Lost in Lualand

meikuree

Why did his mind fly uneasily to that void, as if it were the sole reason why life was not thoroughly joyous to him? I suppose it is the way with all men and women who reach middle age without the clear perception that life never can be thoroughly joyous: under the vague dullness of the grey hours, dissatisfaction seeks a definite object, and finds it in the privation of an untried good.

The same uniform for twelve years. A white skirt, blue collar, blue belt, blue hem. A dark, no-nonsense kind of blue. White as snowfall in Eden. You washed it every single day, made sure you ate in small bites, always wore an extra pad so none of the blood could seep through. You began wearing that dress at the age of six, your skin haunted by the British flag, so you could be Chinese with English characteristics. Each time you wore it, you shut your body up. Some girls wore theirs short, discoloured, tight. Head Girl, you reported them to the Office of the Headmistress for inappropriate behaviour, kept your dress at just the right length. Most mornings you see the face of a boy in the mirror. You expect to fall in love with him. Meanwhile, your fingers brush the wrist of another girl as you jostle into the assembly hall, and you understand that sin was never meant to be easy, only sweet. What memory might light up the pond you sat beside in dreams, eyeing so much depth it would be years before you dared? What curvature of tongue might you taste, as if another’s breath were blessing? One night, you find yourself kneeling beside the pond. You dream. A voice says: Hell is not other people. You slip into the blue water, stripped of the glowing dress you wore for thousands of days.

An odourless room is not necessarily without trauma. We must interrogate the walls. My skin is yellow because it must. Love is kind because it must. Admit it, aloud.

queenlua

When I tried to think whom I spent time with before I became friendly with Sensei, no one came to mind.

I had been alone. I rode the bus alone, I walked around the city alone, I did my shopping alone, and I drank alone. And even when I was with Sensei now, I didn’t feel any different from when I did these things on my own. It seemed, then, that it didn’t really matter whether or not I was with Sensei, but the truth was, doing these things with him made me feel proper. “Proper” is perhaps a strange way to put it. It was more like the way I felt about leaving on the obi, the extra band that sometimes came with a dust jacket, after I had bought a book, rather than throwing it away. Sensei would probably be angry if he knew I was comparing him to the band on a dust jacket.

那么在与老师接近之前，又是和谁在一起的呢？我寻思着，却总也想不起来。

是独自一人。独自一人乘公共汽车，独自一人行走在街头，独自一人购物，独自一人喝酒。与老师一起的时候也与从前独来独往时一样，心绪毫无变化。既然如此，似乎不必非与老师在一起，然而，却觉得在一起的时候似乎更为正常。说正常，其实也挺奇妙。也许不妨说，这种心情就好像不把新买的书的腰封取下，而是存放起来。如果知道将他比作书籍的腰封，老师也许会发怒吧。

“什么巨人队，是他妈的浑蛋！”

我说着，将老师斟的酒一滴不剩地泼在空盘子里。

“浑蛋之类，哪里是妙龄女郎该说的话呢？”

老师用稳重镇定的声音回答。腰板比平素挺得更直，喝干了杯里的酒。

“什么妙龄女郎！我可不是。”

“那我可失礼了。”

“The Giants, they’re all fuckers,” I said, spilling the entire cup of saké that Sensei had poured me onto an empty plate.

“‘Fuckers’?! Such language from a young lady!” Sensei replied, having regained his perfect composure. He stood up even straighter than usual and drained his cup.

“I am not a young lady.”

“Pardon me.”

‘You were so right not to publish your plays, they were nothing, nothing, froth, but at least they didn’t pretend to be anything else. Now you’re offended, vanity, vanity. Yes, I hate the theatre.’ Perry meant the London West End theatre. ‘Lies, lies, almost all art is lies. Hell itself it turns to favour and to prettiness. Muck. Real suffering is – is – Christ, I’m drunk – it’s so – different. Oh Charles, if you could see my native city – And that spitting bitch – How can human beings live like that, how can they do it to each other? If we could only keep our mouths shut. Drama, tragedy, belong to the stage, not to life, that’s the trouble. It’s the soul that’s missing. All art disfigures life, misrepresents it, theatre most of all because it seems so like, you see real walking and talking people. God! How is it when you turn on the radio you can always tell if it’s an actor talking? It’s the vulgarity, the vulgarity, the theatre is the temple of vulgarity.

