of its wonders, as if it were as banal as dust: “She sank into memories and told José that she was in an accident in the interior several years ago and was taken to the hospital, where she was pronounced dead. But after a day in the morgue, she came back to life. She was moved into an ordinary room. A young person went to her room every day and chatted with her. As they chatted, the institute director sensed that she’d seen him somewhere before, but couldn’t remember where. The young person said he was a vagrant and constantly on the move. He was currently helping out in the hospital. Not until the day she was discharged did he tell the truth: he said he had talked with her an entire night in the morgue and had almost frozen to death. She suddenly found this young person really annoying.”
In another section, an anecdote also takes a strangely pragmatic turn, as if Can Xue wants to transform anything mythic, mystical or magical here into something more folkloric, simple, mundane: “Grace’s legs gave way and she sat on the floor. She propped herself up with her hands and then grabbed hold of a little feathered thing. It appeared to be a dead bird. This whole room seemed full of dead birds. She saw Lee standing against the wall, afraid of stepping on them. Oh, he was moving away from the wall, apparently intending to exit. Grace said silently, ‘Coward—what a coward!’ Lee exited, and Grace lay down. Dead birds kept dropping from above. Although she couldn’t see them, she could smell the fresh blood. She started thinking back. She recalled that when she was a child, the old woman she called Granny (perhaps not her real granny?) smoked cigarettes. She had a little turtle in her pocket. Grace wanted to look at the little turtle, so Granny pulled it out and placed it in her hand, warning her, ‘Careful—it bites people.’ One day, it did bite her palm. It was gory, for it broke her skin. She cried. As Granny bandaged it, she kept saying, ‘Didn’t I warn you?’ Grace still had a scar on her palm. When Granny lay in her coffin, they put this living turtle in with her; they put it in her pocket. Afterward, Grace thought about it for a long time: How long could the little turtle live underground if it ate Granny’s flesh?”
The book is full of these vignettes and stories within stories, that operate with more autonomy than they would in another book. Reading Frontier is not unlike reading the Old Testament, where stories are strung together by some other logic that is not always apparent to the reader, though you are still left with some thematic impression. And the stories have their own arcs and narratives and stand up on their own. But their relation to each other is often the mystery.
But unlike the Bible’s eschatological semiotics, the issue here is something more straightforward: the nature of Pebble Town, or the Frontier. Where are we exactly? Is this heaven? Is this hell? Is it earth? A land of the past or present? China at times gets mentioned alongside the Gobi Desert. The placelessness of our destination is what carries this curious tale.
Can Xue seems very interested in this. On the one hand, Pebble Town is everything: “Our Pebble Town is a huge magnetic field, attracting people who are fascinated with secret things . . .” And on the other hand, it is nothing: “When we went to the frontier years ago, we couldn’t see the road ahead clearly then, either. Since we couldn’t see the road, we just walked. Sometimes we could tell we were walking on flat land, sometimes on rubble. Later, at daybreak, we found we had circled back to where we had started. We had gone nowhere.”
In the end, we are left with something like a message in a bottle, a beautiful compelling thing that might, like a frontier itself, take endless readings to crack. I know I haven’t done it yet. But like that message in a bottle, the interior is greater than the exterior—the book indeed expands as you go on. I wasn’t crazy in finding it only got longer, and I fear that I will have many decades to go before this book gets to its conclusion with me. I guess in the end, I too—sitting here, book in lap, computer on porch, within a still twilight in the middle of this unknowable frontier of my own that I’ve come to know year after year—am one of the denizens of the Frontier: “Between cracks in the foliage, the steel-blue sky was divulging some information to them. Deep down in their hearts, they understood, but they couldn’t say what it was. They could only sigh repeatedly, ‘Pebble Town, oh. Oh, the frontier. Oh . . .’”
With Can Xue’s permission, we have changed some of the Chinese names to English names that are similar to the Chinese. For those who have read or will read the novel in Chinese, we provide this list.
Sherman – Shi Miao –
Amy – Ayi –
José – Hushan –
Nancy – Niansi –
Lee – Zhou Xiaoli –
Grace – Zhou Xiaogui –
Little Leaf – Xiao Yezi –
Marco – Ma-ge-er –
Roy – Rui –
Woolball – Maoqiu –
Tulip – Yujinxiang –
It was late. Liujin stood there, leaning against the wooden door. The ripe grapes hanging on the arbors flickered with a slight fluorescence in the moonlight. Blowing in the wind, the leaves of the old poplar tree sounded lovely. The voice of someone talking blended with the rustling of the poplar leaves. Liujin couldn’t hear what he was saying. She knew it was the man who had recently been coming here late every night and
