北京麻雀 (Sparrows of Beijing)
The Accident - 01
The Accident
意外※
Handwritten Script
[Here, in luscious hand of Ardelle Li, was her writing of the Days Before The Accident.]1
春眠不觉晓2
14 April 1989 – Friday
Midway upon the journey of life, I found herself within a forest dark, for the straightforward pathway had been lost.3 The trees, those that were forward, had been carefully crinkled, into forms that had been formed into ghogshi – philosopher's stones or rocks– with bonsai tree wrapped around them – the horizontal nature of humanity, as opposed to the vertical nature. Through the two panels I ran, and almost as an afterthought, a bit of new fabric came into being – it was not solid, but a Kitty-corner which just drooped out from behind, a silvery bit of reflection. But it had not been there. This was the beginning of a change, from a natural to an unnatural state of being. My face was still serene, but there was a clue that something was stirring in the blood. 毒无穷并.4
15 April 1989 - Saturday
Lead, and we will follow. Hu Yaobang was sent from out of power and settled into legend. And today, the young follow with a passion. Blooms out of blooms, and into fullness. With red sorghum in their hair, to reach out in a farewell, to the concubine. A red lantern had been raised. It is like reporting three springs. 引子.5
Whither go I? To the Opium silence, lush stony quiet akin to death? I do not know. Yesterday I lied, today I lie, tomorrow I lie. The mother of Pearl explodes rather than let an untruth collide with the air. This should be noted and learned from. The master sits and ruminates. Wit, man to the breeze to my old home.6
On the square, a few, at dawn, were agitating about. Cry immense cry, over the loss of the savor. Myriads strolled past, without a lump in the throat to mark the rising. While I hid, even I knew this was a mistake. Crush the bottle under the feet if you like, it will come back. Even the State Council feels this, in the rumples of its hearts. Die young by looking at the heavans.
Gathering and gathering, until the heaven's ached. Multitudes at the score, years to be the highest lake to which the poets when from the Golden Hoards. 今年乘興卻南遊.7One grumbles and, in the distance, grow quiet to the rushing of the river of Jiangxi.
Noon and they were enough to stop the bicycles, enough to start the cursing and swearing of the Proletariat 普罗.8
15 April 1989 addendum - Saturday
The leader is dead.
16 April 1989 - Sunday
April, come she will, the cruelest month. A vision softly creeping buried one dead who we didn’t see. This leads my father and my mother to have a conversation. It went like this, father first:
“We must decide whether we are involved or uninvolved.” I am a girl and do not know these things. 高高在上.9
A woman must: “Un-.” 没.10 Or 沒 in the unspoken old way, but would-be Taiwan, and the Central Government did not recognize the Nationalist - they’re being only one 中间.11
“Why so?” 32 Skidoo. Catch 22. Melancholia.12 We who are dumber than before.”
“Because they will not win. The old revolution will defeat the young evolution.”
“And if they do?”
“We will join the ruckus.” Becoming Language, in a Noam Chomsky sort of way.
With this father only nodded. That got me to thinking when the twain decides, it often sends one to the left, and one to the right. Since my mother and father were in agreement, my older brother would follow their lead. I must go the other way to go back home. Grab my things.
This led to a knock on the door, late at night. I waited because my parents would just come in, but my older brother would not.
This is not for you. 千千万万.13
The sentence on the obverse side is true.
反面的句子是错误的。14
Then you count in primes.
So, opening the door was the black mop of hair with white eyes on the yellow staff. 圍棋 Black white on yellow.15 Viet Nam rescindment in a Protracted Game. Maoist Revolutionary Strategy supreme. 天地玄黄.16 Trodden underfoot.
I motion him to come silently in. Virginal decorations of the Modern.
Again, the Master sits. But video killed the radio star.
“If you think there are any secrets, dismiss that thought from your mind.”
So, we met in an abandoned studio. I drop my eyes to my bare skin.
“Did not think it, or even emote it.”
“Everyone saw it.”
“But did they feel it?”
To this, he had no answer. It meant that I must do what I must do, but hide the colour of blood, la.17 安.18
17 April 1989 - Monday
I picked up an apple. A stillness happens, yet it keeps dancing on and on, through the music of time. No myth - I just want someone to dance with as time stood still. A Gold Faded Gold Star. With red sneakers.
But still, I must defeat my urge to run rampant through the streets. It is the earth to a scholar.
Through the bowels of the elevator, saying nothing to the lift girl, since there were only two floors, I could go off at. Anything else would be a secret between us, marfan.
Down and out, by the back into the alley, din was din-din spider year of the earth snake. It flies high with the English patterns of “89”, “89”, “89” et fin.
