Hualing

The Daughter of the Sea

2009-08-14T09:58:00.000-07:00

My two-year old daughter Lianne has developed the habit to listen to recordings in the car. Whenever she gets on her safety seat, she would say, "Daddy, play "The Little Red Riding Hood." Her father would put the CD on, and we would all listen to the tale with her. Somehow,that tale often fails to stay with me while the next one, "The Little Mermaid," always does. Whenever I hear the latter, I cannot help being deeply touched by the tragic life of the daughter of the sea, and I always have the urge to rewrite the tale so that it will convey different notions about gender.

Whether it registers male fantasy of what a woman should be or reflects certain historical truths about women, the tale presents a woman's life as extremely miserable. In order to be able to stay close to the prince, the mermaid has first to lose the freedom to swim in her own kingdom and to walk with such pain as if there were a knife pierced into her heart. She also has to lose her tongue so that she can never really speak to the prince about her feelings and thoughts. She is to save the man only to be forsaken by him. She tragically collapses down to bubbles while he happily starts his honey moon. Can there be more personal miseries than hers?

If Anderson is laudable in having some insight into the tragic elements in the life of a woman, he is not so in idolizing a woman who willingly submits to all the miseries and turns herself into a heroic martyr. He is being whimsical in letting the mermaid choose to die for the man instead of having his blood. What historical and male psychological needs does it satisfy to imagine a woman of such great obedience and such huge capacity to sacrifice?

Indeed, the little mermaid does not have to die. She should take up the witch knife and wield it carefully on the man. Drops of blood will incur pain but not death to him. Pained, the man will, hopefully, see the woman as she is for the first time. For the first time, then, the man may learn to live with the woman--rather than an image of her--or his.

For my daughter, I will have the tale rewritten.

The Unberable Lightness of Being

2009-04-04T20:49:00.000-07:00

Response 1

In his novel _The Unbearable Lightness of Being__, Milan Kundera portrays love as a big irony with the man and the woman constantly misunderstanding each other or coming to understanding too late. Franz and Sabina of course never really understand each other. It is a big irony that Franz leaves his wife for Sabina,which just urges the latter to leave him permanently. But what is more ironic is what happens between Thomas and Tereza. While Thomas thinks he is the strong protector of a weak child, it is Tereza's very weakness,however, that gradually levels his world in which scalpel and penis are exchangeable tools for discovering and conquering the world. Although Thomas thinks that compassion sustains his love for Tereza, what really urges him to follow her is his desire to nudge her into his game; compassion is the kitsch he invents to cover the very lack of it in his successful managing of various womenn. Similarly, fidelity is a kitsch Tereza uses to cover her conscious or unconscious awareness of her own role in their relationship: she is not a weak child but a persistent trainer who dreams to turn Thomas into a Karenin. That may be why they do not have happiness together while each may feel they love the other very much. For Kundera, this is the biggest irony of human love: it can never be greater than the love between man and dog; for the former is inevitably intertwined with the love of the self while the latter is a selfless love. Perhaps if human beings could give up some bits of themselves or when they do not have much of themselves--as at the end of the novel when Tereza realizes her mistakes and when Thomas is too old to conquer for himself--they would love each other better and have moments of happiness. But by letting the two major protagonists die immediately after they reach this understanding, Kundera obviously refuses to build a kitsch of love in his book.

However, does love really have to be as Kundera portrays it? Are human beings indeed unable to make selfless, unconditional love? Are we indeed incapable of "delivering ourselves up to [a partner] demand-free and ask for nothing but his [or her] company (297)? I would like to give more positive answers to these questions.

Response 2

In K's view,love is a kitsch that we have to invent and reinvent to find meanings for life, which is of course the biggest kitsch--the denial of the shit of death. But what I want to know--and what I find lacking in the book--is that kitsch making does not necessarily lead to misery and destruction. True, no one can do anything about the final erasure, but the invention of love itself demonstrates the voluminous and volatile qualities of human intelligence; in its constant assertion of human contact, love has rendered void the final separation. Of course, love here should not be interpreted narrowly as simply the romantic relationship between man and woman but must include love of the self, which engenders love of the other and of the world in general. The fact that the love of the self is the most fundamental form of love does not necessarily lead to the concept of the world as a selfish crap; for in initiating and maintaining the circuit of love, it makes possible-however ironically--human contact, a fundamental triumph of life over death. In this sense, an old woman's resentment against her acquaintances dying on her is no longer an odd lady's funny babbling; it is also a poignant effort to reconnect the chain of human contact when death has broken it.

