A green parasol tree, around thirty feet high, towered outside the gate to the family home, every year hanging heavy with large clusters of nuts. Hoping to bring them down, children would hurl stones into the branches, the occasional missile sailing through the canopy to land on my desk, at which point my teacher—whom I respectfully knew as Mr Bald—would stride out to give those responsible a scolding. A clear foot in diameter, the leaves would wilt in the summer sun before springing back—like a fist opening out—in the resuscitating night air. At this point in the day, after drawing water to scatter over the overheated ground, our family's old gatekeeper, Wang, might gather up a battered old stool and head off with his pipe to swap stories with my amah, Li. And there they would sit and chat, deep into the night, the darkness interrupted only by sparks from his pipe.
While they were out there enjoying the cool of one particular evening, I remember, my teacher was enlightening me on the principles of verse composition—my task being to come up with a poetic match to a given subject. To his 'Red Flower', I tried 'Green Tree'. Objecting that the tonal patterns were not consonant, he told me to go back to my seat and think again. Not yet nine years old at the time, I had not a clue what tonal patterns were; but since my teacher did not seem about to share his mature wisdom with me, I returned to my desk. After a long, fruitless ponder, I very slowly opened out my fist and slapped it resonantly against my thigh, as if I had swatted a mosquito, hoping to communicate to my instructor the extent of my mental discomfort, but he continued to take no notice. On and on I sat, until he at last drawled that I should approach—which I smartly did. He then wrote down the characters for Green Grass. 'Red" and "flower" are level tones,' he explained, 'while "green" is falling and "grass" rising. Dismissed.' I was bounding through the door before the word was out of his mouth. 'No hopping and skipping about!' he drawled again. I carried on my way, although more sedately.
When I was young, I too had many dreams, most of which I later forgot—and without the slightest regret. Although remembering the past can bring happiness, it can also bring a feeling of solitude; and where is the pleasure in clinging on to the memory of lonely times passed? My trouble is, though, that I find myself unable to forget, or at least unable to forget entirely. And it is this failure of amnesia that has brought "Outcry" into existence.
For four years of my childhood life, I divided my time between the pawnshop and the pharmacy. Which four years it was, I forget—all I remember is that the top of my head reached exactly up to the counter in the pharmacy, while in the pawnshop it was twice my height. I would push clothes and jewellery across the latter, take the money slid back at me, then make my way over to the former—to buy medicine for my chronically ill father. Back home, there was still work to be done, because our doctor seemed to have built his substantial local reputation on prescribing the most elusively exotic adjuvants: winter aloe root, sugar cane that had survived three years' frosts, monogamous crickets, seeded ardisia...Most of them were excessively difficult to get hold of. And still my father went on sickening, day by day, until finally he died. />
Dr. Julia Lovell, born in 1975, is a prize-winning translator who has also written on China for The Guardian, The Times (London), The Economist, and The Times Literary Supplement. Her translations include works by Lu Xun, Han Shaogong, Eileen Chang and Zhu Wen. She is lecturer of modern Chinese history and literature at the University of London, where her research has been focused principally on the relationship between culture (specifically, literature, architecture, historiography and sport) and modern Chinese nation-building.