by Qiu Miaojin
Good night, my Zoë with the wild hair standing on end against the violet. Love you. Trust you.
· · ·
I felt relief after our phone call. A shadow still looms but I can fake calm for a while to endure. I’m really afraid. Please forgive me if I’m pedantic and weak. “Defeated” is the word you used that hit me hardest. I’m always such a lost lamb. You’ve mended the fence, but I can’t see on the same level as you. I wrote a letter full of playful apologies, apologizing for loving you, apologizing for you loving me, apologizing for your commitment to never turn back, apologizing for your pristine and expansive new life; I apologized for my sentence structure, my language, and for my writing style, as well as my inability to take responsibility. . . . I apologized to the books you left for me that were all open and staring askance at me, and apologized for hating myself for always apologizing, and then tore up the apology. Only from you can I demand the will to live, so I now have before me a pile of colorful phone cards.
I sat for more than half an hour on the curb near the bus stop waiting for it to get light in Paris and a little girl passed me twice and turned to smile at me twice. It was like being hugged. I wanted to thank her for giving me the courage to call you.
Yesterday I was thinking that love is so painful, that my tightly folded feelings were only allowed to unfold when you and I were in the same space together, or if we were writing letters to each other. That’s why I said I apologized for my love for you. I really want to fight for a patch of heaven and earth that stretches its branches and unfurls its leaves, this nourishment from heaven and earth would heal your pain. I want to grow stronger, Zoë. Help me, give me another chance.
Good morning, Zoë, I am so ashamed that my love has not reached you. Send me your smile.
(The Golden Age of Oaths II: Xu is in Taipei, Zoë is in Paris)
Can’t help falling in love.
Wise men say only fools rush in,
But I can’t help falling in love with you.
Shall I stay? Would it be a sin?
If I can’t help falling in love with you.
Like a river flows surely to the sea,
Darling so it goes,
Some things are meant to be.
Take my hand, take my whole life, too.
For I can’t help falling in love with you.
Riding the clutch in tears until a phone call, an apology, and a way to shift into neutral unnoticed. . . .
· · ·
Raining really hard in Taipei tonight; cold and empty and peaceful in my room. I didn’t want to turn on some music, afraid that even the slightest movement, even writing a letter, would trigger a collapse. Dreading movement, I want to hibernate.
Changes in the weather are terrifying. I ask again, Why weather?
You returned then left again. For the next six months I’ll have no respite, only a synchronic obliteration.
I concentrate and my heart swings, unsettled, if only I were to lean my head against your chest. . . .
· · ·
Let’s not separate like this, okay? I can’t even imagine that enduring the next six months will depend entirely on two minutes and thirty-five seconds a week of phone calls. And that you’re facing so many difficulties and I can’t be by your side, nor console you with words when you need them. Cruel torture!
· · ·
You and Piggy stick together now, you hear! I heard you had received Piggy in the afternoon when I was at work, and I wanted to scream and shout with relief and thank the postal services of Taiwan and France for delivering Piggy to Zoë in three days so that she could have someone to keep her company so soon (Piggy can count as half a person). The night before I sent her out, I sat her down in front of me while I wrote your letter, thinking how she’d keep you company just like this and look after you for me (her eyes and nose are functional). I feel like I already took over her body with my own body with the hope that she would keep close company. Piggy is a curly-tailed pig! You didn’t even notice her tail. . . . She and I are both a little sad.
· · ·
The melody of the waltz still tumbled around in my head after the last encores of the philharmonic, and I walked alone on the broad red-tile sidewalk outside the Chiang Kai-shek Memorial Hall, thinking how romantic it would be if I kissed you here. I forced myself to attend three concerts and see five movies in November, on my own like this, walking down the street, my nose tingling, tears imminent. The shadow of us was on every corner! At 10:15 I caught a beat-up bus. The men sitting on either side of me reeked of sweat. From far away I could hear a graduate student going on and on in a stammering voice, a stammer that caught my attention, painful memories of you poured steadily forth, the sad, empty phone call that broke my heart. A sinking ship and there’s only one lifeboat, only one life can be saved, and the man begs the woman to go, but the woman won’t go! The woman won’t go!
I won’t let you go. I will try my best to get stronger and so you have no right to grow weak. How could you bear to destroy me? Sitting at the makeup counter, face tilted slightly, shimmering rays of light shining in through the windows to your cheeks, and then a skull’s visage appears in the mirror, its deep-set eye sockets and sunken cheeks and dark complexion. . . . I won’t allow myself to weaken, don’t worry. Zoë would say that I am her will to live, right? And how can one undermine one’s own will to live?
Good night, Zoë. Do you have any idea how much I love you?
· · ·
In my infinite lethargy I don’t know the limits of missing you. I dreamed you were sleeping in a big bed and I was tidying up the study. Chen Sheng was playing in the background and you were saying something like “Quick, come here! If you don’t come over here I’m leaving.” I finished tidying up the study but you were nowhere to be found. I woke up in a cold sweat. Zoë, I wouldn’t insist on tidying the study. Being with you is my greatest desire. Yet now I don’t know how much more of this separation I can take. I fear that if I call, hanging up will be even more painful, but if I don’t call I’ll be in pain anyway alone in Taipei, in a perpetual state of lethargy, using lethargy to withstand a hundred years of waiting. . . .
