Ran Chen - A Private Life

Pointing to the mottled shadows that the leaves under the street lamps cast on the pavement, she said, "Look at the way the leaves are shaking. There must be an earthquake."

I said, "That's impossible. If there was, you'd feel the shaking too. It's just the wind."

The girl said, "But look, the tree's trunk is shaking too."

I stepped back out of the tree's shadow and looked up at its trunk and main branches, and they were indeed moving – quietly, almost imperceptibly. Extending my arm, I touched the tree to see if this was really so. Like great heads of flowing hair, the shadows of the trees were dancing in the lightly moving air, their roots like giant buttons fastening them to the earth.

I wasn't quite sure what to make of this.

But whether or not it was an earthquake didn't interest me in the least. An earthquake was nothing compared to the upheavals my heart had been going through.

I said, "How can you stare so long at the shadows of the trees under the street lamps? It must be terribly boring."

The girl said, "What else is there that's interesting?"

I said, "I don't know."

After Mother was gone, in the evenings I would spend a long time sitting in my room watching how the sunlight slowly shrank away from the walls. I also followed the tracks of a mouse as he moved about secretly over the course of a day, and I measured how the footfalls of winter first found the tips of my fingers, then slowly covered my whole body. This habit of watching was something that came to me only after all my dearest friends had left me.

So I totally understood this girl.

The wavering shadows of the trees suddenly made me feel that there was a separation between my own body and the insubstantial things around me. It was as if there were a crevice between me and the rest of the world, or a great glass screen, and anything that passed through it lost all substance.

My mind suddenly changed, it was no longer my own mind. The person standing there was no longer me, it was someone called "Miss Nothing."

This peculiar feeling lasted for only a few minutes, then it was gone.

After that, the lineaments of the girl's face gradually became clearer to me. She did not really look that much like Ho, it was only her outline in the distance that seemed a bit similar.

I turned to leave.

"Good-bye," I said.

That evening in my mother's apartment, I opened her closet and told her clothes about this encounter.

Mother's clothes said, "The girl must be very lonely."

It was amazing, it was just as if my mother had been speaking.

Once, on another evening, when I was walking aimlessly down some street, the pale pink light of the setting sun fell through the gradually thinning leaves of the trees onto the faces of the bustling crowds below, and the sweet fragrance of autumn floated on the air. All the shops were closed and the broad street seemed filled with casually wandering souls. Cars flashed past me, weaving their way to and fro.

I was seized by a sudden impulse to throw myself under the wheels of the speeding cars, unable to resist the feeling that it would be a kind of reincarnation, that I would be reborn.

Just then, a handsome young man came up to me, breaking my train of thought.

He said, "I want to give you a pair of tickets."

I was a bit nonplussed, but eventually said, "Tickets – to what?"

"To a disco dance," he said.

I said, "Why do you want to give them to me?"

He laughed, said nothing, and swung around and left.

How strange!

That evening I heard the sound of my mother's voice in the air in her apartment. "Don't go to the disco dance. Maybe it's a dark plot, or maybe it's an open plot."

I was frightened. Why would anyone want to hurt me?

In the end, they sold my mother's apartment to stop me talking to her clothes – "abnormal behavior" – and to give me something to live on.

That's the money I use to cover my living expenses.

But this didn't stop us from talking to each other. And anyway, I could still keep listening to my own silent thoughts. There was always the sound of conversations going on in my head. They were filled with the things I thought about but hadn't yet spoken.

One afternoon, I was sitting on my sofa just about to open a book when I noticed a spider on the ceiling. I watched him for a while, but I couldn't figure out what he was doing tucked up there the whole day. A misty drizzle was blowing against the screen on my window. I watched the threads of rain as they slowly trickled down to congeal into large drops, like little damp birds clinging to my window screen.

I heard a voice that seemed to come from an invisible tongue somewhere in the air saying, "Read, read!" So I bent my head and started to read.

I remember the book was Kafka's Metamorphosis. It was a novel I had read before, about a man who turned into a huge cockroach. But for some reason the work had not struck the passionate chord in me that it did that day. I was wildly excited and agitated.

I read and read. I don't know whether it was something in the book that had infected me or something else, but suddenly I felt something inside me tugging, or tearing, or flowing, or walking, or crawling, something I could neither place nor identify. I was highly agitated. Finally, I thought that maybe it was masses of little black words scrambling back and forth in my veins like so many insects.

With that, I went to get a pen and some paper so I could copy down all those insectlike words crowding through my veins.

It was from that moment that my life of ceaseless writing began. And once that life began, it could not be stopped.

I wrote a story at that time that was different from Kafka's: How a Person Turned Into a Book.

I took evolution as my starting point:

They say that mankind evolved from animals; therefore, human beings should not eat pork, beef, or mutton. Furthermore, animals evolved from plants; therefore, human beings should also not eat vegetables. And since vegetables grow up out of the earth, mankind should not tread upon it…

If we were to accept this theory of evolution, we would have to forever keep our feet on our shoulders, and it would be impossible for mankind to continue. So I think the theory is fallacious.

I think that our endless journey down the road ahead of us is what gives shape to human evolution. For every ten thousand kilometers we walk, we evolve one step. For every time we walk through the life span of a clock, human history evolves one more level.

Later, I drew a schematic picture of the molecular structure of Earth.

I continued writing:

From the moment we entered the stage of civilization, humanity has been swallowed up in an endless sea of written symbols and signs that seep down into the core of our breathing, crawling all over us like ants, in and out between our bones. Just how these "ants" have the ability to gnaw away a person's bones and turn her into a book is another long and complicated evolutionary process…

A confused mass of totally disjointed thoughts kept crowding their way into my head, from every direction and of every ilk. Anything might come suddenly into my head, and just as suddenly turn into something else equally unexpected.

Before I knew it, the paper was covered with strings of words.

What's your name? My name's Ni; I look like I'm one person, but actually I'm several. Familiar place. One foot running off in different directions. An ear in a flower garden listening, a knocking sound. My one true love. Psychosomatic amnesia. Everywhere. Nice guy, okay. Look before you leap. Machine gun. Have some more. Ahh, yes, rumble, rumble… crackle…