趙海虹：一九二三年科幻故事

1923―a Fantasy

By Zhao Haihong

Translated by Nicky Harman and Pang Zhaoxia

EVERYONE needs ideals in life, don’t they?

Jia Su’s ideal was to create a machine.

Bubbles’ ideal was to make revolution.

Meiying’s ideal was to make an honest woman of herself.

This was the 1920s in Shanghai. Everywhere you went, you heard the

ravishingly honeyed, husky tones of popular singers like Zhou Xuan and Bai

Guang floating in the air. People who breathed this in drifted through life day by

day looking slightly tipsy, blithely ignoring the fact that their country was on its

knees.

I can already hear angry protests as I write these words. After all, was not

Shanghai in the Twenties a hotbed of revolution? Sure, some parts of the city were

awash with money and a playground for comprador foreigners, but that was only

the demonic flip side of the coin. Take Bubbles for example. She is an unusual

personnage, because she belongs to the other side of Shanghai life, yet here she

is, veering off-course and a gaudily-lit nightclub by the name of ‘Flowers of

Shanghai’.

No doubt I have been too influenced by how Brigitte Lin looked in the Hong

Kong film, Peking Opera Blues, but I imagine Bubbles as having a rather

strange hairstyle. For no very good reason, I see her with her hair cut short

like a man’s. This would not raise an eyebrow nowadays but at that time was

considered far too ‘advanced’. Her thick black eyebrows were set low over a pair

of lively dark eyes and these features dominated a face which was more sharp

than pretty.

At the door of the ‘Flowers of Shanghai’ nightclub, Bubbles was greeted by the

hostess, who patted her coquettishly on the chest, pushing a white rose the

breast-pocket of her Sun Yat-sen jacket as she did

so. ‘Good evening, Sir …’

The hostess’s words were no sooner out of her

mouth than she flinched, her fingers fluttering from

Bubbles’ chest like a startled bird. The corners of

Bubbles’ mouth twitched in a smile, which allayed

the hostess’s surprise.

‘I’m looking for someone,’ Bubbles announced

calmly, and slipped the brightly-coloured

world of the club’s interior, crowded with customers

cruising in the glittering, night-time waves of light

like brilliant tropical fish. Bubbles melted the

pool of colours, with a flick of her tail as it were,

almost giving my imagination the slip. Just at that

moment, Jia Su appeared.

As Bubbles approached him, it seemed to her that his face emerged like a solid

and sharply contoured rock from the water. It was a rock which many women

would want to lean on.

But Bubbles was not a woman, she was a revolutionary.

If only I could conjure up the first meeting of Bubbles and Jia Su in my mind’s

eye, and hear the words spoken between them. Perhaps he said ‘Hello, I’m the

one you’re looking for,’ or ‘I’m Jia Su, are you looking for me?’ It has become

almost an obsession with me to write their lines for them. Am I slighting the

third protagonist in this story, Meiying, with my extraordinary enthusiasm for

Bubbles and Jia Su? I do not think so.

Meiying was my great-grandmother. I lived with her and my maternal

grandparents until I was ten years old, and she first told me my great?grandfather’s story when I was nine. A ninety-year-old’s memory and a nine?year-old’s powers of understanding are an unpromising combination, certainly

not enough to compel me to write the story down. Yet nearly twenty years after

my great-grandmother died, I suddenly found myself wanting to record it,

fragmentary and timeworn though it was. The trigger was a family genealogy

and a box.

A month before, I had arrived back in China on holiday. The air quality was

worse than in any number of other countries where I had lived and very soon I

had a persistent, hacking cough and was unable to go out. While I was at home

with nothing to do, it occurred to me to go through some family bits and pieces

which had lain untouched for many years, and sort them out.

There was a cupboard containing a number of things which my parents

had brought with them from their old home, things which I had never paid any

attention to in the past, but which I now inspected with care. There was a rusty

iron box with a brass padlock hanging from it which looked quite old. Out of

curiosity, I wiggled the padlock. It held firm—and unfortunately there was no key.

‘What’s inside it?’ I asked my mother at dinner that evening.

‘I have no idea. I think it belonged to your great-grandmother, and she buried

it in their yard during the Cultural Revolution, for safekeeping.’

‘That’s interesting.’

‘Apparently it contains the family’s genealogical records, but I’ve never seen

inside.’

Were family records really as heavy as that? I wondered. ‘And what about the

key? Where is it?’

‘If there was one, I’d have opened the box ages ago. We only got it when my

grandmother passed away. I’ve no idea where the key is.’

I picked up the box carefully and weighed it in my hands. ‘I don’t believe that!

A padlock like this isn’t hard to force, yet you’ve waited all this time!’

‘If you wish to amuse yourself with it, take it with you,’ my mother said with

a dismissive wave of her hand. ‘There can’t be anything valuable in it, or she

wouldn’t have lived in such penury all those years.’

Very interesting. I coughed again.

Jia Su, courtesy name Tingtao, style name Ningjiang, was born in Ke Town,

Shaoxing Prefecture, Zhejiang Province in 1894, and died in 1945 at the age

of fifty-one. He came from a long line of scholars dating back to the Qianlong

period, many of whom achieved the supreme grade of jinshi in the Imperial

Examinations. From childhood, Tingtao was bright and hard-working, and

excelled in classical poetry and prose … at the age of eighteen, he won a Boxer

Indemnity Scholarship to attend Cambridge University, where he gained a

master’s degree in physics and a doctorate in chemistry. Having completed his

studies, he returned home in 1923. …

These snippets, expressed in semi-classical style, tugged at threads of memory

which lurked in the deepest recesses of my mind. They were not family records but

merely brief biographical notes written by my great-grandfather’s friends after


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