In the autumn of the renchen year, a man surnamed Shao of Qingyang suddenly turned into a snake, swallowed a court runner, and burrowed into the earth. The cause, they said, was that his fruit cart had been confiscated and his livelihood destroyed. His wife and daughter sometimes saw him online on his phone. When they asked where he was, he replied only: in the mountains. Two months later, the wife and daughter also vanished.
Rain Bell Extra | Fufonfia
Thursday, December 16. PLA 452 Hospital, Surgical Ward Three, Orthopedics Inpatient Department.
This wasn’t originally Old Mo’s night shift, but since the weekend was coming and he wanted to head back to his hometown in Nanchong tomorrow, he traded shifts with another doctor.
Under normal circumstances, orthopedics at night either had nothing to do or a major operation. Small injuries that just needed plaster casts and bandages could always be put off until dawn under the excuse of “observation” and then dumped on the interns for practice. As for the really big cases, the sort that required plasma, power saws, and steel pins, those never fell to him. The department chief would certainly take the lead himself. So when Old Mo was on night duty, he played PSP and watched soap operas.
2011-04-02 10:29 Over the past two days we risked passing through heavily irradiated ground, retracing our way along the Qinghai-Tibet Railway through the contaminated region of Gangca county, hoping to reach Hargai and find a rail line leading into Gansu. But by the time we reached the Qinghai Lake farm, my wife and both Blade and his wife had fallen ill at the same time, burning with high fevers. To make matters worse, Blade’s car finally ran out of engine oil and blew the block. Five people became two, and we were stranded on this dangerous scorched earth.
2011-03-01 09:12 We spent another day sitting in the sun, and my leg wound is nearly healed. I learned from one of the young soldiers how to disassemble a Type 81 automatic rifle, and with my clumsy hands I ended up smeared all over with gun oil. Charging my gear with the solar panel brought trouble. At first a few people came over with laptops and flashlights to top up their batteries. Later someone tried to carry off my solar panel with a bucket of water in hand, and when I stopped him he said, “Didn’t I give you water?” I later found out he was the driver of Vice Mayor Xu.
2011-02-01 00:45 Overnight the government set up porridge kitchens all along the main streets of the county town, serving pilaf and clear noodle soup. Unexpectedly, I even saw blue tents marked with the United Nations emblem. At last, medical vehicles were visible again, and my wife ran off to collect some glucose and cold medicine. It was already after midnight. The smell of roasting mutton was drifting everywhere, and for a moment I felt as though I had slipped back many years into a night market in the northwest. I have a feeling we’re going to be staying here for a while.
Rain Bell
01-01 00:09 Scattered firecrackers went off around the compound, sounding oddly out of place in all this darkness. Most people must already be asleep. I kissed my wife on the forehead, watched her drift off, then stepped onto the balcony. The red light on the camera mounted to the tripod blinked steadily like the eye of a Terminator. Far below, the white steel helmets of the sentries caught the searchlights in cold flashes, as if to remind me that time means nothing. It is only a ruler with which we measure our own suffering.
Rain Bell
Rain Bell is an ongoing Twitter-novel experiment serialized simultaneously on Fanfou and Twitter. It tries to tell a near-future story set in Chengdu by following a real-time timeline in the voice of someone posting as events unfold.
12-17 18:00 This week has passed neither fast nor slow. Tonight the company had a gathering at a hotpot place on Chunxi Road. These days you can no longer trust hotpot with free broth bases. Who knows what kind of chili essence and coloring go into them. Still debating whether I should drive later. Saw a news item today about an unidentified woman’s body found in a greenbelt downtown. News like that barely registers with me now.
Get as close as you can to the object of your desire.
LOMO Rule
Some say that the character cheng in Chengdu is really a pictograph meaning “electric scooter.” If you have ever seen the rivers of scooters during rush hour, you would be inclined to praise the sheer force of numbers.
It was already well past midnight now, so Lin Fei could ride the scooter at full stretch. Even so, the black shadow was faster than he had imagined, so fast that he could barely keep up. Yet it behaved like a cat teasing prey, always pausing for an instant at crucial corners to wait for him. Even then an ordinary person would long since have lost the trail. Fortunately Lin Fei still had another camera in his backpack: a Polaroid SX-70 Alpha 1 that looked like an elegant leather notebook.
LOMO is part of life.
LOMO Rule
Lin Fei’s cramped little apartment was not far from Jiuyan Bridge, tucked behind the notorious unfinished high-rise east of it. It was only a one-bedroom place, yet he had swaddled the living room in heavy black curtains and turned it into a darkroom.
The moment he got home, Lin Fei plunged into the darkroom and developed the roll he had just shot. Feilin means photographic film, an old Chinese rendering of the English word “film.” Nowadays it generally refers to camera film, though it can also mean negatives used in printing plate-making. Back in the day, it was seeing that word feilin that had made Lin Fei fall in love with photography. It seemed the perfect expression of his own name. Lin Fei possessed a pair of eyes the ancient Shu called “subduing-nightmare pupils.” People with such eyes could see what happened in spans of time invisible to others. By combining that ability with LOMO cameras, Lin Fei was able to produce all manner of uncanny photographs.
Carry it with you at all times.
LOMO Rule
The ease of old Chengdu is not something people merely speak of. It sinks all the way into the bones. The city was born with a life-attitude so calm and composed that every corner of it seemed to rest in an almost lazy state of comfort. Even white-collar workers in the forest of steel and concrete walked with a pace markedly slower than their counterparts in other cities.