Elsewhere, p.1
Elsewhere, page 1
‘At times ghostly, at times sensuous, always visceral and darkly witty, Yan Ge’s writing drifts across borderlines and cultures, held aloft by eerie currents. Yan Ge feels like the first great cosmopolitan writer of the twenty-first century. These stories astound.’ Eoin McNamee
‘If a dark angel were to wake from a dream-filled sleep and write its visions, this collection is what it would look like. Yan Ge explores the big themes – grief, love, being, belonging and, most of all, departing – with profundity, mischief and gut-savage intelligence. Glorious.’ Mia Gallagher
‘Rich with philosophical depths, comedy, feeling and playfulness, Elsewhere is a wondrous book of books. It is like new light in an old, searching world.’ Madeleine Thien
YAN GE
ELSEWHERE
STORIES
To my mother, 楊世蓉
Contents
Title Page
Dedication
Epigraph
The Little House
Shooting an Elephant
When Travelling in the Summer
Stockholm
Free Wandering
No Time to Write
How I Fell in Love with the Well-Documented Life of Alex Whelan
Mother Tongue
Hai
Acknowledgements
About the Author
Copyright
流水今日，明月前身。
—司空圖《二十四詩品 洗練》
And flowing water is right now,
the bright moon, its former self.
Ssu-K’ung T’u,
‘Washed and Refined’,
The Twenty-Four Categories of Poetry
The Little House
outside the little house, old stone was talking about geese.
‘Their intestines. That’s the best part,’ he said. ‘The best goose intestines come from White Family Town; do you know why?’
‘No idea,’ I said.
‘The women there have strong and slender fingers. The perfect kind of fingers for plunging into the goose’s asshole and yanking out the entrails while it’s still alive. They do it with precision and determination. They do this in a flash to preserve its tenderness.’
‘I’m a vegetarian.’
He shook his head. ‘Why?’
I thought about how to reply.
‘That’s no good,’ he said. ‘Plus, I don’t think I’ve seen you eating since you came here.’
‘I don’t feel hungry,’ I said.
He turned around to the table next to us and shouted, ‘Small Bamboo! Can you talk some sense into this girl?’
Small Bamboo had fallen asleep in his chair. It was almost 3 a.m.
‘Anyway,’ he said, turning back to me, ‘guess which part of the cow the yellow throat comes from?’
‘Its throat?’
‘Ha!’ He reached for his beer and took a long pull. ‘I’ve asked more than a hundred people this question. Nobody’s got it right. It comes from the cow’s coronary artery. And it has to be the right one. Because the right one’s thinner than the left one so it gets cooked very quickly in the hot pot. Do you know how many seconds it takes to cook the yellow throat?’
‘Uh-uh.’
‘Eight seconds. Lots of people overcook it. That’s why you should never throw a piece of yellow throat into the pot. Hold it with chopsticks and dip it into the soup. Count to eight and take it out. Only this way will it be crispy and chewy.’
‘I need to go to bed now,’ I said.
‘Sure. You go.’ He took another mouthful from his beer bottle.
‘Aren’t you going to sleep?’
‘Ah no, no, I’m fine. When you are old you don’t need to sleep. I’ll just get another beer.’
He stood up and walked into the Little House. The light was still on. Sister Du was curled up on a booth seat, snoring. I watched through the window as Old Stone went behind the bar, grabbed a Tsingtao and returned.
‘I’ll ask her to put it on my tab in the morning.’ He slumped back into his chair.
‘I’m going now. Good night.’ I stood up and walked back into the tent I shared with Vertical.
——
Small Bamboo had brought me to the Little House three days earlier. When he bumped into me, I was sitting on a bench outside my apartment compound, reading a book.
‘Hey, Pigeon,’ he said, coming swiftly across the street towards me. ‘What are you doing here?’
‘Just reading,’ I said, waving my book at him. ‘To kill some time.’
He tilted his head and read: ‘The Plague. I didn’t know you kids still read Camus.’
‘Some of us do.’
