“Hey,” Li Shisan said calmly, “you’re a grown-up. Why would you spread groundless rumors like this?”
Seeing Li Shisan’s nonchalance, Tian Shewa turned pale. He slammed his fist loudly into his palm and spoke hurriedly as if he were reciting his lines in an opera: “Emperor Jiaqing sent an official to the county. My housekeeper’s third son is the cook in the county government. As soon as he heard about the message, he sent someone to tell me. I ran all the way here to let you know. And yet to my surprise, you don’t believe a single word I’ve said—”
Li Shisan interrupted: “Did they say which law I violated?”
“Obscene tongue and foul tune,” Tian Shewa replied. “The emperor said that, like overgrown weeds, your plays have spread into several provinces. The emperor was so irritated that he sent officials to Weinan to escort you to Beijing. Even those shadow players who’ve cooperated with you—including me—are to be punished . . .”
Tian Shewa paused and grew silent. As he considered their grim fate, Tian Shewa set his swallowtail-shaped eyes on the face of his beloved brother. He spared no glance at his sister-in-law, who was still holding the mill rod.
Li Shisan was dumbfounded. His face turned from grayish yellow to grayish white—whether from anger or from fear, it was hard to tell, but Tian Shewa was scared speechless.
All of a sudden Li Shisan stood up, threw his head backward and then forward, and gave a loud cry; a spray of blood erupted from his mouth. A beam of red light, as crimson as sunshine, flashed through, and the whole mill was suffused with red flame. Like a flying blood waterfall, rushing and whirling with a resonant sound, the blood splashed and spattered onto the crushed wheat and the carved angular millstones, reddening everything it touched. Tian Shewa froze in terror.
Li Shisan squared his shoulder again. He faced upward first and then forward with a jerk, as another stream of bloody flame spouted out. Finally he tumbled onto the mill pan, one hand limp.
For a moment, Tian Shewa was at a loss. Then he snapped out of his panic. He carried Li Shisan in his arms and laid him gently on his back on the floor. Frightened, Mrs. Li squatted and rubbed her husband’s chest and forehead, wailing, “Please don’t go . . . you can’t leave me alone . . .” She firmly pinched the bridge of her husband’s nose.
Eventually, Li Shisan opened his eyes. He pushed away his wife’s hand still pinching his nose. After a moment he struggled to sit up, both hands pressed on the floor. Mrs. Li and Tian Shewa stepped forward quickly to help him from either side. Li Shisan sat slowly up. He heard Tian Shewa’s cry and Mrs. Li’s. Taking a breath, Li asked Tian, “Why don’t you run away?”
“Look at you!” Tian Shewa replied. “How can I bear to leave you suffering and run away alone? Let them arrest both of us so that I can take care of you.”
Shaking his head, Li said, “It is better that we both run and disappear.”
“That is what I was waiting to hear. Now, be quick.”
Standing up, Li tried a few steps and found he was able to walk. He said to his wife, “Don’t worry about me. If the emperor wants my life, there’s nothing you can do about it. You can’t be of any help. If there’s any way to escape, I will manage to send you a message and get my play back. My writing is just moving to its climax. Keep the play safe for me.”
Trying to act natural, the two men walked out through the gate, crossed the lane of the village, and even politely said hello to the villagers they passed. A neighbor asked them where they’d be performing that night. Tian replied that they’d be in a remote village on the north plateau. Hearing this, the man said with great pity that it was too far for them to go.
Once out of the village, they turned from the main road onto a one-foot-wide footpath with corn plants as tall as a man on either side. Vanishing into the vast green sea of overgrowth, they felt a sheltered safety. Soon, as if by prior agreement, they both stepped out onto another footpath. The path was covered with grass and smelled of mint.
They crossed over a ditch. The flowing stream and the white poplars on either side had once been a source of inspiration for Li Shisan; he would stop to wash his face in the limpid water and absorb the poetic beauty of the scene. Now, neither man found poetry in the trees or water; nothing was left but panic, terror, and desperation. When Li Shisan gathered his strength and jumped over the ditch, he suddenly felt faint; his vision blurred. As he steadied his feet on the other side of the ditch, blood again spewed from his mouth.
