Frontier

by Can Xue

  Praise for Can Xue

  “There’s a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue.”

  —Robert Coover

  “Can Xue has found not just a new direction but a new dimension to move in, a realm where conscious beings experience space, time, and each other unbound from the old rules.”

  —Music & Literature

  “Vertical Motion is incredible—short stories that I’d call ‘surrealist,’ but it’s a kind of clear-eyed surrealism, as if dreams had invaded the physical world.”

  —John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van

  “Funny, bizarre, improbable yet oddly moving, her stories in The Last Lover often arise from the mutual fantasies of East and West. They can sometimes bring Kafka, Ishiguro or Calvino to mind. In the end, though, Can Xue commands a truly unique voice.”

  —The Independent

  “One of the most raved-about works of translated fiction this year.”

  —Flavorwire

  Also by Can Xue in English Translation

  Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories

  Dialogues in Paradise

  The Embroidered Shoes

  Five Spice Street

  The Last Lover

  Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas

  Vertical Motion

  Copyright © 2008 by Can Xue

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping

  First edition, 2017

  All rights reserved

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.

  ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-55-7

  Design by N. J. Furl

  Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:

  Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627

  www.openletterbooks.org

  CONTENTS

  Introduction

  Note on Names

  Chapter 1: Liujin

  Chapter 2: José and Nancy

  Chapter 3: Qiming

  Chapter 4: Sherman

  Chapter 5: The Baby

  Chapter 6: Liujin and Amy

  Chapter 7: Lee and Grace

  Chapter 8: Liujin, Her Parents, and the Black Man

  Chapter 9: Little Leaf and Marco

  Chapter 10: The Director and Nancy

  Chapter 11: Liujin and Amy, as well as Qiming

  Chapter 12: Liujin and Roy, as well as a Headless Man

  Chapter 13: Qiming and Liujin

  Chapter 14: Liujin and Ying

  Chapter 15: Snow

  INTRODUCTION

  Porochista Khakpour

  In the summer of 2016 I found myself in a place on a 20,000-acre working cattle ranch in the middle of a desolate stretch of northeastern Wyoming: Ucross, Wyoming, population 25. It’s an artist residency I’ve been to twice before, and one could indeed dare call it a part of the old mythos of the American Frontier. There is nothing to do but work. Once a week the residents and I go to a saloon about 25 miles away in Buffalo, where local cowboys and cowgirls play bluegrass. This saloon, part of a hotel called The Occidental, has been a haunt of everyone from Butch Cassidy to Buffalo Bill. That’s about the only thing there is to do.

  These high plains are where I’ve done most my writing in the past decade, and it became where I did almost all my reading of Can Xue’s Frontier this time around. This residency, my own writing escaped me as Can Xue’s book demanded more and more of my time. I had thought a few days would be all I needed—I was not a new Can Xue reader after all, and had usually managed to plow through even her most difficult work in a couple days—but this was not the case with this recent novel. In fact, a curious thing began to happen as I read. The further I got, the longer the book seemed to get. It was shocking; the book would lengthen the more I got into it. This book won’t end, I told a friend, it’s strange, I swore I was two hundred pages in a day ago and there I am today. Days later, I felt I had made very little progress. It went on like this for quite some time, til my time was basically up.

  This is usually a complaint—something taking a long time, a book requiring effort. “Time flying” indicates an enjoyable exploit—this is what you want. But this time around, even this sentiment felt reversed. I didn’t want the book to end, and the story, perhaps sensing that, refused to end. Even when it ended, it didn’t end. I just started reading it again. I went from the last pages to the first without breath. I had no choice.

  One might say, this summer I found myself trapped in Can Xue’s Frontier.

  This of course, would probably not surprise my friend Can Xue. This seems to be part of the fabric of the book. And of course who could put a stunt like this past her—she is China’s premier writer of the avant-garde, an experimental trickster, whose very name is not just a pen name but an alter ego—she refers to herself in third person—and so who could possibly put anything past her?

  We have been regularly emailing for over a year now, so I thought to write her amid all this. I didn’t want to alarm her so I asked a mild question at first, not sure how to explain my dilemma—this book is lengthening as I read it, not shortening, help me—instead I said, So, dear Xiaohua (what she goes by), how did you come up with this?

  I should have known this question could go nowhere. She wrote back quickly:

  “Like all the works by Can Xue, the idea was from her dark heart. Then the idea (I [Can Xue] didn’t know clearly what it was, but I did know it was what I wanted) came out gradually, naturally . . . I wrote and wrote for some time, then someday I found that a great pattern appeared faintly in the work. Actually anything I wrote, am writing, or will write is like this, I’m sure. I call the pattern ‘the pattern of freedom.’ In Frontier, everybody, every animal is a pattern of freedom, and the background is the background of that great pattern of freedom.” Her final sign off was appended with a polite “Please feel free to ask Xiaohua anything!”

  I did not. I simply sat and stared at the yellow and blue expanse in front of me, the Big Horn Mountains looming faintly like the “purple mountain majesties” of American patriotic verse, and all the high grass interrupted only by an occasional creek, prairie upon prairie only punctuated by blackbirds, bison, rabbits, deer, antelope, a turkey or two.

