June 11, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Brian Castro is the author of eleven novels, a volume of essays and a poetic cookbook. His novels include the multi award-winning Double-Wolf and Shanghai Dancing. He was the 2014 winner of the Patrick White Award for Literature and the 2018 Mascara Avant-Garde Award for fiction.
APOPHLEGMS
So I shall begin in pencil, where everything can be erased and the handwriting improved with the body’s shaping, so that lightness, craft and humble shavings should not last beyond the moment of creation, the smell of wood, some graphite, scenting the lone forests of perennial disappearance, the forever of lost time.
***
Henry David Thoreau: “I am a pencil.”
***
Janna Malamud Smith: “My Father Is A Book.”
***
Nadine Gordimer: “A serious person should try to write posthumously.”
***
My father was a tension highball – bourbon and temper – a genius for striving – never giving up – though all of giving up was necessary for me, giving up on marriages, futures, how old am I! Crushed by appearance. But let the real seduce the real – those beautiful women of the imagination and their first deaths, when I got it all wrong emotionally, not hearing the silence of the icebergs and their subliminal creaking. I found out pretty quickly that there was no woman for all seasons.
***
But hey, I understand cool. Phlegmatic is my humour. Epistolary my manner. Do you read me? Probably not, these shuddering wings of butterflies leaving only powder on the page which one blows as drying pounce over ink, but there is nothing afterwards, as though I am being dreamt.
***
I would like to slip into reading again like an old familiar slipper after all these years at the factory in Hobbesian boots, one leg in fear, the other in contract. But how long will it last? How long before the scribbling itch returns and speeds past, overtaking the slow train of thought only to come to grief at the level-crossing?
***
When he thinks of death he is overcome by an inconsolable loneliness. Irreversible oblivion is relieved by living expression, which is fake, as fatuous as saying: “Tomorrow I died.”
Such irrational tenses are nevertheless possible and not only in language. The future is already done if you know how to practise this solitary exercise.
***
Sitting up late Sunday night:
How I love its beauty and revolving charms!
Each loaded chamber a lessening option.
Meditate on its weight, the heft of its cross-hatched handle,
smell of fine oil.
Well, no one writes to the colonel of desire.
***
In a recurring dream I forget that I am on my own and then I wake and am on my own and what a reprieve!
***
Geoffrey Blainey said we had to limit Asian immigration because if you walk down the main street of Cabramatta they are all spitting.
On more than a dozen occasions, in outer-suburban railway stations, blond or shaven-headed young men hawk and spit very close to me until I am of no doubt they mean to spit at me. I presume someone spits for someone to watch the spitting. Perhaps it is a sign of solidarity. An epidemiology of semiology. But it is not a football field where everyone spits together out of physical effort. Politics and sport do not mix. Some senators, all of whom can’t play football, should turn themselves black by injecting melantonin. Then they would know where they really stand when someone spits on them.
Apophlegm: Choked with the flegma and humour of his sins he shouted: “Apathy forthwith!” to relieve his chill Blaineys.
***
I was given a Japanese calligraphy chest, circa mid-nineteenth century, probably carried on and off American ships led by Commodore Perry in 1853. Someone had carved an anchor on its side. Such barbed weights must have been intriguing, quite like briefcases.
It is a dark wooden chest no larger than a US Army ordnance grenade box.
But what smells it harbours!
Old lives, multiple secrets, aged coffin-wood.
In the top section there is a secret compartment in which you can lift out a tray from the whole.
Beneath is not another chamber but a very shallow section, only deep enough for secreting a special letter from an envoy or a lover. A fragrant missive perhaps, hidden from prying eyes but which can only be identified by scent. Or maybe poison, if you lick the envelope.
There are always these chambers of the heart made shallow by time, undiscoverable for their deep meaning. No longer secret, unsophisticated in the technological age, they become the logic of memory in its reinvestment of story.
But how frivolous are books without the engagement of the writer in total desperation?
One needs to put oneself on the line; go out and get hurt; lose one’s lover and all one’s money. Then tell me you’re trying to write.
***
Nous travaillons à la recherche de la réalité plutôt que de chercher la sagesse.
La réalité est un but idiot. Elle s’arrête tout court. Éphémère, elle n’est qu’une illusion de la vérité, c’est à dire, la mort.
***
Unknown: She who thinks like a cryptic crossword is the lover of my dreams.
One has to go figure.
June 8, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Grace Yee was born in Hong Kong and grew up in New Zealand and Australia. Her poetry, short fiction and essays have appeared in various journals, including Meanjin, Southerly, Westerly, Island, Heat, Going Down Swinging and Hecate. She lives in Melbourne, where she teaches creative writing at universities.
the mission: by miss w, fourth generation chinese new zealander
each day it began with the morning poo
baba’s coffee steaming kitchen tiles
greased with the splatter of wok-fried food
baby sister dribbling marmite in her highchair
while burning toast smoked the kitchen sepia
baba would hand out the cadbury’s
after we’d tied our tattered shoes
and slid into the backseat of the rusty fusty toyota
by the time we got to school our eyes were wide as walnuts
stay out of the sun our wan-faced mother would warn
too-dark-like-a-māori
but I knew I had to be brown
it was the colour of everyone-and-everything-in-the-world-that-wasn’t-white
as pretty as miss hong kong
in summer my mother stomped around the house
in bare feet. she didn’t pad, she stomped.
she stomped because she hated the heat, the house
and raising children in the heat in the house.
she stomped because god had given her a gambling man
and a job frying fish six days a week.
at night when all was done for the day, my mother would sit
on our second-hand hemp sofa, tuck her feet sideways
like a mermaid and watch television.
she liked selwyn toogood’s money or the bag
because she wanted to win the sewing machine, and she loved
the annual miss universe pageant because she wanted to win
that too. she would ask my ogling dad if he thought she
was as pretty as miss hong kong.
I would be sprawled on the floor with a book
not far below her feet. my mother’s feet were the colour of cooked chicken
(though bonier) and the heels were cracked dry and black.
she never had the urge to moisturise
or to do that thing where you slough off the dead skin:
exfoliate.
I yearned to pull at the crusty bits myself,
sure that if I could yank the skin off
I would find my real mother underneath.
but we were forbidden to touch any part of her body.
(my little brother stroked a toe one day, and for his trouble
received a kick and a blood nose).
when my mother dressed up to go out
she would spend hours setting her hair and powdering her face
and she’d put her feet in pretty sandals. that her crusty black heels
were on show didn’t seem to bother her in the slightest.
I think they were her parting shot,
a way of saying as she left a place: ‘yes, I do look nice, don’t I?
but look how hard I have to work for it’
June 8, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Dorothy Tse is the author of four short story collections in Chinese, including So Black and A Dictionary of Two Cities. Her collection, Snow and Shadow, translated by Nicky Harman, was long-listed for The University of Rochester’s 2015 Best Translated Book Award. A recipient of the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and Taiwan’s Unitas New Fiction Writers’ Award, Tse is a co-founder of the Hong Kong literary magazine Fleurs de lettres. She currently teaches literature and writing at Hong Kong Baptist University.
The Door
translated by Natascha Bruce
By the time the men arrived, the sky was a swathe of bruise-dark purple, a red and blue concoction that seeped through the air like melting stage make-up. I leaned from a second-floor window and spied on them as they swaggered up the main street. They wore baggy, factory-issue windbreakers that puffed in the wind, like balloons ready to take flight. But when they reached the front door, their trapped shadows leaked away, leaving them more like deflated dolls.
They did not remove their shoes, which were caked in dust and mud. Instead, they marched straight inside, treading all over my wife’s well-swept floor and throwing themselves onto the sofa, and the chairs that circled the dining table (and, in one case, onto Lily’s wooden rocking horse), asking what I had to eat. I fetched a pear tart from the kitchen and, as I sliced through it with a wheel cutter, made sure to turn and watch them. Just as expected, they were immersed in their own gloomy worlds and failed to notice my wife’s masterpiece. I couldn’t help feeling sad for her, and her meticulous efforts; of course such a refined gesture was wasted, with guests as boorish as these.
My wife had made the tart the night before, kneading flour and water into a soft skin and pressing it into a circle, then laying on slices of pear in a spiral, working out from the centre. When she put it in the oven to cook, the crust rippled like waves and the pears glistened like molten gold.
‘There aren’t many moments in life as moving as this,’ I said to her, watching the transformation through the oven door. She was standing beside me and giggled behind her hand, elbowing me in the arm as though I’d made a joke.
The men devoured the tart in an instant, scraping down to the bottom of the dish and coming face-to-face with my pathetic reflection in its stainless-steel surface. I thought back to the last time my wife made one, and felt its lingering sweetness welling in my throat. She and Lily would probably be on the train by now, far outside the city. Now only the men were in the flat, with their chewing and belching, their periodic hearty slaps at something or the other, and their constantly jiggling legs. I moved to a far corner of the living room to escape them, sitting down on a low stool near the entrance to the kitchen.
I’d never been fond of these manly get-togethers. Inviting them over had been my wife’s idea. A few days holiday were coming up, and she’d put a hand over mine and asked about my plans. I had the idea of building a model castle with Lily (I’d bought a set and hidden it away under the bed). There was also a strip light in the kitchen that hung down at one end, and it was high time I fixed it. But my wife didn’t seem to be paying attention – she went to stretch out on the sofa, closed her eyes, and let out a soft, contented sigh.
‘The thing is, I’ve bought train tickets. I’ve decided to take Lily away for a couple of days, to a faraway guesthouse, and let you have a bit of freedom. Why don’t you invite your friends round?’
And, of course, those ‘friends’ she mentioned were the men I worked with in the furniture factory, fixing and inlaying wood. I didn’t have anybody else.
*
Several years before, in order to live with my wife in the city centre, I’d had to leave the little flat that I shared with my parents in District M, where we relied on one another for everything. At the time, Lily was still inside what I used to think of as my wife’s black aquarium. I would spread my fingers across her rounded belly, and feel the faint, rippling motions of a lonely aquatic creature. Perhaps another description could have been a train without a view? When I left, watching from the train as the icy night swallowed row upon row of squeezed-together houses, I suddenly realised that I didn’t recognise a single person in the fluorescent-lit carriage. My wife and I had known each other less than six months; she was fast asleep against the darkened window-glass, and her illuminated face took on the contours of a stranger, shaking with the rhythm of the train. I placed my hand on the high swell of her stomach and tried to imagine the child’s face, but Lily didn’t have a face yet, or a name. On public transport, nothing is more permitted than feeling like a stranger. I thought I’d miss the familiar people from back home, but the train entered a tunnel and my parents’ voices were crushed by the roar of the engine. Even I changed, turning into the flickers of light and shadow projected into the carriage from outside.
Starting a new life was easier than I imagined. I brought only one suitcase and moved into the flat where my wife had been living all along. Everything was already there. Light fixtures with cloth umbrella shades hung from the ceiling, casting a golden glow over the ripe peaches on the dining table. She had crocheted antimacassars, which extended like cobwebs along the length of her sofa, and there was a thriving tropical plant, grown to the same height as me. A coat pattern she was making spread across the work table in the living room (she dreamed of becoming a fashion designer, but had been drawing up patterns for other designers ever since art school). Pulling back the sunflower-print shower curtain and soaking in the tiny bathtub, I had the feeling that I’d become another part of the house. In her orderly space, I had come alive.
But after moving into my new home, I was much farther from the furniture factory, which was on the outskirts of District M. To get to work on time, I had to wake up at the crack of dawn, when even the dust motes were still asleep, and join the flow of commuters feeding into the sea of drab city faces. And once I became a regular passenger, there ceased to be anything charming about trains. In those years, the crush of passengers was rife with resentments, especially between locals and the many others who came from elsewhere. A good number of times, a muttered comment sparked an on-board fist fight. Nothing ever went quite so far as the poison gas attacks reported in other cities, but suspected bombs turned up at the station on more than one occasion. Eventually, they were all dismissed as pranks, but there were always a couple of skulls or shoulders trampled in the preceding panic.
On days off, I chose to stay at home as much as possible. I read, or fixed furniture, or simply stayed in bed with my wife until Lily pushed through our door, clutching her book of fairytales. She’d climb up and burrow her way in between our lazy bodies, demanding that we go through those crazy stories yet again: a mother who sold her own child to support her desperate craving for cabbage; a daughter who disguised herself in animal skins to escape the lascivious affections of her father; a blue-bearded monster who killed his wives and kept the corpses locked in a secret room.
Once in a while, I’d go with my wife to meet her friends and, to my surprise, did not dislike these gatherings. My wife refused to believe that I’d never really socialised before, because her friends always showered me with praise for my impeccable manners. She didn’t know it was precisely because I had no history in those situations – I didn’t have to act like ‘myself’, so I simply played the role of her husband.
My wife didn’t have the kind of girlfriends who were always heading out to the beauty salon or comparing latest shoe styles, but all sorts of people seemed to feel especially drawn to her. The building’s cleaning lady, for example, who was always taking her aside to share pieces of neighbourhood gossip. Or the man who came to fix the water pipes, who could recognise her from miles away and would wave enthusiastic greetings, even though he’d only been around once in months. Or the solitary old lady who used to sit out on the main street in her wheelchair, taking in the sun, still as a statue; at the sight of my wife, her head would dip and her fingers would suddenly spring to life, rapidly wheeling the chair towards her. My wife never told me what she heard, when she stooped down and pressed her ear to the old lady’s mouth. She’d just smile, firmly gripping the Chinese pear the lady had pressed into her hands. In the evening, once we were home, she’d slide its sweet, juicy flesh into my mouth like a secret, one slice at a time.
As for me, standing behind my wife, all I wanted was to make my presence as unobtrusive as a shadow. With a smile fixed to my face, I carefully remembered the names of all her friends, spoke very little, nodded at the appropriate moments and, every so often, made sure to place morsels of food in her bowl. In this way, it was easy enough to win everyone’s affection.
‘How come you don’t have friends of your own?’ my wife would ask me, and I never had an answer. I had my wife – and later, Lily – and because of my wife I had all her friends, in a way, and this was enough for me. But when she asked the question, my contentment made me doubly ashamed. I didn’t mind not having a social circle of my own. Wasn’t it just further proof that my reclusive character was unsuited for mainstream society? Before my marriage, in an attempt to keep up ‘appropriate’ levels of interaction, I sometimes dragged myself along to the staff socials organised by the factory, or joined my parents on low-cost outings with the local community centre. Afterwards, I was always exhausted, filled with shame and frustration at the thought of my chameleon-like facial expressions, and all the things I’d said but not meant. At the same time, I found it reassuring to have made the effort, as though I’d fulfilled a duty to act like a human being. Once I was married, I attached myself to the goodwill around my wife, like a cold shadow hitched to a warm human body, and found myself winning the approval of others without any struggle at all.
