At this year's Macau Literary Festival, there was an event where I had the opportunity to have a conversation with the Irish writer Claire Keegan. Keegan is a novelist I have long admired, and I have read her short story collections Antarctica and Walk the Blue Fields more than once.
Without any preparation, I started to talk about a short story of mine called Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao. It was only at that moment that I realized it had a certain connection with one of Keegan's stories. Li Yiyun once said that she would use her own writing to converse with works by authors she admired. For example, she loves William Trevor, particularly his story Three People, so she wrote Gold Boy, Emerald Girl as a response. Three People is a mysterious and dark story about an elderly man, his daughter, and a young man who is infatuated with the daughter. The three characters form a stable triangle. For various reasons (which I believe would be unethical to spoil as they are the hidden secrets of this brilliant story), the existence of the elderly man becomes the condition that sustains the relationship between the two younger people. If the old man were to die, the couple would no longer be able to face each other. In Gold Boy, Emerald Girl, Li Yiyun also explores a triangular relationship: an elderly woman, her son, and a girl who intrudes into their lives. But the background is 1990s China, and the characters' personalities and predicaments are different, giving the story a distinct atmosphere and texture. If Li hadn't mentioned it, no one would have thought of Three People when reading Gold Boy, Emerald Girl. But once you know the connection, reading the two stories side by side reveals an intriguing mirroring effect.
Keegan wrote a short story called Sisters. In that story, there are two sisters born in rural Ireland. The younger sister marries and moves to the city, leading a middle-class, luxurious life. The elder sister stays behind to care for their aging parents, missing out on marriage and living a solitary life. After the parents' deaths, she inherits the land. Every summer, the younger sister returns with her children to stay for a while. But this year is different. She arrives and lingers as if she has no intention of leaving. The elder sister endures this, serving her sister and her children daily, until, at last, she explodes with the truth. There are no satin curtains or dishwashers; everything was fabricated. The younger sister has been abandoned by her husband and has returned to claim the elder sister's land. But the elder sister tells her that everything here was earned with thirty years of her life, and she will never allow anyone to take it away. At the story's end, the elder sister stands in front of the mirror, combing her younger sister's hair as she did when they were children. The younger sister has long, blonde hair that the elder sister always envied. Suddenly, the elder sister picks up scissors and cuts off her sister's hair with a snip. The younger sister screams in terror. The story ends there. The scene of a girl cutting another girl's hair out of jealousy is not original to Keegan; Fitzgerald wrote a similar scene in Bernice Bobs Her Hair, where a pretty girl's hair is viciously cut off. Whether Sisters was written in response to Bernice Bobs Her Hair is unknown. But this doesn't diminish Sisters as a remarkable story. I love the lonely, stoic, and stubborn elder sister, who fiercely guards the only thing she has, her right to exist in the world.
Sisters is included in the short story collection Antarctica, which I probably read around 2011. Although I've reread it, I had long forgotten it. I consider myself a "volatile reader" (a realization that comes from drinking—when I drink, my face turns red, and the alcohol hits hard, but a few hours later, it completely dissipates as if I hadn't drunk at all). I can't remember any sentences from books, and quoting them when writing is nearly impossible. After about a year, I forget most of the plot, remembering only a few scattered details. Three years later, if someone asks me about a book, I'm embarrassed to say I’ve read it because, well, there's no trace left.
This has its advantages—I never worry about the so-called "anxiety of influence." If enough time passes, there's no masterpiece too great to forget.
Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao was published in 2017 in the literary magazine Harvest.
