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Praise for Can Xue
“There’s a new world master among us, and her name is Can Xue.”
—Robert Coover
“Can Xue has found not just a new direction but a new dimension to move in, a realm where conscious beings experience space, time, and each other unbound from the old rules.”
—Music & Literature
“Vertical Motion is incredible—short stories that I’d call ‘surrealist,’ but it’s a kind of clear-eyed surrealism, as if dreams had invaded the physical world.”
—John Darnielle, author of Wolf in White Van
“Funny, bizarre, improbable yet oddly moving, her stories in The Last Lover often arise from the mutual fantasies of East and West. They can sometimes bring Kafka, Ishiguro or Calvino to mind. In the end, though, Can Xue commands a truly unique voice.”
—The Independent
“One of the most raved-about works of translated fiction this year.”
—Flavorwire
Also by Can Xue in English Translation
Blue Light in the Sky & Other Stories
Dialogues in Paradise
The Embroidered Shoes
Five Spice Street
The Last Lover
Old Floating Cloud: Two Novellas
Vertical Motion
Copyright © 2008 by Can Xue
Translation copyright © 2017 by Karen Gernant & Chen Zeping
First edition, 2017
All rights reserved
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data: Available.
ISBN-13: 978-1-940953-55-7
Design by N. J. Furl
Open Letter is the University of Rochester’s nonprofit, literary translation press:
Lattimore Hall 411, Box 270082, Rochester, NY 14627
CONTENTS
Introduction
Note on Names
Chapter 1: Liujin
Chapter 2: José and Nancy
Chapter 3: Qiming
Chapter 4: Sherman
Chapter 5: The Baby
Chapter 6: Liujin and Amy
Chapter 7: Lee and Grace
Chapter 8: Liujin, Her Parents, and the Black Man
Chapter 9: Little Leaf and Marco
Chapter 10: The Director and Nancy
Chapter 11: Liujin and Amy, as well as Qiming
Chapter 12: Liujin and Roy, as well as a Headless Man
Chapter 13: Qiming and Liujin
Chapter 14: Liujin and Ying
Chapter 15: Snow
In the summer of 2016 I found myself in a place on a 20,000-acre working cattle ranch in the middle of a desolate stretch of northeastern Wyoming: Ucross, Wyoming, population 25. It’s an artist residency I’ve been to twice before, and one could indeed dare call it a part of the old mythos of the American Frontier. There is nothing to do but work. Once a week the residents and I go to a saloon about 25 miles away in Buffalo, where local cowboys and cowgirls play bluegrass. This saloon, part of a hotel called The Occidental, has been a haunt of everyone from Butch Cassidy to Buffalo Bill. That’s about the only thing there is to do.
These high plains are where I’ve done most my writing in the past decade, and it became where I did almost all my reading of Can Xue’s Frontier this time around. This residency, my own writing escaped me as Can Xue’s book demanded more and more of my time. I had thought a few days would be all I needed—I was not a new Can Xue reader after all, and had usually managed to plow through even her most difficult work in a couple days—but this was not the case with this recent novel. In fact, a curious thing began to happen as I read. The further I got, the longer the book seemed to get. It was shocking; the book would lengthen the more I got into it. This book won’t end, I told a friend, it’s strange, I swore I was two hundred pages in a day ago and there I am today. Days later, I felt I had made very little progress. It went on like this for quite some time, til my time was basically up.
This is usually a complaint—something taking a long time, a book requiring effort. “Time flying” indicates an enjoyable exploit—this is what you want. But this time around, even this sentiment felt reversed. I didn’t want the book to end, and the story, perhaps sensing that, refused to end. Even when it ended, it didn’t end. I just started reading it again. I went from the last pages to the first without breath. I had no choice.
One might say, this summer I found myself trapped in Can Xue’s Frontier.
This of course, would probably not surprise my friend Can Xue. This seems to be part of the fabric of the book. And of course who could put a stunt like this past her—she is China’s premier writer of the avant-garde, an experimental trickster, whose very name is not just a pen name but an alter ego—she refers to herself in third person—and so who could possibly put anything past her?
We have been regularly emailing for over a year now, so I thought to write her amid all this. I didn’t want to alarm her so I asked a mild question at first, not sure how to explain my dilemma—this book is lengthening as I read it, not shortening, help me—instead I said, So, dear Xiaohua (what she goes by), how did you come up with this?
I should have known this question could go nowhere. She wrote back quickly:
“Like all the works by Can Xue, the idea was from her dark heart. Then the idea (I [Can Xue] didn’t know clearly what it was, but I did know it was what I wanted) came out gradually, naturally . . . I wrote and wrote for some time, then someday I found that a great pattern appeared faintly in the work. Actually anything I wrote, am writing, or will write is like this, I’m sure. I call the pattern ‘the pattern of freedom.’ In Frontier, everybody, every animal is a pattern of freedom, and the background is the background of that great pattern of freedom.” Her final sign off was appended with a polite “Please feel free to ask Xiaohua anything!”
I did not. I simply sat and stared at the yellow and blue expanse in front of me, the Big Horn Mountains looming faintly like the “purple mountain majesties” of American patriotic verse, and all the high grass interrupted only by an occasional creek, prairie upon prairie only punctuated by blackbirds, bison, rabbits, deer, antelope, a turkey or two.
The pattern of freedom. Was this freedom? Was freedom expansion instead of contraction? Was freedom in its essence eternity?
After all, frontier by definition meant “the extreme limit of settled land beyond which lies wilderness,” that I knew. So what were the borders of the frontier? No one could know, most likely, I decided. The minute the borders are set, it’s possible the