To Hold Up the Sky

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  FOREWORD

  TRANSLATED BY ADAM LANPHIER

  This anthology includes more than ten of my short stories, most of which were published more than a decade ago. At that time, sci-fi was still a very marginal pursuit in China. The genre had few readers and was largely overlooked. In China, science fiction is seen as something foreign; its fundamental elements have never been a part of Chinese culture. Life has passed steadily, with few changes, from generation to generation over the course of China’s long history, so people unconsciously believe that life will be ever thus. Historically, the term “future” itself appeared mostly in Buddhist texts, which are also foreign; people have seldom thought about or paid attention to the future in their daily lives.

  But in recent years, things have changed drastically. China has entered wholesale into a process of rapid modernization, and every day, all around us, there are stupefying changes. Suddenly, the future stands before us in vivid detail, and it exerts a huge appeal. Old China has suddenly become a nation with an extremely keen sense of the future. It is understandable why people, under such circumstances, would pay unprecedented attention to science fiction.

  In Europe and the US, the question I’m asked most often is: “What makes Chinese science fiction Chinese?” For my part, I have never consciously or deliberately tried to make my sci-fi more Chinese. The stories in this anthology touch on a variety of sci-fi themes, but they all have something in common: They are about things that concern all of humanity, and the challenges and crises they depict are all things humanity faces together. In fact, when you read or make science fiction, your sympathy automatically moves away from ideas of ethnicity and nation and toward a higher idea of humanity as a whole; from this vantage, humanity naturally becomes a collective unit, rather than an assembly of different parts divided by ethnicity and nation. Even if the sci-fi you read or write tells a distinctly trivial, mundane, or personal story, you’ll still have this feeling. I believe this is one of the most valuable features of science fiction.

  In China, the new generation’s way of thinking is changing dramatically. They are gradually turning their eyes away from the reality of their immediate environment and the mundanities of life toward the distant, starry sky and the future. More and more, they are beginning to see themselves as members of humankind, not merely as Chinese people. They are also beginning to care about those ultimate questions that their forebears seldom considered: where humans and the universe came from, and where they’re going. This change in their thinking will profoundly affect China’s future and even the future of humanity. The science fiction stories in this book are a vivid expression of this new way of thinking.

  Yet I am also Chinese, and, whether by design or not, these stories will inevitably have a strong Chinese flavor, imbued with the culture, history, and present reality of China.

  In creating sci-fi, I always try hard to imagine and describe the relationship between the Great and the Small.

  “The Small” refers here to human smallness. As individuals, we are small indeed, and collectively, humanity is small, too. Imagine a concert attended by all of humanity. How big a venue would you need? Not as big as I’d imagined—a space about as large as Shanghai’s Pudong District would suffice. Here’s another perverse thought experiment: If you were to make a meatball out of humankind, its diameter would be less than a kilometer.

  “The Great” refers, of course, to the universe. Every person has a deep sense of its enormity. The most distant light we see was sent out over ten billion years ago. If you shrank the solar system to the size of a dinner plate, the diameter of a correspondingly shrunken Milky Way would still be one hundred thousand kilometers.

  In my sci-fi, I challenge myself to imagine the relationship between Small people and the Great universe—not in the metaphysical sense of philosophy, nor as when someone looks up at the starry sky and feels such sentiment and pathos that their views on human life and the universe change. Stories about such relationships between people and the universe are not science fiction; they are realism. In my sci-fi, I work to imagine the direct, tangible relationship between people and the universe. In this relationship, the evolution and metamorphoses of the universe are inseparable from human life and human fate.

  It’s very difficult work, and it’s the greatest challenge I face when writing science fiction. Common sense tells us that there is no such relationship. Whether the universe is expanding or contracting, or whether a star ten billion light-years away has gone supernova, truly has nothing to do with the mundane, insignificant events of my life. Yet I firmly believe that there is a relationship between humanity and the universe. When it was born, the universe was smaller than an atom, and everything within it was intermixed as a single whole; the natural connection between the universe’s small parts and its great entirety was thus determined. Though the universe has expanded to whatever its current size, this connection still exists, and if we can’t see it now, that doesn’t mean we won’t be able to in the future. I work hard to imagine all sorts of possibilities in the relationship between people and the universe, and I try to turn what I imagine into thrilling fiction. This anthology, just as its title suggests, contains a portion of my efforts.

  Thank you all!

  THE VILLAGE TEACHER

  TRANSLATED BY ADAM LANPHIER

  He knew he’d have to teach his final lesson early.

