"So, you've come…" he said. "Are your gums inflamed again?"
At first, Miss Dai Er held her tongue, but then she started talking about something totally unrelated. She talked on and on, delighted to be able to unburden herself of her past.
Miss Dai Er said that in her childhood she had a friend, an architect, a gaunt, weary, middle-aged man who was her only friend. He lived next door to her. At that time, children's toys consisted of sand, cobblestones, and water. Things like building blocks and simple rubber, nonelectric toys were luxuries. Day in and day out, little Dai Er was immersed in the joy of playing in the sand. She dug countless small holes around herself and put a blown-up paper ball into each of the holes (she called the balls mines), then crisscrossed two or three twigs over the holes, covered them with paper, and buried the whole thing with sand. When that was done, Dai Er stood there surveying the area like a general devising strategies in a command tent, while arrayed around her were hidden accomplishments. Closing her eyes, she spun around several times, then walked out of the minefield in the grip of excitement. This was a game she had learned and adapted from the movie Mine Warfare, and she was absorbed in it for a long time.
The grown-up Miss Dai Er recalled her childhood game whether at the office or out among the crowds, and only now realized how her present life resembled that game.
Little Dai Er spent a great deal of time with her architect friend, a reticent man who grew lively only when he played symbolic games (the term symbolic was a modifier the grown-up Dai Er bestowed upon the word game). He taught little Dai Er some games she'd never dreamed of; for example, he taught her how to build high towers by mixing crushed stones with mud. He built them high enough for the child Dai Er to think them truly lofty. They were always in danger of collapsing with a loud crash: a strong wind could blow them down. And as they stood there, lofty and tottering, the architect would lead Dai Er in squeals of delight.
They also played faucet. At the southwest corner of the yard was a long trough with three faucets. The architect often turned them all on at the same time, releasing three powerful streams of water, which nearly drove him wild. He would howl excitedly; the sounds reverberating through the deserted yard sounded especially horrible, both thrilling and frightening little Dai Er.
He was an excellent architect, whose certificates of merit covered a wall in his home. But his wife was never proud of that. In Dai Er's memory, these neighbors, her only neighbors, quarreled constantly. When little Dai Er asked her parents why that was, they became evasive, avoiding the important and dwelling on the trivial; or they equivocated, saying that Uncle was busy with his work in architecture and didn't have time to take care of the family and so Auntie was unhappy with him. Children wouldn't understand and shouldn't ask so many questions. Dai Er was never satisfied with this answer. She constantly sought an opportunity to ask her architect friend-until one rainy day, when the event that Dai Er would remember all her life happened. After telling her mother tearfully that the architect had exposed himself in front of her, they were not friends anymore.
Now that she is grown up, little by little Miss Dai Er has come to understand the connection between his frenzied need to work and play and the loss of his manhood-a compensation for failure.
Finally one day, a white ambulance, its siren blaring, took the architect away from the yard where little Dai Er played her games. They said he was taken to the asylum in the northern part of the city. They also said that after pacing up and down a gloomy, re-mote, and shaded pathway for a long time, he did to a young female passerby what he had done to little Dai Er on that rainy day.
When Dai Er was in elementary school, she experienced a fire. At first, people were driven out of their homes by a strong, scorching odor and the acrid, choking smell of smoke; then they saw the architect's windows being lapped by countless bright-red dog tongues. Bit by bit, those hissing dog tongues merged into a wall of hot flames. On that afternoon, after being suspended from his duties, the architect had locked himself in his room, where he set a fire amid the suffocating smell of gasoline that brought an end to his vexations, regrets, and powerless desires. The billowing smoke and crackling flames enveloped the quiet yard, the twisting alley, and Miss Dai Er's serpentine childhood, which was lost in the hidden recesses of that alley.
The young dentist laid a hand heavily on Miss Dai Er's shoulder, as though to keep her from being carried away by the billowing smoke in her memory. That was the arm for which Miss Dai Er had long been yearning. She had been waiting for just such an arm to rescue her from her memories. For the first time in her life, she became a patient, giving herself up weakly to the arm that had rooted out so many decayed teeth. The arm itself was the warmest and safest bedside practitioner, the most accurate psychoanalyst.