*
The men all lived near the factory, and to reach the city centre they had to endure the torture of the train ride. I’ve already explained what it was like – they liked to stress that, were it not for our great friendship, they would never put themselves through such torment on a day off. But I didn’t believe they would ever have let their dislike for the journey stand in their way. What they declared to be our ‘friendship’ could have been the reason, but there were other possible factors: the exciting buzz of the city, or the table laden with food that my wife prepared for every gathering, accompanied by an endless stream of beer. Perhaps even more to the point, they had bellies chock-full of complaints, and they needed to get far enough away from their own homes to vent in peace.
In the furniture factory, I never went near these men. I worked silently and alone, by a window with a view onto a line of cotton trees. If you walked deeper into the factory, passing through the angry sound of hammers banging against wood and steel, you’d see the irate, exhausted eyes of the men, turned a dull grey by the swirling sawdust. But now, enthusiastically recounting their misfortunes from the comforts of my home, their eyes emitted vivid beams of light. Sometimes, their faces would take on the expressions of dictators, lining up their personal tragedies like obedient citizens. Naturally, they would conclude that their wives were the eyes of every storm, or else their wives’ parents, or those foreigners who kept coming in to find work, or the tropical climate, or the pollen that filled the streets in springtime. If it hadn’t been for them, the men would have been bolder, and lived entirely different lives.
Listening to their endless, meandering talk, it was hard not to let my mind wander. I’d slip away down a little forked alley, walking further and further along, losing myself in my thoughts. In this sense, I had to be thankful for their boorish, oblivious natures, because it meant they were unlikely to notice that my attention was elsewhere. I suspected that even they ended up lost in their own chatter; lost in forests they had planted themselves. Then there’d be a few words that struck them like sharp stones, shocking them back to consciousness. Their faces flushed and their ears went hot, and they worked themselves into such aggressive, emotional states that I felt like a wild animal tamer, with a duty to calm them down. I’d keep their drinks topped up and bring more food from the kitchen.
On this occasion, I brought out the last of the comfort food: the chicken my wife had roasted the previous night. Such a beautiful bird, wings clamped tightly against its glistening body. Its head inclined slightly towards me, with its crest angrily sticking up. The eyes had been shut all morning, but somehow were now wide open and staring fixedly at me, as though sizing me up. I caught sight of my face reflected in the television screen; you couldn’t have called it a warm face, but I watched it crack into a winning smile. This was something I’d learned from experience: a facial expression is like any other domesticated life form, knowing when to nod and wag its tail, or when to burst out laughing.
I was surprised to see this same smile reciprocated on the men’s faces. Usually, they kept up an uninterrupted litany of grumbles and debates, only stopping after a string of reminders that the last train was due. That day, however, they lost interest in talking ahead of schedule, and had no appetite for the food left on the table. But they seemed to have no intention of leaving. I looked away from them, towards the door to the kitchen, thinking of the strip light hanging down at one end, wishing I could go in and fix it. But the men pinned me with their stares. Their silent smiles were like so many nails, keeping my buttocks tacked to my seat. Not knowing what to do, I turned to watch the sky changing colour through the window. At first, a big group of black jellyfish-like creatures seemed to be swimming through it, slowly devouring all other colours, but gradually I realised it was the other way around: the other colours were vomiting the black, and this was why it looked so mottled and fractious. And in front of that ominous roll of blackness, faces were pressing in on me, their hands reaching for my arms, clasping me in a brotherly embrace. One of them patted my back and said, ‘Don’t keep your feelings stuffed in your guts, how are things with the wife lately? If there’s something going on, you should tell us.’ Then he poured the second half of a bottle of beer into my glass, filling it to the brim, and cheerily told me that they weren’t leaving until I confessed the truth.
I took a sip of beer and, as the bubbles dissolved pleasurably in my mouth, wondered whether this was a rite of passage, and they were welcoming me as one of the guys. But all I could do was shake my head, because what could I tell them about my wife? That late every evening, once our kid was in bed, we huddled under the same sheet, tired but happy, discussing the menu for the next day’s dinner? That I liked to go food shopping in the market after work, examining the shape of an aubergine or an onion, contentedly imagining the delicious aroma once it arrived in her hands? That I would bury my head between her thighs and stick out my tongue, tasting her sweet, seaweed flavour? None of those things were suitable for sharing. Not because they were too private, but because they were too close to happiness. Pain and misfortune are the only gifts suitable for friends; only shared tragedy builds friendships. Perhaps because they’d had too much to drink, the men’s eyes glowed red and they encircled me like a pack of starving dogs, eager to gnaw on the bones of my hidden sadness. But what did I have to feed them?
*
There was nothing in my present life that I could really complain about. I couldn’t imagine doing any job other than working in the furniture factory. I loved the scents of the different kinds of wood, and how each had its own distinctive grain – to the point that, every time we shipped out a finished chair or bedframe or, most of all, big wooden farmer’s table, I felt a pang of regret. And my blissfully-happy marriage was surely some mysterious gift of fate, because until I was thirty-eight years old, I’d never even been in love.
It all started with the complimentary ticket to a Christmas party that came attached to my family’s new air conditioner, giving the address as a three-star hotel in the city centre. The moment my father solemnly pressed it into my hand, I knew there was no getting out of this assignment (we weren’t a well-off family and unexpected gifts were bright spots in our lives, certainly not things to be turned down). But when I stepped into the hotel ballroom, which was festooned with streamers and balloons, with my face freshly shaved, dressed in my only white shirt, I immediately regretted that I’d come. I walked into the crowd of men and women I’d never met before, and felt their chatter and laughter weighing against my chest, leaving me unable to breathe. I kept walking straight ahead, my eyes trained on the back of the room, where there was a row of long tables covered in white tablecloths. The tables were laden with all kinds of little delicacies – light glinted off the grease of flaky pastry rolls and the grooves of the fresh cream swirled on top of tiny cakes, and this was my salvation. I marched single-mindedly towards them and piled my plate high. Then, selecting an out-of-the-way corner, I settled into an unoccupied chair and promised myself that I could leave once I had eaten all my food.
I must have been too concentrated on the cakes, because until she whipped out a shiny silver fork, I didn’t notice my wife (although at that stage she was still just some unknown woman). She sat down in front of me and exclaimed: ‘This dessert’s all gone! You don’t mind if I have some of yours, do you?’
As though conducting a symphony, she held her shiny fork poised over the mini donuts on my plate (believe it or not, I’d taken two of every kind). I nodded immediately; I’m sure I blushed. She grinned, revealing a row of widely-spaced teeth. It thrilled me to discover that the gaps between her teeth were much bigger than other people’s; dark and mysterious, like tunnels waiting to be entered.
Her curtains were the gauzy, translucent kind that let light flood in, dispersing the last, muddled dreams of the early morning. I thought she was still in bed, but when I reached for her my fingers clutched at air. I staggered out of the bedroom, calling wildly through the unfamiliar flat, the events of the night before as uncertain as my footsteps. Back then, I didn’t even know her name. I followed the hallway, peering into another room, which led to another room, whose walls seemed to block the way to another. Confused, I walked back along the hall. The woman seemed to have vanished, until her face pressed against my shoulder, appearing as suddenly as a snake darting from a cave. ‘Where have you been hiding?’ I asked, and she smiled but said nothing, curling a hand round to pass me a cup of ink-black coffee and a mini donut dusted with icing sugar.
Her mini donut was much better than the ones in the hotel, just as she had promised. I still remember that morning, and the way we walked out onto the street hand in hand, mouths covered in icing sugar, inviting mockery from passers-by. But I had passed by the kitchen, and there had been no trace of cooking on the gleaming counter tops. I never said anything, but my wife’s ‘disappearance’ wasn’t a one-off occurrence; in her flat, the same thing happened again and again. Was there some kind of secret passage, where she could hide without making any sound? Any time I raised these kinds of questions, she would tap me lightly on the forehead and joke about my over-active imagination.
It’s true that it was just a small, two-bedroom flat. Walking out of the master bedroom, I was confronted by the gloomy hallway. The first room on the right was Lily’s – if I opened the door, I’d see her dolls and wooden building blocks strewn across the floor. To the left was the bathroom, and straight ahead was where we ate dinner every evening, which linked to the living room, which doubled as my wife’s studio. The kitchen was to the left of the living room, and at the back of the kitchen was a door. The door seemed like it must lead somewhere, but when I opened it, all I saw was a headless dressmaker’s mannequin, draped with a coat that hadn’t yet had its sleeves sewn on, a few boxes stuffed with my wife’s yarn and fabrics, stacked on top of one another, and some of her older projects. And if I shoved all this to one side, there was just a murky white wall, pressing in on me.
Before we married, my wife’s flat was like our private express train of snatched pleasures, and I never had the chance to explore it properly. She gave me a tour after I moved in – ‘This used to open out onto an illegal balcony with a view of the street,’ she told me, ‘but it had to be dismantled a few years ago.’ So why did she fail to mention the door? Later, while cleaning the flat, I discovered that, in the hallway, diagonally across from Lily’s room, there was another door; one that I’d never noticed before. It had always been concealed in the shadows, but with the light from Lily’s room spilling into the corridor, I could see its outline. Even in the light, it wasn’t an ordinary door. It looked as though it was afraid and trying to hide itself in the wall, like an enormous creature covered in camouflage. There was no handle and, no matter how I pushed, it wouldn’t budge. I gently stroked the surface, but it refused to respond. The gap between the door and doorframe was too narrow for my fingers to fit.
My wife shook her head when I mentioned it, asking what crazy thing I was talking about now. I brought her over to look but she played it down, saying it was probably just part of the decoration, because a door wouldn’t have anywhere to lead to. Did she think I was some kind of joke? She put her headphones back on, clearly in the middle of listening to something, and burst into hearty laughter. I stared at the black gaps between her teeth, now on full display, but had no way of guessing what they were hiding.
After Lily was born, I often carried her into the hallway and stood in front of the door, pointing at it, saying, ‘Look, Lily, don’t you want to go and play behind the door?’ I would take her hand and try to make her press it into the edges, but she always shook free and threw her arms around my neck, closing her eyes and burying her face in my shoulder. Once, I was firmer about it and forced her fingers into the crack, hoping they’d be able reach past the accumulated dust, but she wailed loudly, as though she’d touched something dangerous. She didn’t stop until my wife ran over, asking what had happened, brow furrowed with concern, and carried her away.
*
Perhaps my wife was right, and the door was just a figment of my imagination. Maybe it was a repeat of another door, one I’d seen in middle school. I had nothing to hide from my wife, but I’d never told her that, once, back then, you could almost have said that I fell in love (possibly, I hadn’t told her because I’d convinced myself I’d forgotten all about it).
Was it the very first day of middle school? I had arrived very early. Because of the sultry weather, or else my aversion to groups, I headed straight for a big, leafy acacia tree. I sat beneath it, enjoying the fresh breeze and imagining my face turning unrecognisable in the shadow, while listening attentively to the voices behind me.
Those two girls must have met before, because they exchanged nicknames and code words that only they could understand, excitedly sharing tales of their fathers being ‘pervy’ – they stretched out the word, making it peeeeervy, as though it had breath and feelings of its own. There was a pattern to their conversation: they took turns to give examples of ‘pervy’ behaviour, and then proceeded to assess it. For example, one girl would tell the other that when her father went downstairs to buy a paper, she’d seen him slipping porn magazines in between the pages. Then the other girl would talk about how her father always took the raised walkways to go home, so that he could ogle the breasts of women below. Sometimes, the fatherly wrongdoings were deemed suitable only for whispers and I couldn’t hear what was said, just the cackles of laughter that followed. After a while, I realised that for them the important thing wasn’t the content of what they were saying, but the exaggerated, mutually-affirming way in which they said it. It brought them closer together.
Once I worked this out, I lost interest and stopped listening. Surveying my surroundings, I saw that the playground had broken up into a series of little cliques. Even the new students had found companions, aside from a few loners who stood off to one side, emanating the wretched air of abandoned animals.
Of course, back then I thought that I was different. For some people, solitude is a choice; for others, it’s something life decides for them. I had actively rejected company, whereas those other students were flawed, and had been squeezed out and abandoned. There was a girl standing by herself, some distance from the other students, grinning in my direction, and I quickly determined that she was one such creature. I had nothing better to do, so looked back at her. A while later, I realised I couldn’t tear my eyes away, and the reason was the wide gaps between her teeth, which made me feel like I knew her. They reminded me of the street market and its row of grinning clowns, lips stretched back so that customers could shoot at their teeth.
When I was younger, there were a few boring streets in District M that would sometimes liven up at night. On the ground, or on makeshift tables, people would lay out random, messy assortments of cheap clothes, toys, household items, and electric appliances. These goods were dusty and dirty, leaving almost no doubt that they were second-hand, but most of the shoppers had no other choice. And thus, despite their sad appearances, the objects still glinted with a desperate kind of life.
For us kids, these rare transformations saw the streets turn into a fairground. A long queue always snaked from the entrance to the space shuttle ride, which charged two dollars to carry children two metres into the air and back again, and crowds clustered around a game of torturing goldfish with a little net. But I only ever had eyes for the wide, flat faces of the clowns. I had an insatiable passion for shooting at their teeth.
Repeated practice meant that my technique was honed to perfection, but even once I could easily have knocked out every single big clown tooth, I always made sure to leave one standing. My father used to accompany me to the market, and refused to let this go; he’d snatch the gun from my hands and shoot out that last tooth himself, winning me the toy bear jackpot but leaving me in tears. He didn’t understand that I couldn’t stand a completely empty mouth, but found a clown with only one tooth left hilarious.
I don’t know why the girl with gaps between her teeth looked at me with such affection, that first day of school. When the scratchy speaker-system voice started repeating orders for us to line up, the clown-girl followed me, and we walked together into the rank of students. Contrary to what I’d first thought, she wasn’t one of the abandoned creatures. As it turned out, she blended easily with all kinds of groups, and was welcomed by everyone. In my case, on the other hand, she was my only friend for the whole of junior high. Perhaps she thought I was the rejected one, and that was why she befriended me? The thought made me want to run away. But then, at lunchtime, when she invited me to sit with her on the old tyres on the school slope, and we traded side dishes from our lunch boxes, my resolve crumbled. And (I have to admit) when she laughed, showing those black gaps between her teeth, I felt indescribably happy.
After class one day, she suddenly asked whether I wanted to come over to hers. She said her mother had bought a lot of chocolate cake the day before, but there was only her at home and she couldn’t finish it by herself. It was the first time I’d ever been invited to a friend’s house. Embarrassed to tell my parents, I crept home to change my clothes, snuck a few pears out of the fridge and into a plastic bag, and then headed out.
