在细雨中呼喊
Twenty years ago, I was a dentist in a little town in southern China. Forceps in hand, I extracted teeth for up to eight hours a day.
In China in the olden days, dentists were in the much the same line of work as itinerant street-performers, more or less on a par with barbers or cobblers. In some bustling neighborhood they would unfurl an oilskin umbrella and spread out on a table their forceps, mallets, and the other tools of their trade, along with teeth that they had extracted in the past, as a way of attracting customers. Dentists in those days operated as one-man bands, and they needed no helper. Like traveling shoe-repairers, they would wander from place to place, shouldering their load on a carrying pole.
I was their successor. Although I worked in a state-run clinic, my most senior colleagues had all simply switched from plying their trade under an umbrella to being employed in a two-storey clinic—not one of them had attended medical school. At the clinic where I worked, tooth extractions were the main order of business. There were only about twenty of us. The people who suffered from such acute toothache that they came to us for treatment called our clinic the “tooth shop,” and it was very rare for anyone to think of it as a healthcare facility. Compared to the career of a dental physician, already such a respectable profession, I felt that I was no more than a shop worker.
It was during this period that I began to write. By that time I had worked for five years in the “tooth shop,” and had been given a grandstand view of thousands of gaping mouths. I was bored out of my mind. All I knew was, there was one place where you were guaranteed to find the world’s least attractive scenery, and that was inside the human mouth. I would often stand by a window overlooking the street, and when I saw people from the cultural bureau loafing about on the boulevard at all hours of the day, I was green with envy. Once I asked someone from the cultural bureau, why did he spend so much time strolling around on the boulevard? He told me that this was his job. I thought to myself: that’s the kind of work I would like to do. So that’s when I decided to write, hoping that one day I would be able to join the cultural bureau. At the time there only three routes of access to the cultural bureau: you could be a composer, you could be a painter, or you could be a writer. Composing music and painting pictures were out of my league, while writing just required knowledge of Chinese characters, so for me it was the only option.
One afternoon in November 1983, I received a long-distance telephone call from Beijing. A literary journal asked me to go to Beijing to revise one of my stories for publication. When I returned home later after making the revisions in Beijing, I became aware that our little county town was all in a tizzy, for I was the first person in the history of our district to have been summoned to Beijing to make revisions in a manuscript. The local officials came to the conclusion that I must be some kind of genius, and they said that they could not have me go on extracting teeth, but should put me to work in the cultural bureau. That’s how I gained entry to the cultural bureau. In China in the early 1980s, people were not entitled to look for a job themselves: all employment was assigned by the state. When I moved from the clinic to the cultural bureau, my transfer authorization was stamped with big red seals of approval, a dozen or so in all. At my first day of work at the cultural bureau, I made a point of showing up two hours late, only to discover that I was the first to arrive. I knew then that this was just the place for me.
In recent years friends from abroad have often asked me why I abandoned the profitable world of dentistry for the paltry remuneration of a writer. What they don’t realize is that in China in the 1980s a dentist was paid no more than a factory worker. Medical staff in those days were all as poor as paupers, depending solely on a salary that was dictated by the state. So when I forsook the dental clinic for my job at the cultural bureau, I did not feel the slightest economic or psychological pressures. Quite the contrary. I was so happy that I would practically wake up with a smile on my face, because I had changed from being a pauper mired in drudgery to being a pauper who spent his day having a good time. Although I was a pauper just the same, at least in the cultural bureau I enjoyed a life of carefree leisure. Almost every day I would sleep till noon, then saunter all over town, and when I ran out of people who could keep me company, that’s when I would go home and start to write. In 1993, when I felt I was capable of supporting myself with my writing, I gave up this wonderfully unstructured job, took up residence in Beijing and began a life that was even less regimented.
By now I have been writing for twenty years. After twenty years of long, long nights and clear or cloudy days, I have discovered that there is no way I could now separate myself from my writing. Writing has stirred within me countless desires—desires that I have experienced in my past life or desires that I have never had at all, desires that I have attained or desires that are totally unattainable. My writing has gathered them all in one place, and in the reality of the imagination they acquire legitimacy. After twenty years, what I have found is that my writing has forged a path through life, a path that lies beyond real lived experience. It began its journey at the same time as the path I have taken in my own life, and the two follow a parallel course. Sometimes the paths intersect, while at other times they go in entirely opposite directions. This is why, more and more, I believe in the truth of the saying that writing is good for the health. When desires that are unattainable in real life one after another find fulfillment in the life of the imagination, I feel that my own existence is in the process of becoming more complete. Writing enables me to claim ownership of two lives, one imaginary, and one real, and the relationship between them is like that between sickness and health: when one is strong, the other is bound to fall into decline. So as my real life becomes more routine, my imaginary life is brimming with incident.
I knew that reading other people’s works would have an effect on me, and what I realized later on is that the characters that appear in my own works also influence my attitude to life. Writing can truly change a person: it can make a strong man tearful, or render a resolute person indecisive, or it can convert a bold man into a timid and apprehensive creature. Its effect, ultimately, is to transform a living person into a writer. My point is not to denigrate writing, but rather to show how important to an individual is literature, is writing. At the very moment when a writer’s senses become more and more alert, his inner self may often feel weak and helpless. He finds that the world in which he has become so deeply immersed is at some remove from the reality that surrounds him, and may even be incompatible with it. Then he discovers that the norms he has come to internalize are quite different from those of other people: they are entirely a product of his own understanding, his own judgments. He feels that his soul possesses a capacity to penetrate any barrier, and his inner world becomes a land of plenty. Its abundance derives from a sustained immersion in writing, from the wisdom and observational powers that develop fully in the wake of a physical decline. It is a fragile resource.
For twenty years now I have been living inside literature, inside fleeting images and vibrant dialogues, inside descriptions that are compelling and utterly convincing, inside the narratives of many great writers, and inside narratives of my own. I believe that literature is created by human souls, and weak as these souls may be, they are also incomparably fertile and sensitive. They enable us to understand things intuitively, and they stir us so deeply that we cannot sleep. They make us identify with people from whom we are thousands of miles apart, they make us care about those from whom we are separated in life, or separated by death.
Translated by Allan H. Barr
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