by Hualing Nieh
Chia-kang never tires of reading these clippings.
I’ve already copied out two books of the Diamond Sutra by hand, and two books of classical poetry. I keep copying and copying. I don’t even know what I’m writing ...The woman of Shang-yang Palace. Lady of Shang-yang
Palace.
Her fresh face slowly fading, hair suddenly white.
Prison guards in green watch at the palace gate.
How many springs has the palace been closed?
Chosen at the end of Emperor Hsüan-tsung’s reign,
She was only 16 then, but sixty now.
More than one hundred were chosen then.
Alone, the years pass, wilted by time.
She recalls how she accepted her sorrow and bid farewell
to her family.
She was helped into the chariot daring not to weep.
Everyone said that she would be the emperor’s favourite.
Her face like hibiscus, her breasts like jade.
But before the emperor met her
Jealous Consort Yang ordered her sent away.
All her life sleeping in an empty room, sleeping in an
empty room sleeping in an empty room sleeping in an
empty room empty room
Tonight there is no gnawing on the roof. Everything is black, inside and outside. The only light comes from the house at Number Three across the way. Chia-kang is asleep on his tatami mat. The clock, which is still being repaired, sits beside his pillow. In the dark I can’t see what time the clock says.
Sang-wa is asleep on her tatami mat.
I lie wide awake on my tatami mat, waiting for the gnawing noise to begin on the roof.
Suddenly someone bangs at the gate, shouting, ‘House check.’ The police often use the pretext of a census check in order to search for fugitives.
I sit up with a start.
The main gate is opening. Someone comes into the courtyard. He shouts at Old Wang. He is ordering him to wake up everyone in the house. Tell them to get out their census papers and identification cards.
Chia-kang suddenly turns over and sits up. He lies down again and then sits up.
They’ve come? They’ve come? Have they finally come? He can’t stop mumbling.
I nod and motion for him to be quiet.
We sit side by side. Each sitting on our separate tatami mats. Backs against the wall. Holding hands.
I hear them go into the Ts’ais’ house.
Chia-kang writes on my palm:TS’AI WILL TURN US IN
NO, MY FATHER SAVED HIS LIFE
OLD WANG?
NO
I DON’T TRUST HIM
HE HAS BEEN WITH THE TS’AIS
MORE THAN 20 YEARS
THE TS’AIS HAVE SAVED OUR LIVES
YES
THEY’RE QUESTIONING HIM
MAYBE
THEY’LL SHOW HIM THE WARRANT
MAYBE
THEY ARE COMING UP TO THE ATTIC
I’M READY
I’LL GIVE MYSELF UP
NO
WHY NOT
PERHAPS WE CAN ESCAPE
THEY’LL COME SOONER OR LATER
I’LL GO WITH YOU
YOU SHOULD BE FREE
FREEDOM WHERE
THEY’RE COMING
I’M LISTENING
IN THE COURTYARD
SOMEONE IS LAUGHING
LAUGHING AT WHAT
WHO KNOWS
ARE THEY COMING
WHO KNOWS
Hey, Old Wang, the inspection is over. Go on back to bed. They talk loudly as they walk out the gate. The gate is closing. Sound of boots on the stones in the alley. They knock on the gate to Number Three. In Number Three the lights go on one by one.
Chia-kang lies back down. I am still sitting by the window. He reaches out and tries to pull me over to his tatami mat. I can’t move.
He wants to sleep. He wants to forget. It will be all right when the night is over. He mumbles and writhes under the blanket. I pull aside the blanket and lie down beside him. I let him crawl on top of me. With one jerk he wets my thighs like a child squirting urine.
Finally he falls asleep.
The noise on the roof starts up again. It gnaws from the corner along the eaves. I suddenly remember that there’s a woodpecker that lives on the roof. Old Wang told me about it before we moved into the attic.
(B) Summer, 1958
The time on the clock in the attic is still twelve thirteen. It makes no difference if it’s midnight or noon. The humidity and the heat are the same. The dampness seeps into the marrow of my bones and mildews there.
Chia-kang doesn’t try to repair the clock anymore. We have our own time.
Sang-wa’s tatami mat is near the window. The sun is shining down on her. Nine o’clock in the morning.
The sun is licking her body. Licking. Licking. Suddenly I look up. The sun has disappeared. Twelve o’clock noon.
The man who sharpens knives comes by, banging his iron rattle. Two in the afternoon.
In the distance the train whistles. Three in the afternoon.
The government commuter bus stops at the intersection. Civil servants in twos and threes walk down the lane. Five in the afternoon.
The woman who sings in the local street opera suddenly bursts into tears over a lover’s quarrel on some nearby street. Seven in the evening.
The blind masseuse is blowing her whistle in the dark alley. Midnight.
For a long time there have been no house checks after midnight.
Chia-kang sits on his tatami mat telling his fortune over and over with a deck of cards, three cards are fanned out in his hand. He hunches over and studies them, mouthing words.
Three sworn brothers.
