Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning
A Yi
Yilin Press
January 2018
48.00 (CNY)
Brief introduction:
The title comes from a Borges interview, in which Borges planned to write a short story entitled Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning but never ended up doing so. Hence, A Yi borrowed this title. In A Yi’s novel, protagonist Hong Yang, got drunk and asked his wife to wake him up at nine in the morning. The next morning, when it was time to wake him, she found that he had drunken himself to death. The novel begins here, tracing Hong Yang’s rise to local fame, and taking advantage of his physical strength through the narrative of a hasty, insincere funeral. Through him, the novel depicts the disappearing countryside and its characters in a scroll-like manner.
A Yi
Dubbed as “the Chinese Franz Kafka,” A Yi is one of the most talked-about fiction writers in China. He worked as a police officer before becoming editor-in-chief of Chutzpah. He is the author of two collections of short stories that developed his bizarre literary style and utterly unsentimental worldview. He has published fiction in Granta and the Guardian. In 2010 he was shortlisted for the People’s Literature Top 20 Literary Giants of the Future. In 2012, his novel A Perfect Crime was published in China (English edition Oneworld, 2015). Wake Me Up at Nine in the Morning is his latest work, first published in China in 2017, the rights to which have been sold to over ten countries.
We went west. “You’ll know how far to go,” Qu the fortune-teller had said. I’d paid him with a fifty-yuan note and he gave me forty in change, then I picked his pocket for another hundred, which meant he’d given me ninety for telling my fortune. I figured he’d done a proper job, because I got his predictions before I settled up with him. I had a gut feeling everything was going to be OK, and Gou Nie and I got off the bus in a small township called Liu’an and found a room to rent.
Every day I went out buoyed up with enthusiasm. (I took it for granted that I only had to push open the door of an office, and the man sitting there would get up out of his swiveling chair and greet me with a: ‘Fine, come and do it to me.’) Then, as evening drew in, I’d trail wretchedly back to our rented room with the money and food I’d nicked (I would say I’d bought it). Sometimes, I’d be afraid of getting back too early, and I’d sit on a grassy bank, staring into space. The tarmac road, as inky-black as a bottomless pool, unfurled before my eyes until it reached the horizon, and the cars sped past, growing smaller as they receded. Concrete chimneys of enormous girth reared up at the edge of the road, vomiting one last puff of smoke. ‘Idleness is the root of all evil.’ That was what a man in uniform once told me, whoever he was. Looking portentous, he snorted out a lengthy stream of smoke, then patted me on the shoulder and left. Actually, I was perfectly well aware of that. It wasn’t that I didn’t want to change, it was that I was dragged down by an immense physical inertia. I was ‘dead to the world’, as my father used to put it.
Hook-Pinch was always complaining of headaches. The way she slept all day, then watched all those films, it wasn’t surprising she had headaches. Soon, our sense of time faded away. First, we forgot which month it was, then which day of the week, (though sometimes Hook-Pinch could tell that by the TV schedules), until eventually we only knew whether it was light or dark outside. It was as if we were lying in a small boat, being tossed around on an endless ocean. Sometimes we didn’t say a word all day. Sometimes we couldn’t be bothered to eat. We spent the days dreaming up a concentrated nutrition pill that would mean we were never hungry again. Often I lay on the lawn, almost weeping that my life consisted of nothing more than eating and drinking, pissing and crapping. I’d been reduced to a mere animal, I thought. But then I gave it some more thought and figured that it had nothing to do with that. Human beings were animals by their very nature. Animals were concerned about eating and mating, so obviously human beings were. But surely we had other desires too?
I thought and thought, until I suddenly felt a surge of excitement. I would make a serious effort to write down all these ideas:
Every living creature, no matter whether a pig, a rat, or a human being is the unique result of millions of years of tenacious reproduction, (the process is fraught with danger, the link can be broken at any moment by famine, disease, war, the political system, even yeast spores in the vagina), all living creatures carry with them a millennial inheritance – their family, their history – and are duty-bound to carry this forward. This being the case, what are we, that is, our ancestors and ourselves, doing it for? Or, put it another way, what are we waiting for?
We must have a mission, why else would we tolerate this long, boring wait? Or rather, there must be a conclusion, a climax that makes the long and hugely costly process worthwhile. Surely our lives are more than just getting ourselves something to eat, then mating and dying like male cicadas? So this great, resplendent mission that we accept so cheerfully, what exactly is it? … I spent a whole day gazing up at the blue sky. I figured that in bygone times, there must have been plenty of people doing the same thing. I almost expected a four-horse chariot to come leaping out of the firmament at any moment.
Of course, my train of thought was meaningless (but then, wasn’t every damned thing meaningless?)
Hook-Pinch and I carried on living like this, fixing something to eat and drink when we felt the need. ‘Full to the brim, must overflow,’ as they say about water, and it’s true for sperm too, so we constantly had sex, though we often fell fast asleep, both of us, right in the middle of it. We started to fight tooth and nail to while away the time (that’s pretty much what bullies banged up in prison do). Sometimes we were vicious to each other in the spirit of professionalism, as you might say. Finally one day, she began to pace back and forth, hurling anything within reach to the floor, shrieking like a mad woman: ‘Enough! I’ve had enough, dammit!’ as if those objects were the source of her anguish, and not me. It caused me more distress than if she had yelled at me directly." I’ve done my best, I thought. I looked up, mortified, and stared after her as she went into the bedroom. I expected her to shove her clothes into her case, and slam out of the house. If she did that, it couldn’t be helped. That was what I thought. Instead, she came out of the room, and enunciated slowly and clearly:
‘We’ve got to find something to do.’
I felt mortified. After a bit, she said to me, sounding like a kindergarten teacher admonishing a child, almost taking me by the hand: ‘You do know that, don’t you?’
‘Yes.’
‘What do you know?’
‘We’ve got to find something to do.’