I Have Seen My Country in the Most Outside of Places — Xiao Yue Shan

In Paolo Sorrentino’s The Great Beauty, there are two variations of the scene in which the film’s protagonist, a cavalier writer played by Toni Servillo, runs into the enthralling Fanny Ardant on an outdoor staircase, in the lurid Roman night. For the version released to theatres, the two cross paths to Servillo’s wide-eyed astonishment. Madame Ardant, he addresses her. The camera fixates to her silhouette as she turns, surprised less at the recognition than its sudden interruption of her long, step-by-step thoughts. Oui, she says, after the camera cuts back to Servillo. We don’t see their faces when they utter these brief acknowledgements. We witness, instead, the electric field of attention as it reaches out, as it penetrates the object of its fascination; we see reminiscence, thinking, fantasy. He smiles. The stoic, somehow-sad, somehow pleasured smile of someone remembering a much younger woman. She smiles back, not flirtatious but not void of desire, and tilts her head. After exchanging these silences, they bid each other bonne nuit, resuming their journeys into the warm, ancient dark. The scene lasts barely a minute.

The other version, which Sorrentino abandoned in favour of that anti-dialogue, is significantly longer, unfolding the striated contents of this stunning, torridly aching nothingness between them. In this parallel universe, Servillo is emboldened. May I say something a bit audacious? he asks her in a French heavy with Italian music. When I watched The Woman Next Door—and his voice stretches a little thin here, thinking—I fell a little bit in love. He shakes his head back and forth, as if willing the memory of her dark curls, her open blouse, her lunging embrace, out like water from the ears. She smiles that enigmatic smile—a perfect mirror-image of the shorter scene—before replying, May I also say something a bit audacious? We see her magic here when he assents, Of course, and her expression takes on an entirely new heaviness; her eyes—they’re not quite shining, but one can almost foresee tears welling up, in another story, on another night. I really wanted to be in The Woman Next Door. He wants to know: Why? She looks at him, and decades of cinema, of longing, of lying yourself into the truth—which is the actor’s vocation—passes between them, these two veterans of their trade. To die for love, she says. 

In the spring of 2022, sequestered in the olive verdure and low clouds of Tuscany, I watched these two configurations of the same moment, dozens of times. One after the other. In countless stopped frames and rewinds. I saw that Sorrentino had made the choice, in revision, to simply elide all those spoken lines from his footage. To leave only the smile, the gaze, the passing-between. Turning from the Fanny Ardant who recalled her carnal role in that Truffaut film and the Fanny Ardant who traded wordlessly with the unreadable night, I loved the precipice of the image when it changed—when it became one and not the other, when film betrayed its burden of reality to reveal its intentions, when the brightness of decision shatters the veil. I loved the broken conversation healed over by music, the heaviness of sights meeting in front of the camera’s guard, the choreography of a watched past and a watching present, as what goes unsaid in one world is said in another. How powerful silence is, one realises, when one knows what detonates and riles and resounds, directly beneath it.

***

There is a habit, of the writer, to take on the film cutter’s blades and trim certain lines, certain incidents or movements, from the long strips of recollection. It is done both out of necessity—for most of us lack a Fosse-esque vigilance to slights and particularities—and to serve language’s demand for control. Henry James once told us that: “relations stop nowhere, and the exquisite problem of the author is eternally but to draw, by a geometry of his own, the circle within which they shall happily appear to do so.” The fixation of the text cannot divert beyond the circle, cannot endlessly break off into ever longer tangents and fixations; we must always honour the centre and its gravity, the structural integrity of a duration rounded off from the chaos of time. When I want to translate a moment into text, I strike the conversations, I contour the light, I fixate on details—real or imaginary—that I could not back then. These memories, cultivated to cinematic standard, are done so to distill their beauty, their drama, or their perfect ephemerality. Their brevity—occurring in but a flash across the mind’s eye—carry along with them the invisible weight of years, of all that has happened and has never stopped happening. Only with a slight switch in thinking, one can draw a circle.

