Islands and Continents: Short Stories by Leung Ping-kwan

Transcendence and the Fax Machine

1 Transcendence and the Fax Machine I am thirty-seven years old and single, I work as a research assistant at the Institute for Cultural Research, and I moonlight at an accounting firm. In my spare time I like to read the Bible, the Koran, and Buddhist sutras. My field used to be British and American literature. But with the emergence of a Chinese Studies clique among the local scholars and the importance they attached to bibliographic citations, and since I was never on particularly good terms with these people, I began to find my name and my writings excluded from every bibliography and anthology they had a hand in preparing. As time went by I began to sense the presence of bibliographies everywhere: no matter where I went, no matter what I was doing, there always seemed to be an enormous pen hanging right over me, which, with one fell swoop, would make me vanish into thin air. After that I began reading anything and everything. I even began subscribing to certain French journals, including several that focused on religion and literature. Perhaps people involved in the study of religion are more tolerant and considerate; in any case, I would occasionally send them an unsolicited article, and to my surprise they would always respond. Translated by Jeanne Tai Transcendence and the Fax Machine 2 Short Stories by Leung Ping-kwan I have remained single for one reason only: I am not very good at interpersonal relationships. Before the age of thirty-five, I used to idealize every woman I met, seeing only the good points and finding plenty of things to love in each of them. And, of course, it always ended in absolute disaster for me. After thirty-five, by way of compensation, I found faults and shortcomings — many of them — in every female I came across. Under these conditions I no longer fell in love with anyone. My heart was calm and serene, like a placid lake, and I expected to live like this happily ever after. But something unexpected always happens. One drizzly evening I was out with my photographer friend Li Biansheng. Over a couple of drinks, I mentioned to him that I had been invited by some French scholars to submit a paper for their upcoming conference on Literature and Transcendence. But corresponding with them by mail was timeconsuming and very inconvenient. Biansheng was convinced that the solution to my problem was to get a fax machine. Later, while we were walking around Causeway Bay, both of us feeling kind of light-headed, he suddenly said: ‘Wait, weren't you going to buy a fax machine?’And he took me to an electronics appliance store. It was just like what my girlfriends used to tell me: if you wander around aimlessly in Causeway Bay, you’ll always end up buying something. Since Ah Sheng knew the manager, it didn’t matter that I didn’t have a cent on me. By the time I left the store I was no longer lonesome — I was on my way home with my fax machine. Her looks were nothing out of the ordinary, but somehow they came to be more and more pleasing to my eye, perhaps because I was growing, uh, accustomed to her face. I understand that a fax machine is just an instrument for the facsimile transmission of documents — nothing to make a big fuss over, really. But ever since the day she came home with me, my life changed. When I finished something I was writing I no longer had to wander all over the city looking for a real mailbox among all the toylike receptacles on the street, or stamp my feet in frustration in front of the locked doors of the post office, or dodge trams in my quest for some safe deposit to which I could entrust the bundle of intimate, red-hot confidences I was holding in my hands. 3 Transcendence and the Fax Machine No more would I be condemned to roam all creation like a lost soul, stopping in at some telecommunications centre or the Foreign Correspondents’ Club for a temporary respite, a chance encounter; never again would I dread the emptiness of an endless weekend or an idle weekday. Though the world outside might be filled with deception, and communication between people might be fraught with traps for the unwary, I could be certain...