I stand here on 清平路 — Qingping, “clear and peaceful” — though the name feels more like a wish than a fact. The alley is soft with the hush of old walls, the drone of wires overhead, the smell of dried roots and sweet sugar pearls drifting out from 陈基二号, Chen Ji No. 2, all these tiny stalls stitched into the city’s circulatory system.
The two old men hold this street in place. One walking out, half turned from me — the other pivoting back, caught at the threshold of his stall, his glance a backward echo. Between them drifts a time so dense it almost stands still: 靓绵茵珠 shimmering faintly in its plastic bag, 观音蔗珠 sweetening the air, 夏枯草 withered but potent — all these dried words promising life extended, softened, bought back in ounces and grams.
And yet, they walk through it like ghosts of themselves — or ghosts of the street — or ghosts of my seeing. This is Nietzsche’s soft snarl at the back of my mind: the Eternal Recurrence. A man walks this lane. He sells herbs, counts coins, locks the shutter. Tomorrow he walks it again. And again. No final exit. The cycle curls back on itself. The shop’s sign rots and is replaced. The fungus grows on a caterpillar in a high valley, dries, powders, is spooned into boiling water. The old man drinks it, coughs less, lives longer — but only long enough to circle back to the same lane, the same door.
Here too, a Hindu murmur: Brahma births, Vishnu sustains, Shiva devours. Creation, maintenance, dissolution. A dried peel of tangerine sold for small change is the shape of that cosmic loop in miniature. The peel that once was sweet flesh is now cure. Sweetness gone — bitterness preserved — a memory turned medicine.
And if time is the clearing, as Heidegger said — or the deferred trace, as Derrida would correct him — then these two men are not just here now but always here: young once, maybe slipping through this same lane with coins in their pockets, eyes clear, backs straight, seeing their own fathers standing at these same thresholds. They walk through a street that remembers more than they do. They walk through a memory dissolving at the edges like old rice paper — presence that is already absence, now that is already once.
Presence is never fully here — Derrida’s ghostly grin reminds me. It is always deferred, always a trace, always haunted by what is not said, not seen. 靓绵茵珠, 观音蔗珠, 夏枯草 — all these names are signifiers dangling from hooks, signs promising sweetness, softness, cure. But the cure is not the cure. The sign is not the thing. The street is not the street.
What remains is a drift — two old men, circling each other like Brahma and Shiva, birth and decay mirrored in every slow step. 清平路 promises clear and peaceful — but clarity is confusion folded into stillness, and peace is only the hush that covers up the constant hum of becoming and unbecoming.
Perhaps they do not remember being young here. Perhaps memory has faded to a blur — a faint taste of bread they can no longer chew, a sweetness on the tongue that might be 蔗珠 or just the ghost of it. Perhaps the past and future slip over each other like layers of cellophane — translucent, sticky, impossible to pull apart.
I stand in the middle of this thought — half presence, half absence — Derrida’s différance whispering through the wires overhead. Meaning slides sideways; the sign drifts from the stall; the men slip from frame to frame.
Maybe this is all we have: this narrow lane, this slow drift, this old pair of feet scuffing stone that was once new, now cracked, someday dust. A loop that refuses exit.
Somewhere a butterfly lifts off from Zhuangzi’s dreaming head — its wings brushing past Nietzsche’s circle, Heidegger’s clearing, Derrida’s trace — and the two old men walk on, soft echoes of each other, circling a street that remembers them more perfectly than they remember themselves.
And I stand here, quiet witness, sign and signifier dissolving in my mouth, tasting the faint sweetness of a sugar pearl that was never really there.
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