Snow Line
by Xujun Eberlein
1
Shiao Su had searched every inch of his room, under the bed, under his roommates’ beds, under the piles of dirty laundry, in every drawer of his desk, between the pages of every textbook, but still couldn't find what he was looking for. For a moment he even doubted if it had ever existed.
The class bell was already ringing as he dragged himself toward the Economics Department Building, wincing when the forgotten cigarette burned his fingers. The bright sunshine and gentle breeze of May failed to soothe him. From the other side of the high brick wall that separated the campus and an elementary school, clear voices of children reading their textbooks surmounted the wall with the breeze:
"I—love—Beijing—Tian-an-men
Above it—the sun—is—rising . . . "
The uninformed innocent voices irritated him; that was the same text he had read in elementary school. There seemed no evidence that this was already the 1980s. In the distance, at the entrance of this largest university in southwest China, stood a lime-white, larger-than-life-size statue of Chairman Mao, one arm raised, beckoning you to enter the campus. There the statue had stood for the decade during which the university, like all others in the nation, was closed. Since the university reopened three years ago, Shiao Su had heard of similar statues quietly disappearing from some campuses further east. An eastern poet had even begun to use, ever so shyly, the word “love” without reference to a political symbol. But for some reason the west seemed always behind the east in China, just as the sun always arrives later.
Shiao Su remained in this distracted state of mind through his Economics classes until late morning, toward the end of his math class. The professor was a skinny man of average height in his early 40s, only a couple of years older than the oldest students in the class, the very first admitted after the decade-long Cultural Revolution. There had been an exam the day before and, as was conventional, the professor had just read the names of students who scored above 90 in the test. His level voice stirred up some excitement and some disappointment in the classroom. Shiao Su did not hear his name and he stared at the professor’s thick glasses, his eyes perplexed behind his own glasses.
Suddenly, the professor's voice became animated. "Now I want to read you the best answer sheet I've ever seen!" This unexpected move stilled the class of 32 men and women. This was not part of convention. Students in the front rows could see that the pages in the professor's hand were upside down and he was looking at the wrong side. He walked to the front edge of the raised dais and read with as much gusto as his thin chest would allow:
"First seeing you as in fog
Across a drifting earth, longing your graceful figure
Is this a wild wish?
I instantly utter—
Be my wife!"
He waved one arm to the audience like a flag as he yelled out "be my wife," receiving a few suppressed chuckles. A student raised his hand. The professor impatiently permitted his question.
"Be my wife?" the young man asked in a baffled tone. "That's a solution to the math test?" The whole class burst into an uproarious laughter.
The professor raised his palm for silence.
"This is poetry, understand? Poetry! The twin-brother of mathematics!" Then he sighed, "I have not seen a real poem in ages." Before the class calmed completely he again engaged himself in the passionate reading:
"The sun sets, highlighting a mountain peak
On the edge of the green shaded cliff
I throw down a bouquet
The echo says—
Be my wife!"
Another wave of laughter rolled across the classroom but the professor kept reading:
"The fond poet sleeps in a little log house
Wolves cry deep in the woods
Only the moon bends down, recognizing
Each fresh character on the grassy hill—
Be my wife!
. . ."
The women students did not join in the laughter. As in any science and engineering classes, they were a small minority. All seven lowered their heads to hide moist eyes.
Shiao Su sat motionlessly, his long back up straight, his glasses glimmering. He was totally awake now. Only now did he understand why he could not find the draft of his first poem, and why his name was not in the top score list as it had often been. As the professor kept on, Shiao Su hoped the author's name might not be revealed.
When the last words of the poem hit the floor with the sounds of brass cymbals, the laughter finally died down. In the fresh silence the bell rang. The professor collected his papers and walked out of the classroom; the women students hurriedly followed.
Behind them, a shrill male voice suddenly broke to a solo of a popular, though long-forbidden, folk song:
"If you wanna be a bride,
Don’t be another’s—"
All but one man, old and young, picked up the lyrics in one united tone:
"You just gotta be mine!"
Then, pounding their hands on desks, they shouted out as one “Be my wife” breaking out once again into uncontrolled laughter.
