Village of Stone

by Xiaolu Guo

  Actually, I wasn’t at all like a piece of red coral. I was more like a tiny pebble that had been flung up from the sea and fallen into one of the cracks between the cobblestones, to be trampled on by passing feet. Every day the fishermen, with their fishing nets and floaters in tow, would walk through the cobblestone alleys in their waterproof boots, and the fishermen’s wives would step over and around the shallow, circular bamboo baskets they used for drying shrimps. They would leave the cobblestones drenched. Then, at noon, the sun would emerge to evaporate the brackish water from the stones, so that soon, all the cobblestones were bleached a pure white and covered with a fine crust of dried sea salt. The house I grew up in was along one of those cobblestone alleyways skirting the sea. I was nothing more than a tiny stone – crusted in salt, silent, unnoticed and insignificant.

  The little lane on which we lived stretched from my grandmother’s doorstep all the way to the muddy roar of the sea. The cove near our house had once been a hideout for Japanese pirates, who would occasionally come up into the village to rape, loot, pillage and wreak general mayhem on the villagers. For this reason, our lane was known as ‘Pirate’s Alley’.

  When I was seven, I would go out every day during the typhoon season, to stand idly at the end of Pirate’s Alley and stare at the sea. The sea in the Village of Stone is rarely blue; in fact, the true colour of the sea is yellow-brown, the colour of soil, or a soil-coloured banner. I would stand and watch the typhoon winds churning the ocean into waves, not unlike a fisherman’s wife who waits year after year for her husband to return from the sea. The rough winds buffeted me until my skin, my hair, my eyes, even my fingernails took on the colour of the sea. I was a small, soil-coloured person. My entire body was the colour of dirt. The sea was my only friend, my constant, mysterious and awe-inspiring companion. Each day I would walk down the beach and wade into the sea. The sea was unusually pungent, and tasted strongly of salt. With each cresting wave, I was immersed in the sea to my very marrow.

  All my impressions of the Village of Stone begin with that cruel, muddy sea. The sound of the sea, the colour of the sea, its volume and surface area, its four seasons, its penchant for swallowing boats whole; the Sea Demon who gobbled up children from the shore during typhoon season, and the women who stood on the shore wailing for their lost men. At seven, the sea was something to be feared, something to be worshipped.

  ‘The only thing separating a sea scavenger from the Sea Demon is three inches of wooden plank.’

  Our next-door neighbour, the father of my best friend and the captain of his own fishing boat, used to say this often.

  That’s what the fishermen and women of the village called themselves, ‘sea scavengers’. They relied on the sea, or whatever they could beg, borrow or scavenge from the sea, to provide them with a living, and that’s how the name came about.

  Our next-door neighbour was a sea scavenger himself, with his own boat and crew. Everyone in the village called him ‘The Captain’. The Captain’s skin was the colour of brass, and I thought he was the bravest of all the sea scavengers in the village. He once caught a shark, and everyone in the village came to have some of his shark cartilage soup. You are what you eat, as the saying goes. People in the village said that shark cartilage soup strengthened your bones.

  At least, that’s what the Captain always said. The Captain was always saying things like that.

  I was often to be found by the Captain’s side in those days, and whenever a damaged boat came in from the sea, he would turn to me and say:

  ‘You know, Little Dog, the only thing separating a sea scavenger from the Sea Demon is three inches of wooden plank. You know that, don’t you, Little Dog?’

  The sea was all the Village of Stone had, the only nature it possessed. The village was built on a peninsula with no rivers, lakes or farmland, just the craggy, desolate mountain behind it that sloped down to the sea. The inhabitants of the Village of Stone built their houses, row upon row of them, on the lower slopes of the mountain, so that all the streets were at a sharp incline. This was partly to protect the houses from the tide, but more importantly, to prevent them from being swept away by the frequent typhoons.

