by Yunte Huang
37
Space!
Tear away your net of stars.
Let me see the face of your light.
79
I wish before I leave this world
That I might softly, softly say to it—
“O world—
I thoroughly understand you.”
100
When the burden on the shoulder of the young
Suddenly lightens,
The brave heart—
Because of this very relief, becomes lonely and sad.
102
My questions,
My heart
Never answers in the midst of light.
But my dreams
In darkness, give me their solution.
144
The poet writes in vain,
One little heart—
Could it bring comfort
To wanderers suffering bitterly in the rain?
(Translated by Grace Boynton)
LI JINFA
(1900–1976)
Although little is known of the life of the elusive “poet eccentric” of the 1920s, Li Jinfa was credited with introducing French Symbolism to China. Born Li Shuliang in Guangdong, he adopted the pen name “Jinfa” (literally meaning “golden hair”) because of a recurring dream in which he was flying in the sky, led by a blond goddess. In 1919 he went to study sculpture and painting in France, where he became enamored with the poetic symbolism of Charles Baudelaire and Paul Verlaine. He wrote his best symbolist poems in the early 1920s, incorporating French words in his lines, which irritated many contemporary and later critics. Upon returning to China in 1925, he taught art history and was once appointed China’s ambassador to Iraq. After the founding of the People’s Republic in 1949, Li left China and lived a reclusive life on a chicken farm in New Jersey. He died in Long Island in 1976.
The Abandoned Woman
Long hair hangs disheveled before my eyes,
Severing all hostile stares of contempt,
And the quick flow of fresh blood, the deep sleep of dried bones.
The dark night and mosquitoes arrive slowly together,
Over the corner of this low wall,
To scream behind my clean white ears
Like the crazed winds raging in the wilderness,
Frightening the wandering shepherds.
With a blade of grass, I come and go with the spirit of
God in the empty valley.
My sorrow can be deeply imprinted only in the brains of
roaming bees.
Or with the waterfalls, let it be dashed down the hanging cliffs,
To be then drifted away with the red leaves.
The hidden grief burdens her every move.
No fire of setting sun can melt the ennui of time
Into ashes, and fly away through the chimney
To color the wings of the roaming crows,
And with them perch on the rocks of a roaring sea
To listen quietly to the boatman’s song.
The frail old skirt mournfully sighs
As she wanders among the graves.
Never will there be hot tears
To drop on the lawn
To adorn the world.
The Expression of Time
1
Wind and rain in the ocean,
Wild deer dead in my heart.
Look, autumn dream has spread its wings and departed,
Leaving behind only this wilted soul.
2
I seek abandoned desires,
I mourn discolored lips.
Ah, in the gloom of dark grass,
The moon gathers our deep silence.
3
In love’s ancient palace,
Our nuptials have fallen ill.
Take a discarded candle,
Dusk has shrouded the fields.
4
What do I need at this moment?
As if in fear of being scorched to death by the sun!
Go, the garden gate is unfastened;
The roaming bees have come in winged sandals.
5
I await the waking of dream,
I await my wakefulness to sleep.
But with your tears in my eyes,
I have no strength to see the past.
6
Leaning against snow, you long for spring;
Amid the faded grass, I listen to the cicadas’ cries.
Our lives are withered, too wasted,
Like a rice field after a stampede.
7
I sing rhymeless folk songs
With my heart keeping the beat.
Entrust your sorrows in my bosom
Where they will be cured.
8
The sleeping lotus in the shade
Cannot understand the glory of sun and moon.
Row your boat to the wide pond,
And let it learn a bit of love in the world of men.
9
Our memories
Are searching for a way home from the wilderness.
(Translated by Julia C. Lin)
YU DAFU
(1896–1945)
Born into an impoverished genteel family in Zhejiang, Yu Dafu went to study in Japan in 1913. As a student of economics at Tokyo Imperial University, he lived a bohemian life, and in 1921 he published Sinking, the first collection of short stories written in vernacular in modern China. Lyrical, decadent, and honest, his stories often portray the psychodramas of young intellectuals caught in the crossfire of the new and old in a changing world and extend, in the words of C. T. Hsia, “the psychological and moral frontiers of modern Chinese fiction.” A founding member of the Creation Society in 1921 and the Chinese League of Left-Wing Writers in 1930, Yu struggled against radical politics and ideology. At the outbreak of the Sino-Japanese War, he joined the national alliance of resistance and became an editor in Singapore. When the city fell, he fled to Indonesia and lived under a pseudonym. In 1945, he was tracked down and killed by Japanese military police in Sumatra.
Malady of Spring Nights
1
For half a year I lived in Shanghai with no job, and because I was unemployed, it was necessary to change my lodgings three times. At first I lived in a birdcage apartment on Bubbling Well Road, a prison cell without guards that never saw sunlight. Except for a few tailors who looked like ferocious gangsters, the inmates of this place were mostly pitiable unknown men of letters. Hence my epithet for the place: Yellow Grub Street. After a month in Grub Street, the rent suddenly went up, forcing me to pack up a few tattered books and move to a small hotel I knew near the racecourse. At the hotel I suffered all sorts of ill treatment and had to move again. I looked around on Dent Road to the north of the Garden Bridge, a slum opposite Rixinli Lane. I found a small room there and relocated.
