by Han Shaogong
Her rather meddlesome guides had already run off ahead into the yellow mud house, yelling and calling, had passed through the few empty rooms but discovered no one home. Someone then went to the lotus pond, and shortly after shouts came over from that direction: "She's here, she's here!"
An old woman was at the side of the pond, washing clothes.
Hei Danzi flew over and threw herself before the old woman: "Brother Xiuqin, Brother Xiuqin, it's me, Tiexiang…"
The old woman carefully looked her up and down, to left and to right.
"Don't you recognize me?"
"Tiexiang who?"
"When I was in the hospital, it was you who sent me food and water. The evening I ran off, it was you I came and kowtowed to!"
"Why you're-you're-you're-you're…" Whatever thought had just come into the old woman's head, she never verbalized: her words choked in her throat, her eyes glinting with tears.
They said nothing else, just wept so bitterly in each other's arms that the bystanders didn't know what to do, didn't even dare come closer, just watched from far off. A clothes-washing pole fell into the water and slowly spun in circles. A twisted bundle of clothing also rolled into the water, scattered, then slowly sank.
*Flame
: It's very hard to define this word precisely, as it's both abstract and ambiguous in sense. If you said you didn't believe in ghosts, you'd never seen ghosts, Maqiao people would flatly declare it was because your "flame" was too high. So what is flame, then?
If this question is a slightly tricky one to answer, then I could try rephrasing it as: what sort of people have a high flame? Maqiao people would say: city people, educated people, rich people, men, people in the prime of life, who've never been ill, state employees, people in daylight, people unplagued by disasters and difficulties, who live by highways, people on sunny days, in open country, people with lots of friends and relatives, people who've just eaten their fill…… And, of course, people who don't believe in ghosts.
This covers practically the full gamut of life's problems.
I'd surmise, then, that what they mean by flame is a general life view: in situations where humans find themselves in a weakened position, a person's flame goes low, is snuffed out, and ghosts and demons start to appear. The popular saying, "poor people see more ghosts" probably refers to the same sort of thing. Writing this reminds me of my own mother, who'd received a modern education, had been a teacher, and had never believed in ghosts. In the summer of 1981, because of a big septic boil on her back, an affliction that frequently reduced her to a state of semi-stupor, she started to see ghosts. Time and time again, she would cry out in terror in the middle of the night, shrinking, trembling back into the corner of the bed, claiming there was someone behind the door, a woman called Wang, come to assassinate her own ghost, and asking me to kill her with a vegetable knife. It was then that I was reminded of this word "flame." At that moment, I thought, her flame was definitely too low, she'd seen things I had no way of seeing, had entered a world I had no way of entering.
Afterwards, she hadn't the slightest recollection of what had happened.
The power of the intellect is without doubt the most important ingredient in flame: it's the mark of the strong, advancing revolution, science, and economic development; wherever it touches, ghostly shadows will disappear like smoke, ghostly talk will scatter like clouds, and dazzling sunlight will reign triumphant. The problem is, if you understand flame as Maqiao people do, then it's only relative: since the strong become weak before the even stronger, fear of ghosts may never be utterly, triumphantly dispelled. There are also times when the power of the intellect is thwarted, when it is insufficient, and disintegrates. My mother doesn't believe in ghosts. But when her sense of reason was sufficiently weakened so as to be rendered incapable of resisting a septic boil, on came the ghosts. Modern people don't place that much credence in ghosts, but when their sense of reason becomes incapable of overcoming difficulties such as war, poverty, pollution, indifference, becomes incapable of shaking off the weight of inner anxiety, then specters and superstitions of every shade and description will rear their heads once more in even the most scientific and developed cities of the twentieth century. Even those who categorically deny the existence of ghosts, even highly educated, modern people will still, perhaps, use ghostly imagery (think of modern painting), ghostly sounds (think of modern music), ghostly logic (think of modern surrealist poetry or fiction)… In a sense, modernist culture is the covert breeding ground for the biggest ghost town of this century, a scholarly cacophony of ghosts and spirits that derives from those members of modern society with the lowest flame: peasants, the uneducated, the poor, women, children and old people, sick people, people plagued by disasters and difficulties, refugees, people who live far from highways, with few friends and relatives, people at nighttime, on rainy days, who don't live in open country, people suffering from hunger… and people who believe in ghosts.
