Written on Water, page 5
In Ernü yingxiong zhuan (The story of lovers and heroes), Young Master An has an “East Chamber Wife” and a “West Chamber Wife.”4 He commissions a carved plaque to be placed above the door to the eastern chamber that reads “Banxiang shi” (Fragrant petal boudoir) and one for the western chamber that reads “Banxiang shi” (Fragrant companion boudoir). He goes on to call himself the Banban zhuren (Petal companion lord). When Old Man An sees these signs, he is most perturbed, viewing them as dubious markers of descent into the degenerate frivolity of romance. This passage often fires readers with indignation against the tyranny of the old-style family, so ubiquitous and invasive that even when a son chooses a perfectly harmless sobriquet, the patriarch still feels compelled to interfere. Surely all the name signifies is the son’s desire to enjoy his own wives? And was it not his own father who arranged his union with these women? Despite these objections, however, I still have quite a bit of sympathy for Old Man An, if only because creating superfluous sobriquets is, after all, a rather inane occupation.
What if we were to analyze the question on a more fundamental level? Why ever would someone feel compelled to have several names in the first place? Because, it seems, each individual is multifaceted. What a father sees in a person and what the foreigner at the office sees of the very same person are completely different matters, made so through differentials of power and relative position. Some people like to plaster their walls with mirrors from the ceiling to the floor so that they will always be able to take stock of their own image from several different angles, never tiring of the view. Taking extra names is a similar sort of self-inflation.
But if self-inflation does no harm to others, what’s wrong with using it as a means of amusing oneself? A sort of spiritual superfluity it may well be, but we Chinese have always had a penchant for profligate indulgence in beauty.
The desire for those in the world outside to take an interest in one’s name is an altogether different matter. Perhaps we really believe that when a reader sees our latest incarnation, they say “Oh, Gongyang Huan. When his first piece was published, he was still going by the name Zang Sun Didong, and when he submitted a manuscript to such and such magazine, he went by Ming Di, but he’s also been called Bai Bo, referred to on occasion as Mu Lian, and apparently the writer who goes by Ying Yuan is really him, too, as is Duan Dai, at least according to some people. In such and such a newspaper, his byline is Dongfang Maozhi, but when he’s acting as the editor for a women’s magazine, he temporarily takes on an appropriately feminized Lin Yanchan, also known as Nü Gui.”5 Even a prominent public figure who counted on people to commit so many names to memory might be accused of unduly extravagant expectations. How much the more so a writer?
If people do what they are expected to do, they receive the expected amount of recognition. And after ten years or so, when they have finished the job they have set out to do or simply can’t do it anymore, they are forgotten. Society has a short memory, and that is as it should be, and no one really has a right to complain . . . even though there are many things out there that people ought, but do not, remember!
When I was still in school, there were at least two other people who had the same name as I did, and no one seemed to think it was funny or lacking in good taste. When the Chinese teachers called out the roll, they never mispronounced my name; when the English teachers read out a name like Wu Wanyun they invariably ran into difficulties, as if their tongues were tied in a butterfly knot. But when they read my name, it always came to them loud and clear. No small mercy!
Recently I’ve begun to think that I ought to be dissatisfied with my name. Why shouldn’t I adopt two lovely and profound characters to make a new one? Even if they would have no impact on whether I’m really lovely and profound myself, they might at least prevent a bad first impression on my readers. I seem to remember that someone once said: “The art of succeeding in publishing depends first and foremost on selecting a positively effulgent name.” Could it be true (as Confucius said) that “if the name is incorrect, words will not follow. If words do not follow, deeds will go unaccomplished”?
China is a nation of words. When an emperor met with misfortune, he would immediately change the name of the reign period in hopes of turning the country’s luck in the year to come. What used to be the Twelfth Year of the Martial Advent would suddenly become the Inaugural Year of the Era of Great Celebration, thus putting an immediate end to the sufferings of the past. An excessive faith in the power of words is our most distinctive characteristic.
Everything in China sounds just a little bit too good, rolls just a little too easily off the tongue. Certainly, not everything that sounds or looks bad from the outside is necessarily useful, but the most useful people are often the most ordinary. I am willing to keep my unbearably vulgar name as a warning to myself that I must find a way to rid myself of the fussiness with words of the typical well-read intellectual and begin to look for life through its essentials: wood, rice, oil, salt, soap, water, and sun.
This story has wound its way back to the beginning. My desire to become an ordinary person and to focus on having an ordinary name is admittedly another form of “word worship.” Perhaps these are merely excuses. The reason I feel such a fond attachment to my name is tied up with my memory of how I came to be named. When I was ten, my mother proclaimed that I should be sent to school, and my father raised a huge storm of protest and refused to give his consent. Finally, my mother personally carried me to school over his loud protests, like a kidnapper. As she filled out the school registration card, she hesitated, uncertain what name to write down. My childhood name had been Ying, but to be called Ying Chang would sound a bit too reedy and dull. She propped her head against her hand and thought for a moment before saying: “Let’s transcribe your English name into Chinese for the time being.” She always planned to change it someday but never did; now, I wouldn’t want to change it anyway.
