Chris Song’s Note: Xu Nianci 徐念慈 (1875-1908), from Changshu, Jiangsu, was a Chinese writer, editor, and translator in the late Qing dynasty who mastered English and Japanese in his early twenties and was skilled in mathematics and writing. In 1904, he took part in the founding of the Fiction Grove Society 小說林 in Shanghai, where he served as managing editor and then translation editor of the Fiction Grove magazine. He was enthusiastic about introducing advanced Western scientific and cultural knowledge. He not only translated the science fiction novel Dark Star 黑行星 (retitling American writer Simon Newcomb’s The End of the World) but also wrote the science fiction story “A New Tale from Mr. Falou” 新法螺先生譚 (inspired by various sources including German writer Rudolf Erich Raspe’s The Adventure of Baron Münchhausen in the Japanese translation by Sazanami Iwaya 巖谷小波 and the Chinese translation by Bao Tianxiao 包天笑, making him a pioneer of modern Chinese science fiction writing.
In my younger years, I harboured this belief: contemporary scientists limit their explorations to the phenomena within the realms of minerals, plants, and animals, presuming this to encompass all there is in the world. I, however, begged to differ. Regrettably, despite having my own ideals, I found no point of departure, lost in a mire of bewilderment, my thoughts becoming increasingly chaotic. Two years on, I one day found myself running involuntarily with such fervour that I quickly reached a mountain towering 360,000 feet above the sea. A fierce wind rose up, rendering me unable to stand my ground. This gale, not merely a movement of air, was the result of the interlacing gravitational forces of various planets. It originated tens of thousands of feet above my position, blowing at a speed of a million feet per second, in all directions—downward and upward, from right to left, and left to right. The peak where I stood was the very nexus of these colliding gravitational forces. The wind not only buffeted me about but also propelled me like a meteor, spinning me as if I were a top. Twenty-four hours later, I realised I had never been so clear-headed, but by then, my body had split into two, as though I were two distinct persons. One as light as a balloon, and the other nearly as heavy as my former self. Each body embarked on its own extraordinary adventure, which I shall recount in due course.
The body, as light as a balloon, possessed an incredible elasticity. Using this elasticity, I soared out of the Earth’s atmosphere. Harnessing the Earth’s rotation from west to east, I gradually entered the Moon’s orbit, coming into contact with it. My speed of flight thus increased dramatically, like a cannonball breaking free from Earth’s orbit. At this point, Earth appeared as small as a basin to my eyes, a bright disc with faint shadows, much like how the Moon looks from Earth. I continued my flight into the distant cosmos…
As I neared Mercury, I saw two or three people binding to a wooden frame an old man with white hair, a bent back, and toothless gums. The old man’s eyes were closed, his mouth shut, as if he were dead. They drilled a large hole in the top of his head and began to spoon out his brain matter. Standing next to them was a person holding a container filled with a milky white liquid, steaming hot. Once they had removed all of his brain, they began to pour the milky substance in. At this point, the old man’s eyes opened, and his mouth moved; his hands and feet began to twitch… It turned out that this was a brain transplant procedure being performed by the people of Mercury. Unfortunately, as the distance between us grew, I could no longer see clearly. The survival, movement, and thoughts of a person all depend on the brain, and these people had managed to replace the old with the new, transforming an aged man into a vigorous youth. Upon my return, I resolved to emulate this method and start a company for brain improvement.
Within half an hour of encountering Mercury, I plunged into the orbit of Venus and alighted on the planet.
Looking up at the sky, a red sun blazed intensely, almost oppressively. Venus seemed as thin as a sheet of paper; even with my lightweight form, I managed to break through its surface, falling two hundred feet before finally landing solidly. What caught my eye was a landscape glittering with gold, white jade, emeralds, corals, diamonds… Even with a thousand pairs of hands, one could not exhaust this treasure trove; even with a thousand pairs of eyes, one could not discern the variety of these jewels. On closer inspection, I discovered a white stone resembling a wriggling earthworm, and a piece of green jade shaped like a clam from the seashore, sprouting something akin to clam meat in its centre. Among them, creatures resembling coelenterates, echinoderms, molluscs, and arthropods abounded, each more bizarrely shaped than the last. Amid this heap of precious stones, I carefully searched and found a plant resembling a fern. I carefully uprooted it, noting its well-developed branches and leaves. Then I saw ferns and mosses, confirming the existence of cryptogams here. This led me to believe that the biologist’s assertion that plants existed before animals is incorrect; in primordial times, lower plants and lower animals coexisted simultaneously.
As I wandered aimlessly, I astonishingly found the diary I had lost five years earlier during a trip to the Arctic. Now, I will transcribe some excerpts from the diary for the benefit of all.
