Just like any other girl, my kid sister went through a phase during which she loved to laugh. When I think back to that time, I cannot explain with complete confidence just why she was giggling, but she truly did use that laugh to confront the entire world. That’s right, there are a handful of things in the world that are genuinely funny, like the fat man falling down in a comedy show, an idiot getting knocked upside the head by a wooden revolving ladder, or oranges or balls falling out of the chest of a male transvestite. Or have you heard jokes like the one about the explorer who stuck a pineapple up his ass? How about the one about the guy with the coarse, husky voice who had his wiener bitten off by a shark? Sometimes political news or a television miniseries based on a love story is also enough to make you laugh so hard that you even surprise yourself. But what I want to talk about has nothing to do with any of this.
As for my sister, any event happening in the world at the time was enough to arouse her laughter: a stranger who took an extra glance as he passed her on the street, an adult who asked her how old she was or where she went to school, the poster of a pop idol hanging up on a huge bulletin board, a light breeze from out of nowhere that lifted the edge of her blouse, or the extremely corny music that you often hear in an elevator or restaurant. Who knows what experiences she was reminded of by these insignificant events, but somehow she would always find a way to laugh about them. For the two years she wore braces and the few months after she had them removed, she would laugh with her lips closed or conceal her giggles behind her hands; afterward she would still laugh, except then her teeth were exposed.
I always felt that her laughter was mysterious, filled with an element of bashfulness and insecurity; you could even say that laughter was, for her, a kind of fragile weapon. By then it had been quite some time since Dad had brought up Freud. He had also left behind The Book of Changes, Lao Tzu, and the miracles of acupuncture, all of which he wouldn’t shut up about for quite some time, in order to embark on what would be a fairly extensive journey through cartography. He dug up and collected massive quantities of maps of different types, sizes, scales, regions, uses, and versions, and he demanded that the whole family join him in his delirious fantasy of a magnificent voyage. One evening in the living room, he unveiled what was said to be an extremely rare and precious map of the New Guinea Island territories. That was the first time that my sister and I (probably my mother as well) learned that upon this planet there existed such a thing as Dobuans. My father provided quite an explanation of the customs, habits, and intricacies of life for the Dobuan people. But all I remember is that when he got to the part about the Dobuans’ marriage practices, Mom’s face suddenly lost its color. One of the details of marriage for the Dobuan people is that if the husband dies or the couple divorces, the children are not only forbidden to consume any food produced in the father’s village but also prohibited from even setting foot in the father’s village again. If the mother dies, the same rule applies. When Mom heard this part she quietly sighed and stood up. Slapping her hips, which had already begun to grow plump, she lowered her head and walked toward the kitchen. I heard her opening the refrigerator and frantically gulping down a glass of distilled water. My kid sister suddenly burst out laughing. Covering her mouth, she laughed so hard that she keeled over. Although she tried to hold it in, from the space between her teeth she blurted out, “It is really strange. What is he going on about this stuff for?”
From that day onward, I began to pay attention to laughter and the unhappiness that it so often marks.
Unhappy laughter and other related behavior was the determining factor in my discovery that my kid sister was gradually changing. Unhappy yet not necessarily sad or painful; to say sad or painful would be going overboard, for although young girls like my sister are already willing to take on the burdens of life, they do not necessarily have the strength to do so. And so laughter becomes a key that they can use to search for all of the complications, contradictions, and conflicts in life. They laugh, and during the brief moment when people see that smiling face, they always mistake the laughter for a sign of happiness; but that split second of laughter is actually used to ponder the meaning of what lies outside the realm of happiness.
Just like always, my sister was using that awkward smile of hers to confront an awkward situation; I made the acquaintance of Little Chess at some roller-skating rink or disco (anyway, it was one of those places with a revolving mirror ball and laser lights). The line I used to pick up Little Chess was quite simple: “Your smile is just like my little sister’s.” God only knows what girl doesn’t have a smile like my sister’s.
