Excerpt 1

The sky of the city has no stars. Even though the weather was so clear during the day, you could never see any stars at night. In my mind, people that look at the stars and recognize some constellations or small points of significance are people with very powerful imaginations. I, on the other hand, was someone who had a weak imagination. Sometimes a sudden strengthening of my imagination would put me into a state of anxiety. I didn’t want my brain to remain in the same murky turbid state of being that it was in before the universe was created. Only the dim state of this foggy city gave me a place to rest. I worried that my imagination would suddenly get stronger and my brain would begin to glow. This kind of glowing was as frightening as someone entering the pitch blackness and not being able to distinguish anything. But this cloudiness did not signify an endless state of restfulness, because it was pregnant with everything. It was the beginning of a horrible creation. I imagine that the period from the state of murkiness to the beginning of creation must have been perfectly soundless with a kind of creepy suspense and terrible peacefulness.

The murky condition of the city in the fog, the murky mental condition of my brain, and the ambiguous position of my identity in the Xinjiang Uyghur Autonomous Region seemed to be totally of the same substance; sometimes they mirror each other and sometimes they seep into each other. Due to the constant threat of choking from the inside, being smothered or drowning, for most people this peacefulness seemed to be more dangerous than the most frightening panic.

I lost my sense of direction when I first came to the city. Since I was a kid, I’ve always thought the higher ground was the north and the lower the south, and because of this I always felt disoriented. Even after I realized that my method for determining directions was wrong, I couldn’t correct it. My small village was located on the southern slope of the Tian Shan mountains. As you walked to the south, the land gradually descended into a scrubby marshland. When the sheep we were herding were grazing, I would lie in the grass with my head resting toward the north and feel as though it was higher than the rest of my body. This feeling that I got from my birthplace became a permanent principle of my constitution. It grasped me very firmly and prevented me from correctly understanding the geographical situation and cardinal directions of other places.

Ürümchi is located in a narrow valley that looks like the scar of a deep wound. In opposition to the orientation of my village, in this city the water flows from south to north, but in my mind, water should naturally flow toward the south. I couldn’t come to terms with the idea of water flowing from south to north. Now, in the fog, my sense of direction was deteriorating even more. I couldn’t even judge which direction was higher and which was lower.

I heard the sloshing sound of muddy footsteps as I walked. This noise made me really sad. I didn’t know why this sound made me sad. Perhaps it was because it sounded like blood splatting on the ground.

I don’t know anyone in this strange city, so it’s impossible for me to be friends or enemies with anyone.

It was difficult to determine whether or not the forms on the road were human. As I looked at them I thought, What time is it? Is it day or night? What day is it? Suddenly I realized that I couldn’t recall any such markers. What month is this? Not only this, but I couldn’t even remember what year it was. My awareness suddenly seemed to fade out. What century is it now? In the end I gradually lost my sense of what era I was a part of. I was lost in time. It began to dawn on me that people could become homeless exiles not only in space but also in time. They can struggle to ascertain where they belong in the infinity of time. Maybe all of us are wandering exiles in time or a simulation of time. Perhaps the original form and standards of time were very different from what they are simulating today. Compared to the original form of time, perhaps the calculations of people to separate it out into days, weeks, months, and years is a kind of children’s game. It’s like one philosopher said, “If a person tries to make plans, it only makes God laugh.” I tried to come to terms with my place in time by joining and accepting the simulated form of time that others had put into practice. But I couldn’t even make myself aware of this. Because I’m also human, I felt I had to accept the concept of the time made by other humans and feel comfort in satisfying my desire to know the world my mind belongs to in time. But it seemed as though time had suddenly disappeared and that I was now in a place where time had not been created.

Excerpt 2

When the smiling-faced man saw my Letter of Guarantee about not needing a room from the office, a smile appeared on his face like I had never seen before. Since he always had a smile on his face, and, on top of this, he expressed everything with a smile, I could only guess at what he was expressing through this strangely different smile. The smile at this moment seemed to convey a viciousness and particular cruelty. This was the smile he had before he injected others with poison. With the poison that came along with the strengthening of this smile, he could make people squirm. It wasn’t hard to understand that he was trying to infect others and himself with viciousness and cruelty. It would be easier to understand the way he dehumanized others if he had a snarl on his face instead of this constant smile.

