Faraway, by Lo Yi-Chin. Translated by Jeremy Tiang (On the Way)

Lo Yi-Chin T R A N S L AT E D B Y

JEREMY TIANG

A NOVEL

have appeared helpless and scruffy sitting in that dark little shop (with old people all around us).

Yet I no longer felt part of this scene, because something fatal had happened, and although my journey hadn’t started yet, I’d prematurely gotten on the road, no way to turn back, my body already inhabiting other scenarios, incomplete from lack of understanding and perception.

ON THE WAY

This wasn’t how I’d imagined my father’s death.

Crowds moving like goblins through the sunlit streets.

Hunched over three-wheeled scooters. Women in inexpensive summer dresses, showing off tanned shoulders, legs, and bellies.

Fruit stalls. Oddly shaped melons. Piles of coconuts, husked and looking like ostrich eggs. One kilogram of Asian pears for onefifty, of grapes for one-sixty. More variation between these fruits than in the bare arms and cleavage on display in the street, or the faces of men on the prowl.

The road was straight as a runway, and for a long time I saw no taxis other than the one we were in. Coconut groves swayed on either side, but you couldn’t tell what lay beyond them. This was the highway from the airport, forcing its way through the jungle. No turnoffs, no traffic lights. Lonely, unbending, monotonous, forging straight ahead.

The sun blazed hot enough to melt rubber, but our driver, in his pale blue and white Hawaiian shirt, refused to turn on the air conditioning. Two speakers blared behind Mother and me, lashing the backs of our heads with a treacly, unctuous tune (hard to imagine) imitating Teresa Teng’s nasal voice, “Three hundred

2 6 FA R AWAY

and sixty-five days are so hard to get through, if I’m not in your heart. Return my true love to me . . .”

Haikou Airport on Hainan Island, a border crossing. My travel permit had expired, and there hadn’t been time to get a new one in Hong Kong, so Mr. Chen from the tour company (the same one that organized Father’s vacation) decided at the last minute to fly from Hong Kong to Hainan (where it was possible to get one on arrival). But when we got to the drab counter (which reminded me of the military police outpost in a corner of Taichung Railway Station years ago) before immigration and went through the paperwork with a man and woman in People’s Liberation Army uniforms, we found that none of us had any Chinese money to pay the hundred-yuan administration fee. My money pouch held only crisp American hundreds, changed earlier at Taoyuan Airport. Finally we decided that Mr. Chen would go through customs and come back with renminbi for us. A complicated and tedious process, but there was no way to skip it.

I found myself thinking: We’re journeying to the scene of a death.

Right now, Father is in a dilapidated hospital in some strange, distant town, all alone, slowly dying. Yet unlike in an actual nightmare, we have no way of jumping straight to the next scene. No way to avoid the exhausting, byzantine bureaucracy. We had to get on the plane and tell the smiling stewardess no thank you, I don’t want a meal, out one gate, in another, a standby ticket, changing money, waiting forever in a departure lounge for our next flight as the air conditioning sucked every drop of moisture from our bodies.

Earlier, as we’d sat in silence on the plane, a time machine bringing us to Father’s death, some kids flung rubber balls with a glowing red light inside them toward the back rows; in front of us, a mainland businessman got out his cell phone and began an animated conversation; a whole line of people stood squashed

FA R AWAY 2 7

in the aisle, waiting for the bathroom, just like any public toilet (at least no one lit a cigarette). The stewardess appeared, handing out packets of beef jerky like the sort I used to get from the convenience store as a kid, a dollar a packet (my playmates told me it was pickled tree bark). Everything felt like I was a child again, accompanying Father (still in the prime of life) on a long bus ride. We’d hoped to quickly get through the blank span of time in the middle, but a gentle female voice came over the airport public address system: “We regret to inform you that due to mechanical failure, the flight originally scheduled to depart for Beijing via Nanchang has been delayed, and will now leave at seven-thirty.” So we’d be there a whole seven hours.

Mr. Chen took us in a taxi to dinner at a Haikou City restaurant (to burn away those extra hours, sprung from nowhere).