Little Chess really wasn’t completely indifferent to me mentioning my kid sister—even though I never felt I went as far as she complained, “all day talking about my sister this, my sister that.” One day, without giving a second thought to her senile grandfather and his housekeeper, who were both right downstairs, or to the fact that the door wasn’t even locked, she screamed, “Your sister, your sister! Why don’t you go fuck your sister!” She buttoned up her shirt, hopped off the bed, and turned the doorknob, leaving my naked, exposed body to blankly face a long hallway. From the veranda window on the right side of the hall, a cool mountain draft slithered in. Before the empty room on the left stood a dark and lustrous wooden door. Out of nowhere, I had the illusion that the whole world was watching me. However, I didn’t cover myself up or try to hide; instead, I stood up, placed my hands on my hips, and heaved a deep sigh. Once again, my girlfriend Little Chess yelled out, “Go fuck your sister!”
How old was my sister that year, twelve or fourteen? As my naked body welcomed the cool damp breeze off Yangming Mountain that bore a hint of sweetness, I wondered what my kid sister was doing. If she had the ability to travel through space and see me standing there like that, what would her reaction be? Laughter? You bet, she would definitely laugh.
That day, Little Chess and I screwed like mad—we kept at it until the next morning when, on the brink of exhaustion, she began to sadly cry. Her lips repeatedly mumbled, “You can’t love your sister, you just can’t fall in love with your sister!” She said it a hundred times, maybe a thousand, or then again perhaps even more, and then we both fell into a deep slumber. After we woke up I almost told her about my theory of how “jealousy is the best way to spice up any relationship,” but I stopped myself. That was because I didn’t want her to know too much about my own sexual awakening. At the time I was still young (although even today, all these years later, I have yet to grow old), but well before I had begun to grow up I had already realized just how difficult it was to extricate oneself from selfish sexual desire to control and possess a single woman. I didn’t want those chicks I dated to learn even a little bit of the methodology involved in the self-examination of the origins of sexual desire. Once they discover that their infatuation with some male’s body is a possible result of their own intellectual fragility, they will become cold and distant. So let them be jealous, let them go crazy, let them be even more unhappy than unhappy. Take advantage of that moment when all they have is that awkward smile to confront an awkward situation to terminate their pondering. Let them fall into a deep, heavy sleep.
Could this be my sole desire after having been left with but a shell of mortal flesh? Without you even realizing it, Little Chess and those other chicks will awaken and flash you a winsome smile. In the daylight that followed that long, wild, passionate night, I opened my eyes to see her smiling; she didn’t look anything like my little sister. Little Chess continued to button up her shirt—she’d button it and unbutton it, unbutton it and button it back up—and she told me, “One day I will leave you and you will never even know why.”
When was it that my sister’s smile began to have that enchantingly sweet power? Perhaps I will never know. The autumn I enlisted in the military, my sister was already a sophomore art student at a technical high school. She was obsessed with aerobics and health food, she had begun to drink a bit of alcohol and she carried a lighter and pack of cigarettes around wherever she went. She came to visit me where I was stationed and we sat in the shade under an enormous drooping fig tree. She told me that she had begun to study sculpture, she had met a boyfriend, Dad finally admitted the secret affair he had been having with a woman artist for more than twelve years, and Mom had abandoned the hopeless diet plan she had stuck to for the last few years. And then my sister shook her head, exposing that winsome smile. “You men are despicable,” she said.
That day, besides reporting on the latest family gossip, she also brought up a young female teacher named Xu Hua. It was this teacher who once lent my sister more than a few books on feminism that not only opened her eyes to the world, but also awakened my sister’s “other self,” which had been sound asleep within her body. That “self” told my sister (my sister later told me): Man’s invention of the multitude of differing mythologies is a result of their jealousy of their fathers having possession of their mothers. In these myths, the hero slays an evildoer or monster and saves the kingdom. The saved kingdom is also another symbol for a kind of father. After the hero rescues the kingdom, the readers (naturally that includes the inventors of these myths) feel that they have repaid the debt owed to their fathers for raising them. Thus with their consciences perfectly clear and their actions justified, they sever all relations with their fathers. The other meaning of ending relations with their fathers is that they can feel justified when, on a spiritual level, they possess their mothers.