For several nights in a row various handwritten copies of Shiao Su's maiden poem, "Golden Bell," quietly passed from room to room in the women students' dorm. In some rooms candles burned into the small hours after the lights-off bell, as girls concentrated on copying the poem by hand:
". . . The old captain died; the ocean was his life
His ship with proudest mast— now passed on to me
I sail tomorrow, faraway
My heart hides the words—
Be my wife!Holding sleeves of dawn I float
Put your beloved orchid on the windowsill
Your cat standing on the headboard
I stoop to ask—
Be my wife!Where will the sampan drift?
Finally stranding at a river oasis
Frightened, my first kiss to you
I murmur—
Be my wife!Comes autumn, the rice turns gold
Reluctantly, geese part from the lake
Long chasing remnants of sunset clouds
My voice getting hoarse—
Be my wife!"
The poem fell into the hands of a student Party member from the countryside. Though she angrily condemned the "yellow poem," she kept reading. The girl who had shown it to her panicked and tried to grab the paper back; the Party member held it tightly. Rumor was that after that, she hand-copied the entire poem and hid it in her locked drawer, offering a revision for the other girl's copy: "How about changing 'be my wife' to 'be my comrade'?" The other girl did not dare protest.
So that was how the pointy tip of the awl emerged from the pocket. Shiao Su became a well-known lyric poet literally overnight. In the next few months his name constantly hung on the lips of female university students all over Sichuan Province. Despite the Party’s rule “no talk of love on campus” that had caused the math professor to be denounced after the fateful class, a few brave girls attempted to contact Shiao Su. They were too late: the poem had already reached its mark. In the circulation of "Golden Bell" there were many variations. Incidentally, or perhaps intentionally, most of them did not have the ending stanza:
"Says she, my response—
Strawberry, mud, olives and baby deer"
2
As flower fragrance graced the summer air of Chengdu, hand copies and mimeographs of Shiao Su's poetry made their way to other universities and the public. His newly discovered talent resurrected his old Pa's dead hope for him to become a dragon, while bothering his wife-to-be, Qian-qian, with reason.
One Sunday morning when Shiao Su and Qian-qian were enjoying their weekend together, without warning a small crowd of young women came to Shiao Su's house, or more precisely his parents' house, located in downtown of Chengdu, a half-hour bicycle’s ride from the campus. Shiao Su politely let them in, turning around only to find that Qian-qian had disappeared. The curtain between his bedroom and the small living room swayed in the wind brought in by the uninvited guests. After introducing themselves as "literary youths," the girls started pouring out questions, such as, “How did you start writing poems as a science student?” or “What’s the purpose of your writing?” He noticed some of them kept eyeing the swaying curtain and he wondered what Qian-qian was doing behind it.
Shiao Su lit a cigarette and sat quietly smoking. In the curling smoke and an invisible fog of unfamiliar perfume, he felt a slight headache caused by the questions. Once he had written a foreword to his poetry: “No matter what the topic, when I give up studying its essence, I find myself unspeakably happy and relaxed.” Another time, several men from the Chinese Literature Department had a big debate about his motivation for writing. They finally reached an agreement that writing poems “is the best way to radiate outward the strength of his life.” The fact that Shiao Su's academic scores were good, and that he was also a key member of the university’s track and field team, were excluded from his “strength.” They came to tell him their conclusion and wanted to know what he thought about it. He conveniently wrote two lines on the back of a cigarette pack as the answer: "The value of all arguments / Merely worth a glowing cigarette butt."
But the playful disdain for the rational was a trick that Shiao Su could only perform on men. In his 25 years of life he had not learnt how to deal with women, especially rational women. He had no alternative but to answer, “Ah, I wrote just for fun.”
His words touched off a wave of dissatisfied tongue-clicking, but another curious question surfaced at that moment. "Could we see her?" one pretty girl asked with a shy smile. It looked like the questions had held her for quite a while. Shiao Su was softened by her hopeful eyes but he listened to Qian-qian's heart beating behind the curtain. He shook his head and said, "She's not here. Maybe next time?"
Another girl was encouraged by this and asked for their love story. When she heard that the couple was introduced by a matchmaker friend, and that Qian-qian was a common government employee, not a college student, and only 21 years old, the girl's shining eyes dimmed a little. At this point Shiao Su knew that the peak of their enthusiasm had passed. A note of disappointment echoed silently between the host and the guests.
Not until almost an hour later did Qian-qian dare to lift the curtain. Eyeing the emptied living room, her pink cheeks pouted a little and she mumbled, "Could you stop mixing with those literary women?"
"Okay my little deer, " Shiao Su replied and placed a light kiss on her youthful lips. She dodged away from his next attempt and warned with a childish anger:
"Be careful, your mother is back!"
