FOUR
LITTLE TALES
These first appeared in Paradoxa, as parts of a long essay titled
“The
Tale of Jian Lu-sen”.
An eccentric scholar named Jian Lu-sen lived near Lan-ling Shan [translator's note: the Indigo (or Blue) Range Mountains]. Now, this
Jian was excessively fond of three things: perusing old accounts of anomalous or
supernatural events, constructing miniature landscapes in elaborate containers,
and writing calligraphy in a hand so crabbed that each person who saw it read it
differently.
One night, Jian sat in his study gazing out at the collection of
container gardens in his courtyard. It was just past the midpoint of the lunar
month, and shafts of light from the waning moon broke now and then through
shifting clouds. Here, they illuminated small faux mountains made of eroded
limestone greened with trees; there, they cast shadows across tiny porcelain
pavilions or pagodas carved of ivory. Jian's eyes grew heavy and his head began
to nod.
Suddenly, an eerie radiance broke into his reverie. Jian saw that it
shone forth from a cave in a gnarled stone hill in his finest dish-paessagio.
He rose from his desk and walked toward it. But the way seemed long and soon
grew steep. Beads of sweat broke out upon his brow. Jian found himself upon a
twisting pathway; clutching the gnarled trunks of pines and maples, he clambered
up. He paused near a pagoda made of some rare white polished stone. But the
light still beckoned, so he hurried on.
Finally, he reached the glowing mouth of the cave. Above its arch hung a
sign inscribed with the words, "Gateway to the Ebony Tarn". Within
stood a rosewood desk, very like his own. The wolf's-hair writing brushes, the
inkstone, the lamp, the ornamental paperweights upon it: all resembled the
precious objects in his own studio--and yet none was precisely the same.
Jian hesitated. He cast a glance back over his shoulder. Far in the
distance, he could just make out the courtyard of a miniature replica of a
house. Within one little room, a diminutive writing desk held calligrapher's
implements, and a wee shining lamp. Much
like home, he thought. And yet
altogether unhomelike. He blinked, and shrugged, and turned back to the desk
before him.
A small dark lake of ink, freshly ground and mixed with water, filled the
basin of the inkstone. A sheet of blank paper lay stretched across the desk.
Jian could not resist: this at least he could make something of. He sat down,
dipped his brush into the ink and wrote: "The Tale of Jian Lu-sen".
*
"I am a foreigner to myself in my own language and I translate myself by
quoting all the others."
---Madeleine Gagnon, 1977
"The words will not, so to
speak, mean a thing, but there they will be. For a time.... If the Wandering
Aengus could spread wings or slender spreading plastic sails, it could sail home
on solar wind, soar and drift and tack, come home like a bird, a pigeon bearing
the message that matters."
---R. H. W. Dillard, 1983
A barbarian called Qi-un-la-er-xun came from a western land known as
"Ancient Dominion of the Virgin Queen", hoping to pay homage at the
Temple of Literary Fragrance in the imperial summer residence. This gawky
outlander, whose unkempt hair resembled a tangerine in color, jabbered in many
tongues. Not only that, the foreigner's voice and manner shifted wildly: now
soft and decorous, now boastful, now aping the cultured tones of literary
persons, now mocking or seductive.
One Pi Xi, a senior eunuch in the office responsible for applications to
enter the grounds of the imperial park, mistrusted the barbarian's intent.
"How dare the creature presume?" he asked in a department meeting.
"And why?"
A good-hearted junior eunuch who had befriended the foreigner spoke up.
"This Qi," he said, "being somewhat near-sighted but driven by
sincere admiration, comes following maps bequeathed the western tribes by the
venerable Ts'ui Pen and a wanderer named Aengus--and wishes only to sketch a new
map or two for the edification of other barbarians, that they too may be
inspired to make reverence at our temple."
"Ayo!" cried Pi Xi. "Why so many maps? We need only the
one my own father drew, the one they use in the palace schoolroom. Surely that's
enough to capture truth."
At that, the entire Department of Permissions burst out laughing. All
knew that great areas of the vast summer-palace estate were represented on the
official map only by blank space, and that even where buildings and topography
had been sketched in, scale and location were matters open to dispute.
Pi Xi blushed. He saw nothing for it but to pretend his words had been
uttered as a sarcastic witticism. Soon the department agreed to let the gangling
outlander come burn incense at the temple. No harm, it was acknowledged, could
be done to the unfathomed splendors of the palaces in allowing a few more maps,
however clumsily drawn, to be added to the world's collections.