The blue-floral-shirted driver, possibly Indonesian, laid siege to us in that overheated, loud interior (after Teresa Teng came an even more incongruous folk song, “The maidens of Ali Hill are beautiful as the lake . . . ee-yah-na-lu-he-hai-ya . . .”) with his chatter, but was summarily and rather overbearingly shut down

by Mr. Chen. That probably put the guy in a temper, which might be why, as we sped down that blinding, arrow-straight, deserted road to the city, he pointed at a military food truck in the next lane and announced, “Look, getting ready for war.”

“What do you mean?” Mr. Chen snapped. “Like our government said,” came the reply, “Taiwan can’t be independent. If they try, we’ll whack them.”

The taxi sped past the restaurant Mr. Chen had named, but our driver refused to stop. “This one won’t do, it’s no good at all.”

He said he’d bring us somewhere he knew, guaranteed to be delicious. And from god knows where, I found an enormous surge of rage, my voice coarsening into a roar: “He said stop, so stop.

Why are you still driving?”

2 8 FA R AWAY

I’d thought Mr. Chen would send him away and we’d get another taxi back (his frustration and rage as he squabbled with the driver had left me certain he was staunchly pro-Taiwanese independence), but instead they launched into another fevered round of bargaining, finally deciding that for an additional fifty yuan, the driver would wait for us. To be honest, as Mr. Chen led the two of us into the restaurant, which had a mirror on each wall with a carved, gilt-painted frame, the sympathy with which he’d approached us in the arrivals hall (“Mrs. Lo? Such a terrible thing to happen. We’re all so sorry . . .”), that expression calibrated for grieving families (or widows?), solemn and restrained, filled with some sort of tension, suddenly seemed overcooked, sodden, and spongy, ready to fall apart. The restaurant was completely empty apart from us, the heavily fragranced air carrying a hint that this place might be the closest this impoverished town could come to sultry charm. But how greasy the tabletops were, how dim the lights. Mr. Chen seemed to be a regular here. The waitresses roused themselves from afternoon naps, peeping out from behind screens or rising from pulled-together chairs, smoothing their wrinkled stockings beneath their high-slit cheongsams. One of them slinked over. “Oh dear, Mr. Chen, it’s been such a long time since you’ve come to see us.” The sort of girls I could imagine bewitching American GIs during the Vietnam War, so cheap and yet so beautiful. Plucked from their previous jobs selling rotten fruit from a street stall, their young frames still unused to these close-fitting dresses, well-cut bodices and tight skirts or flapping cheongsams that revealed their legs. And beneath these garments were immature bodies, still reeking of little girl, obediently submitting to the unequal demands of capitalism and allowing their placid limbs to writhe wantonly.

I slowly pieced together how they were connected: Mr. Chen, the driver in the Hawaiian shirt, these girls in uniform. Each

FA R AWAY 2 9

of them hated and despised the others. But there was also a sort of crude acceptance of fellow sufferers. This flyblown restaurant, the taxi that refused to turn on its air conditioning, the perpetually delayed plane—to Mother and me, these were just a dreamscape, the people in it no more than props scattered around each setting. But to Mr. Chen, they were family. He had to keep reliving this nightmare, returning every month or two to see them again. He wearily ordered more than ten dishes (although Mother kept protesting that neither of us had any appetite at all), and we watched in silence as he chewed through those great plates of shrimp and shellfish, washing them down with ice-cold local beer. The lines of his face settled into pure rage, and he kept calling over the long-limbed girls.

“How long ago was this chicken cooked? It’s rancid.” (They apologized indifferently.) Each dish was discarded after a few mouthfuls. I grew agitated, watching him putting on airs to destroy his opponents. The man who, in Taoyuan Airport, had appeared mundane and middle-aged from every angle was completely puffed up by some unseen energy. He told us, “I’ve been cheated too many times by mainlanders.” But by that point, I’d stopped listening.

With this delay, my congealed grief stretched out, staring blankly, killing time.

