Dear Xiaoyu

Liu Jiming · Originally published in Shanghai Literature, no. 3, 1998; republished on the Red Song Society website, October 31, 2025

1

When we married, I took a photograph of my wife. She is wearing a white wedding gown and sitting at the dressing table, looking at her reflection in the mirror, coy and charming and lovely as an angel.

Since my wife died, it is this photograph that has played over and over in my mind. I often sit before the mirror in that photograph, dazed and listless, like a ghost with nowhere to rest. I feel that perhaps my wife has not really gone; she has only lost her way in the mirror for a while. Or, just as she used to love playing hide-and-seek with me, she has hidden herself inside the mirror, and one day, who knows, she may suddenly step out of it.

Borges often spoke of time in the same breath as mirrors, numbers, and labyrinths, and he had reason to. When I think back on the year and more of brief happiness my wife and I spent together, I must admit that there is some mysterious bond among them…

2

My wife was born in Shanghai, but she grew up in Xinjiang and Wuhan. In Xinjiang she went to school as far as the fifth grade on a farm near the Chinese-Russian border, at a place called Alashankou. At twelve she moved with her parents to Honggangcheng in Wuhan, where she finished primary school, junior high, and a technical secondary school, and later earned a junior-college diploma in journalism from Huazhong University of Science and Technology. When we met, she was twenty-three and already an accomplished editor and reporter at the Wuhan paper Young People.

I had only recently joined the magazine Yangtze River Literature and Art as an editor. Just a year before, I had come back to Wuhan after drifting around Hainan for a while. I had turned thirty, and then gone through an operation, neither major nor minor, that wore me out in body and spirit. As the pop songs like to put it, I truly felt I had seen the sea and nothing could move me again.

I remember that it was December 2, 1994. In the morning, Fan Bu, a reporter for Chutian Weekend, phoned to say that a reporter named Sun Yuan from Young People wanted to interview me. I did not know Fan well; we had met only once, not long before, at a “salon for cultural people,” and I had liked him. So I agreed, and waited at the editorial office. By one o’clock in the afternoon there was still no sign of anyone, and I was about to leave. Just then I heard the crisp, pleasant sound of high heels tapping on the floor outside. I went to the door and saw a small, blurred figure coming toward me from the far end of the dim corridor, drifting nearer like a cloud. The whole thing was very brief, and yet, like a slow-motion shot in a film, it seemed to go on forever. Only when she was right in front of me did I see a lovely face rise with startling clarity out of the gloomy light, like a full moon: serene, round, shy. With the faint hint of a smile at the corners of her mouth and in her eyes, it had a kind of radiance. She wore a pale blue skirt suit that seemed a little large for her slight, delicate frame, and with the quiet smile on her face, she seemed almost to float.

Later, Wu Yaoling, an older editor who shared my office, said to me after he had seen her: “Is that your girlfriend? She’s like a little fairy…”

And so she walked suddenly into my empty, desolate life, not as one of those professional reporters skilled at socializing and saying what they don’t mean, but as an innocent, intelligent girl.

That afternoon the office was closed, and in the end only the two of us were left. It was very quiet. In my experience nearly every reporter has the gift of the gab, but I could see that, like me, she was not much of a talker. She was a little stiff, like a student just out of school. She solemnly took out her notebook, but after quite a while she still had not written anything down.

At first our talk was all about literature. When it turned to my own work, I casually asked which of my stories she liked. I expected her, like most people, to mention “Toward Huang Village” or “The Village Under the Sea,” two stories that had been labeled “cultural concern” and were drawing a good deal of attention in literary circles at the time. But she hesitated and said she liked “June Canon” and “Aria from the Opera House.” Her answer surprised me. They were two early stories that neither the critics nor I myself thought much of. Intrigued, I asked her why she liked them. She hesitated again, then said that the two stories were beautiful; there was something melancholy, tender, and graceful in them…

I had to admit that her feeling was remarkably precise. What she described was indeed rare in my work, and she had caught it. Privately astonished, I began to see her in a new light.

Little by little our conversation opened up. As she later wrote in an article, we both found ourselves talking about Xinjiang, where she had lived and where I had once wandered. The Tianshan Mountains. The Gobi. The great desert. Camels. Nang bread. The Production and Construction Corps… The subject seemed at a stroke to break down the distance peculiar to a first meeting. My wandering in Xinjiang, in 1987, when I was just past twenty, was a secret chapter of my life, painful to look back on and yet one that profoundly shaped my fate. For years I had seldom spoken of it to anyone. Now I was talking about it without reserve to a reporter I had only just met. It left me deeply unsettled.

Before we knew it the afternoon was gone, and we both seemed to feel there was more to say. I walked her out of the Writers Association compound, and as we passed a stand of pines beside East Lake, I suggested we go in for a stroll. In the middle of the wood was a clearing where local residents had planted a good many vegetables, with something of the charm of the countryside. It was early winter. We sat facing each other on the ground among the yellowed grass, and I felt our eyes brush lightly across each other’s faces, like birds looking for a branch to settle on…

My heart gave a faint flutter.

Afterward we had dinner at a little restaurant next to the Hubei Daily and I walked her to the bus. By then it was dark, perhaps a little past eight, and the early-winter wind was already cold. I saw how thin her clothes were; her hands seemed red with cold. I asked if she was cold, and took her hand for a moment. Then the bus came, and I watched her climb aboard and watched the bus carry her away until it vanished, before I rode my bicycle slowly home.

That night I could not sleep. All night her image floated before me. Her every smile and frown, that gaze of hers without affectation or pretense, frank, serene, clear as water, seemed to light up at a stroke my gray and stifling life…

The next morning, as soon as I got to work, I dialed her number.

“Who is it?” came her childlike voice over the line.

“You… guess,” I said after a moment’s hesitation.

“No need to guess. I know who it is!” She seemed to smile knowingly.

Everything was so romantic and so lovely, like the opening of a classic love story. The whole thing seemed to move along to a simple, bright piece of light music, in tune with that old and ever-young phrase, “love at first sight,” so much so that I felt as if I were living inside a fiction, and something in it seemed unreal. I thought of what Tomas feels about Tereza in The Unbearable Lightness of Being: she was like a child someone had put in a basket and sent floating down the river to him!

On New Year’s Day, 1995, she sent me a card. On it was written:

“To know each other and love each other, forever”;

and also:

“I walked home alone. In the night, with a light snow falling, I smiled…”

In my long and lonely bachelor life, it was the first time I had been seized by a love so pure and so unreserved. And what mattered more was that I loved her just as unreservedly. For me it was a “perfection” I had never known. My literary career had truly begun in Shanghai, and now, having reached thirty, I had fallen in love with a girl born in Shanghai. Could that be mere coincidence? If there is such a thing as fate, I believed this was it. In an age awash with material desire, there were not many girls this good left, and now I had found one; I was blessed indeed. I thought: I will treasure her a hundredfold, I will love this girl well and repay her love with my whole life. I thought: I want to make her my wife.

In those days we were almost always together. For a long time I had been little more than a spectator of life, a loner wandering outside the crowd, with something of a tendency to shut myself away. Now that state was broken. Joy and sweetness began to pour into my life, and little by little I came to feel the warmth and fullness that come only from being among people. And all of it was because she had come into my life. Sometimes I thought she was like an angel sent by God, who had changed me without the least effort.

Was it her I should thank, or God?

In Shanghainese, the Yuan in Sun Yuan has three readings: yuan, yuan as in “round,” and yu, “fish.” She had once used “Xiaoyu,” “Little Fish,” as a pen name, and so I came to call her Xiaoyu.

