The Blue-Eyed Shan

by Becker, Stephen;

  Ming-tzu wondered if he was still red, if his eyes shone, if his fat lips protruded. How long had he lain here, out of the mine? The odor here was sharp, but not of men, animals or filth.

  He could not think what to say, and so did not speak.

  Later he stood in a pair of short trousers and a kind of shirt-without-sleeves before men and desks. He had eaten bits of meat twice each day for three days, with his rice. He knew now what these men did on their desks, with their brushes and their sticks. It was called writing, and was a way to send messages, like a shop sign or a poster.

  “So you are the miner Ming-tzu.”

  The boy nodded.

  “Let us see your card.”

  “There is no card.”

  “No card!” This man was stern of face, with a drooping mustache. “You were to carry that card at all times.”

  Ming-tzu said timidly, “The esteemed pit captain took it first day.”

  “And where is this pit captain?”

  “He is dead.”

  “And the card?”

  “This lowly one never saw the card again.”

  The mustache twitched; this well-fed man was smiling. “Then how can we know who you are?”

  Ming-tzu stood silent.

  “Or how old you are?”

  “This lowly one is fifteen.”

  “Fifteen!” All three of these men laughed with enthusiasm. “Not a day over ten! So you lied about your age!”

  The boy knew he was to be punished. He knew also that in the presence of the tiger no-speech is better than speech.

  “So you will be paid at the children’s rate,” the man said angrily. “Not three dollars a day but one dollar.”

  Ming-tzu was wondering if he would be flogged, or go to prison.

  “Well then, well then, how long have you worked?”

  “This lowly one cannot know,” he mumbled.

  “Well then, what was the number of your card?”

  “This lowly one—” But a memory sparked, other men like these, perhaps these very men; and his voice repeated the words before his memory had confirmed them: “Two seven two seven nine!”

  They made owl eyes. “Why, this is a scholar!” one cried. The smallest shuffled papers. “That was the sixth month last year,” he muttered, “and previously the twenty-seven thousands were used three years ago, so it cannot have been this same boy, and here we are at two ten thousands, and now the seven thousands,” and peeking upward the boy saw the lips twitch and work like a mouse’s, the man’s finger gliding down the page as the others waited, amused, and the little man called out, “Ming-tzu! So it is! By the gods, I shall give him an extra dollar!”

  “That is two hundred and seven dollars,” the mustached man summed up gravely, “plus your contribution of one, makes two hundred and eight, less one hundred for opium, as stated here. No bonus. He has not completed his contract. So: one hundred and eight dollars for this retired miner.”

  One hundred and eight dollars!

  “You will sign this.”

  “This lowly one cannot.”

  “Then make a mark here, so.”

  Clumsily Ming-tzu took the brush and stroked a mark.

  The small man handed him a sheaf of limp bills. Ming-tzu’s tremor overcame him at the sight of money; the bills slipped from his hand and fluttered to the floor. Swiftly he dropped to his knees, whimpering, swiftly he gleaned them. The men were entertained by this performance, and encouraged him with ribald suggestion.

  He clutched to his breast his one hundred and eight dollars.

  One of the men snorted. “His father got more than that for him.”

  Another said, “Go now. Hop the locomotive and go out the gate. You are no longer a miner.”

  “This lowly one must say farewell to Shang at the concentrator.”

  “You will hop the locomotive,” said the mustached man, “and be gone from here.”

  Ming-tzu never again saw Shang. On the ore train a young man made as if to search him, but Ming-tzu snarled, and the young man drew back, raising one palm in peace. When Ming-tzu saw his left eye, reflected in a window in the town of Kochiu, he too was appalled and drew back.

  He slept behind walls, in fields, in gutters and ditches. His one hundred and eight Yunnanese dollars bought him hot rice, hot field corn in street stalls, steamed dough and boiled water for almost ten days. He traveled west, toward the mountains, true mountains and not mine mountains. His back ached constantly. His knees and elbows were afire. His feet bled, but hardened on the road. He dreamed while awake, dreamed of flights of white cranes, of one-eyed locomotives, of fires that consumed whole provinces. In one village he told, haltingly, of the mine, and men and women pitied him and gave him one meal. This was a dry year. The meal was simple, millet and a strip of old chicken. That night he woke in agony. His back, his joints, his every bone stabbed; his body convulsed, he frothed at the mouth, he shrieked. In the morning clouds had gathered. A day more, and torrential rains all but dissolved the earthen huts.

