Five Spice Street
   
 

    Background to the Story

  1
Lady X’s Age and Mr. Q’s Looks
When it comes to Lady X’s age, one person’s guess is as good as another’s:  there’s no way to decide who’s right.  There must be at least twenty-eight opinions.  At the oldest, she’s about fifty (for now, let’s fix it at fifty); at the youngest, she’s twenty-two.

The one who says she’s about fifty is a much-admired forty-five-year-old widow, plump and pretty.  Her husband died years ago.  It’s said that she often sees Lady X applying make-up in her room, “powder that’s an inch thick,” resulting in “completely masking the wrinkles in her neck”—a neck that is “almost without any flesh.”  As for the particular spot where she carries on her spying, she indignantly “refuses to divulge it.”  The writer would like to interject a word here, to give a little introduction to this lovely widow.  For sure, she’s a classy woman, a cut above others.  She plays a pivotal role in this story.  The writer has been influenced by her all his life, paying her special respect all along.
The one who says Lady X is twenty-two is a young guy who is himself twenty-two.  In his words, one foggy morning, he “chanced to meet” Lady X next to a well; to “his surprise, her laughter was beautiful, showing a mouthful of white teeth.”  And from the “uninhibited melody” of her laughter, “the sturdiness” of her teeth, her “sex appeal,” and various other factors, he concluded that for sure Lady X couldn’t be a day over twenty-two.  This guy works in a factory that produces coal briquettes, and that’s what he said to a neighbor as he squatted in the public toilet after getting off work and washing away the coal dust.  At the time, the neighbor just responded with a doubtful “Geeeee.”  Looking into the details, how come the young worker said twenty-two, and not twenty-one or twenty-three?  With neighbors seeing each other all the time, how come he said “chance to meet” her?  He must have had some shameful motivation.  Not to mention his using words with open-and-shut meanings, like “foggy” and “sex appeal.”  Therefore, we must discount much of what he said.

And then there are the twenty-six other points of view, each having some basis and reason.  Anyhow, everyone stuck to his own opinion, none willing to give in to the others.  Among them, a respectable middle-aged man is worth our notice.  He’s a good, loyal friend of Lady X’s husband.  Whenever he runs into a person talking about his good friend’s wife, he pulls at your sleeve and solemnly proclaims that Lady X is thirty-five, because he’s “seen her ID card with his own eyes” (X’s family were outsiders on Five Spice Street).  When he talked, he was livid and his voice quavered.  He forced his opinion on people, but no one appreciated his gallant, generous heart.  Instead, they held a grudge against him, believing he was “poking his nose into other people’s business too much,” he was a “hypocrite,” maybe he had even “tasted the sugarplum, as well.”  Because of the vilification, the man “grew thinner by the day.”  When he got up in the morning, he had bad breath because of dyspepsia.  The one who said this was the widow’s good friend, a forty-eight-year-old woman who has retained her grace and charm.

At twilight one day, these doubts and suspicions which had been plaguing people for a long time seemed to suddenly reach a resolution, but it was immediately overturned.  That’s because there were two resolutions, and the crowd was divided into two large factions at loggerheads with each other.  It was a stalemate, finally reaching no verdict.

It was dusk on a sultry summer day.  After dinner, everyone sat at the side of the street to enjoy the cool breeze.  Before long, everyone saw “two balls of white light flashing,” like meteors streaming in front of their eyes.  Then they suddenly saw the white silk skirt that Lady X was wearing; it was “flashing light.”  The little boy was also dressed in white, but no one could tell what the material was.  When their first astonishment subsided, people clamored excitedly.  The faction of middle-aged and young men led by the young coal worker was united in asserting that Lady X was about twenty-eight.  And from her “graceful, slender” stature, the “smooth softness” of her arms and legs, and various other factors, they concluded that indeed she was “even younger.”  But the crowd of middle-aged and young women led by the much-admired widow asserted that Lady X was “more than forty-five.”  Through detailed, close inspection of her neck, they discovered that her neck had been disguised.  Several places on her neck had “pores as large as grains of rice” and “layer upon layer of flabby skin.”  Then the women lit into the men for being so “shameless” that they had even “peeked under the woman’s skirt.”  This storm of abuse opened the men’s eyes, and with a great deal of pleasure, they snooped into the particulars of the women’s “close inspection.”  This commotion went on for about two hours.  Only Lady X’s husband’s good friend constituted a faction by himself:  he took on the whole crowd, and was knocked down to the ground by several vigorous young guys.  He “burst into tears.”  When the commotion wound up, the widow hopped onto a stone table, and sticking out her sexy full breasts, she shouted that she wanted “to stick up for the traditional tasty sentiments.”

