by Cai Jun
In 1990, I entered May First Junior High School’s prep class in the Putuo District.
Suzhou River flew past behind the school. A sports field was right by the school entrance. The teaching buildings sat to the right and in front. On the left was a coal slag–paved jogging track. There was a row of squat two-story buildings; they looked like a string of deserted islands, far from the teaching buildings and everything else. The school’s medical office was in there. I was always afraid of the vision chart since I used my eyes hard every summer vacation reading all kinds of novels.
The PE teacher also had his office in those buildings. The male students liked PE class, and some of them were friendly with the PE teacher. They practiced long-distance jumping by the sand pits. The music classroom was there, too; its walls were soundproof. The windows looked out at the sports field, where you could see the pale-green teaching buildings. An ancient piano made music like an organ. In seventh grade, a new music teacher arrived. She was young and pretty; she had just graduated from the teaching college. Her last name was Zhu; I still remember her melodious name. Every music teacher could play the piano, and so did Ms. Zhu. Schools didn’t take music and art classes seriously back then. After ninth grade, I rarely had music class. My impression of music class was me hiding in the back row, listening to her play the piano. I was learning to play the flute at home and performed twice at school. Ms. Zhu didn’t know I had the ability, and I was too shy to show off my flute. They were already teaching the staff in junior high music textbooks, so for a long time I used them to practice flute. The last music exam I had was singing a song with Ms. Zhu’s accompaniment. Technically, we were supposed to pick a song from the textbook. A couple of the male students chose a popular song like the “New Mandarin Duck Love Song” or something from one of the four Chinese pop stars. I chose the song “My Motherland” from the textbook; it was old-fashioned, but I loved the melody. Too bad I stopped out of embarrassment halfway through. Ms. Zhu thought I did a good job in the beginning and gave me a medium score.
I never saw Ms. Zhu again after graduation.
The school library was above the music room. There was a young school staffer who worked there. I am not sure if she was a teacher or a library employee. I remember her for how she always wore a short skirt, even in winter. Her pale and shapely legs would make the high school boys scream. Back in those days, girls in short skirts were rarely seen, even on hot summer days. Once in seventh grade, I crept to the second floor and into the tiny library. There were just a few rows of books, but they were enough for me. I was excited to see those yellowed spines. I chose The Adventures of Sherlock Holmes by Sir Arthur Conan Doyle. I held it like a treasure and wrote my name on the book-lending card. As I walked gingerly down the steps, I was stopped by two older students. They saw what I had and said, “I read that—it’s great!” I was even more overjoyed as I went back to class with the book.
Soon after I graduated, May First Junior High School closed. A nightclub opened outside the school entrance. It’s now a well-known entertainment venue in Shanghai.
My music teacher was assigned to work at another school after the closing. One of Ms. Zhu’s students eventually became the famous singer Shang Wenjie.
After that, I went to school in a faraway place. It was a rural factory area then, with a blast blower factory nearby. We often played soccer at school; whenever the ball went over the wall, we had to go find it. I heard the factory was once a famous cemetery where the legendary Chinese actress Ruan Lingyu was buried.
After that, I started working.
From 2002 to early 2007, I worked near Suzhou River in the Postal Plaza, which was to the north of the Sichuan Road Bridge. The plaza was built in 1924 in a style that combined Corinthian columns and Baroque domes.
After that, I became the person you see now.
It is a coincidence that ever since I was born I’ve always lived near the Suzhou River.
It’s my River of Life and Death.
In 2012, one June evening, I went shopping at Carrefour with my family. While eating at Yonghe King, I suddenly had a thought. What do kids really think about? Do they remember things grown-ups can’t even imagine? Things beyond their experience, or from another dimension? When kids are silent, are they remembering events from their past lives?
We all go through the same thing, even after we drink the Meng Po Soup by the Bridge Over Troubled Water. We all keep some past-life memories. We only start to forget as we grow up and are invaded and polluted by so-called education. We forget all the partings and the sorrows.
Then I started this novel.
In six months, I had finished 80 percent of the book; over 60,000 words of the book were already serialized in Suspense World magazine. But I suddenly thought of another plot, with a character none of you read, someone called Yu Lei, who was like Julien in The Red and the Black. I thought the book’s protagonist should have been him; why couldn’t he cross the River of Life and Death?
I faced a difficult and cruel choice: either finish the book as planned and write the ending, or rewrite it with another protagonist, change the point of view for most of the book, and go from first person to third person. The book would have to be almost entirely rewritten, and I would have to stay up for dozens of nights.
This was a predicament I had never faced before. An easy road lay ahead, but it only reached Egypt, where one departed. If you wanted to reach the promised land of Canaan, you had to scale harsh mountains.
I believe a writer is fortunate to face such a crossroads.
I chose the more difficult path.
That was in the Lunar New Year of 2013. I gave up my holiday to write the second draft, as in completely rewrite the book.
It became the story you just read.
At the end of March, when I finished, I was so excited that I actually wrote my finish date as 2014 at first. It was as if my own life had time-traveled to Si Wang’s timeline in the book.
I wrote a Weibo update that night:
I finished writing The Child’s Past Life. I really feel like crying. It’s like having my heart crushed, glued together, crushed again, and then sewn back up. I remember the struggles I had. Right now I’m listening to Chris Yu’s “Meng Po Soup.” Please allow me to quote Gu Cheng’s poem for the last line of the novel. Tonight, I think, life will never end, novels will never end, the pen lives on.
I want to thank my publisher Motie Books, my publisher Shen Haobo, my planning editors Liu Yi and Bu Di—and you, the reader.
I want to thank every character in this book. You were all so vivid in front of me; you lived through the emotions with me. When Huang Hai died, I pounded the keyboard as I cried with Si Wang.
Last night, the friend who gave me Journal of the Soul visited me. I took him on a tour of my school, the same elementary school in the book. We were right by Suzhou River, where Si Wang found the body in the jeep.
There was a pedestrian bridge; we walked up the steps and looked down at the river. It was midnight and there was a spring breeze. It was hard to see the river in the dark, but I could imagine the quiet and deep waters.
Time passes just like the river—endless, every day and night.
Cai Jun
Wednesday, May 1, 2013
Suzhou River, Shanghai
ABOUT THE AUTHOR
CAI JUN has published a dozen books and is China’s best-selling horror writer. He started his writing career at twenty-two and was quickly awarded the Bertelsmann People’s Literature Award for New Writers. His novel 19th Floor of Hell won the Sina Literary Award and is one of three of Jun’s novels to have been made into a feature film. Two of his books have been developed into television series, and his work has been translated into six languages.
ABOUT THE TRANSLATOR
YUZHI YANG was born in Beijing, China, and arrived as an immigrant in New York when she was thirteen years
old. Going through puberty and learning to live in a new country at the same time was a character-building experience. After attending a big state school in the South, she moved back to New York to work in online publishing. She did that for ten years before deciding to do translation full-time. She loves buffets, discount shopping, and playing with her daughter. She loves translation because, if the book is bad, she can always blame it on the author.
