Ordinary People 07

Chinese Stories in English

Ordinary People 07
Stories printed in 百姓人家(2023), 秦俑/赵建宁选编
Page citation and link to online Chinese text noted after each story.

1. Big Rice 3. Jasmine 4. Emergency Room Stories
2. Securing a Life 5. Infants

1. Big Rice (大米)
Chen Yuchen (陈雨辰)

Little Rice Bai held the bouquet in both her hands and raised it high. "Big Rice Bai,” she shouted, “did you see me get married?" I did see it. Little Rice and I were together in our mother's belly for ten months. If I hadn't poked my head out a few seconds earlier than her, I’d be Little Rice.
I’d started getting ready for her wedding three days ahead of time. I went to West Thirteenth Street and bought a bright red gown, a loose-fitting one with no waist or hips. It was embroidered with large flower petals in the style of the Western Regions, which is my usual style. It was made of silk. That’s the thing Little Rice and I have most in common: We like slick things.
I set out from the old condo on the west side wearing the gown. That condo bears the weight of all the memories of the first twenty-four years of our lives. We’d walked out of the building’s shiny stainless steel door hand in hand on the first day of elementary school. We turned around and waved to our mother, who was scrutinizing us through the upstairs window.
On the first day of college, we dragged our suitcases out of the building’s stainless-steel door, which by then had long been stained and repainted green. I headed off to the northwest, and Little Rice headed to the southeast.
Maybe fate had separated us, just like oranges from north and south of the Huai River are different. Maybe we started our own unique life paths the afternoon we walked out of the building door at age eighteen. Before then we’d carried the same small, patterned schoolbags, used the same large-size fountain pens and worn the same school uniforms. Starting from that day on, though, Little Rice and I at last blossomed into two vastly different flowers.
At her wedding today, I saw her in-laws sitting all in a row and wondered how she’d face those formerly unfamiliar faces on her own from now on. I was chewing a mouthful of eight-treasure rice when she called my name. It was sweet and sticky, sweet enough to make me ignore the greenish red silk that I’ve always detested.
I waved my arms and signaled to her on the stage: Here I am. Maybe she was too excited and didn't see me. Anyway, she turned around and threw the bouquet over her shoulder hard. It was still a few meters away from me when someone’s hand intercepted it. I just kept smiling at Little Rice on the stage, not paying too much attention to anyone else. I even stood up to let her get a good look at my embroidered gown. She was busy responding to some witticism from the emcee and still didn't see me.
So I had to sit down.
The woman sitting next to me was someone I’d never seen before. She had longish, disheveled hair and spoke with a pure Eastern Shandong accent. She started talking about a very spiritual woman in the village of West Three Mile Station in Shaanxi Province who butted heads with a certain magical pixie. She kept stuffing food into her mouth while she blabbed on and on, so her accent sounded more like an independent localized dialect than simply an accent. But I more or less understood what she was saying. The spiritual woman had told Little Rice's mother-in-law to take two red strings and two strands of hair and wind them around and around until they were ninety-nine meters long. Then Little Rice could come through the door of their house.
I took a few more bites of the eight-treasure rice. When I looked at it closely, I found that the dish didn’t contain "eight treasures" at all. What was visible to the naked eye was greenish red silk and red dates. The woman next to me said, "Little Rice has a weak horoscope. Someone close to her better patch it up for her."
You’ll get sick of eight-treasure rice if you eat too much. It’s made from glutinous rice, after all, so sweet that you can keep eating without even thinking about it. People like to eat it at weddings.
I didn't understand what the woman said next. I wasn’t interested. I’d gone to buy that embroidered gown and get a manicure in less time than that woman talked.
Little Rice loves to glam up more than I do. She frequently paints her nails all kinds of colors. Sometimes she insisted on painting mine, too, but I’m not used to typing with painted nails, so I wouldn’t let her. I still remember the last time she wanted to paint my nails. It was light reddish-brown polish, so I went as fast as I could from West Thirteenth Street to the nail salon on East Eighth Street where we used to go when we were seventeen years old. The salon operator has grown from an immature slip of a girl to the mother of two children.
I bought a beautiful pair of embroidered shoes, too. The black soles symbolize the earth, and the red trumpet vines are my soul. I dressed up in the bright red gown, the bright red embroidered shoes and reddish-brown nail polish to attend my sister's wedding.
As is the custom at wedding receptions, Little Rice and the groom went from table to table to toast the guests. I looked at her wide-eyed when it was our turn, but she seemed like she’d never seen me. She drank the drink she had in her hand and smiled warmly at the people at the table, people we didn’t really know, at which point I stood up and took her hand.
"Mom,” she shouted, “has my sister come back?"
Our mother got up from a table nearby and hurried over. That’s when I realized that the only people seated at the main table were Little Rice's in-laws.
Little Rice's mother-in-law wore a bright red shawl and had a crafty look in her eyes.
Mom came over.
I held Little Rice's hand, just like when we were little, natural and free with the open sea as our playground. Mom stood beside us, her eyes wishing us well. Her back was no longer straight, and her wrinkles had grown longer. She opened her arms and hugged me right there, and her tears fell on my beautiful gown. My eyes began to wander, and Little Rice's features became hazy. She seemed to be moving away from me, just like when we parted at the airport when we were eighteen years old, when she walked away until I could no longer see her.
But Little Rice, I really did see your wedding.

