It is fundamentally human to disregard our own mortality, to believe – especially through our younger years – that we’re indestructible, even immortal. Yet Death is undeniable; it casts its shadow across every aspect of our daily lives whether or not we dare to look. After all, all things must come to an end.
So it is appropriate that death plays a large but quiet role in Dong Jun’s Professor Su Jing’an in His Later Years, revealing itself in its various forms throughout the short story in ways that are true to life. Its influence can be felt in every character’s actions, in their personal relationships, and, ultimately, in their association to identity. It serves both as an explicit motivation and as an unspoken one. It is even there in the book’s title, asking us to confront life’s finality before a single page has been turned.
With his ticking clocks and his conversations about legacy, Professor Su had already confronted the passing of time, to some degree, in the years before he is introduced to us.
As it goes, we, like the narrator, meet the retired Professor Su in the middle – or, more accurately, in the middle of the end – of his life, after the seventy-four year old academic requires a caretaker at his eclectic estate, the Bamboo and Plum Blossom Pavilion. There, with his wife and housekeeper, the professor oversees his now modest life like clockwork, though to which, if any, of his many international clocks that decorate his study he follows remains unknown.
Hoping to gather insight into the prestigious professor’s accomplishments, the narrator initially accompanies Professor Su as he moves through his daily routine with particular pride, crediting his not-yet-diminished sharpness on the habits he keeps. He wakes up to a pot of coffee and a glass of milk each day, he walks in reverse down his street after sunrise as exercise, and he eats salty sprouts and fermented bean curd with every meal, all the while making time to read, write, and construct those blue book sleeves for his library.
He criticizes his peer for being senile while comparing his own age to “a good tune played on an old fiddle.”
At first glance, it seems true; he is an aging man who both looks back on his life with fondness and looks forward to a rewarding and productive future – a future which, according to his planner, will see him to “at least a hundred.”
It is time’s indifference to people’s plans that sends Professor Su and the narrator on an unexpected trajectory, as death weighs more and more like gravity. His marriage evaporates suddenly, his rival is left hemiplegic after collapsing in front of a crowd, and his mentor loses his fight with lung cancer. In some ways we are more a companion of time than of Professor Su, as we observe his evolving relationship with his everchanging surroundings.
Sid Gulinck, a Belgian sinologist and certified interpreter, translates Dong Jun’s first-person narrative with a casual ease, weaving both observation and exposition with language that allows us to step into the intimate realities of the characters. It helps that the story is composed as a near timeline, one that starts by familiarizing the reader to a life already lived and then slowly departs – or, arguably, crash lands – as lives are propelled forward.
With each glimpse into this timeline, Dong Jun raises the stakes ever so slightly until we have no choice but to reckon with the effects that time has on who we are and who we will become. Plans and relationships are no match and reveal themselves to be fragile when up against such a relentless force.
As the story progresses and life’s tiny and mundane tragedies pile up, the characters must learn, like the rest of humanity, to examine even the most well-intentioned habits and to submit to what cannot be controlled. Professor Su, in particular, has staked so much of his identity on the illusion of control that when the rug is pulled out from under him he is faced with the existential threat of the death of self.
How he deals with this is at first is relatable, if a little predictable: he shuts his doors to all but the housekeeper, allows his routine to unravel, refuses to shave or shower or brush his teeth, and changes all of his clocks – the timekeepers – in an illogical manner. He caves to all the things he has been fighting against.
It is when he forgoes his established life completely that the Dong Jun’s narrative delivers on the unexpected.
Death may be the endpoint for us all but it always seems to come as a surprise. The real surprise, however, is the way we try, as humans, to negotiate with it. By the end of Professor Su Jing’an in His Later Years, Dong Jun reveals through his subject that by being overly concerned with doing so, you can lose perspective on what you have and who you are.
When Professor Su finally asks the narrator, and by extension us, “Who might you be?” he is offering an opportunity to decide if we are the sums of our pasts or, simply, whatever we may be in the flash of this moment.
Professor Su, at the end, has more or less already made up his mind.
Dong Jun (Author)
Sid Gulinck (Translator, Chinese to English)
Professor Su Jing’an in His Later Years
Penguin Random House/Penguin Books
2019, 55 pages
Patrick Schiefen is an expatriate writer from Upstate New York who currently writes and performs in Shanghai, China. His writing is greatly influenced by topics of identity, politics, and sexuality and aims to build community through his writing. His work has appeared in various publications both inside and outside of China, most recently in High Shelf Press and A Shanghai Poetry Zine.
“If You Know, You Know” is his first collection of poetry and was launched with the help of Literary Shanghai in September 2019.
Find more information about him on Twitter, @p_schiefen, or on his website, patrickschiefen.com.