Remark 1. As a writer, I am heavily influenced and inspired by magical realism, surrealism, postmodernism, and stream-of-consciousness writings. Perhaps some of my influences are manifested in the story below.
Remark 1. As a writer, I am heavily influenced and inspired by magical realism, surrealism, postmodernism, and stream-of-consciousness writings. Perhaps some of my influences are manifested in the story below.
Remark 2. As a non-native English speaker, I find the biggest challenges of writing in English to be my limited vocabulary and frequent confusion of one word with another, and all the micro grammatical issues. I'm trying to actively increase my vocabulary and precision of word usage through reading and some useful apps these days (when math and life are not stressing me out too much).
Remark 3. This story is still under possible revisions, and I'd always love to hear comments and critiques from others!
A Review of the Manuscript
This is an informal and rather personal review of the unpublished manuscript of Jiajun Yan’s experimental writing “My Documented Life”. The original handwritten manuscript is featured in Yan’s solo show under the same title, along with a large collection of paintings, sculptures, other original writings, etc., done throughout the past several decades, currently on view at the Norton Simon Museum, Pasadena, until June 30th.
As the curator of the show, I'd like to say that the show is well-received, although I’m unsure about how many of the show-goers have the time to stop and read the manuscript, the most central piece of the show, which has a volume of nearly 2000 pages. As one of the very few people who have read this unpublished manuscript in its current yet shifting entirety, I think fairly confidently that any likely reader of this review will not have beforehand read the manuscript themselves. Hence, I judge it appropriate to give a brief recap of its main contents here.
First of all, I'd like to mention that the author has indicated that she'd like to refrain from calling the manuscript a book since a book should itself stand as an independent piece of work. Yan’s writing, on the other hand, isn’t the completion of itself (in the sense of a metric space, this is a metaphor, said the author herself). It belongs to a larger space, reaching out to the things being removed from it. Let me elaborate: one of the central goals of the manuscript is to relate the two careers of the author — Yan is known to be both a mathematician and an artist. A large number of pages are hence dedicated to explaining how the two careers interact with each other through various aspects of the author’s life. Consequently, this manuscript cannot be viewed, or rather, would have been meaningless, without the existence of Yan’s actual works in mathematics and art. Moreover, the manuscript goes beyond simply being a self-analysis/parody of Yan’s own works, it is also a personal account of her memory, identity, political views, among many others, and countless fleeting ideas that are never fully realized, scattered in the manuscript as if scattered in the years of her life. As a result, the manuscript declares the process of creating paintings and theorems, living daily life, and evidently the act of writing the manuscript itself, altogether, enveloping, Yan’s very own form of performance art.
The manuscript is a true amalgamation of everything, but one can still more or less identify a few key components, the most prominent one perhaps being a novel, in an approximate sense, that one can safely say is autobiographic in essence. The chapters of the novel are divided in a way that the protagonist is in love with someone new in each chapter, and hence each chapter can also be thought of as an independent novel on its own; a quote from the protagonist in the first chapter of the novel goes as follows: when I’m no longer in love with you, I die; and someone else takes over my body and mind; she’s no longer me, but she’ll remember me, if no one else does; she’ll mourn me, if no one else does; she’ll love me, if no one else does. Hence, one can also say that the protagonist is different in each chapter. Another thing to note is that the chapters of the novel do not appear in consecutive or numerical order in the manuscript. For example, the third chapter of the supposed novel shows up first in the manuscript, and afterward, a manifesto claiming to be “a critique of cool, a praise of boring; a critique of change, a praise of repeat; a critique of more, a praise of less” appears. The manifesto then leads to an analysis of the painting triptych made by Yan in her mid-20s related to the same theme. This is in fact the typical structure of the manuscript: one theme is explored and digested in different formats of writing, through different lenses, which then leads to another theme and hence pushes the writing forward, so on and so forth. Another example illustrating this pattern is the following: the sequence of progression starts with a novella written by the protagonist of the novel in the third chapter in which walking is a major component of the plot. Then a digression is inserted where Yan talks in detail about her memory of walking with her father when she was young, and their conversations during the walks, regarding politics, philosophy, history, etc. And the recollections of the conversations further lead the manuscript to another digression where Yan references the writings of Octavio Paz, in particular, The Labyrinth of Solitude, where she talks about a collective Chinese identity, claiming “if for Mexicans, the national identity is solitude, then for Chinese, it must be shame.”