Chinese text at 《百姓人家》p. 212. Also available here.
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2. Securing a Life (安生)
Liu Bowen (刘博文)

Cumin, minced garlic and wild chili peppers.
Oyster sauce, sugar and chopped green onions.
He was boiling up a batch of his secret sauce. He distributed charcoal briquettes evenly into the stove, then picked up a cattail leaf fan and waved it vigorously over the fire exactly three times, no more, no less. Flames leaped up and his sweat sizzled when it dripped onto the stove.
Smoke got in his eyes.
The smoke irritated River so much that he used the towel in his hand to fan it away. Eventually he grasped the towel, stained into a yellowish white with sweat and soot, and rolled it into a ball in his palms. He turned around and made an effort to get bamboo skewers while he demanded that his apprentice, Reed Pipe, tell him, "Where’d you buy this charcoal?"
"You told me go to the spill at the tail end of Hu Ancestral Hall Lane on the other side of the Lushi River. Where else would I go?" Reed Pipe handed him some bamboo skewers. They were each busy with their own work and weren’t looking at one another.
"Bull. Does good charcoal burn like this? You think I'm blind?”
River held the bamboo skewers in his hand and threaded pieces of food onto them one by one. The voices of people on the street had all merged into one solid hum. The clock on the wall struck six, the evening rush hour when people were getting off work.
The moon was hidden behind clouds on the horizon, but its faint silhouette could be seen from time to time. It was as big as a bowlful of milky fish soup, but it apparently wasn’t getting enough light from its father-in-law, the sun.
"I'd say a change in the weather’s coming tonight."
"Well, if that’s so, we might as well not open the stall. Just go home for a lie-down and everything’ll be OK, right?”
"Works for me!" Reed Pipe stuck out his tongue and hurried into the inner room to get his parka. He’d expected to be slapped around and getting the raincoat was just an excuse to get out of the way, even though his master's reach was bigger than the inner room.
"I'm not a child anymore, but all day long he’s been saying I’m a naughty brat!" But on second thought he didn't voice his complaint. It rolled past his Adam's apple and into his stomach, leaving a sullen expression on his face. “We’re all human beings, and we all need to keep our dignity.”
He stayed mum while he spread open the awning struts positioned outside the door and put up the nylon tarp, forming a simple barbecue stand. Before long a wave of people surged up in front of the tarp, keeping him busy.
He stole a glance or two at the stove while he put food on more skewers. The smoke had gradually cleared away and beads of sweat oozed from his master's forehead. He’d been an apprentice for three years, and this wasn’t what his master had promised him when he first came to Old Town.
What two years as an apprentice? That was just a load of crap.
Time doesn’t heal all wounds, and over the years a rift arose between master and apprentice. Three years was three years, and like the ashes left from burning charcoal in the stove, the empty promises and all the rest were blown away by the wind. He really shouldn't have listened to his family's advice to come here to work and learn skills. These days you have to find a job on your own to have a good life.
A bamboo skewer jabbed him in his right index finger, perhaps because he was lost in thought and not paying attention. Fortunately, the stall was busy and the master didn’t notice. Otherwise, he would’ve been chewed out again.
Like the man always said, "The most important thing about barbecue is freshness. Uncle Zhang collects the fish and shrimp baskets from the river early in the morning, and Grandma Li wades through the depths and shallows in the pond to dredge up lotus roots…. And the charcoal. Don’t think it’s the ingredients alone. Charcoal blocks made from dry wood don’t burn as quickly as those made from industrial charcoal, and the taste they produce has the original fragrance of the wood to complement the freshness of the barbecue. Regular customers can taste it. It’s best when it’s roasted crisp and slightly burnt. It's all in the know-how.”
