Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

Even if this book is neither popular nor serious, at least it’s sensational. Five cents a word.

There’s no suppressing the truths that arise from our experiences. Desires teach us lessons, and we have to go forth into the new worlds that we construct for ourselves.” Chu Kuang’s voice trembled. “When you can’t, that’s when you die.”

Likes: A houseful of lies, lovers’ talk, any housework that can be performed with one’s tongue.

My life was extraordinarily lacking in all sense of reality, as if I were watching a different me playing various characters within a mirage. I wanted to be kicked out into reality so badly. . . .

(Though I couldn’t define what I was, I knew what I wasn’t.)

I’ll tell you the kind of person I was. In the eyes of the average person, I was a woman, but that vague semblance was an illusion, an easy category. In my own mind, I was a beast straight out of Greek mythology: a centaur.

“We come from a long line of deviants throughout history, all with the same final destination in the celestial order: death.

I buttoned her up in a snug-fitting coat and spread out layers of clothing to serve as makeshift blankets. I tucked her in. Her arms were wrapped around my neck as she said to me, You know, we might die together like this. . . .

She’d shared emotions I had no idea about—so profoundly and lucidly, so poignantly, so beguilingly even! This woman was like a nautilus in her intricacies. She’d been harboring her love for me like an oyster cultivating a pearl. Yet none of that pleasure was to be mine.

There are many important images in my mind that were captured at strange twists and turns, during the passage from one stage to the next, accumulating a weight I never expected. But I never did say goodbye or thank you to all the people in those images. With a stiff upper lip, I stood back and watched as they slipped out of my life.

I was determined to transform myself into a real girl.

Suffice it to say that Tun Tun had turned living into an art form.