Z came over one day and said it was getting hard to hear out of her left ear. We spoke briefly over the apartment intercom, and it sounded like her ear really did have a problem. I tidied up the place and let her in. She hung her scarf on a chair and shoved her mask into her pocket. She asked, what’ve you been reading lately? Which wasn’t a real question, since she’d already picked up a book from my desk. She said, hm, Elizabeth Bishop. I said, someone gave that to me. Haven’t read it. She said, I’ll give it a flip through. I glanced at the clock. It was late. Not just late, it was already 10:00 p.m. I said, what’s wrong with your ear? She said, not sure, not a big problem. It’s just gotten harder to use. She tapped her other ear and said, I have a spare, see? I nodded. She said, is that your daughter’s cape? I said, it’s a bath towel. She said, it’s shaped like a shark. I said, it’s for the bath. She said, how come you’re still living here? Hasn’t it been seven years since the last time I came over? I said, don’t remember. She said, sounds about right. So what did Bishop do? I said, a poet. She said, but what did she do? I said, taught at Harvard before she died. She said, that’s really something, look at what the book says: writing this poem saved her life. She was sinking into despair at the time. But Alice Methfessel left her fiancé and became Bishop’s lover again. The two stayed together until Bishop died. I said, haven’t gotten to that part. She said, listen to how cheesy this poem is, let me read it to you. I said, alright. She read: the art of losing isn’t hard to master; so many things seem filled with the intent to be lost that their loss is no disaster . . . never mind, it’s so bad. I saw blood trickle out of her left ear and said, there’s blood coming out of your ear. She said, it’s fine, it’s fine. Her face was ashen, even her fingertips were white. I said, did you eat something you shouldn’t have? She said, no, no . . . what was up with us back then? I said, what do you mean what was up? She said, please, we don’t have much time. What happened to us? I said, can’t remember. She smiled and said, right right right, you said I never cooked for you, and my portraits of you didn’t look like you. From her bosom, she pulled out a sheet of paper and placed it next to Bishop. She faced the door when she waved goodbye, without looking at me.
After she left, I sat by the desk for a while. Then I got up to wipe the blood off the floor. I tore her paper to shreds and threw it into the trash. I tied up the bag and left it by the door, fitting a new bag into the can.
I looked over at the bath towel. It was a cape in her mind. Z was my neighbor, a painter. Since her husband and daughter died in a car crash last month, she had already come to my apartment seven times. It was the seventh drawing she had given me of her husband.
2.
Since leaving home to write fiction, I’ve often thought about this one high school teacher, W. Her eyes shone bright as searchlights. I once mentioned her in the epilogue of a book, talking about how she encouraged me to write. That book was an early work, and the epilogue is embarrassing to read now. I thought of her often. I even began dreaming about her, which was odd. In the dreams, I’d stretch my hand out at her, as if I were asking for something. It’s reasonable to say that I was the one who owed a great deal to her. Since I didn’t even visit her after I left the school, asking her for something seemed ungracious. What was it that I wanted? Two days ago, a reporter sent me an email and said, I have a question for you. What was your first story about? Not the first you published, but the story you consider to be the first. Maybe this reporter was channeling Freud. No one’s asked me that before. I thought about it and suddenly remembered. If we’re talking about this business with stories, I wrote my first in high school, during my second year. I’d turned in a short story instead of an essay, about three thousand words. What was the topic again? Oh, right, it was “Jing Ke in White,” about why the assassin dressed in white clothes. I’d completely forgotten what I wrote. That’s what I wanted from my teacher.
W must’ve kept that story. I had a feeling. It actually wasn’t unreasonable for me to have felt so self-righteous in my dreams. I had a contact list on my phone that I cleaned out every month, deleting people I didn’t need. Not a single high school classmate or teacher’s number was left. The high school hadn’t moved though. It was still there. So I sent W a package with two of my books and a note: Dear Teacher W, I fondly recall all that you did for me, but most importantly, please return “Jing Ke in White.” After a week, the package came back—recipient not found. At such an impasse, I could only run some online searches. The school was mediocre, and W’s name was common. Many people shared her first and last name. I found the name of the school’s current principal. I sent the package again with a new note that inquired about W’s whereabouts. After a week, I got a reply. They took the books and my note, and someone had written in response:
Dear novelist friend, twelve years ago, or a year after you graduated, a man in white led Teacher W away at the school gate. There’s been no news of her since. Someone in Xi’an reportedly saw her flit by with hair flowing past her waist, bright flashing eyes, and a sword on her back. If this information is of any help to your career, consider it a humble act of support from your alma mater. Be well. Do not send things that carry words again.