A typical junior monk chanting sutras – the words were on his lips but not in his heart. He didn't say a word about the secret sauce. Was the master afraid he’d starve to death if he taught the apprentice how to make it?
Sheesh! Stop playing games with me!
Reed Pipe's thinking was chaotic but his work proceeded in orderly fashion. The day’s hard work began by placing pre-boiled Hubei Begonia tea on each folding table. Reed Pipe’s job was writing a list of side dishes. River set to grilling, the last step of which was sprinkling on chopped green onions to bring out the flavor.
And so the days passed like candies that children scatter in a drawer to save for later, until they melt after their best-by date expires. When winter comes, they re-solidify in their wrappers, waiting to see the light of day again sometime.
The older people get, the more they tend to look at things from opposite sides. The resentment that comes from this is called temperament.
As for the barbecue, River had obviously noticed that his apprentice had been getting less attentive lately. He often looked for a chance to slip away, as if he was going to talk things over with someone. Could it be that he also knew about the renovations to Old Town?
Just now, River’d gotten into a big argument by the bridge with Six Lives, the fellow in charge of planning at the City Demolition office. They’d argued about land confiscation: "Can't we leave a place for the old generation to live in peace? We’ve long passed the age when we can start over, and we can’t stand worrying about our future.”
When River returned to his stall, Reed Pipe was once again nowhere to be seen. That further confirmed River's judgment.
To his surprise, Reed Pipe came back with Six Lives the next day. River threw his hands in the air and said, "I’m not leaving no matter what you say. I don't believe you’ll dare force the issue.”
He was even more surprised when the two men ignored him and walked on by. They set up a mobile stall selling Hubei Begonia tea next to the barbecue stand.
If you can't beat them, join them? – Somewhat inappropriately, River recalled that Reed Pipe and other young people always said that when they were joking around. His apprentice seemed to have read his mind and picked up the thread of the conversation that hadn't yet started. "We’re not joining you, Master. More accurately, it’s called franchising.”
"Franchising?"
"Yes.” Six Lives said, “After the renovations to Old Street, you can still carry on with your barbecue stand in peace. Reed Pipe will go out on his own with the title of franchisee. Hubei Begonia tea is convenient and suitable for young and old at night markets, and Reed Pipe will turn it into a brand. He’ll launch it as a companion to your barbecue and will never steal your business. What do you think?"
"You want to know what I think of it?" River curled his lips, "Not much! Silly young man, you think I'm really afraid that you’ll go out and steal my business? People always say that teaching apprentices will end up starving the master, but I don't believe it! I know why they’re going through with the planned demolitions. They just want to shuffle the storefronts around to give you youngsters more room for when you take over, so you can live up to the trust your mothers put in you."
"Really?"
"Isn’t that what’s being cooked up? As a master, I’ve only known how to do one thing for most of my life, and that’s barbecuing. Up to now, I’ve just wanted to harden your temperament in the fire, so that you’ll be able to do whatever you want in the future. I was helping you out."
Reed Pipe was shaken by that.
"Take some time to go home and see your mother. She’s an old widow, and she’ll only be at peace when you get home." River tapped Reed Pipe's forehead as he spoke. This had turned into something he was giving his apprentice, and it wasn’t just bamboo skewers. Six Lives could see it clearly -- a Band-Aid, shining brightly as a crescent moon in the sky.

