by Xiaolu Guo
‘The Dragon King had no choice but to obey. He quieted the wind and quelled the waves, and in an instant the storms ceased, the typhoons were put to rest, the sun emerged and the sea was tranquil. The waters receded, the land reappeared, and green rice seedlings sprouted all over the Village of the Marsh. Seeing this, the villagers gathered onshore began to applaud and cheer. The Sea Child removed the cauldron and extinguished the fire beneath it. As soon as the fire had been extinguished, however, the Dragon King made a surprise comeback. He called up a wave that swept the cauldron back into the sea, where it disappeared for ever. In an instant, the village was transformed once more into an endless stretch of waves and typhoon-swept waters.
‘The Sea Child was furious. What was he to do? He stamped his enormous feet in anger and the entire village, from the mountains to the sea, began to shake. The impact of the quake caused the gold buried beneath the surface to go flying into the air. At the sight of all the gold, the villagers rushed forward to snatch up the treasure, but they soon discovered, to their amazement, that as the gold nuggets fell to the ground, they turned into stone. As the stones fell from the sky, they formed a wall around the entire village to protect the land from the ocean tides. From that day forward, the villagers realised that all of the gold that had been buried underground had turned to stone, so they stopped being so greedy. They stopped chasing after fortunes and turned to fishing instead. Now that there was a wall to protect the village from the sea, they were able to lead a peaceful life. They settled down and raised families, and the village grew larger and more prosperous. From that day forward, the village was renamed Village of Stone …’
This was the story that the old stationmaster told me that afternoon in the village bus station. He talked for a very long time, until the sun had disappeared behind the hills and I heard my grandmother’s voice in the distance, shouting for me to come home:
‘Little Dog … Little Dog! Get yourself home to eat …!’
14
AFTER MY GRANDFATHER died, my grandmother seemed to grow much sunnier, her mournful sighs less frequent. It was as if his death had freed her from the penance she had been living under since she first arrived in the Village of Stone as a child bride. His death was her liberation. I look back upon those years as my grandmother’s happiest times. On calm, sunny days she would move her cane chair outside to bask in the sun and watch the passers-by. She had no hopes, no cares. She seemed to be counting out the days one by one, reckoning up the scant remains of her time on earth. She even stopped going to the well for water. Every few days, Boy Waiting’s mother brought us a bucket of fresh water. Occasionally, if she had cooked something particularly delicious, she would bring over an extra bowl. My grandmother and I were like a couple of beggars, one young and one old. All we asked of each new day was a full belly and a warm place to sleep. Sometimes the life of a beggar is a carefree one.
My grandmother particularly enjoyed the days in early October, when the typhoons had passed. Bamboo poles appeared all over the village, hung with clothes and bedding that had been mouldering all summer long. The village women got out their laundry sticks and set to beating the moisture out of their heavy quilts. The sound of laundry sticks echoed down the alleyways, carried on waves of golden sunlight. The whole village resounded with it. Only when the quilts had been battered to the soft, spongy consistency of a steamed bun did the women relent. My grandmother sat outside in her cane chair and immersed herself in her favourite hobby: making decorative birds from the discarded bones of fish. My grandmother could fashion a bird in flight from nothing more than a single fish skeleton. The birds were a traditional handicraft of the Village of Stone, but only a few women still knew how to make them. Most of the women in the village were too busy supplementing their incomes by shelling shrimp for the seafood cold processing plant. They had neither the time nor the patience to fiddle around with piles of discarded fishbones. As someone who had married into the Village of Stone, my grandmother had done her best to master the traditional handicrafts of the village women. When it came to making these fishbone birds, she had surpassed her teachers. She never used glue or string, but relied instead on the natural angles and curvatures of the skeletons to piece and weave the bones together. Each bird was made from one complete fish skeleton. She even used the fish eyeballs, so that her creations appeared unusually lifelike. Sometimes she hollowed out the white egg-sacs of cuttlefish and fashioned them into fleets of tiny fishing boats.
