective material needed for such a project has yet to become available. And, in fact, all I really write about are some of the trivial things that happen between men and women. There is no war and no revolution in my works. I think that people are more straightforward and unguarded in love than they are in war or revolution. War and revolution, by their very nature, make more urgent demands of rationality than sensibility. Works that portray war and revolution often fail precisely because their technical prowess outstrips their artistry. In contrast with the unguarded freedom of love, war is inexorably imposed on us from the outside, whereas revolution often forces the individual to drive forward by dint of will alone. A real revolution or a revolutionary war, I believe, should be as emotionally unguarded and as able to penetrate into every aspect of one’s life as romantic love. And it should bring one back into a state of harmony.
I like forthright simplicity, but I must portray the rich duplicity and artifice of modern people in order to set them off against the ground of life’s simplicity. This is why my writing is too easily seen by some readers as overly lush or even decadent. But I do not think it possible to use the elemental approach of a book like the Old Testament. This is the altar on which Tolstoy was sacrificed in his waning years. Nor do I approve of the aesthetes who advocate Beauty above all else. I think that their problem lies not in their beauty but in their failure to provide the figure of Beauty with a ground. The water in a mountain stream is merely light and frolicsome, but seawater, though it may seem to ripple in much the same way, also contains within it the prospect of vast oceanic swells. Beautiful things are not necessarily grand, but grand things are always beautiful. And yet I do not place truthfulness and hypocrisy in direct and unequivocal contrast; instead, I utilize equivocal contrast as a means of writing the truth beneath the hypocrisy of modern people and the simplicity underneath the frivolity, and this is why I have all too easily been seen as overly indulgent and criticized for lingering over these beguiling surfaces. Even so, I continue to write in my own style and can only feel ashamed that I have yet to perfect my art. I am, after all, just a neophyte when it comes to literature.
When readers of the old school read my works, they find them rather diverting but also more unsettling than they should be. New-style people find them reasonably absorbing but not quite as serious as they might be. But that is the best I can do, and I am confident that my art is not compromised. I only demand of myself that I strive for an even greater degree of truthfulness.
Further, because I rely on a particular conception of equivocal contrast in my writing, I do not like to adopt the classicist manner in which good and evil, spirit and flesh, are always posed against each other in stark conflict, and thus the theme of my works may sometimes seem vague and unsatisfactory. I think the theory that a literary work needs a main theme could do with some revision. In writing fiction, one ought to have a story. It is better to let that story speak for itself than fabricating a plot in order to fit a certain theme. Readers often pay very little heed to the original themes of the great works that have come down to us through the ages, because times have changed, and those concerns no longer have the power to engage us. Yet readers of these works may at any time extract new revelations from the stories themselves, and it is only thus that the eternal life of any given work is assured. Take War and Peace, for instance. Originally, Tolstoy intended his story to revolve around the religious and collectivist philosophies of life that were popular at the time, but, as it turned out, the unfolding of the story itself eventually vanquished his predetermined theme. This is a work that was rewritten seven times, and with each revision the predetermined theme was forfeited still further. In the end, what remained of the theme was little more than an aside, becoming in fact the most awkward section of the novel, and there was no new main theme to replace it. This is why Tolstoy felt himself somewhat at a loss after having finished the novel. In comparison with Resurrection, the main theme of War and Peace does seem rather indistinct, but it remains much the greater work. Even now, every inch of the text comes alive as we read. The difference between modern literary works and those that came before also seems to rest on this distinction. No more does the emphasis lie principally on a main theme; instead, the story is allowed to give what it can and readers to take what they are able.
This is how I have and will continue to write Chained Links. In that work, the absence of a main theme is conspicuous, but I hope that people will like it for the story alone. My original idea was very simple: I would describe these sorts of things as they are. Modern people for the most part are exhausted, and the modern marriage system is irrational as well. Thus silence reigns between husbands and wives. There are those who look for relief by engaging in sophisticated flirtation, so as to avoid having to take responsibility for their actions, and those who revert to animal desires by patronizing prostitutes (but these are only beastly men and not beasts and are thus all the more horrifying). Then there is cohabitation, which is not as serious a bond as marriage, involves more responsibility than sophisticated flirtation, and is not so lacking in humanity as whoring. People who go to extremes are, in the final analysis, the minority, and so living together out of wedlock has become a very common phenomenon in recent years.
