Author’s Note
I was twenty-five when I wrote this piece, handwritten at the time on sheets of seven-leaf white paper. I happened upon it yesterday and was overcome with emotion. I no longer remember what prompted me to write it. There is no time, no place, no event—strange indeed. I transcribe it here exactly as it was, without alteration. The manuscript also preserves my youthful habits of writing—for example, using “好象” where I would now write “好像.” One further note: the original handwritten manuscript is available on this blog under the title “Summer — The Manuscript.”
Each time I watch him pass by from afar, I say to myself: “Do you see anything special, anything out of the ordinary? Is there really something about this person that sets him apart?”
No. Not in the slightest. He is merely one among many. Compared with others, there is not even the tiniest bit of distinction. He walks past just as all other passersby do. First he steps forward with one leg, then the other. When he moves his right leg, you see his left hand in front; when he moves his left leg, his right hand is behind him. Whenever he sees someone approaching from the opposite side of the road, his steps gradually shift—so subtly you can barely notice—toward one side. That is to say, in this way, the person coming toward him will merely brush past him, as people usually do, rather than colliding head-on.
If, after each time he passes by, I often follow him—like a shadow following a body—traveling through several places, that is not because I sense anything special in the way he crosses paths, enters and exits shops, or mingles among larger crowds. No, that is not it. I know all this, just as I know any other person. When the muscles of his face suddenly begin to relax slowly, and an almost imperceptible smile appears, the me who is standing where I stand at this moment has long already foreseen it. For a long time now, I have been familiar with the manner and process of his smile, just as I am familiar with his gait.
This smile means something. I know it carries some kind of meaning, though I do not quite understand what that meaning is. But I am not particularly eager to know, because whenever that smile begins to emerge slowly on his face, I already sense that it can in fact be said to be my smile as well—it is my smile. He follows me, or I follow him; the two smiles appear simultaneously on his cheeks and on mine. You can sense its arrival from that peculiar feeling on your own face, as if it were suspended in midair. That relaxation—comfortable, yet tinged with a few threads of unease—a faint but unmistakable sensation gradually spreads across your face—that is to say, across his face. Even after he has disappeared for several minutes, it remains there, lingering together with the shine of the shop windows, alongside the reflections on tin foil and toy soldiers.
On those days when he is absent—seagulls fly slowly in the distant sky, tracing large, round circles without end. The air drifts lightly, like gauze, as if it might gently fall to the ground at any moment, like a curtain slowly descending. On days without him, I sometimes lie still, while deep blue, bottomless water extends behind me, above my head, and all around. Deep green, bottomless water. I know this is the effect of sleep: it deprives me of the ability to move. I can desire, but I cannot move. I want to go beyond this deep-green, slanted world—either to vanish into nothingness, or to use some method of continuously increasing my body’s height, bursting out like one would break through a distant, vast sky, escaping from this green-and-blue world. It is suffocating. Those drifting shafts of sunlight. Those are long stretches of time, as though for countless years I have already remained where I now remain, while boundless, infinite time still waits for me at the farthest edge of sight.
Sometimes he comes, wearing such an expression, as if he is gazing at something, or as if he is merely staring straight ahead. His steps are the same as always, his expression no different from usual. You see his whole body first, and only then his face. Everything unfolds as I expected; everything is so familiar—so familiar that a trace of conjecture crosses my mind, a suspicion that perhaps what I see and expect is not the whole of things. Yet I still like this sense of familiarity; it clears my fog-laden mind. You can fix your eyes on his face without moving them, for as long as you wish. But if you continue to do so, his face loses its usual position and slowly—but unpredictably—escapes from your line of sight.
For someone like me, who is familiar with such matters, this problem does not seem so serious. I can continually change the angle of my gaze, allowing myself to follow my counterpart as I please. In fact, if I apply myself just a little, I can even tell myself—on reasonable grounds—what expression his eyes carry, saying when they are gentle, “benevolent,” and at other times merely “calm.” Bright, of course—like the eyes of someone his age.
Besides this, you should sometimes pay attention to his hands. They remain at the ends of his arms, swinging as he walks. I always feel that whenever I notice his hands, my own hands begin to tremble slightly as well, swinging in the same manner. When he comes very close—this does not happen often—when he is very close, I even notice those fine lines beneath the corners of his eyes, not signs of aging, tracing delicate patterns across the moist, textured skin of his face. At such moments, my conviction that he is nothing more than an ordinary person grows ever stronger, so much so that I would even say: if what he possessed were not precisely this human appearance he now has—the fine wrinkles on human faces, the moisture of human skin—then I would truly find that strange.
