by John Hersey
We left him there. Perhaps Dolphin and the others had planned future rendezvous with him. We emerged by the temple, and I rejoined Moth.
Walking home, I was in a daze. Moth, who was thrilled by the thought that Dolphin had taken me into the thicket for interesting reasons, teased me all the way. I did not tell her what I had seen; I tried to play up to her gossipy excitement.
At the Huas’ we all dined on la pa chou, “winter-sacrifice congee,” the delicacy reserved for this day of the year—dates, chestnuts, jelly, fruits, good things to the number of eight, mixed into a kaoliang gruel. Hua’s wife had decorated the bowls with designs of birds and flowers made of bits of fruit. We slaves were given each a taste, and as the delicious mixture melted on my tongue I closed my eyes and saw again the tattered free man under the juniper bush gnawing like an animal on the dry millet cake.
Hog-Kill-Hog; Pig-Eat-Pig
At the first series of days with heavy frosts, the Huas held a swine-killing.
Grin and Jasmine, whose daily extra chore had been the feeding of Hua’s swine, were in charge of this routine of slaughter and feasting. So skilled was Grin at the split-second work of slaying and cleaning the animals that Hua himself remained in the background, and at times, if a big hog got loose when we were catching him to kill him, or if a piece of hoisting equipment appeared to be on the point of giving way while a carcass was being lifted, we were treated to the spectacle of a slave giving urgent commands to his master, which the owner obeyed with alacrity.
But Grin was no threat to our master. Grin’s temperament was lax, and but for the strength of Jasmine he would have been a shiftless man, or a drinker, or simply a groveling shame of accommodation.
Grin had, however, certain specific skills, which were developed to a high degree. Swine-killing was one of them, and under his direction the two days of this work became a festival—or so the entire household except for me seemed to regard it.
Every moment of the festival was, to me, a horror.
In the first place the swine themselves filled me with revulsion. I loathed the very words “pig,” “hog,” “sow,” “piglet,” meaning slave, meaning creature with white skin, meaning myself, Dolphin, Moth, Perfection, even defenseless Tender; connoting our skin, our filth, our disgusting greediness, our degradation, our grunting speech and clumsy feet, our “bad eyes,” our light and often curling hair, our hopeless single fate: to fatten our owners.
The men hauled out two enormous caldrons, filled them with water, and placed one of them over an ogre-throated fire in a pit, and erected above the pair of kettles a tripod of bamboo poles as thick as thighs.
Now the process of catching and killing began, and Jasmine, Moth, and I had to help. We were within the mud-walled swine wallow; the footing was slime. The swine seemed to know what was in store for them, and they ran here and there at hurtling speeds, grunting with effort and fear. Grin bounced around with the grimaces of an all-or-nothing athlete. With each lunge or dive we made, muddying ourselves like the animals we were trying to catch, Moth flew into cascades of laughter. But my only inclination to laugh was at a bitter incongruity: I was a devoted student, at the time, of The Doctrine of the Happy Mean, and I was reduced to tackling swine in their own element—playing at pig-catch-pig.
Yet hog-kill-hog was far worse. Once caught, the swine commenced a screaming that mimicked the extremities of human terror. Grin with flying fingers roped the kicking knuckles, and Lank and Daddy Chick hoisted the creature, who kept shrieking for sympathy from any who might be called pig in this world, onto a shoulder pole and jogged around to the blood pans in back of the swine hut, and there Grin would cut off screeches and life with a single perfect axe stroke. Relief and pity. Fellow pig!
Each time new squeals for help arose I thought, for some reason, of the boar under the bush near the temple. He had needed our help, his silent eyes had pleaded for help; but we had needed his help, because he was free, and I thought I had seen a kind of scream in selfish Dolphin’s eyes! Yes. Dolphin wanted to run away. I knew that. I was in a desperate fool’s race. Try to win him in time to lose him.
When the prime animals were dead and bled, Grin attached the carcasses, one at a time, to a hook at the foot of a system of blocks attached to the bamboo tripod. By this time the water in the great caldron on the fire was boiling. Grin would hoist each body over the caldron, let it down into the scalding water just long enough to loosen the bristles, raise it again, and drop it into the other kettle of cool water beside the pit.
