If you were walking along Hot Springs Road in Beitou, you
would notice it getting increasingly narrow, just wide enough to
allow a car to pass along, and towards the end, you would find it
almost completely engulfed by the weeds encroaching from both
sides.
A huge building, over ten floors high, suddenly appeared
on the hill on the left, but although the steel frame was completed,
for some reason the construction had been abandoned
halfway, leaving it a gloomy, desolate ruin. Because it had no
external walls, from a distance it looked as if a multitude of
black eyes were gazing emptily out at the blue sky above.
Past the ruin, at a bend in the road about three hundred
meters further along was a large cluster of acacia trees, and by
the side of the road stood a small wooden sign with the message “No thoroughfare” written unevenly on it, though it was not
clear who had written these words. In fact, if you looked carefully,
you might notice a tiny mud path threading its way
through the trees, and if you walked along it, you seemed to be
descending into a prehistoric world. Bracken taller than a man
and great big taro leaves grew all around. Then, if you progressed
a little further, you would emerge from the woods, and
suddenly everything became brighter once more, for you would
be in a small valley nestling in the midst of a host of mountains
and filled with lush green paddy fields and vegetable plots as
well as about ten traditional Fujian-style brick houses clustered
together by the side of the fields.
When had the villagers moved there? Some said that it was
probably during the Japanese occupation, but others claimed that
they were the descendants of communists who had fled into the
mountains. However, one way or another, after being cut off
from the outside world for so long, it was not surprising that the
village was stubbornly conservative and rather backward.
Because of its location, the place was enshrouded in a thick mist
for about half the year, but the villagers had long ago become
accustomed to their foggy environment. With low visibility all
around, their movements had inevitably slowed down, but
instead they had sharpened hearing and an enhanced sense of
smell.
For these villagers, the world was a vast white expanse, and
sometimes it seemed that their night-time dreams offered a
clearer view of the world.
“I reckon Ying Ning must originally be a snake spirit,” the old fellow living next door muttered as he sat in the entrance of
his house.
Not only did we find nothing strange about this, in fact
there were several grunts of assent. It suddenly all seemed to
make sense, so of course it must be true, and after pondering the
matter for a moment, everyone nodded in agreement. For just
then, Ying Ning was standing on a path between the fields,
bending over to gather some wild ginger flowers, and the faltering
rays of the setting sun suffused her body in an extraordinarily
resplendent aura, an amazing sheen reminiscent of the luminescence
reflected on the beautiful skin of a snake. How could a
human exude such a glow?
Late one night a month before, Ying Ning had suddenly
turned up at our house, arriving on the back of a motorbike
chugging its way up the mountain road. Motorbike taxis like
this often plied their way between Beitou and the mountain
region, mostly bringing bar girls. That night, however, everyone
in the village was already fast asleep, and as there were no lights
along the road, it was a strange time for someone to choose to
make the trip. Mumbling in complaint, Mother opened the door
and found a girl of about twenty standing there, carrying a green
rucksack on her back and speaking in a strange accent. She said
her name was Ying Ning, she was the daughter of Mother’s
Third Brother, and she had traveled back to Taiwan from abroad
for the summer vacation. In her hand she held a letter addressed
to Mother.
“Third Brother?” Mother sounded startled. She quickly
tore open the letter and read it, and as soon as she saw the familiar
handwriting, she gave an involuntary shudder, losing her
usual impassive demeanor as a tear rolled down her cheek.
Mother had always been close to her third brother ever since they were young, but he was by nature perpetually unsettled, and
at the age of twenty, as soon as his military service was over, he
went off on his own to Brazil. Later he emigrated to Saudi
Arabia, and then moved to various places such as South Africa
and Mozambique, and the last time we heard from him, he was
in Paraguay, where he said he had invested in the entertainment
industry and got married to a local star. However, that was over
ten years ago.
“But we don’t have a spare bedroom in our house,” Mother
objected after she had wiped away her tears.
“Isn’t Ah-hsi’s room quite big? I can sleep with her,” Ying
Ning replied breezily.
That was strange: how come she knew my name? I had
kept quiet all along, but at this point I raised my head and
glanced at her. Ying Ning suddenly burst out laughing, and
pointing at me, continued, “Ah-hsi’s expression is so cute.”
I shrugged my shoulders. That was also rather unexpected,
as my face was usually so inscrutable. After showing her where
the bathroom was, I took no more notice of her and went and lay
down on my bed, gazing quietly at the night sky outside the window.
That evening, there was no mist, and the moonlight was
particularly crisp and clear, just like a gleaming knife dissipating
the harsh light and scattering it over the tops of the trees. After
Ying Ning had finished her shower, she turned off the lamp and
lay down next to me, but her eyes remained wide open, and she
suggested that if I was unable to sleep, she would read a book to
me. Indeed, after she had spoken, from the side of the bed she
picked up a book that I had been reading the night before and
continued from where I had left off. What was really strange
was that she was able to read perfectly well in the dark, and also
that her voice changed with the characters in the story, sometimes male and sometimes female, and at times becoming old,
just as if a fictional drama was being acted out by the side of my
pillow. Although I felt somewhat surprised, I drifted off into a
deep sleep.
She really was an unusual girl, and her ability to learn new
things was extraordinary. When she arrived, she spoke
Mandarin with a strange accent, but within a few days she
sounded no different than us, and not long after that,...
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