  The boy continued toward the setting sun. He hobbled, limped, starved. From time to time a wagoner pitied him. In a town called Mo-chiang he saw a foreigner, a man with a long sharp nose, pink skin and hazel eyes. This was perhaps an Englishman or a Frenchman; the boy scuttled away. That afternoon he saw an aircraft, and a street barber told him what it was; the third seen in these regions, though in foreign journals there had been pictures. It seemed to the boy that he had seen one before, perhaps through the twilight at Kochiu.

  That night he was racked by fierce pains. In the morning the sky was leaden; by evening showers had cooled the land, and his pains had been eased.

  Again and again unpredictable agonies exhausted him. Each time rain followed. He made, finally, the connection. It puzzled him. But thenceforth among his disjointed visions were apocalyptic downpours and epic floods. He also had a vision of the American, a fat kindly man with soft hands, who was a healer. He could hear again the outlandish, crooning tones of the American voice.

  By now he was starving truly, and when he was overtaken by a trade caravan he made humble submission and asked for work. This request was greeted with hilarity. A stout, winy sort of fellow with the two upper front teeth missing, a man as bald as the moon, bellowed for an audience and cried, “See what we have here! This little green elf is unemployed!”

  “One of those miners,” a mule-skinner said, and spat a spumy gob. “What can you do, boy?”

  Without thinking—there was little thought left in him, only pain and visions—the future Sawbwa said, “I can mine tin. I can see distant events. I can foretell rain. And”—remembering Shang—“I can play the woman’s part.”

  They did not laugh. The boy’s had not been an ordinary response. These men looked him over. The boy was one-eyed and a scarecrow. His hair was patchy and gray. He wore a loincloth. His complexion was not so green as the willow even in winter, but it was notably unhealthy.

  “Furthermore I bring luck,” the boy said, “like hunchbacks.”

  After some moments the stout bald man said, “Bugger! We’ll take him to Lan-ts’ang and sell him there.”

  The boy saw that these men were uneasy. He fixed his good eye on each in turn.

  “How old are you?” asked the mule-skinner.

  “Fifteen,’ said the boy, “or nine.”

  Then the men laughed lustily and were pleased that they had found him. “That is a considerable spread,” said one. “We shall let him be nine when he eats and fifteen when he plays the woman.”

  At this a gust of laughter seemed to whip up dust all along the caravan.

  The Sawbwa was on his way to Pawlu.

  He saw himself in a good glass, and was allowed time to inspect his face carefully. The bad eye was unnerving, milky, with gray and brown swirls; it protruded slightly. His hair was indeed thin and gray. His pale yellow-green skin was finely wrinkled. His good eye no longer gleamed unnaturally, and his lips were no longer bloated.

 
He ran off at Lan-ts’ang before they could sell him, taking with him five copper cash, a wooden bowl and his loincloth. Westward he traveled, and upward, and once at sunset, when he had seen no other human being in a full day’s travel, he stood on a high ridge and saw the sky before him aflame, and he could make out the sinking disk of the sun; and far below he saw a silver river.

  He spoke to the gods then, calling from his ridge to the distant mountains, and the gods answered. He saw thousands of men on horseback, bearing banners. Again he saw the locomotive. He saw ships. He saw the dead pit captain. He fell to earth, and there he slept. He woke at dawn, freezing, and began what was to be the last leg of his journey, down and down to the silver river, and then up and up to the far ridge. Beyond that far ridge he would be safe from the mines, from caravans, from beggary, from man’s evil. Beyond that far ridge lived the gods.

  Beyond that far ridge he found a road, and he followed the road. It was early days, and there were not yet cages full of bandits’ heads by East Poppy Field. The boy recognized poppies, and assumed dimly that they had been cultivated; here then were people, and here was the source of good black yen, and here was his destination.