  The pattern of freedom. Was this freedom? Was freedom expansion instead of contraction? Was freedom in its essence eternity?

  After all, frontier by definition meant “the extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness,” that I knew. So what were the borders of the frontier? No one could know, most likely, I decided. The minute the borders are set, it’s possible the thing ceases to be a frontier.

  •

  I came to Can Xue about six years ago. In 2010, I was teaching a World Literature intro class at an arts college in Santa Fe. I had chosen Daniel Halpern’s international reader The Art of the Story (2000) as one of my principal texts. Most of the writers I had heard of, but there were a few I didn’t know so I went about reading those carefully. One was Can Xue, whose story “The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes” was definitely the most bizarre story I had ever read. This is saying something—I have a big appetite for the bizarre. When I taught it a few students got the bug like me, but most were confused and traumatized by it. I was secretly happy about that—I wanted her to myself. I imagined a weird cult all around the world of her admirers, her allure completely lost on normals. Occasionally I’d ask people about her and nine times out of ten they had no idea who I was talking about. But when they did, it was instant cult camaraderie.

  In 2015 I got to know her. I was on the jury for the Neustadt Prize for Literature—some call this “the American Nobel,” and it comes with a hefty award—and it was obvious to me who I’d pick for my nominee. The best part was we had to inform the person we were
nominating. It happened that I was writer-in-residence at Bard College, where Bradford Morrow first published Can Xue in the States, in Bard’s journal Conjunctions. All I had to do was write the managing editor, my colleague, and ask her for Can Xue’s email, and there we were, emailing all the way until now. Can Xue was honored by the nomination and especially by the invitation to the States which came with the award—so much so that when she did not win (she was close), we decided she should still come. And so we schemed, and indeed she is due to come to the States in October 2016, not far from the American publication date of Frontier, in fact.

  Every time Can Xue has a book out in English translation, it’s yet another opportunity to see if that cult of Can Xue can expand. And one expects it won’t, but I’ve seen it with my own eyes: those chosen ones really bite and can’t let go.

  And so how does one introduce her? I always begin with her name. Can Xue’s name is a pseudonym that means both “the dirty snow that refuses to melt” and “the purest snow at the top of a high mountain”—and it happens to be synonymous with Chinese experimental literature. She is the author of six novels, fifty novellas, 120 short stories, and six book-length commentaries, with only a half a dozen of her works published in English (she has had five English translators, all of whom she refers to like they are close collaborators and even friends). Robert Coover called her a “new world master,” Susan Sontag believed she was worthy of a Nobel, and Eileen Myles has been a longtime fan.

  Then there is her self, the transmission of her writer persona through interviews. Here is the writer as true iconoclast, the uncompromising original. A choice quote on her process: “I never edit my stories. I just grab a pen and write, and every day I write a paragraph. For more than thirty years, it’s always been like this. I believe that I am surrounded by a powerful ‘aura,’ and that’s the secret of my success. Successful artists are all able to manipulate the ‘balance of forces’—they’re that kind of extraordinarily talented people.” Of course.

  As I mentioned she refers to herself in third person, describes fiction as a performance, and claims that all of her works are from the experiments in which she takes herself as the subject. In this sense Can Xue is almost more medium than artist, a vessel rather than a generator, creation being relegated to its perhaps most logical state: the mystical. “In my mind, my ideal readers are these: those who have read some works by the modernist writers, and who love metaphysical thinking and material thinking—both capabilities are needed for the reading of Can Xue.” Of course.

  She is also of the late bloomer species, one who came to her work well into adulthood, a story I don’t relate to but now wish I did: “I decided to become a writer when I was thirty years old. But I think before that I had been preparing for this, actually, since I was three years old . . . After the situation in China changed, all the literary things happened to me naturally. I have been like an erupting volcano ever since.” She began writing in 1983 and now is 63—at her peak, it feels like, though it’s hard to say when she wasn’t at a peak.

  Her last novel The Last Lover (Yale University Press) won a big translation award in 2015, the Best Translated Book Award, and got her more attention. One might say Can Xue has never quite “broken out” in the U.S., or even China, or anywhere for that matter.

  I always say the same thing when a book of hers is about to come out: it will be interesting what people make of this one. I’m not even sure who I’m talking about—perhaps my ideal reader—but here I go again with Frontier: It will be interesting what people make of this one.

  •

  Can Xue’s Frontier refers to a place called Pebble Town, the main location of the novel, a sort of dreamlike realm at the base of Snow Mountain, where reality constantly mingles with some other dimension. Through a dozen different characters, we dip in and out of the region, and it’s hard to know if we are also going in and out of the worlds of the living or the dead, the dreamlife or the waking life.

