WEN ZHEN

ITEM LOG

translated by Tiantian Yuan

Excessive, excessive, everything is excessive. It won’t ever be used up, even in the next life. Packs and packs of toilet paper rolls are stacked in the storage room, the unopened ones numbering thirty-seven in total. This Lunar New Year, both Zheng Tianhua and Liu Mei’s employers happened to make the same decision of denying holiday bonuses; instead, they sent rice, apples, and cooking oil, which are now piled on the balcony, giving off a funny smell. Otherwise it’s clothes. Clothes, scarves, and hats everywhere. In closets, behind doors, on shelves in the hallway laundry room, on the sofa, chair backs, the bedside table, under the bed—mostly Liu Mei's all-season clothes. Winter down jackets and coats take up the most room, but summer dresses far outnumber them. Spring and autumnal sweaters and jackets are pinched between these two superpowers, interspersed here and there all over the place. There are about fifty hats, some in storage and others hanging on the coat rack in the hallway, crumpled up with scarves in irregular balls. And stockings—besides the two major sects of black silk and nude, there are also minority reds, oranges, yellows, greens, blues, and purples. As for socks, there are about eighty-five pairs. If they were all tied together, they’d easily go around the fifty-square-meter apartment at least eight times, if not around the earth once.

Almost forgot about the bags. Out of the leather ones, the only genuine designer bags are the three Coach bags that Zheng Tianhua brought back from a business trip to the US, the Gucci bought in Shin Kong Place that Liu Mei pinched and scraped for, and the Guess bag given by a close girlfriend. All the others are fake LVs, Burberrys, and Pradas from Silk Street Market and Taobao. Non-leather bags of all materials are out here as well: linen, fabric, silk, etc., and over twenty canvas totes. Zheng Tianhua was awestruck: Do you really have that much stuff that you need to have this many bags?

Liu Mei just calmly said: It’s because I have so many clothes that I need this many bags to match them. 

Zheng Tianhua complains neurotically each time some random thing is lost: I remember there were five nail clippers. Why can’t I find even one?

Liu Mei would say, If it’s not in the bottom drawer of the chest, check the left drawer under the TV cabinet. 

Not only are there five nail clippers, but there are also four pairs of scissors: a pair of kitchen scissors, a pair of gardening scissors, a pair of office scissors, and a pair of the most traditional Zhang Xiao Quan iron scissors, brought back from a trip to Hangzhou. One kitchen knife for dishes, one for pastries, one that came as a gift with the microwave, still in its packaging, and a rusty one left by the former tenant that Liu Mei refuses to throw away, “What if we come across a knife sharpener?” So many knives, enough for both of them to wield one in each hand during their fights—that fight would be spectacular. The items in their home are in automatic pairs, cuddling close or doomed to echoing each other from a distance, coexisting in this family of two. It’s never easy for an opened drawer to be closed again—there are always bits and pieces squeezing out the front or fallen past the far depths. The small porcelain knick-knacks brought back from various trips are heaped in every nook and cranny, aesthetic and practical values completely lost. The Lijiang ox horn combs and the fans from Hangzhou’s Wangxingji are entwined, arm in arm. The Chow Sang Sang earrings in 925 silver in their red satin boxes, the Swarovski brooches in their blue velvet boxes, and the Pirateship necklaces in their round iron boxes share the same fate of having never been worn, although their boxes rub shoulders, united in comradeship. One drawer is full of miscellaneous chargers; their appliances having long died; only the chargers survive, seemingly imperishable.

It might be simpler to put it this way: except for an apartment under their own name, which neither currently has, everything in this rental is self-replicating, disastrously profuse. This makes it more and more difficult to keep their daily lives in order.

Zheng Tianhua’s favorite question to Liu Mei is: Why do you have to buy so many things?

Every time Liu Mei fails to come up with an answer, she throws out the same flimsy excuse: We don’t have enough money for an apartment anyway, better to spend it than to leave it lying in the bank.

