Mu Xin (1927–2011)

An Empty Room is a collection of short stories, which Mu Xin selected from several of his works to be translated into English for this collection. If there is a common thread to them, it seems to be about traces - the traces that we leave behind us, and the traces of people's inner selves that come through in everyday interaction and make us feel we understand the people that we know.

Most of the stories are what I think of as the 'traditional' kind of short story, ie they are about a moment or an epiphany rather than a full narrative arc. Personally I prefer stories where things actually happen, but there are many images that will stay in my mind - the loss of a treasured possession in The Moment Childhood Vanished, a room full of discarded love letters in An Empty Room (my favourite story), and above all, the powerful and vivid image at the end of Halo.

This is hardly even a story but starts off as a long discussion of the different depictions of halos in Eastern and Western art. I was wondering what on earth the point was, when one of the speakers starts to tell the story of a time when he had a halo. During the Cultural Revolution he spent time in a crowded prison cell. The prisoners who have been in the cell the longest have the privilege of sitting against the walls, so that they have something to lean on. Each has their own spot - and the sweat and oil from their heads has created a patch on the wall behind them. The circles were exactly like the dignified light of Buddha portrayed in ancient art. Not only that, each new prisoner had to have his head shaved. Our arms were bared as it was the peak of summer, and we sat with legs folded. Our posture, the hazy circles, the shaved heads formed eighteen arhat profiles, no more, no less.

Unlike books written for non-Chinese audiences, there are traces here of the censorship which means that certain events cannot be referred to directly. In Halo, the prison service is explained like this: "In the second half of the twentieth century, certain events akin to religious persecution of heretics occurred in a certain country. I wasn't exactly a heretic, but certain details of a sculpture of mine were used against me." Fong Fong No. 4, a story about a woman who the narrator knows at four different stages of her life, contains the lines: After I returned home, our correspondence gradually became less frequent. Her letters then began to arrive from Anhui Province where she had been sent to do farm work. - a reference to the mass sending of urban youth to the countryside towards the end of the Cultural Revolution.… (mais)