· · ·
As long as I can be with you I can bear anything, and am willing to bear anything, no matter how I writhe and seethe, my nose bloody and face swollen, no part of my body left unscathed. Just don’t uproot me, don’t leave me all alone in the world! I beg you.
In your journal of France, you say you want to carry me on your back and that you completely understand your place in my life, which is why you were tongue-tied with anxiety that day, right?
Zoë, please let me stay entangled with you. I simply can’t let you endure future suffering on your own.
· · ·
I miss you, I miss talking to you. I dreamed you came back; you were in tears because I hadn’t spoken to you. How comforting it would be to cast aside all practicalities and lean against you. My spirit is so weak.
· · ·
I will tend to you with my life. Please rest assured and give yourself to me. It makes no difference whether you were sincere before or not; I’ve already given myself to you, and know you are the only person who could look after my heart. You won’t let yourself go bald or get a fat belly, and you’ll always strive to expand and enrich your mind, right? You couldn’t stand yourself if you became vulgar, right? I know I can possess a pure emotional life with you.
· · ·
Every day my dreams weigh down on me until I can’t breathe—something I’ve never experienced before. I need to speak to you; I need to hear you say you love me. I don’t know what’s wrong with me.
· · ·
One day a fireball caused me to radiate power and vitality. The body and soul of a woman loved by someone can emanate a mild plenitude. It is the color of sapphire.
· · ·
I want to live with you—breathe together, live and sleep together, and ask you to trust me. I beg you to give me a chance, though the
fact that I’m asking for this credit in advance is so contemptible.
Please don’t give up on me, on us.
· · ·
Zoë, promise me that we’ll be sweethearts who always trust each other, okay? Please believe that I’ll always trust you and support you, okay? So there will be no hesitation and no dishonesty between us, please? Even if everyone in the world betrays us, let’s both trust that when returning home one of us will be there to embrace the other, okay?
· · ·
We come from different worlds. This is fated.
No matter how madly we love, no matter how many tranquil moments of “intimacy” we enjoy, this is the fundamental nature of things.
Every time I let myself greedily need you, let myself take pleasure in the love that you offer, which satisfies me so perfectly, it’s like I’m a kamikaze jet. After the wild dive of arousal and romantic passion, only the flying cinders and smoldering ash remain.
Today I received your journals, knowing that you don’t want me to be sad.
But I’m till crying, sleeping with my clothes on. The contents are like nothing I expected. This access to your inner world leaves me anxious and terrified.
I didn’t know I could love this about you. What I have expected in our love has been a kind of sheer enthusiasm masked with a mirage of self-confidence. Sometimes we pretend to trust that I can love you, a pretense of tacit understanding, a necessary pretense even if pretending only proved that I couldn’t love you.
Sometimes I think I’m too greedy. What’s wrong with being a harbor that is slightly larger than another harbor? As for all your efforts in Paris, I am endlessly grateful—grateful that you loved me and thus let yourself be loved by me.
Is it okay to share with you these little lonely bits of mine? Paris must be lovely in the snow. Good night.
· · ·
This afternoon my colleague suddenly put on Jacqueline du Pré’s recordings of cello sonatas and the quiet office was filled with the sound of her majesty. Suddenly I felt transported back to last April and May when late at night with du Pré in the background I made three tapes (Zoë’s letters to Xu) for you as your birthday present. My heart tightened in pain. Was the heartbroken du Pré calling out to me? I can’t tell anymore. Her cello playing sounds fraught with pain. Du Pré was eventually paralyzed from an illness and her husband, the pianist Daniel Barenboim, later grew distant from her, but neither of them was to blame, don’t you think? The fundamental nature of their relationship was simply tragic. I really thought our relationship transcended such tragedy.
P.S. Perhaps the reason you were sad is because you were too busy to listen to each tape right after you received it! Though I do feel shy about them.
· · ·
I still can’t get through on the phone, I float in the vast unknown.
I suffer from loneliness. No letters for more than a week and my life is completely uprooted. To this add the abyss of your suffering in Paris and I’m losing my mind.
I dutifully called Paris twice a day and listened while it rang thirty times. My anger dissipated to calm. To keep you company on the phone in this way is fine too. Call me an Ah Q if you have to, tell me I’m like an ostrich with its head in the sand, it doesn’t matter. I’m selfish and weak and care only about my own miserable existence!
Please don’t wipe me away from your life! This week I slept deeply, not from the conviction that I would disappear without you but because the person I see reflected in the mirror is becoming more and more godless and haggard. In life there is an ineffable, restless anxiety that accompanies us, so very, very imprisoning. . . .
Zoë, I am dumb when it comes to feelings, both in terms of my reactions and in expressing them. But please believe that I possess an enormous love for you and that my every loving gesture to you comes from my whole heart and whole mind, my whole heart and whole mind.
Or have you already left?
