Month: May 2021

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This Tranquility, Long Missed

By Tome Loulin

From a very early time of that summer, I come to imagine that it would only be a matter of time before we again walk together, only to realize that a thing that comes along easily doesn’t necessarily walk away the same way. Everything, it occurred, comes and departs in its own preferred way.

It was about time for me to go home just as you were ready to work when the summer sun whose light glistened through the window of your room was in its prime near Hankou’s side of Yangzi. Seeing my worried face, and voice lowered, you said the watch lost a day ago when we strolled together around a lakeside really wasn’t that important. “It just isn’t.” you assured me, rejecting the offer I proposed to buy a watch for you.

Pinned on the wall of your room were postcards and letters of gratitude you received—from individuals you encountered before in the different stages of your life. In one of such photos appeared a couple in their middle fifties squatting beside a dog before their house near–if I didn’t remember it wrong– Nashville, Tennessee. Before your vivid and detailed recounts about your life in Nashville many years ago, your experience of working there as a K-12 teacher of Mandarin Chinese, the room you rented there, and the beautiful pictures about you and the students you taught, I knew almost nothing substantial about Nashville other than it being the heart of American country music, let alone any intimate imagination about it. In one of these photos appeared houseplants placed on a wooden desk in your previous room; besides a nightstand was a black iron single bed covered with white beddings. And when you talked about Nashville, your voice was like, I felt, filled with ineffable liveliness that was lovingly touching to me as if all of the things that you recounted—green plants, your students, and the days you spent in the States—were emerging afresh from your memory, rippling across mine.

On the windowsill were potted plants you took care of thoroughly; beside it several lucky bamboos in vases growing with time bigger and bigger. Such is the delicacy and sophistication of the way the room was decorated that so much was said, I thought, of your carefulness of life’s beautifulness. After we saw the sun set and biked along the lake of Donghu together, the electronic watch you wore was lost, you, astride the bike seat, said, leaving me several meters away from you speechless because I didn’t expect such thing to happen in a time when all I was thinking of was how could I maintain a happy memory for us and a good impression of me to you. And it was the first time we set our feet together to walk in a park where trees were everywhere though everyone who came here looked indifferent to the issue we encountered.

There was like a sea of people waving up and down on the road by the winds coming afar when I tried to bike as fast as I could to go back to where the watch could perhaps get lost. “If this is truly lost,” I thought, “this evening would be a very upsettingly remembered one.” So, losing almost no time of searching and lying the bike on the ground unlocked, I checked bench after bench near where we had sat around of the evening but found no clue of its whereabouts.

“Why this worried,” you said to me, “it’s truly unnecessary for I could buy another one.”

But somehow, aware of your voice lowered, though still touchingly soft, I felt that until the lost thing be recovered, our sentiment towards each other would never be the same as before. I insisted to buy a watch as a gift to you but very determinedly you refused. So it occurred to me that your sentiment is perhaps that if it was truly lost, so be it. I was not this prepared for this suddenness of change occurred during that evening walk.

Life changes fast. And it truly does, I think when reading the opening lines of Didion’s the Year of Magical Thinking.

Life changes in the instant.

And I start to think of the way we think about each other.

As we walk around the lake and try to know each more, the way we thought of one another exists no longer.

Sideways were bikers speeding toward another way after we got our way back to the room you rented but I wasn’t attentive as was before. Of course, the feeling I had that evening after the event was a travail matter of personal tranquility compared to other life matters but what challenged this sense of triviality was that a parent of the student in your class contacted you and asked whether the watch picked by a stranger in the park was yours thanks to the phone numbers you saved in the watch. I was in surprise, especially after my doubt that there would be zero possibility to find the lost watch given the current social reality characterized by radical indifference of social connections.

Away summer goes and comes back.
Along the lake bank
Over the water was the reflection of the sun
Setting westward back. 

-Loulin

“Believe in the goodness of people.” You had said then. And it was then I was to wonder whether there was such thing as destiny. And from a very early age, immersed in Chinese cultural environment while growing up, I knew destiny is a concept widely believed by many and it was not until the turn of the century that the concept was to lose some of its attractions to younger generations.

