Bird Talk and Other Stories by Xu Xu

by Xu Xu

  Then, three days later at around eight thirty in the morning, when neither Zyunfuk nor Daksing had yet set up their stalls, Ah Heung suddenly came over and asked Old Gam to help her move two suitcases. Old Gam went to help Ah Heung bring the luggage to the entrance of Gousing Road. Then, Ah Heung hailed a cab.

  “Your mistress wants to go on a trip?” he asked.

  “I don’t know, but she asked me to take these some place.”

  Old Gam helped Ah Heung put the suitcases into the trunk. Then she got into the cab, thanked him, and off she went.

  V

  At first Old Gam didn’t notice, but eventually he realized that he hadn’t seen Ah Heung for a couple of days. When they all started to be concerned, Old Gam told them what had happened that morning when he had seen her off.

  The three of them began guessing what might have happened. Zyunfuk said, “I am sure it’s that Chinese-Filipino. She ran away with him. First, I delivered their letters, and then she brought over her luggage.”

  “I never once heard her say that she had any Chinese-Filipino friends,” Daksing said, “and besides, that letter did not seem to be written by her.”

  “And judging by the suitcases,” Old Gam observed, “they did not seem to belong to Ah Heung. They were fancy leather suitcases, which is why I asked her whether her mistress was going on a trip. She said that her mistress had asked her to take them some place.”

  “So why hasn’t she come back?”

  “Could she have fallen ill?”

  “If she had fallen ill, she would have gone to see a doctor, and we would have seen her.”

  …

  They debated back and forth for a long time but could not settle on an explanation that they all found convincing. At first they thought that sooner or later, Ah Heung would show up again, but then another two days passed and there still was no sign of her. Finally, they decided that they should buy some fruits and pastries and have Zyunfuk deliver them to the Si residence the following day. If she was there, then there’d be no problem, but if she wasn’t there, he could just say that he was a relative from Canton who had come to see her and leave them for her.

  Early the next morning, Zyunfuk went over to the Si residence. He rang the doorbell, and a healthy-looking older women who must have been in her sixties opened the door. When he inquired after Ah Heung, she told him that Ah Heung was her granddaughter and that she had gone to Macau the day before yesterday to get married. Zyunfuk originally had wanted to say that he had come from Guangdong province, but when that old lady said that she herself had just come over from Canton a few days ago, he changed his plan. He said that a certain Mr. Gam had asked him to deliver these snacks. He had wanted to ask the old lady some more questions, but she had already shut the door on him.

  Upon his return, Zyunfuk reported everything to Old Gam and Daksing. They all felt even more perplexed. If Ah Heung had gotten married, then it must have been to that Chinese-Filipino. But why had her grandmother come out to Hong Kong? They then guessed that Ah Heung would probably move to the Philippines after her wedding and therefore had wanted her grandmother to come to Hong Kong so that they could spend some time together. That of course made complete sense.

  Now that Ah Heung had found a good match, they naturally were happy for her. Nevertheless, they couldn’t help but feel a little disappointed that she hadn’t shared the news with her friends first. With Ah Heung gone, the three of them felt a little lonely, but otherwise everything was just as it had always been. Old Gam kept himself busy with his work, and whenever Daksing and Zyunfuk had nothing to do, they’d play chess. In this way, six days passed.

  On the seventh day, just when Daksing had stepped into the street to buy something, he saw a car stop ahead of him. The person stepping out of the car was none other than Ah Heung! Her appearance had changed completely. She wore a green dress and high heels and had permed her hair. She had a diamond ring on one of her fingers and a shiny watch on her wrist. Daksing at first did not believe his eyes, but when Ah Heung turned her head to beckon the person in the car, he clearly saw that it was her. Daksing had assumed that the person stepping out of the car with her would be the Filipino-Chinese, but it actually turned out to be her master, Mr. Si. Daksing refrained from going over to greet them. Instead, he looked on as Mr. Si got out of the car and the two of them disappeared inside the residence. Only then did he run back to tell Old Gam and Zyunfuk.

  “And you are sure you are not mistaken?” Old Gam asked.

  “How can I be mistaken, I was standing right there and saw her go inside with her master.”

  “Just the two of them? What about that Filipino-Chinese?” Zyunfuk asked curiously.