He had already found some mistakes in that guarantee. According to him, I had changed the word bao (保) in “to guarantee” into the bao that means “to hug” (抱). The word “stay” or zhu (住) in a “room to stay,” I had changed to the zhu (注) that means “to inject.” As he discussed these mistakes with me, he sported a smile of revulsion as if I had written some dirty words. For a second, I thought perhaps he felt that there really were dirty meanings associated with those words. But then I realized they weren’t very dirty words. If they had been, it would have been better.

You could spend your whole life learning the full meaning of these words. It’s not so easy since this isn’t my mother tongue—especially the second word. I use this word based on my encounters with it in books. I might have seen it in a passage describing the catastrophe of the Great Flood or in a book about sexual concepts. It is hard to get rid of a first impression, regardless of whether it is true or not. This word isn’t my own word, I could only really understand it by searching for its meaning in a dictionary. This meaning was defined by others, so no matter how hard I tried, I couldn’t use that word very fluently. I could get confused by the vagueness of these

definitions forever. In my mind, that word has a meaning of “spurt”—like when sperm is ejaculated. But I couldn’t find this definition by searching the dictionary. I don’t know why I learned to think of it in this way—why I related it to spurting sperm. After I searched the official dictionaries, I found several different definitions. First: pour, like pouring liquor in a bottle. Second: flow into, for example, the water flowed into the fields. Third: drop, for example, the rain drops from the sky. All these definitions were related to water, and that may have caused my misconception.

The boss forced me to rewrite the Letter of Guarantee stating that I wouldn’t demand a room. I wrote it over and over, but every time there were some mistakes. So, he would make me write it again. I was angry at myself for proving what he had said about me not being able to write a letter properly. So I insisted that I be allowed to write the Letter of Guarantee using our own language. But this made the situation deteriorate even more, because I couldn’t even write it properly in Uyghur. Gradually I became unable to open my mouth in front of him. Every time I would write it slowly with so much care, and then immediately check my work. As if I were cursed, each time there was a mistake that I hadn’t accounted for. When the letter was placed in front of my smug coworker, who was the boss’s assistant, he would always find it. As soon as he found one, he would immediately flash the letter in front of the boss’s shining face. I couldn’t figure out why I always missed those damn words. They returned my sixth version of the Letter of Guarantee because of some words that were out of place. They acted as though I had intentionally written the wrong words in order to later be able to get out of my guarantee.

Ever since I was little I had a habit of seeing miswritten words as some sort of sign. I thought that miswriting these words wasn’t just my own mistake, but that some sort of superpower was controlling my hand as I wrote—changing the spelling. When I wrote the word for “should live” (yashisun) it changed into “should vanish” (yoqalsun) in my homework notebook. When my father saw it, he stood there transfixed by the word. Suddenly he slapped me across the face. Immediately blood shot out of my nose and mouth like a geyser. Later, the word that came before “should vanish,” unabashedly became my father’s name in my memories. It was useless to blame myself for any feeling of guilt. In the end, I came to believe that I might truly have written my father’s name that way. This was especially so when my father was in the last stage of his illness, and he was groaning in pain. He looked me in the eyes as if piercing them with needles, and then I really believed my memories. I wanted to avert my gaze from his enlarged eyes, so I immediately left to dump out his shit.

I looked over the mistakes they had found in the Letter of Guarantee. They were just a bunch of Uyghur words. They didn’t have any bearing on whether I would rescind my guarantee not to demand a place. Even if the missing letters made the words meaningless, they wouldn’t have helped me deny the meaning of the letter itself. I didn’t understand why they ordered me to write it over and over. I looked at these Letters of Guarantee for a long time. There were no major mistakes that justified the way they acted. Each time I wrote it, there was just one word miswritten. There were no other mistakes that were more apparent than this, but this was enough of a reason for them to give me a ridiculing look and laugh at me in a forced cackle, while saying there was no such word as this in Uyghur. In truth, this was a mistake I really shouldn’t have made. I arranged those Letters of Guarantee that I had written seven of sequentially in front of me. I looked at them and realized that I really didn’t know why I had thought of arranging them like this. I started combining the letters I had missed in each of them. Just then I started, and a sudden chill came over me like I was naked in a blizzard, because the word that came from adding all the letters together was my father’s name, exactly.