ZHU GE

REST STOP IN THE CLOUDS

translated by Josh Spacë

Suppose there’s a backyard. What kind of tree would be best to plant?

If there was a fruit tree sticking up out of the ground there, its owner would certainly be tired. Because, invariably, they’d be counting on it to live up to its name and produce some fruit. Thus, while underneath the tree, if one didn’t do a bit of manual labor—lay down some fertilizer, weeding, pruning, trimming, and so forth—it would be a bit unfair to its name. Also, for the purpose of picking fruit, one would have to learn some techniques to stunt its growth, keeping it from growing too tall, gradually becoming a stout little tree. A sturdy, stocky tree standing in the backyard, well-behaved like a pig in a pen, diligently hanging heavy with fruit during the seasons in which it should hang heavy with fruit. That being said, I still hope that there would be no fruit tree in the backyard. Best would be a tree of some other sort—one that although may flower, doesn’t have any fruit to be waited on expectantly—a camphor, a banana shrub, a tallow, or any other kind would do. As long as the leaves at the crown could grow to form a beautiful mushroom cloud—the kind of tree that fills you with a sense of reassurance when you look up, the kind you just can’t help but admire for its adherence to the standard of “tree.”

This is Shaoxing Hotel, the backyard of Lingxiao Pavilion. In the yard, it’s plain to see there is no fruit tree. In front of me, there’s a lilac tablecloth laid out with food ready to eat. Lilac is a bit floaty, not a good colour to begin with, but at this moment it’s somewhat inclined towards light blue, igniting a sudden feeling of delight. I chew the food, thinking how much better it would be to grow a tree that isn’t a fruit tree, bringing about a pleasure quite unrelated to food. Sitting in the air-conditioned room, the sunlight is cut off outside the window, seeming feeble and without temperature, despite this thirty-eight degree celsius summer.

Being someone with a poor sense of direction, I’ve passed through ring upon ring of misty obstacles to have lunch, finally arriving at this restaurant by the name of Zhiyulou. Really this is a tad exaggerative, as Shaoxing Hotel is really just a square piece of architecture surrounding a lake (those with strong spatial memories are welcome to refute me). But as for myself, square shaped architecture, as well as roads laid out like pound signs, and even intersections, are all the same—roads arranged with ninety degree perpendicular symmetry, that somehow easily incur one getting lost. Coming from any side of the symmetry, not only are the vertical railings and horizontal thresholds the same, the scenery from both sides are also much the same—perhaps it was that I merely took notice of the potted plants hanging from the lakesides that made me think so. As a neophyte horticulture enthusiast, I can only name a few of these plants: periwinkle, petunia, coleus, and one fluffy dense plant that looks like cold seaweed salad. Mainly it was these few potted plants that cyclically appeared along every side of the long square corridors, each species running on parallel lines, separated by the surface of the lake and facing one another from a distance, gazing across at each other and echoing one another in concert, presenting a rather obsessive-compulsive conformity. The funny thing was the school of koi fish in the lake. Looking down, you’d see them converging in large numbers, irresponsibly tailing the pedestrians. As soon as they coerced the humans into halting, they’d slightly raise their heads, exerting themselves, poking their mouths out from the surface of the lake—opening and closing, waiting on a morsel to drop from the sky. Appearing in dense formation, like swarms of starving ghosts, they’d leave what have been traditionally hailed in Japanese garden culture as “water jewels” and “lifetime companions” bereft of a certain beauty of restraint. And it’s said that these carps can live to be seventy years old. I realize that schools of fish cannot be used as objects of reference to navigate the road, and if these long-lived creatures can’t be used as road signs, then so be it. Due to their ceaseless pursuit, they even bring to mind the same sense of displacement as the old story from Lüshi Chunqiu, wherein the man seeks the sword by carving a notch on a moving boat. Now that’s actually kind of interesting.

Surrounding the hotel are a few small mountains. It’s said some are Long mountains, and some are Fu mountains. The reason for this rather inadequate description is that I have absolutely no clue just which is which. Before coming I heard that Shaoxing Hotel was once the former residence of Zhang Dai of the late Ming Dynasty —the “Kuaiyuan" (Kuai Manor) of his Ten Chapters of Kuaiyuan. The reason behind the Kuai 快 in its name is that the previous owner took this word and meaning out from the Chinese idiom, “a noble son-in-law” 东床快婿, and when the manor fell into the hands of Zhang Dai, I feel in the end it has culminated in some Jianghu chivalry in what was “a lighthearted peaceful life” 快意平生. Today, in this modern rest stop where businessmen converge from all over the north and south, the vestiges of those years still remain everywhere to be seen, yet also seem to have completely vanished without a trace.

Not so long ago, I was a high school language arts teacher. Once I went to a particular middle school to listen in on a class. They were learning about Zhang Dai’s most widely appealing piece of short prose, “Watching the Snow in the Mid-Lake Pavilion.” 

