by Dai Sijie
“The week after I got the letter of rejection,” Tumchooq told me, “I felt a mark of infamy, shame and sorrow weighing on me; I hid all day long in a little tea-house mulling over this destructive, not to say fatal, failure which had struck me down before I even went into combat, and I looked my future in the face with a terrible feeling of impotence at the prospect of being condemned, excluded from society, you could say, for my whole life. I shut myself away in silence. Talking—even to say one word, a simple ‘hello’—took superhuman effort. Sometimes I’d open my mouth and no sound would come out. At the end of the sixth day it was the evening before my birthday; I was on the brink of my twenty-third year. At ten o’clock in the evening, with a bottle of cheap booze in my freezing hand, slugging it straight from the bottle, I skated like a drunken madman over the frozen moats at the foot of the imposing walls around the Forbidden City, in the area where I’d spent my childhood. Commercial skates were way beyond my means, so I made do with some holey old trainers onto which I’d attached some metal rods, the way they did in the ancient kingdom of Tumchooq, according to Marco Polo’s accounts. This meant I could more or less glide over the ice, like a wandering ghost, pursued by the rather pitiful sparks flying from my Tumchooqian skates on the dirty surface, and tracing two black grooves, one deeper than the other. Those sparks sprayed and scattered, filling my flared trousers, dazzling me like fireworks marking the feast day of a Tumchooq prince, which, I knew perfectly well, bore no relation to my lifelong status as a seller of vegetables. My mind was left far behind by my body as it ran and jumped and danced, carried away as much by speed as by alcohol. For the first time in days I started quoting Holden Caulfield, my favourite hero, talking to a cab driver in The Catcher in the Rye, one of the first American novels translated into Chinese and which conquered an entire generation. It was the part where Holden talks about the ducks on the lake in Central Park, wondering what they did in winter. Did they fly away or were they picked up and taken somewhere? But the cab driver thinks it’s a stupid thing to wonder about.
“I must have seemed just as stupid, but I didn’t come across anyone to talk to apart from invisible fish breathing in that icy water. When the huge clock on the Telegram Centre struck eleven I went under the Bridge of the Divine Army, turned towards the Beach of Sands and arrived beside the National Library, where countless table lamps still glowed, casting an extraordinarily dreamy light through the misty condensation on its tall windows, so that the whole sumptuous edifice with its Western columns and Chinese roofs stood out clearly against the dark sky, conjuring in my mind Kublai Khan’s palace as it appeared to Coleridge in an opium-induced vision, a sparkling, glittering palace floating over the ice, while inside guests in the same drunken state as myself drank a mixture of alcohol and fermented mare’s milk flowing copiously from artificial trees in which Kublai Khan had hidden his soldiers, just as my father described in his Notes on Marco Polo’s Book of the Wonders of the World.
“It suddenly struck me with enough force to leave no room for doubt that living without taking university entrance exams wasn’t a handicap but rather an advantage, and I could take the academic authorities’ refusal as a lucky turning point, a new departure giving me an opportunity to realise a plan I’d been nurturing for some time: to annotate Marco Polo’s book using Chinese documentation, doing it in my own way, quite distinct from my father’s version.
“I still wonder, if all those circumstances hadn’t come together, if the lights in the library hadn’t been on, how that night of drink, loneliness and misery might have ended. I don’t know how long or in what sort of state I skated, or which way I went—a tram on route 103 or a bus on route 330?—to get back to Little India Street and my greengrocer’s shop at dawn.
“That revelation, which was so salutary for me, provoked absolutely no reaction in my father when, in the visiting room a few days later, I told him what had happened from my receiving the rejection letter from the university right up to my final inspiration. He sat there on the far side of the double grille. His hair, which he’d been allowed to grow since being appointed the camp’s pig-keeper, was all tangled, full of filth and mud from the pigsty, a thick red mane standing up on his head in haphazard tufts. He was wearing a worn pair of trousers and a sheepskin jacket, another privilege he owed to his new status, as he no longer had to wear a prisoner’s uniform. He listened attentively to my story, took off his glasses all patched with bits of wire and, using the dirty rags wound round the side-pieces, meticulously wiped the lenses, without looking at me or saying a word. When he did eventually open his mouth it was, as with all my visits, to teach me some Tumchooq vocabulary.
