“The night gave me black eyes, but I use them to look for the light” — Gu Cheng, murderer (discursive aside page 11)
“黑夜给了我黑色的眼睛,我却用它寻找光明” — 顾城, 凶手
Some months ago I learned of gruesome literary history:
So I read about it. It was even more terrible:
Then I read about it in Chinese. It got worse.
Here is a part of the unnerving story. (Translations below from Chinese to English are from me.)
Gu Cheng met Xie Ye on the train from Shanghai to Beijing.
到南京站时,别人占了你的座位,你没有说话,就站在我身边。
我忽然变得奇怪起来,也许是想站起来,但站了站却又坐下了。
我开始感到你、你颈后飘动的细微的头发。
我拿出画画的笔,画了老人和孩子、一对夫妇、坐在我对面满脸晦气的化工厂青年。
我画了你身边每一个人,但却没有画你。
我觉得你亮得耀眼,使我的目光无法停留。— 顾城
At Nanjing station, someone took your seat. You said nothing, only stood next to me. I felt strange, perhaps I wanted to also stand up. I stood, yet sat down again. I began to sense you, the soft fluttering of hairs behind your neck. I took out my sketching pens, and sketched the old man and child next to you, sketched the married couple, sketched the young man from the chemical plant with a face full of bad luck across from me. I drew everyone around you, but not you. I found you dazzling, so that my eyes could not stay.
— Gu Cheng
晚上,所有的人都睡了,你在我旁边没有睡,我们是怎么开始谈话的,我已经记不得了,只记得你用清楚的北京话回答,眼睛又大又美,深深的像是梦幻的鱼群,鼻线和嘴角有一种金属的光辉,我不知道该说些什么,就给你念起诗来。
— 顾城
Night, everyone is asleep, but you next to me is not asleep. How we began to speak, I no longer remember clearly. I only remember you answered in a clear Beijing accent. Your eyes were big and beautiful, deep like a dream’s school of fish. The line of your nose and the corner of your mouth had the shine of metal. I didn’t know what to say. So I began to read you poetry.
— Gu Cheng
Upon parting, he wrote his address on a piece of paper, and put it in her hand.
火车走着,进入早晨,太阳在海河上明晃晃升起来。我好像惊醒了,我站着,我知道此刻正在失去,再过一会儿,你将成为永生的幻觉。
— 顾城
The train went on, into morning. The sun rose shimmeringly over the river-sea. I startled, and I stood, knowing this moment was being lost. In a short while, you will become a dream for the rest of my life.
— Gu Cheng
你是个怪人,照我爸爸的说法也许是个骗子,你把地址塞在我手里,样子礼貌又满含怒气。
— 谢烨
You are strange. According to my father, perhaps a swindler. You stuffed you address into my hand, looking polite yet full of anger.
— Xie Ye
She went to look for him.
为了能去找你,我想了好多理由,我沿着长长的长着白杨树的道路走,轻轻敲了你的门 […] 你不该同我谈哲学 […]
我给你留下地址 […] 你
会给我写信么?你说会的。
写多少呢?— 谢烨
To be able to find you, I thought of many excuses. Along the long baiyang tree path I walked, and softly knocked on your door. […] You shouldn´t have spoken about philosophy with me […] I left you my address […] Will you write to me? You said you would. How much will you write?
— Xie Ye
He was a strange man. A strange, terrible, deadly, and for a while, beautiful, mesmerizing falling-in-love-withable man. And that they spoke of philosophy together, as if the early moments of falling in love, the fascination, and limerence and infatuation would make up for, could make up for, all that is dreadful and to come.
My life has nothing to do with hers (Gott sei Dank), but I think of her. My mother used to say to me, about me: wei gu ren dan you 为古人担忧, meaning I worried for long-dead or fictional people, shedding tears for them, as if my care would retroactively protect them, as my mother´s zukünftig-ly protected me.
