Chaos and All That Read online

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  Chaos

  and

  All

  That

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  Fiction from Modern China

  This series is intended to showcase new and

  exciting works by China’s finest contemporary

  novelists in fresh, authoritative translations. It will represent innovative recent fiction by some of the boldest new voices in China today as well as classic works of this century by internationally acclaimed novelists. Bringing together writers from several geographical areas and from a range of cultural

  and political milieus, the series opens new doors to twentieth-century China.

  h o w a r d g o l d b l a t t

  General Editor

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  Liu Sola

  Translated from the Chinese

  by Richard King

  General Editor, Howard Goldblatt

  University of Hawaii Press Honolulu

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  Chaos

  and

  All

  That

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  Originally published in Chinese in 1991

  by Breakthrough Publications, Hong Kong.

  English translation © 1994 University of Hawaii Press All rights reserved

  Printed in the United States of America

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  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data Liu, Sola, 1955–

  [Hun tun chia li ko leng. English]

  Chaos and all that / Liu Sola ; translated from Chinese by Richard King.

  p.

  cm. — (Fiction from modern China)

  ISBN 0–8248–1617–X (alk. paper). —

  ISBN 0–8248–1651–X (pbk. : alk. paper)

  I. King, Richard. II. Title. III. Series.

  PL2879.S6H8613 1994

  895.1’352—dc20

  94–9228

  CIP

  Two excerpts from the English translation

  appeared in volume 15 (1993) of the journal

  Comparative Criticism. Reprinted with the permission of Cambridge University Press.

  University of Hawaii Press books are printed on acid-free paper and meet the guidelines for permanence and durability of the Council on Library Resources

  Designed by Richard Hendel

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  Chaos

  and

  All

  That

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  Why wasn’t I just born an ant?

  “Oh my God. Will you look at the little

  mite – her head’s only the size of my fist.” Auntie’s great-great grandfather was the great-great grandson of an ump-teenth-generation descendant of the Great Sage Confucius, so she was surnamed Kong, like him. She put my very first bonnet on her knuckle, and it fit just fine.

  The doctors weren’t impressed with me either, so they put me in an incubator, like bread going into the oven, to bake for a few days.

  When I was ready to go home, the doctor handed Auntie a recipe, and from that point on she was forever fussing about the kitchen, chopping and pulverizing everything she could lay her hands on, concocting soups and purees to pour down my throat. After a month of this she looked me over and pronounced, “This baby is disgustingly fat! Her calves are so chubby you can’t even see where her feet begin!” She tweaked my toes through the blubber, chortled “kootchie-koo” and made funny faces, all with no response from me.

  “Oh God, it’s hopeless. She’s gorged herself stupid!” So I was rushed back to hospital for a regimen of physical therapy.

  After a month of that I had slimmed down enough that my feet poked out.

  After another month I started to grow.

  After a year I could cry could laugh could sit could stand could walk could talk could play with my ants.

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  And after a few more years, when the ants decided to move out, I doused them all with boiling water.

  And then there was my family:

  Eggs and rice, eggs and rice,

  Eat them once and eat them twice;

  Open wide, here they come,

  Right into your tum-tum-tum.

  Poo your pants, poo your pants;

  Wash ’em in the river when you get the chance.

  Up your pants froggies come,

  Bite you on your bum-bum-bum.

  Auntie would chant as she walked around the courtyard rocking me in her arms; Mommy and Daddy’s snoring

  wafted out from the North Wing, and the sun lit the

  swarms of bugs on the crab apple tree.

  “What’s for dinner, Auntie?”

  “Wisteria blossoms.”

  Wisteria grew in such abundance on the pergola that it blocked out the sun; only the scent of its blossoms was gone.

  Auntie would knock the furry purple blossoms down with a long pole and scoop them into a wicker basket. Then she would steam them in a pot with salt and garlic. The fra-grance was enticing, although I couldn’t tell whether it was the garlic or the blossoms that smelled so good. There was a hairy caterpillar on the peach tree; the branches of the date palm that bore the most fruit seemed to grow over the neighbors’ fence; and the alley cat with one eye blue and one eye yellow slept under the grape arbor, too lazy to catch mice.

  Hey diddle diddle, my pride and joy,

  Kong Rong was a good little boy;

  Took the littlest pears and plums

  And left the big ones for his chums.

  Hey diddle diddle, my pride and joy,

  Now wasn’t he a good little boy?

