by Justin Hill
Wei-fang had tugged his sleeve and jumped up and down and his father had said, “Yes. Why not?”
Wei-fang started to go daily, not weekly, and then twice a day and stay for hours. He learned quickly and was not afraid of hard work. It was refreshing to be with an adult so unlike either of his parents. Neither his mother’s fussy adoration, nor his father’s vacant smiles. Here was a man who watched him so closely he could lift his fingers a little higher, or change the angle of his bent elbow a fraction, or the bend in his knee. “Good,” he would say when Wei-fang did well. And when he was lazy, or tired, or sick of taking up the same stance over and over, Master Zhang would tut and shake his head and look at him with disappointment. “No,” he would say. “Not good.”
At first Wei-fang sulked. But sulking got him nowhere with the old man, so he tried something new: pushing himself, being as strict as the old man, stricter sometimes. In those months he flourished. He took on an adult air. He was calm, focused, managed his feelings, spoke his mind.
Wei-fang was proud of all of the changes with Master Zhang, but they disturbed his mother, and as she privately fretted at his father, they disturbed him too.
Wei-fang did not know what to do. Returning home each night became a more and more difficult experience. It was like the kite that flies high in the air, soaring as free as a bird, being wound unwillingly back to the ground, where it sat clumsy and awkward.
At dinner with his parents, Wei-fang learned to keep his silence.
His mother tried to charm him with the treats she had charmed him with as a child. “Sesame crackers,” she would say. “Sugared plums!”
“I’m not a child,” he said.
“Don’t speak to your mother like that,” his father said, and the silence returned.
The next morning Wei-fang was up before dawn, and the old man was waiting for him. “Good!” he would say. “Have you practiced?”
“Yes, master.”
“Show me.”
The old man sniffed and spat as he watched.
“Faster,” Master Zhang would say. “Quicker. Harder, with more conviction. You’re a warrior, not a baby!”
Wei-fang trained until the sweat ran down his face in streams. He squatted in the horse stance until his thigh muscles burned and his whole body trembled like a bamboo leaf.
One day Master Zhang seemed sad. “Wei-fang, you are good. Very good. I have not seen one so committed. You have something special, I think. Something more than I can teach.”
“What are you saying?”
“I am saying,” the old man said sadly, “you need another master. A better master.”
“But I have you.”
“Yes, but I will not be here for long.”
“You look so well.”
“I am old.”
Wei-fang didn’t know what to say.
The old man looked at him. “If you are serious about your skill you should go to the Twelve-Sided Pagoda. There are great masters there. They can teach you.”
“Where is this place?”
“South,” the old man said, “and east. In the mountains there is a great valley, near the temple of the Shaolin monks. There are many temples there. Many schools of learning. Many great masters . . .”
That night his parents sat Wei-fang down.
“No,” his father said. “Listen. Your mother is worried.”
His mother sat forward. She spoke kindly at first. “All this training,” she said. “It is time you put such childish things aside, and think about your future.”
“It is not childish,” Wei-fang said.
“Listen, you are our only child. We are not young, your father is already retired. If you go to the mountains to study, who will look after us? We cannot let you go to some mountain master, to train to be a fighting man. It is not right. It is not how a gentleman should live,” she said. “You have all a man could desire. Wealth, education, learning. Stay home. Be a good son. Study hard. Your father will help you pass the civil service exams. He will help you find a good job.”
Wei-fang felt her words like a cage that was being built around him. “But I don’t want that,” he said.
His mother looked at him. “Wei-fang,” she said, “you are still a child. You do not know anything about the world. We will choose for you. We know what is best.”
He felt his stomach ache. “But I want to be a warrior. Master Zhang says it is all about self-discipline. Honor, fighting evil. That is why I learn. He says I am good.”
His mother looked at him. She had based all her fortunes within her husband’s family on him, a male child. His birth raised her from the common position of a concubine, easily dropped and discarded, to a proper wife, with all the status and respect that brought. And when First Wife died childless, his mother had been promoted and now she acted as if she had always been First Wife. It was a matter of pride to her, and now her eyes brimmed with tears as she slowly raised her sleeve to cover her face. “I see it all now. You do not love us. What have we done to raise such an ungrateful child? I carried you into this world and this is how you repay our love and care.” She lifted her sleeves to hide her face from him, and Wei-fang felt humbled and selfish for following what would make him happy at the expense of all around him.
The worst sins for Buddhists were injuring a Buddha, killing a holy man, then matricide, then patricide; for Confucians the worst was unfilial behavior. But in this household, nothing was more heinous than the sin of making his mother cry.
She sobbed like an opera singer and Wei-fang felt such guilt. He was an ungrateful child. He wanted to do what she wanted. How could he be so ungrateful? he thought. “I’m sorry. I did not know that this would cause you so much pain. I swear I will stop this. I will study hard. I will be a good son.”
Next day Master Zhang nodded sadly as Wei-fang stood before him and told him what his mother had decided. He folded back his sleeves and half smiled. “I cannot stop you if you mean to go but I shall miss you. You have talent. Not many can say that. With teaching you could become very fine!”
