The New Year was coming, and my calendar was full of social engagements. A good number of friends, more than usual, had invited me out to dinner that year, many of them the county’s most celebrated fiction writers, essayists, and poets. I was a simple agricultural entrepreneur, and I happily accepted every invitation. Although these writers were relatively poor, they persevered in their creative endeavors and continued to inspire people with their literary works. I enjoyed being in their company because I had loved literature with a passion ever since I was a child. For various reasons, in the end I did not become a fiction writer, an essayist or a poet, but I often wore the mantle of a local patron so that those artists could continue their work. Still I did not fully understand why that year they invited me out for such a string of Spring Festival dinners in a row. They were always friendly to me, but this concentration of invitations was not the typical practice. Maybe there was some good news they wished to share. Had one of them been tapped for the Nobel Prize for Literature? If so, none of them was letting on.

A well-known fiction writer invited me for a meal at noon on the first day of the new year. Although as far as I knew he had never in his life traveled beyond our county, he had published three novellas in literary journals in Beijing, Shanghai, and at our own provincial level. This writer had never invited me out before. After three cups of baijiu, I couldn’t contain my curiosity any longer, so I asked him straight out what was going on. He reddened, hemmed and hawed for a bit, and finally told me that he wanted to give me this formal farewell because he was going away—far away.

“Ah, far away? You’re off to Sweden. Picking up your prize?” I asked, full of excitement.

“No, it’s even farther than that.” He seemed a little embarrassed and ill at ease.

I couldn’t think of any place farther from our little county in southern China than Stockholm. Seeing my confusion, he explained, “I’m an alien. I’m going to leave Earth.”

I paused, but then raised my glass with a smile. “Nice one, boss. Fuckin’ fiction writers, right?”

“You don’t believe there are aliens in the universe?” The writer sounded earnest.

Although I lived in an out-of-the-way municipality, I knew a little something about these matters. I had read Liu Cixin’s Three-Body Problem.

For example, I knew about the Fermi paradox. According to that theory, because the universe had existed for 13.7 billion years, it only stood to reason that many intelligent civilizations must have developed, some of which were bound to be many times more advanced than human civilization. That is to say, though there must be many aliens in the universe, if that were the case, why had we never managed to see any of them? This paradox was named after the famous physicist Enrico Fermi. The apparent contradiction may indicate that there was no mutual contact between different civilizations because of the vast distances between them, or it may indicate that human civilization on Earth was in fact the only civilization in the universe. Yet at this moment, here in this small restaurant in my insignificant hometown, the touted Fermi paradox had fallen to pieces. Before my eyes there sat an alien, with very good posture, who loved to write fiction, who usually accepted my financial help, and who now had come to say goodbye to me before he left the planet. In China, your everyday literary worker didn’t normally talk about off-world matters, so I guessed this must be for real. I was flabbergasted.

“In fact, we came to Earth thousands of years ago and have lived together with human beings for a long time; we just didn’t advertise our presence. Now we have to go. I have come to you in particular to say my goodbyes, and while I’m at it, to reveal my true identity. But I am telling only you.” The writer of fiction who claimed to be from an alien world said this apologetically, as if he were harboring some regret.

I couldn’t drink anymore; I kind of wanted to throw my glass at his face. So, after all this, this person whose writing I had worked so hard to support had turned out to be an alien. And that literature…

“Please don’t feel bad,” he tried to comfort me. “Writing novels and stories in this little town on this dear little planet has been a great joy. I’m but one of many alien writers, just a common, ordinary member of the group. You know the famous writers are all aliens.” He rattled off a long list of names: foreigners like Shakespeare, Faulkner, Austen, Márquez, Kafka, Le Guin, Keigo Higashino, Taiyo Fujii; and a bunch of Chinese writers like Mo Yan, Yan Lianke, Can Xue, Yu Hua, Su Tong, Ma Boyong, Nan Pai San Shu, Baoshu, and more.

“Of course, there are also people here on Earth who emulate us, set down a few phrases and think of themselves as writers, but that’s something very different. We take a tolerant attitude toward this and have not taken measures to curb their activity. What literature needs most is to be forgiving and inclusive.”

