After my sister started middle school, she began to endlessly ask me, “Why do you want to write?” Her expression was extremely sincere, as if crouching over my desk with my atrocious posture—which from childhood had never been properly corrected—and writing line after line of poetry, essays, and novels were among the most inconceivable of careers. She never once mocked my dream of “one day becoming a writer,” she simply didn’t understand just what there was about this career worth dreaming about. There was at least one argument that provided a reason good enough to support her suspicion. That was because each time she asked, “Why do you write?” I never failed to give a different response. Author—what an indeterminate career.
I simply don’t recall if I ever confessed to my kid sister that when I was younger I once fabricated a story of her falling off the swing set and ending up with a cerebral concussion in order to fulfill an essay assignment. This type of event, however, would actually often occur in my day-to-day life. What I mean is that everyday life frequently puts people in a position where they have no choice but to tell a small untruth. I don’t like to do it, but sometimes that’s how things go. And so, I became a writer.
As far as I can remember, I wrote my first novel when I was a junior in high school, and my first reader was my sister. She had just gotten her braces and was able to perform the soothingly sweet A and D scales both fluidly and gracefully—at times her performance could even be delightfully witty. That winter, after finishing her nightly practice, she would often push open my door and collapse face-down on my bed. In a muffled voice, she would ask, “How come you don’t have to practice the violin?” My usual response would be, “But I have to study for the college entrance exams.” After continuing this completely insincere dialogue for several days—it was probably more like several weeks—I had the inspiration for a story. It was about a four-person family. The reporter father suddenly lost his job and yet was not in the least bit depressed; in fact, he used every last penny of his severance pay to buy gifts for the whole family. Mom got a pearl necklace, his son got a cross-country motorcycle, his daughter got a set of braces, and he bought himself a computer—which was in preparation for his working at home. Unfortunately, their home was robbed and the thief made off with the pearl necklace. Then the son and daughter got into an accident while chasing after the robber on the motorcycle, completely smashing the daughter’s new set of braces. Good fortune, however, came from this sad news: the father turned this tragedy into a novel. His novel was published and it shook the literary scene. He became a famous writer.
I read the finished story to my kid sister, who sat on the bed hugging a pillow. Right afterward, she asked me several questions: “Why do you have to write about me?” “Why do I have to have such bad luck?” and, of course, the question she would later continuously bring up: “Why do you have to write?”
“It’s fun!” I said.
By the time my sister had begun to suspect that she had inherited some kind of mental disease from Mom, my answers to questions like “Why do you write?” had become relatively serious and depressing—no longer was it very fun. Barely even taking the time to think about it, I would respond, “Writing is my form of self-treatment.”
In real, everyday life, my sister had already had her braces removed, exposing her white, straight, beautiful teeth. It had been seven years since she had touched a violin or any other musical instrument. Dad had successfully attained the position of assistant editor-in-chief, a job in which he barely had to lift a finger, and thanks to praise and flattery from his connections, his art exhibition was an overwhelming success. As always, Mom would take her daily walk to the pharmacy three blocks away to fill prescriptions for cold and diarrhea medicine, skin creams, health tonics, and other medication for the middle-class families in the neighborhood. Not one of her patients knew that she had divorced and for some unknown reason had been stricken with a kind of manic depression. I had been living in a neighborhood no larger than three square kilometers for twenty-seven years, but using a few figments of my imagination, a handful of little white lies, and a bit of exaggeration, I became “the new comet that the literary scene had been awaiting.”
Occasionally, this new comet’s kid sister would scribble down a few sentences that fell somewhere between a joke and a pop-song lyric—for example: “My feelings are a faded blue, my tears are invisible, moreover they do not flow.” Aside from this, she would write only when she wanted to make me laugh, composing all her notes on those little yellow Post-it notepads. During the last winter vacation before I graduated from college, I received my first literary award. In a little note she drew up an acceptance speech for me: “I would like to thank God for creating the world, my parents for creating me, and myself for creating this novel. I would also like to thank my little sister for not creating anything. It is her lack of creation that has provided hope for both me and the world.”