Xiaoyu was born into a family steeped in the ways of ordinary city folk. She had been a bright child. She once showed me watercolors she had painted when she was only a few years old, full of wonderful fantasies, like the work of a small artist. After junior high she had wanted to go on to senior high school and university, but in the end her parents sent her to the Wuhan Iron and Steel technical school. Although she later completed the journalism course at Huazhong University of Science and Technology through self-study, this setback in her growing up left a shadow on her heart that never went away. I think her somewhat introverted, melancholy nature and her love of literature probably had something to do with it. And this was exactly where her intelligence and her freedom from the commonplace set her apart, in spirit and in taste, from her parents and even from her two younger sisters. She loved literature, not, like so many girls, to seem cultivated, but because something in her very bones was at one with it. Later I read some of the essays she had published in newspapers and magazines. They had a fresh simplicity and a soaring spirit, a quality transparent as crystal, far finer than the “little women’s essays” in fashion at the time! She also loved fashion design. She said her greatest dream was not to be a reporter or a painter but a fashion designer, and her favorite magazine was Shanghai Fashion…

She really was a special girl, I thought.

3

1995 was a happy year in Xiaoyu’s life and mine, a blessed year. 1995 was a river of love rippling with passion, happiness and joy brimming in its every wave and every splash. In 1995 we both became fish, swimming freely in that river, so happy we forgot to go home. 1995 was bound to leave an indelible mark on the life we shared.

I am not someone good at “talking about love.” I remember a television station once inviting me to talk on the subject of love, and I turned them down without a moment’s hesitation. But now, like a high-school boy, I want to sing the praises of love tirelessly: to sing of 1995, to sing of every minute and every second I spent with my dear Xiaoyu…

February 14 is Valentine’s Day.

Xiaoyu and I had arranged to meet that evening and spend together this holiday that was rather new to me. As it happened, that afternoon Yangtze River Literature and Art and Today’s Celebrities were holding a joint New Year party at the Prince Salon in Hankou. Today’s Celebrities had grown out of the literary series Yangtze, and, like Yangtze River Literature and Art, was published by the Hubei Writers Association.

The Prince Salon was a dining and entertainment spot with a character all its own, where Wuhan’s arts world often gathered; I even mentioned it in my story “June Canon.” The offices of Young People were in Hankou, not far away. So I phoned Xiaoyu and asked her to join our party. But it was a Friday, and they were rushing to get copy out. Xiaoyu said she was afraid she wouldn’t make it, but she would try; if she couldn’t, I should come and find her at the paper after the party. So all through the party I was waiting for Xiaoyu. I took no part in the festivities myself, my mind elsewhere, and had no heart to watch even the fine performances my colleagues put on. When it was over, there was still no sign of her.

On the bus back to Wuchang after the party, I got off halfway to go to her paper.

It was my first visit to Xiaoyu’s paper. I hired a “mumu”[1] and we wove through a jumble of narrow little streets for a good while before we found the offices of Young People at 74 Daxing Road. On the ground floor of an old, damp, dimly lit office building, I found Xiaoyu still busy editing copy for the “end-of-month edition.” She was the editor in charge of two pages, “Companions” and “Salon” (very nearly the two most distinctive and cultivated pages in the paper). Xiaoyu worked conscientiously. When she saw me she only greeted me briefly and went back to her work. I sat to one side leafing through the papers and waited for her. Only when she had finished what she had in hand did we walk out of the office together.

Evening was coming on, and the streets seemed busier than usual, all the way from Hankou to Wuchang. Couple after couple walked by hand in hand, most of the women holding a single rose or a bunch of roses so red they were almost purple. In the flower shops along the street, cassette players played over and over the song that had just come into fashion, “999 Roses.” Business was booming; to draw in customers, some shops had simply set out flowers of every color on the sidewalk. With Xiaoyu on my arm, walking among the crowds, I found myself caught up in the mood. This really is a lovers’ festival, I thought. I must buy my Xiaoyu some roses. But one rose, or a bunch? And how many make a bunch?

I had never given a girl flowers. Except when using language in my writing, I am clumsy at expressing feelings. This thorny question had me stumped.

“Just buy one,” said Xiaoyu. “One flower shows you’re true to me. More than one, and you’re a flirt!”

I thought she was right, so I bought one rose and gave it to her.

Xiaoyu and I had a simple and amusing supper at the Sunshine Fast Food restaurant at Jiedaokou in Wuchang. We wanted fast food only because we thought “Sunshine” was a lovely name. After we left the restaurant we bought a “lovers’ lamp” with two red glass shades from a street stall, and strolled on. We were not far from the Hubei Provincial Opera Company, where I had once worked; a little farther on was the famous Wuhan University. A few years earlier I had graduated from there and been assigned, almost at the university gate, to the Hubei Provincial Opera Company as a professional playwright. I remember that when my assignment came through, my classmate the poet Lang Mao teased me with a line from an ancient poem: “Out through the eastern gate, the girls are as many as clouds.”[2] He predicted, quite confidently, that I would marry an actress. His prediction plainly came to nothing. After several years of storm-tossed life, Xiaoyu had come to me like a fresh and perfect poem, and beside it all the poems I had written before lost their luster. For me, I thought, this was a poem beyond compare. I watched the couples of university students pouring out of the gate of Wuhan University onto the road like water through an opened sluice, every one of them wearing a happy smile, and Xiaoyu and I were swept, in spite of ourselves, into that river surging with life and passion, wearing the same happy smiles.

I saw it on her face, and she must have seen it on mine.

4

At the beginning of March I went to Shanghai and elsewhere to solicit manuscripts, and Xiaoyu took the chance to go to Shanghai to see her grandmother. It was our first trip together since we had fallen in love.

Our first stop was Nanjing. In Nanjing we went boating on Xuanwu Lake, visited the Sun Yat-sen Mausoleum, and were guests at the homes of Xu Zhaohuai, deputy editor of the magazine Zhongshan, and Zeng Liping, a fellow native of my hometown, Shishou. I had first met them both at a literary event in the mid-1980s. In the early summer of 1994, when Xu Zhaohuai came to Wuhan to solicit manuscripts, I had met him again; I had gone to the airport to collect him, so we were old acquaintances. Mr. Xu was a generous, sincere elder, and on this trip to Nanjing it was he who arranged all my meetings with the writers.

While soliciting work for my magazine, I did not forget to find some work for Xiaoyu, and suggested she interview a few writers and write some profiles for her paper when she got back. So in the gaps between my own appointments, she interviewed Ye Zhaoyan and Su Tong. I had even drawn up a list of questions for her beforehand, but in the end she did not follow my “outline” (which shows how she always had a mind of her own).

She interviewed Ye Zhaoyan at the Zhongshan office and Su Tong at his home. Su Tong was still living then in a rundown little Japanese-style building, and Xu Zhaohuai, Su Tong’s wife, and I were all present. Xiaoyu and Su Tong sat on either side of a square table. As she asked her questions she wrote steadily in her little notebook. Her voice was soft and slow, and at first it sounded a little nervous and unsure, but gradually it grew more fluent. By contrast, her subject, Su Tong, was much more at his ease. This popular novelist, about my age, spoke as nimbly and abundantly as he wrote, and when he grew excited his voice would rise without his noticing, giving an impression of great self-assurance.

Xiaoyu’s “interviews” were certainly a success. Back in Wuhan she wrote “Drawing Near to Su Tong” and “Ye Zhaoyan in the Sun.” From their titles to their contents they were essays, airy and thoroughly feminine.

