First Encounter With Can Xue's Grotesque Fiction

Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas by Xue Can

My rating: 4 of 5 stars

Truth is often a tiny, dim star enveloped in thick layers of cloud and fog, quite beyond recognition by ordinary eyes. Only sophisticated yet simple and sincere creatures can "discover" it in meditation. - Can Xue, "Yellow Mud Street"

Readers need only set their imaginations free. Even if they do not always understand Can Xue, they will invariably be challenged, fascinated, and provoked. - Charlotte Innes

What is there to say about the art of the grotesque? One must taste it. Taste it:

Old Hu San was asleep under the eaves.It was particularly hot that day. Early in the morning Hu San had a dream in which a red spider with a huge belly and long, hairy legs kept crawling onto the tip of his nose. He whisked it off five times, but it crawled back a sixth time. He was about to whisk it off again when a loud tap woke him up. Opening his eyes, he found a big water drop hanging from the tip of his nose.***Lying still, Old Hu San listened to the rain. It beat on the tarred street like popping beans. Streams of black water poured from the eaves. The rain soaked his clothes, then flooded on to the step where he lay. His whole back was immersed. "The rain this year is a little sticky, and a little salty, too," he thought. "Very similar to human sweat." He recalled the year when there was a rain of dead fish. The rainwater then was also salty. He had even salted two big fish.

From out of death, comes life again, but if the trauma of death is massive, the returning life will be grotesque. There is something like a cathartic juissance, a vomiting up of the bile of soul which feels so cleansing and refreshing, that makes Can Xue's descriptive writing a sickeningly addictive performance:

Lying there, they heard the autumn wind skim over the roof. A child shot stones onto the tiles with a slingshot. When they heard the last tiny cricket groaning in the tile jar, they hugged each other in terror, then separated in disgust."Your T-shirt smells sweaty around your armpits.""I changed it this morning.""Maybe, but I smell it. You told me it was a sweet odor, but you were wrong. It's a sour smell. There can't be a mountain so tall that you could catch the sun even if you were at the peak. Can you be wrong about everything?""But I just want to tell about these things. I have to find something to say.""True. I love talking, too. Maybe we're both wrong. Maybe we're doing it on purpose, so we have something to talk about. For instance, you came just now smelling of sunflowers. Then we talked about sunflowers which do not exist in reality. You know that.""My father-in-law incites his daughter to steal things for his home. They think I don't know it. They just like to put on a show.""But you don't care at all?""I pretend not to have seen through their tricks and act greatly annoyed. And sometimes the funny way the old man eggs my daughter on, too, makes me feel like holing up and having a good laugh. Yesterday my daughter came and said she hates her mother bitterly and could no longer tolerate her. She claimed her mother constantly put pressure on her, hid rats under her pillow, stole and burned her letters to her friends, and forced her to dress like a beggar. When she leaves the house, she said, her mother follows her, spying to see if she flirts with anybody. While my daughter feels so humiliated, the mother boasts to her colleagues that her daughter is striving for perfection and will have a bright future. My daughter also told me that all the things that disappeared from my home were stolen by her mother and her grandpa in collaboration.""What did you say then?""Me? Definitely I won't be taken in! I gave her an angry stare and yelled, 'Beat it!' I scared the wits out of her. Only after a long time did she state her grievance: 'I've come to inform against others only to get shouted at.' 'Who asked you to inform against others?' I said fiercely. 'Spying on people! Learning such tricks at your young age!' She looked at me with terror, and ran away. As I expected, my wife flew into a rage that night, saying I suspected her of being a thief! I dashed into my daughter's roomand searched her bed. I found a paper box containing half of the cat's tail. I threw the tail at my daughter, and she started to twitch immediately. These people are crazy.""You make such a great show of being in earnest. Did you tell me you were standing at the other end of the forest at the same time? And you saw something?""When I was standing there, I saw long columns of smoke. The whole city was trembling in the red light. The sky was crackling. Something was crawling haltingly in the mud. Its back was cracked. Dark red bloodstains crimsoned the long path.""The sky full of red light?""It made me dizzy. I regretted that the thing could never crawl to its destination. The smallest stones tipped it over. Where did it intend to go?""Where did it intend to go?" she echoed.

Oh well, life goes on! It will crawl, crippled. It will drink its own pee and eat insects at the bottom of the vat, with the black water. But what might be irreparable are the attachments of human beings to each other, as of parent to child, with the accompanying sense of what these human beings owe to each other. The state of nature is ammoral, non-ethical. Human attachments degrade, are reduced, and may ultimately be lost, disconnected. Then each person is the same as the fungi growing under the floorboards, the spider waiting for the fly. Can Xue's early fiction as represented in this collection closes the gap between life and the mud, food and shit, the man and the rat. She makes one hope like hell that the human experience can recover the injuries dealt it, injuries in the past, ongoing now, and to come. Sometimes hope lies in imagining the worst.

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