The only sculpture that my sister completed and preserved was a metal figure two feet long, a foot wide, and just over a foot tall. Right now it is on my desk before me. Carved in the head of the statue are a few unevenly shaped cavities—I imagine that they are eyes, ears, a nose, and a mouth. The neck is very thin and made up of crisscrossing strands that resemble fibrous roots of a fig tree or the frame of a lantern (you might say it looks like trees in a forest or something that has been partially hollowed out). The shoulder, chest, and waist area is like a long vine of drooping grapes of different sizes. The largest bunch is near the lower abdomen and after that there are two piles shaped like the lock of a handbag, which I named the butt. Both legs are extended horizontally; the left leg is extended straight out to the left while the right leg is bent forward at the knee. These two legs are the sole element of realism in the whole sculpture. It was also only on the basis of the legs that we could identify the work as “a sculpture.” Its name is The Living Me. The day I completed my military service, my sister presented me with this living element of herself. You could say it was a gift.
“Is this bronze sculpture of you?” I asked.
She shook her head: “Part of it is bronze, but only one part. What is inside”—she tapped her finger on the grape-shaped part—“definitely isn’t.”
“What is that part made from?”
“How can I put it?” She began to smile. “Anyway, it’s really complicated, so I forgot.”
Later that day, in a loud, crowded restaurant specializing in Jiangxi and Zhejiang cuisine, she told me that she was pregnant. Her words were constantly being drowned out and interrupted by the resonant voice of the bald guy at the next table. The bald guy was teaching the other guests at his table how to properly sing the line “I’m called Little Fan” in The Fourth Son Visits His Mother with just the right crackling tone.
Grandpa also loves to sing this opera, The Fourth Son Visits His Mother; probably everyone from his generation loves to sing it. In this respect he and my father have absolutely no way of communicating. Once, while I was in the courtyard of the run-down juancun where Grandpa lived, I watched Grandpa and a whole bunch of other grandpas singing The Fourth Son Visits His Mother. I asked my dad who this fourth son was. My father said that it was probably the same fourth son from the Zhenping comic strips, right? Grandpa continued to bow his two-stringed Chinese violin as he twisted his head and yelled at Dad, “That’s a bunch of damn bullshit!” When they got to the end of the next section, Grandpa pointed to the grandpa playing the role of the fourth son and said, “His name is Yang Yanhui, and he was the fourth born so they call him Yang the Fourth. His father and all five or six of his brothers were slaughtered in a battle. Only he escaped to the Kingdom of Fan, where in order to survive he changed his name and took the princess from the Kingdom of Liao as his wife. Many years later, Yang the Fourth still direly missed his long-lost mother, so he secretly left the palace and rode horseback several nights to the border region to see his mother once again.”
I remember that being a tragic tale; Yang the Fourth was a chain-smoker with a crimson nose that resembled a wax apple. He was drinking strong tea and spitting in the small garden. He was a pitiful grandpa.
A few years later, that Yang the Fourth, while on a Taiwan-bound aircraft leaving America, asked the stewardess for two pillows and two blankets, then went to sleep and never woke up. Grandpa took my sister and me to his funeral. At the funeral, people sang the holy verses and gave sermons. Even though I dozed off once or twice, I will never forget one thing: Yang the Fourth laid out in that black metallic casket. The coffin was covered with ivory-colored satin and bursting with fresh flowers; Yang was wearing a slightly wrinkled gray and black Western suit. People who had come to pay their respects crowded around, walking in circles around his casket. Holding my little sister in one arm and grasping his cane in the other, Grandpa walked extremely slowly. I walked much more quickly. I did two laps around the coffin and discovered that the face of the deceased was much redder than that of the average person. I also realized that that crimson nose of his that had always resembled a wax apple had turned a pale white. This experience was my first encounter with the face of death. It enabled me to tell stories.
Spicing things up a bit, I once retold this story to my elementary-school classmates. I told them that Grandpa Yang the Fourth killed himself. Suicide—how very mysterious and mystical.
My classmates grilled me on how I knew it was a suicide. This skepticism, however, couldn’t stop me; I just told them that Grandpa Yang stuffed a suicide note in his pillowcase. The note stated that he would rather die than face the lack of filial piety displayed by his son and daughter-in-law after they emigrated to America. What proved more difficult was explaining the technical details of the suicide. And so I created a 100 percent fictitious ending for Grandpa Yang the Fourth. When he was in mainland China he had had many brothers, but during a battle in the Kingdom of Liao they were all killed, and he was the sole survivor. In order to get by, he changed his name and married a woman from the Kingdom of Liao. Because he was doing underground political work, most of his actions had to be carried out in secret. One example was his study of the “magic art of assassination by will” during a time when the Liao natives were distracted. What is the “magic art of assassination by will”? It is using the power of one’s spirit to make another person kick the bucket. To learn this art you must first learn to meditate; then you must wholeheartedly concentrate on one person, his features, voice, actions, everything. Once you have him perfectly clear in your mind, all you need to do is bite down on your teeth and that faraway person will die of bronchial rupture. The Grandpa Yang in my story used this method to take out every person from the Kingdom of Liao who came too close to him, and in the end he escaped back to Taiwan. But because he used his magic to kill his wife, his son hated him and emigrated to America. From then on, his son never again spoke one word to his father. The story’s conclusion is, of course, on board a plane. Our Grandpa Yang asked the stewardess for two pillows and two blankets. He placed one pillow behind his head, held the other in his arms, and wrapped his entire body in the two blankets (this was to avoid harming other innocent passengers). Grandpa Yang began to reflect upon his past, and the moment he understood his whole life better than he could ever have hoped to, he bit down on his teeth, bringing his life to a close.
Many, many years later, my classmate Huang Anbang still remembered that story. During one of our class reunions he presented each person with his business card (stating that he was the assistant manager of an insurance company), and a retelling of the tale of the “magic art of assassination by will.” He said I was a natural writer who could create stories a person could never forget. Take him, for example: every time he takes a plane, he cannot help but suspect that the character next to him wrapped up in a blanket is in the midst of carrying out a suicide. He stirred up all my old memories of Grandpa Yang, but he had an ulterior motive. Besides praising how moving my stories were, I suspect he was hoping his old classmates would admire him for flying all over the world in 747s.
After that class reunion, with drunken, bleary eyes, I went with a chick whose name was something like Jasmine back to her apartment on the twentieth floor of some luxury high-rise. Her apartment was thick with the mixed scent of air freshener, aromatic oil, essential oil, and perfume. This Jasmine, or whatever her name was, said that she had sat next to me in elementary school. At the time she had burnt brown hair, crooked teeth, and incomparably pathetic grades, yet she claimed to have had a secret crush on me. I don’t remember any of that stuff. All I know is that after she grew up she was beautiful and alluring, probably the mistress of some rich businessman. She didn’t work, yet had an apartment full of namebrand clothing and jewelry as well as several hundred club cards and credit cards. She threw those cards in the air and, as they fell to the ground like scattered snowflakes, she said, “Actually, I lead a very difficult life.” After that she took off all her clothes and draped a soft fur coat, made from what looked like marten, over her body. Standing in the light of the flashing neon sign, which was coming in from the window, she asked me, almost pleading, “Write a story for me, my story, okay? Then I will be able to die in peace.”
Her story is pretty much the same as everyone else in the world’s story. The main character experiences something and afterward is unable to recover or return to the way things were, like Yang the Fourth reuniting with his long-lost mother, or that Jasmine girl attending an elementary-school reunion. These allow the main character to discover that living is but the accumulation of a series of death experiences: we experience a day of life just to realize that we are unable to return to yesterday’s life. When the character realizes this, he feels terribly sad, because the reality of life is precisely the reality of death. Even sadder is the fact that in reality, he or she was never any kind of a main character. They never lived; moreover, they always pass away so insignificantly. And so all that is left is that final wish: “Write a story for me, okay?”
I never took this Jasmine chick’s petty, vulgar story and put it down on paper—because of which, during one of her visits when I was in the military, my sister accused me of being a “literary profiteer.” That is because I took advantage of my name as a writer to bang that Jasmine chick a good couple of times but never fulfilled my promise to write her story. My sister felt my actions were unjust; she said I was even worse than the rich businessman who provided Jasmine with an apartment, a marten fur, and a whole bunch of credit cards. After my sister’s lengthy and voluble condemnation, it was a long time before I was willing to mention my romances to her again, even though I could refute her by saying that sex has its own impetus, objective, and value. But I could not deny that from the beginning, each time I went to that small apartment on the twentieth floor, my objective wasn’t this Jasmine’s pathetic story—it was her fragrantly perfumed body. And so I can’t help but admit that the accusation of being a “profiteer,” in an extremely humorous way, is actually right on the money.
Would my kid sister use the same severe language to criticize that little bastard who disappeared after getting her pregnant? Right now, if I lean a bit forward and reach out my hand, I can touch that statue The Living Me. Even now I still don’t know whether or not my sister was pregnant when she was working on this sculpture. Was she already in love? Or did she already foresee that she would have to experience a death within her? Right now, as I speak, I am using a standard completely out of line with orthodox artistic criteria to read my sister’s sculpture. I think what I read from it is “the meaning of my sister’s life.” Did my sister realize that she was a person with a blurred identity, and is that why she dug out small cavities all over its face? Did my sister feel the suffocating stress of life, and is that why she let the figure have a neck bursting open with holes? Did she feel that the female corporeal body was a string of plump and juicy fruit, a malignant growth that continued to spread, or a combination of both? Is this why she decided to give her sculpture an armless body, lacking the ability to either seize or hug? Then what was the meaning of the pelvis and hips that looked like a closed handbag lock? Could it mean that the organ that gives birth to life is not easily opened? Has the device that deep down contains unlimited maternal potential already been sealed? Then why did she still get pregnant?
The Living Me is a living mystery; the sole part with an explanation is the figure’s legs. The legs are an element of pure realism: in their proportion, contour, skin texture, and lines, they are without doubt a perfect simulation of my sister’s legs. Why is it that this was the only place where my sister substantively and delicately copied a portion of her true self?
“Only when I walk and walk and walk and walk and walk do I know that I am alive,” my sister once told me.
The day she told me that was before I had left the army, and I had just gotten back from Xitou where I had broken up with some chick. When I arrived back in Taipei I got the news that Mom and Dad were getting a divorce. Shoulder to shoulder, my sister and I aimlessly strolled along the city limits—perhaps we were trying to return to a part of our subconscious past? We walked back to the tattered juancun where Grandma and Grandpa lived. Pushing open the always-unlocked courtyard gate, I pointed to the fifty-square-foot red-brick area in the corner of the garden and whispered to my sister, “That is where Grandpa always plays his Chinese violin and sings opera.”
Once Grandpa was deep asleep, Grandma started to play her Mahjong Mate video game. As she hit the buttons to show the tiles and take new ones, she told us all the latest neighborhood gossip; the latest news was always about death. There was always some grandpa who slipped in the bathroom and passed away, or some grandma who, after putting off her final date with lung cancer for many years, finally couldn’t delay the meeting any longer. After she told us about some mother who passed away in a car accident just outside the neighborhood, Grandma turned off her Gameboy and announced that she was cooking noodles for us. She even muttered, “You never know how much time you have left. I’d better eat while I still can!”
Late that night, my sister suddenly asked me, “Did you ever wonder how you will die?”
How could I not? I’m a writer. Are not writers that peculiar breed of animal that spends all its time taking the unpredictability of death (and subsequent resurrection) and putting it down on paper? I delicately slurped a strand of noodle into my mouth, careful not to bite it in two, while I eyed the other half that was still struggling to come to the broth’s surface from beneath the vegetables. Honestly speaking, I hate talking about death over noodles.
“Have you ever imagined that your continued existence will mean death for another?” She used her chopsticks to twist her noodles apart, rendering them into short, stubby pieces that looked like a bunch of insects.
I didn’t answer her question; instead I just warned her not to play with her food. As I continued to stuff my noodles down, my mind started to wander. My thoughts wandered past Grandpa talking in his sleep and the mosquito net, past the fragrant pittosporums that were growing in the garden, past the several rows of closely packed black tiles that covered the roof, and past several blocks to a small apartment on the twentieth floor of some modern high-rise. Probably inside this apartment we would find a woman called something like Jasmine who always feels she has a difficult life. She hopes that someday she will be able to appear in a novel where she can live with more dignity, live more like a main character, and then she can peacefully die. I finished my bowl of noodles, let out a belch, heard my grandfather call out someone’s name, picked up my sister’s bowl of noodles, and began to slurp it down. I thought that perhaps I could have this Jasmine character kill herself in my next novel. I could arrange a noble motive for her suicide in the story.
That’s right. After putting away two bowls of noodles I realized that I had gotten to an age where I could come up with all kinds of excuses to keep on living. At the same time, I could better find a meaning in death, unlike when I was in elementary school and all I knew how to do was tell tall tales of the arts of assassination by will and suicide by will. Perhaps toward the conclusion of the work I could have this Jasmine come upon some sudden enlightening realization. For example, after living a life of pettiness and degradation, having served as mistress for over a dozen men, she realizes that suicide is a challenge directed at the heart of the supreme power. If we use the words of my grandfather, a devout Christian, God bestows life upon us; thus, suicide is a crime no different from showing contempt for or insulting God. In my novel I could designate this Jasmine to usurp this power from the controller of life, God. Her suicide symbolizes her extrication from His power, for suicide is outside the realm of even His control. This Jasmine leaps from a twenty-story building and, after plummeting past several flashing neon signs, lands on the ground—I could even arrange for her to land on the red-brick corner of a courtyard where a crowd of people are singing The Fourth Son Visits His Mother. The noble motive for this suicide is to overturn the sacredness of the root of life.
The day I accompanied my sister to have her abortion, I told her that she wasn’t doing anything wrong; all she was doing was taking away a small child’s right to hate and detest his or her parents, and that was it. I tried to use a dialectical argument to explain to her that existing, surviving, and living out a full life are all of the utmost difficulty and pain. It is precisely because of the misery of life that with life there must also come a hatred for its source. Then I turned to her and told her the whole story about how, before she was born, Dad confined me to the run-down juancun until I recovered from pneumonia. Looking back, I told her, “That was the first time I discovered that I had hatred within me. Moreover, the object of my hatred was Dad—and now I realize that I had every right to hate him!”
“You must have fucking hated me back then,” my sister said as she wiped the tears from the corners of her eyes. She then grabbed my wrist and continued with a forced smile, “I must be hateful. I’ve always been nothing but a despicable wang ba dan, haven’t I?”
I shook my head and asked in reply, “Do you remember you once asked me about someone else dying in order for you to continue living?”
She didn’t remember. It is so easy for her to forget those casual details that later influence others. I’m the same (I had completely forgotten about that story I made up about Grandpa Yang, yet it always haunted at least one person whenever he was on board a plane). Afterward I patted the back of her hand, saying, “What we have been doing from the beginning, and always are doing, is leading to the death of another.”
I don’t just mean Grandpa Yang, that Jasmine girl, and the innumerable number of characters who died in my stories and novels—they are not the only ones. Neither is that real-life fetus that lived in its mother’s womb for only three months. But as long as there are people, their existence will necessarily be a part of a secret order that will result in the ending of other lives. I went on vaguely explaining this to my sister, though it is quite probable that I myself didn’t even believe it. I just wanted to help my sister be rid of the evil guilt associated with destroying a tiny life, which I was afraid would gnaw away at her for the rest of her life.
“Oh, I remember!” My sister’s eyes suddenly lit up. “I asked you that day we were at Grandma’s place. It was because Grandma mentioned some mother who got run over by a car.”
“That’s right,” I said. My sister asked if I knew the reason she had posed that question. I said I didn’t know. My sister said she was thinking about our mother.
Twenty-eight years ago, my mother witnessed a terrible bus accident. Squeezed in the bus were ninety-one children and adults. When the accident happened, my mom was beside the road just a few yards away, taking photographs. For the last twenty-odd years she has always felt that she had something to do with that accident. Not only did she witness death, but something within even drove her to take several dozen photos documenting it. After the incident, she gradually, peacefully, gently, and softly fell apart. During this time she had the illusion several hundred, several thousand times that my sister and I were both dead spirits of the accident victims.
Could this be who we are? The moment the face of death approaches, the ability to tell stories is born. This ability forces the living to repent from deep inside, confess that the existence of life is a kind of reliance on a supreme power. Precisely because of the devoutness and sincerity of our confession, the ladder to religion and God is long surpassed and we have the opportunity to shed our reluctance to part with life. We also only then understand that life is actually the accumulation of a series of death experiences, and it is also only then that we dare own up to the fact that we all have the mysterious and mystical ability to commit suicide.
