Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu

by Xu Xu

  After five days, I added an extra hour of study in the afternoon. Whenever she wasn’t able to grasp a new topic, I would try to channel the information to her bit by bit, using all sorts of stories or allegories. In that way, ten days went by. As for the coursework we were trying to tackle, it is fair to say that we did not make much progress, but we managed to get to know each other better and began to interact in a very natural way. In the mornings, she always would come to listen to the birds from the other side of the fence. Only when the birds had flown away would I go out and greet her. Sometimes I would invite her to come into the garden and we would talk about what we had studied the previous day. On other occasions, we would chat about the nearby hills or local stories and legends. She then would return home before showing up promptly at ten, and then again in the afternoon or early evening. She was now much more natural with me than before, but, once we started class, she would be at a loss again. This was a problem I continued to grapple with and I kept wondering how I could possibly get her to view our class as an extension of our everyday conversations, so that she could be as relaxed when studying as she was at other times.

  One morning, after we had finished listening to the birds, I met her at the back gate and took her for a walk. It was overcast that day and layer upon layer of gray clouds concealed the sky. The nearby hills appeared distant that day, their contours faint, like in a Chinese landscape painting. The rice paddies had just been planted with new seedlings, and they were rippling like a gentle emerald sea when the wind blew over them, filling the eyes with an expanse of lush green. Dew still covered the path, and our shoes and socks got a little wet. Suddenly, a magpie started to sing from atop of a pine tree. Yunqian stopped to look at it. Her face shone with a radiance that it never showed when we were studying.

  I jokingly said, “Yunqian, I have been teaching you for over ten days now and you still haven’t taught me any bird talk.”

  “Bird talk?” She laughed, and then suddenly blurted, “Yes, they seem to be talking, but they are not actually talking.”

  “They are not talking?” I asked. “But you understand what it is that they are saying?”

  “Yes, I understand,” she replied, “but I don’t quite know how to put it into words.”

  “Well, what was the meaning of what the magpie just said?” I asked.

  “She said … Well, she said …” She began to stutter. “She doesn’t mean things the way we do.”

  “But if there is life, then there is always meaning,” I said to her. “The magpie is also a living creature and like other living creatures has to eat and sleep and look for a mate.”

  “Maybe, maybe …” She knitted her brows and was struggling to find the right words. “But they are different from us, they are not like us.… How can I put this? What I’m trying to say is, their lives are not complicated like ours. They don’t need to mean things like we do.”

  She tried hard to express herself. I could see that she was very agitated, and I did not dare to ask any further. I was thinking that if bird talk was like a foreign language, then it should be possible to translate it. Could it be that it was not a language but rather a set of symbols in the way an exclamation mark is a symbol? It was of course because Yunqian was unable to translate bird talk that no one in the village believed that she could understand birds. But to me, there was no doubt that Yunqian and the birds were interacting.

  I asked her, “How did you learn bird talk?”

  “I don’t know,” she said. “I’ve just understood it ever since I got to know them.”

  After a while, I asked, “Do you know if all those birds are happy?”

  “Some are, some aren’t,” she said. “Sometimes they are happy, sometimes they are not.”

  “The ones who are not, do you comfort them?” I asked.

  “Of course I do!”

  “So what do you say to them?”

  “I can’t explain; I just, just …”

  There wasn’t anything left for me to ask. I realized then that she was bestowed with an unusual gift and that there was no way for me to ever really understand it.

  IX

  But then one day, something unexpected happened.

  That day, my grandma asked me to write a letter for her. When Yunqian came by in the morning, I told her to wait for me in the pavilion and to read for a while. When I returned to my room after ten minutes, she was holding a piece of paper, her face all radiant.

  “What’s this?” she asked me.

  I saw that it was the draft of a poem I had written the previous night:

  “Bird Talk”

  As the dust rises from the town’s street corners

  The partridges in the hills

  Warbling away in their unperturbed murmurs.

  On a tree in the garden under the sun’s warm rays,

  a senile old woodpecker

  talks about nothing but the good old days.

  And on top of the willows, from morning ’til sundown

  a flock of orioles

  singing of spring in the nearby market town.

  Nesting under the eaves in many a great number

  the little sparrows

  chirping about the spring breeze, sunshine, and thunder.

  In his cage under a curtain, who is still missing?

  The gossipy parrot

  complaining about cats and dogs and the tea kettle’s

  hissing.

  Perching on telephone lines that crisscross the land,

  Shall we keep listening to man’s foolish rant,

  Or better just fly away now for they’ll never understand?

  “It’s a poem. I wrote it last night.” I said.

  “You wrote it?” she asked, her face still radiant. “I like it; can I make a copy?”

  “Of course you can,” I said and, suddenly feeling curious, I asked, “Did you understand what it said?”

  “I am not sure,” she replied, “but I like it.”

  “Have you read other poems before?”

