by Yan Lianke
Also by Yan Lianke
The Explosion Chronicles
The Four Books
Lenin’s Kisses
Dream of Ding Village
Serve the People!
YAN LIANKE
THE YEARS,
MONTHS, DAYS
Two Novellas
Translated from the Chinese by Carlos Rojas
The Years, Months, Days copyright © 1997 by Yan Lianke
English translation © 2017 by Carlos Rojas
Cover artwork © Fang Lijun
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The Years, Months, Days first published in China in 1997
as Nian yue ri by Harvest magazine
Marrow first published in China in 2001 as Balou tiange
by Beiyue Literature & Art Publishing House, Beijing
Translation from the original Chinese by Carlos Rojas first published in English in 2015 by Penguin Group (Australia) in association with Penguin (Beijing) Ltd.
Copyright © 2001 by Yan Lianke
Translation copyright © 2015 by Penguin Group (Australia) in association with Penguin (Beijing) Ltd.
Published simultaneously in Canada
Printed in the United States of America
First Grove Atlantic paperback edition: December 2017
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication data available for this title.
ISBN 978-0-8021-2665-8
eISBN 978-0-8021-8881-6
Black Cat
an imprint of Grove Atlantic
154 West 14th Street
New York, NY 10011
Distributed by Publishers Group West
groveatlantic.com
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Contents
Cover
Also by Yan Lianke
Title Page
Copyright
Translator’s Note
The Years, Months, Days
Marrow
Chapter One
Chapter Two
Chapter Three
Chapter Four
Chapter Five
Chapter Six
Chapter Seven
Back Cover
Translator’s Note
“When I was young,” Yan Lianke writes in a recent essay, “hunger constantly followed me around, like a tail.”*
Yan Lianke is known for his unconventional use of analogy. In his work, colors and smells, emotions and motivations, and even sunrays and moonlight are often treated as though they have a material existence. In this particular description of his youth, he compares his hunger to a corporeal appendage—albeit a body part that humans don’t actually have in the first place. In likening his hunger to a tail, Yan emphasizes not only its immediacy but also its phantasmic character—a yearning so acute that it is perceived as though it were a concrete presence in its own right.
For the young Yan Lianke, hunger was indeed a fact of life. The author was born in rural Henan province in 1958, which happened to be the first year of the national campaign known as the Great Leap Forward. Initially conceived as China’s second Five-Year Plan, the Great Leap Forward sought to jump-start the nation’s economic development, permitting it to quickly overtake developed nations like Britain. In reality, the campaign’s policies resulted in a devastating famine that claimed the lives of tens of millions of Chinese. Known officially (and euphemistically) as the Three Years of Natural Disaster, the Great Famine that consumed China during Yan’s childhood had far-reaching implications for both the nation and the people who lived through it. Although Yan’s novel The Four Books is his only work that is explicitly set during the period of the Great Famine, many of his other works reflect on related themes of hunger and loss, yearning and desire.
The Years, Months, Days unfolds during an acute drought afflicting a remote community in the author’s home province of Henan, in central China. The drought results in a mass exodus, and the only resident who stays behind is a seventy-two-year-old man identified simply as the Elder, who fears he wouldn’t survive the journey. The Elder devotes himself to raising a corn seedling he planted, so that the other villagers might have food when they eventually return. His only companion throughout this time is a blind dog, and the Elder’s remarks to the dog and his comments to himself frequently bleed into one another as they both struggle desperately to survive. In this way, the Elder comes to view the dog as both an extension of himself, but also as an external projection of his own hunger.
Marrow also revolves around the specter of hunger. The novella focuses on a family with four children. The three sisters each suffer from epilepsy and other ailments, and when their younger brother is a year and a half old he, too, begins displaying similar symptoms. The boy’s parents take him to see a doctor, who concludes that all four children have inherited their condition from their father (who happens to be asymptomatic). Despondent upon realizing that he is the source of his children’s illness, the father commits suicide, leaving his wife to raise the children on her own. Although the story unfolds two decades after the father’s death, his widow continues to interact with her husband as though he were still alive—particularly with respect to issues of how to raise their children. By this point, the mother has already succeeded in marrying off her two eldest daughters, but is still struggling to find a suitable husband for her third daughter, while also attempting to domesticate her son’s deviant desires—which include incestuous and even zoophilic impulses. In the end, the novella explores the boy’s more literal hunger and its possible reconfiguration.
Underlying the themes of food and hunger in these two works are related concerns with identity and alterity. In The Years, Months, Days, the Elder develops a peculiar symbiotic relationship with the blind dog, whom he comes to view as a virtual extension of himself even as it becomes increasingly clear that there is insufficient food to feed both of them. A parallel, and inverse, figure can be found in the wolves that the Elder encounters near a small pool that is one of his only remaining sources of fresh water. The Elder and the wolves are united by their shared hunger, even as that same hunger leaves them in a deadly stalemate that threatens the Elder’s very existence.
