2. Fragments: The attractive outsider

A woman had come to save his soul and he wasn’t sure he was ready. Afterall hadn’t he, for the past decade or so, found plenty of ways to put readiness off to just around the corner, while convincing himself that he was closing in on it? Isn’t that why he had volunteered for this transfer to this forsaken place, beyond civilisation, in the third world where it was others who needed saving? And he… well, he could be exactly as he was.

He had reached a kind of happiness – or if not happiness then a compromise - between who he was, who he’d like to be and who he really was. This required a complicated balancing act that he would never have been able to explain. And it was all possible because he was here, living the life of an expat in a foreign country, in a tiny sliver of space being part of it and not being part of it, both inside and out at the same time. It was all part of the magic that this, paradoxically, gave him a much more luxurious lifestyle, with more privileges and more status, than the locals could ever dream of.

This woman now, with her simple, straight and annoyingly unshakable sense of what it means to be saved – or not saved – threatened to cast a different light on the whole thing. Like when you find out the trick in an optical illusion. 

The universal substitute

The door swung inward noiselessly, and I found myself being looked at by a young boy whom I judged to be about fifteen.

He rubbed his eye with a finger, as if he had just got up. He was cadaverously thin; he had no shirt on, and his ribs stuck out like that of an emaciated figure in a medieval woodcut.  The skin stretched over them was nearly colourless, not white but closer to the sallow tone of old linen. His feet were bare, he was only wearing a pair of old Khaki pants. The eyes, partly hidden by a rumpled mass of straight black hair that came down over the forehead, were obstinately melancholy, as if he was assuming the expression on purpose.   

*** 

He must have been equipped with a kind of science fiction extra sense, a third eye or antenna. Although his face was turned away so that he couldn’t see mine, he said in a soft dry voice, ‘I can tell you’re admiring my febrility. I know it’s appealing, I practice at it; every woman loves an invalid. I bring out the Florence Nightingale in them. But be careful.’ He was looking at me now, cunningly, sideways. ‘You might do something destructive: hunger is more basic than love. Florence Nightingale was a cannibal, you know.’ 

*** 

What is character? Maybe we know them only by the dent they make in our emotional landscape. Some are so odd in shape you are left wondering for years afterwards what difference did they make? What did they change? Like someone who came into your house when you weren’t around and rearranged, ever so subtly, the things on your shelves. You are compelled to go back and back over anything you can hold onto to find an answer, but like a seed that refuses to grow, the dent gives you no answers.

There is a character from a book I read years ago who won’t let me go. The character is an aimless graduate student called Duncan from The Edible Woman by Margaret Atwood. Aimless, thin, unattractive, sly, manipulative and selfish, he was completely, smugly and self-consciously comfortable with not conforming to expectations. He was calculatedly deceptive and so he often pierced through to the truth. It’s not clear if he brings redemption or destruction – or just nothingness - as he (metaphorically) devours the heroine at the end.

I feel like I’ve received the occasional long distance phone call from a ‘Duncan’ over the years. I hear the ringing mostly when I’m asleep and have slept so long I can hardly wake up. I feel like I’ve met many ‘Duncans’ over the years, he keeps reappearing in different guises. Sometimes he even feels like a permanent fixture, there at the back of my mind, being his sly mocking self, making things uncomfortable, offering no answers. 

***

The long time she had been moving through…had been merely a period of waiting, drifting with the current, an endurance of time marked by no real event; waiting for an event in the future that had been determined by an event in the past; whereas when she was with Duncan she was caught in an eddy of present time: they had virtually no past and certainly no future… Duncan was irritatingly unconcerned about her marriage. He didn’t seem to care about what would happen to her after she passed out of the range of his perpetual present. She found it comforting, and she didn’t want to know why.

*** 

‘I don’t want you to think all this means anything. It never sort of does, for me. It’s all happening really, to somebody else.’ He kissed the end of her nose. ‘You’re just another substitute for the laundromat.’

Marian wondered if her feelings ought to be hurt, but decided that they weren’t: instead she was faintly relieved. ‘I wonder what you’re a substitute for, then,’ she said.

‘That’s the nice thing about me. I’m very flexible, I’m the universal substitute.’

*** 

He was talking in a monotone, sitting hunched forward, his elbows on his knees, his head drawn down into the neck of his dark sweater, like a turtle’s into its shell… He wasn’t even looking at me. He might have been talking to himself.  I leaned forward too, so I could see his face. In the blue-tinged fluorescent lighting of the laundromat, a light that seems to allow no tones and no shadows, his skin was even more unearthly. 

