A Center You must hold your quiet center, where you do what only you can do. If others call you a maniac or a fool, just let them wag their tongues. If some praise your perseverance, don't feel too happy about it-- only solitude is a lasting friend. You must hold your distant center. Don't move even if earth and heaven quake. If others think you are insignificant, that's because you haven't held on long enough. As long as you stay put year after year, eventually you will find a world begin to revolve around you. If Eating Is a Culture We eat mice. Mice have nice glossy fur and can give you a head of thick hair. Even if you're bald they can restore your hair. We eat cats. Cats, quick by nature, can make you smarter, or at least livelier. We eat frogs. Frogs can swim and crow loudly. They can make your voice resonant. Even in the rainy season you won't develop rheumatism. We eat foxes. Foxes are cunning and swift and can increase your agility in dodging traps laid for you. We eat tigers. Tigers, powerful and fierce, can strengthen your body and enhance your potency. They can help you conquer and dominate anywhere. We eat phoenixes and dragons but cannot catch them throughout heaven and earth and ocean. So we eat snakes for dragons and chickens for phoenixes so that we can eat them up as well. Weasels In those days weasels often hexed villagers, bewitching young girls and women of frail health. Such a victim would rave in a weasel's voice, trembling and brandishing her arms. Her family would rush out, shouting and beating a basin to scare away the weasel casting the spell. Some carried brooms to thrash the creature if they found it. Once the rascal fled the crazed person would return to calm. Nowadays no one believes that animals can hex humans. Instead we send the possessed to a shrink or hospital. Sorcery is nothing but a superstition. Yet if a voice cries out, "Go chase the weasel away!" I might hurry out to search through haystacks, bushes, firewood in hopes of finding a weasel shrieking and rocking in spasms. A 58-Year-Old Painter Leaving for America Tomorrow you will leave Shanghai, the city you used to love, to look for another life far away. "Probably another death," you often joke with a smile these days. You have attempted death several times. Expel it from your mind. No matter how hard life is there you must continue to live. As long as you are alive there will be miracles. Indeed, you have no English or youth for starting over, only your painting brush and fortitude. In that strange land you must live, as always, with stubbornness and care. You must quit drinking and avoid staying up all night. Keep in mind the meaning of your existence: wherever you land, your footprints will become milestones. Cemetery I have seen the beauty of that cemetery, where grassy slopes glow with sunshine and the North Atlantic tides lap at the pebbles and granite steps. Tombstones spread from winding paths, where Mexican workers trim flowers. It's so peaceful and sunny everywhere and everything is neatly organized. I can see why both of you want to go there and even purchased lots for your families who are yet to leave our motherland. Knowing where to end can help to curb your wandering heart and stabilize this drifting life. In fact, a fine cemetery is a village or town of another kind, where people can settle afterward. I envy your clarity about your journey's end, but I'm still not sure where to go, never attached to any place. Even after this life, I might continue to roam. Missed Time My notebook has remained blank for months thanks to the light you shower around me. I have no use for my pen, which lies languorously without grief. Nothing is better than to live a storyless life that needs no writing for meaning-- when I am gone, let others say they lost a happy man, though no one can tell how happy I was. The One Following You Because of you, that coastal city has appeared on my map. In my mind it's no longer a fishing village far away. Every morning I wake to follow you on the bus to work, passing the bay enclosed in mist and through a long tunnel into town. We then walk along the street shaded by maples, enter a gate to a schoolhouse and finally stand before a room of children. You open a textbook and read out with them legends of triumph and updated fables. You also draw on the chalkboard a tomorrow that might be more colorful. Whether you know it or not, whether you like it or not, you always bring along an invisible guard. Excerpted from A Distant Center by Ha Jin All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