Yan Lianke recounts a similar face-off at the beginning of the essay in which he compares his childhood hunger to a tail. Yan opens with a description of how, one day when he was four or five, he encountered a wolf in the doorway of his home. The animal appeared emaciated, and Yan initially assumed it was merely a hungry dog. His first impulse, accordingly, was to try to feed it, despite the fact that he didn’t even have food for himself. Yan and the wolf simply stood there staring at each other, and it was not until the other villagers returned and drove the animal away that Yan finally realized that his unexpected visitor was, in fact, a wolf. Yan subsequently came to view the wolf with a combination of fear and love—recognizing that the predator could easily have attacked him, but also feeling deeply moved by the animal’s gentle expression. In this description of the famished wolf, and in the hu
nger-as-tail analogy that immediately follows it, the wolf and the tail both function as a sort of phantom limb—an external manifestation of the author’s hunger and a vicarious projection of the author himself.
In their focus on solitude and loneliness, the two novellas included in this volume are shaped by similar phantasmic logic, in that they both explore the transformation of absence into spectral presence. In both works the natural world becomes endowed with a set of distinctly anthropomorphic qualities, and conditions of extreme deprivation encourage a radical reassessment of the protagonists’ understanding of themselves and the world they inhabit.
—Carlos Rojas
* Yan Lianke, “Kongju yu beipan jiang yu wo zhongsheng tongxing” (Terror and betrayal will follow me throughout my life), in Chenmo yu chuanxi (Silence and breath) (Taipei: Ink Literary Monthly, 2014), 127–150: 129.
THE YEARS, MONTHS, DAYS
In the year of the great drought, time was baked to ash; and if you tried to grab the sun, it would stick to your palm like charcoal. One sun after another passed overhead, and from dawn till dusk, the Elder could hear his own hair burning. Occasionally he would reach up to the sky, and could smell the stench of burned fingernails. Damn this sky! He always cursed this way as he emerged from the empty village and stepped into the interminable loneliness. He peered side-eyed at the sun, then announced, Blindy, let’s go. His blind dog followed his faint footsteps, and like a pair of shadows they left the village.
The Elder climbed the mountain, stomping the sunlight under his feet. The rays of light shining down from the eastern ridge pounded his face, his hands, and his feet like bamboo canes. His face was burning as though it had been slapped, and as the corners of his eyes met the deep wrinkles on his cheeks, the fiery red pain seemed to conceal countless pearls like glowing embers.
The Elder went to take a piss.
The blind dog followed him.
For half a month, the first thing the Elder and the dog would do every morning after they woke up was to go to Baliban Hill, to take a piss. On the side of the hill facing the sun, there was a corn seedling the Elder had planted. There was only this single seedling, standing alone in the middle of this devastating drought—and under the searing sun it appeared so green that it was as though the color were dripping off it. When the seedling lacked water, it relied on the Elder’s and the dog’s urine that had accumulated overnight. The Elder saw that the seedling appeared to have grown another three fingers taller since the day before, and where it had previously only had four leaves, now it had five. His heart started pounding and he felt a surge of warmth in his chest, as a smile rippled across his face. The seedling grew only one leaf at a time, and the Elder wondered why scholar trees, elm trees, and toon trees all grew two leaves at a time?
The Elder turned to his blind dog and asked, Why is it that the leaves of trees and crops grow differently? He gazed at the dog’s head and then, without waiting for the dog to answer, he turned and left, continuing to reflect as he walked away. The Elder looked up, held his hand to his forehead, and traced the sun’s rays. In the distance, he saw the bare mountain ridge glistening purple, as though there were a thick layer of smoke on the ground. The Elder knew this was nighttime air being released from the soil by the heat of the sun.
The villagers had all resolved to flee. As a result of the drought, the wheat in the fields had died, the mountain peaks had been left barren, and the entire world had withered. The daily hopes of the villagers had also dried up. The drought had continued until the autumn sowing season, when suddenly there was a downpour and the streets were filled with the sound of pounding drums. Everyone had been shouting, “Autumn sowing … autumn sowing! Heaven has given us an autumn sowing season!” Adults shouted, children shouted, men shouted, and women shouted as though they were performing in an opera—their delighted voices flowed down the streets of the village, from east to west, from west to east, and then from the village over to the mountain ridge.
“It’s autumn sowing season.”
“It’s autumn sowing season.”
“Heaven has given us rain, to let us proceed with the autumn sowing.”
These shouts, by both young and old, shook the entire mountain range. Sparrows that had alighted on tree branches were startled from their perches and flew away, their feathers drifting down like snow. Chickens and pigs stood astonished in the doorways of houses, their faces pale with shock. The oxen in cattle sheds suddenly started tugging at the ropes tied to their snouts, as their nostrils were ripped open and dark blood flowed into the feed troughs. All the cats and dogs crawled up onto the roofs of houses and gazed down at the villagers in terror.
For three days in a row, clouds grew increasingly dense.