I suppose that all those years of suffering through violin practice probably had a subtle influence on my sister. Brewing in her subconscious was a compulsion for structure, order, and precision; however, because of the torture brought on by this array of needs, she also developed a thirst for freedom. I read between the lines of the notes and handful of letters she gave me, and my analysis told me that she never underwent any kind of training whatsoever (she never even learned how to write an essay), yet she was still able to pick up the profound intricacies of manipulating language. And so time after time, she carefully read through my writings, offering conjectures about each work’s origin in real life. She compared every aspect of the content of my works with the content of my life. Every now and then she would praise my work, but I felt like a diseased specimen of mangled flesh and blood stripped naked in a glass display case for examination.
My prize-winning story, “The Invisible Man,” was for me the beginning. I wrote about a university student who is possibly suffering from paranoia and how he is used by Uncle Tang, a character whom I don’t know whether to classify as real or fictional. The main character eventually becomes a career student who develops underground intelligence on campus for the ruling political party. Toward the end of the story, the university student is sent to a sanatorium to live out the rest of his life in confinement. In my opinion, the most clever aspect of the novel is the fact that no one can figure out if the student is truly insane or if he is society’s victim, his deranged values and inability to distinguish right from wrong, truth from falsehood, all a result of intense political persecution. The book got excellent reviews, and the prize money I received for the first award allowed me to become the first on campus to own a high-performance cross-country motorcycle. During the lunar holiday, my sister went with me to test out the motorcycle. While we were riding, she asked, “Didn’t you incorporate some real people into your novel?”
She couldn’t remember clearly, but that is indeed what I did. It was June of the previous year. One day during final exams, as I dragged myself out of the deal with the Faustian Lucifer, I was left with a lingering fear. The only thought in my head was: “I’m screwed! I have to rewrite the fucking thing again!” With that also came an extreme anger, even hatred toward Goethe. I rushed out of the examination hall cursing every one of those old bastards responsible for writing the literary classics. And then someone across the tree-shaded avenue shouted my name. He called out two or three times.
It was that weirdo whom everyone on campus called “Zombie.” All year round he would wear turtleneck shirts; he was over six feet tall, and even when he was directly under the noon sun, his shadow seemed to stretch over the entire street. His body was like the pole holding up a basketball net and his head was like the rim, with his chin dangling high above me. I had heard that Zombie was a student in the philosophy department. He usually didn’t have much to do with his classmates and was a rather shady character. Occasionally he would spend long periods of time chatting with one of the most unpopular instructors, which is why someone started the rumor that he was a mole sent to campus by the Guomindang.
“Do you remember me?” he asked. Lowering his head, he sneered at me with the hint of a smile appearing at the edges of his mouth. His expression lasted for about ten seconds, maybe a bit longer, and then he waved his hands, saying, “Forget it.”
“Excuse me…” I continued to think about all those basketball superstars whom his tall frame had reminded me of.
“Forget it.” As he turned his head and walked away, he said, “Your essays aren’t bad. Keep up the good work.” It was hard to tell if he was talking to me or to himself.
Later I remembered that during the previous spring I had an essay or story published in the campus magazine. I wrote about my kid sister when she was still a baby, and I mentioned a certain person. Who would have guessed that “Zombie” was this very person, Family Morals Shen—my primary-school classmate who came a hair away from meeting an ugly demise by hanging with his mother and little sister.
When I told my kid sister about my chance encounter with Zombie, I couldn’t help but also share with her the widely known stories that were flying around campus about the spy’s multitude of activities. What she couldn’t understand, however, was why I later wrote Family Morals Shen into “The Invisible Man.” She leaned on my back, her hands wrapped around my waist. My cross-country bike hit sixty miles an hour as we flew past Clear Water Reservoir on that lonely scenic roadway. Over the howling wind, she asked me, “Didn’t you incorporate some real people into your story?”
“Family Morals Shen?” I asked. “Are you talking about Family Morals Shen?”
How are you supposed to clearly explain issues such as literary creation, the drawing of materials, fabrication, and realism to a little devil who has just begun her sophomore year of high school? I could barely even explain it to myself—and I was almost finished with college. “Of course not,” I said, contradicting myself.
