Old Land, New Tales: Twenty Short Stories by Writers of the Shaanxi Region in China

by Chen Zhongshi

  “What’s gotten into you, old lady?” He did what should be done, ignoring her words. When he strolled around the tomb, he refused to remain idle, clearing the weeds away from it. Once finished, he pushed the shovel into the ground, not feeling tired at all. The crust of the sandy soil, covered by thin grass, easily turned over. In a short time, he turned a big stretch of land. When the morning passed and the Sun reached its peak, a vast field had been turned over.

  It was springtime. Grass sprouted, trees budded, and everything came to life. A newly turned field was next to her tomb, and the place didn’t feel so desolate. Before his work, though sandy date trees and red willows grew on her tomb, it had still seemed desolate. It was the turned earth that made a difference. The earth gave off a unique smell from its depths. The breathing of the earth touched his face in a tender and sensuous way. The old woman was not dead: her tomb was alive.

  He was very excited. He planted potatoes there. Potatoes from this sandy soil were fresh and big. He had directed the Sun to the tomb field and potatoes were the children of the Sun. He’d come to understand this when he was very young.

  The next fall, around the end of August, the Child left Grandfather for school in town. Dog was very excited. Dog had restrained himself for as long as half a year and now he could not control himself. Dog licked the Child’s hand and wagged his tail freely. Everyone could sense his great joy. Dog alone would now enjoy the happiness of staying with Grandfather.

  Grandfather—

  When the village disappeared from view, the Child was in tears. He was a child, anyway, and could not control himself anymore.

  In school the Child behaved like a real man. Nobody despised him, including teachers. Not just the ordinary teachers, but even the one from Beijing. The trend was to come to the West voluntarily to support education there. Her lecture was great. Some discs, brought by university students, were played on TV for after-class activities. Students from the farthest reaches of the desert saw the Old Palace, the Winter Palace, and the Great Wall. Teachers would ask questions about those things in class. Maybe it was predestined that the Child was the first to be asked a question by the Beijing teacher. He didn’t answer in a loud voice, but he spoke very clearly. “Beijing is very good, but it is rather remote.”

  At first the teacher could not believe her ears. She asked again. The other students’ eyes opened wide, thinking the answer wrong. But the Child again spoke clearly: “Beijing is very good, but it is rather remote.”

  The classroom became quiet. This teacher with her glasses was very young, maybe in her twenties. She took off her glasses, wiped them, and put them back on. She approached the Child, asked his name, and touched his head.

  “I have a brother the same age as you.”

  She returned to the front of the class and told the students about her hometown. Her hometown was in an impoverished, mountainous area far inland. She’d studied hard and successfully before attending a university in Beijing.

  “Only when I was in my second year as a university student did I understand what the Child said just now. He said it so well.”

  Translated by Ren Huilian and Hu Zongfeng

  Mo Shen

  Mo Shen is the pen name of Sun Shugan. Born in Wuxi City, Jiangsu Province, he graduated from the Training Institute of Chinese Literature. He worked in the countryside of Qinling Mountains in 1968, and from 1972 he worked in succession as a freight yard porter of Baoji Station, a reporter of Xi’an Railway, deputy chairman of the Literary Federation of Xi’an Railway Bureau, a screenwriter and director of the Literature Division of Xi’an Film Studio, and a major author.

  Mo Shen is director, standing director, presidium member, and vice-chairman of the Shaanxi Provincial Writers Association. He made his literary debut in 1977 and joined the Chinese Writers Association in 1979. His works include the novels Carnal Thoughts and Time; the novella collection Life Is Gathering Together; the collections of short stories Yun Chunhua, Dream Has Gone, and Treasure; the nonfiction titles Travel to Eastern Europe and Great Beijing-Kowloon Railway, Making a Fortune in Russia, Love Is Born in Death, and Sprint; and the TV series Wind from the Boundary (four episodes) and Eastern Tide (twenty-two episodes), as well as film adaptations of a number of his books.