  He entered Pawlu and followed the narrow track north of East Poppy Field. He sniffed the air: food. He ambled openly, knowing no other way to travel. He stumbled often. He gazed vacantly at the sun, and laughed aloud. He did not know that he was watched, that word had already reached the village; so when he shambled down the slope and onto the large common field, and found a dense semicircle of villagers observing his progress and inspecting his person, his cloudy mind told him that the gods had prepared this welcome.

  He advanced. He fell to his knees, set down his bowl and removed his loincloth. Naked, he pried the five copper cash from a knot in the loincloth and poured them into the bowl. He then kowtowed three times, touching his head reverently to the earth, and said, “Here is Heaven. I go no farther.”

  At first the villagers shrugged and tolerated him. He was a fool who raved and was clearly sick; it would not do to offend the gods by inhuman behavior. He had little to say for some time. He slept out of doors in all weather, seeming to suffer a horror of houses. He ate little, but more as time passed. He was like a wizened mouse who whisks his tail comically and destroys little grain.

  But when he was stronger, he interrupted. That was offensive. To interrupt indicated low breeding and foreign manners. One would be saying, “If there is not rain soon—” and the child, or tiny old man, would interrupt: “Englishmen and Frenchmen must be destroyed.” This was translated immediately; an interruption might, after all, indicate urgency. But the remarks seemed random and obscure, though not altogether unreasonable: no one in Pawlu objected to the destruction of the English, somewhere west of them, or of the French, somewhere south of them, or of anyone at all outside Pawlu.

  Soon the interruptions came in Shan; the boy heard no other language, and was instructing his tongue. This, then, was the language of the gods. He listened and listened, and from time to time he interrupted. One would be saying again, “If there is not rain soon—” and the child would interrupt. “A locomotive is a one-eyed dragon,” and this would necessitate conferences, first to translate “locomotive” from the Chinese, then to make sense of the whole phrase.

  That was a dry year, and East Poppy Field showed rusty from the hillside. The sky was blue and clear, and when the boy, writhing, clenching, his good eyeball rolling, cried out, “The gods send rain! Tomorrow comes rain!” and fell unconscious, the old Sawbwa and the men about him were merely embarrassed. Two of the women carried the little fellow to the shelter of a wall, away from the blazing sun, and washed him down and tended him.

  Next day a memorable downpour swelled the Little River Mon, and consequently Upper Stream in Pawlu, and consequently Lower Stream in Pawlu; it lasted all one day and half another, drowned the paddies, revived the vegetation, restored Pawlu’s spirits and occasioned serious discussion of the boy. Most scoffed. But the old Sawbwa hated foreigners and had sensed in this boy a rare sweat of the same hate. It was decided to take the boy seriously for the time being. Perhaps he was inhabited, or visited, by a nat. Nats were forest spirits, some benign and helpful, others malign and baleful.

  The boy confirmed his importance almost immediately. He fell into a foam-flecked trance one morning and spoke of the house that flies and roars like thunder. Two of Pawlu’s men had seen aircraft, and knew what the boy was speaking of. But no such machine had ever droned through Pawlu’s sky or racketed through Pawlu’s peace—until three days later, when to the amazement of the entire village and the terror of half its people, a silver bird appeared from the west, crossed the valley buzzing like a bee and veered off to the south. It possessed, they swore, four wings, two on each side, and it emitted a modest but steady stream of smoke. (When he heard the tale years later, Greenwood surmised that a French or British bomber, honorably surviving World War I, had been achieving one of the first primitive aerial reconnaissances Out East, probably making a zigzag run from Mandalay to Hanoi and perhaps even taking photographs.)

  After the third spectacular and successful prediction of rain, the old Sawbwa adopted this stunted, sickly, half-blind, discolored, demented youth. Over the years the boy announced many irrelevant visions, but he was never wrong about rain.

  So when the old Sawbwa died a few years later, the village voted this grotesque the Sawbwa’s turban, wardrobe and bangles, being careful at the same time to confirm Hu-chot (a polite rendition of whose name would have been “Tiger Tamer”) as First Rifle with independent powers. The Shan of Pawlu were religious, orderly, traditional folk, but not to the risk of their land and freedom.

