by Chen Poyu
translated from Taiwanese Mandarin by Nicholas Wong
Let me tell you how machines have crept into our lives—see that thing by the window? Clinging to the white wall like a flying squirrel making a futile leap towards the bodhi tree behind the wall. That is a clock, yes, but not the most ordinary kind of clock (not ordinary, though rather cheap). Where the numbers usually exist, there are crude images of birds if you take a closer look, twelve species of them hand-drawn meticulously by naturalists (suspected of piracy). On the hour, the machine mimics the distinctive squeaks of these birds. Pigeon at two, sparrow at five. Their timekeeping is humbling, nothing like the birds’ concert at a park. The sounds blend in like spies. Those who know nothing of bird language, upon hearing them, would think they are chit-chatting about polka. But to a literary cochlea, the ten-o’clock nightingale is always, inevitably, sentimental.
I listen carefully to it at first, the mysterious four-o’clock greenshank. The machine is mimicking a bird I know nothing about, and who knows if it imitates well. I stop paying attention and get used to it. Day after day, it gives me an illusion that I’m flying toward a wall, never making any progress. School ends at four, students play and laugh like a cloud of mist, gathering a hundred meters away in the sky. The most, most mechanical; the most, most natural. Only the early graders are like birds, but there’s no other place like elementary school, always exactly the same, at once familiar and distant—just as I once was. Laughter robbed of meaning is a blaze.
Born in 1993, Chen Poyu has won numerous literary prizes in Taiwan, including the Lin Rong-San Literary Award in Essays, and the Times Literary Award. Named one of the Ten Most Anticipated Writers born in the 1990s by Wenhsun Magazine, Chen is the author of The Scientists (interviews), The Bubbles Maker (essays), and two poetry collections, mini me and The Art of Rivalry. His recent publications include The Basement Tapes, a book of collaborative texts and illustrations with Kuo Chien Yu. His Chinese translation of Robert Hass’s Summer Snow was published in 2022. He currently lives in Taipei.
Nicholas Wong is a poet, translator, and visual artist from Hong Kong. He is the author of Crevasse, which won the Lambda Literary Award for Gay Poetry, and Besiege Me, also a finalist for the same prize. His recent poems and translations appear in Hunger Mountain, Beloit Poetry Journal, American Poetry Review, The Yale Review, among others. In 2024, he is an International Writing Program resident at the University of Iowa and currently teaches at the Education University of Hong Kong.
