by Ge Fei
Lilypad yawned constantly and could make no progress on the hempen weave she carried around with her. Magpie sat next to Mother, smacking her lips when Mother smacked hers and sighing when Mother sighed. No one spoke. Storm winds hammered the windows; the shushing of rain on the roof continued without end.
“The hell did you have to go picking flowers for?” Mother snapped at Lilypad, as she had done several times already. When no reply came, she turned to Magpie. “And you don’t seem to have ears on your head either. I told you to wait until after the harvest to grind the flour, but there you go hurrying off to the mill anyway.” Then her eyes fell on Xiumi. “Your father may have been crazy, but he’s still your father. If you had held on to him tight enough, he wouldn’t have bitten your arm off.” Finally, she cursed Baoshen, the dumb cur, repeating the same insults over and over. “Where did that cockeyed bastard disappear to all day?” Magpie would only shake her head, Lilypad claimed ignorance, and Xiumi heard Lilypad’s lie and didn’t contradict it. She struggled to keep her eyes open; even the sound of the rain seemed a little unreal.
Baoshen did not return until long past midnight. He trudged into the main hall carrying a hurricane lantern, his pants rolled up to the knees and a look of defeat clearly visible on his face. He had led a search party across every inch of ground in a several-mile radius that stretched as far as the Martial Temple at the foot of the mountain, and questioned hundreds of people without obtaining a trace of useful information.
“Did he just fly away?!” Mother cried. “How far do you think a crazy man with a suitcase can go in half a day?” Baoshen just stood there in sheepish silence, water dripping from every part of his body.
2
WHAT DROVE Father insane? This unanswered question would weigh on Xiumi for years. Once she asked her private tutor, Ding Shuze, about it, but the old man merely frowned and chuckled, “Go ask your mother.” She did, when she got home that day, and Mother slammed the table with her chopsticks so hard that all four rice bowls leapt into the air at once. Later, she would recall thinking that four rice bowls leaving the table at once might have been the reason Father went crazy. She went to pester Lilypad, who replied with an air of total confidence, “What else but all the fuss over that stupid Han Yu painting of the Peach Blossom Spring?”
Xiumi asked her who Han Yu was. Lilypad informed her that Han Yu was a great general who had defended China against a Jurchen prince who invaded from the north many centuries ago. He also had a wife, Liang Hongyu, who was famous the world over for her beauty. Eventually Xiumi read Han Yu’s essay “On Entering the Academy” and realized that Han Yu was not the famous general Han Shizhong, nor was he married to Liang Hongyu, and Lilypad’s explanation fell apart. So she went to ask Magpie what happened, and her only answer was, “I guess he just turned out that way.” In Magpie’s mind, going crazy needed no explanation—insanity would come for everyone eventually.
At that point, Xiumi’s only option was to coax answers out of Baoshen.
Baoshen had worked as Father’s valet since the age of twelve. When Father’s connection to the salt-tax scandal in Yangzhou cost Father his official position, Baoshen was the only one of his subordinates to follow him home to the south. Baoshen confirmed that the Peach Blossom Spring painting really did exist; it had been a gift from Ding Shuze on Father’s fiftieth birthday. Ding Shuze and Father had become fast friends during Father’s first few years home after his dismissal, exchanging poems and passing the cup with frequency. The painting, reputed to be the work of the Tang dynasty scholar and poetic luminary Han Yu, had been the crown jewel of the Ding family library. Even when the library burned down twenty years prior, the painting had miraculously survived.* That Ding Shuze could have made a gift out of the only surviving item of his collection, a cherished heirloom and a great masterpiece at that, clearly indicated the uncommon depth of his friendship with Father.