  And so this Sawbwa of Pawlu, spawned in the hell of the Celestial Kingdom and banished by its inhumanities, reigned for many years in his mountain fastness, celibate, visionary, crippled, shrewd and simple at once. White-haired where he was not bald, wrinkled and squinting, venerable and slow of speech, he was almost precisely Greenwood’s age.

  5

  The Bandits in the Hills

  Eight years before Greenwood’s return to Pawlu, Yang’s flight from China, and the death of the two Kachin, the Japanese had invaded Burma. In January of 1942 they struck by land from Siam and advanced with strategic caution and tactical brio. Hastily the Allies—stodgy Britain, stunned America (it was only a month after Pearl Harbor) and feudal China—improvised a defense. This was necessarily a limited defense. British generals believed in war but not in combat. Americans were thin on the ground and inexperienced. The Chinese (whom the British, with perhaps justifiable reluctance, finally deigned to admit to the “defense” of the Shan States) believed that when you had trained and equipped a good division you should not erode it in battle. (“The Fifth Army,” said a Chinese general to a British general, “is our best army because it is the only one which has any field guns, and I cannot afford to risk those guns. If I lose them the Fifth Army will no longer be our best.”)

  At first the Allied line ran north-south, and the Japanese thrust westward across Burma’s southern panhandle. The Japanese then consolidated, struck for Rangoon and fanned northward; the Allied line pivoted to run east-west. By mid-April the Japanese had slashed their way to within two hundred fifty miles of Lashio, the western terminus of the Burma Road, strategically vital (every town, island, fort that fell in those first months were “strategically vital”), and the Lashio Road was defended by the famed Chinese 55th Division.

  Famed ever after, that is. The battle lasted only a few hours. The 55th’s General Chen (whom the theater commander, the most crusty, aggressive and frustrated of American generals, had proposed court-martialing a week before) deployed his troops in echelon along the road, unit after unit staggered back from an insanely narrow front. In effect this forced each company to deal with the whole Japanese advance in turn; and when Chen ordered his rear battalions forward, the Japanese swung wide, flanked, enveloped, isolated and annihilated. The 55th simply disappe
ared. It was never again listed on Chinese army rolls. The most crusty, aggressive and frustrated of American generals said next day to the most romantic, idealistic and melancholy of American correspondents, “There’s not a trace of it. It’s the god-damnedest thing I ever saw. Last night I had a division, and today there isn’t any.”

  Two of the survivors were in apprentice American anthropologist named Greenwood and a Chinese major general named Yang. They survived because they never reached the battle.

  Greenwood was then twenty-seven years old. He had spent his early adolescence hoping above all that his freckles would fade; also dismantling and reconstituting motor vehicles; and yearning after pudgy girls. He had spent his late adolescence at Harvard College, where motor vehicles were a means to an end—namely, women’s colleges and their baffling inmates; and the two and a half years since his Master of Arts in 1939 absolutely without motor vehicles, fulfilling an anthropologist’s dream: he had found an exotic people that no one had yet elucidated, and was living as one of them, in Shan trousers, Shan jacket, Shan turban, with a Shan beard (though golden), Shan tattoos, a Shan woman and by the grace of the nats a half-Shan daughter.

  When he contrasted that life—Pawlu, Loi-mae, Lola, amethyst sunsets, blushing opal dawns—with his past (St. Louis, cars, proms, Cambridge, waistcoats, ritual sherry, sanctimonious and resentful women armored in layers of moral theory and underclothes), he wondered seriously if he should bother with a ticket home. But Shan life was family life, and he missed his own: each month he wrote a letter to his parents—pharmacy and notary public, soda fountain; Gray Lady and garden club—with a postscript to his younger sister, and after inscribing the magical foreign characters “Air Mail” and affixing a one-rupee stamp (he had purchased a hundred of those in Mandalay), he scouted the Nan-san road for a caravan. His postman was most often a ruffian, turbanned or skullcapped, ostentatiously armed. Greenwood informed these couriers that this was a message to his father, a great sawbwa across the water, and mother, a princess; he then proffered small silver and hoped for the best.