The Illusion of the Past

Jaswinder Singh Khalsa
15 May 2009

The Illusion of the Past

In Yu Hua’s short story “The Past and the Punishments,” the punishment expert states: “Actually, we always live in the past. The past is forever. The present and the future are just little tricks the past plays on us” (Howard Goldblatt, ed. Chairman Mao would not be Amused 159). What does it mean to always live in the past? Essentially, we live in the past when we do not accept the present moment when it happens. As time moves on, part of our minds are still back there fighting what happened. This battle can never be won because, to speak bluntly, what happened is what happened and no amount of denial, regret or even prayer can change it. So, if we resist what is, then the part of us embroiled in resistance and constantly replaying the scenario in question. So a person can either accept reality or be doomed to replay the same patterns in a futile attempt to change reality. So, to live in the past is to have unresolved feelings about the past, and to have some degree of our energy unavailable to us in the present moment. The energy spent grappling with the past is what prevents us from really being present and seeing what is happening around us. Instead, we often only see confirmation of the past repeating itself, because the past is really what we have been paying attention to in the first place. When all you know is a hammer, as the saying goes, everything looks like a nail. So, “the past is forever” to the extent that we continue to project it onto current events due to a neurotic obsession with trying to fix it or change it. This behavior describes may of the characters found in Howard Goldblatt’s anthology, and we watch them struggle with the past until they finally overcome it, not by changing it but letting go of their resistance to it. In Yu Hua’s To Live, conversely, the protagonist Fugui represents an individual who accepts what happens no matter how awful it is, and through him we gain insight into the simplicity afforded to someone whose energy is entirely directed toward the present moment. As we shall see, this does not make Fugui a great man. It makes him the companion of his past, rather than its slave. In the other stories we will scrutinize, the characters are only able to stop fighting with the past when they are allowed a cathartic experience, at which point they return to the present moment, liberated. What we shall see is that punishment expert is only describing a trap most people fall into, but there is nothing inevitable about it. Freedom and transcendence are available to all at any time because the present moment is always available to us to return to, and the reality that the past is the past is always there for us to recognize.

In Li Rui’s story “Sham Marriage,” we see the past constantly eclipsing the present and canceling the future every time the man thinks about the time leader sleeping with his wife before they were married. From the very beginning of the story, the husband is indicating his preoccupation with the thought: “When the production-team leader, who was standing as guarantor, grinned and led the woman and a three- or four-year-old girl into the courtyard, he was pretty sure that one thing guaranteed was that the team leader had already boiled her noodles” (90). We are immediately given observations that support this claim, the first of which is the slimy nature of the team leader, evidenced by his crude manners (90) and his vulgar, suggestive remarks to the man after the wedding ceremony: “Heh heh, some goods she’s got, nice and plump; I guarantee you, you can’t go wrong” (91). Despite the man’s attempts to rationalize with himself and release any unreasonable expectations of “marrying some unplucked lily” (91), he finds it very hard to ignore his wounded pride at the thought of being with someone who has just recently been with someone else. When the woman suggests that they postpone their first sexual encounter until after her daughter is asleep, “He flared up and, not knowing why, thought back to how the team leader had boiled her noodles the night before” (94). After the first time they have sex, the man seems to become possessed by a kind of sexual rage that drives him to compulsively indulge his sexual appetites with the woman. This obsessive behavior is not at all unlinked to his preoccupation with the team leader’s exploits: “...he had only to think of that night before the woman belonged to him, how another man had already boiled her noodles, for that gush of madness to swell ten times over...” (94). He finally confronts her about the team leader, demanding her to “Say it! Did he touch you or not” (97)? When she says yes by simply nodding her head, the man is again gripped by a compulsion to have intercourse with her: “He lunged for the woman, brutal, rabid, giving vent to the bitterness of half a lifetime, which had turned even more bitter from all of this” (97).