“I can hardly remember us talking once about anything personal; Tumchooq has been his only means of escape for two whole decades and I get the impression that—except in Tumchooq—he’s forgotten everyday words, and every aspect of real and personal life that goes with them is buried deep inside his memory. He never asks anything about my mother, her circumstances or her life, no more than about mine. I’ve got used to the enormous barrier he’s built out of a dead language, and I carry on erecting it around him, always frightened the truth about his personal feelings might escape through some crack; and yet everyone recognises that, in camps, prisoners tend to cling to their loved ones, and want to know everything that’s going on in their lives … but not him.
“Our language lessons in the visiting room arouse palpable, virtually universal hostility, judging by the muttering and sideways glances from the other prisoners—most of them common criminals—and their families sitting in the neighbouring booths. Far from being frightened, I take comfort from this hostility, not to say disgust, because it makes me feel not only that my father has his own value but that I too, a humble greengrocer, have mine, and that he’s raised it with those Tumchooq words reverberating around that pitiful room, words whose resonant rise and fall the others perceive as mere modulations belched by a solitary camel in the middle of a desert. I pity them, because they’re not equipped to admire this language, half angel music, half siren song, even if, when my father speaks it, with his head resting against the wall and his eyes blank, he always looks as if he’s suffering some appalling and incurable pain, and his face never shows any trace of the verbal pleasure described by the camp’s director, but rather two decades of accumulated unhappiness in each of his craggy features.
“That particular day, because most of the visit was taken up with my story about entrance exams, we had barely ten minutes left to devote to studying Tumchooq and he taught me only two new words: mokasha, which means relic or bones associated with a saint, a word whose pronunciation, according to my father, bears similarities with certain central Indian languages, particularly Prakrit and Pali, both languages in which Buddha preached and which are as soft and transparent as pearls and corals beneath the limpid waters of the Indian Ocean. The second word, alaghaci, means massacre and has a brutal, warlike ring to it, clearly indicating Persian or Parthian origins. My father, who’s a connoisseur of the subject, couldn’t help telling me its roots (ala—killing, and alaca or alaja—assassin), as well as its nominal and passive forms; and it is thanks to these two forms, he claims, that a Tumchooq sentence maintains all the versatility and variety of Sanskrit constructions, despite the absence of inflexions and declensions. To finish, as he usually did, he gave me a syntax exercise using the two new words, putting together a sentence which he uttered so unbelievably slowly I was completely bemused: ‘I wouldn’t be in the least surprised were you to end up like me with a massacred relic’ (that’s a rough translation, given that the Tumchooq language only has present, future and conditional tenses, and has no subjunctive form).
“At his request, I repeated the sentence until I knew it by heart, although I didn’t understand its exact meaning or logic. His voice grew deeper and deeper, petering into a silence in which he might have been picturing the future he had just drawn for me, until the guards shouting to say visiting time was over brough
t him back to reality. He left with them and the door closed once more on his unimaginable suffering.
“The true significance of his comment in the form of a grammatical exercise had escaped me. I didn’t understand what either of us had to do with a ‘massacred relic.’ The following day I set off for Chengdu in a lorry laden with stones, from there I took the train to Peking and my fathers enigmatic remark faded as my mind was steadily exhausted by that ordeal of three days and two nights on a hard, cramped seat, an ordeal that always ends up erasing every kind of suffering and unhappiness, and even the most memorable words …
“But two weeks later, back in Peking, in an underground train at the stop for the Temple of the Source of Law, the doors of my carriage opened and I heard a boy singing in the language of I have no idea which minority, with a refrain in Mandarin. His voice was heavenly, resonating as if in a church, with a tremulous celestial grace. When the train set off I saw the boy sitting on a bench next to a monk; they were at the far end of the platform and the passengers were slowing down to admire him as they passed. The monk was wearing bright yellow Burmese robes and the young singer, who was ten or eleven, wore a very fine length of linen wound around his waist, like a long white skirt falling to his feet, attached with a black silk belt, Thai style; and his top, which buttoned up to the neck and had wide sleeves, was so white it shone under the lights. He was a novice of extraordinary beauty, head shaven, round eyes, straight nose and shining teeth. When my carriage passed him, in spite of the deafening noise the wheels made on the rails, I couldn’t believe my ears when I heard him sing: ‘I love the Lotus Sutra, which taught me that the sutras are Buddha’s relics, his supreme relics.’
