by Qiu Miaojin
“Chu Kuang, don’t you think I’m right? You need Meng Sheng to see you once a year. You’re still leaving the line between life and death blurred. All you’ve done is taken the decision-making responsibility and passed it to him. Isn’t that vindictive of you?” Just hearing about these two and their entanglement was draining. Part of me wanted to get up and leave so that I could shut out the panorama of hazardous terrain that had just opened before my eyes, this world of embattled relationships. I wanted to retreat to the solitude of my desert, which, though bleak, was tame compared to this.
Meng Sheng cackled loudly, as if in response to my question. It was two in the morning. We heard the sound of slippers shuffling downstairs in the lobby of the men’s dormitory as the giant, broad-leaved trees swayed outside the window, their silhouettes graced by nocturnal melancholy. Meng Sheng had stripped off his clothes at some point and was now strutting around naked, making an ass of himself. Every once in a while, he’d swivel his hips in a womanly manner or, alternately, swing his dick around. But there was more to his acting out than a desire to break the rules or put on a display of vulgarity; it seemed defensive, as if he’d been hurt.
“Whoa! You’re not offended, are you? How about if the three of us agree to have post-gender relations? I’m done talking about it. In the end, all three of us have been seriously warped by gender labels. Everybody has, more or less. The only difference is, we’re the blessed children of Tripitaka. We’ll talk about it later.” Blushing, Chu Kuang extended his hand in a gesture of solidarity.
“Hey, we should found a gender-free society and monopolize all the public restrooms!” I was elated at the idea. He didn’t have to explain. He too could envision the manual I was writing about my own experiences. I decided to stop pressuring myself to state those experiences explicitly. If I couldn’t, I wasn’t going to let it bother me. I would speak up when the time was right. With these guys, it was about laying the foundations of trust.
“So, about this problem, Sis. . . .” Chu Kuang, both inquisitive and protective, took my hand. “Making choices versus getting revenge, that’s a deeper issue I haven’t overcome. When I was eighteen and ready to hurl myself into the ocean, I was in a bad place. That’s how my therapist describes it. That ended after I turned eighteen. . . . We still fight, though. Doesn’t take much for us to start an argument, heh. . . . But when our fights get too intense, I slide back into that bad place . . . I lose control. For me, Meng Sheng is like this thing F. Scott Fitzgerald described in The Great Gatsby: ‘A single green light, minute and faraway, that might have been the end of a dock.’ Every day, he’d stare at the green light. If it went out, that meant hope was gone. It was his only point of reference. Know what I mean?”
Chu Kuang smiled sweetly. I felt an overwhelming urge to stroke his hair. He lowered his head into my lap, and Meng Sheng came over and curled up behind him. The tiniest beads of moisture formed on the tip of his nose. . . .
4
Preface to The Secret Lives of Crocodiles
Based on the research of a central investigator who scaled mountains and forded rivers to locate the nearly hundred-some crocodiles residing across the country, the lifestyle and characteristics of the average specimen are compiled herein. Amid a recent crocodile frenzy, one radical theologian has predicted that no prophet will emerge from among the crocodiles, and that the gods will see to it that they are all cast into a pit of flames. All things considered, it is indisputable that crocodiles—whether they are studied or scorned—warrant closer attention.
Favorite TV shows: Hawaii Five-0, Variety 100, The 700 Club.
Likes: A houseful of lies, lovers’ talk, any housework that can be performed with one’s tongue.
Toilet habits: HCG brand toilets (with Sujay brand toilet paper).
Wears: Only the finest—Wacoal.
Hobbies: Knitting with wool yarn.
Mottoes: “Those who believe will find salvation.” “God loves the common man.”
Since it was unemployed, the crocodile went for a stroll. At the bus stop, by the pay phone, was a stack of pamphlets with the words THE LIGHT OF JESUS CHRIST on the cover, the mere sight of which frightened the crocodile out of its wits. Could it be that even Jesus himself was a crocodile watcher? The crocodile mischievously took out a red pen and ripped the first six pages from one copy. On the last page, it drew a giant red X, and in one fluid stroke, inscribed the following words: TRUE—BUT DON’T FEEL BAD, EVEN JESUS MADE A FEW MISTAKES! The crocodile placed this pamphlet face-down on top of the stack so that it would serve as the corrected edition. It merged into the crowd that was piling onto the bus, and with a dimpled grin, watched in the rearview mirror as the bus stop receded into the distance. . . .
Nostalghia. A burly man bundled in a heavy coat. He struggles to lift the knitting needles in his right hand toward the ball of white yarn in his left. The classroom is filled with the chattering of school-girls as they learn to knit. In solitude the burly man, deeply engrossed in his stitches, wipes the sweat from his brow. (The camera zooms out, and the depth of field expands.) On the second floor are an aristocratic couple dressed in formal attire. The gentleman’s hands are folded across his stomach, and the lady has put her arm through his. The sound of the symphony swells, resplendent and exalted. The burly man has grown thin. His coat now fits him loosely as he persists in knitting. Hunched over, he mumbles to himself as the ball of yarn unravels, revealing a white wool scarf in progress. (As the camera zooms out, the frame widens to capture the ruins of an ancient façade.) Built for the spectacle and pageantry of sports, the three-story coliseum was at one time filled with the noise and clamor of crowds. On the arena floor is the once burly man, now gaunt as a stick, who, in isolation, has knitted a fluffy white dog. Snowflakes land on its fur coat. That’s Tarkovsky.
5
I lived on Tingzhou Road during my second semester in 1989. It was right before I turned twenty.
Twenty. I was stuck in a rut and feeling hopeless. I couldn’t go on.
Life didn’t feel real. My reality was the occasional call from family, the twenty classes a week that kept me glued to a desk, the coming and going of nameless faces in the classroom, taking tests between the ringing of bells, sitting on a table in the student organization offices and goofing around, making plans to hang out with people from my classes. I packed my evening schedule with private tutoring and playwriting workshops. Every once in a while I’d meet people who got me and we’d hit it off. But even so, what good did it do me? Joining the group meant I’d either be the one who mixed things up or I’d get lost in the jumble. In reality I’d always be relegated to the margins. I forced myself to put one foot in front of the other, reminding myself that there was a place for me out there in those moments of happiness, even if I was a different person at home, someone who went to bed shit-faced. It reminded me of a scene out of W. Somerset Maugham’s memoirs: My life was extraordinarily lacking in all sense of reality, as if I were watching a different me playing various characters within a mirage. I wanted to be kicked out into reality so badly. . . .
In May, the club president was relieved of her post. By then, van Gogh’s The Potato Eaters had come to life. The painting shows four gloomy faces under a dim light, figures with dark circles under their eyes, sitting around a table in a cellar, divvying up the potatoes. At the changeover ceremony, Tun Tun and Chu Kuang sat in the front row, grinning at me. Zhi Rou didn’t go. I’d latched on to the club for dear life in the year following my split from Shui Ling. I’d fled the jaws of reality and become the painting’s central figure—the fifth one, whose back was turned. Whether I was delivering a rambling speech or serving potatoes, I reeked of a degenerative disease of the spirit, the result of having been sequestered for too long. The layer of glass had grown thicker and harder to shatter. Life had drained me.
My twentieth birthday. I was in a bad place, and death was a speck on the horizon. The night before my birthday, I took two years’ worth of journals from college
and packed them with Shui Ling’s letters, a copy of Haruki Murakami’s Norwegian Wood, and Daddy’s credit card, and I took the night train to Kaohsiung. The white light of the station sign flooded my vision as I passed the stop for my home. Inside the train, I felt as if I were being whisked away by the wind, and tears filled my eyes. It was after one in the morning when I arrived in Kaohsiung and lumbered over to the hotel, where I stayed in room 514. The facilities were brand new, the bedsheets were clean, and the carpet was royal blue. There were other amenities—a white refrigerator, a TV, a stereo, a vanity mirror, toilet-seat liners. Splayed out on the bed, I picked up and examined one of the neatly arranged pieces of the ice queen (her name being two strokes shy of being exactly that) and opened it—
July 21, 1988
As you read this, you probably resent me and wonder why I’m writing to you, why I won’t leave you alone. Or maybe you’re sick of my being evasive and immature. But that won’t be the case this time. Just listen. I’m here to confess. Since you think we need to have a talk, it shouldn’t be asking too much for you to sit back and listen. In the end, it won’t affect you. The only connection between us is the old you, and I can talk to her whenever I want. All I’m asking you to do is open this letter and read it to the end. Someday, when you meet someone who’s living in a prison, you can remember how I was once imprisoned by you.
After you left, I was overflowing with love that nobody wanted. You left me standing in the cold, with only you in my heart and nowhere else to turn. I can’t say I never thought of running off with whoever was convenient. But I never did because everyone else seemed so inferior. I felt that if I let anyone else into my heart for even a second, it would sully the love we’d shared. I’d never be able to live with myself. I couldn’t hate you or stop loving you, and that was only the beginning. It was impossible to hate you, though I tried. I knew there was no hope of running away or winning you back, but I still waited right where you left me. I imagined there was a completely new you who met my needs, that my love was requited. That way, I was never lonely in a crowd. I was just another woman in love, lost in a daydream. My tragedy began when you left. I felt like a child abandoned by her father, facing a hard road ahead.
My love has only grown stronger, leaving me helpless. Just like you predicted, I didn’t know what you were to me until it was too late. I wasn’t like you: I always knew it was love, that I should love while I could and prepare myself to no longer be able to love. Only I was confused by my attraction to you. The moment I experienced your tender side, I gave myself completely. That’s why it hurts so much that your cruel side took my love and never returned it. Though I don’t understand how that’s considered love on your part, I’m not negating it either. I guess everyone has a different way of expressing their love. No matter how it comes out, it always finds its way to the person it was meant for. I just didn’t know—or care—if it would last.
Tell me, just this once, if you still think of me. And let me recklessly, tenderly, tell you one more time: I love you.
Norwegian Wood: “I’ve lost Naoko! Her beautiful flesh has vanished from this world!” My leaden heart cracked open with sadness, and raging waves submerged the embankment.
NOTEBOOK #5
1
In 1989, I entered my third year of college. Through the course of my post-heartbreak purgatory, in those eighteen months of being cut off from the object of my desire, I was a blind man fallen into the ocean. I spiraled downward, deeper and deeper inside myself, until I sank to the seabed and slipped into a sinister cave in which Shui Ling’s beckoning was the only sound. Sometimes her call grew distant, and other times it drew nearer. Finding myself at the border of life and death, I followed her echo as it led me toward death.
Shui Ling was the only thing I had that was real. That year, my attic bedroom on Tingzhou Road became like a coffin in which I lay awake at night, painfully alone. She was the only one I’d been close to, and now there was no place where my reality converged with the outside world. The look in her eyes, the sound of her voice, snatches of our conversations—those sensory impressions formed a leech that attached itself to me and started sucking my blood. I sealed the leech in a plastic bag and kept it at a distance. But then I discovered white foam spilling over my windowsill. The ocean was depositing its frothy residue, filling my sanctum with wave after wave. To my horror, she insistently lived on inside of me.
That was how I started to see things. Or maybe this was the product of the schema that I’d long been using—unconsciously—to block out the outside world. That way of seeing had gotten me far in this world. But now everything I’d achieved in my first twenty-one years of life—connections I’d forged, status I’d earned, talent I’d nurtured, possessions I’d acquired, and traits I’d developed—were at the mercy of a death wish that negated it all. I’d always been surrounded by people who cared for me, but no matter how much they loved me, they couldn’t save me: It just wasn’t me. I never let others get too close and simply paraded a fake me that resembled their image of me. Sweeping that other me into their arms, they led me in a dance within societal norms, along a trajectory based on a delusion. (Though I couldn’t define what I was, I knew what I wasn’t.) I was shown the limits, and being confined within a set of walls tormented me and drained me of life, for the real me spanned multitudes, stretching far beyond the bounds of normality encircling ninety percent of the human race.
There was no one I wanted to share my thoughts with. There was nothing I could do to lessen the pain, no source that I could pinpoint. Secretly, though, I did sort of enjoy being a fucked-up mess. Apart from that, I didn’t have a whole lot going on.
Who was the real me, then? It was an abstraction that hadn’t yet taken shape in my lifetime. Self-actualization became the fulcrum that my survival rested on. Like a convict being hauled off to prison, I handed over my clothing and jewelry, which were to remain locked away in storage, and in turn I was given the key. I would wear the uniform of a prison convict for life, as that alone was permitted. My greatest longing was to use that key, so I could steal a glance into Shui Ling’s eyes, which were so full of life.
I’ll tell you the kind of person I was. In the eyes of the average person, I was a woman, but that vague semblance was an illusion, an easy category. In my own mind, I was a beast straight out of Greek mythology: a centaur. Like that beast, I’d willingly and madly fallen in love with a woman. Since I’d managed to shake off this woman’s affections, I’d succeeded in fleeing from all the desires and fears that came with having someone special in my life. Over the course of eighteen long months, a distant flame had been ignited and passed from one candle to the next across a great distance until it would finally arrive at my darkest hour, illuminating the candle I held before me. Until then, the intermittent flicker of that flame was enough to console me. No matter who I was, no matter how anyone else saw me, no matter whether I knew who I was, somewhere on this planet there was someone who’d completely accept me, who’d been trying to figure me out all along, who genuinely loved me.
And that, right there, was the truth. It hit me one night, under a cobalt sky. It was during the summer vacation of my third year, on the cusp of late summer and early autumn, and I’d just moved to Gongguan Road. The evening air was cool. I was sitting at an intersection of Roosevelt Road and a brick road next to a musical instrument shop. The piano melody of “Thanksgiving” played in my head, putting me in a meditative mood as I took a few soft drags from a cigarette and reflected on the five years that had passed since I’d left home for Taipei. People had come into my life and left without a trace. Late at night, I sat in a desolate corner of the city, dispatching lone smoke signals.
The gears of memory, now warmed, were set in motion: scenes of life with my family when I was little; each of us children leaving home in succession until it was my turn, and this scrawny kid lugged her bags all the way to Taipei; my high school years, filled with secret crushes and the camaraderie of friends who
laughed and cried together, later torn apart in the process of growing up. Even if we had prevented that estrangement, our former kindredness would be replaced by a pained silence if we were to meet again. My college years were spent among people who were like oil in water, unable to form bonds. A few friends had broken through my shell and made me less alienated, but I didn’t treat them well, and it was my loss. My only salvation—Shui Ling—was as short-lived as a rainbow. What the two of us had was an achievement on par with landing on the moon, then floating in space with zero gravity. Images of all these people flooded my mind. Some emotion of mine—whether love, pain, or sorrow—had been preserved in each of their faces. But there was no escaping separation, which was left to the mercy of fate. One by one, those dearest to me had disappeared, and my memories, which I had so closely guarded, were ultimately of little consolation.