The clown-girl lived on top of a hill, in a peaceful little neighbourhood that I’d never been to before, in what turned out to be a three-storey detached house. She came to the door and graciously accepted my bag of unappetising pears. Then, just like a grown-up, she brewed tea for me and served it in proper tea cups, and placed two slices of chocolate cake on two butterfly-patterned dessert plates. Usually, our interactions felt as natural as breathing, but that day, probably because of the unfamiliar surroundings, I felt awkward. For a long time, we sat side by side on the sofa. I was waiting for her to start eating her cake, so that I could follow suit, but she ignored all the refreshments in favour of meaningless chit-chat. I forget what we talked about; all I remember is that she was wearing a silk nightgown that she must have borrowed (stolen) from her mother’s wardrobe. Sitting beside her, every so often I’d glimpse the gentle swell of her still-growing breasts and, whenever she shifted position, feel the heat from her body waft against mine. I don’t know how much time passed before she announced that she was leaving for a bit, but we still hadn’t touched the cake. I watched her walk away and, for several seconds, was unable to react.
I looked up and realised that I was all alone in a spotlessly-clean living room. The ceiling was much higher than the one in my house, and the walls were covered in fragile glass and ceramics. To start with, I barely dared move for fear the house would rock and all those expensive-looking ornaments would come crashing down. But the girl was away a long time and, eventually, I couldn’t sit any longer and found myself walking out of the room. I passed through a room containing a piano and a collection of other musical instruments that I didn’t recognise, and then a room lined with what looked to be very serious books, and then another that was entirely empty aside from a red rug spread across the floor. And then I saw her, on the stairs to the second floor. I followed and remember very clearly that, when I reached the second floor, she was in a hallway not far from me, facing a wall. I called her name, but she didn’t answer. Instead, she vanished. I went to where she’d been standing, and discovered that it wasn’t a wall, it was a door, but there was no keyhole or handle to turn, just a thin seam where the door met the doorframe. I tried to shove it open, but it didn’t budge. Then I shouted for her again, but the house was silent. The door stood defiantly where it was. I gave it a couple of good, hard kicks, but it made no difference at all.
Disheartened, I went back downstairs. I wanted to return to the living room, but suddenly couldn’t remember where it was. I walked all over the house looking, and kept ending up in the room with the red rug. It was like being trapped inside a maze. When I finally made it to the living room, I was pouring with sweat. I went back to where I’d been sitting, and sat without moving a muscle, not daring to drink the tea or touch the cake. There was no clock, so I had no way of knowing how much time had passed, but the little flowers of hazelnut cream on the cake had collapsed, and the rays of sunlight hitting the wall had moved several inches closer to me. When the girl reappeared, I searched her face, convinced that something must have changed, but said nothing. She pointed to my belly and asked what was going on; I looked down, and saw that my trousers were tented like a mountain over my crotch, and my whole body was shaking.
*
I don’t quite know why, but that afternoon I found myself telling my boorish guests all about the door. Afterwards, they looked at me with excited, dream-filled eyes. ‘There’s no such thing as unsolvable!’ they said, telling me that the world’s greatest locksmith was among us.
Giving me no time to think it over or object, the men leapt from their seats. They were like frightened cockroaches, scuttling around the hidden crevices of the flat. The only one I could see was in the hallway, in front of my door (although it hardly qualified as mine). He pressed his nose against it, as if trying to detect its scent. He sniffed up and down all four sides, and then cocked his head and looked thoughtful. Not long after, another man came out of the kitchen with my toolbox. One man – and I have no idea when he’d gone out there – climbed in through the living room window. Another emerged from the bedroom I shared with my wife, hurriedly throwing something on the floor. Surely not the full-length nightgown my wife had been wearing the previous night? Yet another had found Lily’s toy wand and was waving it around. The man in front of the door clapped his hands to get everyone’s attention, and loudly proclaimed his assessment. Without a doubt, most of this speech was just for show, because he added a quiet line right at the end, about only being able to open the door if he had a very fine wire or some other little thing, like a hairpin.
By this stage, the men were gathered in front of the door. What was inside? I watched from a distance, undecided as to whether I wanted them to succeed (not, of course, that I had any real say in the matter). The door looked frailer than usual, like it was barely existing. One of the men poked a piece of very fine wire into the crack, and the door emitted a piercing shriek, as though it wasn’t a door being opened, but a living organism being sliced apart. The whole room broke out in goose pimples.
The door opened. The men were delighted; they lined up and marched single-file into that place I’d never managed to reach. When the last man had disappeared through the door, I was alone in the flat once again. But I was still sitting on my stool. Strangely, I felt no urge to go through the door myself, and instead just stayed where I was. A long while later, I finally walked over. Now the opening was right in front of me, but it was hard to summon the will to enter. The door seemed smaller than it was supposed to be, like it would be impossible to fit through without stooping. What’s more, I’d always assumed it was a standard rectangle, but now that I looked more carefully, it was actually a trapezoid, its sides slanted at bizarre angles. I contorted my body into different shapes, trying to barge my way in, but the door kept forcing me out.
I couldn’t work out how the men had done it. From what I remembered, they’d walked in quite naturally. I tried to shout into the door opening, but the moment my voice passed the doorframe it stopped, as though hitting a muffler. Gusts of icy wind kept blowing in from the other side. I tried to stick my head through, hoping to see something, but the view was blocked by some kind of internal structure (almost as though the door was growing on top of another door).
The mists parted, although I couldn’t say when, revealing a crescent moon like a razored eyebrow on an infinite expanse of face. There was beer spilled on the table, its bubbles all gone, glowing with a soporific blue light. Minutes ticked past and not a single man reemerged from the door. What had they found in there? I thought I could hear a distant shrieking. Would my wife and Lily be asleep by now? I was very tired, and somehow ended up passed out on the sofa.
When I woke up, the sun had restored some reality to the world, including to the roast chicken, which had been stripped of most of its meat. What remained was a wingless, legless, olive-shaped skeleton, with its eyes wearily closed. I went the door, and found it returned to its original state. I traced my fingers along the rim. It was shallow, like a door-shaped shadow, or an imitation of a door. I crooked a finger and rapped with my knuckle, and it made a low, husky noise, like a voice coming from deep in someone’s throat.
*
After the holiday, aside from her prominent suntan, my wife was the same wife she’d been a few days before, and my daughter the same daughter. I shook the box containing the model castle, and Lily shrieked with excitement outside the front door, immediately letting go of my wife’s hand and rushing inside. Without pausing to take off her shoes, she pounced on the box and began tearing it open. At the sight of the fragments of model castle scattered across the floor, my wife gave me a helpless smile, and then announced she’d bought some squid and a bottle of squid ink to make us squid ink risotto for dinner.
The light in the kitchen was fixed, making the plates and bowls in the drying rack sparkle, and my wife looked extremely pleased. At dinnertime, she served us each a plate of the risotto, and placed a big bowl of peach and rocket salad in the centre of the table. As we ate, our mouths turned jet-black. My wife winked, and said: ‘Pretty good to have a couple of days freedom, then?’ Was she hinting at something? I waved the question away, and asked her and Lily about their trip. They looked at one another and smiled but said nothing, as though, inside their inky lips, there was some secret they couldn’t tell me.
Lily lay on the floor by herself, stacking tiny building blocks one on top of the other, completely absorbed in her castle. While my wife was showering, I knelt beside her and whispered, ‘Won’t you tell Daddy what happened while you were away?’ She shook her head, still focused on the construction. I scooped her up and put her on my knees, pressing my face close to hers. ‘First answer your father’s question,’ I said, ‘then you can go back to playing.’ Lily pouted and burst into tears. My wife walked out of the bathroom and took Lily in her arms, kissing her and saying something into her ear, so that the child was all smiles again. How had she done that? She turned to look at me. I expected her to blame me for upsetting Lily, but she just grinned. I saw the gaps between her teeth, black as black, and couldn’t help feeling a stab of resentment.
That evening, I went into the bedroom without waiting for my wife. But before arriving there, I had to pass the unopenable door and, when I did so, I heard a faint breathing sound, like a cry for help.
I wasn’t sleepy, and lay on the bed with my hands behind my head. I thought of how, early the next morning, before the city was awake, I’d have to rejoin the mass of strangers squeezing onto the train. In a city teeming with resentments, who knew what setbacks lay in wait? And in the factory, the air swirling with sawdust, I knew I’d see those men, swaggering past me in their identical windbreakers. I’d lower my gaze and keep on with my work in silence, avoiding their reddened eyes. I loved my work. An advantage to being a carpenter was that you could immerse yourself in voiceless, wordless wood, and a whole day could pass without the need to exchange a single word with anyone.
My wife had not yet come to bed, and Lily had not yet come to kiss me goodnight. I couldn’t sleep, so I got up again. Walking out of the bedroom, I was confronted with the gloomy hallway. The first room on the right was Lily’s – if I opened the door, I’d see her dolls and wooden building blocks strewn across the floor. To the left was the bathroom, and straight ahead was where we ate dinner every evening, which linked to the living room, which doubled as my wife’s studio. The kitchen was to the left of the living room, and at the back of the kitchen was a door. The door seemed like it must lead somewhere, but there was just a murky white wall, pressing in on me. The house was extremely quiet, and I couldn’t find Lily or my wife; it was as though they’d faded into the air. I went back into the hallway and saw the frail door still hiding in the wall, although its outline was blurred. Sitting down with my back against it, I thought I could hear a faint sound coming from the other side. But it could have been the wind rattling a distant window blind, making it chatter like a row of teeth.
Natascha Bruce translates fiction from Chinese. Recent short story translations have appeared in Granta, Words Without Borders, Wasafiri and Asia Literary Review. She was joint-winner of the 2015 Bai Meigui translation competition and recipient of a 2017 PEN Presents translation award. Current book-length projects include Lonely Face by Yeng Pway Ngon (forthcoming from Balestier) and Lake Like A Mirror by Ho Sok Fong (forthcoming from Portobello). She lives in Hong Kong.
June 8, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Zheng Xiaoqiong (郑小琼) was born in 1980 in Nanchong, Sichuan. In 2001 she left home to work in Dongguan, Guangdong, and began writing poetry. Her poems and essays have appeared in various literary journals, including Poetry (《诗刊》), Flower City (《花城》), and People’s Literature (《人民文学》). She has published over ten collections of poetry, including Women Workers, Jute Hill, Zheng Xiaoqiong Selected Poems, Thoroughbred Plant, Rose Manor. Her work has won numerous awards and been translated into many languages, including German, English, French, Korean, Japanese, Spanish, and Turkish.
郑小琼
黄昏的车头淅淅沥沥的呜咽着，青山隐于烟雾之外。京广线上的灯盏，庄稼的孕育着一个个俚语的村庄，它先行抵达铁轨的尽头。
溅着几千万民工的颤栗，溅着雨水的头，溅着那头不肯停落的雨滴。
树木，村舍，渐退的山坡，缓慢劳作的农人。幻觉的玻璃之外，退去了一条疲倦而污染哭泣的河流。
暮色从前方插入车厢内，黑暗从铁轨上的黑雨水间涌起。
我看对座的旅客，疲惫而辛酸，残滴着衣锦回乡的松脂，一滴一滴，清澈而苦涩，保持着雨水冲洗过的洁净。窗外，山河呜呜而过，穿过雨水的戳印，向北而行。
官僚们正把一块土地划成块状抵押给水泥，钢筋，化学制品，资本银行。断枝的树木与砍削半边的山岭是最后的赎金，它们的背后，一群失地的百姓像雨水一样哭泣。
看车，看雨水。
看呜呜而过的河流。
看斑斑驳驳的车厢，火车凶狠地鸣叫，
人世间，人们正像一群赌徒一样抵押着一切。
我把行程抵押给铁轨。把痛苦的生活抵押给虚无的理想。
词典里面，是一张从夏到民国的周期表。它们穿汉越唐，过宋经清，像我此行，经湖南，过贵州……缓慢的车是否抵达目的地。
雨水正下，村庄退后。像过去的时间，埋葬在火车行程间，不复再现。
Rainwater Illusions
The dusky locomotive sobbing drips and drops, among the murky mountains veiled beyond the smog. Passing by the lights on the Beijing-Guangzhou Track, by the villages of slang borne to crops, it reaches the end of the line first.
Splashing millions of shivering migrant workers, hitting their heads, the raindrops refuse to stop.
Trees, villages, retreating mountain slopes, slow toiling labourers. Outside the glass of illusions, weeps a weary, polluted river.
Night penetrates the carriage from the front. Between the tracks in the black rain darkness swells.
I look at the passengers sitting opposite, in their homecoming sartorial splendour, miserable, exhausted, dripping resinous sweat, drop by drop, clear and bitter, rain-washed.
Through the windows, mountains and rivers whistle past, through the stamping marks of rain, heading north.
Bureaucrats are carving up land as collateral for concrete, steel, chemicals, and capital. Trees with broken limbs and hills half hewn are the last ransom. Behind them, a crowd of commoners are raining tears.
Watching the train. Watching rainwater.
Watching the weeping river.
Watching the motley carriage. Hearing the train’s fierce shriek.
In this world, people are mortgaging everything like gamblers.
I’ve pledged my itinerary to the trainline, my painful life to illusory aspirations.
Inside the dictionary is a periodic table from Xia Dynasty to the Republic of China. Across Han, over Tang, onto Song, then Qing, my trip reaches Hunan, into Guizhou … Will the slow train ever arrive at its destination? Rain falling, villages retreating. Time past is buried in the journey of this train, never to be seen again.
入楚
山鬼隐于水泥地板庄稼的化学药品间，穿豹皮的勇士们就已去了城市之间，剩下那头金钱豹已尸骨无存，急剧退却的河流，菖蒲与艾草，一朵盛开的荷花隐于时间之中。
日月星辰，风雨雷电，春夏秋冬，云海苍穹正化着一支箭，越过沼泽井泉，田土宅厝，命中注定的鸟兽虫鱼们，花树藤蔓们，它偏执于相对安好的命运。
灶台鸡笼的神，育鬼育魅育妖精育花鼓腔调中的菩萨与亡灵。
一只苦闷的鸟深入湖泊的深处，它来自远古，有着兽样的面孔。
它沿着京广线漂泊着，出川入楚，她怀抱着原始的直觉，返回一只鸾鸟的原形。
旧世隔得太远，隔了几个轮回，剩下苍茫的记忆，在一棵苦楝树的枝杈间寻找人世与兽面的花纹。
入楚。她已似回到前生的眸间。
湘鬼或者傩女，在巫的气息里，人们对她的回忆已成为山，成为水，成为河，成为日常俚语。花烛燃烧她的脊柱。
天空飞来古代的鸟与记忆，八百里的湖泊干涸的滩头。
撒满白花花的时光，三吨重的传说入水。
原来是一只鸟，掠过。
她的翅膀入楚，入楚之穹庐，入楚之乾坤。
她白色的翅膀划过一道道巫的魂迹，在光的波澜间。
万物正呼吸，怀孕，育动，分娩。
入楚，她黑暗的记忆不断衔接着前世，返回那些完好无损的巫咒与傩语。
她尘世间隐匿着，隐匿了她数千年轮回的鸟翅，隐匿了她的兽面。剩下记忆不断在梦境中返回前世。
万山已入暮，惟有白雪喧哗着黑夜。
Reaching Chu
Mountain Ghost hides under the concrete floor, among chemicals and pesticides for crops, in the city left behind by warriors once clad in leopard skin, though the bones of the last leopard are long gone. Rivers retreat, and the calamus, and the wormwood. A lotus blooms inside time.