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  Auntie made all the stories in our nursery books into rhymes like this. It goes without saying that when we had pears, none of us wanted to take first pick for fear of having to do a Kong Rong.

  By now I was growing every time I slept, and as I grew, I dreamed I fell from a steep cliff – down, down – until I woke in terror. Auntie was there. “You’ve grown some more,” she observed.

  The turtle clambered out of the fish tank and disappeared into the mud; hairy caterpillars climbed out of the peach blossoms and peered down my neck; the goat stood under the date palm and stared
at the cat; the hedgehog stared at the grapes and drooled; the rabbit nibbled the peonies.

  Auntie had turned the courtyard into a menagerie, and now my brother insisted that he was going to grow wheat in the garden. At Spring Festival Auntie emerged from the cellar bearing a huge melon that had been down there for six months. It was all mushy inside, but Auntie still said, “Eat it while it’s fresh.” In the main room of the North Wing they put a figurine of the Great Leader that glowed in the dark, and it looked just like my mommy!

  “How dare you say such terrible things, little girl!” Auntie glowered at me and just managed not to laugh.

  “Little pals, you are the flowers of the nation, the hope of world revolution. You have to learn good manners and proper deportment and when the foreign guests come here tomorrow you go straight over and give them a hug and kiss without being told to – who just farted?” demanded the kindergarten teacher.

  The little pals looked at each other.

  “Very well then, you must all sniff each others’ bottoms.

  The one with the smelly bottom is the one who farted, and that way the offender will be exposed!”

  So we all began to sniff each others’ bottoms. Every day the teacher would devise some new version of the exposing-offenders game, and whoever was brave enough to denounce 3

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  a classmate was a good little child. After one sniff at Song Li’s bottom, I knew he was the culprit, but he hissed, “If you tell on me, I’ll beat your head in after class!”

  So I didn’t tell, and when the teacher called on us to expose the offender, Song Li pushed me forward.

  “Right then!” the teacher ordered. “Off to the play-

  ground and get rid of the smell!” She commended Song Li for daring to wage war on wicked people and evil deeds and instructed all the other little pals that they too must learn to denounce evildoers properly while they were still young.

  I didn’t have the nerve to tell on Song Li, so I went out into the playground instead of him to air out.

  Why do people have to have noses? Nasty ugly bulges

  sticking out of our faces, always sniffing out revolting smells. The buses were full of grown-ups doing sneaky farts for all they were worth, but no one denounced them. The ones who should have been performing this heroic deed were us little pals, because we were shorter and right up against their bottoms, and we did special sniffing classes in kindergarten. Really good-looking people shouldn’t have noses at all.

  Mommy took me in for the entrance exam at a posh primary school that had been turning out big shots for hundreds of years, and the first question on the exam was, What do you keep in cages, birds or people?

  I received a letter of admission and thereby became the beneficiary of the concern of the state leadership. The leaders even invited our teacher to eat pork hocks with them and sent us cute foreign dolls, which were locked up in display cases in a special exhibition room. The teacher said that the pork hocks served in the leaders’ residence at Zhongnanhai were far whiter than the ones you could get in ordinary Peking markets.

  When the leaders had their pictures taken, they always made a point of putting on old clothes with big patches and carrying shovels so that everyone would see how hard they 4

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  worked. But Auntie had herself photographed in a cheongsam and high heels, which she kept stored in her cut-price treasure chest and which she wouldn’t have dreamed of bringing out for everyday.

  “I want to be a bluebottle,” I wrote in my composition for school. Other essays that got the same grade were pinned up on the board as models; mine and Wazi’s were the only exceptions. Her ambition was to be an ambassador’s wife.

  When the teacher read this out in class, everyone laughed at her and she burst into tears. So she gave up on the ambassador’s wife idea and wrote in all her essays that she wanted to be a ragpicker instead.

  The composition teacher said that my style was elegant enough, but the essay couldn’t go up on the wall unless I portrayed the bluebottle as a class enemy. She made me add,

  “O, that the winter would freeze me! O, that fires would consume me! That the sewer would bear me away! That a flyswatter would slap me! That insecticide would . . .” So it goes.

  “. . . studied so hard that he stabbed his leg with an awl to stay awake and kept his head up with a rope hung from the rafters . . . ,” intoned the form mistress.

  “. . . the horrors of the old society . . . the theme of this paragraph of our text is . . . ,” explained the composition teacher.

