Love of Stone

Abstract

Love of Stone Lin Yi-Han (bio) Translation from the Chinese Click for larger view View full resolution Click for larger view View full resolution [End Page 26] Translator's note: The following text by Lin Yi-Han, like her novel Fang Si-Chi's First Love Paradise, is based on the theme of what it's like to dwell in a body that carries trauma, and what it means to live in a mind where literature, memories, and vulnerability interweave with one another. Lin's language is unique and devastatingly beautiful. Her language and metaphors are rich in lyrical tradition, from the Chinese classics, chengyu expressions, and lines of cultural history. Translating Lin's language is like perusing blood in our veins, feeling that heartbeat against our chests, and letting our emotions flow with our bodies. As a translator who has spent over three years with Lin Yi-Han's works, her writings not only brought me closer to topics of gender, of the rights to our bodies, but also to the importance of discussions about mental health. How does our relationship with our minds change over time, especially after trauma? How do we live with the rhythms of our emotions when our bodies remember agony from the past? What kind of change can we bring to our bodies and minds, and what can we talk about with one another, in order to not otherize the journey we have been through with our minds? What does love mean to us, or shape in the need of us, in our paths to find that love, that sense of belonging ever again? Content warning: The following work references suicidal thoughts and sexual assault. – Jenna Tang This was my everyday life: I would walk to the subway station, listen to Tae-yeon's new album on the train, and then walk to the coffee shop from the station. I always started listening to the first song; like reading a novel without a bookmark, it was as though I'd memorized the first sentence of the book and would never know the ending. I watched the barista wash a pot of Ethiopian coffee beans. What does it mean to wash something? To dry something under the sun? Drifting among the words was satisfactory enough, and there was no need for an answer. Just like my life. I would first peruse a novel of exactly two hundred pages, no more or less. And then I would listen to Professor Der-wei Wang's guest lectures on the contemporary Chinese lyrical tradition, recorded in 2015 at Taiwan National University. One of the two-hour classes took me four to five hours to finish; I paused and listened to every scrap of it, slowly writing down line by line. I piously jotted down almost every sentence. After that I would take a shower back home, pumping out shower gel for my lower body, another pump for my upper body. The bottle and its ducklike pump looked obedient. I went to my doctor's appointment every Wednesday, and on the way I would see two rows of carmine azaleas spewing out along the path toward the hospital. One time, as I sat in the long row at the coffee shop, I was approached by a little boy in a superhero suit. His young mother apologized to me, but I thought, I'm the one who should be sorry—he almost contracted my mental illness. As I waited for the subway, my bag was full of books and notebooks as well as my laptop. I held on firmly to the soft and fragrant handle of my bag, as though it were a rail of hard stone, so that I wouldn't jump down onto the track. My friend Meimei had started her fifth year in college. She was struggling to complete her last two credits. Once she told me glumly that she had inquired about graduation several times, but the school kept responding, "You have applied for an early graduation, but you have deferred two semesters, so lacking two registration stamps, you'll have to complete an extra year." I said fuck, and we said this was like...