  “No.”

  I happened to have a copy of the *Three Hundred Tang Poems on hand and quickly selected a few poems, which I read out to her. To my utter surprise, she was delighted and that radiance returned to her face. It seemed that she intuitively grasped the poetic beauty of the lines we had just read. Her excitement exhilarated me. I felt I had finally found what spoke to her. That day, all we did was read a few more Tang poems. I asked her which ones she liked and which ones she did not like, and she confidently voiced her clear preferences and dislikes. The whole time, her face bore a happy expression. Her eyes shone brightly with the same radiance that they showed when she was conversing with birds and that was so very different from the dull expression she usually bore during our classes. How I would have loved for that radiance to always shine on her beautiful face!

  I did not know what it was that made her grasp the sentiment of each poem. What I read out to her was the literal meaning of the words, but the beauty of a poem often is something that eludes explanation. Her vocabulary naturally was limited, and her compositions frequently lacked cohesion. What’s more, her spelling was very poor. Yet with the help of my explanations she effortlessly overcame all the difficulties those poems presented and immediately grasped their poetic qualities. What was most extraordinary, though, was that, while she usually had a hard time remembering our class work, she was able to recite from memory almost all of the lines from the poems, even though we had only read them out loud three or four times. When she went home at noon, I asked her to copy those poems into her notebook. She also borrowed a draft copy of my poem “Bird Talk,” and I reminded her to pay attention to the way each word was spelled so that next time she would not misspell them.

  The following morning, after we had listened to the birds, we went for a walk. She recited the Tang poems we had read the previous day from memory as well as “Bird Talk.” Yet what amazed me most was the indescribable beauty with which she intoned the poems. Especia
lly when reciting “Bird Talk,” it felt as if she was endowing the work with new qualities beyond the actual lines I had written.

  We happened to be walking toward a white stone tomb of the kind often found south of the Yangtze River, with a sacrificial platform in front of it that was surrounded by a circular stone railing.

  When we walked onto the platform, I inadvertently brushed against her porcelain-white hand and, taking hold of it, said to her, “Yunqian.” But I no longer knew what I wanted to say.

  It was late spring. The sky was blue, the fields were green, and a host of yellow and purple wildflowers surrounded the tomb.

  “Do you like spring?” I eventually asked her.

  “I do, I like spring a lot, because of the birds and the flowers.” As she said so, she briskly shook off my hand and ran off to pick some wildflowers. I did not say anything else. I sat down on the stone railing and thought that she was indeed a mysterious creature, and maybe not of this human world. When she returned, I asked her to sit with me. Beginning with flowers, I told her about botany and about the basic facts surrounding the weather and its connection to plants. Then, looking up at the sky, I told her about the sun and the relationship between the earth and the stars, and about storms and thunder and lightning. Next, I talked about the earth, about geography, and the history of mankind. During this long conversation, I noticed that even though she did not understand everything, she seemed very interested.

  The sun was rising toward its zenith. We were bathed in sunlight and I started to feel hot. I realized that we had not had breakfast yet.

  “Do you know that we were going over school work just now?” I asked her.

  “That was all really interesting.”

  “Why don’t you think about all the things I just told you now. We won’t be having another class today,” I said, “but you later can show me the poems you copied yesterday.”

  X

  From that day, I no longer clung to a rigid lesson format. Instead, I encouraged her to think for herself, to experiment freely, to try to figure things out by herself. I also shared my poems with her and asked her what she thought of them. Once I was certain that she had understood them, I would ask her whether she liked or disliked them, or whether she agreed or disagreed with me over the meaning of a certain image. Only then would I ask her to try to use her own words to write down her feelings about them. I told her that she did not have to stick to a certain topic or length, and that she should simply write down what she saw and felt. This kind of exercise worked really well for her. She came up with some exceptionally insightful opinions and ideas, and I then helped her with diction and style. In that way, she slowly learned how to express her opinions in writing, even though when stitching together the various pieces into a longer essay, there would invariably be some repetition and inverted logic.

  Mathematics was the subject that most puzzled me. She continued to have a hard time with even the simplest of calculations. Regardless of whether she was adding or subtracting, multiplying or dividing, if the numbers were just a little larger, she would not be able to handle them. Very complex mathematical problems, on the other hand, she often was able to think through with relative ease. Hereafter, I no longer insisted that she complete anything that required excessive effort on her part. I wanted her to be confident, to feel unrestrained and natural, not only in our studies, but, I hoped, in her dealings with others. And she certainly showed a lot of improvement. I noticed that even though her cognitive abilities no doubt exceeded those of other people and she had a keen intuition, she was unsystematic and unorganized. She did not have a good memory, yet she possessed an excessive sensibility. She had a dozen souls, but she seemed to lack a brain. Maybe that was precisely why she was of such a sublime and beautiful nature, and why she was so pure and noble.

