The History of
Dreamdragon Feng: A Tang
Transmitted Marvels’ Tale
During the Kai-yuan reign period of the Brilliant Emperor, in the town of Jia-jou in southern Shu, lived a poor but honest scholar called Tutor Feng. His personal name I will not sully with my brush. Now, this man had one son, Feng Literary Victor, known to his friends as Dreamdragon Feng. Since early childhood, young Feng had studied the classics, gathering fireflies in the summer evenings so that he might read late into the night and yet spare his parents the cost of lamp oil.
Young Feng distinguished himself in the local and province-level examinations, coming first among all who competed. Consequently, he set off for the capital to take the national examination, taking with him his manservant – a slave named Sparker – all his parents’ hopes, and most of their money.
Upon arriving in Chang-an, young Fen grew confused amid the hurly-burly of the capital and wandered by mistake into the lanes of the Pingkang Ward. The young scholar could hear the distant melancholy twanging of someone practising an air on the barbarian lute. He passed a courtyard with an open gate; leaning in the doorway of the house within, a young woman dressed in willow green gazed out at him with heart-stopping charm. Feng’s horse came to a standstill, and his riding crop slipped from numbed fingers. Beside him, Sparker sat just as still and just as silent.
The scarlet lanterns before the gate glowed in the first lengthening shadows of late afternoon, though it was yet some time before the sunset curfew drum would sound. A shabby gatekeeper emerged from the courtyard, picked up the riding crop, and respectfully held it up to the young man. Feng took the crop and gave the gatekeeper a handful of coins, hoping to impress the woman in the doorway. With a word to Sparker, Feng slid from his horse. Leaving his cap on the saddle, he stepped into the garden, towards the doorway where the beautiful young woman waited. Water trickled from a tube of bamboo into a rock-lined pond, making a hollow sound. Feng glanced at it for no more than the wink of an eye, but when he looked up again the woman in the willow-green robe had disappeared.
A fattish old lady with a squint bustled out into the garden. ‘Greetings, Young Master!’ she called, bending her body downwards at the waist and her lips upwards at the comers. ‘I see you have travelled a great distance. Will you come and rest awhile?’ She waved Sparker towards the kitchen and led Feng into a reception room where two little maids brought him sweet warm wine. Introducing them as Catkin and Floss, the old lady excused herself and hurried off.
After Feng had drunk a cup or two, he asked Floss to bring him paper and writing materials. The little maid complied, Feng quickly downed another cup and his brush flew down the page. This is the quatrain he composed:
A lovely willow wavers in spring’s wind.
The passerby is drawn, as bees to flowers.
A melancholy lute song fills the air.
For whom do fine white hands pluck high-strung notes?
No sooner had the ink dried than Feng bade Floss to take the poem to the beauty in the willow-green robe. Meanwhile, Catkin brought in fresh hot wine, and before Feng had finished his next cup Floss returned, bearing another poem. The paper she presented to young Feng read:
Alas, no lute rings from my empty room.
My fingers only play the flute of jade.
Suppressing longing, pressing parted lips,
I make it rise, and make its small mouth sing.
With trembling fingers, Feng took up his pen once more. He was racking his. brain for suitable words when the squint-eyed old woman returned, leading the beauty in the gauzy green robe. ‘Allow me to introduce my eldest daughter. Young Master. Her name is Willow, and though she is not without accomplishments, I fear I have mishandled her upbringing, for I discover she is a forward thing. Having glimpsed you from the doorway, nothing would do but that she should have the chance to converse with you awhile.’ Willow hung her head.
Soon, however, the pair were chatting merrily, and Catkin and Floss hurried back and forth with more wine and spicy snacks and warm scented cloths for refreshing one’s face. When the curfew drum sounded, the old woman – who had told young Feng to call her Granny Squint – returned to the reception room and, full of apologies, advised him that he had better hurry home before the gates of Pingkang Ward were locked for the night.