  “There were just the two of them,” Daksing replied.

  “I am sure that Mr. Si was their witness and now he has come back from Macau. Ah Heung is accompanying him and is meeting her grandmother at the same time,” Old Gam said with certainty.

  “Now that she has come back, I am sure she will come and see us,” Daksing said.

  “If she doesn’t come, I am going over there again to see her,” Zyunfuk said.

  “Maybe she does not want us to come and see her,” Old Gam said, considerate as ever.

  “I’d say, best not to rush things. Let’s wait a few days and see.”

  But then, early the next day, less than twenty-four hours after the three of them had discussed the matter, Ah Heung came to see them. She also brought a lot of things to eat. Some were for Old Gam, she said, and some for Daksing, and the rest for Zyunfuk. Without paying attention to Ah Heung’s gifts, Old Gam straight out asked her why she had gotten married all of a sudden.

  “And what about your husband? Who is he?” Daksing wanted to know.

  “It’s my master,” Ah Heung said.

  “Your master? That Mr. Si?” Zyunfuk asked in astonishment.

  “Why not? He’s rich, I like him; what’s wrong with it?” Ah Heung replied candidly.

  “So you will be his third wife!” Zyunfuk exclaimed, full of pity for Ah Heung.

  “I guess,” Ah Heung replied. “My mistress, that Ms. Si, she’s left.”

  “She’s left? And she won’t be coming back?” Old Gam asked.

  “She left with her Filipino-Chinese lover.”

  “Is he the one you had asked me to deliver a letter to the other day?” Zyunfuk asked.

  “Yes, that was him. He is a soccer star in the Philippines. A few years ago, he went to Taipei and fell in love with my mistress. This time he came to Hong Kong. After the two had exchanged a few letters and seen each other once, my mistress decided to go off with him. But because she was afraid Mr. Si would be heartbroken, she asked me to take care of him. And now we got married.”

  “Are you sure you’ll be happy that way?” Zyunfuk asked.

  “Why not? I can have everything now.”

  “And we all thought you had gotten married to that Filipino-Chinese,” Old Gam said.

  “You guys really have a vivid imagination,” Ah Heung said with a cheerful laugh.

  “I am still somewhat puzzled, how rich is that Mr. Si really?” Old Gam asked.

  “I am not entirely sure either,” Ah Heung replied, “but I told him that while I don’t have a lover, I have a lot of poor friends to look after, and three of them are right here in Gousing Road. And so Mr. Si said that he wants to give each of you a small shop in a newly built high rise in Kowloon. He wants you to open a business over there, so that you’ll no longer be keeping an eye on him day in and day out over here.”

  “Really? How did all that come about?”

  “Well, I asked him to lend a hand to my poor friends.” Ah Heung laughed and took her leave. But Old Gam asked her to hold on. He took out something wrapped in paper from inside his stall, and said, “Just a little something, please don’t laugh at me for not having done a better job with them.”

  Ah Heung tore open the wrapping and exclaimed, “Ah, a pair of leather shoes! Thank you!” She wrapped up the sh
oes again and went back, holding them tightly in her hands.

  VI

  Two weeks later, a big change came to Gousing Road.

  The shoe repair stall was still there, but it was now run by a young cobbler who had taken over the lease from Old Gam. The hardware stall was gone, and the stall for potted flowers was now a fruit stall. On Nathan Road in Kowloon, a row of shops opened for business in a newly built high rise. Three of them were clustered together, and they had all moved over from Gousing Road.

  One of them was “Old Gam’s Leather Shoes.”

  The next was “Daksing’s Metallurgy.”

  And the last one was “Zyunfuk All Lucky Electrical.”

  AFTERWORD

  A Chinese Romantic’s Journey through Time and Space: Xu Xu and Transnational Chinese Romanticism

  I changed from one job to the next, and drifted from place to place […]. I sold my songs and my stories and everything else to make ends meet. And in the end, I drifted to Hong Kong. (Xu 2008, 6:406)

  This is how the first-person narrator of Xu Xu’s 徐訏 short story “Bird Talk” 鳥語 (1951) ends up stranded in Hong Kong. He arrives alone, the reader later learns, without his fiancée Yunqian, who has stayed behind in mainland China. “Bird Talk” was among the first works of fiction that Xu Xu (1908–80) wrote in Hong Kong after leaving Shanghai in 1950 in the wake of the founding of the People’s Republic. Like many other mainland émigrés, Xu Xu initially believed that his stay in Hong Kong would be a temporary exile. In Shanghai, he left behind his wife whom he had married the previous year and a two-month-old daughter. Xu Xu’s exile would last three decades and only came to an end when he passed away in the Ruttonjee Hospital in Wan Chai on Hong Kong Island on October 5, 1980, without ever having returned to China. Like the lonely narrator in “Bird Talk,” Xu Xu reluctantly had to make Hong Kong his new home.