Then one day, Baoshen was carrying a kettle of boiling water for tea up to Father’s study and heard the repeated strikes of flesh against flesh. He opened the door to find the two men fighting—Mr. Ding cuffing Father, Father punching Mr. Ding, both of them standing there hitting each other without saying a word. Baoshen was so shocked he merely stood and stared, without thinking to break it up; the fisticuffs ended only when Ding Shuze spat out a front tooth in a wad of bloody sputum and ran off howling with a hand over his mouth. Little time elapsed before one of his students dropped by with a written declaration of a terminated friendship. Father opened the missive and read it seven or eight times while shaking his head and exclaiming, “Those brushstrokes. Look at those beautiful brushstrokes.” Both his cheeks were swollen, and it sounded like he had an egg in his mouth when he talked. Baoshen had no idea as to why their relationship had soured, but simply sighed, “Scholars all over are just a bunch of crazies, anyway.”
That was Baoshen’s explanation. Ding Shuze’s own story went that Father had written a poem to him that misquoted a line by the classical poet Li Shangyin—“Golden toad bites the lock; burning perfume enters”—accidentally replacing the character for “toad” with the character for “cicada.”
“Both characters are pronounced the same—it was obviously an orthographical error. Your father’s scholarship was amateur at best, but he knew Li Shangyin’s poetry well, well enough, at least, to avoid such a silly mistake. I corrected him with the best of intentions, and I certainly didn’t mean to ridicule him. But he blew up, and railed on and on about checking the sources. He knew he was wrong, but he played the imperious official and tried to shout me down. Well, since they fired him, he was no longer an official. He may have passed the civil service exam, as I never did, and held a provincial post, while I never served. But an exam score and a teaching post in the Imperial College still won’t change a perfectly good toad into a cicada. And when I told him so, he stood up and hit me. Even knocked out a tooth.” With old resentment clearly audible in his voice, Ding Shuze opened his mouth and exposed his pink gumline so his student could see the proof. Thereafter, Xiumi suspected that Father had turned crazy because of Ding Shuze’s lost front tooth.
In any event, Father lost his mind.
When he first received the painting, Father locked it away in his study and rarely showed it to anyone. After the fight, Ding Shuze regularly sent servants to ask for it back, to which Father replied, “If he comes for it himself, I shall return it on the spot.” While the mere thought of the painting made Ding Shuze’s heart ache, it had been a gift freely given, and he could not bear the embarrassment of asking for it himself. Baoshen’s opinion was that Father had gone mad looking at it.
Lilypad had been in the habit of making Father’s bed in the morning after he got up. But one day, she entered his chambers to find his bed untouched, the owner sleeping soundly at his desk, on which lay piles of books and the Han Yu painting, speckled with soot from the lamp. Lilypad shook Father awake and asked him why he hadn’t gone to sleep on his bed. Father made no reply, but rubbed his bloodshot eyes, turned to Lilypad, and stared at her fixedly. She caught the empty look in his eye, sensed his unnatural bearing. Tucking her hair behind her ear, she asked, “After all these years, aren’t you sick of staring at me?”
Father held her in a motionless gaze for a long moment. Then he gave a small sigh and asked, “Lilypad, do I look like a cuckoo to you?”
At this, Lilypad turned and hurried her way back down the steps to tell Mother exactly what Father had said. Mother had been at the peak of fury with Baoshen for running off secretly to the whorehouses in Meicheng, and hadn’t paid much attention. But that evening, as everyone sat down for dinner, Father strolled into the dining room (his first time coming downstairs in two months) without a stitch of clothing on. The sight of his naked body stunned the room into dead silence and a flurry of confused glances. Father tiptoed behind Magpie, covered her eyes with his hands, and asked, “Guess who?”
Magpie recoiled in fright, an
d the hand that held her chopsticks flailed about in front of her for a moment before she timidly replied, “The master.”
“You guessed right,” admitted Father, giggling like a child.
Mother’s shock was so profound she forgot to swallow the food in her mouth. Xiumi was twelve that year. She would never forget the sight of Father’s wordless smile and ashen face.