I told her, “That is Freud’s stale and rotten tune from eighty years ago.”
“And eighty years later, men are still turning the same stale and rotten tricks,” she said. “Men are really despicable! Their whole lives they have to play around with a whole bunch of women just because they can’t screw their own mother.”
“And what about your boyfriend? Is he despicable too?”
“Of course,” my sister laughingly replied. During the remaining time in the day’s visiting hours, my sister helped me brush up on several aspects of Freudian theory that I had come in contact with during college and graduate school. The main point of our discussion didn’t go much further than how the primary characters in male-centric hero stories make use of religious, political, and national disputes to create war, and through these wars they reinforce the heroic status of the male. This status enslaves not only the evil and inferior defeated males but also all women. As for her boyfriend, she just pointed out, “Unlike men, who never want to let women know anything, I let him know he is despicable. Moreover, I let him know that I know he is despicable.”
All I knew, on the other hand, was that my time for receiving visitors had been ruined. For the majority of the time, I listened with broken attention to those names and terminology that seemed at once so close and yet so far away, and at the appropriate times I nodded my head or mumbled an “uh-huh” to let her know I was listening. Actually, another part of me was thinking of Mom, Dad, Grandma, and Grandpa the whole time.
I never had the ability to go head-to-head with Freud on anything. I’ve had a prejudice against him ever since Dad took my kid sister as a specimen for observation, imprinting on me the old devil’s theories on the anal and oral periods. Any guy with a name as strange as Freud (Folluoyide) can’t be a very respectable character. After that, whenever my parents’ discussions or even arguments about the Electra and Oedipus complexes unexpectedly made their way into my ears, it was like a permanent brand. For a long, long time I was living in constant fear that hidden somewhere in my body was a strange monster. At any time this beast could tear open my flesh, jump out, swallow my father alive, and rape my mother. And it would do this over and over again. Each time my parents appeared in my field of vision, it was as if that strange beast appeared for a split second. The question is not whether or not the beast actually exists, but rather whether or not you know it exists.
This kind of brainwashing can leave you unable to make judgments; it can lead you to suspect your own father as the sole reason you have the desire to possess your own mother. For twelve years, my father surreptitiously screwed a woman artist, and when I started to hate him because of this, was it really because I myself wanted to have my mother? If I were to put my hatred aside for a moment and think of things from his perspective, just what was it that possessed him to torture my mother like that? Was it also the result of an Oedipal chain reaction? The reason for my inability to answer these questions was not my rejection of Freud, but rather that I never understood my father, mother, or anyone else. Now then, could my lack of understanding also be a result of the strange beast sent by Freud that is hidden in my body? The night after my sister came to visit, I dreamed of her riding on a statue of a strange monster. She smoked with a posture that was quite odd, puffing broken, misty clouds of smoke into the air. Then I realized that she was actually straddling me. What were we doing? Don’t ask—I don’t believe that I could have such a dream. But my sister indeed said,“Let’s go!” Just as the distant wake-up call was pressing near, from within the mosquito net I murmured, “Actually, you can fall in love with your sister.”
Is a man just in the state of regaining consciousness willing to admit or confess that he has sexual desire for a blood relative? I unhappily pondered the question. Even though there was no one around, just thinking of that fragmented dream and the sentence that I muttered while still half-asleep was enough to make me shake all over. It was as if I were attempting to shake off some evil spirit that was attached to my body. My facial features squeezed together for a second as if I had been electrocuted. Afterward, this expression scattered and dissolved; all that was left of my grimace were the two slightly upturned edges of the mouth. It looked like a smile, the smile of my sister, which disappeared so very long ago.
