Fan Wu

He said: at fifteen I wanted to learn. At thirty I had a foundation. At forty, a certitude. At fifty, knew the orders of heaven. To disobey the ladder of age is to invite all that’s solid to melt into air. It’s a fucked path that leads you down the labyrinth of reason. I obey heaven’s orders a sexless cherub. Wound of care. He wears a toupee which he takes off only to scratch his head. In frustration, he shows for a moment the pate of his vulnerability. What love was left has gone to pity. Or, languid, love had no start nor quick in time. Why rush to begin, now, twenty-four years in?

Fan Ch’ih asked about humaneness. He said: Love men. Asked about knowledge. He said: To know men. And asked about men themselves: the entropy of manliness. I enjoy the core of rage, to handle it before it’s thrown in an arc, away from any target. My father’s rage loosens dumb avalanches, boundaries seizing to barriers. It always has an object. Fear comes when I cannot tell if he is angry at me or at himself. Terror, when I cannot tell us apart—no boundaries left by which to make such measurements. I have loved men, never well, but recently. It grows dark to draw me down to the shame that’s underground.

I am a no-place with a pain in its middle. The weather was too soon for reconciliation. To whom is your reverence given? Your own mother ruled you with a fist clenched between your teeth. In my culture it is customary to fight for an hour before settling the bill. Even the trout waiting for its turn on the grill looks bored. We are at our best when we attain mutual exclusion. Politely I gather my belonging and slip away from the shadow of the family stump. When eating beside someone in mourning he did not stuff himself. He did not sing on the same day he had mourned.

He said: During a father’s life time, do as he wants; after a father’s death, do as he did. I watch the father’s eye upon the urban lawn. His boy strikes a pose to balance on concrete. Such a moment of life, torn from fantasy, the unstained youth six metres from automotive death. Freedom is released only in proximity to what tears it away. And his dad’s pride glows a sober ember turned vapour by the daily banality of rearing him. His whiteness would not have mattered, but his face bleached into this summer’s white humidity. My dream of a white father mixes like risk into my dreams of neutrality, blankness, a being always able to be rebirthed. Any man could be my father, why ask a question around fact, around truth. Suddenly the footsteps not too small to be followed, nor the purse strings drawn so tight.

When a man's father is alive, only the man's aspirations are observable. After his father passes away, his actions become observable. Since memory I have aspired to kill my father in order to open myself up. I wait and do not act. I mourn the living father so others can take his place. Make room, you stupid man. I have caught you stuffing the table with money. His cruelty is my lone inheritance. I would be unwise to spend it on filial piety. The sounds of those two words make me feel like a prize horse, steel in the skull for running too slow. Once, I call out “daddy” during sex and do not think of him. Where I cannot act, I wait.