by Neil Clarke
“Why aren’t you in the new house? There’s air conditioning.”
My father’s tone was uncharacteristically gentle. The new house he referred to was a three-story addition just erected at the back of the ancestral compound, filled with imported furniture and appliances and decorated in the latest fashion. He had even added a spacious study just for me.
“I hate the new house.”
“Foolish child!” He raised his voice, but then quickly lowered it to a barely audible mutter.
I knew he was apologizing to our ancestors. I gazed up at the shrine behind the joss sticks and the black-and-white portraits on the wall to see if any of them would react to my father’s entreaties.
They did not.
My father heaved a long sigh. “Ah Peng, I haven’t forgotten your birthday. I had an accident on the way back from up north with the cargo, which is why I’m two days late.”
I shifted, and wriggled like a pond loach until I found another cool spot on the tiled floor.
The cigarette stench on my father’s breath permeated the air as he whispered at my ear, “I’ve had your present ready for a long while. You’ll like it; it’s not something you can buy in a shop.”
He clapped twice, and I heard a different set of footsteps approach, the sound of flesh flapping against stone, close together, moist, like some amphibious creature that had just crawled out of the sea.
I sat up and gazed in the direction of the sound. Behind my father, a lively black silhouette, limned by the creamy yellow light of the hallway light, stood over the algae-green mosaic tiles. A disproportionately large bulbous head swayed over a thin and slight figure, like the sheep’s head atop the slender stick that served as a sign outside the butcher’s shop in town.
The shadow took two steps forward, and I realized that the backlighting wasn’t the only reason the figure was so dark. The person—if one could call the creature a person—seemed to be covered from head to toe in a layer of black paint that absorbed all light. It was as though a seam had been torn in the world, and the person-shaped crack devoured all light—except for two tiny glows: his slightly protruding eyes.
It was indeed a boy, a naked boy who wore a loincloth woven from bark and palm fronds. His head wasn’t quite as large as it had seemed in shadow; rather, the illusion had been caused by his hair, worn in two strange buns that resembled the horns of a ram. Agitated, he concentrated on the gaps between the tiles at his feet, his toes wiggling and squirming, sounding like insect feet scrabbling along the floor.
“He’s a paoxiao,” my father said, giving me the name of a creature from ancient myths who was said to possess the body of a goat, the head of a man—though with eyes located below the cheeks, the teeth of a tiger, and the nails of a human, and who cried like a baby and devoured humans without mercy. “We captured him on one of the small islands in the South China Sea. I imagine that he’s never set foot on a civilized floor in his life.”
I stared at him, stupefied. The boy was about my age, but everything about him made me uneasy—especially the fact that my father gave him to me as a present.
“I don’t like him,” I said. “I’d rather have a puppy.”
A violent fit of coughing seized my father. It took him a few moments to recover.
“Don’t be stupid. He’s worth a lot more than a dog. If I hadn’t seen him with my own eyes, I would never have believed he’s real.” His voice grew ethereal as he went on.
A susurrating noise grew louder. I shuddered; the typhoon was here.
The wind blew the boy’s scent to me, a strong, briny stench that reminded me of a fish, a common, slender, iron-black, cheap fish trawled from the ocean.
That’s a good name for him, isn’t it? I thought.
My father had long planned out everything about my life up through age forty-five.
At eighteen I would attend a college right here in Guangdong Province and study business—the school couldn’t be more than three hours from home by train.
In college, I would not be allowed to date. This was because my father had already picked out a girl for me: the daughter of his business partner Lao Luo. Indeed, he had taken the trouble to go to a fortuneteller to ensure that the eight characters of our birth times were compatible.
After graduation, Lao Luo’s daughter and I would get married. By my twenty-fifth year, my father would have his first grandchild. By twenty-eight I would give him another. And depending on the sexes of the first two, he might want a third as well.
Simultaneous with the birth of my first child, I would also join the family business. He would take me around to pay my respects to all his partners and suppliers (he had gotten to know most of them in the army).
Since I was expected to work very long hours, who would take care of my child? His mother, of course—see, my father already decided it would be a boy. My wife would stay home; there would be two sets of grandparents; and we could hire nannies.
By age thirty I would take over the Lin Family Tea Company. In the five years prior to this point, I would have to master all aspects of the tea trade, from identification of tea leaves to manufacture and transport, as well as the strengths and weaknesses of all my father’s partners and competitors.
For the next fifteen years, with my retired father as my advisor, I would lead the family business to new heights: branching out into other provinces and spreading Lin tea leafs all over China; and if I’m lucky, perhaps even breaking into the overseas trade, a lifelong goal that my father had always wanted—but also hesitated—to pursue.
By the time I was forty-five, my oldest child would be close to graduating from college. At that point, I would follow in my father’s footsteps and find a good wife for him.
Everything in my father’s universe functioned as an essential component in an intricate piece of well-maintained clockwork: gear meshed with gear, wheel turned upon wheel, motion without end.
Whenever I argued with him over his grand plan for me, he always brought up my grandfather, his grandfather, and then my grandfather’s grandfather—he would point at the wall of ancestors’ portraits and denounce me for forgetting my roots.