Xiaoyu had been brought up by her grandmother as a little girl, and since she had not seen her for several years and missed her terribly, she wanted to spend a few more days with her and went on to Shanghai ahead of me. I had other writers to see, and stayed in Nanjing two more days. Because I was worried about Xiaoyu, who had gone ahead, I was a little distracted at my meetings with Han Dong, Lu Yang, Zhu Wen, Bi Feiyu, Wang Binbin, and the others. As soon as my business was done I caught the Nanjing–Shanghai train and hurried to Shanghai. On the bustling, teeming square outside Shanghai Station, when her small figure at last came into view, it was as if a stone had dropped from my heart…

The evening I arrived in Shanghai I spent at her grandmother’s home. Before we went in, following the Shanghai custom for visitors, Xiaoyu had me buy a white-cut chicken as a gift. Her grandmother lived on Hongzhen Old Street in Hongkou District, the kind of “shack district” the Shanghai writer Cheng Naishan wrote about, its alleys crammed with all kinds of little stalls, everything old and jumbled, as though a whole century lay between it and the rows of tower blocks nearby. Xiaoyu had been born here and lived here until she started primary school and went to Xinjiang, so it felt especially dear to me. Her grandmother was in her seventies, warm and kindly, about my mother’s age, but much sturdier. After their long separation, the two of them talked nonstop in Shanghainese in the cramped attic, and I understood not a word, as if they were speaking a foreign language.

After a night at her grandmother’s, on the second day, through an introduction from Shanghai Literature, I moved into the Rose Queen Hotel on Xianxia Road, run by the Sichuan poet Wei Zhiyuan. That noon, Zhou Jieren, executive editor of Shanghai Literature, Zhang Zhongguang, head of the editorial department, and Li Yanshu, who had edited my stories “Toward Huang Village,” “The Village Under the Sea,” and “Heavy Snow Tomorrow,” treated me to a hot-pot meal with a flavor all its own at the Rose Queen. I had made my start in the literary world through Shanghai Literature, and this fiery welcome seemed proof of the friendship already established between us. My only regret was that Xiaoyu was not there. During the meal I mentioned Xiaoyu to Big Sister Li, who was genuinely glad that I had such a girlfriend and urged me again and again to bring Xiaoyu to her home.

Because Xiaoyu’s leave was nearly over, our time in Shanghai was cut short. I had to fill every hour. In all that time, Xiaoyu and I went out only once, with her uncle, to stroll along the Bund and the night market on Nanjing Road. On a footbridge over a busy crossing on Nanjing Road we had our picture taken together. In the photo Xiaoyu nestles against me like a little bird, and behind us blaze the lights of the Nanjing Road shopping district. It is the only picture of the two of us from Shanghai. The rest of the time I was busy all day soliciting manuscripts and seldom kept Xiaoyu company. Besides, where I was staying was a long way from her grandmother’s (more than an hour, right across the city). Only on the day before we left Shanghai did Xiaoyu and I arrange to visit her aunt together in the afternoon.

That day I had also arranged to meet Mai Suiqi, an editor at Harvest. Mai had edited two of my novellas, in 1992 and 1993. He was a warm man who had followed my writing for years and sent me copies of the magazine, never stopping even when I had given up writing entirely in Hainan. Yet we had never had a chance to meet. This trip to Shanghai was a rare opportunity; not to see him would have been inexcusable.

That morning I went to 675 Julu Road. Probably no one who writes literature does not know the address, because the famous Harvest and Shanghai Literature both have their offices there, one on the second floor, one on the third; and their working days alternate: one works Mondays, Wednesdays, and Fridays, the other Tuesdays, Thursdays, and Saturdays. When you think of the important and distinct roles the two magazines have played in the development of contemporary Chinese literature, the arrangement seems almost symbolic.

At the office I met Mai Suiqi, whom I had known so long in spirit. Mai was not like most Shanghainese. He was short but full of energy, cheerful and lively. At that time, besides editing, he put most of his energy into developing Harvest’s “tertiary-sector” business, and he was very busy; that afternoon he had to go to Pudong on business.

At noon Mai Suiqi and the deputy editor, Ms. Xiao Yuanmin, took me to lunch at a small restaurant near the office. Xiao was a quiet, archetypal woman of letters, sparing with words, but her shrewdness and competence were obvious at a glance. Until then I had known only of Harvest’s deputy editor Li Xiaolin. Xiao Yuanmin had edited He Dun’s breakthrough novel Life Is No Crime, and that alone was enough to make me look on her with new respect. In fact, behind nearly every editor at a magazine like Harvest stands a long list of writers and works whose names ring in the ears of ordinary readers. A few days before I came to Shanghai, I had received a letter from He Dun, who said he had just come back from revising a manuscript in Shanghai (he added teasingly that Big Sister Li was always “tirelessly” bringing up my “cultural concern” with him). Only now, talking it over, did I learn that what He Dun had been revising was the novel We Are Like Sunflowers, which Harvest published soon afterward. Xiao Yuanmin had only just been made deputy editor, and her name was not yet on the masthead, and Mai Suiqi had not given her name when he introduced her, so I took her for Li Xiaolin, Ba Jin’s daughter. Only after we had talked for a while at the table did I realize my mistake. Luckily I am not much of a talker either, or there might have been a little misunderstanding.

Because I was thinking about going to Xiaoyu’s aunt’s that afternoon, I took my leave right after lunch.

I went back to the hotel and slept, and it was nearly five when Xiaoyu came. In those days cold air from Siberia had moved south, and the weather in Shanghai had suddenly turned cold. I was wearing two woolen sweaters and still felt cold; Xiaoyu wore only one and seemed unbothered, though I could see the tip of her nose had turned a little blue. Like many girls her age, Xiaoyu would rather suffer a little cold than lose her slim figure.

Her aunt lived not far from my hotel, just two streets away, so we did not take a car but walked, which gave us a chance to look at the streets along the way.

The area around Xianxia Road is near the edge of the city, not far from Hongqiao Airport, a new district of Shanghai that was growing fast. The streets were clean and wide, with none of the crowded jumble of the old city. High-rises, just finished or still under construction, shot up into the clouds. Xiaoyu said that a little over ten years earlier this had all been bleak, run-down countryside; she had never imagined Shanghai would grow so fast. Walking around alone these last few days, she had not recognized many places and had nearly gotten lost. She had been to a few places, and was plainly astonished at how her birthplace was changing day by day; that was perhaps the greatest thing she took away from this trip. As for me, I was in such a rush that Shanghai stayed in my mind like a quick sketch, rough and spare, and even now I cannot give a complete impression of it.

Night was falling. The lights came on in their splendor, turning the nearby streets and the distant towers into great sculpted clusters of diamonds, all gold and jade. Arm in arm, Xiaoyu and I strolled along the empty street, chatting about this and that, making our way slowly to her aunt’s. As we drew near, I suddenly told Xiaoyu how Big Sister Li had urged me again and again to bring her home to visit, and how, since we were going back to Wuhan tomorrow, I felt a little sorry.

“Teacher Li is such a good person, caring so much about you,” Xiaoyu said. “Next time. We’ll just have to wait for next time…”

Who could have known that the next time we came to Shanghai, it would be for her treatment?

The next day we hurried back to Wuhan by train.

5

Not long after we got back from Shanghai, Yangtze River Literature and Art began planning a writers’ gathering in the Three Gorges, and meant to invite some well-known writers. Each editor was given a quota. The names I put forward included Zhang Chengzhi, Zhang Wei, Han Shaogong, and Li Jiefei. Zhang Chengzhi and Han Shaogong could not come, but Zhang Wei and Li Jiefei both arrived as planned. It was at that gathering that Zhang Wei and I formed a sincere friendship.

