A weatherworn, clawed, half-starved ginseng hunter will occasionally have the good fortune to make his way through dense underbrush and come upon a small plant with four branches that have violet flowers and a fifth branch in the center that rises higher than the others and is crowned with red berries. The stalk is deep red, and the leaves are deep green on the outside and pale green on the inside, He will drop to his knees, his eyes streaming with tears, and spread his arms wide to show that he is unarmed. Then he will kowtow and bang his head three times upon the ground, and he will pray,
“O Great Spirit, do not leave me! I have come with a pure heart and soul, after freeing myself from sins and evil thoughts. Do not leave me.”
Then the hunter covers his eyes and lies still for many minutes. If the ginseng plant does not trust him, and wishes to change into a beautiful woman or a plump brown child and run away, the hunter does not want to see where it has gone. At length he opens his eyes, and if the plant is still there his joy is not so much from the fact that he has found a valuable root as it is from the fact that he has been judged and found to be pure in heart.
He takes the seeds and carefully replants them so that the ginseng can grow again. The leaves and flowers are stripped and ceremoniously burned, with many prayers. The hunter's bone spades are used to dig up the root, which is forked and has something of a human shape—skeptics point to the shape as the basis of an ignorant folk religion—and the small pliable knives are used to clean the tiny tendrils called beards, which are supposed to be crucial to the curative powers. The root is wrapped in birch bark and sprinkled with pepper to keep insects away, and the happy hunter begins the long, dangerous trek back toward the safety of civilization.
“Where his throat will probably be slit by somebody like Ma the Grub,” the abbot said sourly. “Who will be swindled by somebody like Pawnbroker Fang, who will sell the root to somebody like the Ancestress, who will squat like a huge venomous toad upon a folk deity whose sole purpose in life is to aid the pure in heart.”
“Reverend Sir, I have never heard of the Ancestress,” I said shyly.
The abbot leaned back and rubbed his weary eyes.
“What a woman,” he said with grudging admiration. “Ox, she began her career as an eleven-year-old imperial concubine, and by the time she was sixteen she had Emperor Wen wrapped around her fingers to the point where he took her as his number three wife. The Ancestress promptly poisoned the emperor, strangled his other wives, decapitated all but the youngest of his sons, elevated that weakling to the throne—Emperor Yang—and settled down behind the scenes as the real ruler of China.”
“Reverend Sir, I have heard all my life that Emperor Yang was a depraved and vicious ruler who nearly destroyed the empire,” I exclaimed.
“That's the official version, with parricide tossed in,” the abbot said drily. “Actually he was a timid little fellow, and quite likable. The real ruler was the Ancestress, which is a title that she awarded herself and which carries a certain Confucian finality. Her reign was brief, but gorgeous. She set about bankrupting the empire by decreeing that every leaf that fell in her imperial pleasure garden must be replaced by an artificial leaf fashioned from the costliest silk. Her imperial pleasure barge was 270 feet long, four decks high, and boasted a three-story throne room and 120 cabins decorated in gold and jade. The problem was finding a pond big enough for the thing, so she conscripted 3,600,000 peasants and forced them to link the Yellow and Yangtze rivers by digging a ditch 40 feet deep, 50 yards wide, and 1,000 miles long. The Grand Canal has been invaluable for commerce, but the important thing for the Ancestress was that three million men died during the construction, and a figure like that confirmed her godlike grandeur.
“When the canal was finished,” the abbot said, “the Ancestress invited a few friends to accompany her on an important mission of state to Yang-chou. The fleet of pleasure barges stretched sixty miles from stem to stern, was manned by 9,000 boatmen, and was towed by 80,000 peasants, some of whom survived. The important mission of state was to watch the moon-flowers bloom, but Emperor Yang did not watch the moon-flowers. The excesses of the Ancestress were being performed in his name, so he spent the entire trip staring into a mirror. ‘What an excellent head!’ he kept whimpering. ‘I wonder who will cut it off?’ The chopping was performed by some friends of the great soldier Li Shih-min, who eventually took the imperial name T'ang T'ai-tsung and who sits upon the throne today. T'ang shows every sign of becoming the greatest emperor in history, but I will humbly submit that he made a bad mistake when he assumed that little Yang was responsible for the crimes of the Sui Dynasty and allowed the Ancestress to retire in luxury.”
I suppose that I was pale as a ghost. The abbot reached out and patted one of my knees.
“Ox, you will be traveling with a man who has been walking into dangerous situations for at least ninety years, assuming that he began at your age, and he is still alive to tell about it. Besides, Master Li knows far more about the Ancestress than I do, and he is sure to exploit her weaknesses.”
The abbot paused to consider his words. Bees droned and flies buzzed, and I wondered if the knocking of my knees was audible. A few minutes ago I had been ready to dash out like a racehorse, and now I would prefer to dart down a hole like a rabbit.
“You are a good boy, and I would not like to meet the man who can surpass you in physical strength, but you know very little about this wicked world,” the abbot said slowly. “To tell the truth, I am not so worried about the damage to your body as I am about the damage to your soul. You see, you know nothing whatsoever about men like Master Li, and he said that he would stop in Peking to acquire some money, and I rather suspect…”
His voice trailed off, and he groped for the proper words. Then he decided that it would take several years to prepare me properly.
“Number Ten Ox, our only hope is Master Li,” he said somberly. “You must do as he commands, and I shall be praying for your immortal soul.”
With that rather alarming blessing he left me to return to the children, and I went out to say farewell to my family and friends. Later I was able to catch some sleep. In my dreams I was surrounded by plump brown children as I attempted to tie a red ribbon around a root of lightning in a garden where three million fake silk leaves rustled in a breeze that stank of three million real rotting bodies.
5. Of Goats, Gold, and Miser Shen
“A spring wind is like wine,” wrote Chang Chou, “a summer wind is like tea, an autumn wind is like smoke, and a winter wind is like ginger or mustard.” The breeze that blew through Peking was tea touched with smoke, and spiced with the fragrance of plum, poppy, peony, plane trees, lotus, narcissus, orchid, wild rose, and the sweet-smelling leaves of banana and bamboo. The breeze was also pungent with pork fat, perspiration, sour wine, and the bewildering odors of more people than I had dreamed there were in the whole world.
The first time I was there I had been too intent upon reaching the Street of Eyes to pay much attention to the Moon Festival, but now I gaped at the jugglers and acrobats who were filling the air with clubs and bodies, and at girls who were as tiny and delicate as porcelain dolls, and who danced on the tips of their toes upon enormous artificial lotus blossoms. The palanquins and carriages of the nobility moved grandly through the streets, and men and women laughed and wept in open-air theatres, and gamblers screamed and swore around dice games and cricket fights. I envied the elegance and assurance of the gentlemen who basked in the practiced admiration of singsong girls—or tiptoed into the Alley of Four Hundred Forbidden Delights if they wanted more action. The most beautiful young women that I had ever seen were pounding drums in brightly painted tents as they sang and chanted the Flower Drum Songs. On almost every corner I saw old ladies with twinkling eyes who sold soft drinks and candied fruits while they cried, “Aiieeee! Aiieeee! Come closer, my children! Spread ears like elephants, and I shall tell you the tale of the great Ehr-lang, and of the time when he was devoured by the hideous Transcendent Pig!”