The houses on Dent Road stood no higher than about twenty feet. My chamber on the upper floor was so small and low that if I stretched out to yawn, my arms would poke through the dusty gray roof. Coming through the front door from an alley, you first entered the landlord’s room. Edging your way around piles of rags, mounds of old tins, bottles, and rusty detritus, you would come to a rickety ladder with missing rungs leaning against the wall. Climbing the ladder to a dark hole of two square feet, you would arrive at the second floor. This dim little space, no bigger than a cat’s face, was partitioned by the landlord into two tiny rooms. The inner room was occupied by a woman who worked at the N Cigarette Company. As she had to come and go through my cubby at the top of the ladder to get to hers at the back, my monthly rent was a few coppers cheaper than hers.
The landlord, a man in his fifties with a bent back, looked older than his age. His sallow face had a dark oily sheen. His eyes were of different size perched above high cheekbones. The wrinkles on his forehead and face were filled with a fine coal dust, which, despite his efforts every morning, could not be washed out. He got up at eight or nine every day. After a fit of coughing, he wen
t out with a pair of bamboo baskets dangling on a shoulder pole. He returned around three or four most afternoons, still carrying two empty baskets. Occasionally he came back with the baskets full, loaded with the same kinds of rags, rusty junk, bottles, and so on that already littered his chambers. On these nights, he would get some wine and sit by the edge of the bed drinking by himself, cursing freely in an incomprehensible dialect.
My first encounter with my housemate on the other side of the partition was on the afternoon I moved in. At about five o’clock, when the fleeting light of a spring day drew close to dusk, I lit a candle and began to arrange the few books I had brought with me from the hotel. I divided them into two stacks, one big and one small. Then I placed two large picture frames on top of the larger stack. I had sold all my furniture, so this setup of books and picture frames would have to serve as a desk during the day and a bed at night. Done with the task, I sat down on the smaller stack for a smoke, facing my newfangled desk. With my back turned against the trapdoor, I pulled slowly on the cigarette and stared at the candle. Just then I heard a movement from the ladder. Turning around, I could see nothing but my own enlarged shadow, but my ears plainly told me that someone was coming up. I stared into the darkness for a moment, and then a pale oval face and the slender torso of a female figure came into view. Seeing her face, I knew instantly that she must be my housemate on the other side of the partition. Earlier when I had come looking for a place, the landlord had told me that besides him, there was only a female worker living in this house. Liking the cheap rent and the fact that there was no actual housewife or kids around, I took the place without any hesitation.
I waited until she came up the ladder, stood up, and bowed to her politely. “Excuse me,” I said, “I just moved in today. I hope you will not mind.”
She made no reply, but her big dark eyes looked at me solemnly. She then unlocked her room and went in. Ours was just a brief encounter, but for some unknown reason I felt a kind of pity for the waif. Her high-bridged nose, pale oval face, and slight wispy figure, all appealed to my sympathy. But as someone struggling to make ends meet myself, I had no time to care for someone who at least had a job. A moment later, I returned to my previous state, sitting still on the small stack of books, staring at the candle.
A week had passed since I moved into the slum. Every day my neighbor went to work at seven in the morning and returned after six that evening. She would always find me sitting on top of my books, staring at the candle flame or oil lamp. Perhaps my long idling stirred her curiosity; one day when she returned from work, came upstairs, and saw me standing there, letting her pass like the first day, she suddenly stopped and looked directly at me. “What are you reading every day?” she stammered in a halting voice. She spoke a pure lilting Suzhou dialect, producing an effect on me beyond description, so I will only transcribe her words in plain Chinese.
Her question made me blush. Even though I was sitting there day in and day out peering into several foreign books I had opened, my mind was in such a state of confusion that I wasn’t able to read a single line. Sometimes I let my imagination conjure up strange patterns and plugged them into the space between the lines. Other times I only flipped through pages looking at the illustrations and invented fantasies inspired by the images. Due to my insomnia and malnutrition, this trancelike state was not difficult to induce. I saw it as a form of sickness. Also, my heavy padded gown—my only worldly possession—was so threadbare that I could not go out in it for walks. As there was no natural light in the room, I had to light a lamp or candle day and night, causing my overall health to decline still further, my eyesight weakened, leg muscles atrophied. In such a sorry state, how could I not feel exposed by her question? So I replied vaguely, “I wasn’t really reading. It’s just that it doesn’t look good sitting around idly all day. That’s why I put books in front of me.”
She gave me another searching glance, seemingly confused by what I had said, and then disappeared into her partition.