When the man sleeps with this woman, nothing about his behavior communicates a feeling of intimacy. On the contrary, it seems as though sex is simultaneously a release of his frustration and spurned on by a sense of insecurity. Instead of making him unable to sleep with her, the thought of her being with another man seems to arouse him sexually. One explanation of this behavior is that he feels the need to somehow prove his virility to himself so as to avoid feeling diminished by the knowledge that other men have satisfied themselves with her. Here, the woman’s sexual history represents an affront to his feelings of male dominance, which he will be compelled to assert repeatedly as long as he clings to the thought of someone else “boiling her noodles.” In other words, their relationship is in a constant state of reaction to past events. He is most aroused not by a genuine feeling of attraction or affection towards her, but rather by the feeling of having to reaffirm his manhood whenever he thinks about the team leader. This preoccupation with the past makes him unable to see her as a human being, and she becomes a kind of shock absorber for his negative emotions.

Another way in which the past manages to negate the possibility of happiness in the present moment is when the man ferrets out the knowledge that the woman is already married to a man in a neighboring town. Surely, this would make it very difficult to feel like their marriage was anything less than a thinly veiled act of opportunism on the part of the woman, which was in turn capitalized upon by the team leader, both of whom were playing the man for a fool. After a few days of them living together, he confronts her, saying, “Don’t try to fool me. You’ve already got a home, you’ve got a man, he’s not dead, you’ve got other kids, they’re all back home waiting for you” (95). The woman initially tries to deny it, but eventually she admits it to be the truth: “Elder brother, we’ve had a terrible harvest at home this year. We had no choice” (95). The implication is that the woman was just allowing him to take her under his wing so she could ride out the lean times in her native village. In other words, as the man himself points out, she would have presumably left after a relatively short period of time to go back home. When we learn this, it becomes clear why the team leader declines to produce a marriage certificate at the time of the ceremony, saying, “When you’re all settled down, you just ask somebody to write home for a letter of proof to make up for it” (90). Obviously, this goes well beyond the man’s fixation with the woman’s one-night-stand with the team leader: the reality that she has another home and another husband is a clear indication that there is no real future for the two of them, and while that itself does not negate the present moment, it certainly does a lot to trivialize it.

The most significant aspect of the past that overshadows the present, which is addressed but not discussed quite as explicitly as in the case of the team leader and the woman’s other husband, is the issue of the man having been living as a widower for the last twenty years. The man’s expectations of disappointment, his boorishness, and his feelings of discomfort during moments of intimacy, owe much more to his feelings of abandonment and to the long years of being without female companionship than they really do to the exploits of the team leader. The bitterness of having spent twenty years alone comes out most obviously when he confronts her about her real husband: “You’ll live here for three months, five months, maybe a year or more, but when you see your chance, you’ll be gone, and here I’ll be all alone again. Right” (95)? We know that his past feelings of hurt and loneliness are acting up and feeding on fresh negative emotion because of the perverse enjoyment that he finds in upsetting the woman: “For some reason, he actually got some satisfaction out of those tears” (95). On the surface level, this emotion is linked to having finally broken through her wall of dignity and reserve that immediately struck him as “too unfeminine” (93). The need to feel dominance and control in the relationship has undoubtedly been intensified, however, by the lingering fear of abandonment so apparent when he says, “you’ll be gone, and here I’ll be all alone again.” His expectations of disappointment, while not unfounded, are only adding more emotional pain to a scenario that is already less than ideal.

In their last sexual encounter, there seems to be a hint of redemption as all his negative emotion finally comes to a head. As he forces himself on her, “the torment and suffocating bitterness he could never find words for and the body and soul he could neither tear nor break apart - all pulverized into fragments, into a foul slime of flesh and blood as it spurted into the woman” (97-8). The gruesome language used to describe the exchange does very well to evoke a feeling of catharsis. In the final paragraph, he brushes his hand “across the warmth of tears on the woman’s face” (98), suggesting that some sense of humanity and tenderness has returned to him. We now see that while sex has been tainted by his insecurities, mental preoccupations and emotional baggage for the majority of the story, it is also a way of releasing the same burden, not just venting the frustration it causes. When he brushes the tears away from her face, we sense that the last twenty years are loosening their grip on him, and woman’s manipulations have perhaps been forgiven as well. Having released his own frustration, we might speculate that he has room in his heart to be present to her own tribulations, which must not be insignificant if they have obliged her to sleep with this man and the team leader. His sudden display of tenderness towards her, however slight, is indication that he has moved beyond simply venting his anger and that he is actually relating to her as a human being for the first time. It is interesting to note that, when he was firmly in the grip of both the immediate and distant past, he could only relate to her as both confirmation of the past repeating itself and as a way of validating himself in the face of past indignities. He can only sincerely give attention to another person when he has broken free of the past and thereby released himself from the fate of perpetuating it.

