When Fox Is a Thousand
Page 26
The park came up ahead and the dark trees swallowed them. The night folded around them, as they rolled towards the vision of themselves walking single file through the wooded park, each bearing a tiny yellow flame.
There was a chicken at the foot of the hollow tree. I found it halfway through my morning stroll. I’m not trying to imply that morning strolls are a regular thing with me. As you know, I’m much more a creature of the dim hours. But this morning I decided I would take a walk, and in my original form at that. I hadn’t gone out in my vulpine shape for ages, having long since lapsed into the habit of falling asleep in the Poetess’s body, or whatever form I had invented for the moment, before I got around to changing back. But I am an immortal now. Why shouldn’t I do as I please?
I ate the chicken. It was a plump one, steamed to tender perfection, although a bit smudged with ashes and dirt. All traces of the body they had found there nearly two months ago had vanished, but there were clusters of burnt-out joss sticks poking out of the soil like little red antennae, and here and there a solidified pool of white wax.
I remember coming across the body while it was still warm on one of my evening forays less than a week before my thousandth birthday. I am disturbed, but also proud, to admit it did not interest me in the way it would have in the past. The urge to investigate did not burn through me, although it was certainly present. I did go take a look. Once I was there, what could be wrong with a little animation? I nudged the mouth open with my snout and blew my soul inside. Up and down the seawall we walked, six inches above the earth, scaring night fishers, amorous young men, and old derelicts alike. I rode a cloud into the city and paid a visit to my new friend while she was sleeping, curled like a child in her blankets. I was careful not to wake her. I never meant to go close, but some perverse instinct drove me through the window, right up to the edge of her bed. Her face was soft and relaxed, all the tension of guilt and worry washed from it by sleep. I crouched beside her, certain that she would be terrified should she wake to see me there – the animated body of her friend, with my soul peering out of it. I reached out to stroke her cheek, not realizing how cold my hands were. Her eyes opened. I was caught. I expected her to scream, but she didn’t, only gazed evenly at me as though she had already dreamt of Ming’s death and felt reassured by the appearance of this strange shadow. It was my eyes that froze in hers. After a long moment, she released me by merely closing them again. I rushed back to the park. Scratching diligently at the earth, I dug a grave of respectable depth beneath the same tree, and put the body to rest.
But on my return to the spot this morning, I thought to myself that my time has come. The constellations have shifted from their original positions in the black bowl of the sky. Surely congress between the divine and the mortal should not take place with such sordid regularity. I must be heedful of my new situation. My selfishness in this most recent haunt has been childish beyond my years. It is time for me to move on. I will tell her so this evening.
She will not be sad. Her soul, like mine, is an old one. They have been intertwined since an herbalist and an oil seller made a promise to one another more than a thousand years ago in another country, when they were still neighbours. Since a chance meeting on a hill beneath a temple in the rain. I know we will meet again.
SOURCE NOTES
I am indebted to the sixteenth-century writer Pu Songling and the unnamed storytellers whose stories he collected. Many of Fox’s monologues in this book are adapted from tales contained in Pu’s popular collection of tales, variously (though incompletely) translated as Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio (Herbert A. Giles [trans.], Hong Kong: Kelly and Walsh, Limited, 1968); Strange Tales from Make-Do Studio (Denis C. and Victor H. Mair [trans.], Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1989); Strange Tales of Liaozhai (Lu Yunzhong, Chen Tifang, Yang Liyi, Yang Zhihong [trans.], Hong Kong: The Commercial Press, Ltd., 1988); and Selected Tales of Liaozhai (Yang Xianyi and Gladys Yang [trans.], Beijing: Panda Books, 1981). Ten newly translated selections are available in Renditions: A Chinese-English Translation Magazine (Hong Kong: The Chinese University of Hong Kong, No. 13, Spring 1980).