The moment we got back to Wuhan after the gathering, I phoned Xiaoyu. I had not seen her for a whole week, and it felt like a year; I could hardly wait to see her. We were giving a farewell banquet for the writers at the Hubei News Hotel, and I asked Xiaoyu to come. Traffic held her up, and she was late. With the banquet about to start and still no sign of her, I went out to look, and I had gone only a little way from the hotel door when I saw her. She was wearing a black jacket and clutching the little beige oval leather bag I had bought her in Shanghai, as if afraid someone might snatch it from her hand, and gazing, with a childlike look, at the dazzling array of shops along the street. Full of tenderness, I stood to one side and watched her for a long while, until she looked up, almost upon me, and suddenly saw me and jumped.

By the time Xiaoyu and I walked into the dining room together, the banquet had begun. I introduced Xiaoyu to Zhang Wei, who sat at our table. He stood up at once and clinked glasses with her, his eyes moving back and forth between our faces, and said to me with a smile: “Jiming, when do we drink at your wedding? Don’t forget to tell me!”

Zhang Wei is a deeply sincere man. We stayed in close touch afterward. Once, on the phone, he asked me again, like an elder brother, when I was getting married, and warmly invited Xiaoyu and me to visit his “vineyard”…[3]

Summer came.

“Summer is the season when plants grow, burning, spreading, rising…” That is a line from my long poem “Elegy,” written later. Back then we took it for granted that summer was the loveliest season (perhaps in the eyes of every pair of lovers deep in love, summer is always lovely). In late July, just before the real heat set in, Xiaoyu and I planned a short trip.

We chose the summer resort of Mount Lu.

In those days the temperature in Wuhan kept climbing, and more and more people were leaving to escape the heat. We went to book boat tickets a day early and still could not get berths, so, with two “deck tickets” in hand, we hurried aboard the nine o’clock night steamer from Wuhan to Jiujiang. The ship was already packed far beyond capacity. The cabins, the gangways, the decks were jammed solid with people, who had laid out straw mats, rented or brought from home, wherever they could find a gap, and lay down on the spot. The air was thick with the smell of sweat and rotting food.

Xiaoyu and I rented two straw mats too, and at last found a spot at the stern. When we had finally “settled in,” Xiaoyu looked around at the passengers lying side by side on the after deck like sardines, then at the two crumpled tickets in her hand, and said: “So this is what ‘deck berth’ means. I thought…”

Seeing her pout, with the look of someone who had been cheated, I could not help laughing. When we boarded that day, Xiaoyu was wearing a dress of printed cotton with a small floral pattern and a little sunflower tied at her neck. She looked fresh and pretty, and utterly lovable.

The next morning the ship reached Jiujiang. I got up off the mat and looked at Xiaoyu. Her face and body were covered with black specks, as if she had put on stage makeup. I was about to tell her when she pointed at my face first and cried: “Oh! What’s that on your face?…”

I froze, put a hand to my face, and it came away black. It was coal ash from the funnel at the stern. Looking around, I saw that every passenger’s face was the same, as if there had been a fall of black snow. Xiaoyu and I gazed at each other for a moment as if into a mirror, and could not help laughing.

We spent nearly a week on Mount Lu, just missing the worst of the Wuhan heat. The souvenirs we brought back from the mountain were a set of quaint, elegant wooden tableware and a computer portrait made from a photograph of us in front of the site of the Lushan Conference.[4] In it, Xiaoyu leans over my shoulder from behind, her arms around my neck, her face rippling with a sweet and radiant smile. In the upper left corner of the picture is printed a line:

“Deep love and true, through long years flowing.”

When we came down from the mountain and boarded the steamer back to Wuhan at Jiujiang, we had just enough money left to buy a roast chicken.

After we got back from Mount Lu, Xiaoyu and I began to think about getting married.

At the time, I had not yet been formally transferred to the provincial Writers Association, and I was living in an office that Yangtze River Literature and Art had cleared out for me. On holidays and in the evenings the main door of the office building was locked, which made it very awkward to come and go; it was plainly no place to set up house. So I meant to rent somewhere for the time being. In those days Xiaoyu and I often went searching through the residential areas around Dongting and Xudong Village for a place we liked. Once we very nearly came to terms with a landlord. The flat was right by Xudong Road and the Second Yangtze River Bridge, convenient for both of us to get to work, and it was a good flat and cheap: two bedrooms and a sitting room for just over a hundred yuan a month. Its only drawback was that it was rather bare, and the landlord had even promised to do it up before we moved in. But at the last moment Xiaoyu hesitated. The reason was that her parents were soon to take early retirement and go to Guangdong to live with her two younger sisters.

“The flat at home is so big, and it’ll be empty anyway,” Xiaoyu said. She meant that rather than rent a place, we might as well live in her family’s flat. She said this was what her parents wanted too.

Xiaoyu’s family lived in Ganghua New Village in Qingshan District. From Wuchang, where I worked, and Hankou, where she worked, it was almost like another city; a round trip took at least two or three hours. But compared with renting, it was certainly much more convenient. After going back and forth on it, we gave up the idea of renting and decided to live in her family’s flat.

In mid-August, Xiaoyu and I bought a set of furniture at the Peace Furniture World not far from Ganghua New Village. Compared with the expensive rosewood furniture, it was much cheaper and simpler, but we both loved its natural, unpretentious orange-yellow, so close to the color of living wood, while the furniture that looked grand and splendid made us both uneasy. On this point our tastes were astonishingly alike.

Our wedding preparations were simple and quick. I had bought the refrigerator, the air conditioner, and a small color television when I came back from Hainan in 1994. We did not plan to redecorate the flat. Everything seemed plainly “temporary.” But that did not mean Xiaoyu and I were in any way casual about our marriage. On the contrary, it showed that, like two athletes on the starting line, we were full of tender, lingering, long-lasting hopes and imaginings about the marriage that was about to begin.

In those days Xiaoyu was like a bird carrying twigs to build its nest. Every day after work she would bring home a few things: a bedspread, pillowcases, a tea set. With the particular care and patience of a girl about to be a bride, she sketched out bit by bit the ideal shape of our future home. I am careless about the practical side of life, but every time I saw Xiaoyu pull some little trinket out of her bag like a conjuror and say to me, half showing off, “Look what I’ve brought!”, that childlike absorption of hers moved me. I could not help being caught up in it, and my heart slowly filled with a tenderness I had never known. Only after we married did I understand that this “tenderness” is the feeling peculiar to a man about to become a “husband.”

August 29 was Xiaoyu’s twenty-fourth birthday. By then her parents had already gone to Guangdong. On the day she saw them off, Xiaoyu stayed home alone, and when I came in after work she threw herself into my arms, the tears rolling from her eyes like pearls from a broken string. I knew that this was the first time in her life she had been far from her parents, and she must have felt a loss and a sorrow hard to bear.

“Fish, don’t cry. Aren’t I here with you?…” I held her, stroking her hair gently as I spoke, and at last she smiled through her tears and grew calm.

On the evening of her birthday, we had a delicious dinner at a tastefully decorated restaurant on Industrial Avenue with a lovely name, the Wutong Tree Restaurant, and then went to a film. By the time the film let out it was late at night. With Xiaoyu on my arm I walked through the residential streets, their midnight lights burning low, and climbed to the fifth floor of Entrance 63, Block 111. I opened the door and we walked into the empty flat that now belonged to us, as if stepping onto a brilliantly lit stage, where Xiaoyu and I were two characters in a joyful comedy, happy and envied.

Who could have imagined then that happiness was only a brief prologue, and that the fate that followed would make us the leading players in a tragedy?