  He felt another shot of pain in his liver, so strong he almost fainted. He didn’t have the strength to get out of bed, and, with great difficulty, he pulled himself closer to the bedside window, whose paper panes glowed in the moonlight. The little window looked like a doorway leading into another world, one where everything shone with silver light, a diorama of silver and frostless snow. He shakily lifted his head and looked out through a hole in the paper window, and his fantasy of a silver world receded. He found himself looking into the distance, at the village where he had spent his life.

  The village lay serenely in the moonlight, and it looked as if it had been abandoned for a hundred years. The small flat-roofed houses were almost indistinguishable from the mounds of soil surrounding them. In the muted colors of moonlight, it was as if the entire place had dissolved back into the hills. Only the old locust tree could be seen clearly, a few black crows’ nests scattered among its withered branches, like stark drops of black ink on a silver page.

  The village had its good times, like the harvest. When young men and women, who had left the village in droves to find work, came back, and the place was bustling and full of laughter. Ears of corn glistened on the rooftops, and children did somersaults in the piles of stalks on the floor of the threshing ground. The
Spring Festival was another cheerful time, when the threshing ground was lit with gas lamps and decorated with red lanterns. The villagers gathered there to parade lucky paper boats and do lion dances. Now, only the clattering wooden frames of the lions’ heads were left, stripped of paint. The village had no money to buy new trains for the heads, so they had been using bedsheets as the lions’ bodies, which worked in a pinch. But as soon as the Spring Festival ended, all the youths of the village left again to look for work, and the place fell back into torpor.

  At dusk every day, as thin wisps of smoke rose from the chimneys of the houses, one or two elderly villagers, their faces grooved like walnuts, would stand and gaze down the road that led beyond the mountains, until the last ray of gloaming light got caught in the locust tree and disappeared. People turned their lamps off and went to bed early in the village. Electricity was expensive, at ¥1.8 per kilowatt hour.

  He could hear a dog softly whimpering somewhere in the village, whining in its sleep, perhaps. He looked out at the moonlit yellow soil surrounding the village, which suddenly seemed to him like a placid sheet of water. If only it were water—this year was the fifth consecutive year of drought, and they had had to carry water to the fields to irrigate them.

  His gaze drifted into the distance, landing on the fields on the mountain, which looked in the moonlight like the footprints of a giant. Small, scattered plots were the only way to farm that rocky mountain, covered as it was with vines and brush. The terrain was too rough for agricultural equipment—even oxen would have had no good footing—so people were obliged to do all the labor by hand.

  Last year, a manufacturer of agricultural machines had visited to sell a kind of miniature walking tractor, small enough to work those meager fields. It wasn’t a bad little machine, but the villagers weren’t having it. How much grain could those tiny plots produce? Planting them was detailed work, more like sewing than sowing, and a crop that could feed a man for a year was considered a success. In a year of drought, as it was, those fields might not even produce enough to recoup the cost of planting. A five-thousand-yuan tractor, and on top of that, diesel fuel at more than two yuan a liter—outsiders just didn’t understand the difficulties of life in these mountains.

  A few small silhouettes walked past the window. They formed a circle on a ridge between two fields and squatted down, inscrutable. He knew these were his students—as long as they were nearby, he could detect their presence even without seeing them. This intuition had developed in him over a lifetime, and it was particularly keen now that his life was drawing to a close.

  He could even recognize the children in the moonlight. Liu Baozhu and Guo Cuihua were there. Those two were originally from the village and didn’t have to live at school; nevertheless, he had taken them in.

  Liu Baozhu’s father had paid the dowry for a bride from Sichuan ten years before, and she had come and given birth to Baozhu. Five years after that, when Baozhu had grown a bit, his father began to neglect his wife, the small bit of closeness they’d had slipping away, and eventually she left him and returned to her family in Sichuan.

  After that, Baozhu’s father lost his way. He began gambling, just like the old bachelors of the village, and before long he had lost everything but four walls and a bed. Then he began drinking. Every night, he sold roasted sweet potatoes for eighty fen a kilogram and drank himself useless with the money. Useless and angry: he hit his son every day, and twice a week he hit him hard. One night the month before, he’d nearly beaten his son to death with a sweet potato skewer.

  Guo Cuihua’s home life was even worse. Her father had found a bride for himself through decent channels, a rare thing here, and he was proud. But good things seldom last, and right after the wedding, it became apparent that Cuihua’s mother was unwell. No one could tell at the wedding—she’d likely been given a drug to calm her. Why would a respectable woman come to a village like this in the first place, so poor that even the birds wouldn’t shit as they flew over? Nevertheless, Cuihua was born and grew up, and her mother got sicker and sicker. She attacked people with cooking knives in the daytime, and at night she would try to burn the house down. She spent most of her time laughing to herself like a ghoul, with a sound that would set your hair on end.