  “Liu Wenxue sacrificed his precious life to save the commune’s – er, yams, wasn’t it? Now pay attention when you’re writing yam. Don’t write yarn as in rattling good yarn, ”

  admonished the calligraphy teacher.

  “Uncle Lei Feng wrote in his revolutionary diary every day. Could your diaries be published the way his was? If not, then there may be something wrong with your political consciousness,” warned the tutor from the Young Pioneers.

  Elder brother Russia’s finer

  Than his little brother China;

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  Junior bows each time they meet

  Can I have something nice to eat?

  sang the little girl as she skipped rope.

  “Mind what you say. Are you tired of living? Hasn’t anyone told you that the Russians are revisionists now?” An old woman rushed over, clouted the child around the head and dragged her home by the ear.

  “If the truth be told, every day takes us closer to the grave.” In his final class before he retired, the history teacher drew a picture of two people on the blackboard, one farther from the grave – that was us – and one nearer – that was him. The last thing he said to us was, “If you don’t believe me, just think about it when you get up in the morning.”

  I was so scared I couldn’t sleep. I boxed my quilt around me like a coffin and imagined going out into the street to beg for food. The people at the end of the alley would sit in their doorway at lunchtime, and their food always smelled more enticing than mine.

  “What a little sweetie pie,” gushed the woman with the bloodred lipstick on her mouth. She was trying to suck up to my father so that she could ride in his limo and dance with him.

  “Put on your school badge!” snapped the duty monitor.

  “Eat up all your gristle!” ordered the form mistress.

  “Washyourhands washyourhands washyourhands!” yelled

  Mommy the moment she set foot in the house.

  “Children shouldn’t listen when grown-ups are talking.”

  Auntie always dragged me away from adult conversations.

  “Going to be a change in the weather,” said the old pedicab driver at the end of the alley, looking up at the sun and pummeling his legs. Every morning he would sit by the standpipe and scrape the scum off his tongue.

  “There’s sanitary pads at the store today!” Grown-ups and children rushed off to join the queue.

  Then, just as everyone was settling in for their after-6

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  lunch nap, there came a voice loud enough to scale the highest walls and be heard in the North Wing: “Grind your knives; sharpen your scissors!”

  I couldn’t be an ant; I had this great nose that sniffed out nasty smells, and I couldn’t be a bluebottle and be swept away down the sewer. I had revolutionary aspirations and a sound physique – I was healthy in body, mind, and spirit.

  All I needed was a red kerchief
, and I was practically ready to shake hands with the leaders. “Two-thirds of the world’s foreigners are languishing in despair and need us to go and save them. . . . American imperialism manufactures stiletto heels and the twist to poison the people’s souls.” The Great Leader and Poet wrote,

  On this tiny globe

  A few flies dash themselves against the wall

  The sound is sometimes chilling

  And sometimes like sobbing.

  We lived bang in the center of the world, the place where all people longed to be.

  Mommy told Granny, “If you go to the netherworld in an old-style longevity suit and there’s a revolution going on down there, then they’ll call you a landlord’s wife and beat you up.”

  “Well then, I’ll have to be burned.” Granny had always been dead set against cremation, but now she went off the idea of burial in a longevity suit with equal determination.

  She ate a hearty breakfast of oil fritters and bean milk and died at noon with a smile on her face.

  * * *

  Was this writing a novel? Huang Haha stared blankly at

  what she had written. She hadn’t thought that she had lived long enough to be doing any such thing. But she’d had this sudden urge to write one anyway, and a mass of material had come gushing out of her mind, a ragbag of half-told stories, 7

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  half-formed ideas and half-remembered incidents. She forgot them when she was trying to write, and then they leaped out at her when she was distracted, as if determined to drag her away from her daily life in London.

  “If you keep on wearing that sweater with pictures of goats on it, you might end up turning into a goat yourself,”

  she imagined herself saying to the young man nodding off opposite her in the stuffy warmth of the Tube. For some reason the sight of his little goats made her feel sick, and she thought up a string of insults to hurl at him. She knew that they weren’t really aimed at him – so who were they for?

  Anyway, Haha had it in for everyone right now.

  Maybe it was because of the weather.

  Haha was used to the way things were in Peking. Here in London there was no difference between the seasons, no variety or distinction, no yin and yang, and the people, like their weather, were bland and colorless. She’d arrived just in time for another downpour, and – what with the rain and the people on the street – it was like walking into a B