3.
M’s late husband was a doctor. He looked quite refined in the photos, the type of person that carried ballpoint pens in his pocket. I’ve gone on two dates with M. She’s fond of cleanliness and even brought her own sheets and towels to my house. Maybe she got that trait from her late husband. She doesn’t have a job right now, but she inherited his estate. Her parents are both professors in the Chinese department. Actually, she’s never had a job, but she’s not worried about money. She’s real cute, has a head of neat short hair and two well-written poetry collections. During our second date, she sat and smoked on the side of the bed and started talking about how her husband died. She said, it was so unexpected! He was a cardiologist. That day, we went to the supermarket—you know, the 7-Eleven. We wanted some chips and planned to go home to watch a movie. He liked to watch movies on his laptop with his feet on the table, eating chips and drinking soda, and I liked to snuggle against his chest—you’re an author, so talking about this with you is fine, right? I’m pretty candid, if you haven’t noticed. When he wanted to marry me, I reminded him of something. I said, me, I’m pretty casual. I dated around a lot, can you accept that? He was pretty unconcerned, said that if I didn’t love him one day, I could leave, that marriage was like climbing a tower without carrying any luggage, you just go back down if you get tired. I said to him, words well spoken, I’d marry you for that analogy alone. We were quite happy after the wedding. He was magnetic, and I liked telling him stories. How should I put this—sometimes, he reminded me of my mother. He knew all my boyfriends, heard about each one. It’s not like I mentioned what went on with them in the bedroom. Being candid doesn’t mean being a dumbass, you know what I mean? That day in the 7-Eleven, we were figuring out whether to buy potato chips or fries. Out of nowhere, I saw one of my ex-boyfriends. He was a musician, the kind that sang folk songs. I said hello to him and dangled my wedding ring in front of his face. He was also happy to see me. We had a good time together back in the day, and neither of us held any grudges when it was over. He pointed at the guitar on his back, said there was going to be a show in the bar and invited us to listen. My husband had no objections, he knew it was fine. As soon as he looked me in the eye, he knew it was fine. We would save the movie for tomorrow. It was stored in a hard drive anyway.
The bar wasn’t big, but the ambience was great. The acoustics were just perfect. I could tell the people there knew the business. My ex sang two songs, both of which he had written. He was just fantastic, you know, actually had talent, and he was in no hurry, singing happily even in a bar. Before the third song, he gave a talk. He said the lyrics were from a poem I wrote. I would’ve forgotten if he hadn’t mentioned it—we made that song together. He started singing, and I got chills right away. It was so good. I didn’t think it was good back then, but the song had soul after all these years. After the song, I turned around to look at my husband. His eyes were filled with tears. He said, I’m hit, M. Then, he leaned against the table and died.
It was a heart attack. So unexpected.
4.
Once around midnight, I was out drinking with S, an elderly writer. S was thirty years older than me, drank twice as much, had married five times, wrote millions of words, had bought two buildings in his hometown and three flats in Beijing, but couldn’t drive since he was always drunk. What else? He had a hot temper and hated the lottery. We drank too much that night. S ordered another roasted chicken carcass and wore plastic gloves as he tore at the meat. Hearing the “ding” of an incoming text, S took off his gloves and pressed his nose against his cell phone. He had written too much, slept too little, and his eyesight was seriously bad.
“What does that mean?” he said. “What does that fucking mean?”
He pushed his cell phone at me and said, “What the fuck is this supposed to mean?”
I saw the words on the screen: “Babe, I forgive you.” There was no name to the number.
“Probably meant for someone else,” I said. “How old are you anyway?” He took the phone back and pressed his face into the screen: “Not so. I remember this number. And people call me babe.” I said, “You think about that, I’m going to eat this chicken rump.” He nodded, then cocked his head to one side and said, “It’s her. She’s dead though.” He drank another bottle and said, “Should be dead.” He picked up the phone and called someone: “Hey, yeah yeah yeah, cut the crap. Let me ask you something. Didn’t L die? She’s dead, right? When did she die? Three years ago? I went to the funeral? Ok ok, go to sleep. Alright alright, I’m on the judging panel. Shut up. Get some shut eye.”
“You heard of L?” he asked.