On December 30, I, alone, boarded a lightweight balloon I had constructed myself, equipped with necessary supplies. After three months, having passed through the Bering Strait, I entered a land without a trace of humans. Each year in March, the period for exploration, the sun still lurks below the horizon at the North Pole. Through my telescope, I saw nothing but a vast expanse of icy wilderness and snow, with the wind howling fiercely and the thermometer plummeting to forty degrees below zero. Polar bears, a characteristic species of the Arctic Ocean, frequently appeared in my field of view. Four days later, while eating bread soaked in alcohol, a fierce gust of wind struck head-on. The balloon, like a fallen leaf, fluttered down from the sky, landing on a reclining polar bear. The bear leaped up suddenly, overturning the basket of my balloon, and opened its massive jaws to bite at my head. I screamed with all my might, the echo reverberating, causing the bear to retreat. I immediately stood up and ran a mile, boarded the balloon, and after flying for three days and nights, returned to the Bering Strait…
I couldn’t comprehend how my diary had ended up on Venus. Ultimately, I decided to leave it there, placing it in a hole in a large rock, covering it with sand and stones. After I had buried the diary, thinking that there must be water on Venus since there were lower forms of vegetation, I went in search of some but found no rivers or swamps. Instead, I saw a column of wind stretching into the sky, resembling a waterspout at sea. On closer inspection, I realised it was composed of airborne particles. Suddenly, I felt myself being drawn into a vortex and, before long, I left Venus’s orbit… As for my other body, with a thunderous sound, it plummeted towards the earth’s core. The geological layers changed five times before my eyes. Fifteen minutes later, I landed on top of a pit in someone’s home.
Upon this pit lay a quilt a foot high, under which slept an old man with grey hair, deep in slumber. Startled awake by my arrival, he exclaimed in astonishment, “You, the only person in this world with open eyes, where have you come from?” “Where is this place?” I asked him in return. “This is Henan Province, China,” he informed me. I was amazed and said, “I am a surface-dweller from China, and I had no idea there was another China beneath us!” The old man also told me that this nation had twenty-two provinces and four hundred million compatriots. His name was Huang Zhongzu, a resident of this Henan Province. Although he was only fifteen days old, people here already considered him a longevity monster. I later learned that their timekeeping measured one second as being 216,000 times longer than our seconds. In other words, they considered six hundred years as one day. At fifteen days old, this man could very well be considered an ancestor of mine from over three hundred generations ago.
Then, the old man stepped down from his bed and accompanied me to a place where there hung a sign that read “Exterior Mirror”. He invited me to sit in a reclining chair. On a dome-shaped canopy that looked like glass but wasn’t, he blew many breaths, creating images of towering mountains, trickling streams, lush forests, various animals and birds, and people of all ages going about their activities. Later, he took my hand and led me into the small room marked “Interior Mirror”. While he was showing me around, suddenly, he closed his eyes tightly, his breathing became short, and his body temperature rose significantly. In my haste, I fell into a pond.
In my stupor, I had no idea how my two bodies managed to merge back into one. When I came to, I found myself floating in the sea. After struggling to swim for thirty or forty minutes, I was utterly breathless. Fortunately, a ten-thousand-ton warship approached and rescued me from the sea. I was immensely grateful. It turned out I was in the Mediterranean Sea, and the ship was en route to China. We travelled through the Red Sea, across the Indian Ocean, and finally returned to Shanghai.
Drawing from my years of bizarre experiences, I placed an advertisement in the leading newspapers of various countries, seeking students interested in learning the methods of utilising cerebral electric currents. In Shanghai, I founded a university capable of accommodating a hundred thousand students for meditation, where they would learn the methods of generating electricity, transmission, signalling, memorisation, analysis, and synthesis. Each method was taught in a day, completing the course in six days. Eager learners from all over the world flocked to the university.
I also established branches in many major cities to cultivate talent.
Life is unpredictable, and human hearts are inscrutable. With the widespread adoption of the methods of using cerebral electric currents, its tremendous utility led to a sharp increase in unemployment. As a result, people grew to hate me. I was not only verbally abused but also physically assaulted, forcing me to flee back to my hometown for refuge.
Alas, what an unimaginable end I had met! This was a portion of the extraordinary experiences of my youth.
How to cite: Song, Chris and Xu Nianci. “A New Tale from Mr Faluo.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 30 Jan. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/01/30/mr-faluo.
Xu Nianci 徐念慈 (author; 1875-1908), also known as Donghaijuewo 東海覺我, was a native of Jiangsu and a distinguished late Qing translator. As a founder of Fiction Grove Society 小說林, he was one of the editors of the Fiction Grove magazine 小說林. Xu’s “A New Tale from Mr Faluo” 新法螺先生譚, featured here, is one of the earliest Chinese works of science fiction. He is regarded as the first Chinese science fiction writer.
Chris Song (translator) is a poet, editor, and translator from Hong Kong, and is an assistant professor in English and Chinese translation at the University of Toronto Scarborough. He won the “Extraordinary Mention” of the 2013 Nosside International Poetry Prize in Italy and the Award for Young Artist (Literary Arts) of the 2017 Hong Kong Arts Development Awards. In 2019, he won the 5th Haizi Poetry Award. He is a founding councilor of the Hong Kong Poetry Festival Foundation, executive director of the International Poetry Nights in Hong Kong, and editor-in-chief of Voice & Verse Poetry Magazine. He also serves as an advisor to various literary organisations. [Chris Song & Chajournal]
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