  14

  MO SHEN

  Mountain Forest Lasting Forever

  Rustles from around the woods alert Old Jia Qiu and he looks around. Yes, it’s the little black bear! Only a furry face shows, the little black eyes wide open, looking at the outside world from between the trees.

  Jia crouches down carefully, trying to be quiet. At the same time he aims his gun at the bear. Jia is ready to press the trigger. With a bang, those little black eyes will close forever.

  Old Jia is known far and wide as a hunter. Years before, a crack shot challenged his marksmanship and invited him to a contest. The crack shot started the contest by killing a little sparrow. Jia showed no hint of hurry and asked, “Do you see the butterfly on that branch?” His gun fired. A close look revealed a hole in the branch and a pair of wings falling down to the ground. The bullet hit right between the two wings.

  The little bear makes no movement, waiting silently. It holds its breath, and even its eyeballs stop moving; it blends itself into the rock and the woods. Five minutes, then ten minutes pass. Jia can’t wait anymore—but he puts down his gun. This little cub can never change its fate; down in the hollow its mother is groaning with severe suffering.

  Jia turns back, waits for a moment, and steps behind a huge rock. He leans against the rock, fills up his pipe, lights it, and smokes.

  In the hollow, the wounded black bear gets worn out and stops groaning. A silence covers the woods; even the birds are silent. All is silent. No trace of a breeze, no gurgling of the stream; everything is frozen. Only a cloud floats high in the sky.

  Jia has never seen the sea. People who have been in the mountains for generations never see a truck or a bus, let alone the sea. He learned about the blue sea from those intellectuals who came during that time when cadres were sent to live and work in the countryside. According to them, the sea is as beautiful as the blue sky. But their description made him all the more puzzled. He always wondered why the vast blue sea hadn’t devoured the huge Qinling Range like the blue sky had.

  Old Jia has become one with the huge mountains. He loves sitting on the sunny slope and enjoying the caress of the sun; he loves to close his eyes and listen to the rustling of trees in a pleasant breeze. For him every little stream is filled with life, and he can understand the tears and laughter of each branch of every tree. For him the blue sky is like a strict father, and the mountain a tender and kind mother. Once in a while storms and lightning howl, seeming to devastate the whole mountain range, but the mountain is tolerant and can bear everything. She melts all the ice and snow into clear streams like milk, nurturing everything that grows in the mountains. The sky and the mountain rely on each other day and night, through summer and winter.

  Years ago, a group of prospectors told Jia that the earth would be gone someday and so with it the mountains. But he’d never believe it, for he has a determined feeling that the blue sky will always stay with the blue mountains as long as the years last.

  The tobacco in his pipe has burnt out, and Jia feels a trace of coldness in his back, which urges him to straighten himself up. This is the way of the remote mountains. No matter how hot it is outside, the heat will vanish as soon as you enter the forest. It seems that those speechless rocks, the sky-blocking trees, the rotten leaves over the slopes, and the streams meandering along the mountain foot all have a certain magic power. Dwelling here for thousands of years, they keep the air clean and pleasant and bestow a special chill to every inch of ground here. If you lie here for only a few minutes, you’ll be pierced with a cold that will sink into your core. Old Jia once had such an experience. When he was young he thought himself strong enough and lay down on the rotten leaves for a rest, but when he opened his eyes he found his
arms and legs unable to move, although his mind was still clear. Luckily some others found him and carried him home.

  His throat feels a little uneasy, but he forces himself to hold the coughing. He used to cough whenever he smoked, but he’s never succeeded in giving up smoking. It is said that people in town have to take night shifts, to rack their brains to write, to ponder over problems, and to socialize with other people—and therefore cigarettes become their wonder drug to keep them refreshed, the tool to aid their thoughts, the media for socializing. But why did Jia start smoking? The intellectuals once asked Old Jia, but he gave no answer. Thinking it over later, he found his answer: he is lonely.