*** 

His mouth tasted like cigarettes. Apart from that taste, and an impression of thinness and dryness, as though the body I had my arms around and the face touching mine were really made of tissue paper or parchment stretched on a frame of wire coathangers, I can remember no sensation at all.

*** 

She wanted to stand for only one more minute with the snow sifting down here in this island, this calm open eye of silence…

‘Hello,’ a voice said.

Marian was hardly startled. She turned: there was a figure seated on the far end of a bench in the darker shadow of some evergreen trees. She walked towards it.

It was Duncan, sitting hunched over, a cigarette glowing between his fingers. He must have been there for some time. The snow had settled on his hair and the shoulders of his coat. His hand, when she removed her gloves to touch them, was cold and wet. 

*** 

His ringing jolts me from my sleep. But that's it. I wonder what he would say if I ever picked up the phone? I imagine it would be something like this: 'hello, sugar,' he'd say. 'It's me.'

Identity is an endeavour we can fail at

It's not just our bodies that die - it is our lives that we lose, which is why we experience hope, despair, longing, regret and the like. In the chronological passage of time, we grapple with phenomenological time: the past, present and future; time that flies and drags; and time that can be made up or squandered - Kim Atkins. 

I don't know yet if there is a philosophical question at the heart of all writing. I think it might be true but I'm not sure. But there is a philosophy that suggests a sense of self - an identity - is a sustained effort to tell a story, a narrative. Like all narratives, it is subject to revision and retelling as new evidence emerges to make it all add up. This story links past, present and future. We look in the past to understand the present and project into the future.

We can cope with most things, including new information and contradictory evidence, through this process of retelling the story. That's why none of us are truthful: not to ourselves or to others. But there can come a point when, if the incoherence is too extreme, the story breaks down and the narrative ruptures. This means that identity is really a verb and it's an endeavour we can fail at. And then what happens?

The Crow, a native American tribe that was assimilated by the US, famously answered as follows:

'And then, nothing happened.'

I wonder if all the developing nations are trying to answer this question, in response to the spread of Western culture and the fact that modernity is synonymous with Westernization.

I wonder if my answer would be the same (i.e., 'And then, nothing happened'). I'm not sure; this one will take a long time; but I don't think so. 

Endings

Reading Li Yiyun is like dancing a slow two-step, cheek-to-cheek, only to be stabbed in the heart at the end.

On the evening of the day the children return, Granny Lin is asked to leave. Her things are packed and placed at the gate: a duffel bag, not heavy even for an old woman.

"The happiness of love is a shooting meteor; the pain of love is the darkness following." A girl is singing to herself in a clear voice as she walks past Granny Lin in the street. She tries to catch up with the girl; the girl moves too fast, and so does the song. Granny Lin puts the duffel bag on the ground and catches her breath. All the people in the street seem to know where their legs are taking them. She wonders when she stopped being one of them. 

What is there to say about modern China? After death and the birth of money, after the lights and dust refuse to settle, when frenetic energy and escape is exhausted, what is there left of us that is still human?

One moment later, he comes out and looks at Mrs Su with a sad and calm expression that makes her heart tremble. She lets go of the receiver with Mrs Fong's blabbering and walks to Beibei's bedroom.  

There she finds Beibei resting undisturbed, the signs of pain gone from her face, porcelain white with a bluish hue. Mrs Su kneels by the bed and holds Beibei's hand, still plump and soft, in her own. Her husband comes close and strokes her hair, grey and thin now, but his touch, gentle and timid, is the same one from a lifetime ago, when they were children playing in their grandparents' garden, where the pomegranate blossoms, fire-hued and in the shape of bells, kept the bees busy and happy. 

Can you feel you lived at least - and acted - even though through its entirety, you suspect, you were a blind mole doing the wrong things in the right context - or was it the right things in the wrong context?

But on second thought, I wish that Mrs Pang had lived long enough. I wish we would sit together and fold his clothes for the last time. I wish Mrs Pang would smile at me when she puts away Mr. Pang's clothes, and I would know that she is proud of him, earning his life between hills of envelopes at seventy-nine, being a useful man, defending himself, dying with dignity. 

- Death is not a bad joke if told the right way.

1: Outside the window

The house where I grew up has long been dismantled. Removed to make way for a new generation of shining towers in Shanghai, an ancient fishing village born again as a gleaming metropolis, all brittle glass and metal. Nothing could have stopped the city’s inexorable march towards modernity, even if that meant selective amnesia. This included the rickety concrete buildings in Teacher’s Village No. 2, Putuo district, which once housed me and my family in my most wide-eyed and vulnerable years. On the scrap heap, it was, like the other remnants of Communist era housing.

