by Yunte Huang
After much difficulty we made it to the top of the mountain. A bunch of bare-bottomed kids surrounded us, jumping and shouting. A group of farmhouses made of bamboo and straw came into sight. A bare-breasted woman was sitting on the balcony of one of these houses, her skin like the old trees in the forest. On seeing B, she disappeared into the dark room behind her. These were all two-story farmhouses. Animals and men lived together there—animals downstairs, men upstairs. Gesticulating all the while, I asked one naked child whether he’d seen a man passing through here, dressed in black, his head shaven, singing about whatever he saw.
The kids all laughed and there was quite a hullabaloo. B took out a handful of sweets and passed them around. One of the kids pointed at a place halfway down the mountain and shouted something, and the rest joined in. But we had just come from there! Desperate, I shouted, “An old man down there said he’s at the top of the mountain, said he lives at the top, how could he be down there?” The kids started to play among themselves; a dog strolled over, stretching himself lazily in front of us. I screamed and shouted. One of the kids looked up at me, and then looked at the place halfway down the mountain. I flung my knapsack to the ground; a dark cloud drifted slowly across the sky, darkening the village. I sat glumly on the ground; the cloud passed, the colors of bamboo and straw returned to the village. I started to cry.
I wasn’t keen to see the King of Singers; I only wanted to help B by fulfilling the duties of a girlfriend. I was dying to fulfill my duties. Perhaps love was a transparent vacuity; it needed to be embellished by something solid and colorful. I was obsessed with this kind of fanatic embellishment, but the King of Singers seemed to be sneering at me for my vacuity. There was a foreign magazine on the ideal home. It had photographs of every single thing a home needed, from shorts to fur coats, from cutlery to bedroom items. The magazine was on sale at a special department store for forty-five yuan. I was a student and couldn’t afford it. Even now I wouldn’t want to fork out so much money for a lousy magazine, but at that time I really hankered after it. I kept thinking about it whenever I felt bored. It was only after B had proposed the plan to go in quest of the King of Singers that I put it out of my mind. But as I sat crying at the top of the mountain, I thought about that magazine again. I wanted the food pictured there, wanted one of the dresses they featured, wanted to abandon myself to three days of sleep on the huge bed, to spray myself all over with French perfume, to get a new haircut and have a manicure. . . . Oh, the city, the city, the city!
To people in the city, B was an odd fish, he was too full of enthusiasm. He tried endlessly to improve himself and was too busy to think about life. As far as I was concerned, he hadn’t yet attained complete success, but he’d rushed off to complete, to perfect, his self. I felt, however, that the self and success were two totally different things. Composing music was no religion. All that talk about character and spirit, the heart and the soul, enlightenment and inspiration; about true music being pure, lofty, and sublime, and so on and so forth. . . . As I saw it, B was full of talent, full to bursting; but he insisted upon seeing himself as a monk and looking up to the King of Singers as Buddha. At the university, this King of Singers had been my sworn enemy; B was gripped tightly in the King’s clutches, a glazed look in his eyes. I could feel that he couldn’t concentrate even when he was kissing me. But now it seemed that it wasn’t such a good thing after all for the King of Singers to have acquired this disciple. B hadn’t given any concerts since his university days, when he received recognition from the public, and no more was heard of his work. He spent all his time on this quest for the King of Singers. Orchestral music had brought him fame but, years later, he dressed himself in rags and mixed with country people, his whereabouts completely unknown.
We went our separate ways a long time ago. I looked upon this quest for the King of Singers with increasing despair. That day when I sat crying at the top of the mountain, B came over to help me up; I didn’t move. He dropped his hands to his sides and squatted on the ground. Still crying, I started to splutter, I didn’t know what I was saying. Words just tumbled out of my mouth, like tiny smoke rings smokers make by pouting their lips and tapping their cheeks. One sentence tumbled out after another. I kept feeling that we were like two somnambulists who had climbed up a high mountain. The wind at the top blew away all sound, so that you suspected this was really a world without sound and that there was no King of Singers after all. Then the wind stopped, I heard a few dogs bark. Several months later, when I was in the amusement park wearing a long dress made of pure Hangzhou silk and laughing merrily in one of those electric whirling chairs, I suddenly remembered that the wind up in the mountain could blow away all sound. Yet, amid the sound of the swirling wind around the whirling chairs, I could hear pop music. It was loud and triumphant, powerful enough to drown everything.