‘Alas!’ said Feng. ‘I have no place to stay in Chang-an. All day my manservant and I have searched for the town home of a dear friend of my father’s, but to no avail. I have a good bit of money with me and am rather afraid to lodge in a common inn. Can you recommend somewhere for us to spend the night?’
Granny Squint knit her brows into a dark line above her wrinkled eyes. ‘I’m not sure that anyplace one could find in the short time before the gates close would be suitable for a gentleman such as Young Master. Our little house is rough, but if you could stand simple fare and plain accommodations you and your valet are more than welcome here.’
A thrill raced through young Feng’s blood. He thanked her warmly, and bade little Catkin find Sparker and have him fetch several bolts of fine silk from the goods his parents had given him for his expenses in Chang-an. Granny Squint refused to hear of payment, and it was only after much talk that Feng persuaded her to accept them as a gift. ‘Back in Jia-jou, my family has warehouses full of such stuff,’ he told her. ‘You would give me pleasure by taking some of it off my hands.’
The rest of the evening passed like a fireside reverie on a winter’s night, or a youth’s daydream on a sultry afternoon. Sparker was given a bed in the servants’ hall. Feng and Willow moved to a quiet apartment on the upper floor of the building and retired within the curtains of her bed. The joy of their union knew no bounds. Blissfully they sank among brocade cushions, tenderly they embraced beneath embroidered quilts, passionately they stammered words of affection, lightly their hearts floated on the spring winds of love.
The dream continued through the whole winter. Every day, Feng gave Willow some keepsake, or showed his gratitude to Granny Squint, or tipped the gatekeeper and the other girls of the house. When he wasn’t with his beloved in her room, he was hosting little dinners for the gamblers and roisterers and honeybees who hovered about Willow and her younger sisters Fascination and Patchouli and Lilyskiff. Feng learned how to move his counters on the liubo board, how to bet heavily on the fall of the bamboo sticks, and how to shout with a charming anger when his luck was bad. He slept little and studied less, growing steadily thinner; his skin lost its pure glow and his hair its blue-black lustre. The spark of poetic genius left his eye, though his words ran wild with wine and his imagination wild with indecency as he amused his companions by relating fantastic narratives best not committed to paper. More than once, Sparker reminded him that the time remaining before the examination was passing quickly, but Feng paid him no heed. Shortly after New Year, he ran out of money.
For a while he disguised the fact as best he could, selling Sparker’s donkey and pawning his spare clothes, though it was still quite cold. When this money was gone, he sold his books, and finally borrowed what little he could from the youths who had professed to be his friends. But the bills mounted and finally the day came when he could put his creditors off no longer. He found Granny Squint supervising the installation of a new and elaborately carved front door and threw himself on her mercy.
‘No money?!’ the old madam cried. ‘And a goodly debt run up on my books, too, my lad. Well, you’ll have to work off what you owe me, and then you’ll have to leave.’
Feng protested and then he wept and then he called for Willow, but he received no answer. He stormed towards the courtyard gate in a huff. Granny Squint shouted an order to the gatekeeper’s grandson, a hulking carpenter, who leapt upon the unsuspecting Feng, beating him until his whole body throbbed with bruises and welts. The gatekeeper and his grandson dragged the young scholar to the servants’ hall and dumped him on a thin mattress of woven reeds.
All during the beating Feng crie
d for help and tried to reason with the gatekeeper and the madam, telling them that after he passed the examination and received a post he would repay all his debts and more. But this did no good at all. Indeed, when he mentioned the examination. Granny Squint merely laughed and asked him if he thought he remembered enough even to try. Feng’s best tools, his quick mind and his clever tongue, had failed him – they hadn’t protected him from the beating, he thought as he lay weeping softly on the crude pallet. And he knew he had forgotten so much of the classics that he had no chance of passing the examination.
Soon Sparker returned. Seeing his master, he let out a cry of woe. Feng told him all that had occurred, and asked Sparker if he had managed to sell the roan horse in the Eastern Market that morning.
