Choose Your Own Ending
I’ve been reading a lot of nonfiction books about China these days, and Chinese fiction, because I was invited recently to Sun Yat-sen University’s inaugural International Writer’s Residency, which will convene this fall with a 28-day program that will include readings and workshops, but mostly three weeks of extended time for “reflection and writing.” This last part will take place in Yangshuo, as idyllic a spot on the planet as I’ve ever seen.
Whenever the anticipation of travel kicks in, I turn to books—history and journalism, of course, but especially fiction, all to allow my ignorant eyes the opportunity of opening just a little wider. So many more books to go! I’m especially looking forward to Decoded: A Novel, by Mai Jia; another novel, A Dictionary of Maqiao, by Han Shaogong; and a science-fiction novel by Cixin Lui, The Three-Body Problem.
One of the best books I’ve read so far is Yu Hua’s memoir, China in Ten Words. Yu is the author of the celebrated novel To Live, made into an equally celebrated film. Yu’s memoir is filled with insights into the recent history of China, but the best parts for me are those where he recounts his budding love of reading and writing when he was a child living in an isolated town during China’s Cultural Revolution of the ’60s and ’70s. Even at a young age, Yu had a love of stories, and he’d scour the footnotes of Selected Works of Mao Zedong because they contained “explanatory summaries of historical events and biographical details about historical figures . . . Although there was no emotion to be found in the footnotes, they did have stories, and they did have characters.”
During the strict fervor of the Cultural Revolution, books of fiction (“poisonous weeds”) were more often burned than read, and yet some did survive. These forbidden books were passed secretly from reader to reader, thousands of readers, and by the time one of them reached Yu, “they were in a terrible state of disrepair, with easily a dozen or more pages missing from the beginning and the same number missing at the end. So I knew neither the books’ titles nor their authors, neither how the stories began nor how they ended.”
An incomplete book was no deterrent to a reader desperate for the internal paths nurtured by narrative, but there was also a cost. “To not know how a story began was not such a hardship,” Yu continues, “but to not know how it ended was a painful deprivation. Every time I read one of these headless, tailless novels I was like an ant on a hot wok, running around everywhere in search of someone who could tell me the ending. But everyone was in the same boat. Such was our experience of reading: our books were constantly losing pages as they passed through the hands of several—or several dozen—readers. It left me disconsolate, mentally cursing those earlier readers who had been able to finish the book but never bothered to stick the pages that had fallen out back in.”
And then came a moment for Yu when those difficulties no longer mattered, and their frustrations disappeared: “Nobody could help me, so I began to think up endings for myself . . . Every night when I went to bed and turned off the light, my eyes would blink as I entered the world of imagination, creating endings to those stories that stirred me so deeply tears would run down my face. It was, I realize now, good training for things to come, and I owe a debt to those truncated novels for sparking creative tendencies in me.”
This is a wonderful story of deprivation overcome, chronicling as it does the birth of a major writer’s imagination, a young boy lying in the dark and granting himself—as he might never have otherwise—the permission to invent.
Those missing endings that Yu learned to supply for himself could easily be adapted into a writing exercise. This summer I’ll be teaching a short creative writing course, “The Art of Revision,” and I think I’ll pick a short story from the reading assignments and cut out its last page. Then I’ll ask each student to write his or her own version of the missing ending. Comparing notes should be instructive on the multiple ways a story might be ended, how one possibility might be more satisfying than another, or if a definitive resolution suffers in comparison with a more ambiguous ending. I’m thinking here of Kazuo Ishiguro’s short story “A Family Supper,” in which the reader is left uncertain whether or not the patriarch of a family has served his son and daughter a dish of fugu, a fatally poisonous pufferfish.
There are other ways of reinventing the endgame of a story, such as the African oral literature form called a dilemma tale, but I’ll save that for another post.
Tagged with: African oral literature • China in Ten Words • Chinese literature • dilemma tales • Sun Yat-sen University • Yangshuo • Yu HuaRecent Entries
- May 2023
- March 2023
- January 2023
- December 2022
- August 2022
- July 2022
- December 2021
- October 2021
- February 2021
- January 2021
- September 2020
- August 2020
- January 2020
- August 2019
- December 2018
- November 2018
- September 2018
- June 2018
- April 2018
- October 2017
- May 2017
- March 2017
- January 2017
- November 2016
- September 2016
- January 2016
- October 2015
- August 2015
- June 2015
- May 2015
- March 2015
- February 2015
- November 2014
- August 2014
- May 2014
- December 2013
- November 2013
- October 2013
- August 2013
- June 2013
- May 2013
- March 2013
- December 2012
- July 2012
- May 2012
- March 2012
- January 2012
- December 2011
- October 2011
- September 2011
- July 2011
- June 2011
- May 2011
- April 2011
- March 2011
- February 2011
- January 2011
- December 2010
- November 2010
- October 2010
- September 2010
- August 2010
- July 2010
- June 2010
- May 2010
- April 2010
- March 2010
- February 2010
- January 2010
- December 2009
- November 2009
- October 2009
Blogroll
- 3bute
- 3quarksdaily
- 99% Invisible
- A Newbie's Guide to Publishing
- A Space for Image
- Adam Deutsch
- Alma Gottlieb
- American Nyckelharpa Association
- Asymptote
- Best in Portugal
- Brevity
- Cabaret Mechanical Theatre
- Caipirinha Lounge
- CinemaDivina
- Cooper Dillon Books
- Critical Mass
- Defunct Magazine
- Dispatches from Stay More
- Dzanc Books
- Emergency
- Fiction Writers Review
- Flavorwire
- Guernica
- HTMLGIANT
- Hunger Mountain
- identitytheory
- In Love with Lisbon
- Ivebeenreadinglately
- John Bresland Video Essays
- John Martyn
- Leite's Culinaria
- Like Fire
- McSweeney's Internet Tendency
- Mira's List
- Miriam's Well
- Moving to Portugal
- Mundo Pessoa
- My American Meltingpot
- NewPages Blog
- Ninth Letter
- Numero Cinq
- Oi Musica
- Open Letters Monthly
- Os Tempos Que Correm
- Patagonian Road
- Portuguese American Journal
- Powerhouse Arena
- Practicing Writing
- Quarterly Conversation
- Remembering English
- Richard Hoffman blog
- Rigmarole
- Rui Zink versos livro
- Sahelsounds
- shadowbox
- Significant Objects
- Songlines
- Spiritual Crossroads
- St. Petersburg Review
- The Alchemist's Kitchen
- The Book Bench
- The Brink of Something Else
- The Common
- The Education of Oronte Churm
- The Literary Saloon
- The Millions
- The Morning News
- The Mouth of the River
- The Rumpus
- The World's Fair
- The Writer and the Wanderer
- things magazine
- Three Percent
- Times Literary Supplement
- Tywkiwdbi
- Words without Borders
- Write the Book
- Writer Abroad
- Young and Hip
Sounds like a terrific residency and a great course. Thanks for the titles too. Might have to read the memoir!
Yes, there are so many more stories in Yu’s memoir about reading and the writing life, wild tales that make your head spin!