We need to value kitsch-making a bit more rather than taking it all negatively. Of course, not all kitsches are productive; some lead us directly to destruction, such as fascism. But kitsch-making itself should be taken as a trenchant sign of human intelligence.

思念 Si Nian

2009-04-04T20:46:00.000-07:00

"Field [田]over heart [心] means remember,"
Writes Kimiko Hahn (CAP 178)
What about Nian [念}]
Can we say "Today [今] over heart means remember," too?

Really really Si is nothing than
Fill your heart with memories of a closed world that
You do not remember there is an outside that knows no boundaries

Nian is to let today weigh so much on your heart that you forget
There is something called succession.

Succession? Succession?

Drop the heart,and you win the day.

Parallel Lines

2009-04-04T20:42:00.000-07:00

What would you say if we
Remain two parallel lines
Never crossing we stay in each other’s view
Point blank, heart to heart?

No, No, No, you say
It is cruel.

Yes, yes, I agree
I know that longing
Love’s magic power of drawing
Two lines to melt in hearts’ popping

But you know and me and then
And then no more no more
Happily ever after we shall see
White despair in between
And yet a moth I’d like to
Be in your light and die.

乡愁

2008-06-04T19:19:00.000-07:00

乡愁是心头涩涩的滋味，
乡愁是涌上眼帘而不曾落下的泪。
乡愁是你凝望远方的眼神，
乡愁是我不知所措的疲惫。

乡愁是你眼中的那朵白云，
孤寂地在天空飘。
乡愁是我眸中的那只小鸟，
怯怯地在草间跳。

乡愁是窗外的那颗枯桐，
执意将落叶打向窗棂。
乡愁是屋角的那盏台灯，
炽热地眨着昏黄眼睛。

乡愁是对你无法说出的眷恋，
乡愁是望你一眼便消失的梦幻。

Cloud and Night

2008-05-25T20:56:00.000-07:00

云

从虚无中来，徘徊
在空空里。
步履轻盈，蹒跚
向何处归去？

本是一抹尘埃，
焉何到此高界？
宠受光焰非本意，
哪里觅孤寂？

不要把我阴郁的面庞
说成是悲哀
燃烧的炉膛里不可能有冰雪
即使在我泪流满面的时候
也不要说我在忧伤。

从无边里来
到无边里去
在光华四射的时候
我走向消极。

奔

我走在夜的心脏
听不见夜莺歌唱。
济慈的美梦已醒，
夜行的蝙蝠扑腾在何方？

几盏孤寂的路灯
几株冷落的白杨
辨不清的嗡嗡机音
萦绕我在灰色的建筑群。

我走在夜的心脏
闻不到花草暗香。
即便是波德莱尔之花
也被夜色深深埋葬。

夏的蛙鸣已去
秋的蝉唱不响
寒冷的冬夜不飞雪
黑暗里只生长欲望与诱惑
哪里去觅灵感的光彩？

我走在夜的心脏
寻不着灵感的光芒
浓浓的暗在我的肢体沉淀
撂我倒在黎明的边上。

Mother

2008-05-25T20:40:00.000-07:00

I am afraid
She won’t wait for me
To know her better.
I have long planned
When I am not so damn busy
To sleep in the big bed with her arm around me
Telling me all about herself
Not what I was as a child
But her life when small, young, and meridian
How did she manage it as a woman
Bringing up four daughters and
Surviving two husbands and three sons.

Ever since I remember
I have been flying away
On various planes of language
That she labors for me to catch up with.
The one thing she truly misses, she says
Is the night school that was closed
Before she learned to write wo— the self
That have many strokes in it, she remembers
Never managed to sketch even half of them
She would gave anything
If only Chairman Mao could be back and re-open the night school
For women like her.

a o e y u ü
Standard Chinese
English
I am farther away
I do not even tell her
I am doing a Ph.D
In women’s studies
I am afraid to be asked
What do you do
I do not have a language
To make her understand
That women needs studies

She’s been counting the days
I have left for America.
I am getting shier of the phone
Do not know how to answer
When are you to be back?

Wait for me, wait for me—
I will come home—
With no language but egg noodle soup
To fill your bowl—
We will touch the rain—
Drink the smell of the corn field—
Watch the rainbow
Arching over
East—West—
North—South—
High—Low—
Left—Right
You by me and me by you

Apple and Sunday Noon

2008-05-11T12:31:00.000-07:00

In the dee dee da da silence of Sunday noon
I set out numerous claws contained
In an old fashioned fashionable cocoon
To crawl over the smoothy sneaky surface of the ball
Trying to detect some sound solid core
Trapped up in juicy joy floppy floor

Ka ta ka ta
Ka ta ka ta ka ta
I packaged several boxes of crawling claws
To send out
To various bites of my s-elf
In the dee dee da da silence of the noon.

Click, clock, cling, clang
Click, clock, cling, clang
I collected from various bites of my s-elf
Tanks and tanks of crawling claws
In the dee dee da da silence of the noon.

Daodejing: Response to Water

2007-06-04T20:19:00.000-07:00

who is brecht
laozi dao and benjamin
de-de da-da re-re-me-me
daodejing

bury yourself in the C
you will get a D
and who cares
If you have a poignant p

but sure, dear, give me a ring
and you will find me still
eating, drinking, drooling
with beibei oo aa cooing

Repetition

2007-04-21T13:51:00.000-07:00

"A moment comes when what one has done, what one writes, one's work, one's practices, all of it seems a little like an endlessly repeated substance doomed to repetition....And then suddenly you see the future that remains to you, the future of writing, the future of work, as a kind of foreclosure of everything new..." [Roland Barthes, Speech delivered at the season's James Lecture, New York University, Autumn, 1978--quoted in Blonsky, Marshall. "Introduction: The Agony of Semiotics: Reassessing the Discipline." _On Signs_. Ed. Marshall Blonsky. John Hopkins U Press, 1985. xiii.]

Barthes is indeed Barthes, who can see so clearly into life and expresses his ideas so well. Isn't his vision what used to haunt me in an unspeakable but tangible way? Yes. Used to, that is, before Beibei was born. When I actually read this passage with her in my lap, soundly sleeping, I smiled, feeling Barthes was not all right.

Is she a repetition? Whenever I smile involuntarily at her involuntary smile during sleep, everything around seems to start to life, asking me to rearrange them into Beibei's life. Surely, the other day, sunshine knocked at the pantio door, inviting me to take Beibei out, and for the first time after a long winter, I noted there were so many greens already there..."This is grass, That is tree." I was teaching Beibei: or maybe it was me who should have been--and probably was--the student?

Girl at the Window

2007-03-23T15:31:00.000-07:00

Dears:

Thank you all for your responses. The following poem is my note of gratitude. Take it lightly, though.

窗前伫立的姑娘，
收起心绪箩筐！
冰的火热
火的冰凉
三千长的记忆
街头叫卖的小曲
“冰糖葫芦哩”。

不要被我的假象迷惑
哭泣的欢颜
开怀的清泪
我不是你眼中的紫薇。

The girl at the window,
Conceal your thought willow!
The ice is scathing
The fire is freezing
The memory of three thousand meters long
Is mingling into the pedlar's song
"Bing Tang Hu Lu"--Bang!

Sugared berry
Sour sweet
Buy one and
Get two free.

Enjoy!

Lianne

2007-03-16T15:37:00.000-07:00

Little girl Lianne joined town on February 18, 2007, and is now a chubby and cheering creature: motherhood is enjoyable OVERALL, AFTER ALL?!

Slightly smiling and seemingly satisfied, her face often touches me, reminding me of something--something long forgotten, something yet to come by. In the sound of night and in the silence of noon, I try in vain to find language for that something.

This morning, as I gazed at the crystal branches outside the window, something jumped into my head: you are my dream--after all these years. After all these years, you are my dream? You, my little girl? You that fills my everyday? You that I put away to make room for everyday? You-my beauty of sadness? You--my coffeeortea? You--that part of me that longs for permanence--Siheng, Siheng? Yes, you, why doubt?