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24 Eylül 2025

Beyond Exile (1)

1

 I still remember the day Naci[1] Zara's file landed in my super-secure inbox like it happened yesterday. Behind my back was a hard pillow adorned with Tibetan sky patterns; on the coffee table, where I stretched out my swollen legs, laid the golden pits of the plums I'd just devoured with my bated breath; on the other side of the sofa was our kitten, Hundun, engaged in a relentless struggle with its own tail; on the radio was a voice from the nineties, singing "Bù zhǐshì péngyǒu[2]" and in my womb was my son who would never be born. Outside, heavy July rain was pummeling the city's concrete streets. Selfless grandmothers and grandfathers, sworn to be hand fans for their grandchildren, had escaped to the scooter parks beneath the buildings as if the elixir of youth had been suddenly injected into their legs. The green garden at the center of the complex, which was becoming more dilapidated with each drop falling from the sky, was left to the patience of African snails and our native, squishy earthworms. Water splashing against the metal roof of the outbuilding housing of the security guards sparkled and rippled beyond the garden's boundaries. The two long metal poles we used to hang laundry swayed from the balcony ceiling like a cradle, clashing against each other. The sky grumbled like an old lady snarling at a street vendor who tried to cheat her. Mosquitoes sought warm, humid new spaces in defiance of the suddenly foul weather, and smoke-colored clouds sparkled momentarily across the sky like mischievous children who couldn't give up their firecrackers on festival days.

What happened? Are you bored already? Did my descriptions weigh heavily on the minds of the most impatient generation that history has ever known, the relentless children who aren't used to challenges, who expect action every ten seconds, who, when they don't find what they're looking for, move on to the next entertainment with a flick of their finger? Did I exaggerate a simple rain? What could be more natural, more ordinary, and, some might say, more despicable and devastating than the torrential rain in Shenzhen in July, the flooding, and even the traffic chaos? But what can I do? If nature itself exaggerates without limits, if it's always chasing one madness after another, if even its simplest form can shake already-settled souls, is it my fault? I am responsible for recording what unfolds before my eyes, the sounds and sights that shake my heartstrings, with such anxiety and tremors that I feel as if I'll never experience them again. I so desire that you too will tremble within. May this unique moment I've experienced transcend time and space, causing a tornado in the hearts of those who, thousands of years later, have never even heard of Shenzen, and stirring a movement in their bodies. May these images, coursing through my consciousness like a virus, live on in other consciousnesses nestled on the inaccessible fringes of the universe and history, becoming immortal, remaining ever-living. Since my body cannot survive this mortal life, may my consciousness, clinging to life in the minds of others like a pearl clinging to an oyster, remain there, always speaking, murmuring, sparking forth curses at the most unexpected times, like the blade of an axe striking a stone, seeking and creating paths to immortality, adorning and polishing what exists, and enhancing its power. May people, when they read my writing, feel a wetness on their heels, a cool relief on their shoulders, a faint itch on their lips, and a spring breeze on their bare chests. Let them hear the sound of rain in their ears, enough to make even the numbest lovers long for love. Wouldn't that be good? Besides, does literature have any other mission than this? I should focus on it, hone and develop my talents in that area, push my boundaries when the time and place come, and even surpass them! If Naci were here now, he'd agree with me. Perhaps the act of writing could be accomplished with fewer words, with less effort. I don't know. After all, I'm a rookie, just starting out, a novice in this field! An apprentice who will never become a master, a slave with no ambition for ownership, a dreamer who prefers flowing stream to a calm lake. You could call mine a kind of midlife crisis, the final straw brought to me by boredom and material comfort. Paper cutting[3], calligraphy, or dancing with my peers in the park aren't for me! I'm just trying. Maybe after I write my first and last story, I'll lose my enthusiasm and get rid of this problem. Until that day comes, I can't save any effort. Besides, isn't it common for beginners to overdo things, exaggerate, and mess up? If you don't like it, suppose that you haven’t read this paragraph. I won't interrupt again, I promise.

