Translator’s Note: What follows is a translation from the Chinese of an excerpt from the novel The Lost Lives of Lena Wu (Wúlìnà shīqù de rénshēng) by Yvonne Fung. I came across it in the form of loose pages lying unassociated among my father’s papers. As with other fragments “literally torn from Fung’s published works”, he had probably considered Scotch taping them to the manuscript he later titled Daydreamers, but then thought better of it. Since there was no way to place them in the manuscript proper, I present them here as a kind of outtake or appendix.
Going through these entries, I became aware of the problem of scenes in which I was absent. Certain details had acquired the quality of coming from neither here nor there. They were neither what I witnessed nor what I imagined. Even a list of items in a room can be taken up in the meticulously rendered tapestry of narrative once the storyteller says I was there and I saw these things, but if it becomes clear she was not in that scene, if where she is situated starts to seem suspect, other questions get asked. What is she going off of? What is she going off of, anyway, whether the character that is supposed to be her is there or not?
A reason these questions, one nested inside the other, did not occur to me earlier is language. I mean the language I was writing in was not the language of the world I portrayed. It camouflaged the problem from me by making the entire record seem a work of fiction. What did veracity of scene and action matter if those were not even their words they were speaking and thinking? Would I be able to retrieve the kernel of the real that lay at the heart of the recollection? No, too much time had passed. It happened without my realizing it, but these words were now the only ones I had.
And yet I know what follows happened. The specific details, my father, my former would-be fiancé, and the room I spent my childhood in, are more than familiar. I — or maybe I should say she — was just not there at the time, but I remember it all in a way that could not be made up.
The sound of cicadas came out from the trees and potted plants, in the lazy, dragging rhythm of a Taipei morning. It was very loud through the sliding glass door her father kept open for ventilation.
Francis sat back. He had been in this room before. There was the painted tile of two children in hanbok playing neolttwigi, a Japanese fan, a wood carving of a dancing couple and a woman chopping a mango with a machete, a steel wind-up alarm clock full of metallic density, and a stuffed flying squirrel in a glass case. Behind the sofa were shelves of art books highlighting the collections of the great European museums. He had been here, with her, at different times of the day, at different times of the year.
There was no light, except the natural light filtering through the leaves of the banyan tree outside.
Besides being able to hear the cicadas, which seemed to have infested the banyan tree, though they were not visible at this distance, it made no difference if her father kept the sliding door open or not, because there was no breeze. The morning was just starting to warm.
Francis was sitting in a rattan chair. He wore a short-sleeve shirt with green stripes. Her father, in white undershirt and loose shorts, was at the end of the faded leather sofa Francis always saw him in, fanning himself in slow, broad waves.
It is possible I was there but not present, which is to say not as a participant but as a witness. That would explain the feeling of an observer lurking in that passage, perhaps just outside the open sliding door. So much would be explained by that, except, as you will see in the pages to come, the whole point of the scene is my absence. After speaking with my father, about me, Francis waits, but I never show, for I have been held up at work. Now, reading it over, the whole of it seems too neatly drawn. The original purpose was to be ironic and cruel, to descry Francis’s triumph in passing my father’s judgment and to show him in the moment he thought I would become his fiancée, before fate intervened.
Had I set things up that way to absolve myself? Let me put it this way: if I were there, I would have heard his intentions. It would have meant that I turned away from them knowing what they were. The full weight of the betrayal would have fallen on me, but the way it is now, there is nowhere to place the blame. We were just victims of bad timing.
So was I really there, regardless of whether or not my father and Francis knew it? And was what-was-made-up not the scene itself, which seems faithfully recounted, but the shuffled chronology around it, the sleight-of-hand meant to lessen my guilt or at least make me come across as more sympathetic?
For someone else, perhaps. Not that I recognize that young woman in the story that much, but one thing I know about her: she was not the kind to be guilty about anything or care what others thought of her. And neither am I.
Alvin Lu‘s newest book is Daydreamers, from FC2. He is a native San Franciscan and author of a previous novel, The Hell Screens.
