envisioned,
though they have no idea
whose maps their footprints might update.
DIFFICULTIES
Don’t mention your loss again.
Indeed, you’ve lost so many things:
home, jobs, family, a country.
You landed in such a place
where everything is strange,
where you must start all over.
Sometimes you are like a child
who has just begun to talk,
sometimes you are like an old woman,
confused, unable to collect yourself.
These years you have lived
from loss to loss to loss,
surrounded by difficulties.
But whose life, if meaningful,
is not rooted in a predicament
and made of difficulties?
Stop talking about suffering.
Sufferings are never equal —
compared to billions of people,
you ought to feel fortunate
that you can start again.
TALENT
How many people wish you were mediocre
so as to prove you are the same as they?
Now that you want to stand out,
you will have to endure pain and injury —
surely there will be fists that all at once
hit you from different directions.
But even if a whole gang attacks you
you mustn’t fight back, because
they mean to sidetrack you
and watch you rolling in mud.
Keep in mind your talent also includes
patience and endurance.
Get up, move quietly, and leave
all the clamor behind.
MISFORTUNE
Misfortune is again descending.
In what fashion will it appear this time?
You have seen calamities and deaths
and have been shaken by shattered families,
their members scattered everywhere.
So many times you almost collapsed,
moaning, “No more — I’m done for!”
But you picked yourself up
and set out again, although
you had to make abrupt turns,
had to cross new hills and valleys
learning another kind of staggering.
Now, misfortune is coming,
but you don’t tremble anymore,
already familiar with its company:
beneath a ghastly mask are the faces
of various deities, including Opportunity.
THE CHOICE OF EXILE
Although you are almost middle-aged
you still want to uproot yourself
and go far away so you can start over.
You haven’t set out yet, uncertain
where to put down roots.
You often wish you could be like that artist
who bought a little island so that
he could live freely on his own land.
He raised vegetables and chickens, did carpentry,
planted bamboo and fruit trees
all over the slope beyond his cottage.
Every season was like spring on his island,
where he could hear only the tides and birdsong.
It was beautiful and quiet enough to smother him.
Don’t forget he chose to kill himself
and even strangled his wife,
because he couldn’t see how to continue,
so crushed was he by madness and fear.
From the very beginning he should have known
that if he chose exile he would have no land of his own
— the desire to depart
would rise in him again and again —
he could find no home other than the road.
Don’t dream of taking root somewhere else.
Once you start out, you must live like a boat,
accepting a wandering fate
drifting from port to port, to port . . .
A 58-YEAR-OLD PAINTER LEAVING FOR AMERICA
Tomorrow you will leave Shanghai,
the city you used to love,
to look for another life far away.
“Probably another death,”
you often joke
