The Invisible Valley

by Wei, Su; Woerner, Austin;

  —There’s a creek just down there. We cross it, skirt the bluff on the far side, and that’ll bring us to the foot of the little pass where Autumn discovered his rosewood tree. If he hasn’t run off for good, he ought to be nearby.

  Sure enough, Lu Beiping could hear the faint gurgling of water. In the darkness his hearing had become acute, and he was now aware of the eerie symphony of noises that filled the jungle: the shrill cries of birds, the deep croaks of toads, the occasional loud howl of some nameless beast; even, to his highly suggestible ears, what sounded like the hoarse rasp of a saw in the branches overhead. As soon as he focused his attention on the sound it disappeared, leaving only a buzzing in his ears. Against this multitude of noises Kingfisher’s voice rang out again and again: Autumn! . . . Are you here? . . . Where are you, Autumn? . . . Answer me! . . .

  Nothing but echoes.

  Grief and remorse tackled Lu Beiping like a panther dropping out of the branches.

  —Uncle Auuuuu-tuuuumn! Smudge called out. Where aaaaaaare you? His bright childish voice was painful to hear. Lu Beiping didn’t dare join in; he knew that the moment he opened his mouth he would probably burst into tears.

  Kingfisher led the way, hollering as he walked. At first his cries sounded lazy and offhand, and he didn’t even pause to listen for a response. Calling for Autumn awakened hope, but it also to drew despair dangerously near. Lu Beiping followed in silence with leaden steps, every shout seeming to attach another lead ingot to his feet. After they hopped over the creek Kingfisher stopped shouting, came to a halt, and his square face appeared in the glow of his flashlight.

  —Do you hear something? Kingfisher asked.

  Worry and alarm were written all over his brow. A shudder of fear ran through Lu Beiping as he remembered the weird, stentorian rumble he and Autumn had heard when they’d ventured up here to round up the cattle, like a roll of subterranean thunder emanating from a neighboring valley.

  But he heard no sound, except for the usual din of the forest.

  Kingfisher’s next question was even more unsettling:

  —I smelled something, Four Eyes. Can you smell it?

  Lu Beiping and Smudge both breathed in deeply through their noses. Lu Beiping smelled only the usual jungle odor, that mixture of fruit, rotting leaves, and humid air that so closely resembled the smell of semen. It was strongest in the morning, much fainter now in the evening. Smudge said he could smell roasted yams, and Lu Beiping knew that that was the smell wild ginseng plants gave off at night. Smudge complained that he was hungry. Kingfisher said nothing, just spat out his cigarette and used it to light the torch made of snakesbane branches that he’d been carrying. As the torch ignited with a whoosh, the smoke and flames transfigured his face into a forbidding, fiery mask. Sure enough, the torch’s fumes smelled like sulfur, but even more pungent. In the branches overhead Lu Beiping heard a flurry of wing beats as a flock of birds took to the air, fleeing the smoke. Only many days later would Kingfisher tell Lu Beiping what it was he’d smelled that night: an animal scent, either the smell of a snake or of a man. But just then he didn’t want to scare either Lu Beiping or Smudge, so he said nothing, just lit the torch.

  The torchlight drove the shadows away temporarily, then the darkness seemed to well back in like a rushing tide. The darkness was more like a living thing now, dancing and retreating as the flames ebbed and leapt. We’re here, Kingfisher murmured. This ought to be the spot. He cast the torchlight in a circle around them, and Lu Beiping saw that they were standing on a gentle slope where a few trees rose like towering islands out of a sea of dense underbrush. At the edge of the ring of light he could make out the foot of a bluff, which gave this glade a sheltered, cozy feel, as if it might lie just a hundred yards from his hut and not in a distant corner of a godforsaken wilderness. Lu Beiping even thought he caught a hint of Autumn’s scent, that smell that he remembered so clearly from the night they spent together. Encouraged by this sensation, he called out softly: Autumn! Are you here? He didn’t feel at all sad, just as if he were waking up a sleeping friend, and he kept on yelling: Autumn! Are you asleep? Autumn! Wake up, answer us! As he shouted, a quiet feeling of excitement stole over him.

  There was no answer—not even an echo.

  Just at that moment Smudge’s bony fingers dug painfully into Lu Beiping’s arm. The instinctive fear conveyed by the boy’s touch sent an ominous premonition shooting through him. Now, suddenly, he heard it: a snatch of that hoarse, sobbing wail, the voice of the Child Crying from Beyond the Grave. Immediately he pricked up his ears, straining to hear more; but the terrible, spectral cry was gone, vanished like an apparition. He didn’t know whether Kingfisher and Smudge had heard it too, but it was impossible to ignore the tendrils of panic creeping up slowly from deep within his gut.

  —Look! What’s that?

  In the torchlight, through the smoke, Lu Beiping made out a wisp of something caught on the branch of a short understory tree, fluttering soundlessly, almost invisibly, in the breeze. Lu Beiping strode over and trained the white glare of his flashlight beam on the object. In the combined light of flashlight and torch, he saw that it was a torn piece of thread, the ripped cotton fibers undulating ever so slightly in the slow flow of air. At first glance Lu Beiping knew without a doubt that it was a thread torn from Autumn’s shorts. He even thought he caught a whiff of Autumn’s body odor: that faint, peculiar smell of sugarcane. But he said nothing of this to Kingfisher. No, he said, I have no idea what that is. He’d already drawn so close to hope that now, for fear of extinguishing it, he couldn’t bring himself to embrace any hopeless version of reality, even one supported by reliable evidence.

  Kingfisher began calling for Autumn again, a new urgency in his voice.

  —Autumn! Autumn! Where aaaaaaare you?

  Still no answer. After what seemed like a very long time the echoes straggled back out of the darkness, faint and distant.

  Suddenly, Smudge sang out nearby:

  —Come look! A tree! A big, chopped-down tree!

  All the hairs stood up on Lu Beiping’s neck. As the ball of torchlight glided through the darkness toward Smudge’s voice, he took a deep breath and followed.

  The glow of the torch and the restless flashlight beams revealed the body of a huge fallen tree. Only the very bottom of the trunk was visible; the tree’s upper half melted away into the darkness. The trunk, severed at its base, showed a cross-section about as big around as a man could circle with his arms. The rippled growth rings had a jade-like patina, and the wood shavings that littered the ground nearby looked brittle and lustrous, like flakes of shell, and glittered faint gold. In the fitful firelight it was difficult to make out the wood’s color—it was probably black, maybe dark purple—but the sap that had beaded along the rim of the trunk was black and crusted like dried blood. The area around the tree had been cleared, and all the epiphyte roots and bands of lichen that clung to the bottom portion of the trunk had been carefully cut away. A familiar long-handled machete and a big-toothed handsaw lay nearby, the bluing of their blades gleaming in the torchlight. On the other side of the tree sat a crude metal watering can with a long, tapered spout, for what use Lu Beiping couldn’t guess.

  Every detail spoke of the diligent attentions of the woodcutter. There were smoke stains and water stains on the wood, footprints and splashes of sweat in the soil; the only thing missing was the man himself.

  He was gone. After they’d combed every corner of the site with torch and flashlight, they still had found no trace of the living being they’d hoped to find—no sign of Autumn.

  —Kingfisher, Lu Beiping said in a strained voice: You’re sure this is the tree? You’re sure this is the right place?

  Kingfisher stood, still holding the smoldering remains of the torch aloft, gazing in silence at the fallen tree.

  —Uncle AUUUUU-tumn! Uncle AUUUUU-tumn! Smudge yelled, refusing to give up, casting his
flashlight beam every which way.

  —Don’t shout! Kingfisher barked. Then he sat down on the stump, lit his cigarette from the dying torch, and began to smoke.

  —Here, let me check again! Lu Beiping said, and though he knew he was deceiving himself he took out the black notebook and began flipping through it by the light of his flashlight, searching for the map that showed the location of the rosewood tree. Wafting off of the pages he smelled a hint of the clean, lucid fragrance of hillflower rice wine.

  Before he found the map the notebook fell open to the second half of the poem called “Stanzas Written to the Tune of ‘A Golden Thread.’” This was the poem he’d stumbled upon the day after the typhoon, leafing through Autumn’s journal in the glade by the stone tablet—the poem Autumn’s father had copied down for him the night he smuggled him out of the village, which the Qing courtier Gu Zhenguan had written three centuries earlier for his friend who’d been sent into exile, Wu Zhaoji.

  Once again Lu Beiping read the lines penned in that harsh and forceful script:

  (II)

  I too have suffered the caprices of Fortune’s hand.

  Yet, throughout my trials, I have remained

  To your memory, true;

  And it sears me through

  To have failed you, whose benevolence knew no end.

  Once, all Jiangnan did celebrate

  Our names, and our glory to Heaven commend;

  But could the heartsick pining of the Sage undo

  Li Bai’s wrongful sentence, or lessen his hardship’s weight?

  Of all my misfortunes, this most I rue:

  That I have lost both my wife, and my closest friend.

  Could there be any fate

  More desolate?

  These, my utmost sorrows, I lay bare to you.

  I was fifteen, you twenty-two; for a few brief years

  You were my brother and my teacher by equal shares.

  Now the blissful dawn

  Of our youths is gone;

  Reeds are withered by frost, men by earthly cares.

  So let us less often at verses play

  But save our strength, and redouble our prayers—

  Stay well, friend! For I hope someday to fan

  The ink-spidered sheaves you’ve laid away

  All these troubled years, and then pass them on,

  Bequeathing your name to the indifferent heirs

  Of a brighter day.

  Still so much to say,

  But I must end here. Yours truly, Guan.

  Before Lu Beiping reached the end of the poem his glasses were blurred with tears. He closed the book, threw back his head, and yelled hoarsely into the black vault of the night:

  —AUUUUUUUUU-tumn! Where ARE you? AUUUUUUUUU-

  tuuuuuuuumn!

  Smudged began sobbing wildly. He pounced on Lu Beiping and clamped him in a fierce embrace, burbling through tears:

  —Whatever happened to Uncle Autumn? I didn’t mean it, honest! I was sad, that’s all . . . sad you and Autumn made good together and forgot all about me . . . sad you didn’t love me as much as him . . . I’m sorry, Four Eyes, I’m so sorry!

  Smudge’s grip tightened on Lu Beiping’s shoulders as he sobbed louder and louder, overcome by a frenzy of grief.

  Goodness, love—always those two words. Lu Beiping hugged Smudge tight, patting his bare back and marveling that even a child’s need for love could be the fiercest of imperatives, to be ignored or trivialized at one’s peril. A human life is a speck of dust on the earth’s surface; and affection, love, is such a trifling thing, yet the most necessary of all things for a living being—the most mundane, yet the most sacred, good, upon which the hopes of every human life rest.

  Kingfisher’s solemn features materialized out of the darkness in front of Lu Beiping. He murmured:

  —Where’s Autumn? Where could he be? A wild goose doesn’t fly off without a farewell honk or two . . . Then he trailed off mid-phrase, shuddered, and stood with his mouth hanging open as if struck by a sudden realization.

  At the same time a flash of understanding went off in Lu Beiping’s brain. He thought of the big bull Alyosha, who’d vanished whole and wailing into the wilderness, remembered the bloodstained cowbell and the pool of fresh blood spreading beneath the carpet of leaves. He strode over to the tree and renewed his search, looking for some sign of Autumn, something, anything, like the Dunhuang harmonica he’d given him as a present, which Autumn had had in his pocket the morning he left.

  The fallen amaranthine rosewood tree lay still and silent among the shadows.

  There was no blood, not even a fleck, much less a last token like a cowbell or a harmonica. Or—Lu Beiping turned suddenly, and searched the tree branches for that single cotton thread torn from Autumn’s shorts, off of which Lu Beiping had fancied he’d caught a whiff of Autumn’s scent. But the thread was gone, carried off by the wind.

  The smoldering torch butt in Kingfisher’s hand gave a final flicker and went out.

  Darkness flooded in on all sides, swamping the silence. No—it was silence that enveloped the darkness, swallowing it down into its cold, still depths. The silence thickened into a viscous fluid, oozing and hardening around the peaks and valleys of Mudkettle Mountain. As if this place had never woken from immemorial slumber, as if all memory and imagination lay frozen here, as if this silence were the original silence out of which the world was born.

  Just at that moment, from far down the valley, came a faint noise echoing over the treetops: a thin, delicate sound like a piece of eggshell china shattering. The three of them stood still, listening. Kingfisher was the first to identify it—it was the cry of a premature, newborn child.

  Translator’s Acknowledgments

  This translation took shape over many years, and any artistic project that takes so long cannot be a solitary affair by virtue of the number of lives it has paralleled. As the book goes to press I am indebted to all those people who left their mark on it in ways both tangible and intangible, whether they knew it or not: people who helped, inspired, offered encouragement, gave honest criticism, hashed out ideas with me, or simply were patient as the years elapsed and the English version of the mysterious Chinese novel The Invisible Valley grew slowly in my head and on my hard drive.

  Thank you first to Perry Link and the UC Riverside Department of Comparative Literature, who contributed in the most direct and material way to the English translation’s completion. Their support, in the form of a visiting scholarship in autumn 2010, allowed me to finish the novel’s first draft in a crucial three months in the crisp desert sunlight of southern California. Professor Link’s graduate students Tian Xi, Wang Hongjian, and Anne Chang were some of the first native Chinese speakers to read and comment on the translation. Thank you also to Tony Fok, who facilitated a trip to Hainan Island in 2009 that allowed me to see the novel’s setting with my own eyes, giving me both an emotional and physical tie to the real experiences of the sent-down youth.

  Thank you to all the friends and teachers who read chapters, gave guidance, and offered moral support. If you feel your name belongs on this list, it does. In particular I’d like to thank: Professors Ed Kamens, Jing Tsu, and Kang-I Sun Chang at Yale, who helped steer me as I began the project; Jenny Blair, Olivia Gunton, and Dan Nagler, enthusiastic readers of the novel’s first drafts; my writing teachers John Crowley, Sigrid Nunez, and Patrick McGrath; fellow students Winston Len and Francis Gonzalez at the New School; Noa Wheeler, whose ear I bent numerous times for advice about navigating the world of book publishing; Li Ling and Wang Xiulu, with whom lasting friendships blossomed over discussions of The Invisible Valley, and whose faith in me has buoyed my spirits along the way; all my translator friends from Paper Republic; and recently, my students in China, whose enthusiasm continues to buttress my belief that language study
and literary translation are meaningful ways to spend one’s years.

  Now for the big one: Thank you to Su Wei himself, who on a whim and a hunch handed over his novel to an ambitious 21-year-old, offered unstinting support and no pressure, and spent countless hours with me poring over the book and plying me with stories and memories. More so than most translations this one was in fact co-created with the author, and this book is the child of our friendship. Thank you also to his wife Liu Mengjun and his daughter Emily, to the san’er and si’er (their numbers change constantly), and to Ah Kuan and Su Wei’s family in Guangzhou, who welcomed me on the other side of the world. If The Invisible Valley was a bag of magic beans, then you are the beanstalk up which I’m climbing.

  Lastly, thank you to Nikki Greenwood, first to explore Mudkettle Mountain with me, who helped me dream up names for ghosts and spirits and who never cut me any slack; and to my parents, who always supported my resolve to complete this unconventional project, who, even when they must have had their doubts, waited and had faith in me.

  About the Author

  Like many Chinese writers of his generation, Su Wei spent his teenage years being “re-educated” through farm labor in the countryside, working for ten years on a rubber plantation in the mountains of tropical Hainan Island. He is known for his nonfiction essays as well as for his highly imaginative novels, which are seen as unique in their treatment of the Cultural Revolution. He left China in 1989, and since 1997 he has taught Chinese language and literature at Yale University. The Invisible Valley is his first book to be translated into English.

  Austin Woerner is a Chinese-English literary translator. In addition to The Invisible Valley, he has translated two books of poetry, Doubled Shadows: Selected Poetry of Ouyang Jianghe and Phoenix. Formerly the English translation editor for the innovative Chinese literary journal Chutzpah!, he also co-edited the short fiction anthology Chutzpah! New Voices from China. He holds a BA in East Asian Studies from Yale and an MFA in creative writing from the New School.