Andrea Lingenfelter’s Note:  In “The Legend of a Funambulist”, Lawrence Kwok-ling Pun 潘國靈 takes us on a journey with the tightrope-walker Mantra from his origins in the former Soviet Union, through Cold War Europe, and on to sojourns in New York, Las Vegas, and the Western United States. Reaching Alaska, Mantra undertakes a mysterious walk across the Bering Sea, coming full circle in a way. Told from the point of view of one of Mantra’s young protégés, the story traces the often vague and unknowable details of the enigmatic title character’s life and times.

Threaded with philosophical ideas and subtle political commentary, Pun’s story highlights the marginal and mystical qualities of the liminal lifestyle of wandering circus performers. His narrator describes a tightrope as a “straight line suspended in the air”, which is “the narrowest of filaments, but in the mind of the funambulist it is a passage, which takes them from this place to the opposite shore”. Pun’s tale poses many questions about the nature of perception and reality and cautions us, in the words of one of the narrator’s fellow performers: “My little Marvel, instead of trying to figure out what’s true and what’s false, you would do better to remember that all of these stories lie somewhere between truth and fiction.”

A tightrope walker (or funambulist) is not Icarus—they have no wings. A tightrope walker is not Lucifer—they are not a fallen angel who disobeyed God. A tightrope walker cannot fly, soaring high and foolishly trying to touch the sun. They haven’t been cast into the abyss to meet with perpetual punishment by fire. No Heaven above or Hell below, the tightrope walker lives in the realm of human beings.

But the denizens of the human realm walk stolidly down the street, sometimes looking ahead, sometimes looking up, but mostly they keep their heads down. The tightrope walker can also be found ambling along the street, but in the course of their lives, they will also spend time in the air, neither soaring nor plummeting, but rather, standing on a level line suspended in the air, walking from one end to the other. In the eyes of most people (such as those who gather below to watch the performance), this straight line suspended in the air is the narrowest of filaments, but in the mind of the funambulist, it is a passage, which takes them from this place to the opposite shore.

But where is here, and where is there? As capitalism has continued to advance, skyscrapers have been getting taller and taller, with soaring buildings as dense as forests, so that modern day towers of Babel can be found everywhere, and not just in the capital of ancient Babylon. Some tightrope walkers cross borders, travelling from nation to nation.   

Tightrope walkers can be soloists, they can work in pairs, or they might also perform in a group. If they belong to a circus, they might mix in other kinds of performance, such as riding on each other’s shoulders, pedalling unicycles, or standing on pointe and dancing ballet on the rope. People like this are more than tightrope walkers; they are also professional entertainers who work in the company of other members of a circus, including trapeze artists, contortionists, clowns, pyrotechnic artists, and even speed racers, forming an itinerant troupe, perpetually on tour. I am one of these people, and the troupe I belong to is called Cirque du Raven. The leader of our circus is also the master with whom I apprenticed. At one time he was a hero among the world of tightrope walkers, but by the time I met him, he had retired and was managing a travelling circus that performed under a big top. He went by the nickname Mantra. As for his real name, he said it didn’t matter anymore.

The circus is an ancient phenomenon, with roots reaching back to the arenas of the Roman Empire. In addition to all sorts of competitive performances, there were chariot races, combats between humans and wild animals, and hand-to-hand combats between human beings. Blood flowed from torn flesh, and audiences took a great deal of pleasure from watching violence and suffering. It was both a celebration and a blood sacrifice. When Christianity was still considered heresy in the Roman Empire, some believers were brought to the Coliseum to be eaten alive by lions. But as my Master said, modern times are nothing like ancient times, and those Roman circuses vanished more than a thousand years ago. But the circus has never disappeared from the world entirely, and for many centuries, circuses have popped up here and there, in cities and small towns alike, “taming” wild animals rather than “killing” them, for the pleasure of audiences addicted to “laughter” rather than “blood”. Modern circuses have no martyrs, but they have, on occasion at the far edges of cities, taken in all kinds of marginalised and rare people: little people, contortionists, people who leap through hoops of fire, sword swallowers, pratfall experts, snake charmers, and fortune tellers. At holidays and festivals, these circuses would put on strange and unusual performances. Itinerant circus performers are another sort of Traveller like the Roma. As capitalism has flourished, and cities have relentlessly continued their expansion, occupying vast swathes of the wilderness, an increasingly rare circus troupe like ours has become a coda marking the end of an era. Not bound to any fixed location, famous circuses have travelled the world. As transportation technology has advanced, they have travelled by rented container ship and charter plane, which has enabled them to perform their meticulously crafted programmes year after year, in big cities, public squares, and sports arenas, and at high-end hotels and resorts.

