Can Xue - Five Spice Street

‘‘By the light coming in from the small window, I got a good look at that woman’s face. She was like a thirteen-year-old girl, barefoot and wearing two bows in her hair, prancing around in the room like a locust. What rubbed me the wrong way was that she showed no respect: she just kept setting out her playthings in front of me (a wrap-around that she hadn’t finished knitting, a glass-bead necklace, a cartoon, a little plaster dog, and so forth). She intended to affirm her being with these miscellaneous things and establish a certain self-confidence, even hubris. Think about it: even such a pitiable thing struggled to stand out and finally climbed into her husband’s head and took control over him and staged this scene. You, with your petrified brains, wouldn’t have expected this!

‘‘There are several suspicious things about this man Q. First, among the women on Five Spice Street, he’s as familiar as a family member. When you’re talking with someone, you need only mention him (even if not directly, the conversation might lead you to think of him), and she will immediately become absorbed and avidly inquire about all the details. It seemed that everyone felt a vague attraction to him and wanted to confide this. But all they could do was bashfully strike a pose and put on a nonchalant air, while in private they pitifully offered him their romantic passions. How could he achieve this social status out of all proportion to what he was? Had anyone carefully taken stock of every part of his body, or tasted his sugarplum, and then finally ascertained where his charms lay? (Of course not!)

‘‘We can speculate that the reason lay in his relationship with X, or more precisely in daydreams about such a relationship. Here is an analogy: no one had ever made any inquiries about tangerines, but now research has shown that tangerines can prevent cancer and so people rush to buy them and the prices skyrocket. This kind of cancer-prevention psychology is the same as our daydreams. Suppose one day we find that our daydreams are just a subjective mistake, and we finally discover that in a small dark room at the end of a long wall a psycho is seated, gripping a rusty dagger. Bending over and gritting her teeth, she’s counting the socks in the trunk. Ugly, plump cutworms are climbing all over outside the room. It’s finally she who is everything. Q is only a puppet whose strings are being pulled. Then what would Q’s image be? We’ll get the answer without any doubt. Nevertheless, we all survive in daydreams. At such times, people seem charming and bashful, with expectant eyes. Each action is suffused with childishness. If a man darts past the window, everyone is inwardly pleased and whispers excitedly: ‘What a living Apollo Q is!’ They’re determined to think of this silhouette as Q for no other reason than that they’ve daydreamed about a certain bewitching ‘relationship’ between him and X. The less sense we found in this strange behavior, the more we endowed it with beautiful poetry and magical colors-accessorized it to become the spiritual sustenance for our existence. This was the root cause of our inferiority.

‘‘After we visualized the bewitching relationship between Q and X, we also put ourselves in X’s position and measured ourselves against her, crazily considering our strong points and marveling at how much better we were than X-and how overjoyed we’d feel if we entered that realm with Q. What a great mistake Q had made. We mulled it over this way until we were exhausted and lost the last bit of self-confidence we had about our worth. We were like a dog sniffing after a certain person: we didn’t know that the hero we were chasing was simply a puppet manipulated by a bizarre woman sitting in a dark room.

‘‘Second, each of us imagined this Q to be a young, intrepid, stalwart man, a handsome man without equal. He was not only brave but sweet. His words were like a light, gentle rain warming people’s hearts. You believed that there couldn’t be any other Mr. Right in this world. At home, you paced impatiently, thought aloud, couldn’t sleep, and tossed and turned all night. You jumped up at daybreak and ran to the public toilet, where, as you squatted, you sleepily confided these baffling feelings to one another. It was so exciting. By comparison, you felt your own husbands were intolerable. You crazily put yourselves on a pedestal, as if all of a sudden you had become aristocratic ladies. You were unapproachable to your husbands. If they wanted to get close to you, they were reduced to begging, even kneeling. And then even if you broke down and consented, you did so disdainfully, as cold as ice water. You would all be disappointed if you knew the truth I’m about to tell you. Remember the other day when someone saw him fall in front of Madam X’s door (and he was knocked unconscious from the fall)? Have you given this serious thought? Is it possible for a healthy man walking on level ground to fall and lose consciousness?

‘‘Of course, I know what this was all about. You may think I’m making this up out of jealousy. Or you may think I’m elevating myself by degrading others. I don’t care what you think. I’ll still stick to the truth. I won’t give in. I want to tell you that on that eerie afternoon, you can’t imagine what he looked like when he appeared at my window: he was leaning on two sticks. We looked at each other for no fewer than twenty-three minutes-not until the sticks could no longer hold up his heavy body did he, not without regret, turn and leave. With each step, he looked back, reluctant to part: he recognized his own kind.

‘‘Third, this Q: we’ve all concluded that the only one he’s interested in is X. We have no doubts about this. From his actions that afternoon, I could see that he wasn’t headed straight for X’s home; first, he stopped at my window for a significant twenty-three minutes. This illuminates the issue. If I had the least little hope for all of you, I wouldn’t have been so inactive and let the bird out of the cage. You’ve disappointed me too much: my heart has been like dead ashes for a long time. I am too tired to take any action. I don’t think X is his only objective. (He hasn’t put all his eggs in one basket, as the saying goes.) If only we change a little and aren’t quite so contrary and start acting a little more open-minded, it’s completely possible that he will become interested in each one of you. He isn’t a great hero who’s all that perfect: he’s no different from your own husbands; he’s not the least bit better. It’s your impertinence and carelessness that pushed him into X’s arms. Now you regret this and for no reason come up with all kinds of romantic sentiments, even making him into an idol and worshipping him. What you’ve done has wiped out all the possibilities. This is exactly what I figured: it’s just because of this that I’ve lost hope and recognize that any efforts are all for nothing. I was the first woman Q was interested in. It wouldn’t have taken the slightest effort for me to win him over. I could have made some introductions, too, and then none of you would be as lonesome, sentimental, and frustrated as you are now. In a word, the opportunities have all slipped away. Why? Because of your stupidity! Because of your sloth! You just lay in bed moaning and daydreamed of non-existent, impossible things. You would do that even if the sky was going to collapse. If you’re awakened, you dash over and close the curtains, but go out of your way to leave the door wide open. You stare hard at the door as you inwardly beckon with all the longing you can muster. If your husband came home at this time, you’d be furious and drive him out, cursing him angrily: ‘You’ve wrecked my mood!’

‘‘Now I can tell you a story. After you’ve listened to it, perhaps you’ll understand some truths. My story is long and complicated. You need a lot of perseverance and patience to understand all the relationships in it. And still it’s very likely that you’ll fail. At most, there’s only one chance in a thousand that you’ll succeed. If you don’t change your lax attitudes, you’ll have no way-not in a million years-to enter into my story. The story I’m telling is how a woman or a man (perhaps a person who is lame as I am) gets on in life when the social system is abnormal. This story isn’t at all related to the person in the small dark room at the end of the gray wall, but it’s directly related to each of us seated here. Indeed, you could have entered the story directly and served as the protagonists. At that time, this possibility would have been completely revealed: it only waited for you to bring it into play. But you didn’t. Instead, you wielded your slack but boundless imaginations to link some isolated things together, busily wove the threads together, and then threw the whole thing aside and were content with superficial understanding. Each person would go her own way, crying and grieving for no reason. Up to now, you still haven’t figured out what’s happened. What happened? An earthquake! A flash flood! Demons visiting! Or perhaps nothing happened. It was nothing more than eating an extra dumpling at breakfast and crying later because of a stomachache.