‘Where are you staying these days?’ he asked.
‘I’m camping in the courtyard, with my neighbours.’ I pointed back over my head.
‘That’s no fun,’ Small Bamboo said. ‘Why don’t you come with me to the Little House? We’re all staying there in the square: Old Stone, Young Li, Six Times, Vertical, Chilly and lots of other poets.’
‘But I don’t write poems,’ I said.
He grinned. ‘It doesn’t matter. Just come with me.’
We walked to the Little House. The buses hadn’t been running since the 12th and there were no taxis. Small Bamboo had smoked three cigarettes by the time he finally remembered to offer me one. I told him I didn’t smoke.
‘You’re sensible. Cigarettes kill you.’ He nodded, taking out another one and lighting it up.
We went across the Second Ring Road and turned into Ping’an Square.
‘Wow,’ I said.
The sunken square was brimming with tents, of various sizes and spectacular styles, their colours ranging the full visible spectrum. Small Bamboo pointed at the building at the far end of the square and told me the Little House was on that corner. We descended into the square and wove our way through it. The tents were clustered closely together and cast shadows over one another. People sat outside, eating, chatting, bartering. Vendors elbowed past with their baskets, selling food, magazines, T-shirts and cosmetics. Kids chased each other, laughing. We steered through, Small Bamboo nodding at acquaintances and friends. Ahead of us, I saw a gigantic scarlet tent. It looked like a castle.
‘That’s Young Li’s,’ Small Bamboo said. ‘One big living room and three bedrooms for him, his wife and two kids. There’s even a kitchen inside. God knows where that prawn got it from!’
It was a warm late May afternoon. The air was stale and humid. We walked from the sunken square up the steps and arrived at a rundown pub. Above, three big white characters hung, which read: The Little House. A dot in the first character was missing. A large group of men and women – the poets – sat outside, drinking beer. Small Bamboo introduced me: ‘This is Pigeon.’
‘Pigeon!’ they called out together, like a choir singing.
‘I’ve heard about you,’ one of them, a man in his forties, said. ‘You’re the kid who writes fiction.’
A middle-aged woman in a red floral dress looked me up and down. ‘You seem like a smart kid,’ she said. ‘You should write poems.’
‘Ignore these old drunks,’ Small Bamboo said apologetically. ‘You go sit with Vertical.’ He pointed me to a table on the side, at which sat a young woman and two men in their twenties. They waved at me gleefully.
Later I realised they were all in varying degrees of drunkenness. Some had been drinking since Monday; some had started on the evening of the 12th. Sister Du, the owner of the Little House and Small Bamboo’s cousin, had driven her mini-truck to the wholesale market outside the city three times to restock beer. The supermarkets nearby had nothing left.
‘And all of these rats here, they don’t even bother to pay,’ Sister Du said. ‘“Put it on the tab,” they say – but nobody ever opened a tab!’
‘I’ll have a tea please,’ I said, taking out my wallet.
‘Ah come’n take a beer,’ she said and opened a Tsingtao for me. ‘I’ll put it on the tab.’
I took the bottle, walked outside and sat down at the table with Vertical, her boyfriend Chilly, and Six Times. A woman with a basket approached, wondering if any of us would be interested in purchasing her goods. She lifted up the lid, revealing the little turtles inside. They were luminous, as white as pearls.
We were admiring the turtles when the alarm rang out in the sky.
‘Always this time of day,’ the woman said. She covered her basket and trotted away.
That night I washed my face for the first time since the 12th and slept in Vertical’s tent. There was moaning coming, off and on, from different directions. Someone sang until the small hours. Eventually, I slept like a dead person and did not dream of anything.
It was 2008. My father had been dead for six years. My grandfather had died in 2000 after having a stroke outside a convenience store. My first aunt, she’d lost her life in 1998 due to a haemorrhoid removal operation. My uncle had broken his neck in the summer of 1990, when going for a dive in the river with his friends.
