Ran Chen - A Private Life

I live quietly in this old city in the apartment my mother left to me. The hallways are long and dark, but the apartment has windows everywhere.

Living alone has not made me any more uneasy. There was no special warmth when I was living with my parents. Things are fine now. For so many years, time seemed to be rushing by. But it was tired, wanted to slow down. It has stopped in my apartment. It has also stopped in my face. It seems that time is exhausted. It has come to rest in my face and does not move, so that my face looks the same as it did a number of years ago.

But my mind has already entered old age; everything has slowed down.

For example, I no longer argue with people, because I now know that ultimately there is no connection between argument and truth. It is nothing more than a matter of who for the moment holds the advantage; and "advantage" and "disadvantage," or who is winning, who losing, no longer holds any significance for me.

I will never again believe that the earth beneath our feet is a highway. I believe that it is nothing more than a huge, chaotic chessboard, and that the majority of people go where their feet take them. Any who insist on making rational choices should be prepared to accept the loneliness of going against the tide, to stand quiet and uncertain by the roadside looking on, their bodies bent into question marks, like old men who have suffered from rickets.

I love vegetables, and I'm practically a vegetarian, because I'm totally convinced that only a vegetarian diet can keep the spirit distinct from the flesh, and the eyes clear and beautiful.

I am fond of the plants on my balcony – a large rubber tree, a tortoiseshell bamboo, and some perennial flowers. I don't have to go to public parks with all their noise and clamor to enjoy fresh foliage and pure air.

A few days ago, my doctor friend Qi Luo called. He was very concerned about how I was doing, and suggested that I pay a visit to the hospital. I told him I wasn't interested in seeing anybody, no matter who it might be.

The words that I encounter around me are as insubstantial as the false radiance of moonlight. Believing in conversation gives us a kind of solace, much like believing that a picture of a loaf of bread can fill our stomachs.

Just as my spirit has no need for religious faith, my body has no need for pills.

I told him if I needed him, I would look him up.

He told me that my "agoraphobia" was incurable.

I know that the attribution of names to the fantastic variety of people and things is said to be one of the significant elements of civilization. But a name is nothing more than a name. Take mine, for example – Ni Niuniu. All it is is a string of sounds. I can't see that it makes any difference whether you call me "Ni Niuniu" or "Yi zhi gou" – little Miss Stubborn or little Miss Puppy.

At this moment, I am stretched across my huge, comfy bed. It is my raft upon the vast ocean, my fortress in the middle of a chaotic world. It is my man and my woman.

A licking flame of summer morning sunlight, intermingled with the noises of the street, penetrates a crack in the curtain, and its luminous center does its dance of time upon the tired lids of my reluctant eyes.

I don't like the feel of sunshine. It makes me feel exposed and vulnerable, as if all my organs have been laid bare, and that I must immediately place sentries at every hair follicle to ward off the prying light. But, of course, there are too many suns in this world. The light from every pair of eyes burns more than sunlight, is more dangerous and more aggressive. If this light were to invade my frail being, I would be lost, vanquished, and would die.

Because I know that a life that is crowned with any kind of light will be full of false appearances and lies.

I was born on an unremarkable night in the extraordinary year of 1968. Quietly, I left my mother's uneasy womb to enter a world I feared and was not ready for, where I wailed like a frightened lamb. The light in the room where I was born was fluorescent blue. I have disliked bright light ever since.

The Chinese zodiacal and western astrological texts say that girls born at this time are as firm in their faith as the Spanish nun Theresa Davila.

Today, almost thirty years later, I see that I clearly haven't gotten beyond or been able to avoid that piercing light. Now, lying on this huge bed, I can feel the sunlight dancing back and forth on my eyelids, time turning her pages as she follows.

I used to be an angel, but angels can also become mindless demons. As they say, the road to hell may be paved with dreams of heaven.

All this requires is an age that has gone mad; when nurtured under the fierce light that shrouds them, all living cells are turned into lifeless stone.

I don't want to get up. What for? I don't have to leap out of bed and go to the office to scramble after money anymore, like so many others.

As long as I have enough to wear and eat, I have no desire to chase after money.

An odd-looking ink stain on the pillow catches my eyes as I open them. I stare at it for a long time. Suddenly, it seems as if my soul is floating around the bed examining the body on the bed from different angles. I try desperately to account for the ink blot and pull my dark spirit back into my body. In this rose-colored bedroom, on this bed where I have lived and slept alone for the past year, there has been no fluid other than the blue-black ink of my fountain pen. Under the pillow are a few sheets of paper and my pen. I like to prop myself up in bed and write or draw whatever comes into my head. It doesn't matter whether these fragments are diary entries or letters that will never be sent or that have no address; they are a record of my musings, a product of the confrontation between my inner consciousness and the outside world. They are the breath of my life.

I often feel that I have nothing to do with normality, that all around me there are enemies; that I am no longer myself, but have become someone else; even that I am sexless – neither female nor male. This is exactly like the person in the American film The Looking Glass, who stands for ages in front of the bathroom mirror, whose bright surface the steam has covered over with a layer of mist. Though the window is tightly closed, a soft breeze still finds its way into the room, swaying the shower curtain, so that it covers the private parts of the person before the mirror. The person has chosen to stay in the bathroom out of self-love, mind and body having been too long exposed to the filthy world outside.

There are invisible eyes lurking everywhere in the air, malevolently watching this person.

You don't know the person's sex because the person doesn't want you to know.

I often think that I am that person in the mirror. Clearly, it is from my image in the mirror that I recognize myself, a combination of analytical observer and one who is analytically observed, a person whose sexuality has, as the result of a variety of outside factors, been obscured or neglected, a sexless person. Through its intriguing allure, this image has the possibility of developing in any number of ways. As soon as I look at typical phenomena of the external world, they are distorted, altered. It seems that everything is an illusion.

Even though a lot of religious or philosophical works, eastern or western, have taught me that if I want to escape ignorance and gain enlightenment, I must go through this feeling of personal alienation. I worry all the same that someday I may lose control over this separation of mind and body and go mad.

This morning, with the light piercing my eyes like slivers of glass, I focus all my attention on the ink blot on my pillow, probably the result of carelessness when I was doodling on a sheet of paper.