I'd risen from my seat, swaying like a well-fed bear cub, and had securely closed the door and window to prevent the water from the balcony into the living room. Just in case, I'd spread a few of my husband's old clothes on this side of the threshold. The profound silence that then filled the house, the sudden cessation of the hum from outside, giving way to a motionless solitude, had at first surprised me, then brought me some relief. Yes, I was alone; now, like Clark Kent entering a phone booth as a reporter and emerging as Superman, or Dr. Jekyll evolving into Mr. Hyde at night, I too could transform, allowing my inner spy to possess the soon-to-be-mother housewife. I wouldn't have to attend to anything else for at least two and a half hours. The meat I'd taken out of the freezer for dinner was thawing on the kitchen counter, and the vegetables I'd bought from the grocery store at the entrance to the complex were being disinfected in soda water. My husband wouldn't be home for three hours. This meant I could pore over the file to my heart's content, memorize every detail of my new assignment, and even find information online about some topics I wasn't familiar with. And half an hour before my husband arrived home, I'd slip into the kitchen and return to my loving, hardworking, beautiful, and charming self.

Oh, my naive husband, oh, the kindest, the nicest, most gentleman in the world, who never had the slightest doubt about his wife's work... I could never blame you for seeing everyone around you as "the inside is the same as the outside"! On the contrary, I often blamed myself for not being like you, for keeping a secret from you my entire life, and for luckily avoiding detection despite the small mistakes I made. And it wasn't just you who were unaware of my second life. My family, your family, our mutual friends... Everyone knew me as a smart, hard-working, and enterprising woman who made small profits from home, buying goods from wholesale stores on Nan Hai Boulevard and selling them nationwide, and running a small shop with a small assistant. My name is Lai Zi Ran[4], I am a trader who deals in wholesale buying of clothes and exporting some, and at home I am a diligent housewife who has created a perfect life with her husband!

Frankly, most of the time, I couldn't believe I could carry a second identity in my soul like heavy remorse. I often thought, "Let me climb this hill, I am going to let go of my burden, and flap my wings to find my freedom," but the hills never ended, nor did the weight of the burden on me ease. Oddly enough, for years, I followed the people I sometimes saw on television living two separate lives— men with two families in two different cities, unaware of each other; serial killers who raised three children on the money they earned as accountants while murdering dozens of innocents; financial advisors who, claiming to make a fortune for their friends, actually work as motorcycle mechanics and collect money from people; pyramid scheme scammers who advertise Bitcoin with lavish performances in giant halls, only to swindle billions of dollars and vanish a few years later—with an envy I couldn't even admit to myself. How was it that they didn't feel a pang of conscience? How did this immense secret they carried within them not take over their bodies, leak out like black vinegar seeping from cracks, and ruin everything? I'll never know the answer to that question. Perhaps what made me different was that, like a teacher, a nurse, or a soldier, I was led to believe that I was working for the welfare of my people. I wasn't a seductive woman who cheated on her husband, a vagrant who gambled secretly and squandered her family's fortune, or a scoundrel who spent every penny she could on drugs. My duty was sacred, my goal was clear, and my heart was pure. There were times when I couldn't believe this last one, but isn't it, as you Turks say, "Even a judge’s daughter can have those little issues!"? Besides, is the past a scrapbook so we can find and erase the things we don't like? Every sentence you delete from a previous page can cause the next pages to burn down. Therefore, I owe nothing to anyone. From now on, I can write as I wish, listening to all the voices within me, embracing all the colors, without shame or embarrassment, and believing with all my heart that, even if there is a small possibility, one day Naci will read these pages.