My grandmother collected all sorts of fish skeletons: broad flat yellow croaker, long delicate hairtail, thick sturdy eel and the curved outer shells of shrimp. In her calloused hands, their spiny bones became soft and pliable and were transformed into tiny phoenixes, mandarin ducks, white cranes, eagles and skylarks that she lined up on the hearth. Soon our hearth was filled with little birds. Village children began flocking to our house to see them, oohing and aahing over my grandmother’s creations. Now and then, the children would steal one of the birds – an eagle, perhaps, or a crane. When my grandmother discovered this, she decided that she might as well go ahead and give all the children gifts. She presented them with tiny fishing boats, which the children liked to set afloat in basins of water. All in all, my grandmother seemed very content.
It seemed that my grandmother’s life had reduced itself to three main concerns: eating meals, making fishbone birds and reciting sutras. My grandmother always recited her sutras in the kitchen, before the white porcelain statue of Guanyin that graced our hearth. After she had finished her recitation for the day, she would light a stick of incense, bow and place the burning stick in her old, battered incense burner. The burner was filled with ashes that looked as if they had not been emptied in centuries. As soon as she had lit the incense and the house was filled with the fragrant smoke, my grandmother would go back outside to sit in the sunshine in her cane chair and work on her fishbone birds.
It amazed me that my grandmother, who was so illiterate that she could not even write her own name, could manage to memorise entire volumes of sutras perfectly. She could recite them by heart, word for word and line by line, jabbing at each ideograph with her blue-veined fingers for emphasis. ‘Form is emptiness, emptiness is form …’ she would recite, pointing out the ideographs rendered in brush calligraphy, pages of words she couldn’t possibly have recognised. Line by line, page by page she ‘read’, moistening her fingers with saliva to turn the pages, until she had finished the entire book of sutras. Sometimes she asked Boy Waiting’s mother to help her with a passage, often at the beginning of a new page. Hearing the first word of it was usually enough to jog my grandmother’s memory. From there, she could recite the rest of the passage by heart, even with the book closed. Sometimes she would lose her place, or find that she had been reciting the wrong part, but she always managed to put herself right. She could probably have recited the sutras backwards if she had had to.
I had never understood the meaning of those tongue-twisting sutras. If there were any meaning in them, I suspect that only Guanyin herself understood it. I don’t think my grandmother had a much better grasp on the mysterious workings of heaven than I did, but she never asked anyone what the sutras meant. She seemed to feel that faith was sufficient, and that if she persisted in her recitations of the sutras, eventually they would reveal their meaning to her. I was inclined to doubt this.
My grandmother had paid two yuan for her book of sutras, written top to bottom in brush calligraphy on rough bamboo parchment. The old man who wrote letters for the villagers at the post office had copied it out for her. It was probably the first time he had ever been asked to copy a whole volume of Buddhist sutras. Most of the villagers only needed brief letters written. He must have put a lot of time and effort into copying that thick book of sutras, for the language was difficult and there could be no mistakes. Two yuan was no small sum in those days, but as his usual charge was thirty cents for a one-page letter or fifty cents for a two-page letter, two yuan for an entire book of sutras mea
nt that he must have given my grandmother a considerable discount.
One day two men from outside the village came to our house looking for my grandmother. They said that they were interested in buying some of the birds she made from fish skeletons. I thought this was interesting, because it was the first time I had ever heard of anyone willing to pay money for the things. It turned out that the two men were rather high-ranking cadres from the provincial headquarters. They wandered around our kitchen taking photographs of my grandmother’s bird sculptures, which were lined up on the hearth and along the window sills. When they had finished, they watched my grandmother nimbly working on one of her creations. They seemed quite fascinated, clucking their tongues and shaking their heads in admiration. Because my grandmother was sitting outside in her cane chair the entire time, she soon attracted a crowd of curious onlookers. Passers-by and neighbours ran over to see what all the fuss was about, and stood alongside the visiting cadres watching my grandmother’s ‘performance’. In such a small village, this was big news indeed. But my grandmother didn’t feel that her silly little trifles were worthy of selling. She told the cadres to keep their cash and suggested that, in exchange for the bird sculptures, they just give us enough rice, flour and oil to get us through the winter. The visiting cadres did exactly as she asked, delivering enough food for that winter and the next. Then they packed the sturdy little sculptures into a wooden box covered with red silk and carted them away.
