Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts

by Zhongshu Qian

  “It’s all your fault,” Aimo said angrily. “What can you do? Go away. I’ll call you if I need you. I’m fine. I’m only mad because Jianhou has left me in the dark. I’ve been so muddleheaded.”

  Knowing Aimo’s temper, Xiajun said something inconsequential and left. Aimo didn’t see him off but sat on the sofa, her teeth clenched. The tearstains on her face were like dried streaks of rain on a window.88 Yigu saw that, in hatred her face had assumed a sharp, hardened, even murderous look. He sensed that this was a formidable woman and grew scared. It occurred to him that today it would be better if he went home. He got up. “Mrs. Li . . . ,” he began.

  As if awakening from a dream. Aimo said, “Tell me, Yigu, do you love me?”89

  Yigu was taken aback by the sudden question and didn’t know how to answer.

  “Don’t think I don’t know,” Aimo said playfully. “You’re in love with me.”

  How to deny that, yet not annoy the other person? An impossible question. Yigu didn’t know what Mrs. Li meant. Nor did he want to reveal his feelings to her. He only felt that the situation had turned grave and wanted to escape.

  Seeing that he had not taken the bait the second time, Aimo demanded impatiently, “Say something!”

  Looking frustrated, Yigu stuttered, “I, I dare not.”

  That wasn’t the answer Aimo had expected. His awkwardness enraged her, yet when she thought of Jianhou her will hardened and she replied, “That’s interesting. Why don’t you dare? Are you afraid of Mr. Li? You’ve seen how absurd Mr. Li is. Are you afraid of me? What’s so scary about me? Please sit down. Let’s discuss this in detail.”

  Moving to one side, Aimo vacated half the sofa and patted it, inviting Yigu to sit down. The meaning in Aimo’s question was unmistakable. Yigu felt like he had awakened from a dream. Day and night he had fantasized an exquisite scene of himself wooing Aimo. Never had he expected it to turn out like this. He suddenly remembered Chen Xiajun’s laughter just now. To others, Jianhou’s love affair with that girl was merely a joke. All flirtations and clandestine love affairs, to the persons concerned, were incomparably sentimental, romantic, and bold. But to outsiders they were dubious, ludicrous, and fodder for gossip; as a rule, they could only win a lascivious smile. Yigu, as yet untempered by the ways of the world, recoiled in fear at the thought.

  Already incensed and seeing Yigu’s hesitation, Aimo grew even angrier. “I asked you to sit down. Why don’t you sit down?” she demanded.

  Hearing the order, Yigu had to sit down. No sooner had he sat down than he jumped up and exclaimed, “Ouch!”

  The sudden recoil of the sofa springs also jolted Aimo. Startled as well as enraged, Aimo asked, “What’s wrong with you?”

  “Taoqi was hiding under the sofa and scratched my heel,” Yigu replied.

  Aimo burst out laughing. Yigu pursed his mouth and protested, “It hurt! My sock might be torn.”

  Aimo caught Taoqi and put the cat on her lap. “Now you can sit down and be at ease,” she told Yigu.

  Yigu was frantic because he couldn’t think of any pretext for refusing. Wearing a serious expression, he blurted out rubbish: “This cat may not be human, but I always feel she understands what we’re saying. She’s like a third party. There are so many things that are inconvenient to say in her presence.” Only after he had said it did he find it ridiculous.

  Aimo frowned. “You’re such a difficult lad. Fine, you put her outside.”

  She passed Taoqi to Yigu. Taoqi struggled. Yigu grabbed her by the back of the neck, an act that was itself upsetting to Mrs. Li, held the study door ajar, threw Taoqi out, and immediately shut the door. Taoqi yowled nonstop, the sound so high-pitched it pierced the nerves of one’s ears. It turned out that he had shut the door too fast and it had caught the tip of the cat’s tail. Aimo could stand it no longer. She stood up and slapped Yigu in the face. As she opened the door to free Taoqi, she said, “Get lost, you big fool!”90 Taoqi scurried in with a painful tail, and Yigu ran out to the street with his cheeks burning. He didn’t even wait for Old Whitey to open the gate. “Big fool! Big fool!” The words resounded in his head like the sound of rice being husked with mortar and pestle.

