The Kite

The Kite

Lu Xun 1925

Tr. Huiwen Zhang 2013

 Winter in Beijing, over the ground snow is still piled, bald ash-black branches fork and cross in a bright clear sky, while in the distance one or two kites bob—for me, a puzzlement and sorrow.

Home’s kite season is springtime February.  If you hear the rustle of wind wheels, sha sha, look up and you will see a pale-ink crab kite or a tender-blue centipede kite.  Still more a lonesome tile kite, with no wind wheels and released too low, solitarily exhibits a fatigued, pitiable appearance.  Yet, at this moment, willows on the ground already shoot forth sprouts, early mountain peaches oft also break into buds; both correlate with the children’s adornment of the sky, merging into the mild harmony of spring.  Now where am I?  All around is still the solemn desolation of harsh winter, yet in this sky the long-elapsed spring of long-parted home ripples.

But I have never been fond of releasing kites, not only not fond, but even scornful, because I considered them trifles made by good-for-nothing children.  My opposite was my younger brother, at that time about ten years old or so, oft ill, miserably skinny, yet most fond of kites.  On his own he could not afford one, nor would I have allowed him to release one.  All he could do was to open his little mouth and stare motionless at the sky, his spirit flown, sometimes even as long as almost half a day.  When in the distance the crab kite unexpectedly fell, he exclaimed in surprise; when two tangled title kites came loose, he leaped for joy.  All these, in my view, cause for laughter, despicable.

One day, I suddenly recalled it seemed that for many days I had barely seen him, but I remembered once seeing him in the backyard picking withered bamboo.  As if a light dawned upon me, I ran toward a seldom visited hut of amassed junk.  I pushed open the door, and sure enough, among a dusty heap of odds and ends I discovered him.  He was facing a large square stool, sitting on a small stool; taken by surprise, he stood up, pale and crouching.  Leaning against the large square stool was the bamboo frame of a butterfly kite on which paper was yet to be pasted; on the stool was a pair of small wind wheels to be used for eyes, which he had just been decorating with a red paper strip, almost done.  I, in satisfaction at cracking his secret, was also furious at his concealing it from my eyes—that he with such persistence and expertise was underhandedly making a good-for-nothing child’s trifle.  I immediately reached out and broke the frame of one butterfly wing, then threw to the ground the wind wheels and crushed them flat.  In age, in strength, he was not at all a match for me; of course I reaped total victory and then proudly walked away, leaving him standing dispirited in the hut.  What happened to him then, I did not know, nor did I care to notice.

My punishment, however, finally turned on me, a very long time after we had parted, when I was already middle-aged.  I had the misfortune of bumping into a foreign book about children and then I became aware that play is a child’s most proper conduct, that toys are a child’s godsend.  So the childhood scene of spiritual slaughter I had not at all recalled over the last twenty years all of a sudden unfolded before my eyes; while at the same time my heart seemed to have also turned into a lead lump, heavily, heavily falling down.

But the heart did not fall all the way down to shatter at the bottom, either; it was just heavily, heavily falling, falling.

I was well aware of ways to make amends: present him with a kite, approve him to release, encourage him to release, he and I together release.  We are shouting, running, laughing—yet he at that time was already like me, had long before grown a beard.

I was well aware of still another way to make amends: go ask his forgiveness, wait for him to say: “But I did not in the least blame you.”  Then my heart would certainly be lightened—this indeed was feasible.  At one time when we met, both our faces had gained many an engraved line of life’s hardship, while my heart was heavy.  Little by little we brought up childhood stories; then I recounted this particular chapter, speaking of my own young confusion.  “But I did not in the least blame you,” I thought he was going to say; I would then immediately receive forgiveness, and my heart from then on would also be freed.

“Did this kind of thing happen?” he said, with a smile of puzzlement, as if listening to someone else’s story.  He did not recall it at all.

Wholly forgotten, not the least grudge, what meaning did forgiveness even have any more?  Ungrudging forgiveness: nothing but a lie.

What could I still hope for?  My heart had to be in fall.

Now, home’s spring is anew in the sky of this foreign land, not only bringing me back the long-elapsed childhood reminiscences, but along with them also an unmanageable sorrow.  I would do better to go and hide in the harsh winter of solemn desolation; but all around is in any case harsh winter, already providing me extraordinary severity and chill.