Giant Ape by Lu Nei, translated from Chinese by Edward Allen
The short story that follows was adapted by the author Lu Nei 路内 from a story within a chapter of his five-part work Mistwalkers 雾行者, published on 1.1.2020.
A.
In 2008 I wrote my BA thesis on post-avant-garde avant-garde literature. The Wenchuan earthquake occurred on the day of my viva. I was in Hangzhou, 2000 kilometres from the epicentre, though nonetheless my head was suddenly spinning. That was the first time I became aware of seismic infrasound. After the earthquake passed, so did all the news, and you know what happened next. My dissertation was begrudgingly approved since some of the citations were taken from underground literature (my viva professors’ heads might have spun as well). Then I wound up in Beijing, alone, instead of following a handful of classmates off to the disaster zone. I rented lodgings at a relative’s home, and planned to find a job in literature.
Two things happened around that time. Firstly, I developed an interest in this seismic infrasound, of which I had the scantiest knowledge as a material phenomenon, and for which I tried to locate some metaphorical relationship between physical experiment and literary criticism, like my own Theory of Relativity, for example, or Schrodinger’s Cat, or Chaos Theory. Naturally these metaphors were the most fraught with danger of any, as they were meaningless. Put against literary meaninglessness, meaninglessness in literary theory is simply arson. I had to exercise caution veering towards inappropriate language, failing despite great efforts, partly because my dissertation defense had concluded and there was no need to actually worry further. In my free time I found some infrasound materials online, every bit of it superficial pop knowledge. I learned of the damage caused by infrasound at different frequencies: 7000 Hz can’t pass through paper, but 7 Hz can make objects in the immediate vicinity resonate, destroying concrete and hearts. I learned things like that.
Secondly, a friend returned from the disaster zone, having worked for two weeks rescuing injured personnel and dispensing bottled water and food to disaster victims. He had been witness to death in huge numbers, impossible for the average man to stomach in a lifetime; he was still young and considering writing down that period of history into a novel. We discussed infrasound and the contemporary fad of writing poems about the disaster zone, my friend deriding them and the very behaviour itself. At the time I delicately challenged this view: wasn’t writing a novel all the same? Time, he answered me, after prolonged hesitation. A poem is made in too brief a time. It’s a shoddy answer but time’s the only place we can still put our hopes. My friend said this was all like gamma rays after a supernova, which cross the vastness of the universe to reach Earth.
A decade later I met him again. He still hadn’t written that novel, as he said, pen hadn’t even met paper. I imagined he might have written it — a few thousand words, perhaps over ten-thousand words — at some time. But he tapped out. Much time had passed; discussing it was basically meaningless. As we ate our meal, however, I couldn’t hold back commenting: There’s been quite a bit of documentary literature and poetry this decade, but not one novelist writing about the disaster (well maybe there was, but I didn’t read them); a decade’s a long time — are those gamma rays still crossing the void, or did something go awry with the novel? He refused to talk about it and mocked my “literary history syndrome”. The problem doesn’t lie in composition, he told me later, but in reading: some reading is infrasound at 7000 Hz, others at 7 Hz, sufficient to shatter the writer in pieces. Those metaphors were meaningless, in my book.
B.
In 2666 Roberto Bolaño writes how the perfect short story is an example of the maestro practicing his swordsmanship, but that the novel is him fighting for his life. He portrays how the world loves watching the maestro’s elegant and stunning display, but can’t appreciate the struggle with the perilous and fully fetid. People often post quotes like that, and it’s somewhat unfair on short story writers. Fortunately, the saying is built on the shoulders of the “maestro”.
A decade ago I was working in a tiny bookstore with the daily duties of moving books, working the till and cleaning. A girl often dropped by to buy books, and occasionally we discussed writing, mostly novels. She was wonderfully cultivated and had received a literary education, but I wasn’t sure whether she wrote also. One evening, probably passing by after work, she came in and bought a Thomas Beckett novel. There weren’t any customers otherwise, and when she was settling up she asked me: What can’t a novel manage to write? Put another way, what’s unreachable for the novel?
