The day my brother came with his bassist, only one sentence occurred to me: “Nothing looks emptier than an empty swimming pool.”
He told me I had to find He Li. He Li: I grew up in dread with that name beside me, and I will always remember the moment I suddenly realised that the synonyms for a phone were half near, half far and nowhere in particular. That was when I began helping my brother look for He Li.
Looking for He Li costs money. You scan a code with your phone and pay; password-free payment, money taken straight out. I do not like spending money, but without spending it she is hard to find.
People are always sending me photographs and videos of He Li. I have also seen plenty of He Lis in real life. They are not her. Only someone who has never seen me can be He Li; only someone who has never known me can be He Li. I possess none of her attention. I do not know her name. She will never know I am looking for her.
Only when I look at He Li through a schizophrenic, dissociated third-person view does she exist. Only when I do not exist can my brother’s love for her exist here. The He Li I mean is not Holly Kujo, Jotaro Kujo’s mother in JoJo’s Bizarre Adventure. She can be called Holly; she can be called He Li. It depends how you translate it. In early Chinese translations of foreign names, people would choose a Chinese surname with a similar sound. That is why her surname is He. Are you satisfied now? How about this? Have I explained it thoroughly enough?
This is how it is: children, once grown, are like people playing GTA; the world is one enormous amusement park. My God, the university students had gone home for the holidays. That day, I had complete control of the car.
He Li runs fast. Sometimes she goes abroad for a while and leaves her mother tongue behind. She changes her name and paints up her face. She says it is better that way: back home she must never be seen by anyone she knows. He Li darts through the feed at speed. Several hundred new He Lis can appear in a day.
Men—the men beside He Li—are exacting surgeons. They turn unsuspecting women into He Li, then offer them up with both hands as if showing off. Only my memory, surging wherever it pleases, exists. Concrete versions of certain moments, spaces and occasions occupy a great part of my brain. All these He Lis: I am a man with an assignment.
He Li is scattered across all the major websites. Sometimes men lose money to scams because they want to see her too badly and make impulsive purchases. Every He Li they meet that way is a fake. And no, I do not mean Jotaro Kujo’s mother.
Men look at women, get themselves off and regret it. They begin to feel boundless disgust for them, as if they were South Koreans who had got hold of a North Korean propaganda balloon. Too disgusted to touch it, unwilling to look at another inch, they move the mouse to the top right-hand corner. One slip and every page is closed.
They will never find He Li that way. I never wanted to look for He Li. My brother told me to. All my brother wants is the He Li behind the screen.
I have taught them how to look for He Li—they look only at He Li’s face, breasts, arse, legs, feet and genitals. Sometimes they find He Li wearing a surgical mask or a blindfold. Some burn with desire; others feel nothing. Sometimes He Li is half naked, sometimes entirely naked. Some He Lis assume the pose of a martyred saint. How much she resembles a vessel passing from something into nothing: the harder they try to fill her, the emptier He Li’s heart becomes.
You may never have noticed—may never have realised—that while they watch He Li, they never register the minute changes in the scene. Even the air begins to feel pity. Amid meaningless gasps it grows heavier and heavier, silencing every appeal to reason; the camera cannot find its focus, the image blurs. He Li is not Wushuang, not Mudan, not Jiayuan, not Rascal Does Not Dream of Bunny Girl Senpai, and not Daiqing.
He Li always trusts the man in front of her too much. She has never imagined she might become the He Li in my eyes. She does not know I am looking for her.
My brother truly loves Holly. He loves the way she makes him feel himself shrink into a speck in the primeval wild, watching in primitive terror as the mythic Gonggong and Zhuanxu beat each other senseless in the distance, fighting for the throne. These days the only things worth anything are the right to speak, the right to define and the right to interpret. You want to talk about subculture? He Li has long since entered the struggle and resistance in which all things carry yin on their backs and embrace yang. My brother watches those images again and again, searching for her traces. He likes the feeling: always on guard for monumental stones, like South American pyramids, falling from the edge of the sky. On the Fifth Plateau, such images are everywhere. In a place where life does not exist, my brother carefully tends his own life, hiding it well, letting no one see. Oh, these hidden cameras.
Information and images are the cheapest things in this age. I am not a photographer. Those men are. The beautiful bodies of carbon-based monkeys have begun to lose value too. Many people willingly display themselves and profit from their bodies, but they are not He Li.
He Li knows nothing.
In He Li, ignorance is not the chronic disease of an age but a medicine that soothes the mind. It is her defining trait. It erases the boundless possibilities of her subjectivity and exposes her naked—He Li was quite literally naked at the time—to the audience. Naturally, the audience knows what to do with its own lingering desires.