I recalled the day before, rushing home from Hualien after hearing the bad news. On the Xiaogetou stretch of Beiyi Freeway (just after Pinglin district), we turned onto a little road winding through the hills down to the Wutu Caves. In the past (about ten years ago, I guess), when Father’s legs were still strong enough, he used to like walking up this road from the caves and resting at an Earth God temple along the way. I made the trek 3 0 FA R AWAY

with him quite a few times. He’d point at the slopes above and say a local had told him if you followed this road all the way to the top, you’d reach Beiyi Freeway.

When I passed the Earth God temple this time, I stopped the car and told my wife and son to wait while I squeezed myself into the dilapidated little building, no bigger than a sedan chair, and lit three sticks of incense. Three Earth God figures smiled up at me from the altar (strange not to have the usual trinity of Fortune, Prosperity, and Longevity, but the same deity in triplicate).

I remember walking out of the temple, sitting at the foot of the slope, and lighting a cigarette, muttering possibly to myself and possibly to these three low-level gods, old acquaintances of my father’s, “Now I’m just a fatherless child.”

THE TOUR GUIDE

It was very late by the time we got to the hospital. Changing planes, getting a visa at Hainan Island, a delayed flight . . . and when we finally got to Nanchang’s Changbei Airport, it was still another two hours’ drive to Jiujiang. The travel agency’s local office sent a newish air-conditioned nine-seater van to meet us.

It was only later that I found out our driver was the agency boss, and the middle-aged woman next to him was the tour guide who’d led the group up Mount Lu. My first impression was that these two mainlanders were putting on a good front, warmly saying things like, “My god, what a thing to happen, you must be worried to death,” “What a long journey you’ve had, you must have left Taiwan first thing in the morning,” “No question about it, as soon as the old gentleman finds out his wife and son came all this way to see him, it will do him a world of good. Maybe he’ll be on his feet and walking around FA R AWAY 3 1

In Taiwanese writer Lo Yi-Chin’s Faraway, a fictionalized version of the author finds himself stranded in mainland China attempting to bring his comatose father home. The middle-aged protagonist embarks on a protracted struggle with the byzantine hospital regulations while dealing with relatives he barely knows.

Faraway offers a deft portrayal of the rift between China and Taiwan through an intimate view of a father-son relationship that bridges this divide. Lo’s depiction of family dynamics and fraught politics contains a keen sense of irony and sensitivity to everyday absurdity.

“Lo Yi-Chin is the most remarkable and creative writer Taiwan has produced in recent decades, and what’s more, he is the most inventive writer in the entire Chinese-speaking world.” h DAV I D DE R-WE I WA NG , author of Why Fiction Matters in Contemporary China “A poignant, beautiful work by an important author, Faraway should be on every bookshelf. Jeremy Tiang’s subtle and sensitive translation brings a level of transparency to the text that allows you to immerse fully in its world. The novel will resonate long after you’ve put it down.” h A R I L A R I SSA HE INRIC H, translator of Chi Ta-wei’s The Membranes “As Lo Yi-Chin narrates and contemplates three generations of often strained relationships with places and people now and then, here and there, on both sides of the Taiwan Strait, Jeremy Tiang makes a monumentally challenging task look easy in a translation that is accurate and affecting, on point and poignant.” h DA R RY L ST E RK, translator of Wu Ming-Yi’s The Stolen Bicycle Lo Yi-Chin is an acclaimed Taiwanese writer, the recipient of numerous honors including the Hong Lou Meng Award and Taiwan Literary Award. His novels include Kuang Chaoren, Daughter, Western Xia Hotel, Surname of the Moon, and The Third Dancer.

has translated works by writers including Yeng Pway Ngon, Su Wei-Chen, Yan Ge, Zhang Yueran, Chan Ho-Kei, and Li Er. He is the author of the short story collection It Never Rains on National Day (2015) and the novel State of Emergency (2017).

JE R EM Y T I A N G

MODERN CHINESE LITERATURE FROM TAIWAN

ISBN: 978-0-231-19394-8

Cover design: Lisa Hamm Cover image: Digital composite. (top) Jui Chieh Chang / EyeEM / via Getty Images. (bottom) Royalty free.

COLUMBIA UNIVERSITY PRESS / NEW YORK

C U P. C O L U M B I A . E D U

PRINTED IN THE U.S.A.