Mother didn’t quite believe that Father could suddenly lose his mind; at the very least, she held out significant hope for his recovery, and the first few months did not distress her much. First she called the doctor, Tang Liushi, who force-fed Father herbal tinctures and covered him with acupuncture needles. Xiumi could recall witnessing Father being tied to a sedan chair by Baoshen in nothing but his underwear and squealing like a stuck pig as golden needles shimmered all over his body. After Dr. Tang, the Buddhist monks with their rituals arrived, followed by the Taoist priests with their exorcisms, the yin-yang geomancers, and the blind witches right behind them, trying every trick from ancient physiognomy to Heavenly Stem divination to Celestial Palace augury—everything short of pulling out his bones and boiling them. The parade continued from early spring right through late summer, during which time Father became more docile, as well as noticeably fatter, so much so that the extra flesh on his body jiggled when he walked and squeezed his eyes into slits.
That summer, while walking around the garden, Father leaned against a stone table to rest and immediately tipped it over. Baoshen summoned a few stout worthies from the village to lift it back up, but a solid afternoon of shouting and straining proved useless. When Father was in a good mood, he liked hitting people for fun; one heavy slap could send Baoshen spinning in circles. One day he somehow managed to get his hands on a halberd; he took it into the garden and started cutting down trees and flowers. Mother led a team of servants to see what was going on—the glittering blade flashed through the air, chopping down everything in its path. Eventually he felled a wisteria, a persimmon tree, three white poplars, and two young pagoda trees. Finally, Mother sent for Baoshen, who circled, dodged, and danced like a martial arts master as he tried to stop Father, but he couldn’t even get near him.
The incident drove Mother to a courageous decision: she would hire the Wang brothers to forge her an iron chain with a heavy bronze lock, and tie Father up like a mule. She begged the Earth God’s advice, and he readily agreed. She asked the Bodhisattva Guanyin, and the deity visited her that night in a dream, exhorting her to act quickly, and to make the chain as heavy as possible. Yet before the instrument was finished, disaster struck again: late one night, for no apparent reason, Father set his chambers on fire. By the time tendrils of acrid smoke jolted the household awake, the flames were already rising to the eaves. Baoshen displayed his undying loyalty to his master by charging into the inferno with a soaked cotton blanket over his head and shoulders, and miraculously returned with Father (who was three times his weight) on his back, a bag of books clutched to his chest, and Father’s prized painting in his mouth. The scroll lost a corner to the blaze, but the building burned to the ground.
The unexpected fire woke Mother to the fact that every major disaster caused by Father’s insanity was somehow connected to the painting. When she asked Baoshen’s advice, he noted that since the painting was actually the Ding family’s property, and Ding Shuze had repeatedly sent over servants demanding its return, they would do well to oblige and give the gift back. Though the fire had eaten up one corner and hardened the paper, turning it dark and brittle, a careful remounting could essentially allow for a complete restoration. Mother thought this a sensible plan, and went along with it: the next day, even as the ruins in the courtyard still smoked, she left through the side door and set off for the Ding family estate with the painting in hand. As she approached their western chambers, she heard voices and stopped to listen. The speaker was Ding Shuze’s wife, Zhao Xiaofeng.
“And so the Lu family hoards our family treasure for no reason and refuses to give it back. And now look what’s happened—it’s all burned down. We kept that painting safe for how many generations, through difficult times, ill fortune and good, without so much as a scratch, and the day it moves to that horrible family, all kinds of strange things start happening. How can a dumb fool like him be able to look at a painting like that? He went crazy just trying.”
That was enough for Mother. She turned and marched right back home, swearing she would torch the rest of the scroll right there. “Why burn it when I can cut it out for shoe soles?” exclaimed Lilypad. She snatched the painting from Mother’s hands and marched to her room.
In September, Mother directed Baoshen to hire people to rebuild Father’s studio. The changing seasons brought nearly constant rain, and the masons and carpenters managed to trample the well-tended rear courtyard garden into a pigpen. They wandered around the estate wherever they liked, and made no effort to avoid Magpie or Lilypad, but followed them with such hungry stares that Xiumi didn’t dare go downstairs for over a month.