He may have been talking about people like the former Director of the Cultural Center in our county, who was ridiculed mercilessly on social media for publishing some vulgar doggerel kissing the ass of the County Magistrate. Or he might have been talking about individuals like me, people who loved literature but who had never done it well themselves. I had been a typical literary youth, born and raised right here, with an ardent love of reading. I’d written several poems, stories, and other prose pieces and submitted them to the big-city literary publications, but my manuscripts were always returned to me. I had no choice but to go to Shenzhen to work. Later, by happy chance I had an opportunity to return to my home town to establish a potato acquisition and processing company, and I used the money I earned to fund literary creation. Those contributions might be said to have satisfied my youthful literary ambitions. Only now, I’ve come to find out, the reason I couldn’t write great literature was because I wasn’t an alien. What I still couldn’t figure out was how these aliens had all these powers to travel from distant planets to Earth and then, while they were here, to write all of our best novels, essays, and poetry, yet they still had the balls to take my money? And now they were just going to say, “We’re done writing,” and take off? Could true writers of literature be so casual? I couldn’t help but feel like a victim in an elaborate con job.

“So this is funny to you?” I said angrily.

“It’s not about entertainment. This is about world view, about cosmology,” replied the novelist from outer space.

“Cosmology? World view?”

“Our world view is a literary world view. On our planet, literature means everything.”

He tried to explain himself, taking a short story he’d written last year, “A Jar of Vinegar,” as an example. In terms of form and content, on his planet that short story pretty well corresponded to Einstein’s theory of relativity on Earth. The theory of relativity was an odd thing; it could keep a husband’s features youthful while his wife became an old woman, thus creating a separation between intimates in their own lifetime. His story, he claimed, led to similar results. But this was just an example, and not as literal or direct a correspondence as I was perhaps imagining. Aliens did not go in for relativity. The mass-energy formula was only applicable to low-dimensional worlds. Einstein had also liked literature since he was a child, but he’d finally chosen science. He apparently had never seriously considered the relationship between literature and science, but only brought up the subject of literature in passing when he talked of the connections between religion and science. This was why he’d ultimately failed to discover the grand unified theory. The fundamental law that determined how the universe operated was literature. The tool God used to create the world was EQ, not IQ. And the aliens’ interstellar travel? Literature. They transformed matter into stories and then reproduced the same stories on various planets. When such literature had spread widely, the barriers of time and space had ceased to exist. Aliens didn’t need to ride in spaceships to reach Earth.

Whoa. Once the insight had flashed through my mind, I felt as if I too had made a quantum leap, a spontaneous transition from one state to another.

“So where I’m from, literature is called the universal engine or the engine of all things,” he said. That’s why people on Earth never saw visiting alien spaceships, and that was how the Fermi paradox came to be.

In short, literature determined the alien vision of life, their values ​​and world view. Literature determined everything about them. If they wanted to solve the myriad problems of survival and development, they simply wrote fiction, essays, and poetry. They didn’t reclaim wasteland for agriculture or build dams, lay tracks for high-speed railways or turn computers into mobile phones; they didn’t accelerate particles, fold proteins, or construct Dyson spheres. They didn’t invade other planets. The ecological costs would be too high. They had in fact achieved everything, including immortality, through literature.

“But why don’t you simply stay on your own planet and spend your time writing there? Why come over here to our planet?” I asked, in honest confusion.

“To experience the game firsthand.”

“What does that mean?”

“Earthlings may not be writers, but you are game-players. Your whole life is a game. We are not like that.”

“So you’re here to experience our lives—uh, our games—directly? And then you write about them.”

“Yes. The game is amazing. Your world provides new fuel for the universal engine.”

What did he mean by “game”? Our whole life is a game; their whole life is literature. I didn’t know how to respond. After reflecting for a bit, images of China’s literary greats floated up in my imagination: Qu Yuan cast into the river, Ruan Ji feigning madness, Li Shangyin’s genius born under an unlucky star, the impoverished Du Fu sheltering in a thatched cottage, Su Shi banished, Li Zhi imprisoned, Cao Xueqin dying penniless, and Shi Tiesheng suffering physical and mental deprivation. In my mind the slideshow went on: Lao She drowning in the lake, Yang Shuo swallowing pills, Hai Zi prostrating himself on the tracks, Xu Chi jumping from the hospital window. There seemed to be no end to the list. And I considered that, in literary circles, we did indeed call the artist’s life “the game.”

