Before you became a landscape painter You were an architect Maybe you were not so great People would say you were at best an amateur And you were not an architect at all You were only a foreman More precisely an overactive petty proprietor Trying to build a mini condominium on a tiny patch of land Coordinating all the masons, tilers, plumbers, carpenters To carry out your ambition to design a dream edifice Even though in reality it was just a mediocre building And you never told me how you bowed hundreds of times In front of the bankers to ask for a loan And bribed the municipal officials to get the certificate In your landscape, huge boulders and sheer crags in distance Overlapped each other like a skyscraper But the shanty at the foot of the mountain Was exactly like the first house you bought Where your son was born Before you became an architect You were an entrepreneur No. You had never been so successful You were just a small businessman You were a shoemaker, clockmaker, clothe manufacturer, Orchid cultivator, goldfish breeder, green finch raiser… You tried all kinds of speculations As long as there was some money in your pocket You wanted to make an investment Yet you failed again and again, draining your savings In your landscape, the flying birds, the swimming fishes The blossoming flowers seemed to tell The funny stories of your industrial adventures Fortunately, you bet your biggest investment on your son It was not about any stake but love Before you became an entrepreneur You were a shipowner Of course you were not a shipping tycoon You were just a clerk in a shipping company And later had some shares of an old pilot boat No, you dared not get involved with smuggling Its penalty was capital punishment And you never defered any payment or workers' wages in arrear Maybe that's why you couldn't accumulate capital Maybe that's why you painted in such detail The wooden ferry, the bamboo pier And the fisherman who put no bait or hook on his rod Maybe that was just the way you did your business Back to reality, before you became a frugal clerk You had lived too long already, yes, lived too long To see the great China you fought for, after passing through All the ordeals, unified once yet falling apart again Yes, you should have died and been promoted to captain posthumously Before you celebrated the victory over Japan in Shanghai Wearing a white suit and a Panama hat Going to all the expensive cabarets and theatres with your wife And your newborn son wrapped in swaddle You telegraphed multi-million devaluated money to your widowed mother And a message saying, "I visited the U.S. battleship in Shanghai today I will come home as soon as the communist revolt is suppressed" Yes, you should have been shot by the caliber of a Zero fighter When you took shield behind a mossy tombstone Trying desperately to tune your shabby walky-talky And yelling for the anti-aircraft gun unit Before you abandoned your mother in the remote hometown And fled to Taiwan with Chiang Kai-shek's nationalist troops- Yes, the landscape scroll is too long for you Too much blank is waiting for, not your pigment But your explanation. Like the white corner with a black smear Among the emerald hills, is it the brink of a lake With a glimpse of a fighter plane's shadow Or a cloud with a strand of cremation smoke? Too many fellow soldiers had died yet you survived Because you were a technician, a signal lieutenant And most of the time you hid in the bunker of the headquarters Because when you set telephone poles along the country road The illiterate battalion commander would question Why you let another side of the road empty without poles Why you didn't set two lines for his troops And he didn't accept any other explanations until You answered the other side was for the wireless only In your landscape, there is no electric pole No radio mast, no dam, no oil pipe, no power plant No tractor, no truck, no metal grain bin, no asphalt road In your imagined blueprint for your country You had drawn them a hundred thousands times But now, you were a retiree learning traditional landscape From your son, a professional painter You only wanted to draw your pre-modern hometown It was the time before you became a soldier When you were only a simple country boy, probably a swineherd You used to mention your hometown producing the best pork Those pigs live in the elevated, thatched cage above the fishing pond The pond keeps them cool and clean and receives their excrement As feed for fishes, and no you don't eat those fishes They become the fertilizer for the paddy fields Growing more crops to raise more pigs No, you were probably not so simple, You were from a petty landlord family Your father used to be a public functionary No matter how hard it was, your widowed mother Supported you to finish middle school You were probably one of the radical students Because Chairman Mao is also from your hometown No, your mother and brother died during the Cultural Revolution No, when you came back half a century after you left You couldn't find the exact place of your mother's tomb No, in your landscape, everything is fine, no trouble The white corner with a black smear Is just the moment when a kingfisher skims over The curve of the Yangtzu River --

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