‘Both of my parents died in 1989,’ Small Bamboo said, ‘my mother at the beginning of the year because of diabetes; my father at the end of year, in prison.’
‘My girlfriend has been dead for ten years now,’ Old Stone said. ‘She struggled with anorexia for years and killed herself in the winter of 1998.’
‘You prawns!’ Young Li puffed out a mouthful of smoke. ‘Can we talk about something else? Haven’t we had enough of dead people?’
‘Shall we have a game of Mahjong?’ Old Stone suggested.
After they left the table, I took out my book and began to read. The TV was on in the next room, and Sister Du and the waitresses were watching the news, weeping.
Six Times wandered over and sat down beside me. ‘What are you reading?’
I showed him the cover.
‘Camus,’ he said. ‘Interesting. Do you like him?’
‘He’s alright,’ I said.
‘You should read Márquez,’ he said, ‘Love in the Time of Cholera is a better choice.’
I put down the book and looked at him. ‘What are you getting at?’
He smiled shyly. ‘Vertical and Chilly are having sex in my tent. Shall we go to Vertical’s tent and have sex as well?’
I thought about his proposal for a while. ‘Okay,’ I said.
We walked into Vertical’s tent and removed our clothes. He touched me for a short while before entering. We hugged and moved towards and away from each other repeatedly. I felt cold the whole time because I was lying on the ground. He cried when he came.
Afterwards, we sat outside the tent, sharing a cigarette.
‘Four days ago I was a non-smoker,’ I said.
‘Five days ago I had no idea there’d be an earthquake,’ he said. ‘What were you doing?’
‘I was giving my cat a bath,’ I said. ‘And you?’
‘I was trying to fix my laptop,’ he said. ‘How’s your cat?’
‘She ran away wet. Hope she’s dry now. How’s your laptop?’
‘Dead,’ he said.
‘I heard earlier on TV,’ I said, ‘that the number of casualties is now sixty-two thousand, three hundred and fifty-seven.’
He took the cigarette and smoked. ‘You have a good memory.’
The alarm rang sharply across the city again.
Sister Du rushed out of the Little House and shouted: ‘Another one is coming! The news just said there’s a big aftershock tonight! A 7.8- to 8-magnitude one. The government is telling us to seek shelter.’
‘Relax, cousin,’ Small Bamboo said, half turning from the Mahjong table. ‘We are already in a shelter.’
That night, nobody could sleep. We went into Young Li’s tent and sat down in the living room. It was surreally spacious, furnished with a pair of ivory four-seater leather sofas, one white armchair and a cream chaise longue. There was even a bookshelf.
Small Bamboo sat down in the armchair. ‘Bloody hell,’ he said, slapping his thigh. ‘This is a palace.’ Young Li and Six Times walked in, carrying a square table. They put it down and flipped up four curved extensions. An enormous round table emerged.
We all stared at it. ‘Bloody hell,’ Small Bamboo said.
‘Old Stone asked me to get a big table for dinner,’ Young Li said.
‘If this is the table we’re sitting at, I’ll need a telescope to see the dishes,’ said Chilly.
‘When the aftershock comes, we can hide underneath it,’ Six Times said, knocking the tabletop.
While Old Stone was busy cooking in the kitchen with Calm – Young Li’s wife – and Sister Du helping out, we talked about him. Apparently, after his girlfriend died, Old Stone immersed himself in the study of how to make the perfect twice-cooked pork. From there, taking it dish by dish, he had become a chef and a reputable food critic. He’d published three books: Love and Lust in Sichuan Cuisine, The Pepper Corn Empire and The Night We Ate Armadillos. The last one was a collection of poems.
‘I actually have the books here.’ Young Li stood up and searched on the bookshelf. ‘Here.’ He took a book out, leaned on the bookshelf and started to read: ‘“When language becomes corrupt, we need to talk about fish. Are fish happy? someone asked, a long time ago. You have no idea because you’re not a fish. If a tomato knows a fish well …”’
‘Is this the poetry book?’ I asked.
‘No, it’s his cookbook,’ Young Li said and pushed it back.