“No.”
“She was a pretty good writer twenty years ago.”
“Oh.”
“Oh oh oh, are you a robot? She wrote better than I did.”
“Mm.”
“Was my first wife.”
“I see.”
“I had an affair, and she decided to kill herself.”
“ . . . ”
“Falling didn’t kill her, made her disabled. Waiter, another bottle of Yanjing. It broke her back.”
“Mm.”
“Three years ago, while no one was looking, she took sleeping pills and died. She’d sent me novels before that, wanted my help in getting published. Her writing was nothing like it used to be. Maybe she broke her head when she fell and it made her stupid, don’t you think?”
“I’m full.”
“She texts me even though she’s dead, don’t you think she fell on her stupid head? Huh, don’t you think?”
5.
During the middle of my class, three people came in, two men and a woman. They sat in the first row. I looked at them. One man said, why don’t you keep lecturing? So I kept going. After a few minutes, the other man said, what a load of bull. Most of my students stood up and left. Two were asleep. But one girl, sitting in the second row, was still taking notes. The woman who came in started eating sunflower seeds: ka ka ka, pei! ka ka ka. The first man took out a slip of paper from his chest. He handed it to me and said, you can’t use these words in your next book. I said, why? He said, everything will be fine if you do as I say. I said, well, Hemingway’s editor had also told him to leave out certain words, and Hemingway responded, “emasculation is a minor operation to perform on men, animals, and books, but its effect is great.” The man said, I know, but Hemingway still blanked out the words, he yielded after his editor wrote: “If we can bring out this serial without arousing too serious an objection, you will have enormously consolidated your position.” I said, “you underestimate my integrity.” He took out a gun and a bag of tobacco and said, you’ve written about guns and tobacco in your fiction. Now, you can pick one. I said, I don’t smoke. He said, just pick one. I said, Sima Qian still wrote the Records of the Grand Historian after he was castrated. His name was left to posterity. The other man said, you’re a different case. Do you remember what Sima Qian said in the Afterword? The Great Way demands that we leave behind obduracy and desire, be rid of wit, put these aside for wisdom. Obduracy, as in an unyielding will; desire, as in greed. You’ve got no integrity, you’re all talk. Greedy and clever. Stop causing so much trouble for yourself. Walk the peaceful road of nonaction and let things take their course. You think about that. He put two things in front of me—a rusty knife and a pack of Marlboro cigarettes.
I finally recognized the student in front of me, the girl who always listened during my lectures. She came to every class and always sat in the second row. She was never late, never left early, never asked questions, never answered questions. She was O, a deaf person who came to my event five years ago and asked me to sign her copy of my book. At the time, she was fourteen or fifteen. She had given me a letter. In it, she told me she was quiet and liked to read. Her favorite story was McEwan’s “Solid Geometry.” She found that she had the same ability as the character who made people disappear by folding them into a void. She once folded away her father, an alcoholic and a tyrant. She folded away love letters that she could neither send nor burn. She said that one day, she hoped to join my class to learn how to write, and of course, she was willing to wait a few years.
I knew she could read my lips, so I gave her a request. By the time the bell rang, O had folded away those three people. She left the pack of Marlboros alone. Then, she left.
6.
My dear friends, guests, members of the judging panel, good afternoon. I’m so happy to win a prize. It gives me great encouragement. When I was very little, my teacher would draw wavy lines in my essays to point out well-written sentences. This prize is like having a wavy line drawn under my life, proving that the work I’ve done these years is actually not bad, and that this novel can hold its own.
