Can Xue - Five Spice Street

She held the child’s hand, but the child turned bashful. It seemed that everyone saw him nod his head and then start whimpering. He hid his face in the widow’s black robe. ‘‘This kind of child is still adorable.’’

The widow turned toward the crowd. ‘‘My research into this incident has gone deeper and deeper. We are rushing toward the torch in the midst of the dense fog.’’

By now, we ‘‘have a good general idea’’ of Madam X. We’ve drawn the diagram of the maze from her birthplace to the valley or hillside where she is destined to go in the future. Though phantasmagoric, she can’t deviate much from the diagram.

However, she isn’t our biggest problem. Rather, it’s the two who stick to her like shadows-Q and her husband. After further thought, we realized that these two are even more shadowy than Madam X. They are mere shadows-X’s shadows, two parasitic vines, parasites on X’s large, rootless tree, colorless and shapeless. X brought them with her to Five Spice Street, and when X dies they will disappear. Of course, this is only a superficial impression, or perhaps the misconception they produced by getting mixed up with X. As individuals, they remain ordinary men. This is substantiated by Dr. A’s argument about who took the offensive. The problem is that in our story, we haven’t yet considered these two persons as individuals. All along we’ve looked at them as a trio-one person and two shadows, or a moth and two pupae. As long as the moth flies back and forth below the big tree, the other two can only be unmoving pupae forever. Their metamorphosis ends at this point.

All the men and women on Five Spice Street resented this analysis. We all wanted to draw our swords and help them. We need to differentiate: in general, most of those who wanted to draw their swords and help Q were beautiful, dissolute women who had desired him for a long time because Q was good-tempered and gentle.

But X was an obstacle, and they couldn’t succeed. If they disposed of X, they were convinced they would get Q.

‘‘A momentary slip,’’ the lame woman said as she bent her head and sharpened the sword. ‘‘Our eyes met for twenty-five seconds. This allowed thousands of opportunities to change fate. Just because of a momentary slip, I lost it all. He left the dark room and strode ahead along the gray wall. That was death, not a new life. He was racing toward raw and bloody bones.’’

Over time a lot of other women forgot Q’s weak points, forgot, too, that they’d been annoyed by him, and simply gave him their unstinting affection. They commented on what a handsome, feeling man he was, and how bewitching his physique before he got involved with that demon. The woman who had ‘‘encountered’’ Q at the foot of the stairs attested to this. ‘‘He’s an endearing god,’’ that beautiful woman said, taking a paring knife out of her pocket. The other women also took out knives.

Their enthusiasm was of course praiseworthy. Unfortunately, the effect of their actions was questionable. After his metamorphosis into a pupa, Q lies unmoving in the crack of a tree trunk-probably for his whole life-and can’t make use of their ‘‘drawing swords to help him.’’ Though he chose this lamentable final scene for himself, and later might regret it, there wasn’t time to reconsider, for he had ‘‘gone crazy heading toward death.’’ The childish, optimistic guy might say, ‘‘Spring is coming.’’ But spring would never be his again. He was only a pupa, and in the spring, he would slowly dry up and atrophy and become merely an empty husk. He’d had so many hopes when he rushed toward X. He’d imagined changing, like her, into a colorful butterfly. But the ruthless laws of nature had changed him into an empty husk in the crack of a tree. What led him to this end?

We must seek the reasons from his own being.

From the age of eleven, a person developed a certain romantic notion and would always be a child who couldn’t grow up because he had no way of expunging his inner dread. To begin with, he should have kept his childishness and lived a calm and quiet life with his dear wife, who also couldn’t grow up. However, he fell into this demon X’s wide-open, passionate net and began acting out all kinds of adult tricks. Inwardly, he also felt that his performance was awkward (for example, dribbling the basketball-he still blushed over this). In the eyes of bystanders, this was ridiculous, but how could he control himself? He’d gone crazy. He’d adored X so much he shed tears and all day long thought only of going into that granary. He wished to stay there forever. And then there was X: from her bragging, it seems she was also madly in love with Q. She was good at creating miracles, so why didn’t she turn Q into a butterfly so the two of them could fly off into midair? ‘‘No,’’ she said, denying her power. ‘‘I can just make curtains and toys. I can’t create people.’’ Alas! So our Q could only stay in the crack in the tree and become an empty husk! With bitter hatred, the women of Five Spice Street rammed their heads against the tree trunk. They did this until blood poured down: they cried their hearts out. One question kept bothering them until the last day of their lives. Since Q, this lovable man with beautiful eyes, wanted to become a real man, why wasn’t he looking for them-Five Spice Street’s beautiful women? Why was he racing after that skull and crossbones? In their warm embrace, he would certainly grow up fast, shuck off his childishness in a short time, and change into a brave, resolute, and bewitching man. They had already trained many heroes with their abundant creativity and strength! They had never publicized this but had quietly contributed their youth and energy to society. This selfless spirit made them fascinating and youthful all their lives, so even when they reached the old widow’s age, they were still glowing with health and were as good, innocent, and graceful as young girls.

The most inexcusable thing was that having once encountered our widow who was going to be a genius, Q was blind as a bat and didn’t size her up carefully. Later, he didn’t even realize what caused his ‘‘lust to burst and glow with health.’’ He forgot the effect of that one encounter and confusingly felt he owed his physiological change to X. This is exactly what people mean when they say, ‘‘Rotten wood cannot be carved.’’ We may boldly imagine: if in that one encounter, Q had really seen the widow clearly from head to toe and rather than going to the granary had turned around and pursued our widow, then under the widow’s guidance, he would have started the process of genuine evolution. In which case, how could he have ended up as an empty husk in the crack of a tree?

The widow’s power to infect people was astonishing: everyone on Five Spice Street had experienced this repeatedly. Unfortunately, Mr. Q hadn’t seen her clearly, and she remained humble and aloof. She had never forcefully projected herself, nor had she wanted to control people (on the other hand, when X saw men, she pounced like a hungry tiger and didn’t hesitate to take advantage of their stupefaction to inject them with hallucinogens and perform cruel experiments on their bodies and then, when this was over, just kick them out. As she put it, ‘‘Each was going his own way’’). She also had the kindly heart of a mother: she cared for the nation and for the people. She loved the people as if they were her children. All her influence was latent, invisible. Only people with pure hearts were permanently attracted, so in his confusion Q, whom X had injected with toxins throughout his body, lost his only opportunity to evolve and quickly sank into a deep pit. The widow’s brief sideways glance made him ‘‘glow with health’’ for a few days, but he definitely wasn’t aware of what this was all about. Nor did the widow bring more of her influence to bear on him (she had too much work to do, and it was too heavy a burden; she couldn’t neglect everyone else in order to look after Q!). And so X-this demon-pulled him into a muddy pit. He divulged that in the process of seeking fun with X, he’d wanted several times to wash his hands of it and free himself from that unsportsmanlike position he was in (of course, this was because of the latent influence of the widow’s brief glance), but that damn sorceress’s witchcraft intoxicated him and made him crazy. So he went all out in trying to become a colorful butterfly like X.