Gao Xingjian - One Man

One of the friends insisted on talking about a whole lot of bizarre happenings in China that had nothing to do with literature. He said that this person who fed the animals in a zoo went to work early one morning, before they started selling tickets. He had just gone in through the side gate for zoo personnel, when he heard the roaring of the tiger he normally fed. He wondered why it was roaring if it wasn't feeding time, and went to take a look. The tiger was lying in the cage in a pool of blood, with its front paws missing. A rescue attempt was made, the wounds bandaged, but the tiger had lost too much blood, and there was no tiger blood for a transfusion, so they couldn't save it.

"Why had the tiger's paws been chopped off?" someone asked.

"Surely everyone here has heard stories about Chinese people eating bear paws?"

"But I've never heard about tiger paws being eaten."

"It's for making tiger-bone liquor, which has been a cure for rheumatism from ancient times! Where else could you hunt for a tiger these days, except at a zoo?"

Everyone broke out laughing and said, "You scoundrel, you're anti-Chinese right through. You've made it all up, haven't you?"

This friend, however, was quite serious and said he had read it in an official Mainland newspaper. "A friend sent me a newspaper clipping from China, it was just a two-line item. In Sweden, it would have made front-page headlines! And, for sure, the environmentalists would have marched in the streets. Hey, does Sweden have a Green Party?"

You didn't go to the dining room for breakfast. From your window, you watched the limousines downstairs drive off to take the others sightseeing in Stockholm.

Afterward, you went for a walk along the gravel path around the lake. On the surrounding fields, here and there, stood big, white, plastic bags that probably contained grass fodder. At the edge of the dark-green forest, these white bags looked surreal, and you again seemed to be entering a dream.

As you follow a track into the forest, the light around the lake vanishes, and, deeper into the forest, the trees seem to get taller, the tallest and straightest being the Korean pines. Suddenly, you hear the shouting of children, and you can't help feeling emotional. It's as if you have returned to your childhood, even though you know those times no longer exist. You stop to listen, to prove you're not hearing things, then hurry on. The track turns, and right ahead, between the trees, is a clearing where two girls are dragging sacks of, most likely, pine cones. The taller of the two is wearing jean shorts, cut off so the frayed edges come above the knee. Farther off, a boy is running about with a butterfly net. The two girls stop from time to time, and, as you don't want to disturb them, you slow down. The boy is in front, running and shouting. The girls call out to him, but he takes no notice and keeps running, so the girls follow, dragging their sacks. The sound of the children gradually fades into the distance, and, by the time you can no longer see them, the dirt track has started to disappear into the grass, and the place looks quite desolate. You still seem to faintly hear the shouting of the children, and you stop to listen, but it is only the rustle of the waves of pines as the wind passes through the tops of the trees.

You keep trying to recall that dream, to recall the tactile sensation of fondling her smooth firm breasts and to recall that indistinct but familiar face. Instead, you recall another dream you have had. The odd thing is that you have had this dream so many times that it has turned into a memory, so it seems that there really was such a girl. After school, she and her girl classmates were a happy lot and were always together. You seem to have been in the same class, but it was not easy to get on friendly terms with her. Those girls also made friends with boys, in fact, they only made friends with boys, but you could never get into their circle. You then remember a big courtyard complex where you once lived. Your home was in a back courtyard, and it was hard getting there through the front courtyard where a lot of people were living. The girl, it seems, lived in the front courtyard. Just like that, another dream is summoned up. The girl lived in a little dead-end street, an old courtyard complex that was very deep, with one entrance after another. Her family lived in the first courtyard, in the left wing after entering the gate, and a classmate of yours from middle school also lived in that courtyard. You went to see this classmate to see if the girl's family still lived there, but, when you got there, you didn't see your classmate. This summons up other dreams that are more like vague memories, and it's hard differentiating the dreams from the memories. You recall that when you were four or five years old, during the chaos of war, you and your parents were refugees and had lived in such a big courtyard complex. But you are searching for a big girl with full breasts, and your memories and dreams are all confused.

Your childhood years are dim and hazy, and only some points of light appear before your eyes. How is it possible to retrieve past happenings that have become submerged in what has been forgotten? It's hard to confirm what gradually appears, and it's hard to decide in the end whether it is memory or something you have imagined. Moreover, are memories accurate? They are fragmented and jump backward and forward, and, when you try to track them, the flashing points of light become dim and turn into words, but you can only link up a few of them. Can memories be retold? You doubt it, and you also doubt the capacity of language to do this. One retells memories or dreams, because some wonderful things that give you warmth, fragrance, longing, and impulses flash up. But can this be said of words?

You remember clearly that there was such a girl, and that you sat at the same desk, on the same wooden bench, and that she had a fair complexion. He once broke his pencil during a test, and when the girl noticed, she pushed the pencil box full of sharpened pencils she had on the desk to him. From then on, he began to take an interest in the girl, and would look out for her on his way to and from school. He once picked up a perfumed card that had dropped out of her textbook, and, after school, the girl gave it to him. When the boys from the class saw this, they started chanting, "The two of them are in love! The two of them are in love!" It made him blush, and, probably because of that, thereafter, warmth, fragrance, and femininity all came to be associated for him.

You also remember a dream from your teenage years. It was in a garden with long uncut grass, and among the clumps of grass lay the pure, white, naked body of a woman, a cold statue of carved marble. This was a dream he had after reading Merimee's novel The Venus of Ille. He slept close to the statue, and how he had sex with it was unclear, but there was a cold puddle around his thighs. It was a winter's night, and he woke up terrified.

You think about Bergman's old black-and-white film Wild Strawberries, which captures in detail an old man's anxiety about death; probably you've gradually moved into the phase of old age. In another of his films, Cries and Whispers, you feel sympathy for the three sisters and their buxom maid, who are all tortured by loneliness, sexual desire, illness, and fear of death. Can literature and art communicate? It is, in fact, pointless discussing this, but there are people who do believe that this is impossible. And can Chinese literature communicate? Communicate with whom, the West? Or communicate with the Chinese on the Mainland, or with the Chinese living abroad? And what is Chinese literature? Does literature have national boundaries? And do Chinese writers belong to a specific location? Do people living on the Mainland, Hong Kong, Taiwan, and the Chinese-Americans all count as Chinese people? This, again, brings in politics, so let's talk just about pure literature. But does pure literature really exist? Then let's talk about literature. But what is literature? These issues are all of relevance to the conference and are all endlessly contested.