Ran Chen - A Private Life

It looks like this:

It looks a lot like a map, a map with a hole in the center. It seems to symbolize a number of characteristics of the human beings who inhabit this sphere – emptiness, estrangement, separation, and longing. The top portion seems to be a pair of goats, a male and female, perennially occupying the opposing poles of sexuality, yearning to couple even as they reject each other; in the center there is a dividing ditch, a fathomless black hole; on the left and right are two strange beasts in mad flight from each other.

… A huge heart with its center gradually eaten away by passing time – a window to heaven opened in the middle of barren peaks and uncultivated fields – a thirstily breathing mouth exuberant with life – an open womb awaiting a moist rain – an anxiously gazing eye drained of its last tear – a doomed lung that has been eaten away like a leaf devoured by insects…

I don't want to get up. I want to lose myself in my ink blot fantasies.

For the past year a great part of my life has been spent in quiet introspection, clearly out of step with today's hedonistic "playboy" lifestyle.

The truth is, the unalloyed pursuit of pleasure is just as much a shortcoming as indulgence in hopeless grief.

Day in and day out, I feel an endless emptiness and lacking welling up from under my feet. Like cup upon cup of tasteless tea, the days leave me listless and inactive. I don't know what it is I need. In the course of my not very long life, I have tried everything that I should have tried, and everything I shouldn't.

Perhaps what I need is a lover, a man or a woman, young, old, maybe even just a dog. I no longer have any demands or limitations. It's the same thing as my having to make myself understand the need to forsake perfection, to accept less. Because I know that the pursuit of purity is pure stupidity.

For me, having a lover doesn't necessarily mean sex; sex is just a kind of spice, an extravagance.

Sexuality has never been a problem with me.

My problem is different. I am a fragment in a fragmented age.

I was eleven then, or perhaps younger. The late afternoon summer weather was as unsettled as my mind. The rain would suddenly start pelting down, choosing me as its target. Afterward, I would see that the sleeves covering my skinny arms had angrily twisted themselves into stubborn wrinkles, and that my pant legs, even more obviously angered, as stiff as spindly sticks, kept an uncivil silence.

So I would say to my arms, "Misses Don't, don't be angry." I called my arms "the Misses Don't," because they most often followed my brain's bidding.

Then I would say to my legs, "Misses Do, let's go home to Mama, then everything will be okay." I called my legs "the Misses Do," because I thought that they most often followed the bidding of my body, paying no attention to my brain.

I would then set off with my Misses Do and Don't, soothing them with sweet talk along the way. Of course, these were private, unspoken conversations.

Sometimes I felt like I was a whole group of people. It was a lot more fun that way. We exchanged ideas all the time, telling one another all our problems. I always had plenty of problems.

But what was really strange that day was when I looked up from the soggy Misses Do and Don't and was surprised to see that none of the people around me was wet. Why was I always the first one to get soaked in the rain? I didn't understand, but I was much more easygoing than my Misses Do and Don't. I didn't get angry.

What's the good of getting angry?

Once, after a thunderstorm, an ethereal rainbow hung suspended across the horizon, and our courtyard, still drenched with rain, was carpeted with the rich green leaves brought down by the wind and rain. In front of our house there was a really huge date tree. I was sure that it was much larger than the courtyard date trees described in my schoolbooks, because its great armlike limbs were the largest I had ever seen. Stretching completely across the courtyard, they rested firmly on the top of the high walls, forming a great, protective crown. Every summer they filled our courtyard with round, crisp, honey-sweet dates as fat as little pigs. Right after the storm, before the rain puddles had disappeared, I went out to collect the big dates that had been blown down. There was a tiny sparrow, head cocked to one side, still dazed, clinging to a fallen limb. I quickly cupped it in my hands and put it in a cage we had, with fresh water and millet.

My mother told me that if I kept it, it would die of frustration, because it had its own life, its own home.

I replied that I loved it very much and that I would feed it.

Mother said it wouldn't eat what I gave it.

I wouldn't listen.

And after a few days my sparrow died, because it refused to eat.

When he saw that I had a bird, one of the neighbor's children brought home a pussycat. Already full grown, it was sleek and fat, and its readiness to accept amazed me. It would eat whatever food it came across, sleep wherever there was a place to curl up, waggle its tail and play up to whoever came along, and attach itself to whoever provided its saucer of milk. As a result, unlike my stubborn, intractable sparrow, it survived. Since that time I have detested monsters like that cat who would do anything just to stay alive. To me they are nothing more than a bunch of depraved opportunists, like many more of different types that I have encountered since I have grown up.

The sparrow incident upset me terribly, and, in my eleventh year, gave me a lesson in life. I always counseled my index finger, "Miss Chopstick, we have to learn how to control our temper or we'll do ourselves in."

I called my index finger "Miss Chopstick" because she helped me eat.

I once heard my mama say that the faster you run in the rain, the faster you get wet. But like other people who pay no heed before they get wet, I continued to act and think as before. On the one hand, I soothed my Misses Do and Don't, while on the other, I tried to figure out just what had happened. Eventually, I convinced myself that it was something to do with my nerves or my blood or some other unobservable inner thing that made me run too fast, so I got soaking wet.

I was walking home alone. I knew that none of my little classmates wanted to or would dare to walk with me. No one wanted anything to do with me, because, in addition to being the youngest member of the class, I was skinny and weak and not very outgoing. An even more important reason was that Mr. Ti, the teacher in charge of our class, had been encouraging them to exclude me. I couldn't understand this and had long resented him for it.

I was very angry and hurt because he always tried to embarrass me and make me look stupid in front of the class. Although I was the youngest member of the class and not a particularly clever girl, on occasion I would stand up to him. When I was nervous, I would mix up my left and right hands, and my right hand would forget how to write. But I was always trying to prove that I wasn't the class dunce.

One time, he asked my mother to come into the office. He wanted her to take me to the hospital to see if I was mentally handicapped. He said I behaved like a mute. He had no idea that my brain was racing incessantly.

How mean of him to say I was "handicapped"!