Once Upon a Time in the East

by Xiaolu Guo

  Despite the differing opinions, the three men began to chop at it. We kids were a bit scared by this point and ran to hide behind some rocks. It took them a long time to get it open. We saw them looking confused as they stood staring at the contents. I ran back with the other kids, and was greeted by a sight I’d never seen before. Thousands of small pills packed in different glass bottles, each bottle labelled with foreign letters. The pills had various colours and shapes; some were big white tablets, others round like fish eyes, brown and transparent. For a long while, we all stood gathered around these neatly packed bottles of pills, not knowing what to do with them.

  ‘Western medicine,’ said one of the men, breaking the silence. ‘We can take the box to Doctor Ruan, he’ll be able to tell us what they are.’

  ‘Don’t be stupid!’ Da Bo scoffed. ‘Doctor Ruan knows no more English than us! How would he know what these pills are?’

  We called him Dai Fu, meaning Medicine Master. He ran a herbal-medicine store and knew about every grass and root in the world. Patients came to see him, told him what was wrong, he would check the tongue and press his fingers to their wrist to check the pulse. Then compose a herb mix from the jars on his shelves and give his patient instructions on how to cook the herb soup and when to drink it. I used to hang out at Doctor Ruan’s shop every now and then, so I had picked up some knowledge – orange skins for a cough, mint roots for a stomach ache, lingzhi mushrooms for the kidney, ginseng for women, and so on.

  Doctor Ruan was checking a woman’s pulse when we arrived. The woman, who looked sickly and pale, was somewhat irritated by our interruption. The three men laid the box on the counter and said loudly to the Medicine Master: ‘Dai Fu, we found these in the water, maybe you can find some use for these Western pills!’

  Doctor Ruan let go of the woman’s wrist, and examined the bottles in the box. He sighed heavily. ‘Western pills. I wish I could read the instructions!’

  He then grabbed some brown-coloured herbs from a jar on the shelf, and a handful from another jar, weighed some seeds from a drawer and mixed them with some oyster-shell powder. He wrapped the medicine in a piece of thick brown paper and told the woman to cook it slowly, and drink the concoction a day for three days.

  As the woman paid her bill and thanked him for what seemed like an eternity, the Medicine Master put on his glasses and began to study the small labels on the pill bottles more closely, as if he could understand them.

  The villagers said it took the Medicine Master three years to identify every bottle in the box. Apparently, he physically tested each one, either on himself or on his patients, and kept a very detailed diary of what effect each type of pill had on the body. Not that anyone died from his experiments, at least not that I heard. All we knew was that, in the end, he sold the pills with properly labelled Chinese characters written in his own hand. They were very popular and sold quickly, despite their expiry dates.

  The Heart Sutra

  ‘Form is not different from emptiness, and emptiness is not different from form. Form itself is emptiness, and emptiness itself is form. Sensation, conception, synthesis and discrimination are also such as this …’

  My grandmother sat beside our dining table ‘reading’ a Buddhist sutra, the pages crumbling like dried, old cuttlefish. Her index finger was moving along the lines as she chanted. She ‘read’ slowly, word by word, her finger carefully pointing at each character. But wasn’t my grandmother illiterate?

  Even now, I don’t fully understood how my grandmother read a whole book of sutras. I knew then that she was regularly reading at least two scriptures – one was the Heart Sutra and the other was the Diamond Sutra. And she really did read each character, line by line, on those brown, smelly pages. One day I did an experiment. I grabbed the book and asked her to close her eyes. I flipped and messed around the pages and then randomly pointed to a character by covering the others on the page. I asked her to open her eyes again and tell me what it said. She fixed her eyes on the strokes, but shook her head blankly. Then she tried to remove my hands from the page so that she could locate the character in the text. Of course I refused. ‘Ha, I won!’ I yelled mercilessly, having proved my grandmother was indeed illiterate. She could ‘read’ because she first listened to others chanting, and then synced the sound to the position of the character in the text. Even I, just six, could manage that.