Skip, skip, skip to my Lau - and out to the busy street, with restaurants and sites of rolling hot plates, with bribes for the urban police. Be very careful with police who are not police chin-chin-chen. The dizzying array of tones and timbers shades and tinctures beguiling on the ocular membrane to dazzle the electric boogaloo. And it is only Monday, Monday, Monday. 星期一,19 the first day of the star period. The was no dive to hunker down.20
There is a spatter of clothes with verve and style - the citizens inside them are doing well, wrapped in Kaui so thick it is almost like silver. While the rest of us are dressed in mao, and glad we are not dressed in sīn, the close of the outsiders, who every morning sweep the boulevards and avenues in their platoons scabbarding soap and washing behind with dirty water, to keep the asphalt clean.
Looking both ways, I see the dim slivers of figures, who are the ghosts of people made thin by The Great Leap Forward and The Cultural Revolution.21 Whereas I know that I am not like that because both of my parents were members of the party and teachers at Beijing University besides. They read the signs and decided that I would be fat with grace. I hate them for that.
I hustle to join the parade’s end, with a gusto I do not feel, peering out of the corner of my eyes for the signs of open revolt, verging on Glasnost warfare.
But what I saw was a young man, so tall, so very tall. His skin was milk with jasmine, and he had red mixed in with his hair. He wore a faint mustache and beard, trimmed, but only barely. Loose clothing bought at an ershou shop, folded yet worn - black as the Ace of Spades. And bedraggled sneakers qua tennis shoes.
And then he was gone.
And into my mind. Ah, look at all the lonely people!
Exploded like a spurious track across the high plateau which streams down the mountain pass, shimmering plumes of ivory toward the gorge. 此恨綿綿無絕期.22
18 April 1989 - Tuesday
She, is susceptible. The throughs are small, but everywhere has sent them. Perhaps everywhen, to watch the game underfoot. As if Thomas Jefferson would peek around the corner, like some gawky meiguoren, look to score with a nuhai with a piaoliang face. 靓女23 Měinǚ ni hao is not me, I am rotund. I am not the cause of some 非婚生子女.24. He is impossible.
Looking across the littering students and the old gristled workers, they are theys, a pairing in the sand, 昭陽殿裡恩愛絕.25 A still of anger spread wings of a pigeon, to call a cock-a-doodle-doo, from the lands of rice and tea, where the eggs steamed and ruminated under the sun. It was a sprout from the mountain.
The sun above The Gate of Heavenly Peace, beat down on us until I had to shadow my eyes. Then to peer, again, on that dim shadow that had yesterday burned my heart and eyes. The evidence before the court is incontrovertible. It is my beloved.
But I could not run, Je revois la ville en fête et en délire. The bright that burns as nothing else before. Dreams become nightmares to have the forbidden city. Suffoquant j'entends éclatent et perdue. À la recherche du temps perdu. Étourdie, retourne, se recule. La foule, la foule, la foule. À la recherche du temps perdu. She is susceptible to a face that ever quivers like nothing before. Le fou de la foule de java de la musique. Padam. Padam. Padam. La comédie du la tragédie: 三國演義.26
I ate a plump mango. Nothing special.
Hao la! Hao la! Hao la!
19 April 1989 - Wednesday
On the morrow, it broke, the day. The sweepers in their robed tan uniforms to span the brown scrubbed square. Clean making the whole world clean. Glowering to the small corners, the below, above, and all around the toils. Then the sellers from 城种村27 went around with mǐfàn, jiǎozi, bāozi - and of course, yóutiáo with sawdust in it, washed down with cheap mòlìhuāchá. It was there that a few protesters showed up, by the rain undaunted. It was the heat of the moment. And in it, he shall die.
Now there had been protesters from the government side often, acting as if their chants were unrehearsed. There had even been true rabble, for example protesting the cost of bread.28 But these were different in nature. They had true demands, succinctly phrased, which cut to the core of power. This would not do. Wednesday morning 3AM.
All along the northside ripples of red kiln roof ripened by seasons to ancient age, where nothing has happened, twice. The bones of the masters hang from the rafters from ropes, after they are dead. The north is a Chang’an Jie, a boulevard on which half of the government lives. And does only one thing: to keep the Party in glory, which it uses to hold power. Here’s where the story starts, with a little souvenir. So the sun says.
Its size is vast, almost 110 acres of flat plain of pallid brick, which on the southern plane a hill is cast Zhengyangmen, on the east is Zhōngguó Guójiā to the Republic for which it stands, the sun sets over the Great Hall of the People, where everything is rubber-stamped, officially with a chop and seal and drawl and dreel. Homeless Generation and kin redux. Waishengren not benshengren of Santa Claus - the students will someday join the workers’ party, but the worker will not. waibei - waibei - waibei. (Like a helicopter.)
平心而论:29 Not work hard enough to avoid working, nenggan
Get in line, or fei the bill. We are just for someone to dance with.
Here the rebellion, as I document it. She has awakened, here will be her dénouement décolletage sou la main, for better and for worse: 雨過天青.30 But I’m frightened of things I might find.