Everybody laughed. I laughed with them. We drank beer.
Calm came out from the kitchen, wearing a purple apron on top of her red floral dress. She dropped a stack of bowls and chopsticks on the table and said: ‘The food is coming.’
We pushed over the sofas and each grabbed a bowl and chopsticks. As we took our seats, Sister Du carried out the starters on a tray and put them down one by one: chicken feet with chilli pickle, fried fish skin with coriander, marinated pig tails and thousand-year eggs with green pepper.
The poets cheered and dived in.
‘What can Pigeon have? She’s vegetarian,’ Vertical said.
Young Li examined the dishes. ‘Fish skin? There’s no meat in it.’
‘It’s fine. I’m not really hungry,’ I said and drank my beer.
The starters were gone within minutes and Sister Du delivered more dishes: hot, steaming and aromatic. Old Stone’s signature twice-cooked pork was served, followed by braised pork belly, stewed pig feet with fermented black bean, sautéed pig kidney and liver and braised pig knuckles with bamboo shoots.
‘Where does he get all this stuff?’ Chilly marvelled, jabbing a knuckle with his chopsticks.
‘Old Stone has connections,’ Young Li mumbled between chewing. ‘Do you know who his father is?’
Chilly shook his head. ‘No, should I?’
Young Li spat out a bone and disclosed a name that I had learnt in my Local History class at elementary school.
‘Seriously?’ Chilly said.
‘Yep.’ Small Bamboo nodded. ‘This prawn could have been sitting in an office in the central government now if he hadn’t got the wrong girlfriend and joined the protest with her at the wrong time.’
‘Our generation is just fucked,’ Young Li said.
‘We’re fucked too,’ Chilly said competitively.
They continued arguing while the second round of food was brought out. This time: sliced beef in chilli oil, stewed beef brisket in casserole, spiced calf ribs with Sichuan peppercorn and beef offal soup.
The room was filled with hot steam. I sneezed.
‘Can I get you anything?’ Vertical said. ‘Poor Pigeon, you must be starving.’
‘I’m fine,’ I insisted.
She looked around the table. ‘How about the soup? I can get you some soup without offal,’ she said.
‘Uh, okay,’ I said.
She ladled me a bowl of offal-free soup. I stared at it and drank. The soup flew into my mouth and diffused into my guts, like a long, soft exhalation. It made me think of when my grandfather carried me on his back to the cattle market to see the cows. They smelled like manure and peat. Their eyes were the eyes of Buddha. They looked at me.
‘Can I have another one?’ I said. ‘With offal, please.’
We were all devouring like wretched beasts. It began to rain outside. The rain fell, drumming the roof with an urgent rhythm while more food was served. We had a round of poultry: chicken, duck, goose, quail and ostrich; and then six types of fish: rudd, sea bass, mandarin, silver jin, golden chang and fugu; afterwards some rare delicacies whose names I learned from the others: boar, abalone, soft-shelled turtle, muntjac and armadillo.
‘Bloody hell,’ Small Bamboo said, his chopsticks gnashing. The rain fell in torrents.
A group of beautiful women walked out from the kitchen, wearing shiny silk dresses embroidered with pearls. Their hair was embellished with small crowns and colourful feathers, their lips glossily red. Together, they held a huge brass pot, in which a dense and hearty chilli stew bubbled, exuding a brawny fragrance of meat, chilli pepper and Chinese five-spice. It was head stew, and had been extremely well cooked so the heads cracked, mushed and melted together – some eyes were missing, some noses crooked, lots of tongues stuck out. They were the heads of men and women.
My stomach turned sharply. I bent and threw up under the table.
The Night We Ate Armadillos
By: Old Stone
About five in the afternoon Small Bamboo asked me to have dinner with him and his friend Boss Huang.
Huang has got some rare delicacies he told me.
In a private dining room Huang locked
the door and served us a huge pot of braised armadillos.
Dig in, said Huang, it’s a first-class national protected animal
so we are all committing crimes together.