If you look into the biography of any important modernist writer or artist, you'll soon discover the shadowy forms and flashing eyes of people with low flame, people like those I have just listed.
I'm not arguing for the existence of ghosts. As I often remark, the ghosts Maqiao people discovered, including those ghosts which came from outside Maqiao, could only ever speak Maqiao dialect, they couldn't speak Mandarin, much less English or French; they obviously hadn't transgressed the intellectual bounds of their discoverers. This leads me to believe that ghosts are manmade things. Maybe they're just a kind of hallucination, a kind of imagining that springs forth at times when the body is weak (as in my mother's case) or the spirit is weak (like the despairing modernists)-the same as what happens, more or less, when people dream, get drunk, take drugs.
Facing up to ghosts amounts to facing up to our own weaknesses.
This is one way of understanding the term "flame."
And so I suspect that what's known as the Hei Danzi story never happened in Maqiao (see the entry "The Ghost Relative"), that Tiexiang wasn't really reincarnated. When I returned to Maqiao, Fucha categorically denied there was any truth to this story, rejected it as devil talk that misled the masses, as groundless gossip. I believed Fucha. Of course, I don't in the slightest suspect those who claimed to have seen Hei Danzi with their own eyes of deliberately deceiving me, no, they probably felt no compulsion to do that. It is simply the case that I see, in their scattered and contradictory narrative fragments, the dubiousness of this story. I once tried pursuing the story to its end: where was Hei Danzi now? Will she ever come back to Maqiao? They hemmed and hawed. Some said that Hei Danzi had eaten red carp-people who'd eaten this variety of fish no longer remember things from their past life, so she wouldn't come back. Some said Hei Danzi had followed her uncle down south to a city on the coast to make money and couldn't be found. Others said Hei Danzi was afraid of Benyi-which meant: she had neither the face nor the courage to come back. And so on, and so forth.
There was no neat ending. Of course, it didn't need a neat ending, I could weigh each version for myself. I had absolutely no doubt the whole story resulted from general confusion at a time of low flame, that it was a shared illusion of theirs, just like everything my mother saw while ill.
When people hope to see something, that something will always pop up one day or another. People have two possible means of making this something appear: at times of high flame, they use the techniques of revolutionary, scientific, or economic development; at times of low flame, they use illusion.
People can't be made identical to each other. If I can't raise the flame of most Maqiao people, I don't think I have any reason to rob them of their right to illusions, to prevent them from imagining that their Tiexiang returned once more to Maqiao, that she overcame the boundary between the living and the dead and wept in the arms of her sister-in-law by the side of the lotus pond.
*Red Flower Daddy
: Uncle Luo wasn't originally from Maqiao: he'd been a long-term hired hand all
the way up to land reform, after which he became village head for a few years, making him a veteran cadre in Maqiao. Various people had proposed marriage to him at various times, but each time he'd refused. He was a confirmed bachelor: when he'd eaten his fill, there was no one else in his household to go hungry. When just he worked, everyone in his household toiled. Sometimes people called him "Red Flower Daddy"-"red flower" meant virgin.
People later discovered that the reason he wouldn't get married wasn't because he lacked money, it was because all his life he'd kept his distance from women, had been afraid of women; whenever he saw a woman approach he'd do his utmost to take a detour off elsewhere; you'd never, ever find him anyplace where there were a lot of women around. His nose was very sensitive, peculiarly so: he could always sniff out a fishy smell on women's bodies. He thought the only reason women used face powder was to cover up their fishy bodily smell. In spring in particular, the air was always full of this fishy female smell (which was particularly strong on women of about thirty), mingled with a smell of rotting melons; it could travel one hundred paces on the wind and his head would swim as soon as it hit his nostrils. If he remained in contact with this smell for any length of time, it would do terrible things to him: his face would go yellow, his forehead would break into a cold sweat, he'd retch over and over again.
