Memories of Mount Qilai: The Education of A Young Poet

Ahead of me, under our golden sun of late spring, there were countless utterly exhausted people, strangers. Their clothes were in tatters, their panic evident in their breathing, as if they had a million and one frightening stories—reeking of blood, gloom, obscurity—to tell. All of this was apparent to my sensitive soul—it was mockingly obvious that those dirty, sloppy clothes were uniforms, and that, despite having absolutely no military bearing or discipline whatsoever, those men were soldiers.

I was already aware that in life there are conditions; in that age, existence depended on a few difficult-to-understand taboos. In that oppressive age of turmoil, I cautiously protected my feelings, lest I suffer harm. Wherever you went, it seemed that you encountered severe restrictions, especially with regard to behavior—for example, your pace or posture. Someone was keeping an eye on you at all times and always took great pains to correct you, loudly scolding you and even at times raising their hand to beat you with a pointer or call you up to the rostrum, where you’d receive a knuckle rap on your childish forehead or be struck in the chest by a flying projectile of a piece of chalk hurled from the blackboard. Whenever something like that happened, silence would reign in the classroom and, although you couldn’t see the faces of your classmates, you could be certain they were very cowardly and even base, putting on innocent, respectful, and submissive expressions, as if echoing the tyranny and cruelty of the punisher, reprimanding you unanimously. At that age, they were as hypocritical as reed flowers in the autumn wind. They lacked character because they were afraid, and because, like me, they already were aware that in life there are conditions and taboos.

Time passed very slowly.

We too were slow in growing up. We studied how to roll our tongues and how in conjunction with our teeth to produce sounds, reciting ridiculous nursery rhymes such as “Pop, Pop, Goes the Threshing Barley.” What was barley? It wasn’t rice, it wasn’t corn, it wasn’t taro, it wasn’t potatoes; it was something else that you might never once see in your entire life. It was said that war had broken out again in the distant barley fields. We studied addition and subtraction, and started reciting multiplication tables. One morning after the flag-raising ceremony, one of the male teachers got up on stage to speak. With a heavy accent, he spoke with emotion. The playground was silent, and the janitor who rang the bell stood under the eaves listening intently. A flock of swallows flew over the school roof. It was the spring planting season and they were busy looking for food. The swallows disappeared behind the tree-filled garden. I heard the teacher intermittently say “communists.” The swallows regrouped and headed off in the direction of the river. There was a large smokestack outside the school. At that moment the direction of the wind changed, a gentle breeze from the sea, and soon the thick black smoke enveloped the playground, floating above us. Once again the teacher mentioned the “communists,” and bits of coal began to fall. I don’t know where the swallows went. My eyes wandered, searching for them, figuring that when the wind changed—actually the black smoke had begun to retreat from the playground—the swallows would turn out of a corner of the tree-filled garden. It was spring planting season and the wind came from the sea, blowing toward the mountain peaks.

The rice sprouts filled the warm new fields. White clouds drifted slowly in the sky, and the brimming paddy fields reflected a myriad colors. An egret leisurely spread its wings, flying smoothly over the fields crisscrossed with paths, heading over the top of the bamboo. By that time, the swallows had probably gone elsewhere, but I didn’t know where.

War? I thought we had gone through war several years ago. When I was fully composed and without any real fear, war had broken out overseas and in the mountains. It wasn’t fear that the war instilled in me, but rather a sense of excitement. I was like a participant in a simplistic adventure story, one that wasn’t very real, because the plot lacked focus. Perhaps under my own volition I had sought a metaphysical mystery amid the changing symbols of Nature. Grasping that mysterious fear frightened me, a romantic fantasy.

I heard that war had started in some other inconceivable place. People were not really willing to discuss it in clear terms. My intuition told me that many irresolvable factors were involved, creating a number of problems. People spoke evasively, trying to avoid the heart of the matter. Naturally I couldn’t understand any of this. The teaching materials for music class were the first to change. The gentle tone of the Japanese songs suddenly vanished. We opened our mouths wide to loudly sing songs of a different tone. Every one of those Chinese songs opened on a slow, soft note. With so many difficult and hard-to-pronounce words and phrases, and though hard to understand, they were so lyrical and sad. Suddenly the tempo would increase and the notes rise, sonorous and forceful, grating, slightly imprecatory in significance, making it impossible for the organ to harmonize. Soon, the prosody would revert to its original lyricism and sadness before coming to an abrupt end. I never understood the lyrics, but I imagined that they were nostalgic, sad, accusative, declaratory, as well as possessing a kind of poetic solace.

Sometimes there were not enough Chinese songs, so they would take some Japanese martial songs out of the files and we’d sing those. However, although the tunes were Japanese, the words had been changed. We sat in the shade of the banyan tree, singing the Japanese martial songs with new lyrics. It felt as if we were a bunch of Japanese kids showing off our imperial strength and power in song to criticize another war of smoke and gunpowder in the new China: raping, burning, killing, famine, and hatred. All sorts of strange words were printed under the Arabic numerals, leaving us guessing as we sang together. In the shade of the banyan tree, countless brilliant golden flecks of light flickered over the students, momentarily illuminating the girls’ short hair, momentarily reddening the boys’ cheeks. In the sequence of time, it was already late spring and we wore only a single layer of clothes outside for music class, occasionally feeling drowsy.

One day in late spring, we got out of class early, the moment the sun was at its hottest, and I decided to take the long way home to kill the extra time. We walked along the riverbank, laughing and shouting. We took off at a run, turned left only to be confronted with a startling scene—both sides of the long, straight street were filled with uniformed soldiers. Suddenly I was curious; not exactly frightened, though maybe just a little. I’d never seen so many soldiers in one place. Intuitively I knew they were soldiers, strangers, tired and sentimental. My intuition told me they were feeling sentimental. They were resting here and there along the street, leaving the middle of the narrow street open. As far as I could see, the middle of the street was empty, but at regular intervals a soldier walked nervously, blowing an ear-piercing whistle intermittently.

I hesitated a moment, but without really thinking, I had already stepped onto the long street. My curiosity overcame any fears I might have had. Originally that long street had been lined with holly and mulberry hedges and two rows of banyans. Both sides of the street were crowded with soldiers. They sat under the banyan trees, some lying by the hedges. Their uniforms and hats were a soft color and disorderly. At that time they were resting and had removed their hats and unbuttoned their uniforms and, though they still wore leg wrappings, most of them had removed their cloth shoes, letting the cool breeze in the scorching tropics caress the aching soles of their feet. Their weapons and cooking utensils lay by the roadside, some stacked neatly, others piled randomly along with baskets filled with pieces of coal, pans, scoops, and other things. I advanced step by step, frequently looking to both sides. Some of the soldiers noticed my footsteps and spoke to me, but I didn’t listen; some pretending to be asleep opened their eyes to look at me, then closed them again, looking exhausted. Most of them just looked at me indifferently, without expression or interest. Their faces were dark or yellowish and were all skinny and unshaved. My intuition told me they were sentimental. Filtered through the banyan trees, the sunlight shone on their faces and their bodies, shining brightly. A strange smell floated faintly in the dead stillness on both sides of the straight street late in spring. I don’t know what the smell was, but it floated on the breeze, neither entirely unpleasant nor entirely pleasant. I continued forward, passing the fatigue, alarm, low spirits, the unfathomable curiosity, some disintegrating dreams, dissolving fancies, uniforms, steamer baskets, rifles, pans and scoops, bayonets, and devilish whistles.