  As time went on, Lady X’s age turned into a major problematic issue on our street.  What’s more, as soon as everyone left the group, each person once more stood his own ground, and there were at least twenty-eight different views.  No one was interested in continuing to argue over this issue.  Even Lady X’s husband, a thirty-eight-year-old Apollo, also—without rhyme or reason—simply accepted the young coal worker’s view, and thought of his wife as twenty-two years old and not the thirty-five that his good friend had insisted she was, based on her ID card.  This husband was weighed down by inertia:  he loved clinging to his own particular habits, and he was always tender and affectionate toward his wife.  It’s said that from the very beginning he “couldn’t see that she had any blemish.”  So the very most unbelievable was this husband’s point of view, because “it could be said that he never used his eyes to look at the truth; he just let his imagination run blindly away with him.  His head was filled with optimism.”  (These are the widow’s words; the facts narrated later will bear out the brilliance of the widow’s prediction.)

The problem of Lady X’s age wasn’t resolved.  Not only was it not resolved, but later, more and more doubts arose.  The day after hearing that Lady X and Mr. Q, a clerk in a certain department, were involved in a furtive, shady way, the much-admired widow found a way to secretly enter her room and steal a look at her ID card.  She noticed that the column noting her age had been artfully altered.  The traces left after the changes had been made confirmed that the widow’s estimate was not only generally accurate, but “exactly right.”  But at the same time, another of X’s husband’s friends—a young man with sideburns—jumped out to attest that Lady X wasn’t thirty-five, but thirty-two, because he and Lady X had been born in the same year and had felt puppy love for each other when they were children.  Both sets of parents had even considered betrothing them as children.  As for Lady X, when she reached puberty, she had always been tender and shy with him.  It was just because he himself hadn’t yet understood male and female relationships that he hadn’t seized that chance and let their relationship develop.  Now, if it was said that X had all of a sudden become three years older than he, well, this was simply inconceivable.  There were also several guys who intended to muddy the waters even more.  They tried to persuade people with their own particular arguments:  besides the twenty-eight opinions already noted, one said she was thirty-seven and a half, one said forty-six and a half, one said twenty-nine and a half, one said twenty-six and a half.  It seemed that when they added a half year’s difference, the issue became extremely profound, suffused with philosophy.

Even though there’s still been no verdict about Lady X’s age, for now we can take her husband’s first good friend’s investigation into her ID card and postulate that she’s thirty-five.  This is expedient for a number of reasons.  This way, we don’t have to consider her a young girl (after all, her son is already six years old), nor do we have to consider her an older woman (even though some people like the widow reckoned that she was fifty, they didn’t assert that she was an older woman.  Within this there is still a subtle difference.  The widow is a precise person who knows the proper limits of speech.)  As for her husband insisting on considering her to be twenty-two, well, he’s free to do that.  No one has the right to interfere.  They can only wait for him to “wake up” on his own (the widow’s words).  The stream of drivel coming from the young coal worker and the guys who deliberately muddied the waters is even less worth taking account of, because they were merely seeking chances to fill their own needs:  you couldn’t hope that what they said held an ounce of sincerity. 

After all this controversy about her age, we have now come to a faint and contradictory impression:  Lady X is a thin middle-aged woman, with white teeth, a neck that’s either slender or flabby, skin that’s either smooth or rough, a voice that’s either melodious or wild, and a body that’s either sexy or hasn’t the slightest sex appeal.  This blurry impression sometimes unconsciously “discloses its true face” for just an instant, and then everything reverts to the way it was and becomes unfathomable again—just a blurry and motley whole.  Let’s put this issue aside for now.

As for her husband’s impression of her, we don’t approve of it, because his opinion is the one that’s most doubtful.  Although he’s a big man with considerable presence, when he talks of his wife, he immediately adopts a female’s state of mind:  he becomes a copycat.  Indeed, when he talks with you, he suddenly becomes stupefied, as if having a seizure.  He forgets the thread of the conversation, and unexpectedly suggests that you play “hopscotch” with him, and right away finds some chalk to draw a grid on the ground.  If you refuse, he just forgets about you, and throws himself into playing hopscotch.