  Now that Yigu had gone, Mrs. Li regretted that she had been so rude. She realized that she had been acting strangely today and was amazed that she had gotten so worked up on Jianhou’s account. All of a sudden she felt old, so old she seemed to be crumbling away. Fame, status, and appearance were like so many heavy burdens that she was too tired to shoulder any longer. She wished only that she had a place to escape to where she could forget her pride, avoid her current friends, not have to dress fashionably or put up a glamorous front, and not be obliged to look beautiful and young for anyone.

  At that moment, the train, which had started out in Beiping the day before, had entered Shandong province. Jianhou looked out the window. His heart was as dry and withered as the yellow soil that flashed past. The previous day’s excitement, like the exhilaration of drunkenness, had left behind only a hangover. Jianhou figured that Chen Xiajun was sure to report to Aimo, and that it would be impossible for him to back down with good grace if things got complicated. The girl sitting beside him was plain and naive and not worth breaking up his family for. He acutely regretted having set a trap for himself in a moment of muddleheadedness when he had been unable to swallow an insult. The girl who held Jianhou’s arm and watched the scenery outside the window was ignorant of all his thoughts. She felt only that her future was like the never-ending tracks of the train, stretching out limitlessly ahead of her.

  Translated by Yiran Mao

  INSPIRATION

  There was once a famous writer, but strangely enough, we do not even know his name. It was not that he had not taken a name, or that he had done away with it.1 Nor was it that he had somehow remained anonymous, or that something about him was perhaps so peculiar that it defied naming. The reason was simple: the ring of his fame was too deafening for us to hear his name clearly. This was hardly a unique case. The postman, for instance, would unhesitatingly deliver an envelope addressed to “The Greatest French Poet” to Victor Hugo.2 Likewise, the telegraph company was sure to route a telegram for “The Greatest Living Italian Writer” to Gabriele D’Annunzio,3 making it absolutely unnecessary to specify name and address. This writer of ours was even more famous, for his was a name that needed no written or spoken forms. The name was completely obscured by the reputation, as it were. Mention “writer,” and everyone knew you were referring to him.

  Being a genius, the Writer was prolific, but, having an artistic conscience, he suffered labor pains with each act of creation. Then again, writing was not quite the same as childbirth, since a difficult delivery did not cost him his life, and his fecundity was a burden only to his readers. He penned numerous novels, prose pieces, plays, and poems, thereby moving, inspiring, influencing countless middle-school students. Overseas, sales of a literary work are dominated by the tastes of the middle class. But China, that ancient and cultured land of ours, is a country where material wealth matters not. Here, the value of a work rests, instead, on the standards and wisdom of the middle-school student. After all, the only ones willing to spend their money on books and on subscriptions to magazines are those who are still in middle school: unthinking adolescents, eager to hear speeches and lectures; ever ready to worship great men; and full of the unremarkable sorrows of young Werther. As for university students, they themselves had authored books and hoped to sell their own products. Professors, of course, would not even bother with books, writing only forewords for others and expecting complimentary copies in return. Those more senior in position disdained even forewords, limiting themselves to gracing the cover designs of friends’ works with their calligraphy; books, meanwhile, would of course be respectfully dedicated to them.

  This Writer of ours knew only too well where the key to his success lay, having seen that middle-school students made great customers. It comes as no surprise that his works would be c
ollectively titled For Those Who Are No Longer Children but Have Yet to Grow Up, or, alternatively, Several Anonymous, Postage-Due Letters to All Young People. “Anonymous” because, as previously mentioned, nobody knew his name, and “postage due” because the books had to be paid for out of the young readers’ pockets. The Writer was able to disguise his ignorance as profundity, pass off shallowness as clarity, and speak with the voice of a radical who proceeded with caution and good sense. The volume of his production was such that he became the unavoidable author whose works one would run into wherever one went. Customers of food stalls, of peanut hawkers, and street-corner stands selling panfried cakes regularly received his novels or plays in loose, torn-out pages, thereby unexpectedly acquiring spiritual nourishment. Thus, his contribution to the literary world, a matter of popular recognition at first, eventually won official endorsement. He had become a nationally certified talent. The government commissioned a panel of experts to have his masterworks translated into Esperanto, so that he could compete for the Nobel Prize in literature. As soon as this was announced, one fan wrote the “Readers’ Forum” of a newspaper:

