Ran Chen - A Private Life

The things that followed have distorted my memory, or perhaps I should say that my memory has distorted the things that followed.

At any rate, those days were a confused labyrinth of tangled knots, mirrors within mirrors, paintings within paintings, through which time wove its way.

This terrible time left me feeling like everything was upside down, backward. It was as if I had gone to see a film, but instead of me sitting among the audience in the darkened theater watching a fictitious story unfolding on the screen, the fictitious characters on the screen were malevolently watching me, sitting down there in the audience. Unceasingly, enviously, they ferreted their way into my innermost being, leaving me feeling totally exposed though I sat in darkness, completely shattering the old structured patterns of my thinking…

I was placed in a hospital.

I lay awake all night in my room staring at the ceiling, pursuing the shadows of the past in a desperate effort to remember… something. What? Even to have been able to grasp a few traces here and there would have been all right, but it was like trying to look into the impossibly distant future, as if nothing had ever happened – a blank.

It was only in the spring of 1992, when I returned home from Qi Luo's hospital with my mind straightened out, that I was at last able to face the truth: my mother and my friend Ho, whom I loved dearly, were both dead. And my friend Yin Nan had left me forever.

The apartment was dark and silent, dust everywhere, lifeless.

My once so familiar home no longer recognized me. It was as if a new tenant had arrived. Even though I tried to behave like a familiar old friend, it remained silent and uneasy.

I could tell that from the moment I left, time had stopped in these rooms.

As I stepped softly inside, I said to myself, "I've come home! I feel terrible – just when everyone else left you, I left you too. But I had no choice, they took me away."

I looked out the window. The sun was bright, beautiful. The trees with their soft green branches, unable to restrain themselves, waved softly, solicitously, back and forth. The window curtains in the ranks of apartments opposite were fluttering slowly like colored photographs come to life, blocking out all the grief outside. Beyond the buildings, the cold, impersonal highway stretched its hungry hand toward the distant spring mountains and the limitless blue sky. On the mountains the hazy firs, proud poplars, and brightly blossoming clove trees waved their pastel wings in the gentle wind, an embroidery of spring colors set against the gray clouds and lovingly delicate mists. The languid spring sun inclined its sleepy head upon the warm pillow of young leaves.

It was truly the beginning of spring.

I turned to look at the empty room. I didn't want to believe that so many years had actually passed away. It was like awakening from an immense dream, unable to remember any of it.

From a neighbor's window, the faint, unsteady strains of a woman softly singing floated on the air. It was a song that Ho used to sing:

I closed the window. I couldn't bear listening to that song. I wanted to get rid of it, along with all the numberless white and pink and blue pills dissolved into my system in the hospital, along with all the grief and despair in my heart and the marrow of my bones that I had already jettisoned.

I spent the following days assessing this new, erupting world of dreams.

I call it a dream world because I did, in fact, essentially spend those days in a dream state. Like a little baby, I needed endless hours of sleep. Most people would likely regard such a constant need for sleep as simple physical fatigue. That's just a biological explanation.

But seen from an outside, objective point of view, this excessive desire to sleep was the product of the need to suppress or alleviate my fears, my sense of hopelessness, and my suffering. It's rather like the sexual drive of a failed man. It is much more likely that a person who has experienced failure in life will have some sort of overpowering need that must be satisfied to bring him peace of mind than that a person who has achieved great success and a good reputation in life will, because the former must prove his ability and his worth to himself, and his importance to others. He will use his sexual prowess to overwhelm others, to place himself in a dominant position.

After thinking about it for a long time, I began to recognize the many questions I needed answers to, and to find some of the answers.

But I still wasn't ready to reveal this to anyone.

All I can say is that this new understanding had not come to me abruptly, but rather had taken shape gradually, in the way that the arrival of night is not the sudden dropping of an impenetrable black curtain but a slow and gradual deepening of shade.

At the same time I had also come to realize that if a person lives within a fragmented world, unless she can find harmony and completeness within herself, she will walk the same road to perdition as the world around her. Every outward nervous symptom is the product of a fierce conflict between a person's inner needs and the realities of the world around them. It's the same as symptoms of a physical illness. They are manifestations of the struggle within a healthy body against influences harmful to it.

I leafed through the pages of confused notes left on my desk from before I was taken to the hospital. I couldn't clearly understand many of them, but still, I could try to guess.

I had a feeling that these notes could be extremely important because of the time when they were written. This led me to think that I should write down my personal history, that with my individual peculiarities I could take my place as one of the many unique entities that make up the multiplicity of humankind, my uniqueness determined by all those other unique natures with whom I coexist. Though every person is alone, a single isolated entity, with a history that is different from everyone else's, she cannot live without connection to her fellow human beings. She has no choice but to share in the joys and sorrows of the people of her time.

So, although she is a unique entity, she is also a representative facet of what it is to be human. This realization set my resolve to analyze those notes I had scribbled prior to my hospitalization.

One afternoon, I had dozed off, curled up in a blanket on the sofa leafing through some of my notes.

Suddenly the doorbell rang.

Punching my feet into my slippers, I went out to open the door.

It was Qi Luo.

I was delighted.

He said, "I brought you something."

A bit nonplussed, I took the big envelope he handed me, without any notion of what it might contain.

He said, "Aren't you always asking me about how you got sick? Wouldn't you like to go over your own records to trace the development of your illness? As your doctor, I'm not allowed to give them to you. But you're different, not really a patient at all, at least, not one of my usual patients. So I've brought them over for you. They'll help you understand what you've been through, put things together."

I pulled out a stack of paper that smelled of disinfectant and there it was – a complete record of my former condition:

HI NIUNIU-MEDICAL RECORD