The Big Red Book of Modern Chinese Literature

by Yunte Huang

in the lonely world of men.

  —June 1971

  Farewell, Cemetery

  In Chongqing’s Shapingba Park, facing distant Geleshan Martyrs Cemetery, among weeds and scattered trees, is a Red Guard cemetery. Following no footprints, my poem and I happened upon it. What more can we say. . . .

  1 A Faded Path Has Brought Me Among You

  a faded path

  has brought me

  among you

  like a stray ray of sunlight

  standing with the tall grass

  and short trees

  I don’t speak for history

  or that voice from on high

  I come

  only because of my age

  staggered you

  sank into the earth

  crying tears of joy

  clutching imaginary guns

  in clean fingers

  that had known only textbooks

  and heroes’ stories

  maybe out of some

  common custom

  on the last page of each book

  you drew yourselves

  no longer depicted

  in the pages of my heart

  it has turned against the tide

  now wet with leaf-tip blue dew

  when I open it

  I can’t use a pen

  can’t use a brush

  I can only use my life’s

  softest breaths

  to paint some

  image worthy of conjecture

  2 Geleshan’s Clouds Are Cold

  Geleshan’s clouds

  are cold

  as bloodless hands

  reaching for the cemetery

  amid fire and molten lead

  silent parents

  with the same hands

  caress their dear children

  the slogans they left you

  never forgot

  maybe they were just what

  called death down upon you

  you poured a shared belief

  into your final breaths

  you are not far apart

  on one side are fresh flowers

  lively Sundays

  Young Pioneers

  on the other side, beggar-ticks

  ants and lizards

  you were so young

  your hair was jet-black

  death’s night

  has eternalized your purity

  I wish

  I were a Young Pioneer

  a fresh hanging fruit

  and I wish I were you

  a newlywed photo

  forever frozen

  in a happy moment

  but I go on living

  in gravity-bound thought

  like a rowboat

  slowly approaching

  the dusk riverbank

  3 I Have No Brother, But I Believe . . .

  I have no brother

  but I believe you were

  my brother

  in the whirs of cicadas

  on top of a sandpile

  you gave me

  a clay tank

  a paper airplane

  you taught me

  to join words in clever ways

  you were a giant

  though just in sixth grade

  I have a sister

  but I believe you were

  my sister

  in the pale green morning

  you’d slightly turn

  then jump so high

  those rubber band chains

  that shot you toward the sky

  were stretched too tight

  I had shortened them some

  to bind up my socks

  and he?

  who was he

  who tore off the reed sparrow’s

  gold-button wings

  sprinkling the ground with blood

  who wrapped the antennae of the long-horned beetle

  in gauze and flame

  made it unsteadily

  climb onto the sill

  for its pulp-gulping crime

  who was he?

  I don’t know

  4 You Lived Among Tall Mountains

  you lived among tall mountains

  lived among walls

  every day walking the requisite path

  never having seen the ocean

  not knowing love

  knowing no other land

  knowing only that somewhere

  in some mute fog

  an “evil” floated

  thus, down the center of every desk

  a battle line was drawn in chalk

  you were leaving

  laughing

  to hide strange flashing feelings

  as if to hide the glow of the moon

  behind silhouettes of trees

  in the statutes you found

  only callousness and hatred

  as spectacular as fireworks

  so, one morning

  you polished up your belt buckles

  with rough leaves

  and left

  everyone knows

  it was the sun

  that led you off

  riding on marching songs

  to look for paradise

  until, halfway along

  you got tired

  tripped into a bed whose headboard

  was studded with bullet holes and stars

  you seemed to have played in a game

  that could start all over

  5 Don’t Question the Sun

  don’t question the sun

  it can’t be responsible for yesterday

  yesterday belonged to

  another star

  that has burnt away

  in terrible yearning

  these days in the temples

  there are only potted plants

  and airs of silence

  as solemn

  as white icebergs

  sailing warm currents

  when did the bazaar

  and the rebuilt merry-go-round

  start to turn again

  carrying the dancing and

  silent youths

  toothless children

  the elderly

  maybe there must always be

  lives doomed to be

  shed by the world

  like the feathers dropped daily

  in the camps of white-breasted geese

  tangerine, pale green

  sweet and bitter

  lights come on

  in the humid twilight

  time has a new lease on life

  I’m going home

  to rewrite my life

  and I haven’t forgotten

  to carefully circle the tombs

  the empty eggshell moon

  will wait here

  for the fledglings to return

  6 Yes, I Too Am Going

  yes, I too am going

  to another world

  stepping over your hands

  despite the fallen leaves

  and a thin film of snow

  I keep on walking

  huge rocks beside me, dark woods

  and an exquisite

  gingerbread town

  I go to love

  to seek out kindred spirits

  because of my age

  I believe

  you are lucky

  that the earth doesn’t flow

  those proud smiles

  cannot float up through the red

  clay and disperse

  November’s drizzle

  as it seeps down to you

  will filter out

  life’s doubts

  eternal dreams

  are purer than life

  I have left the cemetery

  leaving only the night and

  the blind canes still groping

  your headstone inscriptions

  groping

  your entire lives

  farther, and farther, cemetery

  may you rest in
peace

  may that faded path

  by some pale green spring

  be quietly erased

  —January 1980

  I’m a Willful Child

  —I want to draw windows all over the land, let eyes used to darkness get used to the light.