Chinese text at 《百姓人家》p. 215. Also available here.
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3. Jasmine (茉莉)
Tang Guagua (唐呱呱)

I got a job as a financial auditor at JD.com not long after I graduated. The work focuses on nitpicking what other people do, so it’s easy to step on a landmine between people if you tread the least bit carelessly. Lots of stress, so on those occasions when I get off work early, I often go to a massage parlor near my condo to relieve the tension.
The first time I went, I had to choose a masseuse. A face as pure and savory as jasmine impressed me. She had a scar caused by a blunt object close to the corner of her left eye, like an indigo spot on white porcelain. In an instant, I was enveloped by gentle sympathy for her, or perhaps it was a feeling of superiority over an inferior.
I went there a second time over a month later. I chose her again.
"I match your disposition."
She actually recognized me even though I’d only been there once. Even more amazing, she remembered everything I’d worn -- my clothes and accessories, the brand of my perfume -- and the small talk we’d engaged in the first time I visited. That’s why, from then on, the process of getting a massage was like meeting an old friend. We got to know each other's soft spots a little better with each rubdown.
I decided to help this single mother and her six-year-old daughter without telling anyone. Coincidently a friend who wore a straw hat and carried a hoe every day happened to open a new fruit import and export company. With its promising young boss and a favorable business climate, the company was moving steadily on the fast track. It lacked only a considerate female assistant, female secretary, female manager and female housekeeper.
This friend had only been to the massage parlor twice, but she was the only masseuse he’d have. To be honest, with the salary this new boss was offering, I’d have been up to a little job-hopping myself.
"Thank you, but I'm doing fine at the massage parlor." That’s what she said, as related by my friend. I was as shocked as he was.
"If I’m feeling good of a day, I’ll come in and make some money. If I’m not feeling so hot, I don’t come in. It makes me feel like my life is my own.”
I continued going to that massage parlor and continued picking her as my masseuse. Girlie, they called her, was the kind of woman who seems bland when you first meet her, like boiled water that’s cooled off. The more you understand her, though, the more substance you find to chew on and the more you want to know about her. In the crowd of people you’d like to see again, she couldn’t be a more ordinary worker. She’d had jobs in various factories and helped the world make all kinds of strange things.
There was a worker in one of those factories, a man one year younger than her, who revealed a sharp canine tooth when he smiled. He often passed by the iron fence separating the male and female dorms, and he’d pass out an orange, an apple or a few lines of poetry with seeming indifference.
Once, a bunch of people had a little wine to drink. This guy only drank a small cup, but he acted like he’d drunk the most. He clung to the iron fence and slapped it hard, like he wanted to use the sound to drum up his courage. Three or four people standing there started to hoot all kinds of strange noises in the middle of the night, and that gave him the courage to shout at the women's dorm, "Are you dead? I'm calling on you to come out and see me! See me! Just say one word!"
From start to finish, he never called out her name. He took one shoe off and threw it over the fence. Then he took off his other shoe and threw it over the fence, too. That shoe hit the iron door of the women's dorm and fell to the ground with a thud.
Various rumors began to spread through the factory. In fact, they were just hot air. The rumors would naturally fade away in a few days if the parties involved didn’t react, but they rubbed her the wrong way. She bought a piece of red cardboard for a buck, folded and cut it, and finally wrote the two names together in a crooked line. They didn’t go to the assembly line the next day, and only the empty bed boards were left on the two beds. The bright red "marriage certificate" was pinned on the iron fence between the men’s and women’s dorms. It seemed to invite all the workers to a feast in a distant place.
