Notes of a Crocodile Read online

  QIU MIAOJIN (1969–1995)—one of Taiwan’s most innovative literary modernists, and the country’s most renowned lesbian writer—was born in Chuanghua County in western Taiwan. She graduated with a degree in psychology from National Taiwan University and pursued graduate studies in clinical psychology at the University of Paris VIII. Her first published story, “Prisoner,” received the Central Daily News Short Story Prize, and her novella Lonely Crowds won the United Literature Association Award. While in Paris, she directed a thirty-minute film called Ghost Carnival, and not long after this, at the age of twenty-six, she committed suicide. The posthumous publications of her novels Last Words from Montmartre and Notes of a Crocodile made her into one of the most revered countercultural icons in Chinese letters. After her death in 1995, she was given the China Times Honorary Prize for Literature. In 2007, a two-volume edition of her Diaries was published, and in 2017 she became the subject of a feature-length documentary by Evans Chan titled Death in Montmartre.

  BONNIE HUIE is the recipient of a PEN/Heim Translation Fund Grant. Her rendition of Motojirō Kajii’s story “Under the Cherry Blossoms” was nominated for a Pushcart Prize, and she has also translated the work of Tatsuhiro Ōshiro. Her writings and translations appear in The Brooklyn Rail, Kyoto Journal, and Afterimage. Huie lives in New York.

  NOTES OF A CROCODILE

  QIU MIAOJIN

  Translated from the Chinese by

  BONNIE HUIE

  NEW YORK REVIEW BOOKS

  New York

  THIS IS A NEW YORK REVIEW BOOK

  PUBLISHED BY THE NEW YORK REVIEW OF BOOKS

  435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  www.nyrb.com

  Copyright © 1994 by Qiu Miaojin

  Translation copyright © 2017 by Bonnie Huie

  All rights reserved.

  Cover image: Nicola Bealing, Crocodiles Suspended, 2011; private collection/Bridgeman Images

  Cover design: Katy Homans

  Originally published as Eyu shouji by China Times Publishing Co.

  This publication was made possible in part by a grant from the PEN/Heim Translation Fund.

  Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

  Names: Qiu, Miaojin, 1969–1995, author. | Huie, Bonnie, translator. Title: Notes of a crocodile / by Qiu Miaojin ; translated by Bonnie Huie. Other titles: Eyu shouji. English

  Description: New York : New York Review Books, 2017. | Series: New York Review Books Classics

  Identifiers: LCCN 2017000237 (print) | LCCN 2017006563 (ebook) | ISBN 9781681370767 (paperback) | ISBN 9781681370774 (epub)

  Subjects: LCSH: Lesbians—Fiction. | Women—Taiwan—Fiction. | Gays—Taiwan—Fiction. | Taipei (Taiwan)—History—20th century—Fiction. | BISAC: FICTION / Lesbian. | FICTION / Coming of Age. | GSAFD: Bildungsromans.

  Classification: LCC PL2892.5.U65 E913 2017 (print) | LCC PL2892.5.U65 (ebook) | DDC 895.13/52—dc23

  LC record available at https://lccn.loc.gov/2017000237

  ISBN 978-1-68137-077-4

  v1.0

  For a complete list of titles, visit www.nyrb.com or write to:

  Catalog Requests, NYRB, 435 Hudson Street, New York, NY 10014

  CONTENTS

  Biographical Notes

  Title Page

  Copyright and More Information

  NOTES OF A CROCODILE

  Notebook #1

  Notebook #2

  Notebook #3

  Notebook #4

  Notebook #5

  Notebook #6

  Notebook #7

  Notebook #8

  NOTES OF A CROCODILE

  NOTEBOOK #1

  1

  July 20, 1991. Picked up my college diploma at the service window of the registrar’s office. It was so big I had to carry it with both hands. I dropped it twice while walking across campus. The first time it fell in the mud by the sidewalk, and I wiped the mud off with my shirt. The second time the wind blew it away. I chased after it ruefully. The corners were bent. In my heart, I held back a pitiful laugh.

  When you visit, will you bring me some presents? the Crocodile wanted to know.

  Very well, I’ll bring you new hand-sewn lingerie, said Osamu Dazai.

  I’ll give you the most beautiful picture frame on earth, would you like that? asked Yukio Mishima.

  I’ll plaster your bathroom walls with copies of my Waseda degree, said Haruki Murakami.

  And that’s how it all began. Enter cartoon music (insert Two Tigers closing theme).

  Forgot to return my student ID and library card but didn’t realize it. At first I’d actually lost them. Nineteen days later, they were returned to me anonymously in an envelope, instantly transforming their loss into a lie. But I couldn’t stop using them anyway, out of sheer convenience. Also didn’t take my driver’s exam seriously enough. Took it four times and failed, although two of those instances were due to factors entirely beyond my control. What’s even better is that I publicly claim (and perhaps society buys it) to have failed only twice. Whatever, I don’t care. . . .