  The rest of the children were from other villages, the closest of which was at least ten miles away on mountain roads, so they had to live at school. In a crude village school like this, they would spend the whole term there. The students brought their own bedding, and each hauled a sack of wheat or rice from home, which they cooked themselves on the school’s big stove. As night fell in the winter, the children would gather around the stove and watch the cooking grain bubble and purl in the pot, their faces lit by straw-orange flames. It was the most tender sight he’d ever seen. He would take it with him into the next world.

  On the ridge outside the window, within the ring of children, little stars of fire began to shine, bright in the moonlit night. They were burning incense and paper, and their faces were lit red in the firelight against the silver-gray night. He was reminded of the sight of the children by the stove. Another scene emerged from the pool of his memory. The electricity had gone out at school (due perhaps to a faulty circuit, or, as happened more often, a lack of funds) while he was teaching an evening class. He held a candle in his hand to illuminate the blackboard. “Can you see it?” he’d asked, and the children answered, as they always did, “Not yet!” It really was hard to read the blackboard with so little light, but they had a lot of material to cover, so night class was the only option. He lit a second candle and held them both up. “It’s still too dark!” yelled the children, so he lit a third candle. It was still too dark to read the board, but the children stopped yelling. They knew their teacher wouldn’t light another candle no matter how much they yelled. He couldn’t afford to. He looked down at their faces flickering in the candlelight, those kids, who had fought off darkness with every fiber of their beings.

  The children and firelight, the children and firelight. It was always the children and firelight, always the children at night, in the firelight. The image was forever embedded in his mind, though he never understood what it meant.

  He knew the children were burning incense and paper for him, as they had done so many times before, but this time he didn’t have the strength to criticize them for being superstitious. He had spent his whole life trying to ignite the flame of science and culture in the children’s hearts, but he knew that, compared to the fog of ignorance and superstition that enshrouded this remote mountain village, it was a feeble flame indeed, like the flame of his candles in the classroom that night. Six months earlier, a few villagers had come to the school to scavenge rafters from the roof of the already-dilapidated dorm, with which they meant to renovate the temple at the entrance to the village. He asked where the children would sleep if the dorm had no roof, and they said they could sleep in the classroom.

  “In the classroom? The wind blows right through the walls. How can the children sleep there in the winter?”

  “Who cares? They’re not from here.”

  He picked up a pole and fought them fiercely, and he wound up with two broken ribs. A kind villager propped him up and walked with him all the way to the nearest town hospital, fifteen miles or more on mountain roads.

  While assessing his injuries, the doctor had discovered that he had esophageal cancer. There was a high incidence of this sort of cancer in the region, so it wasn’t a rare diagnosis. The doctor congratulated him on his good fortune—he had come while the cancer was still in an early stage, before it had started to metastasize. It was curable with surgery; in fact, esophageal cancer was one of the types of cancer against which surgery was most effective. His broken ribs might well have saved his life.

  After, he had gone to the province’s main city, which had an oncology hospital, and asked a doctor there how much such a surgery would cost. The doctor told him that, considering his situation, he could stay in the hospital’s we
lfare ward, and that his other expenses could also be reduced commensurately. The final amount wouldn’t be too much—around twenty thousand yuan. Recalling that his patient came from such a remote place, the doctor proceeded to explain the details of hospitalization and surgery.

  He listened silently and suddenly asked: “If I don’t get the surgery, how long do I have?”

  The doctor regarded him blankly for a long moment and said, “Maybe six months.”

  The teacher heaved a long sigh, as if greatly relieved, and the doctor was nonplussed. At least he could see this graduating class off.

  He really had no way to pay twenty thousand yuan. Over his life, he could have saved up some money. Community teachers may not make much, but he had worked for so many years, and he had never married, nor did he have other financial obligations. But he had spent it all on the children. He couldn’t remember how many children’s tuition he had paid, how many of their incidental expenses he had covered. Recently, there were Liu Baozhu and Guo Cuihua, but more often, he would see that the school’s big cooking pot had no oil in it, so he would buy meat and lard for the children. All the money he had left would cover perhaps a tenth of the surgery.

  After the appointment with the doctor, he had walked along the city’s wide avenue toward the train station. It was already dark out, and neon lights had come on in a dazzling blur of stripes and dots, bewildering him. At night, the tall buildings of the city were like rows of enormous lamps extending into the clouds, and snippets of music, alternately frenetic and gentle, filled the air along his way.

  In that strange world of the city, he reflected on his own short life. He was feeling philosophical, calmly considering that each person has their own path in life, and that he had chosen his own path twenty years prior, when he had graduated from middle school and decided to return to the village. In fact, his destiny had been given to him by another village teacher.