The Beginning of Birth or Death
One breezy, sunny morning a few months after I moved in with him, we cut through the busy district of town, then crossed a vacant lot and a yard piled high with rusty metal, rotting wood, and crumbling bricks. I had always felt a strange affection and melancholy toward all those relics; the desolation never failed to spark feelings of nostalgia: maybe that junkyard held my childhood and early youth. We stood silently for a while, then walked toward a small hut-for years, it had been regarded as the cradle of love as well as the source of the graveyard; people said it was a stage that accommodated both comedies and tragedies. I was incapable of naming this place, just as today I am incapable of naming my love of that time.
A warmhearted young man received us, one who habitually punctuated his speech with fuck (used in place of commas, this word evinced neither joy nor anger). From this small hut, we obtained a red certificate that read
Registration No. 13
Dai Er (Female), 23
Kong Sen (Male), 26
Wed of their own free will.
Investigation confirms that their marriage conforms to the marriage laws of the State.
We each kept a copy, knowing that the paper was thick as sheet metal and thin as a cicada's wing.
A Ceremony for Hovering
On an afternoon after her marriage, Miss Dai Er finally shows up again at dental chair 103 in Hospital 103. She looks especially beautiful, her face radiant with softness and charm. The panicky eyes exist no more; now her gaze has a dazzling fascination, like a shining constellation.
Sitting peacefully and confidently in the chair, she says to the young dentist beside her, like a mistress commanding her attendant: "Let's begin."
In his right hand, the young dentist holds a full syringe, the needle pointing straight up as if it were a loaded pistol ready to fire. He waves it in front of Miss Dai Er and asks, "Are you sure?"
Dai Er smiles. "I'm sure."
She opens her mouth wide, calmly accepting the highly symbolic hypodermic as it stabs her soft palate. Following a momentary sting, her mouth is suffused with a warm, sweet numbness. Sunshine enters her mouth, penetrates her jaw, permeates her tongue; it dances trippingly and sings gracefully in her mouth. A pink smile spills out over her lips.
The young Dr. Kong Sen bends over her, and even though the white gauze mask hides his lips, Dai Er can still feel the hot breath greeting her. The dentist holds forceps or scalpel in his right hand, and with his left arm he presses against her chest for support. This weight stirs her imagination wonderfully. The young dentist deftly extracts two impacted wisdom teeth from Miss Dai Er's mouth, one from each side. When they work together like that, Miss Dai Er feels no pain. She cooperates obediently and meekly. They seem to be hovering together, distantly light as a feather, the sky covered with their rainbow arcs. This intimate cooperation and harmony resurrects the memory of sharing her husband's bed on their wedding night.
When the young Dr. Kong Sen noisily drops the two bloody wisdom teeth onto the milky tray, the secret anguish deeply buried in Miss Dai Er's remote past is finally uprooted.
Translated By Shelley Wing Chan
Li Xiao – Grass on the Rooftop
This story was ignited by being cooked up over a fire. Perhaps you think this is an exaggeration bordering on sensationalism: after all, how can a fire cook up a story? Now if we were talking about cooking a bowl of soup noodles or something… But in our little village of thirty or forty households, where a story about somebody's chicken dying is front-page news, a fire is really a major event. So you can imagine the stir that was created by the unusual fire that hit the house of the pensioner Old Mr. Chen. The old-timers of the village, who say that everything in this world has a cause and an effect, concluded that the fire was a result of the ancestors' spirits having somehow been offended, maybe because the house wasn't situated just right or because of some evil deed carried out by an earlier generation or because of an act of defiance initiated by the younger generation. But the fact is that even if Mr. Chen, a childless old man, had committed any terrible offenses, he'd certainly have owned up to them by now, and he'd never provoked anyone. So how could a huge fire strike him? That's why we've all maintained there was something fishy in the way this incident occurred.