From the age of fourteen, I studied with the Master for three years. The Master seldom spoke of his past, but he had a lot to say about circuses, and about tightrope-walking technique in particular. Compared to the circuses that changed with the times, our Cirque du Raven was quite small, small enough to be what circus people called a “Mud Show”.^[1] I think everyone has their ups and downs, and circuses are no different; but as I grew up, I came to understand that keeping the enterprise “low-powered” was inextricably bound to the Master’s philosophy of life. More than once, he told me that in order to be a true artist, you have to be a failure. Success gives you money, but it can ruin your talent. When a circus gets big, it becomes an institution, and the members are no longer in step with each other.

The drifting life is a philosophy; when I’m on the road, the tent is my firmament, my vault of heaven, and the wide-open spaces are my home. Naturally, even for a relatively small group of thirteen people, there are still fixed expenses required to cover the costs of travel. One has to maintain a balance between art and entertainment, but as long as there are places in the world that have not been subjugated, there will be a place for us. And even if there is only one person in the audience, the show can go on. This was how our troupe leader thought, and of course, he also had the support of the members. Everyone knew that the outside world had many temptations, and that if someone was truly talented, there was nothing to keep them from being poached by a larger circus, or from starting a circus of their own. But precisely because the Cirque du Raven was not a corporation and the Master was not the CEO but was instead the leader of a group of performers, his relationship with the troupe was more than an employer to his employees—he was essentially a spiritual leader, and his philosophy functioned as the glue that held us together. All of us were basically unattached and homeless, and each of us had our own story. People in our profession are like a train heading in the opposite direction from the times; the only destination is death.

When I met Mantra, his glory days were already behind him. When it came to his many achievements, he seldom brought them up. But a number of stories circulated nonetheless, mostly among friends in the troupe who were older than me, especially the clown Marshall, who had been with the Master through thick and thin. It was said that the Master was from Moscow. Born into a circus family, by the age of five he had become a street performer. Because of his natural talent for the tightrope, when he was young the Ministry of Culture selected him for the national circus. But there was also talk that the circus he worked for was not in Moscow, but in the Baltic state of Lithuania. According to another version, he had tested into the top circus school in Moscow, and when he was later called up for military service, he was assigned to an “entertainment unit”, where he became a soldier-entertainer. Not long after, the world entered the Cold War. The Soviet Union and its Eastern European satellites did not allow their citizens to vacation in the West, but the Russian circus was allowed to pass through the Iron Curtain and perform in Western countries. This is how the Master was able to visit places like the United States and England. It was said that later on he was injured while performing, but other people say that he got tired of the collective lifestyle of the national circus and took early retirement. For a period of time, he travelled around Eastern Europe and recovered his “personal liberty”. There was a story that he went to Hungary and crossed the Danube River on a tightrope, walking from Pest to Buda. After that, he went to Berlin, where, rumour has it, that in the days before the Berlin Wall was built he walked a tightrope through a corridor of air from the Eastern Sector to the Western Sector. People also say that he traversed Niagara Falls on a tightrope, walking from Canada to New York State. In Manhattan, he took on the challenge of modern skyscrapers, walking a tightrope from the Empire State Building to the nearby Chrysler Building. The longer I listened, the lower my jaw dropped. Seeing my expression, the clown slid his hand over his face and assumed a serious expression. He said sternly: “When I’m not on stage, I don’t kid around.” But if these things were true, then why was there nothing left but stories, and no images? When I asked this question, the clown pulled a long-stemmed rose from the handkerchief in his hands, and putting the smile back on his face, he asked: “Tell me, do you think the handkerchief is real, or the rose?” Later on, I asked the Master about this, and after a few moments of silence, he replied: “There’s no point in bringing up the past, especially since that ‘I’ is long dead.”

