Islands and Continents: Short Stories by Leung Ping-kwan

Afterword - Writer’s Jetlag1

117 Afterword: Writer’s Jetlag Afterword Writer’s Jetlag1 Translated by John Minford and Agnes Hung-chong Chan You could say I’ve been a traveller all my life. A permanent migrant. My parents migrated from the ‘continent’, from mainland China, to Hong Kong in 1949. They were literature lovers who adored things like The Story of the Stone2 and the new twentieth-century Chinese vernacular literature of the May Fourth Movement. They brought few valuables with them in their travelling bags. But they did carry loads of books. My maternal grandfather, like so many Chinese men of letters before him, retired to the seclusion of the countryside in a mood of profound disenchantment. He found some land in Wong Chuk Hang in the southernmost corner of Hong Kong Island, grew vegetables and raised chickens — a latter-day Tao Yuanming,3 plucking pak 1 Originally presented by Leung Ping-kwan at the Sinophone Literature Workshop, Harvard University, April 2006. 2 Cao Xueqin, trs. Hawkes, D. and Minford, J., The Story of the Stone, Harmondsworth: Penguin Classics, 1973–86; see also Yang, X.Y. and Yang, G., The Dream of the Red Chamber, Beijing: Foreign Languages Press, 1978–80. 3 Tao Yuanming (AD 365–427), prototype of the Chinese hermit poet, famous for the lines ‘I pluck chrysanthemums under the eastern hedge,/And gaze afar towards the southern mountain’ (from his ‘Poem Written While Drunk’, translated by WilliamAcker, in Minford & Lau, Classical Chinese Literature, New York and Hong Kong, 2000: pp. 503–4). 118 Short Stories by Leung Ping-kwan choi under the eastern hedge and gazing afar, in not too leisurely a fashion, towards the less-than-attractive Brick Hill (Southern Long Shan). My family’s home in the country was humble, but it contained a treasurehouse of books, a library that had drifted with them from the mainland to the small island of Hong Kong. They had works ranging from classical Chinese poetry and fiction to modern literature, from Lu Xun4 to Zhang Ailing5 to old Soviet fiction, from Zhu Shenghao’s translated works of Shakespeare6 to The Guava Collection (Fanshiliuji), Zhu Xiang’s7 anthology of western poetry in translation. Besides the literary classics, there were plenty of popular romances too. When I was small and no-one was looking, I used to read these by myself, and then I’d while away the hours adapting the stories in my head, in my own random fashion. My grandfather was well versed in classical Chinese poetry, and he was also fond of expounding the intricacies of the cleverly constructed couplets and some of the witty puns perpetrated by outstanding Cantonese scholars of the older generation. My father, who died young, had forced himself to delve into some of the indigestible political theories of art and literature that were current at the time. But what I related to most of all as a child were my mother and her sister and their Cantonese recitations from memory. They chanted poetry and prose as they worked together, doing piece-work at home, assembling plastic flowers, pasting labels on matchboxes, or threading beads.And I specially loved reading the popular romances which my aunts kept for their regular leisure reading. Before finishing primary school, I moved from the country to the city. I was amazed by the wonders and the vastness of my new urban environment, and at the same time continued to pursue my love for literature by reading more and more books in the city library. But nowhere could I find a point of reference in the ‘reality’ around me for the things I was busy reading about. My passion for Chinese books caused me to resist the prevailing trend, which 4 Lu Xun (1881–1936), novelist and essayist. 5 Zhang Ailing (1920–1995), prominent novelist, who ‘migrated’ from Shanghai in 1952. 6 Zhu Shenghao (1912–1944) translated thirty-one of Shakespeare’s plays into Chinese. 7 Zhu Xiang (1904–1933), poet, critic and pioneer translator. 119 Afterword: Writer’s Jetlag was to study in an English secondary school. Instead I entered a Chinese secondary school. My Chinese teacher, who came from Beijing, considered my experimental Chinese unacceptably odd and insisted that I should use the old-fashioned four-character clichés, in order to make my Chinese prose style seem more mature and fluent. I refused to do this, and as a result I always got a C minus for...