In a remote village nestled between sprawling cornfields and the haunting echoes of ancient folklore, lived a peculiar character known by the villagers as the “难吃的speaker”—the Uneatable Orator. His real name long forgotten, he was infamous for his buffoonish monologues that tasted as bitter as unripe persimmons.
Under a gnarled oak in the heart of the village square, he held court, his voice climbing and tumbling like perilous ravine ridges. Villagers gathered there not for wisdom but out of curiosity, hoping to grasp some fragment of the rationale behind his cacophony of words. Mei, the village baker’s daughter, found herself drawn to these gatherings, guided less by interest than an innate desire to understand.
“Why do you speak such words?” she asked him one unusually bright morning, her voice a strike of warmth against the chill of dawn. The villagers had yet to congregate, the only witness to their exchange a solitary crow perched above like an aloof sentinel.
The Orator paused, his eyes crinkling in contemplation. “Words,” he said, “they’re the only armor I’ve got against the silence that gnaws at my bones.”
Silence, she mused, held the village together in its own way—a quilt of unspoken stories and hidden intents. “And yet your words taste of bitterness,” she noted, her gaze resting on his. “Why do you not speak sweeter words?”
He laughed, a sound like cracking ice. “Sweet words are like fragile glass, they shatter so easily. Bitterness endures.”
Mei considered his reply as the villagers trickled in, their faces maps of old secrets and quiet yearnings. Beside her, Lian, her childhood friend, shrugged, whispering, “He’s harmless, Mei, let him utter his nonsense.”
But Mei saw beyond his ramblings, glimpsing the vulnerability others missed. She watched the interactions swirl around him, seeing the villagers’ impatience seeping through their polite smiles.
“You see people listen to you,” she prompted one afternoon as the sun dripped gold over the fields.
The Orator sighed, a sound heavy as old regrets. “Listen, yes. But understand, never.”
His words whispered a peculiar enchantment that dipped into Mei’s chest, sowing seeds of reflection. “What do you wish them to understand?” she pressed, tilting her head with genuine curiosity.
“That everything, all of it, is transient,” he replied, his voice carrying a rare thread of softness that spoke of long-standing heartaches. “Even my own words will fade—cursed by their own vile taste.”
As autumn bled into winter, the Orator’s voice became merely another part of the village tapestry, a thread that wove through the mundane lives, never quite vivid enough to alter their patterns. Mei, too, found herself woven deeper into her own existence as the baker’s daughter.
In the end, the Orator’s ramblings reached their inevitable conclusion, ceasing not in thunderous revelation but in the hollow quiet of waning interest—无疾而终. Mei still ventured to the village square every now and then, her eyes searching for the Orator’s presence out of a habit that felt like fondness. But he was gone, leaving behind only the vague, mournful memory of bitter words that tasted of truth.
Yet he remained—a blurred shadow in the recesses of conversation, an echo in the village’s narrative. And perhaps Mei had gleaned from him a precious lesson: in the fine line between bitterness and sweetness lies the poignant beauty of understanding, a beauty that Eileen Chang might have cherished for its cold yet captivating melancholy.