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4 - Escape: Out of and into Various Places ‘Real’ and Imagined

Published online by Cambridge University Press:  27 January 2021

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Summary

One Afternoon's Assorted Emotions – 个下午的零碎感受

each and every event speeds away from us

the room is cramped

and we are confined within it

all we can do is watch, like we were sitting on

some unique planet

that didn't move and that made us sit still with it

when an apple

drops from your hand in an instant of carelessness

we are both shocked, seeing it as an omen

perhaps it's the truth

that we’ll both wind up like this:

two people abandoned by everything

there's something special about this feeling

of being shut in, of being under some kind of curse

outside time and velocity

our feet become things of no use

this afternoon drags on – the one thing we are capable of doing

is to wait as the world screams on its way

with autumn once more outside our window

Jin Haishu 金海曙 (2005; translation by Simon Patton)

Sometimes I need to leave the surface of the earth, sometimes I need to be full of love for the entire world, I need some ecstasy […] This candy-coated city, blurred but seductive, where the speed of the car controls my mood and heartbeat. When he speeds up, I feel good, but when it's more than I can take, he slows down. The taxi driver puts on the music I brought with me, the elevated highway becomes soft, and my eyes stand up, and my eyes lie down. Warm and gentle sparks embrace the emptiness; when the music plays and the bloodred pipes in my head begin to melt, I feel myself stepping into another skin.

I’ve decided to go to China Groove on weekend nights.

Mian Mian, in Candy (2003: 207)

While in Jin Haishu's poem, the lyrical subject and her/his lover are locked into their room, waiting ‘as the world screams on its way’ outside their window, the protagonist in Mian Mian's Candy is in the midst of that very dazzling world outside, as she speeds over the elevated highway to yet another nightclub.

Type
Chapter
Information
Shanghai Literary Imaginings
A City in Transformation
, pp. 201 - 242
Publisher: Amsterdam University Press
Print publication year: 2015

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