I used to know this chick who later emigrated with her whole family to Canada. And from that faraway place, which I can’t hope to set foot on even in my next life, she wrote me saying, “The past is like mist, I cannot bear to look back.” Not long after that, her name appeared in the newspaper, under a headline that read: YOUNG OVERSEAS CHINESE STUDENT UNABLE TO WITHSTAND PRESSURE COMMITS SUICIDE. I always held on to that article, and from time to time, I’d take it out and read it together with the letter she had sent me. Once while I was in the middle of reading them, my grandparents came over. I knew that they had come to discuss a way to prevent the imminent divorce of my parents. This was a pretty boring subject for me so I didn’t bother to go out and greet them. But Grandpa, being truly bored to death, came barging into my room and knocked me on the head with one of Grandma’s stuffed buns. I don’t know if it was that my head was too hard or the stuffed bun was too soft, but the whole thing fell apart. The soup and stuffing inside all spilled out, spraying all over my desk and ruining that chick’s letter, my newspaper cutout, and my homework notebook. I cursed Grandpa: “Why don’t you just drop dead!” That day the four adults in the house seemingly didn’t mention a word about the divorce, they just took turns offering both single and cooperative lectures on how the older I got the more rotten I became—I guess you could say I saved my parents’ marriage that day. But when I yelled at Grandpa, it wasn’t because I suddenly got angry; actually I was pondering how a young child, alive and kicking one minute, could suddenly die with “the past is like mist, I cannot bear to look back.” All the while, those people who look like they have already lived for a long, long time are not only fine and dandy, but seem as if they’ll just keep ticking on for an eternity. The longer they live, the more things about the past they have to tell you.
Take Grandpa for instance—each time Mom calls Dad a worthless wretch, or Dad says Mom is too overbearing, his response is always: “Let me tell you a little story from the past for you to think about.”
Then Grandpa usually goes on to recount how during the Anti-Japanese War he traveled from one province to another searching for Grandma. At the same time, Grandma was also running from province to province in search of Grandpa. Searching all over, the two of them left their tracks over more than half of mainland China, during which time they witnessed almost every strange person and oddity that you can think of. Grandpa said he once saw a child with three legs—some adults who charged twenty cents for a peek had put him on display. Grandpa went once on his own and went a second time with Grandma. Grandma sat beside him nodding. “It’s true.” It’s bearable to hear this kind of story from the past once, but after you hear it more than twice it gets really irritating. Even more annoying was that if I happened to doze off while sitting beside him listening, they’d even wake me up. Moreover, just what did this kind of a story have to do with Dad being a worthless wretch or Mom being an overbearing tyrant? But you know, stories from the past are all the same—only the storyteller himself feels that the story really has some kind of connection with the present.
But I’m not the kind of person to judge a book by its cover. I know the importance of the past; back when I wanted to get in that chick’s pants, I pretended to want to know all about her past. I would ask her things like where she went to elementary school, what cool comic books she had read lately, and whether or not she had any little pets. I probably wanted to tell her about my past as well. But what a shame, I guess I never told her all that much; nor do I remember just what I did tell her. After she died so mysteriously, I couldn’t imagine another person who could entice me enough to want to know about their past, or inspire me enough to talk about my own past. I just wrapped up that newspaper article, her letter, my notebook, and what was left of that stuffed bun in an old newspaper and threw the whole thing into the garbage can. I figured this was what she meant by “the past is like mist, I cannot bear to look back”!
When Annie asked me to talk about myself—honestly speaking, I drew a complete blank, I couldn’t think of a thing. I might as well have been a blow-up dummy.
First off, I didn’t know if I should talk about important stuff or trivial things. For example, I’d been dying to tell anybody who would listen that I wasn’t the one who burned the geography exams. And even though I knew who did it, I couldn’t reveal their name. For important events, if you can’t give the whole story, it’s better just to keep your mouth shut. Another important event was the disappearance of my father, but I had no idea what had actually happened, so what was there to talk about? If I think again, perhaps Mom and Dad’s divorce was a bit important; then again everybody on the block was getting a divorce, plus the details were no more interesting than the latest soap opera. Each time you think of something, you feel embarrassed to talk about it.
Besides that, there were those things that appeared of the least importance. For example, I studied Tae Kwon Do but as soon as I earned my fourth stripe I broke my big toe doing a side kick and gave it up. Or the fact that I had more than forty dinosaur models—buying them almost put my family in the poorhouse—but when I finally looked them up in a dinosaur book, I discovered that more than twenty of them were dinosaurs that never existed on this planet. Or that ever since I was little, I was trained by my mother to scrub 150 strokes each time I brushed my teeth. If I didn’t get in the full 150 strokes or got halfway through and then lost count, it was really a nightmare and I’d have to start over. So I’d often get pissed and wouldn’t brush at all. Is this insignificant enough for you? I just didn’t know what to say that would be interesting. And so I just zoned out like a blow-up dummy.
“If you don’t want to say anything it’s okay,” Annie said as she gazed at me.
That was one strange situation—or at least it was a situation I had never run into before. When someone stares at you like that, waiting for you to say something, for a while you suspect that she wants to find something out in order to take some kind of action against you. For instance, I was thinking: if I tell her where I live, give her my phone number, and then tell her what happened at school, perhaps she would contact my parents or somebody else to come and take me away. But this only flashed through my mind for a split second. After Annie said, “If you don’t want to say anything it’s okay,” she took off her elastic hairband, spun it around her index finger, and began to stare blankly like a blow-up dummy.
I could sense that she was also thinking about some things from her past, and of those, there definitely were a few instances that left her far from happy. And so, staring at her beret, she slightly knitted her brow. After a second her brow eased up, but then it knitted again. From time to time when she would look at me I would instantly look the other way. Then something strange happened.…
From the blinking fluorescent light, from the glass bus window that reflected our shadows, and from the carpet scattered with newspapers, magazines, mineral water bottles, blue jeans, walkie-talkies, cigarette butts, and a pile of other random items, the past came looking for me. These objects seemingly had absolutely no connection with one another, but let me tell you: each came one after another in strict uniform as if they were a well-ordered battalion.
What came to mind first was the time that my mother took me to the supermarket. When we got there, she suddenly remembered that when we left the house she had forgotten to turn off the gas stove, so the water on the stove was still boiling. Mom left me with a young lady giving away free samples of grilled snakehead roe while she rushed home to turn off the gas. She was gone really way too long and I in turn ate really way too much snakehead roe. Finally I found my way to another cart that was giving away free samples of something else. By the time Mom came back and found me, she looked like a ghost. Her face was covered with a combination of tears and smeared black and red makeup; her mouth uttered a never-ending series of ghostlike groans while her long fingernails dug into my flesh. I don’t remember the exact language she used to curse me, but I can still recall her whispering, “Don’t you ever, ever tell your father what happened.”
The time my father took me to Wulai came up second. Before we had left for Wulai, my father had told me there was a cable car there and a place to go bungee-jumping. He told me that if I had enough guts, there was no way he could restrict me from going jumping—for man to experience the feeling of flying was simply too good to pass up. But in the end, while we were halfway through the line to buy a ticket, Dad discovered that a pickpocket had lifted his leather wallet. Not only was I unable to experience the feeling of flying, but I had to accompany Dad on the endless foot march home. On the way home, Dad whispered, “Don’t you dare tell your mother what happened.”
My guess is that Dad also kept Mom in the dark about the third incident. That was when Huang Munan, Xie Caijun, and I took advantage of the time we were supposed to be doing off-campus volunteer work to sneak off and catch a movie. That was the first time I saw a romance flick. As we ran back to campus to get there before the roll call, Huang Munan said that there was no way that female lead was a virgin. Xie Caijun said that in real life the male actor was a homosexual. I said nothing. That is because during the movie my father was sitting two rows in front of us, his left arm caressing some chick with her hair up in a pineapple-style bun.
The fourth event—actually it doesn’t even count as an event, it was just a picture. In the picture, my dad had really long hair; it was just as long as Chow Yun-fat’s when he was younger. His left arm was wrapped around my mother. Mom was wearing a low-cut Western blouse, but because of her super-small breasts it looked like she had put an evening gown with an exposed back on backward. Two lines were written on the other side of the photo: “In this life and the next, always and forever”; then there was Mom’s name written in Dad’s handwriting, and Dad’s name written by Mom.
In the end, however, I didn’t tell Annie any of this. If you were to rank what I eventually told her according to the criteria used above, it would probably only come in seventeenth, eighteenth, or nineteenth. But that’s exactly how recollecting the past goes, like a game of guess-who-the-leader-is. One thing always pops out first, even though it isn’t necessarily the most important one or even the one that occurred first; it just happens to be the first to burst out. As it pops out, it inspires you to talk about it, and then it helps you to connect it with other events from the past. Perhaps the past is the same for everyone, making people feel happy and sad and all kinds of other emotions, but what escapes from your mouth first is always something that your true self can hide behind and never be discovered.
“We’ve got a teacher at our school called Mr. Hippo. He’s got four huge false teeth, you know, just like a hippopotamus. We all call him “River Horse.”* Once while he was at the school gate inspecting our backpacks, he sneezed, sending his false teeth flying into one of my classmates’ knapsack.…”
If I were to think back to how I fell in love with Annie, I would tell you it started the night she listened to me telling stories. That’s because before her, there was never anyone else who made me feel like a true storyteller. But later I realized that compared to Annie’s, my past didn’t mean shit.