by Chongda Cai
The invitation to speak at the university had come, completely by coincidence, as I happened to be headed back to my hometown to apply for travel documents for Hong Kong and Macao. The memories that day in the classroom were a long-delayed collision with reality, delivered like a hammer blow to the head.
When I got back to my hometown, I went for a tour on my motorcycle. I saw that the tavern my father opened years ago had been turned into a warehouse. The gas station had been knocked down, and there were plans to put a park on top of it. Nana’s old house had been carved up into lodgings for migrant workers, and the rose bush I loved so much had withered away to a few twisted branches. When I went to Quanzhou to visit the newspaper office where I had once worked with Chenggang, Director Zhang, who had been promoted following Chenggang’s passing, showed me an official document announcing that the newspaper office would be closed at the end of next year.
Director Zhang invited me out for a couple of drinks, but I made an excuse and a hasty exit. As soon as I got outside, I broke down in tears. I was afraid that if he brought up Chenggang’s name and how the poor man had worked himself to death, neither of us would be able to keep our composure.
Time is cruel. My father might have been a weak man, but he was a good man, and he disappeared without a trace. Chenggang, whom I considered to be my brother, had thrown himself into his work, fighting his way through life, just to sparkle for an instant and then be extinguished. And Nana, whom I loved so much, who seemed as unmoving as a boulder, had been wiped away, too. That is the way life is: people go through life and then are swept away, disappearing without much trace that they ever lived, often without even a place to visit to evoke their memory.
And for me, living my life as I was still aboard that train, all I could do was shout myself hoarse—and I knew that would be useless. There was no way to smash the glass and call out to the people I loved, no way to stop the train and kiss them or take them in an embrace, no way I could insist on staying with them. . . . Any attempt to slow the onward rush of life would prove useless.
I realized one day that I could no longer accept living that way. I didn’t want to be a traveler constantly passing through, as if on the run from something. Human life might be a journey, but it takes a certain mindset and certain abilities for a person to appreciate the scenery seen during a life spent constantly on the road. I didn’t want to float through life, my feet never planted anywhere for long. I wanted to settle down somewhere, to take root, to sprout, to grow, and to provide shelter for my loved ones.
To those I love and those who love me, I ask for your understanding. Even if it proves futile, I will do everything I can to slow down the onward rush of time. I will carve your memory into my bones, so that even if your physical body is swept away, I carry with me your name and your memory. That is the only way I can resist the passage of time.
I have never understood why the train of life has to rush by at the speed it does, forking off down countless detours. Like a child throwing a tantrum, I refuse to accept it. Where are we going, and why do we have to get there so quickly? I know it’s not only me who can’t accept it. I might be one of those who raise a voice in complaint, but I know that even those who remain silent are dissatisfied. Maturity can’t help you accept it, either; maturity only helps you gain the ability to deceive yourself. I remember that when I got back from that first train trip I wrote another short poem, called “The World”:
This is not a big world
There is nowhere I need to be
I could stay here
Watching you
Until everything grows old
It was a fairly juvenile piece of poetry, but I haven’t matured much beyond when I wrote it. I’m just as childish. The idea expressed in the poem encapsulates my childish resistance to the passage of time: I want to halt the onward rush and hold on to what I treasure most, but I continually find myself powerless. I don’t want to lose that feeling, even if it is naive. Even if I am rushing forward, I want to try to travel alongside the ones I love as long as I can; even if I am rushing forward, I hope we can become the beautiful scenery of each other’s lives—that is all I am capable of.
I wrote this for a friend of mine, putting into writing many things that had been on my mind. I wanted to thank him. Even if time and fate are cruel, I wanted to thank them, too, for what they have shown me. Everything inevitably has a dark side and a bright side. If you want to float through life, treading as lightly as possible, you must learn to compromise. My friend is the one who first wrote, “Maturity can’t help us accept things; maturity only helps us gain an ability to deceive ourselves and others.” Is there any way to get through life without developing that sort of pessimism?
Afterword
On my thirtieth birthday, I happened to be in London. The planned itinerary had me at the British Museum.
The museum has rotating galleries in the main spaces, and the day I went, there was one called Living and Dying. Part of the gallery was an installation called Cradle to Grave showing the medical history of individuals represented by various pharmaceuticals and medical equipment arranged in columns on a long table. At the bottom of each column were photographs of the deceased at his happiest and saddest moments, and then in the final moments of his life.