This is the way the Lin family has survived, he would say. Are you telling me you are no longer a Lin?
Sometimes I wondered if I was really living in the twenty-first century.
I called him Balin. In our topolect, balin meant a fish with scales.
In reality, he looked more like a goat, especially when he lifted his eyes to gaze at the horizon, his two hair buns poking up like horns. My father told me that the paoxiao have an incredibly strong sense of direction. Even if they were blindfolded, hogtied, tossed into the dark hold of a ship, hauled across the ocean in a journey lasting weeks, and sold and resold through numerous buyers, they’d still be able to find their way home. Of course, given the geopolitical disputes in the South China Sea, exactly what country was their home was indeterminate.
“Then do we need to leash him like a dog?” I asked my father.
He chuckled unnaturally. “The paoxiao are even more accepting of fate than we. They believe everything that happens to them is by the will of the gods and spirits; that’s why they’ll never run away.”
Gradually, Balin grew used to his new environment. My father repurposed our old chicken coop as his home. It took him a long time to figure out that the bedding was meant for him to sleep on, but even after that, he preferred to sleep on the rough, sandy floor. He ate just about everything, even crunching the chicken bones leftover after our meals. I and the other children of the village enjoyed crouching outside his hutch to watch him eat. This was also the only time when I could see his teeth clearly: densely packed, sharp triangles like the teeth of a shark; they easily ripped apart whatever he stuffed into his mouth.
As I watched, I couldn’t help imagining the feeling of those sharp teeth tearing into me; I would then shudder with a complicated sensation, a mixture of pain and addictive pleasure.
One day,
after Balin had eaten enough, he leisurely crawled out of his enclosure. His thin figure sporting a bulging, round tummy resembled a twig with a swelling gall. A couple of other kids and I were playing “monster in the water.” Balin, waddling from side to side, stopped not far from us and watched our game with curiosity.
“Shrimp! Shrimp! Watch out if you don’t want one to bite off your toes!” Shouting and screaming, we pretended to be fishermen standing on shore (a short brick wall) gingerly sticking our feet into the (nonexistent) river. Dip. Dip. Pull back.
The boy who was the water monster ran back and forth, trying to grab the bare feet of the fishermen as they dipped into the river. Only by pulling a fisherman into the river would the water monster be redeemed to humanity, and his unlucky victim would turn into the new water monster.
No one remembered when Balin joined our game. But then Nana, a neighbor, abruptly stopped and pointed. I looked and saw Balin imitating the movements of the water monster: leaping over here, bounding over there. Except that he wasn’t grabbing or snatching at the feet of fishermen, but empty air.
Children often liked to imitate the speech or body language of others, but what Balin was doing was unlike anything I had ever seen. Balin’s movements were almost in perfect synchrony with Ah Hui, the boy who was the water monster.
I say “almost” because it was impossible to detect with the naked eye whether there was a delay between Balin’s movements and Ah Hui’s. Balin was like a shadow that Ah Hui had cast five meters away. Each time Ah Hui turned, each time he extended his hand, even each time he paused dispiritedly because he had missed a fisherman—every gesture was mirrored by Balin perfectly.
I couldn’t understand how Balin was accomplishing this feat, as though he was moving without thinking.
Finally, Ah Hui stopped because everyone was staring.
Ah Hui took a few steps toward Balin; Balin took a few steps toward Ah Hui. Even the way they dragged their heels was exactly the same.
“Why are you copying me?” demanded Ah Hui.
Balin’s lips moved in synchrony, though the syllables that emerged from his mouth were mere noise, like the screeching of a broken radio.
Ah Hui pushed Balin, but he stumbled back because Balin also pushed him at the same moment.
The crowd of children grew excited at the farcical scene, far more interesting than the water monster game.
“Fight! Fight!”
Ah Hui jumped at Balin, and the two grappled with each other. This was a fascinating fight because their motions mirrored each other exactly. Soon, neither could move as they were locked in a stalemate, staring into each other’s eyes.
“That’s enough! Go home, all of you!” Massive hands picked both of them off the ground and forcibly separated them as though parting a pair of conjoined twins. It was Father.
Ah Hui angrily spat on the ground. The children scattered.
Balin did not imitate Ah Hui this time. It was as though some switch had been shut off in him.
Smiling, Father glanced at me, as though to say, Now do you understand why this present is so great?
“We can view the human brain as a machine with just three functions: sensing, thinking, and motor control. If we use a computer as an analogy, sensing is the input, thinking is the computation carried out by the switches, and motor control is the output—the brain’s only means of interacting with the external world. Do you see why?”
Before knowing Mr. Lu, I would never have believed that a gym teacher would give this sort of speech.
Mr. Lu was a local legend. He was not that tall, only about five-foot-eight, his hair cropped short. Through the thin shirts he wore in summers we could see his bulging muscles. It was said that he had studied abroad.