Address: No. 32 Fragrant Grass Street, Good Life Village.
People said the man loved her very much. He often took her two small hands softly in one of his big hands and gently fanned her face with another marriage certificate she’d made. The red from the cardboard would stain her face, leaving her with scarlet cheeks for the day. The most emotional time was the day he produced a paring knife from somewhere and put that scar by the corner of her eye as a "mark of love".
After she gave birth to their daughter, the man's family spoke about her with raised eyebrows from time to time. She didn't want her daughter growing up seeing those looks and hearing them talk every day, and eventually understanding their meaning, so she took her daughter and moved out.
She said, "Once I was sick for a long time. My hands and feet were so weak I couldn't go out to work. My daughter Mimi and I lived on a small bag of wormy rice my seventy- or eighty-year-old landlord gave me. I took a handful every day and boiled it in water. We drank the milky-white soup in the morning and at noon, and ate the rice grains in the evening.
“Mimi’s a very thoughtful girl. To comfort me, even when her own stomach growled, she’d say ‘Mom, the milk you boiled is so delicious. Drinking it can cure any disease. Mommy, Mommy, look, there’s meat in it. My little stomach is so happy that it sings to me.’
“Maybe, when you’ve truly experienced what it’s like being poor, if you do start to make some money, you’re not so eager to make more."
Eventually more and more people were choosing her as their masseuse. People had to line up during peak hours. This hustle-bustle city seemed to get a little more on the upside, a little better vibe, because of her. She’d give a cup of warm jasmine tea to everyone, whether she’d seen them before or not.
The last time I saw her was around eight or nine on a weekend morning at the entrance to our apartment building. I scratched my head and looked at her in amazement. She had bags, pots and pans hanging all over her body. She looked like she was moving far away and didn’t plan to return.
"As soon as people settle down in a place,” she said, “they start buying, buying, buying. They place orders for all kinds of stuff -- furniture, appliances, friends, phone numbers – as if the more things they have, the better life will be. We slowly convince ourselves that we like the place and don't want to move, but in fact it's not that nice. We've just gotten used to not thinking too much about it. I don't like the feeling of being enamored with anything. It weakens people."
The elevator door opened abruptly, and she turned her head. A boy playing with a yo-yo walked by. "I thought it was the landlord's stupid son."
A slanting beam of light hit her face in the gloomy dark corridor. She looked like a Cinderella and seemed to get brighter every time she took a bag from her body. "It’s a hassle taking these things on the road. If you don't want them, just get rid of them for me." Eventually she was free of her burdens and her whole person lit up before my eyes. It looked like a slight breeze could send her flying off into the sky.
I did see a bunch of photos with her in them that my friend, the guy who sold fruit, burned on WeChat Moments. He was tanned charcoal black and the sun was all over his face, making him look like a plant that had found fertile soil. Turns out he'd moved his company headquarters to the mountains and started an organic farm. Any child who put a few coins in an iron bucket could go there and spend an afternoon with the sheep, and watch how seedlings take in water, and sleep at night under the stars.
Girlie was the farm's assistant, secretary, manager and housekeeper. People said they never talked about marriage. She was a free-running flower on the farm.

