We are not peasants.
Old peasants still gathered now and then. In autumn, driving donkey carts piled high, they came squeezing through the scattered leaves and made straight for the gate tower. If they arrived late, their vegetables would fetch no good price. The sun revolved. Their gazes bent downward, afraid to look up. They had lived forty or fifty years without once seeing the plaque under the flying eaves, its four characters—FIRST PASS UNDER HEAVEN—read from right to left.
You could not say the room was freezing, but your fingers were always ice. Hold them between your legs for a while and they turned icy and numb. Most of the mountains were bald. There was no firewood. There was no food to set on the table; one slab of pork belly had to make three pots of soup. The fish stopped coming. Shoals played in the Pacific, skirted the Bohai Sea, and turned away to Osaka.
Fishermen’s children called clams tuna. Their parents wanted to cry but had no tears. “Child, you’ve never eaten anything good. When I was young, Grandpa Dai came every winter. He was born with five fins and three claws, golden scales all over, spines sprouting from his gills—so very mighty. He always travelled with the shoals and the Atlantic warm current, never afraid when he saw a boat.
Grandpa Dai would flick one fin and thirty or fifty great silver hairtails would plunge into the nets all together. First the fishermen kowtowed and lit incense. Three plates: pork hindquarter, beef shank, sheep-tail fat, with three peaches in the middle. Bang, bang, into the water.
Once ashore, the hairtails were thrown straight onto the ground, every one three chi and three cun long—just over a metre—and frozen hard as clubs in the night. Some men were bold enough to sell the hairtails to the Board of War’s Armaments Office as jingals—heavy wall guns. Then one year in early spring, the crates were all soup and water. His Excellency Li ordered a batch of men beheaded at Caishikou. Their heads hung from the masts, their bodies propped at the sterns. Several great ships went back and forth outside Shanhaiguan for days. Grandpa Dai did not dare come again.”
The horse kept lifting its hind feet, unable to find its balance on the stone road. We grew noisy, then quiet again, waiting for him to come. Once he came, naturally he would speak. Did Grandpa Dai like the tribute? The sea was as black as time. Fog rose every night and all the criminals came out. By rights, mounted constables from the yamen kept the peace, but they had gone too long without fish. Lacking vitamin A, they could not see the demonstrators at night and seized people at random. Night watchmen, floor-moppers, and municipal sprinkler trucks crowded the county yamen.
I wondered: Grandpa Dai lived in the deep sea, so how could he learn what people were doing through the refraction of light? How could people guess what fish liked? Love for Grandpa Dai was carved into collective memory. People wanted him back.
The residents changed themselves to please him. They grew their beards and hair out. Nothing changed. Then they shaved it all off.
In any case, Grandpa Dai had not come to Shanhaiguan in more than ten years. Everyone missed him.
His Story He looked straight ahead, then around the circle. The audience had the eyes of dogs, ravenous, waiting to be fed. Before he even opened his mouth, they grew impatient, yet could not bear to look away. Their mouths opened again and again, wanting to say something for him. Every one of them carried a bestial confusion, tearing him apart with their eyes, loving him deeply.
He did not speak. Last time he had been taught a sentence: Mes yeux sont les yeux des chinois. Before cameras that steal the soul, before documentary directors who trade other people’s suffering for emotion, before French missionaries who drifted from Saigon all the way to the Lancang River, then drove horse carts to the Red River ferry, one could say this: my eyes are the eyes of the Chinese.
The eyes around him were like dogs’ eyes, cherishing a spare rib so dearly they wanted to dig a hole and hide it. They wanted to pull him apart. They were also afraid the things inside his head would disappear and his mouth would never open again.
He performed kuaiban, a form of storytelling paced by bamboo clappers. The clappers cracked. His fingers turned with his wrist, drawing a beautiful figure eight. They plainly had only three joints, yet seemed to link themselves into the Big Dipper, making everyone feel close to him.
The audience’s mouths hung slightly open. They squinted and grimaced, twisting their features into unnatural shapes, staring at those fingers. They watched a finger slide from beneath his jacket onto the tabletop, lightly tap the storyteller’s block twice, then hook it tenderly before lifting it.
If only they could snap those fingers, bend them backward. He would turn into a raptor, click click. Someone wanted to press the claw into the city wall and leave the 5A tourist attraction a souvenir, molding it in sticky rice, lime, and egg white.
