Fugui

She was not willing to leave this place. Old people are like that. They do not want to move anymore. 

The above is from Yu Hua's excellent novel, To Live. It reminds me of something I wrote not long ago, or perhaps some time ago (old people are like that too, unclear about the passage of time). I wrote (I think) about an offer to leave the little house I am in for a better, bigger house, which seemed fine in a way except for one critical drawback: I would have to leave the little house I am already in. Sound ridiculous? Well maybe. Nonetheless, there it is. I cannot tolerate moving. Never have liked it. Always have preferred to put down roots and sense their growth beneath my feet. (Curious therefore that I somehow ended up on the other side of the world, but that's another story for another time; or more likely a story I've already told). 

What's different now is that I imagine those roots reaching not to ever richer, more stable earth but ending dry and thirsty in the grave. I think of this bare little one room house as the final house. Why move again, for I am bound for another place already (rumored to be a better place).  

We don't like to move, because we have the biggest move of all coming. 

 

I don't say that I necessarily long for that final displacement. It seems a terrible bother, after all. Why not just stay put? I'm happy enough, aren't I? Am I really up to moving yet again? Are any of us? Especially given the rather extreme nature of the proposal.  

But enough of that, for there is also this:

 

I have never again met a man so impossible to forget as Fugui. I have never met a man so clear about his life experiences and so able to tell his story, to view his past intact, to describe his journey through youth as well as the process that brought him to old age. Finding a man like that is exceedingly rare. Maybe too much suffering in life destroys memory. The past is viewed without emotion. Not knowing what else can be done, one merely smiles awkwardly, disinterested, and lets it go. What is remembered is no more than rumor, scattered shards and fragments which often are not even related to the person remembering. One or two sentences are sufficient to explain everything. I will often hear little children mocking old people. When they become old, they all begin to live like dogs.

  

Fugui was altogether different than that. He liked to remember the past, to tell the story of his life, for in that way he could repeat his life journey again and again. Like the claws of a bird gripping tightly to the branch of a tree, his stories gripped tightly to me.

--To Live, Yu Hua (my translation from the Indonesian which itself is a translation from the Chinese)

Again, some time ago (2 years? 3? 5?) my mind was suddenly flooded with very distinct, detailed, living memories of the past. Suddenly, I recalled things I had not thought of in years, things that I had altogether forgotten (or seemed to have forgotten). I began to write these memories down in one mode or another--short stories, Facebook entries, blog entries. One after another, I wrote them down, and they seemed to come to me on a daily basis, easy, intact, already articulated in my mind. I merely transcribed, so to speak. I told my story, bit by bit, magically cogent, cohesive. I was like Fugui. I had a life story and could tell it too.

And then I wasn't. It was as if recording these things expunged them as well, erased them in the process--like one of those old tape recorders, where whatever you record on the tape erases whatever had been there beforehand. As you play the tape through, you might hear little squawks and chirps of the old recording at the end of one or the beginning of another, but they make no sense now, they are shards and fragments. What can we do? We let it go.

And we live like dogs. We sleep, we eat, we aimlessly roam or lie in the sun. We like to have our bellies scratched. We do not know what we did yesterday, let alone weeks and years and decades ago. And it doesn't matter, for history has suddenly become irretrievable, superfluous. We breathe therefore we are.

One or two sentences are sufficient to explain everything.