For the Poetess’s story, I relied on R.H. Van Gulik’s Sexual Life in Ancient China: A Preliminary Survey of Chinese Sex and Society from ca. 1500 B.C. till 1644. A.D. (Leiden: E.J. Brill, 1974). Other sources included Traditional Chinese Stories: Themes and Variations (Y.W. Ma and Joseph S.M. Lau, eds., New York: Columbia University Press, 1978); Poets and Murder: A Chinese Detective Story (R.H. Van Gulik, London: Heineman, 1968); Women Poets of China (translated and edited by Kenneth Rexroth and Ling Chung, New York: New Directions Publishing Corporation, 1972); 100 Celebrated Chinese Women (Cai Zhuozhi [Kate Foster, trans.], Singapore: Asiapac Books, 1994); Tales of Empresses and Imperial Consorts in China (compiled by Shang Xizhi, translated and edited by Liang Liangxing, Hong Kong: Hang Feng Publishing Co., 1994); and Tales About Chinese Emperors – Their Wild and Wise Ways (compiled by Luan Baoqun, translated and edited by Tang Bowen, Hong Kong: Hang Feng Publishing Co., 1994).
The epigraph, translated by Jan Walls, comes from Sunflower Splendor: three thousand years of Chinese poetry (co-edited by Wu-chi Liu and Irving Yucheng Lo, Garden City: Anchor Books, 1975). The quote from the I Ching comes from Brian Browne Walker’s translation, The I Ching or Book of Changes: A Guide to Life’s Turning Points (New York: St Martin’s Press, 1992). The translation from Hsuan-chung-chi, on page 92, is by R.H. Van Gulik, in Sexual Life in Ancient China, cited above. The quotation from San-shui hsiao-tu, on pages 237, comes from Traditional Chinese Stories, also cited above. “The Cat Mother” is adapted from a version appearing in The Man Who Sold a Ghost: Chinese Tales of the 3rd-6th Centuries (Yang Hsien-Yi and Gladys Yang [trans.], Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1958). The image of snakes and doves originates in Betty Bao Lord’s Spring Moon: A Novel of China (New York: Harper and Row, 1981).
AFTERWORD
1. Young Women, Your Attention Please
I want young women to read this book, especially young women from immigrant backgrounds. I want this book to give materiality to the complexities of being young, brown and female at the present time. I want this book to speak to the lives, longings and emotional battles of women in their late teens and early twenties, especially women who are dealing with questions of sexuality and race. I hope it offers possibilities for thinking through life and for engaging in friendships, relationships, politics and history in ways that are productive and empowering.
In writing When Fox Is a Thousand, I was not interested in heroic characters or easy solutions to complex problems. None of the characters in this book are particularly “nice” people. I have had the good fortune of coming of age in a feminist and anti-racist community that stressed the importance of producing “positive role models” for young women. Much of the writing I cut my teeth on accomplished this. And I respect it, very much so. But when I started writing this book, at the age of twenty-four, I was desperate to read books that showed youth as I knew it to be, not as some ideal form, or series of moral lessons. I was particularly interested in the disconnections among young people. I wanted to explore the difficult landscapes of weakness, betrayal, sorrow and longing. I was interested in my own generation’s relationship to history, myth and spirituality, precisely because these were things that we’d been cut off from.
Growing up in Pierre Trudeau’s supposedly multicultural Canada, which promised but never defined equality, was an alienating experience. We grew up in the wake of the Korean and Vietnam wars, the children of a generation traumatized by unspeakable violence that they did not wish to pass on. That generation thought we were innocent. They thought they were keeping us safe. But all along we knew. And all the along we carried the violence, all the more potent because it was buried and unspoken.
Writers of my parents’ generation, including Joy Kogawa, SKY Lee, Jim Wong-Chu, Maxine Hong Kingston, Frank Chin, Betty Bao Lord and many others understood the necessity of telling those seemingly unspeak
able stories. They have brilliantly narrated histories of externalized and internalized racism. They have written about histories of migration, settlement, and assimilation. They have written about the Head Tax, the Chinese Exclusion Act, the Japanese-Canadian Internment during WWII. Other elders, who also talk about these concrete and overtly “political” histories, have paved the way for a kind of writing that is more fragmented, cracked open, non-linear and unresolved. I think especially of Roy Miki, Fred Wah and jam. ismail. The work I do here would not have been possible without the groundwork laid by earlier generations.
As a young writer, I was interested in narrating the aftermath of violence (which of course, has its own violence), to explore the psychic territory of those who missed the historically acknowledged events, and yet are still living through an ongoing history of colonization that has not (yet) been monumentalized. Our generation is a haunted generation. We are also a generation with the power to change things. For me this has meant moving beyond providing role models to producing writing that is as complex and multi-layered as we can make it.