Another interesting presentation of living in the past can be found in Chen Ran’s “Sunshine Between the Lips” in the same anthology. The story follows a woman named Miss Dai Er who is very much stuck in her mind. We soon learn that the cause of her mental congestion is two main events from her childhood: receiving an injection from a hypodermic needle and watching a pedophile expose himself to her. These experiences combine in her subconscious to create a dense sexual phobia and a deep feeling of insecurity surrounding medical treatments. Chen Ran shows us that, for Miss Dai Er, the past is a source of unresolved trauma responsible for a great deal of insecurity and sexual dysfunction as it is continuously projected onto her present circumstances. At the end of the story, she is released from her past by the removal of a tooth, simultaneously representing her newfound security that allows her to surrender to the dentist and the removal of past trauma as if it were stored in the tooth itself.

Even the way the incident involving the hypodermic injection is introduced makes it clear that it is still unresolved trauma, waiting for an opportunity to surface. When she is in Dr. Kong Sen’s office, the sight of his hypodermic needle “glides over twenty-eight stairs, passing through more than a decade, and on toward the internal medicine ward. There Miss Dai Er was barely seven and a half years old” (114). We learn that Dai Er emerged from a “fever-induced coma caused by meningitis” (115) to the rude awakening of a long syringe being inserted into her buttock, against her vociferous protestations. The event is experienced as trauma for a variety of reasons. Firstly, it is the first thing she sees after coming out of a coma, and her first feeling is fear: “Mommy, I don’t want a shot” (115). Her mom is so relieved that “she’s not a mindless vegetable” (115) that she happily leaves Dai Er to receive her shot. This compounds the trauma for Dai Er, however, because the message she gleans from it is “no one else could take that resonating needle for her. Everyone had his own needle to face” (116). In this context, these are not so much bold stoic words as much as they are pointers to an inability to trust others and an expectation of abandonment. She doesn’t think of her mother as someone having any power to protect her; on the contrary, she sees her obey the doctor, and this reinforces the feeling of the inexorability of fate. The enduring impact of this experienced is communicated straightforwardly: “the long needle entered her buttock and stabbed at her heart. She grew up with that needle” (116). When we return to the present moment, and Dai Er shrieks at the sight of the needle, we know that it is just as firmly lodged in her as it was at the time of the injection all those years ago.

The next time Dai Er is around Dr. Kong Sen, the depth of the phobia comes more fully into view: “She opens her mouth wide, and the brutal syringe, which is about to stab her upper jaw, makes her pale and sends her out of control” (120). From the outburst that follows we see a lodged memory of a past trauma surface, one which is not related to doctors but has been collapsed with the syringe experience through association: “in the dim light, little Dai Er was shocked to see a huge hypodermic, growing in the body of a man, pointing right at her face. The scene has remained in a secret place in her memory” (121). So now we see why she is so terrified by the sight of a needle. This memory of a man exposing himself to her, presumably following on the heels of the injection after she emerged from her coma, was immediately merged with the memory of the impending syringe. Since the syringe represented a kind of perverse male force from which she had no power to defend herself, made worse by the doctor’s face hidden beneath an unfeeling mask, this experience of a man exposing his “hypodermic” to her would presumably evoke similar feelings of an assault that nobody could protect her from and that she was somehow doomed to endure. When she describes her first consensual sexual experiences, it is clear that she has developed deep phobias because of these aforementioned traumas: “I remember how, when I was burning to take his body into mine, I stopped suddenly, clung to his waist without moving, and sobbed softly, tears glistening in my eyes. I said, ‘I don’t want to see it’” (124). It should come as no surprise that she is so terrified of sexual intimacy. When the man exposed himself to her, she immediately thought of the hypodermic needle, which is associated with forced submission and abandonment by her mother. Sexual contact, for her, brings up a feeling of powerlessness, taking her back to when she was seven years old and unable to resist the demands of the masked, unfeeling doctor. Patterns of thinking formed in the past are causing her to be utterly paralyzed during activities that are not inherently threatening to her.

