River-water represents my heart

Kai dressed herself in dark solid colours, styled in straight lines, with one or two points of decoration. Her tanned, plump, freckled face was cosmetic-free, just a light oil massaged in after showers. Two dark-brown combs held back wavy, shoulder-length, salt-and-pepper hair, through which a tiny false diamond glittered in a lobe.

She held a black gel pen still for a few moments, then wrote:

月

亮

不

代

表

我

的

心

[The moon does not represent my heart.]

Older women often fall through society's cracks. They're too slow, quiet, dull, wrinkly and apathetic from what is now called "permanent hormone deprivation". Sexless, infertile, and dumpy, many have spent decades in casual work and unpaid carer roles, and then become homeless after divorce. At 48, Kai was a perennial pavement dandelion, a quiet corner wannabe pursuing her little wishes. Kai had the luck to have no children.

It wasn't something she'd tried before, wasn't adept at. She tried again:

江

水

代

表

我

的

心

[River water represents my heart.]

The psychiatric report diagnosing schizophrenia when she was 40, said, "She'd done very well academically in her early adulthood." It wasn't bad, Kai had applied for the top university in the nation, partly because it had a tall, sturdy iron railing all the way around the campus, enclosing majestically-soaring, cathedral-like buildings, and screening out all outsiders. She was naive enough to think that exclusive social success must be intrinsically valuable. Kai received a pass degree, and left university with both a music prize and a perennial mental illness, by the time she turned 21.

Medications and talk therapy couldn't repair her psyche. One more spiritually-attuned psychologist later suggested Kai'd had a "spiritual emergency", judging by Kai's behaviour at the time: she'd dropped out of society, lived alone with only a camp bed and a few utensils to cook food, was celibate like a nun, shaved her head, cut off ties from family and friends, became vegan and castigated her body. Kai's eating disorder and body dysmorphia worsened. Outwardly she dropped from 65kg to 48kg in 12 months, inwardly her deep antipathy towards modern humanity waxed full and flabby. She would go for walks thinking about the Zen and Taoist texts she was studying, try to embody and realise deeply. It brought joy, crises, disturbance. She sought safety and security in the permanent ideas of philosophy, but instead was drowning in sea of realisations of the emptiness of all things. Human minds cannot live in sunyata with ease.

Then, respecting Theresa Teng, she continued to write the lyrics of the well-known song,

你

问

我

爱

你

有

多

深

[You ask me how deeply I love you,]

Bred from working class labourers and pioneers, Kai's cells would not allow her to die. Aware she was on a knife-edge path in life, a social pariah, she struggled with suicidality even though her purpose in life was clear. But she was an extremely tough, vigorous plant, like all perennial weeds. Like a dandelion, her creative mind recast and recast its little spidery hopes, hardier than her fears. Her working-class ancestors were strong, her body so strong! But they had never before forged a descendant like she was. So she struggled. Her love, her highest hopes, were like the red-fin carp, battling against the waves, battling up the towering waterfall with the walls of the abyss echoing, resounding in a heart-breaking, crashing din.

Kai had chosen a Chinese name to match the sound of her English name, 凯, meaning "victory or triumph", using a name for a male. Learning Chinese was one of the things she did after she turned 40, along with learning classical violin. She genuinely liked these pursuits and found them satisfying challenges, transforming her piano-centric mind to find the same love of violin music, and she did find it in such as Bach's Chaconne.

Kai moved her pen to the left to continue the well-known refrain, writing from top to bottom:

我

爱

你

有

几

分

[... how much do I love you]

How could someone like her, living in the past, centuries old at heart, live in the modern world? Though high-functioning, independent ("very independent" said the internship report in her final year of the second undergraduate degree that followed soon after the first), Kai was still unemployable in the classical sense of the word. She tried to fit in somehow, but she was a square peg. Can we do otherwise than how Reality makes us?

Kai had a few little gifts, but Picasso may have altered his motto for her: "1% inspiration, 40% perspiration, 40% luck, 9.5% genetics, 9.5% upbringing." And Kai had had bad luck. For her, in an ordinary society where philosophy was either obsolete, relegated to religious orders, or only for university boffins, she was alone in a hidden war, seeking ways to survive somehow. Unemployable, prone to perfectionism, procrastination and dreaming, Kai yet found ways to survive in freelance work, teaching music, tutoring Italian, various online jobs that came up.

我 我

的 的

决 神

定 经

还 还

真 真

[My mind is still strong, my decision is still strong]

Kai had learnt an important truth about success: do not talk about a project that you are undertaking alone, before you bring it to completion. Contrary to her overt antipathy towards people, she was still deeply motivated by a desire for acclaim and social approval, which would be soothed by announcing any special project she was working on, and destroy any further motivation to work onwards towards completion. This is also the inner war of the classical musician. Desiring acclaim that only arrives on achieving the peaks of beauty and the greatest levels of perfection, the classical musician daily endures long, long hours of solitary practice, where imperfection fills almost the entire spectrum of one's output. Self-congratulation is always dominated by humility, as today's achievement is overshadowed by the real benchmark. 10,000 hours to mastery, almost entirely spent alone in practice, cannot be summed up by "How talented they are!"

Could someone like her, not merely a "leftover woman", but really an undesirable, ignorable, no-use-woman, plausibly compete against much more experienced, talented, street-wise, proficient and accomplished candidates?

Now, at the final line of her lyric, she added an idiom, like the turning-point of a Shakespearean sonnet:

江

水

不

犯

井

水

[River water does not interfere with well water]

At 48, she was interfering in another stream, not "minding her own business" but trying to be recast her dandelion seeds into a new crack, a new career, a new slash. It wouldn't matter if she didn't win the Reedsy competition. She was driven by the creative's instinct to play in new waters. She trusted that it would be interesting and safe.

From watching visual art, pottery, makeup, baking, glass-blowing competitions on television, she knew that the ultimate winner never boasted or said, "I will win at all costs." If it was her time, then the 40% luck – 40% perspiration see-saw would tip just so.

Thank you for this time.

Menping, Author