  Animals abound here, more than in any other Can Xue tale. You have geckos, wolves, eagles, black cats, snakes, black birds, butterflies, parrots, frogs, snow leopards, centipedes, turtles, crows, worms, sheep, pangolins, and cicadas, and probably many more that I lost track of. These animals sometimes operate like humans, other times like all-knowing deities, sometimes as demonic antagonists, other times as saints, occasionally as real entities and often as symbols. Pebble Town, as stony as it might seem, is alive with poplars and wind and all sorts of flora, and it is also quite brimming with fauna. (And sometimes flora and fauna seem like one: “The other poplars were so beautiful and vivacious that they seemed on the verge of speaking.”) The humans are never quite alone, always being witnessed or witnessing some other species who is on this ride with them. You are never ever quite alone in Pebble Town. The frontier, as free and expansive and limitless, is always populated just enough. Before you can fully let go and lose yourself, something, some being, something with a pulse, is there to remind you, you exist.

  The nature of your existence, though, might be up for debate (“Nancy looked bewildered, and—as though discussing a problem with an invisible person—said, ‘Hunh. I’m puzzled by lots of things here; they’re mixed up. Still, this place is magnetic. Look at that eagle, flying and stopping . . . Everything’s in doubt.’”). You could be an abandoned child, you could be the Director of Pebble Town’s Design Institute—the region’s Kafka-esque Castle of Dubious Employment—who goes in and out of death, you could be the one black man originally from Africa but adapted to this presumably Eastern land, you could be a couple trying to find your footing in a new land. Time is not quite clear and as some characters note, people don’t age in quite the same way.

  The beauty of Pebble Town is that everyone expects its lawlessness—or at least the fact that its laws and properties are not to be known. Can Xue very casually writes of its wonders, as if it were as banal as dust: “She sank into memories and told José that she was in an accident in the interior several years ago and was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. But after a day in the morgue, she came back to life. She was moved into an ordinary room. A young person went to her room every day and chatted with her. As they chatted, the institute director sensed that she’d seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. The young person said he was a vagrant and constantly on the move. He was currently helping out in the hospital. Not until the day she was discharged did he tell the truth: he said he had talked with her an entire night in the morgue and had almost frozen to death. She suddenly found this young person really annoying.”

  In another section, an anecdote also takes a strangely pragmatic turn, as if Can Xue wants to transform anything mythic, mystical or magical here into something more folkloric, simple, mundane: “Grace’s legs gave way and she sat on the floor. She propped herself up with her hands and then grabbed hold of a little feathered thing. It appeared to be a dead bird. This whole room seemed full of dead birds. She saw Lee standing against the wall, afraid of stepping on them. Oh, he was moving away from the wall, apparently intending to exit. Grace said silently, ‘Coward—what a coward!’ Lee exited, and Grace lay down. Dead birds kept dropping from above. Although she couldn’t see them, she could smell the fresh blood. She started thinking back. She recalled that when she was a child, the old woman she called Granny (perhaps not her real granny?) smoked cigarettes. She had a little turtle in her pocket. Grace wanted to look at the little turtle, so Granny pulled it out and placed it in her hand, warning her, ‘Careful—it bites people.’ One day, it did bite her palm. It was gory, for it broke her skin. She cried. As Granny bandaged it, she kept saying, ‘Didn’t I warn you?’ Grace still had a scar on her palm. When Granny lay in her coffin, they put this living turtle in with her; they put it in her pocket. Afterward, Grace thought about it for a long time: How long could the little turtle live underground if it ate Granny’s flesh?”

  The book is full of these vignettes and stories within stories, that operate
with more autonomy than they would in another book. Reading Frontier is not unlike reading the Old Testament, where stories are strung together by some other logic that is not always apparent to the reader, though you are still left with some thematic impression. And the stories have their own arcs and narratives and stand up on their own. But their relation to each other is often the mystery.

  But unlike the Bible’s eschatological semiotics, the issue here is something more straightforward: the nature of Pebble Town, or the Frontier. Where are we exactly? Is this heaven? Is this hell? Is it earth? A land of the past or present? China at times gets mentioned alongside the Gobi Desert. The placelessness of our destination is what carries this curious tale.

  Can Xue seems very interested in this. On the one hand, Pebble Town is everything: “Our Pebble Town is a huge magnetic field, attracting people who are fascinated with secret things . . .” And on the other hand, it is nothing: “When we went to the frontier years ago, we couldn’t see the road ahead clearly then, either. Since we couldn’t see the road, we just walked. Sometimes we could tell we were walking on flat land, sometimes on rubble. Later, at daybreak, we found we had circled back to where we had started. We had gone nowhere.”

  In the end, we are left with something like a message in a bottle, a beautiful compelling thing that might, like a frontier itself, take endless readings to crack. I know I haven’t done it yet. But like that message in a bottle, the interior is greater than the exterior—the book indeed expands as you go on. I wasn’t crazy in finding it only got longer, and I fear that I will have many decades to go before this book gets to its conclusion with me. I guess in the end, I too—sitting here, book in lap, computer on porch, within a still twilight in the middle of this unknowable frontier of my own that I’ve come to know year after year—am one of the denizens of the Frontier: “Between cracks in the foliage, the steel-blue sky was divulging some information to them. Deep down in their hearts, they understood, but they couldn’t say what it was. They could only sigh repeatedly, ‘Pebble Town, oh. Oh, the frontier. Oh . . .’”