  To help withstand the fierce typhoon winds, every year my grandmother and all the other villagers would climb on top of their houses to pile stones onto the black tile rooftops. We children were given the task of climbing the hill to collect stones. The more stones you could pile onto a rooftop, the less likely that it would be ripped off and carried away by the typhoons – assuming, of course, the weight of the stones themselves didn’t make the roof collapse first. And so the village was truly transformed into a Village of Stone: the houses were built from boulders found around the peninsula, the streets were paved with smaller pebbles, and even the rooftops were covered with piles of stones. No matter how you looked upon the village – from the ground, from the hillside, even from the sky above – it really was a village constructed entirely of stone.

  Nor was there even any soil in the village, for the constant storms that lashed the peninsula during typhoon season had eroded the ground bit by bit, until all the remaining topsoil had been washed away. The typhoons and rainstorms carried away everything they could – all the smallest, feeblest bits of matter, weeds and roots and seeds, dandelions growing up through the cracks in the walls – until the only things remaining were the large chunks of rock.

  Every year during the typhoons, the houses of the village were flooded and, after the storms had subsided, it was not unusual to find lone slippers and errant chopsticks bobbing up and down in pools of water. I remember once finding some golden incense burners floating around, along with a white statue of Guanyin, the Buddhist Goddess of Mercy, now rendered every bit as powerless as me, a mere child. Wading through water well past my knees, I finally caught sight of some grown-ups paddling towards me, and I began to cry and shout. At that moment, though, the grown-ups noticed the statue floating away and, horrified, hurried to fish it out of the water. Only then did they take me in their arms and carry me home to safety.

  I can’t remember now whether or not the Village of Stone had any trees. It seems to me that it was a place without any vegetation at all. It stands to reason that there must have been something, but the only green I can remember is the green of the fishing nets spread out on the shore. The nets looked just like green dragons sprawled out along the beach, knotted strands of green nylon twisting and tangling, coiling around the women as they worked, repairing the nets. There were always children scampering around, and although they were forever tripping and falling over the nets, they never cried. In fact, they could often be found sleeping peacefully, snuggled into thick piles of fishing nets.

  On the days the fishermen weren’t at sea, they would spread the green fishing nets out in the courtyards of their houses to dry in the sun. That’s right … the courtyards. Now I remember, there was greenery in the courtyards. In the winter, there were the green leaves of the narcissus plants with their long stalks. The villagers planted the narcissus in large nautilus shells filled with earth. I remember the rows of nautilus shells that lined the window sills of the houses during winter, each of the plants a profusion of green leaves and yellow flowers. All winter those narcissus plants would perch on the window sills like tiny statues of Guanyin. But the minute spring arrived, bringing with it the southerly winds, every narcissus would wither overnight. It was as if someone in the village had blown a whistle, sending some signal to the plants that caused their yellow flowers to wither en masse.

  Nor did I ever encounter spring in the Village of Stone. Spring? What was spring? I remember springtime only as the season that brought southerly winds and rainstorms gusting into the village. The hot, wet southerlies blew from the surface of the ocean, seeping into every last house of the Village of Stone, making the walls so damp they seemed to be perspiring. The wind brought with it a dripping heaviness that wound itself around your body, penetrating your hair, your skin, your every pore. It was
like beeswax, gluing the inhabitants of the village to that sheet of dirt-coloured ocean. Even on days when the skies were clear as far as the eye could see and sunshine reflected from the surface of that boundless sea, you could feel the damp gusts of wind on your skin and know that the rain was not far off.

  When I was seven years old, I would stand at the end of Pirate’s Alley, watching the tide recede from the shoreline to reveal the jagged edges of reef, gazing at the fishermen’s wives, who sat along the beach and chattered as they wove their fishing nets, white gardenias tucked into their hair. I see now that my memory has been playing tricks on me because those white gardenias also grew in the courtyards. That tiny, cloyingly fragrant flower that the fishermen’s wives would weave into their shiny coils of hair somehow managed to survive the storms, its fine white petals bursting into bloom as the typhoons raged all around. I remember the plants clearly now, sprouting from cracked pottery jars in the fishermen’s courtyards. Sometimes people would plant the gardenias in rusty chamber pots that had belonged to somebody’s ageing father or grandfather and been recycled after he died. Just before autumn, the gardenia flowers would start to wither up and bear fruit, a small yellow fruit that the fisherwomen plucked from the plants to grind with a mortar and pestle into a sort of dye. The more aesthetically inclined village women would dye their plain white cotton shirts in a basin filled with the fragrant dye. Afterwards, they could be seen proudly sporting these bright yellow shirts through the streets.

