Tales of Accidental Genius by Simon van Booy

come from fist or foot—but from memory, and the struggle to keep hold of our lives.
    His wife asked if it would be a love story, reminding Longwei how they found each other as teenagers at the railway station. She asked if he remembered the night markets, and they laughed about sharing single bags of Ningbo fried batter, so their hands might accidentally touch.
    It was almost five A.M. when they finished talking. Thegarden outside Longwei’s room was coming back as night drained. He lay there going over their honeymoon in Hokkaido. The tops of mountains like white fists.
    His new film would be like his very first film. The one he made with a handheld camera at the Ningbo night market as a teenager. He would sit down and let the story write itself from start to finish, then send in the script without telling the studio what it meant. There would be an uproar, he knew that: people screaming, bottles of Johnnie Walker Blue Label hurled as men and women lost face with studio heads.
    But in time they would see he was right. They would catch up.
    There would, of course, be new conditions with a picture like this. The studio might want him to finance a portion personally, until audiences could get used to the new genre.
    But Longwei believed so strongly in his vision, that with his wife’s blessing—he was prepared to finance the entire picture himself. This would almost certainly give him final say on the last scene, because, although he was yet to write the script, he knew instinctively, there could be no people in the shot:
    Just a tiny hutong home,
    with an old spring bed,
    a vase of blue flowers,
    full moon drifting. . . .

Inspired in part by the true story
    Restoring the Light
    A documentary film by Carol Liu

意识是改变的第一步。
    . . . awareness is the first step for change . . .

一
    For a long time,
    Golden Helper II was just a lump of metal welded
    to the frame of a crooked tricycle
    used to ferry small mountains of bok choy
    (and occasionally celery)
    to a street corner in Beijing opposite Chanel
    where blind Mr. Fun and his wife
    had their vegetable business.

The idea for Golden Helper II had appeared in Mr. Fun’s head
    one night at the kitchen table
    searching for a home in the world like fire or the wheel.
    Mr. Fun folded pieces of newspaper to help him remember—
    couldn’t draw his ideas for the same reason he sold vegetables
    and didn’t work as an engineer,
    which was his dream.

Mr. Fun put the pieces of folded newspaper away
    in a drawer that wouldn’t close because of New Year’s cards,
    coins, a set of teeth, old keys, plastic toys, souvenirs,
    and a whistle;
    Mr. Fun’s life in small pieces.
    Most of his inventions never became anything
    more than a folded newspaper,
    but Golden Helper II was special,
    and Mr. Fun knew exactly where this bundle
    of copper, steel, and rippling chains could be welded
    onto the frame of the Fun family tricycle.
    Mr. Fun’s ideas often came in the evening
    when Mrs. Fun and Little Weng were at home
    watching television, bellies full, eyes closing.
    At night he sometimes stood over their beds,
    sometimes stood there in the darkness,
    his heart like a kite on currents of breath.
    It would be like when they were dead , he thought,
    except he would be dead too.
    No more Fun.

Mr. Fun was also a worrier,
    but if there was nothing to worry about,
    he let himself be swept up in flights of fancy.
    Once he wondered what it would be like to go backward.
    He caught the idea from television:
    Mrs. Fun staying up to watch Brad Pitt
    in the old days of America.
    In the movie, the voice of Brad Pitt got younger and younger
    until he could only cry, and not say to those around him,
    â€œI was born an old man who played cards, smoking.”
    When the house was quiet, Mr. Fun imagined living every day
    of his own life again in reverse.

. . . sitting around as Little Weng gets younger and