A Private Life

by Chen, Ran

• ISBN13: 9780231131964
• ISBN10: 0231131968
• Format: Hardcover
• Copyright: 2004-05-03
• Publisher: Columbia Univ Pr

Summary

From one of China's most celebrated contemporary novelists comes this riveting tale of a young woman's emotional and sexual awakening. Set in the turbulent decades of the Cultural Revolution and the Tian'anmen Square incident, A Private Lifeexposes the complex and fantastical inner life of a young woman growing up during a time of intense social and political upheaval.At the age of twenty-six, Ni Niuniu has come to accept pain and loss. She has suffered the death of her mother and a close friend and neighbor, Mrs. Ho. She has long been estranged from her tyrannical father, while her boyfriend -- a brilliant and handsome poet named Yin Nan -- was forced to flee the country. She has survived a disturbing affair with a former teacher, a mental breakdown that left her in a mental institution for two years, and a stray bullet that tore through the flesh of her left leg. Now living in complete seclusion, Niuniu shuns a world that seems incapable of accepting her and instead spends her days wandering in vivid, dreamlike reveries where her fractured recollections and wild fantasies merge with her inescapable feelings of melancholy and loneliness. Yet this eccentric young woman -- caught between the disappearing traditions of the past and a modernizing Beijing, a flood of memories and an unknowable future, her chosen solitude and her irrepressible longing -- discovers strength and independence through writing, which transforms her flight from the hypocrisy of urban life into a journey of self-realization and rebirth.First published in 1996 to widespread critical acclaim, Ran Chen's controversial debut novel is a lyrical meditation on memory, sexuality, femininity, and the often arbitrary distinctions between madness and sanity, alienation and belonging, nature and society. As Chen leads the reader deep into the psyche of Ni Niuniu -- into her innermost secrets and sexual desires -- the borders separating narrator and protagonist, writer and subject dissolve, exposing the shared aspects of human existence that transcend geographical and cultural differences.

Author Biography

Ran Chen is the author of numerous short stories John Howard-Gibbon, a copy editor for China Daily in Beijing, has translated many works

Table of Contents

Translator's Note	xi
0 ALL TIME HAS PASSED AWAY AND LEFT ME HERE ALONE	1	(7)
To avoid crying out, we sing our griefs softly. To escape darkness, we close our eyes.
1 DANCING ON TIPTOE IN BLACK RAIN	8	(6)
This woman is a deep wound, The sanctuary through which we enter the world. Our road is the light That shines from her eyes. This deep wound is our mother, The mother each of us gives birth to.
2 MY ONE-EYED NANNY	14	(9)
Our most profound self-denial comes when we say yes to our fathers and yes to our lives.
3 I CARRY AN INFECTIOUS DISEASE	23	(6)
"Willing to go through a keyhole, but not through an open door."
4 SCISSORS AND SEDUCTION	29	(6)
The pair of scissors dominating the dressing table, like a bird perched on the topmost branch of a magnolia, had long been waiting their moment. After deciding what to do and how to do it, they flew into my head and borrowed my hands to complete their work.
5 THE WIDOW HO AND HER "CHANGING ROOM"	35	(12)
This woman is a labyrinth, the outer form of a cave, into which I have fallen. The confining space around us is filled with darkness. It is like being buried under bedclothes. We can only vaguely make out each other's faces. We do not dare converse openly because of the echoes whispering from the walls around us. The unfathomable depths beneath our feet render us incapable of moving either forward or backward, and the nothingness around us is spreading. The dangers ahead of us force us to stop, to remove our clothes, abandon our duties, and cling together in the darkness. We are overwhelmed by the feeling of touching each other. We are pushed to the precipice at the edge of existence. She is older than I, but on the horizon of time she is the shadow behind me. She says that I am her salvation and her future.
6 A STRANGER TO MYSELF	47	(9)
Time is an artist. I am a stone rubbing: the lineaments of a range of peaks, of the caves of a grotto. Before I came into this world, the picture was already complete. As I slowly proceed along the watercourse of this segment of time, I discover my place in it. I see that the picture itself is a piece of history, a depiction of the life of all women.
7 YI QIU	56	(10)
Her father let her be born in a "zoo." With her amazing adaptability she was able to flourish within this "cage" and learned through experience the pleasures of the hunter and the hunted. . . . She stands at the paling with one hand supported on her buttocks and the other one clamped over her mouth. Her voice is submerged within her own body. She has no history.
8 THE INNER ROOM	66	(8)
For women, the inner room is referred to in a different way; it has a different name. It is a wound, it seems, that comes along with birth, that others are not allowed to touch, that secrets itself in shadow as deep as the obscure darkness within the womb that quickens the heartbeat of men. Our maturation process involves our gradual acquiescence to and our seeking for and ultimate acceptance of "entry." During the process of seeking, our girlhood ends and we enter womanhood.
9 A COFFIN LOOKS FOR AN OCCUPANT	74	(7)
Through the open eyes of the dead, all that we can see is what has become of their bodies, but their spirits have not died. When the miasma of death from the netherworld in a twinkling suddenly reclaims their bodies, these "fragmented" people at last become aware that their lives were never lived as authentically or as passionately as they thought, and that they never understood this world in the way that they thought they did.
10 BED-A STAGE FOR THE DRAMA OF THE SEXES	81	(8)
11 A NEW MYTH OF SISYPHUS	89	(8)
12 A BED CRIES OUT	97	(10)
It is said that the sounds we hear are an illusion, that there is no absolute connection between the objects that produce sounds and the objects that receive them. Without our minds, without illusionary desire, all the ears in this world would be silent voids. In reality it is our own skin that cries out, and the sounds we make sink into our own bodies and fade away within us.
13 YINYANG GROTTO	107	(10)
He made the events of their past die quickly in her body. Working like a bolt of lightning, he frightened her, hurt her, made her aware that her body had another mouth she didn't know about that also breathed and moaned. Slowly developed commitments were his enemy; the quick heat of friction was his friend. Penetrating the void within her, terminating her deep, obscuring sleep, he conquered time, driving it deep into the channel of her being... .Friction let him see the light of the sun. Friction made her smell the odor of death.
14 ONE PERSON'S DEATH BRINGS PUNISHMENT TO ANOTHER	117	(13)
In the end, a spirit that has suffered wrong finds its way back to punish its tormentors. Sometimes it assumes the shape of a cloud and returns to the world of the living as rain. The dead make use of its special form to continue their fight against their living enemies.
15 ENDLESS DAYS	130	(13)
With his eyebrows and his fingers, he attacked me. He was the house I built out of my fantasies.
16 APPLE BOBBING	143	(12)
17 A FIERY DANCE OF DEATH	155	(13)
I want to share your bed in heaven. The dead best understand the dead.
18 A STRAY BULLET	168	(14)
Even until today, we still use silence to avoid our past.
19 THE BIRTH OF MISS NOTHING	182	(11)
A person's ability to act in accord with her own conscience depends upon the degree to which she can go beyond the limits imposed by the society in which she lives, to become a citizen of the world. The most important quality she must possess in this is the courage to say no, the courage to refuse to obey the dictates of the powerful, to refuse to submit to the dictates of public opinion.
20 THE YEARS HAVE PASSED AWAY AND LEFT ME HERE ALONE	193	(10)
I must have peace and quiet unto my second death.
21 THE LONELY ARE A SHAMELESS LOT . . .	203
Life, like grass, needs moisture because our cells cannot survive without it; therefore, life can exist only in mire.