210 chapter five
The taxi covered in snow is pure white, like a polar bear. Its engine doesn’t work,
its body temperature is dropping to zero. But I can’t stand watching it give up, so
I write “I love you” on one of its windows. As my finger moves across the glass,
it makes a happy, squeaking sound, just like the forehead of a girl expecting a
kiss will start to glow.The speaker literally writes the life back into a victim of the cold with
what must be one of the most fundamental and hackneyed phrases
from his art.
I have twice referred to the speaker’s dual personal ity. This is il-
lustrated by the following quotations from the first, fourth, and sixth
stanzas of «Abode»:
What I will not allow has happened: I am slowly changing into someone else.
I must call out three times, I must call myself back...
The world in the mirror is my world’s equal but its opposite, too: if it isn’t hell,
it must be heaven. A man exactly like me, but my opposite too, lives in that
world...This often happens: Liu Jun makes a phone call to find another Liu Jun. As if
I am talking to myself, cradling the phone.Liu Jun is Xi Chuan’s official name. He could have used his pen name,
as he did for Haizi, but he did not. Perhaps he thought it unbecoming
or distracting, or he saw no need for a general readership to connect
the above scenes with their author. Be that as it may, by using his own
name he makes them autobiographical, no matter how many Liu Juns
exist in historical reality. In the context of «Salute», which depicts po-
etry in opposi tion to daytime life, this splitting of a personal ity on the
phone to itself refers to a double identity of poet and daytime person.
I have not yet quoted from «The Monster», the fourth and lon-
gest poem in the series, with a dominant “monster” protagonist at its
center. To read that conspicuous presence as a metaphor is thrilling,
and it is a radical instance of the decision to interpret. The reading
of «Salute» that has emerged in the preceding pages, however, offers
good grounds for doing so. Moreover, toward the end of the poem, the
monster is called a “metaphor of a monster” (↨ஏⱘᎼݑ).
«The Monster» is perhaps the strongest poem in the series. A story
well told and delineated in form and content, it exemplifies the ability
of effective imagery—and of expertly manipulated language—to gen-