Can Xue: Five Spice Street

All of Five Spice Street’s women were masters of this conversational art. For example, the widow’s female friend, after talking at length about qigong, touched on ethnography, leading to a line from a folk song: ‘‘Southern Women and Northern Men.’’ When the other person fully understood this line, she would shift the topic from northern men to a man of big stature. Then, both would come around to the issue of Q’s looks. Through suggestive language they bounced this topic back and forth until dark, when each happily exclaimed, ‘‘I had a really good time today!’’

The second to come up with an impression of Q was a lame woman who hadn’t been able to get out of bed for years. She was twenty-eight, all bones. A kind of ray emanated from her sunken, jet- black eyes. That ray at any moment could force young men to ‘‘retreat thirty feet’’ (the widow’s words). The first day that Q came to Five Spice Street, she saw him once. At the time, she was opening the curtains next to her bed (of course, her bed was next to the window). When Q walked by, their eyes met. Summoning all her strength, the woman fixed him with her gaze for a full twenty-five seconds (her estimate). At first, Mr. Q was flustered, and with one hand warded off the ray from her eyes, but then, instead of ‘‘retreating thirty feet,’’ he reluctantly smiled and walked on. The woman opened her window with a peng and shouted shrilly at Mr. Q’s receding figure, ‘‘A wolfhound! A wolfhound! Please look out for thunder!’’ Later, feeling sentimental, the lame woman said, Mr. Q certainly wasn’t like a wolf, but rather like a catfish instead: he had a barbel-like mustache. When he shaved, he got rid of it, but if you looked carefully, you could still see it. The one who looked like a wolfhound was the scoundrel who had taken her virginity years earlier. Q merely resembled him in certain ways. Precisely because of this, as soon as she set eyes on him, she was incensed and launched an attack. That’s the only way she could express her hatred.

Still, Q wasn’t the first who looked like him. Over the years, she had cussed out countless people. That’s the only way she could maintain her equanimity. She added that she hated the wolfhound most-well, not for taking her virginity, but for daring after just one night to ‘‘take off without a word of farewell.’’ This was enough to torment a woman with regret for a lifetime. If only he would repent, she said, and then kneel before her and beg forgiveness, she could consider forgiving him for deflowering her. This, however, didn’t mean that she wanted even a hint of a relationship, because after ‘‘having her heart broken’’ that night, she became ‘‘clear-headed and methodical.’’ Had she with great difficulty vanquished external and internal pressures and become an iron woman who wanted to suffer all over again? No! All the guys harboring this illusion were wrong. The lame woman’s description of Q certainly couldn’t be taken as true, because she thought Q resembled her former lover, whose very existence was doubtful. Never mind that she hadn’t gotten a good look at Q. No one had seen her lover either, and even she couldn’t say for sure what he looked like. Was there any chance that she had pulled this out of thin air? Or was it possible that she was deliberately spreading misinformation and taking the opportunity to raise her own status? Why didn’t she even have a photo or two of her lover? (If she had, wouldn’t she have shown it around a long time ago?!) Even worse, perhaps there’d been no lover, and that’s why she had stared at Q and picked a quarrel. Was this merely her way of flirting and vamping? (When foxes can’t eat grapes, they say grapes are catfish.) If this was so, then we on Five Spice Street should congratulate Q for not falling into her trap. When all is said and done, it would have been ten thousand times worse to be seduced by her than by X.

The third to notice Q’s looks was a woman who claimed she was X’s younger sister and also that she herself was twenty-nine. (Nobody could prove this.) When Q first arrived on Five Spice Street, she and her older sister had been together the whole day ‘‘from beginning to end.’’ She had ‘‘carefully taken stock of Q for a long time’’ and noticed that Q’s appearance looked ‘‘very familiar.’’ Even though ‘‘there was not the slightest similarity’’ to her sister’s appearance, it seemed as if ‘‘there was a kind of invisible connection to it.’’ But as to any special characteristics of Q’s looks, she weaseled and said, “You’ll know when you see him,’’ ‘‘It’s something you feel but can’t describe,’’ ‘‘Anyhow, there’s something a little bizarre,’’ “You can’t judge him by traditional aesthetics,’’ and so forth. You knew she was covering up for her sister. Her words revealed neither intelligence nor clear-headed analysis. She’s muddle-headed and obstinate; her biased views are worthless.

We have one more piece of information for the readers: this younger sister, or anyhow the one who called herself a younger sister, abandoned her simple and tolerant husband later on to take up with another man. It was an ‘‘amicable settlement,’’ and they are still on ‘‘good terms with each other.’’ This made everyone realize: a person like X is certainly not an immortal set apart from the world. Careful analysis shows that she carries a malignant disease (affected people don’t realize they’re sick). She also can manipulate people behind their backs. Isn’t she the one who sent the whole of Five Spice Street into foolish turmoil, making everyone wild with lust? Without setting foot outside her house, she stirred things up as if mustering an army, made it impossible for all the people the length of the street to defend themselves, and created bedlam. Where did her power come from? Why were people close to her (including her husband, younger sister, son, and Q) completely taken in and changed until they did odd and inexplicable things-and moreover did them brazenly without a thought? Was this all caused by X’s supernatural ability? Doesn’t this sound dubious? What kind of education had X received to grow up like this? It’s a riddle. In any case, all it took was for her to move her eyeballs and people on Five Spice Street would break out in a rash. When she talked to herself in the middle of the night, everyone on the street listened intently in their dreams. According to the writer’s tally, at least two persons wanted to sacrifice their lives for her under any circumstances. Eventually, they moved to roadside work sheds and lived tragic lives filled with hardship, all because of X.

The fourth person who noticed Mr. Q’s appearance was a widow so old she looked like dry bamboo. She wore a little black felt hat on her little bald head, and she nodded all day long, like a chicken pecking rice. It was quite by chance that she noticed Mr. Q. At dusk on a winter day, a deliveryman was unable to pull his load of coal to her home because of the steep grade. The old dame looked all around for assistance. Only one person came to help: Q. Afterwards, she grabbed the front of Q’s coat by the buttons to steady herself. She looked him all over and then finally exclaimed, ‘‘What a large face-broad enough to hold mountains and rivers!’’ A fleeting impulse caused her to make this remark. Before long, she forgot the incident, even Q. If someone mentioned Q, she confused Q with one of her cousins from long ago (whether this cousin actually existed was extremely doubtful) and thought of them as one and the same. She talked at length of how marvelous her cousin’s ‘‘square face’’ was. All the while, she nodded, pecking rice. She was very old and began hallucinating easily. Later, she hallucinated almost continuously. Her eyes would cross and she’d swallow saliva while she talked. Once begun, there was no end to it -gudong gudong. It was distressing. Someone raised doubts: had the old woman hallucinated what happened at twilight on that winter day? She was so old and her vision so blurry, could she have been mistaken about who it was? Suppose that the one who helped lug the coal was in fact her nephew (she insisted that this nephew hadn’t entered her house for more than twenty years), and that because of the grudge she’d felt toward him for more than twenty years, she had purposely concealed his benevolence and instead had given the credit to a certain Q, who was then being talked about: this was entirely possible and reasonable. From her wild talk about his face being ‘‘roomy enough to hold mountains and rivers,’’ you could spot the flaws in her statement. Her impression of Q’s looks boiled down to one point: he had a very broad face. But ‘‘holding mountains and rivers,’’ this shocking image-applied so impulsively-must have some other meaning.