“In a fraction of a second the mystery surrounding my father’s words disappeared and I understood for the first time that I would end up like him, searching for the missing part of a manuscript, a mutilated sutra, in other words a massacred relic.”
26TH JANUARY
The first day of spring is nearly here and with it the holidays, the university deserted, the student residence almost empty I don’t know whether my exam results or my friends’ invitations make me happy or unhappy I don’t know who I really am. Either way, a feeling of emptiness put a lump in my throat earlier when I went along Little India Street, past the greengrocer’s where the coral pinks of carrots, the matt ivory of parsnips and the tiny green marbles of peas made bright splashes of colour under the red lanterns set up for the celebrations, celebrations without Tumchooq, who’s gone to spend them with his father, and I gauged what an infinitely long time it takes for a week to go by in his absence. Outside the shop the only feeling I had was of emptiness, of missing him; I should have bought lotus roots, sweet potatoes and red-hearted turnips to eat raw this evening, chomping into them as I sit alone in the courtyard listening to the firecrackers that will be going off, but all I could think about was slinking away.
I associate Tumchooq less with sexual pleasure than with the taste of the various vegetables he’s taught me to eat raw; the first steps towards a radical re-conversion for someone like me, who grew up with boiled green beans and mashed potatoes. It started, if I remember right, one Sunday in the middle of summer when the two of us set off by bike to visit a temple on the outskirts of Peking, which was once very famous but is now in ruins. On the way back, the sun, like a vibrating ball of lead setting the rhythm for Tumchooq’s pedalling and our beating hearts, was so hot it had melted the tarmac; in other words, we were pedalling through an oven with our throats on fire, so we made a beeline for an isolated house by the side of the road where Tumchooq succeeded in making a friend—a natural gift for him, he’s equally at home with princes and beggars. In this instance it was a farm labourer of about forty, a thin man with very tanned skin and one arm missing so his shirt sleeve flapped limply, who took us to a well in an inner courtyard, beneath a large ginkgo. Using his one arm, with a deftness and grace all his own, he lowered a bucket on a long rope into the depths of the well. We heard a dull impact right at the bottom and the muffled echo of the bucket smacking the water, sinking into it and filling up. The man tugged sharply on the rope, the bucket came back up, he grabbed it by the handle and, without a word, poured it over Tumchooq. Gasps of surprise, laughter. Then he lowered the bucket back down and it sank into the water again and came back up; when I screamed, half the bucketful was already streaming over my hair, shoulders and body—pure, cold, refreshing water; I took a big gulp of it, shuddering with pleasure while the other half of the bucket gushed down inside my T-shirt and my trousers, and I felt them billowing out around my waist, stomach and legs.
After this restorative shower, Tumchooq took some long lotus roots (probably stolen from the shop the day before) from his rucksack, washed them assiduously with help from our new friend, who filled the bucket again and slooshed the roots to remove the mud from them, revealing fragrant, creamy, almond-coloured skin. Like the two of them, I picked up a long root and bit into it: it turned out to be so juicy, fresh and crisp that it later became my favourite vegetable, always associated with our “meetings of the clouds and the rain,” either as a prelude, or at the end.
