Can Xue - Five Spice Street

‘‘Even if I can’t change into a colorful butterfly, I can appreciate the true meaning of being human,’’ he clenched his teeth and said. ‘‘Anyhow, I’m bored with being a child. Just think about it: I’ve been like that for almost forty years!’’

When the incident reached its crisis, Mr. Q’s colleague stuck his head out of his blanket and gave his views: ‘‘A person makes himself out to be neither old nor young. It’s really odd when someone your age dribbles a basketball or looks into mirrors. In the countryside, this sort of thing is called being ‘bewitched,’ and the consequence is usually serious. This guy believes wholeheartedly that he can be whatever he wants to be. How’s that possible?’’ He sneezed several times from the dust stirred up on the other side of the room by Q, who was dribbling the basketball.

Many people were slinging mud, and many were making faces. Q’s eyes were somewhere between seeing and not seeing, and his ears between hearing and not hearing. In fact, he saw everything and heard everything, but-filtered through his mind-the things that he saw and heard changed into grotesque colors and deafening noise that made him uneasy day and night. He frequently felt scared and coerced. It wasn’t even possible for him to have the few seconds of quiet he wanted. His legs were constantly springing, and he lived that way, too. He couldn’t stand this. He had worked hard at imitating X: he wanted to ‘‘achieve that highest degree of serenity.’’ The result: fifteen seconds of quiet. That was when he and X were together and X led him into a certain fairyland where they stayed for fifteen seconds. After he returned, the situation grew worse. He jumped back and forth like a kangaroo and didn’t go to bed for three days. His wife wept for three days and three nights and became even skinnier.

‘‘That world has lured me in. Unfortunately, it doesn’t belong to me.’’ He summed things up dejectedly. He looked into the mirror and saw the wrinkles in his forehead and his absurdly stiff bearing. ‘‘I’m no more than a cockroach.’’

Though he reached this gloomy verdict, the next time X suggested they roam around in fairyland, he couldn’t wait. Even more afraid he wouldn’t be able to enter, he hugged her tightly around the waist so she couldn’t abandon him. When someone asked what he had seen, he became blank and feverish, and his eyes brimmed with tears. He laughed idiotically and forgot to answer. It was this way every time. In such brief moments he could neither see nor hear and was completely happy.

Our Q was nearly forty years old and up to now had passed his time playing games. That laughing and joking romantic sentiment was the fundamental cause of his death. He wasn’t killed by a wave, or by hallucinatory drugs, and certainly not by public opinion. He realized his romantic idealism by disappearing into the crack of a tree and becoming an empty husk. From the age of eleven, he had looked forward to this day. His romantic ideal coincided perfectly with X’s murderous complex, and thus this series of incidents occurred. Earlier, we set forth X’s murderous complex merely to explain this evil virus and not to stress her social potency. Up to now, she’d had only enough power to drag one child into the water. A metamorphosis such as Q had undergone had little to do with X’s power. Things like waves and drugs all came from the imagination. His metamorphosis was caused by his inner elements. Of course, ‘‘combining two into one’’ with X was the key activator. As for the slow-witted Q, at first he owed being ‘‘reborn’’ (he wholeheartedly believed he was going to be reborn) to the waves in X’s eyes. He had called X a sorceress and by frequently looking in the mirror had verified his rebirth. When he put his mirror in his pocket and walked proudly down the street, and when he looked at himself in the shop windows, who on Five Spice Street could keep from covering his mouth and giggling? Especially since he had been such a serious, timid, conservative guy, and except for lying under the melon rack and dreaming wildly, in all his forty years he had never done anything rebellious.

As soon as we thought of Q, a strange feeling surged up in our hearts, and we felt unsure of our footing. Really, what was good about him? The odd thing was that our beautiful women actually yearned for him. Some were desperate. One clamored: she didn’t care whether he was strange or not, dependable or not, she was in love with him. He was the only man she could be friends with! Even if he was an empty husk in a crack in a tree, she still wanted to ‘‘draw swords and help him’’! Women desperately ran to check on Q. An empty chaise longe stood under the melon rack at the entrance to the small house. They searched carefully a long time before discovering that Q had ‘‘dissolved’’ ahead of X. The women found a broken mirror under a rock behind the house and smiled at each other. Some guy with a vague expression and wrapped in a blanket walked over and told them that Q was sitting in his office working on statistics. ‘‘Those days after he went crazy were a nightmare for us,’’ he said.

The beautiful woman from the foot of the stairs immediately offered her opinion: ‘‘Since he’s returned to normal, his charm is gone. Before this incident, there was nothing so wonderful about him.’’

After some reflection, everyone felt this opinion was brilliant. Without X, how would they have known about Q? Wasn’t it only when he entered Five Spice Street on a beautiful afternoon that he became adorable? They vied with each other in yearning for him. This was also a spiritual trust directly related to the incident. Now he had retreated, melted into the crowd, and become an ordinary person. He would no longer be the object of desire for Five Spice Street’s beautiful women. Who would fall for an ordinary guy? Our women’s love required self-sacrifice and a courageous spirit. Only an outlandish love would do. We weren’t gray and solemn! We’d run over here with knives to wholeheartedly undergo baptism by fire. We were ready to ‘‘die for love.’’ Who knew we were pouncing on thin air? This Q really was uninteresting. How difficult it was to realize our spiritual ideals! We regretted getting in so deep, regretted embracing unreasonable hopes. In reality, things that could make you happy were so rare! Sometimes the reality was precisely the opposite of what you’d imagined, and you met with blows that simply confused you. If we’d known earlier that Q merely wanted to be dissolute, that he didn’t regard this ‘‘incident’’ as real and would draw back into his shell, we wouldn’t have given him the time of day. Who would ever have known of this rundown, worm-eaten house!

Shaking with anger, they thought they had been greatly humiliated and duped. Following the lame woman (she recalled her breathtaking twenty-five seconds and realized that she and Q were absolutely irreconcilable; in fact, this goddamned Q was a hundred times worse than the young guy who robbed her of her virtue), they broke the window with stones and smashed the door. Then they barged into the house and broke every piece of furniture to smithereens. When they came out, they faced the open fields and laughed out loud to their hearts’ content. Someone started singing a march. Finally, they left triumphantly. Our widow didn’t participate, because she was enlightening a young person about his serious mistakes.

She summed up the incident later: ‘‘To be a man, one has to be consistent from beginning to end. One should mind one’s manners, keep one’s word, and be responsible. Throughout my life, I’ve most feared chameleon-like people. The worst thing that can happen to you is that a man makes you feel uncertain or changes overnight. How can a decent man hurt a woman’s pride? That’s a crime! We women sincerely want to trust men. We would always like the man we love to make us feel secure forever. Only then can we be vital and energetic. In general, when we women of Five Spice Street yearn for a certain man, we unhesitatingly endow him with these qualities and hope we can grow old with him in spirit. Such a situation develops naturally, and up to now our adorable men have not disappointed us. Regarding Mr. Q, our adorable women were candid, gullible, and absolutely unreserved. No one guessed that this puppet, this guy with a dubious background, would play such a trick on us. After kindling everyone’s enthusiasm and dreams, he suddenly took off and cast us beautiful women aside to look at each other in hopeless despair. Who among us had ever been ridiculed like this? We were all fine ladies. I completely understand their smashing doors, windows, and furniture. I didn’t think it at all barbaric.’’