  The mountains in front of him extend all the way to the far distance. They have not only held Jia’s steps and vision but have also blocked his thoughts and even his life prospects. However, a person needs contact with the outside world. He needs to get close to nature; he needs to feel the leaking water drops and the rustling leaves; he needs to live with living animals—a cat, a dog, even the buzzing flies and bees.

  Jia can shake off everything when he is completely engaged in his work, but when he stands on top of the mountains for a rest he feels vacuous and totally at a loss, feels like he’s been frozen into something as still as the lifeless rocks. At those times, various unanswerable questions enter his mind. What is the universe? Which is larger, the earth or the sky? Why should human beings live in between the earth and the sky?

  It is true that there were no human beings in the past and the world was nothing but chaos. He learned from those prospectors that there used to be a vast sea here, with only sediment and lava. Gradually the ground grew out of the sea and reduced again under the sea, until one billion years ago a mass shifting of the plates of the earth forced the sea to recede, and thus the ground rose up to form the mountains that are now known as the Qinling Range. Jia has no concept as to how long one billion years is, but he knows it is a long period. He understands that he is actually living in a place with neither origin nor end. All these profound questions stay with him, perplexing him. What an afflicting thing, when a person is alive but knows nothing about himself or the world around him!

  The heart-stricken howls are heard once again. It’s the wounded mother bear.

  Jia draws calmly on the smoking pipe and blows out with the same calmness, not even turning his head. This suggests that he is a weather-beaten, experienced hunter. His tact shows not only in his calmness but also in his complexion. He is thin and has a face etched with wrinkles. When he squints in his usual manner, his expressionless and gloomy eyes can stay motionless for several minutes, which makes him look like a statue. Because he was born in this special environment, all the joints in his fingers bulge out like gnarls and the hands feel like hard, cold boards or stones, with no body heat. Only after you have held them tightly for a long time can you feel the liquid flowing deep inside those boards or stones . . .

  Having hunted a muntjac and a couple of golden pheasants in the morning, Jia then continued his hunting up the other side of the mountains. Around here various tendrils blocked the sky, and rocks in grotesque formation rose up into the air, which provided a perfect habitat for boars.

  With only two bullets left, Jia expected to meet a boar. He made his way forward to a Chinese catalpa, where he detected a mass of boar footprints. Following those tracks, which disappeared in just a few steps, Jia stopped to observe the trees around him. Boars like to rub their skin against tree trunks and thus should have left certain hints. Soon he found some hairs on a tree trunk. Moving forward, Jia heard a strange noise and something in front of him took him aback: a boa constrictor just slithering its way out from behind a rock, its bucket-thick body cutting a path through the bush. The snake wriggled its huge girth toward a two-meter-wide crevice as if nobody was around.

  Jia stayed still behind a tree, daring not to heave a breath—for it would have been impossible for Jia to kill the snake with only two bullets, and a wise hunter should be brave and decisive and know when to retreat and escape. He carefully stepped backward for about ten meters and then turned and picked up his heels at once. He ran fast and didn’t stop for a breath until he was sure that the snake could never catch him. He sat there for ten minutes and was just ready to rise up, but he again heard something. Looking toward the sound, he saw the mother bear behind a rock and, amazingly, the baby bear walking behind.

  Jia crouched on one knee and gazed at them, slightly nervous. He held his gun in his hands, already loaded with bullets, but he knew that he could never fire at the bear in such a spot and with such a short distance. Once, a hunter named San Wa had shot at a bear moving toward him, and the bullet hit the bear’s underbelly. Inflamed and with great suffering, the bear howled and sprang at San Wa. With only one claw, the bear exposed the white bones in San Wa’s shoulder. A good hunter should never fire at a bear or a boar moving toward him.

  The bear sniffed around as if looking for food or having detected something suspicious. Jia remained motionless, hiding himself behind a tree, for he knew that the bear was less agile than the leopard and also less tricky. As long as you make no noise, a bear will detect nothing—Jia was pretty sure the bear didn’t realize the danger around it and was looking for food and offering it to the cub. Later the black bear led the little cub to move to the left.