As for Tumchooq, he knows no greater pleasure than biting into a turnip from the Zhangjiakou region: the skin on the bottom half buried in the ground is the colour of jade, an almost transparent green, on the top half it’s ivory-coloured; the flesh is white as snow, with a pattern of purple veins shot through with a ruby-red thread. Holding a turnip in his hand, Tumchooq likes imitating street vendors, bellowing a sing-song “Zhangjiakou turnips, better than Guangzhou pears …” Then he throws it on the ground, the turnip splits into pieces and he bites into one, chews it, then passes it to me, mouth to mouth, like feeding a baby bird. The sugary, exquisitely refreshing juice pours over my tongue and down my throat, and spreads through my whole body for an immeasurable length of time; it sometimes feels as if the taste will stay with me till the end of my days.
Tumchooq left a week ago and after three days on the train—“listening to the hammering of the wheels,” as a popular song goes—he must have arrived in Chengdu on Monday evening, set off for Ya An on Tuesday morning, that’s the day before yesterday, and spent another whole day on the bus on a rutted mountain road, “a snaking, silvery ribbon climbing to the clouds,” if his greengrocer’s funds allowed. Sometimes lack of money means he has to get to the prison camp by hitchhiking and he spends hours by the side of the road. When he’s been refused by several lorry drivers he hides behind some trees on a corner where the lorries have to slow down before a steep slope. He’s described it to me so many times I can picture him running behind a lorry, launching himself at the back, gripping onto iron bars or a rope that holds down a tarpaulin, then, in a dangerous manoeuvre, heaving himself up to this access point, freeing one of his hands, untying the rope, opening the tarpaulin and climbing inside; then the lorry gets smaller and smaller and I lose sight of it. But that’s not always the end. Often, somewhere along the four hundred kilometres he still needs to cover, he has to jump out of the lorry at the last minute and get into another one, because the driver changes direction without any warning and heads for somewhere else—Luo Shan, Emei, E Bin, but not Ya An—usually accelerating, hurtling off at top speed, thundering along, as if to express his pleasure, his eagerness to deliver this trapped man to justice. A real nightmare. Tumchooq knows he’ll have to retrace his steps, but first he needs to escape the possessed vehicle. He closes his eyes and jumps, and sometimes he lands in a rice paddy by the side of the road and sinks into mud and shit full of worms no one’s ever seen in any biology textbook, Sichuan worms covered in white down, which squirm and writhe, until one of them settles under the skin on your forehead or in the pit of your chest.
NOTEBOOK
CHINESE NEW YEAR 1979
Ya An, “Exquisite Peace,” is the name of a mountain town which is now small and poor with barely sixty thousand inhabitants, but, if the regional annals are to be believed, it had a glorious past as the
capital of the province, complete with bustling streets, a cinema, the governors palace, two decent hotels, its opium trade, its vegetable and spice market (where the heads of decapitated criminals were displayed), and its Tibetans and Lolos who made up part of the population. In 1955 Ya An was demoted, reduced to the status of principal town in a region of eight districts, each more dependent on the mountain economy than the last … in other words, extremely poor. An area from which Westerners were banned. Over several decades under communist rule this region achieved fame across the whole of China for the number of people who died, nearly one million between 1959 and 1961—that’s forty per cent of the population—anonymous victims carried off by famine, most of them dying long, slow deaths, too weak to stand upright, crawling on the ground like animals breathing their last. So Ya An became synonymous with a giant mass grave. After that scandal no one mentioned the sinister place again, the shameful wart erased itself from collective memory and all that remained were prison camps, lost among the dark silhouettes of its towering mountains, which curved bizarrely through the fog. One of these camps, on the River Lu, is known by millions of admirers of Hu Feng, a writer and great intellectual condemned by Mao himself, who always appeared extremely jealous of this particular prey, though no one ever knew why. (Hu Feng has been imprisoned there since 1955, a detention, I notice to my horror, which—give or take a couple of years—coincides with that of the French orientalist Paul d’Ampère, also incarcerated at the River Lu camp.) His sister Hu Min describes the camp in her memoirs, which were recently published in Taiwan: