Red Mandarin Dress

“You aren’t going on with your Chinese literature program, are you?” Yu queried, breaking into his thoughts.

“No, I don’t think so. You don’t have to worry about that,” Chen said. “But I still have to finish this paper. You may not believe it, but this paper has really helped.”

Yu seemed relieved and handed back the envelope. “Oh, there’s a piece of paper in the envelope.”

“A poem.”

“For you to publish?”

Chen took out that piece of paper and started reading.

Mother, I have tried to make the far-off echo
yield a clue to what is happening to me;
in the old mansion people come and go,
seeing only what they want to see.
The recall of the red mandarin dress
wears me out, flashing in the flowers,
your bare feet, your soft hand: the stress
of memory strips me of waking hours.
But we are flattened, framed in the zoom
of one moment, click, and cloud and rain
approaching fast, a doomful gloom
scurries across the horizon again,
Oh that is all I know, all I see.
Mother, you drink the cup for me.

“There’s no cup in the picture,” Yu said in bewilderment.

Chen wasn’t sure if the last image about the cup came from Hamlet, in which the queen drinks the poison for her son. In his college years, he had read a Freudian interpretation of it. He vaguely remembered.

“It’s about Hamlet and his mother,” Chen said, deciding not to explain any more. “There are more things in heaven and earth than in a case report.”

“I’m damned,” Yu said, shaking his head like a rattle drum.

Qiu Xiaolong

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