I wrote When Fox Is a Thousand with the benefit of an Explorations grant from the Canada Council, in-between various cultural organizing projects. It was the height of the “identity politics” era in Canada, when many of my elders and peers were doing work that explicitly addressed questions of race, class, gender, power and inequality. It was a moment of great promise and great cruelty. Much experience-based work was produced, work that disclosed secrets, broke silences, articulated anger against the systemic abuses of power marginalized people have endured in this country since its inception. As stories were told, so contradictions became apparent. Identity-based work was at once liberating and debilitating because it required the use of the language of oppression in order to undo oppression. There was always an element of reproduction embedded in the act of liberation. Many of us were aware of this, but it seemed at the time as though there was no other way to begin freeing ourselves from the uncomfortable conditions we were born into.
When Fox Is a Thousand was my attempt to find another way of writing, one that was consciously fictional, that used multiple voices, that refused to nail certainties to the wall. I wanted to talk about history but break away from the production of fixed identities.
2. Tradition, Irony, and Re-telling
Here is a story:
There is a young scholar walking through the forest late at night. He is the bookish sort, and a bit naïve, but handsome. From behind a tree, a woman emerges. She is well-dressed and seems to come from a good family. This is an unusual thing in feudal China, because “good” women are not supposed to wander forests alone. They are kept indoors, or if they must travel, they travel with a retinue.
So the young scholar is surprised.
“What are you doing here?” he asks.
She offers him a story. “I was travelling with my family and we were attacked by bandits. Everyone was killed but me.”
Or: “I was to be married to a young man in the next village, but the servants he sent to carry me abandoned me in the forest. Perhaps his family didn’t think the dowry was big enough.”
The young man feels sorry for her. They linger and chat. She is well-read and can quote ancient poetry. This is another unusual thing, since learning is not considered a womanly virtue. Since she has nowhere to go, he invites her hack to his quarters for the evening. They drink together, and perhaps play verse-writing games. She stays the night, and then another, and then another.
Before long, the young man becomes ill. The woman is distraught. She cooks for him. She nurses him. But to no avail. Until one day, an older scholar, or a monk perhaps, comes along, and recognizes the woman for what she is: a fox spirit, who has gone into the graveyard late at night and found the body of some young woman dead before her time. She has animated this body with her non-human spirit. The young man is ill because human and non-human are not, in the proper order of things, supposed to become inimately involved.
The old monk tricks the fox spirit into entering a brown glass bottle. He seals it with a bit of pig’s bladder and buries under an old tree. The young man’s health improves.
In other tellings, the fox herself diagnoses the situation and leaves voluntarily. Through her fox magic, she might arrange a meeting for the young man with a pretty human girl from a nearby town. Perhaps she visits the man when he is old and on his death bed to remind him of their doomed romance, so long ago.
This is a traditional telling of the fox myth. As a writer who is interested in both history and the ideological implications of its telling, there were two things I wanted to do in writing When Fox Is a Thousand. Firstly, I wanted to share the popular mythology of the fox with North American readers. Secondly, I wanted to take that mythology apart so I could play with its gender and class biases. I belong to a generation that is very conscious of the histories that have preceded it. In the Western tradition, we are living in a moment when the idea of “newness” is highly suspect. Certainly it is difficult to deal with mythic characters, tropes or ideas without some sense of irony, or some other acknowledgment of the repetition. Were I to set the Fox loose in Asia, there would be no question that people would recognize the figure without my having to explain anything. In my particular trajectory through the geographies of immigration, language and politics, the problem becomes how to put an old story into a new context in such a way that the audience can grasp both the traditional version and my remaking of it, in a single move.
I present this story now, at the end of the book, as a kind of repetition and a kind of confirmation. I present this story as traditional, but I want to be very careful here. Within the processes of race and racialization in this country there is a tendency to look to those with bodies like mine – dark-haired, dark-skinned and dark-eyed – as carriers of a certain kind of authenticity, or to put it another way, as a kind of native informant on an exotic and distant culture. So let me be very clear. I got this story from library books. I don’t read Chinese. I read it in English translation. And I am fine with that. I have very little interest in those old colonial tropes of the “authentic” because they are invested in the production of an exotic other in order to maintain the centrality of the white European subject. I like the idea of quoting anthropological texts back at the anthropologists, infusing it with my own social and political interests quite explicitly before passing the parcel on. It amuses me, because those texts themselves are so infused with the ideological interests of their producers, even as they pretend objectivity.
I want to be firm that the idea of the traditional itself is highly constructed and highly ideological. This version is one among many. There is no original, only endless multiple trails that point into the past. We can never grasp that past. These stories are always about the present.
And yet, in some ways, When Fox Is a Thousand is also an exercise in nostalgia. I am trying to produce a consciously artificial history for those of us who come from histories that are broken, fragmented and discontinuous, histories that exist in multiple languages and that have survived multiple traumas and multiple acts of forgetting. In the words of poet and essayist Fred Wah, I am “faking it.” I see a kind of liberation in fakery and its acknowledgement, especially in contradistinction to notions of pureness and authenticity, which in the end produce only fascism and violence.
3. Hauntings
I was haunted in the writing of this book. The Fox, the Poetess, and Artemis all visited me and kept me in their thrall sometimes for days at a time. They were marvellous company – smart, tortured and full of schemes. There is a magic in the writing of a first book because you have it entirely to yourself. No one expects anything of you. You can keep company with as many spirits as you like, and no one suspects a thing. Once you’ve released them into the world, there is no bringing them back. In the three years that I took to write this book, I still carried all the grief and the innocence of my teen years. At the same time, I felt blessed by a part
icular kind of magical energy that made the world shimmer with possibility. Later I realized it wasn’t permanent. It belongs only to young people, and ultimately leaves us, or transforms into something else as we grow older. I am no longer the person who wrote this book. And yet I mourn the fact that I will never write another book like this. Sometimes I long for that fire to return. I long to live in language that way. But my relationship to it has changed. And I don’t want the terror of living in that uncertain space. But I’m always delighted when I encounter it in others – women and men – that ability to contact the other side, that burning terror and wonder and that energy to create.
In many ways I feel I did not write this book, but rather that the book wrote me. As an exploration of a certain narrative and psychic space, it transformed my internal universe. Put out in the world, it transformed my external one. It gave me many opportunities – to speak, to travel, to meet other creative souls and find out what makes them tick.
More than ever, in these dark days of war and pestilence (how medieval, but then, we are again experiencing crusades and holy wars, aren’t we?) I think we need these kinds of stories. We need the wisdom and innocence of youth. We need to be haunted. We need to have visions. We need artificially constructed pasts and futures. How else are we to imagine ourselves out of the suffering we become implicated with every time we fill our tanks, invest our money, eat a hamburger, go to the mall? How else can we germinate a future full of hope and possibility rather than war and greed?
4. Rezoning Economies
Sometimes I wonder how a book like this might be circulated differently now than it was in 1995. Certainly the landscape in which questions of race and racialization were at the forefront of critical and artistic concern is no longer one we can take for granted, if we ever could. We are living in an infinitely more conservative and violent moment. When Fox Is a Thousand was deployed very much in the context of national belonging, something that marginalized people were explicitly struggling for in the early ‘90s in Canada. In the ten years since those important struggles, I think the nation state has been eclipsed by concerns about global capital, as free trade agreements and corporate conglomeration became massive forces that link – not necessarily in fair, kind or equitable ways – populations around the world. The state has certainly re-emerged in recent years with an unparallelled vengeance, though whether it engages the democratic idea of the nation is fully open to question. What does this matter to a bunch of young people who can’t care for each other, or an ancient, troubled fox spirit, or a woman poet long dead? Certainly the issue of representation has become more complicated. Asian bodies that circulated as signs of difference in the early ‘90s now become further marked by the complexities of mobile capital, border crossings, national returns (as in that of Hong Kong to China) and the pressures of advertising to sell products to niche markets that can be just as conveniently marked by reclaimed racial identification as by any other demographic descriptor. It will no doubt require another book to think through this very changed world. But in the meantime, the struggles of the 1990s have not gone away, they have only been made more complex, or been pushed underground. In that regard, I hope that When Fox Is a Thousand will continue to needle its readers into a thoughtful discomfort with the world as it is, and into imagining how it might be different.