CHEN CHUNCHENG

CLOUD SNIPPETS

translated by Joyce Fung, Ruru Hoong, and Weihan Chung 

On the bus back to the suburbs, I began to sense that something wasn’t right. It was early fall. The mountains were mottled with trees, dense and crisp, and the cool air wafted with the fragrant scent of rice. The fields shone gold, dazzling the eye. Rice is not a plant, but light grown from the earth. The sky was as blue as a secret. The earth rose and fell, hills rolling into green.

It was then that I spotted them: curious shadows, gently sweeping over the paddies towards the distant plots of land, like a snapshot taken from a dream, or a residual memory from some past life. An ancient feeling surfaced, putting me at ease. The child in the seat behind me asked: “Grandpa, what is that?”

I’ve worked at the Snipping Station for five years now. On that particular trip down the mountain, I visited the old gentleman under the pretense of needing new supplies. When I left his house, my mind was swimming in a never-ending couplet, ringing with the calls of phoenixes. After spending the night in a hotel, I set off for home.

The whole town is grey, surrounded by dusky green mountains on all sides. Only one spiral of deep grey emerges from that emerald foliage—the highway. The road passes through several villages, stacks of khaki and black. They flicker past in a moment. An endless dark green follows, interspersed with dots of dulled yellow and crimson. Then there is a little speck of white, perched along the mountain’s waist. That’s my Snipping Station. There are many Snipping Stations under the Cloud Bureau, scattered all over town.

My day job consists of maintaining the station’s normal operations: snipping clouds, fixing machinery, and printing advertisements. It’s very light work, and when the job is done, the remaining hours of the day are mine to spend freely. The station used to have a mute doorkeeper, but he passed away not long after I joined. Only while sorting through his items did we discover that he was a serial killer. Regular as clockwork, he had descended the mountain to commit murders.

There are no other traces of life in the station now, aside from myself and the moss spreading across the stone steps at the door. But plenty of life surrounds the station. The neighbouring forests are under conservation; at night, one can listen to the calls of birds and beasts for free.

The Cloud Bureau is an institution with a long history. Many years ago, the Head of State planned an inspection of the area. As if preparing to face a mortal enemy, the whole town swept the streets pristine and renovated the exteriors of every building. Each crooked tree was uprooted, and in their place were planted trees straight as rods, crowns trimmed to the standard roundness. Stray dogs were shot and dragged off. To prevent unwanted stenches, no rubbish was allowed in the street bins.

The day the Head of State arrived, the sky was bright and the air clear. It was nine in the morning. The streets were empty of people and cars, the grass and the trees stood rigid at attention. Mighty buildings glistened under the sun. The Head of State took a look around with his hands laced behind his back, and was greatly satisfied.

“You are managing the city rather well,” he said to the officials behind him. “The streets are clean, the landscaping looks good. Only… The cloud in the sky there, why is it all torn up? Don’t you think it looks like an old rag?”

The officials lifted their gazes and saw that, in a sky clear as fresh laundry, a stray cloud had somehow floated in. It passed lazily over the sun, its margins in wild disarray, void of any civility. The officials’ faces darkened, and suddenly their sweat flowed free. Little did they know that the Head of State was in a good mood, and had simply hoped to charm them with a passing joke.

A brief snatch of humour condemned every cloud in the sky for eternity. When the inspection concluded, the Cloud Bureau was founded. Its responsibilities extended to all the clouds that passed through the town’s sky. The Regulation of the Cloud Bureau stipulated: “All clouds must, according to the law, be trimmed to the required size, be of elliptical shape, with edges snipped into a uniform wave. Otherwise they may be considered illegal clouds, and are subject to destruction by the Bureau.”

From then on, all clouds were made to resemble those seen in cartoons: round, puffy, easy on the eyes. In language classes, outdated phrases like “sea of clouds” and even “sunset” have already become too difficult to explain.

My Snipping Station rests at the edge of the Cloud Hat Mountain Forest Reserve, a white lighthouse of a building with a rounded top. I live at the very top of the tower, above a warehouse with gates that open up on either side. The whole building is—simply put—a huge machine. At night, thick, milky-white clouds swell in the neighbouring valleys, gradually drifting out into the early morning sky, sometimes in clustered clumps, sometimes in silky strands, all unkempt and dishevelled illegal clouds. These unsuspecting clouds are sucked in through one gate to emerge on the other side in the standardised oval form, complete with the wavy edges of a legal cloud. They float on like cute little biscuits, towards the vast blue sky stretching over the town.