If Grandpa Dai came back, people certainly would not let you leave. They would scrape off your scales and use them as the currency that held its value best. They would fry the flesh in rapeseed oil, never peanut oil, or it would taste rancid. Most important was the skeleton. They would tie a rope to the tail vertebra and throw it back into the sea for a few days, then, when grieving shoals embraced your corpse and wept, scoop them all up in one basket.
He said, “Where did I leave off last time?”
The water was still that high, flooding as high as the sun. Grandpa Dai and his friends sailed happily westward, ripples flexing their tentacles like jellyfish, without end. It happened every year.
Our Story A friend said I was like the Supreme Court of the United States. I said, where would I get that kind of power? He went on: the Supreme Court does not answer to the president, Congress, or the masses. And you? You answer neither to the people, nor to life, nor to yourself.
The Supreme Court answers only to the Constitution. I can answer only to creation. From now on, her throat must be there between every line. A decent grave, lush and burnished.
I did not know what direction the sunlight came from. The sky in the Southern Hemisphere was higher, the sun closer, flashing between buildings. I changed buses again and went to the inner harbour, looking over the port through a hundred and seventy degrees. I was subtitling an old French film: the story of Grandpa Dai.
Translating a particular text into another language. Writers also translate the countless works of other people into their own language. Gilles Deleuze says that to create is to draw a line of flight; the writer flees from other people. I wanted to flee from the film and translate every subtitle into swear words.
At the beginning of all things there was language, yet you were silent as a fish.
Grandpa Dai, we hope you can come back. We torment ourselves desperately. We are the idiots who voluntarily post advertisements for designer labels on social media. There is only ancient selfish wisdom, every way of life built for survival used to fill the void.
Things were not peaceful outside. In a fight, the many always bullied the few. Angry young people, grief. I saw it at once: a classic metaphorical technique. I knew they only wanted to attract Grandpa Dai’s attention by hurting themselves. He was old now, without the energy to shelter people.
There are countless avant-garde films in the world that no one can make head or tail of. Jump cuts, slow rhythms. I know more than three thousand art-film directors. A friend asked: really? I said: my inbox is full of them. They yearned for Grandpa Dai. As a respectable adult, I hated that emotion.
Grandpa Dai, a name children love to call out. They were as old as Grandpa Dai. The older they grew, the more they missed him.
Grandpa Dai, come back. We only want to see you. The wren nests in the deep forest but uses no more than one branch; the mole drinks from the river but takes no more than a bellyful. The wish of a small man is merely to have enough. Should we spend money? Once we earn more and spend more, once we turn Qinhuangdao into a 5A tourist attraction and the financial center of Bohai Bay, will Grandpa Dai come back?
My grandfather and grandmother were the only newlyweds not married under Grandpa Dai’s witness. My grandfather’s childhood friend had followed General Duan in Tianjin and scraped together a little glory in battle. On the wedding day, he gave my grandfather a Hanyang 88 rifle. It shone like a hairtail in the sun, wood and iron growing together, a living gun, Grandpa Dai wandering.
The Executioner’s Story His Excellency Li, your hand was truly ruthless. The men were beheaded before the fleet even left Shanhaiguan.
At noon they were all fishermen, with little money at home. The man carrying the blade had received nothing for his trouble, so naturally he was not enthusiastic about sharpening it. It was as dull as an oar. That day the great sheet of iron fell on a pitiful neck. The man lay there while the executioner worked as easily as a woman beating laundry beside a river.
The great sheet of iron fell, pressing the breath down, one muffled blow after another. Later, when he became a storyteller, he also slammed the storyteller’s block. The fisherman was tough. By the end his whole body had turned black. He had become a Black man.
The man with the blade thought, this is bad, this won’t do. The rules said the head must hit the ground, but the man had died first. Yet I was still alive. Trying to depict some feeling, attempting to sum up a planet, a nation, or an entire civilization in words, always taking the part for the whole. I am the translator. I am the translator; I must follow the original line of thought. They pleased Grandpa Dai. I am pleasing the audience. Whatever one does is futile. Tighten the pacing. Heighten the reader’s emotional response.
I need to add clearer bodily sensations or echoes of concrete scenic detail; add a location/time anchor at the opening of the first section; insert a passage in the middle of the second that questions the reader’s own awareness; in the third, emphasize the contrast between “I” and the myth of Grandpa Dai, adding recurring symbolic objects. Finally, leave the ending blank or make a sudden turn. Perhaps Grandpa Dai never truly existed: a collective hallucination. Or perhaps, when everyone gives up waiting, Grandpa Dai has already returned unnoticed, leaving room for the reader’s imagination.