After a short rest, the men resumed their escape. The path was still lined with stretches of thick emerald crops like a dense green fog, hot and suffocating. A ridge divided the end of the path into another fork. There, Li Shisan stopped and said, “It is time to say good-bye now.”
Tian Shewa shook his head, startled. “Good-bye? To whom? To me? But I’ll never part with you, even to death!”
Li Shisan replied, “We should not be so stupid to be caught together and killed! You, who can sing and act and bring shadow puppets to life—you should have a chance to live!”
“No, no, no!” Tian Shewa shook his head more quickly. “Anybody can play with puppets. A troupe of my fellow actors would take my place if I died. But nobody but you, Brother Shisan, can compose such brilliant plays. You must not be the one to die.”
“Neither of us should die,” said Li Shisan. “Of course it is good for both of us to be alive. But now we have a slim chance of escape. We have to run in different directions if either of us is to live. Perhaps we will both get out. But we must not be caught together and killed.”
Tian Shewa was not convinced. “You are ill. If I left you alone, I would be the same as the ungrateful wretches in your plays.”
Li Shisan thought for a moment before speaking. “You have all my original play manuscripts in your box. I have no regrets, because I composed all those plays. But if you were killed, your house would be confiscated and the plays would be burnt into ashes. They would be lost. So you should get the chance to live.”
This moved Tian Shewa into silence.
“In fact,” said Li Shisan, “that you live means I’m still alive.”
Tian Shewa gasped. Tears fell from his eyes.
“Your life is now more valuable than mine,” Li Shisan continued. “Hurry, hurry up; all my scripts depend on you.”
Li turned and walked away.
Tian Shewa quickened his step to catch up. He fell to his knees, kowtowed to Li Shisan three times, got up, folded his hands, and made deep bows, swearing, “My dear elder brother, set your mind at ease: as long as I’m alive, not one of your scripts will be lost!”
Li turned and spoke over his shoulder. “Even if you do lose your life, the scripts can be protected,” he said resolutely. “Hide them before you flee.”
“I will,” replied Tian Shewa. He ran into a field of corn and then cursed aloud to the sloping land: “You’re no longer my emperor, Jiaqing!”
All was silent.
Li Shisan walked along the gently inclined path. It occurred to him that he should turn and walk in a different direction, since nobody was stupid enough to flee along the official thoroughfare on the Weibei Plateau. But he didn’t feel like running away. On one hand, he was quite sure that his life would come to an end in a few hours. On the other hand, he did not like the idea of getting caught by the running dogs of Jiaqing, nor that of dying in Beijing. Still, now he wouldn’t die by the millstone or on the kang bed at home, which would have caused his wife terrible pain. Though he hadn’t given her a comfortable life while he was alive, he could die knowing he had not driven her into misery. And, of course, he didn’t want to die in front of Tian Shewa. The closer the two had become, the farther they wanted to keep from each other when death beckoned.
The vast Weibei Plateau, then, was the best possible final resting place for Li Shisan.
Facing the plateau against the Weihe River plain, Li Shisan tottered step by step and spat out a mouthful of blood, moistening the dry, trodden earth beneath his feet with
an undignified mixture of water and blood.
He spat another mouthful of blood as he struggled upon a field ridge.
When he felt yet another spray of blood welling up, Li Shisan knew it would be his last. Twenty lis away from the village, he turned around, gazing at the green central Guanzhong Plain across which the Weihe River flows, and spat out his last mouthful of blood onto the earth road, no longer seeing the sun and clouds over the Weibei Plateau.