I was never enamoured with Italy by way of her enchantments, well-documented with the demure joy of Goethe, the aureate fragments of Vittorio De Seta, or the intimate discoveries of Jhumpa Lahiri. It wasn’t the artwork, the food, the dolce vita. What fascinated me instead about the long-romanced peninsula was that, despite its distinctions, it bore a striking resemblance to the country from which I came. Superficially, there are not many lines that can be drawn between the sprawling vastness of China and the thin curvature of Italy, not landscape nor history nor society’s patterns. Yet there was something undeniably familiar when I first walked through Milan, Naples, and Palermo in my mid-twenties, knitting my body into that frenetic topography—the mothers calling to their daughters from windows, the tapering streets marking their old labyrinthian logic, the vocal antics of everything alive, the heaviness of monuments, the bluntness that was really a front for what one could not or would not say, the intimacies of meal-sharing, the overbearing infrastructures of power both visible and invisible, and always, the celebration of spectacle. But beyond those common notes, beyond the comparisons of which I am certainly an insufficient measurer, the definitive quality by which these two countries coalesced in my mind was that, within their boundaries, there reigned a fierce, opulent pride. Ill-defined and in infinitely various costume, pride did not always take on the form of superiority or self-worth, but it certified that the idea of country would always pervade its people’s minds, that one could hold onto the solid fact of country and know it as immovable. It was this sense of not loving or hating your nation, but being inextricable from it, that raised the mirror between these two dazzling arenas. This, and the fact that this pride ruled alongside another monarch, equally as omnipotent but much less discernible—and that figure was silence.

***

For a long time, I did not know my grandfather’s name. He died a few years before I was born, and neither my mother nor my grandmother ever spoke intentionally of him in my presence. Occasionally, an anecdote would pass over the table—his sharp isolation of my mother from her teenage suitors, the late nights poured into his local party branch—but it never hinted at the greater portrait, never caught flame enough to shed light. There would be just enough said to open a door in the minds of those that knew him, and for I, who did not, the accounts were as innocuous as weather, without any sense of beginning or end. I never saw a single photograph, I never heard his voice, touched an article of his clothing, I never knowingly held a single object that he had held. I could fit him into my understanding of the world, but only in that he existed; he had come and left in some distant, unknown pattern, and in this way, he was in perfect agreement with death. 

It wasn’t only that my mother didn’t want to speak of him; we were simply not a family—and in this way we resemble many Chinese families—that flooded the present with the past. There were many things my mother kept from me, simply because they had no practical application in my life, and the act of bringing her life nearer, to invite an unshared history into our shared catalogue of memories, was to unnecessarily burden my world with things that did not belong to me. Such details are like the colour of the walls in the room in which I was born; the words others have whispered to me in my sleep; the structures that were destroyed and built over while I lived twenty years in another country, an ocean away. These oblique bones of experience are impossible to know, impossible to elucidate or decode, simply because they have been eclipsed by the bigger fact of living. Just as in chiaroscuro, darkness ripens the volume of light. 

The innumerable contours and aspects of the background hold the world steady on its foundations, giving reality shape. But as such they also come to be the boundaries that define one’s own territory of thinking—that which the outer world cannot trespass, and the inner mind cannot escape. My life is a monument to lost facts and pictures; after all the detritus of day-to-day living glides into the unsaid and the unremembered, what stays standing testifies to what has melted away. Every statue whispers to the non-statues. Every silence is embroidered with the unspoken. 

When I returned to Italy last spring, my mother accompanied me for a few days. Before dropping me off for my month-long residency, she and I walked through Milan. Doesn’t this remind you a little bit of China? I asked her as we strolled down Via Messina, her looking at the city’s version of Chinatown in slightly dazed happiness. Chinese people don’t sit around drinking wine in the middle of the afternoon, she retorted.