He'd ascertained, moreover, it was this very fishy smell that had spoiled his fruit. Behind his house were two peach trees which, despite blooming luxuriantly every year, never produced much fruit; even when fruits appeared, they would rot away one by one. Some said these trees were diseased. He shook his head: those rotten women and their wild goings-on make me ill, he said, so how's a tree to bear it?
He was referring to the fact that the two peach trees were next to a tea plantation, where every year women would go to pick tea and generally let their hair down; as he saw it, it would've been strange if the trees hadn't gone rotten.
Some didn't give much credence to what he said and wanted to test his nose, test whether it really was different from everybody else's, whether it really had this implacable hatred for women. So, at the end of one working day they stole his straw coat and offered it to some women as a cushion to sit on, before returning it back to its original place to watch what kind of reaction there would be.
Everyone was astounded: when he picked up the raincoat, his nose wrinkled and face darkened instantly:
"You low-life lowlifes, who touched my raincoat?"
The men present glanced at each other, pretending to know nothing.
"What've I ever done to you? When did I do you wrong? To make you do this to me?" He made a face and stamped his foot in genuine anger.
The raincoat thieves quickly slipped away in alarm.
Uncle Luo threw away his coat and huffed and puffed his way back home. Anxious to make peace, Fucha washed the coat in the pond. But the coat never again reappeared on the old village head's back-people said he'd burned it immediately.
No one dared play another joke like this on him. If you invited him to dinner, there could never be any female guests at the table, nor any women's clothes drying nearby. And when arranging his work assignments, you had to be careful not to send women off with him. Once, Benyi sent him off on the tractor to the county seat to buy some cotton flower seeds, a trip that took him a whole two days; when he got back, he said when he'd set out his leg had suddenly started to hurt, but he hadn't been in time to catch the tractor and had had to go on foot, so he'd lost a day. It was only afterwards, when villagers happened to bump into the tractor driver in the commune, that they discovered he had been in time to catch the tractor, but just because there were a few women catching a lift on the vehicle he'd absolutely refused to get on, insisting that he preferred to walk by himself. There was no one to blame but himself.
He walked very slowly: the thirty li from the county seat back to Maqiao took him a whole day. And not only that: he did everything slowly, nothing rashly, as if he knew full well there were days beyond days, and also days beyond the days beyond the days, there was no need to shit your breakfast as soon as you'd got it down. The young men all liked to work with him, as he'd make the day fairly relaxed, not overly pressured. One day, the young men went with him to Tianzi Peak to repair the aqueduct over the mountains. The weather was terribly cold that day and an ice crust had frozen over the ground; even though everyone's feet were tied up with grass rope, they still slipped at every step, and at every fall, wails and laughter rose and fell in waves. By the time everyone arrived at the construction site, they were all dreading the work ahead of them, and seeing as even the cadres hadn't arrived and Uncle Luo was the only person who had any speech rights to speak of, they begged him to agree to let everyone wait a while, at least until the sun had come up and melted the ice, before starting work. His drowsy eyes full of sleep, Uncle Luo dug his tobacco out of his cloth bag saying: "Who's to say otherwise? Dragging everyone out from under their quilts on such a cold day, as if you were going to bury your nearest and dearest…" Whatever he was saying wasn't all that clear, but everyone caught what he meant. A roar of delight went up, then everyone dispersed, each looking for a corner to hide from the wind and warm himself up. Uncle Luo had searched out from who-knew-where a few withered, fallen leaves and had squatted down around a mounded fire, winning himself several jostling companions.