About the Story
It was the late 1950s. One Saturday, I was coming home from school to get food for the next week. On the road I saw people of all ages, carrying their small wood stools in their hands and steamed buns in their handkerchiefs, hurrying to Ma Jia village to see the movie Huoyan Ju—the first Shaanxi opera to be put on the big screen. By sunset, the space in front of the stage was filled with people who’d traveled from neighboring villages, carrying their stools and their food. Back in my village, I’d hurried to finish my meal and join my friends to go see the film. Huoyan Ju, the play’s legendary horse who could walk a thousand li in the daytime and eight hundred li at night, was undoubtedly miraculous—but it was Huang Guiying, the beautiful heroine, who left a deep impression on me. In the play, Huang Guiying was unswervingly faithful to her love, having compassion for the poor and eschewing the rich; only under duress did she resolutely marry the son of a high official. The image of Huang Guiying offered the hope for a bright future to the poor young men in the countryside as well as the better-off youth in the towns.
Fifty years later, I learned that the composer of Huoyan Ju was Li Shisan.
Li Shisan (1748–1810) came from a small town in Weinan County; his birth name was Li Fanggui. Li studied very hard, hoping to do well on the imperial examinations for civil servants. He worked his way up in rank until he earned the “empty” title of an official candidate for a vacancy. Suddenly, at age fifty-two, he woke up from the disappointments of bureaucracy and had no more interest in fame and honor.
At that time, shadow plays were very popular in the area north of the Weihe River. The shadow-play troupes were anxious to find good scripts, so they turned their expectations to this learned man. Li Shisan could not resist the enticement; he promised to give playwriting a try. Thus his first play, Chunqiu Pei, came into being. In the two hundred years since, it has been adapted by many opera companies, from the Shaanxi Opera to the Peking Opera and beyond. When this play began to bring him great fame, he decided to take the name of his home village as his pen name. His playwriting career really began when the name of Li Fanggui fell into oblivion.
In order to prove Li Shisan’s identity as the first productive playwright of Wanwan Tone, a branch of the local Qin Opera in Shaanxi Province, I went to consult with Chen Yan, a contemporary playwright. My assertion was proved true. Only ten years passed between Li abandoning his official career in favor of playwriting and his death at age sixty-two under the terror of threats from Emperor Jiaqing. (Various accounts claim that Li was frightened to death or enraged to death.) In that brief decade, Li Shisan wrote eight plays and two playlets, collectively known as his Ten Great Plays. Most of them have been adapted by nearly all the major Chinese opera companies and have held their appeal to audiences for more than two centuries.
I can’t help imagining how amazed Li Shisan would be to hear his plays, the work of a Shaanxi composer, performed in all the different dialects of China. Imagine if Li, unable to speak Mandarin and never having even heard the different southern dialects, had a chance to appreciate one of his plays performed by Hunan Opera or Peking Opera. I believe it would have given him the courage to face down the threats of Emperor Jiaqing, not to mention redeeming all his labors both in writing the plays and pushing that heavy millstone.
When he was frightened enough to spit blood at the grinding work, and then again before dying on the dusty road of the Weibei Plateau, Li Shisan never knew that, 150 years later, his play Wanfu Lian would be adapted into the opera Nuxun An and become an immediate success.
Later, the well-known playwright Tian Han (1898–1968) adapted Nuxun An into Xie Yaohuan, which created a great stir. Its success lasted for a while, and then suddenly Xie Yaohuan was met with a severe attack from almost every corner of the country. But time has marched on, and the past is history; in this case, Tian Han had the courage and safety to confront the attack and did not have to spit blood.
When I first read the details of Li Shisan’s life in an article by Chen Yan, I was too excited to fall asleep. I felt a bit pleased with myself, for his tale corroborated what I had believed about Li: that literary merit was determined by a writer’s artistry with words—not by what the writer lived on (steamed buns or stale bread), where he slept (Simmons or adobe kang), or what was hung on his wall (paintings or hoes). The tale of Li Shisan and his millstone convinced me that it was his sensitivity to words that compelled him in his art, despite his miseries and hardships. Even reduced to working his old legs at the millstone at the age of sixty-two merely for a bowl of noodles, Li Shisan still enchanted us with his creations. Grinding the wheat, putting aside the rod, and then creeping into a humble little room, furnished with only a square table, a chair, and a bench, he held his writing brush, opened the inkstone, and became absorbed in his writing.
In his lifetime, the only material benefits Li received for his writing were those two buckets of wheat from Tian Shewa.
