Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  Guanyin: – her name literally means one who listens to the cries of the world. Legend has it that some thousand years ago she was the daughter of a cruel king. One day the king asked her to marry a wealthy but unloving man. She told the king that she would agree to marry, as long as the union would ease the three great misfortunes of mankind; ageing, illness and death. If her marriage could not help with any of these sufferings, she would rather retreat into a life of religion. When the father-king asked who could possibly ease these sufferings, his daughter mentioned a doctor she knew who could cure all of these ills. Her father was furious, as he wanted her to marry a man of power and wealth, not a healer. He punished her, forcing her into a life of hard labour, giving her little to eat and drink. But still she was unyielding. Every day the king’s daughter begged to be allowed to enter the temple and become a nun. Finally her father agreed, but ordered the monks to give her the toughest chores in order to break her spirit. But Guanyin was such a kind-hearted person that even the animals around the temple wanted to help her. Her father, seeing this, became so frustrated that he tried to burn down the temple hoping that she might perish in the fire. Guanyin was trapped, but as she was dying, a white tiger saved her and took her into an underground world. When she woke up she found herself in the land of the dead. Guanyin gazed upon the suffering souls around her and heard their cries. But her gaze soothed the crying children and soon they began to smile and play; the men stopped punishing themselves and started to find peace within; the dried willow trees flushed green again; the dead lotus began to blossom in the stagnant water. While in Hell, Guanyin witnessed the horrors that human beings had to endure and was overwhelmed with grief. Filled with compassion, she released the good karma she had accumulated during her life, and freed all the suffering souls back on Earth. From then on, the world worshipped her, calling Guanyin the Goddess of Mercy.

  This was one of the few stories my grandmother told me, and I remember my first reaction was: ‘Grandmother, why can’t all women stay unmarried like Guanyin?’

  My grandmother looked at me and shook her head. Then she sighed. ‘Women have to get married. Otherwise we are punished.’

  This seemed like a bad rule for women, I thought. They were punished either way. Just look at my grandmother. I could understand why she prayed to Guanyin every day. Women like my grandmother were not valued for themselves. She was a dutiful daughter, then the dutiful wife, and dutiful mother, until eventually she was abandoned and forgotten.

  During the Cultural Revolution, however, the Goddess of Mercy was to be punished yet again. In the early 1960s, Western symbols like the Virgin Mary or Jesus Christ were banned and destroyed. But some of the underground Chinese Christian groups venerated the Virgin Mary by disguising her as a statue of Guanyin holding a child; a cross would be hidden in an inconspicuous location on her body. So this half-Chinese Goddess half-Western Madonna survived for a while, until one day Mao announced his ‘anti-feudal’ and ‘anti-superstition’ movement. The government in Beijing declared that anything linked to China’s feudal past (such as images of kings and queens, grassroots religious practices, temples, etc.) should be destroyed. Overnight, anti-feudal public meetings in the village market square were set up and statues of the Goddess of Mercy were smashed, the hidden crosses in Guanyin’s robe cast into oblivion along with the little baby in her arms. My grandmother hid her precious porcelain figure in her wardrobe until the middle of the 1970s, when images of Guanyin were finally allowed again, and my grandmother could regain her faith in an afterlife through prayer – surely the next life would be better than the one she had endured so far.

  Swordfish

  Everyone in Shitang was crazy for swordfish. The good fishermen often boasted about how many they could catch in a season (sometimes they did the same for eels). As for eating them – whether steamed, grilled or fried – the fishermen’s wives paid extra care in their preparation. The fishmongers in the market would always try to keep them alive as long as possible after extracting them from the salty water, in order to maximise their succulent texture. For me, swordfish were strange creatures. I especially found their long, sharp bills threatening – like swords cutting through water, piercing anything that obstructed their path.

