Chen Qiufan Read online

  The crabs crawled along the wires of their cage like fruits on a vine. Magpies, startled by the crabs’ snapping claws, spread their wings and scattered across the sky. The eight immortals crossing the sea made a zigzag instead and ran smack into the outlaws about to take refuge in the Liangshan Marsh. The heroes of the Three Kingdoms swore their oath to become brothers in the Peach Garden, and their witnesses were Mencius’ mother, who raised the sage alone, and the ancient giant Kuafu who chased the sun. This small, confined carved sculpture became a hodgepodge of endless time and boundless space.

  I stared at the scene before my eyes, utterly spellbound. The legends that Father have told me back in my childhood all came to life at once. “You mean the gold-lacquered wood carving is also a kind of historical synchronic narrative?”

  “Well, I think wood carving is the best way to talk and learn about history. When you were a baby, you used to spend ages lying on our bed, caressing the wood carving while muttering syllables to yourself. Remember?”

  Of course I remembered. The hard and cold texture of wood and the hills and pits of the complex carvings were my first introduction to the world beyond my own body. My fingertip, brushing past the arcs, curves, and undulations, was like a time traveler who embraced lives and stories from a thousand different worlds. Fictional or real, those stories, shimmering with gold, were ingrained in my memory through touch.

  I was beginning to understand why Father wanted me to come here.

  “Speaking of the robot you’ve been meaning to use, the art it creates is completely soulless if there isn’t a real craftsman to guide its hands. People nowadays are so obsessed with the virtual world that they keep on forgetting that physical bodies are a thing!”

  Coming from you, a virtual avatar! I muttered to myself. “So you’re not against technology, after all?”

  “Using technology right is like adding wings to a tiger, you can only make things more powerful. Using technology the wrong way, though, will only bring harm and ruin our ancestors’ efforts. You know why I never agreed upon your plan in the past? I was worried that you were dreaming a little too big . . . ” Father paused for a second, “Or, not big enough.”

  “Not big enough?”

  “Sure, technology will enhance production efficiency, but what more? Your proposed innovation is superficial; it changes the flesh, but not the soul. I think technology has a lot more to offer us. Technology can lead to the rebirth of the gold-lacquered wood carving by reconceiving it, instilling in it new aesthetics, and adjusting it to fit into our future.”

  Father was right, I realized. Originally, I thought about having robots learn the craft of wood carving and gradually replace human craftsmen in the next three years, so we could mass-produce gold-lacquered wood carving like never before. Yet, if we took the memory and the sentiment away—the human essence of handicraft—would anyone truly care for those assembly-line produced, soulless things? Mass production at its best would only help us win a low-price competition, nothing more. This future I envisioned for the Huang clan was a dead end. In Father’s words, we needed to take the best of both worlds and produce something new: gold-lacquered wood carving that combined the advantages of both machines and humans, fit for our contemporary time. No matter how much its form and shape shifted, it would always preserve the essence of artisanship.

  “I think I know what you mean now. But my brothers . . . ”

  “Look back at the way you came,” responded Father.

  “What?” I turned around. My gaze passed through the back courtyard, middle hall, front courtyard, and landed on the glistening pond outside the memorial archway. My brain reminded me that something was not right.

  “So what did you see?” asked Father.

  “Well, if the entire ancestral temple was built on the same horizontal plane, it would be impossible for me to see all of its structures at once. Which means . . . ”

  “The ancestral hall is designed with a three-part structure. The front courtyard to the middle hall is the first part, the back courtyard to the main hall is the second part. Every part is about three feet higher than the previous part. Thus, walking into the ancestral temple is like climbing up the ladder of success: with every step you take, you get a little higher.”

  “You mean . . . ”

  “I mean that you need to see past the land beneath your feet. Only when you are standing up taller can you expand your horizons and see what’s out there in the wider world. Your brothers have already agreed that you’re the best person to take the Huang clan’s wood carving art to a new level—to make it into something that truly fits the needs of this era. Don’t worry. No matter what you choose to do, you will have our support.”

