Broken Wings

Jia Pingwa

Description

Broken Wings tells the story of Butterfly, who is kidnapped and taken to a remote mountain village devoid of young women. There, she is imprisoned and, later, raped in the cave home of the wifeless farmer who has bought her. Butterfly's fading hopes of escape are described in her own voice, revealing the struggles of a spirited young woman.

Sujets

• China
• Thriller

Informations

• Publié par: Alain Charles Asia
• Date de parution: 03 mai 2019
• Nombre de lectures: 0
• EAN13: 9781910760550
• Langue: English

Extrait

Broken Wings


Jia Pingwa

Translated by Nicky Harman

Sinoist Books
Paperback published by
ACA Publishing Ltd.

eBook published by
Sinoist Books (an imprint of ACA Publishing Ltd).

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Author: Jia Pingwa
Translator: Nicky Harman
Editor: David Lammie
Cover art: Daniel Li
Published by ACA Publishing Ltd in association with the People’s Literature Publishing House
Chinese language copyright © 2016, by People’s Literature Publishing House, Beijing, China
English language translation copyright © 2019, Nicky Harman
ALL RIGHTS RESERVED. NO PART OF THIS PUBLICATION MAY BE REPRODUCED IN MATERIAL FORM, BY ANY MEANS, WHETHER GRAPHIC, ELECTRONIC, MECHANICAL OR OTHER, INCLUDING PHOTOCOPYING OR INFORMATION STORAGE, IN WHOLE OR IN PART, AND MAY NOT BE USED TO PREPARE OTHER PUBLICATIONS WITHOUT WRITTEN PERMISSION FROM THE PUBLISHER.
The greatest care has been taken to ensure accuracy but the publisher can accept no responsibility for errors or omissions, or for any liability occasioned by relying on its content.


Paperback ISBN: 978-1-910760-45-1
eBook ISBN: 978-1-910760-55-0
A catalogue record for Broken Wings is available from the National Bibliographic Service of the British Library.
Contents