  Our next-door neighbour, Da Bo, was about forty-something (I imagined my father to have been the same age because Da Bo had four daughters who were close to me in age). Da Bo was a skilled fisherman with a good reputation; unlike my grandfather who had wrecked his boat and then lost everything, Da Bo always kept his boat in a good condition and sailed it frequently. He fished with his own boat even after the Fish Farming Collective formed in our region. I would go with his daughters to the dock and wait for him to return. His four daughters all bore the same name, Feng, which means Phoenix, but were distinguished by number. So from the oldest to the youngest they were called Yifeng (Phoenix One), Erfeng (Phoenix Two), Sanfeng (Phoenix Three) and Sifeng (Phoenix Four). You would think they had been treated badly by Da Bo and his wife, as they were only useless girls, not longed-for sons, but in my eyes they were not mistreated at all. Da Bo loved them just as he would have loved sons. It made me wonder about my parents. If they had loved me, would I have been living with them?

  Once, while we were playing in Da Bo’s backyard, he taught us how to catch swordfish. ‘The swordfish is the fastest of all the fish in the sea. They can swim down to two thousand feet below the surface of the water and then swim back up again in one go. Can you imagine that?’ Da Bo stared at me, his bloodshot eyes glistening. Just like the swordfish. I shook my head weakly.

  ‘It’s very difficult to catch them, that’s why they are so prized.’ He spoke as his hands untangled the fishing net. His wife was holding the other end, trying to spot any bits that needed mending.

  ‘So how do you catch them?’ I asked eagerly.

  ‘How? Because I never sleep! I catch them by moonlight, when the sea is calm. I don’t like having any other scavengers around me, you see? Swordfish are powerful predators because they have large fins. They have very few enemies, only whales are strong enough to attack and eat them. I take my boat out in the dark and then I circle quietly, choosing spots where the shrimps live because swordfish love shrimps. My old heavens! Those bastards are so quick! They can dive so quickly at the brush of a hook or harpoon. And when hurt, they can run their swords through the bottom of our hulls. Once, I saw them form a gang and attack the sides of my boat! And one of the swordfish was about four metres long. It was half the size of my boat! I thought, those bastards will destroy it!’

  ‘Then what happened?’ I asked, terrified by his story.

  ‘They made holes everywhere and water came in. But in the end, I was fully prepared, and with strong gloves I snatched the four-metre-long monster and smashed his head with my oar!’

  Da Bo stood up, took out a small knife from his pocket and cut a piece of dried swordfish hanging from a branch of his bay tree. He handed it to me. I took it and put it straight into my mouth. After chewing on it for a long time, I decided my teeth were not strong enough. It tasted like salty steak, but felt like a piece of wooden cardboard. I couldn’t swallow it. I would have preferred to eat my grandfather’s shoes. So I spat it out. Da Bo didn’t take offence. He just laughed.

  Since I rarely ate swordfish, I had assumed it must be delicious, when not dried and salted. Of course my grandmother could hardly afford such a delicacy. She would only buy the cheapest creatures from the sea – small crabs and fiddly shrimps for making a kind of pickled-fish mash. Otherwise she would buy jellyfish. Jellyfish were cheap. You could get a big bowl for just five fen. And I loved the sour spicy pickled white globules in ginger sauce. That was my idea of luxury, my swordfish without the proud sword.

  The Hui

  When I was six one of our neighbours told me that I was Hui, not Han Chinese. I didn’t know what he meant. He said Hui don’t usually eat pork, but we ate pork ravenously when we had the chance. Pork was the best. We would eat an
y meat available in the village, including dog and cat. So I went back home and asked my grandparents about the Hui. But my grandfather refused to explain. He had taken to only ever speaking in monosyllables. And my grandmother couldn’t help me since her family’s ancestors were Han. All she said was: ‘Don’t ask me! You know your grandmother is illiterate. I can’t even write my own name.’

  So I went to see the stationmaster, the man in charge of our village’s long-distance bus service. I had heard people say he had made it to the outside world many times and knew lots of things. Besides, he was a member of the Communist Party. Not that I knew what that meant then, but I gathered that it was no easy achievement. So I walked up the hill, all the way to the bus station with its wide view of the coast.