The sun, moon, and stars; the wind, rain, thunder and lightning; the four seasons, the seas of clouds and the infinite skies – all become an arrow. It flies across swamps and wells, meadows and houses, doomed birds, beasts, bugs, fishes, flowers, trees, and vines, aiming for a relatively peaceful destiny.
Goddess of stove and chicken coop, you give birth to the demons and spirits, and the Bodhisattvas and dead souls in folk song and dance.
A sullen bird flies deep into the lake. It comes from the past, with the face of a beast.
It drifts along the Beijing-Guangzhou Track, out of Chuan, into Chu. Bearing an original instinct, it returns to the phoenix form.
The Old World is too distant now, a few reincarnations removed. All that remain are indistinct memories, like the beastly and humanly patterns amid the branches of a chinaberry.
Reaching Chu, she has restored the gaze of her former life.
A sorceress or a witch, in the voodoo vapour, memories of her turned into mountains, rivers, colloquial vernacular. Candles burn up her vertebrae.
Ancient recollections fly from the sky, over the dry sandbanks of Dongting Lake.
Sprinkled with white time, a legend, three tons heavy, slides into water.
A bird, gliding.
Her white wings soar into Chu, into its firmament, its cosmos, sweeping over traces of sorcerous souls in the surf of light.
Everything is breathing, conceiving, burgeoning, birthing.
Reaching Chu, her dark memories reconnect with history, recovering the untouched spells and folk lingo.
Hiding in the mortal world, she’s shrouded her wings over a thousand lives and veiled her beastly face. Remnants of her memories linger in recurring dreams.
Ten thousand mountains sink into the night. Snow is the only noise, whitening the dark.
乔木
山冈的栎木站成猛兽，微小的积水敲落了楝果。
栲树的前生是明月，梓木梦见楚王与浮云，樟木从梦中脱身来到庭院。剩下山楂在岐路上点灯，照亮了故乡与谜语。秋天落地长出了桔梗，夏天的栗树林把时光隔成过去与未来，榆木的瘩哒是结实的今生，有枢木把眺望送到远方。
葛藤为你饱尝悲痛，去年正是樟木的另一侧
刺槐开花，松木在追悼着什么人，它们之间的关系就像我的一场梦。
有雨水降落葡萄架下，白杨树站在发亮的铁轨间，我梦见庄子与蝴蝶。
必须唤来周公为我解梦，昨夜我用一根桃木挡住汹涌的大海。
这是人间生活，从无到有，从人到人，剩下灰喜鹊在梨木上慢慢聚集，那些发亮的鸣叫着的喜鹊，像那些无知的时光，停了一下便飞走了，剩下一树白梨花开着，又谢了。
楠竹有着无尽的缠绵，它们的悲伤青碧着日日夜夜。安身立命的杉树林站在路上期待着什么，星辰与月色像黄叶一样，仿佛一条镜中的河流，它要找到归向大海的路程。
我等待一棵梧桐，繁华散尽，剩下我，原本是孤独的一只凤凰。
站在回忆间的枥木，它的面容变幻。
柏木站于墓穴，从石廊到曲径，稠密的银杏移来十月的光阴，银白的花开满了十三世的孤独，我做了十二轮树木，才轮回成今生的行人，我沉默了十二轮，积聚着太多的言语。
哦，这些与我一般沉默的乔木，它们看透了人世沧桑，它们是前世或者来生的我
如果，我与它们一样，站在此与彼之间。
平静地度着每一滴时光。
Trees
Oak on the hill rears into a beast. Dripping droplets knock down chinaberry’s fruit.
Beech’s former life was a bright moon. Catalpa dreams of King Chu and floating clouds. Camphor laurel frees itself from a dream and comes to the courtyard. Hawthorn, left behind, lights a lamp on the side road, illuminating hometown and riddles. Autumn falls to the ground and grows into bellflowers. Summer’s chestnut forest partitions between past and future. Elm’s knot is the solid here and now. Thorn-elm casts its longing into the distance.
Arrowroot has endured your sorrow. Last year was just the other side of camphor laurel.
Black locust blooms. Pine mourns someone. The relationship between them seems a dream of mine.
Rain descends beneath the grape trellis. White poplar stands between gleaming train tracks. I dream of Master Zhuang and butterfly.
Must call on the Duke of Zhou, the God of Dreams, to interpret for me: last night I used walnut wood to ward off a surging sea.
Such is a worldly life, from nothing to something, from mortal to mortal. The last magpies slowly gather on pear tree, shiny, chirping, like those innocent days, staying briefly before flying off, leaving a tree of white blossoms, which then fade.
Mao bamboos have endless sentimentality. Their grief turns the nights and days green. Fir forest by the road, established and settled, is waiting for something. The stars and the moon drift like yellow leaves, like a river in a mirror, looking for its way back to the sea.
I wait for a parasol tree. While the bustling has dispersed, I remain, formerly a lonely phoenix.
Hornbeam, unmoving between memories, its face everchanging.
Cypress stands at a grave. From stone verandas to winding paths, dense gingko trees transport October’s light and shadow. Their silver flowers bloom thirteen lives’ solitude. I was a tree for twelve lives before becoming this traveller. I was silent for twelve rounds, and amassed too many words.
O, trees silent like me, have seen through life’s vicissitudes. They are my former or future selves,
If I could stand like them, between here and there,
Peacefully passing each moment.
旧堂
月光很白，三株腊梅开放院上。青石板上，唐朝檐滴，点点落于宋代的雕龙
星大如斗，照着明代的溪流，长流不息的草木，年年盛开，年年凋零，红尘里往事。落魄的书生读着清代的八股文。
有鱼跃出，有鸟长鸣，有花开放，老虎出没村头的山冈。
有人谈论嘉庆年间的往事，乾隆皇帝三下江南，有人坐在庭院的槐树下谈论收成，因果报应的鬼神，时光怀着忧伤，清晨在鸡冠花上凝成露滴，夜晚在星座的疼痛间彷徨。
男人们抽着旱烟，种五谷蔬粮，桃花开得艳，有人落发为僧。
女人们纺着纱线，织绸缎锦绣，鹧鸪叫得伤，落红沉默千里。
他骑毛驴，进京城，读四书五经，论语楚骚，读朝代更换，帝王君臣。经书里的人生开始变瘦，瘦成毛驴里的一根肋骨，瘦成古驿道里杉树林的一阵风。
他骑着黄河与长江，骑着秋风与夕阳，骑着满树的枯枝与愁肠。
他骑着一轮浅浅的海峡，骑着东风无常的人生。
人们在戏台上虚拟着欢乐和喜欢，善恶轮回。
它倒了，倒在一场积雪的冷中。
我坐在荒草径间，看落日心怀黯然，岁月滚滚而去。
槐树依旧茂盛，椿树依旧开花，燕子依旧回来，筑巢旧梁。
Old Manor
Under white moonlight, three ice laurels flower in the courtyard. Upon the bluestone slate, Tang Dynasty roofs drip onto Song carved dragons.
Giant stars illuminate Ming rivulets. The everlasting flora flourish and fade like history in red dust. A shabby scholar is reading Qing octopartite essays.
Fish jump, birds sing, flowers bloom, tiger roams the village hills.
Some discuss the past in the Jiaqing Era, and recount Emperor Qianlong’s three visits down the South Bank. Some sit under the pagoda tree in the courtyard, speaking of the harvest and the ghosts and spirits of karma. Time, laden with sadness, condenses into dewdrops on the celosia at dawn, and at night shuffles among the agonised constellations.
Men smoke tobacco and plant crops and vegetables. Peach flowers open bright. Shaved hair falls at ordination.
Women are spinning yarn, weaving satin splendid. Partridges cry mournfully, and the thousand miles of fallen red remain silent.
He rode a donkey, arrived at the capital, read Four Books Five Classics and Chu Songs, studied dynasties, emperors, kings and their courts. Life in the scriptures began to shrink, thin as the donkey’s rib, thin as the gusty wind on the ancient trade road through the fir forest.
Riding the Yellow River and the Long River, riding autumn wind and setting sun, riding trees of dry branches and sorrow.
He rode a shallow strait, a life of capricious easterly wind.
On the theatre stage, people simulate joy and love, good and evil.
It’s collapsed, down in the cold of the snow.
I sit on the forlorn path, watching sunset in dejection, watching time rolling by.
The pagoda tree is still lush. The red toon still blooms. The swallows return to nest on the old beam.
Isabelle Li is a Chinese Australian writer and translator. She has published in various anthologies and literary journals, including The Best Australian Stories, Southerly, and World Literature in China. Her collection of short stories, A Chinese Affair, was published by Margaret River Press in 2016.
June 8, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Luo Lingyuan was born in 1963 and is a German-Chinese writer. After studying Journalism and Computer Science in Shanghai, she has lived in Berlin since 1990 and published works in German and Chinese including four novels, two short story collections and numerous pieces in literary journals. In 2007 her short story collection Du Fliegst für Meinen Sohn aus dem Fünften Stock [You Fly for My Son from the Fifth Floor] received an Adelbert-von-Chamisso Advancement Award, a prize awarded to works written in German, dealing with ‘cultural change‘. In 2017 she was Writer in Residence in Erfurt.
Photograph: Dirk Skiba
The following is an extract from a short story titled ‘Der Zunge, auf der schwarzes Haar wuchert’. It was originally published in a collection of stories by Luo Lingyuan titled Nachtschwimmen im Rhein (or Nightswimming in the Rhein, Deutscher Taschenbuch Verlag, 2008). The stories in the collection all centre around relationships between Chinese women and German men. In the extract, the protagonist He Xue attends a Walpurgisnacht party for the first time with her German flatmate.
The tongue which grew black hair
But Regina didn’t forget her. Shortly after eight, she knocks on the door and two hours later they’re in Charlottenburg in a private apartment. The place is huge, if somewhat run-down. At least fifty strangely dressed women have already arrived. Only a few of them are attractive, He Xue thinks. It’s true there are no old hags with hooked noses and evil looks. And few black capes, pointy hats and broomsticks. But He Xue doesn’t find the sexy costumes of these modern witches so appealing either. Many of the women have made up their faces to weird effect: one half colourful, the other with a snake depicted on it. Some are virtually naked, wearing garish masks, lurid wigs and skimpy outfits. One woman has painted eyes onto her breasts, which stare fixedly out.
As soon as a new arrival enters, a glass of sparkling wine is pressed into her hand. He Xue downs hers straight away out of pure self-consciousness and remains standing uncertainly in the foyer. She can’t help thinking about what the Professor has said – that she probably won’t enjoy this kind of a party. She allows her glass to be refilled anyway. In truth, she doesn’t feel like dressing up in costume at all. But she’s helpless against Regina’s insistence and in the end slips on a baggy dark-blue dress, which cloaks her body entirely. The women start dancing the tango en masse. Since dancing isn’t He Xue’s forté, she heaps up a plate with food, finds herself a quiet corner and watches the women. Each time she spots a glimpse of Regina’s blond hair in the crowd, she feels a deep admiration. She is, thinks He Xue, the most stunning woman at the party.
Two women are standing next to her wearing magnificent headdresses. They’ve already had a few drinks. He Xue hears one of them say: ‘Our boss is such a dirty dog. Now he’s getting it on with the cleaning woman. His assistant caught him. Ha! Apparently his thingy looked like a carrot.’
‘If I’d seen him, I’d have made him sweat a little,’ says the other. ‘Surely a pay rise could have come out of it. See the blonde with the eyebrow ring? Hot isn’t she? That’s Regina. I heard she just hooked up with a dentist. If he marries her, she’s set up for life. If …’ The two of them laugh, a strange bleating sound, then head into another room in search of a mirror.
Perplexed, He Xue searches for a trace of her friend. She knows Regina’s boyfriends are always changing. But she’d never mentioned the current one was a dentist. The women have begun Turkish belly dancing. Once more, it’s Regina who’s the star on the dance floor. Arms raised, she writhes like a snake, laughing blithely. Now she has on a tight sky-blue top and long skirt; around her hips is a belt made of tiny gold coins linked together, so that she gives off a bewitching tinkling with every shake of her body. To He Xue, her friend has a regal beauty. She follows her every movement.
Sometime before midnight, the women take up the unlit wooden torches, leave the apartment and head to the nearby Teufelsberg, singing the whole way. The Teufelsberg isn’t very high and nobody’s ever met any spirits there. Actually, it’s not much more than a large mound rising on the western outskirts of the city comprised of rubble from the second World War. But the Berliners, always liking to sets their sights high, come here frequently to go strolling and look out over the vast sea of grey houses.
After climbing for some time through the dark woodland, they finally reach the top. It’s just before midnight and on the flat summit countless other women are already waiting, most of them in similar costumes. From every other direction, crowds disguised as witches are making their way up. More than two, three hundred women, young and middle-aged, have gathered under the bleak sky.
For some moments, He Xue gazes about her. When she turns back, Regina has vanished. She searches nearby but her friend is nowhere to be found. Everyone is jostling towards the centre for some reason unknown to He Xue, so she backs out to the edge.
Precisely at midnight, one woman begins to wail. Then all the women on the mountain start shrieking war cries at the tops of their voices. He Xue retreats further. Suddenly the flames from a bonfire in the middle of the clearing surge up into the sky. The women raise their torches and stamp in a circle, hooting and jeering. The summit, just a moment ago still dark, lights up with blazing sparks and glows over the city. Now the Teufelsberg is a mountain of fire. The women whoop, their voices shrill, encircling a group that’s laughing deliriously. It’s as if each has turned into a primeval creature, has waited the whole year for this mad event. As if on this night a year of compulsory service as normal respectable humans is finally over.
Now everyone has begun to dance in a frenzy. Dresses lift and drop in the firelight, long hair whips and swirls around the fantastic faces of the women. The scene is reminiscent of numberless female demons summoning up a catastrophe. He Xue desperately wishes she had a friend by her side, most of all another woman who was Chinese, with whom she could talk with. Maybe then she wouldn’t be shivering as though she had a bout of malaria.
At this moment she’s discovered by a particularly high-spirited group of revelers. One pushes a burning torch into her hand, another pulls her along and then they encircle her, shrieking the entire time in their eerie voices. They drag her into the centre then lead her closer to the fire. The torch falls from He Xue’s hand and she feels her neck stiffen and grow numb. Only when the women grab her arms and legs and yank her behind the wall of fire, do her eyes start flickering again. Now she sees that the women have stuck the torches into the ground so they form two close rows like a tunnel.
