“No one’s going to admit he exists. It’s like my talking monkey—he’s a superstition. Maybe he is my talking monkey. The Monkey King could affect—”
“Seventy-two transformations.”
They stopped talking. Ming shivered, and she saw that Zoe was shaking too. They had reached a hilltop, and they stood there in spite of the chilly mist. Zoe kickboxed against the wall of fog, and let out a defiant aaarrgghh sound. Then she looked at Ming and said, “Show me more of the village.”
That was what they were here for, after all. Ming led Zoe to the west, along the dirt path to the riverbank where the big Buddha sat. The cliff was so high that clouds gathered around the Buddha’s neck. “Like he’s wearing a Shakespearean ruff!” Zoe exclaimed. She took out a spiral notebook from her jacket pocket and wrote some notes, looking very purposeful.
From there, they made their way to the northeastern part of town, skipping through rice fields, past a trio of ducks swimming in a pink-scum pond. Plantain trees had shed their green bark in the rain the day before and left a slippery detritus in their path.
The rice stalks were short in winter, but the fields were flooded and peasants were at work, emptying wheelbarrows of mulch into the gullies. They still wore dark blue work suits, just as they had in Ming’s childhood. Their backs were curved from stooping. Some walked barefoot, even though they could contract parasitic worms in the paddy water that way. When Ming was a child, the village council had provided them with galoshes, but the peasants had complained that the boots weren’t comfortable. Three hogs wallowed beside a farmhouse, and geese honked in the distance. You could always tell you were getting close to the rice fields by the fat flies and the smell of manure; that hadn’t changed either. Pig manure and human night soil—always a fresh supply, with a whiff of disease. The tillers of the soil had always scared Ming. They’d had black dirt embedded in their skin and their clothes, snot streaks and sores on their faces. In school, the children, when they came to school at all, would stare between her legs; they’d spit and curse, and the teachers barely bothered to call upon them in class.
“There, you can see your peasants at work,” she told Zoe.
“You say it with disdain.”
“It was one thing to build a socialist state for everyone and honor those who grew the rice,” Ming admitted. “But there were the peasant kids and the factory kids, and we didn’t talk to each other.”
“What if you provided everyone with an equal education?” Zoe pondered. “Even if they work the farm or sweep the streets, they could go to night classes and learn just for the sake of, you know, filling their minds with possibilities? A revolution where everyone learns from the learned instead of the Maoist business of the learned learning from the peasants…”
The two of them clomped through the rice fields toward a cluster of buildings. The closest one, with its squat cinderblock walls overtaken with moss and mold, looked abandoned.
“That was my dentist’s office,” Ming said, and shuddered.
“I should see all the buildings I can,” Zoe stopped outside the door. “Especially since this one might fall down before your capital gets here.”
Ming felt a cold sweat break out on her forehead. Still, perhaps if Zoe saw the old dental clinic, she’d begin to understand. So Ming led her friend down the dank cavity of a hallway, made a right turn, and then pushed open the third door on the left. Inside, a vinyl chair was overturned on the floor, moldy-colored stuffing spilling out like internal organs. Dangling from the ceiling was a drill, half crumbled with rust, but the end was still pointed enough to stab a little girl.
“Can you imagine—my teeth were always decayed when I was a kid, so I’d come here and the dentist would drill out my cavities with this thing.” She pointed an accusing finger at the rusty contraption. “I’d scream and try to punch at him, so he started tying my hands down. They didn’t have Novocain and I was sure I was going to die from the pain.”
Zoe stared at the drill, and at Ming’s beautiful new mouth.
When they were back outside, Ming pointed out another crumbling brick building, just down the dirt road. A sign outside said, in faded characters, “Sunshine Village Hospital.”
“That’s where I had to go when I got pneumonia. There were mosquitoes all over and I had to lie underneath netting.”