‘I did, master,’ the manservant replied. These hoity-toities in the capital haggle fiercely, but not as well as us Jia-jou folk. But alas’ – and here he set aside the rag with which he had been cleansing his master’s wounds – ‘from the marketplace I went straight to the Lucky Ivories to settle up with Old Yuan just as you ordered.’
‘Alas?’ said Feng, who was trembling with cold and pain. He felt relieved that at least Old Yuan wouldn’t be giving him another beating, but when Sparker told him that the gambling debt had taken every bit of the silver from selling the horse, his heart sank. What was he to do? The horse had been his last asset. Even if he ventured to write to his parents for money, they had none to give. And besides, he felt that he would rather die than expose them to the shameful knowledge of his behaviour.
Selling off his slave was out of the question: when Feng was five, Sparker had saved his life by pulling him out of a river, and the two had grown up as close as brothers. Feng’s adroit lies had rescued them from many a boyish scrape. Once Feng confessed to snatching a whole tray of persimmon cakes left on a window-sill to cool; the housekeeper hated Sparker and would have had him whipped had she known that it was he who took the cakes, but she dared not harm the Young Master. Now they were alone in a strange city, without friends or money.
The gatekeeper hobbled into the servants’ hall. ‘Ah,’ he said, ‘the other rascal returns. Good. Your room and board have increased the bill of Lord Emptypockets here. No doubt you’ll be accepting the mistress’s kind invitation to stay on and work it out.’ He cackled at his own clumsy wit.
Sparker leapt up. ‘Ai, ai, ai!’ he cried. He began to drool, twitching and jerking like a madman. All the while he called out ‘Bloodyblade’ and ‘Garrotte’ and ‘Round the neck or up the back?’
The old gatekeeper froze, staring at him in amazement and with more than a little fear. ‘Tzia!’ sighed Feng. ‘My money gone, a terrible beating, and now my servant goes insane,’ He held his head in his hands.
Spinning like a dustdevil, Sparker came up to Feng. He bent low and grasped Feng’s chin, pulling his master’s face up close to his own. Only Feng could see the enormous wink that Sparker gave. He pulled back, blinking in surprise.
Whatever Sparker was up to, Feng decided, he’d better play along. He turned to the gatekeeper. ‘Stand back, you fool! He does dreadful things when these fits come over him.’
‘Yes!’ shouted Sparker. ‘Ai! My hands are burning. Yes!’
So Feng hissed, ‘I’m warning you. I won’t be held responsible if he strangles you. Stand back!’
The gatekeeper’s eyes widened, and Sparker shrieked ‘Throttle’ and ‘Twist it off.’ The old man scuttled away like a crab.
His grandson and Granny Squint rushed into the hall to see what the uproar was all about. They ran up to the gatekeeper, and as they did so Sparker let out one last horrifying shriek and drooled and twitched and danced his way across the courtyard towards the gate. By the time the others realized what had happened, he was gone. The young scholar had been deserted by his childhood friend.
After that, things grew even worse for Feng. His dream of happiness and love had become a nightmare of forced labour. Granny Squint refused to show him her account books, and he suspected that she had cheated him by exaggerating the amount he owed her. Even so, the thought of appearing in court as a debtor and having his selfish waste of his parents’ money exposed was too much for him to contemplate.
From the moment the dawn drum sounded, Feng laboured in the courtyard, cultivating flower beds and transplanting shrubs in the cold dry air of winter’s end. Then the time for the civil service examination came and went, and he was ordered to dig an elaborate winding pond and construct a system to bring water to it. Each day, before any visitors arrived, he was hustled off to the back of the house, where he had to scrub floors and clean the chamber pots and do the worst of the kitchen chores. His clothes turned to rags. His soft scholar’s hands grew calloused and ached with chilblains.
Worse by far was the pain in his heart. Granny Squint told Feng that Willow didn’t wish to see him again. One day he snatched a word with the little maid Floss, begging her to plead with his beautiful mistress on his behalf, but Floss told him that it was true: Willow had taken up with the son of a wealthy magistrate, saying that Feng was a liar who had deceived her into thinking he could care for her when in fact he couldn’t even support himself. Feng was greatly shocked to hear the story of their love told this way, though he admitted to himself that there was some truth in it.