Looking at those faces, I suddenly thought of my father and the eight years of illness that preceded his passing. It occurred to me that my father had just turned thirty, too, when I came into his life.
I walked up and down the installation, studying each photograph, contemplating each life, and I couldn’t stop thinking about my father. He must have been a lot like me when he turned thirty, freshly passed from ignorance to enlightenment, scoured of all naïveté, life beginning to crimp wrinkles into his cheeks, and coming face-to-face with reality. Had he found a way to reconcile his desires with that reality? Did he comprehend the new life that was rushing his way? However he felt, whatever he thought, his eventual fate was lurking even then, waiting to take him captive. . . .
It was then that I realized I had never truly known my father, even if we were the most important part of each other’s life. Strictly speaking, I only knew my father’s life and his story in his role as my father. Beyond that, though, I had never really seen him; I had never understood him except as my father.
The realization made me extremely sad.
I often tell my friends that the greatest kindness you can do someone is to try to understand them. When you sit down with people, look them in the eyes, and listen to them speak, you see all the twists and turns, key moments, and fate that led them to where they are; you can see what carved them into their current state; and when you learn about the way they see the world and how they use that knowledge, you can begin to understand them. When you look at people like that, you are truly seeing them.
I had never truly seen my father, and I had lost my chance. I started to worry that I would repeat that mistake with other people in my life. The awareness of the possibility was a fear planted deep in my heart.
A month after I returned from London, I began to try using memories of my father to construct an essay. I wanted to search for traces of my father, to reach out and touch what I could of him, and to attempt to truly see him. That essay became “Frailty.” I thought it was the best possible way to retain some memory of him and bid him farewell, and also to record some of my own fear and anxiety.
Finishing that essay created a sense of urgency in me: I did not want to stop with my father. If I could make an attempt to truly see my father, I thought I should try to see other people in my life, too, and to honor them in the same way. I was going to walk upstream against the rush of time to attempt to preserve something of them. It was also a way for me to understand myself. After all, it is the people in our lives who form us into the person we see in the mirror.
After I came to that decision, writing this book was no longer something I wanted to do but rather something I needed to do. Before embarking on
this project, I had seen writing as mostly a matter of technical ability, but now I realize it’s about expression and about giving readers a window through which they might truly see other people, their world, and all of the possibilities contained within. Literature completes us.
Once I came to this realization, writing became even more difficult.
I made a living in journalism, but before that, I was a bookish boy with dreams of writing. I went into media work to support myself, but I had a secret goal, too: to improve my skills as a writer in preparation for a return to the literary world. I worked in media for eleven years, turned out 2.6 million characters of copy, and found a place for more complex and wide-ranging writing. I thought I finally had the talent to face the world, to face myself, and to face everyone I cared about, but that turned out not to be the case.
When I started crafting these essays, I realized that writing is like surgery, but I was using the scalpel on myself. When I wrote about other people, I could put their pain into my writing without taking it on myself. But when I began to write this book, each expression of pain recorded by my pen was carved into my own heart. That was what gave authenticity to the writing. I finally understood why most writers’ first books are about themselves and their own individual concerns: a writer must dissect himself before he can turn his attention to other people.
A few of the essays in this book felt, while I was writing them, as if they were being sucked from my very bone marrow. These were stories I cared about deeply, and they were precious to me. I knew them so well it was as if they had been carved into my bones. When it came time to write, it was almost like laying a sheet of paper over those carvings and making a rubbing.
While writing “My Mother’s House,” I finally came to an understanding of my mother’s undying but inexpressible love; while writing “Vessel,” I understood my nana’s legacy; while writing “Friends in High Places,” I realized what people do to escape the onslaught of emotion. . . . And while writing this, I realize how important it is to truly see the people I treasure and to uncover their answers to the questions we all face.
We are lucky that everyone is different. That’s what makes our world so rich. And we’re also lucky that there are so many commonalities among people. If you make an effort, you can see the things people share. It is in those commonalities that we reflect one another and bring warmth to each other.
I think this is the ultimate meaning of writing, and also the ultimate meaning of reading. I hope that my book can help readers truly see other people and themselves.
This book is dedicated to my father and to Nana, both no longer with us, to my mother, who has been there every step of the way, and to my wife, my sister, and my daughter.
I love you, and I know you love me.
A Note from the Translator
I have always gone looking in books for expressions of the thoughts and feelings that I am unable or ashamed or frightened to express myself; I have found many in Cai Chongda’s Vessel. Like any worthwhile memoir, Vessel is a testament to how a writer’s vulnerability can provoke deep emotion.
