(1929–)
Guan Guan (Kuan Kuan) is the pen name of Guan Yunlong, who was born in Shandong Province. He worked as an engineer at a military broadcasting company before becoming a part-time actor in film, television, and theater and a full-time writer.
Guan Guan started writing poetry in the 1960s and is a long-time member of the Epoch Poetry Society. He attended the International Writing Workshop at University of Iowa in the 1970s. To date he has published two books of poetry and four volumes of prose. His poetry is characterized by the use of Shandong dialect and disregard for sentence divisions.
Negroes come dancing out of a drum. Stamping upon your head. From the room upstairs. From this stained-glass window shattered by a trumpet. They dance out with such grinding hips. Such a song of pure fluidity. Such menstrual lips. Splashing on the bared teeth of your eyes. Your eyes that clamp onto cancer, gonorrhea. Up there over the high-voltage line. Below the warning siren. Such huge breasts raised in place by a crane. A bomb of some kind, held in by a silk sash.
Up on a billboard.
Between buildings and jet airplanes. Your face pinched by constant tics. Your stretched throat. Your tired-out shoes.
“Fire! Help, fire!!”
At last your sewer-slinking tail gets run over for good. A shining red truck. You flee. You flee into the door of ravenous thighs. In the zone where beds meet money.
You keep surveillance over the face of a wristwatch. Plead with the face of a watch. Look ahead to the face of a watch. Figure how many cc of true feelings remain after penicillin. After you turned 15. Your younger sister was swatted away by a sheet of newspaper. The beautiful machine that swatted you. For machine and love of country you went on a hormone-buying spree.
This was right. Once Berry went away. This was right.
Underneath a billboard.
At the rifle range, the target breakfasts on bullets. (It ruminates on good years of eight-course dinners.)
It swears at the measly menu. It mutters about the prices.
Tanks are munching on grass. Munching on briar roses.
Cannon barrels are sipping on stars. Sipping bats.
Bayonets are harvesting wheat. Harvesting wild chrysanthemums.
Barbed wire is tangled up with vines, slicing at wind falling in love with a view of ocean.
A downpour falls and passes. Only a police dog is there to enjoy the moonlight.
Between a rifle and a grave. Bullets deserve your approval. Though none qualify as lucky omens.
(1959)
(translated by Denis Mair)
I keep wanting to get myself an ice-shaving machine. I’ll crank it and whip out an ocean or two. Chill my wife’s favorite mixed fruit into an ice dessert. A beautiful assorted platter. Then my wife and I (she wearing her red quilted jacket) will dig in. To go with our cocktail tête-à-tête.
We whittle away at the rainbow of ice. Paste it on the wall of our bellies. Hold an art exhibition for tapeworms. What is left we put in a rouge case. The kind with several shades to prettify people’s faces. Then we lop off a chunk of sun and chop it up with chunks of night. So we can eat gloomy sun. Let it do an air-raid drill in our stomach. Have an affair. Give birth to some gloomy little suns. Give birth to a brood of piglets. Then I’ll mince some moon with some ocean. Get a taste of salted moon. Invite tapeworms to make love on a bed of salted moon. Whistle a tune. Watch the flesh get its baptism. Reduce man and beast to shavings. Chew slowly on them for flavor. My wife says, Why not give some to a saint so he can taste it?
Then with vehemence we chill missiles and satellites in the gelato. At this point we sic dogs at their abashed legs. Like crazy we chill dance steps and grins into the mixture. To watch their embarrassed performance. We vehemently chill an emperor in his connubial bed. To watch him plow away in embarrassment. He’ll think he will be there until wheat harvest time. Fiercely we chill spring, summer, fall, and winter. To watch how even time can be embarrassed. And watch a death-reporting wristwatch read its own obituary.
And then we join anger and melancholy and laughter together. And eat them up. Then we go to sleep side by side. Let any of them complain to the United Nations if they will, or wherever else.
We are children of ice. We are snowmen.
And we know. We know we are eating the sun.
(1959)
(translated by Denis Mair)
Still all these freshly painted little mouths. Still these shoes strolling over pavement. Still this twilight kissing mouths of skirts.
Oh Lord
What to do about this afternoon?
What to do about this long street?
Oh Lord
If a sedan chair trailing ribbons were carried past, what would be inside? What would be sitting inside? Windows glower at each other. What could they be glowering at? Those melodies crushed by the wheels of cars. Don’t take them for leaves whose divorce was decreed by wind. Don’t take them for murdered leaves. Don’t take them for vagrant leaves trampled by porters.
Oh Lord
Utility poles cannot change to betel trees; the base of a marble wall doesn’t get pregnant with dandelions. On the fragrant lawn in the park. Certain skirts have kissed it on certain nights. It has been watered by drops of blood. Hair has gotten tangled. They come to amble on the green, to tread the soft grass. Make a feast of spring’s naked body. At least not to let her be a cement slab.
Oh Lord
In the gelato shop a palm tree grows, bearing coconuts of sun. It hides sexy slacks from view. It hides perishable ice. I try crawling past two skirts, wishing to pluck a rose. A virgin rose. Or a tuft of grass. Grass that has never seen a streetlight. My sole temptation the bit of true feeling in a silk sash. Beyond that I do not claim to know. Even when it comes to models with demure eyes. When it comes to pretty feelings that breed upon gift wrap. To a haggard carnation in the trash heap. To a liquor bottle burning with thirst.
