Qiu Miaojin - Last Words from Montmartre

Xu, I’m an artist, and what I really want is to excel in my art (to feel as confident as the expression in Chirac’s eyes on TV — his charisma can only be the product of long-term self-cultivation; he must have been driven from a very young age). My goal is to experience the depths of life, to understand people and how they live, and to express this through my art. All my other accomplishments mean nothing to me. If I can only create a masterpiece that achieves the goal I’ve fixed my inward gaze upon during my creative journey, my life will not have been wasted.

Xu, perhaps you vaguely or sporadically understood and even helped me a little with my choice to be an artist, but to be honest, art and culture in general aren’t that important to you. You could say that the social environment you were raised in has absolutely nothing to do with what I hold most dear. And yet paradoxically, the social class you belong to devours art as a way to dispel the ennui of life, turning it into an ornament of prestige. As I said, maybe to you I’m just another ornament in your collection. Maybe at this very moment you are analyzing me with the detached discernment of a collector. But your family, your friends will never understand me and what I have sacrificed for you; to them I have little value. We belong to two totally different worlds. So please don’t let them intercept and read my letters. And please ask them to stop lying to me on the phone and acting like nothing’s going on (even though I no longer need to call you anymore). And please stop saying that all of this behavior is just “kidding around.”

Please stop. Stop being so unfair and unjust. No human being deserves this kind of treatment! Maybe you’ve resigned yourself to living in a comfortable, peaceful, idyllic family paradise, but a deep-seated hypocrisy is concealed in your life, apparent only to an outsider like me. Still you reply with such ease: There’s nothing unfair or unjust going on . I hardly ever spoke to anyone in your family, and I don’t need to now. I have nothing to say to them and do not deserve their rude treatment. You have dragged me into this trap, giving me no choice but to deal with them, which in turn gives them the chance to treat me badly. You’ve always been too much of a coward to fight on my behalf, and in this case won’t speak up for me to your friends and family. You even abetted them brilliantly this month, offering me up naked to be ripped to shreds. While you’re incapable of keeping our relationship between you and me, how can you also act like such a coward, leaving me to fend for myself? How can you bury your hypocritical head in the sand and pretend that nothing’s wrong, or say that it’s all my fault? I have always protected you. You’ve never experienced this kind of cruelty and injustice. So you can remain calm and composed and say that all this is happening because I am too “extreme.” Holy shit, this statement is the worst injustice of all!

The truth is, I really couldn’t care less about the mistreatment your family and friends have unwittingly inflicted on me. I can brush off their words and smile again, because I don’t need anything from them. Nor do I want them to agonize over my very existence. I have no prejudices against them. My criticism of these people close to you is only due to their wretched behavior. What I’ve said is the truth and isn’t intended to be malicious. I have tried to treat these people around you with respect. I have little choice otherwise, as you have pulled them into our relationship, I must be in touch with them and hope for their acceptance. The conflict I had anticipated with them has only given you even more cause, in your cowardice, to abandon me. But I finally realize that I don’t need to silently tolerate your cowardice anymore, for someone as cowardly as you isn’t worth the effort. And this is certainly not the part of you I love.

This month what truly “broke my heart” wasn’t their cruelty (the savageness of human nature isn’t foreign to me after all) but that you stood aside, without intervening, and just let them act this way. It was your tacit agreement, your secret consensus to shut me out! If not for your permission, I’m sure they wouldn’t have been so extremely hostile toward me. By allowing your family to shut me out like this you’ve caused me nightmares every night where I wake up crying and screaming. My self-esteem is totally crushed, trampled by your faux naïveté and innocence. If it didn’t take all my strength to control my loathing for you and my desire to kill myself, if it didn’t drain me so much to “suppress” this, I wouldn’t even bother saying any of this to the “real” you. It’s not that I can’t bear any more pain. On the contrary: Even if you further betray me, even if your family continues to be nasty to me and keeps intercepting my letters to you, even if you all decide to throw my letters in the trash and keep lying and lying to me, nothing more can hurt me. I will just smile and smile and smile, because I can’t feel a deeper pain. I no longer want a “real” connection with you, and I have nothing else to ask of you… I am sending a letter to the soul that I love, sending it to the soul who is connected to mine and whom I promised to love forever, to be by her side forever. (If you and your family want to ruthlessly destroy my pathetic letters, I cannot stop you. I’ll stop writing you, go on with my life, and toss away you and your family.) All I want to know is that your soul has received my messages and knows that my heart has been constant all along. That would be good enough for me. I don’t need any other gesture or physical act.

So go on and do what you please. There are only two last things I ask of you, two things I refuse to endure anymore. First, please stop letting others intercept my letters. S-T-O-P! Even if you don’t have the courage to directly stop them yourself. They have no right to intrude upon my inner world. If your soul was not the recipient my letters were intended for, then you, too, would have no right to spy on my innermost self, no right at all. I appeal to your most visceral sense of righteousness that you stop this from ever happening again. If you don’t want to receive my letters anymore, please just return them to me. No need to explain. If you don’t want my phone calls, just tell me. Be direct. There is absolutely no need to act out this indirect, deceptive, ridiculous farce. You only need to say it explicitly, rather than exhaust yourself and others. Why drag your family and friends through the mud of our drama, which only inspires disgust and fatigue. It really doesn’t have to be like this. Yes, it takes courage to be straightforward and risk facing emotional pain, but evasion, pretense, and subterfuge are even more harmful to the essence of human nature; no one can bear it. It’s an elemental truth. There’s nothing complicated about it, no profound principle, so there’s no reason for “I don’t know,” “I can’t help it,” “Everything’s in chaos,” or “I need some time to figure it out.”

The second thing I ask is that you stop revealing the details of your “betrayal” to others — there’s really no need for it. I don’t believe there is or was or will be anyone who can know your innermost desires better than I do. I say there is no need not because I’m unwilling to understand you or communicate with you anymore. (In fact, communication and understanding between us is exactly what I desire.) And it’s certainly not because I’m afraid that these revelations will hurt me even more. (They won’t. I already made that clear in my first letter to you.) Yet in heaven’s name you simply have no right to stain my body again, you have no right to stain me again! If you want to stain yourself along with the clean white jade of love that I gave you, if you want to stain the crystal-pure, angelic image of you impressed in my memory, you are free to do so. You’ve already left an “indelible” stain on me; you don’t have the right to spread stories that further tarnish my name. If you persist, I’ll stop berating you, I swear (I’ve already been stained and have lost the “purity” that makes me want to berate you). I’ll simply endure you.