FEELINGS RUN DEEP 古井情深

CONTENTS

	THE CHILDREN OF MYANMAR 緬甸的孩子 By CHEN I-chih 陳義芝 Translated by John J. S. BALCOM 陶忘機

	GRANNY’S STATE OF MIND 阿嬤的心思 By TING Wen-Chih 丁文智 Translated by John J. S. BALCOM 陶忘機

	AQUARIUM, WITH TWO SIDETRACKS 水族箱（外二首） By Chang Kun 張堃 Translated by Zona Yi-Ping TSOU 鄒怡平

	URBAN CHILDHOOD 都市童年 By FONG Ming 方明 Translated by Zona Yi-Ping TSOU 鄒怡平

	WHITE HAIR 白髮 By Lo Ti 落蒂 Translated by Zona Yi-Ping TSOU 鄒怡平

	MOTES OF SUNLIGHT— In Gratitude to Ya Hsien 陽光顆粒—謝瘂弦 By Hsiang Ming 向明 Translated by John J. S. BALCOM 陶忘機

	VISITING THE BLUE GROTTO— Grotta Azzurra, Italy, 1998 航向藍洞 By Jiao Tong 焦桐 Translated by John J. S. BALCOM 陶忘機

	APRIL 四月 By Hsia Ching 夏菁 Translated by C. W. WANG 王季文

	FEELINGS RUN DEEP 古井情深 By YANG Wen Wei 楊文瑋 Translated by James Scott WILLIAMS 衛高翔

	A NOTICE IN SEARCH OF A MISSING PERSON 尋人啟事 By CHANG Ai-chin 張愛金 Translated by Shou-Fang HU-MOORE 胡守芳

	YOUTH IN NANGAN 少年南竿 By CHIANG Hsun 蔣勳 Translated by Jonathan R. BARNARD 柏松年

	YOUTH IN TONGXIAO 少年通霄 By CHIANG Hsun 蔣勳 Translated by Jonathan R. BARNARD 柏松年

	HIROSHIMA LOVE 廣島之戀 By RUAN Ching-Yue 阮慶岳 Translated by David and Ellen DETERDING 戴德巍與陳艷玲

	FROM “CHINA” TO “TAIWAN” WHAT MESSAGES CAN WE GET FROM THE ART OF LEE MING-TSE? 從「中國」到「台灣」李明則的藝術給了我們什麼訊息？ By Hong-ming TSAI 蔡宏明 Translated by David van der Peet 范德培

	FROM “DANDY” TO “WILD CURSIVE SCRIPT” : FALSE FEELINGS AND TRUE DESIRES IN THE ART OT LEE MING-TSE 從「公子哥」到「狂草」—談李明則藝術中的虛情真欲 By Shui-tsai CHEN 陳水財 Translated by David van der Peet 范德培

	NEWS & EVENTS 文化活動 Compiled by Sarah Jen-hui HSIANG 項人慧

	NOTES ON AUTHORS AND TRANSLATORS 作者與譯者簡介

	APPENDIX : CHINESE ORIGINALS 附錄：中文原著

	BLOSSOM OF BANABA 香蕉花, acrylic on paper, 52 × 33.5 cm, 1993...............................................Cover

	FAIRY 神女, acrylic on paper pulp, 22 × 23 cm, 2008 ..............................................................Back Cover By Lee Ming-tse 李明則

