I wake up to discover that my skull is empty. An uneasy silence on the edge of words pervades my body. I am afraid, terribly afraid. I want to go home, back to that old familiar place. The door to the glass-enclosed, abandoned garden is tightly closed. She is not to be seen. She has been put into an oval wooden box. Her legs grow unsteadily out of the box. She is the expressionless face of death. This coffin walks toward me. I don't know what to do. A secret is hidden in its wreath of fake flowers.
Strangers keep coming over to shake my hand and flash some kind of secret and important hint to me about the existence of a "germ factory." I hear the sizzling of an atomic pile. Something keeps circling around me for some reason. Looking everywhere, I discover that this city is not my home; the square has disappeared. Even the rusty frames around the windows are gone. The sloping, narrow alley that used to kiss my feet is overgrown with weeds and moss. It is silent.
All the people that I knew masquerade in make-up, they are not real…
I no longer exist… I have disappeared…
I am Miss Nothing.
The New Emperor's New Clothes in Cartoon Captions
Q: "Hello. How come this cartoon is just a blank sheet of paper?"
A: "You mean to tell me you can't see it?"
Q: "Where are the new clothes?"
A: "The emperor is wearing them."
Q: "Then where is the emperor?"
A: "He left after he put on the new clothes."
Q: "Oh. So that's it. How stupid of me."
A: "So, you see, I'm a fantastic cartoonist."
One Way of Being a Master Teacher
You're a girl, stunning double-X chromosomes, so young and sexy you make a man's head spin. You see on the desk that XY-chromosome male chop, carved in relief, and the man sitting stiff and buttoned up behind it – the strategist, the maker of plans, the masturbator (sorry, master teacher – an inadvertent error), his big red fists the symbol of authority. You ring the rusty doorbell, but there is no response. He purposely busies himself with boring trivialities, his hands filled with countless numbers. Every number that falls on the paper has XY chromosomes. To him double-X chromosomes are germs, evil spirits. His clandestine yearning for double-X chromosomes cannot be openly, honestly put to paper. He shuns them for fear they can't be shunned. You step into the room and move toward him. He quickly backs away and huddles up in the corner, fearfully gripping his hat, hat in a hat… My hat, he shouts. As if your approach must make his hat fly away.
The Origin of Money
He constantly has to go for a piss – off to the washroom once every minute, back and forth, taking a drink and getting rid of it. Every visit is a solemn moment of hope and struggle. If the piss won't come, he strains with all his might, even for just one drop, while the thin liquid in his veins flows unconcernedly. He imagines his sperm are swimming freely in his bladder, frolicking like little minnows. If he keeps going to piss, he'll fill the bowl with flashing crystals of sperm. His sperm are his gold… so he can't stop pissing.
Artificial "Interpersonal Relationships" in the Garden of Mankind
I'll be "nice to you" if you'll be "nice to me." – This is not at all what "I" want in an "interpersonal relationship." Admittedly, one person's circumstances in life are very frequently influenced by the circumstances of someone else. "I" am not in complete charge of my own life. "My" happiness is very often a gift that "you" have given me. "I" exist only through "you." Nonetheless, I insist that it is only when "you" and "I" strip away our private agendas that we can have a genuine relationship. Our multifaceted world has obliterated the pure "you" and "me." "You" and "I" have already lost control of our destinies. Let me tell you a secret: "I" am not I, and "you" are not you. We don't know who we are. "You" are in make-up and "I" am a pretense. The masquerade ball in the garden of mankind is in full swing…
20 The Years Have Passed Away And Left Me Here Alone…
I must have peace and quiet unto my second death.
The things that followed have distorted my memory, or perhaps I should say that my memory has distorted the things that followed.
At any rate, those days were a confused labyrinth of tangled knots, mirrors within mirrors, paintings within paintings, through which time wove its way.
This terrible time left me feeling like everything was upside down, backward. It was as if I had gone to see a film, but instead of me sitting among the audience in the darkened theater watching a fictitious story unfolding on the screen, the fictitious characters on the screen were malevolently watching me, sitting down there in the audience. Unceasingly, enviously, they ferreted their way into my innermost being, leaving me feeling totally exposed though I sat in darkness, completely shattering the old structured patterns of my thinking…
I was placed in a hospital.
I lay awake all night in my room staring at the ceiling, pursuing the shadows of the past in a desperate effort to remember… something. What? Even to have been able to grasp a few traces here and there would have been all right, but it was like trying to look into the impossibly distant future, as if nothing had ever happened – a blank.
It was only in the spring of 1992, when I returned home from Qi Luo's hospital with my mind straightened out, that I was at last able to face the truth: my mother and my friend Ho, whom I loved dearly, were both dead. And my friend Yin Nan had left me forever.
The apartment was dark and silent, dust everywhere, lifeless.
My once so familiar home no longer recognized me. It was as if a new tenant had arrived. Even though I tried to behave like a familiar old friend, it remained silent and uneasy.
I could tell that from the moment I left, time had stopped in these rooms.
As I stepped softly inside, I said to myself, "I've come home! I feel terrible – just when everyone else left you, I left you too. But I had no choice, they took me away."
I looked out the window. The sun was bright, beautiful. The trees with their soft green branches, unable to restrain themselves, waved softly, solicitously, back and forth. The window curtains in the ranks of apartments opposite were fluttering slowly like colored photographs come to life, blocking out all the grief outside. Beyond the buildings, the cold, impersonal highway stretched its hungry hand toward the distant spring mountains and the limitless blue sky. On the mountains the hazy firs, proud poplars, and brightly blossoming clove trees waved their pastel wings in the gentle wind, an embroidery of spring colors set against the gray clouds and lovingly delicate mists. The languid spring sun inclined its sleepy head upon the warm pillow of young leaves.
It was truly the beginning of spring.
I turned to look at the empty room. I didn't want to believe that so many years had actually passed away. It was like awakening from an immense dream, unable to remember any of it.
From a neighbor's window, the faint, unsteady strains of a woman softly singing floated on the air. It was a song that Ho used to sing: