Novels:
Here are two short novels I wrote.
"Eraser"
A gigantic eraser, now even larger than the school's terracotta bricks, was streaked with a rainbow of colors, so bright it was even prettier than the red and green flowers blooming in the grass.
In the class, perhaps only this yellow-gray, three-layer pencil case could hold an eraser that large. But Tony had no idea how to use it. If he used it on white paper, just imagine, all those off-color rainbows he'd draw in the sky would be erased with it. An eraser this large would have to be polished off by someone who had finished everyone's homework before even a single corner could be smoothed out; no, that single corner would have to be polished from Monday morning until Friday evening, so no one would be foolish enough to do everyone's homework.
Even though Mom said two erasers were enough, the dark one was for the darkest colors, and the light one was the most useful for everyday use—"dark and light" because that's how Mom only described them to me—for some reason, no one at school seemed to have thought of using different-colored erasers to erase different colored pencils. Perhaps it was because erasers this large weren't available before. This eraser wasn't a dark or light eraser anymore, so it definitely wasn't Tony's. Maybe he stole it—he must have a good friend named Edison. So, this invention definitely wasn't used for this experiment; if it was, it would be hard to find it again.
It was almost time. Ms. Lan had always had a habit of taking a short break between classes. With a building so big and a class so full, there were always a few who couldn't hold it in. This break varied in length, but it was always taken when only a few girls were left in the class who hadn't gone to the restroom.
Listening to their conversation, pairs of sharp fangs dangling from playful cheeks, pairs of white hands resting on wobbly chair backs, the creaking sound echoing through the classroom; to avoid matching their blushes, the most effective, and only, way was to turn my back to them, so I wouldn't be noticed.
No, that's not right. What's that black thing between the three rows of lights? If it were a surveillance camera, everyone would be instantly captured—I'd have to go around the other tables first; walking in a straight line would be too obvious. But where should I put it? It needed to be safe from the end of get out of class to the end of school, and even more importantly, it needed to be portable—the first-grade administration classroom was on the first floor, directly below and diagonally across from this classroom. At my running pace, it would definitely take me back and forth. No, there's surveillance in the hallway. Since I can't see their faces, which classroom they enter becomes crucial. To put things in the classroom, they'll probably go from the brown front door to the back. All they need to do is hide in an empty classroom for a while, and their movements must be coordinated, including putting things in a row of wooden cabinets. It's better to be safe than sorry, that's what Dad always tells me.
My peripheral vision darted in the direction of their chatter. The place was dazzling, each one huddled together with a sharp edge. Actually, it was inevitable that things had reached this point. Remember, they'd point out whose drawings were the most colorful, who was right, and whose was wrong. Those who drew the wrong drawings would have to hide, keep their voices to themselves, and try not to draw attention. That's how people relate to each other. Even thinking about it makes me feel heavy-hearted and dizzy. As usual, I could only persuade them to give up. I simply admired this unique eraser.
They were still there, always there, uttering irritating, critical phrases behind my back, as if they didn't realize how such pointed words would quickly grow into a tangled web of withered thorns, bringing shame. Finally, my left hand, unwilling to accept the shame, sat upright at my waist.
………
My steps suddenly stopped. Outside the window at the first-floor stairwell, a rainbow of red, orange, yellow, green, crimson, blue, and purple appeared. The infirmary sign faced it. The nurses gathered around a boy, self-consciously clustering around him, their eyes fixed on the canvas before them. He took his sketchpad and dabbed some paint on it. Black flowers surrounded him, and in the center stood a figure, covered in color. The colors were vibrant, absolutely beautiful.
………
At the front of the desk, he was still lost in thought, mulling over what he had just seen. Without a second thought, a riot of colors suddenly flooded his mind. It was more vibrant than a rainbow, far more beautiful. He fished out the eraser he had successfully retrieved from the outer pocket of his schoolbag. The colors on it didn't seem as dazzling anymore. Perhaps it was the fickle light from the desk, or perhaps he was worried that if he were exposed one day, they would tease him about it.
After a moment's thought, a TV scene involving a classmate buying the same item suddenly popped up in my mind. Still unwilling to risk my life, I placed the colored eraser in a secret compartment on the inside wall of my desk. However, I never took it out again; later, I retrieved it.
After hearing all the confessions, Ms. Lan and her boyfriend emerged from the infirmary on the first floor of the teaching building. From every angle, they looked a perfect match. Sitting by a tree under a clear, cloudless sky, she suddenly leaned on my right shoulder, her eyes fixed on the ball behind the goal. She muttered something.
"Every one of the girls in class that day was incredibly resolute, saying things like 'sure' and 'only'. But they're usually so arrogant, constantly saying things like 'There's no such thing as a blue house or a colorful sky, you can't even paint,' and engaging in such gossiping things. Taking such nonsense to court is nothing more than dereliction of duty."
"Why are you saying things like 'wearing a black uniform like me,' 'as tall as me,' 'running incredibly fast like me,' as if you weren't the one doing it?"
"You know So, I just called my parents, and I could only repeat to my mother things like, "There are rainbow colors on that eraser, not dark and light. There are seven." and "But Mom keeps telling me there are seven colors in a rainbow, so why can't I tell you the colors of the rainbow I saw?" The person on the other end of the line burst into tears.
Finally, I watched the tears stream down her cheeks, and I reached out my left hand to hug her left shoulder, just like I always do; she rested her head on my shoulder. For some reason, the weather had changed; the sky, just clear under the rainbow, had begun to rain again. Suddenly, I remembered a story a great football coach told me many years ago.
"A good football coach never teaches a player how to score a goal; he tells everyone on the team how to play. When one player tells the coach how he wants to play, that person becomes the team leader. But as more and more people do, the coach will tell them they can't play the same way they used to. Only when the coach and players separate, and the coach doesn't know how the players play, do the players truly learn to play."
That day, as usual, Dad drove up in his half-black car. Besides the honking horn, it was the only way to tell which was Dad from Mom. She said nothing the whole way, just evasive glances at Dad's profile as he drove.
Trees, trees, trees, telephone poles, trees, trees, trees, telephone poles, trees, trees, trees...
Green, green, green, gray, branches, no branches, few branches, smelling of iron, claws bared, shaved, rough...
It was probably at the gate of the community that Dad spoke, his voice bland, with no discernible emotional ups and downs.
In the elevator, his thoughts raced even further. But a lie seemed harder to fabricate.
I only remember that the food that day was salty. I only remember not wanting to make Mom cry again. I only remember that Mom's tears were probably colorless.
Not long after, Mom and Dad returned from their business trip, still looking exhausted. The donation consent form he was holding, leaning against the dining table, was covered by two lightly weighted test papers. Before he could say anything, the doorbell rang, two clear ding-dongs. Inside the foam bag was an eraser larger than a brick...
…………
It was a pity that even today, the colors on the eraser weren't as stunning as the colors of the rainbow. Thinking of this, he raised his head again and looked toward the classroom in the teaching building. The fleeting image of ten years ago came back to him. Ten years ago, on the first floor, the teacher and the nurse sat by the court, discussing a vague football topic. Ten years ago, on the first floor, that brother was with a few nurses. They gazed at the dawning sky, then at the silhouette of a man among the flower petals on the drawing board.
That day, he stole the eraser that erased the rainbow, the eraser that colored the world, and the eraser that erased the world's colors again; that day, he stole a moment of today from the past.
"Filial Piety"
Ba-serpent swallows an elephant; after three years it expels its bones.
One, two, three–inch-wide wheel ruts split the ground; the fissures gaped like naked spines laid out on the earth, sometimes arching, sometimes bending. In this place, often called barren, the mud came in varying shades and depths, remembering the rain-dimmed springs that follow winter; in the mist the green algae in the ditches and the green shoots in the deepest ruts blurred into one another in the distance. The high-speed trains that had just passed the village were unmistakably different from the rumbling engines of a decade ago — yet beneath the plain clothes and beneath the former steel-and-concrete frames there was, in both, a heart: a burning heart.
She rested her head against the slightly cool window. Outside, the chill plain sometimes sent up strands of cooking smoke, thin and curling, all drifting upward toward a patch of broken clouds like soap stains in a repeatedly washed corner — thin. She sat there, wooden, showing not the slightest color.
She was dressed neatly: a dark suit and a pair of flat leather shoes. Her manners and speech were nothing like those of coarse, hackneyed people; every gesture was composed and poised. But to a shrewd eye the source of her faint reserve was not entirely hidden: her rounded cheeks bore a simple rose-red blush — the kind that belonged to the girls of her old hometown, natural and effortless — and the cheap, roughly polished, almost irregular piece of green jade she clutched in her right palm made plain that she belonged to a longer, quieter place, not — the city.
Unlike other children who had come from outside, she had not lived poorly there; in fact she had been well liked. Who would hate a young woman whose nature seemed destined to be good, who was witty and carried with her the peculiar spirit of the mountain air? Like wild boar meat and red apples from the valley, fried until glossy and fragrant, the aroma itself invited praise; anyone who tasted it would recall another sight — its prettiness was not aggressive, and yet it was everywhere on the hillsides, blossoming in profusion.
But, like those who have paused somewhere in the city, who can say how many pure cries she had fallen silent upon, how many times she hesitated at the quay where lonely souls briefly rest. So, not long after graduation she reached a rule worth keeping for life — humans, as devotees of rainy days, must taste carefully: under wind and rain, lick the foul stench the mud carries; it is so strong, so real. For on sunny days, once the suffocating shackles are broken, what blooms above the earth is often so pale and illusory.
But why did she want to go home at all? Undoubtedly because there was the tranquil life, the low-desire vegetation. On the eve of New Year, everyone worked frantically, trying to secure a decent year-end bonus and go home for a proper Spring Festival. She had quit her job as a judge’s assistant and left colleagues she’d known for four years, but she had no energy to examine where all those days and nights of her life had gone. It seemed she simply wanted to go back and take a look. Those years — most of life is only a small part of the whole — kept replaying in her mind like a revolving lantern; they rose up at odd times, then were cast away again.
She had long since grown used to such sudden, reasonless impulses: ever since she left home to study in the city, she found that whenever she was alone, her gaze would suddenly fix on any place like a meditative statue or a devout god; she would stare blankly, turning things over inside her head.
….........
From a distance, from down in a sinkhole, the occasional blast of explosives and the dull, sharp clink of pickaxes split the whole area apart.
A little girl picked up stones she could lift and, using her strength without showing much feeling, tossed them one by one into the deep pit ahead.
A burly middle-aged worker came up from behind; the sweat-darkened hard hat at his waist made her instinctively step back. He reached out a large hand, patted the girl’s head gently, then crouched down. The late sun shone on his side; cradled in his hands was a lump of rock with white lime clinging to it, and within a pale, impure green shimmered a faint, alluring gleam in the slanted sunlight.
“Sweetie, look —”
“This is jade.”
After the man left, she reluctantly let go of the stone pressed into her palm. The green in it suddenly felt ugly; she gripped it with her right hand and, aiming toward the sun, threw it — this time the stone flew the farthest and fell fastest from view.
On the way home they said little. She only remembered it had been a clear day — the kind the judge loved most. The moment they left the courthouse, they felt like caged gods, greedily wanting to inhale and consume the human air and the eternal morning they missed — until her father suddenly stepped out of the car, panicked and calling the police, saying something about someone being smashed to death — a strange thing — until, following the green-tinged slant of the setting sun on the ground, he looked back at his daughter in the car.
….........
That day, after trudging along a muddy path, she returned home and was asked what had happened to the jade.
“I lost it.”
“Where did you lose it?”
“In the pit.”
“Sweetie, when I leave later, hide this someplace where no one can find it. When the day comes that you leave home for a very long time, then take it with you. Understand?”
….........
That evening, her father handed the pale-green stone back to her, earnestly warning her not to lose it. He didn’t even pull her close in the usual way; he just slowly closed the bedroom door. But that night she could not sleep. She heard from the kitchen the occasional sound of washing; a crescent moon shone on the weeds growing through the balcony crack. The October wind remained sharp, slashing the skin painfully. The night was destined to be white and gray, the lonely moon destined to hang alone.
Early the next morning, the house was surrounded by four or five sirens-blaring police cars. From the bed she watched her father’s back in the red-and-blue morning light, his back bent several times. Unable to pull the curtain, she hurriedly grabbed the stone left by her father the previous night — she knew it was the same pale-green stone, but after being stained with blood, no matter how she washed it in water until no speck of dirt came off, it had lost its sheen.