I frequently passed through a bamboo grove, which was said to be haunted by ghosts. One believer in Jesus who was not afraid of ghosts gathered some money, cut down much of the bamboo grove, and built a row of red brick houses to sell. The first family that moved in fled in a matter of days, saying that ghosts could be heard moaning in the bamboo grove, complaining of hunger, and even went so far as to drift into their new house. After that, even the landlord who believed in Jesus became wary; no one wanted to buy those houses and his enthusiasm waned. Eventually he abandoned that row of secluded and quiet brick houses in the bamboo grove, and nothing more was said about it.

Knowing that that area was haunted, I didn’t have the courage to go deeper into the grove to verify matters. During the day I walked at a quick pace; at dusk I was afraid of the wind rustling in the bamboo leaves and the faint apparition of those red walls.

One day, a group of soldiers in leg wrappings shambled over to the bamboo grove, halted, formed ranks, right faced, and without the slightest hesitation started for that row of brick houses. They formed a number of small groups; some carried guns, some carried pots and pans, and they all moved into those haunted houses. The farmers and the villagers stood watching from a distance with their mouths hanging open, unable to believe their own eyes. The water buffaloes, dogs, chickens, and ducks didn’t dare take a step forward. The landlord who believed in Jesus hurried over on his bicycle, barged right in, and was inside for quite some time before he came out. When he came out of the first house, he was blue in the face and wiping his sweating face with a handkerchief. He bowed at the waist to an army officer and looked like a man out of his mind. He climbed on his bike, pedaled a few feet, stopped, and fell off. Someone ran over to help him up and found he was uninjured. He apologized and politely offered his thanks. As he departed, pushing his bicycle, smoke was already rising from the chimney of the first house. The cook was already preparing food; the soldiers had garrisoned the area.

After that, the bamboo grove was never haunted again.

I continued to frequently pass through the bamboo grove and slowly realized that the bamboo was decreasing. The soldiers probably had cut it to clear more ground. Initially I imagined that they would drill on the empty ground, but after quite some time, no one had ever used it for that purpose. Occasionally two or three of them would appear holding guns with bayonets affixed, but most of them sat in a corner of the square, laughing and washing for what seemed like ages. Dogs squatted here and there or indolently paced around. I don’t know what the soldiers busied themselves with most of the time. They made a large pigpen with the bamboo they cut, and I think they were raising some piglets. And now the square was filled with ducks and chickens and even some geese, as well as a foul-looking turkey. I couldn’t believe that they raised all these beasts. Actually, I never gave the soldiers much thought except about how they had no fear of ghosts and had an awful lot of free time to raise chickens, ducks, and pigs, and even to grow vegetables.

Sure enough, they managed to get their hands on some farm tools and started digging in the earth and planting vegetables. Their gardens looked different from ours, a bit narrower, and unlike us, they liked to grow tomatoes and bell peppers. I saw them busy all day long with these tasks, and I couldn’t believe that that was all there was to being a soldier. If they hadn’t been armed and lived in groups, you would have simply assumed that they were refugee farmers. This group was different from that earlier group that lived in the back village behind our lane. Those soldiers lived in a big dark building and didn’t raise animals or grow vegetables, and were somewhat mysterious. I once saw them butchering a dog beside the well, and heard that spellbinding flute.…

We studied Mendel’s laws of genetics, story problems, and issues of forestation. This was probably the first time in my life that I developed an interest in knowledge. The first time I discovered that the real world was just a small part of human life, and that in addition to what we perceive with our senses, people could also pursue the abstract. While the abstract was not fixed, it never disappeared, and was its existence any less real than that of the mountains and the sea? It made no difference whether it was the deeds of heroes, the description of unchanging geography, a concept, article of faith, principle, or reason. But our textbooks repeatedly expounded the same teachings and admonishments. From my perspective at least, they never once offered a rational definition of love, freedom, or equality—such concepts existed outside our textbooks. At times, I couldn’t help but ask in amazement if these too were taboo?