  And there is another fragrance wafting through my memories of the Village of Stone. How could I have forgotten the jasmine trees next to the primary school where we all went when we were eight? The fragrant white jasmine blossomed all over the small playground, suffusing it with the spirit of jasmine, turning it into an expanse of snow-white flowers. It got so that it became impossible to play with a skipping rope or run around because of the branches of jasmine. At the morning flag ceremony, the fragrant blossoms even obscured the red flag that was hoisted up in the playground. As we raised our hands over our heads in salute, we would search around for the flag that we were supposed to be saluting, only to find that it had been swallowed up by an expanse of jasmine. Later, when the fragrance of jasmine became too overpowering, the students would become giddy with the scent, some of them allergic and sneezing, others fighting and stumbling beneath the branches. The scent would seep out of the schoolyard and waft through the entire village. Sometimes the village women would come to break off large branches and take them home to dry in the sun. When the flowers had dried, the women would tuck them into the family’s bedding and storage chests during the rainy season.

  ‘The sea is meant to be eaten,’ my grandfather used to say. He claimed that everything in the sea was edible: sea urchins, sea cucumbers, starfish, algae, kelp, even rocks from the reef, which he said could be sucked. My grandfather was fiercely adamant about this.

  ‘Even the reef can be sucked and eaten.’ I would imitate my grandfather as I said this, sounding as fiercely adamant as he.

  Every day, the tide would recede to reveal the black reef, covered with a layer of lichen green. Underneath the reef were clumps of oysters, so well camouflaged in their slate-grey shells that they were easily mistaken for the pointed edges of the reef. In the crevices between the rocks you could see dark-blue mussel shells, and inside these, the fleshy, salmon-pink mussels that we called ‘sea vermilions’. We would sometimes also find a particularly disgusting type of sea organism in amongst the rocks – slippery, luridly coloured creatures with long protuberant heads that adhered to the surface of the rocks and, when you cut or bit into them, oozed a thick, yellowish fluid. The villagers called them ‘sea pricks’ and said they looked exactly like a certain part of a man’s body. Whenever someone raised the subject of the sea pricks – usually when the grown-ups had been sitting around drinking, telling stories and eating salted peanuts – everyone would laugh.

  One of the men would say: ‘I’ll be damned if I can sleep at night lately.’

  And another would say: ‘Can’t sleep at night? Well, just boil yourself up some of them sea pricks. They’ll give you strength.’

  And the man who couldn’t sleep at night would answer: ‘Who needs more strength? I’d get even less sleep then!’

  Then someone else would shout: ‘If you had more strength, you could make it with your wife! Then you’d sleep just fine!’

  At this, everyone would burst into riotous laughter, knock back a few more shots of sorghum whisky, and before long, the salted peanuts would be gone.

  The men used boil the sea pricks into a kind of broth, to which they would add ginger to make a thick, muddy-looking soup. It was said to be a very good tonic – even my grandmother said so. But of course, she never made the soup for me.

  The coarseness of life in the Village of Stone derived from the sea. From the time I was small, I knew the ocean to be the most profound of things; she gave birth to everything, devoured everything. We lived and died by her. The brave fishermen who ventured out into her belly sometimes returned with their plunder; sometimes they didn’t return at all. In the same way, many of the fishing boats and nets that the fishermen dragged along the coast ended up buried at sea. To me, the sea was more terrifying than death.

  Every day, I would stand on the beach watching the tide recede, waiting for the fishing boats to return. I never knew how the horde of boats knew to come in at the same time; whether they’d arranged the time in advance, or whether they’d made the decision based on the position of the sun in the sky. At any rate, the boats would always come in to shore together, the sound of their motors preceding them. The sound drew everyone in the village – old folk, children and fishermen’s wives – out of their houses and onto the foaming shore to wait for the boats.