  As the bears went left, Jia dashed down the slope. Years of hunting in the mountains had turned him into a sturdy man. He reached the bottom of the slope and climbed up the opposite slope using the bush to hide. Attaining a satisfactory position, he halted and groped his way back to a place where he could see the bears clearly.

  This was a perfect position: lying fifty meters between the two slopes, he was in an absolutely secure harbor. Whether he hit his target or not, the bear could never turn back and throw itself in his direction.

  He held his gun in his hands. The bears continued searching for food—calm, little realizing that danger was near. Just as Jia was about to pull the trigger, the bear suddenly threw up its head, straightening itself with caution, and looked over its shoulders to glance around. It would have been a perfect opportunity, but the body of the bear was mostly blocked by a tree. Jia had to wait for the next chance. Then, as soon as the bear lifted its head and revealed itself from behind the trunk, Jia pulled the trigger without even taking aim. Suddenly the whole hollow resounded with a crisp crack, startling a flock of birds to flutter about. Shocked and astounded, the bear looked backward and then rolled down the slope with a terrible howl.

  Without even a momentary hesitation, Jia aimed skillfully at the little bear. The bear was frightened and was running away desperately, its chubby body wriggling amid the rocks. Confidently Jia aimed his gun at a rock on top of the slope. It stood in a small clearing with no trees or bushes around, providing a natural shooting range. The little bear, however, was running. But just as Jia was ready to pull the trigger, the little bear suddenly tumbled over, which saved its life. When it climbed up again it changed direction and ran into the long grasses behind the rocks.

  Now, back in the moment, Jia is a little dampened and withdraws his gun. The mother bear is howling in pain. From the sound of the howl, Jia is pretty sure that the bear is not fatally hurt. He looks down the hollow and sees the bear lying on the grassland covered with blood. Jia aims his gun again at the bear, ready to finish the game, but it is still early and the sun is high above his head. From experience, he judges that the little bear will not be protected from the horror and will come out to pry about. Jia puts his gun on the ground and begins to bide his time and take a rest.

  He thinks of a bear he shot last year. When he had cut through its bosom, the bear showed lean meat a couple of inches thick. He cut the paws off and sold them in the market in town. With that money he bought his foster son a suit of cotton-padded clothes, a tufted cap with ear shades, and a bundle of pencils. Back home he hid the rest of the money in the cracks in the wall. He had to save for a new cabin. His foster son was only s
ix years old, but time flies and a dozen years would pass in merely a blink. He needed money to get his son a wife. In the faraway mountains, a wife is not an easy thing to find.

  Crackles of branches are heard again in the woods. Jia holds up his gun with great care and pokes through the tendrils to search the opposite slope. It is surely the little bear, its eyes wide open and full of dread. The cub is still crouching behind a tree. Dull as the little bear seemed, it is still a living thing and certainly has its survival instinct.

  Jia sits down again for a rest. He has enough time and experience to wait out the little bear.

  In front of him the mountain range is still standing there, stretching to the distance, persuading people into believing it resembles the entire world. It is not easy to live in this world. A hunter, for instance, has to make a living by hunting. The more he hunts, the better his life will be. This seems easy to understand, but quite a few stories handed down from the ancestors are about sharpshooters turning beggar in the end. In one story, a hunter hunted everything he saw; even the pregnant rabbits and staggering cubs could not escape his gun. At last all the wild animals were scared of him and ran away to faraway places. In the end he could get nothing and had to chase the animals to the depths of remote mountains seldom frequented by hunters. There he lost his way and died from hunger, with his shining gun in his hands. The story is not heartwarming, but it is quite old, for it is handed down from generation to generation. It’s like an enlightening lesson delivered in the most basic manner for those hunters, but nobody can say for sure what it’s supposed to mean. The hunter was totally engaged with hunting all the time. When people are focused on pursuing a better life, perhaps everything worth having becomes dull and tasteless.

  With a move of his Adam’s apple, Jia narrows his eyes and returns his focus to his surroundings.