***

Luigi Barzini wrote it in The Italians: “the Chinese, too, love ceremonies, feasts, elaborate rites, deafening noise, fireworks, and good food. . . their art is also highly decorative and ingenious but not always deep. . .” But in reading the author’s critical, yet generous text of his country, I came across another passage that struck me as even more telling of the two nations’ affinities:

The struggle between what should be and what is, hypocrisy and sincerity, make-believe and reality, notoriously goes on everywhere. . . In Italy no one can afford to delude himself. . . The lower his condition the more vulnerable he is and the quicker he must recognise the real rules governing life in order not to prosper but merely to survive. . . Such rules, of course, are not written anywhere. They are suggested by proverbs, humourous mottoes on ash-trays, innuendoes, winks, or shrugs of the shoulder. Few Italians can avoid learning them, however, as they are taught by fear, humiliation, deception, and defeat.

In Tuscany, I stayed in a restored pieve which dates back to the 10th century. Throughout the month, I grew close to its owner, an architect who has been working on the restoration process for decades, and who has also since made it a home for traveling artists and writers, as well as seven birds, three (maybe four) cats, and an ursine, loving dog named Argo. Over cigarettes and globes of Chianti wine, I asked her about what it’s like to make something in Italy, a place where the past is not only with you but always looking over your shoulder, and whether the beautiful prowess of remains and ruins can overpower a mind attempting to draw a circle around the moment. The question came from my personal experience of trying to write in that oblivious, Romanesque building, looking over the slick stone walls and arched windows, the light that matured shades and gradients along the rhythm of the façade’s ancient pronunciations, and the way green—that most eternal and unpossessable of colours—flourished its variegating bouquet in the slopes and orchards, the way green reached all the way to the end of seeing. All of it took me deep into a splendidly defenceless silence, for all of it spoke—radiant, strange, immortal. 

She wasn’t in the business of making anything new, she told me. The vision had been established long ago, the materials set before her, the thought was finished. Her work was the bringing-together, to rejoin the invisible, severed links of the gone-structure and to attach them to the building we now sat in. To erase the in-between of catastrophe and decay, to calm down time and make it tranquil, slow again. It’s meant to be as if nothing ever happened. And in that never-happened, there is no forgetting; after a while, there will also be no remembering. The pieve with its blunt nave and Tuscan columns will wear the mask of its past self, and like this, years will pass, then decades, then centuries. The building, unchanged, will no longer recognise that what survives is not itself, but the illusive disorientation of always. 

In Beijng, the elite and the moneyed have come around to the philosophy of “natural architecture.” Exemplified by the sensitive and sleek predilections of western-educated virtuosos like Zhu Pei, the axioms of this trade focus on achieving a pleasing balance between minimalist, nature-envious forms, and ornate eastern traditions and theatrics. A museum with interlocking compartments of internal courtyards is offset by raw blocks of concrete. A city park sees foliage-covered blocks stacked up against a hollow frame, supposedly inspired by the classic rock gardens of Confucian thought. These buildings are the ultimate indulgence: beautiful and spacious, rich in insinuated antiquity, yet unmistakably contemporary. They pay tribute to the past by underscoring its annihilation. They love history because it is long and far and mutable, and destruction is imprinted in its very conception. It’s the continually tortuous question about the Ship of Theseus—is a machine that has had every single part replaced still the same machine? Except in this case, it isn’t the physical components that have been swapped out; it’s the people. Can we still think about those same old ideas from this completely different time, standing where we are now?

Cannot afford to delude himself, Barzini had said. Yet everywhere I went in Italy, I saw delusions. Denial that time had passed, denial that the essential plot of life was change, denial about what is forgotten and what is remembered—that what has disappeared from consciousness deserved to go, and what has endured is the eminent truth. And because I grew up in the close company of delusion, because I saw it hanging on all the walls and folded in between all the pages and darkened inside every mouth of where I was born, I felt it familiar—almost comforting, almost an old folktale. That is how one survives the brutal questions of country, the hollow plots and gardens of country: you must live in the illusion, all the while knowing what is stirring, right there beneath it, the unthought-of thing boiling on the other side. 

