"Nowadays, whose family doesn't have only one son?"
"Ai, how will the parents survive?"
"If traffic management isn't improved, there'll be more accidents!"
"Well, there won't be any fewer."
"Every day after school, I worry until my Jiming gets home…"
"It's easier for you with your son – daughters are more worry to parents."
"Look, look, they're taking photographs."
"So what if they are, it's not going to help."
"Did he deliberately run over the man?"
"Who knows?"
"It couldn't have been attached, otherwise it would have been hit for sure."
"I was just passing by."
"Some drivers drive like maniacs, and aggressively. If you don't get out of the way, they certainly won't make way for you!"
"There are people who work off their frustrations by killing people, so anyone could be a victim."
"It's hard to guard against such occurrences, it's all decided by fate. In my old village there was a carpenter. He was good at his trade but he liked to drink. Once he was building someone a house and, on his way home at night, rotten drunk, he tripped and cracked his head open on a sharp rock…"
"For some reason, the past couple of days my eyelid has been twitching."
"Which one?"
"When you're walking you shouldn't be so engrossed in thought all the time. Quite a few times I've seen you…"
"Nothing's ever happened."
"If something had, it'd be too late and I wouldn't be able to bear it."
"Stop it! People are looking at us…"
The lovers look at one another and, holding each other's hands even more tightly, walk off.
They finish taking photographs of the scene of the accident, and the policeman with the tape measure takes a shovelful of dirt and spreads it over the blood. The wind has died down completely and it is getting dark. The conductress sitting by the window of the trolley bus has put on the lights and is counting the takings from the tickets. A policeman carries the wreckage of the bicycle on his shoulder to the car. Two men with red armbands get the buggy from the gutter, put it into the car, and leave with the policemen.
It is time for dinner. The conductress is left standing at the door of the trolley bus and looks around impatiently while waiting for the depot to send a driver. Passersby only occasionally glance at the empty bus stopped for some reason in the middle of the road. It is dark and no one notices the blood covered with dirt in front of the bus that can no longer be seen.
Afterward, the streetlights come on and at some time the empty bus has driven off. Cars speed endlessly on the road again and it is as if nothing has happened. By around midnight hardly anyone is about. A street -washing truck slowly approaches from the intersection some way off where traffic lights flash from time to time next to an iron railing with a blue poster. There is a row of words in white: for your own safety and that of others, please observe traffic rules. At the spot where the accident had occurred, the truck slows down and, turning on its high-speed sprinkler jets, flushes clean any remaining traces of blood.
The road cleaners don't necessarily know that a few hours ago an accident had occurred and that the unfortunate victim had died right here. But who is the deceased? In this city of several million, only the man's family and some close friends would know him. And if the dead man wasn't carrying identification papers, right now they might not even know about the accident. The man probably was the child's father, and when the child calms down, it will probably be able to say the father's name. In that case, the man must have a wife. He was doing what the child's mother should have been doing, so he was a good father and a good husband. As he loved his child, presumably he also loved his wife, but did his wife love him? If she loved him, why wasn't she able to carry out her duties as his wife? Maybe he had a miserable life, otherwise why was he so distracted? Could it have been a personal failing and he was always indecisive? Maybe something was troubling him, something he couldn't resolve, and he was destined not to escape this even greater misfortune. However, he wouldn't have encountered this disaster if he had set out a little later or a little earlier. Or, if after picking up the child he had pedaled faster or slower, or if the woman at the kindergarten had spoken longer to him about his child, or if on the way a friend had stopped him to talk. It was unavoidable. He didn't have some terminal illness but was just waiting to die. Death is inescapable for everyone, but premature death can be avoided. So if he hadn't died in the accident, how would he have died? Traffic accidents in this city are inevitable, there are no cities free of traffic accidents. In every city there is inevitably this probability, even if the daily average is one in a million; and in a big city of this size there will always be someone encountering this sort of misfortune. He was one such unfortunate person. Didn't he have a premonition before it happened? When he finally encountered this misfortune what did he think? Probably he didn't have time to think, didn't have time to comprehend the great misfortune that was about to befall him. For him, there could be no greater misfortune than this. Even if he was that one in a million, like a grain of sand, before dying he had clearly thought of the child. Supposing it was his child, wasn't it noble of him to sacrifice himself? Maybe it was not purely noble but to a certain extent instinctual, the instinct of being a father. People only talk about a mother's instinct, but there are some mothers who abandon their babies. To have sacrificed himself for the child was indeed noble, but this sacrifice was entirely avoidable: if he had set out a little later or earlier, if at the time he had not been preoccupied, and if he were more resolute by nature, or even if he were more agile in his movements. The sum total of all these factors had hastened his death, so this misfortune was inevitable. I have been discussing philosophy again, but life is not philosophy, even if philosophy can derive from knowledge of life. And there is no need to turn life's traffic accidents into statistics, because that's a job for the traffic department or the public security department. Of course a traffic accident can serve as an item for a newspaper. And it can serve as the raw material for literature when it is supplemented by the imagination and written up as a moving narrative: this would then be creation. However, what is related here is simply the process of this traffic accident itself, a traffic accident that occurred at five o'clock, in the central section of Desheng Avenue in front of the radio repair shop.
BUYING A FISHING ROD FOR MY GRANDFATHER
I walk past a new shop that sells fishing equipment. The different fishing rods on display make me think of my grandfather, and I want to buy him one. There's a ten-piece fiberglass rod labeled "imported," though it's not clear if it's the whole rod that's imported or just the fiberglass, nor is it clear how being imported makes any of it better. All ten pieces overlap and probably retract into the last black tube, at the end of which is a handle like a pistol's and a reel. It looks like an elongated revolver, like one of those Mausers that used to be in fashion. My grandfather certainly never saw a Mauser, and he never saw a fishing rod like this even in his dreams. His rods were bamboo, and he definitely wouldn't have bought one. He'd find a length of bamboo and straighten it over a fire, cooking the sweat on his hands as he turned the bamboo brown with the smoke. It ended up looking like an old rod that had caught fish over many generations.
My grandfather also made nets. A small net had about ten thousand knots, and day and night he would tie them nonstop. He'd move his lips while he knotted, as if counting or praying. This was hard, much harder work for him than the knitting my mother did. I don't recall his ever having caught a decent-sized fish in a net; at most, they were an inch long and only worth feeding to the cat.
I remember being a child, things that happened when I was a child. I remember that if my grandfather heard someone was going to the provincial capital, he would be sure to ask the person to bring back fishing hooks for him, as if fish could only be caught with hooks bought in the big city. I also remember his mumbling that the rods sold in the city had reels. After casting the line, you could relax and have a smoke as you waited for the bell on the rod to tinkle. He wanted one of those so he'd have his hands free to roll his cigarettes. My grandfather didn't smoke ready-rolled cigarettes. He ridiculed them as paper smokes and said they were more grass than tobacco, that they hardly tasted of tobacco. I would watch his gnarled fingers rub a dried tobacco leaf into shreds. Then all he had to do was tear off a piece of newspaper, roll the tobacco in it, and give it a lick. He called it rolling a cannon. That tobacco was really powerful, so powerful it made my grandfather cough, but that didn't keep him from rolling it. The cigarettes people gave him as presents he would give to my grandmother.