Ran Chen - A Private Life

A little afraid, I put my eye against one of the holes and peered in.

The first thing I saw was a painting on the wall of what appeared to be a broken bathtub, with blood-red water pouring out through a crack. There was no one in the tub, but there was a frightened-looking cat standing beside the gush of red water.

When I looked down I saw a clutter of old furniture scattered about the room, and finally I saw the military camp cot and the two of them tangled together on it, moving regularly like a pair of sleepwalkers, not without some sense of pattern, but rather as if, without conscious effort, they were moving in response to each other. They had taken off all their clothes, and Yi Qiu lay with her arms and legs spread out, her full, round breasts jutting firmly upward. Her eyes partly closed and her head turned toward the door, she looked worn out, like a different person altogether. With Xi Dawang sitting astride her hips as if he were riding a horse, she moaned softly again and again. His sturdy legs were doubled under him, gripping her on both sides, and the muscles of his buttocks were tightly contracted. With both eyes tightly closed and his face turned upward in an attitude of abandon, he strained his entire body jerkily toward the ceiling, while one hand worked feverishly between his thighs and his breathing became increasingly labored. Suddenly a white spurt erupted from his hand, and, like a toppled mountain peak, he collapsed with a great groan on top of Yi Qiu…

Shaking with fear outside that door, I experienced two different feelings: at first, every pore of my skin opened and dilated and I started to breathe heavily. My mouth hung open like the maw of a dead fish, and my entire body seemed to have increased in size, as if I had been smoking opium. The door in front of me also increased in height and breadth, and I pressed even closer to the window. Then I was overcome with a violent nausea and felt a sudden urge to throw up…

It has been said that it is only before and after the occurrence of the real and fleeting phenomena of life that we experience them. The actual events that we think we perceive are only dreamlike fabrications invented by our own bodies.

Only now, more than ten years later, when I recall from among those already faded and dim past events that disturbing scene I covertly witnessed (perhaps only thought I witnessed) from outside the door to Yi Qiu's inner room, do I finally understand that the scene as I perceived it was of my own making, a product of my imagination at that moment.

The creative imagination is the mother of all memories.

My attention to the accurate depiction of the fragmented memories of past events is not motivated by a passion for personal reminiscing, nor am I fanatically nostalgic. The reason my focus persistently returns to the bits and pieces of the past is that they are not dead pages from history; they are living links that connect me to my ever-unfolding present…

The wind is the despot of Beijing 's North China winters. At one moment, its fierce, leaping blasts tear and pull at the black mantle of bare earth; at the next it becomes gentle under a warming sun, and the earth beneath one's feet is transformed into an endless river of golden light. Such extreme weather changes make the people who live through them moody and temperamental.

Winter is an endless season.

One winter day, the heavily falling snow soon above my ankles, I spent the entire afternoon building a snowman in our courtyard. For her eyes, I stole two lumps of coal from under the eaves of Mrs. Ge's house in the courtyard in front of us – the lady who had breast cancer. From our own kitchen I took some cabbage leaves for her hair, and I made an army cap for her out of a piece of cardboard. I made her look like a fearless woman soldier waving an arm in the empty, barren courtyard. Her blank eyes were open wide, as if she were pursuing some unseen or simply nonexistent enemy.

I chose a name for her – Ni Niuniu, same as myself.

That night after dinner, I was totally tired out.

When I went to my room and started writing in my diary, I couldn't stop yawning. The words in my diary, strung together like my yawns, were all awry and uneven, as illegible as the magic scribblings of a ghost. My head felt heavier and heavier, and all my bones seemed to have been pulled from my body so that I slumped in my chair.

At that moment my mother's image wavered into view before me. What was odd was that she hadn't called to me as she entered my room like she usually did, but had waited until she was beside me to call me quietly and mysteriously. Even more strange was the anachronistic sequence of actions: she was already beside me when I heard her knock at the door. But the knock was definitely my mother's. She tapped the door with her middle and index fingers, as if she were plucking a lute, not two or three times, but four times, in a very distinctive way. So that knock could not have been anyone else's.

Frightened, I shrank back.

Mother said, "Niuniu, I want you to come with me to the Ges' courtyard. Mrs. Ge has died, but there's nothing to be afraid of."

I said, "Why would I be afraid? Dead people's yards are safer than living people's."

Then I flew next door to see.

The courtyard had become a brightly lit funeral scene. Green bristlegrass, lilies, "never-die" portulaca, and sunflowers vied in the brilliance of their reds and golds, filling the space with such a rioting blaze of color that everything in the yard shimmered with glowing hues. The scene was dominated by a huge black wooden coffin so high that it blotted out half the wall of the house behind it. When I got closer, I saw that it was the propped-open lid that made it look so high.

One of the men in the Ge family was standing stiffly beside it, holding a small book in his hand. He raised his head to look around at the crowd of people, then look into the coffin again, and finally wrote something in the little book, showing absolutely no sign of grief.

When I came up to the coffin and looked in, I saw a female figure buried in a welter of brightly colored brocade. Her head, covered with a piece of white cloth, was resting on a pretty lotus-pink pillow with a floral border. Looking at her, I was very upset, but I wasn't really frightened.

Then I noticed that the body in the coffin appeared to be breathing. Under the white cloth covering her face, just below where the nose would be, there was a mouth-shaped oval indentation that was rising and falling rhythmically. I jumped back, scared out of my wits.

At that point, the lady in the coffin extended a long, emaciated arm and grasped my hand. I was astonished to find that her hand was warm. Then with her other hand she lifted a corner of the white cloth covering her face to reveal an eye, or, to be more precise, half an eye.

She smiled at me and very softly and weakly said, "Don't be afraid."

I said, "You haven't died yet?"

She said, "No, I haven't died yet. I'm conducting an experiment."

"Experiment?"

"I'm not too inclined to believe in people, including my husband. Look at him. All he's doing is making a list of the funeral gifts. He doesn't look the least bit grief-stricken; on the contrary, he actually looks quite happy. No doubt he's happy because he's gained a new chance."