As a punishment to his "mixing" with other girls, Qian-qian ordered Shiao Su to accompany her to the farmers market. Carrying Qian-qian in his bike's handlebars, Shiao Su rode through the twisting alleys, where there were no traffic police, to arrive at the West Suburb Bridge farmers market. Before Shiao Su locked up the bike Qian-qian was already off bouncing along the gravel road. Her slickers kicked the small stones up and away; she was humming a children’s song. Ahead of her, wicker and bamboo baskets of green, yellow, and white vegetables arrayed with the purple, blue, pink and red flowers, all lined up on both sides of the road. Farmers, both women and men, cried out under the golden sun, "Come on here, mine's selling cheap!"
It took Shiao Su a while to move his gaze away from Qian-qian as she sunk into the crowded market. Looking around, a sign, "Modern Art Gallery," caught his eyes. He had heard that this was the first private gallery in Chengdu.
He walked into the small, empty hall. Oil and water paintings of all sizes were arranged artfully on three white walls. A young man wearing a colorfully stained canvas apron greeted him so warmly that Shiao Su was a little flustered; he was used to the salesclerks' rude yelling in the government-run stores.
Shiao Su perused the walls, occasionally making a stop. Something caught his attention in a quiet corner. He glanced at it, walked past it, and came back to it. He looked closer and lightning struck.
Under a small oil painting were a few lines of his poem written in delicate script of small characters:
Not a man walking toward me
Not a bundle of familiar sunrays
Only a land of wild flowers
Accompany me
In dusk with no wind
Begin a trek with no reason
He looked at the oil painting with surprise and pleasure. He had been enjoying echoes from his audience; but he had never expected to receive a message from a different form of art. The oil painting was titled "Balang Mountains," with a cool color bias in a purple keynote. Clusters of mysterious flowers and open grounds between wild bushes appeared misty and hazy. From the haziness rose a rich autumn mountain smell, inexplicably touching. Shiao Su let out a sigh; the genuine mood in the painting erased any pretentiousness he perceived in his poem.
The painting was signed “Dandelion.” So oil painters also use pen names? Shiao Su thought curiously. He stood in front of “Balang Mountains” for quite a while before he walked away to look at other paintings. Then he came back again.
"Peek-a-boo! I just knew you would be here." Qian-qian's giggles startled him. He shushed her and took over a full basket of produce from her hand. For a split second, a question mark flickered in Qian-qian's eyes. She went closer to the painting and looked at the artist's name.
"That's a girl's name – I swear to Chairman Mao," she commented as they walked out of the gallery together.
“Chairman Mao is dead,” Shiao Su responded with a reassuring smile, his free arm holding her smooth shoulder. He did not think more explanation was needed, as she was unlikely to have recognized his poem. In the trip home Qian-qian sat on the rear carrier kicking the wheel all the way, while Shiao Su could not stop contemplating the wild Balang Mountains and the mysterious purple mist, vaguely feeling its seductive power.
That evening Qian-qian cooked a banquet for the family, including Shiao Su's favorite dishes, "Sea Cucumbers Braised in Brown Sauce" and "Tingling Hot Tofu." The plate of "Kong-pao Chicken" was a "wine dish" for Shiao Su's father, and the "Sand-pot of Fish Head" was for his mother. Shiao Su, usually quiet and a light eater, opened up both his stomach and mouth, making everyone chuckle over the dinner table. Whatever the reason, he was in an excellent mood and did not bother to analyze it.
3
As Shiao Su's poetry grew increasingly popular, the enticement of seeing them properly printed and bound also increased. However his submissions to national and local literary magazines were like stones sinking into the sea. The few that ever returned rejection slips had brief comments such as "unhealthy sentimentalism of the petty bourgeoisie," "obscure words nobody can understand," or "mist poems do not suit Chinese readers."
His father tried to help by connecting him with an editor friend. Uncle Jin was the chief editor of Sichuan Youth, a government-run political magazine. The magazine had newly opened a poetry section. In his desperation Shiao Su set out to see Uncle Jin. "You have talent, truly, you have talent," Uncle Jin said encouragingly. "I plan to use two of your poems. But,” he paused and looked apologetically at Shiao Su, "as you know, this is the Party's magazine. You'll have to make several corrections here."
