Over the last month I’ve been drafting a short story, progressing, as I tend to do these days, very slowly. Most days I return have to force myself back to the coal face of writing. When I’m there I look around. I read back through the story, editing it. And then I get into flow, and add a paragraph or two, a few hundred words at most. At some point, just when I enter the world of the story, I break off. I pace the room. I used to be able to write more, to go on for hours. Now, if I break off, at the best I’ll make a few notes, breadcrumbs leading into a forest, or the outline, like prosthesis that extends outward from what I have written.
The story is about two old men who meet while working on the polls at the recent federal election, and how in stolen moments from their work they share their past hopes that the world might change, and their present fears. The story begins in early morning sunlight and ends late at night, as they walk home, with the Vancouver rain falling, scattering the cherry blossoms.
When writing, I began to have a sense of something I’d read before, very faint, more a mood than a location, like distant music or the scent of flowers borne on the wind. It grew stronger, and I could put a name to it. The association was with 冬夜, “Winter Night,” a story by Bai Xianyong, from the collection 台北人，or Taipei People. I was intrigued enough to check the collection out of the library, not the Chinese version, which I think is hidden somewhere in the depths of one of my bookcases, but the English translation by the author and Paris Yasin, which takes the title of one of the stories, Walking in the Garden, Waking in a Dream, as the collection title. Yet the English translations of the stories didn’t satisfy me, and I ended up finding a bilingual version, and moving back and forth between two languages.
The Chinese was quite easy to read, and I remembered how, in the late 1980s and early 1990s, during the two extended periods I spent in Taiwan, Bai Xianyong’s collection was very popular among those of us learning Chinese. It was perhaps the first — and sadly, given the way my life took me afterwards, one of the last — works of fiction that I read in its entirety in the Chinese language. I remember my tutor in Tainan in the early 1990s being puzzled by my interest in the text — why did all the foreigners in Taiwan studying Chinese seem to have a copy? Reading the stories again, I also wonder. They aren’t set in the 1980s or 1990s but earlier, in the fifties and sixties. From the late 1980s onwards, the pace of change in Taiwan had already almost made them historical curiosities. Famously, the central characters in the stories aren’t from Taipei at all; they are mainlanders living in an exile marked by ageing, loss, and the burden of memories that resurface in the present.
Perhaps the wistfulness and alienation in the stories somehow resonated with our own efforts to belong in a society where we were hyper visible. Thinking back to the first time I was in Taiwan, just before the death of Chiang Ching-kuo, Chiang Kai-shek’s son and successor as president, I realise that we were also conduits for the aspirations of young Taiwanese pushing against the limits on travel and knowledge imposed by Chiang’s regime. At a language school in Taipei, I taught a class of young women applying for positions as flight crew, one of the few chances to travel. In the casual conversational English classes I taught at Taiwan Normal University, my students had a more intellectual purpose: they wanted to work with me through American history books about China which gave them a much richer account of the complexities of twentieth century Chinese history than the books in Chinese available to them. I’d come from a year in China to Taiwan, and it was strange to move between parallel national histories that were not even in the most distant dialogue. Looking through postcards they sent me laster, before we lost touch, I wonder what became of them. They would be in their late fifties now, not much younger than I am.
Coming back to the collection, I was surprised that while I remembered the mood of the stories quite well, there were things that I had forgotten, or that perhaps had not impacted me at the time. The first was a persistent and deep-seated misogyny. Many of Bai’s protagonists are women, and so you could argue that he is simply reflecting and indeed implicitly critiquing the misogyny of a patriarchal society. Bai’s certainly often sympathetic, and at times empathetic, in the way he draws his women characters, but there also does seem to be a level at which misogyny is endorsed. Women protagonists often seem to be vain and obsessed with surfaces and appearance: their attempts to defy ageing are mobilised as metaphors for an attempt to cling onto a Mainland past. Women who appear in more peripheral roles are often Taiwanese, and are often stereotypically described: 阿春， awkwardly translated as “Spring Maid” in the bilingual version I’m using, in the story “Glory’s By Blossom Bridge,” for example. That said, I still find the stories quite beautiful, and exquisitely crafted.
The second thing that puzzled me was that while I remembered the mood of the stories well, I could only recall three of them in detail before re-reading. One, “A Sky Full of Bright, Twinking Stars” had impressed me because of its as then almost taboo subject matter: the lives of rent boys in Tapei’s New Park. A second, “Autumn Reveries,” I remembered because I had chosen it to teach in a course I’d taught at the National Institute of Education in the 1990s, looking to add an Asian story to a largely British and American co-taught introductory Literature course. I remembered in particular its use of symbolism: how the flowers cultivated in a garden also reflected the character of Madame Hua, the garden’s owner, and her struggle with ageing. Finally, there was “Winter Night.” Like the story I wrote, it used the weather — the falling rain and wind of a Taipei winter’s night — to mirror the internal state of the protagonist, Professor Yu Chin-lei. Yu is visited by a friend who, like him, participated in the demonstrations in Beijing at the outbreak of the May Fourth Movement. The friend, Wu Chu-kuo, initially seems to have been more successful, but both men, in vividly remembering past struggles and loves, now realise the mundanity of the present. This theme, of a recollected past, and a feeling of irrelevance in the present, was also present in the story I was writing.
My experience of writing and then reading had a curious counterpoint. I’ve been taking a wonderful online course with Thomas Meuser about different forms of life review. In it I encountered the notion of a “reminiscence bump”: how, in later life, our memories of adolescence and early adult life tend to dominate over earlier or later events. This was true across several narrative layers of my life and the texts that I was writing and reading. I’d first encountered 台北人 in my late twenties and early thirties, and the reminiscence bump explains why its mood stayed with me. Both Bai’s stories and my own story were also about reminiscence of youthful activism, and a sense, for their characters, of not quite fitting into the present. And I realised that it’s now been eight years since I left the National University of Singapore. It’s been a wonderfully reflective journey, and yet events aren’t imprinted on my memory in the way that my much shorter time in Taiwan –- six months, and then later, a single year -– is.
Just as I’ve finished reading and writing, I’ve encountered my annual struggles with my re-entry permit as a Singapore permanent resident. It’s not been renewed on time, and so, unless a miracle happens in the next two weeks, I’ll need to fly back to Singapore. Perhaps that’s something also to take from Bai Xiayong’s stories, and my own. When you’re younger, if things go well for you, you think that you have agency to transform the world. As you age, you no longer quite have that confidence: you shift, dodge, feel the weight of wind and rain, but still somehow try to make your way.