(Author note: the original text was written in Chinese. The English translation is provided by Claude Opus 4.8 on June 11th, 2026)
I am a person who dreams often. In one of those dreams, on the white sheet of paper before me there was only the title “Port of the Captive” and the empty pages within. I racked my brains, yet could only sit in a daze, not knowing what words would appear in the dream.
A person cannot trace the details of the past into a word-for-word memory. A person can only compress them to the extreme, forming abstract descriptions and blurred images in the brain. But for a dream, this information is already enough—or perhaps it is better to say, the dream is these compressed memories themselves, hidden within the gully-riddled brain, flickering in the dark of night, burning to ash after death. Gazing at those four perplexing characters, I can imagine that at some moment I am a captive in the “Black Hole” of Calcutta, where in the cramped cell every breath presses upon the lives of my companions. That captive imagines freedom and the deep azure sea, but “Port of the Captive”—once again my imagination collapses upon this noun brimming with bewilderment, just like that dream that came back without avail.
Despite the heavy difficulties, I have resolved to use this name, “Port of the Captive,” to write a longer passage. For now this may be only my grand blueprint, doomed to futility, but when the writing is done, perhaps together with you I might lift the veil from this riddle that so troubles me? A human is truly a laughable creature—gazing at his reflection by the river, fashioning bronze mirrors to observe himself, and now insisting, too, on knowing the meaning of some dream. If there is a god watching me expend my life in this way, could it, at the moment I leave this world, tell me whether this is the voice of my innermost heart, or a forgery of Narcissus? I draw a deep breath, hoping that the divine sign within the sunset will forever remain only beyond the horizon.
Suddenly a piercing bell rang out, and then the actions and words of everyone around me seemed to lose all direction. At the very instant I became aware of their existence, human bodies turned into formless organic matter, the vocal cords vibrating ceaselessly yet resembling no sentence at all. The white paper before me was swept into this unbearable clamor, and before I had time to set down a single story in the universe, a single argument, I lost every chance of it.
“The exam is over.”
What kind of damned middle-school Chinese exam essay would take up such an inexplicable title as “Port of the Captive”? I sat on the stool of the unfamiliar middle-school classroom, complaining. The moment the papers were collected away, all the noise too was sucked out of this classroom. I looked out the window; in this tranquil world, a boundless field of artichokes stretched toward the waning sun of seventeen o’clock. Each day, the last embers of sunlight may perhaps make one recall the long-cherished wishes left unfulfilled. That sheet of white paper just now, bearing only a title, and many other things besides, all seemed as though they would vanish without a trace with the coming of night. I rose to my feet, and suddenly a fleeting thought, like ripples of light too faint to make out, descended into this jumbled dream.
Although I dream often, at the moment of writing down these words here I hold to a strange lucidity. Though the memory of the dream is not truly clear, I have nonetheless seized that cunning thought. Now, let us dissect it in reality.
Yifan Luo
9:31 p.m., Jan. 4th, 2025, Amsterdam