‘A trial by fire for our little Chinese witch!’ someone yells and gives He Xue a bawdy slap on the behind. ‘Run quick through the path of fire and you’ll become pure like us.’ Someone adds: ‘Then you’ll get the witch badge with the green broom.’ He Xue searches for an escape route.
‘Run! Run! We’ll catch you!’ The women at the other end spur her on.
The torches are burning at chest-height. He Xue crouches down and waddles off like a duck. She can’t remember ever having run like this. The women encircling her burst into laughter and clap. When He Xue reaches the other end, she’s surrounded and thrown into the air three times. ‘A cheer for the Chinese witch!’ they cry.
The crippling thought that only a few seconds ago her hair could have ignited into flames inhibits He Xue as she dances. She moves stiffly, like a straw doll among a galloping herd of whinnying horses that’s in danger of at any moment being ripped in two.
As a new candidate is brought over for the trial by fire, everyone rushes back over to where the torches are standing. He Xue uses the opportunity to escape to the sidelines. Two middle-aged women with fake witch noses are approaching. They head over to those dancing, their brooms hoisted. ‘We’ve had incredible luck on the stock market this year. The tech shares went through the roof,’ says one. ‘You should get into the market too.’ The other looks pensively into the flames. ‘So what did you buy? I’ve played around a lot, but …’ Then the women disappear into the mass and He Xue can’t hear them anymore.
In the centre of the dancing crowd now is a girl whose hair is whirling like a hundred delicate snakes. The hem of her dress flutters up and down, like a black pupil dilating and contracting. Out of her mouth comes the call, ‘Ura! Ura!’ He Xue feels dazed watching her dance movements. Just where does she recognise this beauty from? And now this person is dancing towards her. The girl’s eyes display a wildness and then her hand alights, sudden as a spider, on He Xue’s shoulder. It shakes her.
‘He Xue, come on, dance!’
He Xue nearly stumbles over backwards. Until she realises it’s no-one other than Regina who’s come over. But by the time He Xue tries to follow, her friend has already danced away and is nowhere to be seen.
He Xue stands in the dark and thinks she can smell singed hair. She bats at her head with both hands to put out the supposed sparks, then she feels around her hair gingerly. Indeed, she finds what appears to be a hank that has been burnt to a crisp dry cinder. For a long time after, she pulls at the strands on her head until the stench of scorched hair finally disappears.
Notes
1. Celebrated on the night of 30 April, Walpurgisnacht is the eve of the Christian feast day of Saint Walpurga, who was known to ward away witches and evil spirits. The pagan folk rites of Spring are also celebrated.
2. The name ‘Teufelsberg’ literally translates as ‘devil’s mountain’. Teufelsberg, in the Grunewald district of former West Berlin, is a hill made of rubble dumped after the second World War and covers a Nazi military-technical college that was never completed. During the Cold War, there was a U.S. listening station on the hill, Field Station Berlin.
DEBBIE LIM was born in Sydney. Her poetry chapbook Beastly Eye was published by Vagabond Press (2012) and her poems have been widely anthologised, including regularly appearing in the Best Australian Poems series (Black Inc.). In 2016 she moved with her family to southern Germany for 2 years where she started to translate from German into English.
June 7, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Empty Chairs
by Liu Xia. Translated from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern; Introduction by Liao Yiwu; Foreword by Herta Müller
Graywolf Press, 2015
ISBN 978-1-5559772-5-2
Reviewed by RAVI SHANKAR
On April 1st, 2018—that rare conjunction of Easter Sunday with April Fool’s day in the West—Chinese painter, photographer and poet Liu Xia celebrated her 57th birthday as she has every single year since 2010: under house arrest. Better known as the wife of the late Liu Xiaobo, the dissident Chinese academic who was jailed for the last years of his life after co-authoring Charter 08 (that seminal manifesto meant to emulate Czechoslovakia’s Charter 77 by making a public case for basic civil rights, democracy, and freedom in China, and written on the approach of the 20th anniversary of the 1989 Tiananmen massacre of pro-democracy student protesters, of which he had once been one), Liu Xia is a formidable and too-little-known literary figure in her own right. All of that changes with the publication of Empty Chairs (Graywolf, 2015), a bilingual translation of her selected poems, translated muscularly from the Chinese by Ming Di and Jennifer Stern and with a foreword by German Nobel Prize Laureate, Herta Müller.
As a poet and activist, Liu Xia is someone whose courageous work in the face of overt repression makes her a kind of 21st century Anna Akhmatova. When her husband, sentenced to 11 years in jail for incitement to subvert state power, won the 2010 Nobel Peace Prize for “long and non-violent struggle for fundamental human rights in China,” he was barred from attending the awards ceremony and instead was represented on stage by an empty chair. Thorbjoern Jagland, chairman of the Nobel committee, placed that year’s medal and citation on a vacant blue upholstered seat, which then became such a powerful metaphor for the fight against despotism and suppression of freedom everywhere, that Chinese internet censors forbade the posting of photos or even drawings of empty chairs on its social media platforms. But there was never just one empty chair.
As Shayna Bauchner writes for Human Rights Watch, “in her remarks for a 2009 award ceremony honoring her husband, Liu Xia wrote, “I am not a vassal of Liu Xiaobo.” Yes, she has played an inextricable role in the chronicle of her husband’s imprisonment and his global prominence as a face of Chinese dissidence. She has been his artistic collaborator, one of his few visitors in prison, and, with his death, the bearer of his legacy. But no one should lose sight of her singular status as a fiercely independent advocate, an elegiac storyteller, and an enduring survivor of the seven-year isolation imposed on her by the Chinese government. Liu Xia has been held in unlawful house arrest since October 2010 “…detained without charge or trial, she has been stripped of communication with the outside world and denied adequate medical care.” Or as Ye Du, a writer and longstanding friend attested to more succinctly in an interview for The Guardian, “Liu Xia has been physically and mentally destroyed.”
So while her plight has become something of a cause célèbre among writers and intellectuals (recently in November 2017, over 50 international authors, including Chimamanda Adichie, Philip Roth, Margaret Atwood, Tom Stoppard, Louise Erdrich, Stephen Sondheim and George Saunders wrote a letter to Chinese president Xi Jinping appealing to his sense of conscience and compassion to release Liu Xia; unsurprisingly the letter went unanswered and unheeded), her poetry has not been widely read — nor indeed has it been widely available — in the English-speaking world. In part, this might be due to her growing reputation as a visual artist, a sensibility that helps illuminate the stark shape of her poems; but doubtlessly, in large part, it’s also due to the simple fact that she’s a woman. Earlier in her life, she was eclipsed in her marriage by Liu Xiaobo’s fame and persecution; then later in life, she was overtly censored by the State just for having chosen to be with him, even though she insists she is apolitical. In neither case was she given a choice; or a voice.
An early poem “June 2nd, 1989” attests to the nature of her relationship to her husband, who had just been jailed for the first time after the protests at Tiananmen Square. Dedicated to Xiaobo, the poem reads:
This isn’t good weather
I said to myself
standing under the lush sun.
Standing beside you
I patted your head
and your head pricked my palm
making it strange to me.
I didn’t have a chance
to say a word before you became a character
in the news, everyone looking up to you
as I was worn down
at the edge of a crowd.
just smoking
and watching the sky.
A new myth, maybe, was forming there,
but the sun’s sharp light
blinded me from seeing it.
If one of the techniques of the Chinese Misty Poets was the deployment of hermetic, obscurantist imagery as a response against the Maoist aesthetic of social realism, then one of the remarkable things about Liu Xia’s work is how she manages to reconnect with plain-spoken, vernacular language without losing any of the philosophical complexity or subversive power of her male counterparts. Ezra Pound that early exponent and translator (although, ‘transliterator’ or ‘re-creator’ might be the more apt designation, considering that Pound not only didn’t know the source language, but that his understanding of its very structure was misinformed by Ernest Fenollosa’s unpublished scholarly papers, which formed the basis of his 1915 collection, Cathay) defined an image as “an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time” and it’s hard to conjure a better example than in that first stanza.
First, we are struck by the speaker’s interiority; though this is a poem dedicated to a beloved, the poem opens with an internal conversation (“I said to myself”). Next, we realize the oddity of the perspective; someone standing under a lush sun yet nonetheless laments the weather? There’s both emotion and intellect here and the image resonates on both the literal and the figurative plane, especially when we read the next stanza, which introduces the beloved “you”. Unlike the sun, which the speaker stands under, she stands beside her beloved, a telling detail that gets at their love and mutuality. Yet the speaker still doesn’t like the weather from where she stands; she pats her husband’s head in that time-honored conciliatory gesture (far be it for him to comfort her) and feels pricked in return by his head, which suddenly feels foreign.
Ostranenie is the theory of estrangement or de-familiarization developed by the Russian literary theorist Victor Shklovsky. A neologism, it implies both the action of pushing aside and that of making strange; for art, the theory goes, to reach its maximal empathic level, it needs to shift the borders of ordinary perception until the quotidian becomes queer again. Liu Xia’s poem embodies this concept, for the speaker’s beloved’s head, that intimate, well-known corporeal organ, suddenly transforms itself into something that pricks the palm. The subsequent stanza further deepens the connotation of this alienation through a masterful metamorphosis.
I don’t read Mandarin, but I can only trust Ming Di and Jennifer Stern when they write in their translator’s note that they talked “through a way to remain true to impossibly collapsed dichotomies, to a person who we feel like we know but don’t. We have tried to remain true to what we value in the work, to what’s rooted in the gutted and stark political present in China, and in the loving, friendly, funny, insightful and engaged voice.” This book reaps the fruits of that dialogue and to that list of adjectives, I’d also add “dry” and “devastating” for her use of biting understatement. “I didn’t have a chance / to say a word before you became a character / in the news, everyone looking up to you / as I was worn down / at the edge of a crowd / just smoking / and watching the sky.”
This is an Ovidian transformation, for the beloved, whose head the speaker was just rubbing, has suddenly become, through exposure to public consciousness, a character (in all senses of that word), which moves him into proximity with the lush sun and far from her, worn down and receding in the face of the anonymous masses. It’s doubly heart-breaking in that though she’s the one who suffers, she’s nonetheless also the one who has to console him (and in time will have to care-take his memory). The last stanza, alludes to this possibility in brilliantly tying the poem together: “A new myth, maybe, was forming there, / but the sun’s sharp light / blinded me from seeing it.”
I love this provisional quality of Liu Xia’s work. The “maybe” in that moment is like the uncertainties in Marianne Moore. Her soulmate was turning into both newsprint and martyr before her very eyes, and his life (and her own life, though she might not have fully realized it then) had stopped belonging to him. It had become an instrument of the state or a tool for counter-propaganda, but that warm head she has cradled so many nights was changing into something else and she was powerless to stop it. That’s the fundamental heartbreak that infuses so many of these poems, and even though they are starkly quiet verbal artifacts, they nonetheless radiate such volumes of anguish and mortal heat.
Nearly ten years later, Liu Xiaobo was detained for writing an open letter advocating for human rights and then sentenced in 1996 to three more years in prison. During this time, Liu Xia would make routine camp visits, famously announcing to the guards that she wanted “to marry that enemy of the state!” Eventually they did get married, while Liu Xiaobo was still imprisoned, and held their banquet in the prison canteen. Their love story is truly one of the great love stories of our time.
It was during this time that Liu Xia composed some of the poems that constitute the middle section of Empty Chairs and one in particular, “Nobody Sees Me,” expresses an austere existentialism. The poem begins, “Nobody sees me / helpless. / I’m not being cursed. I’m just easily / attracted to unattainable things — / things that reject me, / that are outside what’s real.” The baldness of that declaration, without blame, lacking remorse, is astonishing. It’s a matter-of-fact embrace of the human condition that even Beckett might have admired. The poem continues:
My life steals from me.
I believe in a life that is an absurd
fantasy and is also hyperreal,
a life that hides behind death masks
and looming shadows.
…
I see a shadow walking on death’s path–
slowly, rhythmically,
calmly. Nobody
speaks a word.
I wave–nobody
sees me.
My life steals from me. Just for that line, readers should be jostling for Liu Xia’s insight. Often in her work, she will bifurcate herself, disassociating mind from body, or spirit from stasis, and she does so again here, seeing in herself “a shadow walking on death’s path.” Her greeting, like her predicament, falls on blind eyes, as the world has turned her into a perpetual Persephone, doomed to be a shade in the underworld. It’s telling, therefore, that the other writers and artists she calls out to and finds kinship with in this book were equally misunderstood and driven to madness in their own time: Van Gogh, Kafka, Nijinsky and Marguerite Duras. “The words emerge from her body without her realizing it,” Marguerite Duras wrote in Summer Rain and she could have been describing Liu Xia, “as if she were being visited by the memory of a language long forsaken.”
Indeed, in Empty Chairs, certain tropes and images recur obsessively throughout the book. Cigarettes, dolls and birds populate poem after poem. As the late American poet Richard Hugo advises us in his book Triggering Town, “don’t be afraid to take emotional possession of words,” and Liu Xia takes that advice, which it’s unlikely she ever heard, straight to heart. Seemingly banal, when these motifs recur, something extraordinary starts to happen; the objects begin to take on a powerful symbolic weight that transcends their literal shape in the world. The dolls and cigarettes become totemic while the poems themselves grow more airless and claustrophobic, qualities that evoke the very conditions of living under house arrest. It’s amazing that these images so insistently thread through 30 years of her poetry.
The dolls tie back to Liu Xia’s photography of what she called “ugly babies.” During a period of domestic confinement with her husband, Liu Xia took hundreds of photos of expressive, disfigured dolls that have become representative of the suffering faced by the Chinese people in general. Discovered by French writer Guy Sorman when he was visiting Liu Xia in Beijing, the photographs, captured on a tiny Russian camera and developed by turning her kitchen into a darkroom, toured the world in an exhibit called “The Silent Strength of Liu Xia” (taken from the title of one of her poems). It was an exhibition that Liu Xia would never know about, as her contact with the outside world has been effectively cut off.
As Sorman writes about these extraordinary photos, “Nearly all of the photos are taken with this old camera, without lights, in their apartment. And she’s able to build all these dramatic stories and metaphors with [such] limited technical resources. I think it is this contradiction which makes the photos really impressive.” Although Sorman is discussing her photography here, he might as well be analyzing her poems, for the same principles hold true in both cases. I don’t know if Liu Xia has limited technical resources in poetry (I would seriously doubt it, given how well-crafted her work seems to be in translation), but I do know that she intentionally chooses a simplified vocabulary, without any of the lavish opacity or numinous lyricism of her contemporaries, like Xi Chuan or Ouyang Jianghe (whose own selected poems, Notes on the Mosquito and Doubled Shadows respectively, the first translated by Lucas Klein and the second by Austin Woerner, are both well worth reading). In a certain way, her spare, harrowing poems resemble Paul Celan’s love affair with silence, in that the less they say, the more substantial the unsaid becomes. This ultimately is Liu Xia’s masterstroke; condemned by the Chinese state to silence, she uses her silence against them.
