by Mo Yan
“That is my nephew, Elder Brother. Watch over him for me!”
CHAPTER THREE
Xiaojia’s Foolish Talk
My name is Zhao, Zhao Xiaojia. I get up early with a laugh, ha-ha. (Damned fool, aha!) In my dream last night, I saw a white tiger at our house. Wearing a red jacket, tail standing up in the air. (Ha-ha-ha.) Big tail big tail big tail. White Tiger sat across from me, mouth open, white fangs, a great big maw. Big white fangs big white fangs big white fangs. (Ha-ha-ha.) Do you plan to eat me, White Tiger? There are more fat pigs and fat sheep than I can eat, White Tiger said, so why eat you raw? If you’re not going to eat me, why have you come to the house of my Pa? Zhao Xiaojia, White Tiger said, listen to me. I hear you are obsessed with a desire for tiger’s whiskers. So I’ve brought some for you to pluck from my jaw. (Ha-ha-ha, a damned fool, aha!)
—Maoqiang Sandalwood Death. A child’s aria
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1
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Meow, meow, I learned how to sound like a cat before I could talk. My niang said that the longest whisker on a tiger is precious, and that anyone who owns one can carry it on his body and see a person’s true form. All living humans, she said, are reincarnations of animals. If a person gets one of those precious whiskers, what he sees is not people. On the street, in alleyways, in taverns, in a public bath, what he sees are oxen, horses, dogs, cats, and the like. Meow, meow. There was once a man, Niang said, who traveled east of the Shanhai Pass, where he killed a tiger to get one of those precious whiskers. He was afraid of losing it, so he wrapped it in three outer and three inner layers, then sewed it into the lining of his padded jacket. When he returned home, his mother asked him, “Did you make your fortune during all those years you were away up north, son?” “My fortune? No,” he said proudly, “but I did lay my hands on a rare treasure.” He reached inside his jacket, tore open the lining, and removed the bundle, which he unwrapped to show her the whisker. But when he looked up, she’d vanished, her place taken by a nearsighted old dog. The poor man was so frightened by this that he ran outside and collided with an old horse carrying a hoe over its shoulder. The horse was puffing on a pipe and snorting streams of smoke from its flared nostrils. The man nearly died of fright at this encounter, and was about to run away when he heard the horse call out his childhood name: “Aren’t you Xiaobao? Don’t you even recognize your own dieh, you little bastard?” The whisker, that’s what made all this happen. He quickly rewrapped it and put it away. Now he could see that his dieh was not an old horse and his niang was not an old dog.
Getting one of those whiskers has long been a dream of mine. Meow, meow. I make this clear to everyone I know and ask people I meet if they can tell me where I can get one. Someone once said that the forests of the great Northeast are the best place. I was burning to go see, and would have if it hadn’t meant leaving my wife. A precious tiger’s whisker, just think how wonderful that would be! Well, I’d just put up a meat rack on the street when a huge boar in a long robe under a short jacket, wearing a black silk skullcap and carrying a thrush in a birdcage, sauntered up. “Two catties of pork, Xiaojia,” it said. “Give me a good weigh, and make it streaky pork.” There was no question that it was a boar standing in front of me, but the voice was that of Li Shizhai, Elder Li, the father of Graduate Li, a learned local scholar respected by all. If he didn’t get the respect he thought he deserved, he intoned in a loud voice, “A base man cannot be taught!” Who could have guessed that he’d actually be a boar? Even he didn’t know. No one but I knew. But if I told him, I’d get a taste of his dragonhead cane, for sure. The boar hadn’t even left when a white swan sashayed up carrying a bamboo basket on its wing. When it was right in front of me, it gave me a dirty look and said in a voice dripping with spite, “Xiaojia, you heartless fiend. I found a fingernail when I bit into the dog meat jelly you sold me yesterday. Are you selling human flesh and calling it dog meat?” It turned to the boar. “Did you hear what happened? Two nights ago, the Zheng family’s child bride was beaten to death. Her battered body was a mass of bruises!” Now that the swan had spewed its garbage, it turned back to me and said, “Give me two catties of dog meat jerky. We’ll try something different.” “Who do you think you are, you stinking bitch? A big-assed swan is what you are. I ought to turn you into swan jelly. That’d shut that mouth of yours once and for all.”
—If I’d owned a tiger’s whisker, think how wonderful that would have been! But I didn’t.