First, I went through the security checkpoints, which included three separate passwords, facial recognition, and fingerprints. So much so that if I mistyped a single letter while typing these passwords, the system would lock me out for two hours. If I made a similar mistake on my second try, I'd find myself answering to the Head of the Shenzhen Provincial Intelligence Bureau. Fortunately, I'm not clumsy; and if I were, why would they give me this job? I'm cautious, curious, and suspicious. The first thing I look at when I enter a room is where the exits are. Walking down the street, I know every camera, dead-end street, and pedestrian walkway by heart. When I talk to people, I look them in the eye, focusing not on what they say but on what they don't, probing their souls as deeply as if I were examining a historical scroll from the Tang Dynasty I'd stumbled upon in the archives. Just as I'm a good cook, I'm also a good tracker. I can stalk my target for hours without ever getting bored. So much so that sometimes, when I'm out shopping with my husband or a close friend, I feel the nagging annoyance of not following someone. I sweat all over, my mind is confused, and I wait for a sign from the sky, like a castaway in the middle of a vast ocean, unsure which way to swim. Indeed, following someone is easy; you don't use your mind, you don't make decisions, you don't face any dilemmas. The only difference from a guided missile is that your goal isn't to destroy your target; on the contrary, it's to follow, to obtain the information you need, and to ensure your target is alive. The lies I tell are so consistent, so convincing, that even I occasionally send myself notes to remind myself which story I'm telling and for what purpose, so they don't interfere with reality. The notebook I keep as a diary is a coded record of which lie I told, and to whom, on which date. As a spy, my greatest fear is that someone will treat me like a spy. Ours is a profession that, when identified, self-destructs. In the back of our minds, we have our second identity, those secrets we keep hidden from everyone. Meanwhile, with a childlike enthusiasm, we keep the spoiled self-consciousness of, "I wish I could tell everyone I was a spy, so they'd be stunned, gasp in utter amazement, and their mouths would drop open." The gravity of our walking secrets, even from those closest to us, saddens us like the spoiled children of rich families who aren't allowed to show off their newly purchased, expensive toys to their friends. It irritates the tranquil, subterranean pools deep within our souls even when the time and place are the most inappropriate.

One way or another, we were human too, after all, each of us made of flesh and bone, impatience and weakness, loyalty and betrayal, and even chatter, when necessary, born from a mother and made by a father. How I longed, though; on one of those winter nights, as I hugged my husband tightly, gently caressed his chest with my free thumb, and placed my warm tongue in the orbit of his earlobe, to say, "I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until the day I die." In the early years, I even imagined his responses in my head and wrote a few scenarios.

- I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until we die.

- I'm very sleepy, you can tell me tomorrow morning.

- Why are you so boring like this? I am going to sleep.

- Don't forget, I will ask you tomorrow morning.

- I already forgot!

Or

- I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until we die.

-Don't tell me, let me guess. You're not actually a young woman. You've been under the knife seven times and gotten to this point with tons of plastic surgery...

- Don't make me laugh, I've already eaten too much watermelon, I'm going to pee in my pants!

- So I knew?

Or

- I'm going to tell you a secret, but don't get angry and don't tell anyone, okay? It'll stay between us until we die.

- Let me say it before you do, but don’t be angry. Promise?

- What? Do you have a secret too?

- Of course there is, do you promise?

- Well, yeah I promise! What else can I say?

- I have a mistress, and she is five months pregnant…

- You animal. Is this a joke?

- If it's a girl, we'll name her Zı Ran... Ha ha ha... Stop, don't hit my arm!

When you carry a secret inside you like a bitter poison for years, this is the pickle-like result. When I was alone, I always ended up talking to my secret, not to myself. Lying on my back on sleepless nights, watching the dance of light on the ceiling, irritated by those who slipped through the crowds at train stations and took my turn in the queue, but finding it unnecessary to fight, seeing other strangers who looked like you in parks and tagging along just for the fun of it, pacing the rough pavements of misty streets right behind your shadow at night, and most of all, watching you helplessly from afar, drunk as hell, throwing up in the bushes by the roadside—you never learned not to mix wine and beer!—unable to approach you from behind, unable to pat your back with my warm hands warmed in my pockets, unable to lean in and whisper, “It’s over, it’s over, you’ve threw it all out!”…

