Hey—don’t worry, nobody dies and nothing happens.
No Thomas Mann, no Visconti, not even a formal link to the real Venice.
Why do I say “the real Venice”?
Known to us all, the real Venice is a water-bound city in the northeast corner of Italy that happens to be slowly sinking into the sea. A few years back, thanks to a generous literary prize that markedly improved my financial situation, I signed on to a fourteen-day best-of-Europe tour with my aged father and mother, and duly tramped along. I use the word “tramped” rather than “roamed” or “traveled” because, first, in regard to the word “roam,” a fellow writer and her imitators have used it to death,2 and second, I lingered there for one measly day, didn’t even spend the night, and in the four or five hours that remained after subtracting the tedious business of eating, I entrusted my father and mother to the tour guide and, map in hand, took in every bridge, every lane in the city, never resting and not leaving any time to visit a single shop to admire the traditional glassblowing arts of elderly craftsmen; didn’t even surrender to the temptation to sit at one of the sidewalk cafés, each lovelier than the next. I actually forced myself to race through a marketplace teeming with strange flowers and unusual fruits, with women shouting to me to buy their offerings, like a de Sica movie, and I was relieved to learn that St. Mark’s Basilica, which every tourist is obliged to visit, was undergoing one of those renovations that come along every few decades, which allowed me to pass it by with no feelings of unease and, in the process, squeeze out another precious hour.
At dusk, feeling confused and harried, I paced up and down a ferry landing from where the Bridge of Sighs was well within sight, incapable of generating any sympathy for condemned prisoners of an earlier age who had to cross the bridge on their way to the execution ground. Enrapt, I gazed out at the Adriatic, rippling in the dying rays of sunlight, and at the spot where the sky met the water, tiny Lido Island—where the annual Venice Film Festival is held, a sacred place for me, someone who grew up infatuated with master filmmakers—which at that moment sent its light to me from afar. At no other moment on this earth had so little distance separated us, and I dejectedly calculated the time once more, concluding that unless I left the tour altogether or some frenzied confusion broke out, there would not be enough time to get there and back.
And so, shuffling my frustrated feet along, I walked across the Bridge of Sighs like one of those condemned prisoners, without neglecting the practical obligation of buying five cheap plaster imitations of ancient wood carvings as gifts for the editorial girl whose job it was to pressure me for manuscripts.
Would you consider something like that worthy of the term “travel”?
I realize that opting for the word “tramped” to describe my experience might actually be a bit elegant, since I covered most of Venice as if I were on a forced march, just so I could say—to whom, I have no idea—I tramp, therefore I am, something as laughably foolish as the dog piss and cat turds you can find on any street corner.
That, then, is the sum total of my connection to the real Venice.
Does it then follow that there is another Venice?
Yes.
But that is a long story.
And it all begins with my return to Taipei.
Two years before returning, I took the prize money I’d won in a novella contest sponsored by a major newspaper and the paltry few thousand NT in my bank account and went to a spot on the eastern seaboard to live for two years. The place—nope, that’s wrong!—was neither Yanliao, where the reclusive naturalist Meng Dongli lived,3 nor the Yilan town of Zhang Guixing, but a place between the two, a tiny spot on the Northern Rail Line, in a house a friend lent me without charge. During boom times you might call it a summer cottage, but now it was little more than a dilapidated beach house, like all the virtually identical neighboring structures, seldom if ever visited by their owners, the state of disrepair on a par with that of houses gutted in fires or blown apart in explosions.
I was ready to pack up and go home six months after moving in, a betrayal of the vow I’d taken before setting out, which was to live out my life there as a hermit, maybe even marry a mountain girl, and no, I hadn’t run out of money, it wasn’t my old bugaboo, finances, that caused it, nor that I’d reached sudden enlightenment or, even less grandiose, that I was suffering unbearable loneliness, nothing like that … I just didn’t know how to pass the time.
I must have lacked my predecessor Meng Dongli’s philosophy of life and did not possess the plans, the necessary survival skills, or the temperament for living a self-sustaining life in humble surroundings; neither was I invested with the depth of interest of Thoreau when he was observing the ecology of Walden Pond. I didn’t even feel like opening the books or magazines I’d brought along or that my friends constantly sent from Taipei. I just let them pile up. They were no good as pillows or kindling, and my feeling toward them was that, at a time like this, having so many passionate or thoughtful or contentious words around was the act of an animal called imbecile.
As a result, I had too much time on my hands.
Most of the time, I just sat in the doorway all morning, soaking up the sun and laboriously picking the remains of breakfast from my teeth, like a cow chewing her cud, then minutely and gently cleaning my ears, picking my nose, and then moving on to my other orifices and crevices; on more than one occasion I had to stop myself from licking my paws after hallucinating that I was a big, lazy cat…. Sometime before noon the morning express train announced its speedy arrival, the whistle bringing an increasing sense of joy, much like that of bygone residents of little towns who waved and shouted innocently and good-naturedly at the daily train that never deigned to stop at their out-of-the-way spot.