“Of course, it’s not just about keeping the engine running,” the alien said with some affection. “It’s also for you. We also write for people. Because although you yourselves are quite good at playing games, you don’t really understand what a game is. You usually call a game by a different name. You call it, uh, a career or a war. So, originally, the people of Earth had games without literature, but with literature things changed to some extent. Literature takes the, um, the ‘joy’ that games produce, and expresses it. And look, in recent years we also see the advent of companies that specialize in producing what humans normally think of as ‘games.’ We like those as well. In fact, we helped set those businesses up for you.” He mentioned the names of several well-known internet companies.

“So, have you won all the Nobel Prizes in Literature?”

“We organized that as well. And the Booker, the Prix Goncourt, the Akutagawa, the Lu Xun Literary Prize. All games, right?”

“So, you just gave all the prizes to each other,” I said dryly, feeling a little disillusioned.

He seemed not to pick up on my tone. “No. Humans gave them to us. Of course, the Nobel country-by-country distribution balance may not be perfect because of the uneven distribution of happiness and sorrow across the planet.”

I was trying to work out whether, in the aliens’ game calculus, the miserable or the happy writer had the advantage, but I only asked, “Then why are you leaving?”

“Actually, there’s no question of why, no clear explanation I can offer. We just feel it’s time to go.” His expression grew solemn as he emptied a cup of the clear liquor and looked up pointedly at the New Year poster stuck to the restaurant wall. The Year of the Tiger had arrived.

As my eyes followed his gaze, I immediately understood. The poster portrayed a great reddish-yellow tiger, its powerful and majestic head extended out into a night sky, teeth bared sharp as knives while its muscled and sinuous body rested heavily on the Earth below, blending into the mountain ranges, the surrounding countryside, and the lights of human cities. Stripes of many colors bloomed like flowers across its fur, and in the painting’s few open spaces, slices of starry sky spilled through. The entire universe was the animal’s backdrop. No, the tiger itself was the universe. My body began to tremble as it always did when I experienced an epiphany that I could not express. I realized the poster was produced and distributed by the Future Affairs Administration, the sponsor of many of China’s best science fiction writers. Of course. It must be that in our solar system, the writers of the FAA held the secrets of time, determined the direction in which time would flow, and the order and depiction of the zodiac animal each year. That had to be why, every year at this time, the distribution of the New Year posters in both urban and rural areas throughout the country was entrusted to that organization. Why hadn’t I seen it before?

“To tell you the truth, literature has been on the decline for several years,” my friend said, looking down from the poster and back at me. “When the Year of the Rat began a couple years ago, the first animal of the zodiac, all of time entered a new cycle. The antennae of the universal engine detected some profound and astonishing transformations in the world. What is to come will not be the same as what has come before. The macrostructure of the universe is being modified. This may be related to the operation of some countdown program. We do not know what will happen. We only know that if we wait until next year to leave, the Year of the Rabbit, it will be too late. We must return to our world before the Tiger’s end and once again take stock of the changing circumstances confronting literature.”

“M’kay.” After listening to this speech, without entirely understanding it, I couldn’t help but feel a horror penetrating deep into the marrow of my bones. “But after you leave, there will be no more literature here.” The realization grew in me that this problem would be very grave indeed. I wanted to bury my head in my arms and weep. What would the world be like if human beings lost literature? I recalled my childhood joy in reading a book of stories for the first time: Strange Tales from a Chinese Studio. The more frightening the tales, the more excited they had made me.

From ancient times to today, among Chinese and foreigners, it was rare to find a person who did not like to listen to stories. From listening to reading, from reading stories to writing them and relating them—this voluntary human engagement in the production and consumption of literature—that was its origin and the reason it continued. Or so I had always thought. But what if production had never relied on humans? Literature used verisimilitude, authentic-seeming falsehoods, to provide limitless space for the imagination and for eternal collective memory, which had become the basis for the survival of all peoples on Earth. After the Second World War, someone had asked Winston Churchill which was more important, Shakespeare or India. The Prime Minister replied that if he were compelled to choose between the two, he would choose Shakespeare and let India go. But now the aliens were forcing the other choice upon us.