Uncle Jin went on for the particular corrections, including the replacement of the word “love” with “revolutionary affection.” Shiao Su was too well mannered to refuse and agreed to do what Uncle Jin asked. He just hoped that Dandelion, whoever she was, did not read this magazine. After he walked out he never returned.
The only choice left was to publish himself. This was an unheard-of concept to Chinese in the early ’80s; but the future dragons and tigers in Shiao Su's economics class were not afraid to set precedents with unknown concepts. They formed a well-conceived plan including applying for the imprimatur, designing the book cover, printing the book, and marketing it. All these steps involved backdoors; but who in this class did not have a few connections?
Shiao Su's assignment was to get the book of his poetry, Black Snow, printed in a street-run printing shop. He was told he must meet the contact there in after-hours and avoid the shop manager. The contact's name was Yue Zhu.
When Shiao Su arrived at the shabby printing shop it was dusk. In the air mixed with mold and the smell of oil ink, under bright fluorescent lights he saw the side of a tall girl standing alone and working on a type board. Her off-white cotton shirt and matching skirt were as simple as elegance. A green silk ribbon loosely flowing with her waterfall shoulder-length hair, made him wonder how the ribbon could be so loose and still stay, as though it were a strand of her hair.
The green ribbon danced away; their eyes met. He was unprepared to see a pair of calmly intelligent eyes. She nodded to him with a serene smile as if he was a long-time acquaintance. "Hi. I'll be finishing in a moment," she said softly while her hands kept up swift movements.
Shiao Su walked closer and saw she was picking the small lead characters from the type case and placing them into a stereotype board. In front of her, the layout of a newspaper page was nearly finished. With effort he recognized the reversed characters that formed the headlines: Uphold the Party's leadership! Uphold the socialist road! Uphold proletarian dictatorship! Uphold Marxism, Leninism, and Mao Zedong Thought! The same proclamation for the “four upholds” in all newspapers every day.
“Does this work bore you?” The question slipping out of his lips made him gasp. He did not even know her!
Yue Zhu did not stop her deft hands, nor lift up her eyes. He could only hear her calm voice: “I don’t think when I am working.”
Shiao Su shut up and walked away a few steps to look around. There were no windows in the rather large, storage-room like workshop. On the facing white wall that was free from equipment and supply boxes was a large manual timesheet with dates, names and red checks and crosses. Beside it was a framed space titled “Study Gains,” the words that were so familiar and so remote at the same time. In the framed space, notebook-size pages lined up tidily like soldiers in parade, except one that was not hung well and slightly tilted. Without another look, he knew exactly what was written on the pages: the workers' reiteration of what they had gained after studying Chairman Mao’s works. And every page had more or less the same words, the words that everyone wrote but no one read. The only tiny variation within this tidy space was that lone tilted page.
Shiao Su suddenly missed the vast track fields and the modern library building of his campus. He looked at Yue Zhu again and could not put together her elegant figure and calm demeanor with this workshop where no daylight could come in. He felt gratitude when Yue Zhu led him out.
Shiao Su followed Yue Zhu to the end of the hallway along the shop's wall outside. She opened a door and let him in.
He instantly saw this was actually a corner of the workshop they had just walked out of, with cardboard walls separating this small "room" from the rest of the shop. A room big enough to handle a few pieces of simple furniture: a single bed with a bamboo bookshelf as its end, a small square rosewood tea table, and a bench. There was even a small window on one side of the real wall; it looked as though it had been chiseled out by hand as an afterthought. A long, quaint, wooden Zheng sat horizontally in front of the window; above it hung a large basin of wild ferns. A mountain soil smell spread out of the ferns.
"You live here?" Shiao Su asked with genuine surprise. He wondered how many more surprises Yue Zhu was going to give him tonight.
"Ah - my father's apartment is as small as this one. Besides, not too bad to have my own place." Yue Zhu smiled.
"Your father . . ." Shiao Su stopped in the middle of the question as his sight was caught by a woodcut print on one wall. A little girl, five or six years old, kneeled in a meadow blowing a dandelion. He could not believe his eyes.
" . . .is Lord Yue!" he cried out. Fragments of tales about the legendary artist and his family flashed through his memory. Lord Yue won a golden medal for his woodcut "Dandelion" in a world art competition in the ’60s; Red Guards raided his big house and seized the medal during the Cultural Revolution; after many public denunciations Lord Yue and his wife turned on the gas stove during a dark winter night; the teenage daughter rescued the father but lost her mother forever . . .
