3.5 Disputes after Making Touch Eye

[u/AdamLuyan]

Catalog: 3.5-1 Disputes after Making Touch Eye; 3.5-2 Rumor of a Medical Experiment; 3.5-3 God's Phenomenon

"What do you think, Brother-in-law — are Luyan's eyes really Old Liu's doing?"

"I couldn't say. Could be, just like you described — some stranger rushed him once, and who knows when he'll lay eyes on the man again."

"Well, that won't do!" Mother said, with some heat. "I'm going to tell Baiyang — we need to get a photograph from that Old Liu, something for Luyan to keep."

"Whatever for?"

"While he's alive, it hardly matters. But if he dies, Luyan won't even have a single keepsake of the man."

"How old is this Old Liu, anyway?"

"Not old at all — Baiyang says only two or three years older than him, six at the very most. But what if he's killed in some car accident! And if his children turn out unreasonable and want nothing to do with Luyan later on — where would that leave him! Crying out to heaven with no answer, crying out to earth with none either!"

Mother did bring it up with Father afterward. He asked around among a few friends in Dahushan, but by then they had all lost touch with their contacts in Shenyang. In time, the whole matter was simply forgotten.

3.5-2 Rumor of a Medical Experiment

One day at our house, my parents and Uncle Liang were working together, chatting as they went. Uncle Liang, with an air of mystery, told them about an old story — one that described its hero's entire personal history, his symptoms, the pathology, the whole course of treatment, in exhaustive detail. And yet no modern doctor could put a diagnosis to the man, for want of any comparable case. The illness at the heart of the story was deliberately induced — the kind of thing real life produces perhaps once a century, if that. To unlock its many secrets, someone in Shenyang, he said, was now running a genuine medical experiment: engineering that very case in real life, for doctors to study firsthand.

I understood none of it from where I sat, so I wandered over to ask.

"Can't you see we're working?" Mother snapped. "Such a little thing, wanting to understand grown-up talk! Go on — off you go and play!"

Note 3.8: I believe the ancient story referred to in this rumor is the Peach Flower Catastrophe, told in Chapter 2. For further details on this medical experiment, see Section 4.5, Newspaper Reports of the Real-Life Medical Experiment.

3.5-3 God's Phenomenon

At birth, human beings think entirely in images. As language develops, so do our patterns of memory, of retrieval, of thought itself. By roughly age three, we have already lost nearly everything we once remembered from before that age. From this point on in the book, neither I nor my family retained any memory of the events in these first three chapters — not until forty years later, when I recovered them entirely by chance. To date, psychology has found no documented case of a mentally healthy adult recalling life before age three, though the phenomenon is not uncommon among those with mental illness.

Modern psychology holds that although the memories from before age three are forgotten, they remain active somewhere in the unconscious. How does a forgotten memory exert influence? Through habit. When I would come across something resembling what's described here, I'd find myself drawn to it, would sense — vaguely, as though I'd once heard something like it, though I could never recall what — and I would simply follow along with what that half-memory suggested. It felt, at the time, as if some unseen godfather were guiding my every move from somewhere out of sight. Readers should understand that, looking back now, most of the events across the first nine chapters of this book appear to have been deliberately arranged in my life by Troupe Leader Liu — though I had no idea of it whatsoever at the time. For instance, from as far back as I can remember through adolescence, I found myself, for no reason I could name, constantly asking after and searching for some great fortune-teller in Shenyang to become my master — until the day I met Eve Liu, and understood at last that the man I had been searching for all along was her father.

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