by Lisa See
He had to get moving. He had to call Hulan. He cupped a hand over his ribs, but that gave little protection from the agony that speared through him as he stood up. He staggered up the stairs, every step an immense effort. He crossed the deserted street to the Mandarin Oriental. There were no taxis queued up under the porte cochere and no doormen to welcome guests. The lobby was empty except for one person, who sat behind the reception desk reading a magazine and didn’t look up. The mezzanine bar was closed.
Once David reached his room, he locked the door and called the Panda Guesthouse. He got the same electronic whine he’d gotten after the auction. He called the operator and was patched through to a Mainland operator, who told him that Sichuan, Hubei, and Anhui provinces were reporting downed telephone lines within the Yangzi’s flood zone. If he hadn’t gotten through already, he probably wouldn’t until all service was restored after the waters receded.
He had things he needed to do. If anything Ma had said earlier was true, then calling the police was the absolute wrong thing to do. David did call the U.S. Consulate, however, and left a message that the legate should call him as soon as possible. He also called the Ministry of Public Security and left a message with Vice Minister Zai. But after what Ma had said at the auction about Hulan possibly working for an independent group within the government, David wasn’t so sure he could trust her old family friend in the present circumstances. He thought fleetingly of Dr. Ma. He had lied about his identity and, from David’s perspective, was working for the wrong side, but he’d also saved David’s life. Didn’t he now owe Ma the benefit of the doubt? The least he could do was wait here until the spy showed up at his door.
David was still sopping wet, and he smelled of blood and harbor scum. He stripped off his clothes, cramming the entire slimy mess into the hamper. He looked in the mirror and hardly recognized the person who stared back. His face was haggard, his skin a ghoulish green. A dark bruise was coming up on his jaw where the skin had been shredded by Tang’s shoe. His forehead and hair were matted with blood and bits of asphalt and dirt. A huge bump had developed on the side of his head, and he had a gash above his left eyebrow. He dabbed at the cut gingerly with a wet washcloth. He needed stitches. But none of this was as bad as his torso. His entire left side was bruised an angry purple. He carefully probed his ribs and figured a couple of them had to be cracked or broken.
The shower hurt like hell, but he felt better once he got out. It was four in the morning. His whole body hurt, and his brain felt like mush. He needed Band-Aids and painkillers to tide him over until Ma got here. He sat on the bed and called down to the front desk to ask for the house doctor to pay a visit, but because of the weather, the doctor, along with most of the hotel’s staff, had been told to go home long ago. David checked his Dopp kit and found some Tylenol. He fished around in his suitcase, searching the various pockets, hoping he’d find some leftover bandages from another trip. Nothing. He pulled out his satchel and looked in the center compartment. Again, nothing. Then he unzipped the side pocket and found the papers and notebooks that he’d picked up in Lily’s room for Hulan during their meeting with Pathologist Fong. In the chaos of the last two days he’d forgotten he had them. He pulled them out, laid them on the bed, and scrounged around at the bottom of the bag until he came up with two Little Mermaid Band-Aids. They’d been Chaowen’s favorites. He went back to the bathroom and taped them over his cut, trying to use them like butterfly bandages by squeezing the pieces of sliced flesh together. Again he stared at himself in the mirror and this time bit back an overwhelming desire to cry.
He returned to the bedroom and picked up Lily’s journal. He opened to what seemed like the center and read a quotation that was accompanied by a pen-and-ink drawing of cliffs and water.
“Destructive in their overflow are the waters of inundation. In their vast extent they embrace mountains and overtop hills, threatening the heavens with their floods, so that the inferior people groan and moan.”
—Yau (2357–2258 B.C.), as recorded in the Shu Ching: Book of History, James Legge translation
David had no idea who Yau was, but he remembered Catherine Miller’s mentioning the Shu Ching during that first lunch. He flipped through the pages, stopping to glance at entries about the Yangzi River that Lily had culled from local myths as well as other sources. She had liked to take mundane facts and turn them into compelling sagas. The journal showed just how dedicated she was to this pursuit.