Uncle He was having a drink in the tavern that rainy afternoon—he was an ugly man with a pointed mouth, an ape-like chin, and shifty eyes, a damned gorilla if I ever saw one—when I told him about the tiger’s whisker. “You’re a man of the world, Uncle He,” I said, “so this is something you must know about. And you must know where to get one.” “Xiaojia,” he said with a chuckle, “you idiot. What’s your wife up to while you’re here selling meat?” “My wife is delivering dog meat to Eminence Qian, her gandieh.” “I’d say she’s delivering the human kind,” Uncle He said. “She’s a nice morsel, tender and tasty.” “Stop trying to be funny, Uncle; we sell pork and dog meat, that’s all. Who ever heard of selling the human kind? Besides, Eminence Qian isn’t a tiger, so why would he want to feast on my wife’s flesh? If he did, he’d have finished her off by now. But she’s still here, in the flesh.” With a strange laugh, Uncle He said, “Eminence Qian is not a White Tiger, he’s a Green Dragon, the Taoist guardian. It’s your wife who’s the White Tiger.” “Now you’re really not making sense, Uncle He. Without one of those tiger’s whiskers, how could you see the true form of Eminence Qian or my wife?” “Pour me another drink, idiot,” Uncle He said, “and I’ll tell you where you can get a tiger’s whisker.” I filled his glass to the brim.
“You know,” he said, “that they’re real treasures, worth a great quantity of silver.” “I’m not interested in selling them,” I said. “I want one for myself. Just think, I could walk down the street with my tiger’s whisker and meet up with all kinds of animals wearing clothes and talking just like you and me. Wouldn’t that be terrific?” “Are you serious about getting a tiger’s whisker?” Uncle He asked. “Yes,” I said, “very serious. I dream about it.” “Well, then, give me a plate of chopped dog meat, and I’ll tell you.” “If you’ll tell me where to get a tiger’s whisker, Uncle He, you can have the whole dog, and I won’t charge you anything.” I cut off a dog’s leg and handed it to him. Then I stood there, gaping expectantly. He leisurely sipped what was in his glass and sampled the dog meat. “Idiot,” he said with slow deliberation, “do you really want a tiger’s whisker?” “Uncle He, I’ve given you spirits to drink and dog to eat, so if you won’t tell me now, you’ve been playing tricks on me, and I’ll go home and tell my wife what you’ve done. You can fool me easily enough, but she’s a different story. All she has to do is curl her lip, and you’ll find yourself in the county yamen getting your ass whipped.” Now that I’d brought my wife into the discussion, he said, with a note of urgency, “Xiaojia, my good little nephew, if I tell you, you must promise never to tell anybody who you heard it from, especially your wife. If you do, any tiger’s whisker you get your hands on will lose its power.” “All right, I promise, I won’t tell a soul, and that includes my wife. If I do, I hope her belly starts to hurt.” “I’ll be damned, Xiaojia, what the hell kind of oath is that? What does a pain in your wife’s belly have to do with anything?” “Are you joking? Any time her belly starts to hurt, my heart aches and I end up bawling like a baby.” “All right, then,” Uncle He said, “I’ll tell you.” He took a look out on the street to make sure that no one was listening. Rain was sheeting off of eaves, a curtain of white. I pressed him to tell me. “We must be very careful,” he said. “If somebody hears us, you’ll never get your treasure.” He leaned over and put his burning lips up to my ear. “Your wife goes to see His Eminence every day,” he whispered. “His bed is covered by a tiger skin, and what are the chances of not finding a tiger’s whisker on a
complete pelt? Now, pay attention. Have your wife pluck a curly golden whisker for you. Those, my friend, are the real treasures. None of the others are any good.”
