Gao Xingjian - One Man

Some years later, when he went home for the summer vacation, he saw Luo in a white apron selling bean curd at a vegetable market near his home. Luo gave a wan smile when he caught sight of him, and, taking off his apron, got the plump elderly woman who sold vegetables to take care of his bean-curd stall. As they went off together, Luo told him that he had been a fisherman for two years, but when he came back he couldn't find work. Finally, the subdistrict office assigned him to the cooperative vegetable stall to sell bean curd and to look after the accounts.

Luo would count as a genuine slum-dweller. His shanty, a structure of broken bricks and woven bamboo with a coat of mortar, was divided into an inner and an outer room. His mother slept in the inner room, and the outer room served as the main room and kitchen. On one side of the shanty, Luo had extended the roof and put together some sheets of pressed asbestos to build himself another room. In the far corner, where one couldn't stand up straight, stood a collapsible canvas bed and a small desk with a drawer; against the wall on the other side was a rattan bookcase. Everything was meticulously tidy and clean. Although Luo's mother was at work in the factory, Luo took him into this room the size of a chicken coop instead of the main room of the shanty, and got him to sit at the desk while he himself sat on the canvas bed.

"Do you still write poetry?" he asked.

Luo pulled out the drawer and took out a diary. It contained neatly written poems, each clearly dated.

"Are these all love poems?" he asked, leafing through the pages. He had not thought that this big fellow who was always a loner at school wrote lyrical poetry like this. He still remembered the old literature teacher reading out lines from Luo's poems in composition classes, and he said to Luo that these love poems were totally different from those early poems, which were filled with impassioned youthful determination.

"Those poems were like that so that they'd get published, but now even those poems wouldn't get published. These poems here were written for that little slut," Luo said, and started talking about women. "That little slut was just having a bit of fun with me. She had found herself a cadre who was more than ten years her senior and was waiting to get the marriage registered. She used to stay up all night knitting pullovers for that man. I got this book of poems back from her and I don't write anymore."

He thought it was best to get off the topic of women and started talking to Luo about literature. He said that the new life of the new era should have a new literature, but he wasn't sure what exactly this new literature of this new life would be like. However, he didn't think it could be about the good things happening to good people, like in the new folk songs of the Great Leap Forward that filled the pages of all the newspapers and magazines. He also talked about the fiction of Gladkov and Ehrenburg, and the plays of Mayakovski and Brecht. At the time, he wasn't aware of the purges of counterrevolutionaries by Stalin, Ehrenburg's Thaw, or the execution of Meyerhold.

"The literature you're talking about is too far away," Luo said. "I don't know where you will find any literature. I spend my time selling vegetables during the day, then, at night, after all the stalls close, I do the accounts. Sometimes I read a bit, but it's all about faraway happenings, and I just read to fritter away time, get rid of the boredom. And I don't know where this new life is. The bit of pride I had as a student vanished long ago; I just find myself some girls to have a bit of fun."

He found Luo's decadence sadder than Luo's talk about the little slut. He said he had never touched a woman and this time it was Luo who was surprised. "You're a real bookworm!" Luo said without envy of his apparently better circumstances. Luo was, after all, a few years older and said magnanimously, "I'll get you a girl so you can have a bit of fun. You definitely won't have any problems touching Little Five." Luo said this Little Five was a very easygoing girl, a randy little cunt. He again heard Luo talking disrespectfully about women.

"I'll get her to come. This slip of a girl can play the guitar. She's not like those girls at school, all of them with their airs," he said.

He, of course, wanted to know such a girl, and Luo went off to fetch her. He read through Luo's love poems, some of which were quite explicit. In his view, they surpassed Guo Moruo's "Goddess" in extolling sex, and he was deeply moved. He was even more convinced that Luo was indeed a genuine poet, but, at the same time, he knew that these poems definitely could not be published, and he felt sorry for Luo.

Before long, Luo was back. He turned to Luo and said, "Now, this is poetry!"

"Ha, I wrote them for myself to read." Luo gave a bitter laugh.

Little Five arrived wearing clogs. This young girl with intensely black eyes in a sleeveless round-neck floral top had big breasts. She was barely fifteen, but her body was already that of a young woman. She didn't come into the little room but leaned against the doorway. "He also writes poetry," Luo said, to introduce him to the girl.

In fact, Luo had never read any of his poetry, but this seemed to be an ideal introduction. The girl would have read these erotic poems, and such an introduction would have had an implicit meaning. The girl smiled, and her full lips took on a sultry look; he had never seen a girl with such sexy lips. He closed the book and started talking to Luo about something else. It was he, and not the girl, who felt awkward.

Luo took from behind the door a guitar that had lost most of its varnish and said to the girl, "Little Five, how about singing for us."

He had been saved from his embarrassment. Little Five took the guitar and asked, "What shall I sing?"

"Whatever you like. How about 'Kalinka'?"

This Russian folk song used to be very popular among the youth, but had been replaced by songs extolling the new society, the Party, and the leaders.

Little Five put down her head to pluck the strings. Muted soft notes arose, but she didn't seem to be listening, and looked listless. When she looked at him, he felt utterly confused. Somewhere in the room a cricket quietly chirped, and outside the small window the hot sun glared fiercely. The girl played a tune, stopped, and told Luo she didn't feel like singing. When she turned to him, she seemed to be looking somewhere above his head.

"If you don't want to sing, then don't," Luo said. "But come to see a movie tonight."

The girl smiled without answering, and put the guitar by die door. When she got as far as the main room, she turned and said, "I've got things to do at home!" Then she went off.

"The hell she has. As if I'd believe that crap," Luo said. "You really don't know how to flirt with girls. Don't you want to date her?"

He fell silent. Luo said there wasn't much of a future, so his group of losers often found girls to have a bit of fun, to play the guitar, and to sing together. Sometimes they went to the lake outside the city. They would have a swim or steal a small boat, row out to where the lotus grew in thick clumps, and steal some of the pods. Little Five went with them, and, at night in the middle of the lake, anyone could roam her body and she wouldn't complain. She was a very worldly wench. It was obvious Luo was in love with her, but he said he had a woman. The two of them had grown up together, but she had joined a song-and-dance troupe in a military zone and couldn't marry a vegetable seller like him. Anyway, she got pregnant. That was last winter. Getting an abortion in a hospital required a marriage certificate and a work card, but where could he get hold of these? On top of that, the woman was military personnel, and she had to obtain permission from her superiors to get married. If her workplace found out, she would, of course, be expelled from the army, lose that good job, and end up hating him for the rest of her life! Furthermore, the tiny income from the cooperative vegetable stall was barely enough to feed himself, how would he be able to support a wife and a child? Luckily, one of his maternal uncles was a doctor in a county town, and, thanks to his uncle persuading his associates at the county hospital, Luo was able to take her there, say they were married, and have the abortion performed.