Chinese text at 《百姓人家》p. 219. Also available here.
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4. Emergency Room Stories (急诊室的故事)
Xing Dongyang (邢东洋)

Five nurses sat at the nurses’ station in the Emergency Department’s infusion room. Three wore dark blue uniforms and sat behind the counter, while two wore white and sat outside. They had different jobs. The ones in dark uniforms checked medical records and handled any medicines the patients brought with them to the hospital. The duties of the ones in white included medical procedures like giving injections and infusions.
The two nurses in white, the ones sitting outside the counter, were rather young. They each held a very thick book which they read when they weren’t busy. They drew lines and made marks with pens in their books from time to time. I guess they were trainees who had to pass various exams before they could be certified by the hospital.
My dad sat next to me getting an IV. I wasn't sitting right next to him -- his medical records, CT scans and various test results were all in a bag between us on the bench. He sat there fiddling with his phone, looking at stock information for a while before switching to short videos.
"I heard that the actor Li Yapeng's calligraphy work sold for five million,” he told me. “Do you think it's worth it?" He stuck out his hand to show me his phone. After a while, he showed me another short video of an old lady singing as the waves of Hong Lake rolled by behind her. He thought she sounded pretty good. These days he’s constantly sending me short videos on WeChat that he finds interesting. I never watch them.
A large window behind the nurses at the nurses' station looked into a disorderly emergency surgical treatment room. A woman rolled on the floor by the door, blubbering. I didn't know what was going on. A cleaning lady came in and spoke softly to a nurse. Her tone was mocking but I didn't hear what she said clearly.
The blubbering woman apparently wasn’t a patient. I stood up and looked over at her. Several people surrounded her, including a young man recording a video on his cell phone. A woman tried to persuade her to do something but walked away angrily after trying at length without success. The woman just lay there at the treatment room door, forcing people to walk around or step over her as they came and went.
My dad told me a story he said he’d read in a work of fiction. A woman bus driver had her bus hijacked by two bandits. They forced her to stop the bus and brutally raped her on the roadside. No one on the bus helped her, and she was filled with resentment…. I said I’d read the story and told him that later the woman drove the bus with all its passengers off a cliff, or off the coast, or something, I forgot. He said, “Yes, that's what happened. You read it, too, huh?”
I told him I had. It was a story of revenge against indifference. Then I mentioned the recent bus explosion in Shenyang. The official investigation hadn’t produced any results yet, but I have a policeman friend and I know some things. Then I remembered I’d told my dad about it the day before.
There was another loud noise from the window. An old man who needed emergency treatment was being wheeled in, accompanied by his two sons. The sons were something else, attracting almost everyone's attention, even more so than the woman who’d been rolling around on the floor and blubbering. One of the sons stood beside the bed where his father was being treated, shouting, “Dad, Dad, Dad, Dad, oh Dad.” The other son knelt at the end of the bed. I was looking at his back and could see he was choking and gulping back his tears.
The son standing by the bed and shouting banged on his head with his fist. Without warning he got all worked up and screamed, "Where's the doctor? Hurry up and save my dad!"
The doctor was right next to him. He got angry and scowled. He told the guy, "Calm down, you’re hindering me."
Many people in the infusion room stood up to look through the window into the treatment room. My dad didn't, so I sat down and described the scene to him. Dad said not many people cry that hard even when they’re carrying a coffin to a funeral.
“How old do you think the man is?” he asked. “The patient looks rather old. He’s bald and has what look like age spots on his forehead. Probably in his seventies or eighties.”
“Then his sons must be older than you, so why are they losing their cool like that?”
“I don't really know. Maybe they have a great relationship with their father.”
He laughed. “I wouldn’t go so far as to say that. Just things taking their natural course. They’re all in the hospital, and you can’t say more than that.”
I remembered something all of a sudden. “How’d grandfather really die, Dad? Did he freeze to death?”
“I guess so.”
“What kind of answer is that. Did he get lost and freeze to death outside?”
“Yes. He wasn’t thinking straight and wandered off. The family and the people where he worked looked for him together. Eventually someone from work found him, but by then there was no point taking him to the hospital.”
“Was it winter?”
“Yeah, November eleventh.”
“That's about the same as my grandma.”
“Yes, almost the same day.”
The racket in the other room hadn’t stopped, so I stood up to have another look. I walked over to the window behind the nurses' station. There were blinds on the other side of the window, and I could see through them better when I got closer. They were still working on the old man, getting various instruments in place. Medical staff circled the bed. I noticed they were wearing different colored uniforms, white, dark blue, pink, green and others. I don't know what the different colors signified.
When I returned to my seat, I discovered that one of the five nurses was gone, the one who’d been sitting between two others. I didn't know when she’d gone and left the middle chair vacant. I sat down and stared at that empty chair for a long time. It relaxed me for a while. I felt like I was having a particularly comfortable respite.