Of all the impressions, it was only Lady X’s adulterer (that’s the way everyone referred to him) Mr. Q whose impression was shocking.  The much-admired widow had, with good reason, torn open his letter to Lady X:  that letter threw light on this.  The first time Mr. Q looked at X’s whole face, he saw only one immense continuously flickering saffron-colored eyeball.  Then he swooned and couldn’t see a thing.  Right up until the scandal ended, he never got a good look at Lady X.  That he didn’t was because he couldn’t get a good look.  All it took was for Lady X to show up in front of him, and he could always see only one saffron-colored eyeball, and when that eyeball flickered, he was so moved that hot tears welled up in his eyes.  With misty teary eyes, naturally he had no way to see clearly.  Perhaps his letter was simply deliberately mystifying, going out of his way to curry favor with Lady X’s odd, shadowy mentality, or perhaps it was a certain code or double-talk.  The weird thing is that Lady X also made a confession that echoed his, and it preceded their acquaintance.  (This information is supplied by Lady X’s woman colleague, because all along Lady X loved unburdening herself in nonsensical ways.  She talked uninhibitedly even with this woman colleague, whose temperament was diametrically opposed to hers.  If it had been possible, indeed, she would have “unburdened herself to the whole world.”)  Back then, she sat in her gloomy room, crowing proudly to her female colleague, “The reason my eyeballs are so unusual is that I pay meticulous attention to them.  I’m not kidding you:  I observe them all the time in a mirror—even if I’m walking, I always carry a small round mirror and every now and then I take it out and look for a moment.  Sometimes, I really want to see what they look like after I’ve gone to sleep.  Too bad that’s impossible.  I just think, what do they want to do?  Behind these lenses, what are they working at so hard?  I’ve also done research on their excretions.  I have a microscope, which I bought especially to observe this.  I’m simply fascinated by it, and I’ve already made a lot of headway.  I’ve also collected some mirrors for my little Bao (note: her only son).  When he gets a little older, I want to get him interested in his own eyeballs.  Everyone says that eyes are windows to the soul, but no one thinks about this window.  They forget this window, and let it collect dust on its surface until it’s changed beyond recognition.”  As she talked, she kept blinking and raising her eyebrows for added emphasis.
Although she emphasized this repeatedly, her female colleague didn’t see any proof that she had any supernatural power, nor did anyone else on the whole of Five Spice Street—including her husband.  Though this husband cherished his wife very much, unfortunately he could see nothing supernatural about her.  So was Mr. Q the only person who recognized Lady X’s supernatural power?  Or maybe this wasn’t exactly right, because the world was a lot larger than Five Spice Street.  Moreover, judging by the coal worker’s experience, didn’t X have a certain indefinable “sex appeal”?  Who could guarantee that the men outside of Five Spice Street wouldn’t notice her supernatural power at the same time they were smitten by her sex appeal?  As the years went on, how could anyone negate this possibility just because her husband didn’t see it?

Or—another take on it:  we certainly aren’t saying that just because Mr. Q experienced Lady X’s supernatural ability that this is the same as saying that he understands her completely and profoundly.  Rather, he understands her only in a superficial, one-dimensional way.  Q has one major failing:  he doesn’t like to inquire into the other person’s background, and he has never asked about anyone:  he just prefers to think aloud by himself and be absurdly over-passionate.  Mr. Q and Lady X became acquainted by chance and later consorted with each other for six months, but he’s never known her real age.  In this respect, Mr. Q isn’t like Lady X’s husband who assumes she’s twenty-two, but probably is closer to the truth in postulating that she’s twenty-eight or twenty-nine.  Of course, selfishness and desire also enter into this.  For now, we can’t get to the bottom of it.
Speaking of Mr. Q’s superficial understanding of Lady X and the absurdity of their relationship, we can illustrate this with a dialogue supplied by X’s female colleague.
X:  I don’t have to intentionally look for you.  You’ll surely come.  (X affected a vague, flighty facial expression.)

  Q:  Through the crowds of people, all along I’ve walked toward your eyes.  I’m confused and muddled, seeing nothing, including you.  (Q was acting like a dunderhead, like a clodhopper.)