From there Hua, Lank, and Daddy Chick lifted the corpse with grappling irons and hung it from a crude bamboo frame, under which Hua’s wife, Jasmine, Moth, Perfection, and I worked with scrapers to remove the bristles. These, of course, were kept—to be sold for hairbrushes for fine ladies in faraway splendor. I thought of Big Madame Shen’s table of cosmetic marvels—and of the night when I tried on her exquisite clothes; I was caked now with the mud of a wallow.
But mostly, as I scraped and scraped at the tough pig hides, which had gone from pink to deadest white in the scalding water, I thought about skin. White skin. My fate in the color of my skin.
I looked more than once at the skin on my arm, and the sight filled me with an impotent spirit of revolt; I raged, for want of a more suitable target, at the swine, and I clawed at the stubborn bristles with an energy that brought a quiet word of praise—increasing my fury—from Hua’s wife. “You are an industrious small child,” she said, belittling me as she applauded me, having the right to do this because the skin on her arm was yellow.
After the pallid skins were cleaned the men brought big gut trays and they slit the carcasses and cleaned out the vitals; and as the afternoon waned Jasmine, Moth, and I were submitted to the final indignity: we had to clean the bowels of their feces for the sake of the chitterlings and casings. This was too much for Hua’s wife, who did the less nauseating work of separating out hearts, kidneys, livers, and lights. All these parts we placed for the time being in tubs of salt water, and, still stinking, I rehearsed in my memory the tranquil opening passages of The Happy Mean!
It grew dark, and we carried the carcasses into the courtyard, where, behind locked gates, we laid them out on bamboo racks through the freezing night.
The next morning Grin, wielding dangerous knives and cleavers as if they were sources of delight—as if they were fiddle bows, gong beaters, and tappers for jade sweet-sounding tubes—cut up the bodies, and the rest of us salted the meat. On trays and salting benches we laid out the leaf lard, the hams, the shoulders, the heads, the twinkling feet—no shred to be wasted. The bones were set aside to be boiled. While the men rubbed salt onto the large cuts, we women sat at wooden blocks with hatchetlike choppers, and we diced the inferior meat to be pickled. Hua’s wife tried the fat out from certain portions, and the fragrance of the sizzling lard hung about our heads. The children flocked around us begging for mouthfuls of crisp, for pigtails to roast in the ashes of Hua’s wife’s fire, and for bladders to blow up as balloons rattling with a few beans inside. They ran about, white and yellow, pounding each other over the heads with these blown-up bladders and squealing at their fun. Did the little whites slap the little yellows with an extra force of childish revenge? I thought not. It was I who applied with my white-skinned hand an extra vicious push to each clop of my small hatchet, in honor of my frustration.
When all the meat that mattered was in salt or in barrels of brine we were offered a feast of bits: of spare bones and backbones, jowls and feet, tripe and chitterlings, with a gruel of kaoliang and white cabbage. It was a rare night when so much was set before a slave.
“What is the matter, small child?” Hua’s wife asked me. “Why don’t you stuff yourself?”
“I’m too tired to eat,” I said. I was, once again, on the edge of tears, at the thought of pig-eat-pig.
The Seed-Catching Bird
Yet ten days later my heart was as light
as a thrush’s voice. It was the day before the yellows’ New Year, and Old Sun had invited masters and slaves from the entire district to a celebration, and I knew that I would see Dolphin.
The morning flew. Hua was talkative; he was pleased with his crop, and in general we were not so far behind as usual in the care of the farm. He affixed new couplets, rather grand for our style of life, to the doorposts, in black characters on strips of red paper:
PEACE TO THE COUNTRY ESTATE;
TRANQUILLITY IN THE MANY CHAMBERS.
Hua’s wife pasted up a new picture of the kitchen god, to signal his return from his annual report to heaven, and she spread sesame stalks in the courtyard on which the old year could secretively tiptoe away. She gave each slave a pair of new cloth shoes.