Yue Zhu ignored his exclamation. "Don't you want to talk about your poetry book?" She asked.
"Yes, but wait, why don't you apply for the College of Fine Arts?” Shiao Su could not stop his tongue. That's the only way for her to get out this printing shop, he thought.
Yue Zhu smiled placidly. "I did and I was admitted. But my father does not want me to be an artist."
Shiao Su's next question hung up in the middle of the air. He was quiet for a few seconds.
“I’m really sorry," he murmured at last.
Yue Zhu laughed softly. “Why, this is nothing. Not too bad to be a worker and to live on my own wages.” She paused, and then added: "It wasn't easy to get this job, you know."
Shiao Su was again silenced. Countless young people their age had come back from the countryside at the end of the Cultural Revolution, and failed to pass the entrance exams for college. They were now a huge unemployment force that had been classified by the Government as waiting-for-employment youths. Yue Zhu and he should feel lucky…but was she really lucky?
The remaining glow of the setting sun spilled onto the windowsill and the little square table. Yue Zhu infused a purple-sand pot of jasmine tea, and sat down on the edge of the bed. The two sat by the table sipping tea and talked about the details of the printing process of Black Snow. In the fragrant air of tea, ferns and sunrays, Shiao Su's soul slowly returned to tranquility.
"Your room is like a fairy tale," he commented before leaving. "Where did you buy that? Some kind of fern? I've never seen it in the flower markets."
"I dug it from the mountains."
"Which mountains? Balang?"
Yue Zhu apparently did not expect this. She glanced at him and ruminated.
He hesitated, but could not help asking: "Did you go there alone?"
"It’s a place of wild soil and wild water. A place for going alone."
"I know it's not a tourist place. But could you please be our guide? My class is organizing an autumn outing and I want to go there." Then he added more firmly, "We are going there."
She did not answer immediately. He followed her pondering eyes to the quaint instrument, long and narrow, tapered from one carved end to the other. Threads of long metal-wound silk strings covered its top. Behind the instrument was a music stand with a closed book titled Classic Zheng Music. He wondered if his favorite piece, “Gao Shan Liu Shui”– high mountains and running waters, was in it.
He loved Zheng music and often attended public performances, but he had never seen a real Zheng so close before. The beauty of the ancient instrument grabbed him. He felt a temptation to pluck a string with his own finger and hear the lingering sound clouting the hollow wood, but he controlled himself.
"Is it too late to go there?" he asked.
"…No. I'll see if I can get permission for a couple of days off."
It took him a while to make sense of the notion that she needed permission.
4
Although it was already mid-autumn, the Balang Mountains were still astonishingly beautiful. The group of twenty-some adventure lovers stayed overnight in the Wolong panda preservation zone, and climbed on a truck to go up into the uninhabited mountains the next morning. No tourist buses went this way; but they managed to find a truck driver who did not mind using his state-owned company’s vehicle to make some money on the side.
The mountain road was narrow and bumpy. The passengers standing and swaying on the open truck had to hold on to the sides tightly. But soon the girls’ nervous facial expressions turned to amazement. Now and then milky fogs drifted off the steep cliff on the roadside, slowly diffusing above them. On the hills light-green woods layered with dark-green woods. Time to time unexpectedly appeared a burning-red wild cherry. Most of the wild flowers had withered between clumps of bushes, adding a bit of solemnity to the autumn atmosphere; but yellow Pony Foots, red Honey Flowers, and purple Bear Beads had just started blooming. In a stop requested by the girls who wanted to take pictures, the driver said they were a few days too late to see the peak, when the blossoms on the hills could stop a jaded driver who had run this road for a quarter-century.
The group got off the truck halfway to one of the peaks. As soon as their hiking started, Shiao Su played the pleasant cavalier for his female classmates. He carried one's bag and another's wild bouquet. He cut a tree branch for a girl to use as a cane, and he brought up the rear to make sure no one strayed. Qian-qian did not come. "Too many people," she had mumbled.
Shiao Su subconsciously looked for the scene in Dandelion's painting, but he could not decide if he had found it. They were alike and not alike. Despite his indecisive observations, he experienced an unfamiliar sense of peacefulness. This sense diluted his regrets that Qian-qian had not wanted to come. Still, he had hoped to rediscover that strong feeling that had so startled him when he first saw Dandelion's painting. Why did it not come? Was this the distinction between reality and arts? He did not know.