Foreword


1. The Night Sky

2. The Village

3. Calling Back The Soul

4. The Mountain Walked

5. The Empty Tree

6. Coloured Twine


Glossary

About the Author

About the Translator

Invitation from the Publisher
Foreword

One day ten years ago, during a summer of no rain, I sat in a rented room in the south of Xi’an listening to a man from my old village as he poured out his story. He stuttered so his story came out in fits and starts. Behind the bed curtain, his wife was sobbing her heart out. There were a lot of mosquitos and I had to keep swotting them with the palm of my hand, though all I hit was my arms or my face.
“She’s gone… she’s gone back there,” he said.
The scene is still vivid in my memory: he looked up at me, his gaze blank, and I was so stunned at the news that I sat silent for a long while. The ‘she’ was his daughter. She had dropped out of lower middle school and come with her parents to Xi’an where they were trash-pickers, but after only a year she had been kidnapped and sold. It took them three years to find her and with great difficulty they had managed to get the police to rescue her. But now, six months later, she had gone back to the village where she had been taken.
“It’s demons who made it end up like this. Crazy demons!” he said.
His wife carried on weeping. My village neighbour suddenly lost his temper and grabbed a bowl from the table and threw it at the bed curtain.
“Fucking cry! That’s all you do!” he yelled.
I didn’t try to stop him, and I had no words of consolation. There was another bowl on the table with pickled vegetables in it, along with a colander full of steamed buns and a black plastic bucket that served as a plant pot, holding a small crab apple. They had planted it up three days after their daughter came back. My friend had called me over to celebrate with a few drinks, and I arrived just as the daughter was filling the bucket with earth. Now I pushed the bucket, bowl and colander out of the way so he wouldn’t throw them at his wife, and gradually I found out what had happened. The press, TV and radio had all been keen to give extensive coverage to the heroic rescue of a kidnapped woman by the police. Everyone in the neighbourhood knew what had happened and who she was, so the daughter had been besieged and gawked at in the street. Rumours went around that the man she’d been forced to live with was dirt-poor and half-witted, and that she’d given birth to a child. She stopped going outdoors, or talking, and spent all day sitting motionless. My neighbour was worried she was either going to fall seriously ill or go mad, so he asked around for a prospective husband, the farther away the better, so no one would know about her past history. But just as they were talking to the matchmaker, the girl disappeared, leaving a note saying she was going back to the village.
This is a true story, one that I have never told until now.
The story felt like a knife in my heart. Every time I thought of it, it seemed to twist deeper inside. I had no idea where the village was that the girl had gone back to or how she’d been living for the last ten years. I was still in touch with my neighbour, he and his wife used to go back home every year for the harvest, and then come back to Xi’an for the rest of the year and work as trash-pickers. But his hair was thinning and he was getting frailer and more stooped. A few years ago, when I met him, he was still going on and on about how when they went to rescue his girl, she had been in a village on the loess plateau, blasted by winds, everyone lived in caves and couldn’t even afford wheat buns. But the last few times, he never mentioned his daughter.
“Haven’t you been to see her?” I asked him.
He brushed the question off: “What… what is there to s-see?”
He obviously didn’t want to talk about it, and I didn’t dare probe. Then I made a research trip to Dingxi in Gansu province, to Hengshan and Suide in Yulin prefecture, and Bin county, Chunhua, and Xunyi in the northern part of Xianyang prefecture. This was all loess plateau, and every time we drove along the ridge-top roads we would come across some woman coming back from digging potatoes, her face weathered and sun-burnt, bent double under the weight of a great basket, hobbling along bandy-legged, and I thought of my neighbour’s daughter. In one village we passed by the strip in front of someone’s house. It was piled high with farm tools of all sorts, and there was a donkey and a pig, a dog and a flock of chickens, and Chinese bellflowers and angelica laid out on the ground at the door of their cave to dry in the sun. A man was hunkered down eating his dinner, and there was a woman too, wiping her baby’s nose and shouting imprecations at the people next door. She slapped her own behind and swore energetically at them. I thought of my neighbour’s daughter then too. We strolled around the market and were driving on to the next village, when at the crossroads we came across a child trying to catch grasshoppers in a clump of grass, studiously ignoring his grandmother who was shouting for him. She put down the basket she had been carrying on her arm, and called: “Who wants some flatbread?” Still the child did not come, but the sparrows and crows and eagles did, and by the time the kid arrived with a grasshopper clutched in his fist, there was no flatbread left in the basket, only something that looked like a bone but was actually one of her teeth that had fallen out in the market. She had brought it home to throw up on the house roof. Then, too, I thought of my neighbour’s daughter.
When I was young, death was just a word, a concept, a philosophical question, about which we had enthusiastic discussions that we didn’t take too seriously, but after I turned fifty, friends and family began to die off one after another, until finally my mother and father died. After that I began to develop a fear of death, albeit an unspoken one. In the same way, when a short while ago cases of trafficking of women and children began to appear in the media, it felt as remote from my own life as if I was reading a foreign novel about the slave trade. But after I had heard what happened to the daughter of my village neighbour, it all became more personal; when I walked down the street, I stared at the passers-by, imagining which one was a trafficker. And if relatives came to visit with their children or grandchildren, I warned them to keep a close eye on the little ones as I saw them off at the door.
I was born and grew up in a village and didn’t come to Xi’an until I was nineteen. So I thought I knew everything there was to know about rural life. But at the beginning of the 1980s, I had a conversation with a Women’s Federation cadre, and she said research had revealed that sixty per cent of village women had never experienced sexual pleasure. I remember that my mouth dropped open in astonishment. Ten years ago, when my village neighbour’s daughter was kidnapped, I paid a visit to the police, where I found out that they did not know the figures for the number of city women and children kidnapped each year (because it was hard to verify whether or not a kidnap had taken place), but proven, reported cases of people who had gone missing ran into the thousands. That astonished me too.
In fact, if you look carefully, every lamppost in every street and alleyway in the city, every signpost and every telephone box is festooned with Missing Person notices. Most of the missing are women and children, and most are apparently kidnap victims. And why do such incidents happen largely in the city (you hardly ever get notices like that in the countryside)? Kidnapping for ransom is understandable, as is theft of property, and even the theft of livestock and pets that are then sold on. But why does this barbarous practice of snatching women and children persist in our increasingly civilised age?
The recent transformation of China has led to the biggest migration of people from countryside to the city in history. Take Xi’an, for example: this is an ancient city but everywhere you see young faces, neatly dressed, with fashionable hairstyles, all taking cute selfies on their mobile phones, but all also talking in every conceivable kind of regional dialect. It is obvious that eighty to ninety per cent of them come from the countryside. In the building where I live, most of the rooms are rented out to young peo