They call me little fairy (Handwritten notebook of teenage growth 17-year-old Chinese Du)

Author: Mi Mi July
Publisher:
Publish Date: 2005-02-01
Features: A handwritten diary of a girl's growth. The original Chinese Du Lius, titled "Humiliation Under the Knees," "My Virginity," and "They Call Me a Whore," was serialized on multiple websites and gained immense popularity. Professors from Tsinghua and Peking University were stunned by its bold and explicit content. Due to its daring themes, the novel struggled to find a publisher for several years. This novel was written between the spring and summer of that year. I wrote it with arrogance. I vowed to write about maternal oppression, the hidden dangers of youth, and the growth story of a girl, a small town, and a family. I wanted it to be as famous as my hometown. Until this autumn, I still read it word by word, yet I was still excited about how close I had come to perfection. Besides me, there was another girl in the story, a cousin. Coincidentally, I only had two sisters and one paternal aunt and one maternal aunt. The cousin in my novel was a combination of the two. I recently met her again, right in Ximen Xi Li. She hid behind her mother, my aunt, rubbing her swollen breasts due to abundant milk. She greeted me. Now she has escaped. The path of her escape was marrying someone else, something I despise. The cousin is still a tour guide and an amateur painter, still reckless. She always knew I was writing, and she repeatedly showed off my work to her friends. I never expected I could write this long. She asked me for it ten times. I couldn’t resist showing it to her. She left after reading only a tenth of it. She angrily told me: "You bring shame to the Huang family. Everyone who knows you should be illiterate. There’s no one like you in your novel. No one is human in your novel?" My novel has no people? You can freely criticize me, but you have no right to say that. You know how many people I’ve met, and many more have passed through my heart. They linger in my novel, speaking and moving. You can hear about two people with extraordinary professions soon. One is a thief. Every night, he steals wreaths from newly buried graves. He comes to a reservoir at the halfway point, where freshwater has even grown jellyfish. He crouches down, soaking the flowers from the wreaths in water until they dissolve. He takes the skeletons of the wreaths, which can be exchanged for five cents at a wreath shop in the city. His breakfast is always the bright red boiled eggs he took from offerings the night before. Under the sun the next day, the yolk fills his mouth, like a bee covered in honey after collecting nectar. Another is a woman trafficker. She constantly sells her newborn babies. The child suffocates on the train, and to explain to her husband, she cuts off the child’s right arm and soak it in tung oil before bringing it back. She is still beaten by her husband. The reason is that he deciphers the fingerprints on the green right arm’s thumb and realizes the owner is not his flesh and blood. He suspects she has stolen the money from their shared earnings. The woman trafficker can’t take it anymore and is invited by another same-sex accomplice to start trading each other. They sell and buy one another, taking turns; the one being sold is responsible for escaping from the buyer’s home at their own risk; after deducting travel expenses and food and lodging costs, the earnings are split equally. Eventually, neither of them returned to Ximen Xi. All these people played cards with my father. I’ve seen them. I can name them. I often held a porcelain cup, with my buttocks resting on a torn cigarette box or a half-broken broom. I watched them play cards carefully. Around me were always children rolling like eels, old people with thin, dry bodies whose veins and arteries twisted like red and green wires around their skeletons, and craftsmen sleeping on hammocks between two trees, their fingers marked with thick, finger-thick indentations from the ropes. I grew up among such a lowly crowd. Now I don’t know how others are living so nobly. Instead, I become arrogant. Can money alone determine one’s nobility or lowliness? Those who show weakness to fate, those who surrender to hardship, I love you so much, without any insincerity, I love you until death and old age. I will never stop telling your stories. This time, I tell them so that I can tell them better next time. I resolve to marry all the kind-hearted people. They must be as kind as my family. My father, he dreamed of raising a dog as big as half a horse, gentle and kind. It was my childhood companion, taking me wherever I wanted to go. As a child, I was trapped in a maze of tall stones in Ximen Xi Li and couldn’t find my way out. Every time, he would tearfully worry. My grandmother, outside our home, there was a pair of bakers, looking flustered. She noticed it and led them to our toilet. They were also desperate and rushed in, making a mess of it with feces. Yet she gave them food and water. After they left, she knelt down and quietly cleaned it. My mother, after every banquet, would take the leftover wine. The bottle cap was lost, so she stuck her fingers into the neck as a stopper to prevent the wine from spilling. No one in our family drank, she was bringing it to the lodgers upstairs. To feed the cats that passed through Ximen Xi, bowls were scattered throughout our home, from top to bottom. They had some kindness that moved me to kneel and cringe. I’ve written so much about them, perhaps it’s their other side, but that doesn’t matter. At the same time, I also wrote about the mast. If you treat it as a love story, that would be great. I feel it’s time for me to love someone too. That person has eyes as vast as the sea. His faint tremors and sighs in his sleep make your heart race. If he doesn’t even have a place to rest his feet, you’d stand quietly like a horse, just as long as your necks are intertwined. As I grew, "They Call Me a Whore" was the code word that scared me, the slogan that mocked me. I just wanted you to know my suffering, my beauty. Otherwise, I would be dead even though I’m alive. The more shame a person feels, the more dignified she becomes. — George Bernard Shaw If I’m not a writer, I’m a prostitute. — Du Lius If I can’t meet you in this world, I’ve already died before I was born. — Dedicated to those who surround me.