The social status of the men who support these kinds of arrangements is roughly middle class or below; they work hard and live thriftily. They can’t afford to let themselves go but aren’t so reserved that they are willing to let themselves sink into boredom, either. They need vibrant, down-to-earth relationships with women, relationships that are just as vibrant and down-to-earth as the other aspects of their lives. They need women to look after their homes and are consequently less perverse in their dealings with them. In Chained Links, Yaheya is the proprietor of a midsized silk shop who still must work the counter himself. If Nixi could get along with him in peace, peace would continue to reign in their relationship for years to come and nothing would prevent the two from growing old and gray together. The failure of their life together out of wedlock arises from Nixi’s own character flaws. Her second lover, Dou Yaofang, is the relatively prosperous owner of an herbal medicine shop, but he lacks the swanky air of a big-time capitalist. The petty official with whom Nixi lives has no more than a touch of the bureaucrat about him. Neither man is especially perverse when it comes to Nixi. What transpires between her and them is very human. And thus it should come as no surprise that these relationships are full of genuine affection.
As for women who live with men out of wedlock, their social position necessarily starts out somewhat lower than that of men, but most of them possess a fiery will to live. Still, the seductive power they have over their lovers is no more and no less than the charm of a healthy woman. If they were really as perverse as they are often imagined to be, they would not satisfy the needs of these men. Such women can work for attention, can be jealous, show off, and fight; they can be quite savage but never hysterical. They have only one problem: that their status remains forever in doubt. And because of this gnawing insecurity, they become selfish and mercenary as time goes on.
This sort of cohabitation is more prevalent in China than it is in the West, but no one has yet attempted to write about it. The Mandarin Ducks and Butterflies writers find these types of people lacking in the sentimentality traditionally evoked by “talented scholar and beautiful maiden” romances.3 The new-style writers, on the other hand, dislike that these relationships seem to resemble neither love nor prostitution and are thus neither healthy enough nor sufficiently perverse to lend themselves to the articulation of an unmistakably clear main theme.
What moves me about Nixi’s story is the purity of her passion for material life, a life that she must struggle with all her might to retain. She wants the love of men but also desires security, cannot have both simultaneously, and ends up in possession of neither. She feels she can depend on nothing and invests everything in her children, hoping thereby to reap the bounty of their labor: a most inhuman sort of reward.
It is not that Nixi lacks feeling. She wants to love this world but never finds an opening. Nor is it the case that she is unloved, but the love she receives is merely the leftover stew and cold table scraps from someone else’s meal, as in Du Fu’s poem: “Leftover stew and cold scraps / everywhere bitterness concealed.”4 But she is above all a vital, healthy woman and never resorts to beggarliness. She resembles instead someone who chews greedily on cakes made from leftover soybean dregs, fried in too much oil: even though she has a very strong constitution, and the meal might have a modicum of nutritional value, she’ll end up with an upset stomach. That a human being is made to eat the dregs usually intended for beasts is the real tragedy.
As for the fact that I have adopted phrases and diction from traditional fiction in writing Chained Links—where Cantonese and foreigners of fifty years ago speak like characters from The Golden Lotus or when the Chinese people in Pearl Buck’s fiction sound just like characters from old English literature when they open their mouths to speak—all these borrowings were for the sake of expedience and less than ideal as such. My original intention was this: the romantic ambience of Hong Kong as envisioned by Shanghai people would set up one sort of distance and the temporal divide between the present and the Hong Kong of fifty years ago would create another. So I adopted an already antiquated sort of diction in order to represent better these two kinds of distance. There are times when it may seem contrived and overdone. I think I will be able to make some corrections in the future.
