by Can Xue
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TO
QINGYIAN ZHANG
AND
TO
ALFRED JANSSEN
In Memoriam
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
Several of these stories have been published previously in Chinese and/or English. The following stories have appeared in the mainland Chinese journals noted: “The Embroidered Shoes and the Vexation of Old Lady Yuan Si” in Seagull (, Hǎiōu), November 1986; “Apple Tree in the Corridor” in Bell Mountain (, Zhōngshān), June 1987; “Two Unidentifiable Persons” in The Writer (, Zuòjiā), February 1989; “A Strange Kind of Brain Damage” in Special Economic Zone Literature (, Tèqūwénxué), January 1990; “The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes” in Harvest (, shōuhuò), June 1991; “Anonymities” in Beijing Literature (, Běijīng wénxué), March 1994.
In addition, the following stories have appeared in the U.S. literary journal Conjunctions: “The Embroidered Shoes and the Vexation of Old Lady Yuan Si” and “The Child Who Raised Poisonous Snakes” in issue 18 (1992); “Two Unidentifiable Persons” in issue 21 (1993); “A Dreamland Never Described” and “Anonymities” in issue 23 (1994); and “Homecoming” in issue 28 (1997); and an excerpt from “Apple Tree in the Corridor” has appeared in Grand Street (1997).
THE EMBROIDERED SHOES AND THE VEXATION OF OLD LADY YUAN SI
My neighbor, old lady Yuan Si, is a garbage collector. Though her business is nothing more than picking up trash, she is an iron-willed old dame.
Not long ago, old lady Yuan Si started to terrorize me. Every night after I turned off the light, this woman would barge in, her hair disheveled. She’d ransack my bedroom, smashing mirrors and cups, and then the light reflecting from the shards would drive her into a rage. She’d tear my quilt from the bed rudely and stare into my eyes with a flashlight for a long time. After all this, she would pee right there in the middle of my room. I was totally exhausted by her incursions, which were causing me to grow thinner and thinner, and weaker and weaker, day by day, until finally I was nothing but skin and bones.
Once I tried to lock my door and even pushed a table up against it to block it. As a result, she could only scream and shout outside. Then she found a hole and started to dig away at the brick wall of my house making heart-stopping, thunderous sounds. In the end, I had to open the door and let her in. Another time, I locked my door as early as dusk and hid myself in my neighbor’s house and slept the whole night. Early in the morning I returned home. As soon as I opened the door she dashed in ahead of me. It turned out that she had waited throughout the night just outside my house.
Suddenly she stopped coming, and this lasted for more than ten days.
* * *
Tonight she came on schedule, but she behaved differently. She hopped about on one foot for a while. She giggled and laughed in the darkness, then suddenly took off her shoes and sat on my bed. She grabbed my shoulder with one hand and with the other she chopped at me with force. It hurt so much that I jumped up in pain. Then she said, “The most difficult part is persistence, hey?”
“…”
“The whole truth about this business is going to be revealed, and I am overjoyed! Have you noticed the shoes I’m wearing?”
“Huh?”
“Let me tell you about it in detail. For more than ten days, I’ve been hunting for them in your room. I was suspicious of everyone and felt terribly upset. It was not until recently that an idea came to me out of the blue: I would adopt a strategy of subtle indirection—and unexpectedly the problem has been completely solved. The focus of the problem is this pair of shoes, this pair of shiny, brilliant embroidered shoes. This pair of shoes is the fate of my life. Now that the objects have returned to their original owner, everything will be as clear as daylight. Justice will win a victory and the bright sun will shine over my head…”
“So you mean you don’t need to come to my place anymore?” I asked hesitantly, secretly hoping for a positive answer.
“Why not? How can you be so naive? So insensitive? From now on I will come every day and tell you the story in detail. There’s a host of little details. Whenever I think of getting the chance to tell others about it from beginning to end, I become so excited that I tremble. This is like a secret in a treasure gourd that cannot be told in half a year or even a whole year. Now I’ve found something interesting to do!”
She shouted with joy and sat down right on my chest. Taking out that damned flashlight, she studied my eyeballs. I became dizzy and muddleheaded and felt a yellow coating develop on my tongue.
“I’m a garbage collector,” she said slowly, taking her flashlight away. Her glance was vague but emotional. “When she was young, Old Lady Li was also a garbage collector. Later on she became successful. Do you know why? This involves a profound question. And the question is rooted in this pair of embroidered shoes. Please look carefully at this pair of shoes.”
Using one foot she dug underneath the bed for her shoes. She tried for a long time, and then she showed them to me with her flashlight. They were no more than a pair of rotten wooden thongs.
“What do you think of them? Aren’t they a pair of magic shoes? I have a kind of premonition, a kind of confidence. Now I need only close my eyes and all of those things that happened in the past seem as though they took place just yesterday. As I lie here concentrating, the tears begin to flow.
