許恩恩
許恩恩

清大社會所碩士。自由文字工作者。

Read "Personal Experience" in the Obstetrics and Gynecology Waiting Room

It's certainly good to stay here, but I like to keep the pages of the "After taking the baby to the hospital" version. First of all, it is because, if you stay here, you will be disappointed by the beauty of the aftertaste. I think that the whole book will not surprise you, and the style will only be novel. Second, it is very important that the whole book is a monologue of self-existence and suffering. The end of justification is not a warm cliché, but a real fireworks in the night: a personal experience that can have a positive meaning (saving the baby) for the rugged life, and is presented.


I hate waiting for a doctor. No one likes waiting for a doctor. But there will be a surprise, you have to go to the obstetrics and gynecology department, and you don't have to make an appointment. Unfortunately, on weekends, I can only choose a few that are open on weekends. When I first came to this clinic, on the waiting bookshelf, there were several rows of magazines and health education leaflets, including the biography of Jobs, the mourning breast, and... Kenzaburo Oe? On the weekends when I was waiting for a doctor in a hurry, there were queues of traffic outside the downtown area. I read the reviews in this time and space. After a few months, I finally had the "mood" to read "Personal Experience". I like this novel very much, the overall handling and plot make me satisfied.

The old barber led the bird into the chair with the usual attitude of welcoming customers. He could not discern the omen of a bird's misfortune. Reflected in the eyes of an outsider like the barber, the bird could turn into a pure self, which freed him from sorrow and anxiety. (p.83)
(…) Babies are no longer dying, unlike jelly that melts when a sweet tear of mourning is dropped. (p.149)

While I'm usually extremely impatient with male monologues (especially Japanese ones, sorry, culturally picky eaters' path-dependence), the protagonist of the story goes like this: Wife runs off to play game consoles while giving birth, fights with punks, gives birth to defective babies Running away and wanting to kill infants, always holding an unrealistic (in fiction African) lofty dream, always having a romantic ex to snuggle up to, having sex without bathing, going to lectures drunk and throwing up hangovers on the podium , to find a reason for his near-rape when he was young, and he did not do anything meaningful. I have seen from countless male writers and artists how they describe the existential crisis of human beings with their brilliant ideas and creativity, but in the end I always wonder why they have so much spare time to think about the existential crisis, while women are always surviving Becoming a material, a metaphor, a symbol, or whatever (I don't care) in a barely established context.

"What properties are you afraid of the body and the womb?" "As I said, in your favorite words, there seems to be another universe in the depths. It seems to be a strange universe, dark and boundless, full of all anti-humanity. Once in there, it's like being stuck in the time system of another dimension, and there's no way to turn around. So my fear is like a severe fear of heights in astronauts." (p.168)

But in addition to consciously searching for works, looking back, in fact, not all male creators are so rogue, I don't mean the writers themselves, but the monologue of the hero "Bird", which is very strange and does not touch me. That piece, too, doesn't justify his (broadly) crimes by blaming himself too much. His moods fluctuated, with subtle changes in behavior and smell, sometimes with a sense of a de-gendered human situation, and sometimes with honesty about the frustrating vulgarity of masculinity. The pairing of positive list and negative list is used very well (how exactly? And the Chinese translation is also very appropriate). I also have no doubts about the absence of the wife who gave birth to the baby in this book, because the focus is on "personal experience", and it would be pointless to go into space or pointless self-justification, and it would be ugly. (I am very helpless with the current male approach of "Of course I know this is (gender) politically incorrect, but", "Of course I have the male advantage, so", correct/incorrect, or advantages/disadvantages, seems to be stable. It is enough to keep the premise steady. After the woman nods her authorization, she can take out the penis-like man to speak, and then you can have no scruples. Of course, this is what we all have to communicate in general. Well, it's just ugly. Of course, it's not bad to take out the penis, the point is to take it out well.)

At the end of the book, in the last few pages, the plot took a sharp turn. "Bird" drank wine and discovered that he had the power to liberate and save himself in this way, but in exchange he was just a meaningless self like vomiting gastric juice, so he decided to take the car back. Go to the place where the baby was supposed to be "treated", take the baby with brain problems to the operation and face and bear the responsibility of parenting. After the operation, he passed by the gangster who beat him at the front of the story in the hospital. , the punks didn't recognize him, as if he was a completely different person. The story ends abruptly.

This ending, which was criticized by the literary circle as a superficial "Happy Ending", was even suggested to be deleted when it was translated and published, hoping to stay at the faint beauty of the last paragraph:

"Bird, you have to endure a lot of things in the future." Huo Jianzi said to the bird encouragingly. "Goodbye, bird."
The bird nodded and stepped out of the tavern. The taxi he called was speeding along the rain-soaked asphalt at breakneck speed. If he died in a car accident before he could save the baby, his life for the past twenty-seven years would be meaningless, Bird thought. An unprecedented deep sense of fear gripped the bird. (p.295)

It's certainly good to stay here, but I like to keep the pages of the "After taking the baby to the hospital" version. First of all, it is because, if you stay here, you will be disappointed by the beauty of the aftertaste. I think that the whole book will not surprise you, and the style will only be novel. Second, it is very important that the whole book is a monologue of self-existence and suffering. The end of justification is not a warm cliché, but a real fireworks in the night: a personal experience that can have a positive meaning (saving the baby) for the rugged life, and is presented .

Moreover, just like the end of "Youth" (2021), which is also discussed: the person who wanted to jump off the building missed the hand and let the doll fall to the side of his siblings, so he was found. Critics say there are too many coincidences and are unrealistic, while the director said, "Hong Kong has no justice, please allow our films to still have God's will!" I often feel that I don't have the leeway to empathize with most of the human beings in the world beyond my own suffering and life. , but the work allows the reader to reconcile with the characters, which is not born out of providence, but "personal experience" .

For me, who came across this book in the obstetrics and gynecology department and finished reading it, this may be God's will or personal experience. Organs, life, the Asura field and the endless darkness of caves. In short, reluctantly from the text, it was identified under the completely opposite given conditions.

"Even in one's own experience, going one step at a time into the cave of experience may soon become a shortcut to the universal reality of human beings, should there be such an experience? In this case, the suffering individual can obtain the suffering (…) But, speaking of the drudgery of my personal experience, it was nothing but desperation to dig deep into the cave of my own individuality, isolated from other human beings. Even in the same dark cavern with painful sweat, Nor can I derive a shred of meaning from my personal experience. It is a desolate and shameful cave.” (p.225)


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