By: Xue Yiwei & Miao Wei (Translator)
Abstract: Xue Yiwei is a contemporary Chinese writer based in Montreal, Canada. Xue’s writing
is stylistically elegant, linguistically beautiful, but at times intellectually challenging.
Influenced by French existentialism, Xue has a dazzling talent for revealing the absurdity
and emptiness of history in his works. In this early short story, first published in 1999,
the first-person narrator accidently finds out the secret of her late husband just before
his funeral, which makes her disillusioned about her marriage. This story was collected
in The Dolphin That Doesn’t Want to Leave (Buken liqu de haitun) as “Yu kuangfeng yiqi
lüxing” by the Shanghai Literature and Art Publishing House in 2012
It has been a week since my husband’s funeral, but some people are still criticizing my absence. My children explained that they asked me not to show up at the funeral for fear that I would be heartbroken. They were indeed worried because they knew I had burst into tears the night before the funeral, crying until the early hours. My children, however, didn’t know why I suddenly became so emotional. For years they have thought I am a stoic, and so have I, but I cried almost all night before the funeral.
My husband was an amazing person, which is what the newspaper says, and what everyone says. I also said the same thing before, but now I am hesitant, and I will be distressed if I say that again. Now I am not even willing to judge him or our nearly forty years of marriage. I always thought we had lived a blissful life, as he hardly ever left me in the first thirty years. In recent years, however, I occasionally had an ominous feeling that he would leave me, but he didn’t. No, he didn’t. He didn’t leave me until ten days ago. At the end of his life, the entire family surrounded him, the corners of his mouth upturned in a contented smile.
In the past few years, we have made countless trips that I had thought were spontaneous. Although I am an inactive person, I found this kind of impromptu travel could reinvigorate my husband. That’s why I agreed every time he asked me to join him on his journey. We always set off unexpectedly, and I couldn’t make any preparation. Unfortunately (or I should say, “Coincidentally”), we encountered wild winds every time we traveled. I was very frustrated because of my special antipathy to the wind, which, to my mind, behaved like a robber.
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