from 島之肉 (2022) [“Nowhere Land”]
Translated from the Chinese by Fion Tse
Moon Island
- An island like a moon. An island where only two people live. From a boat far away, it looks like the flattened tracks of a railroad, dark inky green. Wild black birds like dead leaves, circling the sky; they tilt and swoop and descend to earth. Anything more can only be felt in the tossing of the boat and the roaring of the white waves, can only disappear without a trace. Body fills with negative space. Lethargic, trembling, nauseous—a weightless white physicality. Lips white, forehead white.
- I am holding onto the memory of the mosquito lamp, the strangely suggestive violet tubes of light. The sour smell of the cramped sleeping quarters. Everything old, dulled. Ten empty beds, with no people at all sleeping in no positions at all. You think the sour smell is from the mold in the room, or perhaps it is the odor of ten bodies, mixed into an aura of defeated indifference. The wind seeps in through a corner. The ceiling paper flapping papapa. He keeps waking up in the middle of the night, says, the wind is seeping in; and then he says, the man next door breathes so loudly, it’s like we’re in the same bed. The wind seeps in. The couple next door keeps walking back and forth. Several times I think someone has come over and is peering in at the two of us.
- The mosquito lamp is off; the sensual colors are off. The generator, too, is off. Sometimes the darkness and the silence press down on you, let you return to tightly woven subconsciousness. You remember seeing, in the daytime, burial mounds and statues of deities. They face the ocean, this lifetime and forever, in silence.
- You believe evil will happen here, but on the island even the ruins appear good and kind. They exude beauty on purpose. The only evil: a plant pot nearly strangles and destroys a small remote village. The violence of the plant pot is subtle. Even the old woman, sleeping in a stone house not far away, has never doubted this. The landscape, lush yet abandoned, leaves a deep impression on you—manmade objects destroyed, rusting, undecaying among wild blades of grass. Between moments of stillness, small yellow flowers sprout thickly across a tiny room. A night of wind and rainstorm. Then moss, fresh and living; a leaking-through-your-palms living, a licking-through-your-palms living.
- I suppose I also know how to appreciate beauty. I allow beauty to parade naked before me. I allow joy to take over my worthless ego. The first time I heard sounds of scraping in a bamboo grove, I didn’t know that was what bamboo knocking into bamboo sounded like; I didn’t know that was what leaves grazing against leaves sounded like. I was transfixed. Dazed. From deep within the grove, I saw him waving, beckoning me over.
YU Yuen Lan is a writer, journalist, and poet from Hong Kong. She is the author of the novel 《我是嬰》Before I (2023), the poetry collection 《島之肉》Nowhere Land (2022), and the short story collection 《無一不野獸》The Bestiary (2018), which was nominated for a Renaissance Award in 2019. A 2025 resident of the University of Iowa’s International Writing Program, she currently works as a freelance journalist, writing feature articles and interviews for cultural magazines and online media.
Fion TSE (she/they) is a translator working between English and Chinese (Cantonese and Mandarin). She is currently pursuing an MFA in Literary Translation at the University of Iowa, and her work has been published in Asymptote, World Literature Today, and The Shanghai Literary Review, among others.
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