Waking From 20-year Coma, Ukrainian Woman Ages Rapidly
(Synthesized overseas report)
10/20/2002
A Ukrainian woman by the name of Nadezda Liberdina, now nearly eighty years of age, fell into a comatose sleep in her youth following prolonged weeping after a serious fight with her alcoholic husband. It was then 1954.
When Nadezda did not wake up after two days of continuous sleep, her husband took her to the hospital, but the doctors were unable to detect anything out of the ordinary. All they found was that her pulse was weaker than normal, and her body temperature lower. And nobody could wake her up.
Nadezda finally woke up one day in 1974. When she first regained consciousness, her appearance was little different from twenty years ago. But several weeks later, she began aging rapidly. A retired doctor who saw her said, “New lines appeared on her forehead each day, and her hair turned from black to lusterless gray in a matter of months, as though her inner clock was furiously spinning forward. She was still a young woman when she left the hospital, but when we saw her again six months later, she looked aged, like a woman in her fifties.”
◇
My earliest memory of my mother, the image of her seared in my brain, is of her sitting before me upon a beige-colored seat of hard plastic, stationary within my field of vision. And all around her, in the black-and-white background, the whirling arcs of scenery look as though they are silent film reels cast by the sweeping lens of a rotating projector, rapidly streaming away as a result of some centrifugal force caused by the spinning…
It must have been on the Spinning Coffee Cup Ride at some little amusement park. Two photographs stand proof to this. In one of the pictures, my young mother, in a duckling yellow dress, her newly permed hair ruffled, sits with her face turned to the left of the camera, smiling slightly. The other picture shows me, barely a year old, staring dumbly at the camera with my big eyes wide open. Probably because of the cold weather, I am wrapped in several layers of winter clothes; that, accompanied by the oversized head peculiar to young children, make me look like a dumpling sitting there…
(Back then, who would have anticipated what came later?)
(Yes, later. Did I, later, gradually turn into some kind of monster unimaginable to my parents?)
I was born in Jiayi.
That was the only time I lived in Jiayi. My father was working at the Jiayi Christian Hospital back then. My mom gave birth to me there on a Sunday when nobody was at work. Since it was a holiday, there were few doctors on duty, and my dad delivered me himself.
(I picture the shadowy building that must have been projected onto my retina in some curious way that I can no longer recall. The dim, vein-blue light. The empty corridor. A woman giving birth, amid screams, to a heap of bluish head and stiff, folded limbs, a baby with its skin hanging loose and wrinkled on its face, like an old man…)
This was now about three or four years ago.
I was in my third year at Taipei Medical School. I did not have much interest in studying medicine (on top of this, the professors were in general quite strict), as a result of which I floundered academically, and began entertaining the idea of leaving medical school. I had also just gone through a bad breakup, and none of the girls in my life at the time had any interest in me. The gulf widened between my family, who wanted me to study medicine, and myself. Every time I went home to Tainan for more than two days, I inevitably fought with my father. In those days, when I got up in the morning and saw myself in the mirror during my ablutions, I felt like I didn’t know who I was. Staring at my own reflection, I could not help wondering how I came to be like this. When did I turn into such a terrible sight?
I seemed, to myself, so very, very ugly.
Once I went home to Tainan, and stayed two days. In order to avoid a confrontation with my father, I packed my clothes and prepared to return to Taipei on the third morning, thinking to myself that it was better not to stay at home and rile my father. On my way out, I passed my parents’ bedroom door, and caught a glimpse of my mom sitting on the edge of the bed quietly weeping. She told me that she knew school was causing me a lot of unhappiness, but she really had no idea how to help.
“But what would you do after college if you studied literature?” she said chokingly. “Mom and Dad both want you to be happy…”
I looked into that face so like my own, the face of my mother. It was streaked with tears. I seemed to see her forehead and the corners of her eyes losing their glow, growing more wrinkled with every moment even as I watched. I remembered how, ever since I was very little, our relatives always said that I bore a strong resemblance to both my father and my mother…
As for that picture…
That setting. That earliest memory I had of my mother. The sunlight and spinning scenery streaming by outside the coffee cup, outside that narrow little field of vision. And my mother, young and beautiful, smiling at me from within my own miniature camera lens. The centrifugal forces of that moment…
(Oh, isn’t this the first and final metaphor for the feelings between my mother and me?)
Am I the person exacting twenty years of time from my mother?
(Then Mom woke from her reverie. She sat up straight and rubbed her eyes, as though she was unaware anything had happened. She stared into space for a while, then asked me,
“Well, what time is it now?”)
written by Egoyan Zheng
translated (into English) by Laura Jane Wey
曼氏亞洲文學獎部份報導與完整入圍名單
Egoyan Zheng's Interview with Taipei Times⓵
Egoyan Zheng's Interview with Taipei Times⓶
《甕中人》（印刻出版）
參考文本：【小說】咖啡杯遊戲
參考文本：【甕中人後記】那些未完成的
參考文本：【小說】獎座
參考文本：【小說】嬰孩
訂閱伊格言：
說明：
請輸入您的email，按下Enter鍵。
以後每當blog有新文章時，FeedBurner系統就會自動將相關訊息送到您的信箱喔。
（若未順利收到認證信或更新訊息，請檢查您的垃圾郵件信箱。您也可再次訂閱，系統將會重發認證信以進行認證。）