As the economy began to revive and open up, the Snipping Station started to accept commissions, including the printing of cloud advertisements. This required carving a row of words out of the cloud’s center. Hanging in the sky, the words appeared in eye-catching blue.

A downside of cloud advertisements was their aimlessness; it was impossible to chart a course. Their lifespans were also short, disappearing within a day, if not half a day. As a result, cloud ads remained inexpensive, and the station never received any major marketing requests. More often, they ran along the lines of “For rent: 135xxx,” or, “For infertility issues, come to XX hospital.”

There were also private requests: every Valentine’s Day, the sky would be dotted with floating “Wang Lihong I Love You”s and “Li Zhen Xiu Will You Marry Me”s, a majestic sight indeed.

Upon being sent the details by the Cloud Bureau, I would input the advertising information on the backend, and the clouds would emerge printed with words. Occasionally a big gust of wind would break the clouds, distorting the characters. Or two clouds would collide and merge into “Wang Li Hong I Love Li Zhen Xiu Will You Marry Me.”

This is when I would spring into action; piloting an old-fashioned, whirring biplane, I’d fly towards the cloud and throw in a rain bomb. These disordered illegal clouds would vanish with a sigh, briefly drizzling the earth and leaving behind a cloudless sky.

Life in the mountains is not dull. Holding a cup of water and spending all day watching yellowed leaves drift past my door, I feel content. In the dawn, lying in bed, you can hear the sound of moss growing, like the tide rising in darkness. On cold nights, I drink sips of warm wine and listen to literary commentaries on the radio.

When my teacher passed away, he left me thousands of books from his collection. I moved them into the mountains in several installments, organising them by colour. At times I would take one out at random out to read. Other times, I would just sweep my hand along the rise and fall of their spines. I’ve decided to pursue a field of knowledge as my life’s vocation, but have not yet chosen which.

The sun was setting as I sat before the window holding a volume of Ocean Paleontology. The sound of birds filled the forests’ meandering paths, and a fox—with backpack in tow—descended from the mountain.

I recognised this fox: it often shape-shifted into human form in order to gallivant about town, and it never missed a blockbuster. On the contrary, I was always behind on the times. It was him who relayed the news to me about the new Head of State.

“Reading again,” it commented, angling its head up at me as it passed by the station. “You didn’t come the last time I asked you to play cards.”

“Where are you going now? Off on a long trip?”

“I heard that Avatar is screening, I’m heading into town to watch it. Want to come?”

“What-tar?” I asked.

Shaking its head, it cast me a glance brimming with pity and left. I went on reading.

I read Ocean Paleontology for half a year. There was a sweet sense of absurdity in studying long-extinct, giant creatures of the ocean. I never had any desire to become a scholar—all I wanted was to find an abyss to sink into. In my mind’s ocean, some snippets of knowledge amassed into coral; others were like schools of fish clouding the sky, denser here and sparser there, dissipating in a moment. Half a year later, when a sea dragon often invaded my dreams, I stopped my studies. I realised that, were I to continue these explorations, I would never again escape. The curse of the deep blue would engulf the rest of my life, preventing me from moving forward.

I spent the next three months researching the Jianwen Emperor Zhu Yunwen’s whereabouts. I had discovered a long poem in an early Qing Dynasty notebook—written in an ancient septa-syllabic style—wherein the author hinted at the whereabouts of Zhu Yunwen’s burial grounds. Since the language was dense with Taoist expressions, I also had to take up the Taoist anthology Yunji Qiqian, which occupied me for another couple of months. One night, I woke up from a scarlet-shaded dream and realised that, were I to continue like this, the rest of my life would be shrouded in the flames of the Great Fire of 1402 AD, never to be freed. So I put an end to my studies, and after finishing my cloud-snipping duties the next day, I began flipping through a written history of perpetual motion machines.

