Morning and night, all I have been thinking about is my "schol-arization," so how can I accept being a fool? I go to fetch the volumes and find that there is indeed a Record of Fog Before My Eyes, written during the Yuan or Song, and a Record of Past Events and Dream Shadows, written during the Guangxu period of the Qing, both histories of old paintings. I pull them off the shelf and immerse myself for two entire nights, after which I unroll the silk painting and compare it. Then I understand. Paintings like this, in which the ink doesn't bleed through the vitriol paste onto the silk and which make use of starch and crude-patterned silk sprinkled with gold dust, are characteristic of Late Qing and Early Republican paintings. When you add this to the fact that the illegible characters in the square seal are of an oil-based paint and are blue and not red in color, the conclusive evidence is that this filial mourner's carelessly scrawled painting of a lion could not have been made earlier than the reign of the ill-fated Emperor Guangxu.
Never have I felt so strongly that this painting of a sleeping lion is an inferior work. The more I look at it, the uglier it seems. Waking up from an absurd ten-year dream, I don't know whether to laugh or cry. Who would have thought that this thing was totally worthless? Although antique collecting is found among all peoples and is a very noble pastime indeed, certainly foreigners are the only ones who hang plows and wagon wheels upon their walls in an attempt to be sophisticated. Here in China, what are a mere hundred years? Back at my maternal grandmother's house, the broken dish she feeds the cat out of was made during Guangxu, and my father's father in the countryside has a flowerpot in his courtyard that is a Qing monochromatic Shiwan piece from 1851.
The poor brass lion lies tucked away somewhere in Leizhou, lost in dream.
My emotion spent, I still cannot internalize what has transpired. And what if the lion really had belonged to the Tang or the Song, or even to the Qin or the Han, what then? Everything might be different.
In my stupor, I peer at the silk again. Is that me in the picture?
I decide to hang it on the wall.
Translated By Susan Mcfadden
Wang Xiangfu – Fritter Hollow Chronicles
Opening
I have enormous respect for storytellers. I tried to teach myself how to do it once, but in the end I had to admit it was not to be. The story that follows, for instance, should be packed with entertainment value, but it isn't much of a story when I get through with it. Way back in 1990, I was all set to study the art of storytelling with Comrade New Day Tian when of all things, he was swept away in a windstorm of unprecedented ferocity. The additional costs of that windstorm to Fritter Hollow included seven old oxen, eight colts, and fifty-two goats (some say fifty-six); it also shattered the grammar school windows and sent snowy shards of glass swirling into the air. What that means, of course, is that I'll have to grope my way through the story, starting with the following opening:
In the heart of Fritter Hollow lies Fritter Village, home to a carpenter by the name of Tian, who had a son called Broad Bean. To ensure that Broad Bean would have a long life, the carpenter Tian gave him the name Broad Bean, and after a dizzying procession of springs and autumns, Broad Bean appeared as a grown man of thirty-one. Our story opens in 1992, at noon one summer day, when Broad Bean, lathered with sweat, came running breathlessly up to the village boss, Wheatie Liu, informing him that not a single person had dared enter the home of the murderer Talented Wu all morning. Since it was an abnormally hot day, Broad Bean fanned himself with his straw hat as he watched seven or eight average-sized drops of sweat line up on Wheatie Liu's forehead and drop neatly to the ground, followed by a second, virtually identical formation. But instead of looking at Broad Bean, Wheatie Liu gazed fixedly at the knife scars on his arms, which had been there for years: five on the left arm, seven on the right, red in color and very deep.
"Check it out again," Wheatie Liu said without looking up.
At twilight, two or three average-sized pale yet pretty stars appeared in the sky, sort of to the south and sort of to the west, as Broad Bean ran breathlessly into the village for the second time. "No one dared enter the home of the murderer Talented Wu all afternoon!" Broad Bean reported. This time he did not fan himself with his straw hat.
"Sit down, have a drink," Wheatie Liu said, patting the edge of the red-lacquered brick bed, his kang. Broad Bean saw a bottle and some snacks on little plates on the nearby red-lacquered table- only three plates, and what they held is not important. "You're drinking again?" Sitting cautiously on the edge of the kang, Broad Bean kept his eyes glued to Wheatie Liu.
"Why shouldn't I?" Liu said. "I'm happy!"
So Broad Bean joined him. He held out one of the little ceramic cups, which was filled noisily; they clinked cups and drained them. A noisy refill, more clinking and draining. "I'll drain his old lady!" Wheatie Liu said, opening his mouth wide. He turned thoughtful, refilled his cup, and drained it. "That murderer got off cheap!" Liu said, turning thoughtful again as he refilled his cup and drained it. This time, Broad Bean fumbled with his cup to catch up. He tossed down the wine, and the blood drained from his face. "No more for me!" he said as he leaned over the edge and heaved twice. "That murderer stinks to high heaven!" He jumped off the kang, hand over his mouth, and ran outside, where he emptied the contents of his stomach for the benefit of a black pig strolling through the yard: urrp-the stuff landed right on the pig's tail. A quick swish transferred it up to its snout, all but the little bit that soared over to the window-splat.
"So the murderer stinks that bad, does he?" Wheatie Liu asked tensely as he walked into the yard, undid his pants, and sent a stream of piss into the pigsty.
The Background
Time for some background:
Now I won't bore you with talk about what kind of mountains Fritter Hollow has or what its waters are like. Suffice it to say that Fritter Hollow has both mountains and waters, heavy on the former-a whole undulating range of them, like a string of cow patties-and you could probably walk for five or six days without reaching the end. Not much in the way of waters, however. In fact, one scrawny, twisting stream is about it.
The people here are not rice eaters-that should be obvious. The barren slopes of the mountains yield only stumpy buckwheat, stumpy oats, and stumpy millet-that and some long millet and huge quantities of mountain yams, with an occasional crop of mung beans. Naturally, you'll also find wild hemp, with its bright-blue flowers. Not much in the way of legumes and tubers: mostly yellow yams, purple yams, yellow radishes, and carrots. People are quick to admit that yellow-skinned radishes, those coarse, chunky things, are pretty awful, but they keep pushing out their red-skinned cousins, which can't gain a toehold no matter how hard they try. The other green you see sometimes is cabbage, which carefully forms itself into tight little circles, each layer of leaves wrapping itself around the treasure lying at the center, which, when the thing is sliced open, is revealed to be nothing more than a skimpy cabbage heart.
In truth, Fritter Hollow was once a bitterly barren place. Now while people often equate the word bitter with poverty, in 1992 no one was prepared to call Fritter Hollow impoverished. That is because our great and wise government decided to permit the locals to dig tunnels into the mountains, some deep and some shallow, from which black rock was extracted. Narrow, twisting asphalt roads were built, pale-faced folk from the south moved in, and that led to a surfeit of tales regarding loose behavior. Generally speaking, southerners call that black, flammable stuff coal, but in Fritter Hollow it's called charcoal; it stands to reason that the black tunnels are called charcoal pits. The discovery that the term charcoal pits was unacceptable is linked to Wheatie Liu, Fritter Hollow's village chief, which meant he had the responsibility of overseeing activities at the charcoal pits even though people could no longer call them that; when 1992 rolled around, Wheatie Liu was being called the mine boss. Which is also what people once called the murderer Talented Wu.