We listed and overruled several items. 1., which I proposed, was “a film shot” (like in a Tarkovsky film). But she believed the language of poetry exceeded even that (“poetic meaning” wasn’t integrated into a novel with much difficulty). 2., which she put forward, was the sublime; the novel could not reach the level of religious adulation. I commented that from a pantheistic viewpoint the novel could reach that height, rebutting her point unless she believed monotheism ranked higher. 3., my suggestion, still on films, was the improvised performance, the feel of Bette Davis holding a cigarette in All About Eve for example — a flash in time unreachable to language, generally speaking. The post-Freudian novelist could crack open the most complex psychologies (if he set it up like so), but there remained a certain expression or state that they couldn’t write well. She argued against that, saying that certain novelists, like Nabokov, had managed it. 4., she put forward, was fate; novelists who blared on their megaphones that they were writing about fate were shallow (but I brought up Schrodinger’s cat…). For 5. I suggested Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory, that giant lump beneath the ocean surface that wasn’t empty canvas or emptiness but the element the novel struggled to achieve. Intangible objects, she commented. What those were, she never answered clearly.
It was a delightful discussion with no airs and graces about it, like an exchange between two literary youths. That was the time I finally learned she wrote stories as well, although she was basically unpublished. She took out a small volume from her bag, a very thin piece that she explained was a practice composition which she’d found someone to print and bind. You’ll be aware that that was 2008, when most people were publishing their writings on blogs and underground publishing had fallen out of fashion. The book title was printed on the small pamphlet: The Giant Ape; but the author’s name wasn’t. I told her she could leave any extra copies here in the store for readers to peruse for free. She smiled and softly declined.
I read part of the way through, put it to one side, placed the small pamphlet in a cabinet, soon lost trace of it, while the girl, very suspiciously, never reappeared.
I would always remember that discussion, reminisce on it, to some degree. Many years later I read another layer of meaning in that Bolaño passage: a novel ought to reach all things. Blanchot was even more on point: name the possible, resonate with the impossible.
C.
The Giant Ape contained a very short author’s preface: “Discourse is a shallow matter in a novel, but it cannot be shallower than writing about fate.” “The postmodern novel,” the author also wrote, “attempts to hurl fate into a bottomless pit, to muffle the groans and sighs with noise. Despite the hypochondriacs there is sure to exist, nonetheless, mania without mental illness, silence without depression.” It went on like this.
It was a piece of only forty pages or so — a medium-length story — and it began by describing the childhood of the young girl Orchid and her mentally handicapped elder sister. They lived in a small mountain township near a coalmine that was small but had been churning out coal for three decades. Near the mine was a small restaurant, a hairdressers, a clothes shop and an old-fashioned cinema that still played films of a bygone era, from when they were young. They often visited the coalmine for a bite to eat and a movie to watch. Orchid, twelve years old, was responsible for her sixteen-year old big sister, her parents being migrant workers in Shenzhen.
The novel unfolded at a leisurely pace: the small township, the sincere affections its youth secretly engendered, soil dried in clear-blue skies, the aggravation of rainy days… all that southern mix, its language growing out from those mildewed walls without any dense imagery—the only thing was it was too peaceful and you could anticipate, as you read on, a heartbreaking end.
On occasion, Orchid went to the mine to watch a movie by herself, and here the novel was saturated with details: the cinema infested with rats due to years of neglect, the rats clambering across ceiling fans in summer, the rats hurled out by a centrifugal force and splatting against the wall when workers switched on the fans. She also depicted the two elderly cinema guards: a blind fellow, and the other suffering from his intermittent epilepsy, the former a silent “Stink Bomb”, and the latter a “Time Bomb”. That was the very name that Orchid, who’d watched far too many war films in the cinema — from Xia Boyang to The Fall of Berlin, from Heroic Sons and Daughters to The Wreath at the Foot of the Mountain, called them by. One day Time Bomb died, swallowing his tongue during a convulsion. He was a kind old man, as was Stink Bomb. Everybody at the mine was kind — those violent types couldn’t survive there, and left early.
The novel proceeded thus far without any dramatic irruptions, Orchid carried on with her life, her elder sister still tagging along to watch movies. “My sister was another kind one,” Orchid specially stated for the reader’s sake. It was a scene like some footnote to a documentary. Next the writer finally came to the giant ape, totally unconnected to the small township and mine, a giant ape in the Congo forests.
Those giant apes were incredible beings, she said. Hideous, incomparably strong, capable of killing a lion or a leopard barehanded — having never been filmed, unlike gorillas, only sporadic scientific reports existed. The young Orchid read the giant ape story in a dull bulletin that carried stories of rape, murder and divorce on the same page, aware it was all bullshit.