And here's your file before me. Your great-grandfather emigrated from Sivas to Giresun in the early twentieth century, your registry is in Görele, not far from the Black Sea, but you're an Istanbul native, born and raised there. You studied mathematics at a reputable university and speak fluent English. You're about to start teaching at one of Shenzhen's most prestigious high schools. Wow, wow, wow! You'd better stick to that. You also write. Essays, poems, short stories, and so on. So, you're a class of people who know how to hide things, and you claim to be able to see the world through other people's eyes. This means, our job is both easy and difficult! Their investigation into you hasn't yielded a satisfactory answer to the question of whether you're a nationalist, a conservative, a democrat, or anarchist. They haven't been able to definitively determine what you believe in or oppose, whether you hold negative views about our country and will work to spread them, or which side you believe is right on TTXT[5]. You had the potential to poison the young minds of our high school students, and you might even use your job as a cover to achieve other ends. Therefore, every step you took was monitored, all your correspondence and conversations were reviewed with a spy program installed on your phone, and when you left your phone somewhere, physical surveillance was needed to record who you met with, who you befriended, and what you argued about. My previous assignments had included tracking a businessman from Siirt, a retired officer from Erzurum, a journalist from Kayseri, and finally, an actor from Yozgat. Except for the last one, all of them were monotonous, lacking in excitement and depth, and I almost had to get myself caught just to get over with it. Their only interesting aspect was that, when combined, they created a striking pattern. It was as if with each assignment, I was moving a little further west, a little further away from China. That was the question I asked myself the day I came across your file. I wondered if my next assignment would be a sunflower oil merchant from Edirne? No, if I had a next assignment, perhaps I would have had the opportunity to test this prediction and ultimately accept or reject my hypothesis, but you were my last. A long, long assignment that lasted almost 18 years, as deep as the oceans, as high as the Himalayas, as hot as the inside of volcanoes, and painful as the toothaches of the winter nights.

Ahh, Naci, you were 28 when I met you. Just like you said to that advertising woman you met at the bar, you were the perfect age. Since it couldn't be 6 or 496! That day, I thought to myself, "What kind of dorky flirtation techniques does this guy have?" That they actually worked was a whole other mystery for a woman like me, who, despite the intervention of others, had finally married her high school sweetheart. That's where I first saw you in person. I was sitting in the corner behind the door, drinking lemon-soda, and you were sitting at the bar with your Canadian friend—the baby-faced guy who'd resorted to Traditional Chinese Medicine because his hair was falling out—making plans to bike to Beijing. You had jet-black, thick, and curly hair. Your beardless and mustache-free face exuded the innocence and joy of a university student. You were five years younger than me. With your smile, your movements, your restless body, you weren't much different from a middle schooler who'd just finished his homework and thrown himself onto the basketball court. The three or four chairs between us were filling and emptying. When the music stopped, I could hear every word you spoke, and at other times, I read your thin lips. You traced your fingers over the map like a commander preparing for conquest, excitedly saying things like, "If we go together, we can stay in double-bed hotel rooms; we can make the trip cheaper," to your friend. You'd finished your fifth beer and was about to order your sixth when that girl appeared next to you, fixated on the crooked map you'd drawn on napkin paper. Her excuse was to refill her beer, but her true intentions were clear. "See me, talk to me, hunt me so I can be a gazelle you'll find hard to capture, and you can be proud of yourself," she said with the uninterpretable language of a female body desperate for attention. Inwardly, I prayed to the gods I didn't believe in, urging you to stay away from that woman and avoid falling into this trap. But my prayers didn't come true, probably because I didn't have enough faith or because the gods didn't find me sincere enough. But in the end, I got what I wanted. You had lunch with the girl twice and gone to the movies once. The food was fine, but what was that ridiculous movie? I know you passed out in the 14th minute and woke up in the final scene from the activity signals on your phone. For all I know, your potential lover, who devoured a huge bag of popcorn on her own, must have been stumped too. You hadn't seen each other again after that. You were a little upset. Not because she wasn't responding to your messages, but because you'd become so attached to a relationship that was clearly destined to fail. For days, you'd written short self-criticisms in your notebook, along the lines of, "Why am I like this? Why can't I resist sweet poisons?" Blaming yourself for your weak willpower, you'd had minor breakdowns. But I'd known this from the start, so I’d have struggled less. Thankfully, the breakup didn’t shake you too much. And I didn't know back then that it wasn't the endings of such superficial relationships that would truly shake you. In relationships, as in so many other things, there were vast differences between us. These were differences that needed to be understood, not overcome. It would be unfair to expect an old-world devout like me, who would pick the second, if not the first, flower she saw in a garden, put it in her hair, and then close her eyes to all the other plants in the garden, to understand you at that first glance. But I didn't give up, don't worry. I didn't give up, I didn't tire, I didn't complain. I struggled and struggled, trying to find my way in the middle of a desert where the sand dunes were constantly shifting, and to reach the oasis that would cool me down, even if it were late.