Everyone from Liujiajian Village, Wujiahe Village, Qianliang Village, Houliang Village, Shuanmazhuang Village—in short, everyone from the entire Balou Mountain region—took the corn seed they had stored and rushed to sow their fields.
Three days later, the clouds dispersed, and the searing sun once again bore down on the mountain ridge like a fire.
Six months later, half of the villagers locked their doors and courtyard gates, and fled the drought. Over the next three days and two nights, a steady stream of refugees fled. The crowd of refugees grew like ants relocating to another anthill, as they surged along the road behind the village, heading out into the world. The sound of their footsteps echoed back to the village, pounding on the doors and windows of every house.
The Elder had been one of the last to decide to leave. That was the ninth day of the sixth lunar month, and the Elder gathered with a group of several dozen other villagers. The villagers asked, “Where should we go?” The Elder replied, “Let’s go east.” The villagers said, “What is in the east?” The Elder replied that east was the direction of Xuzhou, and in three to ten days they could make it there and live comfortably. They all headed east. The burning sun pounded the mountain road and plumes of dust rose every time they took a step. When they reached Baliban Field, however, the Elder stopped. He went and peed behind his field, then returned and told the other villagers, “You should go on. Continue heading east.”
“What about you?”
“A corn plant has sprouted in my field.”
“Will a single corn plant keep you from starving, Elder?”
“I’m seventy-two years old, and would surely die of exhaustion if I tried to walk for three days. If I’m going to die either way, I’d prefer to die in my own village.”
The other villagers left. They drifted away like a dark mass, and under the searing sun they disappeared into a cloud of dust. The Elder stood at the end of his field until they vanished from sight, at which point a feeling of solitude struck his heart with a thud. His entire body began to tremble, as he suddenly realized that he, a seventy-two-year-old man, was now the only living soul in the entire village—and perhaps even the entire mountain range. There was a vast emptiness in his heart, as a sense of stillness and desolation enveloped his body.
On that morning, as the sun was changing from yellow to red as it passed over the eastern mountains, the Elder and his dog had gone out to Baliban Field as usual. From a distance, the Elder saw that in the center of this field, the corn seedling—which was already as tall as a chopstick—appeared as green as a drop of water under the red sun. He turned and asked the blind dog, Can you smell it? Then added, It’s so fragrant, you can smell it from countless li away. The blind dog angled its head up to him, rubbed his leg, then silently ran over to the seedling.
Ahead of them was a deep gully, from which trapped heat surged out and singed the Elder’s cheeks. The Elder removed his white shirt, rolled it into a ball, and wiped his face. He could smell the reek of sweat three to five inches deep. This would make excellent fertilizer, he thought. I’ll let this seedling grow for another month, then I’ll wash my shirt, bring the waste water to the field, and let the seedling enjoy it as though it were a New Year’s feast. The Elder held his shirt under his a
rmpits, like a precious treasure. The seedling appeared before him. It was one palm tall, had five leaves, but had not yet produced the bud the Elder was hoping for. He examined the top of the seedling, brushing away some dust as a feeling of disappointment welled up in his heart.
The dog rubbed against the Elder’s leg. It walked once around the seedling, then again. The Elder said, Blindy, go away. The dog stopped and barked several times like a dried tangerine peel, then lifted its head toward the Elder, as though there were something it urgently had to do.
The Elder knew that the dog needed to pee. He went over to an old scholar tree and fetched his hoe—the Elder always hung his tools there when he wasn’t using them—then went back and dug a small hole on the west side of the seedling—the previous day it had been the east side. He told the dog, OK, go ahead and pee.
Before the Elder could check to see if the dog had finished urinating, the seventy-two-year-old man’s eyes were struck by something. His eyes hurt, his heart began to pound, when he saw that the seedling’s lowest two leaves had developed some tiny black dots, as though they were covered in tiny wheat grain shells. Are these dry spots? Each morning I come to pee and each evening I bring the seedling water. How could it be suffering from dryness? Just as he was standing up again, the dog’s yellow urine struck his head. It occurred to him that those dots were not a result of dryness, but rather were an indication that the fertilizer was too strong. Dog urine is much fattier than human urine, and also much warmer. The Elder complained, Blindy, I’ll fuck your ancestors, yet you still insist on peeing. He lashed out with his foot and violently kicked the dog, which landed several feet away like a sack of millet. I told you to pee, the Elder shouted, but you deliberately tried to burn the seedling, didn’t you?
The dog stood there, its well-like eye sockets staring blankly.
The Elder said, Serves you right. With an angry glance, he squatted down, held the tender leaves, and carefully inspected the black dots on their jade-like surface. He quickly reached over and grabbed some white foam from the dog’s urine, which had not yet been fully absorbed by the soil, and tossed it away. Next he used his hoe to refill the hole with several handfuls of the urine-mud, then said to the dog, Let’s go. Let’s go fetch some water. If we don’t get water to dilute this fertilizer, in less than two days the seedling will have burned up.