Speaking of mothers and fathers, and we Chinese Volk, I think also of pianist 郎朗 Lang Lang´s father.
Here is Lang Lang on the piano, and his father Lang Guoren on the 2-stringed erhu, playing “Racing Horses” in an arrangement from the two of them:
Lang Lang and his father´s story is a bit told from The Guardian:
When Lang Lang was nine, his father told him to kill himself. Four years before, his father had decided that his only son should become the No 1 classical pianist in China. He gave up his job as a policeman and took his son to live in Beijing, leaving Lang Lang’s mother behind, planning to get the child into the prestigious Central Conservatory of Music.
However, his teacher in Beijing, nicknamed Professor Angry by Lang Lang, had other ideas. “Professor Angry didn’t like me and she always gave me a hard time,” he remembers. “One afternoon she said that I had no talent, that I shouldn’t play the piano and I should go home. She basically fired me before I could even get into the conservatory!”
Unbelievably, when Lang Lang’s father heard the news, he demanded that the boy take his own life. “It’s really hard to talk about. My father went totally nuts,” says Lang Lang quietly. “He said: ‘You shouldn’t live any more – everything is destroyed.’” The father handed his son a bottle saying, “Take these pills!” When Lang Lang ran out on to the balcony to get away from him, his father screamed: “Then jump off and die.”
“I got totally crazy too,” says Lang Lang. “I was beating the wall, trying to prevent myself from being a pianist by destroying my hands.”
[…]
“My mother had always wanted to be a musician and my father played in the air force orchestra before the budget was cut and he had to become a policeman. My parents bought our piano before I was born – it cost half their annual salary.”
Born during China’s one-child policy (which is still in operation [this article was written in 2011]), the young musician became his parents’ sole focus. When Lang Lang was nine, his father and his piano teacher decided that he must leave Shenyang for Beijing, home of the Central Conservatory of Music. If his father had been strict before, he soon became a lot harder.
Lang Lang explains: “My father quit his job as a policeman and we went to Beijing. My mother didn’t come – she needed to earn money for us. Twenty years ago, the trains from Shenyang to Beijing were slow and took a whole day or night. As we had to save money, my mum couldn’t always come to see me. I really missed her. It was a bad time. I didn’t want to leave my home town where I had my friends, relatives, my mum and our little apartment.”
Lang Lang and his father rented a room in a slum where five families shared one sink and one toilet. Their room was furnished with their piano and a bunk bed. “We rented the cheapest place in a bad neighbourhood,” says Lang Lang. “The walls were thin – almost like paper – and the neighbours were pissed off because I practised at 5am. They would throw punches at our door and I was scared that I would get beaten up.”
In Beijing, Lang Lang’s father had to be both mother and father. Lang Lang says: “He didn’t like to cook or do the laundry, because my mum had always done it. We couldn’t do much, because we only had Mum’s salary and had to pay for expensive piano lessons once a week, and if there was a competition, twice a week. It was really hard. My father became strict and strange. In the morning I practised for one hour, and after school I practised the whole afternoon and early evening and then I would do homework. I was practising 65% of the time. My father and I always had arguments about how to play this or that. He had a very strong personality and I also have quite a strong personality, so there was a big clash. Sometimes he hit me – not hard though, he was just trying to scare me. He yelled really loud too.”
Lang Lang’s father does not understand English, but in the past, he has spoken about the way he pushed his son. He said: “The way I see it is, pressure always turns into motivation. Lang Lang is well aware that if he fails to be outstanding at playing the piano, he has nothing.”
Like Xie Ye, I have a three year old son. And like Lang Guoren, I have a daughter who will start piano, with me. I most certainly failed to be outstanding at playing the piano, and a million other things of this earth and beyond it. And somehow, we have more than just each other, Gott sei Dank. For there are more things in heaven and earth, Gu Cheng, than are dreamt of in his philosophy.
Next page: More on the Night, going into that good or raging against the dying of the light