· · ·
Write me, please? A letter every two or three weeks would be fine. Tell me what you’re doing, who you’re hanging out with. I want to know. And I’m worried. I don’t have your new address and I’m scared that there’s some other reason you’re not giving me your new address, ahhh . . . I am as skittish as a bird that flaps at a mere pluck of a bowstring.
· · ·
Zoë, please, can I ask you not to forsake me in this lifetime?
· · ·
I’ve finally lost Zoë—my eyes are wide open and there’s nothing more to say.
Time after time, between my way of living and Zoë’s, I have chosen mine while carelessly abandoning Zoë. Now that I have really lost Zoë and my way wants me to claw violently and scream, I’m finally starting to see how much suffering my love caused him.
But I’ve understood this too late. I know he’s already gone. He gave me one last chance and I threw it away, deliberately, with my eyes wide open.
I didn’t have that strength. I depended on Zoë to feed and water our love, but I used up the nutrients I received for my own personal, individual needs. I failed to seize this moment in life when Zoë loved me with such purity, and ultimately I lost this devoted Zoë. The room is full of the remains of our love. Nothing can be given back. I will keep what Zoë bestowed upon me for the rest of my life, unexchangeable. Before going to Paris to find Zoë, I can only caress everything he left me.
· · ·
Want to make fierce love with you
Want you to gnaw me to pieces
Want you to eat up my rational brain
LETTER TWENTY
JUNE 17
Bunny was tiny, maybe only fifteen centimeters long. Although Bunny’s coat was pure white, the fur on Bunny’s body, feet, paws, nose, ears, and tail was flecked with gray. Xu spotted Bunny immediately as we strolled past the row of pet shops along the Seine near Pont Neuf. We looked in several other shops and laughed at the horrifying sight of rabbits so big that on their hind legs they reached our waist. We spun joking tales of what would happen if we tried to keep one of these rabbits in Clichy, how they might put on bibs and sit with us at the dinner table, or how they could leap across the thirty-five-square-meter apartment from kitchen to bedroom in a single bound, crash through the dividing wall. . . . Then we looked at some small rabbits in a few shops but none of them really appealed to us. Finally Xu said that the most important thing about caring for a pet was karma, so we went back to the first shop. I asked the shopkeeper if I could look at one of the two baby rabbits that were only three months old. He plucked the rabbit out of the cage, telling me to take a good look as I asked many questions like how to feed it, how to take care of it, and how to tell if it was sick. Then it occurred to the shopkeeper to check under the little rabbit’s tail to see if it was a male, which we hoped, but it wasn’t. So Xu turned back to the cage and looked at the other rabbit, the one with pink eyes, and said that this was the one she had noticed first! We were jubilant and we carried the pink-eyed male and his accessories back home with us to Clichy, carrying the fifty-centimeter-long white cage down into the Pont Neuf Métro station where we took the 7 to Palais Royale–Musée du Louvre and then transferred to the 1 before catching the 13 at Champs-Élysées–Clemenceau toward Clichy. On the crowded rush-hour train, I placed the white cage on the floor and carried three big bags of kibble on my shoulders, leaning on a pole. Xu sat down in an open seat next to me and played with the rabbit in his little paper box. . . . Watching the two of them, I resolved that they were my companions for life and that I would fight for them on the treacherous journey of life, until death.
Zoë, I’ll take good care of Bunny for you.
Oh . . . if one were to call this book an unintelligible collection of hieroglyphics with no words and a plot that had long since disappeared, one would be right. I am confused about whether it’s a matter of our love trying to capture me, or to capture her, or of us trying to capture our love. From the first time I saw her (before either of us had even exchanged a word), I dreamed of h
er each night until these continuous dreams drove me to write her a letter every day and to love her unconditionally. . . . Xu often joked that I was terrorist and mystic combined. Was I? How could I not be? Given the irrational and metaphysical nature of human existence, did I really have a choice? Could reason really prevent someone from killing himself or going mad? Could it really prevent someone from being unfaithful or from being struck dead in an instant due to infidelity? I despair. Even now my answer is still “No,” and to the final day I still clearly see that I am bound by fate to love her and even more am doomed to die, struck by the lightning of her unrestrained infidelity, her betrayal and abandonment.
I’ve never regretted loving her this way. I’m still happy she came to Paris and let me give her a beautiful home, a blossoming love. I had wanted it for so long, and attained it. But I despair. I despair over my peculiar personality and fate. . . .
She wasn’t born unfaithful, and I wasn’t born faithful. My life has been a journey from infidelity to fidelity, and her life has been a journey from fidelity to infidelity. Such is the journey determined by the individual materials of each life. And the instant our journey overlapped and influenced the other, my fragile personality exploded and my individual self, caught between heaven and earth, was soundlessly, breathlessly sacrificed. This is merely called Nature.
In No Longer Human, Osamu Dazai tells how an older man takes an innocent young woman as his wife after a long battle with depression. For him the young wife is like the new shoots of spring, purging his life of darkness and pollution and providing him a bourgeois existence as a newlywed. One night he witnesses his wife, whose innocence inspired him to trust again, having sex with some random shopkeeper upstairs. . . . His wife had been raped and wasn’t to blame, but it split him open.
