Raisins in the Sun (page 89)
古龙 Gu Long´s novel 多情劍客無情劍, Sentimental Hero, Ruthless Sword, opens on a snowy day. Xiao Li Tan Hua (one of the sentimental heros) is in a carriage, about to meet the other sentimental hero of the novel, Ah Fei.
Berlin has its first snow day of the season. The Christmas season. I was just trying to explain, at night, before sleep, in the dark, to my daughter why Santa Claus, or the Christ Child (who frequents Bavaria), doesn´t visit Chinese children. None of his manifestations visited the China of my childhood, at any rate. Not Father Christmas, not Saint Nicholas, not the Christmas Man.
Well, I didn´t want to paint him a bad guy. And we´d already discussed, the limited geographic activity of the tooth fairy (she didn´t visit Germany in the olden days, but does now, though still selectively).
Waiting in the physiotherapy practice (I injured my knee, badly, in the summer, and it doesn´t heal, or it has, but not enough, and I´m scared, of what´s in the future), waiting in the physiotherapy practice, I read a first person essay from a woman in Brigitte magazine (a women´s magazine here in Germany). The journalist wrote of her divorced parents, of her ex-boyfriends (the earliest of whom has a daughter by another woman now), of her taking part in a seminar to explore her indecision about having a child. She wrote of crying, and of the reasons of indecision shared by other seminar participants: fear of repeating one´s own mother´s mistakes, fear of the male partner not taking on household chores fairly, fear of not trusting one´s stomach instincts. In the end (before it got to be time for my knee appointment), she wrote of texting a friend that she would after all try to be a mother, regardless of whether her current boyfriend turns out to be a great father in the end.
I noticed that I could read it. The German text, I mean. I remember when I couldn´t read English either. I was already in double-digits (10 or 11 years old), and I was trying to read one of those Little Golden Books, and the words were just too hard for me. And I had to read it. It was too hard for me, but I was being made to read it, and I was crying because the task was so impossible, and there was no respite, and I just had to do this thing that was so beyond my ken. It was like that one time on the piano, too. The piece was simply too hard for me, and I was being directed to play it as if it wasn´t too hard for me. But it was, but it was, and I knew it was, and there was no helping it, so I just cried and tried, and the tears were dropping on the keys, no doubt damaging and dampening the crevices between them, harming the mechanism of the piano that took a whole host of young men to heave up the curved stairs of the concrete tall apartment building.
So I noticed that I could read this German journalist´s first person essay, her very intimate essay, her very brave essay, her very clear and memorable essay, in German. It doesn´t mean I can read all the other technical, complicated, official German that surrounds me. But that goes for English and Chinese, too.
One thing I could read, and loved to read, in Chinese were Gu Long´s martial arts novels. They, too, were very intimate, very brave, very clear and memorable novels, in Chinese, about the Chinese, for the Chinese.
I think about translating them into English, because they are majestic, but I waver, I hesitate, I defer, because I´m not sure my Chinese is enough, because I´m sure I have not time enough, because…
Langston Hughes wrote a poem "A Dream Deferred". From a line in that, Lorraine Hansberry wrote a play A Raisin in the Sun. A play I saw in Toronto with a friend was called night, Mother. I wonder if the Brigitte magazine journalist has seen it. It´s possible. I once saw, in German, in Berlin, Tennessee Williams´s The Glass Menagerie. In that bizarre production there was at least one live chicken on stage, which completely upstaged, in my opinion, all the actors. Not that the actors weren´t good. They were, they were. But with a live chicken! I was constantly on edge to see what it would do. Who knows what it would do? It´s not part of the actors´ union and couldn´t care less about consequences, or impacts, or long-term decision-making!
So there I was, before I had children of my own, at a Berlin production of The Glass Menagerie, bewildered by both the bird (or was it birds? I think there were multiple chickens) which weren´t in the stage directions, and being so bad at German at that point that the speeches sounded the same to me as the clucking.
Back to the production of the Toronto night, Mother, by Marsha Norman. That, and The Glass Menagerie, and half of all literature is people being upset at their moms or about their moms. The other half of literature is people being upset about love. (Shakespeare unites the two themes, see Romeo and Juliet (love problems because of parents problems), Hamlet (same), King Lear (parent problems), Macbeth (life problems because married wrong woman, so love-problems).)
Gu Long was a terrible father. He caroused, womanized, and wrote great novels about love, about honor, about being a man. Maybe I loved those novels more before I was a mother, when my interest was all love, honor, my man. Now that I´m trying to make Santa Claus sound like a generous, merry, jolly guy while explaining away his entire negligence of Chinese children, and gesticulating the geometry of tooth-fairy-toy-under-pillow-placement, I still love Gu Long, but I´m not reading him over, and over again, the way I once did.
The Brigitte journalist wrote of her imagined no-child future, one of working some more years as a journalist, then, opening a sufing school abroad (I imagine in warmer waters than Germany´s eastern and northern seas). She also wrote of her dream of having a child, living in a house with a garden. I wish her both. I sincerely wish her both, this woman who wrote so clearly, so bravely, so openly of her intimate wishes and goals, for all to take a moment, to have a moment, to think of something else while waiting for knee physiotherapy, while scared of potential surgery, while wondering how to manage it all, how to make all the deferred dreams, the hearts´ desires, the childhood tears, the adulthood worries not raisins in the sun, but lush, blooming vines and wines, surfs and boards, children and gardens, partners and parents.
Next page 90 where the deer and the antelope play, home, home on the range