  The oil from the boat engines polluted the beach and covered the surface of the harbour with an oily film, creating whorls of rainbow-coloured oil slicks. The oil even made its way into the bodies of the fish that swam in these waters. As the fishermen turned off their engines for the approach to port, you could see the piles of fish stacked on the decks of the fishing boats: mountains of shimmering fish, transparent shrimp, black mussels and sea eels. The fishing boats coming home with their catch were entirely different from the fishing boats that had set out empty-handed early one morning. They were coming home with a bellyful.

  As the setting sun threw into relief the silhouettes of the fishermen and their fishing boats, the fishermen’s wives, who had spent many long days and nights awaiting the return of their men from the sea, excitedly called out their husbands’ names. With children in tow, the women rushed towards their respective boats. It was at times like these that I felt the loneliest, because I knew that my own father wouldn’t be on any of those fishing boats. Nor was my mother one of the women sitting on the shore, weaving rings of white gardenia or making fishing nets. As for my grandfather, he had retired from the sea long ago and was now just an old man who sold cigarettes in the street. My grandmother had been born on the ‘outside’ and so would always be considered an outsider in the Village of Stone. This vast and endless ocean, this stretch of sandy beach, the triumphant return of the fishermen with their bounty, the exultant welcome of the families – this was a scene in which I, as a lone seven-year-old, had absolutely no part.

  After the drama of triumphant return had been played out, the beach lay silent, littered with the dead bodies of the fish and shrimp that had been discarded by the fishmongers. The sea was completely empty now; no sails skimming across its surface, nobody waiting along its shores, just the sea breezes and the distant shouts of women calling their children home to dinner. Their voices echoed from the hillside, calling out their children’s names: Boy Waiting, Number Three, Dee Fu, Dee Cee. These were the names of my childhood playmates.

  Boy Waiting was the seventh in a line of consecutive baby girls born to our next-door neighbour the Captain and his wife. Her parents were very anxious for a son, so they named their daugh
ter ‘Boy Waiting’ to indicate that they were still waiting for a boy. This name, they hoped, would hasten the birth of a son. Boy Waiting had an older sister named Golden Phoenix, the effective leader of that family of girls. I thought Golden Phoenix was the most beautiful girl in the whole Village of Stone. Golden Phoenix loved to sing the traditional local opera, and was as graceful and willowy as a cherry tree. With her tiny mouth and lovely long hair she looked like one of the beautiful actresses who played the role of Lin Meimei in the famous tragic love story, Dream of Red Mansions. Boy Waiting, unfortunately, resembled me much more than she did her sister. Both of us were tomboys through and through, unattractive children with dark skin and unruly hair, and runny noses that we were constantly wiping on our sleeves. Most people viewed the two of us as repulsive little urchins.

  As for Number Three, she was a little girl with an unpleasantly swollen right cheek. When she was small, she had eaten some kind of wild fruit growing on the slopes of the mountain. The very same day, she came down with a high fever and became so ill that she could hardly breathe. In time, the fever subsided, but the right side of her face remained swollen. Her parents took her to the village clinic, where the doctors gave her acupuncture, inserting the needles directly into her cheek, but they weren’t able to get rid of the swelling. And so Number Three, who had always been a cute little child, was suddenly transformed into an ugly little girl with a swollen right cheek.

  My other playmates were two brothers, Dee Fu and Dee Cee, whom my grandmother called my ‘nephews’. Dee Fu and Dee Cee were older than me, so I have no idea why they called me their auntie. My grandmother, who still believed in things like family rank and pedigree, didn’t seem to think it at all unusual that I had become an auntie to boys from a ‘lesser’ family. Dee Fu and Dee Cee were wild boys who, by the ages of three and four, were already swimming in the ocean and catching mudskippers with their bare hands. I think they thought me a very strange auntie, something of a village freak. Because I had never had any parents, it was as if I were some creature who had leaped up from the stones that paved Pirate’s Alley.