“The thing happened on an April day. Even now I can smell the fragrance of the earth. Early in the morning, I was about to leave the house dragging a willow basket behind me. Then she came. Her face was rosy—she was a TB patient and her face was never red, but that day, I don’t know why, her face was really rosy. She stared at me meaningfully for a while and suddenly raised the issue of borrowing my pair of embroidered shoes. At the time, you know, I was young and naive without any idea of the viciousness of the sophisticated world. Of course, I lent the shoes to her without hesitation. I was even hoping she would ask me for something else. The rooster was crowing outside the door, and I was so touched by my own generosity that my eyes became all red. I wanted to jump up and embrace her.
“At that moment, a gentleman passed by my window. He was a buyer for the salvage station. He glanced at me attentively with a kind of moist look that resembled a drizzle. I’d bet he was even in a daze for a while. Why should he look at me? Why should he look at me instead of her? Why should his glance go through her to look at me? I did not understand at all at that time. I was too pure, as pure as a pool of water.
“That night I slept soundly. In the morning when I woke up I heard the hooting of an owl and I found myself in a bad mood. It turned out that everything had changed unexpectedly in my dream. It turned out that evil had defeated virtue and the devil had won the crown. From that day on, our female swindler rose to success!
“From that day on I fell into an abyss thousands of feet deep. Out of my wits, I ran to the door of her straw hut and drummed on it with all my mig
ht. I drummed and drummed until the backs of my hands were swollen. Suddenly I raised my head and found that the door was locked. There was a small slip of paper tacked on the door that read HOUSE FOR RENT. I fell to the threshold and cried out.
“Out of nowhere that day there came a swarm of wild cats. No matter where I went they followed me, meowing incessantly. I was heartbroken and cried endlessly. Some passersby stopped, feeling sorry to see such great sorrow in such an innocent little girl. And our swindler had become a respectable character! Who could see through such a vicious fraud? Much less would they know there existed such a pitiful little victim. The embroidered shoes that she had made with hardship and sweat had become the tool by which vicious people might deceive others.
“You have to understand that the buyer for the salvage station has remained in the dark even up to this day. Several times when he saw me he was stunned and then went into a trance as if lost deep in a vague and distant memory. This meant that at that time he had totally confused the two of us, and he mistook the woman swindler for me. He had fallen into a love that was not returned. He was simply too honest. Like me he never understood the sophistication of the world and human beings. He knew only generosity. She had enchanted him completely. And the main factor was, of course, my embroidered shoes. Once she put on that pair of shoes, she became unrecognizable.
“My heart was shattered. For several days, I was so low that I could neither eat nor sleep. Intentionally, I made myself ugly. In my rags I would clutch my willow basket and wait outside the door of the buyer. As soon as they appeared, I would scream at the woman, ‘Deception will eventually be seen through!’ That vicious whore pretended not to recognize me at all. With one arm she held that mummy and ran off like a dog. That buyer had been turned into a mummy. She had destroyed him completely. I was so pained and regretful that I beat my chest and stamped my feet in the rain. Stretching my neck, I howled like a female wolf.
“Other times I chased them down the street, throwing banana peels and broken bottles at them. Every time the buyer would flee, towed along by that whore. He sobbed and his head drooped like a dead bird’s. Sometimes while chasing them I slipped and fell in the mud. The rags and papers in my basket spilled out over my body. I struggled up and continued my chase until I caught them. Then I stopped them and glared at the whore, asking pointedly: ‘How are your shoes?’
“Time flew by, one year after another. Wrinkles spread across my face one after another. I was told that the swindler had been promoted to accountant. When I heard the news I felt so disheartened that I passed out. While collecting garbage in the wilderness I would bump into that buyer once in a while, that old man with senile dementia. Every time he would look startled as if he were about to awaken. I wondered if there was some kind of conditioned reflex in that brain of his, which resembled a mess of porridge. Maybe he felt a puff of warm steam? Maybe he thought he saw a light shining through the dim passages in his idiotic brain? The brief glance in front of the window … Oh, oh! He had lost his mind completely, pitiful guy!
“The year I turned fifty I was determined to take revenge. I wanted to make this historical scandal public. I wanted to find my shoes and use them as solid evidence, to administer a humiliation that the whore could never wash off.
“At the beginning I used the strategy of direct attack. Repeatedly I dashed into their house to search around in the dark of night. But that whore was very cautious. Every time I came back empty-handed. In addition there was that damned mad dog. That dog never barked but jumped out and bit people from unexpected dark corners. Even today, there’s a scar on my calf. That was part of the evil trickery of that swindler. She pretended to be sound asleep and she never dared to turn on the light for fear of showing her shameless face. At those moments I did not ransack the place when I dashed in. Instead I made an especially disturbing sound hoping I would give her a nervous breakdown.
