Liu Zhenyun’s style of building a narrative around jokes began with One Day, Three Autumns. He once said that if a writer keeps walking down the same road, it will eventually become a dead end. Each time Liu renews his way of telling a story, he is opening a road of his own. At the heart of Someone to Talk To is the thought that people are everywhere, yet someone you can truly talk to is a thousand-mile find. At the heart of One Day, Three Autumns is the choice to answer life’s suffering with jokes and its absurdity with humor. Each premise offers a different way of reading human life. In this book, Liu tries reading it as a joke—and the new perspective works. That is also why his later novel A Salty Joke has been so warmly received. I look forward to seeing what premise he turns to next, and what new way of seeing the world he will open for his readers.
Hua Erniang’s Red Persimmons and Pepper Soup
One Day, Three Autumns opens with a myth.
The dreams of Yanjin belong to Hua Erniang. Whoever dreams of her must tell her a joke. Tell it well and make her laugh, and she will reward you with a red persimmon. Tell it badly, and she will make you carry her out for pepper soup; in the blink of an eye, a mountain will crush you to death.
Hua Erniang has remained in Yanjin for three thousand years, waiting to be reunited with Hua Erlang. Waiting is tedious. It makes one day feel like three autumns, so she fills the emptiness with jokes. Drawing on the novel and my own rough reading of it, I think Hua Erniang, one of its central characters, carries four layers of philosophical meaning.
The first is that without laughter, life passes with punishing slowness. Hua Erniang waits three thousand years for Hua Erlang, spending the long ages hunting for jokes throughout Yanjin. A joke makes its listener happy in the most immediate way. Beyond that, it brushes a little color over the dullness of daily life. We cannot live in perfect seriousness, but neither can we live entirely in jest: either one can crush us. To live seriously is to face life head-on, yet much of life is absurd and illogical. Absolute seriousness can only break us, and many characters in the novel take their own lives precisely because they cannot loosen their grip on it. To live humorously, on the other hand, is to turn away from life: forget what can be forgotten, let go of what can be released, and leave the incomprehensible unexplained. Yet there are still many things in this world worth fighting for. If we know light exists but refuse to take darkness seriously when we see it, then a life lived in humor loses its meaning too. We need to find a middle way between seriousness and humor. Mingliang does exactly that. His life is filled with darkness and uncertainty, yet he still believes he is standing in sunlight, true to the brightness his name contains.
The second is that we are victims, but we can also become perpetrators. Hua Erniang and Hua Erlang are fugitives; both have been hurt. Hua Erlang dies in Yanjin, while Hua Erniang survives. Over her three thousand years there, Hua Erniang kills many people simply because they lack humor and cannot tell a joke. She is therefore both victim and victimizer. One character who left a particularly deep impression on me is Xiangxiu, a close friend of Mingliang’s wife Ma Xiaomeng from the years when Ma was working as a sex worker in Beijing. When Ma refuses to lend her money, Xiangxiu scatters flyers about Ma throughout Yanjin and eventually drives both Ma and Mingliang out of town. Decades later, what she did even reaches Mingliang’s son. Many years afterward, Xiangxiu tries to apologize to Ma so that she can free herself of the guilt. Ma and Mingliang refuse, and Xiangxiu eventually hangs herself. The bullet we fire at someone else will one day find its way back to us.
The third is that Hua Erniang’s demand for a joke comes without warning, just like the blows life deals us. Hua Erniang represents life itself, while the people of Yanjin are every one of us. Life plays jokes on us. Those who can catch them are the ones who make Hua Erniang laugh: they receive a red persimmon and live. Those who cannot must carry her out for pepper soup—but by then she has already become a mountain, and they are crushed beneath her. The jokes life plays on us are a harmful absurdity; the jokes we answer with are an active form of optimism. Through humor and hope, we can turn passive endurance into willing acceptance. Acceptance means acknowledging fate, but it does not mean admitting defeat.
Mingliang catches one of life’s jokes. One day, he learns that his wife Ma Xiaomeng once worked as a sex worker in Beijing. His answer is to tell her, “The woman I want to marry is Ma Xiaomeng, not Mary.” Mary was the name she had used in Beijing. Mingliang and Ma later open several hotels and build a life that is, on the whole, a happy one. What ending would have grown from that moment if Mingliang had failed to catch the joke? I do not know, but it would not have been one anyone would envy. Do not fight fate; follow where it leads. Mingliang and Ma Xiaomeng are both people fate has toyed with. Their response is to leave somewhere familiar and seek a new beginning in a strange place. They both earn their red persimmons. Neither has to carry Hua Erniang out for pepper soup. Eat enough red persimmons, and even the bitterest experience begins to taste sweet.