By the time I wrote Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao, I had long forgotten Sisters. The only detail I remembered was the haircut, a detail that overlapped in my mind after reading Fitzgerald. But by then, Fitzgerald and Keegan had become intertwined, and I can no longer tell who wrote it first. The inspiration for Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao actually came from a friend I met on Douban, R. She was studying for a PhD in economics in Sweden and spent a year as an exchange student in Boston. We met in winter in Boston. She was reserved and shy, but she radiated a certain deep wisdom. She recommended Marilynne Robinson's Housekeeping to me, and we strolled around the snow-covered Harvard University, where she showed me the little theaters where she usually watched European art films (on that day, there was a film by a master I can’t remember showing, but I was more interested in shopping for ski jackets and mugs at nearby stores). Later, she returned to China, and we met again. She told me about some of the topics she was researching, like how after Columbus discovered the Americas, potatoes were brought to Europe, significantly impacting population growth and urbanization. Then she casually mentioned a story she’d heard from a scholar studying family planning: two sisters, where the legally born elder sister eventually succumbs to family pressure and commits suicide, while the younger, illegally born sister seems unaffected and lives a healthy life. Through her introduction, I met this scholar, who gave me two books on family planning that couldn’t be publicly published. I asked again about the story of the sisters. I wanted to know what the younger sister was like now—she had been admitted to university and was studying in Hunan. Is she happy now? I asked. The scholar shrugged, "Oh, that kid? She’s a bit carefree."
I didn’t write anything down, nor did I take any notes. Due to my volatile nature, I quickly forgot about it. It wasn’t until the spring of 2016, when I was sick at home with plenty of free time, that I remembered the story of the two sisters. I realized that I had always been thinking about the younger sister. By that time, she should have already graduated from college and entered society. I wondered how she was doing now—had she stepped into the sunlight? Of course, there was no indication that she had been living in the shadows all along; that was merely my imagination. In my mind, she had a body and will that gradually grew stronger in the city life, but she also had a self that continually compromised and lost. She fought against urban life, lost much, bled a lot, but she had to survive because she was herself, and she was also her entire family. The days seemed to stretch endlessly when I was sick, so I allowed myself to write freely. Before I knew it, I had written over 40,000 words. Once I recovered, I abandoned this novel that had accompanied me through my illness without even looking at it again. I became busy after the summer, moving on to other projects. It wasn’t until the end of the year that I revisited it.
In the novel, there is a scene where the older sister and the younger sister are standing by the river and witness a child flying a kite fall into the water and drown. The older sister feels like she has seen a water monster and pulls the younger sister to run away. The younger sister doesn’t move, standing still. When the crowd disperses, the younger sister climbs a tree, retrieves the drowned child’s kite, and takes it home. Many years later, the older sister tells her boyfriend, “That’s my sister—she never says what she wants.” But what does the younger sister want? She wants to replace her older sister, to be the legitimate child, the only one in her parents’ eyes. She has always stood in the shadows, and like all plants that never see the sun, twisted and convoluted branches have grown in her heart.
If Keegan’s Sisters tells the story of the older sister’s inner world, then Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao is about the younger sister’s inner world. But a story set in rural Ireland and one set in China are obviously not the same. I don’t have a sister, and none of my friends do either. In our childhood, having an older or younger sister was not acceptable. It was like seeing two flowers bloom on the same stem of a calla lily—no one would find it beautiful, only abnormal. In the novel, the younger sister’s heart experiences a battle between good and evil. Perhaps it’s too crude to call it good and evil; more accurately, it’s a struggle between family loyalty and self-preservation. The scarcity of resources in her childhood made her especially cautious in defending what little she had won. But she eventually realizes that she may not have truly won anything—she can’t hold onto anything, nor can she grasp anything.
Looking back, Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao also creates a kind of mirror image relationship with Sisters. Just as the younger sister’s return in Sisters disrupts the older sister’s life, the older sister’s appearance in Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao shatters the younger sister’s maintained peace, posing a certain threat. Strangely enough, the older sister in this novel also has beautiful and proud long hair that sways in the summer night, exuding the scent of shampoo. Thank goodness the younger sister doesn’t cut her sister’s hair in the end—she doesn’t need to. The cruel reality will eventually cut off the older sister’s long hair; the younger sister doesn’t need to do anything. All she has to do is watch. However, watching the older sister disappear is akin to conspiring with an invisible murderer. This is where China and Ireland differ. Compared to the lowly position of women, there exists an even greater form of degradation here—about class, about the cursed lives dictated by law. A similar story of sisters, set on this land, could never end with just a lock of hair being cut off.
The title Da Qiao and Xiao Qiao came later. There’s a band by the same name, and I really like their songs. In one song, they sing, “What’s forgotten doesn’t disappear; it hides behind the trees.” So many things that seem forgotten don’t really disappear. We will always meet again, behind some big tree in the spring.
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