  Locked the door. Shut the windows. Took the phone off the hook and sat down. And that’s how I wrote. I wrote until I was exhausted, smoked two cigarettes, and went into the bathroom and took a cold shower. Outside were the torrential winds and rain of the typhoon season. Halfway undressed, I realized there was no soap left. Got dressed again. Returned to the bathroom with a bar of soap, undressed again, then climbed back into the shower. That’s how it is, writing a best seller.

  Soap in hand, and the sounds of late-night TV in the background. Then a sudden clatter, as if the power station had been rocked by an explosion. I was enveloped in pitch-dark silence. The power had gone out. Nobody else was around, so I ran out of the bathroom completely naked, searching for a candle though I had no matches. Carried three tea lights with me into the kitchen, bumping into an electric fan on the floor along the way. Tried to light them on the gas burner, but the wax melted away. There was nothing else I could do. I threw open the balcony door and stepped outside to cool off. I hoped to catch a glimpse of other kindred souls standing naked out on their own balconies. That’s how it is, writing a serious literary work.

  Even if this book is neither popular nor serious, at least it’s sensational. Five cents a word.

  It’s about getting a diploma and writing.

  2

  In the past I believed that every man had his own innate prototype of a woman, and that he would fall in love with the woman who most resembled his type. Although I’m a woman, I have a female prototype too.

  My type would appear in hallucinations just as you were freezing to death atop an icy mountain, a legendary beauty from the furthest reaches of fantasy. For four years, that’s what I believed. And I wasted all my college days—when I had the most courage and honesty I would ever have towards life—because of it.

  I don’t believe it anymore. It’s like the impromptu sketch of a street artist, a little drawing taped to my wall. When I finally stopped believing in it and learned to leave it behind, I wound up selling a collection of priceless treasures for next to nothing. It was then that I realized I should leave behind some sort of record before my memories evaporated. I feared that otherwise it would be like waking from a dream, when the inventory of what had been bought and sold—and at what price—would be forever lost.

  It’s like a series of roadside warning signs. The one behind me says: DON’T BELIEVE THE FANTASY. The one ahead of me says: WIELD THE AX OF CRUELTY. One day it dawned on me as if I were writing my own name for the first time: Cruelty and mercy are one and the same. Existence in this world relegates good and evil to the exact same status. Cruelty and evil are only natural, and together they are endowed with half the power and ha
lf the utility in this world. It seems I’m going to have to learn to be crueler if I’m to become the master of my own fate.

  Wielding the ax of cruelty against life, against myself, against others. It’s the rule of animal instinct, ethics, aesthetics, metaphysics—and the axis of all four. And the comma that punctuated being twenty-two.

  3

  Shui Ling. Wenzhou Street. The white bench in front of the French bakery. The number 74 bus.

  We sit at the back of the bus. Shui Ling and I occupy opposite window seats, the aisle between us. The December fog is sealed off behind glass. Dusk starts to set in around six, enshrouding Taipei. The traffic is creeping along Heping East Road. At the outer edge of the Taipei Basin, where the sky meets the horizon, is the last visible wedge of a bright orange sun whose radiance floods through the windows and spills onto the vehicles behind us, like the blessing of some mysterious force.

  Silent, exhausted passengers pack the aisle, heads hung, bodies propped against the seats, oblivious. Through a gap in the curtain of their winter coats, I catch Shui Ling’s eye, trying to contain the enthusiasm in my voice.

  “Did you look outside?” I ask, ingratiatingly.

  “Mmm,” comes her barely audible reply.

  Then silence. For a still moment, Shui Ling and I are sitting together in the hermetically sealed bus. Out the windows, dim silhouettes of human figures wind through the streets. It’s a magnificent night scene, gorgeous and restrained. The two of us are content. We look happy. But underneath, there is already a strain of something dark, malignant. Just how bitter it would become, we didn’t know.

  4

  In 1987, I broke free from the draconian university entrance-exam system and enrolled in college. People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money. The eighteen-year-old me went through the high-grade production line and was processed in three years, despite the fact that I was pure carrion inside.

  That fall, in October, I moved into a second-floor apartment on Wenzhou Street. The leaseholders were a married couple who had graduated a few years earlier. They gave me a room with a huge window overlooking an alley. The two rooms across from mine were rented by two sisters. The young married couple was always in the living room watching TV. They spent a fair amount of time on the coffee-colored sofa. “We got married our senior year,” they told me, smiling. But most of the time, they didn’t say a word. The sisters would spend all night in one of their rooms watching a different channel. Passing the door, you’d hear bits of lively conversation. I never saw my housemates unless I had to. Just came and went on my own. Everyone kept to themselves.

  So despite the five of us living together under one roof, it might as well have been a home for the deaf.

  I lived in solitude. Lived at night. I’d wake up at midnight and ride my bike—a red Giant—to a nearby store where I’d buy dried noodles, thick pork soup, and spring rolls. Then I’d come home and read while I ate. Take a shower, do laundry. In my room, there was neither the sound of another human being nor light. I’d write in my journal all night, or just read. I became obsessed with Kierkegaard and Schopenhauer. I devoured all kinds of books for tortured souls. Started collecting issues of the independence movement’s weekly. Studied up on political game theory, an antidote to my spiritual reading. It made me feel like an outsider, which became my way of recharging. At the break of dawn, around six or seven, like a nocturnal creature afraid of the light, I’d finally lay my head—which by then was spilling over with thoughts—down onto the comforter.