I’ve spent the past few years as if walking around a cave. I stand at the crosswalks, facing a proliferation of paths, each with a bottomless depth. Cast down a stone, and only decades later would you hear the sound of an echo. I know that if I am to choose any entrance, there would be magnificent stalactites and gleaming crystals along the way, that every path would be inexhaustible, unending, fascinating. But I cannot resolve myself to make a choice. I always take a few steps in one direction, then, fearing that going any further would extinguish the possibility of turning back, I’d humbly make my return. I have no idea which cavern would suit me best, nor do I have the opportunity to try each one by one. Any choice means giving up on the possibility of infinity minus one, and thus I waste a great many days at the crossroads, feeling the cold wind blowing at me from every passageway.

It was on this day that I set the Snipping Machine on auto, checked the levels of the setting fluid (which helps the clouds keep their shape for a little longer), switched off the lights, and locked the doors. Stepping on fallen leaves along the mountainside and tracing overgrown grassy trails for most of the day, I finally reached the nearest station to take the bus into town. My teacher had an old friend I hadn’t seen in many years, so I decided to pay him a visit.

When the grey bus stopped, I disappeared into the grey sea of bodies, and followed the grey street signs to the grey courtyard of his apartment block. Sunset preceded my every step, seeking shelter amongst the foliage of the banyan trees, appearing in a constellation of fragmented orange-red stars. Bats fluttered and danced in my peripheral vision.

I climbed the stairs—they were just as dilapidated as I remembered. The lightbulbs were clouded over in dust and cobwebs, the wallpaper peeling into mysterious patterns. Cool, chilling notes of music, sounding with the resonant texture of jade, ricocheted down each flight of stairs. It was Bach’s Fugue. I knew it must be the old lady playing, and I relished in the fact that she was still alive. I’d been to this building many years ago, when my teacher was still alive. I was young then, and had already heard that the residents of the building were each struggling with “magic barriers”—obstacles posed by daemons. At the time I’d pitied them, but now I am beyond envious. They are all scholars who’ve given up comfort and prestige in order to burrow into some fissure in a corner of the world, caring for nothing else and thus throwing away their entire lives. To an outsider, they seem like a bunch of eccentrics. Some have spent their lives trying to uncover the identity of Jack the Ripper; some are obsessed with proving the four-colour conjecture; some are attempting to restore long-lost instruments; others are working on designing kilns made of wood. The old lady is a theologian. She’d found an ancient note in the ledger of an 18th century monastery, suggesting that there was an oracle hidden in Bach’s fugues. And so she fell under its enchantment and studied the fugues for many years, becoming an eminent cryptologist and musician in the process. After she was discharged from the mental hospital, the authorities arranged for her to spend her remaining years in the building. 

I knocked at the door. The old gentleman did not express any surprise at seeing me; he welcomed me in, took my hands in his, asked how I was, then poured some tea and passed me the cup with unsteady hands. His face was rigid from long years of seclusion. He must’ve seen the same on my face. We exchanged a few awkward words about my deceased teacher, and without transition, I blurted out all my concerns about the cave.

He stared into the cup of tea, the leaves swirling and dyeing the water yellow-brown. Then he said: “Yes—there are too many ideas worth dedicating a whole life to. Like you said, every cave is filled with temptation. It’s difficult to make a choice. When I was young, I too hesitated at the crossroads. Afterwards, I understood that not every cavern is displayed clearly, that there are even more laying low in the shadows. One misstep, and I fell headfirst into that emptiness. Even now, I still haven’t reached the bottom.”

“Like a trap? I don’t think I’ve encountered anything like that.”

“Depends on the person,” he said. “Some are fated to fall into a particular subject—it’s unavoidable. Others will never even get close to the caves and traps, leading perfectly fine lives all the same—or typically even better ones.”

After refilling my cup, he described his cave to me. In the mid-eighties, he fortuitously came into possession of an old book, on clearance from a museum. Beyond the understanding of most, it was tattered and torn beyond restoration, rife with missing words and unfathomable expressions, and thus it came into his care. After reading it thoroughly, he discovered that the entire book was a single couplet, thousands of words long. The author had deliberately hidden certain words in the upper and lower scrolls; the words missing in the upper scroll could only be ascertained from the corresponding word in the lower scroll, and vice versa.