  Years later I discovered that the Heart Sutra is the shortest of all the Buddhist scriptures, with only 260 Chinese characters in total; the English version comes to only sixteen sentences. So my grandmother could easily recite it by heart and ‘read’ each word aloud. My grandmother told me that the Heart Sutra had been found two thousand years ago in an ancient Indian temple, written on a palm leaf.

  Even though I was a rebellious child and hated the rituals, I still remember most of the Heart Sutra, just from listening to it being chanted every day as a child. ‘… All dharmas are empty – they are neither created nor destroyed, neither defiled nor pure, and they neither increase nor diminish …’

  ‘What is a dharma, Grandmother?’ I asked.

  ‘Dharma … I don’t know exactly. But maybe it’s about the right way of living.’

  ‘The right way of living? What’s the right way?’

  My grandmother didn’t give me an answer, but merely repeated the sutra: ‘All dharmas are empty …’ Then she went on: ‘This is because in emptiness there is no form, sensation, conception, synthesis, or discrimination. There are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body or thoughts. There are no forms, sounds, scents, tastes, sensations or dharmas …’

  I repeated in my heart: there are no eyes, ears, nose, tongue, body or thoughts. How bizarre! What did it mean? There is nothing? Where are they then? Where are we? Do we exist or not? Knowing my grandmother wouldn’t answer me, I stopped questioning and carried on chanting with her: ‘There is no field of vision and there is no realm of thoughts. There is no ignorance nor elimination of ignorance, even up to and including no old age and death, nor elimination of old age and death. There is no suffering, its accumulation, its elimination, or a path. There is no understanding and no attaining.’ And then, a short beat, and the conclusion: ‘Because there is no attainment, bodhisattvas rely on Prajñāpāramitā, and their minds have no obstructions.’

  I don’t know if my grandmother understood the meaning of those lines. I certainly wasn’t affected by any of it. You don’t have to understand them, people said. You will understand the meaning by chanting them every day year after year. But still I didn’t get it. It was very strange to talk about emptiness when Shitang was full of cries and laughter and talk of births and deaths. With my grandmother’s chanting echoing in my mind, my heart was bored and grew ever wilder. I wanted great excitement. I wanted whatever I saw – balloons, sweets, picture books, beautiful clothes, butterflies and hair clips. I wanted things, not strange ideas about empty forms and suffering. My grandmother’s mournful whisperings and dead texts only made me even more restless and desperate.

  The Taoist Monk Speaks

  There were two temples in the village of Shitang. The one my grandmother used to go to was located on West Hill. It had survived the Cultural Revolution, though there hadn’t been much revolutionary activity in our remote village. But the second temple, which my grandmother and I rarely visited, was a dark and spooky place behind East Hill dedicated to the Taoist pantheon. It was buried in a bamboo forest and looked sad in the shadowy light of the hill. The temple walls and roof were broken in parts. People said it had been destroyed during the Cultural Revolution, and life had never really returned. I once saw a green snake lurking nearby, and once or twice rats scampering around and making nasty noises where the villagers were supposed to kneel down and pray. I was terrified of the place.

  The Taoist temples of my childhood were always more frightening than the Buddhist ones. At least the Buddhists put up friendly statues of the Goddess of Mercy, the Kitchen God, or a fat Happy Buddha. But the Taoists preferred grot
esque half-human, half-monster figures. The one near the village was always pitch black, and completely lacking in chi. Nevertheless, a couple of Taoist monks had made it their home. We called them Daoshi. The Daoshi were desperately poor, because none of the villagers ever went out there to donate food or money. They barely had enough for a candle or an incense stick for the temple jars. And the place was permeated with a strange smell, the kind of stench you might associate with Hell – dead, menacing, mouldy and dank. It was rare to encounter the Daoshi, but if you did, you would notice they always wore those long robes and square-toed grass shoes you only otherwise saw in traditional opera, as they practised their strange and mysterious rituals.

  On one occasion, my grandmother managed to get a Daoshi to talk to her. This monk was an old man, as old as my grandmother. His long white hair had been combed and tied in a chignon on the top of his head, just like my grandmother’s. He was sitting in the yard, grinding a ball of herbs into medicine.