  I swallowed hard, trying to get rid of the lump in my throat. I gazed into Father’s eyes, utterly wordless. He had planned everything out long ago; and yet for almost his whole life, I had accused him of bigotry and conservativeness.

  “Why didn’t you tell me this earlier?” I stuttered, my voice trembling.

  “You didn’t really give me a chance, did you? You haven’t contacted me in so long, let alone visited home. Was I really going to go looking for you in the virtual world?” Father’s words sounded like a familiar scolding, yet his voice was gentle, even melancholic. A slight smile emerged on his face, “I didn’t expect that my time would be up so soon, though. Sonny, I wish I could have talked to you more . . . ”

  “Dad . . . ”

  Tears rushed out of my eyes. Instinctively, I turned my head toward the pond to avoid Father’s gaze—yet I forgot: registering my real tears was evidently not programmed into the now-virtual Father’s algorithm.

  I took a deep breath and turned back again. Father had already vanished into the forest of memorial tablets.

  His mission was complete, but my mission has just begun.

  * * *

  In the virtual main hall of the Huang clan’s ancestral temple, my brothers and I knelt together and kowtowed for three times. Then we waited.

  Everything was the same as the first time. The rather ridiculous looking old man, clumsy and plump, wiggled out from his memorial tablet. “Sonny, you’re here,” he exclaimed.

  My brothers were clearly not expecting to see this. Stunned, they stared blankly at Father. Gods know how much effort it took me to convince them to celebrate Chinese New Year with me in this absurd way.

  Trying to alleviate the awkwardness, I waved my hand at Father. “Dad, it’s New Year! We’re here to visit you. We brought a present, too!”

  My gesture summoned a wooden box. The box hovered above the pond at the gate of the ancestral temple, glowing as the sunlight reflected off of its reddish-black surface. Its reflection on the water surface vibrated, just like how my body was trembling from the nervous energy.

  To create the desired visual effect, I changed the object ratio of the box to 1:1000. Gazing out from the main hall, I could see that the box was virtually the size of half a soccer court. Dazzling gold light seeped through the few arc-shaped cracks on the box, as if hinting at the magnificence confined inside.

  “I knew you’d come. You’re different from the rest of them . . . ”

  “Dad, don’t you want to look at our gift first?” I cut him off. The intelligence level and social awareness of this simulacrum were the same as the weather in June—you can never predict its highs and lows.

  “Yes, yes . . . ”

  The three of us stood together and piled our right palms on top of one another, our faces completely solemn. A gold light rose from our hands and ripped through the air, aiming for the wooden box. As the light passed by the back courtyard, the middle hall, and the front courtyard, all the porcelain statues also came to life: the cranes flapped their wings, the qilin dashed off into the distance, deities and demons alike played instruments and danced, forming an orchestra of harmony . . . I made a mental note to myself to praise the advertisement team that I hired to do the job. Today was the big day. Better put on the best perfo
rmance we could manage—for the dead, for the living, and for the three hundred thousand viewers out there watching our livecast.

  The gold light struck the box. Ripples of light dissipated in every direction. “Also Sprach Zarathustra” by Richard Strauss and Howie Lee’s remix of Teochew Yingge folk dance music vibrated through the sky and rang in everyone’s ears. The sublimity of mysticism, underlain by the rowdy rhythm of mundane everyday life, was disassembled in a way not unlike drawn thread work, and then rewoven into a vast Dolby holographic sound field. In turn, the sound was delivered to the bone conduction headphones of each viewer watching this virtual livecast via the white box. The auditory sense was integral to this ceremony; hearing would help the viewers empathize better.

  Slowly, the wooden box opened.

