No More Tiesheng Shi in the World

Shi Tiesheng understands himself more after the car accident. Torture becomes delicate Chinese characters as pretty pearls. What life takes away is legs at an age of running passion. As an outbreak in philosophical prepositions, life posts a large barrier on Shi, with the cost of losing legs.

It is always highest compliment to describe a writer’s works as “written by life.” However, when it comes to Shi, such compliment becomes so powerless in front of all his works of life’s heaviness that this term could only be referred to as a statement at most. I am lucky. Although I am born late, I happen to have the honor to read Shi’s works at an early stage. Touched by his pain, I introspect myself after reading his articles. Readers could see themselves by reading Shi, a writer wondering at the edge of live and death, a writer discovering the ground of the bottomless pit of life.

It’s not at all exaggerating. Open the book of Shi’s “Memories and Impressions,” and you will read about live and death right in the first chapter. In this Softly go, softly come, Shi writes, “Nowadays, I always have feelings like this: Satan seats in the dark at the corridor outside, invisible, waiting for me night after night. I don’t know when he will stand up and walk towards me. He will say, ‘Hey, let’s go.’ in an irresistible tone.”

Shi understands himself more after the car accident. Torture becomes delicate Chinese characters as pretty pearls. What life takes away are legs at an age of running passion. As an outbreak in philosophical prepositions, life posts a large barrier on Shi, with the cost of losing legs.

Every time I read The Temple of Earth and I, I always appreciate Shi, who introduces the elongation of life in this long, long prose. He shows us the passage towards the colors of life when reality bleaches our hearts and rusts our existence. Dense as the fog of life, Shi pokes it away. However, life takes away his mother.

Tenacious hugs, silent back ... Shi’s mother left him heavy treasures of memories, as shown in many of Shi’s works such as the famous Albizia Julibrissin. Many stories and characters described in Memories and Impressions also originated from his mother’s narration. What touches me most is the A Shadow Person, in which Shi believes that everyone has impressions of some persons, solely through description from one’s father or mother, such as some senior, whose pictures we have not ever seen, let alone the real figure.

Mother becomes a “shadow person” after ten years of her death in Shi’s family. In Hometown, Shi writes, “On the Tomb Sweeping Day after ten years of mother’s death, my sister and I went with our father to sweep my mother’s tomb, which disappeared unknowingly. With a flushed face, father scuttled east and west, looking all over the hill for a scarlet maple, beside which mother was buried.”

The experience of losing mother is like losing a pushing hand for Shi’s upward-going wheelchair. Bitterness of life transforms into yerning, even power. Too many elements were taken away, Shi becomes so pure. He sits in a park named the Temple of Earth, watching sunlight turning into dusts, hearing squawking of birds. I think, the Temple of Earth is like an idol inched, while visitors are all only passers-by compared with the sedentary Shi. Nothing wins over the erosion of time—the Temple of Earth also sinks into clamor after the departure of Shi.

The last time he wrote about the Temple of Earth in Missing the Temple of Earth, Shi said, “Sometimes I invited some friends to drive me there for a visit. I discovered that it had been destroyed.’ Then I think, why should I look for silence in the Temple of Earth, but not to look for the Temple of Earth in Silence? Like Chuang Tzu, who wasted time in his dreams of butterflies, I wasted my life in the Temple of Earth. I used to doubt, ‘Is it I’m in the Temple, or the Temple in me?’ Now I realized in the universe of life, there is an invisible line—one has to cross it with cognition—as soon as one crosses the line, pleasant fragrance will blow over one’s face. Now I realize that I am not in the Temple, but the Temple is in me.”

Shi enlarges and deepens his life with his pen. He cannot walk, but can wonder through the depth of time; he cannot enjoy common customs, but can have conversation with himself. He has left the Temple of Earth, but the Temple becomes a heritage of his to human beings. Although he has faded away in reality, but just as what he wrote in one of his poem, Heritages—mountains, rivers, trees and every other silent objects are all his heritages to us—so is this delicate book of Memories and Impressions. Characters, events and the angles of viewpoints in this book could open our eyes, nurture our thoughts, and comfort our feelings.