“?‘Hurry up, Big Mother!’
“?‘Listen now: one night, a young man with poems folded up in his pocket heard Swirl singing in the New World Teahouse. It was the first time he’d been there, and the poor soul fell in love with her. Well, who wouldn’t fall in love with her?’ Big Mother said. Why did her voice break like that? Was she crying? ‘No one could help it. That was the world back then.’?”
WEN THE DREAMER, the aspiring poet, was born in the village of Bingpai to a prosperous family with a shaky history. Back in 1872, his grandfather had received a great honour: the Imperial court selected him to be one of 120 children sent to study in America. The family sold everything to help pay for the boy’s journey. Fortune smiled on them for, after only ten years, that crackerjack son, now called Old West, sailed home, having lived next door to Mark Twain, studied at Yale and obtained his degree in civil engineering.
But after ten years at the Shanghai Armoury, Old West suddenly died of consumption, leaving behind a wife and baby daughter, and owing ten years’ skilled labour to the Emperor. It was a calamity. Old West’s father wept ten thousand tears and called destruction down upon himself. The four remaining sons, determined to prove their worth, banded together. Within a generation, the brothers acquired a dozen acres of land, including apple orchards and an enviable brick house, and were among the wealthiest men in Bingpai.
Meanwhile, Old West’s daughter grew up terrified of her father’s books, as if they held a disease that could destroy a village. Little West packed the books into a container and buried the lot of them. Her only son, born long after she had given up hope of a child, was the apple of her eye, and she hoped he would grow up to be a proper landlord like his great-uncles. Instead the boy lost his head to poetry. The boy was a walking cartload of books, he sat at his desk, calligraphy brush in hand, gazing up at the ceiling as if waiting for words to swallow him. His bedroom appeared to float, disconnected, above the solid world of transactions, commerce and land. She called him, sometimes gently, sometimes roughly, Wen the Dreamer. He was an observant and sensitive teenager and when the war came, it broke him.
In 1949, when the fighting ended, Little West sent him to Shanghai, hoping it would restore his vigour. Books made all his pockets heavy. When acquaintances met him on the road, Wen said he couldn’t stop to discuss the Communists or the Nationalists, Stalin, Truman or the weather, because he was composing a six-character eight-line regulated verse in his head, and any variation in his path would push the words out of order. It was a lie. In fact, he was empty of poetry and afraid of words. During the war, Bingpai had been ravaged by the worst famine in a century, but he himself had never known hunger. He had sat in his study memorizing ancient and modern verses while, outside, labourers ate nothing but tree bark, mothers sold their children and young boys died horrifying deaths on the front lines. Half the village of Bingpai starved to death, but the gentry, inheritors of seemingly limitless resources, survived. Now, the Shanghai literati were talking about a new kind of poetry, a revolutionary literature worthy of a reborn nation, and the idea of it both moved and troubled him. Could the avant-garde express the ideas that went unspoken, could it confront the hypocrisy of lives like theirs? He did not know. When his poems came back from one of the revolutionary journals, a thick brush had scrawled across the page: “Excellent calligraphy. But your poems still sleep in their pastoral prison. Moon this, wind that, and who cares about your bloody grandfather?! Wake up!!!”
He knew they were right. Wen kept the rejection letter and threw the poems away. He remembered Bertolt Brecht:
I would also like to be wise.
In the old books it says what wisdom is:
To shun the strife of the world and to live out
Your brief time without fear
All this I cannot do.
By chance, he wandered into the New World Teahouse. A young woman was singing and Wen the Dreamer, perplexed and enchanted, listened to her for five straight hours. Afterwards, he wanted to speak to her, to commend the harsh beauty of her music, but with what words? The young woman’s music contained poetry and the written word, and yet it travelled far beyond them to a realm, a silence, he had believed inexpressible. Wen wanted to call out to her but instead he watched her disappear, alone, up a flight of stairs. Nothing had shifted, the world was still the same, and yet, walking home, Wen felt as if his life had snapped in two. He stood for a long time looking at the muddy, sleepless river, which in the darkness was only a sound, trying to understand what had changed.
—
On a muggy August night, a package arrived for Swirl in the quarters she shared with three widows. This package contained a single notebook: the shape of a miniature door, bound together by a length of walnut-coloured cotton string. There was no postmark, return address or explanatory letter: only her name written on the envelope in a square yet affecting calligraphy. She sat down to her dinner of salted turnips but the notebook, occupying the empty space beside her, beckoned. Swirl opened it to the first page and began to read. It was a story, handwritten in brush and ink. She hadn’t read a story in years, and at first could make no sense of it.
Page by page, her cramped, lonely room dissolved; she breathed in the dusty air of an imaginary Beijing where the government was on its knees, the old beliefs were all corrupted, and two friends, Da-wei and May Fourth, once intimate in every way, had arrived at “the tenth word,” the place where vows are broken and lives diverge. When the notebook ended just as it had begun–in mid-sentence–she retrieved the envelope and shook it mightily, hoping that another might fall out, but it was empty. She sat on her bed in the newly quiet room, consoling herself by setting a passage of the story to music. When she sang the words, they took on yet another life, and filled the room with possibility. Her neighbours, the widows, rapped on the walls and yelled at her to be quiet.