[Photo: Xiaoyu with her mother. Taken by Liu Jiming at East Lake, Wuhan, spring 1996]

6

We planned to marry at the end of September.

As the day drew near, Xiaoyu and I began to work out the details: whether to hold a ceremony, a banquet, wedding photos, the formalities for the marriage certificate, and so on. I have been something of a loner since childhood and dislike fuss; I have always loathed weddings that mobilize crowds and spare no expense. I have always believed that marriage is a matter between two people, whose happiness and sweetness only the two of them can know. There is really no need to throw a great banquet and trouble others (who in fact cannot truly share in it). To my mind, the false, performative quality of a grand wedding turns bride and groom into affected, clumsy actors, destroying the solemnity and sincerity the rite of marriage ought to have, and making it a little ridiculous. Besides, neither of our families lived in Wuhan, so a simple, plain wedding was the natural choice for Xiaoyu and me. At first we thought of inviting a few friends from both sides to a meal, but however we counted on our fingers, we could not settle who to invite and who to leave out, and in the end we dropped the idea.

My ideal wedding was one held on a journey, with no best man or bridesmaid and no crowd of onlookers, with only the mountains and rivers of nature and the years flowing beneath blue sky and white clouds to bear witness for my love and me. I wanted our wedding to take place on a journey to my hometown of Shishou and to Guangdong, where Xiaoyu’s parents lived. In the end, though, we decided to take part in a group wedding jointly organized by Young People and Hubei Television. This was the result of Xiaoyu’s repeated insistence. Given my habits, I had no interest whatever in a so-called “television wedding.” I have little enthusiasm for mass culture, and I am especially uncomfortable appearing on television. I admit this shows that my tastes in life and art, as a man of letters, are too narrow. Xiaoyu was different. Like many girls who love life, she loved fashionable and beautiful things (the two pages she edited were called “Fashion” and “Salon”). She loved McDonald’s and buffets, clothes and karaoke. Yet amid all the clamor she kept a rare innocence and simplicity, and this was exactly what set Xiaoyu apart.

The “television wedding” was held at seven in the evening on September 29. Almost the whole afternoon Xiaoyu spent making herself up and trying on the rented wedding gown, so busy that her face was flushed and tiny beads of sweat glistened on the tip of her nose. Since we lived a long way off, we set out for the television station a little after five.

We waited at the roadside for a taxi. As luck would have it, we stopped several taxis in a row, and every driver said he was about to change shifts and didn’t want to go so far. Xiaoyu, in her white wedding gown, was so afraid of being late that she kept waving at every passing taxi, like a beautiful little swan, and many passersby turned to look at her; she drew every eye. It was nearly dusk. The sky, the road, and everything in the world were darkening fast; only Xiaoyu, like a fairy come down from heaven, grew brighter and brighter in my eyes (and perhaps in the eyes of the passersby too?). Xiaoyu was plainly aware of the people looking at her. Blushing all over, she lifted the winglike hem of her skirt, afraid of dirtying the gown, and ran along the roadside on tiptoe, calling: “Taxi! Taxi!” Her voice was clear and sweet. Today I can no longer recall many of the details of the television wedding that evening. But the way Xiaoyu looked and moved as we waited for a taxi by the roadside, and her eager, tender voice calling “Taxi!”, remain vivid before my eyes and in my ears, never fading, like a videotape and a golden record turning in the depths of my memory. So long as they turn, Xiaoyu has not left me. They are bound up with my whole life, and unless the wheel of my life stops turning, they will go on turning forever, until the end of the world.

I remember that when we came home after the television wedding, at the foot of the stairs I picked up Xiaoyu, my beautiful, lovely bride, and carried her step by step from the first floor to the fifth. When I crossed the threshold and set her down, Xiaoyu gave a happy sigh, and the eyes she had kept closed opened. But her arms were still around my neck, and she gazed at me without blinking, with a look more full of love, more soul-stirring, than any in the world. I heard her murmur to me:

“Now you are my husband…”

I looked at her and murmured too:

“Now you are my wife…”

I believe this was the most moving moment of my life.

7

When I think back on Xiaoyu’s and my brief married life, the first thing I see is a string of wind chimes. We bought it when we married, and afterward it always hung at the bedroom door. It was made of five oval pieces of ochre-red pottery, plain and elegant and quite heavy. When the wind blew or someone brushed against it, the chimes gave out a string of tinkling notes. They did not sound clear and ringing like glass chimes, but deep and low like an organ, gentle and sweet, with a charm all their own. Sometimes, passing the door, Xiaoyu would mischievously stand on tiptoe and touch them with her head or her hand, and the sound of the chimes would spread through the quiet room. It was the most beautiful music I have ever heard in this world. And that string of ochre-red chimes, like an antique harp, accompanied Xiaoyu and me on the journey of our marriage, a faithful witness to our happiness.

Now, whenever I close my eyes, I can always hear that low, sweet sound of the chimes. Sometimes in broad daylight, sometimes in the dead silence of the night, it wakes me from the endless dark of sleep. Xiaoyu’s lovely face flashes through my half-dreaming mind and is gone in an instant, leaving a trail of damp tears on my pillow, like notes the wind chimes let fall…

“Xiaoming, Xiaoming…” I seem to hear Xiaoyu calling softly at my ear. After we married she always called me that. Her hair brushes my cheek, tickling like a crawling insect, but I don’t want to open my eyes; I know it is not an insect. Xiaoyu often played tricks on me while I napped. Sometimes she tickled my face and nose with a blade of grass; sometimes she tied my hair into a little pigtail with a rubber band and painted my forehead or cheeks with her lipstick, and when I woke she would hold a mirror up to me so I could admire my “noble countenance,” as if she had finished a masterpiece, clapping her hands and laughing triumphantly and calling me “Nezha” or “Little Non-Human.” Like a naughty child, she was forever giving me nicknames of every kind. Living with Xiaoyu, I felt time had turned back. Sometimes I thought: how gracious God has been to me, to send me a wife like a sprite. How can I ever thank Him enough?

Su Tong once wrote two little-noticed stories, “The Married Man Yang Bo” and “A Guide to Divorce,” both with a hero named Yang Bo. I had even written a review of the second. What Su Tong reveals in these stories is the negative side of married life: the way the trivia of daily life wear down a person’s spirit and free nature. I am not Su Tong’s petty intellectual Yang Bo, though I may well share some of his nervous quirks. But in my married life with Xiaoyu, what I felt far more was sunshine and warmth, sweetness and tenderness, youth and joy. If before I had more or less accepted the view that “marriage is the grave of love,” now I would gladly revise my understanding of marriage: marriage is the tenderest part of love, and of a whole human life.

For a long time I had lived an unsettled, drifting life. The writer Liu Fudao once wrote an article about me titled “Liu Jiming: Mr. Gypsy.” But after Xiaoyu and I married, like most people I too had a home of my own. I knew a new stage of my life had begun.

I was no longer the stubbly, unkempt, incurably lazy bachelor. I began to taste the peculiar flavor of being a husband, and the true meaning of the word “home.” The difference between a married man with a home and a single man is like that between the clouds and the mud. For a man, “home” and “wife” truly are what some poem calls them, “the harbor of the heart.” It means that on Sundays and holidays you no longer have to go from door to door “cadging meals.” After work, like most people, you hurry off to catch the bus home, and even, passing the market, pick up some oil, salt, sauce, and vegetables on the way, like someone who really keeps house. And when you get home, if your wife is not back yet, the flat feels empty and so does your heart, and you can’t help phoning her work to ask if she has left yet. If your wife has to come home late, you may spend the whole evening restless and distracted, worrying about her…

Although we both had a long way to go to work, Xiaoyu and I, one an editor at a literary magazine and the other a newspaper reporter, had freelance-style jobs and did not have to sit in an office every day, so we spent more time at home than most couples. In the days after our wedding, apart from work, we seldom went out. Not only did we give up ordinary socializing, we almost stopped seeing even the close friends each of us had had before. Even going to work, we sometimes went together. Xiaoyu’s paper, Young People, was printed at the Hubei Daily printing works next door to Yangtze River Literature and Art, and every week she had to go there to check proofs. On those days, when I went to work, we would take the bus together; when Xiaoyu had finished her work, we would have lunch at the Writers Association canteen and go home together. At a literary gathering I once ran into Xiao Su, who swayed his plump body over to shake my hand and said with his usual humor: “Long time no see. Don’t go ‘forgetting your friends once you’ve got a wife’!” In fact, it really had been a long time. Xiao Su and his wife, Liu Yong, were warm and friendly to everyone. Before I married, when I was living at the opera company, I was quite near Central China Normal University, where he worked, and I went to his home to “cadge a meal” almost every week. Before the wedding I had even taken Xiaoyu there once, but after we married we did seldom see each other.

“Home” became Xiaoyu’s and my Garden of Eden, cutting us off almost entirely from the noise and bustle of life. In those newlywed days, our only visitor was the critic Dr. Chang Qie. It was November. He had heard I was married and came especially to congratulate us. Chang Qie is a scholar full of bookish idealism and very much his own man, one of the very few literary friends with whom I could exchange views on literature in depth. We often argued over some point until we were red in the face, but it never affected our friendship. He had written a perceptive critique of my work, published in the July 1995 issue of Shanghai Literature. I remember that Chang Qie changed buses several times to come from Wuhan University to our newlywed home, and when I saw his tall, thin figure appear at the door, I was a little moved. His “wedding gift” to Xiaoyu and me was two books, one of them Agnes Heller’s Everyday Life, and a fine photo album.

It was the only wedding gift we received from a literary friend. As the saying goes, the gift is light but the feeling is deep, and all the more so given in so personal a way! Xiaoyu and I both treasured it, and later Xiaoyu used Chang Qie’s album to keep the photographs of the two of us. That day, too, for the first time, Xiaoyu cooked a delicious home meal as mistress of the house, to welcome the first guest of our married life…

8

That marriage could make life so warm and lovely for Xiaoyu and me was something I had truly never expected. In those days after our wedding in 1995, I became almost a different man, inside and out. Xiaoyu bought me an electric razor, and little by little I fell into the habit of getting my hair cut and shaving regularly. My back no longer hunched all the time, either: whenever Xiaoyu and I went for a walk or out together, she would give my back a pat and remind me, the way a grown-up reminds a child: “Straighten your back!…” It always brought to mind a line spoken by the hero of Wang Meng’s story “Kite Streamers,” which I had read many years before: “Turn up your coat collar!”[5] I dressed far more neatly than before as well. Once, when I went to the poet Zhang Zhihao’s home wearing a black leather jacket Xiaoyu had bought me, his wife said: “Reading your work, I thought you must always be scruffy. I never imagined you’d turn out to be so dashing…”

It was the first time I had ever heard anyone call me “dashing.” I was taken aback, and I thought: Xiaoyu really has made me over, a new man from head to toe.

My writing went exceptionally well in that period too. In less than half a year I wrote several novellas one after another, and I was fairly pleased with them. Each time I finished one, I gave it to Xiaoyu to read. Her instinct was extraordinarily sure; she would often put her finger on a work’s strengths or flaws in a single sentence. I remember that when I was two-thirds of the way through the novella Salvation, I got stuck. Xiaoyu read it and went straight to the heart of what was wrong. I took her advice in full, and only then was I able to finish it. Xiaoyu had real ideas of her own about literature, which plainly had to do with her lifelong love of writing. For a while, probably under my influence, she was itching to write fiction herself, and she planned an “A Zi series.” In a little black notebook she had already written down the titles: “A Zi in Spring,” “A Zi in Summer,” “A Zi in Autumn”…

Xiaoyu loved Can Xue’s fiction and often spoke to me of the story “Amei’s Sorrowful Thoughts on a Sunny Day.”[6] In the winter of 1995 she finished a short story, “Christmas Eve at the Dream Theater.” When I read it, I thought that, apart from some technical flaws, it was a good story; what impressed me most was the lingering, melancholy mood that suffused it. I asked her to revise it, but at the time she was so taken with her “A Zi series” that she kept putting it off. In the second half of 1996, after Xiaoyu fell ill, I remembered that story, dug it out, and showed it to a senior editor at Yangtze River Literature and Art. She too thought it good, and even said it had something of Kawabata Yasunari’s manner. By then Xiaoyu was already very ill. Mr. Wang Yang, the editor-in-chief of Yangtze River Literature and Art, approved it for publication at once, hoping it would lift the spirits of the sick girl. That was exactly my wish too. When I told Xiaoyu the news, a faint, serene smile appeared on her face, pale and wasted by illness. I believe there was gratification in that smile, and also a sorrow and regret that went to the bone. When the story came out, as fast as it possibly could, in the March 1997 issue of Yangtze River Literature and Art, and I put the magazine in her hand, Xiaoyu could only read out the title of her own work in a faint voice: “…Christ…mas…Eve…”

Not only about literature, but about many things, Xiaoyu had independent views of her own. We talked things over constantly. Sometimes each of us stuck to our own side and we argued until we were red in the face, neither able to persuade the other, and in the end we always just let it drop. Not long ago I read an essay by Han Dong in Tianya called “Conversation in Love,” and it struck me deeply. Thinking back now, conversation held a special place in Xiaoyu’s and my love and married life; it was the secret of why our feeling for each other grew deeper by the day.

At the end of 1996, when the cancer in Xiaoyu’s lungs had spread to her bone marrow, she was paralyzed, lying in a hospital bed, needing others to tend her in every daily need. By then neither Chinese nor Western medicine had any power to turn back her illness. But Xiaoyu’s parents and I would not give up, and through a friend we brought in a qigong master to treat her.[7] For a couple of days her pain eased a little. I sat talking with her, and when we touched on some question about literature, Xiaoyu was drawn, without knowing it, into an argument. She seemed to forget her illness; her eyes grew bright and alive, like a healthy person’s, and her hand waved and chopped the way it used to when we debated. And I forgot her illness too, and argued with her in earnest. How I hoped then that, as the qigong master said, it really was a sign that her illness was about to take a miraculous turn for the better…

For Xiaoyu and me, everything had only just begun. We had not yet fully grown into our roles in the family; it was as if we were still courting. When introducing each other to others, we did not even know whether to say “my spouse,” or “my husband” and “my wife.” Like every newly married couple, we were troubled as a matter of course by the trivia of marriage and home. For a while we even felt some nostalgia for the free, unfettered life of the unmarried. I think that, in our hearts, Xiaoyu and I were still in a stage of transition into married life. Neither of us yet knew how to be a husband or a wife. In fact, in her heart Xiaoyu was still the same simple, dreamy girl as before. She once wrote an essay, “Let Time Stand Still Before I Wed,” steeped in that faint, lingering, lovely wistfulness that was all her own. As for me, a man of letters who had long lived a drifting life, the solitude and metaphysical melancholy I seemed to have been born with could still wrap themselves around me at certain moments. I think that if Heaven had given my Xiaoyu and me time, I would have made a better husband…

Yes, everything depended on time. Time is a generous designer; following the logic of life itself, he would have shaped us into what life required us to be.