But I knew, in that moment, the coincidence couldn’t be more demonstrative to me, which is, you were like the sun whose light shone through the heart of the wounded. It occurred, like what you had already been doing, that to see the positive side of, if possible, everything is how can we better regard the pains we felt while growing up.

Though I lost your connection due to my own carelessness, I tried hard, if not helplessly, to imagine that I didn’t because that experience was just too cherishing to lose.

In trying times like this when everything reported or described on newspaper appears horrifyingly intentioned and purposed, I start to think of the time I spent with you in the very evening, perhaps years before. And it is healing.

This memory, though certain details of it are blurred with time, still seems so close to me that my tears well up when I look back to the pictures I took then or anything related to that memory.

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Writing As Remembering

By Tome Loulin

For many times around, I did not know what to remember not because of the forgetfulness but of the heaviness of the things gone too soon to be properly preserved or remembered. Writing is, of course, not all about remembering things worth remembering but imagining also, maybe, because for most of us, there are many different ways of interpretating an event.

Human beings are capable of telling a thing or a story from different angles, increasing the fragility of our already-too-fragile belief of the existing of truth. Writers, who are said to be the truth seekers and to occupy a moral vocation, rarely write for their own interests but for the irresistible urge to tell something ineffably important, something absolutely meaningful.

To this point, nothing stops writers from picking up their pens to write something worth our attention. In this regard, writers are more like attention guiders, instead of attention seekers. The very notion that ‘something important’, if untold, may never find its appropriate candidate who can tell and retell it clearly is still evidently relevant to and resonate with today’s critical minds who have longed for the reevaluation of our living conventions altogether not because the languages we speak fail short to regard this issue but because storytelling as a moral occupation is always a way for us to discover how incompetent a storyteller is. What a great storyteller could reveal is nothing but this: every seeing has a angle and every narrator has a standing. And the question that is yet to be examined critically by all who love, care of, concerned about literature couldn’t be more obvious: are the words we use to record the relationship between our mental world and this physical reality accurate or not, especially when they are used to describe the things that we think are the fact?

People, mostly, use language not only for communication but for the remembrance of personal significance. In our understanding, we, from a very early age, learned to separate things, things that are categorized dichotomously such as ours versus theirs, here versus there, present versus past, alien versus familial etc. so no wonder we are all like edging toward one extreme to another, failing short to maintain a grey-zone where differentness of everything is recognized and preserved as the fundamental prerequisite that guarantees our harmonious existence. And perhaps inevitably, this notion of differentness may sound unsounding to some who prefer the ultimate selection, which is usually another word for indifference, of the competence by the force of nature or natural selection for short.

And by writing, things known or unknown come to our mind in the form of labels, ambiguously defined concepts that are usually self-reflectively over-generalized without proper consideration of the untypical, odd, and rare.

Like photographs that often vivify, permanentize, and seizure the moments personally significant and precious to us because what camera captures is not merely visually preserved images but also the feelings that are related to certain moments and that could hardly be re-experienced without this medium, words are used directly for such purposes but with lesser degree for letters and characters are initially intentioned to record collectively important events. And compared to spoken language, the history of written form of languages is much near and short, suggesting a greater loss of connection between the current and the early ages. And despite of this lateness, writing system is much advantageous to withstand the test of time in term of the preservation of our spiritual selves.

And it is with the help of written language that our thoughts and ideas could be more widely disseminated, known, understood, critically examined or misinterpreted in the public so we won’t easily surrender our past to time. We can get more time to indulge in the past that existed in our mental world, even that past memory may very likely be distorted inevitably by the force of time. But we yearn for that literary remembrance because that may be the own way we can pretend that something beautiful could be at least partially remembered. And for many of us, the factualness of a written record of one’s past is not the point of concern here; instead, it’s the genuineness of the feelings inside the work that we value for we create words in order to preserve our inner selves from which our dreams come.