The novel covered much ground in depicting the giant ape, initially in the bulletin contents, the angle then apparently pivoting into the main character’s imagination. This species of mysterious grey giant ape inhabited tropical forests in family units, murdering big cats likely for self-defence or to protect its young. They slept on the ground and had the physiques of gorillas, the mental capacities of chimpanzees, and when a full moon hung in the sky they couldn’t wail like the other simians; they sat on the ground and looked up peacefully.
All those stories were told by the villagers, whom the scientists asked if they’d seen a giant ape, having never laid eyes on one themselves. The villagers shook their heads. Then where did you hear the stories? They passed down from the ancestors, said the villagers, there’s only one or two chances to see one every few generations — they’re the most mysterious. A scientist, Mary, commented that the apes sounded like gods. Not so, the villagers said, we worship a creator god whose masterpiece is the giant ape, but they’re not gods, and they’re frightened of the fire, like all the wild creatures.
The expedition team entered the forest, Mary among them, brought by the guide brought to the mountain. One day, Mary, alone, encountered a giant ape, grey, indeed, standing over two-metres tall, weighing perhaps 400 kilograms. She kept her cool — usually apes flee on encountering humans, but they’ll also go violently on the offensive — just try imagining the ape killing a wild creature. Yet it watched her silently, eye-to-eye, separated by more than ten metres, grey pupils glistening. Out of what was probably curiosity it took a few steps towards her, but then stopped again. The next moment the other expedition members were calling Mary’s name, without replying Mary gestured to the ape with her left hand stretched out, pushing the air. She couldn’t be certain the giant ape would understand that sapiens body language. As the team advanced in her direction she kept up the action while snapping back her head to look for them. At this point the giant ape left, trees rustling, the creature releasing a ponderous sigh, disappearing into the forest depths at a steady beat.
D.
That friend of mine who returned from Wenchuan worked as a journalist for a time, covering breaking news or writing exclusive interviews. He hoped to write a special feature, but never had the chance, but even so continued to describe himself as a person with journalistic ideals and once uploading a large volume of relevant content on his Weibo: rights protection, crowd incidents and major cases. Working in war reportage became his highest ideal, though after quitting the news industry he went to work at an internet firm while also managing his own Community Account on WeChat. When we met he was studying his phone and reported to me grievingly on the death of ten journalists worldwide on that day alone, nine in bomb attacks, one shot dead. This is a dark day for journalists, he said, you never had ten writers die in one day, by comparison (You can’t be sure, I said, maybe the roof caved at some Writer’s Association meet, for example).
His company had already integrated C-financing and was in discussions for a merger, so he was possibly on the verge of receiving his portion. He sighed with a loser’s and a winner’s weariness. Next, we found some restaurant and moved on from discussing the deaths of those ten journalists. We got chatting about our earliest meeting, at a literature forum, not a specific conference, of course, but an online forum such as had flourished in those years, unlike nowadays when everybody was doodling on WeChat friend-circle posts. We talked about the zeal that prevailed back in those days when young people had first gone online, a time when no one managed the internet and when Big Data was non-existent, a considerably freer environment. Young people were all writing internet novels — nowadays that sort of thing is rare. A young writer from a small township on the Yunnan-Guizhou Plateau could receive special focus, or an alcoholic be manufactured as a disciple of literature — know that all of us came from such places, and we all drank. All these years later a great many were successful and had become wealthy, and after discussing them we talked about a few friends who had died, victims of car accidents, suicide, sickness, and we talked about those gone, whose names even were murky now, simply referring to them by their online handles. Handles flashed upon your retina when you enunciated “Ah_Green” or “795”, already passed. Later my friend, drunk, began cursing he age: our 1980s generation has been ruined by time, by property prices, work, administrative control, and time truly traipsing along. Even if those guys were ruined, I said, they never stamped and thumped their chest about it like you.
That evening I walked him home to his apartment in Yanjiao, in the suburbs, where he lived alone. He put me up at his place, and we sobered up and drank ice water and continued reminiscing, until total exhaustion followed, as if the past had ravaged us. Afterwards I was rummaging randomly on his bookshelf when I found The Giant Ape.
Written by a girl called “if”, said my friend, a decade has passed, no one knows her whereabouts.