"Maybe you'd like to bring over a couple of baskets of charcoal, eh? Set up a few stoves, eh?" Benyi cleared his throat before producing these two enigmatic conversational gambits: everyone jumped with fright. No one knew where he'd popped up from, wielding a bamboo measuring pole.
Uncle Luo, his eyelids stuck up with sleepy dust, remained sedate: "The road's too slippery to stand up on, how d'you get that pole here? Didn't you see? Even the dogs won't go out on a day like this."
That's right, that's right, everyone else seconded him.
"Well, that's great!" Benyi gave a cold laugh, "So I came here to supervise your sleeping: Party members and People's Militia can take the lead sleeping, poor and lower-middle peasants can overcome hardships sleeping, you can all sleep everything into its fundamentals. D'you all know what sleep is?"
He was making use of the Marxist "externals/fundamentals" philosophy he'd just studied. When he'd finished talking, he took off his jacket, rolled up his sleeves, spat into his palm, heaved a brick boulder onto his shoulders, and headed off towards the aqueduct. This was quite an impressive performance, and everyone present watched in silent embarrassment; seeing as some of the others had also started to stir, a few at a time they reluctantly abandoned their corners of warmth, bracing themselves against the freezing wind.
Uncle Luo swallowed his anger, and when he'd finished smoking his ball of tobacco he too picked up a boulder of brick and followed Benyi, muttering as he went. Then something unexpected happened. Just as he'd walked up to the aqueduct, a shrill cry came from Benyi out in front: his body swayed back and forth, his feet failed to steady themselves, and he slid down the slippery face of the aqueduct. It looked as if he was going to slide over the edge of the mountain, right down into the mountain valley where water rushed and freezing air billowed. Everyone's hearts leapt into their mouths. But way before they'd realized how critical the situation was, Uncle Luo's eyes and hands were already on the case: he yelled out, hurled the brick boulder off his shoulder, and immediately flung himself forward; unable to grab hold of the torso before him, he managed a foot instead.
Fortunately, Uncle Luo's own foot was lodged behind a steel girder in the aqueduct and, though pinned against the ice and hauled along by Benyi's considerable weight, he ground to a halt at the edge of the aqueduct.
He couldn't really hear any of Benyi's yells-buffeted here and there by the valley wind, they sounded like a handful of mosquitoes buzzing from a very, very distant valley floor.
"What-did-you-say?" All Uncle Luo could see was the other foot flailing about wildly.
"Quick, pull me up, quick…"
"Let's n
ot be hasty about this," Uncle Luo was also out of breath, "You're the one who's studied philosophy: now, would you say weather like this is an external, or a fundamental?"
"Quick…"
"There's no hurry, it's nice and cool here, nice place to have a chat."
"You son of a…"
By this time, a few of the young men had arrived on the scene: with some pulling the rope, some stretching out their hands, they finally, perilously managed to rescue the Party Secretary from his suspension under the aqueduct.
After Benyi got back on his feet, face red all over, he was no longer so proud, or so philosophical; he even needed to lean on people as he made his way pigeon-toed back down from the aqueduct. After returning to the village, he cut off a catty of meat and invited Uncle Luo over for a drink to thank him for saving his life.
From this time on, Benyi would spare only Uncle Luo-out of all Maqiao-his curses. Whenever Benyi had some decent wine, he'd take it over to Uncle Luo's thatched cottage and invite Uncle Luo to take a drop with him. Some said that later on, when Benyi was arguing with Tiexiang every other day, the main reason was that he was always hanging around Uncle Luo's place. They not only drank and chatted together, they also did some other things that people found rather puzzling, for example, washed together, even went under the mosquito net together, making the bed-plank creak under the pressure-no one knew what they were playing around at. As they were same-pot brothers, was there any reason to say they couldn't sleep under the same quilt? Once, someone in Uncle Luo's back garden stealing bamboo shoots happened to take a glance inside through a hole in the window paper. It was incredible:
