Vessel

by Chongda Cai

  I didn’t understand exactly what function this divine godfather played in my life or how he could bestow protection on me, but I began to feel at home in those temples, like I was stopping by to visit relatives. Visitors to the Guan Yu shrine could pull strips of lottery poetry to have their fortunes told. The poems on the strips of paper were fables written in the style of classical poetry, and I would take the lottery poetry strips home with me and read them before bed. It was almost like my godfather was tucking me in with a bedtime story.

  According to local custom, my divine godfather only held his title until I turned sixteen. After that, I was an adult and no longer under his fatherly protection. But I couldn’t break the habit of going to see my godfather at least once a year to say a prayer and make offerings. Whenever life got me down, I would visit Guan Yu and spend an afternoon talking to him with a set of moon blocks.

  When my father had the stroke that left him partially paralyzed, my mother’s first reaction was to march angrily over to the temple and demand answers from the gods.

  There was not really much in the way of a conversation between my mother and the gods. My mother provided the answers to her own questions, then used the moon blocks to confirm. My mother came up with her own solutions to her problems, so even if the gods did intervene, they were simply helping her choose from among her own suggestions.

  The answer my mother confirmed with the gods after my father’s stroke was this: it was his fate, and it was her fate to stay by his side and help him.

  I knew that was the answer she wanted to receive. Deep down, she was still the stubborn, fearless girl who had jumped into the waves.

  Even though the doctor’s assessment had been that there was almost no chance he would ever regain full use of the left side of his body, my mother refused to give up. My parents put together a three-year plan to nurse him back to health. But unfortunately, the doctor’s assessment was correct, and my father’s condition deteriorated until he struggled to get out of bed.

  In the years after my father’s stroke, my mother dragged me along with her to make an annual trip to each temple, throwing her moon blocks and insisting on a prophecy from each god about my father’s chances for recovery that year. A year later, she would go back to demand why they hadn’t lived up to their promises.

  My father’s left side slowly withered, but the rest of his body seemed to swell. Four years after the stroke, he was so large that when he fell, my mother could no longer help him up.

  My mother would rush off to the temples to desperately demand an explanation for why my father wasn’t recovering. She went again and again, even though we still went on our usual year-end trip to worship at the temples.

  One year on the fateful day, she didn’t throw her moon blocks as she normally did, but instead lit incense and pulled me over to kneel before the altar before starting a mumbling prayer.

  At first, I couldn’t hear what she was saying, but I finally pieced together enough fragments and realized with sudden horror what she was praying for: “Please take my husband before me. Please don’t let him be a burden on the children. I know it’s fate, but please lend me a few more years, at least so I can live longer than my husband. I can die after I see him off.”

  I wheeled on her and demanded to know what she was thinking. She slapped me, then went quiet for a long time. When she broke the silence, she said, “I’m doing this for you.”

  I knelt down at the altar and made my own childish request: “Please let me and my father and my mother all go at the same time.”

  When my mother heard me, she came over and hit me again, then wailed to the gods, “He’s too young to know what he’s saying! Listen to me!”

  On our way home from the temple that day, my mother turned to me solemnly and began to lay out how she saw the future playing out: “All you need to worry about is school. Get into a good university, make your own money, get married, live your own life. Your father is my responsibility. I will live as long as he does. I will take care of everything.”

  “But you can’t even lift him when he falls,” I said.

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “But how are you going to cover all of his expenses? You’re not getting any younger. Things aren’t going to get any better.”

  “I’ll be fine.”

  “But what about looking after yourself? What happens if you’re not well enough to look after him?”

  My mother rolled her eyes at me. “I’ll be fine,” she repeated impatiently.

  “But you’re my parents!”

  My mother stopped walking. “You listen to me,” she said firmly. “It’s fate. I was meant to stand beside him. This is between him and me. It has nothing to do with you.” She paused, and then added, “That’s what the gods told me.”

  I knew better than to tell my father about my mother’s grim prayer.

  With any hope of recovery becoming faint, my father turned to the gods himself, grumbling to the deities and ancestors on our household altar, “If you aren’t going to let me get well, then let me die.” That always caused my mother to lose her temper.

  “Don’t talk like that!” she would say. “It’s up to fate. Don’t complain to them about it. You’ll go when it’s time to go. Don’t sit there complaining!”

  Even though my father was often confined to his bed, he looked healthier than he had in years. His cheeks even took on a rosy hue. “He’s like my big baby,” she would say proudly to whoever would listen. “Even if he can’t get around, he might just end up living to eighty.”

  Although I remained skeptical, I was happy enough to go along with my mother’s judgment. The difficulty of looking after my father increased as his body bloated and his left side withered, but I knew she would continue to look after him. She would keep up the good fight to the very end. In her heart of hearts, she believed it was her fate to look after her husband.

  One winter day, my father departed this world. Just as my mother had prayed, he went before her.

  But my mother could not accept it. Although his left side had steadily lost feeling, she had seen his right side getting stronger. He had to support himself with his strong side, so his right hand and right foot were surprisingly muscular. “I don’t understand how one fall could do it,” she said. “I saw him fall a thousand times. He didn’t even have any bruises. How could it happen just like that?”

  I dropped what I was doing in Beijing and rushed home. When I got there, she was still looking for some explanation. She was just about to head out when I walked in the door. She wanted to go from temple to temple demanding an explanation from the gods. I hurried over and blocked her way. She fell into my arms crying. “Maybe they didn’t understand me,” she said. “I didn’t think looking after him was a burden. When I made that prayer, all I meant was that I didn’t want him to be a burden on you. I would have looked after him until I was a hundred years old!”

  “They didn’t make a mistake,” I said. “Maybe it was just his fate to go. He lived a hard life, but he must have finally atoned for all of his sins.”

  My mother gaped at me. She thought for a moment and said, “Well, I guess you’re right. He was in pain for so many years, but he’s in a better place now. Let him enjoy it.”

  But the day after my father’s funeral, my mother started to see him in her dreams. “Your father must be in trouble,” she told me.

  “That’s not it,” I said. “He just misses you. He wanted to check on you.”

  “No, I have to help him.”

  “How are you going to help him? You don’t even know what his problem is.”

  “I’ll figure it out,” she said seriously.

  If you want to find out what’s happening down below, you have to find a shaman.

  Once you find a shaman, you can have them lend their body for the spirit of the deceased to speak through. This is called spirit-seeking.

  Where I come from, being a shaman is not a particularly unusual occupation. It is no more
outlandish to call yourself a shaman than it is to call yourself a doctor or a fisherman. When the topic of shamans came up, nobody betrayed the slightest hint of skepticism. Asking about a shaman was no different than asking for a recommendation of a stonemason. There was the same discussion of credentials and skills.

  My mother went in search of a shaman and came up with several possibilities. She heard about one on the west side of town who was especially good at making contact with those who had been deceased for many years. There was one up north, a village witch, who didn’t need to wait for the relatives to say anything but could immediately channel the deceased and have them introduce themselves and start recalling stories from the past, but everything was communicated in the form of opera. And there was another on the east side who required that the family members directly request the deceased and provide some details, but the shaman would press the spirit to recollect some memories as proof of identity, and the spirits spoke in their own voices rather than arias.

  After weighing all the pros and cons, my mother decided to go with the north side shaman.

  Shamanism might have been a regular profession in our hometown, but you had to be careful choosing one.

  The shaman’s job was to peer into the crack between worlds and locate the soul of the deceased, so there was considerable risk involved. Offending a supernatural being or becoming entangled with spirits could bring a great deal of trouble.

  My mother was hesitant when I asked to accompany her to see the shaman. She had heard that it was easier to contact a spirit if more family members were present, but there was also a superstition that the supernatural beings inhabiting the netherworld were easily attracted by the strong life force of younger people, so it might be risky for me to be there when we made contact, and my mother didn’t want me getting involved.

  When my mother told me why she was hesitant, my curiosity only increased. “Why don’t you pray to your friends over at the temple for some help?” I suggested. “Maybe they can give me some paper charms or something.”

  My mother thought it was a great idea. She spent the afternoon touring temples and came back with a dozen protective amulets and a bag of incense ash.

  My mother told me that not many of the gods agreed with her spirit-seeking to contact my father. Their reasoning, my mother suggested, was that life and death are decided by fate. We all have karmic debts to pay off in this life, and that’s up to fate, too. If we fail to pay off those debts, we move on to the afterlife to continue working at clearing the slate. Before the day comes when those debts have been paid off, there’s not much gods can do to intervene. “But then I asked them, what’s the point of doing good deeds in this life if it’s fine to leave our karmic debts to our afterlife? We do good deeds to atone for our sins in this life, right? Your father’s on his way to the next life, but there’s no reason he can’t try to clear those debts before he gets there.” I knew how my mother was. She refused to take no for an answer, even from the gods.

  “The gods agreed to bless our efforts,” she said, satisfied.

  My mother offered a stick of incense and mumbled what city and neighborhood she was from and whom she was looking for.

  I offered another stick of incense and said when he had died and how old he was.

  We kowtowed three times.

  After we finished the preliminaries, the shaman’s assistant invited us to wait in the courtyard.

  The shaman lived in a traditional home with two rows of brick buildings separated by a courtyard. It seemed that the shaman’s family had once been wealthy and powerful. As for why their descendant had become a shaman or why they seemed to have moved out en masse, there was no way for me to know.

  The shaman was stationed in the main room of the innermost house. There was a large altar, but it was impossible to tell what gods or idols were being worshipped, since the shaman, unlike most Hokkien people, had hung a yellow cloth in front of the shrine.

  Anyone arriving to make a request of a shaman needs to offer incense to the gods of the shaman’s shrine first, tell them what the purpose of the visit is, then kowtow three times. After that process is complete, the visitor is led to the second courtyard. When we arrived at the courtyard, the wooden door was closed behind us. The door seemed to be made of good wood. It was very heavy, and its lines true. It felt as if we were being locked out of our own world.

  We shared the courtyard with many other people who had come to request the shaman’s help. Some of them were pacing anxiously, trying to listen to what was going on inside the house, but most of them seemed too exhausted to move.

  From time to time, the sound of the shaman singing came from inside the house. “I am from such and such district,” he chanted, “such and such village. . . .” Then the shaman, in the voice of the deceased spirit, would announce a time of death and begin listing relatives who might be waiting to meet them.

  When the shaman found a match, the relatives in the courtyard would begin to wail, saying, “Yes, your brother is here,” or “Yes, your wife is here to see you!”

  The sound of chanting mixed with sobbing and wailing.

  When we arrived, the shaman’s assistant had told us, “There is no guarantee that he will be able to contact the spirit of your loved one. He has so many spirits coming to see him. If you hear your loved one speak through the shaman, you can answer back. But if there is no contact, you’ll have to make another appointment and come back.”

  As soon as I had a chance to sit for a moment and observe the spectacle, I started to have suspicions. This shaman probably sends someone out to pick up the obituaries and fish for information, I thought to myself. When the relatives arrive, he can randomly call out details in the voice of the departed spirit.

  I was just about to break the news to my mother when the sound of chanting came again: “I hope my relatives from Xizhai are waiting for me. I’m on my way, leaning on my cane.”

  As soon as she heard “cane,” my mother let out a gasp and dragged me into the house.

  The windows of the room had been completely blacked out, the only light coming from a dim lamp. The smell of agarwood filled the air. The shaman limped toward us. I still had my doubts, but I couldn’t deny that his bent back and shambling walk looked a lot like my father’s.

  “My son,” the shaman said, “I am sorry. I am worried about you.” I couldn’t contain the flood of emotion that burst forth. I broke down in tears.

  The shaman began to chant, letting my father speak through him. He said that he was not willing to leave, that he knew he had been a burden in the years after the stroke left him paralyzed, that he was thankful for my mother’s care, that he was worried about my future. After those lamentations, my father—speaking through the shaman—began to make his predictions: “My son was born under a scholar’s star, and he will bring fame to his family name. My wife has had half a lifetime of suffering, but things will change for the better in her old age. . . .”

  Tears ran down my mother’s face. Each word of the chants and lamentations was inscribed on my mother’s heart, but she barely listened to his prophecies for her future.

  “You were doing so well,” my mother cut in. “How could you go just like that? Why do you keep coming into my dreams? What do you need help with? Tell me what it is and how I can help you.”

  The interruption seemed to rattle the shaman. He stopped chanting, stood silently for a long time, and then his whole body began to tremble. The shaman’s assistant reprimanded her: “His connection to the spirit is very weak. If that connection is broken suddenly, the shaman might be harmed.”

  The shaman seemed to regain his composure and started chanting again, still channeling my father: “I should have lived many years longer, but bad luck caught up with me. The day I left your world, I had just stepped outside when five ghosts approached. One was red, and one was yellow, another blue, then a green one, and a purple one. . . . They saw that my hold on life was weak. They saw my disability and started t
o mock me. I lost my temper. I wasn’t ready to leave, but they dragged me out of my body, punishing me for getting angry at them. . . .”

  My mother began to wail and sob again. She was about to interrupt again, but the shaman’s assistant stopped her.

  “This was not meant to be my fate,” the shaman continued. “I drifted for a while after I left my body. The gods knew I was from a faithful home, so they brought me to them and told me I must deal with what was left unfinished, that I must atone for my sins, but for now I walk aimlessly, not sure where I’m going. . . .”

  “I’m going to do whatever it takes,” my mother said, unable to hold back.

  “Help me find my destination, help me find a way to atone.”

  “Tell me how.”

  My mother wanted to keep asking questions, but the shaman began to shudder again, and the assistant said, “He’s already gone.”

  After all was said and done, we were led over to make the final donation of two hundred yuan. On the way home, my mother continued to weep, but for me the spell had been broken, and I wanted to explain the trick to her.

  “I could tell right away it was fake,” I started.

  “I know it was your father. Stop.”

  “He must have gone out and got information about people who died in the area. . . .”

  My mother waved me off. She didn’t want to hear any of what I had to say. “I know he must have had some accident,” she said. “We have to help him.”

  “I want to help him, too, but I don’t believe in any of this. . . .”