****
Merebear note: Again, this is the online version from dmbj.org so it differs slightly from Chapter 9 of the published version I did back on 5/31/2020 (POV is different, a few things added, difference in wording on some things, etc). Enjoy!
****
It happened on a sunny afternoon in a Tibetan-style cafe on the bank of the Jiangnan River.
The cafe’s name was “Kekexili”. The walls were studded with prayer wheels and several vajra statues that were half a person high and looked like the Mother Buddha of Salvation. Off on one side, smoke from Tibetan incense rose from a large gilt incense burner. Whether it was the sights or the smells, this shop had a very strong Tibetan aesthetic.
I didn’t particularly like it here. Outside the window was the Grand Canal Cultural Park on the banks of the Jiangnan River, where you could see some Han-style wooden buildings with flying eaves. Looking out the window at the Han Dynasty eaves in a Western Tibetan-style cafe made me very uncomfortable, but that may have been because I was engaged in photography and had an almost abnormal desire for harmony.
But it was obvious that the meeting host didn’t mind this kind of abruptness.
It was a gathering of seven people: two old critics, a publisher, a female writer, myself, and two journalists, all of whom were considered local celebrities. We had scheduled the meeting two months ago, mainly to plan a new book about the desert that the female writer was about to begin writing. In this era, the hard work of writing was no longer done privately. All aspects of the “preheat” planning process had already been launched by the time an author began writing. Even her trip to Badain Jilin Desert two months ago to gather research was a hyped-up piece of news at the time.
Our division of labor was clear-cut: the publisher’s role was obvious; the senior critics were responsible for recommending the book; the journalists were responsible for the media; and I was responsible for taking a set of authentic photos to be used as a publicity stunt when we advertised the book. All of these roles had to be coordinated collectively under one overall marketing plan.
The meeting started at nine o’clock in the morning and continued on into the afternoon, but I actually didn’t know what we were talking about. Publishers, writers, journalists, and photographers were all unreliable people since they kept chatting and going a thousand miles off topic.
In fact, I didn’t really participate in much of the discussion. On one hand, my job was very simple. All the marketing plans had little to do with me, so I was only here as an obligatory observer. On the other hand, my attention was focused on the woman writer for a long time because she was somewhat unusual.
“Lan Ting. Freelance writer” was what was written on the business card she handed to me.
Freelance writers rarely got their own business cards, so I couldn’t help but smile. However, I was familiar with this name. In recent years, this name had always appeared in various newspaper articles and news feeds. It seemed like she wrote mysteries, and was regarded as a rising star. I always thought that her name had something to do with the Lanting Preface, but it turned out to be two different characters.(1)
I couldn’t deny that Lan Ting was extremely beautiful. She had long, natural curly hair and was dressed in the bohemian style.
She looked quite pathetic at first glance, but she had a kind of rare ethereal beauty that was unlike the two unkempt old geezers at the same table. I knew a lot of writers—both ugly and brutish—but they were all men. It seemed that male and female writers were two completely different things.
She caught my attention because she looked a little uncomfortable. The whole table was very relaxed, even laughing from time to time, but she kept quiet and seldom expressed her opinions. I noticed that her hands were unconsciously fiddling with her hair, which was certainly not caused by my good looks.
Photographers not only required a considerable mastery of psychology, but they also needed to be able to use language to control a model’s emotions. Based on my experience, her small actions were generally due to her inner tension and anxiety.
But under the current circumstance, what was she worried about?
My first guess was that she was having an affair with the publisher, so she didn’t know how to maintain her image or how much space she should keep between them. But when I thought about it some more, I realized that few women would be anxious about this kind of thing in this era, let alone if the man was already married but the woman wasn’t.
Was it because of her book? But with her current popularity and the kind of promotion she’d be getting, there was little doubt that the book would be a bestseller. So, there really wasn’t a reason to worry about it.
I couldn’t help my curiosity, so I kept observing her, but she didn’t do anything else besides this little move.
