孔宁:地球新娘(英文版)

　　《孔宁：地球新娘（英文版）》：　　Kong Ning believed the doctors would be happy walking back and forth through the clean corridor. If she worked harder, they would treat her mother with greater care. After finishing the corridor, she cleaned the toilets and meticulously emptied patientbedpans, making sure everything was done properly lest hospital authorities would fire her and keep her from her mother.　　"I had to smell all kinds of stench - disinfectants, blood, feces, urine, discarded gauze…you name it!" Kong Ning recalled. One day, a country woman threw her six- or seven-month-old baby on a doctor's desk and wept sadly outside the door. The baby died of an unknown disease. The head nurse asked Kong Ning toremove the dead baby as if sleeping in a brown fabric.　　Kong Ning walked out holding the little body in her arms as the baby's mother wailed behind her. After exiting the hospital compound, she sat on a stairway at the gate, hugging the cold baby tightly, as if trying to wake her with her body warmth. The baby's mother sat beside her crying until she had run out of strength. By dawn the next day, the mother left with the baby in resignation to fate.　　Soon thereafter, a ballet dancer jumped from the fifth floor of the hospital. She was suffering from bone cancer and the doctor had to saw off one of her legs to save her life. But to her, losing a leg was the same as losing her life, because it meant she couldn't dance any more. With a stretcher on her shoulder, Kong Ning immediately followed the head nurse downstairs to an open flower bed where the dancer lay flat in the pale moonlight. She was still alive! "Lift her and put her on the stretcher! Quick!" said the head nurse. Kong Ning tried but failed. "Carry her on your back then!" The head nurse ordered. The elevator wasn't working, so Kong Ning had to carry her up the stairs step by step. "Why did you jump? Why do you want to die?" Kong Ning breathlessly asked, sounding like a young mother tenderly scolding a thfee-year-old who didn't know what death was all about.　　Doctors saved her. To prevent her from attempting suicide again, they tied her to a bedpost with gauze. Kong Ning said to her: "You must live! You must survive no matter how hard it is!"　　This terrible experience was later framed in The Ballet Dancer, a Kong Ning painting. Professional dancers have a special fluidity of beauty, whether joyful or sad. However, in this 2010 painting, the dancer is writhing in pain and the lines of her body do not seem to stretch. This painful feeling is not exclusive to the ballet dancer who has lost the stage; it is shared by Kong Ning, who suffered due to the wrongs her loved ones were subjected to.　　On a misty morning in the early spring of 1971, Xiaoyu came to Shanghai from Manzhouli. Wearing an oversize blue tunic and a straw rope around his waist, he looked like a famine victim. He had come to take their mother home to Manzhouli. The family of three was to live another ten years in their hometown, experience the fear ofwar and preparations for war, and grow up.　　……