  ‘Daoshi, will you be so kind as to take a look at my granddaughter?’ Grandmother begged. She laid a few oranges she had brought with her beside the herbs by way of an offering. But the old man didn’t even look up. His pestle and mortar continued to make grinding noises, and I thought I saw some rusty powder resulting from this activity. His face was not as wrinkly as my grandmother’s, nor was it anything like the walking corpses that populated our village.

  ‘Daoshi, look at this child! Her face is yellow and her bones are almost poking through her skin! I worry about her.’

  I was a bit scared by the monk’s stoic manner, and I tried to hide behind my grandmother. A few moments later, the monk cleaned the dirt from his hands and glanced at me as my grandmother dragged me closer.

  ‘She’s got a broad forehead, don’t worry.’ His voice was deep and husky.

  My grandmother nodded earnestly, and at the same time pushed me forward. I felt like a little chicken about to have its head chopped off. The monk took my left hand, opened my palm and studied the lines for a few seconds. He took my right hand and examined that too. Then he dropped my hands and went back to his work. He ground some more powder and collected it together in a bowl with a broken edge. The whole scene looked shabby and beggarish.

  ‘The girl is a peasant warrior,’ the old monk announced.

  ‘A what?’ My grandmother hesitated. ‘Did I mishear you? A peasant warrior?’

  But the monk didn’t repeat himself. Just as I was about to ask him myself what a peasant warrior was, he spoke again.

  ‘She will cross the sea and travel to the Nine Continents,’ he announced slowly but clearly as he plucked some dried leaves from a nearby plant.

  In the old days, people used the phrase ‘Nine Continents’ to describe China, or even the whole world. It was a metaphorical phrase because very few people had even been to the farthest reaches of the empire. It was quite an intellectual concept for my grandmother, and the monk’s announcement stunned her. I, however, wasn’t impressed. Somehow, I didn’t believe him.

  The Daoshi gave no more explanation. The monks didn’t like to talk. Instead, he stood up and took the bowl of powder into his clay hut. My grandmother followed him. ‘Do you mean she will conquer her fate and travel the world?’

  ‘Travel the world. Yes, she will.’ These were his last words, and with that he disappeared into his little hut at the back of the temple. We normal people were not permitted to enter a monk’s house. So we stood outside, not knowing what to do. The temple was deathly quiet, only a cicada could be heard screaming with full force in the tree above our heads.

  At that time, Chinese people barely travelled. A monk wouldn’t either, unless he had particular standing like Xuan Zang in the Tang Dynasty, who was entrusted with the task of recovering a set of original sutras from a sacred place far, far away. Travel was simply not a part of our lives. Besides, every Chinese household was strictly registered and monitored through a powerful administrative tradition that originated in imperial times. If a subject left the place of his registered home, he would lose his beneficiary and social status. On top of that, no one had the means to take to the road. The country was vast, bisected by high mountains and long rivers, and even in the 1970s, it lacked any modern infrastructure to enable travel. People unfamiliar with an area could get lost and starve to death. But, for some reason, my grandmother took this palm reading as a good omen. She was happy with the monk’s words, perhaps a bit inspired by the idea. As we walked home along the mountain path buried by long grass, she kept repeating the monk’s message.

  ‘We will wait for that day, Xiaolu. You will travel the Nine Continents and achieve great things when you grow up. Only the Daoshi can see this.’ She paused, struggling for breath. Her bound feet and hunchback made it difficult for her to traverse the hills. She leaned against a tree and almost looked sad. ‘But I don’t think I will live long enough to see that day.’

  Travel the world. I had nothing to say about this. I couldn’t read palms. And I was too small to understand what the ‘future’ meant – it was an impossible concept for a peasant child. All I cared about was the here and now. I wanted everything as soon as I could get it. I didn’t want to wait for the future.

  I have never forgotten the encounter in the gloomy temple. Even today, the sight of a Taoist monk still makes me feel giddy, and slightly fearful. How did that mysterious man with the chignon know my future, when I knew absolutely nothing?

