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Liu Liangcheng (author), Jeremy Tiang (translator), Bearing Word, Balestier Press, 2023. 340 pgs.
Liu Liangchengβs Bearing Word is a story about a polyglot translator, a donkey who can see ghosts, and two countries at war. Set in the authorβs home region of Xinjiang in an unspecified but distant past, the novel is also a reflection on language as a means of communication among humans, animals, spirits, and all the creatures in between.
The protagonist, Ku, is a word-bearer living in the kingdom of Pisha. He delivers messages across lands and languages, being able to speak all of them. One day, Pishaβs religious authority entrusts Ku with a very important task: to deliver a female donkey across the Gobi Desert and to the kingdom of Heile, with which Pisha is currently at war (Pisha and Heile have been at war for decades, but no one really remembers why). βTreat this donkey like you would a message,β the man tells Ku. Our protagonist does not know it yet, but the message has been marked on the young jennyβs skin, tattooed under her belly, and kept hidden by her soft fur.
This is how the story begins. Ku and the donkey, who now answers to the name Hsieh, bid farewell to their hometown and march toward the desert. As the journey proceeds, we get to know more about each of their lives, about the world of humans and the world of donkeys, as well as about the interstitial spaces where these two worlds come together. Ku was adopted (bought, actually) by a man he used to call Master, an interpreter who initiated him in his career as a translator and who taught him that βwith each new language, you gain another nightβ. In Kuβs world, translation is both a necessity and, at the same time, an impossibility:
[…] some things might seem to be illuminated by different languages, but those were actually the darkest of all. You couldnβt describe a Heile dawn in Pishanese. Kun scripture was meant to shine a light for the world, but when translated into Heilenese, Pishanese, Huang or Chiu, it was, without exception, cast into the darkness of these tongues.
Even though he can speak all the languages of the world, Ku cannot (yet) speak the language of donkeys. Hsieh, on the other hand, doesnβt need a translator to understand what humans are saying, and she can communicate with every creature out there, including ghosts. Actually, she (like all her other fellow donkeys) can not only hear words, but also see them, as colours and shapes. When the chants of the devotees at the West Kun Temple soar in the air, she can see the celestial palace that these holy sounds are actually building. Through Hsiehβs synesthetic gaze, Liu makes us see the world that the words (of men, animals, and ghosts) can build.
The journey from Pisha to Heile is arduous and dangerous. Not long after their departure, Ku and Hsieh are caught in a violent battle between the armies of the two kingdoms and, while seeking shelter, witness the massacre of people and animals that is left in the aftermath. While Ku sees beheaded corpses and their detached heads scattered around on the ground, Hsieh sees the ghosts of those soldiers, crying for their missing body parts and longing to become wholesome again, in order to be able to ascend to the heavens. The battlefield soon fills with people looking for severed heads to re-attach to their dead bodies, but sometimes mismatches occur, which is how the ghost TuoJue was born.
The body of a Pisha man (Jue) was sewn to the head of a Heile man (Tuo). TuoJue, who can only be seen and heard by Hsieh, joins the travelling gang, settling on the donkeyβs back but facing backwards, looking at the past. This Frankenstein-like creatureβpieced together from parts of two war victimsβis the past we assemble and carry on our back when we are busy speaking the present into being. Not everyone sees it, but it is there, and it wants to contribute to the story.
In Liuβs novel, everything comes alive, and every creature has agency: donkeys see sounds and ghosts, dogs decide when the moon will appear in the sky at night (which is why they howl at it), and chickens, with their crows, determine when day breaks. But, most importantly, in Liuβs novel, everything wants to speak, everyone has sounds to make and heavenly castles to build. The novel is a journey into the crevices of language, the dark spots where limitations become possibilities and vice versa. Ku and Hsiehβs ordeal through the desert speak to our human desire of communicating with what is outside of usβbe it other humans, creatures, thingsβwhile at the same time pointing out the cruel irony: we are mostly bad at it (and thatβs how wars start).
If we consider the etymological meaning of the English word βtranslateβ, which is βto carry acrossβ (from the Latin trans– and latus), we realise that Liuβs novel really is a story of translation, of what it means to carry across sounds and creatures. Ku, then, is the archetypal translatorβthe one who does the act of carrying. In fact, it was interesting to find out that the Chinese character used for the name of Ku is βεΊβ, which literally means βwarehouseβ. This would make our protagonist an archive of some sort, a travelling repository of a peopleβs memory that war and time threaten to destroy or simply leave behind.
Liuβs novel has been translated into English by Jeremy Tiang, and I am so thankful these words have not been lost to the desert wind or destroyed by enemiesβ armies, but have been carefully collected and skillfully carried across to a time and place where I could find them. I hope many other readers will find them too.
How to cite:Β De Marchi, Serena. βEverything Comes Alive, Every Creature Has Agency: Liu Liangcheng’s Bearing Word.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 9 Jun. 2023, chajournal.blog/2023/06/09/bearing-word.
Serena De Marchi is a postdoctoral researcher at Stockholm University. She is interested in contemporary Sinophone fiction that plays with memory and history, lived and imagined spaces, narrative bodies. [All contributions by Serena De Marchi.]
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