YANG Wen Wei 楊文瑋

FEELINGS RUN DEEP
古井情深*

Translated by James Scott WILLIAMS 衛高翔

    No matter how busy I am, I always wash our clothes by hand. Often, mother, daughter, and washing board all squeeze into our tiny bathroom to do the laundry together, washing and splashing all the while. It’s my little girl’s favorite kind of housework, and the one thing I refuse to change about my life.
    I got in the habit of doing the laundry by hand as a child in Kinmen. On sultry summer days, we’d get utterly drenched splashing the cool well water at one another while we did the clothes. In the winter, we’d warm ourselves up scrubbing the clothes in the warm water from the well. Grandma always said, “This old well is good to daughters-in-law.” In those days, the old well was indispensible; through the seasons and through the years, it quietly looked out for all the women who married into the family.
    When my mother married into a Kinmen family, she came to it as the child of a large family that produced tea in the Miaoli mountains, the kind of family in which she didn’t have to lift or carry anything herself. She married into a Kinmen farming family and suffered a good deal as she learned a new way of life, one in which every bucket of water they used or consumed had to be drawn from a well and carried back to the house. But she was a Hakkanese woman, so she didn’t complain about the changes in her life; she just gritted her teeth and adapted. When she was pregnant and still squaring her shoulders to fetch the water, the neighbors who were already at the well would draw the water for her, and someone would always lend a hand by lugging the pole, buckets, and water, which weighed a ton, back to the house—all of this in spite of already having too much to do themselves. It’s been more than 20 years since my mother left Kinmen, but she has never forgotten their warmth. Her parents finally had a chance to visit her, their beloved eldest daughter, in Kinmen several years after her marriage. When they saw how she had to carry water from the well to her home every day, they exclaimed that had they known how she labored there, they would have long since brought her back home. My mother laughed and told them, “All the wives in Kinmen work like this. It’s no big deal.”
    Children in farming families take up a share of the household chores at an early age. As a result, once I reached the age where I began to feel envy, I was always quietly wondering why it was that our next-door neighbors got to have a well of their own. They didn’t have to carry buckets down to a neighborhood well, draw the water, and carry it back. Why was it that the kids in our family had to trudge down to the well with our buckets and haul the water back? When we were kindergarten-age, it took two of us to lug a carrying pole. When we got a little older, we each carried our own. All the water the family boiled for drinking had to be brought bucket by bucket from the old well. It was some distance from our home, past a neighbor’s house and an air-raid bunker. The buckets would swing when we started getting tired, causing us to lose half the water by the time we got back to the house. My mother had six daughters from five pregnancies before she finally produced a son 10 years younger than me, his eldest sister. When the farm was busy and the whole family was out working in the fields, I was responsible for taking care of him, but he was a good baby even before he was a year old. One afternoon after he’d had his milk, I set him and my little sister on a stone bench to play, and, because I still had to get dinner ready for the family, hurried out to get water from the old well that was a little further from the house. As I reached the bunker on the way back—it was just a hundred-odd paces from the house—my little sister appeared in front of me, a look of terror on her face, crying that our little brother had fallen. Frightened, I dropped the pole and sprinted the rest of the way home. I still remember the panic I felt at that moment. I could have messed up anything else and it wouldn’t have mattered. But I was the eldest girl, and taking care of my baby brother was my number-one responsibility. When I arrived back at the house, I saw to my relief that my little brother had only fallen from the bench to the floor. Even so, tears were already streaming down my face. My little sister was herself only three years old and there was no way to explain to her that he’d only slipped, nothing serious. I wiped my tears on my arm, then headed back to the bunker, where I discovered that the buckets I’d dropped had given the guava tree by the side of the road a good watering. When my brother got a little older, he began riding his tricycle all over the village. Then, one summer evening, we couldn’t see him from the door when we shouted for him to come home and wash up. He wasn’t at the neighbor’s either, and an announcement over the village administration building’s PA system brought no news. The whole village turned out to help drain the well. No one had any idea where he had gotten to, and everyone was terrified. By the time it got dark, stomachs were growling and it fell to me to get some rice going for dinner. And there, next to the rice bin, I found my brother, sleeping as soundly as could be. He’d been safe and sound at home while the whole village had been working frantically at the well. How the years have flown! My little brother now has two children of his own.
    Bringing water back to the house to do laundry always meant being very frugal with the water. So, when I was a little older, my mother let me take a basin to a shallower well to do the wash. There was a concrete laundry trough there, durable and sturdy. I’d fill it with water, add some soap powder, throw in the clothes, then commence my battle with the dirty laundry. One time, I whispered a question to Auntie Ah-fen, who often washed clothes with me: “Auntie, why is it that you get the clothes so clean and I can’t?” She smiled at me, picked up a piece of clothing, and showed me how she scrubbed and wrung it out. It almost sparkled! I was so grateful to her that I couldn’t speak, and thought to myself: I can do that, too! But when Auntie Ah-fen finished her clothes and went home, I was still there fighting the same old battle with a big basin of dirty clothes because I just couldn’t get the collars and cuffs clean. Of course, what made doing the laundry fun was being able to prick up your ears and listen in while the mothers and grandmothers there gossiped. I’d get so drawn into their conversations that I’d forget to do any washing. I was always thinking: the adult world is really weird,....

*	From Kinmen wen-yi 《金門文藝》 (Literature Kinmen), No. 27, November 2008: 109-112.