After I left B and returned to the city, I felt an urgent need to cast off my old self. I got in the bathtub and soaked for so long that I nearly fainted from exhaustion. I did everything I had wanted to do when I was on the mountain. Then I frittered away my days in shops, amusement parks, exhibition halls, and social gatherings. Everyone wanted to know whether we’d actually managed to achieve anything. I exaggerated and dramatized my experience. I became a heroine and a super-woman in people’s eyes. But I saw another “me” on the mountain, one who soon drooped under the light of the sun, like wild tropical flowers that bloom but for a while. I simply don’t know what I’ve been doing these few years. I haven’t seen my Buddha.
Everybody in the city had paired me off with B and reacted to our breaking up with amazement and disapproval. They thought it was temporary, a matter of getting back to the city at different times. I knew, however, that this was a choice for life. He wanted to find his King of Singers; I wanted simply to be a singer. People kept coming to consult me about B’s works. This made me see our differences even more clearly. I didn’t think much about whether I’d been right or wrong, but I did miss the time we’d spent together. I dreamed that he had married a country girl; she had a sad, supple, beautiful singing voice. I cried in my dream. When I woke up, I rushed to the theater to sign payment receipts.
[. . .]
I was lying in bed going over the innumerable letters that had arrived, mostly from my fans. At first I was surprised that I should have made such a hit singing popular songs; later, I came to feel I deserved it. But when I opened a large envelope, I found inside it only a slip of paper with the words: “Your songs are crap.” I crumpled up the paper and threw it away, then picked it up again and smoothed it out. I knew what kind of a singer I was, I knew where I stood. I’d never done anything seriously in my life. Easy come, easy go; always doing things by halves. I was like a sick bird that soared high into the sky one moment and came straight down the next, that hiccupped at the sun and farted at the stars. Everything I did was for fun. When I came back from the mountain, I suddenly wanted to have a go at this business called singing—not arias, of course. It so happened that a friend of mine wanted me as a partner, I agreed, so singing became my profession. There are all kinds of fairy tales in this world. Standing on the stage and relying on the lighting, the colors, and the microphone to make people think you’re a somebody is one such fairy tale. Cut a leech in half and you have two leeches. Two times two makes four; four times four, sixteen—one has to come up with a few tricks in order to survive. I was pleased with myself for my ability to earn good money, when in fact I had been made a fool of by the King of Singers.
The phone rang. Knowing full well who it was, I picked it up and said straightaway:
“It’s about time you rang!”
“Are you still in bed? I only slept two hours yesterday I’m ready to drop I’ve got so many things to do my clothes were all moth-eaten I’d forgotten about the mothballs I sunned my clothes all day yesterday my costume now has a large hole in it how sad how sad how sad and I went out to fix up two shows just the taxis cost me a fortune well, shall we go?”
“Pick me up in half an hour. I’m still in bed.”
“You sleep too much. Be quick. I’ll come right away.”
Before I could reply, she hung up.
Mimi was like this: impatient, always on the move. She had five phones in that small flat of hers—just so she could pick up the phone anytime, anywhere, she said. She even had a phone in the bathroom, and she would read fashion magazines and talk on the phone while sitting on the loo.
