Village of Stone

by Xiaolu Guo

  At seven, I was the only remaining link between those two old people. But as I found myself being pushed and pulled from one to the other, my grandparents remained completely unaware that I had taken neither side. I was like the vast ocean – immersed in my own thoughts, appearing now and again only to recede once more into the distance, living each and every day solely within my own ebb and flow.

  In most of the houses facing onto our lane, the front part of the ground floor was given over to a small shop selling rice noodles, spirits or hairdressing services, while pigs were kept in the back. We, however, had nothing on the ground floor of our house except the kitchen. From its ceiling hung a dried eel that my grandmother could never quite bring herself to eat, so it hung from the rafters year after year, slowly hardening until it looked more like a museum specimen than something you would actually want to eat. The cistern used for storing water was a large porcelain vat occupying a whole corner of the kitchen. On top of the cistern was a hollow scoop, made from a small dried pumpkin, which we used for ladling water. Next to the cistern was a wood-burning stove with a set of drawers that acted as bellows. On the wall, there was a cupboard filled with dishes and utensils and, below that, two small white porcelain statues of Guanyin, the Goddess of Mercy, and Mazu Niangniang, the Sea Goddess. Next to the kitchen door was the large wooden dining table, flanked by two long, narrow benches.

  Other than that, there was nothing of value on the ground floor of the house. A set of steep wooden stairs connected it with the first and second floors of the house. My grandmother lived on the first floor, my grandfather on the second. On each landing was a red lacquer chamber pot, one belonging to my grandmother, the other to my grandfather. My grandfather’s chamber pot had been bequeathed to him by his parents. The red lacquer surface had faded away entirely, exposing the original wood beneath, and a high curved handle jutted from the top. My grandmother’s chamber pot was newer, having been purchased as a part of her wedding trousseau. The traditional scarlet character signifying ‘double happiness’ was still visible on the seat; even the red lacquer on the surface of the handle was still intact. These two chamber pots served as the points demarcating my grandparents’ separate worlds.

  My grandmother cooked her meals on the wood-burning stove in the kitchen and my grandfather cooked his meals on a small single-burner stove on the second floor. There was rarely anything good to eat in the kitchen. Not only was my grandmother a Buddhist who didn’t believe in eating meat, she had lost all her teeth and could not chew solid food. This, combined with the fact that my grandparents kept their funds strictly separate and my grandmother was always very poor, meant that, for almost every meal, she cooked vegetable gruel or something similarly boiled into mush. This was seasoned with shrimp, crab or fish paste, which we ate on alternating days. Crab paste was made by soaking raw shelled crabs in a mixture of salt and alcohol for three days, after which the paste was ready to be eaten. As for the fish paste, it was so overpoweringly salty that a tiny pinch was enough to season two bowls of gruel. There was always a bottle of apparently endless shrimp paste perched on the dining table in the kitchen. It seemed that we had been eating that same bottle of shrimp paste for ever and yet it remained full.

  Very occasionally my grandmother added some shredded fish or bits of pork to the gruel, which she would pick out with her chopsticks for me to eat, but, other than the boiled fish balls she made for holidays, these were the most sumptuous meals she prepared.

  Often, as I was sitting with my grandmother at the large, wooden table, my grandfather would come home and see me sipping my gruel. He would take one look at the contents of my bowl and make a beeline for the stairs, without so much as casting a glance at my grandmother. A few minutes after he had gone upstairs, I would hear the sound of something being stir-fried and soon afterwards, the delicious smell of food would waft downstairs. I would hear my grandfather calling me: ‘Little Dog! Little Dog …’ If I didn’t answer to that, he would call me by my real name, Coral. Having finished my bowl of gruel, I would glance at my grandmother. She would turn her back to me and pretend to wash the dishes, signalling that she meant me to go upstairs. And so, with my belly already full, I would climb the stairs to the second floor to eat my grandfather’s cooking. My grandfather ate meat at every meal. Sometimes he would prepare a freshly caught eel or pork cooked in a clay pot, to which he added soy sauce for flavouring. His meals were delicious, and I always gobbled them down. It was as if I were a born refugee, a little soil-coloured refugee who, having starved to death in a previous life, was given twice her share in the next. Each mealtime was divided between my grandmother and grandfather, so I always ate twice. For this reason, my belly was usually swollen as round as a pumpkin. When I ate meals with my grandfather, we never spoke. The only noises were the sound of chewing or the sound of my grandmother downstairs beating a wooden fish drum as she chanted her sutras.

  As I grew older, I gradually gleaned from the older residents of the Village of Stone the origins of my grandparent’s falling-out. They claimed that it was mainly my grandmother’s fault. The key, they told me, was that my grandmother did not know how to behave. Later, however, I realised that my grandmother’s most fatal error was simply not being born in the Village of Stone.