The fourth becomes visible when we bring the first three together: Hua Erniang is every one of us. She waits three thousand years for Hua Erlang. All that time, she stands in Yanjin and looks beyond it, never knowing that Hua Erlang died in Yanjin itself. Sometimes the answer is beside us, yet we insist on searching somewhere else. Hua Erniang spends a lifetime hunting for jokes without realizing that she herself is one enormous joke. We are all Hua Erniang. Every one of us has turned our own life into a joke.
The People Inside Yanjin and the People Beyond It
I mentioned Xiangxiu earlier, and how she drives Mingliang and Ma Xiaomeng out of Yanjin. She is far from the novel’s only villain. There is Sun Erhuo, Qin Jiaying, Hu Xiaofeng, and many more. Yet remove any one of them and the Mingliang we know would not exist. Every kind person and every cruel one, every touching memory and every ugly encounter are stirred together to make up his life. We should come to terms with those who have hurt us, and be even more grateful to those who have helped us. The less conspicuous a person seems, the more they may set our life in motion. Mingliang’s master, for instance, takes him on as an apprentice and helps him find a foothold in Xi’an. He is no blood relation to Mingliang, but he treats him better than family.
When someone hurts us, our first thought should not be how to strike back, but how to stay out of their way. If I cannot endure it, can I not at least avoid it? If Yanjin will not have me, is there nowhere else that will? Beyond Yanjin, east, west, north, or south—anywhere can become home if you choose it. Xiangxiu bullies Mingliang and Ma Xiaomeng in Yanjin and forces them to leave. Sun Erhuo bullies them in Xi’an and forces them onward to another part of the city. Mingliang originally means to kill Sun Erhuo, but in the end he does not make that foolish choice. When something is too much to bear, hide for a while. Play dead. Once you are dead, people stop paying attention to you. When the storm has passed, you can come back to life.
There is a saying I have always remembered clearly: make yourself strong, then forgive the people who were once your enemies. Years pass, and Sun Erhuo loses his wits. Mingliang takes liquor and cigarettes to visit him. That is forgiveness. So much time has gone by, and without Sun’s bullying, Mingliang might never have become the man he is. Sun asks Mingliang to find Blind Old Dong, a fortune-teller in Yanjin, and have him divine what Sun will be in his next life. Mingliang does not give the request much thought. Even if he had, the fortune could not have been told, because Old Dong dies before Mingliang returns to Yanjin. Back in Xi’an, when Sun asks what he learned, Mingliang can only make something up. “In your next life,” he tells him, “you’ll be a good man—a man of tremendous virtue.” It is Mingliang’s wish for him: may he do some good next time, and bully fewer people like Mingliang.
What “One Day, Three Autumns” Means
First surface meaning: a single day apart feels as long as three autumns.
Second surface meaning: a single day lived in one place can outweigh three years lived elsewhere.
Deeper meaning: make pig’s trotters so delicious that if someone goes a single day without eating them, they will spend three years craving them.
Odds and Ends I Do Not Want to Leave Behind
First: Old Dong is a fortune-teller, but he is blind. He can see what sighted people cannot. We are not the ones observing life; life is observing us. What matters is seeing through to the truths behind it, and that kind of vision does not require eyes.
Second: writing is like Mingliang playing the flute. If the meaning he wants to express with the flute could be put into words, he would not need the flute. Writing is the same. We write to think something through; if we had already understood it, we would not need to write.
Third: Mingliang’s father once sent him money in secret so that he could stay in school. Father and son lose touch for several decades, yet when Mingliang learns that his father is ill, in the hospital, and urgently needs money, he pays most of the medical bills. A drop of kindness should be repaid with a gushing spring.
Fourth: Mingliang remembers the years from age three to six, when he lived with his father, Chen Changjie, in the bachelors’ dormitory at the Wuhan locomotive depot. Whenever Chen left on a run, Mingliang would carry his lunch tin to the depot canteen by himself. There were two kinds of dishes: vegetables and meat. A vegetable dish cost five fen; one with meat cost fifteen. Mingliang only ever bought the meatless dishes, never the ones with meat. This came from Liu Zhenyun’s own experience at Peking University. He was, as he puts it, never well acquainted with the fifteen-fen meat dishes.
Zhengyang Yao
August 21, 2026, Beijing