  Tourists on the Beach

  To my young eyes, the East China Sea was always brown, churning the refuse and rubbish the villagers dumped in it every day. Or else it was greasy and dirty, because of the oil plant they built nearby. When all was still, you could hear the oil-drilling machine working somewhere out at sea, and soon this sound replaced the usual patter of the village. The sea was never beautiful or majestic for me. But for others the sea appeared very different. This I discovered one day, when a group of students came to Shitang.

  I was wandering alone as usual by the thick green-brown kelp bed, looking for shrimp and tiny crabs when I saw some college students around eighteen or nineteen in age arriving with their teacher. They didn’t talk like us villagers. Even in my ignorance, I could tell they were civilised people from a civilised place. I quickly realised from their conversation that they must be studying art. They wore white sun hats and carried army-green shoulder bags. With their clean trousers and clean shirts, they looked beautiful and elegant. Their skin was much whiter than ours. Their teacher said something, and they began to take out their sketchbooks and draw the landscape.

  I was fascinated by them and stood very close, watching them drawing. One of the college boys was drawing a boat on the horizon. He used coloured crayons, a sort of oily stick of wax I had never seen before. The way he sketched the waves was messy but quite dazzling. To my astonishment, the brown-coloured water transformed to blue on his paper.

  For a moment, I was dumbfounded. So I asked him: ‘But the water isn’t blue, is it?’

  He raised his eyes, looked at me with some amusement and answered: ‘Maybe you’re right. But in my eyes, it is.’

  I was at loss for words and absolutely taken by what he had said. Then I ran to a girl nearby. She was tall, her black hair strong and thick like the strands of seaweed before her. Gardenias bloomed across her purple shirt. She was a beauty compared to a scruffy, yellow-skinned girl like me. I stood on my tiptoes and watched her. She was sketching some of the fishermen’s wives repairing fishing nets by the kelp bed. These women, normally so ugly and rough with their straggly hair and muddy trousers, suddenly became stylish and even charming. I was mesmerised by her drawing, and stayed by her side as she began to apply colour to the sketch. She worked on the buoys tied to the nets: yellow, blue, white, pink, purple. I had never noticed such colours in reality. She finished her sea landscape with a sunset. Or was it a sunrise? The sun was half orange, half red. I was astonished. I pointed urgently to the sea where no sun was visible on the horizon, and cried:

&
nbsp; ‘But there’s no sun there! Only grey clouds!’

  The girl just smiled. Without responding, she began to paint the sea with a mix of red and blue.

  It was one of the happiest days of my life. I chatted with the students and I loved being around them. I made brief friends with the beautiful girl with the long black hair that afternoon. She told me they were from an art school in the capital city of our province. Hangzhou, she called it. I imagined it must be very far away from here. They were on their Life Drawing summer trip, and were taking the last bus back at four o’clock. Ah, four o’clock! How I wished terribly that I could go with her, to the city of Hangzhou, and to study at that magical art school. I wished she were my big sister. In fact, I wished the whole group were my siblings. I missed them before they had even left. Time passed too quickly, the light in the sky changed. They began to gather their things, packing their colours, pens and paper. In a panic, I decided to follow them to the bus station. As I walked with them, the beautiful girl with the purple shirt said she would come back to visit, and hoped to meet me again. ‘Really?’ I was so happy to hear that, as if that promised future was all that mattered to me. I cared for, and dreamed of, nothing else, as long as those young artists returned to our village. By four o’ clock, the stationmaster’s long, loud whistle blew, and the group waved as the bus pulled away. Off they went, disappearing along the newly paved mountain road, leading to the outside world.

  From that day, I waited for their return. But of course, they never did and I never saw them again. But those young artists had snatched my heart. I knew I could no longer stay in the village, and all I needed was to wait for my chance to leave. That afternoon, an hour after they left, a sunset danced above the kelp-entangled beach. The colours had been taken out of the girl’s picture, a scarlet red on a deep blue sea. I stood on the sand and watched as it trembled almost imperceptibly above the contours of the lapping waves. It was astonishing. Those art students had seen what I was unable to, even though I knew the village and the sea much better than they did. From that afternoon onwards, I knew I wanted to become an artist. I would devote my entire life to that end.