I later became tired of this and thought that maybe all writers just had some problematic quirks. Nabokov could only write on cards three inches wide and five inches long, and Pope could only write when he had a box of rotten apples beside him. It also wasn’t written down anywhere that female writers couldn’t be nervous for no reason. In this way, I felt relieved, although her anxiety affected me a little bit (I get influenced quite easily). I didn’t take it personally, though.
We talked from morning until evening, and it was only after dinner that several milestones were achieved. Since it was a relatively mature team, the planning was decided quickly after it was discussed in detail.
Towards the end, the conversation had turned into general small talk, and without the psychological burden, we all became relaxed and began to drift aimlessly. Since there were more people in the café at night, the atmosphere gradually became lively and my spirit rose. I unintentionally found myself dragged into a discussion about the desert.
Of course, my first trip was very interesting. Although the desert wasn’t populated, it was a photographer’s paradise. The desert’s natural atmosphere made everything you put there possess a special flavor. At that time, the head of our center said that the desert made boys become men and women become girls, which I thought was extremely wonderful.
To fully comprehend the desert, I ran more than a thousand kilometers back and forth in the sand sea, and I did it by foot most of the time. I visited about four or five ancient city ruins and took more than two thousand photos. For more than two months, my ears were free from any noise or desire floating on the wind. That kind of feeling was like having my whole body washed from top to bottom. It was like every pore was clean.
Of course, this feeling disappeared as soon as I got back to the city. It took me more than two months to purify my body, but it only took a few hours for it to be polluted again. No one could deny the ferocity of the city.
It made me very happy to talk about this experience, so I talked a lot. The party lasted until after seven o’clock in the evening, at which point everyone dispersed. It was at this time that something I didn’t expect happened.
At that time, we decided how to carpool home: the publisher had a BMW 7-Series, so he could drive the beautiful writer directly back to the hotel; the two old men and the journalists decided to hit the bar; I felt a little sleepy after talking for a day, so I decided to walk home along the Jiangnan River and let the cold wind cool down my face.
The winter night was dark and the Jiangnan River was still quiet. I walked silently for a few steps before I suddenly heard someone calling me from behind.
“Teacher Guan.”
Looking back, it turned out to be Lan Ting.
“What, your boss’s car break down?” I asked, half surprised and half joking.
She smiled helplessly against the wind and shyly said, “No, I don’t want to ride in the car. I want to walk with you for a while. Is that ok?”
She was quite tall—almost the same height as me—and her long coat made her look a little thin and somewhat lovely under the streetlight’s glow. I looked behind me and saw that the publisher’s BMW had already sped away in apparent anger. I couldn’t help but weigh the odds of the publisher seeking revenge if I agreed to it. Although it was said that the readers fed a writer, the food wasn’t directly handed to the writer since the publisher still acted as the go-between.
She followed my gaze and looked back. She probably understood what I was thinking, for she smiled and said, “Don’t overthink it. I have nothing to do with him. He likes boys.”
Oh? I froze for a moment, still feeling somewhat surprised because I hadn’t been able to tell at all. Then, I looked at her again and found myself even more surprised. I couldn’t figure out why she suddenly came to me and told me this, either.
If I was still my innocent self back in college, I would’ve probably thought this was the beginning of a love affair, but I had experienced too much, so I knew that the plot of such a novel was definitely unreliable. What I could deduce at this point was that she most likely didn’t want to ride in a car, and among the several people attending the meeting today, I was the most harmless one, so she asked to take a stroll with me for a bit.
But the subsequent developments proved that my imagination was too lacking.
When a beautiful woman makes a request, maintaining a little poise goes without saying. Plus, we’d have to work together in the future, so I smiled and nodded. The two of us then made our way along the Jiangnan River. I originally wanted to initiate a conversation, but she was an adventure writer. I couldn’t dominate a conversation with her on humanity or immorality, so I really didn’t know how to start a topic. But at this time, she unexpectedly took the initiative and directly asked me, “Listening to what you just said just now…”
I secretly breathed a sigh of relief and said to myself, that’s something I’m good at. I then nodded, “It was relatively long, two or three months I’d say. We were in a depopulated zone—not the usual tourist route—so it felt quite worthwhile.”