Gatherings of students, workers, and employed unemployables. Fires bleeding of newspapers without news, in this the four directions of the wind, smoke fluting up to clouds, bring rain on everyone. Hovels with riffraff becoming people in drovish кочевник. Consecrating the people’s insurrection, to be admitted to the halls of cracy, bring demos in. (I really don’t know clouds, at all.)
But where do I fit in? Am I top or bottom? Or thread between two snakes? In my wildest dreams…
20 April 1989 - Thursday
I sit in one of the dives on Liangfan 2nd Alley, uncertain and afraid, misremember for a half-formed line that ruins all - wondering whether I should leap into Machiavelli’s Hell with De Grazian gusto, with mastery of Chinese political thought. So it goes, in a country without a name. Clever dishonest waves circulate darkly. For noxious thought divines’ tranquilising serenity. Low outrage consumes the night surrounding the faces and slurries into the mouths that barely open and say so much in their quacking. Contemplating God and the saints into the shadows, fapiao. 举足轻重31: So much admired, in its day. Coltrane and Davis in Paris Olympia on 1960.
Over the weary floors, the shoes of the waitress strangle, even though they know that luminescence comes a burning. Pans are dropped to be opened and eaten. Giving face to the paying. To the Finland Station and back again with gusto yesterday. Maybe not today, maybe not tomorrow.
1 Who am I? I am the editor, sight unseen, unheard but in a memory in Memorex.
2 spring sleep unconscious
3 Reference to Dante, Inferno, i.1-3
4 The poison is endless.
5 Prologue or primer.
6 Orville Schell’s novel.
7 This year, I took the opportunity to travel south.
8 Proletariat
9 Isolated from the masses.
10 A word for “No”
11 China the Middle Kingdom. That is to say the center of the world in a way as the Romans would call the sea “The middle sea.” Mediterraen.
12 Coin the date:
16 3 2 13
5 10 11 8
9 6 7 12
4 15 14 1
13 Numberless lit. Tens of thousands.
14 The sentence on the reverse side is false.
15 In her fine script, Ardelle Li wrote in Go:
“e dure questo pistolenza fino a”
midst petilenza Finish
diseased swellings
continuous bleeding
Suffered spread
with sweat blood buboes
excrement accompanied
infected bloodstream
contagion physician
Schilling brittle
penetrated Marseille
accomplished faded
3rd world
graveyards overflowed
hoods masking
devoured contagion prosperous manorial
enclosed monasteries infection
exterminate exterminate exterminate
plague rampaged
melancholy truncated
Loathsome deadliness Decameron
renewed peace Christ
mortality mock
unneighborly reaction.
Winters immunity
inhabitants Hanseatic
atrophy epitomized
herdsman Alps prospect calisthenics.
Widows
Morning.
Hedgerows wilderness
annual awful energy,
chronicler inclination
Tannery responded bargain,
bills sexton anxious to obtain.
Bells tolling.
Unfinished sentence.
Medieval learning,
appointed successor vagaries.
Government chaos oligarchy
behavior timeless repented
Pasturella bacillus
Rattus Rattus
Cirurgia anesthesia
contagion anonymous prolonged infection Gentile respiratory
sackcloth superstition pestilence
Très Riches Heures
Duc penitence de Bury profession
4 Cardinals failed fashionable stench
growling revulsion handkerchief curls
Swoopes Boccaccio extraordinary
what you are we were.
“this is the end of the world”
black death.
16 Heaven and earth are gray. First line of 1000 Character Classic, used for teaching writing.
17 In the fine script, Ardelle Li wrote, with many erasures:
Avarice and Fury
dervish’s eye conjoins
Bad Apples in Buffalo
misconduct opposes
elderly protester
blood pooled
aftermath unrest
policing honoring
to get the shit kicked out
incident metaphor
Initially discomfiting
57 officers took a stand
To Allow misconduct
Because where does the face
Sit, so neatly on the ground?
18 Install or peace.
19 Monday.
20 Reference to “1 September 1939”
21 In Ardelle’s notes:
impeachment impeachment impeachment
beseeched appalling partisan
impartial conscience four
literally restored institution expulsion
unexpected
preordained
inevitable.
22 This hate lasts forever.
23 Pretty girl
24 illegitimate children
25 Love and happiness long ended within palace walls
26 Romance of the Three Kingdoms.
27 City walls
28 Years later, in her delicate hand, Ardelle Li made a note:
Abuse of Symbols
Hours ticked
Primetime
Unholy delivery
Summoned corpse
Xaos peaceful
Coronavirus graffiti
Grievous knee.
Nearness Tourists
Beijing or Moskva technology
White construction protests
Reservoir of rage
Degree Capri economy theatrics.
Rose Garden revolted,
Declaring violence dominate
Juxtaposition
At St. John’s.
Nonsense Bible jumble.
29 In all fairness
30 After the rain the sky is blue. Idiom for new hopes after a disastrous time.
31 Pivotal