Chinese text at p. 222. Available here. Translated from (edited version) at 豆瓣
https://www.douban.com/note/825957977/?_i=0929844KU_4P1W
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5. Infants (婴)
Bao Wenyuan (包文源)
1

Tonight they need to give birth to a baby of a story so that the sun will rise tomorrow. Every cry of that baby-like story is a line of poetry. It’ll be sacrificed to the gods at the crack of dawn, as will be done again on the next day.
If the gods are appeased when they read it, they’ll vest the comic elements of the story in the country’s various tribes. If they’re not appeased, they’ll cast the soul of the story’s tragic elements into the world’s four wildernesses.
Each night they deliver a baby story for the sun’s sake. Those who try to avoid punishment will find that no matter how they reshape the baby's body, every word it speaks will be composed of comic and tragic elements. Thus they have no escape from the narrative’s curse.

The clan members named for insects are the ones responsible for composing the baby story’s poetic elements.
The insect-like compilers migrate over the veins of mint leaves. They bounce along the optical tracks of light rays refracted off dewdrops, their facial features resembling red, purple, and blue mists on the wide-spread wings of a space shuttle. Farm animals walking through the living mist merge into a spot on the wing of a poetic insect.
Liquid Worm records the routine:
In the cool autumn or hot summer, at noon and at midnight, people urinate and their urine seeps into the ground. Each drop is packaged into a nameless mass that forms layers on the chart of geologic time. Radiocarbon dating unfolds the urine stains on the rock layers like a scroll, a "Riverside Map"* as it were, a detailed description of the Cambrian, Triassic and Cretaceous periods flowing by as though on a river: detailing when bygone snowflakes melted away, when the rice of yesteryear was harvested, and the temperatures of passing wildfires.
Simple Worm records the changes in shape:
Rows of people who stood on the stage are transported to workshops, toilets, dining halls and classrooms. Textile workers on an assembly line punch individual holes in their backs, then twist papers with names written on them into rolls and stuff the papers into the holes. Like Chinese lanterns, the people’s chests burn the paper rolls into ash. The names on the papers get squeezed into faded black dots that float from the people’s ears on the wings of time to piece together the entire blackness of night. You hold on to an unburned scrap of the papers as squishy as glutenous rice, so a tiny unfilled hole will always be left in the black of the night.