“To be honest, it’s okay because you actually don’t need literature; you don’t need us. Your government recently limited internet play time for kids. They want to reduce or even eliminate the market, and the revenue of the game companies we set up is falling sharply…” the alien began.

“No! We do need it. We need it now more than ever.” So the aliens believed that humans were losing their game-playing nature? Or was this just an excuse? The alien was right about government policy, but even those kinds of games would not disappear. Their manifestation would evolve, and no doubt something even more radically soul-stirring would burst into the vacuum and decimate human boredom like the smashing of rotten wood. This cycle was surely part of the general upheaval in space and time the alien had mentioned. These changes required adaptation, not evasion or full retreat.

“Okay,” his voice had lowered to an unconvincing mutter. “Please don’t be so concerned. Even if you are correct, we’ve thought all that through already, and we’ve made some arrangements just in case, okay? In anticipation of our departure, we’ve already chosen another Earth hominid—that is to say, we made some adjustments to some of the monkeys so, you know, so they can write the literature.”

“Monkeys?”

“Yeah, sure. If it so happens, in the future, that such an eventuality occurs, the monkeys can play games in place of humans. They can feel the joy of games, as vast as the ocean, and translate their joy into literature, thereby carrying on the mission of literary production.”

Another writer’s face floated up before my mind’s eye, but not one of the good ones. This time it was the face of my older, female, and very distant cousin, definitely a human, with whom I was engaged in a formal conjugal relationship. We were, at least on paper and for the time being, husband and wife. She worked in the County Cultural Center and claimed to have a passion for literature. She had written many poems, all of which were strikingly similar to the style of poetry written by the Director of the Center. Soon she had been promoted to the post of Assistant Director, and after the Director became the Deputy County Magistrate, she’d moved right up to fill his chair as Director of the Cultural Center.

She had told me recently that she had discovered a bizarre phenomenon: namely, some of the macaques in the county’s Black Rock Mountain Preserve were writing poems. They weren’t exactly writing; they would simply stare fixedly at a boulder, and as their intense gaze moved across the stone, figures similar to Chinese characters would appear on its surface. After the rocks had undergone expert analysis, linguists discovered the characters did in fact comprise lines of poetry, which bore some resemblance to ancient poems like Qu Yuan’s “Encountering Sorrow” or those collected in the Book of Songs. My cousin believed this was a new miracle of biological evolution, like the moment primitive humans learned to use fire. Even monkeys could write poetry. Didn’t this prove what an amazing age we were living in? If monkeys were writing like classical writers, she opined, this probably revealed that human literature of the current age must itself be reaching new heights. She planned to keep these monkeys in close captivity, and the County Cultural Center would apply for funding to provide them with some literary training. When the province solicited submissions for their annual literary essay competition, she would let the macaques send in their work. They would become an overnight sensation and set the literary world ablaze.

“Okay. Now this is getting a little fucking crazy.” My hand holding the glass trembled as if I were a Parkinson’s patient.

“You know Elon Musk, right?” The alien looked at me sympathetically and continued, “He’s working with us on this, on the monkey thing. He developed the brain-computer interface that makes it possible. His identity as a scientist and entrepreneur is kind of a cover. He’s actually mostly doing literary work, and he’s made major breakthroughs in recent years. Seeing that we’re in a race against time and that his experiments have shown such promise, we’re rushing to spread these developments around the world. Poetry writing monkeys in this county were fostered in the TigerCorps neurosurgery labs in Beijing. Their brains were implanted with brain-computer interfaces, and then the monkeys were repopulated into one of our county forest preserves. Their brain signals prompt the microchips to operate lasers in their eyes, and they can actually write words on rocks. And how do the words add up to poetry rather than meaningless scribbling? Because the frontal lobes of the monkeys’ cerebral cortex, the part of the brain that constrains gameplay, have also been resected and rebuilt. Every ounce of joy they experience in the game is converted into the corresponding poetic electrical signal.”

