On the Second Edition of Romances

I ALWAYS used to think to myself: when my book has been published, I want to make the rounds of the newsstands, and I want the cover of my book, in my favorite blue-green hue, to open a little nocturnal blue window on the shelf, through which people can see the moon and all the excitement of the evening. I'm going to ask the news vendor, feigning nonchalance, "How's it selling? Too expensive, isn't it? Would anyone really buy it at that price?" Ah! Make yourself famous as early as you can! If success comes too late, the pleasure of it isn't as intense. The first time I published a couple of pieces in the school magazine, I was deliriously happy, poring over the pages again and again, as if seeing the words for the first time. But nowadays, I'm not so easily excited. Which is why I have to push myself even harder: Hurry! Hurry! Otherwise it will be too late! Too late!
Even if I were able to wait, the times rush impatiently forward-already in the midst of destruction, with a still-greater destruction yet to come. There will come a day when our civilization, whether sublime or frivolous, will be a thing of the past. If the word I use the most in my writing is "desolation," that is because this troubling premonition underlies all my thinking.
I've been meaning to go see the kind of bengbeng opera that's already fallen out of fashion in Shanghai but could never find the right person to go along with me.' I'm too embarrassed to admit that I'm interested in such

1 A form of pingju, "northern opera," deriving from rural Hebei pr0vince.


a rubbishy, lowbrow sort of thing. It was only recently that I finally came across a married lady whose family didn't dare accompany her to see Zhu Baoxia in the midst of the summer heat, so we went together2 As soon as the huqin player began to tune up, I listened with a strange twinge of sorrow to the high winds and distant skies of the melody, intertwined with the squeak of strings. "Heaven and earth dark and brown, cosmos vast without bounds," the wind blowing through the northern passes, howlingly pursued by the emptiness in its wake, with nowhere to stop and rest.3 A man in a great blue robe beats the rhythm out on a bamboo clapper, with a ruthless hand, "Kua! Kua! Kua!" He moves to the front of the stage, very close to the audience, deliberately drowning out the singer: "Kua! Kuu-wa! Kuu-wa!" His blows rain mercilessly down. I'm sitting in the second row, and I'm so overwhelmed that my head swims, and so much of the stuff in my brain is beaten out that I'm left only with what's most primitive. In the poor cave dwellings of the northwest, people can only live the most rudimentary of lives, and even that is no easy matter. The people in the play contend at the top of their lungs with the caustic wind of the huqin and the iron beat of the mallet. The northern girl playing Li Sanniang, her skin dark and without a trace of powder, with two ink-black streaks for eyebrows, buckets dangling from her carrying poles as she makes her way to the well, laments the bitterness of her fate: "Though I can't compare with Wang Sanjie. . . . " She keeps her eyes fixed on the ground as she loudly and gravely declaims each word. When she is drawing water from the well, along comes "a dashing young commanding officer on horseback," who turns out to be her son, with whom she is unknowingly reunited. This little general later begins to suspect that this poor country woman is indeed his mother and questions her about her family background: "What was your father’s name? Who was your mother? What about your older brother?" She answers each question, her "I's" sounding like "Ah's," until she's even explained her sister-in-law's background: "Ah have a sister-in-law called Zhang." Living in cave dwellings, with storms of dust and stones perpetually whipped across the door by the dusky wind outside, one's existence is restricted to simple facts: who is your father, who's your mother, your brother, your sister-in-law? There's very little to remember, so nothing's ever forgotten.

2Zhu Baoxia was born in the northern Chinese city of Tangshan in 1914 and is credited as a pioneer in the popularization of pin& inShanghai, where she first performed, to great acclaim, in 1928.
3Chang is quoting here from the first two lines of a traditional educational primer, Oianzi wen (The thousand-character primer).

 Before the main play, there was also a short comic sketch about a woman who manages to kill her own husband. Two huge streaks of rouge drooped down across this lascivious woman's broad cheeks. Even the sides of her nose were covered with rouge, so that only a narrow strip of powdery white nose remained. This contrivance-aimed toward creating the impression of a high, narrow, and aquiline Greek nose—just didn't fit the width of her face. Her teary eyes seemed to be located on the side of her face, like an animal’s. She had a gold tooth, two long, greasy braids dangling almost to her ankles, and from under the sleeves of her pink blouse, you could catch a glimpse of her plump, copper-colored wrists. Her husband's aggrieved spirit lodges a complaint with the authorities, appearing as a gust of wind. An officer in a palanquin, having heard him out, reports: "There's an apparition blocking the road." The magistrate asks, "Is it a male apparition or a female apparition?" After a careful inspection, the answer comes back: "The apparition is male." The magistrate orders the officer, "Follow that apparition, and make no mistake about it." He follows the wind to a fresh tomb, where the young widow is arrested. She kneels in front of the officer as she explains how it came to be that her husband came home to her one night, fell suddenly ill, and died. She tries a hundred different circumlocutions in order to get her meaning across. And still he doesn't understand. She sings: "Your honor! Did you ever see a stove without a fire? Did you ever see a chimney without smoke?" The audience cheers.
Women who manage to get the upper hand in barren and backward country aren't actually much like the wild roses most people imagine them to be, with dark, flashing eyes, even stronger than a man, brandishing a horsewhip in one hand and willing to use it at the slightest provocation. That's just an image city dwellers have made up to satisfy their need for tit-illation. In the barren wastes of the future, among the broken tiles and rubble of the ruins, the only sort of woman left will be like the singers in beng-beng opera, who are always able to find a way to survive safe and sound, no matter in which era and no matter in what kind of society; their home is everywhere.
That is why I felt such great sorrow.
Perhaps it's because of H. G. Wells's prognostications that I often think of things like this. I used to think they lay very far in the future, but now they don't seem so very distant at all. And yet it's autumn now, as clear as water and as bright as a mirror, and I should be happy. For the second edition of the book, I've used Yanying's design for the cover, which resembles the cloud tendrils coiled atop ancient brocade or a noisy cascade of sea spray softly falling from a dark and massive wave. If you look carefully, they're
 mostly made of little interlocking jade rings, in twos and threes, inseparably linked. There are a few single rings, like little moons, sufficient unto themselves. Others are in pairs, standing mildly next to one another, although what's done is done, and the scene has already changed: there's no reason they cannot stand in as symbols for the connections between the characters in the book.
Yanying only did a draft sketch. Struck by the strength and beauty of her line, I was more than happy to trace methodically over her lines to make a copy. Life's a little like that as well, no? It possesses the pattern, and we only get a copy. And so they have a saying in the West: "Let life come to you." That sort of submission resembles very little the uncomprehending, wretched, unsightly, and discountenancing submission of the characters in my fiction, yet it's just as desolate.