Preface

Preface

I often long to find a moment of quiet amid the turmoil, but it truly is not easy. The present is so strange, the mind so tangled. When a person has nothing left but memories, their life must surely be counted as dull—and yet sometimes there are not even memories left. Writing in China follows its conventions, and the affairs of the world still move in spirals. A few days ago, when I left Sun Yat-sen University, I thought of leaving Xiamen University four months before that; hearing an airplane overhead, I even remembered the planes that circled daily over the city of Beijing a year ago. At that time I had written a short essay called "An Awakening." Now even this "awakening" is gone.

The weather in Guangzhou is truly hot so early. The evening sun streams in through the western window, forcing one to make do with a single layer of clothing. On my desk sits a pot of "water-crossed branch"—something I had never seen before: simply a section of tree trunk, which, so long as it is soaked in water, puts forth leaves and branches of a charming green. Looking at the green leaves, editing old drafts—at least I am doing something. Engaging in such tasks, it is truly a case where the days of life are like the years of death; it can go a long way toward dispelling the heat.

The day before yesterday I finished compiling *Wild Grass*; this time it was the turn of *Old Tales Retold*, which had been serialized in *Mangyuan*, and I also gave it a new title: *Dawn Blossoms Plucked at Dusk*. Flowers picked while still wet with dew would naturally have better colour and fragrance, but I cannot manage that. Even the strangeness and tangled confusion in my mind at present—I still cannot make them transform at once into strange and tangled writing. Perhaps, when I gaze up at the drifting clouds some day, they will flash before my eyes.

There was a time when I repeatedly recalled the fruits and vegetables I ate in my hometown as a child: water caltrop, broad beans, wild rice stems, muskmelons. All of these were extremely fresh and delicious; all had been the lure that made me homesick. Later, after a long absence, I tasted them again, and they were nothing special; only in memory do they retain their old flavour. Perhaps they will deceive me for a lifetime, making me look back again and again.

These ten essays are copied from memory; they may differ somewhat from the actual facts, but this is all I remember now. The style is probably rather mixed, since I wrote them on and off over more than nine months. The settings vary as well: the first two were written beneath the eastern wall of my lodgings in Beijing; the middle three were composed while I was in flight, in a hospital and a carpenter's workshop; the last five were written upstairs in the library of Xiamen University, after I had already been pushed out of the scholars' circle.

May 1, 1927. Lu Xun, recorded at the White Cloud Tower, Guangzhou. Variant reading: "May 1, Guangzhou."