All around, far and near, sheets are swirling in the wind. Stopping in front of one, he sees the legs of a woman emerging on the white sheet, and he holds his breath to examine the heaving white breasts with protruding nipples. Then, roughly separating the sheets, he comes face-to-face with the child standing among the white curtains with a terrified look in his eyes. There is a loud scream, the sound of the suona, and he covers his face with his hands.
Crawling from the front of the coffin covered in white streamers, the child runs off wailing and howling, and echoing this silent weeping is the long, drawn-out scream of the suona. When the sounds of the child and the suona vanish, there remain around the open coffin only white curtains and paper streamers drifting in the wind.
The gloomy sea keeps rising and the wet mattress is partly floating on the water. The black hat over his face gets closer and closer to the ceiling of the room.
He leaps out of the coffin that is covered in long paper streamers and, dragging the shroud with him, he staggers and stumbles as he flees this mountainside with paper streamers hanging all around. He runs down to the expanse of green lake in the valley, enters the water, plunges into the lake, and somehow becomes tangled in weeds and is struggling. In the distance, ripples are spreading in circles, but it is hard to tell whether he is drowning or swimming out to the middle of the lake.
The sea reaches the ceiling, gurgling like a drowning person who is swallowing water and giving off bubbles like a blocked underwater pipe.
The watery passage grows bluer and bluer and eventually comes out at a seaport with sparkling waves. In the distance, the sea and the sky are virtually one color.
A gray-black floating object is bobbing up and down on top of the waves. As the tide rises and falls, a naked man can be seen lying on a wet mattress that is about to sink.
Lines of white crest surge upon the deep sea; it is ink blue, verging on black. The sky is so bright and the sea wind is so strong.
The flat sea suddenly stands upright. In the trough of the waves, on the mattress about to be engulfed, the naked man, wearing only a narrow leather tie around his neck, is seen removing the black hat from his face with one hand and his sunglasses with the other. In that instant, when the tide crashes down, those dead-fish eyes and the frozen, ambiguous smile on his face can be seen.
Seen through the window, facing the sun, in the distance, on the desolate beach, there seems to be a man sitting in a deck chair, his back to the sea, with a towel draped over him. With one hand he pushes aside the hat over his face and with the other he retrieves a book from the sand and starts reading it.
TRANSLATOR'S NOTE
Gao Xingjian's fiction, plays, and critical essays on literature began to appear in literary magazines for the first time in China during the early 1980s. His book Xiandai xiaoshuo jiqiao chutan (Preliminary Explorations on the Art of Modern Fiction, 1981) created a sensation in the Chinese literary world but was banned upon being reprinted in 1982. Arguably, the 1980s were much more liberal than the Cultural Revolution (1966-1976), during which time Gao had burned all his manuscripts, diaries, and notes rather than allow them to be found and used as life-threatening evidence against him. Nonetheless, even while conscientiously exercising self-censorship, he found that his writings still caused him to be denounced for promoting the decadent modernism of Western capitalist literature. In December 1987, when the opportunity arose, he left China for Europe. Some months later he settled in Paris, where he has lived since.
Gao himself has selected the six stories of this English-language version of Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather: it is his view that these stories are best able to represent what he is striving to achieve in his fiction. The stories, "The Temple," "In the Park," "The Accident," "Cramp," and "Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather," written in Beijing between 1983 and 1986, were first published in various literary magazines in China. These five stories are included in Gao's seventeen-story collection, Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather), which he compiled a few weeks prior to his departure from China. This collection suffered the fate of being rejected by all the major publishers in China but was eventually published in Taiwan in 1989. The last of the stories, "In an Instant," written in Paris in October 1990, was first published in Stockholm in the Chinese literary magazine Jintian (Today) and then included in Gao's Zhoumo sichongzou (Weekend Quartet), published in Hong Kong in 1996.
While still in Beijing Gao wrote a brief postscript for his seventeen-story collection, Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather, in which he warns readers that his fiction does not set out to tell a story. There is no plot, as found in most fiction, and anything of interest to be found in it is inherent in the language itself. More explicit is his proposal that the linguistic art of fiction is "the actualization of language and not the imitation of reality in writing," and that its power to fascinate lies in the fact that, even while employing language, it is able to evoke authentic feelings in the reader. The stories of Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather and the novels Lingshan (1990; translated as Soul Mountain , 2000) and Yige ren de shengjing (1999; translated as One Man's Bible, 2002) document the scope of Gao's unique and continuing experimentation in the genre.
Mabel Lee
University of Sydney
"The Temple " was first published in Chinese as "Yuan en si" in Haiyan 7 (Dalian, 1983). First collected in Gao Xingjian, Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in The New Yorker (February 17 and 24, 2003).
"In the Park" was first published in Chinese as "Gongyuan li" in Nanfang wenxue 4 (Guangzhou, 1985). First collected in Gao Xingjian, Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in The Kenyon Review 26, no. 1 (winter 2004).
"Cramp" was first published in Chinese as "Choujin" in Xiaoshuo zhoubao 1 (Beijing, 1985). First collected in Gao Xingjian, Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989).
"The Accident" was first published in Chinese as "Chehuo" in Fujian wenxue 5 (Fuzhou, 1985). First collected in Gao Xingjian, Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in The New Yorker (June 2, 2003).
"Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather" was first published in Chinese as "Gei wo laoye mai yugan" in Renmin wenxue 9 (Beijing, 1986). First collected in Gao Xingjian, Gei wo laoye mai yugan (Taipei: Lianhe Literature Publishing House, 1989). First published in English in Grand Street 72 (fall 2003).