A rooster cry startled me out of my sleep. I discovered I’d fallen asleep next to the horse trough and had dribbled slobber on the master’s clothing. Only by recalling a dream is an insomniac sure he’s slept. The dream I just told you about was still right before my eyes, and that was proof that I’d slept. Wang Gan, who had suffered from insomnia for years had actually fallen asleep, which was worth celebrating with firecrackers. Even happier was knowing that the master had slept. The master sneezed and slowly opened his eyes. Then, as if something important had suddenly occurred to him, he hopped out of the trough. Dawn had just broken, and rays of colourful sunrise glided in through the window. He rushed to his workbench, uncovered the clay, tore off a chunk, and began kneading, kneading and twisting, twisting and kneading, until an impish little boy with a stomacher and a braid pointing to the sky materialised on the table in front of him. I was deeply moved, as the alluring voice of the woman resounded in my ears. Who was she? Who else could she have been? It was the merciful Fertility Goddess!
At this point in his account, Wang Gan’s eyes glistened with tears, and I saw a strange lustre in Little Lion’s eyes. She’d fallen under his spell.
Wang Gan continued with his story. I tiptoed out to get a camera and returned to take a picture of the master — no flash — as he worked in a sort of trance. Truth is, I could have fired a gun next to him and not snapped him out of it. The expression on his face kept changing — sombre one moment, playful the next, mischievous for a while, then bleak and lonely. It didn’t take me long to discover similarities between the look on his face and that of the face of the child he was moulding. What I mean to say is, the master became the child he was fashioning in his hands. They had a flesh-and-blood bond.
The number of children on the master’s workbench grew and grew. The boys and, of course, girls formed a semicircle facing the master, the exact formation I’d seen in my dream! I was astounded and ecstatic. And overwhelmed emotionally. Two people capable of sharing a single dream — ‘kindred spirits through and through’ is how the ancients described a man and a woman in love, but there was absolutely nothing wrong with using it to describe the master and me. We weren’t lovers, but, as fellow sufferers, we enjoyed deep mutual empathy. After hearing me this far, you two ought to understand why all the dolls the master makes are unique, that no two are alike. Not only does he take real children as his models, he even takes them from his dreams. I don’t have his talent, but I have a rich imagination and eyes that work like a camera. I can turn a child into ten children, a hundred, a thousand, and I can also shrink a thousand, a hundred, ten children down to a single child. I telepathically pass the dream images of children I’ve amassed in my head to the master, who then turns them into his artistic creations. That’s how I’m able to say that the master and I are natural partners and that the finished products are joint creations. I don’t say that to detract from his achievements. In the wake of my romantic episode, I was able to see through the ways of the world; wealth and position are like floating clouds to me. My reason for telling you this is to reveal the miraculous relationship between dreams and art and to help you understand that lost love is a wonderful asset, especially for creative artists. No one who hasn’t experienced the bitter taste of lost love can ever lay claim to the highest levels of creative art.
All during Wang Gan’s monologue, the master maintained a pose of resting his head in his hands, with no observable movement. It was as if he himself had become a sculpted figurine.
4
Wang Gan sent over a boy with a DVD of the TV series Unique Individuals of Northeast Gaomi Township. He was in bib shorts from which emerged long, skinny, Pinocchio-like legs and high-top boots that looked much too heavy for him. His hair was the colour of flax, his brows and eyelashes nearly white, his eyes blue-grey; one look, and you knew he had foreign blood. Little Lion ran in to scare up some treats for him. He stood with his hands clasped behind his back and announced in a thick Northeast Gaomi accent: He said you’ll give me at least ten yuan.
We gave him twenty. He bowed and, with a whistle, ran downstairs. So we went to the window, where we sprawled against the sill and watched him clomp like a cartoon character on his way to the playground opposite our housing compound, where the funicular railcar hove in and out of view on its way up the mountain.
A few days later we ran into the boy while we were strolling by the riverbank. He was in the company of a tall Caucasian woman pushing a stroller and a little girl, obviously his kid sister. They were moving gingerly along on rollerskates, protected by a colourful plastic helmet and knee- and elbow-pads. A handsome middle-aged man walking behind them was talking on his mobile phone, speaking in a lilting South China Putonghua. Bringing up the rear was a big, fat dog with golden fur. I recognised the man right off as a renowned Peking University professor and celebrated TV personality. When Little Lion bent over and all but buried her pudgy face in the blue-eyed baby, the woman smiled, a sign of good upbringing; the professor, on the other hand, reacted with a look of disdain. I reached down, grabbed Little Lion by the arm, and pulled her away from the stroller. She’d been so focused on the baby that the look on the professor’s face had escaped her entirely. I nodded by way of apology, and he accepted my gesture with a slight nod in return. I had to remind her not to pounce on pretty babies as if she were Granny Wolf. These days children are like little treasures, I told her. All you ever look at are the babies, never at their parents’ faces. Stung by the criticism, she first launched into a tirade against rich people, who have as many kids as they want, and Chinese men and women who marry foreigners, then have one baby after another. But self-pity and remorse set in for helping Gugu carry out the cruel, one-child family-planning policy, a harsh course of action that had led to a mass of aborted foetuses and, as a sort of heavenly retribution, made her sterile, unable to bear children. She told me to go marry one of those foreign girls and raise a brood of half-breed kids. I won’t be jealous, Xiaopao, she said, not at all. Go find yourself a foreign girl, and have as many kids as you want, the more the merrier. I’ll even help you raise them. By this time her eyes were glistening with tears and her breathing was rapid. Her breast heaved, filled with motherly love with no one to bathe in it. I had no doubt that if she were handed a child, her breasts would swell with milk.
That was how things were when I put Wang Gan’s disk into the DVD player.
With the nasal strains of Shandong operatic speech — grating to the ears of outsiders, but capable of bringing tears to the eyes of locals — swirling in the air, the lives of my aunt and the sculptor Hao Dashou unfolded in front of our eyes.