  Nostalgia and a yearning for the lost homeland constitutes, according to Wolfgang Kubin, the defining characteristic of postwar diasporic literature in Chinese (Kubin 2005, 259−67). This literary phenomenon is particularly visible in Hong Kong’s postwar literature, most of which was produced by writers who had sought exile in the British colony after leaving the newly founded People’s Republic of China (PRC) and who are collectively referred to as “writers who came south” 南來作家. To Lo Wai-luen, the expression of a deeply felt sense of homesickness 滿懷的鄉思 thus became central not only to the creative work of Xu Xu but also to many of his contemporaries in Hong Kong, such as Sima Changfeng 司馬長風 and Li Huiying 李輝英, who both came to Hong Kong in 1949 and 1950 respectively (Lo 1998, 118−19). Nostalgia and homesickness also became a defining feature in the poetry of émigré writers like Li Kuang 力匡 and Zhao Zifan 趙滋蕃, as well as of Xu Xu, who, besides writing fiction, published several volumes of poetry in Hong Kong (Leung 2009, 24; Chan 2009, 52).

  Nostalgia and homesickness as expressed in the works of these émigré writers, these critics argue, are inevitably tied up to the physical condition of exile in Hong Kong. To them, nostalgia was the catharsis through which these writers could express the pain of having had to leave their homes in mainland China and through which their pain could be made tangible for readers who shared a similar fate. Svetlana Boym calls this practice “restorative nostalgia,” namely, a process through which an exile attempts to rebuild a lost home and patch up memory gaps (Boym 2002, 41−48).

  Physical exile certainly was a painful reality for Xu Xu. Restorative nostalgia might to some extent have informed his literary activity in those years. However, nostalgia in Xu Xu’s postwar fiction above all constitutes the expression of a quest for a purely aesthetic utopia that had already begun to take shape in his prewar oeuvre and that came to full fruition in his postwar fiction. This is particularly evident in his short stories from Hong Kong, such as “Bird Talk” and “The All-Souls Tree” 百靈樹 (1950), both of which are included in this anthology, and also in his novella The Other Shore 彼岸 (1951) that is discussed below.

  Nostalgia in Xu Xu’s fiction is ultimately time and place unspecific, and Xu Xu himself was aware of the limits and fallacy of restorative nostalgia. Instead, nostalgia was a way for Xu Xu to give expression both to a real sense of loss as well as to a sense of metaphysical homelessness that did not directly result from his exile in Hong Kong but that is as much bound up with the experience of modernity as it is with the reality of the new postwar world order.

  Nostalgia thus becomes the expression of a literary aesthetic that connects Xu Xu to a number of other writers who are typically associated with a twentieth-century revival of romanticism, foremost among them Hermann Hesse (1877−1962). As it was for Xu Xu, the expression of nostalgia for Hesse was as much an aesthetic gesture as it was a political gesture. My understanding of Xu Xu’s use of nostalgia thus challenges conventional interpretations of the use of nostalgia in postwar Chinese literature and enhances our understanding of the interplay of aesthetics and politics in the work of Chinese writers in exile.

  The French-Brazilian philosopher Michael Löwy understands the romantic critique of modernity as bound up with an experience of loss:

  The Romantic vision is characterized by the painful and melancholic conviction that in the modern reality something precious has been lost, at the level of both individuals and humanity at large; certain essential human values have been alienated. This alienation, keenly sensed, is often experienced as exile […]. (Löwy 2001, 21)

  Löwy quotes Friedrich Schlegel as speaking of the soul, the seat of humanness, as living “under the willows of exile [unter den Trauerweiden der Verbannung],” far removed from the true hearth of homeland (Löwy 2001, 21). It is precisely this sense of metaphysical homelessness, I believe, that lies at the root of the nostalgic longing expressed by Xu Xu’s fictional protagonists.