David skipped ahead and stopped at a very different entry.
Just got back from an All-Patriotic Society meeting. It’s amazing to me how Xiao Da changes his identity so thoroughly from day to night. I believe what he says about spiritual matters, but it is his views on the river that have made me a convert. We must save what is here at all costs. Although I am a foreigner, Xiao Da says I should become a lieutenant. My Chinese is good enough, and with the travel I do for Lily, my movements along the river would not be questioned. But he also says I could be the first American to speak on his behalf when I go back to the States.
This wasn’t Lily’s diary at all. It had to be Brian’s. David turned back to the first page and began to read from the beginning.
THE WILD DOMAIN
(Huan Fu)
The most remote. The last 500 li are allotted to the wild ones of cultureless savagery and those criminals undergoing greater banishment.
DAVID TURNED THE PAGES, LOOKING FOR ANY INFORMATION THAT would shed light on everything that had happened—from Brian’s death seventeen days ago to Dr. Ma’s claims early tonight about the ruyi’s significance to “other factions.” The journal started a year ago in June, just before Brian left Seattle for the first time. David skipped these early entries, which detailed Brian’s adventures getting to Bashan.
On June 28, Brian wrote:
Dr. Strong is old and his mind wanders. Today he got caught up in the love that the Chinese have for numbers, beginning with the ancient Nine Provinces and Five Domains. He also went on about the Five Punishments. These date back to the Canon of Shun, which was the first of the ancient documents in the Shu Ching. The Five Punishments are branding on the forehead, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet, castration, and death.
Branding, cutting off the nose, cutting off the feet—Brian and Lily had both suffered some of the ancient Five Punishments. Anyone who worked at Site 518 would have recognized them, but Hulan had kept those forensic details secret. Even in pain and even with what he felt sure was a concussion, David was a lawyer. He got up and fished around in his satchel until he found some plastic sticky notes so he could mark highlights in the journal. He put his first on the entry about the branding and then every place he saw the first mention of a visitor to the dig. Michael Quon had come through around the Fourth of July. Like Brian, Quon enjoyed caving, and the two of them had explored a couple of caverns away from the site. Stuart Miller stopped in often to meet privately with Dr. Ma.
July 5—The thermometer has hit 42 for the last four days. About 107 degrees, I guess. I’m dying. So is Lily. Although she lives in Hong Kong, she’s from England and as susceptible to the heat and humidity as I am.
Three days later, he wrote:
Lily invited me to her table for dinner last night. She’s very clever and very funny. (She’s clever and funny in bed too! Ha! Ha!) She went back to Hong Kong today. Says she’ll be back in a couple of weeks. Says she wants fun but no games. Suits me if it suits her.
Over the next two weeks, Brian listed artifacts he’d uncovered and why they were important. During this time, he went to his first All-Patriotic Society meeting. David thought about how Brian—an orphan, poor, rootless, and still too young to have made many decisions on his own—would have felt great solidarity with the plight of other followers in the gorges. Their desire to save their homes against inundation would have appealed to his desire to save the river, its artifacts and archaeological sites. This seemed innocent enough, but David tried to look at it from the Chinese government’s perspective. The F
alun Gong’s spread to the United States and its demonstrations on street corners in New York and Los Angeles were huge embarrassments to China. Would the Ministry of State Security consider the Society enough of a threat to China’s sovereignty to have ordered Brian killed? That would make Ma a prime suspect, but then why would he have murdered Lily? And why the branding and other mutilations?
David skimmed several pages, then stopped when he hit Brian’s first encounter with Catherine Miller. They were close in age, but unlike his dealings with Lily, Brian showed restraint toward the daughter of his benefactor. “Catherine’s great,” he wrote on July 19, “but I want to come back next year.” Nevertheless, he gradually found himself being “drawn to Catherine’s enthusiasm,” although he felt inhibited by his lack of money.