Yet in deference to Pi's opinions, it was required that Qi not use the
main gate into the walled imperial park, but rather enter by way of the palace
theater, through the stage door used by actors, set-builders and other
riff-raff. Moreover, all maps made by the foreigner were to be stamped in red
ink with Pi Xi's own seal: Not The One True Map.
*
"If woman has always functioned 'within' the discourse of man, a
signifier that has always referred back to the opposite signifier which
annihilates its specific energy and diminishes or stifles its very different
sounds, it is time for her to dislocate this 'within,' to explode it, turn it
around, and seize it; to make it hers..."
---Helene Cixous, 1976
"Fiction parodies the direct
word, the monologic voice, and the one-dimensional image of life as presented in
historical discourse."
---Sheldon
Hsiao-peng Lu, 1994
"One may choose to deny that
one's present world is in any part fictitious. The past, however, is chiefly
fiction and must be imagined before it can exist."
---George Garrett, 1974
A dealer in antiquities and objets d'art set up shop in the Eastern
Market, claiming to be a devout Buddhist and a member of a fine old clan fallen
on hard times. This affable fellow soon ingratiated himself into the
neighborhood, and his business flourished.
Yet one shop-keeper on the block, Old Mammy Wang, became suspicious.
"There's something shifty-eyed about that hustler Lai," she told her
husband. "His vintage scrolls and old-time mirrors look downright phony to
me. He'll tell you one thing about them in the morning, and something altogether
contradictory in the afternoon. And just the other day, I spied him holding his
chopsticks in his left hand, not his
right! I mean to find out what's what."
So that night, as soon as the watch-warden had sounded the Hour of the
Rat on his hollow wooden block, she crept to Lai's shop and peeked through a
crack in the shutters.
Old Mammy Wang gasped at what she saw. There in the darkling right-hand
corner of the front room sat Lai: busy modeling wax figures obviously to be used
in making molds for cast-bronze religious statues that he'd pass off as genuine
antiques.
But then again, there in the light-filled left corner sat Lai: hard at
work painting a long landscape of hills and rivers on silk, with a party of
travelers wending their way through scenery realistic and hallucinatory all at
once. And just at that moment, this second Lai signed the scroll--in a false
name, and holding the writing brush in the wrong hand!
The crone's eyes wavered from one Lai to the other, then back again. Her
body froze, but a moan of anxious uncertainty escaped her lips.
Both Lais' heads jerked up. Before Old Mammy Wang could move her feet,
they threw back the door-bar, rushed out, and, grasping her arms on either side,
dragged her into the privacy of the lamplit shop.
"You self-important dullard," roared Lai Yi [translator's note:
"Lai Number One"] in the crone's right ear. "Do you think these
latter-day goods don't count as real?"
"You deluded dunderpate," hissed Lai Er [translator's note:
"Lai Number Two"] in her left. "Do you think they are anything
but fake?"
*
"A
theory is inescapably a 'metastory'....It has to resort to the power of
narrativity for its interpretive and explanatory pretensions."
--Sheldon Hsiao-peng Lu, 1994
"It seems to me that a novel
can be written that is genuinely post-Einsteinian in its essentials..."
--R.H.W. Dillard, 1974
In the last years of the
Clinton administration, the weaver-woman known as Little Mi, a daughter of the
house of Ai, traveled to the capital to sell her wares. She spread her
groundcloth in the Eastern Market and prepared to lay her goods out on it. But
she was distracted by a ruckus emanating from a nearby shop.
Ai Mi had always been a curious sort, so she sidled over to the doorway.
Within, a feisty granny and a lanky personage in a scholar's gown confronted a
pair of twins standing shoulder to shoulder, obviously the owners of the shop.
"Old Mammy Wang here tells me that the antiquities you've sold me
can't be trusted," the scholar growled. "Well, as sure as my name is
Jian Lu-sen, I expect you to set things straight."
"Oh," said the first twin. "Did you think we intended to
deceive you about the way things are?"
"Ah," said the second. "Do you think you know what that is, then?"
Old Mammy Wang had evidently had enough of double-talk, for she lunged at
them, fists clenched. The twins split apart, Wang kept going, and Little Mi's
eyes popped as she saw what the crone was headed for: a roofed walkway leading
into an extensive garden graced by a series of moon-gates diminishing in the
distance and a far-off hillside temple white as the tusks of elephants. All
this, right in the heart of the marketplace!
But when Wang reached the walkway, the garden tilted and fell backward
with a clatter and a crash.