A tribe of magpies living in the Land of Swallows**, subsisting in the soil of darkness, is responsible for writing the tragic elements of the baby story. They peck at each other's throats and hearts, opening fissures, and the injured ones shed tears of blood on a silk cloth, hurrying to trace out the night’s tragedy before the sun rises.
One kind of tragedy:
As the magpies tell it, the earth had no actual deserts thousands of years ago. In the ancient Country of Sand, each sandman spent his life in a search for a bird which could recognize his scent. Only after he found one did his body really start to grow: every day the bird pecked at the grains of sand making up his body, delicately striking them with the tip of its beak and carving each one into a lifelike statue. The statue’s faces, movements, and postures were people and things from the sandman’s memories, memories given form through the bird’s sculpting. His body was a castle in the sky composed of countless hollow statues the size of water droplets. The desert was like an ocean for the sandmen walking in it, and a mirage shimmering in the sunlight was their dreamlike consciousness.
Later, the tribe of oceanic sandmen dissolved one by one in a rainstorm, the kind of rain that occurs in the wilderness only once every thousand years. Thus was their nation destroyed. The wilderness became a real desert when the waters receded. No one has ever seen a real sea in the desert since then, though occasionally someone will see a mirage reflected in the sunlight, floating in the wind as a remnant of the collective subconscious of the sandmen. If you listen carefully to the sound of the waves, you can hear the sandmen talking in their sleep.
A kind of tragedy:
As the magpies tell it, the Ice Age will return to earth after a thousand years. The surface temperatures will be so extremely low that any creature's breath will condense into ice and fall to the ground. At that time, the only living beings on Earth will be a kind of bird. From birth to death, they’ll have to fly thousands of meters above the clouds, where they can bathe in the remaining sunlight to keep warm.
A tired bird needs to fall back to the ground to rest, and the temperature gets lower and lower as its altitude decreases. As it stands on hoarfrost atop a tree on a mountain summit and gasps for breath, its feet begin to freeze in the low temperature and icy frost climbs up along its toes. It needs to take off before the ice crystals spread and cover its wings. It carries its half-frozen body up above the clouds once again, where it bathes in the sunlight for warmth and the frozen parts of its lower body slowly melt.
The birds fly endlessly. The ground beneath them is covered by glaciers which freeze every bird that stops to rest and fails to take off again in time…. Once their wings freeze, they must stay on the ground forever, eternally frozen in the history of all avian species that comprise the ice field.
One night a magpie copying a tragedy meets a traveler perched under a tree. Through the travelers’ body, it sees in his chest a heart that seems made of glass. Every word he’s read burns in that glass receptacle, emitting the warmest light and illuminating an inch of the darkness around him.
His ancestors were mirror-image beasts, born with a predilection for observing the light emitted as their own bodies burned. However, their mirror-image bodies could only see external objects, not anything inside themselves. And so, the mirror-image beasts imitated one another, each one taking on the other's appearance and igniting himself. In this way each could see the light of his own burning.
The mirror-image beasts formed a city of fire when they imitated each other, illuminated each other and burned each other. Some of them burned while acting as schools, some burned while acting as hospitals, and some burned while acting as firefighters.
The mirror-image beasts, obsessed as they were with their internal light, appeared briefly in history and burned out quickly. Humans made rubbings of the burned granules on the remains they left behind, using their own bodies to reproduce the words. What was printed on one chest was reprinted on the next, passing between people by intimate contact. They translated the words printed on their bodies into schools, hospitals and fire departments, building each one anew with fireproof materials.
The descendants of the mirror-image beasts simulate the spontaneous combustion of their ancestors by studying this ancient ritual. The light flows out of the seven orifices of the traveler under the tree in waves. The magpie on the tree seems to be standing in the center of a sea. It stares at the light from the depths of the seabed -- the tragedy of all things is written out in full within it. From then on, magpies sing only of happiness and never write tragedies.

This is the tragicomedy the gods gave them as the sun rose today:
A man with his head sticking out of a jar walks along the coast at dawn, lighting lamps for the tribe’s newborn babes. They must see the light before they can learn to speak.
The head-in-a-jar man strikes the sea with lotus seeds, one seed splashing after another. The initial sound/final sound rhythm falls on the infants’ tongues, and they use kisses to imprint their ancestors’ epigraphs.
The lotus seeds strike until a fire starts. The newborns can see a vast space inside the lotus seeds, inhabited by a type of thing that cannot dream. They spend their entire lives searching for a dream world…. A world that can connect the dreams of all life in the universe and give birth to the last baby story, a story with the sun hidden inside its body.
Translator’s notes.
* A reference to the famous painting “Along the River During the Qingming Festival”. See the entire painting here.
** A legendary place which sends swallows to guide travelers on their way home. See here.

Chinese text from《百姓人家》p. 208.
Also available here to anyone foolhardy enough to wade through it.