Theme park

*

Theme
by Lu Xun

I dreamed of myself in a grammar school classroom learning to write: I was asking the schoolmaster how to establish a theme.

“Impossible!” the schoolmaster said, staring at me over the top of his spectacles. “Let me tell you something.

“A male child was born to a family. The family was so thrilled. During the one-month birthday celebration, the family showed the baby to their guests, probably to invite some auspicious comments.

“One man said, ‘This child will be wealthy.’ He was duly thanked.

“One man said, ‘This child will be powerful.’ He received auspicious comments in return.

“One man said, ‘This child will die one day.’ He was rewarded with blows from everyone present.

“To say the child will die is telling the truth. To say the child will be wealthy or powerful is telling a lie. But the one lying was richly rewarded, while the one telling the truth was beaten.”

“I don’t want to tell lies, and I don’t want to be beaten, either. So, master, what should I say?”

“Okay, then, you’ll have to say, ‘This child! Oh my! How . . . indeed! Ha ha ha! Hee hee hee! Hee hee hee!’”

—from The Pearl Jacket and Other Stories:
Flash Fiction from Contemporary China,
edited and translated by Shouhua Qi

*

The mall across from the hotel I’d stayed at was recently completed but still stands mostly empty; only the stores facing the main road are open for business, occupied by such brands as Versace and Pepe. On my last morning, I walked through the inner court of the mall hoping to find a store that sold tchotchkes, but only an advertising agency, a restaurant, and the occasional half-empty clothing store were in operation. I walked for half an hour with no exit in sight, the path curving continually to the right after every pillared overpass. Finally I turned back when the anxiety of getting lost took hold, though lost in this sense was more psychological than physical. There was just too much space and too few people. After the bustle of the past two weeks, this unending emptiness served to both calm and disconcert—the perfect way to end a trip that had heaved with noise and bodies.

A week after returning, I let the impressions of China settle and wrote very little. I read Coetzee’s Disgrace, disturbed by the growing violence inside the story and fascinated by the narrative pace; read pieces from my writing group (I’m still behind, guys, sorry) that turned my head and heart around yet again; strolled through the Met in heels, absorbing the delicate lines within a Rodin and a Degas and the complementary bursts of vivid color in a Bonnard; ate my favorite foods (omelet and toast) and was introduced to a new favorite (cauliflower sandwich at Num Pang); converted to the Morning Hours due to jet lag; and wrote short lines to remind myself that my feet had so recently trudged through Chinese streets and been planted, sturdily, on either side of many a hole in the ground. Then this morning I wrote a long paragraph about a woman and her husband, an actor, with the first line “When I first came to Mule City to work in the theater, I would lie awake at night listening to my neighbor’s radio through the wall.” I had just woken from a rollicking dream about performing in a musical, which itself had been triggered by the conversation overheard yesterday at Madeleine Patisserie between a woman and her two grandsons about A Chorus Line.

“When I first came to the city to work,” said the woman to the boys, “I would lie awake at night listening to the radio.”

In the dream, while watching the star flit from one side of the stage to the other, I’d said to myself, “You are in this show because of that grandmother, because of storytelling, hers and your cousins’ and your father’s and your own. Write her story. Don’t forget what you know—theme, focus, roundish peg in squarish hole.”

Throughout the trip I had happily engaged in the role of tourist, stranger, an American curiosity. The truth is that I know nothing about being Chinese. The lie is that I am Chinese. So: Time now to fit together the pieces of my little town on the river that’s been meandering through my head for the past few years, and bring truth to lies or lies to truth. Either that or fulfill the next fantasy and move to China, the biggest theme park ever built.

Ha ha ha! Hee hee hee!

4.2.09 — Chengdu; Nanchong

Despite capturing grime on the window, my Little Camera That Could took some nice images from a moving vehicle. None very original, as all I did was point and shoot with fingers crossed, but good enough to remind me what to keep an eye on—shapes, colors, texture, movement, expression. How else could I find common ground in a place where my words are so limited, or recognize gesture in hands and expressions in the face or in the way a body conforms to a motorcycle or teeters on the edge of a sidewalk? None of these images are at all exceptional except in the context of their having been taken in China. That is to say, they’re all special because I was standing firmly in the land I’d been dreaming about these last few years.

*

My youngest cousin lives in a two-bedroom duplex and will move into one of the many, many new condominium complexes currently being finished throughout the city. (The new building had had two floors built before the earthquake last year destroyed the foundation, and the construction had to start over; it’s now almost complete.) My parents and I were given the duplex to live in for the two too-short days we were in Nanchong; my cousin and her husband, meanwhile, stayed with his parents in the apartment below. These orange peels were on the landing between the floors. I wondered whether they were part of a Buddhist ritual; Dad said they were being dried for future meals.

I took eight pictures of the peels at various angles, and just now realized that my mother does something similar with tourist shots. She wants every combination of people in a shot in front of a touristy spot, and then the final shot must include everybody—that is, she’s not satisfied until her sense of a place has been fully populated by us all. I would grow increasingly agitated during each Say-Cheese, but what she must have thought when I shot a single grimy object over and over.

*

I sat in my aunt’s apartment listening to her try to convince my father to move back to Nanchong. I sat on this sofa listening to my father tell his blind little sister to eat more often, to sleep well and exercise every morning. I had sat on other sofas listening to my father tell me the same thing in just the same voice, and all that time I’d never known he’d had sisters waiting for him in a place called Nanchong. What I had known before this trip was simply that he’d been born in Sichuan, that some of his Chinese words sounded a little funny, and that he would always, with a twinkle in his eye, proclaim that the food he was serving me wasn’t spicy at all.

*

I went to explore the park across from the hotel while my parents took a nap. A variation of hearts was being played everywhere. At a far point in the park was a hard-to-watch rendition of the tango being performed by three couples. The water calligraphy held my interest the most. I’m sure this practice is common and has a long history, except the history is something I can only imagine, at least for now. I saw similar demonstrations in other parks later in my trip, and remembered watching a calligrapher once in Taipei’s Sun Yat-Sen Memorial Park write a long, silky poem on the concrete, which later sparked a scene in one of my stories of a little girl training to become an artist, only her giant brush was too heavy to wield so her mother sawed the thing in half—Shaolin Calligraphy or something.