I remembered “if”: she wrote poetry and some sketches for a novel, though we’d never had a conversation. I had the impression of her looming over a great many forums. Yet she wrote The Giant Ape, and she was someone I’d met. When I shared this my friend sank into a long silence, then took whisky from a cabinet, and we began drinking again. He began to tell the story of himself and “if”.
E.
In the forum back then everybody struck up conversation and talked nonsense with everybody else — strangers and familiars — all while concealing their identities, origins and even genders. Naturally the friends could meet when there was absolute trust, people with stronger connections went to bed, with no consequences, all totally ordinary. Sometimes they discussed literature too. Things ran the other way on some individual literature forums that only discussed literature with a kind of kooky taste in poetry and novels, like they were forms of punishments. I met “if” in one of those notoriously strict forums back when still studying at this shithole university in Zhuzhou in Hunan, we chatted through texts on the forum: I knew she was a girl, knew that only. We chatted for about five years and there was one time we met, and I learned she was three years my senior. Later she went to Beijing as an architectural firm accountant, and I was in Guangzhou.
I was bitterly disappointed one day when she told me she had got married. By then a fair number of the literature forums had closed, we were each writing our own blogs, and I spotted her discussing some issue in a current affairs forum, very naively, but zealously (that forum also closed not long after). She had a much better grasp of literature by contrast. My mind was a swirl after the Wenchuan earthquake and I asked if we should go to the disaster region together, which she agreed to, and we met in Chengdu, and several other friends joined us.
We tried getting into Beichuan, but were cut off halfway, a scene I’ll never forget, so I don’t have to describe it all over, one of my travel partners breaking into tears on site, crying and demanding to be allowed to return home immediately, and still crying as she left. I didn’t shed a tear. I was still young and wanted to write everything into a book, and a decade later I’ve achieved nothing — I’m supposing now that it might not be my problem.
“if” and I stayed in the disaster zone, a terrible environment with a huge workload, and I was struggling to sleep, falling apart physically, but also frequently hyperactive, as she was as well. We stuck it out, and more volunteers arrived later on. That was another near-indescribable situation, like a fantasy, like waking from a nightmare and discovering a crystal-clear morning where all is well, but it’s still a dream. One day I saw “if” standing alone by some ruins, wearing a facemask, standing perfectly still, all the while. I reminded myself: She’s an architect. I headed over to talk, but couldn’t find any words at that moment. Afterwards she said to me: Let’s go home.
Instead of heading back to Guangzhou, I came with her to Chongqing, where we saw a few online friends and recuperated. We both acknowledged that returning to either Beijing or Guangzhou wasn’t great under the current situation. She had dreams of post-earthquake Wenchuan, like I did. We had suddenly and truly bizarrely become dependent on each-other, so we settled in Chongqing: she was from mountainous Guizhou, south of Chongqing, the Zunyi border. Home had long been deserted however, she told me, her parents running some small business in Shenzhen. So we loafed about Chongqing, like two freaks who wanted to forget yesterday. One day I travelled down south with “if” and we reached the county town. She said it was where she had gone to junior-high school, geographically a part of Chongqing. We found a small restaurant by the road, where we ate the local fish, she led me up onto the bridge, the weather was heating up, people were out walking, taking in the evening’s cool river breeze. This is Rainbow Bridge, she said, it collapsed like a toy bridge some years ago, and a few people died in the wreck. I had some impression of that incident, which rocked the nation, after which I heard unending news of collapsing bridges, like they were all toys.
We sank into a lengthy silence that went unchanged in the days ahead, not because there was nothing to say, but because everything was understood. There was only one problem: I needed her, whether temporarily or over the long term, I didn’t know. We stayed in Chongqing for five days, but it felt like several months to me. One day we even argued about some trifle, though we made up very quickly. We had a silent accord just like lovers do — just think about it, how we had chatted on the internet for five years, then witnessed (or passed through) an enormous catastrophe, we had to discuss things that went beyond the things themselves. This continued until one day her husband flew to Chongqing to collect her, and it seemed they had this long discussion, then she decided to return to Beijing. She told me before she left that she should have taken me to her Guizhou township, but sadly the chance had been lost. Don’t hang about, she said, the iceberg’s flipped, you can only forget them.
