City Gate, Open Up by Bei Dao

Author:Bei Dao
Language: eng
Format: epub
ISBN: 9780811226448
Publisher: New Directions
Published: 2017-04-25T00:00:00+00:00

3

Around the age of ten I discovered a momentous secret: large stacks of banned books stashed away in the attic space above the corridor between the front door and the kitchen.

The boy was short, the attic high; this proved to be no obstacle as curiosity worked its mischief and, alone at home, I positioned a tall stool on top of two chairs, each balanced on the other. This required an extraordinary degree of precision for all the furniture to fit flawlessly together. It was, essentially, an acrobatic performance without, sadly, any audience present; or it could be said that I played the sole audience member, determined to climb up and see what could be found.

I opened the attic hatch; the smell of dust and old papers blasted me in the face. I often browsed used bookshops where the odor of old paper — refined, remote — smelled like incense, summoning souls from faraway places. But here, maybe from being shut in the dark for so long, the odor emanating from the books smelled a hundredfold stronger; I felt like a prisoner, brimming with hostile aggression, the fumes making me dizzy. Regaining my focus, I held my breath, steadily adapted to the pungent onslaught as well as the dim surroundings, and with swift intuition, it dawned on me that I had found a real treasure trove.

To this day I can still remember the condition of a number of those books, the degree of damage to certain bindings, as well as that very unique odor. They had come from a range of different epochs and regions, each following a different route on its journey. Consider the source of the paper pulp for one — cotton and rice straw mashed together, then add in the differences of temperature and humidity in various locales, the absorption of each season’s fragrances and nourishing flavors. Each book possessed its own life, possessed its own age, birthplace, and name.

My family’s attic library could be divided into four rough categories: first, old editions of Strange Tales of the Tang and Song, Feng Menglong’s Stories to Caution the World (unabridged edition), Investiture of the Gods, and other classic fiction titles of this sort; second, novels published before liberation by authors such as Zhang Henshui, Yu Dafu, among others, who with Mao Dun had been banished to the cold palace, having fallen out of favor largely for their explicitly erotic descriptions; third, assorted fashionable magazines from the 1930s and 1940s, including The Young Companion, Women’s Pictorial, Movie Art Pictorial; fourth, specialized textbooks my mother used during her medical studies, like Physiology and Anatomy and Comprehensive Gynecology.

As is evidently clear, my family lived a cultural double life: The public bookshelf, out in the open for everyone to see, embodied the status quo and mainstream culture; the attic stacks, hidden and sealed off, embodied the illicit and taboo. From that day on, after discovering the secret in the attic, I, too, was thrown into a double life.

Coming home after school, I piled

Download

Copyright Disclaimer:
This site does not store any files on its server. We only index and link to content provided by other sites. Please contact the content providers to delete copyright contents if any and email us, we'll remove relevant links or contents immediately.