Since then, my path has been long and winding. Not as confident, nor as strident, as the journey my native city had taken - to become the new financial heart of a new superpower in the East. But I had done some selective amnesia of my own. I had forgotten everything about that rickety concrete building, set in a small communal village where everyone knew each other; where women called down to their neighbours as they hung their clothes out to dry on bamboo poles; where children played together and parents took turns to babysit; and my mother put bags of rice out in the sun to chase out the bugs. I had forgotten those things, until they were gone.

But these are not the memories I want to tell you about. No, because their disappearance is not a surprise to anyone anymore. Yet some acts of forgetting catch you out and stop you in your tracks, even after they have disappeared for years.

What I want to tell you about is simply one scene I saw year after year, season after season, from the study at the back of that rickety concrete building. That’s it, nothing complicated. The study was badly built with the same thin and flaking walls as the rest of the house. It had a corrugated iron roof and unreliable electric wiring. The neon light, the only ones my parents could afford, flickered and sometimes went out and it was not soundproof at all. But what it did have - to make up for all these injustices - was a large window along the full length of the back wall, and, outside it, a small garden filled with tall swaying bamboo, leafy pomegranate plants and our share of the mature beech trees that lined the whole compound.

I could sit there for hours, watching and listening to the mysterious way nature worked outside. Most of the year there were birds to keep me company. They flew high above us and visited us simply because they could, or sang only when they were happy. Then there was the gentle rain in spring and autumn, that made a pitter patter sound on the iron roof and drenched the bamboo, which would bow and weep in gratitude. Afterwards, the world always seemed cleaner, clearer. And finally, in the monsoon season, the rain would shower down in great torrents that pounded the iron roof and deluged the world outside, fraying and flustering the normally strong, proud beech trees. I thought then that the heavens were saying something important, that I could not, nor put my finger on what it was.

Many years later, I can see that, in other places, and very different situations, I always found a way to keep an eye outside the window. Like from a silent and well-insulated bedroom, many floors up from the earth and its inhabitants, on a narrow bed facing away from the window – a small slit in the wall. I watch its reflection in a mirror on the opposite wall, 12 inches square. Still, I think I hear the birds sing and see the trees sway with the burden and the gift of rain. Even in that narrow aperture, they seemed to tell me, not all those who wander are lost.

I don't eat, I don't sleep

I do nothing but think of you.

What's the difference between love and obsession?
And the difference between obsession and desire?
I don't know.

This is not clever, or bashful, or exuberant or playful. It doesn't hide too hard. It's just good writing:

The Nadir right at this moment, all lit up and steaming north, in the dark, at night, with a strong west wind pulling the moon backward through a skein of clouds-the Nadir a constellation, complexly aglow, angelically white, festive, imperial. Yes, this: it would look like a floating palace to any poor soul out here on the ocean at night, alone in a dinghy, or not even in a dinghy but simply and terribly floating, treading water, out of sight of land. - DFW

with sound punctuation.

Cleverness is endearing if it comes with bashfulness and exuberant playfulness

 (otherwise it's annoying). This may - or may not - be an example:

The man who’d introduced them didn’t much like either of them, though he acted as if he did, anxious as he was to preserve good relations at all times. One never knew, after all, now did one now did one now did one. - David Foster Wallace. 

Anyway I like it. Or rather, I can't get rid of it. The pointlessness of the recurring words keep ringing in my head, banging around from one wall to the other like a bad echo. It is strangely similar to obsession. 

What we talk about when we talk about love

             L.D. put the shaving bag under his arm and picked up the suitcase.

             He said, “I just want to say one more thing.”

             But then he could not think what it could possibly be.

This is the ending Raymond Carver's editor forced on him, after cutting a romantic, lingering, uncertain five paragraphs off the end. One of which was this:

It came to him with a shock that he would remember this night and her like this. He was terrified to think that in the years ahead she might come to resemble a woman he couldn’t place, a mute figure in a long coat, standing in the middle of a lighted room with lowered eyes.

I'm not sure exactly where I'm going with this ... except that I like the idea of radically cutting even vaguely good paragraphs. 

Or maybe it's this - I like the desolate feeling you get after too many Raymond Carver stories, like everything has been stripped of its meaning. Maybe that's liberation (at least for the writer). 

A concise summary of everything I've learned so far about writing

Non-fiction is about making everything crystal clear and taking all the work out of it for the reader. Creative writing is the total opposite of the above.