by Ma Jian
In the early hours of the morning, her breathing grew deeper and louder, and once again he was seized by the recurring terror of being swamped by a baying crowd. He sensed his wife seize his arm and shove him outside the door. Immediately he was surrounded by a hostile mob. There was nothing for him to grab hold of, he was alone and powerless. His eyes were open like his father’s, like the dead rat’s, but he couldn’t see a thing.
An idea suddenly came to him. ‘I must escape!’ he muttered. ‘Make sure they never catch me.’ He thought about a divorcee he’d been seeing on the side. She lived on her own. Perhaps he could stay with her. Although she wore lipstick and painted her nails like his wife, and even read the same books as her, at least she didn’t have a bad temper. Her main fault was that she always burst into tears after a couple of drinks. But lying in his bed, he could no longer remember her name. He thought of all the women listed in his ‘Compendium of Beauties’, but couldn’t put names to any of them either. Then he thought about the textile worker, and how her lips had trembled with fear the first time he kissed her.
His thoughts were suddenly interrupted by a sense of impending doom. The feeling seemed as real as his daydreams. He turned round to look at the undulating tigress, and his body went cold. He realised that the dead rat was in fact himself.
Terrified that his wife might find out his true identity, he slipped under the bed. Everything seemed larger underneath. He wondered why the dead rat’s eyes had been so wide open, and he hoped his own weren’t open so wide. He crawled into the kitchen. From the ground, everything looked familiar, yet strange. He glimpsed parts of the kitchen he’d never seen before. Underneath the sink he found a large web with two spiders sleeping in the centre, locked in an embrace. Between two empty bottles he saw an old sprouting potato and a jar of mustard he thought he’d thrown away months ago. The sky outside the window was getting lighter. He tried to decide on a plan of action. The tigress would be waking up soon. He rose to his feet and set to work on making breakfast. When he realised he must first tackle the pile of dirty plates, he slipped into a daydream, as he always did before starting the washing-up.
He climbed into the control cabin of the steamship and grabbed hold of the wheel. But instead of letting the ship fly into the sky, he steered it down into the deep blue sea. A maintenance worker ran over and told him to stop. He said the ship had sprung a leak and was sinking fast. ‘Why are you still steering?’ the worker asked, glaring at him sternly.
A few months later, the professional writer saw the editor creeping through the corridors of the People’s Cultural Centre. He seemed to move like a ball of dough that was being pulled by invisible hands. His wife had thrown him out of the flat, and he was spending his nights on a fold-up bed in the corner of his office. Without a woman to lean on, he had lost his bearings and developed all the characteristics of an old man. He had become dirty, slow-witted, forgetful. His body gave off an indefinable odour that made one’s stomach turn. His fashionable clothes looked out of place on his now withered and hunched frame. At noon he would walk down to the Cultural Centre’s forecourt to play chess with the old pensioners who gathered there. The writer was taken aback by his transformation. Looking at him then, no one would have believed that this grubby old man had served as editor of the town’s most prestigious literary magazine for fourteen years.
The writer’s mind turns to the female novelist, a woman he slept with once. Immediately he remembers the smell of make-up and tobacco on her face. He still bumps into her sometimes outside the Writers’ Association or at some literary event, and is taken aback by her haggard appearance. It always amazes him how some women seem to turn old overnight. He holds her responsible for their moment of intimacy. One night two years ago, he went to her flat to offer advice on her latest novel. When he arrived, he found the lights were dimmed, there were candles burning, and Old Hep was out of town. He fell into her trap without resistance, but regretted it almost at once. He found her shallow, and resented what he saw as her undeserved literary success.
She had no imagination, he says to himself She relied on her string of affairs to provide her with material for her tearful love stories. The critics claimed she was a great writer, they said her books were inspired. To achieve success as an author these days, you have to have led a troubled life. The more you have suffered, the better your books will sell. Today’s women understand the importance of time, but ignore the need for direction. They focus on the colour of a lampshade, they worry about which parts of their bodies to cover or expose. As soon as they find a man to act as their safe shore, they start floating through life like a boat drifting aimlessly out to sea. She was a boat stranded in mid-ocean, and the editor (it sickens me even to think about the old man) was a dirty sock she had discarded years before but was still floating by her side.
Today, the editor is an old pensioner who walks through the park every morning, listening to his portable radio. His wife divorced him last year and opened a hardware store in an empty room in the Writers’ Association. This innocent-looking shop is in fact a front for a variety of black market activities. Through her father’s military connections she is able to secure many sought-after licences and buy products that she can sell on for double the price. She has made a small fortune, and has lost interest in writing. Her business career is much more compatible with this crippled society, and it has given her the ultimate signs of success: a Western Dream mattress, wallpaper, electric kettle, a 28-inch television, a set of porcelain crockery, ajar of Nescafe, a bottle of French wine, aluminium window frames, and the centrally heated apartment that contains all these things.
‘Is this what we all work for?’ the professional writer asks out loud. ‘What we go to university for, make friends for? Tell me, is it worth all the pain?’
