The Reincarnated Giant: Twenty-First-Century Chinese Science Fiction Read online

  The woman later told me that what the disaster victims needed most at the time actually was not housing. I understood what she was saying, since I later also lost the one I loved most and lived like a zombie for the rest of my life. Be that as it may, when winter came the woman did move into a new brick house that she had made herself, simply because she could not endure the cold winter living in a thin tent. The biological instincts accumulated in her body over tens of thousands of years expressed themselves, and the desire to live on gradually resurrected itself. She even somewhat bashfully wrote to a female reporter from Beijing who had interviewed her, asking if she could contribute some padded clothing or quilts. It never occurred to her, however, to be grateful to the architect-cum-artist, although it was he who had saved her life as well as taught her how to construct such an avant-garde house. She furnished her house only a bit, hanging on the walls photos of her husband and child that she had plucked from the ruins. She abided in her empty house, seemingly unaccustomed to it. The future was still a vague blur.

  But just that evening she heard the voices of two people flowing out of the seams between the bricks. She stood up with a shiver and began enumerating each brick. She was not afraid but realized both in surprise and happiness that building a house using regenerated brick was not only for herself to live in.

  The next year even more people came to live in houses made of regenerated brick. The woman also had her own small-scale brick factory, which provided an income. She did this in partnership with a middle-aged man who had previously run a small building materials business and had also lost his family in the disaster. They hired two workmen and every day worked tirelessly to produce brick. People in the locality who needed to build houses came to buy the bricks they produced. It was as if things had returned to predisaster days.

  “How do you buy the bricks?” asked someone from a neighboring village as he pointed to the neatly lined-up bricks. “Thirty-three cents a batch,” replied the well-versed woman. The villager picked up a brick as he was going by and asked, “Why is it black?” “It is made out of the rubble from collapsed buildings.” “Is it sturdy?” “Absolutely, it’s made using a new technology.” Finally, she smiled and added, “Rest assured; it’s also been thoroughly disinfected.”

  When they saw how the business was thriving, the villagers who had not participated in the original brickmaking grew regretful, so they all set up their own brick works, or at least brickmaking family workshops.

  Not long thereafter that woman married the man who made bricks with her, and a year later they had a child. That child was me. It is said that my birth was a terribly difficult process, a home birth that lasted the whole night, with mother screaming miserably the whole time, as if she were trying to call something back. The walls of the house erupted with huge, strange sounds, like running water, as if wanting to rip something apart; Father stood to one side helplessly, calling on the bodhisattva for protection. This is the only thing I remember about my birth. Later I grew up among these peculiar sounds and gradually became accustomed to them. It was not Mother’s milk but another method of nourishing me, with the deceased who lived in the regenerated brick watching me grow up with what seemed to be gray countenances. I dreaded this at first. I would howl all day long, unable to calm down, eating or drinking nothing, and the doctor could do nothing. Eventually my parents discussed it and invited in a Buddhist monk to perform a ceremony to release the souls of the departed. This was the first time something like this had occurred to them, and they were quite ill at ease.

  “Don’t blame us, we did want to keep you here, but things have changed. I’ve moved into a new house and also have a new family. I had to do this for my child, so please forgive me,” the woman said to them as she walked over to the photo of her late husband and child. She then took the photos of the deceased down, wrapped them up in a cloth, and put them in the cupboard.

  The monk arrived. According to the understanding of Buddhism, after people die they travel to the liminal state of bardo, where after seven times seven, or 49, days they obtain a new life. If because of certain factors, however, this journey could not proceed and the destination could not be reached, not just in seven times seven, or 49, days or 490 days or 4,900 days … the destination could never be reached and the bardo transmigration would be stretched on without limit. Because of the architect, the deceased were suspended in this world and were unable to transmigrate into new lives. My parents believed that only a Buddhist service could remove this impediment. But still they hesitated: was doing this the right thing or not?

  The monk, however, failed. When the ceremony had reached its midpoint, the spaces between the bricks began to emit a strange sound like the lowing of cattle, which overwhelmed the monk’s sutra recitation and his beating of the wooden blocks that accompanied it, and the house seemed to shake, with fragments of brick falling from the walls. The monk’s countenance changed abruptly as he shouted out “Earthquake!” sheltered his head in panic, and fled, treading on his cassock as he went. None of us moved a bit, and my parents were in a trance as they contemplated whatever was on their minds.