Instantly she became a worried soul, the overlap of a lady who’d appeared from nowhere, and her perpetually present online handle. Everything ceased to exist once she disappeared, and talking about hers like commemorating some gigantic catastrophe a decade on, everything remodelled, no lingering thoughts, no finding the entrance to that abyss. I stayed in Chongqing alone for two days, returned to Guangzhou, and found myself a girlfriend. Later I came to Beijing too, but I didn’t hear any news of her — she hadn’t been on the forum and now there wasn’t even a forum.
I received The Giant Ape as early as 2004 when she was twenty-four, but I don’t know her age when she wrote the book. It’s not that outstanding a story and it has its unusual moments, plus the author lacks command of near objects, which also blur when she pulls out to a distance. I can’t say much apart from that: it was the exact opposite when I wrote interview profiles and news later on and had to take responsibility for those near objects, and that might be another reason it was impossible I couldn’t write a novel: everything was too real. I failed massively at the news as well, but that might be another matter from my literary defeat.
“if” and I once chatted about Hemingway’s Iceberg Theory. She said was it possible for the iceberg inverted to expose everything below, or must we submerge to the depths to touch those intangible objects? Now that would be frightening. “if” never believed in fate in novels; she thought it was shallow, and she doubted that “leaving canvas” idea we talked about — it’s a dumb idea in literature.
F.
My buddy finished that, collapsed on the sofa and fell asleep. As light crept into the room, many years on, I finally had the chance to finish reading the novel.
The story returned to the real past following Mary’s encounter with the giant ape: Orchid advanced to junior-high, boarding in the county-town, her mentally impaired elder sister discarded at the township in the care of grandparents. The parents came to the decision that they would bring Orchid south after about one or two more years, where she could study at a high-school. The novel mentioned the small food-processing business they ran in Shenzhen — they were likely imitating low-grade products to make a little cash, though they still couldn’t pay elder-sister’s living expenses. Orchid was unhappy in the county-town: she felt very alone. In of itself, the place was more intriguing than a small township, but the positives stopped there. Later, disaster struck, Orchid watched a large local bridge crumble (the Rainbow Bridge collapse, in reality, happened in 1999, by which time “if” had already left), and then, at the small township 200 kilometres away, her elder sister died.
The giant ape made a reappearance in the novel — in Orchid’s dreams. Like Mary the scientist, Orchid reached the mountains through the forests, and there a grey giant ape stood and stared at her, before vanishing. “Forget these things,” she told the giant ape, “go!” The novel didn’t explain how her big sister died.
Then the story broke off for an unspecified duration and Orchid returned to the small township for her grandfather’s funeral. What this proved was her mentally disabled elder sister had died without commotion, perhaps even a funeral. At this juncture the perspectives of narrator and character ran on a single track close together, with “if” herself cast among them. The story took a deep dive under those waters, and she emerged from the small township, heading over to the mines, over roads absolutely unchanged over all those years; over the brook, tiny train track, the tunnel, the conveyance belt and workers, everything vanished now reconstructed, like someone had pressed rewind. She arrived at the cinema, which was already rubble, no longer screening movies. Everybody she’d known had left. By the entrance she met a kooky lady who claimed to have opened a massage parlour. She sat down next to her by the steps (I worried some reminiscing tone would rear its head, but it didn’t). “Beautiful weather,” said the prostitute. “Just like that horror at the mines last month never happened.” The story stopped there.
Placing The Giant Ape back on the shelves, I left to take a cab before my friend awoke. It was hazily turning into day, and I walked for a stretch underneath streetlamps, wracking my brains to recall that conversation with her a decade previously. We had discussed the issue of realism in novels, whatever that was. Cement survives for a whole century, she had said, and that’s the service life of a modern building. Just happens to match human life expectancy, the absolute limit for the great majority of us. Human limits, she said, resembled the limits of the novel: one couldn’t exhaust all disaster and longing (even by living forever), nor a novel exhaust all quotations, and once you were snuffed out it struck off all experience, like a single farewell folded up all of time. Beneath that ocean was a void.
They were the last words I could recall her saying. She must have spoken of other things, but my memories stopped there.
Edward Allen is an archaeology PhD candidate at Fudan University in Shanghai. He translated Lu Nei’s Mistwalkers during early 2020 and has a general interest in Lu Nei’s work. “The Giant Ape” is a short companion piece written by Lu that vaguely follows a sub-plot in the novel, referring to an imaginary short story written by one of the characters.