  The villagers looked down on my grandmother from the very first day she arrived in my grandfather’s household. That day, as she was upstairs washing off the dirt from her long trek in a large wooden tub, her new husband’s family was preparing a meal to welcome her. It was to be the first and last time that anyone cooked for her in the Village of Stone. The table was laden with all sorts of freshly caught seafood – tiny crucian sea carp, long narrow hairtail and even some freshly caught razor clams, which my grandmother, having grown up in a mountain village, had never seen before. Afraid to try the clams, my grandmother decided to eat the fish instead. Unfortunately, she had no inkling of the complex set of rules governing the eating of fish in the Village of Stone. For the villagers, descended from generation upon generation of fishermen, a boat was home, the sea was life itself, and fish were a symbol of every type of good or bad fortune that could possibly befall a fisherman.

  On that first day, in the presence of her newly adoptive parents-in-law and a husband ten years her senior, my grandmother looked at the bones of the fish they had just picked clean and decided that it would be a good idea to turn the fish over with her chopsticks. As soon as she overturned the fish, her father-in-law, who had been the captain of a fishing boat for his entire life, became extremely agitated, as did her mother-in-law. My grandfather, who had only been at sea a short time but had already had several bad experiences, was even more furious, for the conventional wisdom of the village fishermen dictated that a fish should never be overturned at the dinner table, lest their boats capsize at sea. If a person wanted to eat the underside of a fish, he or she was supposed to use chopsticks to dig the meat out from underneath. This newly adopted daughter-in-law, raised in the mountains and ignorant of the rules for eating fish, had committed the cardinal sin: she had capsized a fish in the presence of two fishermen. The faces around the table grew stony. Had it not been a beginner’s honest mistake, my grandmother would have been driven away from the table with blows and curses. As it was, my grandfather’s family managed to keep their anger to themselves and refrain from cursing her outright.

  In the course of a meal in the Village of Stone, however, there were many other fishermen’s rules to consider. For example, it was unacceptable to poke out the eyes of a fish and eat them because the villagers painted their fishing boats to look like large fish with red eyes. The bow of each boat was painted blue, the hull black and white and the stern yellow. The red eyes painted on the side of the fishing boats symbolised a boat’s ‘eyes’. Removing these eyes was thought to ‘blind’ the boat, rendering it unable to see the catch or avoid being run aground on the reef. After capsizing the fish, my grandmother sensed the family’s muffled anger and so did not dare to eat any
more of the meat from the overturned fish. Instead, she modestly took a few bites of rice, removed the eyes of the fish with her chopsticks and began to eat them. My great-grandfather could stand it no longer. He ordered his twelve-year-old adoptive daughter-in-law away from the family table and into the kitchen to finish her meal alone. As for her mother-in-law, she slammed her chopsticks down and abruptly left the table. Witnessing this scene, my grandfather realised that it was already too late to return the wedding gifts and get rid of this unwelcome bride, so he refused to speak to her instead.

  After that, my grandmother was permanently banished from the family’s dining table. She lived most of her life consigned to the kitchen, where she stoked the fires and prepared the meals, emptied the chamber pots and shelled the shrimp, did the dusting and made the fish balls. But my grandmother was unable to keep the curse of the sea at bay for long. Soon after the dinner table incident, both my great-grandfather and my grandfather met with mishaps while at sea, mishaps that they promptly blamed on my grandmother.

  My grandmother gradually came to understand the rules of the villagers, or at least was able to gain some mastery of traditional village etiquette and prohibitions. By that time, however, it was too late for my grandfather to begin liking her. She had made far too many unforgivable mistakes. For example, after she finished washing the pots and pans, she would throw the dirty water outside into the street. This was fine, because all the residents of the village were in the habit of throwing their used dishwater out into the cobbled streets. The cracks between the stones were large enough for the water to disappear quickly into the crevices. But there came a day when my grandmother threw used dishwater out into the street and onto the head of a passing fisherman. The unfortunate man, soaked to the skin, unleashed a torrent of abuse upon my grandmother. He claimed that he would never be able to set out to sea again because if he did, he was sure to meet with a typhoon that would capsize his boat. As the fisherman stood in the middle of Pirate’s Alley bemoaning his cursed fate, he attracted quite a number of curious onlookers. My grandfather’s house was rather unfortunately located in the middle of one of the village’s main thoroughfares, so all the neighbours from one end of the street to the other heard the altercation. Within a minute, the fisherman’s wife, who was even more superstitious than her husband, came running from a neighbouring lane to see what the commotion was all about. As she pushed her way through the crowd and caught sight of my grandmother, she began hurling invective, heaping curses upon my grandmother and several generations of my grandmother’s ancestors.

  At that very moment, my grandfather returned from the market to find a large crowd of angry villagers blocking the entrance to his house. Terribly humiliated by the whole scene, my grandfather snatched up a broom from the doorway and, in full view of the crowd, began to beat my grandmother about the head. This seemed to placate public anger somewhat, but there was still compensation to be made. In order to dispel the terrible curse that my grandmother had wrought on that poor fisherman, not to mention eight generations of his descendants, simply by pouring water on his head, my grandfather had no choice but to offer the man a bottle of his finest liquor and a packet of expensive cigarettes. With this token of apology and compensation, the matter was finally laid to rest.

  I think that must have been the first time my grandfather beat my grandmother in public. Afterwards, my grandmother refused to speak, nursing her grievances in silence. She became furtive and timid, as if she lived in fear of making another mistake. Her silence and submissiveness, however, only served to fuel my grandfather’s hatred towards her.

