English 214
Reid
4-26-2010
The Accident
Gao Xingjian’s “The Accident” is about a traffic accident that occurred on the street in China, outside of a radio-repair shop. First he describes the events leading up to the accident: the people walking through the streets, a man on a bicycle with a baby carriage attached to the front riding diagonally through the street, the cars and buses coming from the other direction, honking their horns, but not braking. Finally as the man heads straight for a bus the driver begins to step on his brakes. Unfortunately he did not stop in time and struck the man on the bicycle. Other pedestrians said they saw the man on the bike hesitate for a minute then keep going like he could beat the bus. When he saw the bus was going to hit him the man pushed the baby carriage off of the bike to save his son. When the bus hit the man its wheels rolled right over, and killed, him. The bike was a mangled mess, but the baby was alright. The man was left lying on the street and after the police arrived the baby was sent to the hospital (Xingjian 1377-1379).
As people began to gather in the street to take a look at what had happened stories began to be told about what may have been going on, why the man rode out in front of the bus, why the bus driver didn’t stop, who the man was and what kind of father he was to the child, etc. As different people moved in and out there were less and less people there who actually saw the accident, and the story began to change. People began to judge things they hadn’t seen, saying things like “Why didn’t the child save his father and push him out of the way?” (Xingjian 1379-1382). In reality the child was too young to do such a thing, and the people asking such questions did not really know what was going on, but were quick to judge.
At the end of the story a police officer put dirt over the blood in the street, a street cleaner came and washed everything away, and people walking down the street had no knowledge of the accident that had occurred that day. They continued along their way because they did not realize what a life-changing event had occurred on the very street they were walking on. In the final paragraphs the narrator begins speaking to the reader, not telling a story, but describing his thoughts on the happenings in the story. He says “If the man had set out a little later…If he had set out a little earlier…If he had run into a friend on the way home…” but the narrator doesn’t know who the man was or what was going on with him that day. All he knows was what was seen on the street. Finally he says that he is not there to philosophize or to talk about statistics, just to tell a story of a traffic accident that happened on the street outside a radio-repair shop (Xingjian 1379-1384).
Gao Xingjian was born in China in 1940 and began writing at a relatively young age due to the budding interest he received from his mother who was an actress. He went to school and received a degree in French, but during the Cultural Revolution he was sent to a re-education camp where he felt it was necessary to burn many of his manuscripts. He didn’t get anything published until 1979. Many of Xingjian’s stories have political themes and discuss things which China has decided is inappropriate. Many of his stories are banned there, and no one will attempt to act out his plays (Engdahl p3). In “The Accident” we can see some of his Chinese culture shine through as he speaks of a son’s duty to his father, the fact that many people only had one son, and how much of a strain it would put on a family if an accident such as this took their only son. He speaks of parents being worried for their children because the traffic is so terrible and laws are not in place to control traffic as well as it needs to be controlled (Xingjian 1381). These are all problems that are prevalent in the cities of China with the growing population and overgrowth of cities. We even see some of the simplest parts of the culture like when a young woman tells her lover to stop because people are looking (Xingjian 1383). This aversion to public displays of affection is also a pillar in the Chinese culture.
We can see that Xingjian pulls a lot of his story from the culture in which he grew up, though now he is a French citizen and resides there (Engdahl p4). His relationship with his native China is obviously one of love and hate. We can see the cultural aspects and beliefs pulled through in his stories, but with the political statements he makes in other stories we can also see how he would be disconnected from the country of his birth. His first story to be banned there was “Bus Stop” followed shortly by his play “The Other Shore.” Both of these were seen as political statements against the government, but after they were banned Xingjian was quoted as saying “If you put literature onto some sort of combat footing, and turn it into combat literature, then it’s the very thing I oppose” it was further stated that his play was described as “a comedy, but if people don’t have this sense of humor it could become a very serious matter” (BBC p11-12).
Throughout “The Accident” Xingjian was simply stating a series of events as they happened. He wasn’t making a statement (philosophizing) or getting across a message through the story because “…there is no need for us to turn life’s tragic accidents into statistics – that is a job for the traffic-safety department” (Xingjian 1384). He was simply relating the events of an accident that happened in china outside a radio-repair shop. It’s easy to conclude that Xingjian was trying to use this story as a way of describing his writing process. He did not want to make a statement with his stories or create a stir in the government. He simply wanted to describe things the way he saw them and let people take from the event whatever they wanted to take.
BBC, . "Gao Xingjian: Life as a Literature Laurete." BBC World Service. Bush House, 2001. Web. 26 Apr
2010.
Engdahl, Horace. "Gao Xingjian-Biography." Nobel Lectures. World Scientific Publishing Co., 2002. Web.
26 Apr 2010.
Xingjian, Gao. "The Accident." The Story and its Writer 7th ed.. Ed.. Ann Charters. Boston: Bedford/St. Martin's,
2007. Print.
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