Mei Wu

A collection of Wei Da's novellas and short stories. It includes the novella "Mei Wu," and four short stories: "Pigeon's Blood," "Xiang Xiang," "Yellow Springs," and "Black and White."
 
The stories are all about women, their struggles, defeats, and resilience; yet also their pride, drive, and strength.
 

Wei Da, born in Muar, Malaysia in 1982. Graduated from Tamkang University in Taiwan. Lived in Europe and South America for nearly six years, and is currently a full-time dancer in Kuala Lumpur.
 
Author of the novel collections "Bubble," "Fleeting Beauty," "Border," and "Desolation"; and the essay collections "Time Will Tell Me" and "I'm Not Afraid."
 

Afterword
 
I finished writing "Mei Wu" more than half a year before the pandemic lockdown.
 
And the idea to write "Mei Wu" came even earlier, probably when I first arrived in Buenos Aires. Back then, I often took very long bus and train rides, from one end of the city to another, or to another small town. Back then, I often listened on the train to the songs my mother used to play on an old radio while hunched over her sewing machine under a small lamp in my childhood. There were Zhou Xuan, Bai Guang, Bai Ying, Jing Ting, Cui Ping, and others. One day, while researching the background of a certain popular song, I found this news item among the search results:
 
Stripper Queen Chen Hui-zhen's Last Scene
Few Mourners at Her Cremation Yesterday
 
The news, from May 28, 1987, was published on page twenty-six of Singapore's Lianhe Wanbao, next to a report about a double murder of a couple in a Penang banana plantation. The news occupied a rather small space on the page, much smaller than the advertisements below it for Zhongnan Co., Ltd.'s premium ginseng chicken essence and China Beijing Longhua Health and Nutrition Factory's natural pollen essence.
 
I repeatedly scrutinized the scanned newspaper page and spent the entire night searching for Chen Hui-zhen. In Chinese, English, and I even found a few in French. I tried to piece together her life.
 
Born in Suzhou, China, she moved south to Malaysia with her aunt (some say adoptive mother). She only attended school for half a year, then married a wealthy businessman as a concubine. After being cast aside, she became a dancer in Singapore, winning beauty pageants and dance competitions. Later, she formed her own song and dance troupe. With her captivating figure, suggestive dances, and various wild performances such as sword swallowing, stone breaking, and wrestling pythons, she became incredibly famous. Tickets for her shows were hard to come by, and she was the wild rose in the hearts of countless men. Fearless in love and hate, she married five husbands, adopted two sons and three daughters, and later died of cancer in Penang at the age of sixty-two.
 
What an extraordinary woman, what a winding life.
 
I closed the webpage. Afterwards, I continued to drift, continued to live carelessly in the moment.
 
After returning to Malaysia, I published "Border" and "Desolation." Life had a brief period of calm, followed by a series of changes. Asthma, bronchitis, and pneumonia led to repeated hospitalizations; even walking became difficult, dancing was impossible, and my work stalled.
 
During the most severe episode, while in the intensive care unit, I suddenly thought: How long has it been since I last wrote?
 
How long has it been since I last wrote, I wondered. After being discharged from the hospital, I decided to write a story about a woman like Chen Hui-zhen.

2025-03-01

有人出版社

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