He looked around for Yue Zhu, but she had gone too far ahead.
He had heard that Yue Zhu got along with the women students well last night; she'd even drawn a sketch for each of the girls. "Looked like the real me!" a woman classmate had told Shiao Su early in the morning when they were looking for the missing Yue Zhu. She appeared just before the truck started; morning dew on her hair and grass tips on her skirt. In her hand was a sketchbook. After they got off the truck, she quickly walked ahead of everyone, her green ribbon hidden, then showing, hidden, then showing between trees. Several times the desire to catch up with her caught Shiao Su, but he controlled the impulse, aware of the classmates around him.
He lost his chance again when the group stopped at the viewpoint "sea of clouds," as Yue Zhu named it. This was a mountain mouth where the waves of clouds rolled under everyone's feet. Girls screamed and boys whistled with happy astonishment, while Yue Zhu patiently waited for them. "Water is hardly water after seeing the oceans / Clouds are no longer clouds apart from Wu Mountains," the ancient poem flared in Shiao Su's mind. How many mountains had she trudged alone? Had she also been in the mysterious Wu Mountains? He hesitated, wanting to go talk to her. Before he could decide she had turned to continue leading the way up, leaving him behind again.
They climbed till they reached a small woods near the peak where, the girls exhausted, the group stopped for a long lunch break. Shiao Su noticed that Yue Zhu had disappeared again. He sat under a pine tree and thought for a while. He looked around to see if anyone was watching. Then he stood up and went to search in the woods.
He strolled along a path winding upward in fog. The fog was getting thicker. In a short time the fog wrapped him tightly, pushing an icy coldness into his skin and bones. He began to feel impatient. Where did Yue Zhu go? He trotted for a while, making loud whistles, but could hear nothing other than the wind's garrulousness. Not even the birds were making noise. He walked, then trotted again as the fog began to thin. The fog was gradually disappearing. Suddenly, before he was aware, his whole body was showered in vast dazzling sunshine.
He had reached the top, the highest point in the Balang Mountains, almost to the snow line. What emerged in front of his eyes was an incredible picture. On one side of the mountain dark-gray fogs thickly wrapped secluded forests; on the other side bright sunlight shined on the green pines. The sunny side of the mountain presented layers and layers of colors, their contours distinct and powerful. In the remote yet clear distance, the Four Girls Mountains, perennially covered with snow, stood tall and erect, the whiteness blinding. He was transfixed. For the first time in the hiking, an unnamed emotion arose.
He was unaware of how long he had been standing when he heard a faint sound from afar. He pricked up his ears trying to capture the sound, only to find a vast quietness. He walked in the direction the sound had come from and searched. Gradually the sound became more audible. It was a person's voice. He ran forward. Then he stopped.
Not too far from him, Yue Zhu stood on a black rock, letting herself go and reading aloud along the wind. There was a wildness in her hoarse voice:
"…Go collide savage wind
Taste freedom’s conception
Go shower brilliant sunlight
Experience the ungrudging forest
Go dive like fearless water
Or circle around in the abyss
Go to the funeral for withered vines
Sing for the moss and pray for lone cliff
Go scream in total strangeness
Complete all your impulses
Go feel yourself eternal
Renew your soul with bare passion…"
Mountain winds blew the words far away; indistinct echoes fell among the hills. He had not written these words as beautifully as he heard them now. When silence returned to the mountains, Shiao Su found himself frozen, his chest congested. Except the girl who wore a green ribbon flowing with her waterfall black hair, nothing seemed real. Another blast of wind blew over and awoke him. He quickly turned and ran away as fast as he could.
That evening they came down the mountains too late and had to stay in a small hotel on the road. The exhausted group got into their beds with no time to mind the hotel's unclean and crude condition. Shiao Su lay under the cold, hard quilt and listened to the strange sound of the night outside for a long, long time.
5
During the next few weeks Shiao Su visited the art gallery a few more times. If there was any change in the gallery, it was almost imperceptible. Yet he went there again and again, unaware what he was looking for.
He told his parents and Qian-qian that he was too busy studying and changed his practice of returning home from every week to every other week. His grades in every subject went down. He appeared in the track fields less and less frequently and smoked more and more cigarettes.
He did not know what he was waiting for. It was not a call because there was only one phone in the entire dormitory building, which was in the janitor's room downstairs. He was not waiting for a letter either; he got more letters than others but he knew without looking that none were that important. Still, he waited.