They strode to the entryway, and saw that no one was on duty at the front desk so they went in. The halls were dark except for a few twitching lights from the rooms and the air reeked of urine. Through an open door they saw a man in a dingy doctor’s smock trying to get a skeletal patient to make some motions with his two leg stumps. In another room a woman lay muttering as a nurse wadded up blood-soaked sheets.
On the second floor a man with gray-flecked hair and a look of sullen authority appeared. “Are you looking for something?” he asked.
Ming bowed her head.
“I’m the hospital director. Why are you here?” the man demanded.
“Chiirrrppp!” The sound came from within Ming’s pocket. “Chiirrrpppp!”
She started to speak, but, suddenly, a cricket leapt from her pocket to her arm. The green insect rubbed its legs together, hopped onto the hospital director’s head, then bounded onto the grimy hospital wall.
Ming seized the moment to gain the upper hand. “What’s this… bugs in the hospital?” she shouted. Without taking time to glance back, she seized Zoe’s arm and they fled. She heard the hospital director, behind them, mutter something about “foreign human rights activists….”
“Well, since he brought it up, I’ll just have to let Human Rights Watch know about the conditions in this hospital,” Zoe exclaimed, almost giddy. “What kind of things do you think they do here? Organ transplants? Forced abortions?”
“They might just be embarrassed at how filthy it is. But did you see the cricket that jumped out of my pocket?”
Zoe nodded. “Some spirit’s looking out for us.”
They were a few feet from the hospital entrance when a peasant woman with a pale little boy in her arms edged up to them. “Miss, please…my little one’s sick, and…we need money to go in there and get his medicine.” She was a handsome woman of indeterminate age, with jet black hair and the complexion of a well-worn saddle. One eye was clouded blue; that was the river blindness peasants got from the parasites in the rice paddies.
“Don’t,” warned Ming, but Zoe fished in her bag and handed the woman twenty yuan.
The woman examined the bill and turned it over as if she thought there might be more on the other side. It was worth little more than two dollars in the U.S. She shook her head despairingly. “We need a thousand yuan just for his medicine.”
“You see? C’mon,” said Ming, and collared her friend away.
“If I marry Danny,” Zoe pondered aloud as they walked on, “I’ll come back here and give them money to start a free clinic.”
Hunched in their coats beneath a chilly drizzle, the two trudged back toward the inn. A multitude of farmworkers were also making their way home, mothers carrying toddlers on their backs as they pulled wagons loaded with onions and cabbage. They walked in silence except for their footsteps sloshing through the mud and grass, the call of geese, the chortle of bullfrogs, and the ghostly whistling of wind.
In their room, a piece of paper was sitting on the table. Zoe dove for it, then looked befuddled as she scanned the message. “I don’t understand this.” She handed it to Ming.
The paper contained a short note, written in an ancient classical style. The anonymous writer had borrowed one of their ballpoint pens and torn a page from a ledger notebook—but despite the humble delivery, the characters resonated with the authority of an imperial scholar. It took Ming a few minutes to realize that the words ran right to left in the manner of a distant century.
Perhaps I can help you. I humbly request a sma
ll favor in return. A pleasant repast today, but I have many years of hunger to recover. Come to pagoda. You must not be seen.
For a long time, Ming and Zoe stared at each other.
“There are no classical scholars in Sunshine Village,” Ming said finally. “Even if somebody left this as a joke, who could write like this?”
Zoe had a strange look about her, as if she were peering into space. “I swear…the writing here. It reminds me of something.”
It reminds me of something too, Ming was thinking.
“I know. The jasmine tea is laced with hallucinogens.” Zoe laughed with no conviction.
“I saw a talking monkey.” Ming eyeballed the peanuts and oranges on their table. She detected an off-kilter smell in the dank room, and could swear it had an animal undertone. Maybe she was hallucinating. She used to get strange sensations in her childhood. She’d see darkness even with her eyes open, then she’d hear that someone had died. A chill would blast through her chest and then she’d hear that the villagers had turned a comrade over to the community committee for counterrevolutionary activities. What she felt now was something entirely different, more like a chill through her bones and an absence of gravity, as if she could somersault across the river right behind the talking monkey.
