He turned the sheet back and forth. He knew both sides of it were real, and that he was trapped in between. He was aware that he’d made some progress, though. Ten years ago, he was a feeble young man who was prone to tears and could only digest minute quantities of food. Now, however, he was a mature man of thirty with a range of complex emotions. As a boy, he only liked to watch sad films. When he saw the heroine die in the Korean film The Flower Girl, he cried in front of his classmates. He was always drawn to people with scars on their bodies, because he knew that each scar represented a moment of pain.
He continued his note to Chi Hui: ‘I longed to have a scar as a child, but I was sixteen before I finally succeeded in cutting myself. My inertia and lethargy have prevented me from achieving anything of great importance in life. Perhaps my poor digestion and weak heart are to blame. I chose to become a street writer because I thought it would cure me of my loneliness, but now I find myself vexed by a multitude of worries. These anxieties are bad for my health. Whether I see parents saying goodbye to their children at a train station, or a group of friends chatting and laughing, I always feel a wave of nausea.’
After a brief hesitation, he went on: ‘I often feel I’m so light that I could drift into the sky. To prevent this happening, I keep lumps of metal in my pockets to weigh me down. Sometimes, my feet seem to leave the ground. I’m so small and thin, I wonder why the wind hasn’t carried me away yet.’ He stopped again, sensing that he was now just writing to himself. He knew that in the end, he always managed to disappear from the page. He could be whatever people needed him to be, but he was never able to enter their lives.
As the street writer sits under the lamplight, we can examine his haggard face and slowly vanishing body. (In his notes, the professional writer often remarks on the street writer’s smile and premature wrinkles. Anyone who has grown up in a fishing village will immediately picture the street writer as a shrimp that has just been scooped from the sea.) His frail and sickly appearance allowed him to melt into the background, but it didn’t stop his business from flourishing. His skills were in great demand. Illiterate migrants who settled in the town’s new district were grateful for his service, as it enabled them to pass themselves off as locals. Young people who had left school early also relied on him to fill the gaps in their education. They milled around him all day. He would smile knowingly as they passed on to him all the latest gossip about their neighbours. He received information faster than the speed of a telegram, and was the first person people turned to if they wanted to know what had happened that day.
‘Have you seen that cat again?’ people asked as they passed him on the street corner. His knowledge concerning the notorious ‘foreign cat incident’ had made him famous throughout the town. A foreign cat the size of a dog had escaped from a chemical plant run by a Sino-Western joint venture. The plant’s delivery driver, Old Sun, was one of the first to hear about the escape. Since he knew that the cat often scurried past the street writer, Old Sun asked him if he’d seen it recently. The street writer then divulged all the information he had picked up about the case. He told him that because the foreign cat had one blue eye and one red eye, and could say ‘Good-bye’, Good morning’, ‘Long live Chairman Mao’ and ‘Pig’ in English, it was arrested, interrogated, and detained on charges of foreign espionage. The police discovered a bugging device and telegraph transmitter fixed to its tail, and behind its eye a miniature camera that had been secretly photographing the dark side of China’s socialist system. The curious thing, though, was that during its interrogation by two officials from the National Security Department, it cried out ‘Long live Chairman Mao.’ The reactionary spy was clearly trying to pull the wool over their eyes. The night they were preparing to escort the cat to Beijing, it bit through its chains and escaped. The street writer said he had seen it several times, scampering past him then disappearing over the high wall across the road. It was a year later before the police officers finally tracked the cat down and beat it to death with wooden sticks.
The street writer would work late into the night, classifying the drafts he had written during the day, and attaching notes to them. The notes might remind him to ask the client for details of their family background and political status, in case the police decided to check his records. In the new urban district that resembled a plaster stuck over an old wound, he had become acquainted with many important people, including the director of the Party committee of the Industrial and Commercial Management Department, and a poultry farmer who had been selected as the local representative to the National People’s Congress. The illiterate farmer received sackloads of letters exposing various crimes and cases of official corruption, as well as applications for residency transfers. The poor delegate could be seen every day, tramping up and down the streets on his way to discuss one of the multitude of disputes he had been called upon to solve. His suit grew dirtier and his back more bent by the day. Children walking home from school would trail behind him and chant:
Little old man with a crooked back
Falls in a dung pit and picks up a cowpat …
If he was not sleeping or writing letters for his clients, the street writer’s mind would always turn to the draft love letters piled on his desk. To him, they were the most precious things in his life. They contained descriptions of his loved ones, declarations of passion sprinkled with a few obscene words that, since the Open Door Policy, no longer condemned one to a life in prison — words like ‘love’, ‘soft lips’, ‘the sun around which I revolve’ and ‘melancholy’. He felt affection for every woman he wrote to, he poured his heart out to them. He kept not only the drafts of the letters he sent them, but also the letters they sent back to his clients. He developed a deep understanding of female emotions, and treasured the insight he gained into women’s most intimate thoughts.
On summer evenings, when couples were strolling outside in the warm sea breeze, the street writer would lean over his desk, hard at work, the sweat pouring from his brow. The tasks his clients assigned him never fully satisfied his creative desires. In his bones he was a poet. When people fell in love in spring, as they invariably did, he employed all his poetic skills to fall in love on their behalf. When autumn drew in, he would write letters breaking off the affairs. If there were a thousand love letters in spring, he would have to write over nine hundred rejection letters in autumn. His life was very much tied to the seasons.
His complicated love life made him nervous, and when he returned to his shed each day, he would check every corner of the room to see whether someone was hiding there. The search took nearly half an hour to complete, because the previous owner had crammed the corners with planks of wood that he had planned to make furniture with. There were also six or seven boxes filled with burial clothes, paper lanterns and incense coils, and under the bed that took up a third of the room was another heap of odds and ends. When he lay on the bed at night, he always worried about what was hidden below, and whether someone had sneaked underneath to spy on him. Before entering the shed, he would stick his ear to the front door and listen for any noises. He kept a hammer under his pillow so that he could deal with anything that might appear at the foot of his bed at night. He made marks on the wooden boxes, and checked them regularly to ensure that nothing had been moved. In a secret drawer of his wardrobe, he hid the letters he wrote to his clients’ women in which he expressed to them his undying love. Of course, he never posted them. They were the most personal and truthful letters he ever wrote.