He motions to himself in a gesture of victory. He peers into the small mirror in the corner of the room and nods his head and laughs silently.
My hair has grown long again. I don’t bother to cut or brush it. I let it flow over my shoulders.
I spend most of my time on the tatami mat writing the story of ‘Her Life’. I no longer copy the Diamond Sutra out by hand.
She is an imaginary woman. I describe the important and unimportant events of her life. A collection of odd, disjointed fragments. She marries a man who once raped her. She is frigid.
When I’m not writing, I look at old newspapers. First I read stories about people running away. There are all sorts of escape stories in the newspaper.
There’s a story about someone who goes to prison in place of her husband. Lai Su-chu’s husband was a merchant who went bankrupt before he died. He used her name to write bad cheques. Lai Su-chu didn’t have the money to cover them. She was sentenced to six months in prison. She took her two-year-old son with her and served out sentence in the prison.
I cut out the picture of this woman embracing her child in prison and stick it up on the attic wall.
Sang-wa is sitting on her tatami mat drawing. She draws the Adventures of Little Dot on the margins of old newspapers.
I. Little Dot
2. Little Dot, Papa and Mama live on their tatami mats
3. Little Dot wants to go away
4. Mama gets angry
5. Little Dot goes away
6. Little Dot wants the horse to take her away
7. The horse takes Little Dot to play on the sea
8. The horse carries Little Dot to play on the mountains
9. Little Dot pats the horse and says she is happy
10. Little Dot goes back to her tatami mat. Papa and Mama are very angry
11. The horse tells Little Dot to fly out the window and marry him
12. Papa kills the horse with an arrow
13. The horse’s hide is hung up to dry in the sun
14. Little Dot looks out the window
15. The horse’s hide rushes to hug Little Dot
16. Little Dot changes into a silk worm with a horse’s head
I look out the window at the world outside. The world is cove
red with dust and cobwebs.
A white cat is dragging its black tail across the opposite rooftop.
Uncle Ts’ai and several friends come into the courtyard. They gesture and move their mouths. I quickly dodge to one side. Sang-wa crawls over to the window. I tell her not to look. However, I return to the window. The little window isn’t big enough for two people to look out. I push her head down below the window sill.
Why can those people in the courtyard come and go as they please, Sang-wa asks me. Sometimes she presses her face to the window.
I explain. They can’t go wherever they want to, either. There’s a wall around the yard. Beyond the wall is the sea. Beyond the sea is the edge of the earth. The earth is a huge attic. The huge attic is divided into millions of little attics, just like ours. I want Sang-wa to understand that the other people in this world live just like us.
Chia-kang lies on his tatami mat mumbling to himself. His heart is pounding, it’s about to burst. He has heart disease. He wants to die in the attic. He embezzled from public funds only for his family. If he were single, he would be innocent. Even if he has committed a crime, he could get out of the country. He could go to America or South America. Become a foreigner, just like that. His voice grows fainter and fainter. Finally he is just babbling and moving his mouth up and down. Whether his voice is loud or soft doesn’t make any difference. Sang-wa and I ignore him completely. Besides, we aren’t afraid of speaking in the attic anymore. We haven’t used palm writing or writing with kitchen matches to converse for a long time.
Sang-wa sits on her tatami mat singing ‘The Girl on the Great Wall’ over and over in a small voice.
She sings and draws on the newspaper. One whole page is devoted to the important events in the history of modern China beginning with the founding of the Republic 47 years ago on January I when Sun Yat-sen took office as provisional president in Nanking, all the way to the present, to the Communist bombing of the Straits of Taiwan. In between there were the wars against the warlords, the war of resistance against Japan, and the Civil War. Sang-wa scrawls thick, crooked lines of ink all over those important events with her writing brush. Under the lines she draws little circles. Every circle has two eyes and a nose. She makes an ink blot on the thick line. She writes a caption:Little Dot Plays on the Great Wall
She sings ‘The Girl on the Great Wall’ over and over.
I tell her not to sing anymore. That song is too old.
She says that it’s the first song I taught her to sing. If Papa can talk to himself, then she can sing to herself. She keeps on singing the song.
With the New Year comes the spring
Every house lights red lanterns
Other husbands go home to their families
My husband builds the Great Wall.
Suddenly she stops singing. Suddenly Chia-kang stops talking. They turn. They glare at me.
I have put my hand on the window.
I tell them I want to open the window. But I don’t open it.
The people in the yard have left. A fan made of palm fronds has been left on the grass.
It’s twilight again.
The sun sets behind the attic. We can see only a few rays of red and purple light spreading through the sky. The further the rays of light extend, the fainter they become. Finally they blend with the darkening sky outside the attic window.
There are people in the courtyard.
This time I open the window. Just a crack. Now, not only can I see them, I can also hear their voices.
Uncle Ts’ai throws his head back in laughter. That’s a good sign: as soon as I open the window, there is the sound of laughter.
They are speaking in Shanghai dialect. Peking dialect. Nanking dialect. Hu-nan dialect. Different voices. Different dialects. All tell the same story.