"Well, well," said Jian, while Wang plopped down beside the
fallen screen, rubbed her reddened nose and howled. "Trompe l'oeil, eh? You
know, the Qianlong emperor's court painters weren't terribly impressed when that
Italian fellow made such a fuss over introducing single-point perspective. They
found its realism rather pedestrian, you know. See Beurdeley and Beurdeley
147."
But before the scholar could continue, Old Mammy Wang leapt up and shoved
one of the Lais, who backed into the charcoal brazier that warmed the shop. In
an eyeblink, the smell of burning cloth reached Ai Mi's nose.
Suddenly, a force like a typhoon pushed Little Mi aside, as a grotesque
figure barreled through the door. "Lai Er! Lai Er!" the red-haired
giant gasped in broken accents. "Pants on fire!"
The giant quickly tore away Lai Er's burning trousers. An
astonished-looking Mammy Wang stamped out the flames.
And there before the eyes of one and all floated the signifier of Lai
Er's sex. Still hovering in the doorway, Little Mi grimaced uncertainly: half
sideways smile, half down-dangling droop.
Lai Er took up a length of painter's silk and calmly wrapped it round to
form a skirt. "There now," said the left-handed twin. "That's a
relief. Do you-all have any idea how hard it is to relate even the shortest
anecdote in a natural manner, and not wreck everything with one gender-specific
pronoun?"
"Tell me about it," growled the awkward redhead,
Qi-un-la-er-xun. "Maybe we need a different language altogether."
"Oh, please," interjected Scholar Jian. "Must we really
have more heavy-handed allegory here?"
"Allegory, is it?" inquired Lai Er. Or perhaps it was Lai Yi,
who in the confusion had also wrapped him-or-herself with a sarong of silk.
"You'd better take another look."
All eyes (even Ai's) followed Lai Yi's (or Lai Er's) sweeping arm. There
behind the fallen screen depicting that garden (so very
similar to Jian Lu-sen's toylike replicas and the emperor's indeterminate,
labyrinthine pleasure grounds) lay a room entirely walled with mirrors. Mirrors
made not of honest polished bronze, but of fragile, quickly-silvered glass. Lai
Yi and Lai Er stepped inside. The room filled with a hundred, with a thousand
Lais.
"Make sense of this then," they chorused, one winking, and the
other one straight-faced.
Ai Mi froze, bewildered.
"Fantastic!" muttered Mammy Wang.
"Fantastic, eh?" Qi-un-la-er-xun cleared her throat. "For
postmodernism, 'the genre of fantasy' becomes a misleading expression for
whatever leads the reader to the literary and literal chaos from which all
narrative proceeds and that is prior to and essential to every genre."
"By George!" cried Jian. "(Aichele 511)."
At that, Little Mi could stand no more. "Every
genre?" she asked in a timid voice. "Even criticism?"
Heads whirled. "Who're you?" bellowed Mammy Wang.
"I?" asked Ai. "Just Little Mi, the weaver. Oh, and I also
work part-time as a receptionist and interpreter for Dr. Tompkins and Dr. Jauss.
But why this concern with names--as if they really nailed things down! I just
want to know what the story is." She hesitated once again. "And what's
the essay. Snippets started slipping back and forth between them pages ago!"
A voice hooted from the hall of mirrors once hidden by the painted
screen. "Did you think the stories fiction, and the essay truth?"
snickered Lai Yi (or Lai Er).
A second voice (or was it the same one?) chortled, "Did you think
them different in any way?" With that, five hundred cross-dressed twins
turned to kiss five hundred morphic morphodites.
"Most unsettling," said Jian Lu-sen with a cheery grin. "I
believe we've also lost track of what country and what century we're in: this
border-crossing's risky stuff." Then the scholar's eyebrows knitted.
"Poor Little Mi, did you for one moment suppose all that palaver was an
accurate transcription of what she said at the Asian Studies conference? And did
you really think that she knows what she knows?"
"Stop!" the weaver cried. "Enough! I'm bringing this
tom-foolery to an end." Ai shuddered and rushed pell-mell into the hall of
mirrors. Four silk-clad arms slipped round her. And there, Little Mi saw herself
(saw her self herself) in a thousand thousand gleaming shards and shimmering
glimmers, embracing and embraced by the polymorphous, self-pleasuring,
phantasmagorical twins, there--and therefore here--within the house of the Lais.
"The recorder of these
marvels comments:...Alas! I shall seek my fortune in castles in the clouds and
mirages of the sea."
---Pu Songling, c. 1700