One of the main themes of "Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather," a short story by Chinese writer Gao Xing Jian, is the alienation we experience when our environment, both physical and cultural, is abruptly taken away from us in the name of “progress.”
The story starts with the protagonist, an ordinary man, going to buy a fishing rod to give his grandfather. The story is narrated in the first person, realistically, in what seems real time. However we soon realize that something is wrong. The man apparently goes to see his grandfather, but the village where he grew up is unrecognizable. Instead of trees there is a forest of TV antennas on top of a myriad of new buildings, the lake nearby is a smelly puddle, and the river where he used to fish has been paved over. In a Kafkaesque nightmare, the narrator tries to get directions to locate the street where he lived as a child, but the person he asks laughs at his regional accent and seems not to understand him.
We are then abruptly transported to the city apartment where the character lives. In reality he is daydreaming while watching sports on TV. The last third of the story is devoted to the description of the soccer match in excruciating detail, in all its inanity.
The fishing rod, a symbol of the protagonist's cultural past and of family ties, was never delivered to the grandfather. It is still in the man's apartment. Since the apartment is probably small, the only place where the man could store the rod safely to keep it from his small child is the water tank over the toilet (Chinese toilets must be like the European ones, with the tank fixed to the wall at least eight feet from the ground). The toilet tank is the only body of water the rod will ever be near. All streams and lakes in the story are only remembrances in the character's mind, and they are long gone. So is the grandfather, the only family member in the story with whom the man used to have conversations. At the end of the story the man admits that his grandfather has long been dead.
Gao's style is very effective. He starts in an almost journalistic detailed mode, and then switches time and location and goes into the mind of the character in a stream of consciousness fashion, leaving the reader disoriented. Gao wrote several essays on modern human alienation. In his fiction he makes the reader feel it. He engineers the shock effect of taking the rug from under us.
While watching television, the protagonist dreams of the ancient Chinese city of Lulan, which he had seen from an airplane. Loulan used to be located on the Silk Road, on the way to Persia. It had many palaces, and it was built near a lake and a river. Humans built dams on the river and by the year 600 AD the place had turned into one of the harshest deserts on the planet. Due to the continuous blasting sandstorms, travelers are discouraged from going there. The only thing that has been preserved in Loulan is the mummy of a woman. Humanity has been buried in sand.
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| LouLan now |
The unidentified village of the protagonist of “Buying a Fishing Rod” suffers the same fate as the city of LouLan. Its lake is foul and will be filled in. The river is no longer there, and in its place there are streets. Without the natural landmarks, the man is no longer able to find his home: his roots, literally as figuratively.
One important detail is easy to miss. Towards the end of the story the narrator switches focus from the individual players (especially Maradona) and tells us the game was for the World Cup in Mexico City.
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| A reconstruction of what Mexico City looked like, before the Conquistadors |
Mexico City, before being completely destroyed by the Conquistadors in the 1500s, was the capital of the Aztec empire, the city of Tenochtitlan. Like Loulan, it was built near a lake - actually in the middle of a lake. Because of its waterways it had been compared to Venice. Soon the lake and waterways were paved over and now only salty land remains. The basin, which is loaded with houses and shantytowns for 14 million people, is now sinking. It is an environmental disaster.
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| Mexico City now |
Gao Xingjian, born in the fourties, witnessed all the destruction caused by Mao's cultural revolution in the sixties and seventies, and by the subsequent accelerated industrialization of China, now one of the most polluted area in the world. This Nobel prize winner said in a speech that a writer's mission is not to preach but to tell the truth. He definitely tells the truth in this story, in an understated way. But the greatest impact is when one re-reads the story, and looks at pictures of the sites that Gao only alludes to. Then we can "see" what he means.
Works Cited
Gao Xingjian. “Buying a Fishing Rod for My Grandfather.”
Translator Mabel Lee.
New York: HarperCollins, 2004. Pg 63-88. Print.
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