On a Saturday evening when Shiao Su had not gone home for the second week in a row, Qian-qian rode her bike to campus to look for him. She asked for directions several times to find his dorm, only to see most windows in the building were dark. It was a clear evening with a sky full of stars, and a Saturday movie was playing in the big field outside the men's dorms. Qian-qian almost wept: how could she find Shiao Su in the dark crowds?
She walked up to room 201 in desperation, and was surprised to see the door was ajar. A ray of dim light leaked out the crack. All the happiness of life returned to her heart and she quickly knocked on the door. When she did not hear an answer, she gave a little push to the door. Under a table lamp, she saw Shiao Su was alone, asleep on his arms, a book thicker than a brick opened in front of him. Beside the book, cigarette stubs filled an ashtray. She walked to him tip-toe and gently shook his shoulder.
Shiao Su opened his sleepy eyes and was confused for a few seconds.
"How…how come you are here?"
"I want you to come home with me."
He did not know what to say so he said he needed to go to the bathroom. When he went, Qian-qian sat down and waited. To pass the time she read the open page, page 3484, of the big book in front of her:
Entry: “Gao Shan Liu Shui”
Source: Liezi, “Tang Wen”
Period: Han DynastyBoya excelled at playing Zheng, Ziqi personified listening. Boya's music craving for mountains, Ziqi exclaimed, “towering high cliffs.” Boya's music admiring rivers, Ziqi proclaimed, “gracious running waters.” Ziqi died, Boya smashed the Zheng and never played again.
The text was in archaic Chinese. Qian-qian did not recognize several words and she could not understand the context. This was not like a textbook of any of Shiao Su's subjects. In fact she had never seen Shiao Su bring this book home before.
Shiao Su came back and saw Qian-qian's questioning expression. He closed the big book and said to her, "Let's go home."
Sunday they went to the West Suburb Bridge farmers' market together. While Qian-qian bargained with the farmers, Shiao Su walked to the art gallery. He hesitated at the door but eventually stepped in.
And he saw it at once. The painting “Balang Mountains” was gone. In its place was a new black-and-white woodcut print titled "No Subject" by Dandelion. On the picture were barren hills populated by only two young willow trees, their long thin branches whipping in wind. The appearance of the picture was so simple it was more like a photo. Under the picture frame was a poem by Ai Qing, an old-generation poet from before the Cultural Revolution:
One tree, another
Stand in separation
Wind and air
Telling their distance
Below the soil
Their roots extend
In invisible depth
They entangle together
It finally came. The message he had been waiting for.
After weeks of internal storms, this message was more a verification than a shock. For the first time he clearly saw that an other-worldly life could become reality. A moist green meadow studded with tiny yellow flowers. A flock of sheep grazing lazily on the meadow. A little log house in the woods. A Zheng and a steaming teapot in the house. A long trudge no longer lonely. An understanding without words…
He did not hear the footsteps but a familiar, intimate scent pulled him back to the present world. He half-turned and saw Qian-qian's innocent eyes. For a second he thought he detected a thread of fear in her dark brown pupils, pupils that reminded him of a little deer who sensed a hidden prayer.
"What do you see?" Shiao Su asked softly.
"Pictures and a poem." Qian-qian pointed to the wall with her free hand.
"What else do you see?"
"Just artworks. Aren't they? Just artworks. Nothing real,” She said a little too quickly.
Shiao Su did not say anything more. He took the full hand-basket from her without putting an arm around her shoulder. They followed one another out of the gallery in silence. Outside the gallery, under the autumn sun, farmers hawking their wares not too far away were clearly discernible.
That evening Qian-qian cried very hard over a trivial issue. She shed tears like rain and there was only one promise that could console her. When she finally fell asleep with tears still glistening in the corners of her eyes, Shiao Su wrote a new poem. At the end of it were the following lines:
Only now I know
I can't be enlarged
Nor yet shrunk.
-- Is it too late?
6
In late fall, the changing political winds carried an overdue tenseness to the distant Sichuan basin. China’s new leadership had demolished the “Democracy Wall” in Beijing and arrested activists who posted opinions and poetry on that wall. The same activists had earlier risked their lives pushing the current leadership into power. Little was novel in this game; in the many thousands of years of China’s history, the emperor in every dynasty had killed the donkey the moment it left the millstone.