She hesitated for a moment before saying, “The Badan Jilin you mentioned is the place where I collected my research materials. I also stayed there for three weeks, so I really miss all the things you said. But according to our tour guide, it’s only considered a small desert.”
I secretly chuckled as I recalled our panic when one of our teams got lost there. Considering how it was forty-seven thousand square kilometers and the third largest desert in the country, it was indeed too small for a sand sea like the Taklimakan, but it was large enough for individuals.
She continued, “Have you been to a place called Gutong Jing in Badain Jilin?”
I was slightly surprised that she would ask about this place.
In Badan Jilin, I had heard people mention that place over and over again. According to the locals, it was a mysterious place that was located in the no-man’s land of Badain Jilin. I never figured out why this place was considered so special, and the only explanation I got from the local people was that it was best not to go there because it was different from other places. But no one knew why there was such a saying.
This kind of secrecy wasn’t necessarily something people did to fake an air of mystery; it had most likely been a custom handed down from ancient times. Generally speaking, these kinds of customs should be respected by archeologists, so we didn’t go to Gutong Jin. Besides, what we had found during our expedition was enough to fund the topic of our next expedition anyway.
I did a lot of research on that place at the time, but all I could find was a photo of Gutong Jing in a certain issue of a French photography magazine from 1998. It was a low-lying desert with rocky mountains, but it didn’t seem like there was anything terrifying there. However, the article that accompanied the photo mentioned that Gutong Jing gave people a very strange feeling. There was a word to describe that feeling in French, but it was difficult to find the corresponding word in Chinese.
The most shocking thing was that this photographer committed suicide three years later. But there wasn’t a reason to link this incident with Gutong Jing since photographers committing suicide was as common in the industry as poets committing suicide.
At this point, I became somewhat regretful. On one hand, I lost some face because I didn’t go to a place that the beautiful woman had asked about. On the other hand, not being able to go there seemed to be the only thing during that trip that was still bothering me, so I felt a little depressed. I was a bit of a perfectionist, so I often felt uncomfortable and regretful if I couldn’t complete something in full.
I shook my head and said with a wry smile, “It’s a shame, but there was no such place on our itinerary at that time. Plus, our tour guide didn’t want to take us there. I don’t know why, though.”
“Your guide refused your request?”
“Yes. You know, we were walking in no-man’s land, so our guide was different from the usual tour guide from travel agencies. He was the leader of a local adventure club, so during our journey, he had the greatest power. When he said that this place couldn’t be visited, we couldn’t refute him.”
Lan Ting took a deep breath, looked at me, and said softly, “You are so lucky to have hired a good guide.”
I looked at her in surprise and heard the implication, “Did you go there?”
She nodded, paused again, stopped, and then looked at me, “Teacher Guan, I’ve heard a lot about you from my friends. They say that you’re stable and reliable and know a lot about photography. There’s one thing I’ve always wanted to ask someone, but I don’t want others to know. This matter is very important to me. Can I trust you?”
I was a little puzzled but nodded stiffly, “What happened?”
She hesitated for a moment before saying, “Something strange happened in Gutong Jing.”
<Introduction 1><Table of Contents><Introduction 3>
****
TN Notes:
(1) Lan Ting Preface (兰亭序) was the preface to the poems composed at a cultural and poetic event during the Six Dynasties era in China. This event was known as the Orchid Pavilion Gathering (or Lan Ting Gathering). Wu Xie thought the female writer’s name is 兰亭 (Lan Ting) just like 兰亭序, but it turns out to be two completely different characters: 蓝庭 (Lan Ting).
****
Translated by: Yvette
Edited by: merebear226
MereBear's Translation 