“But unconsciously you were,” my sister said.
“What the hell do you know!” I shouted, and slowed the motorcycle down to a stop.
“You’re the one who doesn’t know anything! Not only did you stick him in your book, you wrote Mom in too! You know, you’re really lame!”
My mother never once resorted to writing as a means of dealing with her trivial fantasies. For her, the voices she heard, the images she saw, the feelings she felt, and all the items she became conscious of were alive. The nature of reality bloodily forced its way into her daily life. That kind of thing is too real—so real that it cannot endure translation into written words. I, however, having already grown accustomed to translating life and other items that did not even exist into language, could not endure the intent gaze of my kid sister.
“Well, your writing is brilliant anyway,” my kid sister admitted in a whisper.
My self-treatment was brilliant. A doctor from the psychiatric ward who once declared my sister autistic and my mother as healthy as an ox (God only knows how much my mother hated this analogy) once relayed to me a conversation he and my father had had about my novel. At the time, I was busy trying to cope with the weeding-out stage of my first year of graduate school. It must have started when Dr. Chen came over the house to talk to my mom about something. He took advantage of the free time while my mother was getting herself a glass of distilled water to tell me that he was extremely interested in my writings. He also told me that my father felt his interpretation of my novel was quite sound. What was his sound analysis about?
“You never expose yourself in your writings. Actually, it is just the opposite: your novels are a kind of tool to protect yourself.” His mouth emitted the stench of garlic, and from time to time he would honk through his nostrils as he attempted to clear his stuffed nose. “You are running away and your novel is your vehicle for escape. What I want to get to the bottom of is, what are you running away from?”
I repeated his last sentence: “What am I running away from?”
Because of this he assumed that I agreed with his analysis. “You probably understand what I mean. You are a very interesting case.* Let’s look at this problem together—I want to know your true fear.” Saying this, he began to move closer to me.
Perhaps, like Dr. Chen said, so-called true fear does indeed exist in this world. But just then the healthy ox came back to her seat, interrupting the single instance of close interaction with psychology in my life. Afterward, I never again laid eyes on Dr. Chen. Apparently he said something that offended some gang boss (or a friend of some gang boss), because they found him two or three months later frozen stark naked in an eleven-square-foot cement block.
I am afraid, however, that the deep rift created by his words was extremely difficult to recover from. At the least, I had deep, unswerving faith in the view that I was running away from something. Even though several times afterward I went to great lengths to expose those aspects of the world that I found most difficult to face, my readers were still not gullible enough to believe that the painful disclosure of those unbearable characteristics was actually a result of self-dissection. On the contrary, they would prefer to believe that it was owing to my “sharp observances of the subtleties of human nature.”
Did I say “my readers”? Indeed, when I was twenty-three I became conscious of the fact that I had readers—they were on the street, beside the noodle stands, at the entrance to the pharmacy, at university club meetings, and in my mailbox. My sister at the time had her own share of school stress to deal with, yet she never once abandoned her responsibility of dissecting the relationship between my novels and my life. She was sharper than all of those strangers who made up “my readers” put together; her responsibility included pointing out all elements of untruth in my books, as well as the degree of these lies.
For example, she believed that the short story that established my reputation as a writer, “The General’s Monument,” took Grandpa as a model. But Grandpa was never a general, he never lived in a mountain retreat, he didn’t have the ability to travel through time, nor was he mentally deranged. Moreover, not only did I transpose my mother’s mental disorder onto Grandpa, I also presented the general’s son as a homosexual who loved wearing white windbreakers (just like the ones Dad liked to wear). “What’s the point?” she blurted out. “You should have described him as a playboy, a real skirt-chaser like our dad really is.” And then came her habitual judgment: “I really don’t get it, why do you have to write?”