  When the ceremony was performed I was still a child, lying in my cradle with my eyes wide open, staring at the void above me. The regenerated brick was like a set of nets encircling me completely, to the point that even my parents disappeared from my field of vision. And in this great world there was only a spider overhead, ignorantly and fearlessly moving about; my only thought was that his eyes were big, really big, and it was only with it that I could have a soundless dialogue. The monk’s ceremony was thus, of course, also a baptism for me, and I felt it possessed a sense of reality, but I also felt a desolation for religion in its final moment of abjection—it was extremely odd that I had that consciousness just then. I knew that I was ordained to be accompanied by things I didn’t understand for the rest of my life. A new type of life different from that lived by the previous generation was about to begin, but were we prepared for it? In fact, from the moment the monk fled the house I stopped my weeping, not to mention gaining a strong appetite for food, and a sense of maturity. Mother saw this in me and came over to hold me at her breast and nurse me; I was quite anxious, fearing that she was going to shed tears, but her expression remained determined and calm.

  From that point on I became accustomed to coexisting with regenerated brick and no longer believed in old-fashioned transmigration. Probably art can overturn anything.

  But it was not merely art. After I grew up I came into contact with what we call the scientific explanation for those strange noises. For instance, the American scholar A. Palliser believes that hallucinations and strange sounds possibly originate in a person reflecting upon and being concerned about a lost relative or friend and thus wishing to share these scenes and feelings that he or she has seen and heard with others.

  Another explanation is that this was perhaps a function of collective suggestion. In a group, each person generally has a feeling of having lost his or her independent character, resulting in an impulse for imitation, which produces a kind of reciprocal influence. Under this influence a common mood is produced in which everyone sees and hears the same things. This is especially true in a disaster zone in which the minds of tens of thousands of people have been badly wounded, so it is easy to produce this sort of response.

  If the above still belongs in the realm of traditional psychology, then parapsychology believes that such things as strange sounds are perhaps produced by the psychological energy of survivors. To explain it more profoundly, it touches upon the complicated relationship between material and consciousness.

  There is also an explanation that comes from acoustic phenomena. The crisis produced a huge energy when it took place, such that the electromagnetic field changed, and both the earth’s crust and the atmosphere were no longer the same. This caused the ordinary bricks and tiles in the ruins to become able to record sound, and the final sounds of people as they departed were thus recorded on
the tiles and bricks. And regenerated brick made from these became a resonating body, which, in particular circumstances, could broadcast the voices of one’s relatives.

  None of these explanations, however, resolved the doubts that remained deep in my mind. I merely became even more excited about them.

  Many years later, after regenerated brick had become a nationwide vogue, and even university architecture departments had established regenerated-brick studies, I surprised everyone by not choosing this exceedingly hot topic as my field of study. It was as if I purposely avoided it. But in my spare time I continued to pay close attention—or perhaps better to say a sort of vigilance. A female classmate of mine was mesmerized by it. She was from the city, and she often sought me out to discuss it.

  “Is it the case that every new house in your village has those strange sounds in them?”

  “Only those made from regenerated brick; there’s no doubt that the voices of deceased family members flow out of the spaces between the bricks like water from a spring.”

  “That’s really beautiful. My feeling is that people have completely merged with nature, and that nature and these people have become one body.”

  “But don’t you feel that between them there is a mentality of mutual hatred and that it’s a grudging merger?”

  “Can it really be called grudging?”

  “To be passively bound together via a method over which you have no control, as if you clearly understand something is poison but that you must drink it. Human life is generally nothing more than this.”

  “But this truly is art, or, perhaps, transcends art.… Is it not also poison? To take life and death and congeal them into one. It really is something to be envied.”

  “Art? Wow, you didn’t personally experience the catastrophe …” At this point my heart was pounding so that I thought it would jump out of my chest. Just then I wanted to strip this girl and do her on a pile of regenerated brick.

  “No matter what, it seems as if only fine and primeval handicraft production could produce this result. It’s both wonderful and mysterious.”

  “I’m afraid that has to do with the fact that we actually lived in the ruins.”

  It was my habit early every morning to climb to the top of the classroom building wearing only my underwear and look west. The heavy air pollution kept me from seeing very far, so all that was within my field of vision was heap after heap of gray buildings, like so many pieces of paper, but so sluggish they could never soar up like pigeons. They were for the moment not ruins, but they contained the intrinsic logic of ruins. Not to mention that in regenerated-brick studies, everything was taken as ruins for the sake of research. This sort of mentality would seem to be closer to the basic nature of the world. At such times I would often see my classmate, wearing very little and running repeatedly around the track. Her graceful figure, covered with sweat, combining the obscured sun with a slight burning made her seem like a frail phoenix.

