The Story of the Nail, or The Birth of a Writer

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In 1977, the boy left the drivers corps of the Grain Administration, where he’d been working, and started university. The day he was due to enroll, the man who’d taught him how to drive insisted on giving him a lift—still in uniform, complete with white gloves, in the unit’s newest truck with its liberation plates. The older driver said nothing along the way, just smoked one cigarette after another. Finally, when they were almost at the campus, he broke his silence and asked, What do you actually study in the Chinese Department? The boy said, I don’t know, I want to learn how to write novels. The driver said, What’s the use of writing? The boy replied, I want to write, that’s all. The driver sighed and said, Imagine giving up a good job like this, I’m worried you might regret it someday.

The following fall, the boy finished his first story and sent it to a literary journal in Shanghai. The story was called “The Nail,” and had grown out of an incident he’d witnessed in his youth. Back then, he’d been living in a hospital’s family housing. After going through a struggle session, a doctor from the next block got stabbed in the head with a nail. The victim gradually lost the ability to speak and move, eventually ending up in a hospital bed in a vegetative state. The boy had seen all sorts of violent acts during these turbulent times, but somehow or other, this one in particular left an indelible mark in his brain. A month later, the boy heard back from the journal: they wanted to publish his story. Delighted, he shared the news with his girlfriend, and they celebrated. After another month, he got another letter from the editor: the story was too dark, and they might not be able to use it after all. What a letdown. The boy put his manuscript in a drawer and never looked at it again. He wrote several more stories after that, all similarly dark, and nowhere he submitted them to ever responded. After graduation, he stayed on at the university to teach, and married his girlfriend. The faculty dorm was a congested walk-up building, its passageways crammed with books and cabbages. In the evenings, when everyone was cooking in the corridors, the whole place reeked of sizzling onions. When their child was born, his writing desk was turned into an infant bed. He never wrote another story. Anyone can understand how this might happen—the way daily life grinds us down. Giving up writing makes sense in any circumstances. Every now and then, though, the old driver’s words would come back to him out of the blue: What’s the use of writing? He may have given up fiction, but as time went on, his decision to attend university was looking better and better, and he couldn’t help rejoicing. With so much going on in the world, he slowly forgot how he’d started out, and deviated from his original path. When he looked around, everything seemed pretty good, and so he carried on.

The boy had seen all sorts of violent acts during these turbulent times, but somehow or other, this one in particular left an indelible mark in his brain.

As for that first short story, it got lost during a house move, and the boy eventually forgot what it had been about. If you looked at it a certain way, this story might as well have never existed in the world. It was only many years later, when he was talking about it, that the memory of the nail came surging back. Long consigned to the farthest recesses of his mind, this event was faded and dried out, much diminished. Even as he recounted it, he felt there was no point, and disposed of the story in a few sentences. More years passed, then during dinner one evening, his daughter casually announced that she was planning to turn the story of the nail into a novel. It took him a while to recollect what she was referring to, then he smiled and said, What’s there to write about? Rather than answering the question, she began interrogating him for more details. He dredged up as much as he could, but couldn’t remember the rest. The daughter looked a little disappointed and dropped the subject. Later, he discovered she’d gone to the hospital herself to carry out her own investigation and gather what material she could about the man in the vegetative state. Then, for a long while, nothing. She’d always been a little difficult to pin down—this way today, that way tomorrow—and he was used to this. You couldn’t have said his daughter was rebellious, but nor was she particularly biddable. She certainly wasn’t the sort of child he’d have chosen to have. More years passed. After his retirement, he sometimes came to Beijing and stayed at his daughter’s apartment. On one of these visits, he noticed a stack of books with white covers: galleys of her novel, which she was planning to distribute to her friends. She had to go out, so she filled in the delivery forms and left him to do the rest. He stuffed them into envelopes and handed them over to the courier when he arrived—all but one, which was rejected because the recipient’s cellphone number was missing. He left it on the coffee table. After dinner, he played a round of go on his computer, but his opponent was such an awful player that he soon abandoned the game. Annoyed, he stared at the screen for a while before closing his laptop. The living room was very quiet, just a whisper of a late spring breeze from outside. He poured himself some tea, settled back on the sofa, and stared into space. Then his eyes landed on the white-covered book, so he leaned forward, picked it up, and flipped it open.

Since getting back to Southern Courtyard, I haven’t been anywhere except the supermarket. Oh, and the drugstore once—I needed something to help me sleep. Otherwise, I’ve been here, watching a dying man. Grandpa lost consciousness this morning. I couldn’t wake him. It was still dark, and the pressure in the room was low. I stood by his bed, feeling death hover like a flock of bats.

I got my thick coat from my suitcase. The heater doesn’t do enough, maybe because the room is so big. I’ve tried to make peace with the cold seeping through the walls, but I can’t stand it any longer. I went into the bathroom without turning on the light—the thin, stark fluorescent bulb made me feel even colder. I washed my face at the sink and thought about what would happen after tomorrow. Once he was dead, I would change all the lights in the house. The leaky pipe below the sink dribbled hot water over my feet in the dark, the temperature of blood.

I wrote these words around the beginning of 2011. At the time, this was a novel without a name, and I’d already gone through several different iterations. Some of these started with my female protagonist perched on a high wall; in others, she was on a train. The strangest one was interrupted by the red tail of a fox, though I can no longer recall why I needed a fox in the story—at the time, though, it felt as if I couldn’t continue unless the fox put in an appearance. Probably it was meant to be a prophet of sorts, albeit a completely unhelpful one. I remember the fox warning my main character: You’d better accept my existence, because now that I’ve shown up, I can’t disappear again. That lasted a few weeks, then this dashing fox was utterly deleted from my Word document. Sans fox, my female protagonist was left bereft, castaway on an ocean without any means of navigation, drifting aimlessly. I tried a few times but couldn’t find her a direction, so I set her aside and went on to write something else. We didn’t know each other well back then, and I didn’t miss her.