Before they entered this door they swiped a card. Every story begins as the continuation of another story. He Li is not He Li yet; there is no need to look for her. The man reached the room first and set up the camera and its hiding place. I know that everyone except me is looking for He Li. They wait for the woman’s message; they wait for her to come through the door. There is no need to describe the furniture again. It simply stands there in silence. If you want to find He Li, you must not only dive deep into hell but also climb over scams, gambling adverts and computer viruses. Peter Handke once summed up the whole theory like this: “The names of characters and objects are suddenly preceded by an article; in this way, a name comes to stand for a character or object that has already appeared in a story.”
But he never said where He Li was. He published a collection of stories in which a man walked out into the street. The cigarette butt rolled onto the pavement. The beginning of the story was not a beginning at all. It continued into the photographer lying in the grass, taking shot after shot and hating every one, wanting to ask why you have no chin no jawline no cheek no chick no racism no little photographer who turns and vanishes into the grass while watching you every second.
Where else can you hide? All around you are guitars run through overdrive pedals. Punk music and the beginning of the story have already taken the earlier time into account when they use the article. Through the article, those words become the names of particular objects. If Chinese were reconstructed along Indo-European lines, the greatest beneficiaries would be experimental modern poets: they could manufacture the baroque two-thousands vocabulary of a Sino-Western Renaissance. I learnt this grammar before I ever met He Li. I left messages in her Qzone: bored-ing, sad-ing, ignorant-ing. See? It rhymes forever. My brother is a poet whose mouth tastes of the factory. Something lodged beside his back molar that he could not chew. Scared the shit out of him. He picked it free and found a shard of plastic. Scared the shit out of me too. Thank God it was not a hair or half an insect. The drink tasted of flavouring as well. Anything to keep modern people from dealing with filthy earth and insects… Later I discovered that -ing and all the rest were not articles at all. I had always got it wrong. An article is a function word. I kept reading. Handke said: if universal time becomes the time of a particular story in this way, only then can it be called a beginning… The definite article picks out those particular objects and characters one by one from all others of their kind, allowing the words to compose a particular story. What the hell does that mean? I left the toilet door open for half the day and still could not work it out. The university students had all gone home for the holidays. I kept the toilet open in case someone needed it, since this is not Europe after all. Everyone listens to The Moon Represents My Heart, represents the toilet in my heart, so you should not have to pay to use it. You would not want to pay one euro merely to piss. Better to do it directly in the metro station.
When Handke began writing, there was probably no internet and no cloud server. Now He Li is locked inside a website’s little video frame, where afternoon sunlight forever pours into a classroom. Before he began, he already knew all this would happen. There were handcuffs in his mind, ready to fasten her there.
He thought about giving himself a name like a consumer brand. Call for submissions: looking for a native Chinese speaker, no AI, translation must pass AI-detection software. No machine translation. He does not want names like Good Girl Tailor Shop or Handsome Young Man Clothing, those machine-translated names whose limbs do not sound properly coordinated. Chinese people are so modest; they say they know only a little of everything. Young people have the same mentality. Yes, inside the lactic acid of every person holding a massage gun, a musical note is having a party. Dance music for both hands. Relax. If tapping a touchscreen is going to possess your body and mind completely and waste several hours, you might as well spend them reading this illogical article—or padding the word count for a naïve and sorrowful novelist.
The cameras film me but not He Li. They stand all over the street on tall poles. The place selling that fucked-about chicken, Wal×ace, hired a few university students for the summer, dirty but you eat it and do not get ill: “Hi, is order 8176 ready?” He says do not worry. The employee says there is no need to rush; when it is ready, they will definitely call you. He Li—their existence is more like an elevator advertisement whose background music must be square-dance BGM with an offbeat bass line, so it can eat its way backwards into diners whose metabolism is built from expired breadcrumbs and egg white stuck to miserable chicken produced under the nauseating hygiene of a Western-style burger shop publicly christened Wal×ace by a franchiser only after someone spent hundreds of thousands, diners listening through headphones to ethnic music about disputed territories, already loaded with a political position—where, for instance, did the descendants of the Mongol Golden Clan actually go?—music infected by Han-chauvinist dreams and the faith that all beneath heaven is the king’s land, humming and humming and awoo awoo awoo—awoo—oh-oh-oh—hmm—the Heavenly Qaghan is coming—and thinking this music is fucking amazing, which of course it is, because demanding information from the entire world is precisely what our generation must remember even if we miss the train, that day in Qinhuangdao when the sky as always became the pale blue and broad white of a parrot’s feathers and a strange family-entertainment feeling rose in the heart, looking at the camera and wanting to take it home and install it in the ancestral shrine, wrapping great northern three-delicacy dumplings for it, and then she used the most fashionable modern thing, a twenty-year-old CCD compact camera, to flatten you into an image as you sang the shitty music written after the high point of sixties humanism, for the country and the people and the joy of the people, and even once the image was taken there was nothing wrong with it, no backlighting, no bared teeth, no rhinitis pharyngitis otitis-media little photograph, after which, because of human relations, always because of these relations, she posted everyone’s pictures to WeChat Moments but not yours, and you had questions, and turned, looked at the pole on which your camera stood. The old farts handing out literary prizes who read nothing but Swedish will never understand the beauty of ambiguity, mood and blank space in Chinese: turn, no subject no article no tense no voice, intent before the brush, delight beyond the method, turn—the morning mist of Qinhuangdao. Delusion: moral nihilism social nihilism legal nihilism economic nihilism contractual nihilism credit nihilism, all the terrifying things made nihil, yet the first to be nihilated were the proletarians hogging seats on green trains, because people live in an unprecedented heaven, witnesses to the destruction of the old age and carrying that photograph taken from space, the charcoal-scorched horizon clearly visible as we burn our own houses and bodies and let fire arise of itself clinging to Laozi’s Daodejing, while remembering to avoid those sensitive and dangerous critiques of critique and the cameras and facial recognition squeezed from every corner, projecting your face and voice onto the outside world like my immortal ancestors who chose to put down every family root in Bohai Bay, and when I wrote this long and difficult sentence, fit to hand to Black “three-illegal” migrants smuggled in through Guangzhou as a Chinese reading-comprehension visa test, I finally understood what an article was.