  —Yes, truly beautiful, how she elicited envy. But this was merely the beginning of the day. I couldn’t help thinking of her birth and childhood. What sort of noises accompanied her growing up?

  She already expressed her love for me.

  I couldn’t bear it.

  But what is regenerated brick? Around this question, the academic world produced any number of definitions, which were often contradictory. Within regenerated-brick studies many research articles took defining what they were as their topic. Once people became immersed in conceptual dispute, teachers and their students would fall out over it.

  In order to resolve this vexing issue, regenerated-brick studies developed into an interdisciplinary field, not restricted to architectural studies. It absorbed the most recent achievements of physics, chemistry, and biology, among others. Regenerated brick came to be understood as a kind of composite material, a kind of helix based on the energy of shock waves, or even a kind of effect of a Bose-Einstein distribution. It perhaps had to do with high dimensional space, a wormhole in time-space. Regenerated brick had reordered the electromagnetic and gravitational fields, transformed some of the qualities of physical space, and renewed its geometry. All this produced extraordinary results, allowing us to hear the voices of dead relatives.

  But why did this have to be via regenerated bricks? They were, after all, something quite low-tech. Perhaps, then, we needed to reconceptualize our notions about technology itself. What is our understanding of ideas about “high” and “low”? It is not necessarily directly related to a soul reanimating the corpse of another, the intervention of mysterious external forces, superintelligent beings in the universe, or even of God. What regenerated bricks represent is something much more recondite, which will completely revise the science, philosophy, and theology of our world.

  And in the disaster area, under the impetus of the invisible hand of the market, the regenerated-brick industry has already progressed to a considerable extent. The new-style brick factories have long since ceased to be labor-intensive enterprises, and now seven people can, using computerized controls, easily produce forty thousand bricks a day. This is the scale Mother’s factory eventually reached.

  An important event that took place later was the entry of the government into the production of regenerated brick, reaching in its visible hand. The news media reported on this in the following way:

  Amid a deafening sound, mountainous piles of construction debris are devoured by “ravenous” machines and pulverized, the resulting material sent by conveyor belt to another machine, where it is compacted into forms that conform to quality standards; thus brick after brick is born—this was something this correspondent saw in person on the production line of this city’s regenerated-brick project. At present, the production line has already begun mass production.

  According to a briefing, the site of the production line for this construction debris occupies 205 mu, and its equipment represents an investment of 4,150,000 yuan. The production line is able to produce wall-building material such as standard bricks and cinder block, as well as brick for a variety of functions such as road edging and decorative brick. Each year, the production line processes 400,000 tons of debris and produces approximately 50 million standard bricks, enough to build 150 thousand square meters of brick and concrete dwellings or 500 thousand square meters of framed dwellings.

  According to a briefing by a representative of the city construction committee, this project has been a beneficial attempt at dealing with construction debris via social investment and has established a firm foundation for the next step in the social processing of construction debris of the entire urban disaster zone in an orderly and scientific manner. It is an important part of the postdisaster reconstruction work, plays a positive role in protecting our urban environmental resources, and has extremely important social benefits.

  Reports like this one reveal that the production of regenerated brick has not only transcended the level of handicraft production and entered the stage of industrial mass production, but they also entail more complex and deeper meanings, touching on such spheres as politics, economics, and the social, and from there going on to even more gloriously display their Eastern characteristics. People, however, seldom brought up their original artistic quality and that they had been shown at an artistic exhibition in the West. When someone would occasionally bring up the subject, others would consciously avoid it, and their faces would reveal an expression that resembled having been snubbed.

  People would continuously come to the disaster zone, insisting that they wished to buy brick. They were somewhat out of the ordinary, however, since they didn’t want anything produced on the assembly line but rather bricks produced by hand. At first the villagers really wished to understand why this was the case.

  They were actually tourists to the disaster zone—the disaster zone had become reconstructed as a tourist area, and the tourists inevitably wished to take home souvenirs, with regenerated brick being a most distinctive product that elicited much at
tention. Taking into consideration the needs of tourists, the brick producers recalled their first principles and reprogrammed their brick production to include individual artistry. For instance, they drew pictures on the bricks, like the local bamboo, or pandas, or the scenery, things that true artists (like the architect) regarded as unspeakably vulgar but that now unaccountably added much to the splendor of the brick. As a result, the production of tourist souvenirs also became a part of how the brick-production chain became ever more prosperous. One of the jobs at Mother’s brick factory was just this: every day her workers would drive over to the scenic area, busily delivering brick to souvenir stands there. When Mother saw the brick being taken far away, a girlish radiance would float across her face.