I translated many of my favorite sections of Vessel in tears. Cai Chongda’s writing about his father in particular hit close to home for me. This is a book that I challenge any reader to get through stone-faced. Perhaps part of the emotion, for me, while translating, came from the idea that I would be the conduit—someone, somewhere would be sniffling over the scene of Cai returning to his childhood home and finding the picture of himself that his father had worn white by caressing it with the one hand still left mobile after his stroke. In moments when I was overcome by emotion, I always kept typing, hoping to stay tapped into the emotion of Cai Chongda’s bittersweet revelations, hoping that readers of this translation would get to feel them as deeply as I did. For those sections, I hope that I did not violate rules of faithfulness, but I took as a more crucial job the transmission of the jolt of frisson that I believe Cai Chongda intended.
I see this as a very special book. It was a bestseller beyond the borders of the People’s Republic of China. Comparisons to American memoirs, like Jeannette Walls’s The Glass Castle and J. D. Vance’s Hillbilly Elegy, are not only for the benefit of foreign readers—the same comparisons were made by Chinese readers, who are accustomed to reading memoirs by notable people and business leaders, but not so much naked sentimental and deeply personal accounts of growing up in a small town.
In the context of Chinese literature in translation, Vessel feels even more special. More than any other nation’s modern literature, Chinese books in translation have been affected by ideology. There seems to be, in Chinese literature in translation, a preference for the epic and didactic; books that might inform the reader about events like the Cultural Revolution or the protests of 1989. Vessel is a break from much of what makes it into translation: Cai Chongda’s story is not a rags-to-riches tale of fortunes won in the New China, but a more relatable journey from a precarious middle class identity to potentially equally precarious comfort in Beijing in his early twenties.
I think it’s a shame that Chinese literature in translation is so often promoted for its didactic utility. This book, like any from a foreign literature, can inform the reader about life in a faraway place, but what makes Vessel special is what it might tell us about ourselves.
—Dylan Levi King
About the Author
CAI CHONGDA was born in 1982. He grew up in the small coastal town of Minnan in China’s Fujian Province. At age twenty-four, Cai became the news editor of the influential Chinese magazine Modern Weekly. Three years later, he was hired by GQ China as editorial director, becoming the youngest person to hold this position across GQ’s seventeen international branches. In 2015, Cai branched into the fashion world, founding the menswear brand Magmode. Vessel is his first book. He currently resides in Beijing.
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Copyright
VESSEL. Copyright © 2014 by Cai Chongda. All rights reserved under International and Pan-American Copyright Conventions. By payment of the required fees, you have been granted the nonexclusive, nontransferable right to access and read the text of this e-book on-screen. No part of this text may be reproduced, transmitted, downloaded, decompiled, reverse-engineered, or stored in or introduced into any information storage and retrieval system, in any form or by any means, whether electronic or mechanical, now known or hereafter invented, without the express written permission of HarperCollins e-books.
English Translation Copyright © 2021 by Guomai Culture and Media Company Limited.
Originally published as Pinang in China in 2014 by Guomai Culture and Media Co. Ltd.
FIRST HARPERVIA HARDCOVER PUBLISHED IN 2021
Cover design: Linda Huang
Cover photograph: Lara Young
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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Names: Cai, Chongda, 1982- author. | King, Dylan Levi, translator.
Title: Vessel: a memoir / Chongda Cai; translated from the Chinese by Dylan Levi King.
Other titles: Pi nang. English
Description: First HarperVia hardcover edition. | New York: HarperVia, 2021. | “Originally published as Pinang in China in 2014 by Guomai Culture and Media Co. Ltd.”
Identifiers: LCCN 2020051051 | ISBN 9780063038004 (hardcover) | ISBN 9780063038011 (paperback) | ISBN 9780063038028 (ebook)
Subjects: LCSH: Cai, Chongda, 1982- | Cai, Chongda, 1982—Family. | Fujian Sheng (China)—Social life and customs—20th century. | Working class families—China—Fujian Sheng. | Dongshi (China)—Biography.
Classification: LCC DS793.F8 C3413 2021 | DDC 951.24/5 [B]—dc23
LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2020051051
* * *
Digital Edition JULY 2021 ISBN: 978-0-06-303802-8
Version 06022021
Print ISBN: 978-0-06-303800-4
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