That’s the truth. After eight years of marriage, their savings only came up to about a million yuan. Although their salaries were enough to cover rent and a decent standard of living, buying an apartment was still beyond hope. The average cost of housing within Beijing’s Fourth Ring Road had rocketed from thirty thousand to eighty thousand yuan per square meter, and their accumulating savings have never been able to keep up with the soaring real estate prices. The closest they could ever get was having enough only for a washroom and half a bedroom, with a total space of under twenty square meters. Even for a rental, they didn’t dare go over fifty square meters, let alone try for a bun in the oven. Their apartment—a tiny space fully exploited with all kinds of IKEA furniture sets—was just barely habitable, but Liu Mei has been unstoppable in buying things, so the space has irritatingly continued to fill up. She has been hoarding any discounted items that can be hoarded, especially special selections from supermarkets. During a clearance sale of about-to-expire Deqingyuan eggs, she bought three or four dozen impromptu, and in the following month, the couple had eggs everyday—scrambled with tomatoes, scrambled with chives, scrambled with toon leaves, and scrambled with scallions.

Zheng Tianhua goes through each day in an ocean of cheap clothes, cheap books, cheap pots and pans, cheap shower gel, shampoo, and laundry detergent, cheap colanders and dishcloths, barely keeping his head above these briefly discounted family members adopted from the supermarket. His fifty square meters are not for the purposes of putting the body and soul at ease, but rather serve the dish washing products and their cousins. A bottle of ginger-scented Diao dishwashing liquid, ideal for sensitive skin, marked down on the shelf for ¥3.5 RMB, was hauled home by Liu Mei from METRO with five identical bottles from the same batch, and immediately became the nouveau riche of this six thousand yuan apartment. Zheng Tianhua is the most dispensable one here; Liu Mei rallies her supermarket platoon, warring with him to occupy this limited living space. While writing poems, he forgets even about eating, growing thinner and thinner while Liu Mei gets fatter and fatter. She and her supermarket forces are the irrefutable ruling nobility within these fifty square meters.

Only when neither is able to find a single toothbrush even after turning the house upside-down—knowing full well there are at least twenty stocked up, or when it takes two full days to rotate the wardrobe for the changing season, will Liu Mei’s illusory happiness of queendom be compromised. Yet compared with the world of daily discounts, those moments of epiphany shrink to nothing, utterly insignificant.

At the same time, Zheng Tianhua’s novels have not sold at all. He longs to one day become a master of language, but it’s not quite going his way. The more words flow from the pen, the more trashed files appear on his hard drive. One day he went through all the drafts he had saved, and despairingly found that there were already over one million words—almost outnumbering his savings. It was not as if he had never read any national or foreign classics, but he is neither a winter’s night traveler nor a Kafka beetle, let alone able to grit his teeth and aim a deadly shot into his temple.

Zheng Tianhua is just a young writer of limited talent and a mild personality.

It’s not that he has never fantasized himself becoming an Internet celebrity or a self-media influencer, but the former requires a production of more extremist narratives, dramatic arcs, and catch-all writing templates, while the latter additionally necessitates a sixth sense for buzzy topics (politics, sports, or celebrity gossip), a slightly controversial perspective to incite the public, and hardcore stamina to write over ten thousand words per day—all three qualities absolutely essential. He applied for a WeChat public account, preparing to debut with the familiar topic of football politics, but even after writing over ten thousand words per day for sixteen days in a row, his follow count had still not surpassed twenty. It would have literally killed him to write one more article, and when he looked again at the insincere words that he spouted, they gave him actual physical discomfort, concluding in a nauseous dash to the toilet. Palely returning to the living room, he was just in time to see Liu Mei unpacking six variously sized cardboard boxes, dropped off by the courier, and the sound of packaging tape being ripped nearly brought back the vomit. He confirmed that he is definitely unfit to be a trendsetter of this new media era—maybe some people can make money this way, but he is certainly not one of them.

Like many young creatives, Zheng Tianhua has personally experienced the evolution of the camera—from a Sony point-and-shoot to a Nikon SLR to a Leica. He often wanders through Beijing’s countless exhibitions of photography, painting, installation art—occasionally taking some snapshots of a spring bloom or autumnal moon, clicking the shutter over a hundred times at his most fervent, and becoming even more manic on his short trips out of town. He never edits the photos; once they were saved on the hard drive he stopped giving them a second thought. It started with a USB, then an external disk, and later high-capacity hard drives of over 2TB. He couldn’t even explain to himself why he had to take so many pictures—it was as if he had an insatiable appetite for this enormous spectacle of a world. But in reality, he has never truly owned anything; no one else appreciates his works, and it’s unlikely that even he himself would review the hundreds of thousands of photos. Pictures taken with mobile phones can at least be easily posted on WeChat and grab a few likes, but he rarely takes photos with his phone, and bothers less and less to follow the customary three-by-three Sudoku style; over time, he’s discovered that even if someone hits like, they rarely click on the photos to see them in detail, and no one has ever commented on his carefully designed arrangements or meticulous adjusting of the filter.

