Didi Wu Translation

The Sorrow of Ming Liang

By Liang Hong, translated by Didi Wu

The present. It was three in the morning when Hai Hong received Ming Liang’s text.

S: I can’t do this anymore. Something’s wrong with my brain. It’s almost been a month since I last slept a wink, and I don’t want to live. Don’t be sad. I’m a heartless man, and I don’t care about you guys in the slightest. Goodbye, S. -Ming Liang

Hai Hong turned off her phone. She told herself, ‘It’s the middle of the night. I didn’t see that text.’

Then, she rolled over and fell asleep again.

Hai Hong dreamed that she was going to teach at a school or some such. The details were hazy. She only knew that she was headed for a school. She sprinted along an old-fashioned, dirt road that had been swept spotless by the autumn wind. Massive aspens that were straight as an arrow lined both sides, mirrors of her hometown’s trees which bore the familiar scent of childhood. She ran and ran, yet could not find the place she was trying to reach. Hungry and in need of a bathroom break, she turned off the road in front of a village. A man awaited her there. He looked at her with a twinkle in his eyes, as if he had known she was coming. He pointed at the tall village walls and outhouse by the side of the road and stated that those were his. His serenity seemed to tell her that everything he had would also be her everything. Her running would end here.

Gazing off into the distance at the aspens and bumpy, spotless road that seemed worlds away, Hai Hong understood that she had been cut off from them forever.

In the dream, she saw her eighteen-year-old self fumbling as she was cast out into the wide world.

S:

I’ve reported to Aspen Hill Middle School. This place is like a ghost town. It sits on the side of the hill in the middle of nowhere. It’s called Aspen Hill, but there isn’t a single aspen to be found, only a couple of crooked, old, and ugly pagoda trees. I live in the house below the largest one. If you visit, you can find me by looking for that tree.

The students don’t seem that interested in learning and mill around the schoolyard all day. Some are even older and taller than me. They’re not scared of me. I’m not scared of them, either.

I’ll punch the lights out of anyone who doesn’t show me respect. They’d better fucking keep their heads down around me. They’d better not fucking try anything with me.

The clouds spring to life as gale blows…

Ming Liang

Eighteen-year-old Hai Hong crumpled the letter she was holding and looked up through the discolored wood window which faced a few aspens. Only their cylindrical trunks and the yellow puffs of dust rising off the track were visible. A few chickens pecked at the dirt in a corner of the field. They suddenly took off as if disturbed, feathers dropping everywhere in the noisy flurry of wings. The small school was encircled by towering, close-set aspens and untamed, overgrown grasses and shrubs, while farmland stretched as far as the eye could see beyond the field and school walls. Even the nearest village was 500 meters away. Cornfields taller than a grown man clustered in disorderly thickets, verdant and dark. At night, they furtively whispered outside her window like ghosts emerging from the earth to scavenge for food.

She did not know where Aspen Hill was. Rangxian School of Education produced instructors for multiple counties in the area. Like clockwork, most students returned to their respective counties after graduation. However, they did not have a choice in which town or village of that county they taught at. Hai Hong had been assigned to an elementary school in a village that was 40 kilometers away from Wuzhen. Meanwhile Ming Liang, who was not from there, had been sent to Aspen Hill Middle School in Wuzhen. Besides a scant few classmates who remained around Rangxian’s county seat, the others had been scattered to the winds to their own Aspen Hills.

She was surrounded by wilderness and isolated from the rest of society. But Hai Hong did not think it was that bad on the whole. There was nothing she specifically hoped for, not knowing what other ways of life might be out there.

On the contrary, she rather enjoyed the backcountry with its meditative qualities. After an autumn downpour, she would stand barefoot in the middle of this wild space, feeling the breeze on her hair and clothes. As slate-blue clouds with bellies of fire raced towards the western sky, and as rays of golden sunlight broke through the storm clouds, she almost felt that time stood still for her.

It baffled her how Ming Liang could be so aggrieved and bellicose. He took that “Aspen Hill Middle School” to be his personal battleground. She could envision him at the dorm entrance with his head buried in his copy of Classical Chinese (an unlucky self-study charm which had not helped him pass the vocational exams two years in a row). Resolute yet isolated, he exuded a furious determination as if he were telling everyone: No one’s allowed to disturb my studying. No-fucking-one.

Hai Hong had always felt that Ming Liang liked her. No one could fake the depth of feeling in the looks he gave her, the solemn expression on his face, nor the sorrow in his eyes. But Hai Hong also knew that he had been quietly chasing a girl from his hometown during their three years of education classes. After spilling his guts out to that classmate and receiving a noncommittal response, he returned to Hai Hong, slumped over the desk next to her, and soulfully looked at her in grief.

Later, Ming Liang decided he might as switch seats with Hai Hong’s desk mate and came to sit next to her. He placed two huge teapots on the ground, one on each side of the desk, which were like dumb yet formidable dharmapāla—wrathful protectors which never left his side. A large, burnt-brown plastic cup occupied part of his desk, filled to the brim with a concoction of herbal medicine. Ming Liang would tip his head back, his Adam’s apple bobbing up-and-down as he determinedly chugged the bitter medicine. Afterwards, he would refill the cup with hot water and let it steep. He always had to drink four pots worth of that medicine every day. Ming Liang said that there was a sickness in him, but no one knew what he was sick with nor had he ever said.

“You have to protect yourself. No one can tell you who you are or what you’re like. You’ve already lost if you listen to them. You have to think about why they would say that about you. Once you possess that insight into them, you won’t fall for their tricks or do as they wish anymore,” Ming Liang proclaimed to Hai Hong, gesticulating with both hands. Voice low and solemn, he analyzed every person in their class as well as the power struggles, schemes, and plots of the class leadership.

It was a rude awakening for someone as predisposed to fits of sentimentality as Hai Hong. She understood then that the world was a complicated place where distrust, betrayal, and manipulation ran rampant. When she read that “hell is other people” many years later, an image of Ming Liang came to mind first.