Early one morning, as Feng carried a huge rock over to the winding pond, he heard a deep, angry voice outside the gate, demanding to be let in: ‘… or my sworn brother Judge Tsao himself will throw every person in this den of wickedness into prison to await a most earnest interrogation!’ the voice boomed. Soon the expensive carved door swung open, and the gatekeeper backed up bowing into the courtyard.
A mighty general strode in after him, sweeping the old man aside as he turned to glare about the yard. His iron-black eyebrows scowled beneath a heavy helmet-mask shaped like an eagle’s head, and the few grey hairs in his long beard glittered fiercely in the morning light. Feng crouched down in the dry pondbed and peeked round a rock.
The general’s thunderous voice brought old Granny Squint out to meet him as quickly as if he had been one of the divine Guardian Kings of the Four Directions. The old madam trembled and offered tea or wine, but the general stamped the thick soles of his high black boots and growled that he wanted none of her so-called hospitality. He wanted his nephew.
‘At the personal request of my beloved younger sister, I have scoured the city for her son.’ The general proclaimed this as if he were vowing vengeance for a battle lost through treachery. Though she has had no word from him for months, at last I have traced him here. And I will have him returned to me now.’
Granny Squint anxiously denied any knowledge of his nephew, or anyone else’s, but the general thumped the cuirass of rhinoceros hide that armoured his chest and back, roaring, If he is not here, then you have fleeced a young man from the provinces and killed him with your cruelty, and I will see that you are executed.’ His voice dropped and he added, ‘Slowly.’
With that, he threw back his helmeted head and called, ‘Nephew Feng! Feng Literary Victor! Your Uncle Huo is here.’
Now, Feng had no Uncle Huo, so he crouched lower in the pondbed, confused.
‘Nephew Feng!’ the fearsome general boomed again. ‘My little nephew who always looked so keenly at the reality behind illusion, who always trusted his Uncle Huo! Do not be ashamed to reveal yourself in this time of trouble.’ And he stamped one heavy-booted foot.
What, Feng asked himself, did he have to lose? He drew in a great breath. ‘Uncle!’ he called, leaping up from behind the great rock. ‘Dear Uncle Huo, you have come for me at last!’
It was a matter of few moments and many words – threats and curses and gruff demands to see the record books – before Granny Squint acknowledged that young Feng had doubtless worked long enough to repay what he owed her, and let him go. The two men stalked out through her gate with dignity, but when they reached the first turning the general took Feng’s arm and began to run.
‘We’d best step lively now,’ Feng’s rescuer said, wincing as he tore the horsehair beard from his chin.
Feng gasped, and his faithful servant chuckled. ‘When the old dame opens that “purse of silver” I tossed her and discovers it contains only riverstones,’ Sparker continued, ‘she may send someone after us.’ They laughed and hurried away, never to be seen in that particular lane of the Pingkang Ward again.
Months later. Granny Squint overheard a guest, a well-known general, complaining of a runaway groom who had cut off half the tail of his best mare and disappeared with his boots and helmet and rhinoceros-hide cuirass. But considering her own wrongdoing in falsifying Feng’s account, and the hopelessness of catching up with the two, she let the whole matter drop.
As for Feng, he must have suffered for his foolishness: his name never appeared on the list of those who passed the national examination. Willow became the concubine of the magistrate’s son, and after two years she died giving birth to a stillborn child. Decades later, during the An Lu-shan rebellion, I stayed some months with that same magistrate’s son, now a prefect, when I was roaming south of the Yangzi, and he told me this story more than once, not forgetting a single detail. I have since related it to friends whenever the subject of faithful and clever servants arises, and they have urged me to record it, that it might be preserved as a warning against foolish overindulgence and an example of loyalty to all who read it. And so I have dampened my writing-brush and jotted down what I could.
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