So it was that Zheng Tianhua could not quite discern, between the two of them, who is the more wasteful. When his mind drifts and lands upon his writings, photographs, and that sense of stasis, it always concludes in an aching sorrow. At least Liu Mei’s supermarket platoon is perishing a little every day, but his world of things has never been depleted, only ever growing larger.

He has always suspected that one day he would be submerged by his own works and Liu Mei’s supermarket platoon. In nightmares, he always cried out mutely for help in a sea of ​​waste—the waters gaudy and varicolored, the plankton swimming around taking the forms of either daily necessities or his own stories and photos, weaving through the transparent, empty world, sometimes distant and sometimes closing in through the junk to settle accounts with their creator. All this unpublished poetry, prose, fiction, and photography, who allowed him to bring them into this world so senselessly for nothing? They showed absolutely no regard for him—who had devoted a great number of sleepless nights on their behalf—and in an instant began metamorphosing into vivid, ferocious monsters. In terror, he hid behind a coral reef made out of wastepaper, and didn’t swim away until the creatures disappeared. Unfortunately, his movements were unexpectedly loud, and an enormously thick book of poems dashed wildly over, hurling itself upon him—right then, Zheng Tianhua would startle out of sleep, his head jammed tightly amongst three pillows. There used to be only two pillows, but after Liu Mei applied for a credit card, the bank sent them a slow-rebound memory pillow as a gift, said to be worth two hundred and fifty yuan. However, there was really no room in the closets, so it could only be shoved to the head of their bed. Even the pillows are excessive, Zheng Tianhua thought bitterly. It seemed that the only redundant thing was his own head, being utterly unable to enjoy all of these things.

The most wonderful and terrifying dream he has ever had was empty. Waters and skies mingled. He was walking within a white emptiness, like someone who had opened a door to an icy, snowy world—a void, all was reset, awaiting him to create, discover, identify. Even Liu Mei was gone. In the dream, he happily thought, now everything can begin again. For example, he could find a wife who wouldn’t be so obsessed with shopping. . . But where did Liu Mei go? What if she suddenly comes back?

Turns out that putting everything in place is even more difficult than creation. Zheng Tianhua found that, in a world of chronic oversupply, he has completely lost his imagination.

Because of this empty dream, when he woke up in the overflowing room, he was relieved for the first time, like someone with Stockholm syndrome. That’s right—things were still heaped in every nook and cranny. He didn’t have to worry about the disappointment that would shortly follow the reset, when the things came rolling in once again.

Before bedtime one night, Liu Mei patiently arranged the three pillows on the bed, restacked the suddenly collapsed mountain of facial masks on the table, and stuffed the five or six sets of laundered underwear back into the dresser. When Zheng Tianhua came into the bedroom, she suddenly asked in a serious tone, Have you ever heard of Danshari?

What?

It’s something a Japanese person called Hideko Yamashita said. Dan is to quit buying things you don’t need. Sha is to discard redundant stuff. Ri is to rid yourself of your attachment to them. . . Anyway, the point is that your THINGS aren’t the protagonists of your life, YOU are. Think about what’s best for you, and throw away the unnecessary stuff.

Sounds pretty good.

I think so too. She said joyfully, Honestly, there’s too much stuff in our home. Gets a bit in the way.

Liu Mei must have taken some paid lesson online. Before Zheng Tianhua’s happiness could last even a few hours, he got off work the next day to see five copies of Danshari piled high on the table. It was a website sales promotion. Five copies for free shipping. Spend a hundred and get thirty off.

Didn’t you say that you don’t want things that you don’t need? Why did you buy FIVE copies?

It was cheap. And you can give away the extras as gifts.

Zheng Tianhua understood then: “Danshari” was just a gorgeous mirage brought on by delusion. A fetish is like a drug addiction—one doesn’t quit just because they say they’ll quit.

It’s the same with him. No matter how many times he swears he’ll never take photographs, write, or dream ever again, he still does. Everyone has their dependencies and compulsions. In this immense world, everyone is desperate to leave an impression; of course it’s all vanity, but doesn’t all life end in death?

Since then, he has forgiven Liu Mei, and he has forgiven himself.