Despite the highly interwoven and manifold structure of the manuscript, layers and layers of nestings and containments, there are many hidden gems buried in the 2000 pages, in my opinion. I’d like to list a few of them here that I particularly like:
The dark fairytale where the main character is a Matryoshka doll whose core (the innermost doll) was removed from her. Instead, the owner of the doll, a troubled teenage girl, kept hiding notes with her darkest secrets written on them inside the Matryoshka doll in place of the core. Day by day, the notes accumulated, and the Matryoshka doll’s longing for a core intensified. Meanwhile, the teenage girl felt relieved and freed every time she put a new note inside the doll as if that part of her had become detached from her. One day, the teenage girl found herself trapped inside the doll, and she had become the new core of the doll.
The detailed game design of a classical RPG set in an imaginary dystopian postwar city where the main characters are a middle-aged and divorced police officer who is trapped in the past, and a young woman who lives in a hidden closet in an old public library and whose existence is unbeknownst to all of the library staff. The main plot of the game is to solve a murder case that occurred in the library and the mysterious young woman becomes a key witness and/or a potential suspect in the crime. The plot unwinds as the two main characters search for the culprit as well as their own inner selves, both together and alone. The players first play the role of the police officer and depending on the choices made during the game, they may end the game with the police officer solving the case or have another play-through as the young woman where they experience the entire plot again from a different perspective to obtain a more insightful ending.
The shonen manga in which a teenage boy gains superpowers and fights off enemies to protect his friends, a well-expected piece of work appropriately combining Yan's drawing style and storytelling techniques.
The blueprint of a two-storied house with a garden where a eucalyptus tree is planted, a sunroom for cacti, a painting studio, a small library, murals on the walls, and a lovely cupola above the second-floor bedroom.
The drawing of a Dehn twist applied to a face.
The scores of a piano piece in contemporary style, titled Funeral, composed in memory of Yan’s maternal grandfather.
The link to a YouTube video of a short experimental film featuring a static scene in which a person continuously makes 180-degree turns in between two parallel mirrors, accompanied by a tampered audio of someone saying “nice to meet you, farewell” on repeat, with agonizing infinite echoes, seemingly recorded by signing in to the same zoom session from two different devices in the same room without muting either one.
The vegan canelé recipe on page 587.
The love letter written by the protagonist at the end of the second chapter of the novel.
The three-lined mathematical science fiction which is in fact just a conjecture taken from one of Yan’s own papers.
The design of a website as a directed graph, with a nontrivial fundamental group, centered in reality and branching into the bewildering wilderness.
The poem that goes like: I saw the sunrise
Now I don’t mind
Living
For another hundred years
The prose about memory, aging, and time, referencing In Search of Lost Time and Love in the Time of Cholera, where a paragraph reads “I’m not old, but I’m old enough to have a past. How memories become part of my very being is like cooking oatmeal. At first, a piece of banana is just a piece of banana, a flake of oat is just a flake of oat, and the almond milk is just a thin white liquid. They are like fresh fragments of memories that have formed just yesterday, or the day before yesterday, or the day before the day before yesterday, so glossy and visceral still, retaining the clear fine outlines defining their existence and shapes. But they are not going to remain that way. The bananas soften, the oats melt, the almond milk evaporates. The heat, the time, the mind, mingle everything, combine, blur the boundaries, absorb, refine, abstract, extract, incorporate, blend, digest, process, internalize. The mixture thickens, and thickens, and thickens, becomes one. The memories fade, and fade, and fade, the tears dry, the laughter dies. I forget what happened, and henceforth become who I am. But then, once in a while, a piece of memory sticks around, refusing to dissolve, like a pebble in a shoe, like the half-full moon hanging on the intensely blue 8 AM morning sky, like a winter cloud partially blocking the warmly purple 5 PM setting sun, like a song played on repeat on the rush-hour Beijing subway in harmony with the chaos, like the faint deserty eucalyptus scent infused in the occasionally damp Californian air, always so vivid, so potent, whenever I recall it, as if I’m traveling back in time — sometimes it makes me feel like life is so short, sometimes it makes me feel like life is so unbearably long.”
