{Translator’s Preface}

What follows is a translation of a manuscript found among my father’s papers. The translation is mine. Undertaking this task, and demurring from the same for the actually published work, is a personal decision, in that I am neither a writer nor translator by trade and the nature of the manuscript’s connection to me, aside from it having been written by my father, is apparent from its very beginning.

One can say all one has to go on is on the page, which very well may put the identity of the author in question, even though the handwriting, delimited by squares printed on tissue-thin leaves of Chinese writing paper, running in vertical columns arranged in right-to-left sequence, bears a superficial resemblance to my father’s. Clearly the manuscript differs in genre from the books he published in his lifetime: a memoir about raising a musical prodigy (my sister, not myself) and a pair of collections of desultory sǎnwén about his childhood and later adult life in the California suburbs, articles he had placed in Taiwanese newspapers over the years. These were works of nonfiction, of an autobiographical nature, even if in them he comes across as a distant observer of himself, much as he did in person. The manuscript, on the other hand, bears novelistic traces, even as it is preoccupied with the truth. What lends it this quality, as will become obvious, is the choice of protagonist, who I know, insofar as I know myself, is not the author, but someone whose mind he presumes to speak for. I suppose it is that way with all Chinese fathers and their sons.

Although he enjoyed a moment of fame in the insular world he portrayed with some degree of fidelity, he always thought of himself as an amateur, in that unbroken line of literati dabblers of the classical tradition. Because of language and cultural barriers, I had no reason to pay heed to this self-flattering persona—he was always my father, a civil engineer at a federal research laboratory—but that conception of himself occurred to me when I considered the other remarkable aspect of the manuscript, that is to say, its lack of polish. It was not something meant for publication, I thought, or if it was, it was still drafts away from its aim. Evidence of this unfinished state are the borrowed texts interwoven throughout, especially those taken from Yvonne Fung. It is unclear if these were meant for the manuscript as is, which would require permission for use, or were to be later slyly blended in, after having been reworked in the author’s own voice, their provenance disguised. As they are, the excerpts consist of pages literally torn from Fung’s published works and Scotch taped to the paper. In some cases, my father’s own writing is scrawled around these sections. I have translated them in good faith, there being no official English versions of Fung’s works available, and set them off with crude font changes, an effect that may come across as clumsy, but in this case I believe emulates my father’s original labors. One can only speculate why he would include passages from another, more celebrated author’s writing, someone whom he knew personally, and who plays a significant role in this narrative. Envy comes to mind. He never hinted as much to me, or at much emotion at all, but it underlies the oblique accusations of plagiarism that surface later in the story.

Two other sources of borrowed texts that appear, which I have also translated and indicated by formatting, are selections by himself, from the book about my sister and an unattributed fragment. Regarding the former, they are treated in the same manner as the excerpts from Fung’s, clipped and taped from a printed edition. For background about the latter, see my footnote at the end of its appearance.

On the timing of the composition, I have nothing to go on besides the chronology of the narrative itself. He never spoke to us of his literary efforts, “us” meaning myself and my sister. Even when I was a child at home, when he would have been working on the articles that became his memoir, I never caught him in the act, so to speak. It is a mystery when he did write, although I imagine it must have been late, after we had all gone to bed. This manuscript, the last he ever worked on, based on the evidence, was of course put together following the events it relates, many of which can be corroborated by my own memory. The physical fact of the insertion of fragments from Fung’s sole “nonfiction novel” places it after the event of that publication, which the manuscript also narrates. From there, though, is a road of many long years. How far back did he recall, if what he set down can be called recollections? Given some of those scenes, rendered in striking detail, scenes which have begun to recede into mere tremblings of feeling in my own memory, it seems it would not have been long after their occurrence, when they would have still been fresh in his mind. On the other hand, he possessed a keen memory, one honed, no doubt, by his day job. To the end, he had a superior mental ability to all of us, certainly to mine and maybe even to my sister’s. It would not have surprised me if the composition had come much later in his career.

But it was not only a matter of recordkeeping. The genre he chose lent itself to delusion. The flaw of the manuscript, if I may venture an opinion, comes near the end, where we are asked to believe that the character in question, the antagonist, has infiltrated the imaginations of both authors, decades apart in time. I do not doubt that she ended up as my father’s idée fixe. That she was a real person, upon whom others, including Yvonne Fung, projected their theories, is certain. But it was my father’s conceit to suggest forces at work greater than the minds of creative writers turning upon a theme. I leave the reader to her own devices, but it strikes me that Fung could very well have been lying about having never read my father’s memoir, or that she had, or heard about it, forgotten about it, and then unconsciously resurrected its ending.

As for whether or not, from my point of view, what happened happened, I can attest that my father, quite remarkably, got most of it right. I have spoken of the quality of his mind, glimmering in outline behind the account Fung claimed never to have read, so it does not surprise me that he could have watched his son’s actions from afar and, with fiction’s sleight of hand, conjured a passable version of not only those actions, but what was going through the head of the character performing them. Sometimes he got it wrong, when, exactly, I will not comment. Other times, as in the scene where I finally met up with Lena Wu, I think he knew he was not just wrong, but embellishing for the sake of formal balance, which was his perpetual obligation. I can say, though, in real life that meeting never occurred. As far as I am concerned, the ghost we were chasing was simply that, a specter haunting my father’s dreams. It tormented him enough that he felt compelled to exorcise it by writing this book.

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Daydreamers is now available from Fiction Collective 2. You can order a copy here.

Alvin Lu is a novelist who lives in San Francisco. He is the author of Daydreamers and The Hell Screens. Other writings have appeared in 3:AM Magazine, The Dodge, Firmament, and elsewhere, as well as the Akashic Books anthology San Francisco Noir. Website: alvinlu.co X: @alvinlu ; Bluesky: @alvinlu.bsky.social