During my last six months there, the magnitude of my frenzy grew increasingly absurd (viewed in retrospect). There were nights when typhoons knocked out the power and, since I couldn’t sleep, I sat by a lit candle and reacted to every strange sound as if a malign ghost or someone who had sneaked into Taiwan from the mainland was coming for me, and as a result I actually wrote a story a là Stephen King. In the tranquil days that followed, I heard that a mountain torrent had swept down, carrying traces of gold, half a mile from where I was staying, at a spot where the river met the sea. Many amateur prospectors (including some from western Taiwan) came, and you can imagine what it was like having hundreds, maybe thousands of people converging on a riverside sandbar normally inhabited only by sandpipers and twisted driftwood, plus the occasional plastic soft-drink bottle thrown from a passing train (it all bore a striking resemblance to mediocre installation art). A true postmodern moment.
But rather than mock the scene, I inserted myself in it, pretending to be obsessed with finding gold while actually spying on these humanoids, who uttered human language, barely resisting the impulse to attack them when they weren’t expecting it. By “attack” I mean jumping onto their backs as they bent over and, gaining the upper hand, quickly wrestling them to the ground, like during winters in primary school, when we’d wrestle each other after class, a foolish but eminently enjoyable way to pass the time while soaking up sun in the hallway.
The gold-digging frenzy lasted about a week. The prospectors took all the twisted driftwood away with them, and I was left with a sandbar deserted but for the sandpipers; so I sat there, as if sketching a still life, and in half a day, wrote a story. That story would be selected as a finalist in a short-story contest, and during the deliberations, Mr. A, a judge who favored it, would call it “a successful satirical allegory on money games in contemporary Taiwan.” Mr. B, who disagreed with him, pointed out that it was cribbed from Nobel laureate Gabriel García Márquez’s magic realism, pointing out that the river in the story was none other than the nameless river, with all its prehistoric boulders, that ran outside the town of Macondo in One Hundred Years of Solitude. Ms. C, another judge, insisted that the great river was not necessarily a real river at all, could in fact be the source of dreams running through people’s lives, a river of faith. Mr. D did not vote for any of the finalists; instead he railed against the Taiwan he’d been away from for a dozen years or so as vulgar and corrupt, and incredibly degenerate. Mr. E, a good friend of mine, found quibbling faults with every story and, if my understanding of him is correct, read only the first and last pages of each; but in the end he voted for my story, which proves that he hadn’t spotted it as one of mine.
The story did not win a prize, but my publisher submitted a collection of my stories, Notes from a Melon Patch, for that year’s annual best fiction award, and it received the Jury Prize (which paid for the trip to Europe with my aged parents); all the judges either expressed or affirmed or admired or yearned for the contemporary significance of my hermitlike coastal stay.
I’m not sure what role this affirmation of my literary accomplishments played in the awarding of the prize, but it certainly delayed my plans to return to Taipei. You know, people started coming all the way from Taipei to see me, including old friends, strangers, college students, newspaper and magazine reporters, environmentalists, as well as a bunch of lunatics who don’t fit into any category. Most of the time I sent them home satisfied by describing for them my daily routine, including the early morning strolls through the watermelon patch; by showing them the spot at the mouth of the river where the gold-prospecting frenzy had taken place; by taking them bird-watching; and, finally, by helping them carry pieces of twisted driftwood they’d collected to the train.
In some respects I’m an old-fashioned person. If someone wants to give me a prize for my lifestyle (as my fellow writer, the German Günter Grass, said, “What they want is gods, or heroes, and what I write about is people”), I cannot immediately or publicly destroy their myth.
Ultimately, I did return to Taipei. For reasons I’ve already given, plus the fact that my younger brothers and sisters had all married and moved away, leaving me the only sibling without a mate or a place of my own, I could find no excuse not to move back in with my aged parents, so we could all look after one another.
In the days that followed, I chose to live a cloistered urban life. Even though the editor of a newspaper literary supplement whose stockholders could not decide whether to pull their money out or put more in and a publishing house with annual sales in the range of a hundred million NT both offered me jobs, I made the easy decision to try my luck as a full-time writer. Undeniably, the fact that my parents, who lived on pensions, made sure I always had a place to call home and didn’t have to worry about going hungry figured significantly, but more important, since quitting my last regular job several years before, I believe that a writer is in the prime of his professional life between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five, and even though it had been really, really hard, I’d managed to reach that point in my life, so how could I hand the essence of my prime years over to someone else and earn a living by working for others?
Do you think I’m superstitious, that I’m spouting nonsense?
There are grounds for my belief. Based upon the results of my own small-scale survey, important works by important writers have, throughout the history of literature, been completed when the authors were between the ages of thirty-five and forty-five; not only that, in the years that followed, whether the writers threw themselves into their work or simply took it easy, the difference in the quality of their writing was minuscule. Take, for example, García Márquez, whose work I was accused of cribbing. His One Hundred Years of Solitude was written when he was thirty-six and thirty-seven years old. After that, I heard that he never rested on his laurels or was self-satisfied; no, he kept writing and, along the way, won the Nobel Prize, and yet, eighteen years later, his novel Love in the Time of Cholera shocked readers, who wondered why his writing hadn’t improved or, more surprising, hadn’t worsened.