The village buzzed with talk of the incident. The fishermen’s wives still considered my grandmother a bit of an oddball. They had spent their whole lives eating fish, mind you, but they certainly couldn’t be bothered fiddling around with any discarded bones, shells, eyeballs and what have you. Although they had to give my grandmother credit for being persistent. Not only had the old girl had the patience to learn one of their traditional handicrafts, she had even managed to sell people her batty idea and trade in those little fishbone birds for stores of flour and rice. My grandmother was a strange old bird, they thought, but she was not one to be underestimated.
My grandmother and I paid no heed to what the villagers said behind our backs. We sat back and watched the villagers lugging provisions into our house, until they had filled two large vats with rice flour and green bean flour. Sometimes the villagers would even bring us water from the well to fill our cistern. Needless to say, my grandmother and I were thrilled by this turn of events.
In the years that followed my grandfather’s death, my grandmother finally achieved some recognition in the village. She became even more of a village hero when high-ranking provincial officials presented her with a red-bordered plaque which proclaimed, in fancy gold lettering: ‘Highest commendations to Comrade Liang Yuxiu, People’s Artist.’
Comrade Liang Yuxiu. By this time, I had already been at school for years and could read the name with ease. But the name itself came as a complete shock to me, for I had never seen or heard it before. Comrade Liang Yuxiu was none other than my grandmother.
15
THE EEL HAS become a permanent fixture in our lives.
If you were to open our refrigerator, you would find it filled from top to bottom with portions of dismembered eel. The head resides on the top shelf, the upper half of the body on the second, the belly on the third, and the tail on the fourth and bottom shelf. Even after soaking for days, the head and tail were still so rigid that we had trouble stuffing them into the refrigerator. The eel now occupies most of our available refrigerator space, but the parts are wedged in so tightly that we can’t be bothered to take them out again. Solidifying in the cold refrigerated air on their respective shelves, they present a truly revolting sight. Although we were careful to seal each component part in plastic wrap, the odour of eel has seeped through the confines of the refrigerator and is slowly permeating our flat. The kitchen, bathroom, bedroom/living room, even the sheets on our bed are now contaminated by the smell. The omnipresent stench of fish expands, as if by osmosis, to fill every corner of our darkened flat.
At first, Red hoped that we would finish eating the eel as quickly as possible. The sooner it was annihilated, he reckoned, the better. He even took this principle one step further, waiting until I had left for work to toss large chunks of eel into the rubbish bin. Unfortunately for him, I happened to return home from work one day and notice the eel’s enormous head poking out of the bin, its glassy eyes staring vacantly into the darkness of our kitchen. How could anyone throw out a perfectly good eel head? It seemed almost a crime. I fished the head out of the bin, rinsed it off and set it on the table to dry.
But soon something happened that caused Red to stop regarding the eel in our refrigerator as his personal enemy. One afternoon we decided to go out for a walk. We had just eaten a large lunch of rice and boiled eel and, still burping from our meal, we went to get some air.
As we passed a nearby Japanese restaurant, the two kimono-clad women standing at the entrance bowed to us respectfully. Red squinted in passing at the expensive menu displayed outside the door. It featured glossy colour photos and prices of the various Japanese dishes on offer:
Our eyes were immediately drawn to the eel dishes and their corresponding prices. I did a quick calculation in my head. At those prices, five portions of grilled eel or six point six portions of eel on rice would consume my entire monthly salary. We lingered for a moment, looking at the prices, and then attempted to walk past the kimono-clad hostesses as nonchalantly as we could.