A mind for pursuing knowledge in those weak and immature years meant absolute loneliness. I never wanted to express my desire. In the long, peaceful afternoons I sat in a corner of the room, guessing as I flipped through a work of fiction randomly chosen from the shelf, skipping over the words I didn’t know, trying to grasp the plot of the story. The plots of the books were always fragmented and beyond me. All I could really make out were a bunch of rich and beautiful words, words filling the pages, densely packed, interlocked, one upon another, then spread apart, keeping watch, just like a column of soldiers, arranged with one person at the head. The bewitching power of words was already well established in my mind in those half-baked years. I liked to quickly go beyond the shapes of the words and sentences to imagine that I had already grasped their meaning, putting them aside to vigorously search for the most obscure passages, staring at those difficult words, in order to understand them with my rational mind and thereby feel happy. Actually, I didn’t exercise my faculty of knowledge, but rather a perception that had matured early, or perhaps even a physical indulgence, using that strangely stimulated faculty to approach all those enchanting words. It would be better to say that the happiness I obtained from them was an erotic consolation rather than the satisfaction of knowledge.

I submerged myself in words. Reading on the tatami mats or in the shade of a tree, I had no idea what other meaning a book might possess. I was partial to plump characters, like the round cheeks or plump wrists of a girl; otherwise I liked slack characters, those that evinced sadness from a delicate and pretty thinness. To me those characters and words were incapable of expressing the true meaning they ought to have expressed; in fact, in my imagination, they changed organically into a kind of object in which to place emotion. I knew this was difficult to explain, so kept it to myself, keeping it a secret, much like the love and sadness that occasionally sprouted in my young breast, distant fantasies, delicately stirred feelings, astonishment, and fear.

Love and sadness and feelings, even fantasies and such, never seemed that complicated. It was all part of a bad dream that tormented my defenseless body and mind. Written language was really a temptation. Sometimes I felt self-satisfied, feeling that I was different from ordinary people. I had so many secrets. But this feeling didn’t necessarily create a sense of happiness; in fact, it ate away at me in the dark, because there was no one with whom to share the frustration. I tossed aside my book and tiptoed deep into the lane. That was muggy late summer, in which large drops of warm rain fell. Turning at the end of the lane was an airy passageway where two other kids and I played cards. At that moment, someone slowly appeared at the steps with the sunlight behind, a vague silhouette. I looked up. It was a girl carrying a baby. She approached us and stood by my shoulder and watched, swaying gently at the waist, patting the child as she uttered a few mesmerizing sounds, ever so gentle and moving. I recognized her. She was a young daughter-in-law who had just wedded and moved into the alley before the New Year. I still remembered how she had walked, head down, in her wedding dress. The child, of course, was not hers, but rather her mother-in-law’s newborn.

She squatted. The child slept, leaning against her shoulder. As she continuously patted the child with her left hand, she concentrated on watching us play, gesturing with her empty right hand. Later she asked to be dealt a hand, and in that way joined us in our afternoon game. The large drops of warm rain dripped, tick-tock, onto the muddy ground outside the passageway; her fragrance wafted in the air; perhaps it was a fragrance—I don’t know what it was, but it was something very special mixed in the muggy air. The child slept against her shoulder without moving. She held him in the crook of her left arm, patting him occasionally. She had stopped making that mesmerizing sound. She just extended that clean bright arm, flashing back and forth, as she snatched the cards from the ground, laughing as she held them close to her face to look at them. Then she sat down and leaned against the wall, her right leg folded under her, her left leg raised. Looking down her wide pant leg, I could see a patch of shining, fine black hair against her snow-white leg.

My heart pounded, throbbing against my young chest, like a mad water buffalo charging down the riverbed. I had soon lost nearly all of my cards. Heart pounding and blushing, I imagined the inconceivable, mature beauty harbored in that mysterious world. Perhaps it wasn’t beauty, but a kind of frightening strange phenomenon, like a bolt of lightning splitting black clouds, exploding into panic-stricken flight, and strange images. Frightening, hallucinatory, seductive, uplifting and sinking, suddenly falling into a deep abyss, straightening out a moment later to soar above the clouds. That surge of pure sensibility left me at a loss.