For Dai Er to release the past and start to create a future free of the influence of past events, she learns to surrender herself both to a lover and a doctor, expunging the phobias related to both. While it is essentially the same fear polluting both relationships, it is interesting to note that Chen Ran retraces the specific sequence and consequence to show how past trauma is best processed. Because the phobia of doctors preceded and influenced the sexual phobia, she first opens herself to her doctor, then to her lover. She explains the experience of her neighbor exposing himself to her to Dr. Kong Sen, who in turn reaches out to her and comforts her by simply placing his hand on her shoulder. This reassurance in the moment of vulnerability is what she had needed all along; but she had to first lower her defenses in order to receive it. When Dr. Kong Sen places his hand on her shoulder, “that was the arm for which Miss Dai Er had long been yearning. She had been waiting for just such an arm to rescue her from her memories. For the first time in her life, she became a patient, giving herself up weakly to the arm that had rooted out so many decayed teeth” (127). Here, the real decayed teeth are the memories festering inside her. Her past paradigm was “no one else could take that resonating needle for her,” and now she learns that by reaching out to others, there will be a comforting arm there when it is needed; someone to take the needle for her after all. Shortly after this experience she is married, and the official recognition of her commitment to her partner symbolizes her newfound comfort with intimacy. Again, shortly thereafter, she returns to the dentist who then removes her two impacted wisdom teeth, and “the secret anguish deeply buried in Miss Dai Er’s remote past is finally uprooted” (129). She could not simply build a wall around her emotions by keeping her mind busy. Ultimately, she conquered her fears precisely by exposing her fear to that which made her feel afraid, and thereby evoked the humanity in that which was feared, restoring trust.

To return to the author of the quote that has sparked our discussion, Yu Hua’s To Live
presents further insights into the past; how it grips us, and how it can be overcome. From the very outset of the novel, there is a mindfulness of the past, because the whole story is a memoir. Fugui is in the final phase of his life, unburdening himself of his many experiences onto the open ears of the italicized narrator. Fugui has a unique relationship to his past, which is consciously recognized by the narrator: “Never did I meet anyone who was not only so clear about his life experiences, but also able to recount them so brilliantly. He was the kind of person who could see his entire past... Perhaps the difficulties and hardships of life destroy the others’ memories. They often face the past with a kind of numbness. Not knowing what to do, they simply dismiss the past with an awkward smile. They lack interest in their own experiences...but Fugui was completely different” (Yu Hua, To Live 44-5). What our narrator is telling us is that Fugui is unique because he is conscious of his past. As he says, Fugui not only remembers it, but he has insight into it. His insight comes from his ability to truly see himself clearly. This clarity provides a sense of continuity of self identity through all phases of life. Being able to observe yourself clearly is to say that you are more identified with the observer of your emotions and behavior and not identified with the emotions themselves. This is the very foundation of clarity and insight. We need only to contrast this with the emotional thinking and the compulsive behavior of the man in Li Rui’s story or the paralyzing effects of Dai Er’s emotions to more fully understand the freedom that comes with detached observation.