If Shiao Su was disappointed at the news that his friends failed to obtain an imprimatur for printing his work, he did not show it. He mounted his bike and rode off campus without delay. Yue Zhu needed to be informed as soon as possible; all the typesetting and printing activities must be stopped. If the authority found out about an unapproved printing she, and everyone involved, could be arrested.
It was another dusk and the setting sun was little by little slanting into rosy clouds. There was a filament of coldness in the autumn air. Shiao Su's bike crunched the fallen leaves across half of the city. At the printing shop he stood his bike against the wall, not taking the time to lock it, and hurriedly walked on to the hallway that led to Yue Zhu's room.
The sound of a familiar piece of Zheng music slowed down his steps. His heart pictured Yue Zhu's lean fingers stroking the long strings. Wood hammering metal, breakers dashing on rocks, waters falling off the cliff, echoes fading in the valley… For how many thousands of years had this soul-searching “Gao Shan Liu Shui” been played and listened to? Shiao Su leaned his forehead against the closed door and shut his eyes. The vibration of the Zheng strings passed through the door to his body. He lost the courage to knock on the door.
Peng! A sudden sound, the sound of a taut metal string snapping, sprung Shiao Shu's forehead off the door. He heard her wince inside. He stepped back in panic. This could not be happening! This should only be in folklore! That an instrument's string would break if someone who truly understood the music were eavesdropping…
The door opened. Yue Zhu smiled at him; he could see the pleasure brought by his unexpected visit. He quickly adjusted himself and said "hi" to her. He went in with her and sat down by her square tea table. When she was pouring tea for him he saw the fresh red line across the back of her left hand. His throat tightened.
He sipped tea and searched for words. He could not find any.
"I wrote one for you," he finally said. A thin layer of scarlet flushed over her cheeks then quickly faded. "Could I please read it to you?"
"Yes."
He started to read the poem; his voice flat and dry.
"Snow Line
Far, far away
Dandelion
Absorb the sun's melodyThis shore, the other one
Two light spots
One became the moon
One became the sunLet’s play blocks
You and me
Use these odds and ends
Form an entirely new continent
We will smile
Then push them downA great skeleton
Near the snow line
SilentMy sketch was lost
The lines of flowing water
Graceful green silk
All gone, to the woods of another mountainThe earth forever quiet
Only the uninhabited South Pole
Aurora and meteors
Use the same language to loveI walk to the end of the valley
Winds blow to the universe
Can life return to folktale?Farewell, birch forest… "
Yue Zhu's head lowered in the middle of his reading. Her two hands held the teacup with no movement. When he finished, he did not dare to look at her. He stared at his own teacup, weak steam still wafting up.
"This is the last poem I'll ever write," he said after a while, still not looking at her. The light tone denied the weight of his decision. He did not expect a reply. He thought he could melt in this endless silence, right here, in this cozy little room, and that could actually make him very happy. Then he heard an almost inaudible laughter from Yue Zhu.
He had never known laughter could rend his heart harder than tears. He reached for her hand on the table, his palm covering its fresh bruise. For the first time since he arrived, he looked into her eyes. The eyes were an autumn lake with thousands of ripples. The bare pain in his gaze burned down the dam of the lake; it could no longer hold the water…
* * *
Twenty years later, an authoritative expert on literary history, who had entered a different university the same year as Shiao Su, published a three-volume monograph on western China's poetry. He wrote:
"In the early 1980s, the first and by far most outstanding lyric poet in western China was Shiao Su. On many campuses I heard students reciting his poems. To this day it is still a mystery why he suddenly gave up writing. With his talent, he could have become one of the greatest poets in contemporary China.
"I visited Shiao Su and his wife several years after he put down his pen for good. He had become a top manager of a state enterprise. But he was not happy."
The monograph included the entire poem of "Golden Bell," with no trace of "Snow Line." It did not mention anything about Yue Zhu. The author of the monograph may or may not know Yue Zhu, but his book wasn't about arts, let alone religious arts. Yue Zhu, in fact, later became a Buddhist artist after she met a hundred-year-old priest in a Buddhist temple on E'mei Mountain. The priest said to her, "Nothingness is possession, possession is nothingness." She became the priest's "closing-gate disciple" - his last student. After the priest's parinirvana, some had seen Yue Zhu traveling alone between Buddhist mountains. If you visit Buddhist temples in Sichuan's mountains today, chances are you will come across her wall-size paintings.