This is the only thing she still remembered clearly about her father’s face from her recollections of home. When she was little, her father worked at a soon-to-be-abandoned quarry. The many hectares were operated by only two or three workers in the pit, so he always came home late, lime dust all over his body; he would often come into the house before he had time to brush it off. Regardless of what happened during the day, he would finally pat his clothes and sit on the corner of her desk by the window, pointing to the vast starry sky and talk about how grand the world was — “Sweetie, when I have money someday, where would you like to go? Shanghai? I hear there are all sorts of strange things brought by foreigners. Or maybe Beijing — ‘When clouds part north and south, behold the capital; not reaching the Great Wall, one is no hero!’ Ha ha ha!” She could not help being a little annoyed with him. Every parent-teacher meeting her mother would pull out her white wedding dress from the cabinet. While she bent over her homework, among the pencil-shavings and eraser crumbs she could always smell the lime from her father’s clothes and the evening sweat hurrying close. That irritation only eased in the fourth year after her father left, when her mother, widowed for four years, finally could not hold on any longer.
Time brings and takes everything; her mother could not digest what had happened and was left with alternating waves of intensity and numbness that washed her loneliness. Her mother was not old — only three years younger than her father. As long as she could remember, her mother’s figure was like the first warm ray after a succession of winter rains: whenever anyone faced her or even came near, for a moment they would forget the resentments and grime hidden inside, and the two corners of their mouths — however heavy before — would be lifted again.
Her mother’s face was especially gentle and kindly, like the image evoked in the childhood rhyme “A mother’s thread sews a traveler’s coat.” In their small village of only a few hundred people, her mother’s name was already well known; people would mention her in passing at tea and after meals, often with blessings, as if praising a great benefactor who had come into the world to bestow favors. Unsurprisingly, her mother had always been virtuous and easy to befriend.
But the villagers also knew that her mother was oddly spirited — she could never be sunk into the ordinary, as if fated to shine by herself; fate couldn’t stop her, nor could anyone. She was a living rebuttal to the saying that women should only be modest; though she handled the household labor single-handedly and often paid respects at the ancestor tablet in the afternoon, in her thinking she always had impromptu insights. At unpredictable moments she might utter some Sanskrit-like phrase, not needing cerebral elaboration, and yet it carried some Daoist simplicity.
Stranger still, sometimes, even when her hands were idle and she stared absentmindedly with closed eyes, she would issue a laugh like a silver bell stirred by a breeze. That “blank purity” seemed to carry a spirit, like roots knotted under a tree that, when spring comes, draw nutrients and bud into profusion; conversely, in the bleakness of winter they wither more easily than the dead branches, bringing their own rot. Over time, such hereditary silly laughter had become to her the main explanation for her mother’s daydreams.
Alas, heaven has no moral scruples; it is impartial. If a person spends a lifetime doing good for others, at some point they must become vicious, or else the heavens will become partial and take away the right and the motive to do good. Her mother’s reaction was startling: she vociferously rebutted anyone who said so. Before she could react, it began by taking her health — cruel like bureaucrats — then turned its gaze to her soul. Yet she then became resolute like her father; she met their drive away with actions and demeanor that reflected complete resistance.
Within just a few months after her health failed, she began talking nonsense, her behavior became unpredictable. Sometimes she would place herself among the wheat fields with a few torn-out pages of some dogma at her side, the big words “Sin” and “Pollution” printed on them. Or she would stand atop a two-meter-high haystack and utter verses like “The lonely one climbs the peak and tells people: since I am so virtuous, why do you demand of me?” Unsurprisingly, such moodiness brought others’ dislike and isolation. Suddenly she felt abandoned by the whole world, even by herself; as if thrown into a village with no one in it, the rest of the people were charmed by the starry silence and left it alone; only her soul stubbornly resisted.
“You see it yourself! What are you doing!”
“You’re wrong!”
“Don’t give me your bullshit!”
“You will…!”
“Get out!”