As a result, Brian had been ripe for Lily’s offer to help her get artifacts out of the country. His entry about this was blunt and to the point: “If the Chinese aren’t going to preserve the past, then someone else should.” The fun and games that Lily had predicted earlier had evolved, and David attached another sticky note.
While Dr. Ma tried to keep everyone focused on the Four Mysteries, Brian seemed bewitched by what David knew to be China’s more specific goal—making a physical link to history five thousand years old. “Wouldn’t it be sweet,” he jotted on July 27,
if we could actually find something that showed that Yu the Great had come through here when he was clearing the floods? His wife was reputedly born in the South Mountains near Chongqing. I’m going this weekend—tomorrow!—to check out her temple.
Loose pieces of the puzzle—those random and seemingly innocuous comments made during the investigation—were starting to come together. One such piece was why the archaeologists had always seemed more interested in Yu than in the Ba people and why Xiao Da had invoked him in the cave. Anxious for Brian to provide an explanation, David read on.
July 29—Just got back and I feel like I learned more about Yu and his father than I did about Yu’s wife. Kun, Yu’s father, was hired by Yau—one of China’s first three mythical emperors—to stop the floods. Kun labored for nine years. He stole magical soil—a “swelling mold” called shi tu or “living earth”—from the heavens to use to help block the waters.
Here was another piece. The old blind man had called the land around his home “living earth.” David didn’t know enough about the subtleties of Chinese to know if this was a common phrase, something unique to the region, or something that somehow tied Brian’s research and Wu together. However, for the next few pages Brian concentrated on Kun, whose flood efforts failed so badly that the new emperor, Shun, banished him. Later Kun was executed. He decomposed for three years until his belly was cut open and Yu emerged fully formed. Shun then assigned Yu the task of finishing the flood work and gave him a “dark-colored stone” believed to be a gui as an emblem to carry during his labors.
This time, with Heaven’s blessing, Yu borrowed the swelling mold and used it to build China’s great mountains. Then he cut canals to provide outlets for the waters to drain into the sea. He deepened beds, raised embankments, changed the course of rivers, and created the Three Gorges. He taught the people about agriculture and how to breed and eat animals. A feudal system replaced the old nomadic societies, and China’s first hereditary dynasty began. “Could the swelling mold exist?” Brian asked. “Is it some type of soil, such as loess or clay? Or is it a purely symbolic fabrication?”
David was getting bogged down and in frustration jumped ahead.
August 2—The vultures heard about my trip to Chongqing and invited me into their cave to tell them about it. The vultures say that the Chinese people have never lost their sense of the ancient past. It is an ocean of religion, philosophy, geography, customs, and literature that envelops them. These things are not just “ago” but have the ability to come full circle to inform the present and give a window into the future. We also talked a lot about the ancient books—and what it meant to contemporary Chinese society and politics to save them.
David knew that the vultures liked to speak in riddles. What were they trying to tell Brian? Was it something to do with current—possibly world—events? Could the vultures have been part of one or more of Ma’s so-called factions that were tampering with China’s global stability? That seemed wholly unlikely to David. Meanwhile, Brian remained firmly stuck in the past.
Can I prove that the stories of Yu’s works are a blueprint of the Chinese mind? For ten years, Yu endured tremendous hardship. His nails were worn from his fingers. His hands and feet became callused and hardened. His face and eyes became black. Many times he passed near his wife’s home here on the Yangzi but did not stop. He heard his son, whom he’d not yet met, crying, and still did not stop. These sacrifices for the good of the people allowed him to become emperor.
Last night Xiao Da asked me, if Yu was a real man, what of his story could be real?
This was the first time Brian had mentioned Xiao Da by name. If Brian was actually meeting one-on-one with the religious leader, then he must have already become deeply entwined in the cult.
Was Yu truly helped by a winged dragon that trailed his tail upon the ground, carving channels to the sea? How could one man, even with the help of the masses, have diverted the waters so thoroughly?
The Xia Dynasty went on to have another seventeen emperors, all descendants of Yu. The last, however, was a tyrant of the worst sort, and Heaven showed its displeasure by raining down plagues and disasters of every kind. Xiao Da says this pattern of corruption followed by heavenly condemnation in the form of natural calamities has trumpeted the end of every Chinese dynasty.
Reading the next entry, David learned that Brian’s interest in Da Yu and the Xia had also sparked lunch conversation at Site 518 about the Nine Tripods. This, in turn, gave Catherine an idea. She was fed up with Lily’s “ridiculous stories” and thought it would be “fun” to trick her into believing that one of the tripods was right near them in a whirlpool in the waters of the Yangzi. Lily fell for the charade “hook, line, and sinker,” much to the amusement of the other scholars at the site. Brian added: “Lily’s going to ask me to dive in the whirlpool one of these days! Catherine says it would serve me right.”
By now Brian and Catherine were more than just friends, but Stuart Miller’s pampered only child was way out of Brian’s league. Although others at the site had painted him as an outdoorsman, it turned out that his desire for solitude had been born out of the necessity of putting some distance between himself and Catherine. On weekends, he headed into the hills. He wasn’t a great artist, but he drew what he saw. During the week he scouted out different places until he settled on the little stretch of beach where his belongings were later found.
August 7—Today I finally met the old blind man and his family whose house I pass to get to my beach. Their land is poor. The son and his wife aren’t educated. They’re the first people I’ve met here who aren’t curious about me. I guess a foreigner passing by your door isn’t worth the energy when you’re practically starving to death. Just past their house is the trail I take to get down here. It’s so quiet you can hear pebbles rolling along the riverbed. I can see the Unlocked Gates Gorge across the way. Partway up the hill is the Beheading Dragon Platform. On the other side of the gully is the Binding Dragon Pillar. Next Sunday I’ll try to get over there.
A couple of days later:
I passed the Wu house again today. The old man is a wild one. The son is no different. The daughter-in-law is very shy. Today she was washing clothes in the river near where I have my lunch. At first she wouldn’t answer my questions. I teased her, saying I thought a fox spirit had stolen her tongue. She said my accent was atrocious. Actually she said I was as hard to understand as a river turtle.
As promised, he did go exploring farther east.
Explored the Unlocked Gates Gorge today. On my way back I ran into the Wu daughter-in-law, and she explained some of the stories that relate to the gorge’s geogr
aphy. It seems that the Jade Dragon left his home on the upper reaches of the Bashan Stream to go visiting. The creature got lost, became angry, and in his rage caused mountains to crumble, land to flood, and people and livestock to die. A goddess threw a string of pearls into the air, which turned into a rope that bound the dragon to the pillar. The goddess then ordered Da Yu to behead the dragon on the platform. Wu Taitai pointed out the coiled shape of striated stone where the dragon can be seen. Although she is a Society member, I haven’t seen her at a meeting.
Toward the end of summer, Michael Quon returned to the dig for a couple of days and wanted to go caving, but for some reason Brian balked. “Some people think that their money can buy them anything, but I’m not for sale.” This comment brought him back to Catherine.
The prank that she had cooked up about the Nine Tripods had backfired. Lily was completely obsessed with the missing tripod. She needed someone to retrieve it from the whirlpool, and that someone was Brian. “As if,” he wrote. By this time, Brian had acted as a go-between between Lily and Wu Huadong; her payments would make a huge difference to the Wu family. Notably, from David’s perspective, Brian didn’t mention what relinquishing his travel up and down the river would do to his aspirations for becoming an All-Patriotic Society lieutenant. In fact, David realized, Brian hadn’t written about Xiao Da or the Society since his entry about the Wu girl being a follower.
Brian’s last two weekends had been spent literally underground as he explored local caves. Reemerging into the sunlight after one descent, he finally noticed what Hulan had seen on her first day at the dig. The site and the surrounding area were uncommonly barren. On September 9, he wrote that he had an idea about the land and made a note to talk to his sister about it when he got back to Seattle. His last entry before leaving China read:
