At this year’s Macau Literary Festival, I participated in a dialogue with Irish writer Claire Keegan. Keegan has long been one of my favorite novelists; I’ve read her short story collections “Antarctica” and “Walk the Blue Fields” multiple times.
Without any preparation, I began speaking about my story “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao” (Big Bridge Little Bridge). It was only at that moment I realized its connection to one of Keegan’s stories. Li Yiyun once said she uses her novels to engage in dialogue with works by authors she admires. For instance, she likes William Trevor and his “Three People,” so she wrote “Golden Boy and Jade Girl.” “Three People” is a rather mysterious and dark novel about an old man, his daughter, and a young man who admires her. The three form a stable triangle. For various reasons (I consider it unethical to spoil the secrets hidden in that brilliant novel), the old man’s existence becomes the premise for the young couple’s relationship. If he were to die one day, they would be unable to face each other.
In “Golden Boy and Jade Girl,” Li Yiyun also writes about a triangular relationship: an elderly woman, her son, and a girl who intrudes into their lives. However, the background is 1990s China, and the characters’ personalities and predicaments differ, giving the novel a distinctly different atmosphere and texture. If Li hadn’t mentioned it herself, no one would think of “Three People” while reading “Golden Boy and Jade Girl.” But knowing this connection makes reading “Golden Boy and Jade Girl” feel like a mirror image of “Three People,” which is quite interesting.
Keegan wrote a short story called “Sisters.” In it, there’s a pair of sisters born in rural Ireland. The younger sister marries into the city, living a luxurious middle-class life. The older sister stays behind to care for their aging parents, missing out on marriage and remaining alone for years. After their parents’ death, she inherits the land.
The younger sister returns every summer with her children to stay with her older sister for a while. But this year is different. She arrives and lingers, seemingly with no intention of leaving. The older sister endures, serving her and her children daily until the final moment when she explodes, revealing the truth: there are no satin curtains, no dishwasher – everything is fabricated.
The younger sister has been abandoned by her husband and has returned to seize her older sister’s land. But the older sister tells her that everything here was earned through thirty years of her life, and she will never allow anyone to take it away. At the story’s end, the older sister stands in front of a mirror, combing her younger sister’s hair as she did when they were young. The younger sister has long golden hair that the older sister has always envied. Suddenly, the older sister takes scissors and snips off her sister’s hair. The younger sister screams in terror. The story ends there.
The scene of cutting a girl’s hair out of jealousy isn’t Keegan’s original creation. F. Scott Fitzgerald wrote “Bernice Bobs Her Hair,” where a pretty girl’s hair is also viciously cut off. Whether “Sisters” is in dialogue with “Bernice Bobs Her Hair” is unknown. But this doesn’t prevent “Sisters” from being an excellent story. I like that lonely, patient, and stubborn older sister who defends the little she has, which is her reason for existing 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 call myself a volatile reader (this realization comes from drinking – my face turns red and the alcohol smell is strong, but after a few hours it completely dissipates as if I never drank) – I can’t remember any sentences from books, making it nearly impossible to quote them when writing articles. After about a year, I forget most of the plot of a novel, possibly remembering only scattered details. Three years later, if asked about a certain book, I’m embarrassed to say I’ve read it because, well, there’s no trace left.
This has its advantages. I never have to worry about the so-called “anxiety of influence.” As long as enough time passes, there’s no need to fear any masterpiece being unforgettable.
In the 2017-2 issue of “Harvest,” Zhang Yueran’s novella “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao” was published.
When writing “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao,” I had completely forgotten about “Sisters.” The only thing I remembered was the detail of cutting hair, which came from an overlapping impression after reading Fitzgerald. But Fitzgerald and Keegan had already become entangled in my mind, and I couldn’t remember who wrote it first. The origin of “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao” was a friend R I met on Douban.
She was studying for a PhD in Economics in Sweden and came to Boston as an exchange student for a year. We met in Boston during winter. She was shy and reserved but radiated a kind of profound wisdom. She recommended Marilynne Robinson’s “Housekeeping” to me and took me on a tour of snow-covered Harvard University, pointing out the small theater where she usually watched European art films (that day, a film by a master I can’t recall was showing, but I was more interested in buying ski wear and mugs at nearby shops).