FROM THE ASHES
There’s already a considerable distance between myself and Hong Kong: one thousand miles, two years, new events, and new people. I would not have known how or from where to begin speaking of what I saw and heard in Hong Kong during the war, because the experience cut too close to the bone, affecting me in an altogether drastic fashion. My mind is now somewhat more settled, at least to the extent that I am able to keep those events in some kind of order when they come up in conversation. And yet my impressions of the Battle of Hong Kong seem nevertheless to be almost entirely restricted to a few irrelevant trivialities.
I have neither the desire to write history nor the qualifications to comment on the approach historians ought to bring to their work, but privately I have always found myself wishing that they would concern themselves more with irrelevant things. This thing we call reality is unsystematic, like seven or eight talking machines playing all at once in a chaos of sound, each singing its own song. From within that incomprehensible cacophony, however, there sometimes happens to emerge a moment of sad and luminous clarity, when the musicality of a melody can be heard, just before it is engulfed once more by layer after layer of darkness, snuffing out this unexpected moment of lucidity. Painters, writers, and composers string together these random and accidentally discovered moments of harmony in order to create artistic coherence. When history insists on the same sort of coherence, it becomes fiction. The reason that H.G. Wells’s Outline of History cannot stand as a proper history is that it is a little too rationalized, chronicling as it does the struggle between the individual and the group from start to finish.
Rigid and unswerving worldviews, be they political or philosophical, cannot help provoking the antipathy of others. What’s usually called joie de vivre is to be found entirely in trivial things.
In Hong Kong, when we first received word of the advent of war, one of the girls in the dormitory1 flew into a panic, “What am I to do? I have nothing to wear!” She was a wealthy overseas Chinese for whom different sorts of social occasions required different sorts of apparel. She had made adequate preparations for all kinds of contingencies, from dancing on a yacht to a formal dinner, but she had never considered the possibility of war. She managed eventually to borrow a baggy dress of black quilted cotton, which she figured would not be the least bit attractive to the fighter planes circling overhead. When the time came to flee, all the students in the dormitory went their separate ways. After the battle, when I ran into her again, she had cut her hair short in the boyish Filipino style that was all the rage in Hong Kong at the time, so that she could look more like a man if need be.
The psychological response of different people to the war did, in fact, seem to have something to do with their clothes. Take Sureika, for instance. Sureika was the reigning beauty of a remote little town on the Malay Peninsula, a skinny girl with dark brown skin, heavy-lidded and languorous eyes, and slightly protruding front teeth. Like most girls who have been educated in a convent, she was almost shamefully naive. She chose to study medicine. Medical students have to dissect corpses, but do the corpses wear clothes? Sureika was concerned about this question and made inquiries. This became a standing joke around campus.
When a bomb fell next door to our dormitory, the warden had no choice but to order us to evacuate down the hill. Even at the height of the crisis, Sureika did not neglect to pack up her most luxurious clothes and, in defiance of the earnest counsel of many wise people, found a way to transport them down the hill in a large and unwieldy leather trunk in the midst of an artillery barrage. Sureika later participated in defense work, becoming a substitute nurse for a Red Cross medical unit. She would squat down on her haunches to gather firewood and light bonfires, clad all the while in a copper-red brocade gown, embroidered in green with the character for “longevity.” And though it was something of a shame to wear such a nice dress under those circumstances, the brilliance of her attire allowed her an unprecedented degree of self-confidence, without which she would have been unable to mix so well with her male coworkers, and this made it worthwhile. As she shared their hardships and braved danger alongside them, sharing jokes, chatting, and growing accustomed to the work, she gradually became a skilled old hand. For her, the war was a rare sort of education.
For most of us students, however, our attitude toward the war could be summed up by a simile: we were like someone sitting on a hard plank bench, trying to take a nap. Although in terrible discomfort, and ceaselessly complaining of it, we managed to fall asleep all the same.
What we did not have to pay attention to we managed to ignore. As we passed through life-and-death situations, navigating the most colorful experiences imaginable, we remained ourselves, untouched, maintaining our everyday modes of life. Occasionally, someone might do something that seemed somewhat out of the ordinary, but after careful analysis, one could see that it was in fact entirely in character. Evelyn, for instance, was from the interior of China and had witnessed plenty of combat in her time. By her own account, she was hardy, tough, and entirely accustomed to frightening experiences. When the military garrison next to our dormitory was bombed in an air raid, though, Evelyn was the first to lose control, bursting into hysterical sobs and loudly relating her stock of terrifying war stories for the benefit of the other female students until their faces turned ghostly pale with fright.
Evelyn’s pessimism was a healthy sort of pessimism. When the grain reserves in the dormitory were almost gone, Evelyn began to eat more than usual and urged us all to do the same, since there would very soon be nothing left to eat at all. We had actually thought of making a serious bid to cut down our food intake and even ration our supplies, but she did her best to obstruct these efforts, eating more than her fill and sitting to one side and sobbing, all of which eventually resulted in a bad case of constipation.