My forehead broke out in a cold sweat. I mumbled, “Ooh, this is not good. If what you’re saying is true, gathering monkeys at the County Cultural Center for a writing workshop is not going to end well. There’s gonna be trouble. The director there is my distant relative—and my wife—and I’m very familiar with how she does things. It’s not good. She is exactly that kind of person you were talking about, the kind of wannabe writer who claims to understand literature, but deep down she treats it like dog shit. You’ve probably had the pleasure of experiencing the majesty of her art or her criticism. Practically all professional writers in the county have gotten a dressing-down from her. She has terrible taste and an awful temperament. She wants everyone to write only what she likes to read, and if she catches me giving money to someone who can’t compose to her specifications, she’ll order me to cut them off. She’ll torture those monkeys. She’ll ruin them, maybe drive them to their graves. If you leave them with her or any other government agency, literature will surely die out. Not only that, I’m afraid that very likely the human race will also perish.”

“How is that possible?” the alien asked sternly. “Even though your wife is one of those government officials who keeps repeating that kids would be better off without video games, those bureaucrats are the best game players of all. The monkeys will be just like the rest of us writers. Your wife will administer Pavlovian-style discipline as she does to us, and the monkeys will experience all the pleasures of the game of life on this world just as we have. Over time, they will begin to produce new award-winning works of art. Monkey-writing will ensure the survival of literature, and therefore the human race.”

I was having real trouble arguing with this novel logic, so there was nothing to do but nod my head resignedly. I was confident I knew what the most immediate result of all this would be. My cousin would swiftly be promoted to Deputy County Magistrate because of her amazing achievements with the monkeys.

The alien was doing his best to console me, but I could not be comforted. This manipulation was the work of a true artist. No wonder Stalin had called writers “engineers of the human soul.”

I drank myself almost to death that night. When I got home, I took advantage of my near-blackout bravery to raise the subject of divorce with my distant relation. I had found family life to be extremely difficult from the start, but now I knew that marriage was just a game within a bigger game. I never had been able to keep up with her playful flights of fancy or her shrewd political reasoning. Recently her heart had been entirely with the monkeys. She didn’t attend to the house or family at all. Our child was in middle school, and she ignored him completely, not even attending the school’s parent-teacher conference. Unexpectedly—after listening to my proposal—my elder cousin, apparently almost as drunk as I was, immediately agreed to the divorce. It seemed like she had been looking forward to this day for a long time. She had always considered me beneath her. She thought that all I knew was how to make money, and therefore my appreciation of literature must be entirely superficial. That is to say, she believed I suffered all the joys of the game without the capacity to transform the experience into song. Now in her eyes I was lower than a monkey.

On the second day of the new year, we went to the County Civil Affairs Bureau to take care of the paperwork. Because it was the Spring Festival holiday and we were still dealing with the epidemic, the Civil Affairs Bureau was closed. My cousin made use of her clout in the county to call the necessary staff out of their homes. As soon as the clerk asked the reason for the divorce, he was loudly reprimanded by the Director of the County Cultural Center. When he turned to me, I found it inconvenient to mention aliens and monkeys, so I simply said that I had a different world view than my distant cousin. The clerk advised us gingerly to give our decision a little more thought, but that only served to draw down on himself more angry curses from his superior who said the clerk could not see the whole picture and had no idea what he was talking about. Because I was a well-known businessman and a conspicuous taxpayer in the county, and my cousin was the Director of the Cultural Center, the clerk from Civil Affairs did not dare refuse us, so all parties eventually came to an understanding. However, a thirty-day cooling-off period was still required by law before the divorce could be finalized.

My cousin and I decided to live separately during the cooling-off period. I realized that, at least in the short term, the aliens had made my life better with their plan to leave Earth. They had helped me to do something that I had wanted to do for a long time; divorce more or less made up for the loss of literature. I drank a few more cups of liquor alone that night and suddenly felt happy, so I ran out into the field and looked up at the sky. The black heavens were studded with a multitude of stars, worlds inhabited by aliens. When I was a child, I’d often looked up at the stars, but after I grew up I rarely did. This time I really thought I saw the tiger up there, lounging across the universe, its claws grasping a full quarter of the heavens and the Earth, the dwelling place of all things. It was this creature and the others in the zodiac that regulated the flow and direction of time and that now were poised to transform everything we had become accustomed to.

