Can Xue - Five Spice Street

‘‘Did you ask about the beginning? See, this was it-such a long beginning that it’s almost a section of history. I don’t think it will have any conclusion. While I’m waiting, all the joy and anguish will quietly fade away. Only the perpetual rays of light are blazing ahead, and a new character is emerging. All of this was determined by the porcupine dream: it plunged into a deep pond, and one by one, the giant sequoias fell over beside the pond. From then on, the worthy lady and I made history together. But the clamor at the public toilet is so hard on the ears! Are my buddies splashing themselves with cologne again?’’

The Writer’s Report

‘‘The writer knows well enough that we want to figure out how Madam X’s love affair with Mr. Q began. Each person was burning to know, and each had pigheaded subjective biases; no one would give in, but they also hoped they would be unanimous in reaching an impartial solution so we could get a break from exhausting our brains on this. Of course, this was just a simple-minded wish. Although this looked simple, in fact it was very complicated. On our Five Spice Street, whenever a problem like this turned up, the answers were maddeningly endless. Where one person saw a wild boar, another saw a dove, and perhaps a third person saw a broom. We had to respect individuality and the facts: we had to accept all the various answers before we could rush across riptides and land on the radiant opposite shore. If you split hairs and got entangled in non-essential details, and lacked flexibility, you would unwittingly become more and more confused, finally sinking to the bottom of the darkness. Magnanimity is humankind’s noblest characteristic. In our diverse and confusing world, there are so many knots that can’t be untied and so many bewildering doubts and suspicions that can only be melted and eliminated in a broad and generous heart.

‘‘Perhaps this kind of thing had no fixed beginning: it was so unusual, so exciting, and so colorful that people speculated about it endlessly. So, in everyone’s eyes, it rapidly evolved into some specific lenses that were directly interrelated with each individual. And then they affected each other and formed a sinuous net: this is also understandable. We ordinary people living on this three-mile-long street have always been closely linked. Superficially we looked cold and indifferent, but inwardly we were very enthusiastic, romantic, and humane. One person’s business was everyone’s business. Every day, we cared about nothing but other people’s business and planned our actions accordingly. We might have looked narrow-minded and short-sighted, and as if we cared about nothing but our own small worlds. In fact, we were highly idealistic comrades in the same camp. Our little world was a microcosm of the outside world. Each individual pursuit was also a collective pursuit. Not only were we not disloyal to each other, we supported each other. ‘All roads lead to heaven,’ ‘sublime in the rainbow.’ In this place of ours, as soon as something big occurred, a series of chain reactions would immediately ensue and hundreds of individual lenses would appear, independent of each other and all mutually opposed. Sometimes a big mess managed to bring about a certain temporary, laughable unity, but this quickly collapsed of its own weight, and everyone took his own path, continuing to hold to his own opinion to the end. Each person’s individuality had plenty of chances for practice and development. During this development, each person played God. We were pure-hearted and noble, filled with ardor and sincerity, one after another opening up a strange and beautiful new world, delighted with our achievements. Reality was reflected dramatically in our land. Fluky nature was tamed by the rules of our thought. This new world was fascinating. Here, the vines and trees that grew madly all year long, the birds that sang crankily, the ocean with its grand waves, the waterfalls that roared incessantly: behind all of this, the vital everlasting light was shining. This world was the original source of poetry and the eternal theme of art. In the scorching summer sun, when we opened our blurry, bloodshot eyes and gazed up at the sky, those calls that were everywhere-the low murmur-emerged, and the formations of the wild geese grew chaotic, the sun’s rays turned purple, our flesh was divinely stirred, and our brains experienced the perfection of poetry. What appeared before us this time was merely a repetition of an ancient game that had been around for thousands of years. If one looked upon it with one’s intellect, perhaps it was banal, even a little arid, and so perhaps it was also non-existent. The issue per se was not important. What was important was its artful reproduction in the people’s minds, that magnificent creation, that powerful, untrammeled imagination, that rich, deep excavation toward essence, going into minute detail and not letting go. It’s all of this that constitutes the priceless treasures of our boundless universe. Although we will one day be decrepit, the fantastic fruit on the tree of life will forever symbolize our wild, unruly passion.

‘‘On this three-mile-long street of ours, Madam X and Mr. Q are bewildering and out of line. We don’t want to admit this, for as soon as we do, it’s as though we’re making them the center of our lives, as though they created our history. Of course, this is nonsense. What kind of people are they? One is like an extraterrestrial who dropped down from who-knows-where and put down roots in the earth and doesn’t plan to move again. The other is a masked, invisible man; even his features exist only in our guesswork: it’s absolutely possible that he’s headless or has a serpent’s face and a human body. At first, we didn’t have any extra energy to contemplate or be concerned with these two people who weren’t much connected with us. In the beginning, we thought: let them live and die by themselves. They couldn’t go on very long. Old Meng from the pharmacy reckoned that after five years, they would change into scaly anteaters and ‘go through the wall and leave’ Five Spice Street. Then the sun would shine everywhere, and there would be peace in the world. And so we would pass the time as we usually did, every day organizing our dust-covered albums, replacing them and hanging up large color photos, arranging for all kinds of large-scale and medium-scale group photos, and making rules for highway maintenance and the area for cooling off outside. We were so busy that we were almost about to forget these two. We were intoxicated with our heroism and merely gazed at the stretch of distant undulating mountains.

‘‘We avoided talking about these two people for a long time and deliberately substituted ‘H’ and ‘L’ for their names. We almost got used to this, as if those two had disappeared from the street. The ones we talked of were two new people, much more worth noticing than X and Q. X and Q? No one could remember who they were; we had only ‘H’ and ‘L.’ Only this animated couple greatly interested us. They were special! But whether you pretended not to notice them, whether you used different names for them, these two low-down people were always secretly manufacturing a demagogic hullabaloo. Finally, ‘the beginning’ saw the light of day, and everyone on Five Spice Street began dashing madly here and there all day long-never able to get anything done. Everyone was suffering from serious worries and couldn’t let anyone see how sick he was (that would hurt the struggle). All anyone could do was complain implicitly. For example:

‘‘ ‘We should have new laws to crack down on ‘‘H’’ and ‘‘L.’’ Unfortunately, our present laws are imperfect and have no provisions for dealing with people who have theoretically broken the law even though there’s no evidence of it. Someone has been making use of this situation. Just think about it, it actually began, and with that, my ‘‘spare-time recreation’’ was destroyed. I’m not saying that I was impotent. This is just a kind of psychological reaction.’