X:  We’ll meet each other every Wednesday at a certain intersection.  Even if we wanted to avoid this, we couldn’t.

Q:  Perhaps I’ll turn into a long-tailed pheasant; then I’ll be able to live only on a high tree limb.

After the female colleague supplied this dialogue, she went on to reinforce it with the information given below:  every time the two of them met, their talk seemed to be a continuation of the last conversation they’d had, and it was also purely nutty talk without the slightest significance.  What’s more, the topic was always the same.  And furthermore, each time they saw each other, neither ever called out to the other, just as if they were continuing their previous encounter.  But all along when they talked with each other, it was as if—apart from crazy talk—anything else (for example, names, self-introductions, remarks about the things around them) was superfluous, discordant.  At this point, the female colleague covered half of her mouth and said in a thin voice, “Is this that sort of ‘concealed person’?”  With that, her hair stood on end, and she didn’t dare go on talking.

As for Mr. Q’s looks, although there aren’t as many opinions about it as about Lady X’s age, opinions do differ.  We need to stress a little something here:  our people don’t really like talking about a man’s appearance, because they all embrace the ancient saying:  There’s no ugly man.  So what does Mr. Q look like?  We can reach a verdict only by relying on the tone of people’s talk and the several adjectives they employed in talking about this issue.

The first to produce an impression of Mr. Q’s looks was the widow’s forty-eight-year-old friend.  She thought “there was nothing remarkable” about Mr. Q (at this point in her narrative, she curled her lips and spat).  She “couldn’t even remember what he looked like,” “he seemed to be a big dumb guy,” “anyhow, he couldn’t be more ordinary.”  After saying this, she felt she’d lost some dignity and immediately changed the subject.  She began talking of the magical utility of qigong.  As she talked, she tossed her head, as if to rid her mind of “cobwebs.”

On the surface, the women of Five Spice Street wouldn’t have any interest in Mr. Q’s looks, never mind observing him in detail.  If you put the question to them directly, they would answer in only three words:  he is ugly.  So have the women of Five Spice Street never made eye contact with Mr. Q?  Actually, that’s not the case.  After all, the adjectives and the uncertainty conveyed by people’s tones that we collected here as the bases for our verdict were almost all supplied by the fair sex.  When it comes to this topic, the women talked lightly and indirectly.  Doesn’t this show their tremendous interest and sensitivity about this issue? Sometimes they affected disinterest when they raised the topic, and then circled all around it, and finally returned to sounding out the other person, so that the other person would bring up what she’d long been wanting to say.  Thus, they found spiritual satisfaction.

All of Five Spice Street’s women were masters of this conversational art.  For example, the widow’s female friend:  after talking at length about qigong, she touched on ethnography, leading to a line from a folk song:  “Southern Women and Northern Men.”  When the other person fully understood this line, she would shift the topic from northern men to the virtues of a man of big stature.  Then, finally, the two sides would come around to the issue of Q’s looks.  They employed suggestive language to bounce this topic back and forth.  Not until the sun set and it grew dark did they reluctantly part.  They said to each other, “I had a really good time today!” 

The second to come up with an impression of Q was a lame woman who hadn’t been able to get out of bed for years.  She was twenty-eight, all bones.  From her dark sunken eyes, a kind of ray emanated all day long.  That sort of ray could at any moment force young men to “retreat thirty feet” (the widow’s words).  The first day that Q came to Five Spice Street, she had seen him once.  At the time, she was opening the curtains next to her bed (of course, her bed was next to the window).  When Q walked by, their eyes met.  Drawing upon all of her strength, the woman stared at him frankly for a good twenty-five seconds (her estimate).  At first, Mr. Q was flustered, and with one hand warded off the ray from her eyes, but then instead of “retreating thirty feet,” he reluctantly smiled at her and then walked on.  With a “peng,” the woman opened her window, and shouted shrilly at Mr. Q’s receding figure, “A demi-wolf!  A demi-wolf!  Please pay attention to thunder!”  Later, feeling sentimental, the lame woman said, Mr. Q certainly wasn’t like a wolf, but rather like a catfish, that’s all:  he had a barbel-like mustache.  When he shaved, he got rid of it, but if you looked carefully, you could still see it.  The one who looked like a demi-wolf was the scoundrel who had divested her of her virginity years earlier.  Q merely looked a little like him in certain ways.  Precisely because he looked a little like him, as soon as she set eyes on him, she was incensed and launched an attack on him.  That’s the only way she could suppress the hatred she felt.

