开心

This morning, walking in Lu Xun Park, I slowed, and then stopped, to watch a man writing traditional characters on the footpath using a large calligraphy brush dipped in water from a plastic drinks container. By the time he had completed a line of text his first characters had already begun to evaporate. Further along, sitting on the edge of the path practicing characters was an older man with a beard. At his feet was a puddle of unintelligible words. Buying breakfast from a stall in Tina ai Lú I silently held out a handful of coins for the young girl selling baozi. Having just arrived in Shanghai, and my only Chinese being nihao, I could only point and hope she understood. A small child smiling on the back of a pushbike repeated phrases her mother sang as she peddled passed one of the street’s corner fruit and vegetable stalls. Language I realized was something I had taken for granted; now words were unfamiliar, and I felt more infantile than the child on the back of a pushbike repeating her mother’s song.

But I also experienced something other than a sense of alienation as I held out my handful of coins at the baozi stall. There was something more. The characters written in water evaporating on the warm concrete footpath, and being stepped over by passing pedestrians may have been unintelligible to me; however the gentleman’s practice, his gestures were not. The young girl, with a prod from her father, selected the correct coins from my palm and handed me my meal. At a gallery opening of the Beijing artist Guo Lizhong at Studio Rouge, just off the Bund, Guo, Cath (my partner), and I tried to talk about the artist’s work. He did not speak English, Cath spoke rudimentary Chinese, and I none. We called George, the gallery owner over to ask if he could help, and when either myself, or Guo or Cath spoke, and George translated, we all looked toward him. We were standing close to each other, but our gaze excluded, usually, the original voice. George had become, however fleetingly, the one being translated, even though we could each have reached out our hand and lightly touched the one who had posed the original question or had just commented. It was as if being translated amounted to our being diminished as a person. But given the sincerity of Georges’s attempts to explain what we each meant to say, the obvious pleasure that Cath in particular had derived from Gou’s paintings, and the presence of the work itself, this sense of diminished self also became a humble gift offered between those standing together in this small busy space.

Inside Lu Xun Park through one of its minor gates, opposite an area of fenced off grass, is the Lu Xun memorial. On the second floor at the head of a marble staircase are hundreds of Lu Xun’s translated works encased in Perspex, in rows eight and nine high. The slim pastel coloured volumes published by the Foreign Language Press that I brought in the early 1980’s from the East Wind Bookshop in Hardware Lane Melbourne were displayed on the left hand wall. What I enjoyed about these editions, and still do, was that on the inside, after the English title page, there was a reproduction of the original Chinese publication’s front cover, usually a wood cut or engraving, a form of printing that Lux Xun had loved and encouraged. The original cover of Wild Grass is a vertical landscape printed in grey, with just a few darker green lines highlighting the foreground hills, darker than that of the translation’s cover with its title in black. Outside this three story memorial people walk, sing to the accompaniment of classical instruments, follow the song sheets of revolutionary songs, dance the fox trot and the tango, dance in traditional costume, play badminton (on and off the courts), draw portraits, play cards, sit and talk, and paint in water on the paths. At the main entrance on Sichuan Beilu a woman carrying large multi-coloured balloons, some in the shape of Hello Kitty, or others printed with the face of Snow White, hands two smaller transparent balloons to a man who had been pushing his daughter in a pram, while a small boy smiling, looks up at his bright yellow fish floating at the end of a red ribbon. The park with Lu Xun’s name and its people are the author’s words translated once again into daily life; while inside, the walled memorial encourages reverence and silence. Communal activity and the possibility of singular contemplation in the one location. This is how I translate the day.