This became the daily routine. At such times her younger brother would appear beside them, sometimes listening quietly while their mother screamed in rage and agony; sometimes he would chime in with a remark when he believed himself right — most often directed at their mother. After the shouting, their mother would collapse somewhere alone, allowing her thoughts to wander in an empty shell of a mind. Always like this — always — and they all knew that no one was truly at fault.
Her brother, two years younger, seemed to reject her in his world, especially from the time he entered the second year of middle school. In their father’s absence, he began to grow unchecked at school; no one could restrain him. The force he displayed was an outward eruption of life, greedily drawing energy from the planet; that robust vitality could not be caged by an awkward age and ultimately became a “star” turning toward the sun. This energy seemed driven by an invisible field that dragged anyone nearby toward him. Some people allowed this dominance and let it run rampant like their mother; others quickly sensed danger and withdrew. Some even tried to pull him back in the opposite direction — there are always those who have watched the faint glory reach for the sun only to be burned away.
When he was in elementary school, his parents doted on him like they would on a baby: one gentle hand, one strong hand holding his tiny right hand, his left held by his mother. They planted a sapling of a fig tree in the small yard between the front and back houses, hoping one day its branches would make shade — an irregular mud pit held their limitless hopes.
But whether disaster of nature or man came first is unclear. The next spring, as the fig’s shoots reached for the sun, spring thunder struck and the heavens—unyielding—chopped off the lushest branch without a sound of electricity. From then on the fig tree stopped reaching upward and instead grew like a weed along the white wall, spreading over beams and the cattle shed. After six years of such wild growth, probably from long accumulation, and with nobody hearing any final farewell, it quietly withered. Perhaps it was the turn of fate; in the second year of middle school the brother, without warning, fell in love with the only person of his life. After that, nobody in the family paid any more attention to the old tree — partly because it made no sound, rooted there lonely and still.
The brother and she had actually known each other before kindergarten. She was two years older, and they had been playmates all their childhood. His father also worked in the mine, but away; during the first six months they knew him his father’s face was hardly seen. Only their mothers traded vegetables and rice along the flat mud road. Over time the three of them became as close as iron chains—sharing everything.
Until that afternoon when the two of them sat on the embankment by the village mud pool as usual. White clouds drifted over the vast fields; a warm pre-evening breeze came from the plain, the leaning poplars made the water look verdant. They sat quietly, companions as before, not disturbed, and only when they let the last sliver of sun go home. But the brother, greedy, on the cool grass with damp soil making his movements clumsy, slowly moved his left hand and reached for hers. In childhood, holding hands had been perfectly normal; now it seemed an insurmountable barrier.
His feelings were warm and intense — but just as violent and unchecked. The bonds love brings are heavier and longer-lasting than intellectual pleasures; to him perhaps more burdensome. After three tumultuous months his passion teetered on the edge of collapse, which wasn’t merely her fault. The brother seemed to lose himself, crying and begging her as if the world would end, only to be shut out. Countless brief griefs paced back and forth inside his heart, reveling and dancing; countless times he lay on the bed whether day or night, opening his mouth on blood-stained sheets, trying to call out something but in silence; countless times his eyes spun like marbles on a string, sometimes pressed against the tiles until the floor became a black hole, sometimes circling in the air, while the clock on the wall spun, filling the room. Perhaps in that time, compared to the suffocating chest and tear-tracks like cracked birch in winter, fear of suicide seemed trivial.
So now there were no quarrels at home, and the brother no longer rebelled — he lay sullenly under the dead tree he had dug up in the backyard, alone and mute.
Thus the family may be the thing she least wanted to remember; she could clearly feel how a person’s threshold for suffering could be stretched infinitely, including how feelings mixed with memory. She feared those emotions would fade. Yet every time, after setting these thoughts aside for a while, memories of her brother, her mother, her father would stare back at her, naked and undeniable.
….........
“Hey! Look! Isn’t that Tian Shaxin? She’s back.”
“Hm, don’t know whether to pity her…”
“Why did she return? Her whole family was… because of her… gosh.”
….........
Suddenly she saw her right thumb and forefinger pinching a lollipop she’d just taken from her mouth as she stepped away from a bus stop pole that looked barely weathered. She glanced around helplessly, trying to orient herself homeward; when she noticed everyone staring at her, she walked toward a vendor on the right. While she fumbled for change, she glanced back; the crowd’s gaze slid a few meters to the left as one. But some voice kept sounding.