One of their number was a barrel-chested nineteen-year-old named Qingsheng, who was so solidly built he made the iron rings on the doors rattle when he walked. They called him Listen, because it was the one thing he couldn’t do; he spent most of his time walking around the villa, and not even the foreman could control him. If Listen’s fingers didn’t listen, they’d find their way to Lilypad’s hips for a juicy pinch; if his feet didn’t listen, they’d take him right into the washroom as Magpie was bathing, causing her to leap out of the bath stark naked, and hide under her bed. When Mother and Baoshen complained to the foreman, the old man merely laughed. “He just won’t listen to me. He’ll never listen.”
The day they finally finished, Xiumi stood by a window on the second floor and watched the workmen leave. Qingsheng continued his strange behavior: though the others all walked straight ahead, Qingsheng walked backward so he could keep his eyes trained on the villa, examining it top to bottom and nodding to himself. He caught sight of Xiumi standing at the window, and both of them started. He waved at her, made faces, and smiled mischievously. He kept walking backward and looking at her until he ran into a chinaberry tree at the far end of the village.
Once the mob left, Mother had the servants shovel the mud and filth out of the main hall, whitewash the walls, burn incense in the rooms to get rid of the stench, and send the master’s chair, which the workmen had flattened, out for repair. It took over a week of constant work to restore tranquility to the estate.
The Wang brothers also delivered the chain, but now it had ceased to be necessary: the trauma of the fire had frightened Father so much he became as quiet as a sleeping baby. He spent his days sitting in the pavilion next to the studio, staring into space or conversing with a ceramic washbasin. He sucked on his fingers when he got bored. By his chamber’s western wall stood a trellis of roseleaf raspberry bushes that bloomed every year in the early summer, at which time Father would order Baoshen to carry him downstairs so he could sit beside the small stone table among the flowers. He would sit there all afternoon, surrounded by the mosaic of white petals, and breathe in the faintly perfumed air.
That winter, Mother decided it was time to find a private tutor for Xiumi. They searched and searched, and ended up asking Ding Shuze anyway. The first few days of class, Ding Shuze gave Xiumi no lectures, taught her no new characters, and just complained about her father. He said that even though her father went on and on about leaving worldly troubles behind and swore to “pick wild chrysanthemums by his eastern hedgerows,” as the poet-recluse Tao Yuanming had done, his spirit never left the magisterial hall at Yangzhou even for a second, just as the proverb says: “An ethereal white heron among the clouds, flying round and round the ministers’ halls.”
Xiumi asked her teacher, “Why did Father set fire to his study?”
Ding Shuze replied, “Your father was an unpopular man in the political world, and being excluded filled him with resentment. He h
ad nothing to let it out on except his books. It seemed to him that reading and studying were to blame for his disastrous career. Even before he lost his mind, he used to carry on about wanting to burn every book in the village—all empty talk, of course, as he was still too attached to the glamour of the official’s life. Why else would he keep a soft-skinned young trollop at home?” Xiumi knew he meant Lilypad. She asked, “So why did Father cut all those trees down?”
“Because he wanted peach trees in that courtyard,” Ding Shuze answered. “He once told me his plan to plant a peach tree in front of every house in the village. I thought he was making a joke.”
“Why would he want to plant peach trees?”
“Because he believes that Puji is the ‘Peach Blossom Spring’ utopia that Tao Yuanming wrote about fifteen hundred years ago, and the big river in front of the village is the stream that led the boatman to it.”
“But that’s insane.”
“He’s insane—you can’t expect him to think rationally. And that wasn’t even his most absurd idea, ha ha. He wanted to build a covered walkway to connect the entire village. He thought he could protect the people of Puji from sun and rain.”
Ding Shuze’s unrestrained ridicule of her father only strengthened Xiumi’s sympathy for him. Moreover, she couldn’t figure out why Father’s desire to build a covered walkway was absurd.
“But . . .”
Seeing that a long stream of questions might continue to pour forth, Ding Shuze frowned and waved a hand impatiently. “You’re still too young to understand these things anyway.”
•
The night Father left, fifteen-year-old Xiumi lay wide awake in bed, listening to the rush of rain on the roof and smelling the soaked moss outside. She was aware that she might be too young to figure out the true cause of Father’s madness; she was still too young to understand what was happening in the wide world beyond Puji.