Can Xue - Five Spice Street

The widow followed:

‘‘This husband deserves the most sympathy. We have no way of learning how this man ended up in X’s clutches before they settled down on our Five Spice Street. We know only that from the first day we saw him, he had already lost his sexuality. That woman strictly scrutinized his every move, so he developed a conditioned reflex: when he saw a woman, he ran away. As time passed, this developed into an abnormal, detestable psychology. He spent his life immersed in trivia. Only if X vanished before he did would he be able to hold his head up and recover his masculine image. Some nutty persons felt they were great just because they didn’t try to seduce him. They’re deluded and narrow-minded. They didn’t know that on our Five Spice Street, no woman could really seduce him, simply because he was not a man. I’ve tried many times to illumine and awaken his masculine characteristics. But I was defeated each time. X completely destroyed his being, and I couldn’t waste so much energy on just one person. Many people needed me and I let this matter slide. But because I had occasionally made these efforts, one or two crazy people on our Five Spice Street resented me. They couldn’t conceive that I sacrificed myself to save others. On the contrary, they imagined I was seducing him, this person with no sexuality, this good-for-nothing. The world actually contained such fools! The people spreading this gossip exposed their inner world. If the female colleague hadn’t been covetously eyeing this idol all day long, how could she have known that someone wanted to seduce him? This kind of thing was really very tricky! This snoop is also an undeveloped androgynous person, a person lacking female hormones. This kind of woman adores boys who can never grow up, and X’s husband happens to be one of them. Once she fell in love with him, she would become unusually jealous and despotic. It just took another woman glancing at him (other than me with my lofty motive, who else would look at him?), and she was immediately enraged and went all out to fight with her imagined rival. Ladies and gentlemen, let me tell you: as I see it, both this man and this woman need my salvation. I know being underdeveloped isn’t their fault, for all kinds of outside factors influence this. All along I’ve wanted only to sweep away that bad influence on their bodies and release their inner energy so that they could return to being a real man and a real woman. It’s too bad one’s ability is limited: I can’t take care of everything while protecting myself from arrows aimed from all directions (this also wastes a major part of my energy). I’ve already done a lot of work, some of it successful and some not. I admit that I’ve failed with Madam X’s husband. This is because I’ve always taken him too lightly, seldom giving him any attention. I never ever thought that this little amount of work would be labeled ‘seduction,’ although the person who said this also needs my help. She said this because of her hypoplasia, but still I have to dig deep for the roots of this kind of thought so that people in general will be educated. Why do these boys who can’t grow up exist here? Who created them? You may say that it’s X who created this kind of person. But in fact it isn’t something she could do by herself. On our Five Spice Street, there are quite a few girls who-like X’s husband-can’t grow up, so those boys don’t feel alone and don’t feel that they’re strange. They think the world and people are what they see with their eyes. It’s this that finally makes it impossible for them to grow up. If he’d been attracted to me and had broken away from X’s control, and if a certain resentful woman had restrained herself and let him remain under my good influence, would he still not have grown up? Anyhow, it’s too late, absolutely too late. That pitiful boy and this mouthy girl are stuck midway. Like midgets, they will never fully grow up! Life jokes with people too much!’’

The other women of course all took their leader’s side in this debate. Their sensitive minds grasped that something was wrong and associated this with other things that had happened (such as the time they had gone to the police station and reported X’s adultery). Annoyed that history seemed to be repeating itself, they began to pout.

Pretending to look for her handbag while hoping to make her escape, the female colleague anxiously stood up before all these pouting people. She stole to the door but was blocked by the wife of Madam X’s brother-in-law’s good friend-that muscular dark-skinned woman who shouted:

‘‘Are you trying to fool us? What makes you say he’s a curtain? There’s something fishy here! A person, even if he has lost his sexual function, certainly is not a curtain! Your words are like a blow to my head! Every man, including this one, secretly adores me. I’m sympathetic toward them, just like my leader. Her description of the boy who couldn’t grow up almost made me cry from pity. But your heart is as hard as a millstone. How could you compare a living boy struggling through a painful metamorphosis to a curtain! Your accusation makes us wonder what you’re made of and how hard your heart is. We have observed you coldly all along. Ah, God, that the world still contains a woman as evil as you! Not until I heard the leader’s analysis did I understand what you’re after. All along, your actions have come from your hypoplasia. Your abnormal psychology makes you most interested in a pretty little boy whom you then turn into a cheap curtain. In fact, you want to sweep the crowd away and secretly monopolize him. I bet that if you had escaped just now, you would have immediately looked for him. You threw up a smokescreen and then meant to take to your heels, thinking you were incredibly smart. You never imagined a prophet had seen through your deception and was waiting for you at the door. Are you flustered now? Listen to me: go back and wash your hands and lie down. Stop your wishful thinking, or you’ll make an exhibition of yourself in public. There are rules for everything, and what will be, will be. Open your eyes and look at the people in this room. Who else is as obtrusive as you? You must be a little more careful. An artist here has taken responsibility for writing the history. The night that we were cooling off outside, he and I rushed together into the small dark room. After I had taught him some secrets, he became both delicate and humorous. You mustn’t bring up some curtain in front of him. That’s risky. Our artist now is almost at my level: with one glance, he can discern your inner world. My God, how hard it is to talk with you! In my whole life, I’ve never talked so long. You are really extraordinarily dim-witted.’’

The dark-skinned woman didn’t let the female colleague pass. Gazing brightly at her, she blocked the door by spreading out her arms and legs.

‘‘No, I’ve changed my mind,’’ she said. ‘‘I definitely won’t let you go home. I won’t go home tonight, either. I’ll guard this door until dawn. I feel that tonight is the key. I can’t tolerate other people spreading rumors about a serious matter. Once the nonsense about the curtain starts spreading, my social status will decline disastrously.’’

After many meetings, Madam X’s husband’s role was still ambiguous. The writer had used the diagram of the maze to solve the problem of Madam X’s image, but the diagram wasn’t suited to this man, for a particular problem needs a particular method to solve it. We have to find the right key to open this door. Our Dr. A had employed ‘‘empathy’’ to solve the problem of Q. But the writer believed that he could not also solve the issue of X’s husband. That was the responsibility of genius. After eliminating all other possibilities, the writer acted independently and called on X’s little sister.