  And so, the days went by. The sea of green rice seedlings had gradually turned into an expanse of golden ears and the weather had started to turn hot. My health had improved greatly. My appetite had increased and I slept better. I experienced an unprecedented peace of mind. My life followed a strict routine, and spending time with Yunqian was not in the least burdensome. I had finally begun to understand her, and she had started to trust me. But then one day in early summer, something strange happened. Usually, Yunqian left just before lunch, but that day, she was still with me when I was getting ready to eat. She walked with me into the house where the table had already been laid, but as I sat down, she ran away without a word. My grandma could not make sense of it, but I immediately sensed that something must have happened. Was it that we had not asked her to stay for lunch? But that was not the custom in the village, and she had never taken lunch with us. I did not say anything, but I began to feel gloomy and uneasy.

  The next day, I got up early. I was hoping to ask her about it in the garden, but even though I waited for a long time, there was no trace of her. When she did not show up to class at ten o’clock, I was overcome by a feeling of emptiness and started to worry. Meeting with her all these days, I had not felt anything special, but now that I did not see her for one day I realized how important a part of my life she had become. I could not eat anything for lunch, and was not able to take my afternoon nap. At three o’clock, I could not help it anymore and walked over to Bingyang’s house. He had gone to town and was not at home, but I found his wife who greeted me in a friendly way and told me that Yunqian was sick.

  “She was quite all right yesterday, and very lively,” I said.

  “You must have scared her with something,” she said. “When she came back home yesterday, she was in very low spirits. She ran into her room and cried, and did not even eat.”

  “I didn’t do anything,” I said. “It couldn’t be that I didn’t ask her to stay for lunch, no?”

  “Impossible,” Bingyang’s wife said. And then, as if pitying me, she said, “That girl doesn’t know when something good is happening to her. You indulge her and she’ll come up with something. Best to ignore her.”

  “That can’t be it,” I said. “Surely there must be a reason.”

  “Do you want to know the reason?” she laughed.

  “Of course.”

  “It’s because you had fowl for lunch yesterday.”

  I was bewildered. Of course, someone selling turtledoves had come by the previous day. Grandma had asked me whether I liked them and I had said yes. She had bought a couple and that was what I had for lunch.

  “Don’t be upset,” Bingyang’s wife said.

  “Why would I be upset?”

  “People who don’t eat meat usually don’t care about what others eat,” she said, “but Yunqian can’t bear to see other people eat meat, especially fowl and poultry. Usually we just won’t let her know. That’s why we have her eat alone.”

  “She’s a vegetarian?”

  “She and her mother always ate vegetarian,” she said. “Usually even when she knows that others are eating fowl she never acts like this, but yesterday she cried and cried and did not even have dinner.”

  “Why didn’t Bingyang come over to tell me?”

  “Actually, he asked us not to tell you. He said you are teaching her and still she throws a temper because of what you eat; that’s ridiculous. One shouldn’t be too kind to that child. If you indulge her, she’ll put on an act. With her brother, she’s often completely unreasonable.”

  I thought what she said was extremely unpleasant, but kept quiet. Instead, I got up and asked, “Can I see her?”

  “She’s in her room.” Bingyang’s wife got up and led me into an inner room. On a table in front of the window, Yunqian had put her books. There was an old-style bamboo bed and on the right side of the window there were two worn cabinets. On the left, there was an old tea table, and a sheet of paper had been pasted on the wall above. It had Yunqian’s handwriting on it. I was stunned: It was my poem “Bird Talk.” How deeply she must have felt betrayed by me. I knew that this betrayal was causing her unbearable pain.

  Yunqian la
y slanted on the bed. She did not show any emotions when we entered, but sat up with her head lowered.

  “Yunqian,” I said, “why didn’t you tell me that you got upset at my mistake? You know, people often make mistakes and don’t realize they are wrong unless their parents or teachers point it out to them. It’s just like when you make a mistake in arithmetic. You also need someone else to tell you. Nobody is a sage, and we all make mistakes. We might be clever about one thing, but really stupid about another. Haven’t I told you that I can be really stupid sometimes? You have to teach me when you know better, just like I teach you things I am good at; isn’t that so?“

  Yunqian kept her head low and still did not say a word, but from the expression on her face I could see that she was relenting. Bingyang’s wife silently looked at Yunqian. She thought that Yunqian had not understood what I had said and hissed sharply, “Here is someone who has come to see you with good intentions and still you are acting like this.”

  I signaled her to leave it at this and pulled her out with me. Turning my head toward Yunqian, I said, “I’ll wait for you tomorrow!”

  Map of Shanghai from 1932 showing the foreign concessions and larger city area. Numbers refer to locations mentioned in the Introduction and the stories.

  Detail from Xu Xu’s wartime passport that was issued in December 1943 for travel to the US on behalf of the wartime newspaper Eradicator Daily 掃蕩報.