NOTES ON APARTMENT LIFE
On encountering the line “I long to ride the wind home / but fear those coral towers and jade domes / for high places are unbearably cold,” the majority of apartment dwellers who live on the top floor might well feel a shudder of recognition run down their spines.1 The higher the apartment, the colder. Ever since the price of coal went up, radiators have become purely decorative. The “H” on the hot water tap may be an indispensable feature of a bathroom’s design, but as things stand now, if you mistakenly turn on the hot water instead of the cold, a series of wails and hollow thumps emerges from the “Nine Springs” of the netherworld somewhere down below. That is the sound of the apartment building’s terribly complicated and capricious hot water system losing its temper. Even if you don’t engage in deliberate provocation, this god of thunder might well make an appearance at any time. It comes at you out of nowhere with an evil, elongated buzz followed by two blasting sounds, exactly like an airplane circling over the roof of the building before dropping two bombs. Having lost my courage in the terror of wartime Hong Kong, this sound used to throw me into a panic when I first got back to Shanghai. Early on, the pipes still went about their work conscientiously, laboriously transporting hot water up to the sixth floor, where it arrived with a gurgle or two. That was easily forgiven. But nowadays there is loud thunder but very little rain, and we are lucky if we get two drops of rusty brown mud . . . but there isn’t much else I can say; the unemployed are so full of bile
In the rainy season, the foundation of the tall building sinks into the topsoil from its weight, such that the deepest puddles are clustered right around the front entrance. The street will be completely dry, but we still have to spend money hiring rickshaws to cross the vast and misty moat that rings the building. When there is too much rain, the apartment itself will flood. We take turns coming to the rescue, using old towels, burlap bags, and sheets to block up the cracks in the window. When these things get wet through, we wring them out and put them back, squeezing the dirty water into wash basins and then pouring it into the toilet. After two days and two nights of work, a whole layer of skin has been rubbed off our palms, but water still pools at the base of the walls, and the patterned wallpaper is dappled with water stains and spots of mildew.
If the wind is not blowing in our direction, however, rain at the top of a tall building is actually quite lovely. One day, it rained around dusk. I had forgotten to close the windows on my way out, and when I came home and opened the front door, the apartment was full of the sound of wind and the smell of rain, so I looked out the window. It was a deep blue, raindrop-spattered night, with a few pale lamps swaying in the distance. Most of the houses had yet to turn on their lights.
I am often astounded by how extraordinarily clearly one can hear street noises from the sixth floor, as if it was all happening right beneath one’s ears, resembling the way memories of trivial incidents from childhood become increasingly clear and close the older and more distant they become.
I like to listen to city sounds. People more poetic than me listen from their pillows to the sound of rustling pines or the roar of ocean waves, while I can’t fall asleep until I hear the sound of trams. On the hills in Hong Kong, it was only in the winter when the north wind blew all night long through the evergreens that I was reminded of the charming cadence of a tram. Those who have lived their whole lives amid the bustle of the city do not realize what exactly they cannot do without until they have left. The thoughts of city people unfold across a striped curtain. The pale white stripes are trams in motion, moving neatly in parallel, their streams of sound flowing right into subconscious strata.
Our apartment is near the tram depot, but I’ve never been able to tell exactly what time they come home. The phrase “trams coming home” doesn’t seem quite right—everyone knows that trams are soulless machines and that the words “coming home” all but overflow with sentimental associations. But have you ever seen the strange spectacle of trams going into their garage? One after another, like small children waiting in line, noisy, squealing, hoarse bells happily sounding out: “cling, clang, cling, clang.” Amid the noise, a sense of a docility born of exhaustion, like children before bedtime waiting for their mothers to help them wash up. The lights in the trams shine bright white. Vendors hawk bread to tram ticket collectors coming off the late shift. Every once in a while, when all the trams have gone inside, a single one is left parked outside, mysteriously, as if it had been abandoned in the middle of the street. Seen from above, its exposed white belly gleams in the moonlight in the depths of the night.