Indeed, there are moments when I am jolted awake from my expectations, when unfamiliar thoughts and feelings fill my mind, and I do feel strange and surprised—for myself, or for him. For instance, at times I am astonished that he walks using his legs like everyone else, rather than flying past me like a bird. My astonishment at such thoughts is no less than when I fall asleep and forget to turn off the light. Imagine if he did not walk, but flew! Then he would not appear in the place I expect, in the manner and expression he always does. My ordinary mind and vision would be unable to explain what I see. That would be an unfamiliar world, where everything that happens is beyond my anticipation. It would be tantamount to asking me to believe that the world I now see and touch should in fact be something entirely different. But this exceeds my imagination and fills me with deep unease. No—I would rather believe in myself, believe that everything about him is exactly as I expect: his walking, his gestures, his expressions.
If he is not merely walking, but, as an idiom has it, walking with light, brisk steps, I know it. If he possesses not only the overt and hidden expressions of a face, I know it. If he possesses not only the charm of a pair of eyes, I know that too. I know that look in his eyes that people aptly call “knowing”—when he lifts his gaze and it flashes in my direction, allowing me to see the lively gleam within them. You might even say that beneath his brows there sometimes flashes a pair of crafty eyes—and at such moments, that is precisely the kind of person he is.
Words about to be spoken are stopped by a friend’s finger pressed to the lips; every word is there—you hear nothing, yet not a single word is missed.
During those noon-nap-like moments of stillness, slowness, and vastness, things sometimes happen that fill me with panic. In retrospect, their cause is extremely simple and ordinary, yet I sink into a state in which mind and body are separated, losing all ability to move—as if all the nerves that govern my actions have been severed from their endpoints. I sink into a state from which I cannot extricate myself, while the surrounding circumstances clearly indicate to my consciousness—my drowsy consciousness—that some response is required, some absolutely necessary action. Everything falls into disorder; harmony and tacit understanding vanish. Those things that arrive unbidden, and whose arrival inspires fear, have also arrived in my life.
Most of the time—when the sunlight is bright, pedestrians are few, wind and air sway gently or linger in thin strands where they usually are, and trees let their long leaves hang down—I await his arrival. If he does not appear, or does not appear at the usual hour, I even feel a sense of loss. At times, though, he also frightens me—and this may be simply because he shifts the position of his head slightly, or because of some glance I catch in passing. Aside from that, everything about him is familiar to me; I can foresee it, just as I can foresee most of my own actions.
Speaking of his gaze, I should admit that I fear it somewhat. When I say fear, I do not mean the glances he usually directs toward objects or other people—those do not frighten me. In fact, I often rely on those glances as a way of observing him. What I worry about, what I am faintly afraid of, is the gaze that would meet mine. When such a thing happens—indeed, it has never happened, for I am very careful never to let my gaze meet his—even when I am far away, imagining my gaze aligning with his direct stare is already unbearable. A heavy hammer seems to strike my chest; my throat tightens, my head spins. I cannot determine why I am so afraid of meeting his eyes, and this fear prevents me from thinking about it deeply.
I only know that under no circumstances should I be careless, lest I fail to notice some subtle change in his expression, or the moment when he slowly turns his head toward my direction, or even begins to walk toward me. Though I harbor doubts about such unpleasant possibilities, they have never hindered my unwavering following of him. I attend to everything about him—him as a whole, and as the master of every detail. Yet my devotion does not arise from any particular interest, nor do I attend to him with complete concentration or total effort. Thus, although he floats through my mind like a shadow, my world is still filled with many other things, not only him.
From time to time toward evening, cool breezes blow, as if announcing the coming retreat of the oppressive heat and the imminence of dusk. Objects in view—once blurred and sticky—begin to reveal outlines with fine, granular surfaces. A pleasant sense of exhilaration, like insects skimming across water, slowly spreads through your body. Those headaches pressed against the crown of your head, towering like the sky itself, have not yet eased or disappeared. Everything acquires the flavor of twilight, as if all things were people in their prime—quick-witted, strong-stepping—yet beneath their firm exteriors already exuding an unmistakable scent of decline. Everything. Including that boundless world, which just moments ago loomed so high, yet now wavers like the sky itself. Eventually I too will lose even the place I currently occupy, like those who have entered middle age—along with everything I can call my own, that suffocating boundlessness, or whatever else.