I cannot presume to know anything about Italy or the Italians. In the way of Roland Barthes, the Italy I speak of is the Italy of my mind—a place one goes to think of other places, as I’ve learned that every country one travels to will always be a site of mourning for one’s first country. But if such a mutuality between these two places exists, it is because there is no nation that can define itself singularly, and no societal theory that can be constituted without the same old schemes we have always hung our logic upon. The tensions between past and present, of happiness and freedom, of memory and truth. These two methodologies—the persistent Italian unchanging, the hyper Chinese dream of progress—are two ways of addressing the same vacancy: the void between where we came from and how we got here. 

***

I can’t stop thinking about Sorrentino. About Servillo and Ardant, about the staircase where two distinct histories intersect, about what happens when you purposefully replace noise with silence. I imagined that when the director looked at these two remarkable scenes before him, he opted for the mysterious to lend his film the dignity of the uncommunicable, the allure of coincidence, and the voiceless beauty of his city. And just like that, a single cut of the editor’s hand renders two completely distinct universes. Just as so many things can be said to have never happened, there are so many ways we, too, are constantly participating in this action of never happening.

Hélène Cixous described writing as “a way of leaving no space for death, of pushing back against forgetfulness, of never letting oneself be surprised by the abyss. Of never becoming resigned, consoled, never turning over in bed to face the wall and drift asleep again as if nothing had happened; as if nothing could happen.” When I first discovered this power innate in the act of writing, I had taken such words as a dictum to preserve: that forgetting was something to fear, that nothing could follow a lost instant, that writers are not only legislators but safekeepers, and we must constantly rescue our memories from silence and stillness. The potentiality of language to keep everything in its reins is intoxicating. Our libraries, dictionaries, museums are full of these bastions, of vestiges remaining on the shore like pebbles of soft-edged glass. Our most sacred institutions are made out of keepsakes, of what we collect, honour, and guard—of memory merging into history. And because I too honoured these palaces, these surviving captives from the funereal march of time, I looked back in the vanished exhibits of my youth with terror. I wanted to know who had escaped from the empty picture frames, I demanded that the days arrange themselves in some semblance of grammar, I had thought that truth could only come in the form of speech. Everything that had been left stranded in the vacated halls of my life, everything that had been humming its ongoingness just outside of my reach, the ability to write my way into them was the first glaring signification that literature was something more than beauty and music, more than lyric and more than theatre. It was the extraordinary assertion that the unknown is a material. That it could be given form like marble, like stone or wax, and be fitted to align in the atrium of the mind. I think this urgency to excavate, to interiorise everything, is a commonality between those who come to writing in an effort to articulate what has been kept from them—whether that be the archives of a nation, the secrets of a unviolent existence, or the name of a grandfather.

The emperor that gave China its most recognisable structure is also the one responsible for one of the most infamous book burnings in the country’s history. In destroying the historical records that depicted a different country than the one he unified, Qin Shi Huang held to the artist’s divine dream of creation: to rewrite the landscape, to rewrite the people, to rewrite origin as a way of writing greatness. In the centuries since, there have only been more attempts at erasure, more fractures in the tide, more rebirths. To speak of history in China is to speak at the guessed-at, the intuited, and an architecture whose foundations are sealed in faith—it is a country passionately in love with the premonition of its own newness. The great wall of the Qin dynasty is still standing, long curls of lace tracing the demarcation of my country’s ancient states; I see them with the same scope as all those who came before me—but we are secret from one another. The cord between them and I have been severed, by carelessness or recklessness, by irrevocable burials, by the radical appetite of pride. When I think of them, I think of the static crackle of the fire. 

The first poems I wrote were about China, and they were poems of speechlessness. They are poems to fill that terrifying instant when you open your mouth to answer a perfectly nondescript, pedestrian question—and no answer comes. Questions like: how is your family; what happened on this day; where are you from? Susan Sontag wrote to service her delirious appetite for a limitless number of different lives; I wrote first because I wanted to live more deeply in my own. In what I thought to be the tremendous gaps of my archives, I poured imagined realities, imagined mythologies, imagined tellings. I did it with words. I resurrected the dead with the thinnest gossamer hints of their presence, I built the sets of my childhood with the rims of photographs, I carved the transcript of my story into the unwritten, a thin thread of light chiselling at shadows. Because I had inherited a vast legacy of silence, because silence was my country, I had to build a wall to see its borders. 

