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Thoughts on a Quiet Night
by Li Pai

Before my bed the light is so bright
it looks like a layer of frost
lifting my head I gaze at the moon
lying back down I think of home

—from Poems of the Masters: China’s Classic Anthology
of T’ang and Sung Dynasty Verse, translated by Red Pine

Li Pai (701–762), aka Li Po, was born in what is now Kyrgyzstan and grew up in Szechuan, north of Chengtu. Ranked with Tu Fu as one of China’s two greatest poets, he left behind over one thousand poems. This is one of his most famous, and critics sigh at the effortlessness of his technique and his ability to transport the reader not only to a place but also to a state of mind. When the Chinese see the moon, it reminds them that friends and family members living elsewhere are looking at the same moon.                       —Translator’s Note

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Early one morning last year in Taiwan, while my father and I walked back to my uncle’s apartment from the Sun Yat Sen Memorial, where he’d demonstrated for me his tai chi routines (first with a giant fan, then with a giant sword), I asked him about the different homes he’d lived in before he decided to raise his family in New York. At the age of thirteen he joined the army in order to see the world. He’d added weights to his shoes so the recruits would believe he was sixteen, their minimum age requirement. When he announced his plans to the people who were caring for him during that period (friends of his parents), the head of the family, who’d assured my father’s parents that the boy would receive a proper education, and who was a general, had been heartbroken and apoplectic at the same time. My father sailed all over the world for a few years before settling in Taiwan, where he drove buses and cabs and wrote short stories for local newspapers. He and my mother married when he was thirty-three, my age now, and when she was twenty. His only regrets in life, he always says with his hands held palms up, are that he never learned to play the piano and that he never had the mind for going to school. This is why he reads on his own, with Chinese–English dictionaries at his hip, curious about every single word he comes across. Once, he excitedly spelled out a word for me that he’d seen on a billboard while driving home from another twelve-hour workday in Chinatown, and wanted to know what it meant: V-R-O-O-M. When I told him, he slapped his knee and growled out the word over and over.

Last Christmas, I found the perfect present for him: a T-shirt showcasing the SpaghettiOs logo and design. For as long as I can remember, my father’s always happily shouted out: “Uh-oh, spaghetti-o!” When I presented the shirt to him, he laughed for fifteen minutes straight. Everybody did. All this time my mother had thought he’d made up the phrase. Now, if I ask him whether he’s worn the shirt recently, he’ll chuckle as though I’d just reached out and tickled him on the knee.

To me my father is a wise and beautiful man, whether he’s making things up or reciting a passionate story about home. He is my home.

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The poem above, “Thoughts on a Quiet Night,” is the only Chinese poem I’ve ever memorized in Chinese and know how to recite with any feeling. And as I’d grown up thinking it was a children’s rhyme (it is that well known and ubiquitous), I’m guessing that I must have picked it up from home somehow, most likely from my father, who enjoys performing and discussing popular verse with anyone who’ll listen.

I think my “Winter ends” entry might better reflect the spirit of “Thoughts on a Quiet Night.” And I am longing to post a voice recording of the poem, but I haven’t figured out how. Below, then, is the crude pinyin version, with an even cruder translation of each word in the lines; I have a weak grasp of idioms in general, and it’s even weaker in Chinese, so to all of you fluent in Chinese, I ask you to please, please, please forgive this dodo.

Chuang qian ming yue guang
(window in front bright moonlight)

Yi shih di shang xuang
(frost on the floor shining)

Ju tou wang ming yue
(raise head toward moon)

Di tou si gu xiang
(lower head thinking of home)

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