  The scene before everyone’s eyes was the exemplar of a new era of enlightenment: a piece of art co-created by machines and humans, a hybrid of the Rube Goldberg machine and the Luban burr puzzle.Magnificent, delicate blocks of gold-lacquered wood carving were assembled together in mortise-tenon style. The space frame, transcending even the wildest imagination, was something completely impossible for mortals to create. If you restore the order and perspective angle of those arbitrarily positioned blocks, though, they would at once transform into a stage play about time-space and human history. Thanks to the mechanics, all of this was able to take place without any external power source. This tiny wooden box was the nutshell that encapsulated infinite space, the oyster that held a thousand worlds.

  What’s better, I was able to incorporate Father’s idea in my design. Every box told a story: from eons ago to the modern age, from the oldest myths to the latest technology, from abstract ideas to concrete artworks . . . machines couldn’t draw inferences between seemingly unrelated elements, conceptually or visually, but the human brain could. The box in front of us right now told the long story that began with goddess Chang’e abandoning her mortal life through drinking an elixir that gave her the ability to fly to the moon and ended with the establishment of the Moon Base. It was a narrative complete on its own, concise, powerful, vivid, and rich with symbols.

  The live viewer count grew steadily.

  By solving the puzzle of a wooden box, you could understand a history, apprehend a concept, immerse in a story, or even experience an entirely unfamiliar culture. In this process, however, you are required to interact with this heavy box with your physical body: caressing it with your fingers, smelling it with your nose, interpreting—deciphering—feeling its intricacy and glory from every possible perspective. It will become a part of your body memory, just like once Father has told me. This unique experience, grounded in physicality, is exclusive to humankind, irreplaceable by robots or algorithms.

  You could even customize a box that contained the story of your family. By handing the box to the people you love and care about, the memory gets passed on—to Teochew, to California, to Mars, to the end of the universe. These boxes are ancestral temples that you can hold in your hands.

  And today, through livecasting a carnival in a boxed-up ancestral temple, I was able to demonstrate the concept of our ultimate product to eight hundred thousand—no, one million—people in this world. I knew that those people would in turn spread the word and idea around like nuclear fission.

  Father glided toward my brothers and I and patted us on the shoulders, though I couldn’t feel his touch at all. He nodded in his ordinary matter-of-fact way, “Not bad. Looks like you didn’t disgrace the Huang clan after all. Have you thought of a name for it yet?”

  I glanced at my brothers. “We’re still talking about it. I insisted that the character chao must be a part of the name.”

  Father was silent, as if lost in thought. I didn’t know whether there was a glitch in the algorithm or if he was simply pausing for effect.

  “Chao as in Chaoshan, the Mandarin name for us Teochews, means tide. Wherever there is gravity, there is tide; wherever there is tide, there is life. It’s the ebbs and flows that make up a long and prosperous life. Chao is good, chao is good . . . ”

  Father’s words were interrupted by firecrackers that crackled and spluttered noisily. The box finished unfolding itself. The entire history of humankind conquering space now lay before our eyes, shimmering with glorious gold. Magically, I realized this was how I remembered New Year to be as a child: a fresh start to nearly four hundred new days of hope and positivity. Now so many years have passed, and the only way I could re-experience the New Year of my childhood was in a virtual ancestral temple.

  All of a sudden, I yearned to return to a different reality, to give my family a hug—even though they may not be the most amiable or understanding people you can find. At least I still have a physical body that could embrace, experience, and feel all the imperfections of this world.

  Maybe it was time to leave the box behind.

  Originally published in Chinese in Non-exist Daily, Sci-fi Spring Festival, January 24th, 2019.

  Translated and published in partnership with Storycom.

  Translator’s note on Teochew culture:

  The Teochew (Chaozhou) people are native to Guangdong province, China, and are spread across various Southern regions and Southeast Asian countries. The Teochew prefecture in Guangdong, known as Chaoshan in Mandarin, traditionally included Shantou, Chaozhou, Jieyang, and Shanwei. Teochew people speak their own dialect, the Teochew dialect, which is a derivative of the Minnan dialect of Southern China. The gold-lacquered wood carving (jinqi mudiao) mentioned in this story is a traditional art of the Teochew people.