Honestly speaking, that’s depressing.
But that, after all, doesn’t happen until after middle age.
The sort of conclusion I normally favor is this: from the time they leave school until they reach the age of thirty-five, the writers are out having a good time, involved in trivial jobs like bookstore clerk, telegraph operator, small local newspaper reporter … from time to time producing immature writing, avoiding the sorts of things that occupy other people of the same age, such as marriage. Americans hang out in Paris or enjoy themselves in the Far East; Europeans trot off to the Soviet Union or Africa; Latin Americans hoof it over Spain; Spanish make their way to Mexico….
Keeping this in mind, are you still surprised to learn that, at an age when most people are hard at work, I just took it easy and had a good time? Of course, compared to the lives of great masters before they became great masters, mine might seem excessively moral and overly cautious. You know, I’m a lot like many creative artists, in that I strongly believe (and put the belief into practice) that moral decadence is often a breeding ground for great literature.
But in any case, that was my attitude when I returned to Taipei.
After being away from my fellow writers for two years, I discovered that half of them were studying Buddhist meditation, while the remainder were in either real estate or the stock market, and in contrast with the complex and diverse motivations of the former, those of the latter were remarkably simple. After making a hundred million or so in the market, one of them, a woman some years older than I, discovered what it was like to live in the lap of luxury and move in new social circles, raw material for a series of novels in which she attacked Taiwanese capitalists for knowing only how to make money, not how to respect culture (like spending hundreds of thousands on an antique from an ancient dynasty, only to learn that it’s a fake; or being ignorant of British high tea—the tea service, the accompanying snacks, and the proper etiquette; or making spectacles of themselves through hideous buying sprees in New York and Paris, yet being unwilling to buy pieds-à-terre in which to spend their holidays so they can enjoy leisurely visits to museums and be entertained by street artists and performers …).
There were, of course, people outside these two categories, writers whose situation and lifestyle were similar to mine, but they were viewed as short-circuited rarities.
I cannot say why those writers did not take up Buddhism or join the money game, but I had parents who were honest public servants of an earlier generation and who had missed out on a previous redistribution of wealth when the economy took off, while I spent two years living in a melon field, and thereby lost a golden opportunity during Taiwan’s gigantic—and most likely last—millionaires’ game; as Marx wrote, “We have nothing to lose but our chains.” In my case, rising up in revolution would have been easier than making some real money, and far more likely to succeed.
Buddhist meditation? That was simple, since I felt I didn’t “have” enough, so far from enough, in fact, that it took a lot for me to give up anything, whether it was money, knowledge, wisdom, or worries.
Who was it who said, “Thank God I’m an atheist”?
And then, slowly but surely, I began to enjoy the fruits of a period of peak production.
In the manner of so many writers, ancient and modern, Chinese and foreign, I was in the habit of writing in coffee shops. I’m not sure why that is the case with other writers, nor do I necessarily approve; one of the reasons I heard involved a woman who complained that there were too many snacking opportunities at home, too soft a bed, and too many fun-loving kids. Others took the high road, saying that being away from home and alone kept them from calling upon their illustrious predecessors, whose works filled their bookshelves, when words simply wouldn’t come. A reason with even more positive significance was that a coffee shop is a microcosm of society at large, and offers the writer a platform from which to observe and eavesdrop on people. There were even some whose sole motivation was to emulate Balzac, who claimed that the muse came to him only after he’d finished off ten or more cups of coffee….
My reason was simplicity itself: I went to a coffee shop and wrote from nine to five each day to spare my aged mother, who had never accepted my career choice, from having to explain to neighbors what it was I did for a living.
During this period I completed several pieces, just as I’d hoped, and the reviews that followed publication of the collection were pretty good; while not all the critics agreed in every respect, they were positive, even going so far as to praise my subject matter as rich and diverse.
To be honest, that upset me, since none of the stories developed or concluded in line with my original conception, and even the so-called messages were lost. Here, in simplest terms, is how my writing style developed and took form: a coffee shop atmosphere dictated the style of each story. Thus I could only blame the fact that I hadn’t found the right coffee shop.
How’s that? you ask.
I’ll give you an example: my revered elder, Meng Dongli, was the inspiration for one of the stories, in which I’d planned to exploit the rare opportunity of spending two years on the coast to describe the soul-searching and thoughts of a committed environmentalist about present-day Taiwan.
That should not have been difficult, at least not from my standpoint and with the materials at my disposal. The problem—can you believe this?—is that I walked into the wrong coffee shop!
I walked into the wrong coffee shop (obviously, I only realized this afterward), although, as coffee shops go, it wasn’t bad, one that appealed to popular tastes, a place where the servers were trained in the Japanese attitude of treating customers like royalty, where the prices were reasonable, and where you got unlimited refills, which meant you could work there all day if you felt like it…. So what was the problem?