‘What pain?’ The blood donor stubs his cigarette out. He has become almost as fond of asking questions as the writer.
‘What I mean is – all literature has its cost. Writers must suffer for their art.’ The professional writer doesn’t want to pursue his previous train of thought.
‘Everything has its cost. If you work hard enough, you can buy anything you want. Except time, of course,’ the blood donor says, triumphantly.
‘Yes, except time.’ The writer knows that his fling with the female novelist was meaningless, there were no feelings involved. He admits that when she was a young woman, her writing had shown great promise, but it never lived up to expectations. All she produced in the end was a stream of inconsequential words. The professional writer smiles complacently, convincing himself that the reason he is unable to finish his novel is because he is practising self-control. However, in his heart he knows that he is even more worthless than the female novelist. He lacks the courage to commit himself to one thing entirely, or to jump into the thick of things. He wants to be a bystander, an objective witness, but in order to keep himself fed, he is forced to rely on others and submit himself to their needs. He is lazy by nature, and self-obsessed, and is destined to eke out the rest of his life on the poverty-stricken margins of society. He will never settle down to any serious work. There is always some obscure detail to research or mundane duty to perform, and while these provide a welcome distraction, they also give him excuses to delay what he needs to do. However, these diversions pull him back to the real world. Without them, he would spend his entire life suspended in mid-air.
The lights have gone out once more, and the room is pitch black. For a moment, the professional writer feels like a plastic bag caught in the high wind. It occurs to him that although the plastic bag is worthless, it is able to rise above the mundane world and change directions. When the wind blows against it, it fills with air and glides through space – things the earth-bound can never do.
The Street Writer or The Plastic Bag in the Air
In his mind, the professional writer sees the street writer squatting on a pavement in the new part of town, which a few years ago was open fields. It is a brand new di
strict by the sea, built of concrete and cement. The local peasants who were evicted from their land and rehoused in the new three-storey concrete blocks are not yet accustomed to their new way of life. They still keep their timber and mouldy raincoats outside their front doors, even though they will never again have to burn wood or labour in the fields. The women continue to tie black scarves around their heads, although they no longer need to shield themselves from the sun. The men wear Western suits now, but still smoke their water pipes every afternoon. They always stand at an angle, as though they were leaning on their hoes in the fields. The children continue to shit in the streets rather than use the new toilets in their bathrooms. The flat roofs are pierced by a clutter of television aerials. Farmers from the hinterland who have found work in town but have failed to secure a residency permit, flock to this new district to rent private rooms. The local peasants have become wealthy landlords overnight, and the residents of the old town have been forced to take notice of the ‘cabbage-faced bumpkins’ they have previously preferred to ignore.
The street writer fixed his eyes on a plastic bag that was floating through the sky, and allowed all thoughts to empty from his mind. Passers-by assumed he was looking at the newly restored church, or the acacia tree beside it. No one could have guessed that he was staring at the plastic bag, or indeed that he was in fact squatting down tor that sole purpose. In this dusty, drab corner of the street, he and the plastic bag became one.
He had come to this town on the spur of the moment, without even having applied for a residency transfer. The gloom and smog of his hometown depressed him, and besides, he couldn’t afford to pay the compulsory three-hundred-yuan annual insurance fee that his metalwork factory now demanded from all employees. So he left his job and moved to this fast-developing town by the sea, which he then stuck to like a blob of chewing gum. After a while, the police got tired of arresting him for illegal residency and left him alone. He picked up a string of menial jobs. He washed dishes in a restaurant, worked as a security guard in a bar (although he wasn’t even strong enough to fend off a cripple), he delivered canisters of butane gas, collected plastic bottles, and transported leftover restaurant slops to private pig farmers in the suburbs. After two years of hard toil, he set up business as a self-employed street writer. People paid him to write letters of complaint, business letters and shop signs. His only tools were a pen, some paper and a stack of envelopes.
He became familiar with the latest documents issued by the local Party committee and the major departments of central government. He learned about marriage procedures, finance and publication laws, business taxes, private enterprise regulations, landlords’ rights, traffic laws, the latest developments in the policy of ‘Redressing Past Injustices’, and compensation for injuries at work. The complaints he wrote for his clients were coherent and well-argued, and conformed to the usual practice. He helped families condemned as rightists to gain rehabilitation, and victims of industrial injuries to secure financial compensation. Amorous young men paid him to write love letters to their girlfriends; wives of unfaithful artists paid him to write denunciations of their husbands that were to be read in the divorce courts; tenants and landlords paid him to fill out their tenancy contracts; illiterate peasants paid him to read out any letters they received. He carried out his tasks with great care, and his fees were reasonable. His speciality lay in the writing of love letters. If a client sent one of his letters to a woman, it was guaranteed that the next day she’d agree to sit next to him on a park bench.
If we pick out just one letter from the thousands he wrote, we will be able to see the fluidity of his style, his commitment to his art, and his deep insight into human nature. He dreamed of becoming a professional writer, or at least an intellectual. (Although he based the letters on what his clients asked him to write, he always refined the vocabulary and style, hitting the right note every time.) His words flowed in a continuous stream, like moonlight glittering on the surface of a river.