Still, Q wasn’t the first who looked like him.  Over the years, she had cussed out countless people.  That’s the only way she could maintain an inner equanimity.  At this point, she added:  she hated the demi-wolf most—well, not for taking her virginity, but for actually daring after just one night to “take off without a word of farewell.”  This was enough to fill a woman with hatred for a lifetime.  As to his deflowering her, she said, if only he would repent, and then kneel before her and beg her forgiveness, she could consider forgiving this misdeed.  But this certainly didn’t assume that she still wanted even a hint of a relationship with him, because after “having her heart broken” that night, she’d become “clear-headed” and “methodical.”  Was it possible that she had with great difficulty vanquished the external and internal pressure and come to resemble an iron woman who wanted now to retreat and suffer all over again?  No!  All the guys with this kind of illusion were wrong.  The lame woman’s characterization certainly couldn’t lead to any elaboration of the issue of Q’s looks, because she still thought Q looked like one of her former lovers whose very existence was doubtful.  Never mind that she hadn’t gotten a good look at Q.  No one had seen her lover, either, and even she couldn’t say for sure what he looked like.  Was there any chance that she had pulled this out of thin air?  Or was it possible that she was deliberately spreading misinformation and taking the opportunity to raise her own status?  Why didn’t she even have a photo or two of her lover?  (If she had, wouldn’t she have shown it around a long time ago?!)  Or even worse, there’d been no lover, and that’s why she had stared at Q and picked a quarrel with him.  Was this merely her way of flirting and vamping?  (When foxes can’t eat grapes, they say that grapes are catfish.)  If this was the reality, then those of us on Five Spice Street should congratulate Q for not falling into her trap.  When all is said and done, it would have been ten thousand times worse to be seduced by her than to be seduced by X.

The third to notice Q’s looks was a woman who said she was X’s younger sister and also said that she herself was twenty-nine.  (Nobody could prove this.)  The first time Q arrived on Five Spice Street, she and her older sister had been together the whole day “from beginning to end.”  During this time, she had “carefully taken stock of Q for a long time,” and noticed that Q’s appearance looked “very familiar.”  “There was not the slightest similarity” with her sister’s view, but it seemed as if “there was a certain kind of invisible connection between them.”  But as to any special characteristics of Q’s looks, she also weaseled and merely said, “You’ll know when you see him,” “The feeling you get can’t be described with language,” “Anyhow, there’s something a little bizarre,” “There’s no way to judge him by traditional sentiments,” and so forth.  Her words revealed her stupidity and tenacity.  You knew she was covering up for her sister.  She didn’t have an iota of intelligence, nor any clear-headed analysis.  She’s a muddle-headed sort, so her biased remarks are worthless.

Here, we have one more tip for the readers:  this younger sister, or anyhow the one who called herself a younger sister abandoned her simple and tolerant husband later on to take up with another person.  It was an “amicable settlement,” and they are still on “good terms with each other.”  This made everyone suddenly realize:  A person like X is certainly not an immortal set apart from the world.  Careful analysis shows that she not only instinctively and evilly spreads disease (the affected people are unaware of being sick), but she also has a devilish ability to manipulate people in the dark.  Isn’t she the one who sent the whole of Five Spice Street into foolish turmoil, making everyone wild with lust?  Without setting foot outside her house, she stirred things up as if mustering an army, made it impossible for all the people the length of the street to defend themselves, and created unendurable bedlam.  Where did her power come from?  Why were people who were close to her (including her husband, younger sister, son, and Q) completely taken in by her and changed in baffling ways until they did all kinds of weird things—and moreover did them brazenly without giving a thought to repenting?  Has this all been caused by X’s supernatural ability?  Doesn’t this explanation sound too mysterious?  What the hell kind of education had X received as a child to grow up to be like this today?  This is all an unanswerable riddle.  In any case, as she manipulated the people on Five Spice Street, all it took was for her to move her eyeballs and lots of people ended up with eczema on their faces.  When she talked to herself in the middle of the night, everyone living on the street listened intently in their dreams.  According to the writer’s statistics, there were at least two persons who wanted to sacrifice their lives for her under any circumstances.  In the next parts of this book, these two persons move to worksheds at the roadside and live tragic lives filled with hardships.  All because of X.