The final poem in the collection “How it Stands” crystallizes this stance, practiced over the years into a way of being. In it, as in earlier poems, the speaker is split in half and like the metaphysical poets of the 17th century did, she engages in a dialogue with herself.
Is it a tree?
It’s me, alone.
Is it a winter tree?
It’s always like this, all year round.
…
Aren’t you tired of being a tree your whole life?
Even when exhausted, I want to stand.
The Surrealist anthropomorphism is tempered by Buddhist reconciliation in these lines; and the poem is just heart-breaking. Leafless, bird-less, rooted in one spot, the poet provides a vision of a life that no human being should endure. It’s the kind of human rights abuse that trumps any technological or economic progress a country might make. In this final poem in Liu Xia’s Empty Chairs, the barren tree becomes yet another empty chair, another reminder of all of those people around the world without basic freedoms and civil liberties, even when their only crime might be using language or making art. Though the Chinese government would rather crush her and erase her husband’s memories, this vital collection of poems is an indication of the resilience of our human spirit, which cannot be silenced. There’s great sorrow in her work, but also remarkable strength, and with Graywolf’s publication of Empty Chairs, we are given renewed hope that her and her husband’s love story and alarming martyrdom will never be forgotten.
RAVI SHANKAR is author/editor of a dozen books, including most recently The Golden Shovel: New Poems Honoring Gwendolyn Brooks and Autobiography of a Goddess, translations of the 9th century Tamil poet/saint, Andal, and winner of the Muse India Translation Prize. He founded the online journal of arts Drunken Boat, has won a Pushcart Prize and a RISCA artist grant, has appeared in The New York Times, The Paris Review, on NPR, the BBC and PBS, received fellowships from the Corporation of Yaddo and the MacDowell Colony and been interviewed and translated into over 10 languages. His The Many Uses of Mint: New and Selected Poems 1997-2017 will be out in Australia with Recent Works Press in 2018.
June 7, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Mary Jean Chan is a poet and editor from Hong Kong who currently lives in London. She was shortlisted for the 2017 Forward Prize for Best Single Poem (UK), and came Second in the 2017 National Poetry Competition. Her debut pamphlet, A Hurry of English, was published in 2018 by ignitionpress (Oxford Brookes Poetry Centre), and was recently selected as the 2018 Poetry Book Society Summer Pamphlet Choice. Mary Jean is a Ledbury Emerging Poetry Critic and an editor of Oxford Poetry. Her debut collection will be published by Faber & Faber in 2019.
Cantonese
Spark of wind, gust of neon. The evening swells with the clamour
of voices. A dialect does not recognize the written word, exists if
uttered aloud, sleeps like an emaciated dog when abandoned, tail
wrapped around itself for comfort. That is what my Cantonese is,
a stray canine: I’ll admit – one I care for sporadically. Whenever
mother calls me on the phone and we speak, the dog is brought in.
come home to this body, this unhomeliness
as portrait / sourdough / bitter gourd
like a uniform / a chest-guard / a mask
called girl / boy / anything your mother wants
masquerades
under a pile of laundry / your own shadow / a sudden mourning
having failed your mother / your lover / to be its true self
where we are meant to survive / my birthmark lingers / joy is more than a crumb
June 6, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
The Stolen Bicycle
by Wu Ming-Yi,
Translated by Darryl Sterk
ISBN: 9781925498554.
Text Publishing 2017.
Reviewed by CHRISTINE SUN
Award-winning novelist Wu Ming-Yi is perhaps the only Taiwanese author ever invited to the Melbourne Writers Festival (MWF) in the past two decades. It seems easy to forget the island democracy ever exists, for any attempt to recognise Taiwan as an independent, sovereign state is frowned upon and accused as “interference in China’s domestic affairs” by Beijing. Worse, as the world becomes increasingly wary of China’s political and economic dominance, it is often the oppression faced by Chinese and even Hong Kong authors that draws attention from international literary festivals. “No news is good news” is the consensus about Taiwan, where approximately 40,000 titles are freely released by more than 100 publishers every year.
Hence it is difficult for Taiwanese authors to emerge on the world stage without any political, cultural and even ethnical reference to China. In Australia, for example, Chinese authors Sheng Keyi and Murong Xuecun received much coverage as they discussed censorship and the “potentially dangerous undercurrents in China” in Griffith Review and during the MWF, the Brisbane Writers Festival and the Festival of Dangerous Ideas in 2015.[1] In contrast, media professionals, critics and reviewers only had Wu’s literary merits to rely on when featuring his appearances in Melbourne and at the University of Sydney in 2017. In the words of Readings: “[Wu’s] work, noted for its depth, complexity and vividly observed natural detail, has been compared to that of distinguished writers as diverse as Margaret Atwood, Haruki Murakami, W.G. Sebald, David Mitchell and Yann Martel.”[2]
But what does it all mean, exactly? Especially when anglophone readers have long been swamped and spoiled by China-related literary themes such as oppression of universal human rights, inequality and violence against women, individual struggles for freedom and independence, and trauma caused by political and social turmoil such as the Cultural Revolution and Tiananmen Square Massacre? It seems fair to suggest anyone intending to understand contemporary Taiwanese literature within a “Chinese” framework will meet a dead end. The “One China” policy is doomed when it comes to literature, always the best indicator to a nation’s psyche, for 70 percent of people in Taiwan under the age of 40 – and 78 percent of people aged 29 or younger – now hold an exclusively Taiwanese identity. That is a sharp contrast to survey results in 1991, when one-fourth of Taiwan’s residents identified themselves exclusively as “Chinese” and nearly half claimed to be “both Taiwanese and Chinese”.[3]
More importantly, Taiwan, like many other countries around the world, boasts an ethnically, culturally and linguistically diverse society. The island’s turbulent past – first inhabited by the Austronesian Peoples and then invaded by Dutch and Spanish forces, before being colonised by China and Japan – adds much complexity to its status as a strategically important gateway to Asia. While Chinese migrants arriving since the mid-16th century laid the foundation of modern Taiwanese history, there is no denial that Taiwan’s indigenous peoples and the Japanese occupation made important contribution to the formation of what is known today as the Taiwanese identity. Rich in conflict, reconciliation and determined pursuit of peace, it is an identity burdened with loss yet blessed by perpetual intellectual and emotional struggle for harmony.
This Taiwanese identity, with the passing and re-discovery of many precious memories, is carefully, confidently and compassionately explored in Wu’s The Stolen Bicycle. As the first-person narrator “I” searches for his missing father’s stolen bicycle, he starts collecting similar man-powered two-wheelers that were once an essential part of ordinary Taiwanese trade and transport under Japan’s rule. In the process of researching and tracking down the missing parts, repairing the damaged “iron horses” and restoring their former functionality, he is also piecing together the history of his family and that of Taiwan’s war-torn generations. In the same way that the value of daily objects derives from their being constantly and continuously used, the past lives on as long as we remember it.
And what a scarred and sorrowful past Wu has given us via his vivid and veracious representation of the Second World War’s legacy on the Taiwanese people. Yet a strange sense of peace lingers as each of the characters finds fulfilment in understanding and accepting their profound loss. Abbas, the philosophical photojournalist, pinpoints what is lacking in his art after discovering the bicycle that his father buried deep in the jungles of Northern Burma decades ago is now wrapped in the centre trunk of a huge tree. Pasuya, the aboriginal warrior uprooted and broken by the bloody Malayan Campaign in which he was forced to participate, finds solace in his reunification with a war elephant. Old Tsou, the shabby soldier who has hated the Japanese “savages” all his life, spends his remaining years in a gloomy, derelict village looking after a bird that he believes is a Japanese air cadet. And Shizuko, an orphan of war who lived through the February 28 Incident in 1947 and the following decades of White Terror in which tens of thousands of civilians were massacred, imprisoned or simply “disappeared” in their struggle for Taiwanese independence, is comforted by the fact that a handful of zoo animals were cared for after the destruction of Japanese operations in Taiwan by American warplanes in 1944.
Some may argue it is closure that these characters have found, but it is precisely the journey they undertake in search for the meaning of their loss that nourishes and sustains them, allowing them to realise the point is not and has never been what they lost. Instead, what is important is what they once cherished and what they now choose to remember.
The Buddhist concept of the Four States of Phenomena in the Principle of Physics – formation, existence, destruction and emptiness – may help illustrate Wu’s conceptualisation of objects such as bicycles. However, what makes The Stolen Bicycle unique is Wu’s focus on the significance of objects in the context of our attempt to find/form/foster/facilitate meaningful existence out of nothingness. Take A-hûn, who transforms the macabre into art in her work of making butterfly collages:
Some of the butterflies weren’t completely dead, and when she made the cut, their mouthparts thrust forward and their legs would suddenly constrict. She found it strangely fascinating, and at the moment the beautiful wings were separated from the ugly body, she seemed to touch something akin to her soul… A collage’s value was determined by the complexity of the design, the number of butterfly wings and the variety of species used. Basically, the more lives sacrificed, the more beautiful the result.[4]
Another example is Squad Leader Mu, who survived the most horrendous battles against Japanese forces in Northern Burma:
When that time came looking for him, when pain came knocking out of nowhere at his door, he’d slip away into the woods… Every time he opened his eyes after a brief nap in Fort Li in the days they spent facing off against the Japanese, he saw the tree was still growing new leaves and the sun was still shining through the gaps. It was the most beautiful experience in his entire life. It reminded him he was still alive and that the tree was still alive.[5]
Such diminutive yet determined defiance against the unstoppable may be seen as a major and uniquely Taiwanese theme in The Stolen Bicycle. As the first-person narrator “I” explains: “The word for fate in Mandarin is ming-yun, literally ‘life-luck’ or ‘command-turn’. But ‘fate’ in my mother’s native tongue of Taiwanese is the other way round: ūn-miā. It belies fatalism, putting luck in front of life, suggesting you can turn the wheel of fate yourself instead of awaiting the commands of Heaven.”[6] Instead of letting the past be gone, lamenting the destruction of life experiences and memories and staring at the void that is left behind, the characters in The Stolen Bicycle take the initiative to remember. In the process of remembering they learn to understand all that has been while paying tribute to what remains eternal in their ever-changing world.
It must be said that Darryl Sterk, an expert in Taiwan’s local literature and indigenous cultures, did a fine job translating not only Mandarin and the Taiwanese dialect but also the indigenous language Tsou into English. The resulting writing in The Stolen Bicycle is eloquent and thought-provoking, as Sterk well conveyed the science and philosophy of Wu’s efforts to shed light on traces of extraordinary human spirit across the dark land that is Taiwan’s wartime history. Meanwhile, the MWF should be recognised for compensating its previous lack of attention to Taiwanese literature by offering not one but two events featuring both author and translator. It is rare that readers get to glimpse the fascinating difference between Wu’s and Sterk’s personal styles, to explore how truth, kindness and beauty can transcend across cultural and linguistic barriers, and to celebrate the successful marriage of two distinguished literary voices. It remains this reviewer’s hope that we will meet more Taiwanese authors and their translators at Australian literary festivals in the near future.
Notes
- Introduction to Griffith Review 49: New Asia Now (https://griffithreview.com/editions/new-asia-now/). Retrieved on January 29, 2017.
- Introduction to Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle by Readings (https://www.readings.com.au/products/24092027/the-stolen-bicycle). Retrieved on January 25, 2018.
- Austin Horng-en Wang, Brian Hioe, Fang-Yu Chen and Wei-ting Yen, “The Taiwanese see themselves as Taiwanese, not as Chinese”, The Washington Post, January 2, 2017 (https://www.washingtonpost.com/news/monkey-cage/wp/2017/01/02/yes-taiwan-wants-one-china-but-which-china-does-it-want/?utm_term=.c4db3c548d54). Retrieved on January 25, 2018.
- The Stolen Bicycle, p.118.
- The Stolen Bicycle, p.342.
- The Stolen Bicycle, p.7.
CHRISTINE YUNN-YU SUN is a bilingual writer, translator, reader, reviewer and independent scholar. Her book reviews, essays and other creative writings have appeared in the Australian Poetry Journal, Westerly, Limina: A journal of Historical and Cultural Studies, The Victorian Writer, Overland, The Good Weekend, International Journal of People-Oriented Programming and American Journal of Chinese Studies. Her English re-writing of four Chinese classic novels — Journey to the West, The Three Kingdoms, The Water Margin and Dream of the Red Chamber— were published for young readers by Real Reads in the United Kingdom.
June 6, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Lunar Inheritance
by Lachlan Brown
Giramondo, 2017
ISBN 978-1-9253363-8-2
Reviewed by NICHOLAS JOSE
One of the titles in Lachlan Brown’s new book is ‘(sorites and another traveller’s song)’. The parenthesis is a sign of casual deflection. The title of the poem is an add-on. It could be something else. But actually it provides a good description of the whole, which is a lyrical reflection of a journey and a heap of other things. ‘Sorites’ means ‘heap’, referring here to hoarding—the poet’s grandmother’s literal obsessive hoarding, as well as the metaphorical hoarding of memories, stories, observations and associations that make up (this) poetry—and conceptually to the paradox of a heap. Does a heap stay the same as things are added to it or taken away? When is a heap not a heap but just detritus, nothing? For a certain kind of contemporary Australian poetry, of which Brown’s is an appealing example, this is a problem of situatedness, of inheritance.
Poetry is hard to talk about. The usual way to do so is to add a heap of words, in appreciative response. Hence this review. That’s harder to do with the particular poetry I’m talking about here which is already adding its own loose, dense, fast, fluid language to a referential conversation going on with other voices that share the space. Perhaps with John Tranter at their back, Ken Bolton and Pam Brown comes to mind, Jill Jones, Adam Aitken, John Mateer, Greg McLaren, Fiona Wright, ‘Sydney’ poets, sort of. Lachlan Brown’s first book, Limited Cities (2012) links the 2005 riots in Macquarie Fields, the Western Sydney suburb where he grew up, with riots encountered in Paris, similarly fuelled by disadvantage and disenfranchisement. The poet re-visions the world through techniques of substitution, or ‘replacement’, what a hoarder imagines for the things at their disposal. The manner of the concern is what Brown shares with his cohort. It is exemplified by the epigraph from Borges that introduces Brown’s poem ‘Petrol Stations, or Nine Vouchers Without the Optimism’:
It is as if a novelist of our day were to sketch a satirical caricature of, say, service stations, treating them in a ludicrous way. Borges, ‘Partial Enchantments of the Quixote’
But for the poet of the Australian banlieues in the 21st century, this is no longer satire but revaluing with redemptive intent.
The new book, Lunar Inheritance (2017), makes that underlying purpose and power more apparent:
You rethink your motivations
for writing. You catch yourself frowning.
