Shadows and Their Veins

“My Second Aunt, the Yidan and I”

Excerpt

Another evening of endless rain. I had finally finished teaching, … and was surprised to find that Yang Yin-mei — quiet, slender and graceful — had not left, and was standing there with an umbrella. She seemed to be waiting for someone, yet apart from me there was nobody else around. The rain was getting heavier, and I had no umbrella; I stood hesitating, not knowing what to do.

“Teacher, shall I walk you home?” Yin-mei murmured.

“But it isn’t on your way,” I said, “and besides…”

In those feudal times… young men and women did not dare to be alone together — let alone walk under the same umbrella.

“It doesn’t matter — if Teacher doesn’t find me dirty…” Yin-mei said, a little agitated. Her meaning was plain: she thought I shrank from her because she was a yidan, afraid of being looked down on. That stung me — and in any case I had always been a lawless sort.

“All right!” I stepped bravely under her umbrella. I caught a faint scent of jasmine, utterly unlike the smells of my mother, my second aunt and Miss Tsui-lien. My mother smelled of clean soap; my second aunt and Miss Tsui-lien smelled of the sandalwood of incense sticks; what Yin-mei gave off was the scent of youth, bewitching to the senses.

“Where are you from?” I asked. Just then our shoulders brushed, and my blood surged as if I had touched a live wire.

“Can’t you tell? I’m a Hakka from the north. I was sold to the prefectural city when I was thirteen.”

“Oh! You’re Hakka.” Only then did I understand why she had learned Japanese so quickly and spoke it so precisely, and why her Taiwanese was not very fluent.

“Do you miss your family?” I asked. She said nothing, but suddenly reached out with her free hand and held mine tightly, without a word… Tears poured down Yin-mei’s lovely face and mingled with the rain until her whole face was wet. I was full of regret: my cruel, careless question had pierced straight to where it hurt, and made her so sad.

Commentary

A teacher and pupil sharing one classroom can also be two people under one umbrella — with the greatest distance between them.

The “I” of the story seems to be the one who summons his courage and defies convention, but he is really an inexperienced youth. Precisely because he has seen so little of the world, he cannot yet truly grasp the other person’s background and suffering. And the boy’s second aunt, and Miss Tsui-lien who keeps her company — what were their inner lives really like? Standing outside the gate of the vegetarian hall, we can see the structure of the building and feel the atmosphere of history, but we do not know the origins and way of life of the vegetarian-hall faith, nor the many reasons behind each woman’s choice to live this way. Beyond the vegetarian halls, the role and background of the yidan also carry the constraints and particularities of their time.

Yet it is exactly this kept distance, this atmosphere and setting, that lets a half-comprehending youth lead us to sense the mysterious distance of women. The boy always leans toward women in expectation; he turns his not-understanding into a kind of resonance, and the curiosity that draws him forward into an effort of sympathy. Yeh Shih-tao’s women, too, reach a kind of sublimation — through this understanding and tolerance, and through the strength with which, in the end, they carry their real hardships themselves.

“Skin of Roses”

Excerpt

The funeral procession passed quickly; light glared off the side of the white wooden coffin and grazed my cheek.

A girl who had made a promise of love with me died before it could be kept. It was all very brief.

How much distance lies between the time I held Aoko, feverish at thirty-seven and a half degrees, and today, as I watch her funeral procession go by?

— The bad girl who defied her father is dead…

In the hearse that carried the maiden I sensed the scent of withered flowers; listening to the distant music of rose-colored skin and an upright spirit, I left the town.

White heat rose shimmering over the petals of the flame trees as I strolled through the old city. From within my stalled thoughts I heard the laughter of birds and smelled the flowers of dusk. Old-fashioned love is a skeleton that hardens with time. I whistled. And just then, once again, I heard the mournful funeral march!

— The song is sentimental…

I set summer on fire.

— Life is like spring!

In the wind of these ruins, Aoko’s words mingled tears with joy.

— Life is only the tiredness you feel in hibernation.

Those words of mine gave my heartless self the conditions for solitude. I looked at the distant scenery. In the misty sky, smoke drifted with the wind. Three white egrets rose and sank on the waves like afterimages.

Feeling slightly dizzy, I stood up.

Commentary

In this story Yang Chih-chang shows how he uses the synesthesia of matter: from the rose color of a girl’s skin, his words gradually carry us into one space of memory after another.

In the 1924 Manifesto of Surrealism, Breton stressed the importance of “not shrinking from conception.” He emphasized the process of conceiving and experimenting (the dream): when we accept without reservation a series of strange episodes, new connections and new forms of description can be born.

Even if the reality before us is not like this, even if there are all kinds of limits on what we can experience — some landscapes, for instance, have vanished, and some views before our eyes are not beautiful in the mainstream sense. Or again: what rises and falls with the geological uplift of modernity is the ruin of history. Can a faded modernity still be beautiful?

Every literary landscape is a sensory ruin that was once exposed to light. If so, is the procession escorting the dead not exactly those rays of light walking side by side before our eyes? And so, as we stroll along the route, we seem to be wrapped in a kind of hypnosis, half dreaming, half awake.