We were excused to the slave hut to dress ourselves for the celebration at Old Sun’s. I had nothing but my quilted field coat and trousers to wear, but Moth drew from her poor bundle of possessions two new cotton scarves, brightly printed with patterns of butterflies and cicadas, and she threw one over my shoulders. “If you don’t wear something new on your back on New Year’s,” she said, “the wild birds will shit on you all year long.” Then with great ingenuity she fashioned headdresses for herself and for me, by folding red, black, green, and gold papers, which she had somehow acquired, in intricate patterns, cutting designs into them, and then unfolding them—lace, combs, jade earrings, gold flowers I
Seeing us decked with these cheap jewels, Lank sourly commented, “Two whores—one’s a fool because she let herself get pregnant.” All the same, I could tell by the way he looked at us that we did not appear quite so hardened as he said.
Going over to Old Sun’s, all of us, even Hua and his wife, walked barefoot, cold as it was, with our new shoes clamped under our arms to keep them clean, and our hands tucked into our sleeves—as if having one set of extremities warm would prevent the others from getting too cold.
On the way our path passed through the humped barren field where dead slaves from all the estates of the countryside were buried under paltry mounds—like sea waves, the meaningless tombs of the dead we had thrown in the ocean from the slave ship East Garden, unmonumented, unmarked, indistinguishable one from another; I thought for a moment of the burial of poor Kathy, killed by her bondage to that mad humanity-hating carpenter in the Capital. This moment of dark thoughts, however, passed; Moth, sensing the chill I was having, took me by the hand and broke into a run, and she pulled me with her out of the graveyard. We waited beyond for the others to catch up.
Outside the wall of Old Sun’s main courtyard we all stopped and put on our shoes, and then we were ready.
The road before the compound gate was crowded with guests, yellow and white, who were arriving on foot, on carts, on muleback and donkeyback riding double and triple. There were three carriages by the gate in which rich men must have brought their families. The slaves were all wearing whatever scraps they could set their hands on that were new and colorful—red-paper hats, multicolored ribbons, paper birds and flowers. Children wore good-luck necklaces of a few cash interwoven with ribbons into the shapes of dragons.
We entered the gate. The yellow guests were bidden to cross the verandas and enter the central hall; the whites were relegated to the large back courtyard, where they were to be left outdoors in the cold. On the lintel of the gate into this courtyard was pasted a New Year’s inscription: “THE BOND SERVANT FINDS HEAVEN-JOY IN DUTY.”
No matter! Three hundred slaves, or more, some in the uniforms of prosperous masters, others, like us, in threadbare quilts, were assembled in the open space, and there was much raucous shouting and uncouth loud laughter. Trestle tables had been set up, covered with sheets of red paper. Crude paper flowers and decorations were displayed on the window grilles and door frames. Here and there characters on red paper proclaimed all those things that slaves would never have: happiness, wealth, good fortune, longevity, and peace of mind.
Moth found Quart, in a runner’s uniform, and I went with her to him. Quart threw his arms around Moth and lifted her off the ground, and then he hugged me, too, pressing me hard to his body. Thinking that Moth might not like this, and finding that I did, I was embarrassed, and I blushed, and my blush made me furious.
I was in the midst of this confusion when Dolphin came striding up, in a tunic like Quart’s but again sporting his red trousers, which he apparently wore on festive days, and he said, “Hai! Fall-down! You look like a magistrate’s concubine! Have you a little mouse for me?”
(Now “mouse,” as I well knew from Moth, was the expression white slaves used at that time for the dark, hairy thing at the base of a woman’s belly—as well as for the co-operative use to which she could sometimes be persuaded to put it.)
For Lank to call me names was one thing; from Dolphin this rude talk came much harder. I thought he was going to embrace me, and I spat at him the one word “Rooster!” because of his crimson pants and rutty tongue, and I bit my lip, turned my back on him, and on an impulse (at the root of which Moth’s advice on tactics my well have lain, though I felt angry) I walked swiftly away, losing myself in the crowd.
But then I was at a loss what to do. I knew no one. I stood awkwardly among chatting groups. I tried to pretend that I was paying close attention to this and that. I hoped Dolphin would not see me floundering this way.