  maybe

  I’m a child who’s been spoiled by his mother

  I am willful

  I wish

  every moment

  were colorful as crayons

  I wish

  I could draw on dear paper

  awkward freedom

  draw an eye

  that would never cry

  a sky

  feathers and leaves that belong to the sky

  pale green evening and apples

  I want to draw morning

  draw dew

  all the smiles in sight

  I want to draw all the youngest

  unsuffering loves

  draw my imaginary

  lover

  she has never seen storm clouds

  her eyes are the color of the clear sky

  she’s always watching me

  always, watching

  will never turn away

  I want to draw distant landscapes

  draw a clear horizon and waves

  draw scores of happy streams

  draw hills

  sprouting pale down

  I’ll bunch them together

  let them love each other

  let them acquiesce

  let every subtle tremor of spring

  be the birth of a tiny flower

  and I want to draw the future

  I’ve never seen her, and cannot

  but know she is beautiful

  I’ll draw her fall windbreaker

  draw flaming candles and maple leaves

  draw the many hearts snuffed out

  for love of her

  draw marriage

  draw one after another early-rising holidays—

  stick candy wrappers at the top

  and pictures from storybooks

  I’m a willful child

  I want to erase all unhappiness

  I want to draw windows

  all over the land

  let eyes used to darkness

  get used to the light

  I want to draw the wind

  draw mountain ranges each higher than the last

  draw the Eastern peoples’ yearning

  draw the ocean—

  an endlessly happy sound

  finally, in the paper’s corner

  I want to draw myself

  draw a koala

  deep in a Victoria forest

  sitting on a calm branch

  slow

  with no home

  no faraway heart

  just so many

  berrylike dreams

  and great big eyes

  I am wishing

  wanting

  but don’t know why

  I have no crayons

  haven’t had one colorful moment

  I have only I

  my fingers and the pain of creating

  just these tattered sheets

  of dear paper

  let them go look for butterflies

  let them from this day on

  be gone

  I am a child

  spoiled by an imaginary mother

  I am willful

  —March 1981

  (Translated by Aaron Crippen)

  MO YAN

  (1955– )

  Born Guan Moye in rural Shandong, Mo Yan worked in the wheat and sorghum fields for ten years after primary school, an experience upon which the future Nobel laureate in literature would continuously draw for inspiration in writing. Like the fertile soil of Oxford, Mississippi, for William Faulkner, the pristine land of Gaomi County would provide a backdrop, a Chinese Yoknapatawpha, for Mo Yan’s stories, in which hardscrabble peasants and other lowly characters, while barely making a living, battle against enemies and with each other in the brutal game of life and death. After years of farming, Mo Yan joined the army in 1976 and attended the Military Art Academy in 1984. His debut story “A Crystal Carrot” (1985) brought him national attention, followed by Red Sorghum (1986), a novel about three generations of love and horror, a hallucinatory, myth-laden tale told through a discrete series of flashbacks. While his pen name “Mo Yan” literally means “don’t speak” in Chinese, Mo has been a prolific writer firing verbal cannons at sordid Chinese reality, rendered in a Rabelaisian carnivalesque language. In 2012 he was awarded the Nobel Prize in Literature.

  Red Sorghum (excerpts)

  On her sixteenth birthday, my grandma was betrothed by her father to Shan Bianlang, the son of Shan Tingxiu, one of Northeast Gaomi Township’s richest men. As distillery owners, the Shans used cheap sorghum to produce a strong, high-quality white wine that was famous throughout the area. Northeast Gaomi Township is largely swampy land that is flooded by autumn rains; but since the tall sorghum stalks resist waterlogging, it was planted everywhere and invariably produced a bumper crop. By using cheap grain to make wine, the Shan family made a very good living, and marrying my grandma off to them was a real feather in Great-Granddad’s cap. Many local families had dreamed of marrying into the Shan family, despite rumors that Shan Bianlang had leprosy. His father was a wizened little man who sported a scrawny queue on the back of his head, and even though his cupboards overflowed with gold and silver, he wore tattered, dirty clothes, often using a length of rope as a belt.