What was I to do? In the short time of a matter of months, I was taken by surprise as the universe revealed its significance, its ultimate meaning, to me in a number of different ways, unfolding before my eyes the details of life and death that I had never before dreamed of, transcending the inspiration of mountain forests and the sea. Oh, mountain forests and the sea are eternal. What was I to do? Was knowledge true or false? And written language was nothing more than misleading knowledge. Where did that smell come from under the rainy passageway? Where did that color come from? A flower in the snow? Why did the heart beat for that unknown, embarrassing world? There was only the heartbeat, no longing or love, and no tears.

That afternoon, I held a tattered novel in my hands, desiring to read and understand it. However, aside from mulling over a few words of which I had a shaky grasp, I couldn’t make complete sense of it. Perhaps it wasn’t a novel; what it was, I don’t know. I felt both excited and worried. At that moment, a young man came walking down the road, holding a leafy bamboo stem. He stood next to me, smiling. “Do you understand that?” he asked. I knew him. He was a neighbor with a nervous problem. Every spring, he would go nuts and wander around the neighborhood, talking to himself. It was said that his illness acted up when the peach trees blossomed, and after the flowers fell, he would be okay. Having lost in love was said to be the reason. He was reputed to have been talented, able to pen a fine essay or poem. Later he fell for a young woman, but the other party did not reciprocate his feelings, so he went crazy. In spring, he would walk back and forth along the streets and lanes or stand on the riverbank, conversing with the clouds. But with the arrival of summer, he would be fine. Every year prior to New Year, he would set up a table in a bustling part of town and write couplets for people. Spring had not yet passed, and he stood muddle-headed in front of me. I didn’t want to pay attention to him. “Do you understand that?” he asked once more.

I just shook my head.

He reached out, indicating he wanted to see my book. I hesitated before handing it to him.

He stood there hurriedly flipping through several pages. His eyes drifted, gazing off into the distance, before he suddenly turned to me, recovering himself, and spoke to me in a friendly manner. “There’s nothing good about this book. You’re too young, you shouldn’t read this kind of book.”

“What’s it about?”

“What’s it about?” He then replied, “It’s about … love.”

“What’s love?”

He didn’t answer, and once again seemed lost in thought. He handed the book back to me. “How many characters do you know?”

He laughed. “Okay, I’ll quiz you.”

He randomly opened the book to a page, stripped a leaf from the bamboo stem, and used it to point out a character on the page while asking me, “What character is this?”

wang. “What does it mean?” A lot of water. “Good. And this one?”

huan. “What does it mean?” Ring. “Not bad. And this one?” I don’t know. “Guess,” he said, encouraging me. Well, inside is the character

yin, and the outside probably means sick. “Right. That

. He said, “What does it mean?” With his bamboo stem, he wrote a big and beautiful character

on the ground. I said, it’s probably some kind of hidden illness that can’t be treated and that others can’t be told about. “Wrong. Wrong, you only got a third of it. It’s probably an illness, difficult to treat, but not something that has to be hidden from others!”

Delighted, he laughed, showing his white teeth. I suddenly admired him. In his slightly curled hair, I saw a few white strands. His face was thin, but his eyes were full of feeling. If I could know as many characters as him, I wouldn’t mind going crazy once a year. After he left, I lay down under the tree and continued thinking: What is love? Love means to lose. Right, he had lost his mind on account of love. But if a person was so well educated, and he had such beautiful calligraphy, how could love harm him? I decided to think of something else. Impossible. So love wasn’t something to be feared, and going nuts was normal and not an illness.

I heard he was better the next day and had left for the countryside at once. Usually he wouldn’t be back until after the New Year.

