Ashamed or Proud? | 羞耻还是自豪？

—“Ashamed or Proud?”, Malaysia, 2015.2 | 《羞耻还是自豪》摄于马来西亚

 

Why would we feel ashamed when we haven’t done anything wrong? For being poor? For being born in a poor family? For being born a tiny creature in a poor family? 

我们没有做错事，为什么会感到羞耻呢？因为贫穷？因为出生在一个贫穷的家庭？因为与生俱来我们就是个不起眼的弱小生物？

“Weirdos”. Malaysia, 2015.2 | 《怪人》摄于马来西亚

These are half of the pieces of feedback I received on my last article Bumps. They are categorized into two groups: Westerners & Easterners.

 

以下是来自读者对上篇文章《颠簸》所作反馈的一半内容，分为两部分：西方人和东方人。

 

 

-Westerners 西方人-

 

 

 

Interestingly, more women feel vulnerable in silence than men. More interestingly, we don’t even hear these stories from men. Believable or unbelievable? There are far more true stories to write than fantasies to create.

有趣的是，与男性相比，更多女性在沉默中感到脆弱。更有趣的是，我们甚至很少从男人那听到类似《颠簸》的故事。可信还是难以置信？我们的身边有那么多真实的故事可以写，却有那么多人绞尽脑汁去创造一些遥远的幻想。为什么？

 

 

-Easterners 东方人-

 

 

From being ashamed to being proud, is like a revolutionary moment of fearlessness.

从羞耻到自豪，像是一个无畏的革命性的冲锋时刻。

 

Note: To build a mutual Literature & Art community, Heather has now opened her personal channel (WeChat ID: Heather69) to her fans, who are following HeathersChamber. No cheaters!

备注：由于时间和精力有限，为了建立一个互敬互惠的文学艺术圈子，阿太特向已关注此公众号的粉丝们分享她的个人微信号：Heather69 。骗子勿扰！

 

Last article 上一篇:  Bumps | 颠簸

 

About Heather Cai:

Heather is the daughter of a subsistence rice farmer from Fujian Province, China. She tells stories from her experience as one of the poorest. She writes her dream to share with the world, a very personal place. She has now written two English literary novels and is looking to being published in the UK. Her passion is a splendid cocktail or milkshake of word, image, music and art. She likes collecting books, DVDs, papers, stones, shells and leaves. She desires for all forms of natural beauty. She is currently teaching kids chess in Shanghai and serving as Sergeant-at-arms (SAA) for Shanghai Leadership Toastmasters Club.

Copyright © 2018-2019 Heather Cai. All Rights Reserved. 所有版权归作者所有！

 

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Follow HeathersChamber for more original poems, essays, prose, drawings and pictures

关注阿太的密室，订阅更多原创诗歌、散文、随笔、画画和图片

Into Torture Porn

Photo taken in Little Yellow Mountain, Guangdong – 2015.10.

Sorry, I have been away for so long. Having finished the first draft of In Between, the Goddamned Book, my second English novel, was a triumph in March, a personal history.

Less Than Mystery, the Fucking Book hangs my life between something and nothing. But this Goddamned Book has confidently lifted me up to a state of fearlessness. I feel taller than I am. I feel time is a revolver pointing at my back. I can’t stop the torrents of overwhelming thoughts of writing my third English novel while editing the second. Because I feel the need and must record what has been happening over the year and what is happening now. Because I may die if I don’t.

The horror of being nothing and nothingness is of dismemberment, of decay. Yet the faith of the ultimate lifestyle is art and the world is getting better never fades but only grows stronger as I write more.

And the extremes of this horror and this faith have dramatically pushed me into torture porn.

It is a feeling, an overcome feeling. The first torture porn I’ve “conquered” is Hostel, a splatter film, which, personally, means to splatter your soul with blood. Using the word “conquer” is not an exaggeration. For it took me nine years to finish the movie. It was disturbing and frustrating that I had to turn away every time when facing a bloody scene, like I couldn’t even look at my own blood when having a blood test. Why? What exactly was I afraid of?

It was a fear of dying with the intense redness of blood, which slowly consumed me till 2016. In the end, I found that the only way to overcome this fear was a philosophy. People make great profits out of torture porn like Hostel, because it is commercially successful. The blood is unreal, the act of killing is in fact a “mockumentary”, and the death fake. Go and feel pools of blood. Feel the fat thickness of gore. Feel the devil’s insanity. Feel yourself. You may suffer from trauma, but it is temporary. You are real and alive. Your feelings are strong. But you are the master of yourself, not a slave.

Therefore, torture porn has become the hands of a surgeon and a temptation.

And excuse me, I have to retreat again now.

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The Fucking Book – Less Than Mystery

The Fucking Book – Less Than Mystery – My first English novel is done.

Finally, here is a copy of the Fucking Book, Less Than Mystery.

It is almost as thick as the length of this lighter; total 6 parts, 484 pages, 129,237 words. It has taken three versions of  the manuscripts. The very first one, which was finished within one week, was crap. The whole book took me about two years to complete – one year of writing, one year changing and editing. More precisely, if not counting the parts on suffering from writer’s block, traveling and worrying about other things, it would be half a year of writing and half a year of changing and editing. It is sometimes like a lighthouse sometimes a nightmare. 

Why is it the Fucking Book? Because  sometimes it weighs as heavy as my heart can carry sometimes as thin as the air that my lungs need to breath in and more importantly, because it holds my life between something and nothing. 