  It’s about time the government took this action. One need only consider how many characters figure in his works. Put together, they would be numerous enough to colonize a totally uninhabited island. Now that the nation’s population has been depleted by the war, there is no better time than the present to encourage accelerated growth. By the sheer quantity of production, therefore, the Writer deserves official honors, and should be recognized as a model for public emulation.

  It was most unfortunate, however, that Esperanto did not always mean espérance, the hope that very name stood for. Although the Nobel judges had no trouble with English, French, German, Italian, Russian, Greek, and Latin, not one of those moldy relics from a bygone age could handle Esperanto. No matter how they wiped and cleaned their pince-nez, they just could not decipher the masterpieces that our Writer had submitted for consideration. After a great long while, one of them, a Sinologist senior both in years and standing, finally saw the light.

  “That’s it, that’s it!” he proclaimed. “This is Chinese, what they call Latinized Chinese. We’ve mistaken it for some European language—no wonder we didn’t know what it is!”

  This eased the committee’s anxieties, and they heaved a collective sigh of relief. The one who was seated next to the Sinologist asked him, “You should know a bit of Chinese. So what does it say?”

  “My dear venerable sir,” came the solemn reply, “it is through specialization that learning ascends to the pinnacle of excellence. My late father devoted his entire life to researching Chinese punctuation, and I have spent forty years studying Chinese phonology. But your inquiry just now lies in the area of Chinese semantics, which is quite outside my field of specialization. Whether the Chinese language contains meaning is a topic I should not blindly pass judgment on before I have obtained unimpeachable evidence. This stance of mine, my dear sir, you would not want to question, I am sure.”

  The chairman, observing that the Sinologist was not at all agreeable, quickly put in, “I don’t think we even have to bother with these works, since they don’t conform to our regulations to begin with. According to our eligibility requirements, only works written in a European language qualify for consideration. Since this is written in Chinese, we need not waste any more of our time on it.”

  The other old fogies indicated their unanimous agreement, noting at the same time their admiration for the Sinologist’s scholarly circumspection. He himself, however, was quite humble about it, insisting that he was nowhere close to the American ophthalmologist who had won that year’s Nobel Prize in Medicine. The doctor, he explained, specialized only in the left eye, and did not treat any malfunction of the right. Now, there was the true specialist. In such an atmosphere of graciousness and mutual respect, these senior citizens pleasantly parted company. That was just too bad for our Writer and his single day of hoping. The announcement of the winners plunged the entire Chinese population into a righteous wrath, to say nothing of our Writer himself, who was driven to despair. Earlier, quite a few of his fellow writers, their green pupils seeing red, had armed themselves with mental notes, waiting for the moment he was declared Nobel laureate to attack his works in public. With one voice they were to assert that such recognition was un-warranted. These same people now all turned sympathetic, and were loud in their lamentations. Perhaps because of the cleansing effects of the tears of commiseration they shed, their sight and their pupils returned to normal; indeed, their eyes were now awash with the kind of luster that infuses the sky after a rainstorm has subsided.

  One newspaper ran an editorial admonishing the Swedish Academy for having “forgotten its origins.” Was it not true that Nobel made his fortune from explosives, and China was the country that had invented gunpowder in the first place. The prize thus should have been intended for the Chinese to begin with, a point the administrators would do well to keep in mind in the future. What a pity that the “Sinologist” on the selection committee had not yet begun his research on the semantics of Chinese, thus allowing this forceful essay to escape his attention.4 Another paper was quite imaginative, attempting to comfort our Writer by actually congratulating him. He had been a successful author all along, the paper argued, and he now qualified as a wronged genius and an overlooked and unsung but truly great artist. The paper went on to say, “There is no more unlikely pairing than success and injustice; yet he has now attained it. What a rare and enviable turn of events!” Still another paper made a concrete suggestion:

  While there is much to be gained through the policy of securing foreign loans, to accept a foreign prize would be shameful. In order to recapture the respectability our country has lost, we should establish China’s own literary award as a protest against the Nobel Prize, and to save the right to criticize from falling into foreign hands. The most important eligibility requirement for our prize would be to restrict the medium to Chinese dialects, with the stipulation that admissible also as Chinese dialects would be English as spoken by residents of Hong Kong and Shanghai, Japanese as spoken in Qingdao, and Russian in Harbin. Once this prize is established, the Nobel would cease to be a unique attraction, and Western writers would strive to learn and write Chinese, in the hopes of winning our prize money. China’s five-thousand-year-old culture would therefore penetrate the West. Since the Nobel Prize is supported by private funds, our prize should follow the same format. It would only be appropriate, if we may suggest it, that our great Writer implement the above proposal by way of retaliation, and start an endowment fund with his royalties and fees.

  In addition to practical-mindedness, the editor of a fourth paper demonstrated much psychological insight. He agreed that the literary arts ought to be encouraged, adding only that those who were willing to contribute funds to that cause should themselves be honored too. Therefore, as incentive for the rich to make grants, some honor had to first be bestowed upon selected men of wealth. Since this was to be no more than a gesture, the amount of their cash prizes did not have to be substantial. The wealthy writer surely would not mind. “Would our great Writer,” he concluded by asking, “be willing to set an example for others to follow by making the first contribution?” Who could have guessed that all this goodwill and these kind suggestions would only drive the Writer to his deathbed?

  He took the confirmed announcement of winners so hard that he fell sick, his misery and bitterness mitigated only slightly by the outrage and support of the population. While awaiting articles rallying to his defense to appear in the paper, he made plans to dictate an interview the next day, to be transcribed for publication. By long-standing practice, news stories about him were, without exception, his own submissions. In them, he would often insert some minor factual errors, in order to create the false impression that the piece had been written by someone else. This also gave him the bonus of having a correction appear in the next issue, thus ensuring that his name would see prin
t twice for one iota of trivia. It so happened that while he was making these plans, those editorials came to his attention one after another. The first one alone was enough to make him fly into a rage. “Missing out on the Nobel Prize means a loss of personal income,” he reasoned. “The minute lofty things like the nation, the people, and so on got dragged into the show, I myself would be crowded out of it!” He then noted the congratulatory heading of the second editorial and became so furious that he tore the sheet in two. Suppressing his anger as best he could, he went on to the third editorial; by the time he had finished reading it, he felt nothing but ice-cold water being poured on his head. The moment he finished reading the fourth, he passed out.

  That night, quite a few visitors gathered at his bedside, including journalists, fans, and representatives of various organizations. Besides the reporters, who were busy scribbling in their notebooks items that would make for a good article entitled something like “A Profile of the Writer Indisposed,” everybody was nervously gripping his handkerchief to wipe away tears. All knew that this was the last they would ever see of the Writer. Several young, sentimental females were in fact worrying that one hankie might not be enough. The flowing sleeves of the men’s mandarin gowns might come in useful in such an emergency. But the girls’ sleeves, so short that they barely covered their armpits, would be of no help. Looking up to find all those people standing at his side, this Writer of ours found the scene matched quite well the scenario for his dying moments that he had fantasized about. The only thing that irked him was that he was no longer master of his own mental powers and organs. He could not recall completely or properly deliver the farewell speech to the world he had prepared long ago. At long last, a few words managed to dribble from his lips: “Don’t collect my writings into a series of complete works, because—” Perhaps this line was too long, or what was left of his life was too short, but he was unable to make it to the end of the sentence. Many in the audience pricked up their ears like terriers, only to let them droop like a hog’s in disappointment. Once outside his room they enthusiastically debated the meaning behind the Writer’s last words. Some said he had written so much that it was simply impossible ever to make any collection a complete one. Others conjectured that since additional hundreds and thousands of novels, plays, and songs had been planned, what little there was in print would hardly be representative. This controversy between the two schools soon grew into the most intriguing chapter in the history of Chinese literature.