linglan. American carnations only smell vaguely of grass; on the stone-paved narrow paths here in this neighborhood, linglan is often planted. When you bend your knees to get a good whiff of them, well, you smell nothing and feel like the mute or blind. Linglan, or hyacinth as it’s called here, is of the lily family: narrow, long leaves sprout from the roots and grow in clumps; a single, central long stem produces flowers, each resembling a bell, its six petals in a racemed inflorescence of blue, purple, or pink. How can hyacinth so stately and aromatic appear so idiotic here? I suspect my judgment of flowers is wrong. After all, one’s judgment of other people is often wrong, too. I must be wrong. If one day I return to China, I’ll see the linglan hyacinths again; I’ll gaze at them tenderly and obediently, bend my knees to sniff, and gaze again, remembering a flower in the United States that looks so much like them but has no aroma. So the breeze that just blew was a coincidence and is now gone forever. That was a three-year college, though I only attended for two-and-a-half years. Leaving the college meant leaving that street. We often leave without saying good-bye properly. Thirty years later colonization is now an outdated idea: the French, the Jews, and the White Russians are all gone; the street is gone; the college is gone. Once I asked a local about the college and she pointed to a huge gray warehouse used for cold storage and said that was where the college had been. How could it be? How could a street simply vanish? I explored five more streets and found no trace of what I could remember — nothing left resembled the past. I stood there foolishly looking for nothing. Now I must look quite foolish standing here waiting for another breeze to bring me the scent of flowers. . I start walking again. There are very few pedestrians. Those who appear walk very fast. My slow pace betrays me as a stroller. Taking a stroll is not a bad habit, but a man walking leisurely on a path in the spring, without a dog and near dusk, somehow seems embarrassingly out of place. This world where no one cares to watch or reproach you is still one in which you are watched and reproached. Those free souls in cities who escape to forests and ice-covered lands are perhaps trying to free themselves from the overwhelming feeling of being controlled. There used to be many hermits in ancient China, so many that people eventually classified them: the great hermits hid themselves in top administrative positions, the lesser ones concealed themselves in non-government jobs, and the still lesser ones in wilderness. This may sound fine and meaningful, though in practice, neither is a strict category. After all, those who tried to hide in all three situations sought the same thing. Feelings, freed of all external boundaries, are still confined within us — their sensitivity often causing bewilderment. I initially think the strong scent is wafting from the leaves above my head, but I soon realize it’s freshly mowed grass. So many sliced grass-blades are indeed enough to evoke a cool and refreshing smell; but it’s the green blood of brutally injured grass. . Evening descends and I near the end of my stroll. People like us are no longer capable of surviving outdoors day and night. We work at a table, sleep in a bed. To reproduce, to love or die, we need a house. These houses in Jamaica somehow resemble those in fairy tales, they exist somewhere between the legends of the aristocrats and fantasies of the commoners, narrating a story of the petty bourgeois, as if the aristocrats, in declining, lost their crown of glory, and the commoners, in climbing, lost their simplicity. Every house has this air. I remember those fairy-tale houses of my childhood, their colorful depictions in books. I remember making similar models — as a child in art class — with cardboard and glue. As I observe each house one after another on my stroll, I see that a few of them intelligently apply the techniques of straight lines, oblique lines, and arches, but the surface textures and paint colors are wrong in most cases and will continue to be wrong, as if they only exist to display their mistakes to the world. One experiences pleasure when one sees houses constructed the right way. Yet, on second thought, one worries if the residents within might be stupid or mean, just as one worries if an intelligent and beautiful family lives in a poorly constructed house. Such formalist concerns don’t apply to a minister walking out of a church or a clergyman standing on the steps of a monastery. Monuments are philistine, erected to illustrate the extremely poor memory of humans. Towers are best. Towers without hollow interiors are wonderful to gaze at from a distance. Other towers are hollow inside so that one can walk up the stairs to the top and enjoy a limitless expanse of scenery. It is quite appropriate that no one is permitted to live in a tower. Imagine if smoke from cooking poured out of a tower, or a clothesline was hung outside a tower window. This would cause such an uproar that the intended meaning of the tower would be forgotten. A well-designed tower embodies an architectural theme. When a tower is first completed, people surround it, crane their necks to look at it, they talk about it, a tide of voices rise and fall and then fade, while the original meaning of the tower also fades through the years so that if a bell hanging in the corner of the tower should fall, no one would bother to fix it. From the flowers of spring through the fruits of autumn, the tower stands just as a tower, seemingly in vain but in fact essential and inevitable. The phenomenon of building a group of towers in Southeast Asia is a misinterpretation of, and an insult to, the concept of a tower. Tower-ness is fated solitude that defies praise. The houses in Jamaica are not solitary. The space between each reflects human practicality, and contributes to the modesty and pride indispensable to the petty bourgeois: a cement swan, a freshly painted dwarf carrying a lantern, a sign announcing a certain doctoral degree, a garage added with a basketball rack — I have come to know these houses but their inhabitants I will never really know. The seasonal changes of scenery in Jamaica decide the routes of my strolls. On my return home, I make an unnecessary detour. It’s unnecessary because when the stroll is no longer a stroll, not choosing a straight line between two points is considered a mistake. That objects can neither feel nor speak is fortunate — otherwise, I would be mocked by the houses and plants on my return. They would say, You could even lose your way when taking a stroll. I realize what life is. Life is constantly not knowing what to do. Therefore I let things happen to me — a breeze that brings a street filled with the scent of flowers, a tower whose meaning is obscured although it’s still watched from a distance, a battlefield soaked in the rain while I talk loudly with a friend under a small umbrella. When something loses its first level of meaning, a second level of meaning emerges. The second level of meaning is often more accessible and more suitable for me: a baby stroller leaning against a tombstone, a three-page will found under a freshly baked loaf of bread. I stroll during a pleasant afternoon and lose my way in the second level of meaning. I have no other real pleasure. Often, just as I’m about to feel a small degree of pleasure, I feel a deep sadness. What is sadness? If I knew what sadness was, I would no longer feel sad. What then does life mean? Life means certain things are not yet done and must be done, and other things are done but not done well. Tomorrow, I’ll stroll no more.