“We’re going there,” Zoe commanded. If she was afraid, she didn’t show it; instead she kicked the air and flexed her limbs.
That night, Ming set the alarm clock to wake them at eleven thirty. She lay in the bed without covers, knowing the cold would rouse her just in case she tried to snooze after the alarm went off. When the alarm rang, she saw Zoe bolt upright.
They had gathered two oranges, two handfuls of peanuts, and the second dragonfruit Zoe brought from Chengdu. To these meagre offerings, Zoe added her Swiss Army knife with the blade that didn’t quite retract—because how else would a hermit slice into a dragonfruit rind that had the rubbery thickness of a tire? They wrapped their bundle in the blue and green striped towel, still fragrant with Zoe’s peach-mango soap.
With flashlights concealed in their bag, Ming and Zoe crept through the courtyard beneath a melon slice of moon. A line of geese stretched across the clouds like a guiding arrow.
They walked soundlessly on the grass, past dark houses and a cluster of trees, up a hill with rice paddies, and then below to where the pagoda stood silent. A distant hoo hoo from an owl seemed as brash as a drumroll.
At the doorway to the pagoda, Zoe turned on the flashlight. From inside a foul blackness and a muffled whoosh of flying mites accosted them.
Ming moved an inch forward and jumped, startled, when something touched her.
“Pssst!” It was Zoe, her voice gruff after their long silence. They moved through the doorway in miniscule steps, brushing through cobwebs, and trying to not to think of scurrying creatures underfoot. Ming began to hum a soft Chinese folk song as she knelt down, spread out the towel, and arranged the offerings in a circle around the dragonfruit.
Then the darkness stirred.
“RRREEEeeeeeep!” The shriek was a few notches away from human.
The ragged hermit stood before them, his eyes bright as beacons. Zoe aimed the flashlight down at his threadbare pants and bare feet, then toward the towel.
He reached down and grabbed the peanuts, smacking his mouth as he devoured them, leaving a pile of cracked shells scattered across the dirt floor.
“Niiii….niiii…” The man seemed to be forming distinct Mandarin words. “Ni, huh ni,” he repeated, glaring at them as his body trembled.
“You and you…have mere trifles for a starving man.” His voice was almost operatic, full of sound waves. Just like—yes, a voice Ming remembered. “And this,” the emaciated recluse said, holding the dragonfruit to his lips. “This is like a painted woman with a thick hide. How, I beg to inquire, do you get through to her?” In answer, Zoe beamed the flashlight down on the knife, which he picked up and examined, before pulling out the blade, the scissors, and the corkscrew, one by one.
He was a madman, Ming decided, as she carefully backed away. A madman who spoke beautifully.
“Do I know you?” she ventured.
His fiery eyes penetrated both of them. Then he turned to the dragonfruit, his gaze yearning as if there really were a lover were trapped beneath its rind.
“This is all the food we could find,” Zoe said.
“I would expect more from two such enterprising maidens.”
“Maidens?!?” Zoe didn’t suppress her snicker.
Ming, too, almost laughed. “How about showing some manners and saying, ‘Kind thanks, gracious maidens, for the favor’?”
“Show me your light machine,” the madman commanded, reaching out a filthy hand. Zoe passed him the flashlight. He slid his fingers along the slick surface, and jumped back with surprise when he hit upon the button that flicked the light on. He held it upward, exposing the rotted ceiling beams. Then he aimed the light at the two visitors, making them squint.
“In my travels, I once saw a beautiful, young maiden as graceful as the moon, so filled with virtue that she left her mother and father to give food to wayfarers,” he began. “But she was an evil fiend in disguise. You give me a knife that is smaller than a tiger’s claw. You propose, I presume, that I catch a sparrow on the blade, or stop a rabbit in his tracks? I will eat once again and grow fat. For would you have me believe that the populace eat daily in this prosperous twentieth century…?”
“The twenty-first,” Ming interjected.
He rubbed his chin. “The twenty-first century? And still, men fight to be king of the beasts? They still gather their money and hoard it like food for the winter, and let others starve? No doubt it is your conclusion that I am mad. Isn’t all of mankind mad? You go and ask after the men that they made disappear the day you came to town. Ah, but Sun Wu Kong, the once-great warrior, could save them, if they let me!”
He jumped up suddenly, kicking his heels like a newborn fawn as he lurched forward.
Zoe, in a flash, flew at him. Ming could make out the vision of her friend’s knee thrusting out, her feet dancing then leaping, her body swooping behind the crazed man, sending him tumbling with a side kick.
The man leapt to his feet, an agile opponent, but suddenly withered, crouching with his head in his hands
“Go…,” he shouted, waving them away.
Ming seized the flashlight—leaving the knife behind—and they fled.
They stopped just beyond the trees. “I don’t know what made me do that,” Zoe whispered. “But it’s not like I hurt him.”
When they were back in their beds, Ming uttered what had been on her mind all the way back. “He called himself Sun Wu Kong,”
“Napoleon. Shakespeare. Monkey King. Just a crazy man ranting.” Zoe sounded only partly convinced, though. When the sun rose, Ming turned on her computer and wrote, “Life is like climbing a mountain, but just when you can see a summit you tumble back into the valley and have to start all over again. I thought I saw a peak last night.”
She thought of sending an e-mail to Tom Wendall, but there was no time to delay. She showered, then dressed quickly. It was only eight, early to appear at Tang Fei’s office, but she had a plan to slip out and leave a note for Zoe. It was the escape plan of a coward, running away before Zoe could stomp and kick and say “take me with you.”
Ming was buttoning her blouse in the front room when Zoe peered around the door, her face a buoyant sunrise.
“I’m sorry, but Tang said I should come alone. He claims some of what they do is classified. I think he just doesn’t trust foreigners, but I’ll try to talk to him about that. Anyway, I’ll tell you all about it.”
“I can’t use secondary research,” Zoe protested.
“Stay here. I won’t be long.”
“Stay here,” was a provocation. Zoe stretched he
r hamstrings and warmed up her glutes. In her tee shirt and panties, she sliced the air with her arms and lunged to each side over her knees. After thirty minutes, gleaming with sweat, she showered, devouring the scent of peach-mango soap as if it were breakfast. She sipped from the thermos of jasmine tea that the housekeeper had brought, but there would be no time for the dining room, and no time to dally if she was to go out on her own.
Zoe could still feel those golden eyes boring through her in the dank pagoda.
Perhaps I can help you, the note had read. Even though she couldn’t read classical Chinese, there was something about the swirls of his handwriting that had felt like some kind of answer to questions she didn’t even realize she had. Maybe she was going crazy in this ghost-rattled village. She drank a little more jasmine tea, half-wishing for a vision that would explain things. How had he managed to get the note into their room? Surely he wouldn’t have given it to Mrs. Pang or the chambermaid.
The Monkey King, of course, could assume the transformation of a bug, or make himself invisible. Where had she read that story about the Monkey King lording it over someone? She could practically hear the words: “I’m an enlightened being. I will return to earth in my magic form and remember all. You’ll return as a mortal, and all you’ll know is your mortal incarnation.”
The door wasn’t locked—at least Ming wasn’t holding her prisoner. Zoe walked outside and made her way to the northeast, where the rice fields were. Each step was like slicing through the opaque fog, but the smell of the stagnant pink pond reassured her that she was heading in the right direction. She had five hundred yuan in her pocket, money she was prepared to use to make friends in the most hardscrabble part of town and help them out in return for research. Danny would call it subaltern research, but surely the peasants had stories to tell.
Ms. Ming's Guide to Civilization Page 9