  Grandma’s marriage into the Shan family was the will of heaven, implemented on a day when she and some of her playmates, with their tiny bound feet and long pigtails, were playing beside a set of swings. It was Qingming, the day set aside to attend ancestral graves; peach trees were in full red bloom, willows were green, a fine rain was falling, and the girls’ faces looked like peach blossoms. It was a day of freedom for them. That year Grandma was five feet four inches tall and weighed about 130 pounds. She was wearing a cotton print jacket over green satin trousers, with scarlet bands of silk tied around her ankles. Since it was drizzling, she had put on a pair of embroidered slippers soaked a dozen times in tong oil, which made a squishing sound when she walked. Her long shiny braids shone, and a heavy silver necklace hung around her neck—Great-Granddad was a silversmith. Great-Grandma, the daughter of a landlord who had fallen on hard times, knew the importance of bound feet to a girl, and had begun binding her daughter’s feet when she was six years old, tightening the bindings every day.

  A yard in length, the cloth bindings were wound around all but the big toes until the bones cracked and the toes turned under. The pain was excruciating. My mother also had bound feet, and just seeing them saddened me so much that I felt compelled to shout: “Down with feudalism! Long live liberated feet!” The results of Grandma’s suffering were two three-inch golden lotuses, and by the age of sixteen she had grown into a well-developed beauty. When she walked, swinging her arms freely, her body swayed like a willow in the wind.

  Shan Tingxiu, the groom’s father, was walking around Great-­Granddad’s village, dung basket in hand, when he spotted Grandma among the other local flowers. Three months later, a bridal sedan chair would come to carry her away. After Shan Tingxiu had spotted Grandma, a stream of people came to congratulate Great-Granddad and Great-Grandma. Grandma pondered what it would be like to mount to the jingle of gold and dismount to the tinkle of silver, but what she truly longed for was a good husband, handsome and well educated, a man who would treat her gently. As a young maiden, she had embroidered a wedding trousseau and several exquisite pictures for the man who would someday become my granddad. Eager to marry, she heard innuendos from her girlfriends that the Shan boy was afflicted with leprosy, and her dreams began to evaporate. Yet, when she shared her anxieties with her parents, Great-Granddad hemmed and hawed, while Great-Grandma scolded the girlfriends, accusing them of sour grapes.

  Later on, Great-
Granddad told her that the well-educated Shan boy had the fair complexion of a young scholar from staying home all the time. Grandma was confused, not knowing if this was true or not. After all, she thought, her own parents wouldn’t lie to her. Maybe her girlfriends had made it all up. Once again she looked forward to her wedding day.

  Grandma longed to lose her anxieties and loneliness in the arms of a strong and noble young man. Finally, to her relief, her wedding day arrived, and as she was placed inside the sedan chair, carried by four bearers, the horns and woodwinds fore and aft struck up a melancholy tune that brought tears to her eyes. Off they went, floating along as though riding the clouds or sailing through a mist.

  Grandma was light-headed and dizzy inside the stuffy sedan chair, her view blocked by a red curtain that gave off a pungent mildewy odor. She reached out to lift it a crack—Great-Granddad had told her not to remove her red veil. A heavy bracelet of twisted silver slid down to her wrist, and as she looked at the coiled-snake design her thoughts grew chaotic and disoriented. A warm wind rustled the emerald-green stalks of sorghum lining the narrow dirt path. Doves cooed in the fields. The delicate powder of petals floated above silvery new ears of waving sorghum. The curtain, embroidered on the inside with a dragon and a phoenix, had faded after years of use, and there was a large stain in the middle.

  Summer was giving way to autumn, and the sunlight outside the sedan chair was brilliant. The bouncing movements of the bearers rocked the chair slowly from side to side; the leather lining of their poles groaned and creaked, the curtain fluttered gently, letting in an occasional ray of sunlight and, from time to time, a whisper of cool air. Grandma was sweating profusely and her heart was racing as she listened to the rhythmic footsteps and heavy breathing of the bearers. The inside of her skull felt cold one minute, as though filled with shiny pebbles, and hot the next, as though filled with coarse peppers.

  Shortly after leaving the village, the lazy musicians stopped playing, while the bearers quickened their pace. The aroma of sorghum burrowed into her heart. Full-voiced strange and rare birds sang to her from the fields. A picture of what she imagined to be the bridegroom slowly took shape from the threads of sunlight filtering into the darkness of the sedan chair. Painful needle pricks jabbed her heart.

  “Old Man in heaven, protect me!’’ Her silent prayer made her delicate lips tremble. A light down adorned her upper lip, and her fair skin was damp. Every soft word she uttered was swallowed up by the rough walls of the carriage and the heavy curtain before her. She ripped the tart-smelling veil away from her face and laid it on her knees. She was following local wedding customs, which dictated that a bride wear three layers of new clothes, top and bottom, no matter how hot the day. The inside of the sedan chair was badly worn and terribly dirty; like a coffin, it had already embraced countless other brides, now long dead. The walls were festooned with yellow silk so filthy it oozed grease, and of the five flies caught inside, three buzzed above her head while the other two rested on the curtain before her, rubbing their bright eyes with black sticklike legs. Succumbing to the oppressiveness in the carriage, Grandma eased one of her bamboo-shoot toes under the curtain and lifted it a crack to sneak a look outside.