Day 28: Abdulah Sidran, Lu Xun, Yu Hua
Poem: Abdulah Sidran - Chronicle of a Miracle
With your left hand
You push a thick mass of hair from your forehead and
As your hand moves I have shifted
That gesture into memory and already
No longer see you push hair with hand from forehead
But am remembering how with your left hand
You push a thick mass of hair back from your forehead
You say with a voice that trembles
And stirs the candle-flame on the table in front of us
'It's stormy outside' and something not me but
Where there is some part of me (and what a part)
Shifts that voice into memory so that I am not
Only listening to you I am remembering
Listening to you and remembering your voice
That trembles and stirs the candle flame on the table
In front of us and remembering
The evening and the voice saying 'It's stormy outside'
And it goes on being stormy outside and the evening
Goes on just as the life goes on which
No, I don't seem to be living only remembering
Like the voice with which you are still saying
'It's stormy outside' the voice I remember like
The hand with which you push a mass of hair back from your forehead
As you speak the hand I remember, touching it
For the first time.
Translated by Ted Hughes
I find this poem so minimalist and beautiful, where the speaker is listening to someone but is one step removed from them, his attention focused instead on attention itself, and all the mysterious mechanisms of the working mind. It reminds me of the diagrams of how memory works in my Education Psychology classes:
The poem shows this diagram at work, yet it is more beautiful than this. Although she only utters one banal phrase about the weather, we get a sense that it doesnt matter the topic of conversation; he loves her very much, focused on not the meaning of her words but the sound of her voice and the way she moves her hair, and the memory of touching her hand for the first time. This could be what the "miracle" refers to in the title. That he once touched her hand long ago and she is still here with him now. A lovely poem.
The other poems of Sidran that I found in a book of the selected translations of Ted Hughes are more concerned with the Bosnian genocide, and have an aura of fear, threat and violence surrounding them. That he and his lover survived may also be the miracle of the title.
Story: Lu Xun - Kong Yiji
And so it was that Kong Yiji spread joy wherever he went; though when he wasn't around, we barely missed him.
Spoilers ahead (though its only six pages). Go read it.
The story takes the form of a casual recount from a bartender about the customer Kong Yiji, a reject from the educated upperclass, who would come in each day to be teased by the other regulars. The story could be a tragedy, but it is told so flippantly that it is a kind of cruel comedy. The end of this story made me burst out laughing. "I never saw him again – I suppose Kong Yiji really must have died."
On my first reading with no historical/political context, I missed all the ideological allegory and somehow read this as a story about human NPCs, and the nonhuman value of those who exist solely as comic relief - in sitcoms we think of the Kramer, the Fez, the Screech. Like a Shenmue character, Kong Yiji comes to the wine bar at the same time every day, says the same unintelligible things, and always takes the bait. The other characters value him as a mirth-maker but not as a human being. When he dies, people only miss him in an abstract sense, as an eccentric.
Yet all the characters in this story act like clockwork. The narrator's only job is to warm wine, the customers always trying to catch him out on the watering-down; his boss always asks the same few questions over and over, and the gang of children all hassle poor Kong in the same way every day. Furthermore, when Kong offers to teach classical writing to the narrator, the narrator refuses to listen and walks away. It is all stagnation.
Kong Yiji, the butt of all jokes, is an interesting character. He is of the upper intellectual class, yet for whatever reason, he has fallen through the cracks; for whatever reason he failed the civil service exams meaning he is unemployable, and cannot even get a lowly job because he talks in a language no one understands. He is considered a loser by both the upperclass, and the working class. To avoid bankruptcy, he lives by stealing books.
I read two translations of this. One was William Lyell's 1990 translation and the other was Julia Lovell's one from 2009. It is interesting to see the different ways he is treated in both. The 1990 translation is far less sympathetic, painting Yiji as an arrogant, indignant fool and the teasing feels more malicious; Julia Lovell's translation treats him better, painting him as more of a bumbling fool, and there is more joy and laughter in the teasing. Rather it is the callous narrator and the public who are the bad people in her translation.
The two attitudes towards Kong Yiji are similar to how the understanding of the story has changed throughout China. Mao held up Lu Xun as a revolutionary, and the collected stories were one of the only texts people were allowed to read during the Cultural Revolution. Kong Yiji was seen as an irrelevant upperclass traditionalist to be done away with, and its author was apparently advocating for his rejection, or a rejection of the system that produced him. Later readings have tended to side with Kong Yiji, notably in recent years, where Kong Yiji has become a kind of symbol for China's disillusioned youth, those who are overeducated but cannot get a job. Yiji is the posterboy of the Lie Flat movement. This article explains it.
I think it is a very multilayered and funny story, and one that has helped shape my understanding of modern China.
Essay: Yu Hua - Lu Xun
Every great author needs great readers, and for Lu Xun to have such an influential reader as Mao Zedong may have been his good fortune, or it may have been his bad luck. During the cultural revolution Lu Xun changed from an author's name to a fashionable political catchphrase, and the man's scintillating and incisive works were submerged under a layer of dogmatic readings. In that era, people constantly had "Mr. Lu Xun says" on their lips, in such a familiar turn that you might have thought all Chinese were distantly related to Lucian, but very few of them understood him as Mao had. And so, although Lu Xun's reputation reached its pinnacle during the Cultural Revolution, true readers of his work were few and far between. "Mr. Lu Xun says" was really just a way of jumping on the bandwagon.
Yu Hua talks about the impact of Lu Xun on modern China through a series of autobiographic anecdotes which do a great job at clearly stating both his importance, and how a culture's reading of an author changes through time; Lu Xun soon being rejected as didactic and overrated following the cultural revolution, but only recently being reread and held up again as a great craftsman of fiction.
The fate of Lu Xun in China— going from being an author to being a catchphrase and then back again—reflects the fate of China itself, and in Lu Xun we can trace the zigzags of history and detect the imprints of our social upheavals.