It is possible that she had a point. Haven’t I been talking about literary “creation”? During the past several years, just what have I actually “created”? All I do is take those little details of life that are lacking and add a little of something else; I take D event that occurred during A time at B place to C person, and rewrite it in E time at F place to G person. Then I add a bit of material H or remove a tad of K—did I forget I and J? Oh, I’m saving them so critics and readers will have space to exercise their imagination. In that space, the critics and readers will believe that enclosing a living person in an eleven-square-foot cement coffin is a stroke of originality, full of symbolism and hidden meaning. The night after my sister had her abortion, I indignantly composed a five-thousand-character short story. The story described how a big brother burning with revenge located this asshole guy who forced his sister to get pregnant, and then buried him alive in a tub of cement. No one knew that was the last actual scene that Dr. Chen experienced before he died. Critics just felt that the story’s conclusion was extremely inventive, full of symbolism and hidden meaning. My sister, however, with tears dripping from her eyes, said, “How can you have so much hate for someone?”
Did I hate that little bastard who got my sister pregnant? I examined my conscience for more than a year, and even today I just seem to become more and more confused. Perhaps it is because hatred cannot endure the passage of time, or maybe hatred cannot withstand contemplation and recollection. Moreover, lately I have been spending even more time wondering: Do I hate my grandpa? Do I hate my father? Do I hate my mother? What about my sister? Dr. Chen? Family Morals Shen? Those characters whom I had cut apart and woven together, dishing them up in new forms in so many stories—did I despise them? I dismembered them, tearing their bodies apart and then putting them back together; could this be the full meaning of my self-treatment?
Perhaps my mother, who never once received any type of treatment, was much better off. Early in 1985, someone suddenly put up over a dozen identical posters outside Mom’s pharmacy. On the top of each poster were three horizontally written characters: DRINK BREAST MILK. In the center was a portrait of a young mother breast-feeding. Toward the bottom of the poster were two smaller lines that read something like: BABIES WHO DRINK BREAST MILK ARE THE HEALTHIEST. SMART MOTHERS BREAST-FEED. The line on the very bottom read: PRINTED BY THE EXECUTIVE YUAN DEPARTMENT OF HEALTH. I will never forget that poster; I also learned from it that our country had a poster-printing organ in the Department of Health. At the time, my kid sister was in the sixth grade and already had the developed chest and hips of a young woman. Emerging from the pharmacy, she would wave her violin case before my eyes, not allowing me to see that poster. As she waved her case, she would yell, “Pervert! Pervert! You’re not allowed to look!” This game of my sister’s violin case blocking my eyes lasted until we got two blocks away, ending when we arrived at the entrance to the small park. Then she stopped laughing and playing and suddenly widened her eyes. With her mouth half-gaping, she began to stare at the same scene I had caught sight of—sitting in the white French-style easy chair next to the swings was Mom. She had her thumbs covered by her other fingers just like she used to when we were little and she would pretend to be holding a camera. She aimed at some of the children playing by the swing set and “click, click” pressed her index finger down. That “click” sound was to provide audio support for her two empty hands. Not one of those little kids paid any attention to her.
That was the first time my kid sister saw that Mom’s behavior was oddly different from that of other people. She cowered up close to me and, grabbing hold of my arm, she called out, “Ma!”
My mother looked over as if she had just woken up. She unclenched her ten fingers, fixed the strands of hair coming out of her bun, and then, turning around, quickly walked toward home.
For many years afterward, that encounter in the little park led me to a whole series of different opinions when pondering creative writing. Each time Mom whispered she had heard a child speaking in the kitchen or a car honking downstairs or had smelled a burning odor coming from the bathroom, I would always carefully ask her, “What happened next?”
What happened next? It’s the question that every reader or writer is continually asking. The instant we ask, “What happened next?” what we are actually concerned with is time. We express our feelings through the little bits of rescue, satisfaction, and hope that time brings us. But my mother never answers this question. She is enclosed in one specific temporal space, like a block of solid, hardened cement.
Comparatively speaking, having gradually transformed into a writer, must I be both superficial and common? I follow the story’s axis of time until the end, running away from those aspects of myself that I do not understand, imagining that this is all a form of treatment. My little sister thoroughly understood this, she just never stated it clearly—that is because she didn’t want to hurt me.