Before the New Year, I went to stay with my parents in Jinan—they’d just moved back to the university campus where I’d grown up. It had been many years since I’d been there. The building where we’d lived before had been demolished, replaced with a tall apartment block. At first glance, it seemed as if everything had changed. On the afternoon of New Year’s Eve, I went for a walk around the grounds, and quickly realized traces of the past were everywhere. In the trees, the houses, the garbage dumps. The man who sold newspapers by the gate was still there, and so was the little girl who took care of her dad’s fruit stall for him, though she was now a dull-eyed middle-aged woman. I didn’t feel close to them—in fact, I felt a little terrified. I’d departed, but these people had stayed right here and gone on living. Sure, that’s just how life works. Yet the moment I saw them, I felt as if I’d uncovered a huge secret, scaring myself. Now I felt uneasy, as if I’d abandoned them by leaving them where they were. I stopped walking, and took in the image of these familiar faces and their surroundings, as if I were waiting for something. A moment later, a different me might enter the scene. It would be difficult to put into words exactly how she’d be different, but anyway she’d be another me, one who’d never lived anywhere else, one who’d grown up here and would grow old here, experiencing sorrow and joy in this place. That is to say, the childhoods we leave behind aren’t a closed space and time, over and done with, but parallel worlds that have silently continued. That afternoon, I stood at the courtyard gates for a very long time, but of course no other me showed herself. Instead, the other main character of my novel, whose features I hadn’t been able to make out up to this point, gradually became clear in my mind. He was my female protagonist’s other self, the one who’d remained in the parallel world of her childhood.

As midnight approached, fireworks began shooting into the sky, illuminating the otherwise dark window. I sat at the desk, writing the beginning of this novel. After a while, I realized that not only had I settled on the narrative voices, the structure had also become visible to me. Up till now, I’d been unable to work out how to tell this story that had landed in my lap. Although I’d done my own research and interviews, trying to get closer to the source material, I’d always felt cut off from it. On this night, having returned to the place I’d partly grown up in, I was surprised to find that the path through this story lay in my childhood years.

The story of the nail took place in my father’s childhood, and my own childhood provided an entrance to it. Which just goes to show that my youth and my father’s had been intertwined all along. This incident had left a brand on his younger self, and somehow a mark had been left on mine too. These histories hadn’t come into our lives at the moment we detected and recognized them; we’d been in their midst all along.

I was halfway through the novel when I realized my father had entered it. It seemed I couldn’t separate him from his story—they were conjoined.

All that New Year, I remained steeped in the atmosphere of childhood, but I didn’t say any of this to my dad. We’d never talked very much, and at this point we were barely exchanging any words at all. I worked hard to avoid these conversations, as if only by cutting off my relationship with him could I complete this story of his. I was halfway through the novel when I realized my father had entered it. It seemed I couldn’t separate him from his story—they were conjoined. When I say he’d made his way into the novel, I don’t mean as a particular character—it was more of an undertone. Disappointment, rejection, not believing in anything. Something about my dad that had been there a long time—perhaps the thing driving us apart. As a child, when I was filled with unbounded warmth for the world, this would have been hard for me to accept. Only now am I working out that this temperament wasn’t something he was born with, but a product of his era and his history. Around the time I started writing the novel, I was trying to express a sort of extortionate love, and beginning to understand that I was experiencing difficulties in this area—I didn’t know how to love, or perhaps I’d lost part of my ability to love. As I went on, and my father slipped into my words without me realizing it, I started to grasp that many issues of love had to do with him and others of his generation. Even so, it was only with this novel that I truly understood that the origin might be what they’d lived through, the history that had changed and sculpted them.

The man in the vegetative state was still alive when I was born, lying in the same hospital building where I came into the world. On that autumn afternoon, he may even have heard a baby crying in a nearby room. Could he have known that many years later, this girl would return to the hospital to gather scraps of information about him in order to write his story? Perhaps he wouldn’t have been interested. To someone who was already living outside this world, what difference would it have made to him what form his story existed in, whether dispersed in the air or recorded in a book? This story no longer matters to my father either. My book won’t shine a light on his memory, reminding him of the tremors that went through him in his youth. Perhaps he’ll pick up my novel and flick through it when he’s bored, but it seems highly unlikely that he’ll finish it. Naturally, this is my fault for not making it interesting enough, but more importantly, he no longer believes in the magic of fiction.

No one needs this story. It’s only important to me. Seven years ago, I set off on this journey with no idea what its final form would be, just taking one step after another, gradually piercing the fog, until its outlines became clear and were slowly fleshed out. It accompanied me through many dawns and dusks, through the final stretch of my youth. I’d be lying if I said I didn’t care about the outcome, but I truly believe this process of exploration and discovery was more important to me than the final product. At the end of the day, the point of literature is to bring us to a deeper level of existence, so we can experience something we never have before.

In my mind, the smile of the man in the vegetative state kept appearing without warning. The smile that slowly spread across his face on that autumn afternoon, as he listened to the squalling baby. I’d never met him, but I could see that smile. And so I believe that while I was writing this story, someone I couldn’t see was surely wishing me well the whole time.

***

From the afterword to Cocoon, by Zhang Yueran. Translated from the Chinese by Jeremy Tiang. Copyright ©2022 by Zhang Yueran. Translation copyright ©2022 by Jeremy Tiang. Reprinted by permission of the publisher, World Editions. 

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