Was it that he couldn’t bear to think about the past, or were there things he couldn’t tell people? In any case, the Master just shook his head and said that perhaps what the clown had told me was nothing but a dream. Staring into space, he softly hummed a song, “Once I too was a lonely shadow, Once I too craved fame and glory, Once I too sought freedom like a kite, Once I too dreamed of soaring like a bird.” His song over, he gently patted me on the head: “My little Marvel, instead of trying to figure out what’s true and what’s false, you would do better to remember that all of these stories lie somewhere between truth and fiction.”

This pat on the head, rather than putting my worries to rest, left me even more confused. Max the aerialist told me that he’d met the Master in Czechoslovakia, in the spring of 1968. The Master was giving a tightrope performance at a carnival in Wenceslas Square, and there was a display of a magazine called Funambulism, which the Master edited as a side project. The magazine was devoted to all of the artists who performed in mid-air—trapeze artists, those who performed aerial feats with silk streamers, those who spun around steel poles in mid-air, and of course, those who walked across ropes or metal cables. Did he believe in this unity?     Did he want to create a community or trade organisation? Max said he thought the Master wanted to promote a “tightrope-walking-ism”—that’s what he meant by “funambulism”. Technique would always be important, but, even more than that, tightrope walking was a philosophy of life. To be sure, over the years, aside from giving me physical training, the Master had also instructed me to meditate and cultivate mental discipline. I remember him saying once that every member of our circus was an artist for whom their body was their instrument. For some, speed was of the essence; for others, strength was the key; but the secret of tightrope walking was balance. “Balance is not neutrality, nor is it a sweeping away. Rather, it is the ability to remain poised between two simultaneously existing contradictory extremes. This is in fact the true nature of the world.” And what happened to the magazine? Max hopped up onto the trapeze with the words: “It was a flash in the pan.” He then executed a triple backward somersault in the air, and when he landed, he said: “In the autumn the magazine went underground, and it didn’t last much longer after that, because by then it had been banned.” How could a magazine like that be banned? “There was an essay in one of the issues, where the Master had written: ‘When you have become accustomed to walking on a rope in the middle of the air, it’s difficult to return to the ground.’ The authorities thought that this sentence was a brazen advertisement for risky behaviour and contained a hidden challenge to the government. After that, your Master went even further into exile.”

“When he reached New York, he didn’t know the place or anyone in it, but there were as many different nationalities and ethnicities in that city as stripes on a zebra, and with all kinds of subterranean bars, clubs, and cabarets, it wasn’t hard for him to find a place for himself. You should know that your Master is a man of many talents, and tightrope walking was merely the one at which he excelled the most. The truth of the matter is that entertainers almost never have just one talent, and as the Master circulated through these various spaces, he performed vaudeville, fencing, and dancing, sometimes accompanied by chorus girls. His lifestyle was free and easy—you might even say it was a little bit decadent.” The vaudevillian Maverick is someone he met then. “On the Lower East Side, he met a Sufi dancer, a hippie in rainbow camouflage who once was fascinated by Eastern culture. It was either a blessing from Heaven or some kind of cosmic joke because she was also a tightrope walker. Although your Master was working as a cabaret entertainer, he never lost the desire to practise his primary art. They worked as partners in the Big Apple, that vertical city, stringing metal cables between tall buildings and walking across them. And instead of having one walk in front and the other behind, they walked on two parallel cables, synchronising their steps. It must have been the talk of the town. But perhaps there was something deep inside him that rebelled, or perhaps he was influenced by Magdalene, because more than once she remarked: ‘Aren’t skyscrapers nothing but totems of capitalist desire? Modern people don’t worship stones, they worship a bunch of steel phalluses!’ Is walking a tightrope between skyscrapers really an act of resistance? Despite the fact that we shout slogans up there and turn it into a kind of performance art.”    

Magdalene? “Oh, right. She was the hippie Sufi dancer.” What happened to Magdalene afterwards? “Afterwards? It was just like what happens with a lot of life partners. One day you are incredibly close, and then, poof! Before they reached the other end of the cable, she’d vanished. I’m telling you this, but no matter what happens, don’t ever mention her around the Master. She is a long and shadowy passage in your Master’s heart. After that day, your Master never walked a tightrope between tall buildings again.”         

Now I understood. I understood why other circus tents were striped every colour of the rainbow, but the one the Master had designed was a place of dim and flickering shadows. Other ringmasters wore scarlet jackets with gold braids and tails, but our Master wore a black cloak and veil. Our tent was black and white, and perched on top of it was our circus’s mascot: a big black raven, black everywhere except for a white ring around its neck. Mathilde, who danced with hula hoops and also read tarot cards said: “Haven’t you heard the Greek myth? Ravens were originally white, but the sun god Apollo punished them, and they became black.”      When she was younger Mathilde had been a pole dancer in a bar called Hell. She and the Master had met each other in the New York entertainment world, where everyone mingled. Maybe she knew a little bit about Magdalene’s story? Where did Magdalene end up going? “Curiosity is a good thing in children. Do you want to hear the truth, or do you want to hear the lie? One story is that before one of her performances with your Master, she took some drugs, and as she was walking along the rope she started circling around the ‘ground’, circle after circle. Suddenly there was a big ‘pop!’, and she slipped and fell. But there’s another version, and in this one, she took off her love beads and psychedelic clothing, flew to Las Vegas, and made a bunch of money.”

I really wanted to ask the Master about this. But he just talked about cultivating the mind. “When we’re performing, the only thing people are paying attention to is our skill, but the quality of our minds is even more important. This is something that can only be cultivated through practice, over a long period of time. When you are up in the air on a rope, you’re not flying, you’re floating. The audience can see you from below, but you can’t look back at them or look down. You can’t look into the sun, nor can you focus on the distant horizon, instead you have to move forward one step at a time, and you can only be looking at one thing. Holding a long bamboo stick for balance, you are poised between heaviness and lightness, between safety and danger, between the everyday and the transcendent. This is why, in addition to giving you physical training every day, I am also teaching you how to meditate. Meditation allows you to enter a state of deep concentration, which is essential for every acrobat, every performer. The moment you lose the ability to focus, you have nothing.”

“When I was young, I also liked to take on challenges. I liked the challenge of extreme heights, and I set my sights on making a world record. Taking on difficult challenges is worthy of respect, but if it were simply a matter of physics, the achievements of tightrope walkers wouldn’t count for much. We are athletes, but we are also spiritual practitioners. Funambulism can even be said to be a philosophy, a way of life. The rope suspended in the air has form, and there is another thread, one that has no form, which is attached to the mind.”    

All of this made sense to me. But the fact remained that the Master hadn’t performed in over twenty years. Did he lose the physical ability, lose the ability to focus, or did he have a change of heart? He talked about floating high in the air, so why was it that when I stood beside him, all I saw was a steady sinking? Was this the inevitable course of life? No matter how strong someone was, they still could not escape the ravages of time. Would a rope hanging in the air also inevitably grow slack and become a downhill slide? Why couldn’t I have met him twenty years earlier, so that I could at least have seen his last flash of brilliance before his sun set and his light faded? But I hadn’t been born yet, much less been around during the even earlier time they talked about. Whenever they spoke of the people and events of that season of love and revolution, it was all tinged with the colours of legend.