It is there, first of all, in the foregrounding of form and the ordering of things. The book is organised around travel between Sydney and China’s major cities, but with the notable addition of Kaiping in the Pearl River Delta. That’s where the poet’s grandmother left from in 1939, eventually for Australia. Three generations later she has farewelled her grandson on his ‘return’. The poet tells Fiona Wright in an interview (29 August 2017, Sydney Review of Books podcast) that he was ‘going back to China for the first time’. Yet his ‘first time’ carries the China that has been handed down to him, making this a family ‘going back’, even if to a place that the maternal line broke away from and no longer knows. What return can there be? The question prompts poetry in which the moving through of layers of place, time and identification are fashioned to communicate a questioning, multiple selfhood.
The poems in Lunar Inheritance appear as eight line blocks (with parenthetical titles) arranged in sets of eight. Each set is prefaced by a bold title and an abstracted ideogram and every second set is followed by a poem in sonnet form (14 lines) with its own title in bold. The second set ends with a poem called ‘Chinese Container’, for example, while the third set is called ‘Self-storage’, both indicators that the containment is thematic as well as formal. The pattern continues strictly throughout until the last set, which has only seven poem blocks, the last (eighth) being left void, in keeping with the openness of the last title, ‘Almost there’, suggesting that any arrival can only be provisional. There is cultural play in the arrangement—8, the auspicious number in Chinese—and an embrace of Chinese aesthetic features—the rectangle, the regular sequence—combined with cross-cultural play via the interpolation of the (Western) sonnet, in poems that often critique Australian anxiety about cultural crossing. Flowing through and over the formal constraints, however, there is a great flexibility of line, varied and divided up in all sorts of ways, allowing experiment and openness.
The lunar inheritance is the yin line of female legacies from China, the far side of the moon, through the poet’s great-grandmother, grandmother and mother, all present in these poems, but it is also the pressure of that experience in himself, for an English-language poet whose name is Lachlan (unpronounceable in China) Brown. There is an undercurrent here, and a determination to defend a family’s experience and the power of the culture it draws on. Brown appreciates what he finds in China. It inspires some marvellous similes—‘scaffolding like bamboo / hashtags camped around a high-rise’—and forces reflection from a double perspective: in a Beijing hutong, for example, you glance
sideways for touristic reasons and find your gaze
pattern caught by a workshop that is filled with clothes
and striped bags, and for less than a second this is
your grandmother’s brimming house in Ashfield….
This is not a China limited by national boundaries or history as the future unfolds: ‘Around the world ((y)our) people begin to wake….’ The poet welcomes such transformation with what he calls his ‘(absorption method)’, the title of a poem written on reaching Shanghai, where ‘the river [is] the colour of a bad espresso’. The blocks of these poems image the building blocks by which China has moved forward—producing, transporting, systematising, multiplying: economic activity with a cultural base that extends even to his grandmother’s hoarding: ‘buildings … become Mahjong tiles’, a ‘container’ heads to the coast, ‘my un-heritage stacked five / stories high’, ‘in a shelf-stacked reality’, ‘the promise of a perfect supply chain’, all modular:
So you now know the reticulated
of a Zili village like those gridbooks where your
friends all practised their Mandarin Saturday characters
while you pressed space bar to jump through traffic.
Brown is a fine phrase-maker, at his best when there’s something at stake. His method is to make a connection that glances to something else, recoining the familiar, converting a perception into a metaphor. He worries that he writes from a position of ‘deracinated privilege’, that his poems are selfies. His consciousness of that puts him properly at the centre of what he writes about:
(non-sober judgement)
You’re anxious that each new insight is just
self-surveillance missing/hitting its mark,
the sky-like mirror in a nightclub bathroom
in Chaoyang district.
In an empire of near-universal surveillance whether language hits or misses makes little difference. The presence of China in our world has become the uneasy sign of that: a condition in which we are all complicit. Lachlan Brown registers it with a tentative intensity, his language ‘already straining this experience … like a half-hearted net in a swiftly flowing river’. Lunar Inheritance is especially valuable for the uncomfortable awareness it shares.
NICHOLAS JOSE has published seven novels, including Paper Nautilus (1987), The Red Thread (2000) and Original Face (2005), three collections of short stories, Black Sheep: Journey to Borroloola (a memoir), and essays, mostly on Australian and Asian culture. He was Cultural Counsellor at the Australian Embassy Beijing, 1987-90 and Visiting Chair of Australian Studies at Harvard University, 2009-10. He is Professor of English and Creative Writing at The University of Adelaide, where he is a member of the J M Coetzee Centre for Creative Practice.
June 5, 2018 / mascara / 0 Comments
Modern Chinese poetry begins with its turn away from classical Chinese poetry in the early twentieth century. This turn saw the adoption of the vernacular and the move away from classical forms. Yet the history of modern Chinese poetry does not mimic the trajectory of Western modernist and post-modernist experimentations. In particular, the years between the founding of the People’s Republic of China in 1949 and the death of Mao Zedong in 1976 represent a hiatus in the development of modern poetry in mainland China. The death of Mao and the ensuing end of the Cultural Revolution saw the resurgence of poetry away from the officially sanctioned poetry of the Mao era.
It was during this period in the late 1970s and into the early 1980s that the first experimentations in contemporary poetry from mainland China emerged. Dismissed as the Misty group by critics unreceptive to their imagery and language, these poets were nevertheless the first to be translated and anthologised in English-language anthologies of contemporary poetry from China. In the decades since, several competing aesthetic movements have emerged that represent a move away from the imagery and language of the Misty poets. At the same time, anthologies in English translation have continued to chart this ongoing period even if ‘for two decades contemporary poetry from China was almost exclusively represented by Menglongshi (Misty Poetry) (Yeh ‘Modern Chinese Poetry’ 603). These anthologies even now mostly emanate from the larger metropolitan centres of the Anglophone world. Recent anthologies include W. N. Herbert et al’s 2012 Jade Ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry, published by British poetry publishing house Bloodaxe Books, Ming Di’s 2013 New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry from the American independent literary Tupelo Press publishing house, and Liang Yujing’s 2017 Zero Distance: New Poetry from China from the American experimental Tinfish Press publishing house.
Australian translations of contemporary Chinese poetry have also been forthcoming in the latter part of the twentieth and early part of the twenty-first centuries. Important work in the translation and dissemination of contemporary Chinese poetry has come from such scholars and literary translators as Mabel Lee, who in 1990 published Yang Lian’s The Dead in Exile (Tiananmen Publications) and Masks & Crocodile: A Contemporary Chinese Poet and his Poetry (Wild Peony Press). Her 2002 translation of Yang Lian’s Yi appeared through the American publisher, Green Integer, while her 2014 translation of poet and writer Hong Ying’s poetry collection I Too Am Salammbo (2) appeared through the Sydney and Tokyo-based Vagabond Press in its Asia-Pacific series. Lee is also the editor of the 2014 Poems of Hong Ying, Zhai Yongming & Yang Lian (Vagabond Press) and along with Naikan Tao and Tony Prince is one of the translators. The latter two also published in 2006 Eight Contemporary Chinese Poets (Wild Peony Press). Finally, literary translator and critic Simon Patton has co-edited the China domain of Poetry International Web, and is the translator along with Tao Naikan of avant-gardist Yi Sha’s 2008 Starve the Poets! Selected Poems (Bloodaxe Books).
Poet, writer, essayist, editor and translator Ouyang Yu has over a period of three decades since his arrival in 1991 from mainland China to pursue a doctorate at La Trobe University brought to the notice of the Australian literary establishment contemporary Chinese poetry through his ongoing translation projects. Some of his translations have acquired canonical status in Australian literary culture through their inclusion in such publications as the Best Australian Poems anthologies (Black Inc). His translations of Shu Ting’s ‘Good Friends’ and Shu Cai’s ‘Absurdity’ appeared in Best Australian Poems 2012, edited by John Tranter, while his translations of Bai Helin’s ‘Meeting with the Same River’ and Hu Xian’s ‘The Orchard’ appeared in Best Australian Poems 2013, edited by Lisa Gorton.
Ouyang Yu has translated and edited into English two major anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry. In Your Face: Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation was published in 2002 through the literary journal, Otherland, as a special issue of the journal, and Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China was published in 2013 through poetry publisher Five Islands Press. With a few exceptions, both of these publications, like other English-language anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry, concentrate on poets who either emerged or were born after the death of Mao in 1976. They also define contemporary Chinese poetry in its broader sense to include poetry from the wider Chinese world, including in the case of In Your Face from the diasporic world of Australia.
Apart from his two major anthologies in English translation of contemporary Chinese poetry, Ouyang Yu continues to publish translations of contemporary Chinese poetry and maintains an active connection to contemporary Chinese culture through his teaching and research in mainland China. In 2016, he edited in journal form along with poet and short-story writer Yang Xie ‘A Bilingual Selection of Poetry in Chinese and English’, translated by Ouyang Yu. It features a selection of twenty-one contemporary Chinese poets with forty-six poems. In 2017, he published his translations of three contemporary Chinese female poets in Poems of Wu Suzhen, Yue Xuan & Qing Shui (Vagabond Press). He also engages in what he calls ‘self-translation’, as marked by the publication of his 2012 Self Translation (Transit Lounge) of his translations into English side by side with the Chinese of poems written originally by him in Chinese but translated into English as discrete English-language poems.
Ouyang Yu is also a major contributor to Australian literary culture through his own poetry, fiction, and essays. In his 2009 Barry Andrews Memorial Address, Nicholas Jose notes Ouyang Yu’s ‘original and polymathic contributions to China-Australia literary interaction’. Moving fluidly between cultures and languages, Ouyang Yu has developed a dynamic aesthetic in his work that ‘enables him to move surprisingly between Australian attitudes and Chinese perspectives’(3).
Ouyang Yu’s work as a literary translator functions as a bridge between China-Australia literary cultures. Yet In Your Face received little critical attention upon initial publication. Ouyang Yu describes how it ‘was sent to nearly all the major literary journals and newspapers in Australia but got no response whatsoever (although it has since been reviewed in a number of magazines, notably Overland)’ (‘Motherland, Otherland’ 53). On the other hand, Breaking New Sky received critical attention in such online literary journals as the poetry-focused Cordite, Mascara, and the writing journal TEXT. (3) Anthologies such as Ouyang Yu’s not only bring closer together Australia-China literary relations but also join Australian literary culture to the international stream of English-language translations of contemporary Chinese poetry. A marker of the importance of his work in the translation and dissemination of contemporary Chinese poetry is Cosima Bruno’s inclusion of In Your Face along with publications by Mabel Lee, Tony Prince, Tao Naikan and Simon Patton in her appendix of book-length translations into English of Contemporary Chinese poetry from 1980–2009 (280-285).
Anthologies of poetry in translation carry images of the originating culture that can challenge a target culture’s preconceptions. In the case of China, images of China remain ambiguous in the broader Australian imagination. The question becomes what image of China emerges from Ouyang Yu’s selection of poets and poems across these two anthologies minimally divided by time being only eleven years apart and which span between them a significant period of China’s modernisation. This question does not ignore the aesthetic drive of contemporary Chinese poetry but adds a layer of interrogation. The question applies to any anthology in English translation of contemporary Chinese poetry, but Ouyang Yu’s anthologies circulate within the Australian critical field and therefore merit analysis within the networks of Australian literary culture.
To readers and critics who see the role of anthologies as being one of canonisation of poets and poems, Ouyang Yu throws a challenge when he states in his introductions to In Your Face and Breaking New Sky that they are eclectic and personal collections. He states in In Your Face that his interest does not lie in circulating established names but in discovering what ‘lies about us abundant, abandoned and not yet appropriated’. This is not to say that poets already known to western readers are not among the poets featured in In Your Face, but it includes lesser-known names. In Breaking New Sky, Ouyang Yu is even more provocative when he proposes the radical notion that ‘I have always wanted to publish an anthology of poetry featuring poems without their authors’ names attached to them’.11 He seeks to publish only those poems that have moved him ‘emotionally or cerebrally’. He is not interested in canonisation but enjoyment.
In not delineating the field of contemporary Chinese poetry and setting its boundaries within strict limits, Ouyang Yu opens up the play of contemporary Chinese poetry beyond his taste to that of the reader. If he has made ‘many discoveries’ (Breaking New Sky,8) then the reader may, too. He does not eschew a general positioning of contemporary Chinese poetry in his introductions, but he does not categorically define readers’ tastes for them by circumscribing the possibilities of contemporary Chinese poetry even as he is resolute about what he does not like. In In Your Face, he includes few poets born before the 1950s, because he ‘can hardly read the old ones’, but he reminds readers that several, including him, were born in the 1950s, ‘such as Wang Jiaxin and Ouyang Jianghe, once dominating voices in the Chinese poetic scene now banished to the periphery by the rise of the new-generation poets’. We might compare Ouyang Yu’s playful introduction in In Your Face with that of the anthologists of Jade Ladder, when Yang Lian argues that ‘in this anthology, we hope to rebuild the formal values of poetry’, and ask ourselves whether the Jade Ladder anthologists and Ouyang Yu are that far removed. Enjoyment also means enjoyment of poetry as art form.
Ouyang Yu’s statement in Time magazine in 2010 that ‘poetry is one of the freest media in China, but the West doesn’t know it’ is intriguing when we consider ‘the authorities have turned a blind eye because Chinese society is increasingly focused on the economy’. It means that ‘this is the best time for Chinese poets to flourish’. He repeats variations of this statement in both In Your Face and Breaking New Sky. In the introduction to In Your Face, which predates his Time statement by eight years, he writes that ‘Chinese poetry is no longer a monolith of dogmatism and various isms but one of diversity and vitality’. The latter themes of diversity and vitality are taken up again in Breaking New Sky when he recalls three years after his Time statement that ‘it was only upon editing Otherland magazine in late 1994’ that he grew to see that contemporary Chinese poetry ‘seemed to have taken a turn for the better’. By better, an aesthetic as well as political judgement, he means that ‘poetry, or some of it, was no longer’ written with officialdom in mind but had become ‘an expression of personal poetic truths that readers could identify with’.
Ouyang Yu is not unique among anthologists to assert the diversity of contemporary Chinese poetry. W. N. Herbert observes in his preface to the Jade Ladder anthology that contemporary Chinese poets ‘have embarked on one of the world’s most thorough and exciting experiments in contemporary poetry’ and avows ‘the diversity of mainland Chinese poetry today’ . Yang Lian also hints in his introduction to the Jade Letter anthology at the diversity of contemporary Chinese poetry when he argues that following the deadening impulse of the Cultural Revolution ‘the last thirty years of Chinese poetry has created an era that is one of the most-quick witted and exciting in the whole history of Chinese poetry’.