My impression was that the class was utterly joyless, wheeling with tasteless pretension. What happened at what point in time, what concealed what kind of foreshadowing which set up some other thing to come—the jargon and terminology of the class was absolutely devoid of any sense of beauty, and just like that, like some kind of practical joke, the feeling of literature was transformed into a criminal investigation. There were all sorts of shifting methods of inquiry that, in the end, merely resolved some question of ideology or sentiment, and that served as the entire basis of the questioning. The teacher was at full tilt, and the students cooperated with equal vigor, but all the questions and answers pandered to the well-informed observers in the audience of this class. This segment and that were woven together seamlessly, yet remained isolated, or rather—with fine tune precision—fully ignorant of the text itself. And thus, a very peculiar moment arrived. In a particular instant, that mere two hundred-character piece of prose, “Watching the Snow in the Mid-Lake Pavilion”, was seen clearly as doing all in its power to struggle free of the textbook, like a colossal grain of black sesame let loose into the air. 

The snow, the lake, the embankment, the wine and the people, a few empty cups, a chance encounter in the desolate cold. Sitting cross-legged side by side, forming a circle in the air. No wind, no rain, no other weather entering into existence. This was a season belonging to snow alone. This snow wasn’t the snow taught by some teacher, read again and again until engrained in the mind. It’s not “Like a sudden spring wind come in the night, bringing thousands of pear trees into bloom.” It also isn’t “The snowflakes of Mt. Yan as wide as blankets, falling one by one on Xuanyuan Tower”. It’s a metaphysical snow, a snow that doesn’t touch upon objects. Zhang Dai wasn’t concerned about the specific appearances of snow. Snow is a thing. Biting cold, crystallized, melted. Snow is also another thing entirely, extending, spreading outward, “with cloud, with wind, with water, all white above and below.” The translation from classical Chinese into common speech summarizes the piece, processes it, and disassembles the words, tearing them to shreds, never building a bridge to reach the inner heart of the reader. 

In this way it seems that it is, on the contrary, the good word floating in the air that meets its good fate. It doesn’t fall to the ground. It hovers alone in midair, just like the Mid-Lake Pavilion. It doesn’t rise up from the ground, nor does it hang from the mountain’s waist. It stands long in the center of the water with a uniqueness that cannot be replicated. These words have nothing to support them to begin with. Gazing down below, they muse, “Why fall to the ground?” Crowds, glass, whitewashed walls, scattered conversations, the sound of applause—these things all have the attributes of steel. They’re rules and parameters, groups of things with hurried flying feet, doing demanding work on behalf of pure imaginary logic, blind to a lighter and more graceful beauty. How were the Jingling folks’ words, which called to Zhang Dai in that icy cold, transformed into white mist and vapor? What level of heat did the wine come to on the stove? Was it or was it not that these two outsiders had nothing but sighs and silence at the thought of the words “living away from home”… They couldn’t see in the slightest. They were that heavy—completely incapable of taking off into the air, and in no position to discuss touching the words whirling about in the air. I don’t know what Zhang Dai looked like. In my imagination, perhaps he had a face that, despite the great vicissitudes of life, still revealed an adolescent hooliganism—and which in this instant showed a smile hung with timidity, yet also with guile.

Zhang Dai—who wrote these words capable of flight—and his former home that created all the living spaces from then onward, is firmly stationed upon the land. Architecture is just this vital of a thing. It provides a foundation, and only afterwards compels human beings to hover over it. Compared with daytime, the night is undoubtedly magical. At this time, that same school of koi fish casts off its shameless pursuit of personal gain, and there, hardens on the face of the water like a shooting star, like atomic particles, appearing in a stilled Brownian motion. They seem completely unrelated to daytime. Under the faint lamplight, the surface of the lake maintains a dense, translucent blackness, covering them with a thin layer of concealment, so that their multicolored bodies glitter and shine even more brilliantly, like evening suns in the dark night, burning with soft light. In contrast to Dali’s clock, like soft melted cheese, a surreal school of fish then also becomes an object that hangs in the air. Fish are rather baffling creatures to begin with, really. They cannot be touched, only seen, and as soon as they’re dead, it’s as if they’ve been rotting for ages. They’re closely bound to some apparatus of this senseless world. In comparison with the fish’s relationship to the world, the human being, being a very different kind of creature, has a relationship with the world that, evidently, is quite a bit harder to put into words. All appearances will change, and are changing at this very moment. The square lake is like a great big mirror, reflecting its own appearance.

One night I stood with two friends beneath the plaque of Lingxiao Pavilion. We came bolting in seeking shelter from a sudden downpour, gathering in the hall, lighting up cigarettes. We chatted about boring things and subjects of no significance. Then, sluggishly, unwillingly, we returned to our respective, sealed rooms. Those everyday occurrences—the affairs of others, those within books—are at once remote, and yet again, intimate, familiar, just as if they’ll one day inevitably happen to oneself. And it is precisely because of this that speaking words of reason is useless. And since it is useless, speaking some more won’t hurt anybody. So, just like that, a night like this became inconsequential.