Everyone in our class was puzzled by why somebody who had left China and seen the world would want to return to our tiny, poor town to be a middle-school teacher. Later, we heard that Mr. Lu was an only child. His father was bedridden with a chronic illness, and his mother had died early. Since there were no other relatives who could care for his father and the old man refused to leave town, saying that he preferred to die where he was born, Mr. Lu had no choice but to move home and find a teaching job. Since his degree was in the neurology of motor control, the principal naturally thought he would be qualified to teach phys ed.
Unlike our other teachers, Mr. Lu never put on any airs around us. He joked about with us as though we were all friends.
Once, I asked him, “Why did you come back to this town?”
“There’s an old Confucian saying that as long as your parents are alive, you should not travel too far. I’d been far away from home for more than a decade, and my father won’t be with me for much longer. I have to think about him.”
I asked him another question: “Will you leave after both your parents are gone then?”
Mr. Lu frowned, as though he didn’t want to think about the question. Then he said, “In my field there was a pioneering researcher named Donald Broadbent. He once said that it was far harder to control human behavior than to control the stimuli influencing them. That was why in the study of motor control it was difficult to devise simple scientific laws of the form ‘A leads to B.’”
“So?” I asked, knowing that he had no intention of answering my question.
“So no one knows what will happen in the future.” He nodded and took a long drag of his cigarette.
“Bullshit,” I said, accepting the cigarette from him and taking a puff.
No one thought he would stick around our town for long.
In the end he was my gym teacher from eighth grade through twelfth grade, married a local woman, and had kids.
Just the way he predicted.
At first we used a pushpin, and then we switched to the electric igniter for a cigarette lighter. Snap! There it was: a pale blue electric arc.
Father thought this was more civilized.
The people who had sold Balin to him had also taught him a trick. If he wanted Balin to imitate someone, he should have Balin face the target and lock gazes. Then he should “stimulate” Balin in some way. Once Balin’s eyes glazed over then the “connection” was established. They explained to my father that this was a unique custom of Balin’s kind.
Balin brought us endless entertainment.
As long as I could remember, I’d always enjoyed street puppetry, whether shadow puppets, glove puppets, or marionettes. Curious, I would sneak behind the stage and watch the performers give life to the inanimate and enact moving scenes of love and revenge. In my childhood, such transformations had seemed magical, and now with Balin, I finally had the chance to practice my own brand of magic.
I danced, and so did he. I boxed, and so did he. I had been shy about putting on a performance in front of my relatives, but now, through Balin’s body, I became the family entertainer.
I had Balin imitate Father when he was drunk. I had him imitate anyone who was different in town: the madman, the cripple, the idiot, the beggar who had broken legs and arms and who had to crawl along the ground like a worm, the epileptic . . . my friends and I would laugh so hard that we would roll on the ground—until the relatives of our victims came after us, wielding bamboo laundry rods.
Balin was also good at imitating animals: he was best at cats, dogs, oxen, goats, pigs; not so good with ducks and chickens; and completely useless when it came to fish.
Sometimes, I found him crouched outside the door to the main house in the ancestral compound spying on our TV. He was especially fascinated by animal documentaries. When he saw prey being hunted down and killed by predators, Balin’s body twitched and spasmed uncontrollably, as though he was the one whose belly was being ripped open, his entrails spilling forth.
There were times when Balin grew tired. While imitating a target, his movements would slow and diverge from the target’s, like a wind-up figurine running down or a toy car with almost-exhausted batteries. After a while, he would fall to the ground and stop moving, an
d no matter how hard we kicked him, he refused to budge. The only solution was to make him eat, stuff him to the gills.
Other than exhaustion, he never resisted or showed any signs of unhappiness. In my childish eyes, Balin was no different from the puppets constructed from hide, cellophane, fabric, or wood. He was nothing more than an object faithfully carrying out the controller’s will, but he himself was devoid of emotion. His imitation was nothing more than an unthinking reflex.
Eventually, we tired of controlling Balin one-on-one, and we invented more complex and also crueler multiplayer games.
First, we decided the order through rock-paper-scissors. The winner got to control Balin to fight against the loser. The winner of the contest then got to fight against the next kid in line. I was the first.
The experience was cool beyond measure. Like a general sitting safe far from the frontlines, I commanded my soldier on the battlefield to press, punch, dodge, kick, roundhouse . . . because I was at a distance from the fight, I could discern my opponent’s intentions and movements with more clarity, and devise better attacks and responses. Moreover, since Balin was the one who endured all the pain, I had no fear and could attack ruthlessly.
I thought my victory was certain.
But for some reason, all my carefully planned moves, as they were carried out by Balin, seemed to lack strength. Even punches and kicks that landed squarely against my opponent did little to shock the opponent, much less to injure him. Soon, Balin was on the ground, enduring a hailstorm of punches.
“Bite him! Bite!” I snapped my jaw in the air, knowing the power of Balin’s sharp teeth.
But Balin was like a marionette whose strings had been cut. My opponent’s fists did not relent, and soon Balin’s cheeks were swollen.
“Dammit!” I spat on the ground, conceding the fight.
Now it was my turn to face Balin, controlled by the victor of the last round. I stared at him as ferociously as I could manage. His face was bloody, the skin around his eyes bruised and puffy, but his irises still held their habitual tranquility. I was enraged.
