An Empty Room: Stories (New Directions Paperbook)
Language: English
Pages: 160
ISBN: 0811219224
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
A dazzling cycle of short stories by one of China’s most revered contemporary writers and one of the world’s leading artist-intellectuals.
An Empty Room is the first book by the celebrated Chinese writer Mu Xin to appear in English. A cycle of thirteen tenderly evocative stories written while Mu Xin was living in exile, this collection is reminiscent of the structural beauty of Hemingway’s In Our Time and the imagistic power of Kawabata’s palm-of-the-hand stories. From the ordinary (a bus accident) to the unusual (Buddhist halos) to the wise (Goethe, Lao Zi), Mu Xin’s wandering “I” interweaves plots with philosophical grace and spiritual profundity. A small blue bowl becomes a symbol of vanishing childhood; a painter in a race against fading memory scribbles notes in an underground prison during the Cultural Revolution; an abandoned temple room holds a dark mystery. An Empty Room is a soul-stirring page turner, a Sebaldian reverie of passing time, loss, and humanity regained.
An Empty Room Mu Xin Translated from the Chinese by Toming Jun Liu A New Directions Book Contents The Moment When Childhood Vanished Xia Mingzhu: A Bright Pearl An Empty Room Fong Fong No. 4 Notes from Underground The Boy Next Door Eighteen Passengers on a Bus Quiet Afternoon Tea Fellow Passengers Weimar in Early Spring Halo Tomorrow, I’ll Stroll No More The Windsor Cemetery Diary Translator’s Afterword AN EMPTY ROOM The Moment Childhood Vanished if a child knows what he
day. After all, Li Shan was now quite useless to them; he was only worth mocking and discarding. “Seriously, she has a pretty face and a shapely figure. Li Shan, you have exquisite taste in women and you’re a very lucky guy. You should have asked your wife to wait for us by the road. I could have grabbed her waist to rescue her, whisk her onto the bus. Hey, it’s summer and the little clothes she’d be wearing would make the honeymoon much easier.” “What honeymoon? They’ve been married for over a
just married then.” “Just married. Every other day or two days the air-raid siren would blare. But it didn’t necessarily mean there would be bombing.” “When it was clear, where did you go?” “Nowhere.” “During those three hours?” “Ah … it was like this. When there was a siren and the all-clear wasn’t heard until after three o’clock, you didn’t have to work for the rest of the day. Some people would wait for the sound of the siren and once inside the shelter keep looking at their watches for
design? Is it possible that the beasts, birds, reptiles, and insects might be aware of this harmony? Plants can reproduce themselves via the spore, kernel, and roots. But how flowers and leaves can survive through such efficient means is astounding. As for the cryptogamia (seedless plants), are ferns, lichens, fungi, algae, and figs not found everywhere and anywhere? Do flowers display their divine beauty for their own enjoyment and pleasure? Not likely. The authors of flowers have bestowed their
life, and others who share the same tenets and become members of the same parish, dedicating their lives to the sharing of the gospel, to building and running schools, to offering blessings. It is historically inaccurate to say that such ways of life have nearly died out after four hundred years. Monastic orders originated in the fifth and sixth centuries. When the Crusaders reeled back for the seventh time, it was those in black robes who nursed European culture to keep it from dying at a