It would be untrue to say that in those days I had completely abandoned the idea of employment or had not done anything at all. There were times when my mind hadn’t been so cloudy, and I’d translated a few poems from English and French, as well as short stories from German that were each about four thousand words in length. I sneaked out quietly at night, after everyone had gone to sleep, to mail these translations to some new publishers. Since my hope for finding employment in other fields was all but dashed, this line of work, relying on my dried-up brains, remained the only possibility for me. If the editors happened to like my work and publish those pieces, it wouldn’t be hard to get paid a few dollars in royalty. Since my relocation to Dent Road, by the time she first spoke to me, I had submitted three or four such pieces of translation.
2
Living in the muddled foreign concessions in Shanghai, one hardly noticed the change of seasons or passage of time. After my move to the slum on Dent Road, I felt that my ragged cotton gown was getting heavier and warmer day by day. I thought, “Perhaps spring will be over soon?”
Even so, without two nickels to rub together, I couldn’t afford to go anywhere, and could only stay in my dark cubby, sitting by the light, day and night. One day, sometime around late afternoon, when I was sitting there as usual, my housemate suddenly came upstairs with two paper bags. When I stood up to let her pass, she put down one bag on my desk and said, “Here’s some grape jam bread for you. You can have it tomorrow. I also bought some bananas. Would you like to come eat them in my room?”
While I helped her with the bag, she unlocked the door to her room and invited me in. We had shared the loft for two weeks, which seemed to have bolstered her trust in me as an honest and respectable man. All trace of suspicion on her face during our first meeting was gone. After we went in, I saw that it was not yet dark outside. There was in her room a south-facing window, through which reflected sunlight could enter and shine on this small space containing a bed made of two planks, a black lacquer side table, a wooden chest, and a round stool. The bed wasn’t equipped with a mosquito net, but with two clean blue-cloth quilts. On the side table there was a small foreign tin box, perhaps for her toiletries, that was spotted with grease. Picking up the few half-worn cotton gowns and work pants from the stool and putting them on the bed, she invited me to sit down. I felt a bit uneasy because of her hospitable gestures, so I said, “We are housemates; there’s no need to be so polite.”
“I’m not being polite. It’s just that every day I come home, you always stand up to let me pass. I feel much obliged.”
With those words, she opened the bag of bananas and handed them to me. She also took one for herself, sitting on the bed, peeling and eating.
“Why do you stay at home every day? Why not go out and get a job?”
“My plan was to get a job, but I couldn’t find anything. I tried.”
“Do you have any friends?”
“Yes, but given my circumstance, no one’s disposed to see me anymore.”
“Did you go to school?”
“I studied at a foreign school for a few years.”
“Where are you from? Why don’t you go home?”
Her questions made me suddenly aware of my own situation, of how I’d become, since the previous year, so dejected day by day that I had totally forgotten things such as, “Who am I?” “What is my current situation?” or even “Am I happy or sad?” At her questioning, I began to recall all the difficulties endured over the past six months. I became speechless, sitting there looking at her. My silence must have made her think that I was also a vagabond; an expression of sadness mixed with loneliness spread across her face, followed by a gentle sigh. “Ah, are you just like me?”
After another sigh, she lapsed into silence, her eyes moist and red. I tried to divert her with a question. “What do you do at the factory?”
“I pack cigarettes.”
“How many hours do you have to work each day?”
“From seven in t
he morning to six in the afternoon, a one-hour break at noon, that’s ten hours of work a day. They cut your pay if you work less than that.”
“How much is the pay?”
“Nine dollars a month, that’s three dollars for ten days, or three cents an hour.”
“How much do the meals cost?”
“Four dollars a month.”
“So, if you work for ten hours a day without an absence, your income would be five dollars a month. Is that enough for rent and clothes?”
“Hardly! Besides, that manager is . . . well . . . I . . . I hate that factory. Do you smoke?”
“Yes.”
“You’d better not smoke. And if you must, don’t smoke our brand. I really hate it.”
I noticed her teeth were clenching, and decided to drop the topic. When I finished my banana, darkness had crept into the room. I stood up, thanked her, and left for my cubby. Usually, because she was exhausted by work, she would go to sleep immediately after coming home. But that night, she seemed to have stayed up till midnight. After that evening, she would always talk to me when she got home and I learned about her past.
Her name was Ermei Chen, born in Dongxiang, Suzhou, but she was raised in the countryside near Shanghai. Her father, before passing away the previous fall, had also worked at the cigarette factory. They had shared the same tiny room and gone to work together every day, but now she was left alone. The month after her father’s death, she would cry all the way to work in the morning and cry again on the way back in the evening. Seventeen years old, she had no siblings or close relatives. The cost for her father’s burial was covered by the fifteen dollars he had entrusted to the landlord downstairs before dying, who indeed took sole charge of the matter.
“He is a good man, our landlord,” she said. “He never takes advantage of me; otherwise, I wouldn’t have been able to go to work every day just like when my father was still alive. But that factory foreman, Mr. Li, is an evil man. Knowing my father is dead, he’s been harassing me.”