During the autumn six months before my sister was born I came down with pneumonia. I was forced to spend twenty-four hours a day locked up in my grandparents’ dingy room in that run-down juancun with a never-ending high fever. In my half-comatose condition, I often had the delusion that I was a tiny ant forced to carry a cotton blanket as thick and heavy as a bed down a long corridor. The floor of the hallway was exactly like the ceiling in the juancun, made up of three-square-foot plates with yellow water stains. Carrying that blanket, I had been crawling for God knows how long when a woman came over. She removed the cumbersome burden from my back, but just as I was enjoying the happiness of freedom from the blanket, she stuck out her index finger, snatched me up, and popped me into her mouth. I never felt that this scene was a dream—the same dream cannot recur every single day. Yet my cotton blanket, the long corridor composed of ceiling panels, that woman, and I would tangle almost every day. Each time Dr. Zhong (who I later learned was an unlicensed veterinarian) examined me, I knew that after he declared my temperature above 101.3 and I had my shots and went home and had my medicine and Grandma tucked me in, it would be time to return to my life as an ant.
In all probability, my grandparents had been hiding the severity of my illness from the beginning. When they occasionally telephoned my parents, I would hear them say that I had bronchitis and that Dr. Zhong was a doctor sent by God who could work miracles. Dr. Zhong did indeed believe in God—he also had cured my father’s case of childhood dysentery—thus I had no choice but to accept my fate as a feverish ant. Amid the misery of sickness I did not, however, abandon my search for entertainment. For example, when I was awake I would look for the way to the side street medical clinic in the images that appeared on the television screen and in the newspapers and magazines… searching for traces of the woman who gulped me down with one bite.
Dr. Zhong’s wife was a beautiful and reserved Japanese woman. She had several daughters, all of whom looked almost exactly like her; each had almond-white skin, large wide eyes, long eyelashes, and delicate fingers that they used to wrap up the prescriptions. These features were enough to make the eight-year-old me want to take one of these lovely daughters home to be my wife—the only problem was, I had to first figure out how many of them there were and which one was which.
After I had fully recovered from my bout with pneumonia, I went back home. Upon arrival I found that I now had a kid sister. From that point on, I almost never again saw that woman who swallowed me up in one gulp. I also slowly began to forget about the medicine posters, that long wooden chair, and the needles of the clinic. When Grandma brought me the message that “Dr. Zhong’s daughters asked how the little handsome man in the family was feeling. You little devil, the women really love you,” I couldn’t even remember anything about Dr. Zhong or his daughters.
Only several years later, when my kid sister began to ask me, “When was the first time you had feelings for a woman?” did I slowly recall some of those incidents from the past and tell my sister about my days of illness at the run-down juancun. I concluded that the first woman I had “feelings” for was the giant woman with the blurry face who gulped me down—my feeling at that time was the most extreme terror. My little sister continued her line of questioning: “What I mean is a real woman.” And so I answered with, “A couple of girls who used to wrap up medicine.”
Were they real women? Are those people who appear once during a certain time in your life, later disappear, and are finally forgotten (perhaps you will later remember them), or the people who forget you—are they real? My sister said they didn’t count. I think the reason my kid sister continued to pester me was that she already had in mind what she wanted to hear. “Are you telling me that Little Chess isn’t the one?” she asked, her eyes blazing at me.
Actually, Little Chess once used the exact same question to grill me. Every chick in this world has asked this of her father, big brother, or boyfriend—I’m so sure about this that I’m willing to bet. They always start by asking the roundabout question, “When was the first time you had feelings for a woman?” If you diligently rack your brains searching through the past, it isn’t that difficult to find some hazy scene from your childhood that makes you blush—but the interrogator instantly declares, “That doesn’t count.”
Little Chess was playing with a fish bone when she told me in one breath that neither the woman who swallowed me whole nor Dr. Zhong’s daughters counted. Then she threw away the fish bone, turned over, and pushed me to the floor. She ruthlessly shoved her breast into my mouth and made known her instructions: “Let me tell you, only I count! Got it?” This girl with whom I had my first sexual experience led me to the hazy understanding that chicks will always inextricably combine love with the concepts of the first time, the only one, and forever; moreover, these concepts all imply an extreme exclusiveness.
After I began to write, I never once touched the topic of love. But every editor from papers, magazines, and book publishers that I came in contact with invariably encouraged me. “What do you think? How about an essay on feelings?” they suggested. What they meant by so-called “feelings” was love, because that is what today’s readers are interested in. If, however, they hire an author to write specifically on love, it comes off a bit cheap and superficial, so they must attack the matter through innuendo, asking you to “talk about feelings.”
And then I would proceed to think about the multitude of women with whom I “talked about feelings,” as well as Brave Tree Lü. It is possible that my middle-school classmate Brave Tree Lü is currently doing almost anything to scrape by. He was a salesman, an engineer for a television program, a substitute elementary-school teacher, even a cab driver for a while, and then he eventually became the assembly advisor to one of the members of the Legislative Yuan. When I was fourteen years old he taught me how to whack my pistol and told me that virgins will squeeze you to death between their legs. He also entrusted me with the secret method of how to make your penis larger: take some celery, one apple, a spoonful of honey, and one raw egg, mix them together in a blender, and drink up. What happens after you drink it?
“After you drink up, you’ll feel so damn good you’ll be in ecstasy!” said Brave Tree Lü. “She’ll be in ecstasy too!” he added, and then pointed to my crotch, instructing me: “If you can make this strong, in the future you won’t have any troubles in the love department.” On top of that, he gave me another peculiar prescription: eat a whole silver carp cooked in garlic two hours before you do it, and the girl will love you for the rest of her life.
As for the secret recipe of celery, apple, honey, and raw egg, I needn’t go into too much detail; in short, after two or three glasses I started to get an upset stomach. My diarrhea was so bad that it was as if the world were engulfed in a total darkness; life had lost its glimmer. As I was on the brink of total collapse, I promised myself that I would never fall in love, love presumably being an emotion imbued with pain and suffering.
After my sister had her braces removed, she became quite a stunning young girl; she had a set of legs that were slender and shapely, a tiny little waist, and breasts that were firm and round. She was going into middle school and I was a junior in college when Little Chess became one of our topics of conversation. Those conversations gave me the opportunity to ask myself: Are you truly in love? My kid sister seemed much more eager to learn about the array of events and emotions associated with love than I was. She would endlessly repeat the same questions: “Do you love her or not?” “Do you think about her?” “In what ways do you think of her?” Sometimes I would spit out some answer just to end the matter, but other times I would fall into a solemn, confused daze. (That’s because these rotten old questions can only lead to rotten old answers, and I refused to believe that I had truly become rotten and old.) The worst was one day when my sister asked me if Little Chess and I “did it.” I instantly replied, “How could we?” as if doing it would defile my love.
In actuality, how could we not do it? The Saturday afternoon Little Chess said she wanted to take me up to her granddad’s mountain retreat, I knew that the time had come. Her grandfather was a retired general with a touch of senility. Every spring and autumn, just as the seasons were changing, he would use his military telescope to scan the activities of the birds in the mountains, and from time to time he would issue tactical orders to be followed by the old housekeeper who took care of him.
The day Little Chess brought me up there, the old housekeeper asked us what we wanted to eat. Little Chess said anything was fine. I asked if there was any silver carp cooked in garlic. The housekeeper said they had some grass carp, how about grass carp? I said grass carp would be okay. Afterward I ate a grass carp reeking with an earthen stench and even though I got a fish bone stuck in my throat I had to continually praise the housekeeper’s cooking. The housekeeper said, “No, no, it’s really not that good,” and then she told me that I could sleep upstairs in the room facing west. An hour later Little Chess emerged from her downstairs room, which faced south, and tiptoed upstairs. She softly pushed open the door to my room and called out my name. We quickly undressed each other and, under the cover of darkness, did it.
That is one activity that can make you feel completely free and liberated. I had heard this from Brave Tree Lü, and read about it in some foreign novel with a handsome man and beautiful woman on the cover, but I am completely at a loss to describe just what it is. All I know is that the words other people use don’t even come close. Just as we were at that crucial moment that is most difficult to describe, I suddenly coughed, spitting up that fish bone into Little Chess’s face. A moment later Little Chess turned on the bedside lamp and began to inquire into everything related to such concepts as the first time, the only one, and forever—this went on until just before dawn, when the general issued his senile order for all fronts to begin their assault.
A few months later, during a tangled street fight with ticket scalpers outside the movie theater, I accidentally kicked Little Chess in the back of the head. Wearing a neck brace, she came to tell me that she could not love an advocate of violence. With that, she handed me a package; I didn’t have to look to know what was inside. It was a framed picture, a photo taken just after I had been promoted from the beginner level in Tae Kwon Do class. Besides this were a few letters, two books of poetry, and a box of worthless jewelry. As she turned to leave, I thought I was finished! That was because I didn’t feel even the slightest hint of sadness. When I confessed this to my sister, she was in complete disbelief. “You had to feel something,” she said. Okay, I did have a feeling. I truly felt that Little Chess’s neck looked quite long in that neck brace, longer than you can even imagine.
Subsequent to that, I went out with over a dozen other chicks, and each time, my kid sister would hit me with the same few questions. One of the required questions was: “Did you and her do it?” I always said no; she always said she didn’t believe me. This way at least she didn’t have an opportunity to get into the nitty-gritty, and I never took the time to ponder why I felt it necessary to hide this true and natural act from her.
During May of last year, after I had completed my military service and published my first collection of short stories, I was awarded a national art and literature award, which included a hefty monetary prize. The day I received the award I took my kid sister out to a restaurant renowned for its Jiangsu and Zhejiang cuisine. After drinking two glasses of beer and smoking one of my cigarettes, she told me, “I’m pregnant.”
She wasn’t willing to tell me the details, including who the father was, how it happened, what was the other party’s response, or what she planned to do.
“You haven’t even graduated from high school.…”
As I got to this point, she raised her head and looked me straight in the eye as if I were in the midst of saying the most rotten and despicable sentence in the world. I shut my mouth and began to meditate on the mess that constituted my own so-called love life.
I referred to them as “chicks,” my “babes,” or my “old ladies,” and deep down, I meant what I said. As I met them, I used my intuition to judge if I could get them into bed or not. Then I got to know them a bit better, just enough to figure out approximately how long it would take to get them to do you-know-what. Actually, most of them were pretty close to what I had imagined, and a few times I had them figured out so well that when we did it there wasn’t even a bit of excitement. Afterward I would just have to patiently wait until each of our bodies wore out that feeling of excitement and novelty. It was that simple. That’s me: a simple guy. Moreover, I always seemed to run into girlfriends who also looked at things quite simply.
Sitting in that clamorous restaurant, I would from time to time glance over at my kid sister (for most of the time she was grinning with her lips closed while rearranging the empty beer mugs on the table, which were dripping with the remnants of foam), and then look over at the patrons at the next table. Most of them were old-timers—the men were bald and the women were fat. Their voices bore thick accents as they went on with their old-fogey greetings and gossip. Their conversation was helpless in stirring up any recollection of their waning bodies or the lost excitement of their mundane lives.
If at that moment my sister had asked me what I was thinking, I wouldn’t have hesitated for a second to tell her. I would have told her that the reason I had always concealed the fact that I really did do it with all those girls was because for me sex was too simple, too easy, too commonplace. It was like nothing. But I could not accept the fact that I was a completely uncomplicated person who faced no difficulties, was not in the least bit serious, and worried about nothing. I was unwilling to ‘fess up about my sexual experience, not because I was afraid it would defile my love but because I didn’t even have anything to defile in the first place. Although this is what I was thinking, what I finally blurted out had nothing to do with me, but my sister: “Whatever you do, don’t mistake this for love.”
Just as before, my sister continued to move the mugs around; she barely paid any attention to me. After a few minutes—perhaps it was a bit longer—she finally said, “Do you think it’s possible I would have a kid as screwed up as me?”
All of my ex-girlfriends had said similar things to me. Pressing on top of me at her granddad’s retreat on Yangming Mountain, Little Chess, right after telling me that only she counted as “the first woman whom I had feelings for,” heaved a deep sigh and said, “But I’m so afraid of one day having a child. If I have one, do you think the kid will be as screwed up as you?”
“As screwed up as me?” I asked.
“No, I’m talking about me.” Little Chess turned, lying on the side of the bed facing the window. The shadow of my head cast by the bedside lamp projected onto Little Chess’s face. This made her appear much darker, and only the beads of sweat on her face glimmered in the light. “I don’t want my child to be like me,” she said. “It’s too dreadful!”
From that point on, every time we did it, she would babble on like that for a while. Just like the prayer that my grandparents offered before every meal, this was a kind of orthodox ritual. Each aspect of the whole affair, from our dinner with the senile old general to her getting dressed and sneaking back downstairs to her room; every step, every move, even every thought was like a routine ceremony. We tried to spice things up as much as we could—we’d change rooms, turn on a different light, change our clothing, or switch positions. We would try to change everything we could, but we couldn’t change our bodies. At the same time we were desperately trying to change everything around us, we discovered a stagnant feeling hidden within our unchangeable bodies. That feeling was terror. We were both terrified that we would too easily become sick of our partner’s shell of flesh, and that our partner would become sick of ours.
Growing weary of someone and having someone grow weary of you, fear of growing weary and fear of being the object of weariness; it is the difference between the movers and the shakers and those who are moved and shaken. We were terrified to move but also afraid to be shaken. This cycle also became a part of our standard ritual. When the time came that we couldn’t actively change anything else, we had no choice but to search for new bodies to be with.
You might ask, “Are these different bodies really all that different?” Actually, that is pretty much the same question my friend Brave Tree Lü posed. I once took his cab, and, recognizing me in the rearview mirror, he shouted out and stopped the car. He turned around and we began to catch up on old times. He said that a long time ago he had heard that I had become a famous writer, and he felt proud that he knew me. Afterward, he kept repeating that he had accomplished nothing and was filled with regret. However, after many years of wandering, making a living by all kinds of odd jobs, he had made friends with people from all walks of life and taken in a lot of life’s lessons. This was much more useful than studying for any kind of degree. For example, he told me there was a member of the Legislative Yuan who was just getting ready to hire him as an assistant, and he said if in the future he took the road to politics, who knew where that might lead him. Finally he asked if I was married. I shook my head no. He instantly smiled. “With your background, you’ve probably got more chicks than you can handle. Each piece of ass is different, ain’t that right?”
When my sister, fear written all over her face, asked me if she would have a kid as screwed up as her, I was instantly reminded of a whole series of women, all with completely different features. Some of these chicks were tall, some were short, some were fat and greasy while others were thin and bony, some of them had a faint mustache above their upper lip, some of them always had cuts on their legs from shaving, others constantly had the fragrance of malt sugar candy on their breath, some of them would often have cold sweat dripping down their sides from their armpits. It is as if these material differences are the only fragmentary memories of them I have left. Supposing I were willing to take some time to diligently recollect, I could take the special characteristics of those bodies and match them up with their owners with 100 percent accuracy. But I would prefer to think of them all as having at least one intrinsic characteristic in common with my sister—none of them wanted to have a child who was like them.
“Do you think you’ll ever want a child that resembles you?” my sister went on to ask.
“Like me?” I asked, shuddering.
And then I thought back to when I was still a child. Holding my hand, Grandma walked me to Dr. Zhong’s clinic in the juancun alley to have my shots. With the thermometer in my mouth, I stood on that long wooden chair staring at poster after poster of beautiful women dressed in kimonos in the medicine advertisements. I heard the voice of Dr. Zhong consoling my sobbing grandmother, and a moment later I pulled the thermometer out of my mouth, looked around, and quickly planted a kiss on the lips of one of those beautiful poster girls.
Eighteen years later, I shook my head and went on to answer my sister’s question. “If he’s like me, he’ll never grow up.”
If I had died during the time I was a tiny feverish ant, I probably never would have become a guy who only knew how to carry out redundant ceremonies of the flesh. Or maybe a part of me really did perish in the flames of my high fever, and the part left only knew how to seek out shells of flesh of the same nature as my own—shells of flesh that don’t even like themselves.