  It seems to me, though, that my grandmother’s true enemy was not my grandfather, but the entire Village of Stone, where she would always be an outsider. While the other village women sat on the beach weaving fishing nets and waiting for their men to return with the catch, my grandmother stood alone in the surf. She had no real connection with that ocean. None of those returning fishing boats held any spoils for her, or any catch, or any long-awaited man. Ostracised by the village women and the fishermen, who avoided her like the plague, my grandmother had nothing to do with the returning boats, the typhoons at sea or the incense smoke that filled the temple of the Sea Goddess. The Village of Stone and the sea of the Village of Stone had earned my grandmother’s lifelong enmity.

  6

  AFTER EACH MEAL shared with my grandparents, I would recede from their house and into my own hidden world. That world was my darkness, my midnight, my secret hell – and it was under the absolute control of the village mute.

  The mute was not old. He had short, black hair, a strong build and seemed to be in his late thirties or early forties. He never dressed like the village fishermen, with their shirts of coarse blue cloth and baggy silken trousers tied around the ankles to keep out the sea winds and moisture. All year round, he could be seen wearing the same very proper grey Mao suit. The mute was not a sea scavenger and, like most of the men in the village who did not fish, was considered a bit odd. Anyone who didn’t fish was either too old to be out at sea, physically disabled, seriously injured or chronically tubercular. But maybe the reason the mute did not fish was simply because he was mute.

  When the mute was not gesturing or using sign language, he appeared to be no different from anyone else, at least on the outside, but there was something hidden in his face, some profound malevolence and slyness. When he moved his hands in frenzied sign language, you could also see that he had an enormous black birthmark on the back of his hand. It seemed to me that the black birthmark possessed some sort of evil power over him.

  I don’t know why the mute chose me. Perhaps he knew that I was the village orphan, the only child in the village with neither a mother nor a father. Perhaps he knew that my grandparents hated each other and that there was no one else to take care of me. Perhaps he was simply aware that I was timid and helpless, unable to fight back or defend myself. Whatever the reason, at the age of seven I experienced my first terror of men. It was a terror that came in the form of the mute.

  The mute lived on one of the lanes adjacent to Pirate’s Alley. Pirate’s Alley was the longest street in the village and was intersected at various points by a number of smaller alleyways. Like a giant fishing net, it gathered up the other alleyways and dragged them towards the coast and out to sea. It was so narrow and winding that, in some places, it was hard not to brush against the stone walls of the houses on either side, even when walking alone. The villagers, who often carried things on shoulder poles, had to estimate the angle of each turn well in advance if they wished safely to negotiate the twists and turns. The greenish cobblestones of the alley were always damp, drenched with saltwater spray from the ocean and freshwater spilled from buckets that the villagers carried down from the well on the far side of the mountain. The road was rough and uneven and the crevices between the cobblestones were filled with tiny shrimps and dead fish. It reminded me of the ocean floor, the Underwater lair of the Sea Demon.

  As I threaded my way down the alley, past one narrow turn and then another, I never knew when or in which unexpected corner I might run into the mute. At first he didn’t look dangerous. He would smile and gesture to me using his sign language, although I was never able to work out exactly what he was trying to say. But the moment there were no other people around, he would turn ugly and frightening, and begin to follow me. I would pretend to ignore him and continue on my way down the alley, but it soon became obvious from the sound of my footsteps that I was running, the mute close on my seven-year-old heels. I remember how he would follow me all the way to the end of Pirate’s Alley, to the point at which the houses disappeared and the ocean came into view.

  My favourite place in the Village of Stone was the old meeting hall at the end of the peninsula. The hall had originally been used as headquarters by the local civilian militia, but now that they had nothing to do and no battles to fight, it was used for film screenings and performances by the local opera troupe. The films and operas shown
there were well-known pieces such as Dream of Red Mansions, The Emerald Hairpin, Gold Mountain Under Water or The Legend of Lady White Snake. I loved to go and watch them, delighting in finding elaborate ways to sneak past the ticket collectors and avoid paying.

  One afternoon, as I was walking idly down the alley, I saw the mute waiting for me. Instinctively I started to run towards the meeting hall, but when I reached it, I realised that a film had started. Where could I run? I ducked into the ladies’ toilet. When I emerged a while later and dashed past the usher with his torch, I thought that I was safe, that I must have managed to lose the mute. I walked through the darkness and took a seat in the front row. The film was one I had seen many times before – Meng Lijun – but it was such a relief to feel safe that I soon found myself caught up in the familiar story of the young woman, Meng Lijun, who dresses up as a boy to rescue her father. A few minutes later, however, I saw the mute groping his way down the aisles. When he sat down next to me, I began to feel frightened, but I didn’t dare to do anything. I was too frightened to scream, to run or, most of all, to cry. All I could do was watch as the mute stretched out his hand, pulled down the loose elastic waistband of my trousers and put his hand inside my clothes. His hand, with that hideous black birthmark, was like an enormous pair of tongs holding my body fast within its grip. He spent the entire film rubbing and pinching me through my underpants.