Beyond the eaves, the spring rains are still crashing down. Beneath the curtain of rain the earth is saturated through, vapours unfurling densely through the air. The sounds of vigorous growth come in thick and fast, and suddenly a silence falls among us. In the daytime, Lingxiao Pavilion is a tavern that serves meat and liquor. Yet at this moment the windows and doors are shut tight, with an overwhelming heaviness wrapped up inside. A friend leans against one of the tightly locked doors of the pavilion and it sways ever so slightly, finally settling to bear his weight. The light of the plaque shined down on his face from above, making him look like some statue out of a Rembrandt painting, enshrouded in a faint glimmer of golden light, all shadow, with degree and depth. The dark circles under his eyes were deepened, like the sleepless noble Ning Cai Chen, on that night soon decreed by fate to meet with Nie Xiao Qian. My other friend, being older, sat on the railing rather ill-fittingly, with an expression both solemn and magnanimous, his clothing all wrinkled. His grey-black silhouette, though hard to discern in the pale yellow glow of the lanterns, following his every move. On this night, he looks brand new, like a man that’s never been used by this world. Throughout the ages, countless encounters and gatherings have unfolded down the line of time. Zhang Dai sculled his way to the heart of the lake and came upon the Jinling folk, they shared three full cups, exchanged no contacts, and went their separate ways. Li She took a room one night in Jiujiang and was paid a visit in the small hours by the Bandits of the Green Wood. They talked with great pleasure, yet discussed no heavy subjects, no talk of life or death, the conversation afterwards forgotten in amongst the lakes and rivers. In Du Fu’s last year, he was reunited with Li Gui Nian while wandering through Changsha. It was late spring, petals falling like rain, and everything headed toward its end. These meetings happen again and again, reincarnating, one overlaying another, converging and contrasting one another’s essential colours, gradually growing motley, and finally becoming more the same and less different. In the garden of this rest stop, on the lakeside, and under the long corridors, countless momentary gatherings have taken the stage. Each ephemeral conversation is like dew under the eaves of the roof, ultimately heading separate ways. Within the linear extension of time, no encounter has ever defeated time, and in the end, in fact, all of them are captured by it. Only upon a certain peak—for example, the here and now—the night grows heavier, as if dawn is nowhere to be seen, and people are suspended in the midst of their journeys. They can’t help but throw off the inertia of habit—temporarily leaving the past, and at the same time having no time to run off into the future. “My lord should not say that he is foolish, for there are those just as foolish as my lord.” The parting words of the boatman still rang in his ears, even after the gathering had long passed. A simple, thoughtless encounter, the sleep-talk of madmen.

In The Baron in the Trees, Italo Calvino has the twelve year old Cosimo push aside the snail soup set before him and climb up a holm oak. In the remaining fifty-some years, Cosimo never again came down from the trees. He hung there, unable to touch the sky and unable to step back down upon the earth, spending all his remaining years finding food, raising dogs, reading books, sending letters, wrestling wild animals, even falling in love and participating in politics. Perhaps that feeling of living up in the trees is akin to that unreal sense of security in an airplane cabin. It’s at once like being firmly seated in any chair upon the ground, where gravity has not vanished at all, while at the same time, being pulled right up off the surface of the earth due to the plane’s resistance to gravity. This thing where beauty is on the verge of complete wholeness is indeed the same as that danger of incomparable reality high above the clouds, outside the porthole windows. 

When I was reading this book, there was a time I would return endlessly to the page where the boy takes to the trees, reading one particular sentence over and over again: “. . . we watched him, from the windows, climbing up the holm oak. He was dressed up in the most formal clothes and headdress, because our father insisted on his appearing at table this way in spite of his twelve years of age. . .” It was as if I wanted to pass through the following fifty years to come, looking back again and again to its fountainhead, and remember this pair of respectable feet peeling off the earth in indignation, forevermore remaining in that instant, suspended in midair. When Cosimo, in his old age, finally vanished over the ocean in his hot air balloon, his grave was marked with these few words: “Lived in trees—Always loved earth—Left into sky.”

There really is no fruit tree in the backyard of Shaoxing Hotel. But that’s not to say there is no tree. The words “tree” and “courtyard” are as inextricably linked as the heart and lungs. In reality, there’s a southern magnolia there. Summer isn’t the season its flowers open. There’s no way of seeing its bright giant flowers like white jade in full bloom. The dark green leaves blackening under the sun are not so heavy now. Even their edges are beginning to dry and yellow, dropping with a light thud upon the stone bench when nobody’s paying them any mind, dry as cut-out pieces of cardboard.

The midsummer afternoon, the magnolia, the light. I see but these three things. Mostly it’s the magnolia, but I don’t really care about this tree. It’s got nothing to do with me. When I speak of it, perhaps it’s no longer a magnolia, nor is it a loquat tree. Maybe it drops a few leaves, and then and there, it’s no longer the tree that had appeared in the last moment. What I care about is the mirror image of the tree, reflected in glass, the one carved in the heart. In that place, this tree expresses any tree. It expresses all things in the clouds.