One day I will see him stop along the road and greet some stranger I do not know, using the language I have known since childhood—the only language I know. Will I be surprised? Perhaps. Or perhaps not. When I was a child, I loved a certain play very much. Every day I would go to the backstage area for the sole purpose of hearing the final segment again—the servant’s line that always made me laugh uncontrollably. After listening to the mockery and being told to withdraw, he opens his long-neglected mouth—and at that very moment, the arrogant man opens his mouth as well, almost simultaneously saying, “Servant, withdraw!” …
I would feel delighted. No—indeed, I should say I would feel immensely delighted, when I see him open his ordinary human lips and speak a sentence—or that very sentence I am also reciting at the same time in my heart. What would surprise me in such moments would not be that he failed to say something else he might have been capable of saying, nor that he did not utter some string of unfamiliar sounds in a language unknown to me. Rather, it would be the indisputable fact of what he did say: I hear a certain voice, and what he speaks is exactly that voice. Alongside my pleasure, however, a feeling of regret—or dissatisfaction—would quietly arise in my heart, adding a trace of disappointment and unease to my otherwise light mood.
I am not a god; I would not expect every sentence I utter to withstand the scrutiny of everyone without a trace of impropriety. Yet if I were he, I would rather not let the one mistaken sentence among ten thousand correct ones slip from my lips; I would rather not allow the sentence I just spoke to be heard as flawless. He speaks so appropriately, yet makes it seem as though it were spoken unintentionally. This feels somewhat irreverent, somewhat insincere. But in the end I must still say that I am happy for what I heard—for that it was a sentence I myself would have spoken, had I been in his place.
I am not prone to fanciful imaginings. I have no interest in strange omens, UFOs, or divine manifestations. What I take pleasure in, and firmly believe, is only what the eye sees and the heart holds. I am already familiar with seeing my passerby—his expression and his voice. If these behaviors or sounds fail to satisfy me because of that strange familiarity, at least they do not startle or terrify me.
Throughout the entire summer you notice those lightly drifting, slow-moving hazes of pale brown, deep blue, and red. You enjoy walking along the mountainside. Far to the left lies the sea, steaming with light and mist; to the right, faint smoke rises among the distant, undulating mountain ranges, mingling with pale sunlight and air. The lush grasses by the roadside are also wrapped, from near to far, in increasingly dense mist. Only your mind is traveling through this mountain landscape; your body has long since retreated beyond the frame, sunk in drowsiness.
I am not a soul indulgent in dreams, nor is wandering absent-mindedly through wilderness my nature. Yet I find myself having embarked upon such a path—one that, for reasons unknown, is unavoidable. It, together with that brightness and those blue hazes, fills the entire space of my consciousness. While it lingers through endless moments and a path without end, a trace of unease passes through my mind. Yet the irresistible brightness and haze compel me onward—until a shadow falls into my sight. Vaguely discernible as a human figure, though whether male or female, a thing like a human or a human like a thing, is distressingly unclear. But before long—not because of diminishing distance, nor due to calm regained after panic—I convince myself of an indisputable fact: that the person swaying toward me from afar along the path is precisely the one I follow each day, and who follows me in turn.
I am truly frightened, because this is a new situation—something I never anticipated. I am startled, yet still have enough strength to steady myself. My first thought is to leave quickly, because I still have time—I could run. But I hesitate. Apart from the discouraging numbness that pervades my entire body (including my mind), I have another concern: how can I be sure that the moment I decide to run, he will not simultaneously run toward me from another direction? Yes, I have always followed him and am familiar with him. But he—at least as far as I remember—has never followed me, never devoted himself to observing my every word and action. Yet how can I be so certain that all the thoughts and plans that have just filed through my mind have not also, in the same sequence, passed through his mind (if he has one)?
Moreover, I have never seen him run, nor will I ever have the chance to observe how fast he runs. To race someone whose manner of running may be entirely beyond your expectations is far too risky. No matter how long I consider the idea of escape, in the end I do not move even half a step toward the roadside. In fact, I dare not move at all, fearing that at that very moment he might grow suspicious and bolt toward me. I must think of another way to escape this predicament.
Is it possible that when he passes by me, he will in fact not turn his head to look at me—let alone suddenly attack me? I know that people usually behave this way: they walk toward each other, pass by, and most do not even look into the other’s eyes, much less do anything terrifying. Perhaps the person now approaching me is just such a person. I am so familiar with him! I almost begin to believe that when he approaches me, walking toward me, passing me by, his gaze will turn toward the distant sea steaming with mist, while I shift my gaze toward those pale-brown mountains likewise steaming with haze. In that immeasurably long, yet fleeting moment, we pass each other. Nothing happens. Every minute is so long it seems it will never end.
I know he is approaching me. I also know that if I lift my eyes now, I might at any moment collide with his gaze—and in an instant be reduced to ashes. Yet compared with his gaze, his physical closeness terrifies and depresses me even more; it would truly kill me. I no longer possess even the courage to think, let alone to act. I know the matter is already settled. I know that in that instant there will only be a patch of turtle-green and purple, mixed with bright, flickering air. “One minute, and another minute,” I murmur in a voice so low I can barely hear it myself.
