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Which is Better, Dreams or Reality?
Xue Yiwei, a Shenzhen-based novelist, has, for the past nine years, been looking for his spiritual home, like Odysseus on his way back home. He has finally found his Ithaca in the new century.
He has had over a dozen short stories and novels published in such influential literary magazines as "People's Literature," "Hibiscus," "Harvest," and "Writers" in 2000 and early this year.
All these are strong evidence that his search was not in vain, but what is even more important and unique is the way the stories are told and the philosophical thinking evident within them.
Xue first manifested his philosophical bent in 1989 with his first novel "Desertion." But it was not until 1999 that the second edition of this novel was published. Joking with a friend, Xue said that less than 17 people had read the first edition.
But the book has now been embraced by the critics, albeit a bit late in the day. In the preface to the new edition, critic Ai Xiaoming says the author demonstrates certain qualities in his novels that few other authors possess. With these qualities, Xue unveils for his readers an individual's life, which he uses to explain why Chinese people live the way they do.
At the beginning of the book, Xue writes, "The world deserted me, so, I try to desert the world.''
In his more recent works, Xue has furthered his philosophical exploration of common people's lives.
Life and death
"A Taxi Driver," published in the literature magazine "Frontiers" in May 2000, is typical of his stories. It tells the tale of a farmer-turned-taxi driver's mood after his wife and daughter are killed in a traffic accident.
The plot is so simple that it can hardly be called a story. But Xue writes it in such a manner that careful readers really get a sense of how a man could be affected by the tragic death of his loved ones.
The story starts with the taxi driver dropping off his last passenger and parking his taxi in the parking lot of his company before going to eat in an Italian restaurant across the street.
"I am sorry for your poor wife and daughter," the old man on duty in the office says to the driver when he hands in the key of his taxi. The driver does not seem to have any response to the sympathetic words.
The writer wants to tell the reader that no one can understand the impact the loss of his loved ones has had on the driver. Any words of comfort and sympathy make no sense to the driver, who has suddenly been made to understand the meaning of death and life.
Later the taxi driver resigns and is going to leave the city, which always reminds him of the time he spent there with his wife and daughter.
The words "sorry for your poor wife and daughter" show how meaningless language can be. Why be sorry for the wife and daughter when they are dead and cannot feel£¿
The driver sits at the same table he and his daughter used to sit at and asks for the food his daughter liked most. The moment he orders the food, he almost bursts into tears. He is so lost in thought that the waitress has to ask him three times before he realizes that he should pay the bill.
Using what should be a familiar environment, Xue shows how everything has become different for the driver. After 15 years in the same place with his wife and daughter, he looks up from the table and turns to look out of the window, realizing how alienated he has become. He feels as if life has rejected him and that he no longer fits anywhere.
As Xue explores the driver's memories, he inserts a conversation he has overheard in his taxi that day.
A woman passenger talked on her mobile phone the whole way. Not being able to hear the person she is talking to, the driver only catches fragments of the conversation.
"There is nothing I can do about it."
"It can only be done in this way."
"I don't want it to be like that."
"Of course."
"No, it's not."
"No, it won't."
The taxi driver could not figure out whether it was a woman or a man on the other end of the line. "It might be a woman or it might be a child," he thinks.
It is evident that the fragments he caught had meant something to the taxi driver. Yes, there is nothing the taxi driver can do about the death of his wife and daughter £» it can only be done in this way - the driver has to resign to his fate and go back to his hometown to live with his parents£» and the driver does not want life to treat him the way it has, of course not.
This part of the story suggests that language can sometimes be ambiguous. The same sentences can mean quite different things to different people and it is the listener's understanding that counts.
As he eats, the driver remembers the facial expressions of his daughter and wife£º his daughter with cake filling smeared on her face and his wife's smile as she looks at him. They mean more to him now than ever before.
Xue is trying to say that the driver does not care very much about their existence when they are there, but now that they are gone, he realizes how important their existence was to him.
The conversation between a man and woman on the back seat of his taxi that same day brings this idea out further.
"Sometimes I feel I can hardly tear myself away from it," the man said.
"Sometimes£¿ How can that be£¿" The woman asked.
"It's true, everything seems unreal," the man said.
Everything around the taxi driver seems unreal until his wife and daughter leave him forever.
At the end of the story, the melting of a cube of ice on the table makes the driver really understand the meaning of "departure."
Attempts to communicate
In another story£º "Two Men's Station," Xue compares a person's contact with the world with the encounter between two people at a train station. This story has four separate anecdotes.
In the first, a young Chinese writer, the protagonist in the story, waits for fame. However, because he can only speak one language, he has not come across the world's best literature.
He is waiting at a station in Paris for a friend who used to be his neighbour when they were both young boys. His friend fails to show up. His failure to meet his friend symbolizes the writer's failure to encounter many important things in his life.
His father was the first reader of his first novel, which he wrote when he was still a teenager, but his father failed to understand the work. The stories and novels he writes over the years that followed were also misunderstood and rejected by the critics.
The language he uses is the reason for this rejection, preventing him as it does from communicating properly with readers and critics. Xue wants to tell his readers that language can never adequately convey what people want to express.
In the second anecdote, an Italian missionary arrives in Beijing on January 24, 1601, with the hope of getting to know ancient Eastern civilization. His meeting with the Chinese emperor is the first contact between modern Western civilization and ancient Eastern culture.
However, what the Chinese emperor was interested in is the missionary's alarm clock, not his Western ideas.
Although the missionary does a great deal to bring the two civilizations closer together, translating some mathematical concepts into Chinese and Confucian ideas into Italian, he ultimately fails in his mission. The encounter of the two civilizations takes place just in form but not in substance. The two civilizations have since then continued to travel along their own tracks.
Man and the world
In his story "Floating Rooms," Xue tries to delve into the relationship between life and death and the relationship between man and the objective world.
The first room that the hero enters in his dream is full of books, which refers to the rational side of human beings. The smell of desire makes the hero feel that he has been in the room before, and he has experienced complicated experiences of various kinds there.
Books are where mankind's experience is accumulated. The hero cannot resist the temptation of the hostess while he reads books by such writers as Roland Barthes (1915-80) and Calvino Italo (1923-85). He makes love to the hostess, which shows that man will never overcome his desires and his animal nature with reason.
The second room the hero goes into has only a bed in it, in which the hero and the hostess satisfy their desires. The writer tries to tell the reader that desire is something that everyone has, no matter how civilized.
The third room is one without any windows or lights. The darkness represents man's nihilism in his search for the meaning of life. It is easy for man to become nihilistic when he doubts that life has a meaning. Xue is saying that people in this state of mind are in a room without any light.
The last room is full of music, representing man's imagination and dreams. The hero and his woman talk about matrimony, but the man believes that he will no longer be able to imagine and dream about marriage, the perfect union, if he actually does it. He knows that it will never live up to his dreams.
From reading this part of the story, it could be concluded that satisfying a desire or accomplishing something means that you have lost the dream of it. Xue is asking, which is better, the dream or the actuality£¿
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