To be honest, I thought  I would celebrate it, but now it is more like a victory that brings no joy.  Why? Because it is not the final victory. Just not yet.

It may not be great but absolutely unique. Initially, it is  quite a fanciful illusion – with a structure like Pulp Fiction, a language like William Faulkner’s, a sort of anger like Henry Miller’s and a rightful dream for women’s liberation in China like Simone de Beauvoir’s in The Second Sex. What is it now? – My angers, my wonders, my observations and my beliefs wrapped in mysteries. In a word, it has my character.

 
The next book is In Between.

At the moment, there is the same question – “To be or not to be”.

But –

 

I must write, or I die. If I write, I must survive too.

Big Breasts and Wide Hips

The Purple Blind is here to “bomb” something she thinks is not right. (I collected the leftover papers from the gift shop and created such a character.)

Maybe it’s a matter of time. Maybe not. 

Last year, before reading Wild Swan, I thought it might be a novel with some romance or something like that. But I was wrong. After reading half, I felt it to be boring, as most of the descriptions were repeating Chinese History textbooks, except for the part of Cultural Revolution which the textbooks didn’t tell any details. On the whole, to me, it was rather like an account book.

Now it’s Big Breasts and Wide Hips, a “book as thick as a brick” by Mo Yan, the first Chinese Nobel Prize winner and the author of Red Sorghum.

It has taken me about half a year to finish, going back and forth with other books. Not because it’s so “thick”- I could have read it more than one hour per night and finished it within a full month. But maybe I lost interest in continuing after reading the first chapter. After all, a Greek writer friend did tell me that he just had to give up, after reading less than one-third of it. Plus it would take much longer to finish reading a book that is not interesting to you than those you’ve read with great interest. Right?

The most interesting thing in the book is the “compelling” Introduction, which now seems to be a “trick” and in which, there are three things that caught my attention.

No 1, a dialogue from the book. –

First Sister was stunned. “Mother,” she said, “you’ve changed.”

“Yes, I’ve changed,” Mother said, “and yet I’m still the same. Over the years, members of the Shangguan family have died off like stalks of chives, and others have been born to take their place. Where there’s life, death is inevitable. Dying’s easy; it’s living that’s hard. The harder it gets, the stronger the will to live. And the greater the fear of death, the greater the struggle to keep on living.”

No 2, a sentence from the Introduction. –

“Mo Yan styles himself as a writer of realist, often historical fiction, which is certainly true, as far as it goes.”

No 3, Mo Yan himself has said: “If you like, you can skip my other novels, but you must read Big Breasts and Wide Hips. In it I wrote about history, war, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex.”

However, when I finally finished reading the whole book the night before, it’s like a shit bag, full of shit. From the beginning to the end, the stories float everywhere and go nowhere, the characters don’t make sense apart from Sima Ku, and what he has said about the “history, war, politics, hunger, religion, love, and sex” are ridiculous. Alright, some details are OK. But the storyline is too far-fetched and no story particularly good. Why would people have tried to use such a “brick” to build something “great” for the literary world? I just don’t understand…

Count On Writing#2

A green bottle recycled, a new creative way to make something mysterious and incredible.

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Here is Booker – long listed novelist, award-winning poet and widely published journalist Paul Kingsnorth on writing.

Writing is not a ‘career’. There is no salary, no job security, no promotion, no pension, no guarantee of work, no guarantee that anyone will ever notice what you do. Writing is a calling. If you are called, answer. Prepare for a life of intense work at curious hours, likely obscurity and regular self-doubt, punctuated by periods of wonder that somehow make it all worthwhile. If this doesn’t appeal, try local government.

 

Count On Writing#1

The fog makes the tree a dreaming dancer and the thread of red a poet. Why? Because the fog says so.

A while ago, a good friend passed me something good from another good friend who likes to share some of his writing ideas and who is writing a fiction himself. As always I like to share whatever good with the rest of the world. Carrying a dream to be a good writer then a real artist, I feel it important to share what I think is good, especially with those who have similar interests or dreams.

Here is Booker – long listed novelist, award-winning poet and widely published journalist Paul Kingsnorth on writing.

If you want to be a writer, you will be a writer. In fact, if you want to be a writer, you already are. Congratulations.

P.S.: There are more, of course. But hey, the very first step is the voice, the belief within inside. We not only have to believe we will be a writer but act as we already are. This is essential.

Yesterday Was A Drama

Strangely yesterday I asked myself, how many Yesterdays have I had so far and how many do I remember? Thus, it seems too many to count and too few to remember. Then I tracked it down to my personal diary. There was one day written in 2013. And the mood of that day was as complicated as yesterday.

It says: Oct.25, 2013

Yesterday, a dramatic woman made an odd day. All the way to the market, all the way home and all day long, she covered her mouth with a hand, laughing and crying with smiles yet without tears, feeling like going to marry tomorrow, acting like the secret of American Dream.

Reading through each word, it seemed as if what happened on that day just happened now. The noises from the market, the faces in the crowds, the aimless footsteps on the way home, the broken laughter and the crying smiles, the hungry eyes and the wandering mind, the complex power of the deep inside waves – all these images were still vivid as a dear heart. And yesterday, there was no fewer dear moments than that day. In the morning, I posted a moment of my mind:

After all these days of building a blog and creating some material for the site, I feel my mind floating high and feverishly, my feet walking on the water, my heart rumbling violently, my passion lying restlessly to the mess, the anger, the pain, and even now my period bleeding abnormally.