  Löwy’s study on romanticism informs my own reading of Xu Xu in another way. Löwy understands romanticism as a highly diverse movement whose numerous strands can be found in genres and literatures not usually thought to be part of the romantic canon. By drawing on Xu Xu’s own critical writing on the role of the artist in society and by illustrating his intellectual proximity to writers and thinkers of the romantic movement, I will argue here that Xu Xu’s postwar fiction contributes to a transnational romantic canon and constitutes a creative engagement with romantic aesthetics that links modern Chinese literature to a global literary modernity.

  Xu Xu’s literary oeuvre has been linked to post- or neo-romanticism ever since his “rediscovery” by mainland scholars in the 1980s (Yan 1986 and 1989; Geng 2004).1 Yan Jiayan was among the first to describe Xu Xu’s prewar work as “brimming with the hue of romanticism,” emphasizing Xu Xu’s tendency to create fantastic plots in exoticized settings and his fascination with romance (Yan 1989, 309). Yan’s categorization of Xu Xu as a “post-romantic” appears to follow the logic that Xu Xu’s work appeared chronologically after those of an earlier group of Chinese writers active in the 1920s who are typically referred to as “romantics.” These writers, who include Guo Moruo 郭沫若 (1892−1978), Tian Han 田漢 (1898−1968), and Yu Dafu 郁達夫 (1896−1945), after coming into contact with the works of European romantics such as Goethe, Coleridge, and Lord Byron while studying abroad in Europe or Japan, had begun to emulate (at least temporarily) the celebration of nature, sublime love, subjectivism, and idealism typical of nineteenth-century European romantic literature.

  It was thus primarily the ubiquitousness of certain “romantic” sensibilities and characteristics as displayed by these early-twentieth-century writers that led Yan and other scholars—including Leo Lee in his seminal study of Chinese romanticism (Lee 1973)—to place the works of Yu Dafu and Xu Xu into the romantic canon. Less of a factor was the question of whether they constituted a “genuine Chinese romanticism” that developed as a conscious or unconscious literary response to certain sociocultural phenomena, in the way European romanticism is usually understood as a reaction to French Enlightenment ideals
and the Industrial Revolution (Safransky 2007; Berlin 1999).

  The term “neo-romanticism” is itself not unproblematic. In the West, it has—at least since the 1930s—been used to describe all movements after around 1890 that countered Naturalism (Kimmich 1937, 126−37; Schwede 1987, 26−36). Simultaneously, it has been linked to the effects of mechanization and mass warfare, especially in twentieth-century Europe. Characterized by a boundless subjectivism and a turning away from the present, neo-romantic works of literature were believed to excessively celebrate aestheticism, ignore ethical concerns, and portray an overreaching and isolating individualism. Particularly manifest in poetry, neo-romanticism celebrated exotic locales, like Renaissance Italy, and displayed an interest in myths, sagas, and the marvelous. It was linked to French Symbolism but also to the aesthetics of the Art Nouveau movements and Impressionism.

  Stefan George, himself considered a representative of neo-romanticism, was credited with defining a loose canon of neo-romantic poets through his anthology of European verse termed Contemporary Poetry (Zeitgenössische Dichtung) from 1913, which included poems by Swinburne, Dowson, Koos, Verlaine, Mallarmé, Rimbaud, and others.

  In fiction, both an individual’s search for a unique spiritual and physical identity amidst the backdrops of nature and modern civilization as well as the role of art in the formation of personal identity are seen as intrinsic to the neo-romantic sensitivity. The turn-of-the century works of Gerhart Hauptmann, the brothers Heinrich and Thomas Mann, and Hermann Hesse, through their aesthetic escapism and exoticism, are usually ascribed neo-romantic tendencies.

  Xu Xu himself was acutely aware of these literary phenomena, and he frequently commented on them in his critical essays, some of which will be discussed below. At the same time, his literary works not only shared some of the aesthetic concerns of his romantic and neo-romantic predecessors and contemporaries but, more importantly, were born out of similar sociopolitical concerns and responded to similar sociocultural phenomena. It is for this reason, I will illustrate, that Xu Xu’s work needs to be read within the context of what I call “transnational romanticism.”