In the end, something the clown said to me may have come the closest to the truth. As if drawn by some magnetic force, Mantra was lured away from the East Coast of the United States to the West Coast. He went first to California, and then to Las Vegas, and while everyone else was hanging out in that glitzy resort, he went alone into the desert wilderness studded with massive cacti, where Native Americans had long dwelt, and he walked across the Grand Canyon on a tightrope. Despite the fact that he was highly experienced, at one point, as he stood on the rope, he suddenly and momentarily went into a trance, and the tightrope walker became a sleepwalker—the funambulist became a somnambulist—and there, high above the ground he had a vision, of two large ravens flying down and alighting on his shoulders. One was black and one was white, and in an instant, one flew off with a loud fluttering of wings. He nearly lost his balance, with nothing beneath him and the rope but a drop-off into a chasm several thousand feet deep. In a flash, he came to his senses and made his way forward unsteadily to the other end of the rope. He had escaped with his life, but afterwards he was afflicted with a fear of heights. It reminded me of the great diva who retired after losing her voice. Telling jokes is like this too. This little clown here is no match for Life or God, and I would have to make a graceful exit. After having spent so much of his life in mid-air, it took the Master a long time to come to terms with reality. In the end, though, he planted his two feet firmly on the ground and formed his own circus.

This is how the Master came to drift around the West Coast. He went to San Francisco and Los Angeles, calling up old friends who had scattered, inducing a few new friends to join him as well. He went to Seattle, that cloudy place of interminable rain, where he was captivated by the grunge subculture, and then he travelled to Alaska. Three years ago, he came to my hometown of Anchorage. I don’t know what prompted him to come to such a sparsely populated place, but it wasn’t unheard of for touring circuses to visit Anchorage, and perhaps the vast white expanses were a suitable place for a small circus. People tend to treasure what is scarce. I was descended from indigenous Alaskans and Russians, and as soon as I heard there was going to be a circus performing in the town square, I ran to see it, filled with excitement. They didn’t sell tickets. Instead, there was a top hat placed upside-down in the middle of a rug for tips, so that the audience could express their appreciation as they saw fit. I’d never seen a circus where there was so much black—the vaudeville acts, magicians, aerialists, and dancers with silk ribbons all took turns performing in the bewitching darkness. When the wind unexpectedly came up, people started to leave, and even the tent seemed to be on the verge of flipping over. But then the clown came out and ad-libbed, because no matter if there was wind or rain, the Master was not going to come out, take a bow, and say it was over. This was how I learned the truth of the theatre saying, “The show must go on.” I was one of the last members of the audience to leave.

Although Alaska was my home, there were many places in the state where I’d never set foot. But over the past few years, after leaving my “homeport” of Anchorage, I’ve travelled south with the circus by highway to Whittier, Seward, overwater to the old Russian fur trading post of Sitka, to the state capital of Juneau, and on to the state’s southernmost city, Ketchikan. These were all strange new places, and yet they were also my home.

Maybe there were some nomadic herders in my gene pool because the wandering life gave me a newfound feeling of freedom. Maybe nomads are also wanderers, right Mantra? But as we moved from here to there, I sensed that the day would come when we would have to turn back north. In the event, we did transfer from a boat back to the highway, returning to the region where I was from, to nearby Turnagain Arm, and from there we took a train north to Fairbanks. When we arrived, the aurora borealis, visible for up to seven months. I had seen the aurora in Anchorage, but Fairbanks was at 64° north latitude, at the southern edge of the zone where you could see the aurora. One day after we made camp outside the entrance to Pioneer Park, faint colours began stirring in the sky, and soon the Northern Lights began dancing among the clouds like a massive display of fireworks. I had never seen such a huge and long-lasting display of the aurora, with colours changing from blue-green to a rare pink, and the magenta-stained heavens took on a purple tint beneath the full moon. Our tent was our own auroral hut, and we didn’t even need the tent—the vault of heaven was the most expansive big top we could have asked for. The Master appeared to be entranced by the magical aurora borealis. How could his frail body withstand such a powerful solar storm? I remembered how the Inuit people believed that aurora borealis were the wandering spirits of the dead.