In the years that followed, Wei-fang always remembered how his master had said those words. Always thought about what might have been, if his fate had been different. But he wanted to please his parents more than anything, even though it made him miserable. He would wear the clothes they set out for him, even though they fitted him less and less.
For two years Wei-fang kept his word. He had folded up his wushu clothes, put away his martial training, stopped dreaming of a life of adventure and challenge. He focused on his Confucian texts, read all the Imperial Edicts, made his parents proud. And he became more and more miserable, until he felt he would explode like a New Year firecracker, where powder is packed into a paper cylinder, and remains quiet until the fuse is lit and it tears itself apart in the explosion.
One day Wei-fang was returning from his tutor’s house. There was a funeral procession blocking his usual road home, so he took a detour and after half an hour’s walking found himself on a street he knew, passing Master Zhang’s medicine shop. “Honor your teacher as if he is jade,” Confucius had written. And armed with those words he knocked on the door, and called out Master Zhang’s name.
He did not think anything bad would come from going in to visit his old master, to pay his respects. He pushed in, and a young woman came out from behind the counter. He did not know her. She had a pleasant face, wide at the eyes with a small, delicate mouth and a curious lopsided smile.
His dress, as a young scholar, with writing brush under one arm and a set of books under the other, always impressed. He smiled back, and saw she had a limp, and as she came out from behind the counter, he saw that one of her legs was shorter than the other.
“Can I help?” she said.
“Yes. I was looking for Master Zhang.”
“Oh,” she said. “He’s dead.”
Wei-fang felt his heart sink. He was still new to death: its suddenness, its permanence, its finality.
The girl nodded. “Six months since.”
Wei-fang felt as though he were standing before a locked door, searching for a crack or hole he might peep through. “Was he sick?”
“He was old. It is the same, I think. And he was sad.” She pointed to her leg. There were the ruffled scars of healed sores. “He took me in and healed me, and I stayed on. His old assistant left to get married and there was no one else to take over the shop. He taught me a little. I tried to keep him going, but he had already given up hope.”
Wei-fang felt as though these words were aimed at him. They were like a needle that lances the boil and brings the inflammation to the surface. He thanked her and apologized. He seemed a little confused as he bumbled back out of the door. She seemed almost sad that he was leaving, and he stopped. “I’m sorry, I didn’t ask your name.”
“Plum Blossom,” she said.
“Thank you, Plum Blossom. I should like to pay my respects. Where is he buried?”
She described the place, and then seemed unwilling to let him go, and asked, “Were you his student?”
Wei-fang made a face. “Well. I learned a little.” She was standing looking up at him in a way that made him shy. “You know, I really should go.”
That night he was sad when he told his parents that the old man was dead.
“You should not have gone there,” his mother said.
He looked at her, and did not know how she could be so self-centered at this moment, when he was sharing his sorrow with her. It was typical, he thought, that she was concerned only with herself. “I could not pass by and not pay my respects.”
“Hmm!” she said.
Wei-fang kept his mouth shut. “I thought you would be pleased. A student must respect his master, Confucius said. Didn’t he, Father?”
His father looked up from an illuminated version of the Diamond Sutra he liked to read. “Hmm, what? Yes. You did right.”
It was only later, when his mother had gone to bed, that Wei-fang got his father’s full attention.
“Master Zhang is dead, you say?”
“Yes, Father. There is a girl running the shop now. She was taken in and healed. He adopted her. Maybe we can buy our medicine from there again. I do not think she has many customers. It would be a good deed.”
“Yes,” his father said. “Right. Yes. There are so many ways to earn good karma in this world. You are a good-hearted boy. I’m proud of you.”
Wei-fang felt lighter hearing these words. It was rare for his father to say anything affectionate like this. He usually looked up from a book or scroll and made noncommittal grunts.
“Father, I am sad that Master Zhang died. I feel I should have kept going to see him. I feel it is my fault.”
“What? No. Surely not. He was old. Old age kills us all in the end. Then it is our time to come back again, in another life. He is already back in the world. Don’t grieve. He might be living in the next street. There was a baby born there. Or he might be a young chick in the nest.” His father laughed. “Life is a blessing indeed!”
Wei-fang smiled. He found his father’s religious beliefs slightly disconcerting. He had been so serious and solemn when he was a civil servant, but since he had retired he had started to seem more and more like a child.
He sat quietly, keeping his father company, and then he stood up. “Good night, Father,” he said.
“Oh,” his father replied, “are you still here? I quite forgot. Good night, my child.”
Wei-fang bowed and made his way to the door. His father stopped him. “Wei-fang,” he said, “I am sorry that Master Zhang is dead. He was a kind man. Yes, I think it is fitting that you go to his tomb and pay your respects. His ghost would like that.”
“Thank you, Father. I will.”
“Just don’t tell your mother.”
“No, Father, I won’t.”
“She would make a scene. Good deeds done in private are still seen by the Buddha.”
