A Private Life Read online

  After I had mailed the letter to the hospital, I went to the store and bought a blue lampshade, a vibrant yellow artificial sunflower, and a milk-white and lavender porcelain flower vase, which I took home and carefully arranged in my beloved bathroom.

  When I was finished, it was just like another world.

  Whenever I go into my quiet, simple little bathroom suffused in pale blue-green light, for example, at noon when the sun and the hub- bub of the streets are at their height, it makes me feel the hush of nightfall, when everyone is sound asleep and the world is at peace, and I feel totally secure.

  On one of the ledges at either end of the snow-white bathtub sits the solitary, green-and-yellow sunflower in the plump lavender vase – the effect, a twilight scene bathed in pale sunlight. On the floor beside the bathtub, a faded yellow straw carpet of dense and intricate pattern adds a touch of old and simple beauty. A soap-scented towel hangs casually over the long chestnut-colored wooden rod across the white tiles behind the tub, and a pair of pitch-black pajamas, the color of sleep. It is as misty as the rainy season.

  A three-dimensional modernist painting, a fictitious world.

  It doesn't matter what time of day it is, all I have to do is cast a glance into the bathroom and I feel as if I had just come back from a long journey and, tired and short of breath, all I want to do is feel the warm currents of water flow around me as I lie there quietly, naked as an eel in the shush of running water, conscious only of its caressing warmth.

  The scene in my bathroom is rich in pattern, order, and certainty, while the scenes in the world outside are brushed in sloppy, incoherent strokes, a constant uproar of changing appearances and structures.

  Two worlds, one inside, one outside, and I can't decide which one is nothing more than dreams.

  One by one, the days go by. All time has passed away and left me here alone.

  On one such day, I noticed that my rubber tree, my tortoiseshell bamboo, and all the green shrubs on my balcony were growing so vigorously that there was no longer enough room for them. My first thought was that perhaps I should move them to the flower beds outside. From the way they were gazing down from the balcony window, I could see that they too had been thinking about this and couldn't make up their minds. If they were to move outside, they could draw nourishment from the rich soil of the broad, deep beds, but they would also have to struggle ceaselessly with all the other plants to survive. And they would be unprotected from the wind and sun. On the other hand, although they could escape nature's ravaging heat and cold on my balcony, they would be deprived of any deeper sustenance.

  They are thinking about this. So am I.

  Chen Ran

  Ran Chen and her father Wo Weihan

  b. 1962, Beijing

  A writer of psychological novels, Chen Ran is known as the only Chinese woman writer who identifies herself as a feminist. Chen started to publish in 1985 and toured England, Australia and Germany before she returned and settled down in Beijing as a freelance writer. As one of the few writers of avant-garde/experimental literature in China, she presents herself as writing from the margin even after she became a member of the Chinese Writers’ Association in 1990. Since the publication of her short story The Disease of the Century’ (Shiji bing, 1986), Chen has held critics’ attention because of her modernist exploration of female subjectivity as well as her inventive style and perspective.

  Chen diverges from the literary mainstream in that she tries to go beyond a social and historical interest in women’s experiences to write from an essential female subjectivity. Informed by dreams and fantasies, her analysis often focuses on the female body or domestic space. At the same time, Chen’s writing features a highly personal and sensual use of language: the abstract is described using words of sensual and sexual texture while multiple descriptions of physical reality offset the workings of the narrator’s psyche. This defiance of plot-oriented narration highlights Chen’s painstaking efforts to escape the accepted norms of literacy. Her amoral and apolitical approach to literature and her refusal to accommodate the public’s reading habits contribute to her singularity in contrast to other forms of woman-authored literature, which were increasingly submerged within ‘middle brow’ literature in the 1990s.

  ***

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