Wu Ming-yi and the Hundred Mysterious Paths

Markets are the source of the magical. In Gabriel García Márquez's One Hundred Years of Solitude , the markets in the village of Macondo are always bizarre, colorful, crazy, described by the author as a place where one can find "everything that the imagination can conceive (...). It is a carnival of strange things beyond the ability to think, which one sees only once in a lifetime". The short story collection The Magician on the Footbridge by Wu Ming-yi - the first Taiwanese writer to be nominated for the prestigious International Booker Prize - begins with a quote from Márquez, and perhaps the spirit of a strange folk market also comes from Márquez.

The magical alleys

It's just that Macondo's market sells weird things: flying carpets, magnets that promise to extract gold, and Crusader knights' armor; Wu Ming-yi's market, on the other hand, at first glance is full of very normal, very realistic shops: noodle shops, dumpling shops, Western-style shops, children's clothing stores, optical shops, obituary writing services, fortune-telling shops, grocery stores... But when reality starts to collide with reality, the magical begins to seep out.

Cover of the book The Magician on the Pedestrian Bridge (translated by Nguyen Tu Uyen; published by Nha Nam and the Writers Association Publishing House, 2024)

Each short story in the work seems to take us through the market through a different winding alley. Still in the same market setting, the characters of this story occasionally pass by the other story - like the townspeople still having to jostle, unable to avoid pushing each other in the market space that is both narrow and endlessly stretched. The fragments of each person's memories of the market are put together into a common dream, a collective nostalgia for the childhood market that was demolished during the city's reconstruction. It is an effort that is the opposite of Márquez's characters. Márquez's character leaves to establish a village for the future. Wu Ming-yi's character returns to establish a village in memory.

The magical realism in this collection of short stories by Wu Ming-yi is not "extroverted", not projected into large and expansive spaces like in One Hundred Years of Solitude (people flying into the sky, flowers raining, widespread insomnia epidemic), but often confined to narrow spaces, such as a toilet, a birdcage, an elephant costume, a goldfish tank, a 3D model, the ceiling of a tailor shop...

For example, in the story The 99th Floor , a boy suddenly disappears. Later, his friends ask him where he actually went. He says he didn't go anywhere, he just went into a girls' restroom where some kids had drawn an imaginary elevator control panel, pressed the 99th floor, and ended up on the real 99th floor. The 99th floor is exactly like the first floor, except that he has become invisible to others. Wu Ming-yi places life/death switches in everyday scenes, places the riddles of reality in places or objects we frequent or handle every day. Their main function remains the same, but occasionally, they suddenly "act up" and no longer allow us to see the world as it is.

The Curse of Magic

All the short stories in the book intersect at least two points: one - they share a market setting, two - they all feature the shadow of a magician on a pedestrian bridge.

Again, One Hundred Years of Solitude also has an important character who is almost a magician. That is Melquíades, a strange gypsy. Melquíades not only sells strange items to the people of Macondo, but this character is also the one who holds the prophecy about the fall of that lonely village. In comparison with Márquez's novel, the nameless magician character is also a re-enactment of Melquíades.

Every time he enters a story, we see him demonstrate his talent for transforming one thing into another, resurrecting a dead bird, turning a painting of a fish into a real one, hiding a zebra in a public restroom. He twists and turns dream and reality. It’s as if he takes something out of a dream and puts something else back into the dream. But right from the start, the magician tells the narrator that he is only transforming mental images into the visible—a practice we associate with artists—and that “all your magic tricks are fake.”

It is false, but everyone wants to believe. And among the many who believe, there are many who die. They die, not at all from contact with the supernatural, even long after they have enjoyed the supernatural. But is it true that, once we have seen the supernatural, it is difficult to pretend that reality answers our deepest concerns? Despite the warning that miracles are false, the supernatural is often irresistibly alluring. Even though we know that the supernatural is not volatile, is reality more durable?

Source: https://thanhnien.vn/wu-ming-yi-va-tram-nga-huyen-ao-185241115185837846.htm