Still, it was that exquisite sensitivity to words that frightened and enraged Li Shisan to death at hearing Emperor Jiaqing’s menacing threats. Thus his writing brush was stilled forever. That is why I chose to bring Li Shisan to life in my story.
Translated by Nan Jianchong
Jia Pingwa
Jia Pingwa, a prominent and celebrated writer and essayist, was born in 1952 into a farming family in Danfeng County, Shaanxi Province. He began to write while studying in the Chinese department of Northwest University in Xi’an. Jia Pingwa first achieved fame in the 1970s and 1980s with his award-winning short stories and novellas, the majority of which are set in Jia’s rural homeland in Shangzhou Prefecture.
Jia is known for his realistic depiction of the culture and life of Shaanxi Province. His writing often focuses on peasant life during China’s reforms and urbanization since 1978. His works include Shang Zhou, White Nights, Earth Gate, Old Gao Village, Remembering Wolves, Happy, and the autobiographical novel I Am a Farmer.
He has won many prizes for his work, including the Third National Novellas Award, the National Short Story Award, the Prix Femina (for Abandoned Capital), the Pegasus Prize for Literature, and the French Arts and Literature Prize conferred by the French Ministry of Culture and Communication. In November 2008, Jia Pingwa won the seventh Mao Dun Literary Prize for his twelfth novel Shaanxi Opera.
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JIA PINGWA
The Country Wife
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Darky was older than her husband. She did all the work at home. She fed the pigs, rounded up the sheep, and went to the Black Cliffs to cut and collect firewood. When evening came, her small husband would pester her. He was a short, monkeylike man, but well read. He would use all the tricks he had learned from books to fuck with her. It made Darky angry. She came to hate him. At night she was tempted to push him off of her.
“You’re my land,” he would say, claiming the right to plow any way he pleased.
The evening was dark; stars lit the sky and coldness crept in from the window. Her husband was on top of her, crying out the names of other women. She recognized those of the young and beautiful in the village. When her husband rolled off, he fell asleep beside her as if seriously ill.
Hearing her sobs, her father-in-law scolded from the next room, “Sigh and choke on shit! You’re too full of yourself to sleep.” The old man’s temper grew worse and worse. Darky couldn’t contain her sobs; her father-in-law continued to scold, “What did you eat and wear in your mother’s home? Are you not satisfied with this happy nest you fell into?” Then came the sounds of the abacus.
/> Her father-in-law was the credit agent of the town. His skill with the abacus was well known throughout the nearby villages. In recent years, as the family’s wealth increased, the other family members began to pull long faces at Darky and chide her for being ugly, dark, and fat.
At first, Darky tried to console herself. Her mother’s home in the deep mountains was poor; her food here was indeed better than what she’d grown up with. Back home, her elder brother’s face was always sallow. He came to the town every couple of weeks with mountain produce. After a meal with her, he would say, “My sister is a real lucky bird!”
This only made her more bitter; she would reply, “Good Brother, is a bird lucky with only good food?”
She had no one to talk to. She badly wanted a baby—but the goddess of children did not send her one.
Disturbed, she lay in the dark with her eyes wide open. The stars outside the window faded, and the rain began to fall. If it rained for a whole night, the sweet-potato vines on the slope would spring new roots, and she would have to hoe them again.
There was a heavy knock on the gate, followed by three clicks. Her father-in-law quickly called out, “Coming, coming!” He hurried to the gate, his shoes half-on.
A man’s voice asked, “Are you drinking with someone?”
Her father-in-law answered, “No, just waiting for you.” The two men went inside, cursing the rain. Their chatter sounded like ghosts chanting scriptures.
Darky’s mother-in-law knocked at Darky’s door with her bamboo pipe. “Darky, get up. Your dad is drinking with his guests; cook something for them. Don’t pretend you’re sound asleep!”
Darky was used to this. Still, she didn’t understand why these visitors arrived in the middle of the night. They carried mysterious objects in wooden boxes or in sacks. Her father-in-law never allowed anyone to touch them. Darky noticed but never asked about them.
Old Land, New Tales: Twenty Short Stories by Writers of the Shaanxi Region in China Page 4