Forgive me for being blunt, but I looked up the list of previous prize winners. Some of them were indeed talented, but some, not so much. To tell you the truth, they were trash. Holding this trophy, I wonder how people in the future will view my work. Though I am no genius, I hope that future winners will not feel humiliated by this predecessor. Actually, I don’t want to read from my script anymore. I just remembered my friend H. I imagine everyone here knows H. He is an outstanding novelist. I imagine everyone here also hates him. He has bad breath. He loves to play favorites and attacks people in his own profession. I haven’t spoken to him for nearly five years because of what he did. He was talking to a critic about a novel of mine that got good reviews, and he said it plagiarized a story he told me many years ago, down to the modal participles. Oh right, I remember what he said: if you read that novel carefully, you will find the marks of my lips. This talk is utter nonsense. My grandmother was the one who told me that story. H gravely offended my work and my kin. I imagine that everyone sitting here, under the same circumstances, would sever ties with such a person. He vanished from our view three years ago. No one knows where he went, not even me. But last year, he suddenly called. He wanted to tell me a story. I think you’ll understand when I say that no one can resist his storytelling. So I grunted in the affirmative. He said that lately, he’d been living in an abandoned northern factory. To write about it, he needed to live in it. He often went for a stroll inside the factory and discovered that this factory had a Workshop One Workshop Two Workshop Three Workshop Four Workshop Six Workshop Seven Workshop Eight Workshop Nine, but no Workshop Five. He got used to this fact. But one day, Workshop Five just appeared. Out of thin air. So he walked in. He saw that all the lathes in the room were moving, and the assembly line was still putting tractors together, even though there was no one there. He walked along the assembly line and saw that all the fully assembled tractors were moving into a cave. He sat on a tractor and went in. Inside the cave was a giant beast, ten stories tall, eating the tractors while sitting in a pool of mud. The giant beast said that its name was Little Bull. It had sat there for decades, eating tractors while expelling mud. It had never eaten a person before, and it was ready to eat H. H fought it off and even knocked out all its teeth, but he didn’t catch it. After Little Bull lost its teeth, it shrunk to the size of a cockroach, dug into the mud, and disappeared. Little Bull’s paw had struck H in the head during the fight, which was why he kept forgetting lately. He was telling me the story in case he forgot it later on. He thought that Little Bull must’ve run off into another cave, waiting for its teeth to grow back so that it could keep eating. He had to catch it, and once he caught it, this story would have an ending. Then, he hung up. That’s how my novel Giant Beast came about. The ending is the worst part, because I honestly don’t know how the novel should end. Please allow me to request that the judges confer the award to H, though I don’t know where he is. In fact, let me give the trophy back. You should probably be a bit more careful next time. Don’t give the prize to a stenographer. A great author wouldn’t have the time to stand here.
7.
I lived on Yanfen Street when I was very young. One day, an old monk walked by. When he saw me peeing by the door, he picked up a branch from the ground and started poking my willy. I said, fuck off. The old monk said, you little rascal. Touch the top of your head, do you feel a bump? I felt around and jumped. Sure enough, there was a bump in the middle of my head. Had it been there this whole time? I said, old fart, how did you know? He said, do you understand what this bump means? I said, what? He said, think of the ocean waves. Before the waves in the front have flattened, the waves behind are already rising. I’m talking about your life, which will be more turbulent than most. Your toil will not feed your stomach; it will be greater than food for your stomach. That is for you to mull over in your time. I said, what is it you want, money, rice, or oil? He said, no, I actually have something for you. I said, you lie out of your old face, I’m getting my Pa. The monk took a bird out from his chest. It was white as snow, neck bobbing, eyes bright red, with a grey beak the size of a grain of sand. The bird looked impossibly small resting on the palm of his hand. He said, this bird is for you. It doesn’t eat and only lives for a night. When it dies tomorrow morning, keep it on your person at all times. Don’t worry, it won’t smell. After you turn thirty, someone will ask for the bird. Give it to them. The bird will be of assistance. He lifted his palm to his lips and blew at the bird, which landed on my outstretched palm. It tickled my hand, and I felt the irrepressible urge to keep it safe. When I lifted my head, the monk was already far away, his bald head flashing in the light. After swerving around a tofu stand, he vanished.
The bird died the next day. No one else knew. I laid it inside of my pencil case. When I was a bit older, I kept it in my wallet. When I was thirty and wrote novels, I tucked it into my notebook. Like an extension of my mind, the notebook was with me everywhere. I wrote down whatever I wanted. One night, writing a story in my apartment, I created a character named V. What type of person was she? Hard to say. Big tempered, loved to argue, very straightforward. Her tenderness was blue and her hunger was white. After a month, I fell in love with her, but she was close to death, death from a spell of doubt, a siege, a storm. Wrapped in the whirlwind, she was about to be tossed into the stony wilderness. At this moment she cried from inside the wind, the bird, give me the bird! I jumped up, took the white bird out from my notebook, lifted my palm to my lips and blew. The bird landed on her outstretched palm and suddenly grew enormous. It lifted her out of the wind as it rose, shielding her with its giant wings from the rain. When they landed on my windowsill, it was daybreak.
V pulled open the window. The bird flew out. She turned toward me and said, you may kiss me now. But you’re scruffier than I’d imagined.