One day he wrote a letter for an old woman who was hoping to dissuade her daughter from pursuing a relationship with a professional writer. As the letter bore little relation to what she had asked for, she returned it to him the same afternoon and demanded a refund. The writing of this letter caused the street writer so much distress that he considered abandoning his profession. Here’s an extract from the rejected letter:
… It’s curiosity that first draws men and women together, not love. They are curious to know whether they could ever be united into one. Your father was a writer. He wrote articles for newspapers, but never managed to publish a book. I stumbled into a relationship with him without thinking things through. At first I was drawn to his unusually large face – it was the size of a plantain leaf. His gaze made me smile and blush. The day a woman’s skin first feels the touch of a man’s lips, she loses her fear of the breasts hidden beneath her clothes, and is happy for the man to touch them and squeeze them.
I was as curious about my anatomy as he was, and I let this man with the large face caress and fondle my entire body, then prise my legs apart. The act that followed was horrifically obscene. Had I known as a young girl that women must spend half their lives with their legs wide open, so that men may thrust themselves in between, I certainly would never have let myself get involved with them. When I first smiled at the plantain-leaf face, I never imagined that my blush was somehow connected to that vile organ of his. Before long, I had ‘fallen in love’, or at least that’s what my friends told me. I assumed that ‘love’ referred to all those shameful, sordid feelings one experiences when a man takes possession of one’s body. Once we had become familiar with one another’s intimate parts, we were able to move in together, and my friends told me how blissfully compatible we were.
I was foolish. Even when I found out what this so-called ‘love’ amounted to, I failed to put a stop to it. On the contrary, I was happy to satisfy his every craving, and we became stuck to each other like glue. We would expend our energies, collapse in exhaustion, then have a meal and fall asleep. This was the pattern of our days, it was called ‘normal married life’. Then you came along. The one good thing about your birth was that it destroyed our sex life. Today you are the age that I was when I first met him. If you listen to what your mother has to say, perhaps you will choose a better path for yourself.
My first piece of advice is: never believe anything a man tells you. Above all, never trust a writer – they trap you in a web of words from which there is no escape. They earn their living making things up, they are professional liars. They tell you stories about things that never happen in the real world. At least, I’ve never witnessed any love story like the ones they write about in their books.
I presume that you and the writer have commenced a sexual relationship, because if he has already spoken to you of love, he has no doubt been simultaneously making moves on your body. If this is the case, perhaps you have discovered that love is a word of little consequence that men spew from their mouths without thinking. Or perhaps your curiosity about sex has blinded you to love’s true nature. We are both women. We are fully acquainted with the various mounds and dips of our bodies, and know they are not nearly as sublime as men imagine. You must fend men off for as long as possible, because as soon as they have squeezed and probed every part of your flesh, you become worthless to them, no better than a lump of meat on a chopping board. Don’t wait for your wedding day before you start knocking some sense into him. Tell him at once that he must stop dragging you off to bed, or to deserted sheds and grassy verges. Ensure that you remain standing or seated at all times. Never give him an opportunity to press you down onto the floor.
You convince yourself that his search of your body is a search for love. But love cannot be groped or fondled …
He had based the ten-page letter on the information the old woman gave during their conversation. She said she had tried to write the letter herself, but her hands shook so much she was unable to hold a pen. The street writer
was stunned by her candour and her cynical attitude to love.
When he remembered the cold expression on her face, his skin crawled. He blushed when he thought of the sentimental love letters he had written in the past. He knew that the women who had received them were now waddling contentedly down the street, clutching their pregnant bellies, while the men who had sent them were returning to him on the sly, asking him to pen letters to their new mistresses.
‘Love is a waste of time,’ the old woman told him. ‘If that writer wants to marry my daughter, he should come and take a look at me first. I’m the image of who she will be nine thousand days from now. When he sees me, his love-sickness will vanish like a puff of smoke.’
The old woman mumbled on to him about how young people today confuse heartache with suffering. She said they are two different things: real suffering courses through the body like blood, but heartache is a fleeting reaction to a petty lovers’ tiff. She said if one feels elated with the joys of love, then it means one has not delved fully enough into one’s partner’s soul. Finally, after she told him that the daughter who ignored all her letters was planning to perform a public suicide, she cried: ‘She really is my reincarnation! Nobody can stand in her way. She’s planning to hire a tiger from the zoo and feed herself to it. If she returns to this world, we’ll form an unbeatable team.’
After the old woman walked away, the street writer had to tap his head before he could think clearly again. That evening, he returned to his shed in the entrance passage of an apartment block in the centre of town, and tried to sort out the old woman’s muddled thoughts. (Apparently the shed’s previous owners – a mother and son who ran a private crematorium business – had taken a trip to the suburbs one day, and hadn’t been seen again since.) He focused his mind; the light bulb hanging above him shone on his balding head. Although he lacked the old woman’s sharp eyes that could see through the vanity of this world, the grey matter inside his skull had been taxed so hard over the years that wiry hairs jutted from his nostrils.