An article is the dead history behind the vintage on your body, or the way, when you drum, you wander too far out of your body and play only one beat while the others laugh behind your back and say you are far too definite, transformed into a melancholy artificial intelligence or an 808 drum machine used by Kanye West, while the lost punctuation and the spaces in which the text might breathe fill with He Li’s voice. Sometimes people look after He Li, pay attention to her. Everything she says is listened to again and again with care, no matter how fluent her Mandarin or how elegant her voice. Even a stupid analyst made of lifeless combinations of ones and zeroes—a microcomputer, also called a computer, though almost no one remembers the former name—can observe her flesh. He and it make out what she is saying and transcribe the language into subtitles. We can hardly live without it. Sync the timecode. The font size is just right.
That day I had complete control of the swaying car and happily hummed a tune by Richard Wagner as I sped up like a Soviet strategic nuclear counterstrike; the red and green traffic lights and the flies that bored into fruit on the trees left behind only the excrement of their intermarriage, no one knowing whether they were dead, whether they had run back out the way they came, whether time vanished inside the tiny insects or they simply died in the hole; it roared like everyone’s nerves, inside the primeval chaos in which nothing had begun and everything had already reached its end, through unrecorded years of human struggle, always alert to the grass in the night and whatever might be searching there for plants to roll into cigarettes, the nonhuman species with webbed hands rolling in sludge rock, ready to knock your brains out with a club, while you roamed beside Homo cepranensis, Homo antecessor, Homo erectus, Homo gautengensis, Homo ergaster, Homo georgicus, Homo rudolfensis… and on and on, like thunder with severe hyperthyroidism, striking a tree and generating big data and feeding all of it into the machines of loving grace, and back then the pillar of heaven broke and the tether of earth snapped. ChatGPT would have seen it and said, Fuck me, heaven is tilting northwest, so of course the sun and moon and stars move that way; the fucking earth falls short in the southeast, so where else would all that dust go? And whole packs of Homo wandered around (crowding the parentheses where the joke is explained). All those long English words were selected with my mouse, copied with Ctrl+C, then pasted one by one into the writing software. Once they hesitated upon an earth worth nothing—strictly speaking, private property and value had not yet been invented within that chaos. To a value system, their histories and stories are not worth a cent. They are formless fictitious memories, yet our genes contain their melancholy traces. Is that true? Did I make it up? Or is it only some small subculture that cares about the cultural baggage attached to those four letters and cannot help sniggering at the sight of the symbol? When there is nothing left to say, you have to try a trick. If this were a Bilibili video, this would be the moment to throw up a bullet-comment poll and speak directly to the audience, grandly calling it breaking the fourth wall. Eyes to the lens. Bring your ear closer. I am not going to say fuck your mother. He Li knows the trick too: glancing left, looking right, looking into the camera.
Oh, finally, I found the lens. Hidden fucking well, too. The mineral-water bottle is a camera. The backpack is a camera. The charging port on the phone is a camera. I am a fucking camera too. My mother is a camera.
He Li, do you know why everything you see looks like a camera? Because you are the only thing that is not a camera.
Me? I am a camera. My mother is a camera too. You think I have a miserable life? Miserable is good. I am a camera. If I can keep watching, then my family must still be there. The day my brother finally finds He Li, the cameras will be able to keep watching everyone.
Make a family. Find a hilltop. A post-apocalyptic life. A person is only a person while a camera is watching. Cameras force-feed people existentialism as if they had struck some unspeakable deal with a printing house to coax unsold and outmoded French philosophy from the sixties down our throats, and what has the emperor’s power to do with me? Meaning, who the fuck can tell me what to do. Our ancestors had Discipline and Punish worked out five thousand years ago. The treasure at the end of human civilisation is still the camera. Build a thatched hut. Fence off two plots. Drive in stakes, the sort outside Vlad III the Impaler’s house. Cover everything in cameras. This is the happy life of my brother and He Li.