The following day the Master announced that he was disbanding the Cirque du Raven. Before he came to that decision, it seemed that he had heard a distant summons, and he headed northeast, first by snowmobile, then by dog sled, and then on foot, towards the Arctic Circle. It took him seven days to reach Nome on the Bering Sea. As we bid him farewell, we all seemed to understand that this would be Mantra’s last journey. Perhaps he had been hiding his skill from us, or perhaps these were the final rays of the setting sun, or perhaps because, as they say, “as above, then so below”, Mantra led us to the Bering Strait, and, under the midnight sun, he climbed up onto a rope suspended high in the air, turned to face another land and, step by step, he moved away from us. We were his sole audience. As I watched Mantra’s retreating figure from below, a pair of giant ravens, one black and one white, came to perch on his shoulders. He never looked back and kept walking, as if he were passing through time and returning to his youth, and who knows what he was thinking as he crossed that threshold. Did he brashly look into the sun and perish in the sea, or did he keep walking, all the way to Siberia? We watched his figure gradually melt into the mists, until at last it vanished, but before it disappeared altogether, it seemed to faintly turn in a circle on the rope. At that moment, an unusually large snowflake fell onto the top of my head.

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[1] “Mud Show” is an old circus term for a small-scale travelling circus. The “mud” refers to the mud spatters that would cover performers who travelled from town to town on horseback or by horse-drawn carriage.

How to cite: Lingenfelter, Andrea and Lawrence Kwok-ling Pun. “The Legend of a Funambulist.” Cha: An Asian Literary Journal, 18 Sept. 2024, chajournal.blog/2024/09/18/funambulist.

^{Photograph of Lawrence Kwok-ling Pun © 林振東}

Lawrence Kwok-ling Pun 潘國靈 (author) is a prolific Hong Kong fiction writer, essayist, and poet, who has published many volumes of selected works in Hong Kong. In 2006, he received the Lee Hysan Foundation Scholarship to travel to New York for a writing tour. He has also participated in the International Writing Program at the University of Iowa, attended the first “International Writing Day” at Northwestern University in Evanston, and spoke with fellow writers at the Chopin Theatre in Chicago. His fiction and non-fiction writings have won an array of awards, including the Hong Kong Biennial Award for Chinese Literature and the Hong Kong Book Prize. In 2011, he was awarded the “Best Artist (Literary Art)” by the Hong Kong Arts Development Council. His short story collection 離 (Leaving) was shortlisted for the Novel Category of the 2022 Taipei International Book Fair Prize. In 2016, he was the writer-in-residence at Oil Street Art Space, and in 2022, he served as the writer-in-residence at the Department of Chinese of Lingnan University in Hong Kong.

Andrea Lingenfelter is an award-winning translator, poet, and scholar of Sinophone literature. She is the translator of two collections of Wang Yin’s poetry, A Summer Day in the Company of Ghosts (New York Review Books, 2022) and Ghosts City Sea (Seaweed Salad Editions, 2021). She is also the translator of The Changing Room: Selected Poetry of Zhai Yongming (Northern California Book Award winner), Hon Lai Chu’s The Kite Family (NEA Translation Fellowship winner), Li Pik-wah’s (Lilian Lee) Farewell My Concubine and The Last Princess of Manchuria, and Mian Mian’s Candy and Vanishing Act. She is currently translating Zhai Yongming’s book-length poem Following Huang Gongwang Through the Fuchun Mountains. Her own poetry has been published in journals including Plume and Cha. She teaches literary translation as well as literature and film of the Asia-Pacific at the University of San Francisco. [Andrea Lingenfelter and chajournal.blog.] [Hong Kong Fiction in Translation.]