A multitude of sparks whizzed into the sky from all directions, like meteors falling in reverse, from rooftops, roadsides, fields, and hills. I blinked, but I wasn’t imagining it. The exodus continued. The aliens were using the power of stories or the thrust of the universal engine to depart the Earth in droves. I figured they could have jumped a hundred thousand light-years in an instant without any fuss or noise, but they had decided to withdraw with brilliant fanfare, in a ceremony as resplendent as the annual Spring Festival Eve TV variety show. I realized again that the universe was very different from what humans understood it to be. It must be that in the beginning there were no stars in the sky. Each star was a story invented by an alien writer, and all of them were fuel for the engine of all things. Aliens illuminated the darkness of the firmament with their writing. But now they were abandoning our play and ascending en masse to the heavens like Daoist sages, leaving only the monkeys as company for us in the game. They had reconstructed the minds of monkeys, but they hadn’t even considered transforming us humans. Why was that?

By then, I was starting to sober up a bit and starting to feel that something was not quite right. Did I really want a divorce? Wasn’t this all a dream anyway? At the very least, I knew that as long as I lived on this planet I had to support monkey literature. After all, monkey literature was still literature. And I guessed that my cousin would need me to help with the finances. Most of the other businesses in the county were deep in the red and would not be able to sponsor the monkeys. Reaching this point in my train of thought, I began to feel that the rest of my life lay before me as a desolate expanse.

Just then, I saw the Deputy County Magistrate in charge of Culture, the former Director of the Cultural Center, walking along the rice paddy ridges not far from my wife’s house. He didn’t seem to be going to the village for any business; he seemed to be waiting for someone nearby. While he was looking around furtively, I decided to take the opportunity to report to him about the alien situation and ask him to do what he could to keep more of them from leaving. I pulled off my mask and wrote a line of characters on it with a felt-tip pen: “They are aliens. Make them keep writing!” But while I was still far away, I saw my wife run up to him, coil the civil servant’s arm into her own, and whisper excitedly in his ear. Hmm. She was probably updating him on the monkey situation. Maybe the project would soon be designated part of the recently announced rural revitalization drive and be eligible for more government funding. I grew self-conscious and embarrassed and quickly turned to walk in the other direction.

I walked to my office, opened the door, sat down on the couch that I shared with piles of potatoes, and stared dully at the bookshelves across the room. The literary masterpieces on display were coated with a layer of dust. From The Odyssey to Journey to the West, from Oliver Twist to The True Story of Ah Q, from War and Peace to Ordinary World, from Gravity’s Rainbow to One Sentence is Ten Thousand Sentences—all written by aliens. Through the ages, they had continually been anxious for us, been weeping for us, bleeding for us, ambivalent for us, satirical for us, crying out for us … doing the bare minimum for us … ah, in a word, bearing for us the joy of the game. Because of this fuel and the engine that continued to work in the dark, humanity had survived. I gazed at these volumes that were once familiar, but which had now become strange, and pondered the fate of our world and myself. I couldn’t stop the tears from coming.

Words written by aliens had been constantly circulating through our lives and had become part of our petty, backward, barbaric and glorious civilization, and even this humble county had been fortunate enough to receive these honors and blessings. Historical texts told us that our county was founded in 222 BCE. It had beautiful mountains and rivers and attracted significant numbers of talented humanists. Only five kilometers long, our village had always remained committed to writing and literacy. As far back as the Han Dynasty, there had been Confucian temples, academies of classical learning, and literary salons teeming with writers of stories, essays, and poetry. The village had suffered the endless turmoil and chaos of wars, the people had been bullied and humiliated, sometimes slaughtered, by both officials and bandits. They’d experienced floods, earthquakes, droughts, and plagues of insects. Many people had died of starvation in the years of the great famine. Some writers had written of these games and thereby aroused the ire of the county magistrate; as soon as the writers had found joy in the writing, they’d quickly enjoyed the ultimate glory of decapitation and thereby entered the peak state for any player of the great game. And since there was no brain-computer interface at that time, it was certain that these writers had been aliens all along. It seemed that the aliens had long regarded this county as an important base of operations for literary production. How could they leave this place now? How could I make them stay?

I decided to go to the local bathhouse for a massage. Everything else was closed for the holiday. This was just about the only place still open for business, and besides, I had a girlfriend there I wanted to talk to about all this. In the past, every time I had encountered a dilemma, this friend had always been able to give me good advice.

I came in glowering and said to her, “What are we going to do? An age without aliens is coming.”

Though I was deadly serious, she laughed cheerfully as soon as she heard my words. “Why is everyone talking like this recently? Yesterday, one of my regulars said he was an alien. He said he was going away and gave me an autographed book as a farewell gift.” As she spoke, she reached for her handbag next to the massage table pillow and rummaged through it. Out from among the jumble of compacts and condoms, she pulled a copy of Submarine by Daylight.

I couldn’t help but feel sad and angry. The author had said he was telling the secret only to me. He had told this girl too. I complained bitterly, “Great. Really twisting that knife. Did you know that from now on we’re going to have to wait for the monkeys to win the Nobel Prize for Literature? Is it right to let a man who is about to get a divorce bear this kind of blow? And it seems like no one cares about this but me. It doesn’t matter to anyone else whether there is literature in this world or not.”

My friend did not take the bait of my self-pitying outburst, but instead said happily, “You’re finally getting a divorce? I’m so sorry, but you can’t blame me. You came to me for a massage. But there’s no need to be so low. What makes you think that writers are the only aliens around here? In this day and age, I’ll bet there are aliens everywhere, in all walks of life. Isn’t every profession just playing games? Your information networks are too limited. In a job like this, I get access to all kinds of people. They talk to me about lots of stuff: the game, the engine of all things. Let me put it this way: why did it never occur to you that I may be an alien too? I’ve been working your engine for a long time! Do you really think, if it weren’t for me generating electricity for you all these years, that you’d still be alive? Maybe you’ll come back here in a few days and say to me, ‘Hey, me too! I’m an alien!’ I’ll bet aliens don’t always know they’re aliens. They probably have to attain enlightenment by playing certain games.”

I wasn’t entirely sure whether she was joking or not, but regardless, when I heard her words I felt a jolt of electricity pulse through my mind. Yeah, why couldn’t I be an alien? I didn’t write good literature, but I was kind and honest. I was affable and full of empathy for the joy of the game. Otherwise, why would I donate so much money to support the writers? But should I leave the county too, escape with all the other aliens before the Year of the Rabbit came? Hmm. The County Veterans Affairs Bureau had borrowed money from me to pay for the construction of their new dormitory building last year, and they hadn’t paid it back yet. Besides, what about my employees? They would lose their jobs; their families would fall back into poverty; some of them might kill themselves. They had long relied on me to be their universal engine. Once literature was gone from the world, they would have no comfort if their jobs disappeared as well.

So I left the bathhouse and made my way to the county offices. I stood in front of the County Cultural Center, my hair still wet and disheveled, and I thought for a long time about aliens and literature, monkeys and masseuses. Finally, I gathered up my courage, pulled out my face mask and pen, performed a small edit to the characters there, and held the message high above my head with both hands: “We are aliens! Let us keep writing!” I knew instantly that this was the first real literature I had ever written. Perhaps in the future this text would prove that I too was an alien, thereby fulfilling my friend’s prophecy.

But after standing there for a long time, neither the county leaders nor even their secretaries showed their faces, and none of my neighbors gathered around me to ask what I was doing. That’s when I remembered that it was still the Spring Festival holiday. Everyone is happy during the holidays and not disposed to demonstrate. But this Year of the Tiger was not a normal holiday, so I stood there alone like Don Quixote in the piercing wind until evening fell and the splendid shower of stars once again shot upward like substitutes for our New Year’s fireworks.

Under the gaze of that fierce tiger standing tall amidst the grand universe, my cousin Shanshan suddenly appeared. We looked at each other helplessly without speaking for a time, each of us sizing up the other with eyes full of profound meaning, as if we were the only two people left in the world. Then she removed the mask from her face, shook it in the direction of my own raised mask, and signaled meaningfully toward something over my shoulder. In that instant, I thought that perhaps my wife was the true engine of all things. I turned and beheld a large company of monkeys. On their heads they wore felt hats emblazoned with the character 王, like the pattern on a tiger’s forehead, and draped over their shoulders were ribbons, stripes of reddish yellow. They strode confidently and full of joy right down the middle of the road. I fell in behind the monkeys and kept pace, and they kept pace with our leader, and we marched together toward home.