Hartley made a permanent metaphysical crisis of my life by refusing me for moral reasons. Did this lead me to make immorality my mask? Such pompous speculations are of course a kind of nonsense and I surprise myself by writing them down. What were Hartley’s ‘reasons’? I shall never know. It is possible that some demonic sense of a surrender of innocence entered into my affair with Clement, as if I were saying to Hartley: You did not trust me. Well, I will show you, now and forever after, how right you were! Perhaps all my love affairs have been vicious attempts to show Hartley that she was right after all. But she was only right because she left me.

What, then, is it in Cavafy’s poems that survives translation and excites? Something I can only call, most inadequately, a tone of voice, a personal speech. I have read translations of Cavafy made by many different hands, but every one of them was immediately recognizable as a poem by Cavafy; nobody else could possibly have written it. Reading any poem of his, I feel: “This reveals a person with a unique perspective on the world.”

You said: “I’ll go to another country, go to another shore,
find another city better than this one.
Whatever I try to do is fated to turn out wrong
and my heart lies buried like something dead.
How long can I let my mind moulder in this place?
Wherever I turn, wherever I look,
I see the black ruins of my life, here,
where I’ve spent so many years, wasted them, destroyed them totally.”

You won’t find a new country, won’t find another shore.
This city will always pursue you.
You’ll walk the same streets, grow old
in the same neighborhoods, turn gray in these same houses.
You’ll always end up in this city. Don’t hope for things elsewhere:
there’s no ship for you, there’s no road.
Now that you’ve wasted your life here, in this small corner,
you’ve destroyed it everywhere in the world.

I think these criticisms and the defenses of books that often follow can all be boiled down to a simple question: What is a feminist novel?

It’s an interesting question, but what I find more compelling are the books that sit at the center of this discourse because, in my experience, these books are typically authored by women. Men, I’ve noticed, are very noticeably absent from these discussions. Even when men write compelling narratives centering on women, stories that grapple with feminist themes, I notice that their books are very rarely examined with the same rigor.

I want to be clear: This is not the same as saying that men’s books aren’t deemed misogynistic. That’s not true at all. If you spend even a little time online in bookish spaces, you’ll find a number of novels authored by men that have been labeled sexist, reductive, or otherwise offensive. The Bechdel test is very often applied to the work of male writers to assess how “feminist” they are or are not. But, in my experience, the tone is different. It’s almost as though men are not expected to write feminist novels, so when they fall short of the label (even when they’re not intending to) the response is different, somehow muted. Their own shortcomings aren’t weighed against them as heavily in what seems to be a kind of shoulder-shrugging, “boys will be boys” response.

Gansey despised raising his voice (in his head, his mother said, People shout when they don’t have the vocabulary to whisper), but he heard it happening despite himself and so, with effort, he kept his voice even. “Not like this. At least you have a place to go. ‘End of the world’ … What is your problem, Adam? I mean, is there something about my place that’s too repugnant for you to imagine living there? Why is it that everything kind I do is pity to you? Everything is charity. Well, here it is: I’m sick of tiptoeing around your principles.”

“God, I’m sick of your condescension, Gansey,” Adam said. “Don’t try to make me feel stupid. Who whips out repugnant? Don’t pretend you’re not trying to make me feel stupid.”

“This is the way I talk. I’m sorry your father never taught you the meaning of repugnant. He was too busy smashing your head against the wall of your trailer while you apologized for being alive.”

The day Somebody McSomebody put a gun to my breast and called me a cat and threatened to shoot me was the same day the milkman died.