The train ride reverie from the third chapter of the novel, a desperately silent plea — Perhaps I could be a koi, with mostly red scales blotted by sporadic white patterns, dancing in the still, transparent black water of a deep deep pond, soundless. I expanded my big long tail, a bundle of thin fibers protracting out of me and joined almost parallel by a fragile veil-like membrane, resembling a piece of gossamer, stretched out like the spreading of a peacock’s feathers or the opening of a Chinese folding fan, seducing the phosphorescent algae glowing shyly green in the darkness, like neon, like emeralds. They aligned themselves forming a filament as if a necklace and wrapped around my slippery flopping gills, tighter and tighter, until I couldn’t breathe. Then I broke free and jumped out of the water and had become a bullet traversing through the shortest distance across the Red Sea. Fired out of the pistol chamber from Egypt, sweeping over Israel, and swooshing my way into Jordan, hitting the heart of a nameless refugee, who then, killed him? Bloodstained, from the shape of an almost teardrop I metamorphosed into a blue canary resting on the top of a Mayan temple, the lair of the Aztec mythological jungle beasts, shrouded by tropical ivies and monstrous, lustrous, poisonous, gluttonous sap green succulent leaves out of a Henri Rousseau painting, save only the golden tip channeling the enchanted — that was where I stood, with my small claws clutching, singing the prophecy of the ancient ruins. When it was time to go, I flapped my wings, navigated through the thick sun-eating canopy, and elevated into the vast vast sky, endless, only to notice that I was not a canary, but only a canary-shaped kite. I could fly but I was tied to a string. Yet I was not the least disappointed by my mere simulacra identity. On the contrary, I was relieved, because I’d never lose my way back now. I could fly as far away as I’d like, as high up as I'd like, but I’d always be tied to home. To you. I wanted to drift away, and then come back, to you. I wanted to see the world with my fake blue canary eyes, and then tell the stories, to you. You. Please don’t cut the string, a tiny voice whispered, its echoes weakening.
The short fiction (my personal favorite) that claims to be a review of this very manuscript nonexistent at the time when the short fiction was written, in which there is a mention as well of a fictional review of such a manuscript in which another fictional review of such a manuscript exists… (The reference to Borges is obvious. An uncharitable critic might say that such a short fiction is a slightly amusing, maybe clever, but essentially empty and meaningless farce of self-boasting. I indeed see the sentiment there. But somehow I still like it, the short fiction, it's like a sketchy sketch of a massive painting. Perhaps even just for a little bit, I detect a sense of something wistful and pure that Yan tries to express. It's her moment of Antwerp.)
I will stop the list here before it gets too long. As a reader, it is hard to imagine the amount of organizational effort required for arranging all the fragments of writings and the granular details in this manuscript. One can easily get lost in such an ocean of those. But I see at the end of the day the manuscript as not a chaotic act, but a consistent attempt to bridge the divides, to merge the dichotomy, to become the connection, the in-between — math and art, want and need, innocence and maturity, move on and hold on, Chinese and Western, ideas and polished works, love and silence, control and desire… It is a universe where everything lives, even contradictions. If anything, it represents a genuine and pretentious, ultimately emotional endeavor of living.
*To read the entire aforementioned manuscript, please click here.