At first, it was the endless howls from cell phones, I think. That has pretty much been the case the past couple of years, hasn’t it? It used to be pagers; now it’s mobile phones, whose owners are invariably men who can’t even drink a cup of coffee without trying to look incredibly busy, heavy key rings hanging from their belts, like prison guards. From the start, my protagonist was unwilling to follow my design, choosing instead to leave his hometown and move to Taipei, insisting upon becoming a media correspondent.
And then, well, I don’t want to place all the blame on the coffee shop, but with so many lovely Taipei girls—so enchanting, so fashionable—entering and leaving the place, I just had to find my protagonist a fetching companion, in line with the biblical saying that God would not want him to live alone. My protagonist enthusiastically accepted his companion without a murmur, even made eager advances in an inappropriate place. That’s the sort of person he was, to my surprise, which made it necessary to stop work for two days in order to cool down their ardor and, at the same time, figure out what to do with his female companion, whether or not to let her play an introspective role so as to make him a stronger character; and if not, wouldn’t I be abandoning my original idea for the story?
On the day I got back to work, all they played in the coffee shop all day long were songs by Elvis, who’d been dead nearly fifteen years (most likely the music choice was prompted by the box office success of several recent movies set in the 1960s, and the nostalgic feelings they evoked); as a result, my protagonist dragged my spotty knowledge of the ’60s into the story, like a pile of garbage: he earned a degree from Berkeley, after which he and his girlfriend had sex anywhere they pleased, like a couple of potheads, imagining themselves “flower children” of that earlier time, and, owing to a sense of melancholy over the constant rupture between reality and ideals, he dragged out Karl Popper, Herbert Marcuse, and some other scholars I neither knew well nor particularly liked (which cost me two days, as I leafed through reference books and did some research to seek help from and create a dialogue with them).
Once the piece was finished (that is, when I’d written 11,900 words, in line with the editor’s demand that I was not to exceed that length, so he could publish it in two installments in the literary supplement), he fawningly repeated to college students who were listening to him lecture, “Never, ever trust anyone over thirty!” It would have been easy to describe the students’ reaction, but I laid down my pen and brooded, sensing that I’d been the target of his rebuke, that in his eyes I was a worthless old papa-san.
I could trot out more examples like this. For instance, I later moved to another coffee shop, one done up in standard British style, with floors, chairs, and tables made of heavy coffee-colored sandalwood and covered with Belgian lace tablecloths; wallpaper with an intricate rosebush design; and framed antique botanical drawings that looked as if they’d been cut out of Carl von Linné’s illustrated book of plants. British bone china and handblown, colored, Mediterranean-style drinking glasses were laid out, and in one corner stood a large temperate-zone plant in a green ceramic vase; lush English ivy climbed the outside of the greenhouse windows, capturing the feel of the house where Shakespeare lived….
So elegant, so Victorian a coffee shop that I finished a story without a hitch (the high prices made it necessary to shorten my workday), one that surprised even me. In it I described the homoerotic feelings of two men, with veiled refinement, in stark contrast to the naked descriptions of the same material by my fellow writers. Not long after that a liberal arts student innocently revealed in an interview that my story reminded her of E.M. Forster’s A Room with a View and Maurice. I immediately knew why.
After that I frequented a coffee shop with decades of history, run by an old Shanghai fellow, and I was surprised to find it crowded with immaculately decked-out elderly patrons with fancy canes, who conversed in loud Shanghainese when they weren’t reading a newspaper. After a couple of days, I knew how to say “money” and “me” in Shanghainese, just like a native. But what really caught my attention were their refined table manners and the liberal way they spent money. Some of the regulars treated the place as if it were their own drawing room. Throughout the afternoon they’d entertain guests, not at all like most conservative, frugal retirees.
Slowly I picked up some threads of conversation—at first I didn’t try, feeling it was immoral to eavesdrop on neighboring tables while writing in a coffee shop, and maybe the reason they were nearly shouting was that they were hard of hearing—learning that their children and grandchildren all seemed to be involved in prostitution or gambling, or shady business deals, and that was all they could talk about, no matter how sad or how angry it made them, or whether they were talking to each other or to grandchildren who had returned from America or Canada and could only speak English, or to their middle-aged housekeepers….
Before long, I learned that the unworthy sons and grandsons they spoke about were Lee Teng-hui, James Soong, Hau Po-tsun, and other leading comrades of the KMT, and I wondered what gave these old folks the right to talk about national affairs as if they were family matters and treat senior officials as if they were their own sons and grandsons, until it became clear that they were elderly national representatives who would be forced into retirement at year’s end.
You can probably guess what happened next: my story, the progress of which had been taken out of my hands, was hijacked by those men and became a stage on which they could act out their absurd dramas.
Are you still surprised that critics applauded this story as a successful parody of Pai Hsien-yung’s melancholy classic tales of survivors of a bygone era?4
At this juncture, I must unambiguously state that I have no desire to mock conscientious readers or critics of fiction, but I feel obliged to point out that the coming together of what a reader believes is a well-knit or self-ordained structure is in fact completely open, unknowable, infinitely variable, and filled with risks; most of the time, it doesn’t follow the person’s (author’s) will. Naturally, I still believe there are plenty of authors who can efficiently create works in which their will penetrates every page.
Take us—okay, me—for instance (I prefer not to impinge upon the rights of others to explain the act of creation): when I’m writing, the tiniest factor can enter the process and cause a dramatic shift, such as the need for the hero and heroine of my story to take a trip, and I considered sending them—it seemed perfectly natural to me—to Kending Park or Yilan’s Dongshan River; of course, the potential for development in the latter spot was much greater, but just then, a naïve, idiotic campus song I loathed started playing in the coffee shop, and, regrettably, unleashed a flood of memories of traveling on the highway during my army days in a gypsy bus, my ears assaulted by “Say, girl, why are you crying, is it something unpleasant you’re hiding?” and of the day I took off from work to wander alone in Qijin instead of returning to Taipei, after breaking up with the disconsolate girl, so my hero and heroine did not go to the Dongshan River and definitely did not go to Kending, but went to Qijin instead!
From there I adroitly let them take in the sights of Qijin in roughly 3,000 words, until another challenge surfaced: I didn’t know if they should break up or keep on as they were or maybe even get married (unlike so many of my fellow writers, I take no pleasure in manipulating my characters’ fate).
So I put the story aside for several days, during which I attended a symposium sponsored by a consumer rights group, discussed career planning for teenagers with the host of a certain TV show, took my nephew to the Mucha Zoo to see the butterfly collection and nocturnal animal exhibit, and, most important, read Norwegian Woods, a soso novel by the Japanese writer Murakami Haruki. That night, I couldn’t resist the singular impulse to work at home. My hero and heroine made mad passionate love, her boldness leaving me speechless. You know, they were in such good physical condition they went at it all night long, without letup, and it took more than 2,000 words to describe every detail of their lovemaking, including how their genitals looked and performed.
Just because I’ve volunteered all this information doesn’t mean I’m trying to make the case that creative writing is unscientific, irrational, perhaps even somewhat idiotic, although, in the eyes of some people (Freud, for one), writers and the mentally ill fall into the same category.
I believe that creativity is a riddle far more mysterious and difficult to understand than any mental illness. One moment, the power of creation takes hold of you like a tropical fever; the next, it abandons you for no good reason and vanishes without a trace, refusing to return, even in the face of diligence or anticipation. Look through art yearbooks. How many writers, artists, or dramatists who were considered that year’s most important produced nothing more, not even garbage, over the next two or three years, or, for some, the next few decades?
If we calmly accept this fact, then maybe Jung’s comment won’t be so hard to understand: “Faust was not created by Goethe, Goethe was created by Faust.”
Jung, a proponent of the so-called collective unconscious, considered writers’ invented fantasies to be not a substitute for reality, but a sort of primordial human experience born in antiquity. All other people either avoid it out of fear or protect themselves with the shield of science or the armor of reason, while writers explore it, confront it, convert it into a kind of living experience of reality. He who can transform it into the consciousness of his age can then lead and shape the subconscious spiritual life of all humanity.
No wonder William Blake said, “Every poet takes part in the Devil’s party.”
Are we then to be shocked by Rilke, who suffered great spiritual pain and underwent a period of psychotherapy, when he said, “If my demons were to leave me, I’m afraid my angels too would fly away”?
And as Picasso said, “All creations are, at first, destructions.”
And Degas said, “The feelings of a painter, when he is painting, are the same as a sinner, when he is sinning.”
The comments by the latter two are relatively easy to comprehend, for they both held the view, independently, that all creation implies the imminent destruction of the old order.
While I’m not ashamed to be seen as being on a par with the mentally ill (some people believe that artists and the mentally ill are humanity’s spiritual radar stations, that, because of their elusive primal vitality, they have a keener sense than normal people of the imminent unraveling and collapse of the existing social order), I’m willing to accept psychologist Rollo May’s distinction, when he says that artistic creations are like a river, with primal vitality as its water, and consciousness the banks that guide it in a certain direction. The riverbanks of consciousness help artists direct primal vitality to territories in need of development by using special “forms” (such as the sonnet, seven-character regulated poetry, a lengthy novel, or a quarto canvas); the mentally ill, on the other hand, are “rivers without banks” whose barriers of consciousness have disintegrated. Their primal vitality or subconscious flows irretrievably in all directions and becomes an “unending dream.”
André Gide held a similar view, contending that a masterpiece originates from madness and ends with rationality.
I guess I ought to put it in my own words.
I believe that artists conquer primal vitality and the mentally ill succumb to it. It’s as simple as that, and as merciless.
And so, I cannot avoid being weighed down by an anxiety, a fear that I’m swimming in a river without banks, asleep in an unending dream.
Distracted, I’m forced to confront my sonnet, my quatrain, a piece of canvas, and a lump of potter’s clay….
I spent most of my time searching for a suitable coffee shop, in the grip of a superstitious belief that a coffee shop with a distinctive style would seize and determine the style of my story or my book. You know, in recent years, there’s been an explosion of coffee shops in Taipei’s streets and lanes. To be competitive, they strive to create a unique image, through décor, menu, and background music. I once sat in a little shop, surrounded by rag dolls, while the owner, Mama X, in a white apron, baked gingerbread and almond cookies. I looked down at the milky white pottery cups and plates on a tablecloth with cats and dogs and little bears, trying hard not to imitate a friend and fellow writer who had turned to writing fairy tales in his forties.
Sometimes I feel like I’m in a greenhouse, trapped beneath a pair of lush Sichuan plane trees. A profusion of dry flowers and leaves hangs from the windowless walls, emitting the smell of mummies, and I’m forced to drink an alpine herbal tea recommended by the owner’s daughter, who is made up like a witch, and I discover that what I really wanted to write has already been written by a fellow writer, a woman. Have you read it? Hotly debated last year in literary circles, it’s about a reclusive twenty-five-year-old woman, haggard as an old nun, who lives in a little penthouse apartment that has the feel of this particular coffee shop. All day long she dries medicinal herbs, makes strange tea, and gazes at the sunsets and the city skyline. It’s the most terrifying story I’ve read in recent years.
I also haunted a postmodern coffee shop, made frigid by air conditioning, the exposed pipes and wires along the ceiling looking like a mass of internal organs, where the servers’ faces and actions were cold and robotic. I made absolutely no progress and felt as if I were engaged in an inappropriate and utterly pathetic endeavor.
Things dragged on like that until the end of summer, when I’d fallen seriously behind, already six months past the deadline for submission of the manuscript I’d promised a certain publisher. I tried writing in one particular coffee shop, and it went well. Not at all distinctive, the shop was located in a third-floor corner of a popular department store, and only someone looking for the toilet or a public telephone would likely discover it (I stumbled upon it during a family banquet on the fourth floor, when I took my nephew downstairs to the toilet). There was no music. One of the walls was made of cold stainless steel that glinted like a knife blade; two others were of colorless, transparent, frameless, floor-to-ceiling glass—I guess no one with acrophobia would dare sit next to one of those—and the last was white plaster decorated with wheat stalks, like those you see in southern Europe. The floor was oak, simple, unspectacular, the same material as the simple chairs. The whole place, you could say, was a hodgepodge.
There were only seven or eight tables, and except for mealtimes, I had the place pretty much to myself, which is why I never felt uneasy about sitting there a long time. Another attraction was that the cold windows drained warmth from the hardwood floor, and the stainless steel crushed the wheat stalk–enhanced white plaster wall, imbued with the mythical aura of ancient Greece and Rome. At last I’d found a spot free of disturbances from my surroundings.
Most important of all, the shop’s name—Venice—made it easy to find a title for my story: “Death in Venice” (I frequently have trouble naming my stories, even after they’re finished, and a couple of times I had to ask the literary page editor to give me a title, unprofessional as that sounds).
“Death in Venice.” … Now what to write about?
Neither Visconti’s film nor Thomas Mann’s novella offered even the tiniest element.
Element?
Want to know the professional secret of my creations?
With some of my fellow writers, the beginning of creation is a bit like putting predetermined material onto an assembly line, and at the end of a quality-controlled production process, what comes out is precisely what was expected—no worse, but no better. For some, that apparatus is like a printing press for cash, the envy of many. But for me, literary creation is increasingly analogous to a chemistry experiment. I dump in all the elements my intuition tells me are necessary, but what sort of chemical reaction, what product will result (gold or shit), I neither know nor wish to control. And even the danger I occasionally sense is not something I try to avoid. That’s because it is the unpredictable, the unknowable that I find particularly intriguing.
The elements themselves are even harder to explain. Why, for instance, choose A and discard B? Why take pains to search for C? Why should D, a jewel in the eyes of others (maybe a conclusion born of professional knowledge, or a rare and peculiar life experience, or uniquely insightful observations) become utterly useless? Why spend ten years, or twenty, or even a lifetime waiting for E to appear, as if its absence makes progress impossible? There are times when you’ve prepared the necessary elements and lack only a flash, a spark, the simplest action, a nice day, a special mood, a scent (just think about rich memories of burning coal or Star Cologne) … maybe it’s what people who have had no creative experience call “inspiration.”
It’s been my experience that while the experiment (writing) requires anywhere from a couple of days to half a month, the selection of elements may require nothing more than looking up a word in a dictionary or, as I said earlier, may take ten years, even a lifetime. Most of the time, I feel like a scavenger—Let me interrupt myself here. Have you read the first chapter of García Márquez’s One Hundred Years of Solitude? A gypsy magician sells the protagonist two magnetized ingots, claiming that if he walks over a spot where gold or treasures are hidden, they will draw the items out. The master walks down the street with them and, as promised, the ingots draw out pieces of scrap metal, including a sixteenth-century5 suit of armor.
That’s it! Writers who create the way we do are just like that, always thinking, always searching as we drag a magnet behind us, walking alone through cities and the wilderness, down every block and around every corner of a long life.
And usually the treasures we seek and find are trash in the eyes of others. Given that the things we care about are so different, is it any wonder that we are unproductive, that making a living isn’t as important to us as it is to most people?
With “Death in Venice” I began another seemingly endless dream.
I decided to engage an earlier me in a dialogue. The story would be in the form of correspondence between two old friends (one in Taipei, the other traveling in Venice), both nearing middle age. It would be built around a dialogue in letters, some light and airy, some serious, between the me of today and the me who, several years before, had spent all of one day tramping through Venice.
The writing progressed smoothly (though I only wrote a thousand words a day, slower than my normal pace), but there was no ending in sight. You know, sometimes you can finish a story in four or five days, yet you never feel it’s going the way you want it to, which was the opposite of what I felt with this one.
Before long, I discovered that that was what I had in mind. At first I really enjoyed this particular coffee shop, since it didn’t influence me one way or the other, good or bad, and I was perfectly satisfied with the shop’s one daytime waitress, who dressed like a Japanese office lady and courteously and ceremoniously supplied me with tea, but otherwise left me alone (in more prosperous times I might have asked her to marry me). Most important, however, I got caught up in the correspondence between the two old friends, and in the second letter, a good friend from my youth, whom I hadn’t thought of for years, not only popped up in my draft but actually snatched away the character traveling in Venice (let’s call him A). Because his sometimes absurd, sometimes melancholy tone fit my plans perfectly, I gave him free rein and concentrated on the thoughts of the narrator, B. As the novel progressed, I began to care a great deal about and look forward to A’s letters from Venice.
Normally, my working hours are limited and ordered. I spend more than half the time reading newspapers and magazines I’ve brought along, occasionally, and reluctantly, agreeing to an interview or two, and sometimes embarrassingly lost in a fog. On any given day, I probably devote no more than a couple of hours to the actual writing; when I sense that it’s time to quit, I go to the department store supermarket, buy some fruit and milk, and take it home, where I effortlessly put my writing aside. And I rest both days of the weekend, even if I’ve stopped at a climactic moment in the story’s progress, never curious about what the next hundred words or a sudden and dramatic turn of events will bring.
But the expectation of receiving letters from A broke a writing practice I’d formed over many years. I wrote from autumn into winter, the season that frightened me the most. Dressing in heavy winter clothes, I reported to Venice early each morning and didn’t go home until late in the evening. I even wrote on New Year’s Eve until asked to leave so they could close up early, at six o’clock.
Winter was on its way out, and there were no signs of an ending to the story. I loved the back-and-forth conversation between these two old friends, loved and envied it, and I could find no reason to bring it to a close. Besides, I treasured, however vicariously, the opportunity to reconnect with my youthful friend, particularly since he spoke to me honestly in the story (though we’d both lived in Taipei for years, we managed to see each other no more than once or twice a year, and chatted about nothing special when we did, since I wasn’t interested in his circle of friends, nor he in mine). Truth is, I was shocked to discover his feelings and lifestyle during all the years we’d been living separate lives, and I read with great seriousness what, in the role of the fictional character A, he said he’d seen and heard in his travels in Venice. His curious and idiosyncratic view of things brought me enjoyment, even a sense … a sense of … well-being.
I couldn’t bear to bring that to an end.
And so I dreamed up an odd assortment of obstacles for myself. For instance, cracks began to show in the life and mood of B, a busy and successful old yuppie, as a result of A’s letters. He lost interest in everything; after a stressful lunch date, without telling anyone where he was going, he took off to a small coffee shop, where business was slow, and just sat there, waiting for another letter from his friend A in Venice.
I described the coffee shop in a few hundred words, using Venice as the model, but leaving out the incongruous stainless steel wall and the two walls with tall windows that faced the street. Then I hit a snag. I needed to select a painting to hang on the southern European-style plaster wall with the wheat stalks. Maybe this was to be the element I referred to earlier, the catalyst that could initiate a brilliant and dramatic experimental process and outcome, even if, in the eyes of the reader, it lasted only a second, perhaps a single sentence.
One by Paul Klee seemed most appropriate, since I’d seen his paintings in plenty of coffee shops and hotel rooms abroad. But … too ordinary for my purposes, not significant enough. How about Van Gogh? In the wake of the centennial anniversary of his death a couple of years earlier, he’d become too popular, too commonplace. So how about Dali? Sorry, I couldn’t come up with a lengthy, rich, and interesting description of his Persistance de la Mémoire or his views on excrement. Klimt? His works fit the fin-de-siècle decadence I was looking for, but they were too precise, short on nuance. So what about Renoir’s Ball at the Moulin de la Galette? I’d seen it in other coffee shops, and the joyous ambience it conveyed contrasted well with B’s despondence, but the thought of how this so closely followed the ABCs of writing made me take it down.
Why not simply go with the eighteenth-century Venetian Lagoon by Guardi that hung amid the wheat stalks on the wall of my Venice coffee shop? Often it’s the simplest and most common object that contains the deepest significance.
Then, while I was agonizing over the choice of a painting, without my permission, A took a few days out of his schedule to visit Fellini’s birthplace of Rimini, and as a result, I dug out some Fellini movies and watched them again in order to understand the letters he sent from Rimini. I was frantic that, on an impulse, he’d visit nearby Ravenna, because then I supposed I’d have to dig out Dante’s Divine Comedy, which I hadn’t read since college, to refresh my memory.
He went to Florence!
Reluctantly, I started gathering up Renaissance histories, art books, works on architecture and gardens, religion, and so on. I was poring over a history of the Medicis with mounting interest and excitement when, after only two days in Florence, A was on the move again, without writing about painting (just think, Michelangelo and Da Vinci, and Titian); without mentioning the statue of David, with its coat of pigeon droppings; without visiting St. Florence’s Basilica, which is on everyone’s itinerary (I’d planned to talk about the building’s architect, Brunelleschi); he didn’t even go to the Arno River, outside the city, which served as a backdrop for A Room with a View, which would have given him something to write about. He went only to the old marketplace, lingering there a good part of the day and buying a handcrafted leather backpack. Other than that, all he did was complain about the Florentines, who seem so sophisticated and worldly but are actually quite pretentious, like the people of Kyoto.
I was speechless when I read his letter, fearing he’d get the bug to visit the island of Sicily or Pisa or the little town of Urbino, where Raphael was born…. I couldn’t figure out why A was always so incurably despondent.
By now my story had far exceeded the length prescribed by the editor who’d commissioned the piece. And still I didn’t know how to end it, until A returned to Venice and mailed a letter in which he said, “When I started out on my travels I imagined myself to be one of those argonauts on their dangerous and difficult quest for the golden fleece….” In those two lines I sensed his profound sorrow, but could do nothing to change or stop it—for the first time, the very first time as a writer, not only was I unafraid, I wanted never to awaken from this dream. By the end of the letter, A’s narrative tone was warm again, and he begged me, no, he begged the character B, begged us to plant the flower seeds he’d picked up in his travels and described in detail where they’d all come from….
At that point, I knew without question what A was planning to do.
So I didn’t go to the Venice coffee shop for several days, preferring to stay home and polish some of what I saw now were no longer important sections of the story; for instance, I hung Picasso’s simple drawing of Don Quixote on the southern European-style wall with the wheat stalks, and I changed the order of one or two of the letters…. I was bored to death, like a soldier cleaning his rifle as he awaits an attack at dawn.
I did not want to face that last day.
…
That last day, summer had arrived.
Mulberry bushes lining the sidewalk outside the coffee shop were laden with fruit as red as bayberries, attracting treefuls of happily chirping silver-eyes. Yet these elements were of no use to me now.
The next shock was that the Venice coffee shop had changed! The person who greeted me wasn’t the girl I’d all but proposed to, but a young man in a white shirt and tight-fitting black slacks, his hair cut in the style of a KTV waiter6 (I instinctively knew he’d come to Taipei to avoid military service). He handed me a brand new menu; flustered, I ordered something and took a look around. The walls, the floor, the tables and chairs, they were all the same, including the copy of Venetian Lagoon hanging on one of the walls.
I regained my composure as the waiter laid out a set of plastic utensils. Unable to believe my eyes, I called him over and asked if the place had changed ownership. He nodded yes, but said nothing.
After finishing eating, I realized how much I missed the white china, the ashtrays, and the beautiful crystal water glasses I’d gotten used to. Without waiting for him to clear the table and bring the coffee I’d ordered with my meal, I took out my notebook and effortlessly carried out A’s plan: he shot himself in Venice.
Something I’d put off for days took five minutes, 300 words to finish.
After hearing the news, B sat in the small, never busy coffee shop, where Picasso’s Don Quixote hung on a southern European-style wheat stalk–enhanced plaster wall, waiting for night to fall outside, waiting for winter to pass, waiting for the last (if there was one) letter from his friend A in Venice.
And with that I deserted B as he sat waiting. Put an end to him.
I walked down the sidewalk lined with red fruit–laden mulberry bushes, my arms and legs trembling, not knowing why in the world I was so heartbroken.
Was it A’s suicide?
Or was it because I’d lost the familiar coffee shop that had been so conducive to my work?
Or was it that I’d discovered that it wasn’t really A I’d finished off, but a good friend I’d known in real life as a youth? “Dying is better than living,” after all. In my story, A was dead and could have no further contact with B, while in real life, I had long since fallen out of touch with my good friend, who, like me, lived a good life in the same city, and that was the same as being separated by death.
As I walked down the sidewalk lined with red fruit–laden mulberry bushes on an unbearably sultry afternoon in May, before the early summer rains came, groups of middle school girls passed me coming in the opposite direction, having just gotten out of school, full of vigor and smelling of sweat, and I imagined that one of them might one day be my wife, because I was alone and oh, so lonely.
July 1992