So much of our contemporary existence relies on the perpetuity of an eternal present. We are in an age of meticulous storage, of the classification of experience, of perfect recall. Because we have merged memory into history, we have displaced the perpetual flux of the former into the consecrated constructions of the latter, and as such, we’ve negated the ineffable magic, the curious suddenness of memory. We have eased it away from its definitions, erasing the possibilities of forgetting; the multiplicity of imaginations gives way to a multiplicity of interpretations. The agony of history is that, as Pierre Nora said, it “is perpetually suspicious of memory, and its true mission is to suppress and destroy it.” For history must claim its stoic objectivity, its trueness, its dream of representation, and it has no patience for the whims of memory, the sporadic sparks and discursions, that sheer intangibility. 

For a long time, I thought of my writing as a historiography, but it was not—has not ever been. I was only walking the circumference of history’s incomprehensible continent, waiting for something to catch my eye. Sometimes a small vine seeping from between the porous stones would remind me of my mother’s curls falling on the bathroom floor, or a trick of the light would flash to an island shape in an airplane window—none of it having been entered into the archives, all of it wavering spectral in the air. Qin Shi Huang, for all his destructive prowess, was terrified of death. Throughout his life, he sought the conjurings of alchemists, the remedies of medicine-men. He sent ships, red and gold over the opaque horizon, in search of elixirs, of generous deities, of strange beasts whose feather, horn, or bone would prove the key to everlasting life. At the top of Zhifu Mountain, he took sight of the land that belonged to him, the undulating sea-coast, the dappled eastern light, the overwhelm of eternity at the centre of the sky’s blue eye, and he could not bear to pass himself over it, into the no-longer. Amidst all the clamour of his creations, the nothingness of the unknown was unbearably louder. He feared—perhaps—exactly this: a strange woman on another continent, writing about him as guesswork, her mind taking over his, her reality transposed over his domain. I, too, have been afraid that I would never be accurate in iterating the life I had lived, the days I had grasped at, the lost moments of which I was the sole transcriber. But when I came to know that it was the discontinuity, the oblivion, the multiplicity of memory that allowed something to be where nothing was—that the archive was not empty because new rooms were appearing ex nihilo—something miraculous happened: I no longer feared. My memories are built at the site of their own impossibility.

When Fanny Ardant looks at Tony Servillo and her eyes change, right before she doesn’t say To die for love, those are the few seconds that move me. The same in both scenes, they are dangerous seconds, anguished seconds, mystifying seconds. In those seconds, there is the wanting to say, there is the almost-language that most closely resembles the ur-language, when it was less certain—when it was still trying to find its way to words. It makes me read Cixous differently; that if writing is to never resign oneself to pretending that nothing has happened, then there must be a place in writing—and in thinking—for one to stand upon delusion, upon silence, in order to walk towards the someday of articulation. Just as there are two worlds of the Roman staircase, there are two versions of every text: the one that says what it says, and the one that could still say everything else. We write one, and we keep the other one alive.

What James doesn’t tell us about drawing the circle is that it takes a whole life. That the stream of time is violent, and it will stir up fragments and ephemera from the silt of what has been abandoned, and those shatterings will find its way past the guards, through the conflagration, into the streets of thinking. In Milan, faced with an emblem of the biscione, my mother told me that my grandfather had been born in the year of the snake, and the sands shifted a little more in the underground of lost time.

All this to say that I am more patient that I had been—but I have my ear pressed to the earth. I am still listening for the never-happened.

***

Xiao Yue Shan is a poet. How Often I Have Chosen Love was published in 2019. Then Telling Be the Antidote will be published in 2023. shellyshan.com