Five Spice Street

‘‘There are several suspicious things about this man Q. First, among the women on Five Spice Street, he’s as familiar as a family member. When you’re talking with someone, you need only mention him (even if not directly, the conversation might lead you to think of him), and she will immediately become absorbed and avidly inquire about all the details. It seemed that everyone felt a vague attraction to him and wanted to confide this. But all they could do was bashfully strike a pose and put on a nonchalant air, while in private they pitifully offered him their romantic passions. How could he achieve this social status out of all proportion to what he was? Had anyone carefully taken stock of every part of his body, or tasted his sugarplum, and then finally ascertained where his charms lay? (Of course not!)

‘‘We can speculate that the reason lay in his relationship with X, or more precisely in daydreams about such a relationship. Here is an analogy: no one had ever made any inquiries about tangerines, but now research has shown that tangerines can prevent cancer and so people rush to buy them and the prices skyrocket. This kind of cancer-prevention psychology is the same as our daydreams. Suppose one day we find that our daydreams are just a subjective mistake, and we finally discover that in a small dark room at the end of a long wall a psycho is seated, gripping a rusty dagger. Bending over and gritting her teeth, she’s counting the socks in the trunk. Ugly, plump cutworms are climbing all over outside the room. It’s finally she who is everything. Q is only a puppet whose strings are being pulled. Then what would Q’s image be? We’ll get the answer without any doubt. Nevertheless, we all survive in daydreams. At such times, people seem charming and bashful, with expectant eyes. Each action is suffused with childishness. If a man darts past the window, everyone is inwardly pleased and whispers excitedly: ‘What a living Apollo Q is!’ They’re determined to think of this silhouette as Q for no other reason than that they’ve daydreamed about a certain bewitching ‘relationship’ between him and X. The less sense we found in this strange behavior, the more we endowed it with beautiful poetry and magical colors-accessorized it to become the spiritual sustenance for our existence. This was the root cause of our inferiority.

‘‘After we visualized the bewitching relationship between Q and X, we also put ourselves in X’s position and measured ourselves against her, crazily considering our strong points and marveling at how much better we were than X-and how overjoyed we’d feel if we entered that realm with Q. What a great mistake Q had made. We mulled it over this way until we were exhausted and lost the last bit of self-confidence we had about our worth. We were like a dog sniffing after a certain person: we didn’t know that the hero we were chasing was simply a puppet manipulated by a bizarre woman sitting in a dark room.

‘‘Second, each of us imagined this Q to be a young, intrepid, stalwart man, a handsome man without equal. He was not only brave but sweet. His words were like a light, gentle rain warming people’s hearts. You believed that there couldn’t be any other Mr. Right in this world. At home, you paced impatiently, thought aloud, couldn’t sleep, and tossed and turned all night. You jumped up at daybreak and ran to the public toilet, where, as you squatted, you sleepily confided these baffling feelings to one another. It was so exciting. By comparison, you felt your own husbands were intolerable. You crazily put yourselves on a pedestal, as if all of a sudden you had become aristocratic ladies. You were unapproachable to your husbands. If they wanted to get close to you, they were reduced to begging, even kneeling. And then even if you broke down and consented, you did so disdainfully, as cold as ice water. You would all be disappointed if you knew the truth I’m about to tell you. Remember the other day when someone saw him fall in front of Madam X’s door (and he was knocked unconscious from the fall)? Have you given this serious thought? Is it possible for a healthy man walking on level ground to fall and lose consciousness?

‘‘Of course, I know what this was all about. You may think I’m making this up out of jealousy. Or you may think I’m elevating myself by degrading others. I don’t care what you think. I’ll still stick to the truth. I won’t give in. I want to tell you that on that eerie afternoon, you can’t imagine what he looked like when he appeared at my window: he was leaning on two sticks. We looked at each other for no fewer than twenty-three minutes-not until the sticks could no longer hold up his heavy body did he, not without regret, turn and leave. With each step, he looked back, reluctant to part: he recognized his own kind.