At this, I intercepted, saying that there are no absolutes in couplets. He responded in agreement—that’s why it’s mesmerizing. For example, if the upper scroll has the term green mountain, how would the lower scroll match it? Theoretically, any term composed of two rising or falling tones, and containing a word denoting colour, should work. It could be jade-green water, white water, white hair, green tree, green water. . . However, any word already included in the upper scroll had to be eliminated. And if parts of the lower scroll included the word water, then water could not appear elsewhere. When one considered the “harmony of dual lines”, the possibilities increased exponentially. For example, the phrase that matched the lower scroll’s green mountains is—based on the available information—likely to be wooden oar. However, that would not be very elegant. The text in the lower scroll actually read osmanthus oar and laurel boat, and the upper couplet read green mountains and jade-like waters. The two colours corresponds in the upper scroll, and the two types of material corresponds in the lower. Another example: purple sword and frosted blade matching with dragon leap and phoenix dance. Or the two lines: When one loves the clouds for their shape in water / Life is wonderful when the heart’s truth is the sun. But even such pairings are inconclusive. Until the completion of the entire couplet, any of the matched terms could be wrong—and be proven wrong again and again. The whole thing is continuously evolving, an endless game of wordplay. He told me that he had dreamed of being a mountaineer, and before that, a watchmaker. But after he dedicated himself to the couplets, he experienced both occupations at once. There existed no mountain steeper than that text, and no mechanism more intricate. What’s more, in those missing words, there was something one couldn’t find on snowy peaks or in between gears.

“The most complete sense of serenity,” were his words.

I took that photocopied volume in my hands. Flipping through it, it was as if I held the ruins of a palace, glinting of faded gold and aquamarine. He was once a well-known classics professor, but once he fell into the cave, he lost interest in all else, becoming a strange and lonely old man. Symmetry is the essence of metric poetry, he told me. When the upper and lower scrolls come into perfect unity, they form a symmetrical, closed universe—a smooth, exacting circle. Nothing in the world can disturb it.

“What happens when the work is done?” I asked.

“I don’t know.” He responded, folding his hands and stroking their wrinkles. “At first I was just trying it out for fun, but I was quickly ensnared. The only thing I knew was that it had to be resolved. Later, I found a Ming dynasty journal which said that upon the completion of a couplet, one would hear the call of a phoenix, and the sky would rain a sheet of frost. A British sinologist once speculated in his diary that each word in a couplet comes from some eternal verse, that there are countless fragments of poetry flickering in the secrecy of the couplet, like stars twinkling at the bottom of a lake. A manuscript from the Republic claims in cryptic undertones that the completion of a couplet heralds the endpoint of all word games, like a long snake that swallows its own tail, until it disappears completely. All words in the world will disappear: the universe will return to a sacred silence, and heaven and earth restored to chaos.”

He said that he didn’t know if all this was bullshit, or just literary inflation. But who could say it wasn’t true? As the night came to a close, he shared several new developments with me. The previous night, he had thought perhaps he could pair wisteria moon with grassy wind.

The tea leaves unfurled in the water, floating softly like stingrays.

By the time I headed downstairs, a pitch-black night had descended. Following Bach’s fugue down each flight of stairs, I felt that the building was itself a labyrinth, and behind each door lay an endless cave. In the courtyard, the shadows of trees overlapped with the colours of the night, intensifying the darkness. The bats could no longer be seen. Only the flapping of their wings could be heard. I stepped out of the courtyard, into the cool breeze.

The following day, I spent the ride home trying to remember what a phoenix call sounded like. It was only after some time that I noticed the shadows passing over the fields. They ambled over the plains, caressed the waters, climbed the mountains, all the while rushing towards the direction from which I came. The hills and the fields brightened and darkened with their passing. Finally raising my head, I saw the clouds. Big, fluffy, messy, scattered clouds. Some were like racing horses, some like dolphins, but most of them did not resemble anything. A bottomless blue filled my vision one moment, a dazzling white the next.

“What is that?” The child in the seat behind me asked again.

A raspy old voice replied, “It must be clouds.”

The child laughed. “Grandpa is making fun of me. Clouds don’t look like that.”

It was only then that I realised something had happened. As it turned out, the machine had malfunctioned in my absence. Once the bus arrived at my stop, I hopped off and sprinted wildly along the mountain trails. Entering the office, I saw countless missed calls on the landline, all from the bureau. I ran into the warehouse and emerged moments later in an old-fashioned biplane, buzzing in fits and starts into the sky.