“You know her mother? About six years ago she was bound with hemp rope and put in a sack to be taken — the crazy woman dragged to the county psychiatric hospital. The rumor is she ran off from the county and disappeared three days later; no one has found her. The only ‘witness’ was an old man at the dump who, after putting on glasses, said he heard her mumble without emotion: ‘the capital’ and ‘the court.’”
At that time the news spread through the village and it quieted down. Before the sun rose, the few cocks that crowed in the dawn seemed fewer, perhaps the bean stalks near the haystack that used to have a few beans were now empty, tasting the world’s coldness and hunger. Maybe the village head Guo’s third son married Li Xiaoyi from the north who had just turned eighteen and took the bride price. Other than that, no one mentioned her name — maybe someone in the fields would sigh: “Mind is principle; nothing lies beyond the mind; beyond mind no thing, beyond mind no matter…”
After hearing the news from who knows where, she didn’t show panic or rush to the county; she kept on with daily life but became blank and deaf to everything. Only the two words her mother uttered — “the capital” and “the court” — swirled in her head.
Thus she again started to drift, looking dazed at something unknown — because if a person can be blindly good, she can also be blindly full of evil. Maybe she herself was born a “Satan,” in which case everything seemed ridiculous: “Are you guilty?” she thought.
….........
Earlier she hadn’t noticed that the vendor who offered his hand was sitting on a handcart used for carrying goods. Closest to him wasn’t his stall but a few stainless-steel cups with a few coins and a bowl; a familiar “gold sign” from the city hung nearby. Where those few similar characters appeared, people would toss coins into the bowl.
She hesitated, placed her money steadily into the vendor’s hand, then stepped forward, bent, and picked up the few coins on the ground to put back in the bowl.
People say that if you’re always helped, you’ll never learn to walk. She might have “helped” him up — not for any clear reason, just a random feeling — but she still offered a flimsy excuse: kindness.
….........
After a long absence, she felt a trace of pity flow through her like an electric current, released from the heart outward. People often say that pity arises only when a deep sense of loneliness and helplessness in the self and sensitivity to the surrounding world reach a certain depth. For her, that pity had long since dried up; she had buried the frailty everyone is born with under the ground where her brother slept.
Children’s loves are of little account; adults habitually and selectively ignore their innocence and mock it as mere play. The brother’s feelings were not juvenile crushes but warm and profound, like emotions honed by time — heavy. The villagers scoffed at such stories as if it were not their child who died; at most they offered the brother sympathy, relaxing tight brows along the funeral procession to squeeze out a tear, as if wanting to be seen as deeply moved. With no common interest or desire to drive them, they were like the living dead — even neighborly ties that seemed like iron chains were prone to corrosion.
Along the muddy road at the brother’s funeral, the slope from their house had always been steep. Sharp stones rolled down with the storm-like rain. People jabbered:
“Ah, the whole family, forced to death.”
“Ah, we can’t tell what love it was, but luckily they didn’t turn on each other.”
“Ah, let lovers reunite again, or admonish the thief who upends family ties — what have the heavens done? What law is this?”
That day by the lake, with the last glow of the sun bleeding from the clouds, the sky darkened quickly in early summer. Some clouds turned sullen and rain drops were pushed out by the wind, gradually falling on faces. Rain pricked the skin of the hand and a sharp sensation ran across the scalp; fortunately this wind-blown rain was decisive and prevented another farce from happening.
Stormy days always arrive so suddenly and gratefully; best are thunderstorm days with no sunlight, when people’s emotions sink to the lowest trenches and burrow deeper underground.
At the brother’s burial there were few people. That day resembled the night six years ago: clouds covered the sky and crowns of trees whipped violently; wrinkles in skin and the heavens’ own eyes seemed to scowl at them with authority. The sound of flutes, cymbals, suona horns, and drums mixed with thunder and rain like stabbing needles; the air was heavy and severe.
Their mother clung to the brother’s coffin with half of her body, the other half blackened by mud. Her usually gray-white mourning clothes were torn and ragged; long strips flapped open, revealing swollen, raw knees like steamed buns soaked in air. She cried and she cried — and cried!