But who could have foreseen that time is also a pitiless killer, and would be so stingy and so cruel to Xiaoyu and me?

From the day we met to the day we married was less than nine months; from our marriage to the day Xiaoyu fell ill and went into hospital was again only nine months. In May 1996 we brought home a 486 computer. Xiaoyu stuck the pinyin codes onto the keyboard with clear tape and practiced typing at home whenever she had a moment. I remember that the first essay she typed on it was called “The First Dream.” In those weeks Xiaoyu coughed every night and could not sleep well. She went to the hospital twice for tests, and they found nothing. I was deep in a novel then and in a daze, and since Xiaoyu had had bronchitis before and was prone to colds and coughs every spring and summer, I did not pay it much attention. Some time later, one day at work, a woman editor in our office said to me: “I saw your Sun Yuan the other day. Why is she so thin? Is she expecting?”

Only then did I grow alarmed.

On June 26, before setting off for the “Puqi Writers’ Gathering” jointly organized by Yangtze River Literature and Art and Contemporary Writers,[8] I urged Xiaoyu again and again to go back to the hospital for another examination. On the evening of June 27 I phoned home, and Xiaoyu said the result was pleurisy. Early the next morning I left the gathering partway through and hurried home. The moment Xiaoyu saw me, her tears poured out, and she leaned against me and wept in my arms. Patting her shoulder, I comforted her: “Fish, don’t be afraid. I’ve asked around, and they say pleurisy can be cured in ten days or a fortnight…”

That same day I took Xiaoyu to the hospital. We both thought she would be out again soon. Before leaving, Xiaoyu packed only a towel, a toothbrush, and a few simple clothes, as if it were no different from the trip not long before, on May Fourth Youth Day, when she had gone with her paper’s staff outing to Lushui Lake, not far from Wuhan…

On the day Xiaoyu went to Lushui Lake, I came home from work and found notes she had written and drawn all over the flat.

The one on the dining table said: “Xiaoming, eat pineapple, eat lots and lots!” (with a pineapple drawn on it)

The one on the desk said: “Xiaoming, write well, and make progress every day. Here you are” (with a steaming cup of coffee drawn on it) “drink up!”

The one in the kitchen said: “Xiaoming, don’t put too much salt in when you cook, and wash the dishes properly, you dirty baby, little non-human, big nose, big mouth, little mustache” (with a drawing of my face).

So lovable a Xiaoyu: God could only have showered twice the grace on her. How could He bear to harm her?

Yet even in my dreams I never foresaw that only a little over a month later Xiaoyu would be in hospital, and a little over a month after that she would be diagnosed with lung cancer… On that black, catastrophic morning, when I collected the lab report from the pathology department and saw the words “squamous carcinoma cells…” written on it, I could not believe my eyes. My whole body went limp and I nearly fell to the floor. I phoned Xiaoyu’s mother to tell her the terrible news, and the moment I opened my mouth I broke down sobbing by the phone. Faced with that brutal result, even the hospital did not want to believe it. Afterward I took the report and the glass slides from Xiaoyu’s bronchoscopy to the leading specialists for a second opinion, first at Hubei Medical University in Wuhan, then at the cancer hospital in Shanghai. I held those two deadly things in my hands as if I held Xiaoyu’s whole life, murmuring over and over to myself: let the result be wrong. But each review ruthlessly crushed my hope. I felt as though I had been drawn into a great whirlpool and was sinking deeper and deeper…

In the days that followed, I went with her from place to place, to Shanghai, Hangzhou, Guangzhou, and Huizhou, where her parents lived, in search of treatment and rest. The pain and despair, the grief and torment we went through along the way are beyond counting, and I truly lack the courage to set down in words how, step by step, Xiaoyu was devoured by her disease. Nothing in the world is crueler than watching the one you love torn from your arms by death, while you can do nothing but shed tears. You cannot take on the pain she is bearing, still less bear in her place the ravages of death. This is where life, appearing in the form of the individual, is utterly fragile.

On August 29, Xiaoyu spent her twenty-fifth birthday in the hospital in Shanghai. We were still keeping the truth of her illness from her, but on her birthday, faced with her worsening condition, Xiaoyu could not help shedding sad tears. In the morning I went to a florist and bought her a bunch of bright roses; in the afternoon we went out together for McDonald’s (she had always loved McDonald’s), and only then did her spirits lift a little…

In late September, after a course of chemotherapy in Shanghai, the Western doctors admitted they could only ease the pain and buy time. I left Shanghai with Xiaoyu and went to Huizhou in Guangdong. In Guangzhou we found a doctor of Chinese medicine who was said to have cured a good many cancers, and she took his herbal medicines while also practicing qigong.

On September 29, Xiaoyu and I marked our first wedding anniversary at her parents’ home in Huizhou. That evening the two of us went downstairs for a walk. Her family lived on the seventh floor, and by then Xiaoyu was very weak. Her left lung was completely flooded with fluid, and the slightest effort left her short of breath. I carried her down from the seventh floor, and we walked a little, holding each other. When she grew tired, I lifted her onto the concrete railing by the road to sit for a while, then carried her back up to the seventh floor. Only a year before, on our wedding night, I had carried Xiaoyu up the stairs in just the same way. I felt Xiaoyu with her arms around my neck and her face against my hair, laughing as if gasping for breath, and in the dark my tears ran down again and would not stop…

At the time, Xiaoyu’s parents and I believed devoutly that the miracles that appear in countless tales would come to Xiaoyu too. But what happened afterward proved that all our efforts could not hold back the steps of death closing in on her.

In early January 1997, I returned from Wuhan to Xiaoyu’s side. By then she had been taking the herbal medicine for more than three months, but her condition had not improved markedly, as we had hoped it would. One day, as Xiaoyu lay on the sofa in the living room and I sat talking with her, she told me about three dreams.

The first dream: she and I were playing by a river. A little boat came drifting downstream, and Xiaoyu got into it first. But when the boat reached the middle of the river, she found that I had not got in; she was alone in the boat. She began to cry out in alarm…

The second dream: she and I were sightseeing at some scenic spot. Hand in hand we were climbing toward a mountaintop, but when Xiaoyu had scrambled up a sheer cliff, she found I was no longer beside her…

The third dream: her mother was taking her to the hospital for an examination. Once inside, her mother vanished, and she was left alone in a deserted corridor. She pushed open one door after another, and every room was crammed with patients of every kind, some with bandaged heads, some missing arms or legs. She turned into a corridor as dark and narrow as a tunnel, and it went on and on as though it had no end. A cold wind blew, and she could not help shivering. Then she came to a doorway, from beyond which came the faint sound of desolate weeping. She was a little frightened, and while she hesitated, not knowing whether to go on, someone in the dark called out to her and urged her not to go any farther, as if there were some danger. The person was hidden in the dark, showing only a blurred face, and it seemed to her to be both me and her mother…

When I had heard Xiaoyu’s dreams, I had an ominous foreboding. For a moment I could not hold myself together; grief welled up, and I laid my head beside her and wept aloud. And sure enough, half a month later her condition took a sharp turn for the worse. The cancer cells, never brought under control, spread at last to her bone marrow, and Xiaoyu’s legs were paralyzed. We had no choice but to take her into hospital once more.

At that point her parents and I were still trying every means we could, to the point of turning at last to “special powers.”[7] In the time I spent looking after Xiaoyu at the hospital in Huizhou, I stayed at her side day and night. Once I spoke of the novel I had just finished, The Bionic Man, which I had dedicated to her. The idea for it had come to me in the winter of 1995; I remember telling Xiaoyu about it, and she said it was a good idea and urged me to write it as soon as I could. Who could have known that it might be the last gift I would ever give her?