We congregated in the basement of the dormitory, and in the pitch dark stood between stacks of trunks, listening to the sound of machine gun fire crackling like raindrops on water lotus leaves. Because the little scullery maid was afraid of ricocheting bullets and refused to go near the window to wash the vegetables in the light, our soup was full of little wriggling insects.
Yanying was the only one of my classmates who had any guts.2 She risked her life to go into town to see a movie—a Technicolor cartoon—and, when she got back to the dormitory, went upstairs all alone to take a bath. When a ricocheting bullet shattered the bathroom window, she remained calm, leisurely humming a tune as she continued to splash in the tub. The warden was furious when he heard her singing. Her indifference seemed to make a mockery of everyone else’s terror.
When the University of Hong Kong shut down, out-of-town students were forced to leave the dormitories—driven, in effect, into homelessness. There was no way to solve the problem of room and board save to join the defense effort. I went with a large group of fellow students to register at the Air-Raid Precaution headquarters. As soon as we were done, emerging with newly issued badges in hand, we managed to run right into an air raid. We jumped off the tram we had been riding and made a beeline for the sidewalk, flattening ourselves against a doorway, wondering whether we had fulfilled our duties as Air-Raid Precaution volunteers in the process. (Before I had managed to find out what the duties of an Air-Raid Precaution volunteer might be, the battle was already over and done.) The doorway of the building was crammed with people, bulky in their winter clothes, and smelled of naptha. Looking above their heads, I saw a brilliantly clear pale blue sky. The emptied tram sat in the middle of the street. The space outside the tram was full of pale sunlight; the tram, too, was filled with sunlight. In that moment, the lone tram possessed a sort of primitive desolation all its own.
I felt terribly uncomfortable—would I die amid a crowd of strangers? Yet what would be the good of being blown to bits and scraps alongside my own flesh and blood? Someone barked a command: “Hit the deck! Hit the deck!” How could one possibly find a place to hit the deck surrounded by such a lot of people? And yet we somehow managed to collapse against each other’s backs and tumble to the ground. An airplane dived through the air and with a bang was right over our heads. I covered my face with an Air-Raid Defense helmet, and only after a long moment of darkness did I begin to realize that we had not died after all. The bomb had landed on the other side of the street. A young store clerk who had been wounded in the thigh was being helped across the street, his pants leg rolled up to reveal a trickle of blood. He was very happy, because he had become the focus of the crowd’s attention. At first, the people outside the doorway tried to force the door open, but it wouldn’t budge. With the clerk’s arrival, they fell to again with the courage of newly discovered moral conviction and began to shout: “Open the door! Don’t you know there’s a wounded man out here! Open up!” One could hardly blame whoever was inside for not opening the door, because our little group was a rabble and might be capable of anything. The indignation of the crowd grew to such a pitch that they began to curse the people inside for “heartless beasts.” Finally, the door opened, and the crowd surged inside with a great shout, received by a couple of old ladies and their maids, who stood woodenly in the entrance hall and held their peace. It’s hard to say whether all the chests and storage baskets lining the corridor remained in place when everything was over. The plane continued to drop bombs on other parts of the city, receding gradually into the distance. And when the air-raid alert was finally lifted, the entire crowd made a mad dash for the tram car, for fear of forfeiting the price of a ticket if they couldn’t get on in time.
We received word that Professor France of the history department had been shot dead—by his own men.3 Like the rest of the English, he had been requisitioned by a military garrison. That day, he had come back to the barracks after nightfall. Perhaps he was lost in thought, for when he failed to respond to the sentry’s call, the sentry opened fire.
France was an open-minded and magnanimous fellow, thoroughly sinicized, who wrote a passable hand in Chinese (although he did have problems with stroke order), loved to drink, and had once gone on a trip with a group of Chinese professors to Canton, where they visited with the little nuns at a Buddhist nunnery of less-than-sterling repute. He had built himself a place with three bungalows well off the beaten track. One of the buildings was entirely given over to raising hogs. There was neither electricity nor running water at his house, because he did not approve of material civilization. He did, however, have a beat-up old automobile, which the house boy used for grocery shopping.
He had a childishly ruddy face, porcelain blue eyes, and a prominent round chin, his hair had already begun to thin, and he wore a tattered length of Nanking silk, printed with Buddhist swastikas, as a necktie. He smoked like a chimney during class. As he delivered his lectures, a cigarette would always dangle precariously from his lips, shuttling up and down like a seesaw but never falling to the ground. When he tossed his cigarette butts out the window, they would whiz past the girls’ billowy perms: a not inconsiderable fire hazard.
He had his own unique take on historical research. He read official documents to us with such rhetorical flourish that they became very funny. We derived a sense of being close to history from him, as well as a cogent worldview, and we could have learned so very much more, but he died—an entirely purposeless death. His life could not be said to have been sacrificed for the good of his country. And even if he had died for king and country, so what? He had very little sympathy for England’s colonial policies and didn’t take them all that seriously either, perhaps because he felt that it was only one of the world’s many follies. Whenever it was time for the volunteer corps to drill, he would always say, “I won’t be able to see you next Monday, children. I’ve got to practice my martial arts.” Little did we know that “practicing martial arts” would one day take his life. A good teacher, a good man. The waste of humanity . . .