Later, when she returned to China, we met again. She told me about some of her research topics, like how Columbus bringing potatoes to Europe after discovering the Americas greatly influenced Europe’s overall population growth and urbanization.
Then she casually mentioned a story she had just heard from a scholar studying family planning: a pair of sisters, the legally born older sister finally succumbed to family pressure and committed suicide many years later, while the illegally born younger sister seemed unaffected and lived healthily.
Through her introduction, I met this scholar, who gave me two books about 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 and said, “Oh, that child? She’s a bit carefree.”
I didn’t write anything down, not even make any notes. Due to my volatile personality, I soon forgot about this too. It wasn’t until the spring of 2016, when I was sick at home with plenty of free time, that I remembered those sisters. I realized I had been thinking about the younger sister all along. According to the timeline, she should have already graduated from university and entered society. I wanted to know how she was doing now, whether she had stepped into the sunshine.
Of course, there was no indication that she had always lived in the shadows; that was just my imagination. In my imagination, she had a body and will that gradually strengthened in urban life, but also a self that constantly compromised and lost. She fought with city life, lost a lot, and shed quite a bit of blood, but she had to survive because she was herself, and she was also her entire family.
The days were always long when I was sick, so I let myself write freely. Before I knew it, I had written over 40,000 words. When I recovered, I abandoned this novel that had kept me company through my illness, not even looking at it again. I became busy after the summer and wrote other things. It wasn’t until the end of the year that I took it out again.
In the novel, there’s a scene where the sisters stand by a river and see a child flying a kite fall into the water and drown. The older sister feels she’s seen as a water monster and pulls her younger sister to run away quickly. The younger sister doesn’t move, standing still. After the crowd disperses, the younger sister climbs a tree, retrieves the dead child’s kite, and takes it home. Many years later, the older sister tells her younger sister’s boyfriend, “This is my sister. She never says what she wants.” What does the younger sister want? She wants to replace her sister, to become the only legal child of her parents. She has always stood in the shadows, like all plants that can’t reach the sun, growing twisted branches in her heart.
If Keegan’s “Sisters” is about the older sister’s thoughts, then “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao” is about the younger sister’s thoughts. But stories happening in rural Ireland and China are different. I don’t have sisters, nor do my friends around me. In our childhood, having sisters was not right. It’s like two flowers blooming on a calla lily stem – no one would find it beautiful, only deformed. In the novel, there’s a struggle between good and evil in the younger sister’s heart. Perhaps calling it good and evil is a bit crude; more precisely, it’s between cherishing family ties and protecting oneself. The scarcity of resources in childhood makes her particularly cautious in defending the little she has won. But she finally discovers that she may not have truly won anything; she can’t hold onto anything, can’t grasp anything.
Looking back, “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao” also forms a kind of mirror relationship with “Sisters.” Just as the younger sister’s return disrupts the older sister’s life in “Sisters,” in “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao,” the older sister’s appearance breaks the peace maintained by the younger sister, posing a kind of threat. And very strangely, the older sister in this novel also has beautiful and arrogant long hair, floating in the summer night, emitting the scent of shampoo.
Thank goodness the younger sister doesn’t end up cutting her sister’s hair. Because she doesn’t need to. Cruel reality will cut off the older sister’s long hair; the younger sister doesn’t need to do anything. She just needs to watch. However, watching her sister disappear is like colluding with an invisible killer, isn’t it? This is the difference between China and Ireland. Compared to the humble status of women, there’s an even greater humility here. About class, about cursed lives determined by law. The same sister story happening on this land could never end with just cutting off a lock of beautiful hair.
The title “Da Qiao Xiao Qiao” was chosen later; there’s a band with this name, and I like their songs. In one song, they sing, “What’s forgotten doesn’t disappear, it hides behind trees.” So many things that seem forgotten don’t disappear. We always meet again, behind a big tree in spring.