Ke Ling (1909-2000) is a famous Guangzhou-born film theorist, critic and playwright in China. His multi-dimensional artistic creations are featured with many styles, with a plethora of masterpieces often seen in the fields of proses, fairytales, dramas and films. He started his prose composition during the Second Sino-Japanese War when he was greatly inspired by the critically temporal situation and the illusionary prosperity of the 'Isolated Island' (referring to the time when Shanghai’s former foreign concessions were besieged but not invaded).

Stray Maple Leaves

It has been for two months since that day when the frost first descended here and parasol trees were not entirely defoliated. A little girl went to my house with a bunch of red leaves in her hand. She offered me two pieces, and after saying that she had picked them up in the backyard of the Fifth Normal Middle School on the Dragon Hill, she left.

I held these leaves joyfully in my hand and started to appreciate them: the leaf, being a kind of maple plant, took a shape of a cute palm with seven petals. With fine stems symmetrically veined, and regularly lined foliar ages around its margins, it resembled the most exquisite Chinese drawing. Ardent and crimson, the reddened leaves looked so adorable that I couldn't help but caressing them for quite a long time before putting them in a tiny whiteware dish on my desk, in a very cautious way, for accompanying me in reading.

However, the red leaf faded and withered insouciantly in just a few days time. I was suffering from a sense of loss, such a divine thing with such a short life. Did it mean any good secular thing was just mortal, like broken glazes and dissipated clouds? I was deprived of it and my soul was wafting toward nowhere. So I climbed up the Dragon Hill, to the backyard of the Fifth Normal Middle School. The yard, halfway to the hill, enjoyed a panoramic view and delectable autumn air with withered grasses here and there. Up there on the hillside stood a maple tree, lone, towering and densely foliated, gushing wildfires as if to burn the whole hill into red – the only eye-catching view among the world of desolation. Around the tree roots, however, there were quite a few fallen leaves. I lingered under the tree on and on until I finally picked up many leaves before going back home. This time I did it carefully by using them as bookmarks. 

Three days later, I thumbed through the books and found out that these leaves finally dried up, lost their luster, but they somehow took no shrink, far better than the pair in the whiteware dish that looked so languish and pining away. I tried, lost in a sudden fanciful thought, to redeem their nature in my own hands. So I got some watercolors and rouged the discolored into red again. At the first glance, they looked as if ruddily real, taken for a real thing. And I fancied that I could simply do something beyond the nature, a Nella Fantasia made up by a translucent embossed greenish paper on the window pane, on which pasted with fallen leaves trembling against the wind in a tangled mess. Momentarily satisfied, I was sitting in front of the window, an air of happiness.

Then the scarlet leaves became my partner day and night. Everyday morning when I woke up, I would draw up the curtain over my bed to usher in the first ray of sun, and a 'good morning' greeting from my red leaves, with their silhouettes flickering on my still sleepy eyes. There were times when I came back from this busy world and into a desolate late night. I found nothing but a dim light from my quiet house, projecting shadowy leaves out of window as if to give me a welcoming smile. I hurried into my room like a tired bird returning to his grove. Without further attempts of hovering, I readily went to my bed, seeking dreams.

It was deep in winter then, snowy, windy and biting cold. One evening before sunset, I was sitting upright by the window, facing my tacit leaves. And all of a sudden I remembered that tree at the backyard of the Dragon Hill, so I took a walk there to give it a surprise visit. Who would know that the once luxuriant, fire-raging crown had been entirely defoliated, with bare branches pointing crosswise at the dreary bleak sky? Around the tree roots were wizened grasses and nowhere I could find those leaves but a heap of snow-white cold ashes, with points of red, probably some broken petals not totally burned off. Perhaps the gardener swept the leaves to this place and burnt them all so that they could be decomposed into mud the next spring, an added fertilizer to this aged and towering maple tree.

Back home, still sitting upright facing the window and these red leaves on it, I fell lost. If the leaves had sense and had ever been informed of the news of their fellows while thinking of their own fate, should they be complaining or grateful, since they came from the earth and would go back to the earth? They were accidentally strayed, but they accomplished decorating the tiny window of my humble room. So it should be their misfortune, at least they had been wronged… I finally felt sorry.

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