The moment we had passed the restaurant, Red turned to me and vowed, ‘I promise never to throw away any of our eel again.’
‘Good,’ I said.
Red was struck with another brilliant idea. ‘Hey, why don’t we sell our eel to the restaurant?’
It took walking past that Japanese restaurant, a place where neither of us could ever afford to eat, to make Red realise that our eel was an extremely valuable commodity.
I shook my head. Now that the eel was in my life, there was no way I was going to relinquish it.
* * *
Chomping on slices of banana-flavoured chewing gum in an effort to freshen our breath, Red and I walked back to our building. As we entered the hallway, we noticed a middle-aged woman at the far end of the corridor. She was standing in front of our flat.
‘Looking for something?’ Red asked rather rudely, as he pulled his keys from his pocket and began to unlock the door.
The woman started, and turned abruptly. She had obviously been so immersed in her spying activities that she hadn’t noticed us standing right beside her. She must have assumed that we were inside. Chastened, she hastened to explain her presence.
‘It’s like this … I live next door with my daughter, who works for a perfume company. She’s a perfumier, which means she researches formulas and ingredients for perfumes. You wouldn’t believe it if I told you, but our flat is filled with books on perfume making, shelves of books, and hundreds of bottles of perfume oils and essences. Every one of them has a different scent, you know: But lately she’s been having a hard time working because, well, I don’t know quite how to put this, but … there seems to be a very strong fishy smell coming from your flat. Maybe it’s a piece of rotting fish stuck in the pipes or something. Anyway, the smell is filling our flat and it’s interfering with my daughter’s work. She can’t smell the perfume oils she’s working with, and when she brings the formulas into her office, all of them smell of fish. Why, just the other day her boss criticised her for being unprofessional. The poor girl came home almost in tears. She was too embarrassed to come over and talk to you about it herself, so I volunteered to come over instead. Now, I know we’re all busy and have our own problems to worry about, but I wonder if you might take a peek around the flat and try to find out what’s causing the smell. If you don’t have the time, I’d be willing to clean your kitchen for you, tidy things up a bit, you know. Goodness knows I could use the exercise …’
Perfume formulas? Perfumiers? There were actually people who made perf
ume formulas for a living? And one of them was living right here, on the ground floor of this building? I began to see our building in a different light. As the woman prattled on, I glanced around the crowded hall filled with old, dusty bicycles and abandoned furniture, and wondered whether perhaps there was more to this place than met the eye. It seemed that we had underestimated this building, just as we had obviously underestimated the possibility of our eel becoming a public menace. The whole time we had been living in this building, we had considered ourselves the persecuted. Now we had become the persecutors.
16
I REMEMBER THAT the year I turned fifteen, the heavens deluged the village with winter rain, an uncomfortably sticky rain that far overstayed its welcome. It rained for so long that the cobblestone streets, always damp to begin with, were transformed into pools of water swirling with the dead fish and shrimp that had fallen into the cracks between the cobbles during the autumn catch. Just before the twelfth moon, the rains relented and the sun reappeared at last. My grandmother carried her old cane chair outdoors so that she could bask in the rare sunshine. The sun was still bright when I went outside that afternoon and noticed that she was sitting motionless in her chair. Her head had fallen to one side, but her hands were still draped over the armrests. My grandmother had passed away so peacefully that at first, I couldn’t bring myself to believe that she was really dead.
At that moment, with the sun slanting down upon her black clothes and white chignon, from which a few stray wisps of hair had escaped, she simply looked as if she were asleep.
My grandmother had always kept her incense burner on the window sill. I had never used it myself, because such offerings to the gods held no meaning for me. But after my grandmother died, the house seemed so empty, so noticeably devoid of the rising curls of bluish smoke that had once wafted through our kitchen that it was as if the incense burner had died along with my grandmother. The day after her death, I took one of the remaining sticks of incense from the box and lit it. It was the first and only time I would make such an offering.