As for his love story, I heard it later. It was said that the young woman didn’t necessarily let him down. She was forced to do so when he went to Taipei to study. At that time, not long after the first group of scattered troops had arrived in the small city, the original sentiment of society started changing quickly, and a young soldier fell madly in love with her. The young soldier’s passion clouded his mind, and one day he pulled a knife and coerced her, doing a foolish thing by staining a once pure love with ugly colors. When she woke, she took that knife and stabbed herself. The young soldier slipped back to the barracks, where he shot himself in the heart, dying covered in blood. By the time he returned from Taipei, the girl had been buried. That spring, when returning from her grave, he walked over all the field paths and the small paths on the mountain slopes, mumbling to himself. He lost his mind until the beginning of summer, when the fruit had set on the peach trees; then he suddenly got better. But the following year, when the peach trees began to blossom, he got sick again. Year after year this way, a tragic tale was pitifully resurrected in the memory of home. I don’t know if it was about love or something else.

Indecisive and confused, I slowly passed the second part of my childhood amid so many inconceivable taboos. It was a near certainty that many gloomy ideas actually existed in the environment around us, a number of topics we were not permitted to ask about. Sometimes I was not careful and overheard people talking in a whisper, passing along an unhappy tale about knives and guns and imprisonment, about blood, disappearances, and death. I didn’t understand everything, but I could detect the nervous tone. One day several people came to our house to ask if we had a Japanese sword in our closet. We handed over the sword the Japanese had given to us just before they left. Several days later we received notice that we should go and pick it up. I saw that the long sword had been cut in half, the pointed half confiscated; the half that remained was returned to us. My mother used that broken blade for years to cut firewood.

That broken sword was the distinctive image of the second half of my childhood. I can’t really say what that image meant, except that it occasionally recurred in my dreams. A shining sword would suddenly appear, only to be broken and fall into the dust. Gradually it disappeared, never to return in my dreams, replaced by some other image, I’m afraid. That year I was transferred to an advanced class where I had an indifferent female teacher; I spent two miserable years until I was rescued from the nightmare by junior high school. Yes, when the image of the sword disappeared from my subconscious, I would wake up startled at night, always because of that female teacher’s cold, stern face. That face descended from on high, covering my weak body with bloodthirsty cruelty, treacherously wreaking havoc on my body and mind. Finding myself lost in a black valley, I’d struggle to open my eyes, only to awaken under the dizzying mosquito net. The memory of the sword had dulled.

The memory of the sword had dulled. Everything had dulled.

A gnawing pain reappeared day and night. As I sat in a corner of the classroom, stealthily reading a novel and intentionally ignoring the teacher’s instructions, savoring the solemn and sad beauty produced by my resistance, I was frequently punished by her and would imagine the look in the eyes around me, a mixture of scorn, sympathy, and admiration, or perhaps nothing at all. In that age of being swayed by considerations of gain and loss, when we had just bid farewell to childhood, we were very selfish and consciously sought a brilliant meeting of the minds, single-mindedly hoping to win praise and commendation; we had just lost the innocence of childhood, utilizing unfamiliar tricks, struggling without knowing why, while lacking the hypocrisy and scheming required for that sort of struggle. We were like apes that had not fully evolved trying to demonstrate their intelligence, ability, and courage in a flurry at the iron bars.

I had seen through everything, or so it seemed, but that wasn’t really the case. I vigorously cultivated my own feelings, carefully guarding them. I think I was already tired of the symbols of sword, gun, and soldier. I was situated in an absolutist position without fantasies or heroes to worship. Yes, the long sword was broken. The rifle lay together with the pot and scoop. And the soldier? I had no idea what the soldiers were doing, other than watering and fertilizing their hot peppers and tomato plants. I didn’t know because so many things occurred and were analyzed and eliminated in the dark. I thought I understood most everything, but I’m afraid I didn’t. In addition to the necessity of spiritual resistance, and enjoying that sad and solemn beauty, my body was indulging in suffering the pressure from that nightmare. On the one hand, I wanted to exorcise the fear, but on the other hand, I was loath to forsake that gnawing pain.