But even porn is fake. The title says amateur home video and the people in it turn out to be professional actors. Sexual impulse is fake too. Once I finish the subtitles, who will care who Grandpa Dai was?
Too many years had passed since Grandpa Dai last came. Writers had nothing left to write, directors nothing left to film. All they could do was burrow into old wisdom and dig, until life became like a film, some kind of social experiment. Then the little Japanese devils made trouble for several years. Them—I can hardly bear to say it—they killed until the beach at Shanhaiguan was heaped full.
Only His Excellency Li had faced Grandpa Dai. Three motor ships cruised back and forth off Shanhaiguan. Grandpa Dai liked them, savoring the charms of the Industrial Revolution. Only His Excellency Li dared meet Grandpa Dai’s eyes. Perhaps what he meant was: bro, I’ve got this whole stretch of land covered. Stay out of it. The Beiyang Fleet’s money had all been diverted to build gardens. The shells in the storehouses were roe deer from Jilin frozen into blocks, and wool from Inner Mongolia soaked through with mud.
Ordinarily we had nothing to do but work desperately, wait for him to come tell us the story of Grandpa Dai, save money, tip him, just to win him a smile. I truly hoped he would speak.
The wind poured in. He stuck his hand down his trousers. We all saw it.
His Excellency Li had been pleased that day. The head did not fall. The man involved feared it was not enough of a deterrent. He feared Grandpa Dai would come back and His Excellency Li would certainly drag up the old affair and blame him. All he could do was become a storyteller, frighten children, and tell them how much evil Grandpa Dai had done.
We grew up. We spent our whole lives listening. Every trace of blood drained from our hands. We stared at his hand. Our mouths clenched around our teeth. The skin of his hand was tough. The more he told, the more we loved him. Grandpa Dai, we want you back. You may brutally grind our natures smooth, as long as your terror can make us feel safe.
He did not want Grandpa Dai to return. He endured in silence until the day of my wedding, when we lay on the ground imitating Grandpa Dai drifting in the current, and then he struck our heads with steel. Fingers the white of albumen, every knuckle distinct.
My grandfather beat him to it and shot through the terrorist’s windpipe. He fell to the ground. Nothing flowed out.
The Story of the Little Japanese Devils Japanese militarist invaders, commonly called little Japanese devils. Standard reactionaries, wearing reactionary uniforms, reactionary packs, reactionary bayonets at their sides. Bent at the waist, no one could tell whether their baggy trouser legs held legs or dried bones. They did not look like a species that ought to exist in the world. Standing together, they were no different from the heap of fallen leaves beside them.
A set of jūkendō bayonet drills. They stood in a row: left right left right right, parry thrust pick, sow dissension and let the Chinese hack one another to death with knives, that works too. Before formally enlisting, I often killed stray cats inside Osaka Castle with crossbow bolts. I always had to kill something, then be killed according to the theory of drama. Their lives, their experiences, memories and lessons—what little tunes did they whistle on ordinary days?
I carried all the bodies to the beach. They looked exactly alike. From their stiff faces I could not distinguish age or even sex. Their pupils spread wide, like my eyes, ferocious with the merciless ferocity of death. I felt I belonged to their world.
Then the little Japanese devil saw my grandfather holding a Hanyang 88. He drew his gun. “Theory says that if a gun appears, it has to go off.” My grandfather said, “Then let me fire it, or there won’t be anything after this.” The little Japanese devil said, “No. For the Emperor, I have to fire first.”
My grandfather said, then let’s play Russian roulette. The little Japanese devil agreed.
In the dripping wet fog, my grandfather and the little Japanese devil played Russian roulette with the gun. The day was damp. Grandpa Dai liked weather like this. The Hanyang 88 gleamed silver. It did not like being held; hands sweated and were too sticky. It opened its toothless mouth.
Fernando Pessoa said: the making of almost every work contains a flash of imitation, a learned shudder, and stolen ecstasy.
The little Japanese devil went down to the beach. My grandfather threw the Hanyang 88 into the sea. It slipped happily beneath the surface, deeper and deeper, going to find its friends. He bent down like a peasant. He had seen the plaque reading FIRST PASS UNDER HEAVEN too many times before. He did not want to look up again.
He told me the little Japanese devil also fell on the beach. Nothing flowed out. He and I stood on the beach waiting for Grandpa Dai. I kept coughing.