When my wife returned home from delivering the dog meat, the night sky was inky black. “Why are you so late?” With a smile, she said, “Use your head, you poor fool. I had to wait till His Eminence ate every bite. And don’t forget, it’s raining, so it gets dark early. Why haven’t you lit the lamp?” “I’m not doing needlework, and I’m not reading, so why waste the oil?” “My dear Xiaojia, you’re all about getting by, aren’t you? A little bit of oil won’t make the difference between rich and poor. And we’re certainly not poor. My gandieh told me that from this year on, we’re exempt from paying taxes. Go ahead, light the lamp.” So I lit the bean-oil lamp, and she adjusted the wick with one of her hairpins, flooding the room with bright, holiday-like light. I saw that her face was red and her eyes were moist, the way she looked when she was drinking. “Have you been drinking?” “Greedy cats have pointy noses,” she said. “My gandieh was afraid I’d be cold on the way home, so he gave me what little was left in his flask. It was pouring out there, as if the River of Heaven had been diverted to earth. Now turn around; I’m going to change into dry clothes.” “Why? What you need is to climb into a nice warm bed.” “Now, that’s a good idea,” she said with a giggle. “Who’d dare call our Xiaojia a fool? No, he’s brilliant!” With that she began undressing, throwing one item of clothing after another into a wooden tub, until she stood there, milky white, like a luscious eel just out of the water. She arched her back and hopped up onto the heated bed, then arched it again and slipped under the covers. I stripped and climbed in beside her. But she rolled herself up in the bedding. “Don’t bother me, my young fool; I’ve been running around so much today I can barely keep my bones attached to my body.” “I won’t bother you,” I said, “but you have to promise something. I want you to get me a tiger’s whisker.” Again she giggled. “Where, my little fool, am I going to find you a tiger’s whisker?” “Somebody said you could get one. I want a curly one with a golden-yellow tip.” Her face turned bright red. “What son of a bitch told you that? I’ll flay his dog hide right off him! Give me the name of the bastard who put you up to this!” “You’ll have to kill me first. I’ve sworn on your belly not to tell. If I say who it was, your belly is going to hurt.” She just shook her head. “You poor fool, your niang was teasing you. Use your head. Things like that don’t happen in this world.” “Other people can tease me, but not my niang. I want a tiger’s whisker; I’ve wanted one all my life, so help me get one, I beg you.” “Where am I going to do that?” She was getting angry. “And a curly one, at that. You’re not a fool, you’re a big fool!” “The person told me that Eminence Qian uses a tiger pelt as a bedspread, and where there’s a tiger pelt, there must be tiger’s whiskers.” “Xiaojia,” she said with a heavy sigh, “Xiaojia, what do you expect me to say to that?” “Help me get one. I’m begging you. If you won’t do it, then I won’t let you deliver any more dog meat. Someone said you really deliver the human kind.” “Who said that?” she demanded, gnashing her teeth. “All you need to know is that somebody said it.” “All right, Xiaojia, if I get you what you want, will you leave me alone?” I just grinned.
My wife was as good as her word—she brought me a tiger’s whisker the next night. It had a golden-yellow tip. “Don’t let it fly away,” she said as she handed it to me. Then she doubled over laughing. My heart beat wildly as I clutched my whisker. A treasure I’d longed for most of my life, how could it have come so easily? Well, I examined it closely. It was just as Uncle He had described, curly with a golden-yellow tip. I held it between my fingers till my wrist tingled. It felt heavy in my hand. I looked up and said to my wife, “Let’s see what you really are.” She curled her lip. “Sure,” she said with a smile, “take a good look and tell me if I’m a phoenix or a peacock.” “Uncle He says you’re a white tiger.” Her face colored. “So it was that lousy maggot who told you,” she cursed. “I’m going to have my gandieh drag him over to the yamen tomorrow and see that he gets two hundred whacks with the paddle. He’ll know what it feels like to have his ass turned into fried bamboo shoots and meat!”
Still clutching the tiger’s whisker in the lighted room, I stared at her. My heart was racing, my wrist shaking. Now, with heaven’s help, I was going to see my wife’s true form! She was an animal, but which one? A pig? A dog? A rabbit? A goat? A fox? A hedgehog? I didn’t care what she was, as long as it wasn’t a snake. I’ve been afraid of snakes since I was a little boy, and I’m more afraid of them now than ever before. If I so much as step on a rope, I jump three feet in the air. My niang said that snakes usually turn into women, and that most beautiful women are transformed snakes. Sooner or later, one of those snake-women will suck dry the brain of any man who sleeps with her, she told me. Don’t let me down, heaven. I don’t care what my wife is, even a toad or a gecko, just so it isn’t a snake. And if she is, well, I’ll pick up my butcher’s tools and run off with my tail between my legs. So with all those wild thoughts scrambling the landscape in my head, I sized up my wife, who turned the lamp up as high as it would go, until the wick was as red as a pomegranate and really lit up the room. Her hair was so black it was almost blue, as if oiled. Her shiny forehead was as bright as the belly of a porcelain vase. Her brows arched and curved like a pair of willow leaves. Her nose was so white it was nearly transparent, as if carved from a tender lotus root. Her limpid eyes looked like grapes floating in egg white. Her mouth, which was a little too big for her face, curled upward at the corners, like water chestnuts, the lips naturally red. I could have looked till my eyes ached and not known what she was before she was a woman.
She curled her lips into a sneer and said with palpable sarcasm, “Well? Tell me, what am I?”
Bewildered, I shook my head. “I don’t know, you’re just you. How can this treasure lose its effectiveness when it’s in my hand?”
She reached out and tapped me on the forehead with one finger. “You’re possessed,” she said. “You’ve let a whisker take control of your life. Your niang told you a story one time, and you elevated it into your life’s work, like treating a stick as a needle. Are you ready to finally give it up now?”
I shook my head again. “You’re wrong. My niang wouldn’t lie to me. The rest of the world might, but not her.”
“Then why doesn’t it let you see what I am? I don’t need a tiger’s whisker to show me what you are—you’re a pig, a big, stupid pig.”
I knew this was her way to make me feel bad. She couldn’t possibly see my true form without a tiger’s whisker. But why wasn’t I able to see hers, either, even with one? Why wasn’t my little treasure working? Oh, no! Uncle He had said that if I mentioned his name, the thing wouldn’t work. And that’s what I’d just done without realizing it. I was crushed. How stupid could I have been, ruining something I’d worked so hard to get? I stood there with the whisker in my hand, in a daze. Hot tears streamed from my eyes.
My wife sighed when she saw me crying. “You fool, when will you grow up?” She sat up, snatched the whisker out of my hand, and, with a single puff, blew it out of sight. “My treasure—!” I shrieked tearfully. She wrapped her arms around my neck and tried to calm me down. “There, now, don’t be foolish. Here, let me hold you, and we can get some sleep.” But I fought my way out of her grip. “My tiger’s whisker! It’s mine!” Frantically, I groped all over the bed trying to find it. Oh, how I hated her at that moment. “I want my tiger’s whisker! You owe me!” I went over and picked up the lamp to help me look for my treasure, cursing and crying the whole time. She just sat there watching me, shaking her head one minute and sighing the next. “Stop looking,” she said at last. “It’s right here.” I was thrilled. “Where? Where is it?” With her thumb and index finger, she held the curly tiger’s whisker with its golden-yellow tip and laid it across my palm. “Do a better job of holding on to it this time,” she said. “If you
lose it again, don’t blame me.” I curled my fingers tightly around it. It might not do what I wanted it to do, but it was still a treasure. But why wouldn’t it work for me? I needed to try again. So once again, I stared into my wife’s face. If it works this time, I was thinking, if she turns out to be a snake, then so be it. But once again she was just my wife, nothing more.
“Hear me out, my foolish husband. My niang told me the same story yours told you. She said the whisker doesn’t work all the time, only at critical moments. Otherwise, it would be nothing but trouble. How would you live if all you ever saw were animals? So listen to me and put that thing in a safe place, where you can retrieve it at a critical moment. It’ll work then.”
“Honest? You’re not lying, are you?”
She nodded. “Why would I want to lie to my beloved husband?”
I believed her. After scaring up a piece of red cloth, I wrapped up my treasure, tied it tight with string, and hid it in a crack in the wall.
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My dieh is a force unto himself. He sent Magistrate Qian’s two yayi back to the yamen empty-handed. You might not know what the Magistrate is capable of, Dieh, but I do. When Xiaokui from the Dongguan oil mill spat at his palanquin as it passed by, a pair of yayi dragged him off in chains. Two weeks later, his father sold two acres of land to pay someone to stand as guarantor to get his son back. But by then one of Xiaokui’s legs was shorter than the other, and he not only walked with a limp, but the toes of one foot dragged along the ground. They started calling him the foreigner, because the lines he scraped in the dirt looked like foreign writing. After that, any time he heard the name “Magistrate Qian,” he foamed at the mouth and fainted. Xiaokui knew what Magistrate Qian was capable of. Not only doesn’t he dare spit at the palanquin when it passes by anymore, but the minute he sees it, he wraps his arms around his head, turns tail, and hobbles off. What you’ve done today, Dieh, is a lot worse than spitting at his palanquin. I may be a fool in other things, but where Magistrate Qian is concerned, I’m as smart as I need to be. Even though my wife is the Magistrate’s little pet, he is strictly impartial. How could he let you get away with what you’ve done when he went and arrested that disappointing gongdieh of mine?
