Jia Pingwa - Ruined City

For no reason at all, he reached out and tore off the sheet before walking away, his heart racing. He took out a cigarette, but each of the three matches he struck went out in the wind. The wind grew stronger, and he heard an eerie sound, like the cries of a ghost or the howl of a wolf. He looked up and saw, over the north gate, a horizontal banner proclaiming “An Exuberant Celebration of the Arrival of the Ancient City Cultural Festival.” Above the banner hung a leather drum. Zhuang could tell that it was the old cow’s hide. The drum was humming in the wind.

He walked into the station waiting room, where he ran into Zhou Min. They stopped.

“Zhou Min, how are you doing?” Zhuang called out.

“Zhuang—” Zhou stopped and greeted him without calling him “Laoshi.”

“Leaving town?” Zhuang asked. “Where to?”

“I’m leaving for the south. How about you?”

“We’ll be fellow travelers again,” Zhuang said, and they laughed. Zhou picked up Zhuang’s suitcase and helped him over to a bench. Telling Zhuang he would go buy them some soft drinks, he went to the station shopping mall. When he returned, Zhuang was asleep, his face covered with a newspaper.

“Here,” Zhou offered, but Zhuang remained motionless, so he removed the paper. Zhuang was holding Zhou’s backpack, which contained his xun, but his eyes had rolled up and his mouth was twisted to the side.

Outside the waiting room, the old junkman was standing with his cart under a giant panda created from thousands of potted plants and flowers.

“Junkman! Collecting junk and scraps! Give me your junk!”

Zhou banged repeatedly on the window until the glass pane broke. His hand bled, sending blood streaming down the cracked window like red earthworms. Through his blood, he could see that the old man did not hear him calling out to him. Instead, he saw a woman’s bony face pressed against the other side of the pane, her thin lips moving. It was the wife of Wang Ximian.

1. Joel Martinsen, “Jia Pingwa’s Banned Novel Returns after 17 Years,” August 4, 2009, Danwei: Chinese Media, Advertising, and Urban Life , http://www.danwei.org/books/jia_pingwas_abandoned_capital.php.

2. Yiyan Wang, Narrating China: Jia Pingwa and His Fictional World (New York: Routledge 2006), 252. Wang has done a superb job of analyzing Jia’s novels up to 2005, especially Feidu , in terms of “cultural landscaping,” “the sexual dissident,” and “female domesticity.” She translates the title as Defunct Capital , but when I asked Jia how he wanted it to be rendered, he said he preferred “city” over “capital,” since the latter no longer applied, and asked for a term of destruction, not abandonment, as some critics and scholars have used, in the title.

3. A comment by Xie Youshun in an unreleased documentary titled Feidu .

4. Martinsen, “Jia Pingwa’s Banned Novel Returns after 17 Years.”