‘‘Perhaps this kind of thing had no fixed beginning: it was so unusual, so exciting, and so colorful that people speculated about it endlessly. So, in everyone’s eyes, it rapidly evolved into some specific lenses that were directly interrelated with each individual. And then they affected each other and formed a sinuous net: this is also understandable. We ordinary people living on this three-mile-long street have always been closely linked. Superficially we looked cold and indifferent, but inwardly we were very enthusiastic, romantic, and humane. One person’s business was everyone’s business. Every day, we cared about nothing but other people’s business and planned our actions accordingly. We might have looked narrow-minded and short-sighted, and as if we cared about nothing but our own small worlds. In fact, we were highly idealistic comrades in the same camp. Our little world was a microcosm of the outside world. Each individual pursuit was also a collective pursuit. Not only were we not disloyal to each other, we supported each other. ‘All roads lead to heaven,’ ‘sublime in the rainbow.’ In this place of ours, as soon as something big occurred, a series of chain reactions would immediately ensue and hundreds of individual lenses would appear, independent of each other and all mutually opposed. Sometimes a big mess managed to bring about a certain temporary, laughable unity, but this quickly collapsed of its own weight, and everyone took his own path, continuing to hold to his own opinion to the end. Each person’s individuality had plenty of chances for practice and development. During this development, each person played God. We were pure-hearted and noble, filled with ardor and sincerity, one after another opening up a strange and beautiful new world, delighted with our achievements. Reality was reflected dramatically in our land. Fluky nature was tamed by the rules of our thought. This new world was fascinating. Here, the vines and trees that grew madly all year long, the birds that sang crankily, the ocean with its grand waves, the waterfalls that roared incessantly: behind all of this, the vital everlasting light was shining. This world was the original source of poetry and the eternal theme of art. In the scorching summer sun, when we opened our blurry, bloodshot eyes and gazed up at the sky, those calls that were everywhere-the low murmur-emerged, and the formations of the wild geese grew chaotic, the sun’s rays turned purple, our flesh was divinely stirred, and our brains experienced the perfection of poetry. What appeared before us this time was merely a repetition of an ancient game that had been around for thousands of years. If one looked upon it with one’s intellect, perhaps it was banal, even a little arid, and so perhaps it was also non-existent. The issue per se was not important. What was important was its artful reproduction in the people’s minds, that magnificent creation, that powerful, untrammeled imagination, that rich, deep excavation toward essence, going into minute detail and not letting go. It’s all of this that constitutes the priceless treasures of our boundless universe. Although we will one day be decrepit, the fantastic fruit on the tree of life will forever symbolize our wild, unruly passion.
‘‘On this three-mile-long street of ours, Madam X and Mr. Q are bewildering and out of line. We don’t want to admit this, for as soon as we do, it’s as though we’re making them the center of our lives, as though they created our history. Of course, this is nonsense. What kind of people are they? One is like an extraterrestrial who dropped down from who-knows-where and put down roots in the earth and doesn’t plan to move again. The other is a masked, invisible man; even his features exist only in our guesswork: it’s absolutely possible that he’s headless or has a serpent’s face and a human body. At first, we didn’t have any extra energy to contemplate or be concerned with these two people who weren’t much connected with us. In the beginning, we thought: let them live and die by themselves. They couldn’t go on very long. Old Meng from the pharmacy reckoned that after five years, they would change into scaly anteaters and ‘go through the wall and leave’ Five Spice Street. Then the sun would shine everywhere, and there would be peace in the world. And so we would pass the time as we usually did, every day organizing our dust-covered albums, replacing them and hanging up large color photos, arranging for all kinds of large-scale and medium-scale group photos, and making rules for highway maintenance and the area for cooling off outside. We were so busy that we were almost about to forget these two. We were intoxicated with our heroism and merely gazed at the stretch of distant undulating mountains.