“When will it come out? Maybe I won’t get to see it…” Xiaoyu murmured to herself, lying in her hospital bed and stroking the thick typescript.

When I heard that, I felt as if a blunt knife were sawing at my heart, and it took all my strength to keep from crying in front of her again. I knew that the time Heaven had left Xiaoyu and me together was running out.

On March 23, 1997, my dear wife Xiaoyu was finally taken by cancer and left me and this world forever. It was, as it happened, nine months again.

Xiaoyu had traveled only twenty-five years of life’s road. She was not yet twenty-six.

In Chinese eyes nine is a most auspicious number, and between lovers whose hearts beat as one, it stands above all for a love as lasting as heaven and earth.[9] Yet when it came to Xiaoyu and me, it meant exactly the opposite…

9

In 1991 I wrote a story called “The Flock of Birds over the City.” When the girl Qun leaves him, the poet Lin Rong cries out in grief:

“Ah, little bird of love, messenger of happiness to a poor poet, you have carried off my soul as well! You brought me the gospel of the world; why must you so soon plunge me back into darkness?…”

Had I foretold Xiaoyu’s and my fate in that story six years earlier? I think of Shi Tiesheng’s story “Life Like a Lute String,”[10] and feel that life truly is like a fragile string: no one can know when his own string will snap and its music fall silent, not even a woman as lovely, simple, and full of dreams as Xiaoyu. We live passively and shall die just as passively, unable to withstand a single blow, frail as an insect. Death and life are like two close neighbors, with only a thin wall between them. Or, to put it more exactly, what lies between them is a curtain: life and death are no more than a hurried change of scene between the front of the stage and the back. The difference is only that the stage of life is a riot of color, with bright lights, watching eyes, and laughter and applause that vanish in an instant, while the backstage of death is eternity, a silent void. For the dead, only love can draw back completely the dark curtain that shrouds him (or her) and light him (or her) up again.

Perhaps the true misfortune is not the death each of us must face, but to be without “love.”

The death of one who is unloved is darkness without end, and darkness is hell.

Love can restore him (or her) to the light, and light is heaven.

In the heart of every living person stands a tombstone, and the tombstone is love.

I believe that every one of the dead has one single spectator who lights them up. For now I am Xiaoyu’s one single spectator.

Edgar Allan Poe, a writer I love, said that the living cannot converse with the dead; only the dead can converse with the dead. (Like mine, the wife of that ill-starred genius died young, of a disease of the lungs.)[11] Those words strike me with special force. And indeed it is so: in the days since Xiaoyu died, I have never once spoken with her. Whether in photographs or in dreams, all is soundless, like a mime play or a silent black-and-white film. To the living, the dead are only images in a mirror, and you cannot converse with an image in a mirror unless you break the glass. But when the mirror is broken, your life is broken too. You step from outside the mirror into it, and even as you pour out your heart to the one you love, you become an image in the mirror of someone else who loves you.

Since mirrors break so easily, writing has become my one way of building a castle of words to hold my wife back and to talk with her. Through the cracks in the language I see my dear Xiaoyu, forever young and lovely. Time cannot mar her angel-pure face. She seems lovelier even than when she was alive, more real and clear than when she dwelt in the mirror, close enough to touch.

As I recall, Poe died two years after his wife. Plainly he could not bear the pain of being unable to talk with her, and he had no choice but to smash that mirror. Its sharp shards pierced his brain and his heart, and at last he walked into the world inside the mirror and became one with Virginia, his wife, thirteen years younger than he.

Poe was forty when he died. Poe was luckier than I: he lived with his wife for eleven years, and I lived with mine for less than two. Perhaps I have even more reason to consider it: either be wounded by the mirror, or smash it. Never before have I felt death to be closer to me than life. In fact, I have all but shut myself away. I seldom see people, because they might at any moment pull me back into life. I grow more and more used to being alone, sunk for long stretches in designs and meditations on death from which I cannot free myself. The fruit of those designs and meditations was a great deal of poetry, written in a short time: a long poem of nearly two thousand lines, The Book of Death, and many short poems. Before that, I had not written poetry for years. It was in these circumstances that I came back to poetry. But I have lost my dear Xiaoyu forever. Or rather, Xiaoyu, at the cost of her own life, delivered me back into the arms of poetry and then left me, going on ahead into that eternal world…

To think that one day I shall meet my dear Xiaoyu again in another world: perhaps that is the only thing that can console me.

I have written a “Requiem for Xiaoyu.” Now I will sing it to you, Xiaoyu. I believe you can surely hear:

Now, let us set out
The rain stopped long ago, stopped
Let me hold over you an umbrella made of newspaper
notes dance on it; grief dances on it
time dances on it; joy taken by surprise dances
on it; stones dance; rain boots dance; the journey of July
dances. Only your heart sleeps. Your fantasies and dreams sleep
from September to March. From winter to spring. From day to night. Xiaoyu
my shadow keeps you company, my limping words support you through your twenty-six years
grammar and rhetoric scatter on the wind. In spring the leaves fall rustling. Our steps more
solemn than dance steps, more classical. Like the dusk panpipe tune “The Lonely Shepherd”
we pass through an old age drawn in advance, receiving God’s grace ahead of time: forsaken by God
and consoled by God. This is our fate beyond measure. Who
is more wretched? Who is happier? Beneath the boundless gray sky
we walk, walk unsteadily, and little by little in
this world we lose each other: the story of you and me, like a
perfect sentence split in two
by a stroke of lightning. My severed arm reaches out and grasps only
a wisp of breeze. Xiaoyu, go on
ahead. Walk slowly, or else
the green grass behind you will cover
my footsteps
that follow

(Shanghai Literature, no. 3, 1998; Collected Works of Liu Jiming, vol. 9)

Notes

[1] A “mumu” (麻木, literally “numb”) was the Wuhan name for the motorized or pedal tricycles that served as cheap taxis.

[2] “Out through the eastern gate, the girls are as many as clouds” is from the Book of Songs.

[3] The “vineyard” is something of an emblem for the novelist Zhang Wei (b. 1956): the vineyards of the Jiaodong coast of Shandong, where he grew up, are a recurring setting in his fiction.

[4] The Lushan Conference of 1959, held on Mount Lu in Jiangxi, was where Marshal Peng Dehuai was purged after criticizing the Great Leap Forward. The conference site is now one of the mountain’s main sights.

[5] Wang Meng’s “Kite Streamers” (风筝飘带, 1980) is a love story of two young people in post-Cultural Revolution Beijing.

[6] Can Xue (b. 1953) is one of China’s most uncompromising avant-garde writers; the story, published in 1986, is one of her early works.

[7] Qigong is a traditional practice of breathing and meditation. In the 1980s and 1990s China saw a “qigong fever,” in which masters claiming “special powers” (特异功能) promised cures for incurable diseases; desperate families of cancer patients often turned to them.

[8] Puqi, in southern Hubei, has since been renamed Chibi (“Red Cliff”).

[9] In Chinese, “nine” (九, jiu) sounds the same as “long-lasting” (久, jiu), which is why it is a favorite number for weddings and lovers’ vows.

[10] Shi Tiesheng (1951–2010), paralyzed in both legs at the age of twenty-one, wrote some of the most searching reflections on life and death in modern Chinese literature. In “Life Like a Lute String” (命若琴弦, 1985), an old blind storyteller is promised that his sight will return once he has worn out a thousand strings on his sanxian lute.

[11] Poe married his cousin Virginia Clemm in 1836, when she was thirteen. She died of tuberculosis in 1847 at the age of twenty-four, and Poe died in 1849 at for