Checking the plane’s dashboard, I was relieved to find that it was well-stocked with rain bombs. As I throttled the horsepower to its maximum, the body of the plane shook uncontrollably, like an old man in a coughing fit. I flew towards the scattered clouds. For a brief moment, my task felt quite meaningless. I had no ill will towards those clouds—on the contrary, I quite liked them, especially in this moment, glinting pure as snow in the sunlight, rimmed in a soft blue glow. Floating above the human realm, they appeared grand, elegant, like wild horses. But I didn’t have the option of not destroying them. I would lose my job. When survival instincts take over, it too is like a wild horse. I wanted to remain at the Snipping Station to continue my explorations. I could not think of anything else to do. In any case, clouds are supposed to be oval. When I was little, every cloud was oval. Like how one must wear a necktie, there are certain things that don’t require explanation. Such things make up the foundations of civilisation. They cannot be shaken.

I charged towards the clouds without hesitation. When I got close enough, I dropped a rain bomb. The clouds vanished with a sigh, briefly drizzling the earth with an enigmatic shower of rain.

After this incident, the Bureau conducted and circulated a reprimand of my conduct. The Leader was very angry; during the few hours of the machine’s malfunction, he felt that he lost his control over the skies—an unimaginable insult. I thought I would be fired, but that was not the case. As it turned out, none of my colleagues wanted to come and snip clouds deep in the mountains, so all of them put in a good word for me. In the end, the punishment was for me to continue on at the station, without change, for the next ten years. After the disciplinary proceedings ended, I took the bus once more back into the mountains.

Each time the bus passed a village, a group of people would alight. There were fewer and fewer of us remaining on the bus—by the time we reached the edge of the forest reserve, only myself and a man in the seat behind me remained.

Suddenly, I heard a bang; I turned to see the fox, sitting behind me amidst a cloud of dissipating smoke. The fox looked stunned for a moment, but upon recognising me, he brightened. “Shapeshifting time’s up. I was wondering who it was sitting up front. Had to hold back the whole ride. If I knew it was you, I would’ve changed back way earlier!”

At night, I heard someone scratching at my door. I opened it to find the fox, once again inviting me to join their game of cards. Feeling like it would be awkward to refuse a second time, I followed the fox into a cave deep in the forest. Inside, there was a large tree stump with cards laid over it, and a large turtle sitting on the floor.

The fox said, “Let’s play landlords.”

They usually played with a squirrel, but since autumn had descended, the squirrel was busy preparing for winter. I’d been invited to take its place. As the game began, I realised that each hand contained an arbitrary combination of patterns and numbers. Even if we played ten thousand rounds, a different hand could emerge every time. This too was a game that could not be exhausted, that had no end. We could spend our entire lives playing it.

“Are we betting money?” I asked.

“Do we look like we have money to you? We are betting our lives, on a point system—each point equals a decade.” The fox said. As it spoke, it looked over the top of my head as if it could see a number floating above me. “Ah, so little! Well, that’s no problem. If you run out, we’ll lend you some. Turtle has more than anyone could ever need. But it’s slow to play, so don’t get too worked up.”

“I’m not good at this game, you’ll have to go easy on me,” I replied. I stole the landlord position, took three cards, and threw them down onto the stump. 

In the light of a new day, I returned to the Snipping Station. As I waited for the tidy queue of white ovals to float out from the gates, I sat down at my desk. Taking out a piece of paper, I began to write. There was finally a solution to the question of the caves. Sitting there, it took only a minute for it all to sink in. I wrote down all my subjects of interest down on paper, one by one. If I spent twenty years on each one, my current lifespan would sustain one hundred and twenty topics. I could spend one hundred years on ocean paleontology, one hundred years to track down the Jianwen Emperor, and a few hundred years to conquer the perpetual motion machine. In my remaining time, I would drift though the other caves. I would become proficient in the names of every plant, familiar with the temperatures of every star. If I were to fall into a pit, I would set my sights on the bottom, and pursue it without end.

In the shimmering sheen of morning, my finger traced over the row of book spines, as if stroking the keys of a piano. Stopping suddenly, I took one out, and facing the light of the window, I began to read.