As the observations of our italicized narrator suggest, Fugui is the master of his past. The root of this mastery is his acceptance of events as they occur. The more that acceptance can be exercised in the moment, the less likely it is than an event will continue to influence a person unconsciously. This is because acceptance creates total closure, and a person can move forward into the next present moment with one hundred percent of his or her energy focused on the present moment; it is not tied up in grappling with whatever has not yet been accepted about the past. When Fugui loses all his material possessions to gambling, he is shocked, stupefied even, but does not complain. He is emotionally present to the responses of his family members, and allows the feelings in. When his father speaks coolly and rationally about how to handle repaying the debt to Long’er, Fugui shows us his feelings unabashedly: “I was moved to tears. I knew he wasn’t going to beat me, but the words he spoke were as painful as death itself. It was as if my head had been severed by a blunt knife yet failed to fall off” (31). Most noteworthy is the complete openness about his emotional state. This openness is part of his immediate response as well as how it is recollected: he does not suppress his feelings, but cries openly. In fact, my enduring image of Fugui is a man who cries often and yet never complains. Yu Hua is educating us about life, and the lesson is that accepting life does not make it enjoyable. The power of acceptance is that things are not made any harder than they already are. Fugui’s tears are not the tears of a man who cannot accept what is, they are the tears of a man who is fully allowing the weight of reality to hit him. Just as his financial debt is paid in full, he allows the full extent of the pain evoked by loss every time it occurs. Paying in full, it seems, is at the root of his ability to look back with detachment. Conversely, we could look at Miss Dai Er’s sexual phobias as a lingering debt from her past experiences. And, interestingly enough, Dai Er gave no indication of expressing her emotions in the doctor’s office; they were ignored, collecting interest, so to speak, until one day she could no longer function at all and was forced to revisit them. Fugui is spared the need for this kind of excavation work.

Let us consider one possible protest to the above remarks: Fugui’s inability to tell his wife Jiazhen about their son Youqing’s death. He pretends to go out every night to visit him in the hospital long after his little body has been buried, and he has to lie to Jiazhen to maintain this charade until she calls it out: “‘Fugui, don’t lie to me. I know Youqing’s dead’” (160). When he takes Jiazhen to see Youqing’s grave, Fugui is stung by profound feelings of remorse: “Seeing Jiazhen like this, my heart hurt so much it felt like it was all blocked up. I really shouldn’t have buried Youqing - I should have let Jiazhen see him one last time” (161). Are not these heart wrenching thoughts and emotions indication of an emotional debt that was made bigger by a lack of total confrontation in the moment? Yes, of course they are. However, Fugui’s actions do not so much indicate a refusal to confront his emotions, but rather a confrontation with emotions that are so strong and so devastating that he really has no idea what to do. We can see that he does not suppress his emotions aroused by Youqing’s death: “As soon as I looked down at him I couldn’t hold back the tears. After crying for a long while, I started to think about how to break the news to Jiazhen. After going through everything in my head, I decided I should keep Youqing’s death a secret from her for the time being” (157). Fugui makes a bad decision, and part of what makes it so bad is that he does not try to create a plan for when or how he will tell Jiazhen, he just decides to postpone it indefinitely. Part of the lesson for us as readers is that just because Fugui is fully open to feeling his emotions does not mean in any way that he is therefore able to make more responsible decisions in the moment. His decision to keep Youqing’s death a secret does indeed cause him additional suffering, but here we are obliged to acknowledge the difference between bad decisions that create unnecessary emotional suffering and emotional suffering that continues to grow because it is unnecessarily repressed. To clarify, Fugui’s virtue lies in his willingness to feel emotions, not in the emotions created in the wake of the decisions he makes. Even though Fugui feels remorse because he didn’t tell Jiazhen right away, his acceptance of his own emotions spares him the fate endured by our protagonists from the previous stories: the negating effect of behavioral patterns that stem from unprocessed emotions created by past events. Fugui is not unconsciously living in the past, and this is what makes him so unique. Yu Hua shows us, particularly in this scene, however, that this is not enough to make somebody a hero.

In light of the three stories we have analyzed, we can conclude that the punishment expert was not entirely correct: we do not always live in the past, and the past is not forever. The present moment is always offering the possibility of escape from the grip of the past, and the possibility of charting a new course for the future. This is made possible only by self acceptance. By accepting our emotions, we are released from them and we do not become locked into patterns created by unprocessed emotions. We can move on to the next challenge. In the case of Fugui, these challenges do not necessarily become any less severe or painful. Similarly, Miss Dai Er is not necessarily promised a “fairy tale ending” just because she has forgiven the past, and it is more than likely that the nameless man in Li Rui’s story will still wind up alone despite his final display of humanity. “Charting a new course for the future” in no way means that the course charted will be better than what came before. What is promised, however, is that whatever comes into our lives will be authentically new, authentically the present moment, and this authenticity is ultimately that which is most valuable in life.