They are talking about a ghoul that eats people alive.
It happened on Lin Huo-t’u’s thirtieth birthday in a village in the south of Taiwan. He invited three friends to his home to drink t’ai-pai. The four of them drank themselves into a stupor.
The next morning a monk walked into the yard of Pao-tz’u Temple. He saw a man lying under the palm tree. The monk carried him on his back into the temple and poured ginger water down his throat. When he came to, he said his name was Lin Huo-t’u.
Lin went home. At home he found his three friends dead. They were lying in pools of water and they stank. The families of the dead men objected to the idea of having the coroner do autopsies. Instead, they held a ceremony to invoke the Ma-tsu Goddess to come. Speaking for the Goddess, the exorcist announced that an evil spirit was lurking in the tomb beside Pao-tz’u Temple. The coffin would have to be moved. Only then could the people of the village avoid calamity.
A girl, Pan Chin-chiao, was buried in the tomb. Six years before she had left the village to go to Taipei. Someone from the village had run into her when she was working as a prostitute in the red light district. She was beautiful and clever. She had acquired quite a reputation for herself in the district. Then, four years ago, Pan suddenly killed herself. There were only two sentences in her suicide note:This time I die just for fun
To see what death is like
The people of the village moved Pan’s coffin, but it was still buried in the same grave.
The third day, just as Lin was waking up, his own dog that he had had for three years, suddenly leaped at him. He fell to the ground and expired. In rapid succession, three young men between twenty and thirty died in the village.
After Lin’s death, a story began circulating in the village. On Lin’s birthday, the four drunk men had fallen asleep in their chairs. Dazed, Lin heard silk rustling. He opened his eyes and saw a girl in a red dress and hat. She had a lovely face and long hair; waves of cold came from her body. He pretended to be asleep. The girl in red breathed into the faces of the three other men. Lin jumped out of his chair and ran away. The girl in red chased him. He saw the lights of Pao-tz’u Temple. He thought to himself: Inside the temple, the gods will protect me. He ran up and pounded on the gate. There was no answer. The girl in red caught up with him. Lin grabbed hold of a cypress tree outside the temple to protect himself. The girl in red reached her arms around the tree and tried to grab him. He ducked left and right to get away from her. Her fingernails were like hooks and sank deep into the cypress bark. She couldn’t pull them out. Lin jumped over the temple wall and rolled under the palm tree. Then he passed out. The next day the monk from Pao-tz’u Temple revived him. On the cypress tree there were four fingernail cuts each a foot deep. A trail of blood went from the gate to the temple all the way to Pan’s grave.
... The ghoul devours people. Another young man died. The people of the village went to find the monk from Pao-tz’u Temple to have him verify the traces of blood left by the corpse. The monk had disappeared. It was rumoured that he did not keep his vows of chastity. It was said that he kept a woman from a good family at the temple. The district magistrate wanted to punish him according to the law, but the monk had run away. Someone found part of a corpse in a clump of straw in the mountains behind the village. All that remained were the thigh bones, pelvis, fingers, and head. His spine was missing. The coroner could not establish the cause of death. He guessed that the dead person had died while sitting in the clump of straw. It was sitting, facing south, looking at the village at the foot of the mountain. The people of the village claimed that it was the monk of Pao-tz’u Temple. He was sitting in the lotus position in the clump of straw when the ghoul found him. The girl in red ate human spines.
Two more people died in the village, both under strange circumstances. The people of the village went to Pao-tz’u Temple to ask for help from the gods. The exorcist said that Pan’s body had not yet decomposed, so she had become a ghoul who ate human flesh. Though at first, she was only eating men, later she would eat women. In two months she would eat all the people in the village. In six months she would eat all the people in the city. In a year, she would finish off all the people o
n the island and not even the fishermen would be spared. Taiwan would become a deserted island. The people of the village must burn her body.
On the next day the exorcist died.
On the third day the statues of the gods in the temple disappeared.
The people of the village decided not to disturb the corpse.
Then the people in the village began to attribute calamities to a different spirit - the spirit of the 11th century Judge Pao, who returned to avenge secret crimes and reward good deeds. Sometimes he inhabited the body of the victims; other times he appeared in the flesh. It was said that he had two black horns on his head.
A seventy-two-year-old carpenter quarrelled with his wife over an egg. Suddenly he lost consciousness. When he came to, his wife was lying in a puddle of blood. He was holding a bloody cleaver in his own hand.
A woman dreamed that a man with two black horns on his head wanted to take her to heaven. From then on she saw that man with black horns during the day. She burned incense and lit candles to seek his forgiveness. But the man with black horns did not spare her. She hanged herself.
A woman visited her mother’s house. When she saw her younger brother, she grabbed his hand and shouted for the Goddess of Mercy to save them from disaster. The two shouted as they raced toward the pond. When the family got there, the brother and sister had already drowned in the pond. Before their death, neither had shown any signs of depression. The sister had been married for ten years and had four children. The younger brother had just gotten married. The two were both happy, optimistic people, and not the least bit insane.