I was rescued by a loud gong at the courtyard gate. Here came Old Sun in a crimson hat and brocaded robes! All the slaves in the courtyard fell to their knees and kowtowed. The old man kept nodding and flapping his hands to us as if dripping water off his fingertips. He spoke a few words, which I could not hear, in a cracking voice, and all stood up. Slaves lifted him into a carved chair on a raised platform, and he presided over the giving of cheap gifts: shoddy hats, fragile pipes, bits of ribbon, trashy scarves like the one Moth had given me—so this was how she had acquired hers in the first place!
Near Old Sun’s feet, besides, were several huge clay jars, as high as a man’s waist, full of spirits distilled from a millet mash, and this liquor was dealt out indiscriminately to the slaves as they came forward for their presents.
I received a cow-horn comb and almost choked on a single sip of the drink; it reminded me of “Uncle” Ch’en’s nightmarish pleasure garden, whence I had been sold out of South-of-the-River Province.
During the giving of gifts various slaves, who were thought, or considered themselves, eloquent, stood up and made florid speeches, squealing in the falsetto tones of itinerant actors, in praise of the senile miser sitting on the throne at the top of the yard. Old Sun nodded at each hypocritical flattery, obviously gripped with a conviction of the truth of the praise.
Dolphin came up to me with a bowlful of the millet liquor and offered it to me, and like a fool I gulped it all down, cupping my hands tenderly over Dolphin’s in a pretense of steadying the bowl. The brew burned me right to my belly as it went down, and I felt wild, and wildly I turned once again and strode away from Dolphin.
This time he followed me; I soon felt a strong hand clamped to my upper arm. “Not so fast, you little sparrow. Come on. Let’s go up near the platform; they’re going to have games.”
I was dizzy from the liquor. I shook off Dolphin’s hand. “Leave me alone,” I said, “you…you centipede!”
This wooden epithet from the traveling slave-players’ stock roster of villains made Dolphin throw his head back and roar with laughter. My silliness vexed me; I was filled up with false emotion, and with tears in my eyes, firmly believing that I was in the act of stalking haughtily away from him for the third and last time, I flung myself on his chest. His arms closed tightly around me, and I heard him laughing in my hair, “You stupid little sow!”
With his arm around my shoulders Dolphin pulled me up into the thick press of slaves around the platform. Old Sun had been carried off, and two jugglers were hurling and swinging five fire-tipped torches ba
ck and forth; the flames somersaulted and caracoled.
For the better part of two hours I leaned, half drunk, in a paralysis of tongueless bliss, against Dolphin’s side. The noisy crowd forced us against each other. Dolphin’s hand was at my waist, and now and then, at the sight of an acrobat’s masterful passage with a foot shuttlecock, or at the sudden lifting of a weighted beam, on the third desperate try, by a strong-man slave, or at a conjurer’s making an entire living pheasant disappear into thin air, converting it into a sudden brilliant flutteration of paper birds, the pressure of the hand palpably increased. All my slave’s life melted into the mind-numbing contentment of this unreal place, this unbelievable pressure.
In all the time he spoke to me only once. “So you belong to Dirty Hua?”
Was this what Sun’s slaves called my master? I nodded.
Then suddenly there was a commotion, some shouting back and forth, and he was gone. I felt a panic. Dolphin was going to be exactly what I had judged—selfish, ruthless, and indifferent to the feelings of others. He would pick me up and drop me, like a twig, whenever he wanted.
Now bareknuckle boxing began, and Dolphin appeared in the fourth bout. I was relieved: he must have been called away from my side.
He fought unshod and stripped to the waist, in just his red trousers, and all across his back I saw long ugly welts.
He won his match and was given a dipperful of millet liquor as a prize. He came back to me, red-faced from the drink. A bruise on his cheek was turning dark. “How was I?” he asked, with a conceited leer.
“They have beaten you,” I said.
“Ayah, baby,” he said, facing the platform and putting his arm around me again, “I’m not going to let them do that to me any more.”
A slave gave a demonstration of sending a bird into the air to catch seeds that the man tossed up. The bird’s foot was tied by a string. I felt very close to the bird, as if it were another self of mine. Its feats were miraculous! It had learned to turn right over in the air (did the slave jerk the string?), to glide, to catch three seeds at one attempt.