The question of diversity conceals within it another question which is the question of why diversity receives emphasis in anthologies of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation. W. N. Herbert recalls in the preface to Jade Ladder that modern Chinese poetry is a product of a two-fold pressure. Firstly, the arrival of modernism through the New Culture or May Fourth Movement of 1919 ‘moved literary writing decisively away from the rules if not the influence of classical forms’. Secondly, the Communist victory in 1949 ‘confirmed and intensified the same tensions between propagandistic “realism” and individual expression that were then afflicting Stalinist Russia’. However, such factors as the death of Mao in 1976, the end of the Cultural Revolution, and China’s opening to the West as well as different movements of poets emerging to explore diverse aesthetic drives have all spearheaded the diversity of contemporary Chinese poetry.
A critical difference between In Your Face and Breaking New Sky is the former’s anarchic introduction compared with the latter’s more normative one. The biographies of poets across In Your Face read more like knowing conversations between friends than the more literary offerings of Breaking New Sky. In de Certeauan terms, the latter is less guerrilla tactics of invasion, or infiltration, and more calculated, or strategic, invitation of reflection. (4) Readers and critics who view the role of anthologies in translation as the polite introduction of another poetry may dismiss Ouyang Yu’s provocatively entitled ‘Poems as Illegal Immigrants: an Introduction’ in his earlier In Your Face as polemical.
However, Ouyang Yu is throwing up a challenge to readers who approach contemporary Chinese poetry as consumption or criticism. His vociferous tone in the introduction to In Your Face is the avant-gardist’s call to arms. He is inviting Australian readers to rethink their relationship to both China and the consumption of poetry. Within the context of the difficulty of writing and getting published in Australia as someone from a non-English speaking background, he writes that ‘translating contemporary Chinese poetry into English for an audience whose main interest in Asia read China is money and everything that goes with it defies description’. The unexpected critical judgement on readers seeking a poetry critical of contemporary China is that if they wish ‘to know what characterizes these poems’ then it is ‘that they are mildly and sensitively anti-Western’.
Despite the milder tone of the Introduction in Breaking New Sky, it recalls the avant-gardist’s call to arms in In Your Face. In what is a ‘labour of love’ for him, Ouyang Yu offers readers, who have now morphed into ‘Australian poetry lovers’, a diverse collection of ‘the most interesting, the most enticing, the most loveable poems’ from ‘the best known and unkown poets, from an ancient shiguo (poetry nation)’. The story of contemporary Chinese poetry is but one step in a long poetic journey which, as Ouyang Yu tells us, the Beijing-based poet, Lin Mang, argues that it can ‘hold its own with the rest of world poetry in that it flies on two wings’. Thus, ‘one wing is its 5000-year-old history of poetry’, and the other is ‘its absorption or assimilation of Western poetry over the last 100 years’. Both mean that it can ‘fly higher’. The invitation is that contemporary Chinese poetry stands on its aesthetic achievements.
Ouyang Yu poses in the introduction to Breaking New Sky the perennial question of what is the lasting quality of a poem and argues ‘it is the unspeakable mysterious truth captured in the brevity of lines that transcends cultures and politics’. In western terms, this is the expressive truth of lyric poetry since the Romantics. Yet Ouyang Yu’s statement reverberates with Yang Lian’s notion in Jade Ladder that the contemporary Chinese poet is ‘a professional questioner, maintaining a constant position of questioning the self and facing up to a constantly changing world’. The power of contemporary Chinese poetry in English translation also lies in what comes across from the Chinese in the very texture of the translation. For Ouyang Yu, direct translation that preserves the original language is the preferred method, operating in his analysis as if the sublime, numbing the senses and ‘adding strangeness to the beauty of the translated poem’ (Breaking New Sky 9-10).
In organising both anthologies alphabetically, and in not limiting himself to one group of interrelated poets or labelling poets according to their aesthetic affiliations, Ouyang Yu allows the diversity of contemporary Chinese poets to flourish within the pages of his anthologies. The question remains that if diversity is one of the characteristics of contemporary Chinese poetry then it is legitimate to ask what kind of China emerges from within the pages of Ouyang Yu’s anthologies, if not any anthology of contemporary Chinese poetry, since poems contain within themselves traces of social life and engagement.
Reading social interactions in China through Ouyang Yu’s anthologies
Ouyang Yu’s 1990s poem ‘Translating Myself’ in his first collection of poetry, Moon Over Melbourne and other Poems, offers a way in to reading the poems across In Your Face and Breaking New Sky as artefacts of social relations. It is suggestive of how the translated poem also conceals within itself the social body of another culture:
I translate myself
from Chinese into English
disappear into appearance of
another existence looking back across
the barrier of tied tongues
at the concealed image of the other body
(83)
Ouyang Yu’s diverse selection of poets in these anthologies allows precisely what is operating across different aesthetic groups to emerge with full and overlapping complexity. The selection of poems puts the diversity of contemporary Chinese poetry under pressure. Diversity implies both aesthetic and representational diversity. Both anthologies engage in a diverse questioning of a shifting contemporary terrain that frequently puts the present in tension with the past. In the 1990s, Michelle Yeh noted that ‘Chinese poetry stands between traditional society, which is fast disappearing, and modern society, which is dominated by mass media and consumerism’ (Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry xxiii). The poems in In Your Face and Breaking New Sky are not always suggestive of a modern world in tension with a traditional world. Yet as poems in both of Ouyang Yu’s anthologies are drawn from poets across the generations, we see a tension between the present and the past playing out in both anthologies. In In Your Face, such tension is often at the surface of the poem, but in the later anthology, Breaking New Sky, we encounter poems where the losses of the past are more subtly integrated into the concerns of the present. The poetics of individual poets show not aesthetic stagnation but renewal; not naïve reflection but sophisticated engagement.
In Your Face
Featuring seventy poets and with a total of one hundred and eighteen poems, In Your Face gives a wide view of contemporary Chinese poetry with some poets born in the 1950s, 1960s and 1970s. Ouyang Yu argues that the poets born in the 1960s write in a more down-to-earth, or minjian, style, having an eye to ‘ordinary daily details, often sordid ones’ than ‘what they dismiss as the intellectual’ poets of the 1950s ‘whose masters seem all western’. However, those born in the 1970s ‘are even fiercer’ .
Poems like Ah Jian’s ‘Unfortunately, I Do not Have any Belief’ suggest an ennui that functions as cynicism with the status quo. It is highly suggestive of a boredom with politics and a concomitant resignation. The social space conjured in the closing lines of the poem is one in which irony itself has been enfolded into the poem’s indifferent cynicism. We are far removed from any grand statements of purpose or will. The speaker is resigned to the status quo even as he ironises it:
If I am punished eventually for lack of a belief
What can I do
Except bear it (6)
Reminiscent of Ah Jian’s cynicism, Han Dong’s poem ‘A and B’ deals in dissociative relationships in which the sexual tensions of male-female relationships manifest through the speaker’s cynicism. The lyrical in the form of the expressive has been subtracted from the equation of romantic relationships. The poem uses the banal language of official reports that annul any idealistic tendency when the speaker says that ‘for the purpose of a complete description it must be pointed out that / when B stands up after tying the laces, she has semen running down that belongs to A’ (18).
Cynicism also features in Hai Shang’s ‘An Evening Visitor to the House’ that deconstructs literary repression in an ironical, matter-of-fact tone. The poem says of the female lover, or prostitute, that ‘she must have recognised this scene from another century’ (22), but a few lines later ‘she is swaying her buttocks / and walking directly towards the bedroom / and this episode has been removed from the book’ (22). Yet the poem strikes an ideal note in its suggestion of poetry as the refuge of the forbidden. What is excluded in a book can yet find its way into poetry. Contemporary life is a negotiation of psychic freedom.
Domestic life comes under scrutiny in Chen Dachao’s poem, ‘Dreams Shattered Late at Night’, in which the speaker’s sleep is shattered by the intrusion of another’s domestic argument. The poem reaches beyond the confines of its own boundaries to raise the more generalised question of violence within the urban home, suggesting that the urban itself is implicated in the occurrence of such violence:
No-How many homes there must be
in cities today that look sturdy on the
outside
but are broken within (13)
Hou Ma’s ‘Learning English’ critiques the linguistic intrusion of English into social life at the behest of the state. The topic, as articulated in ‘Learning English’, is one which highlights loyalty to one’s own language and hence culture even as the foreign entices one away from one’s own heartland:
As a state policy
English intervened in my life
It had nothing to do with the social environment
In which I lived then and it was useless (25)
…..
I wish that I could fall in love with my lover, the English, one day
Without carrying my wife, the Chinese, in my heart (25)
In Ma Fei’s ‘In the Western Food Restaurant’, the speaker stands apart from those around him, who ridicule an elderly man. The latter’s indifference to etiquette is transferred to the poem itself which critiques imported western lifestyles. The elderly man insists on eating his western food with his chopsticks, saying ‘he was eating, not killing’. In a double move, the speaker’s reaction to the snobbery around him enfolds into the poem an ironic distance to western cultural influence. Ultimately, the poem becomes a commentary on writing poetry:
Unlike my pretentious compatriots
I did not present a face
Of snobbery to the old man
I found him a genuine bloke
Who didn’t give a damn about etiquette
But just did it the way he was comfortable
Like the poem I wanted (46)
Xi Du’s ‘The Son and Daughter Problem’ highlights the emotional cost of the one-child policy not as political critique but as social reality. A married couple fantasises divorce as means to gain a sibling for their unborn child:
We’ll give birth to a lonely generation
Oh, the lonely generation
Even before you are born
you put your parents in despair
Before we wake up from our dreams
we each have divorced the other once (83)
The poems across In Your Face unfold a thought-provoking commentary on contemporary life that challenges any lingering perceptions in Australian readers and beyond of Chinese poetry as rhetoric.
Breaking New Sky
Unlike In Your Face, most of the poets gathered in Breaking New Sky were born in the 1960s and 1970s with a few in the 1980s and with the youngest in 2002. As in In Your Face, they are not necessarily canonised in western anthologies. However, like In Your Face, the poems throughout Breaking New Sky are infused with the existential challenge of day-to-day life, its wryness and its lyricism, albeit in a sensibility that is not always at the vanguard of the poem. The collection features forty-five poets and seventy-two poems.
Bai Helin’s ‘A Fake Rattan Chair’ interrogates the existential quest for a symbol of the past in the form of the chair the speaker’s father once possessed but which now can only be obtained in artificial plastic:
Now the fake rattan chair in a black-coated iron frame
Has retired before its time
Like a weary housekeeper. In it, there is a mess consisting of
An old attaché case, four unwashed items of clothing, three stacks
of trousers
Two mobile phones, a stack of poetry collections and a copy of
The Golden Rose
As well as a white bra, just removed
From my girlfriend’s breasts (16-17)
In Lu Ye’s ‘On the Balcony’, the lyrical interrogation of a symbol of the Chinese historical imaginary in the form of the Yangtze River turns it into a symbol of inner celebration. It performs a complex poetics that shifts the tension between traditional and modern poetic images away from critique to negotiation:
A house from whose balcony one can see the Yangtze
Can be called a luxury residence even at its humblest
My windows all open towards June and the viscera of the
summer exposed
The summer in my body happens to be lush with water grass
Open only for you
There is another Yangtze that originates in my heart, running
through my body
Ah, my heart is the origin of Mount Geladaindong
My veins meandering for 6,300 kilometers, with upper, middle
and lower reaches
And, at its tenderest place
There is also a sandbar in the heart of the river (63)
Zang Di’s ‘The Philosophy Building’ is a complex articulation of meditative inquiry, ironic observation, and unadorned lyricism where the tension between the old and the new is one of nostalgic loss as much as realistic acceptance of the temporal:
built in the 1940s, with a blue-grey roof
like a wing-room directly taken from a temple
its style certainly is not ordinary
beautiful because of dusk and disappearing because of the
punctuation of stars (81)
One of Lu Yu’s other poems, ‘B-Mode Ultrasound Report, Gynecology Department’ ironises both the rhetorical and lyrical modes of language when the speaker writes that “if the report were written in a figurative language” than it would talk about “its shape is cvloser to a torpedo / Than an opening magnolia denundata” (52). This is a sophisticated poetics that conceals within it a tension between woman as vessel and woman as autonomous being:
In a lyrical language, it would have to be written thus:
Ah, this cradle of mankind
Grown on the body of a failed woman
Stops short of germinating despite its rich maternal instinct (53).
In conclusion, in both In Your Face and Breaking New Sky Ouyang Yu gives an expansive picture of what makes contemporary Chinese poetry vibrate. Both collections demonstrate an ongoing renewal of the poetic element in contemporary Chinese poetry and offer a window into the complexities of contemporary social life.
Notes
1 This essay with slight alterations was presented as a paper at the Association for the Study of Australian Literature Conference ‘Looking In: Looking Out: China and Australia’, which was held in Melbourne, 11-14 July 2017, and draws on my review of Breaking New Sky in TEXT. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/giannoukos_rev.htm
2. See my review of I Too Am Salammbo in Rochford Street Review.
3. See my review of Breaking New Sky in TEXT. http://www.textjournal.com.au/april14/giannoukos_rev.htm
4. In The Practice of Everyday Life, Michel de Certeau identifies tactics with the disempowered and the strategic with the empowered.
Works Cited
Bruno, Cosima. ‘The Public Life of Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation.’ Target: International Journal of Translation Studies, vol. 24, no. 2, 2012, pp. 253-285.
De Certeau, Michel. The Practice of Everyday Life. Translated by Steven Randall, U of California P, 1984.
Herbert, W. N., et al. Jade ladder: Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Bloodaxe Books, 2012.
Jose, Nicholas. ‘Australian Literature Inside and Out.’ (Special Issue: ‘Australian Literature in a Global World.’ Eds. Wenche Ommundsen and Tony Simoes da Silva). Journal of the Association for the Study of Australian Literature, 2009.
Ming, Di, editor. New Cathay: Contemporary Chinese Poetry. Tupelo Press, 2013.
Ouyang, Yu. Breaking New Sky: Contemporary Poetry from China. Introduced and translated by Ouyang Yu, Five Islands Press, 2013.
‘In Your Face. Contemporary Chinese Poetry in English Translation.’ Introduced and translated Ouyang Yu, Otherland Literary Jornal, no. 8, 2002.
‘Motherland, Otherland: Small Issues.’ Antipodes, vol. 18, no. 1, 2004, 50-55.
‘Translating Myself.’ Moon Over Melbourne. Papyrus Publishing, 1995.
Yeh, Michelle. Anthology of Modern Chinese Poetry. Yale UP, 1992.
TINA GIANNOUKOS is a poet, writer, reviewer, and researcher. Her latest collection of poetry, Bull Days (Arcadia, 2016), was shortlisted in the 2017 Victorian Premier’s Literary Awards and longlisted for the 2017 Australian Literature Society (ALS) Gold Medal. She has a PhD in Creative Writing from the University of Melbourne where she has taught in Creative Writing. She has lived and worked in Beijing.