They all watched, stared, and prepared to put on crying faces: “This is all your fault, you are a complete ‘ill omen’! We must distance ourselves, so we draw close!” No, why can you think this? Why does anyone assume it’s my fault — utterly stupid, utterly absurd, self-righteous — why do you habitually put yourselves into the position of the weak, the pitiable? These poor people always draw to one another, rot together in a heap. Fuck your sympathy for the weak — what right have you to mourn for him? What right have you to question me? Born from the most grotesque place, damn it — I want to speak, but I’m lazy; rows of dark silhouettes, people who don’t even know their own face, who give you the right to speak — meaningless guesses exposed as ignorance, followed by petty meaningless things in your exhausted futures, attempts to escape lead only into thin fog; ask, challenge, and death will hover on the other shore. Best give up preparing. When your time comes to die, you will still ask, ‘Why pity the weak?’ But like at this moment, I will always pity myself — always towards the thunder in the blind dark, always toward the sudden rain dancing in the gale, always toward the other side where the sun rises. No, no, don’t! Get away.
They were about to cover the brother’s coffin, but the mother remained motionless.
Only she threw herself between the crowd and the coffin.
She was the last trembling hand to hold his left hand — the same right hand used to plant the tree years ago.
….........
This is obviously unfair. Under moral interference, human behavior will always be unjust. Absolute fairness exists only among savage animals — and that does not even include chickens or pigs, for they too are kept by humans to serve certain purposes and thus enjoy inherent “advantages.” This slant in fairness proves that humans cannot be completely fair, because “morality” is stamped deep in human genes. Yet this is also humanity’s greatest blessing: whether “Heaven” or “God,” they discipline morality. For such a peculiar blessing they surely anticipated that those who lost “morality” would no longer be called human. Of course, they might expect that some Übermensch would cry “revalue all morals” — such a heart-rending slogan, such an earth-shaking howl would stir echoes for years — but when they lord over people and lure them into “morality,” they could not foresee that someone would actively abandon morality. Only by abandoning it can some attain true “superhood.”
….........
Dazed, she walked straight to the road that led home. There was a safety island in the middle and a traffic light ahead flickering yellow. Four seconds ago she hadn’t paused at the road’s end; now she didn’t choose to walk forward, even though there were no fellow pedestrians or passing cars. Suddenly those around her swayed left and right; she looked at her own feet and her steps as if discovering some barely perceptible, unimportant thing. Then she kept walking.
….........
The house was in disarray, like an old ruin left for a decade, leaning and collapsing; the only thing still standing upright seemed to be the clock permanently stopped at one in the morning. The slanting sunset hit the central pin of the hour, minute, and second hands, and something green gleamed there.
….........
“Hey, Xiaojuan, did you hear? They say that girl once stole a green gem from the pit at the village head, and when her father’s coworker found out, her father ran and killed him for her. Now nobody knows where that stone is hidden.”
….........
That dead tree now might be the only object in the house that still looked like a dead thing.
….........
In the corner, the brother’s schoolbooks lay scattered. The art book had a portrait of the sister; the language book was covered on every page with the name “Shaxin.” The math book, when counted, showed 5,200 identical pairs of characters.
….........
Go — go to the capital, go to the court.
….........
Go — go to the capital, go to the court. There will be the starry sky after evening winds stop; there will be cloudless dark nights; there will be a pure solitary moon; there will be people, there will be the self; there will be snobbery, there will be kindness; there will be sin, there will be attachment; there will be grief, there will be death; there will be morality, there will be surging and there will be tranquility; there will be madness, cries, abandonment, mist, thunder, time, memory; there will be things that fade, things that reappear — all that I yearn for.”
On the high-speed train from Shanghai to Beijing she propped her head with her right hand and rubbed the faintly green ring on her left hand. Wearily she rubbed her eyelashes and leaned against the right-hand glass, quietly throwing her gaze out the window. Above, clouds covering the sky were torn open at the horizon like a narrow slit, revealing a pale yellow; the misty haze was lit by the rising sun and just hid the direct beams that would have poured down. Suddenly that emerging sun struck her elbow, fiercely devouring every cell — she let it bare her there, and her resolve to go to the capital court flared, like that sun, increasing in intensity.
March 28, 2025 — End. Overcast.