Fishing Dreams

Author: Ke Wenhui
Publisher:
Publish Date: 1997-01-01
Features: After a long time, I finally understood the whole story: For three consecutive days, she was busy treating the severely injured patients transferred from the Tangshan earthquake area. With her left hand holding a cold steamed bun and nibbling on it, her right hand kept writing prescriptions and test reports. After completing the urgent task, she returned home and found that Aihong had pneumonia. Her nostrils flared wildly, her cheeks were as red as charcoal, and whenever she coughed, she would curl up in a ball, even wetting herself. Her father had gone to the regional meeting for criticism, and there was no one to take care of the children. Seeing this, the mother couldn’t help but feel extremely heartbroken and quickly gave her a shot of streptomycin. Cases of allergic reactions to this antibiotic are less than one in 10,000. At first, the child weakly said a line from a model opera: “Thank you, Mom!” Then she started trembling, having convulsions, and finally, with a smile, she called out, “I don’t blame you,” before dying. The doctor tore at his clothes and pulled his hair, but how could he bring her back? The child was sent to the crematorium, and she ran to the public security, procuratorate, and justice team, asking to be imprisoned. The person in charge felt she was a bit unstable and asked the pediatric expert, Dr. Li Jianqiu, to explain to her that the child died of cardiac collapse, and the mother had no liability for an accident. To seek peace of mind, she took a large sum of money from the bank and asked me to write an epitaph, which she then had carved into a large stone monument and erected at the Third People’s Hospital to educate her colleagues and non-colleagues.
For many years, I had been carrying dozens of loads of pig feed and manure every day, never expecting anyone would ask me to write an epitaph. At a time when self-criticism had vanished from daily life, explaining to the “” of the small town about the difficulty of erecting a monument was no easier than writing one. I preferred to spend some futile effort and use the traditional official method of “push, delay, and shrink” to temporarily ease her grief. The money, of course, was returned to her.
Forty years ago, when I was just six years old, I greatly respected chefs who prepared delicious dishes to satisfy people’s cravings. My mother was often hired by wealthy families to cook, and she was quite famous, so I had great admiration for her. How skilled was my mother’s cooking? Because the family often only cooked root vegetables and scraps, there was no need for a chef to demonstrate their culinary prowess. Moreover, childhood memories are often deceptive, and being hungry made one less discerning. Even a simple bowl of coarse rice was a cause for celebration, let alone a piece of rustic bread, which was almost like a holiday. There was no room for tasting, and since I had been away from home since my youth, I no longer had the opportunity to evaluate my mother’s cooking skills. Only among the elderly neighbors did a story remain, one that often made me reflect.
I know that the extraordinary is found in the ordinary, but I failed to honestly portray life in my novels and scripts, seeking novelty but losing authenticity from the start. I forcibly added philosophical seasoning, which couldn’t save the, and followed it with moralizing and illustrative writing. The expression of emotions and atmosphere replaced the portrayal of daily life, and I lacked a sense of responsibility toward the common people I had been raised by, daring not to criticize the old things they resented.
Technically, I was too conservative when trying to innovate and too conservative when trying to be innovative. I was too realistic when being a romanticist and too romantic when being realistic. Without perseverance to overcome my inertia, my novels and scripts came to a halt. Given the vast world, it’s fresh and harmless for an outsider like me to talk about art, but too much might be trouble. Unfortunately, cleverness and foolishness often go hand in hand. With insufficient inner energy, even if I made some discoveries, without academic backing, it would be like closing the stable door after the horse has bolted—by the time I turned fifty. Relying on manual labor and small-scale production made it difficult to update my knowledge structure. With tens of thousands of index cards still uncompleted, my time was running out.