  ‘What are Hui, stationmaster?’ I asked. He was standing by the ticketing window, holding a book of bus tickets and a pen. A whistle hung around his neck which he used when it was boarding time. But it was noon, and all the buses had already left. He was having some time to himself, chewing roasted sunflower seeds while monitoring the station.

  ‘Hui? They are descended from the Mongols or the Turks. Your ancestors were Tartars.’

  ‘Tartars?’ I didn’t understand a word he was saying.

  ‘Yes. They were from the west of China, that is, Central Asia. They were very powerful and brutal people. Haven’t you ever heard of the Mongols?’

  I shook my head. How could I, in such a village?

  ‘They ride horses and sleep in yurts on the grass. They don’t like growing rice, nor do they know how to fish.’

  ‘They sleep in yurts on the grass?’ I was caught by that image, thinking it could be fun living under a giant umbrella beneath the sky.

  ‘You might be a descendant of the Mongols. You know, one out of every three hundred Chinese is related to Genghis Khan, the great emperor of the Yuan Dynasty. I bet you are one of them!’

  A descendant of Genghis Khan?

  ‘But, stationmaster, you mean I don’t come from around here? I come from the place where people ride horses and sleep on the grass?’

  ‘Yes. And when you grow up, you’ll be just like your Tartar ancestors. You’ll carry a long knife and conquer the world.’

  I was never a girly girl. For some reason I was always drawn to epic stories of heroes. So I was impressed by what the stationmaster had told me. Carrying long knives and conquering the world. It was unimaginable for a skinny girl like me. It sounded strange but wonderful!

  ‘Your grandfather should know where your family comes from. Ask him.’

  ‘But Grandpa doesn’t like to talk. You know that. He doesn’t even speak at home.’

  As we talked, a bus full of passengers arrived. Chicken cages, wedding quilts and piles of luggage had been tied to the roof. The exhaust was so thick it made me want to throw up. The stationmaster jumped back on duty. He blew his whistle loudly and made signs to the bus driver.

  As he was directing the driver he turned to me and said: ‘One day, when you see your parents, they will tell you where you come from.’

  I watched the passengers climb down from the bus, covered in dust, carrying their chickens and shopping from the nearby town. I tried to form an image of my parents. I was told they had to work elsewhere in a newly built town, a whole day’s bus journey from here. Surely I had already met them, given the fact that my mother had given birth to me. But my poor head was otherwise empty of details about them. Neither did I feel I missed them. How could a child who had never lived with her parents miss them? How could someone who doesn’t know what love is, miss love?

  In 1970s China, we lived an uneducated, rural life with no television, no books or magazines, and no access to information that wasn’t state-controlled. With Communist ideology running from top to bottom, there was barely any room for personal discussion about love or intimacy. I don’t ever remember having heard the word ‘love’ before I had turned twelve or thirteen. No one ever mentioned it. Or if I did hear it, it would have been used in propaganda about Mao and the Communist Party. But they would use the word re ai, – literally ‘hot love’, or passionate devotion. You were supposed to devote yourself entirely to the Communist Party and Chairman Mao. Personal love was the last thing one should be concerned with. I wondered, years later, whether that was why my grandmother took to crying alone in her kitchen corner so often. There was so little love in her life. And she didn’t ‘love’ or understand Communism and the ideology of Chairman Mao either. She probably loved her son, my father. But he barely ever came home. We were abandoned by him and by my mother, or by the idea that you should ‘devote your life passionately to Chairman Mao and the Communist Party’.

  Pirates of the East China Sea

  During the Ming Dynasty, some four hundred years ago, local militia used to march through our street, Anti-Pirates Passage, before going off to fight the Japanese pirates. The stationmaster was descended from one of those fighters and would tell stories about this brave forefather.

  ‘Do you know why we called those pirates wokou?’ the stationmaster asked me once while I was listening to him recount the heroic deeds of his family.

