Notes of a Crocodile

by Qiu Miaojin

Locked the door. Shut the windows. Took the phone off the hook and sat down. And that’s how I wrote. I wrote until I was exhausted, smoked two cigarettes, and went into the bathroom and took a cold shower. Outside were the torrential winds and rain of the typhoon season.

For four years, that’s what I believed. And I wasted all my college days—when I had the most courage and honesty I would ever have towards life—because of it.

It was then that I realized I should leave behind some sort of record before my memories evaporated. I feared that otherwise it would be like waking from a dream, when the inventory of what had been bought and sold—and at what price—would be forever lost.

For a still moment, Shui Ling and I are sitting together in the hermetically sealed bus. Out the windows, dim silhouettes of human figures wind through the streets. It’s a magnificent night scene, gorgeous and restrained. The two of us are content. We look happy. But underneath, there is already a strain of something dark, malignant. Just how bitter it would become, we didn’t know.

People in this city are manufactured and canned, raised for the sole purpose of taking tests and making money.

I lived in solitude. Lived at night. I’d wake up at midnight and ride my bike—a red Giant—to a nearby store where I’d buy dried noodles, thick pork soup, and spring rolls. Then I’d come home and read while I ate. Take a shower, do laundry. In my room, there was neither the sound of another human being nor light. I’d write in my journal all night, or just read.

At the break of dawn, around six or seven, like a nocturnal creature afraid of the light, I’d finally lay my head—which by then was spilling over with thoughts—down onto the comforter. That’s how it went when things were good. Most of the time, however, I didn’t eat a single thing all night. Didn’t shower. Couldn’t get out of bed. Didn’t write in my journal or talk.

It exempted me from an oppressive system of social and personal responsibility—from going through the motions like a cog, from being whipped and beaten by everyone for not having worked hard enough and then having to put on a repentant face afterward. That system had already molded me into a flimsy, worthless shell. It drove my body to retreat into a self-loathing soul, and what’s even scarier is that nobody knew or seemed to recognize it.

The fact is, most people go through life without ever living. They say you have to learn how to construct a self who remains free in spite of the system. And you have to get used to the idea that it’s every man for himself in this world. It requires a strange self-awareness, whereby everything down to the finest detail must be performed before the eyes of the world.

Her feminine radiance was overpowering. I was about to get knocked out of the ring. It was clear from that moment on, we’d never be equals. How could we, with me under the table, scrambling to summon a different me, the one she would worship and put on a pedestal? No way was I coming out.

Those wrenching eyes, which could lift up the entire skeleton of my being. How I longed for myself to be subsumed into the ocean of her eyes. How the desire, once awakened, would come to scald me at every turn. The strength in those eyes offered a bridge to the outside world. The scarlet mark of sin and my deep-seated fear of abandonment had given way to the ocean’s yearning.

I am a woman who loves women. The tears I cry, they spring from a river and drain across my face like yolk.

She spoke timidly, not because she wasn’t supposed to have such feelings but because she was telling me about them. Because femininity meant having to hide one’s true feelings.

With the slackening of a rope, I’d been sent tumbling to the ground, and now that I was on my own again I was at a loss. I missed her. I had gotten what I deserved.

On other occasions it was like a major year-end cleaning where I was forced to throw something away because I couldn’t find anywhere to put it. And still other times, it was like trading in a used car for a new one: I didn’t give it a second thought.

College—now there’s a system. Though it’s not quite death, it’s a pretty close second. It’s the nexus of three major institutions (compulsory education, compulsory labor, and compulsory marriage), and these three institutions happen to be the greatest achievements of human civilization.

But while death takes you straight to the morgue, college is a single rope dangling loose from the inescapable net of society.

I reassured myself that I’d done nothing wrong. It felt like the fear was coming from inside of me. I never did anything to attract it, nor did I choose to be this way. I had no hand whatsoever in shaping the self that was crawling with fear.

When I held her body for the first time, it was as if I’d severed the very tendon of my fear, and it hurt so bad that I gnashed my teeth. One form of pain had been brought to an end by another even more violent pain. Like the big bad wolf, I harbored a ferocious desire to devour her body. And that became my new vision.

She let out a laugh, and then, as if she’d finally been torn open, a cry of pain. To paint a picture of our embrace, I’d almost have to use her blood and guts.