“For several years I continued with this strategy. Then one rainy night, the thunder rolled so loudly that one question leaped into my mind: Could it be possible that she had transferred the shoes to someone else’s house? Could there be a secret partner here? I started my attack and search in different households, never letting one night go by—I have long cultivated the habit of not sleeping at night. There was no sign of progress in my work and I couldn’t see any hope. Heavy dark clouds enveloped me. During those melancholy days I wavered, and I even thought of committing suicide. I became so pessimistic and world-weary that I would hide myself indoors, crying and stamping my feet. I even broke windows without any reason and shot passersby with my air gun.
“In the final critical moment I adopted the strategy of indirection as my single venture. I stopped going out and collecting garbage and I stopped my hunting at night. When I met others I declared that I was suffering from some serious illness and I put on an air of being in pain. I even sent a little child to the drugstore to buy medicine. Day after day I observed the outside world attentively through a crack in the curtain. Blood throbbed in my veins, and my heart pounded madly in my chest. Oh, day after day, day after day, I encouraged myself continuously: ‘What should happen is going to happen, it’s going to happen!’
“When the blue glow brightened outside the window, when I was moved to tears by the heroic struggle in my life, the truth all of a sudden was exposed in the light of the day! This is truly a miracle of mother nature, an unthinkable miracle!
“Tonight I feel a little bit tired and I’m going to sleep at your place. Wait until tomorrow evening—I’m going to tell you the shocking details. I’m going to tell you in great detail.”
And then she started to snore loudly.
TWO UNIDENTIFIABLE PERSONS
It was Lao Jiu (Old Vulture) who led him to see that man. Passing through a dense willow forest, they found him amidst a pile of dried-up weeds on the riverbank. His face covered with a ragged straw hat, he lay on his back sound asleep, the toes on his bare feet spread wide. Lao Jiu pulled him down and thus the three lay together. Soon afterward, they saw the waterfall plunging overhead.
“There’s a landslide quite near here,” Lao Jiu harrumphed. “That guy, he understands everything. All doubt will come to an end here.”
He started to make up a self-deceiving story. Recently such stories came to him automatically and turned in his mind like a revolving lamp.
The sound of bubbles breaking is a delicate one. You can only hear it by touching your ear to the earth. Is the sound of silkworms pulling silk for cocoons more delicate than that?
They had finally reached this place. For a long time, he’d had the feeling that Lao Jiu would lead him to see this man, but he had not guessed that the day would come so quickly. Now the thing had happened before he’d had time to pull the snarled threads of his confused mind out straight.
* * *
The day before, he had argued repeatedly with Ru Shu until they reached a kind of compromise. Clinging together, they stood in the chill wind probing for the image in each other’s mind.
“Don’t go,” she said, laughing softly, a little to his surprise. “Of course, I’m going to write that kind of letter. You’re going to receive a lot of them, piles of them, heaps. There’s virtually no possibility for retreat.”
Instantly, she vanished without sound or shape, as if she were a gust of cold, black wind.
He could not connect the feeling that she gave others now with the bright, sunny days of May. Before the coming of those days every year, he would be sleeping soundly. The naughty children in the neighborhood would take that chance to break his window in broad daylight. When the broken glass hit the floor, he would tighten the quilt around his body, pretending to be a silkworm swinging his head. He was the sort of person who is mentally a little bit slow. He did not count the disappearance of Ru Shu as starting at that time. Instead, he insisted stubbornly on reckoning it from a day five years later. The very concept of time was distorted in his mind. This was unexpected even to Lao Jiu.
Lao Jiu had also produced letters, though never in written form and never received by him in the mail. However, in those long five years, he had reread those letters constantly, and he knew that Lao Jiu had never let him go.
On the riverbank all sorts of feelings welled up in his heart, and his body felt extremely fragile as though with one slight movement he would fall into pieces. His brain was delicate and juicy, like a tiny melon sprout. Lao Jiu always disdained his brain, never considering it seriously. However, on this day stories streamed out of his brain like a flooding river. His hair hung down into the water. Each strand swirled in its own fantastic pattern.
“I’m not that disheartened,” he started to think, with some reason. “Without parents and brothers it appears like that kind of thing. The matter is becoming clearer as time goes by.”
“It’s okay not to go,” Ru Shu had said. Childishly, she stretched out a finger and drew a big circle in the air. “The blossoms of the broad bean are twinkling.”
Before making the decision, the two of them had pried open the lock of a deserted house and lived there together for three months. The house stood at the very end of a deep, empty lane whose dim and narrow path was piled with rotten leaves. At the entrance of the lane, there shone a tiny electric light that never went off all year round. Every time he entered the lane, he had to fend off a sudden attack of horror. The door was always ajar. Ru Shu insisted that once the door was closed the air pressure inside the room would become so great that her temples would swell with pain. She acted like a deranged person—she feared light, sound, air currents. All she did every day was huddle in the dead air.
“This is such an evil place,” she would say, lying in his bosom, trembling. She felt as hot as a lump of burning charcoal. “It’s our bad fortune that we have stumbled into such a place.”