  ‘Wokou?’ I shook my head. It was a very old word, a word only very old people used.

  ‘Wo means short people, dwarves, like the Japanese. Kou means bandit – in this case they were sea bandits.’ The stationmaster squatted down and, using his index finger, wrote the two characters in the sand: . The characters had so many strokes and composed by all sorts of radicals. They looked incredibly complicated. As I watched him writing in the sand with his finger, I wondered if I would ever learn to write, especially characters like these ones. I couldn’t understand how any adult knew how, it looked an impossible task in my eyes. No wonder my grandparents were illiterate.

  ‘The wokou – the Japanese pirates – lived on small islands out there in the ocean, between us and Japan. They were poor, and lived like savages compared to us – we were in the midst of the wealthy and civilised Ming Dynasty. The wokou didn’t fish or grow vegetables like we did. They lived on boats and went along the Chinese coast, robbing the locals of food and clothes. They killed lots of people too …’

  Killed people! How terrifying, I murmured in my heart. I would never want to meet those dwarf pirates.

  ‘Some of them were also Chinese. They lived on tiny islands in the East China Sea. They helped the Japanese to loot our towns. We didn’t understand their dialects. No one understood anyone from outside their part of China really. But my great-great-great-great-grandfather could tell if they were pirates or not, even when they were still miles out to sea.’

  ‘How? Because they looked different?’ I asked.

  ‘Yes, they wore very shabby clothes – ragged robes and torn hats. And as I told you, they were much shorter. They were midgets, vile, nasty midgets! Their boats were not well built, and they were not well mannered. Also, if you looked closely, there were no fishing nets hanging from the side of their boats, because they were lazy people! They only robbed, never worked.’

  ‘So how did your great-great-great-great-grandfather fight them?’ I was eager for the real story, as the stationmaster was always getting sidetracked.

  ‘Ha! He volunteered to fight after the dwarf bandits attacked the village! They always attacked in the night. They looted and murdered people in their beds, taking pigs and rice with them and running back to their boats before dawn. Then the Ming emperor sent a general called Qi Jiguang. General Qi was a legendary military man. He trained my great-great-great-great-grandfather and all the other local farmers and fishermen. He taught them how to use guns and swords, and how to swim. Can you imagine! No one in Shitang could swim at that time but we had been fishermen for centuries.’ The stationmaster paused to see if this important point was clear to me.

  I shook my head, then nodded with great seriousness. Yes, I could imagine that. Because my grandfather was a fisherman and he had never learned to swim. He, like us, believed sea demons would snatch him if h
e went into the water. So he never liked the idea of learning to swim.

  ‘But it must have been difficult for the general to train the fishermen to swim, because they would be scared of being eaten by sea monsters,’ I said, picturing the fishermen spluttering around in the water.

  ‘You are right, Xiaolu. You are a clever girl.’ The stationmaster patted me gently on the head. ‘But General Qi was from inland and he had been sent by the emperor. So he didn’t care what our fishermen thought about sea monsters and he was very forceful with his rules. In the end, he trained all our men, and even got everyone in the province to build forty big warships!’

  Wow. I was impressed by this story. This general sounded like the real hero, not the stationmaster’s x3 great-grandfather, who was actually just some low-level soldier.

  ‘So in the end, we beat the dwarf pirates. They didn’t dare get so close to the coast again! And our villagers learned how to build very big ships. So big that you could bring everything you needed to live on them for days on end!’

  ‘And what happened to your great-great-great-great-grandfather, stationmaster?’

  ‘He died in battle. Many of our fishermen perished. Nasty sea bandits!’ the stationmaster cursed.

  People said you only became a hero if you died in battle. Otherwise stationmaster’s family would not have been descended from a hero. It had earned the stationmaster respect in the village. I wandered off, my mind full of images of those big ships. I would like to have lived on one of them with all the food and water and supplies I might need, and free to go wherever I wanted.