Endless War: Fiction and Essays by Wang Wen-hsing

Midsummer on the Prairie

115 Midsummer on the Prairie May 1961. This, the fifth of Wang’s experimental stories, depicts a group of soldiers on a one-day training exercise. Many paragraphs function like stanzas in a poetic work. The story also contains one of the first examples of Wang’s use of an existing Chinese character to convey a new meaning. This is one of the most striking techniques in Wang’s literary repertoire and is mistakenly believed to have first appeared in his first novel, Family Catastrophe. The setting is Zhuzikeng in Taizhong, where Wang was stationed for a short period during his compulsory military training in Taiwan. v This stretch of prairie runs north right to K City, but the city’s voice is inaudible. From here, K City looks like a shallow lake, cool and refreshing . This morning, as the sun climbs up the mountain slope on the eastern side of the prairie, it gilds several small hills (they are shaped like steam buns) on the western and southern edges of the grassland, wrapping them in a bright, golden, Chinese robe. The small mountain’s sweeping shadow (like a king’s robe), spreads flat, hesitating, over the prairie. The sky is null, an empty land, the azure color as formless as the sky itself. The pure-fire sun will roll back and forth as it pleases across its playground; up in the sky, it cannot play the arsonist and set fires. An extremely hot day is about to begin. On the prairie near K City, the terrain has a slightly higher elevation . Pale green sugarcane grows on top, taller than a man, but the southern side is untouched by human development. This area contains a dried up riverbed with exposed heaps of pebbles that look 116 v SHORT FICTION like white bones; also a wasteland of withered wormwood—deep brown shoots of parched grass grow on it like a heavy beard, reaching waist high. This is what comes of the sunshine’s daily conspiracy, its extortion by deception, but a minuscule patch of green life continues to multiply at its feet. The sun’s rays plate all of the trees on the hillsides with golden masks. At this moment, the air still retains the freshness of early morning; the dew on the grassland has not yet disappeared. Before long, the singing of the cicadas starts. It comes from the mountain forest, confirmation that the sun’s heat has penetrated the leaves of the trees. The cicadas’ sensitive bodies detect the scorching heat. The crying of the cicadas is the whisper of the tree spirits. A group of men wearing grass-green military uniforms and grass-green helmets comes through the valley between two small mountains on the eastern side, from a valley graced with a bamboo grove. The ant-like line of men, an apricot-colored army flag in the lead announcing their presence, emerges into the abrupt expanse of this vast world. Their route suddenly appears to lack any fixed direction and they fall out of step. Nervousness, a lack of confidence, spreads among the troops. A man wearing a yellow helmet, who had been standing apart from the soldiers, accompanying them independently as they forged ahead, now quickens his pace and runs to the head of the column. In a loud voice he reprimands a soldier, and the troops’ forward march comes to a complete halt. The soldiers at the head of the column shift direction, resuming the advance . The march is still ambling and awkward because the ground beneath their feet is rugged and rough. The man wearing the yellow helmet stands motionless, both hands on his waist, legs spread wide and firm like two poles, looking sideways at every soldier who passes in front of him. They are all extremely young and dressed identically : a rifle on every man’s right shoulder, a small wooden stool hanging from the left wrist, an extremely wide cartridge belt buckled tight around their slender waists, a bayonet on their belts hanging flat against their buttocks, its handle tapping the canteens at their waists. This tapping, the sound of the metal ring on the rifle strap, the footsteps of more than one hundred men, all combine to MIDSUMMER ON THE PRAIRIE v 117 generate the strange sound of these troops. Nothing else can be heard, not even the voice of one man talking among them. At the tail...