Most of my time passes easily and pleasantly. I move my steps lightly, weaving among paths, tables and chairs, seated and standing people. I am familiar with the feeling of moving toward a tree, and equally familiar with the feeling in my heart when moving toward a person. I have even made myself familiar with the sensation of moving toward the same person or the same open space in different places—like swimming in different waters, like sensing two different colors. Of all these moments, most belong to him.
If one day he does not appear, I feel utterly hollow—like a vast blue sky missing the embellishment of a single white bird. If one day he does not appear, it is an irreparable loss, like a perfect picnic in which everything is present except a single patch of shade. In fact, I cannot imagine such a thing happening. Everything would become unbearably long and dull, boundlessly heavy. Those bubble-like blues would continue to swell, the tilting would grow ever more severe. There would not be enough air to breathe, even though air fills the endless sky growing longer and taller all around. Everywhere there would be an excess of vastness—an annoying vastness, so vast that there would not even be a sharp knife to pierce your body and let drops of blood fall.
If one day he were to stop appearing, just as consistently as he has always appeared, the thought unsettles me. If he disappeared, becoming unrecognizable, what would that be like? I know those nights—when I do not know his whereabouts or his dwelling—when his daytime image shatters into fragments of mirrors, each reflecting only scales and claws of things. I hear soundless murmurs from the surrounding void—perhaps from my own chest. I hear my inner secrets read aloud, memories exposed beneath lamplight. During those sleepless nights under the quilt, sounds and lights fill your darkened mind. Things drift away from you, including your own body. I am familiar with these—but not with the possibility that he might disappear forever.
If he vanished entirely, I ask myself, would something—or someone—appear in my world as his substitute, if not at night then at least by day, during those long stretches of time? And if his replacement were some Zhang San or Li Si, what then? I have never paid attention to such a person. In fact, I have never paid attention to anyone: every day, what occupies my eyes is always the same him, his every word and action.
One can imagine that he would leave behind something that resembles him in others—something that, upon seeing it, would remind me of him. But I cannot determine what that something might be. I know time is quietly slipping away; the time left is not much. I will no longer have many days of color and light to gaze upon. Then the strands of moisture and trembling heat in the air will be washed away by time, like the aftermath of a motionless rain curtain, leaving only an eternal vista to unfold my boundless sight.
As I walk along the road, or move among crowds, I begin to pay attention to the strangers passing beside me, harboring a vague yet ardent desire to find such a person. In the beginning, I merely sought among the many passersby that possible stand-in—the one who resembles an ordinary person in most respects but is in fact his replacement, the one who, within a few brief seconds, can be distinguished from his ordinary demeanor and movements. Naturally, my attention first falls upon those who resemble him in appearance. I observe them one by one, carefully. I attend to their clothing, their hair, their skin tone, and of course their faces and their gazes.
It cannot be said that I gained nothing. Although I did not manage to identify the impostor in time, I firmly memorized several types of clothing, colors, and body types most closely associated with him. I learned which fabrics and styles most resembled what he commonly wore, and which types of people tended to wear which colors. But before long, these small comforts vanished without a trace. Unease and frustration returned. Not being able to know clearly which of all these people he is, not being able to know his location or his distance from me—this makes me extremely uneasy.
To identify and follow that person (or his replacement), I must often come very close to passersby who could very well be him. And when I think that while I am absent-mindedly examining others, the one I search for daily might be right beside me, my hands and feet turn icy. Worse still, as my observations accumulate, certain crucial distinctions begin to lose their original differences in my mind, becoming similar, even confused. For example, his back view—I once knew it so well that a fleeting glance out of the corner of my eye sufficed to tell me it was him. But now I can no longer do so without hesitation. When I try to fix on a familiar back, several other equally familiar yet very different backs crowd into my vision at the same time. I must constantly compare one back with a prior one, and that one with yet another earlier one, in order to determine whether it resembles that back itself—or, if I am lucky, is the same.
In short, the more I gain, the further I lose my target. This hesitation fills me with deep anxiety. Worse still, I find myself increasingly making the same gesture: standing in one place, unable to move my feet or control my mind. I stand there, my mind blank. Time ticks away with a quiet sound, while I remain there, my legs unable to move even half a step. He still exists; he may still be just inches away. Yet I remain there, hollow and lost, powerless to free myself. Every day I sense his closeness, and every day I am trapped in this predicament. I watch the stream of passersby—those moving away from me, those coming toward me. I want to shout, but hear no sound. I want to flee, as if escaping an ever-more suffocating space, yet I am nailed there, letting people pass through me, from afar or up close.
Yego’s Chronicles 