And yet it didn't work, Naci! I encountered nothing but mirages in the endless curves of the long, thin line you left behind. As I crawled on my knees, belly, and elbows in those curves, I always talked about you, I became one with your reunion. I made room for you even if only for your dreams in the rough caves of my womanhood, but you could never enter through that wide threshold. You managed to fit with your childish frame into the narrow tunnels of my mind, where no one else could fit, but you couldn't even take a step closer to my body, which shattered like glass every evening and was put back and glued together every morning. I always saw your silhouette on the wet sidewalks softened by the moonlight, but on the rough surfaces of the same sidewalks that resembled tree bark, you never saw me, you never noticed me; You never once shared with me the shy smile you generously distributed to those petite girls you met at your school, whose names you couldn't even be bothered to learn despite having worked on the same floor for years. The tide incident that occurred between us was just like my unborn child, the son I lost a few weeks before birth, never seeing his mother's face. I was close to you; you were even farther from yourself. I was the lively world, you the desolate, dark moon! I was the expectant mother who looked at her swollen belly like a pot and had rosy dreams, you, the blessed face whose arrival had been heralded. Yes, I had waited for him for months too, dreaming of the day he would look at me and smile, I longed for the moment he would call me "mom" with every cell in my body. Neither he could look at my face, nor you! Neither could he love me, nor you! From him, all I have left is a six- or seven-year-old friend, whose plump cheeks, red as tomatoes in the cold weather, never grew up, and whose eyes sparkled like wet tomatoes. From you, a desolate city, a cold planet, and a terrifying desert night where scorpions and snakes swarmed. You were both lame baby rabbits stranded on the opposite bank of the Yangtze River. Following you, I'd run downstream, brushing aside the twigs that crossed my path with hope and love, ignoring the thorns that tore and bled from my skin. Sometimes I was surprised by your closeness, occasionally filled with hope at the narrowing riverbed, but ultimately, I couldn't change the ill fate of my adventure, which ended in the East China Sea. Do you know what was most painful, Naci Hoca[6]? On sleepless nights, the silky face of that six- or seven-year-old boy meets the spots on your unshaven face, your eyes appear on his face, his lips on yours, my mind goes blank, and at the end of all this confusion, I find myself crying silently, my elbows on the cold railings of the balcony at three o’clock in the morning…



[1] Pronounced as “Naa-gee”. Turkish male name. It means “saved from hell, deserves heaven”.

[2] You are more than just a friend to me.

[3] 剪紙: jiǎnzhǐ: An artistic activity with roots dating back to the invention of paper. It plays an important role in decorating homes during holidays and special occasions. 

[4]It is read as "Lay Zı Ran." To prevent the reader from reading the "ı" sound as an "i" sound, it will be written as "Lai Zı Ran" in future sections.

[5]Tibet, Taiwan, Xinjiang, Tiananmen

[6] Hoca: Teacher in Turkish. “Naci Hoca” sounds like “Naci Laoshi” in Chinese. 

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