  That’s how it went when things were good. Most of the time, however, I didn’t eat a single thing all night. Didn’t shower. Couldn’t get out of bed. Didn’t write in my journal or talk. Didn’t read a single page or register the sound of another human being. All day long, I’d cry myself sick into my pillow. Sleep was just another luxury.

  Didn’t want anyone around. People were useless to me. Didn’t need anyone. I started hurting myself and getting into all sorts of trouble.

  Home was a credit-card bill footed by Nationalist Party voters. I didn’t need to go back. Being in college gave me a sense of vocation. It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility—from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterward. That system had already molded me into a flimsy, worthless shell. It drove my body to retreat into a self-loathing soul, and what’s even scarier is that nobody knew or seemed to recognize it. My social identity was comprised of these two distinct, co-existing constructs. Each writhed toward me with its incessant demands—though when it came down to it, I spent more time getting to know my way around the supermarket next door than I did getting comfortable in my own skin.

  Didn’t read the paper. Didn’t watch TV. Didn’t go to class—except for gym, because the teacher took attendance. Didn’t go out and didn’t talk to my roommates. The only time I ever spoke at all was in the evenings or afternoons at the Debate Society, where I would go to preen my feathers and practice social intercourse. All too soon I realized that I was an innately beautiful peacock and decided that I shouldn’t let myself go. However lazy, a peacock still ought to give its feathers a regular preening, and having been bestowed with such a magnificent set, I couldn’t help but seek the mainstream of society as a mirror. With that peacock swagger, I found it hard to resist indulging in a little strutting, but that’s how it went, and it was a fundamentally bad habit.

  The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

  Since there’s time to kill, you have to use boredom to get you to the other side. In English, you’d say: Break on through. That’s more like it.

  5

  So she did me wrong. If my old motto was I’m sentencing her to the guillotine, my new motto contained a revelation: The power to construct oneself is destiny. If only it weren’t for you, Shui Ling. In spite of everything, the truth is I still can’t take it. I can’t take it. Really, I can’t. No matter how far I’ve come, it’s never far enough. The pattern was already in place.

  It must have been around October 1987. I was biking down Royal Palm Boulevard and passed somebody. I remembered it was their birthday. It was at that precise moment that all of my pent-up grief and fear hit me at once. I knew more or less that I’d been rejected and that was the bottom line. But somehow, I was convinced I had to get even.

  She’d just turned twenty. I’d turned eighteen five months earlier. She and some friends from high school walked past me, and I managed to glance at her. But as for what significance that glance held, it was as if my whole life had flashed before my eyes. Though they were off in the distance, I could still feel the glow of her smile. It left me with the acute sense that she never failed to elicit the adoration and affection of others, that she was someone who radiated a pure, childlike contentment.

  Even now I’m still in awe of her innate power to command such devotion—not only her charms but how it felt to be deprived of them. She maintained only a handful of friendships. In the past, the people around her had clung dearly to her, giving her their entire attention. She didn’t need any more of that, but she didn’t have much of a choice. She was trapped and suffocating. Whenever I was around her, I’d become clingy, too. If I wasn’t by her side, I felt distant from other people, when in fact she was the one who was distant. That’s how it worked. It was her natural gift.

  I didn’t see her my entire senior year of high school. I was careful to avoid her. Didn’t dare take the initiative, though I longed for her to notice me in the crowd. An upperclassman and my senior, she was an ominous character, a black sp
ade. To shuffle and draw the same card again would be even more ominous.

  6

  The lecture hall for Introduction to Chinese Literature was packed. I got there late and had to sheepishly lift my chair up higher than the rostrum and carry it all the way to the front row. The professor stopped lecturing, and all the other sheep turned and gawked at me and my antics.

  Toward the end of class, someone passed a note from behind:

  Hey, can I talk to you after class?

  —Shui Ling

  She had sought me out. I knew it would happen. Even if I had switched to a different section, she would have sought me out all the same. She who hid in the crowd, who didn’t want anyone to see her with her aloofness and averted eyes. When I stepped forward, she stepped out, too. And she had pointed with a child’s wanton smile and said, “I want that one.” There was no way I could refuse. And like a potted sunflower that had just been sold to a customer, I was taken away.

  This, from a beautiful girl whom I was already deeply, viscerally attracted to. Things were getting good. There she was, standing right in front of me. She brushed the waves of hair away from her face with a seductiveness that painfully seared my heart like a tattoo. Her feminine radiance was overpowering. I was about to get knocked out of the ring. It was clear from that moment on, we’d never be equals. How could we, with me under the table, scrambling to summon a different me, the one she would worship and put on a pedestal? No way was I coming out.

  “What are you doing here?” I was so anxious that I had to blurt something out. She didn’t say a word or seem the least bit embarrassed.

  “Did you switch to this section to make up a class?” She didn’t look up at me. She just stood there, dragging one foot behind her in the hallway, and didn’t say a thing, as if this one-sided conversation had nothing to do with her.