Oh Lord
The wall of this cheap hotel has no hitching rings for horses. His Eminence the Circuit Commissioner passed through and once slept in this bed. That woman also slept here. She has slept with barbarians from all frontiers. She has slept with several foreign currencies. Ah! Those magotty spring days, all bunched on the phoenix head on your cheongsam slit up the thigh.
Oh Lord
If I win the lottery
I will buy a red-lacquered coffin
And lay it down at the end of this long street
To be a boat for children to play in
Or a den for wild dogs
Or for flocks of sparrows to land on
Or to hell with it
Or maybe …
(published 1961)
(translated by Denis Mair)
A complete Buddhist tripitaka, called the Emperor Qianlong Edition, on which carving began in the eleventh year of Yongzheng’s reign (By that time he had murdered his brother the prince and tortured the upright minister Zheng Yin to death. That was when champions of justice like Lü Liuliang and Gan Fengchi and Fourth Missus Lü were crawling over walls and jumping from roof to roof in “Swordsmen of the Yongzheng Reign” and in “Arson at Red Lotus Temple” and in “Razor Garotte.”) The carving went on until the fifth year of Qianlong’s reign. (That was when the Gold River region was pacified [really wiped out], and the Muslim queen died forlornly in the emperor’s rear palace.) Who knows why they got it in their minds to carve this salvation-bringing, pain-relieving, greatly compassionate compendium of sutras? How did the bloody hands of two emperors bring themselves to take up knives and carve this compendium of sutras?
Four hundred fifty carvers. Every single one was adept at martial arts; well-known swordsmen gathered from across the empire over a collection of scriptures. One hundred thirty-one devoted monks came to do the proofreading. Who knows if they found a bloody taint between the lines from the bloody talons of Yongzheng and Qianlong? This must have been the Peach Blossom Fan* of Buddhist sutras!
Seventy-nine thousand thirty-six woodblocks. Who knows how many thousand knot-free unblemished pear trees were killed? The price of pears must have gone through the ceiling in those years. A lot of people didn’t know the taste of pears. I wonder if his fine Majesty had pears to eat? (Ah, so many fewer “raindrops spangled on pear blossoms in spring”; so many fewer “blossoming pear trees overshadow the crabapple.” His majesty sure couldn’t do without a blossoming pear tree to overshadow the crabapple tree in his harem!)
The blocks weighed four hundred tons. Four hundred tons of pears would make good eating for a whole lot of people. Eighty thousand ounces of silver were spent. How many tons of wheat could eighty thousand ounces of silver buy?
None of this is important. This set of scriptures has made it through four hundred-odd years since Year Five of Qianlong’s reign to become a national elder—that’s what’s important!
Who knows how many people these sutras saved? How many bandits? How many robbers? How much greed, anger, delusion, and pig-headedness? How many monks did these sutras save? How many Taoist priests? How many fishermen, woodcutters, gentlemen farmers did they save? How many heroes and good fellows did they enlighten? How many imperial relatives did they awaken? How many moonstruck boys and pining girls did they wake up?
Anyway, if those pear trees hadn’t been carved into the tripitaka, you can bet they wouldn’t have lived for four hundred years. They would have been burned sooner or later by the “Red Spear Syndicate” or the “Cutlass Gang” or the “Heavenly Peace Kingdom” or the “Allied Armies of the Eight Powers” or the “Boxer Rebels”! Four hundred fifty expert carvers would have gone hungry; one hundred thirty-one devout monks couldn’t have spent time beneath a votive lamp, burning the midnight oil!
How many people’s worth of rice would eighty thousand ounces of silver get you? After all, a man can’t turn into a scripture compendium; a man ends up as shit! Unless you happen to be the female corpse excavated from Mawangdui that wore a suit of jade armor!
Seventy-nine thousand thirty-six blocks of pear wood meant the death of how many pear trees? How many flowers bloom on a pear tree each year? How many pears grow? How many flowers bloom from a scripture compendium? How many pears grow out of it? How many monks and nuns can a pear tree save?
I’m telling you, this is the most fascinating question. Who can answer this question?
Do you want the tripitaka? Or do you want pear trees that bloom and grow pears? Do you want an antique, or do you want pear trees that won’t last four hundred years?
The great river hurries eastward. Waves have washed away the gallant figures, and not-so-gallant ones too. Blossoms and pears quickly turn to manure. Give those seventy-nine thousand antique woodblocks a few more four-hundred-year spans, and they’ll be manure too.
“Huineng, Huineng, nothing exists after all; what is there for red dust to defile?” “Tell me, Rector, what are you?” “What is there for red dust to defile? Nothing exists after all.”
“Ah!”
“Nowadays all we see is muddle-headed tyrants who kill people. We never hear of emperors who carve a tripitaka after their killing.” “Mama Rat had another brood; the littering problem gets worse each generation.”
“You’re talking nothing but bullshit!! A lot of bullshit!!”
(1993)
(translated by Denis Mair)
*The Peach Blossom Fan is a drama written by Kong Shangren in the seventeenth century about the destruction of the Ming dynasty at the hands of the Manchus in 1644.