“I’m sure he sees us all.”
“Indeed he does. I can feel him like a shadow. He comes with me all day. It is humbling that he should lavish such attention on our family. I am sure we don’t deserve it.”
Wei-fang’s smile faded a little. “Yes. I’m sure. Good night, Father.”
The tomb was on a hillside a mile from the west gate. It was simple, with a carved headstone with his master’s name. Wei-fang took out dumplings and meatballs, burned incense and said a prayer.
He wore a simple dark blue scholar’s gown, and started to pay his respects on every seventh day, four times each moon, and on the day of the new moon Plum Blossom came with him. She waited for him by the gate, and when he appeared she was shining and eager.
“Let me take the basket,” he said, and when her foot was too sore, he would carry her on his back. “You’re light as a willow wand,” he said, and when he put her down she blushed.
“You know Master Zhang talked about you.”
“Really?”
“He said, ‘I had a student who had such natural skill, such talent, but his mother would not let him study. Now they have made him into a scholar. It is like turning the mighty mountain pine tree into chopsticks. It is a waste. It is against the nature of the world.’”
“He must have been talking about someone else,” Wei-fang replied, but he thought about the words as the long cedar needles combed the slight breeze. It was a soft sound, like a gently foaming stream, or the roar of the wind heard when lying snug in bed.
It had a sad note to it, and made him think of the mountains, the high hermit temples where wushu masters lived. Chopsticks were used and washed and then thrown away. It was not what he wanted from this life.
5
The day before Wei-fang’s seventeenth birthday his mother came to him, a fox-fur muff in one hand. He could still feel the welt on his cheek. His mother drew herself up, as if speaking to him were a great effort, but then she forced a smile, and there was a desperate look in her eyes.
“Tomorrow is your birthday. I have a special lunch.”
He sighed. “Long-life noodles?” It was always long-life noodles.
She nodded, and came into his room to sit next to him.
“I am sorry I struck you,” she said.
He nodded.
“Can it be the same between us?”
“I don’t know what you mean.”
“I just want you to be my little boy again.”
“I’m not a boy,” he said.
She sighed and looked at him and nodded. “No, you’re not.” She sighed again and said, almost to herself, “You’ve grown so quickly!”
Next day he joined his mother in the Red Chamber. A couple of her lady friends were with her. He had dressed in a simple scholar’s gown and the new jacket she had embroidered. He felt uncomfortable, but it pleased her, and when they were all sitting down she waved her chopsticks at the bowl of noodles and soon all the ladies were doing the same. “Eat!” they shouted. “Eat! Eat!”
The forced jollity weighed heavily on him as one lady seized his bowl and another filled it to spilling with long white noodles, bright with mutton sauce. Wei-fang nodded politely as his mother and all her friends watched expectantly as the bowl was set before him.
“It will be so good when he is married,” one of them said.
“Yes,” his mother said, and there was an odd note in her voice.
“Married?” Wei-fang said.
His mother put out a hand to shush him. “Don’t listen!” she said. “People have asked,” she added. “Nothing more. But I thought I would ask Aunt Ma to be your matchmaker.”
The smile Aunt Ma gave was purely perfunctory, and went no further than the strained corners of her mouth,
which was black with tobacco-stained teeth. She was a dreadful old skeleton with white hair pulled back from her head, bony prodding fingers, enormous eyes and a smile as black as crow’s teeth.
The skeleton turned and assessed the young man, and he felt like a market goose being prodded and squeezed to see how much meat he had on him.
He smiled politely at her, but she frowned. “Are you arguing with your mother, who knows best for you?” she said.
Wei-fang shook his head.
The skeleton stared at him for a dreadfully long time, then turned to his mother. “Is he filial?” the matchmaker said.
“Very,” his mother said definitively.
The matchmaker squinted at her.
“Does he listen to his elders?”
“Always.”
“Gamble?”
“No.”
“Smoke opium?”
“Never.”
“Does he visit the sing-song girls on Pipa Alley?”
Wei-fang watched his mother closely as she answered this particular question.
She did not pause for a moment. “Certainly not,” she said.
“Hmm.” The matchmaker looked at him now, and sipped her tea. “On what day was he born?”
Concubine Fang paused, and the matchmaker sensed something in the delay and looked at her.
“You do not remember?” she said. “The horoscopes are important. If I cannot draw up his horoscope how can I find a girl whose fortunes will combine with his? It is very unlucky to put two people together whose fortunes are not alike. It is like feeding bananas to the sheep.”
Wei-fang’s mother paused. “Of course I remember,” she said. “I was there, of course! It was winter. Seventeen years ago. The twenty-eighth day of the twelfth month, the Year of the Snake that was the tenth year of the Emperor Guangxu. It was evening. After sunset. I cannot tell you the exact hour.”
Concubine Fang grew more confident as she summoned the details back to mind. Across the room her maid Fai kept her head bowed as she sewed mating ducks into the bridal quilt, but Wei-fang knew that there was something wrong.