When I had the time, I loved reading fashion magazines about fashion trends abroad. I had quite a collection of such magazines. One day my girlfriends came and divided them up among themselves. Collecting fashion magazines was like going in search of the King of Singers: labor in vain, that’s what it was! In the end, I thought better of it and simply went and bought myself a pile of cheap sportswear—it was still fun, I thought. But Hanna, wrapped in that expensive dress of hers that was worth over a hundred U.S. dollars, never stopped telling me I was too sloppy. Hanna was a beautiful woman with a slim figure, poised and elegant. She had just come back from England, and was so loaded with good breeding and good manners that she seemed to find it hard even to laugh in public. She spoke with a perfect accent, was impeccably dressed, and showed a proper disdain for discotheques. This “aristocratic air” of hers threw Weiwei completely off her stride, and she worried endlessly that she might be shown up for her “vulgarity.” Weiwei was as clever as a rat, but she had a face like a cat. With an impressive flow of Peking dialect at her command, with the slang and colloquialisms of different countries at her disposal, Weiwei did exactly what she felt like in front of anybody and everybody, in defiance of good manners. Yet, when Hanna was around, even if the whole world was dancing to the beat of disco music, she’d only dare to wriggle her shoulders stealthily when Hanna was not looking.
Hanna loved lecturing me. “You can’t see beyond your nose! Don’t you know there’re other countries in this world—Paris, New York, London? Of course, New York doesn’t count. Americans are so common,” she said with a wave of her hand. “Here the most you can do is to sing, or interpret B’s symphonies for people. Now that you’ve broken up with B, why don’t you marry into Europe? But don’t go to America, Americans are so common.” She paused. “This quest for the King of Singers—it’s unthinkable, simply suicidal. You’ve seen nothing of the world. Go abroad, go abroad! But don’t go to the States, Americans are so common!”
True, we had seen nothing of the world. I rather feared B would have to spend the rest of his life in the wild mountains. I too was entangled in this absurd business of his: I could neither follow him, nor leave him. Hanna had married a descendant of an English aristocrat. People said her lucky star was smiling on her; she was the “aristocrat” among us. Perhaps the family she married into could be counted one of the true aristocratic families in the world, that was perhaps why she could speak with such absolute certainty about the Americans all being “common.” But, when she fell asleep, that wonderful heritage which could be traced back to her father and her grandfather would manifest itself, making her snore and mumble in her sleep. What was more, that faint trace of a mustache around her mouth, and her gnarled knuckles, all reminded her mercilessly that she was her father’s daughter. Her eyes were dark and bright, but they only shone when she forgot that she was her husband’s wife and her mother-in-law’s daughter-in-law. I knew how absolutely charming she was when she opened her mouth wide to laugh, twisting her nose and baring her teeth, and she had in her a real treasure of sophisticated vulgar language. Her husband had certainly fallen in love with these wonderful qualities of hers, only to discover that they were all gone after he married her.
I was too lazy to argue with Hanna about my future. She said I made life difficult for myself and that I was simpleminded; I just stuck to my own opinions. The word loneliness might be rubbish, yet it never stopped niggling me, shamelessly, stubbornly. I thought about finding myself a new partner, but I couldn’t forget B. I could have married a good husband, yellow or white or black, it would be fine by me as long as he loved me; but I felt completely at a loss, not knowing what to ask for. My private life was a complete mess.
[. . .]
I really wanted to know how many of the virtues of an Oriental woman I possessed and how many of the “obsessions” of a modern woman I had in me. “Don’t model yourself on what you see in films and pack your bags and go and stay in a hotel the minute you get home,” as one model husband said to his disgruntled wife. All the women in the world were competing against one another in madness. I had packed my bags, stayed in hotels, but I still became B’s official representative. I wanted to leave him, yet I also wanted to do something for him; I knew I wasn’t capable of being his able and virtuous wife, yet I also knew that there was something in his innermost being which held my soul in tether. There’s a fairy tale about a pair of shoes. Whoever put them on would find himself at a loss as to where he’d go and what would become of him. It was said that the shoes were put away by a goddess. I suspected that the goddess was a shoemaker. She must have gone home and produced innumerable pairs modeled on them. They were now sold at a high price in shoe shops, throwing everyone into confusion.
All right, I’d be B’s representative and hold a concert for him. B wanted to channel art toward purity and sincerity, but was utterly forgotten by the people. Holding a concert for him now was like excavating an ancient tomb. Everyone likes to sing the praises of dead geniuses.
I was helping in this excavation and working a lot harder than when I dug holes in the ground to plant trees. I was excavating the B in my heart and his colleagues as well. Real musicians are the biggest blockheads in the world. Equipped only with the twelve notes of the scale, they hover above a stretch of marshes. The rest of us can only look up at them from the marshes. But, even more pitiful are those who tend to think too much in words. I’ve never come across that type; I only know that the marshes are full of the bubbles they’ve thrown up. May music bless us and keep us.
There were people who loved to argue about what sort of art was the greatest. I wouldn’t dare participate in such lofty debates. Before I put that type of shoes on, I could say anything I liked. Now giving my views on this subject was suicidal. A long time ago I had a dream about my former self, what I used to be, and what I grew out of. It was a thick white bean-curd-like lump. It lay on a stretch of salt-soaked wilderness. Nothing could grow there. But soon the sun, rain, tides, mountains, and rocks came one after another to change it. And then there were flowers, plants, and trees to decorate it, the spirit of heaven and earth to nourish it, and the practical education of the human world to shape it. So it became me, lying on a huge warm and comfortable bed. This I knew with certainty. But I could never make out when I had mistakenly bought those shoes and let them gain possession of my feet, leading me I knew not whither.
What was B’s former self? What did he grow out of?
“All my life I have wanted to do this.” He looked at me but was not talking to me.
“All my life I have wanted to see this King of Singers.” He did not look at me but could only be talking to me.
“You really believe that those prehistoric cave paintings were done by extraterrestrial visitors?” After all it wasn’t you and it wasn’t me, though of course it could be you or it could be me.
“Do you believe that without the mountains the sky would fall?” How could that happen? Even without anything to hold it up, the sky wouldn’t fall.
“Every year the King of Singers holds a gathering with his disciples.” I know, it’s the same old story again, a gathering with his disciples in the wildest and most primitive region. “All the people go there to hear the King of Singers; the singing spirits dance as they sing, the singing spirits of the entire world are there.” It would have to be an enormous stretch of wilderness, wider even than the sea, or the singing spirits would all fall into the sea. “The entire wilderness is packed full of singing spirits, they sing and dance, sing an
d dance.” Sing and dance, sing and dance. “For five days and five nights nonstop. It’s earthshaking.” Like a landslide and a tidal wave. “All those who love the King of Singers go there to see him; they go in groups, carrying torches, bringing provisions. It will take days or weeks, or months, or years.” I know there were people who set off on this journey from time immemorial. “They sing all the way.” Yes. “They do sing all the way.” Yes. “Thousands of years have gone by like this.” Yes. “Would you go too?” Yes.
Did I buy those shoes then? What made me do it? It was midnight now, a whole pile of B’s scores were lying in front of me. “Don’t you know by now that B’s music is in a class of its own?” I had never studied them carefully in the past. I read over these scores under the lamplight, and listened to the tape recordings. The scores were filled with notes like the prehistoric cave-paintings, like those mountains taller than the sky. The mountains collapsed, becoming the wilderness. The wilderness collapsed, becoming the sea. The sea collapsed, becoming—I switched off the light—the place which gave us birth and nurtured us.
The mountains in the south were shrouded in thick, eerie mists; people there seldom saw the sun. Like a rising tide, waves of mists rose from the valley, obscuring the fields and villages at the foot of the mountain. All the mountains were alive and exhaling steam, steam which carried with it monotonous, long-drawn-out calls that echoed everywhere. People said these were the voices of the “singing spirits”—the followers of the King of Singers—calling to one another. Trees in the burnt-out wasteland, deeply scorched, stretched out their long fingernails to clutch at the soil. Crash. Crash. Everywhere huge boulders collapsed and came rolling down from on high, swallowing all living things.
“Is this rosin the fragrance of pine? Just pine. No fragrance.” A “singing spirit” was holding a piece of rosin in his hands and sniffing at it again and again. He hunkered down on his haunches and walked about, trying to amuse the others.