by Chen Qiufan
The old man’s face sparkled in the setting sun like a piece of Taihu limestone, filled with the pores and wrinkles of eons. He gazed in the direction of the sea, and his sunken eyes seemed to conceal a strange light.
“I went to the temple yesterday and prayed for a divination slip.” He handed a slip of red paper to Kaizong.
Ksitigarbha Temple, Sexagenary Stems-and-Branches, Goddess Mazu’s Oracle
The fifty-eighth sign, Gui-Wei, ○○● ○●●, of the element of Wood, advantage Spring, suitable for the East.
A snake’s body desires to be a dragon;
But fate seems to have other ideas.
A long illness requires rest and relaxation;
Many words are spoken, though few are wise.
Kaizong knew that the coastal inhabitants on both sides of the Taiwan Strait had the custom of praying to Mazu for safety on the sea, but he couldn’t figure out what this obscure bit of oracular text had to do with him.
“Whose future does this slip speak of?”
“Good question.” The old man did not turn around. “I prayed for it on behalf of Silicon Isle.”
The answer wasn’t at all what Kaizong had expected, and he understood right away the worries hinted at by the clan head’s fortune. Whether he had really obtained it from Mazu, the poem clearly revealed the Chen clan’s attitude toward the TerraGreen Recycling project. Of course, if the elder really intended to express his opinions via the will of the heavens, Kaizong could marshal no arguments against it.
“I’ve been alive for almost a century and have never left Silicon Isle. I’ve seen the rice paddies dry up and wither and our soil turn into poisoned wasteland; I’ve seen reef islands sunk with explosives, bays filled in to reclaim land, ports and bridges spring up faster than crops; I’ve seen warships bare their gray spines on the horizon while schools of fish retreat farther away and grow more sparse; I’ve heard the loudspeakers, the radio stations and TV stations broadcast an endless stream of songs of celebration, but folk operas about the suffering of the common people find few patrons and are dying out.
“Silicon Isle is sick with a deep and serious illness, but it is not a disease that can be cured by a simple, strong dose of harsh medicine. To the contrary, to speak in the language of folk medicine, such an attempt might well arouse a stronger, poisoned tongue of flame to attack the heart.”
So selfish. Chen Kaizong’s first response upon hearing the elder’s soliloquy was disgust.
He knew very well how people were exploited and oppressed. This was a common theme throughout history: take any group of people—it didn’t matter if they were of different races or compatriots—some always set themselves apart as a higher class, and, in the name of gods, the nation, or “progress,” made laws and constructed rules that allowed them to dominate the lives of the other classes, to own their bodies as well as spirits.
Survival is sufficient justification. It was easy for Kaizong to convince himself when he was dealing with abstractions in textbooks, but when everything was real, living and breathing before his eyes, the matter was completely different.
In the last few weeks, he had immersed himself in the lives and labor of the waste workers. He saw the pallid, sickly complexions of the young women and their rough, spotted hands, the result of corrosive, harsh chemicals; he breathed in the odors that made him gag, tasted the nigh-inedible fare provided by the bosses that passed for food, and understood the unbelievably low wages offered to them. He thought of Mimi; thought of her guileless smile, and underneath, the particles of heavy metal stuck to the walls of her blood vessels; thought of her deformed olfactory cells and damaged immune system. She was like a self-regulating, maintenance-free machine, and like the other hundreds of millions in the high-quality labor force of this land, she would work day after day tirelessly until her death.
Kaizong’s heart skipped a beat, and he couldn’t explain why he was feeling this way. He saw that the elder had turned around to gaze at him in his entranced state. The elder smiled, and, almost carelessly, said, “I hear that you’re close to one of the waste girls.”
“Her name is Mimi.” Kaizong corrected him deliberately.
“Of course. I’m just not used to referring to them by name.”
“I think it’s possible to get used to it over time.” Tamping down his anger, Kaizong struggled to maintain his speech in the respectful register. He did not want to offend this powerful man.
“Ho ho, young people always think that the Great Wall could be built overnight.”
“No, but it is very possible for it to collapse overnight.”
“I guess we’ll just have to wait and see. Don’t you have a date with her tonight?”
Kaizong was taken aback, but the old man was no longer looking at him; instead, he stared into the distance.
Kaizong rapidly replayed the scenes of his time with Mimi: the dead dog whose body still spasmed; the sea full of glowing blue lights, the spirit of Tide Gazing Beach at night … he was trying to figure out where the clan head had implanted his spies. Abruptly, he realized that the sparkles coming out of the deep-sunken eyes of the old man were not reflections of the setting sun at all: the tiny blue dots flickered like the status lights on a wireless terminal gathering secrets from the ether.
* * *
Contrary to Scott’s expectations, they did manage to catch his intruder.
The interrogation room was clean and brightly lit, unlike what he had imagined. The man had a young face with strong features, and one of his hands was cuffed to his chair. As Scott came into the room, the young man’s eyes seemed to look up and to the right, as if matching Scott’s face with some image in his head. He spoke in Cantonese-accented English. “We meet finally, Mr. Scott Brandle. I’ve been looking forward to this.”
“Do you know me?”
“More than you can imagine.”
“Oh, please elaborate.”
“Let’s not waste too much time on your identity, shall we? Exxon-Mobil, Rimbunan Hijau, the World Bank, TerraGreen Recycling, and the terrifying puppet master behind them—don’t all of these changing names share the same last name: Greedy?” A smug grin filled the man’s face.
“Good joke. But let me remind you, Greedy folks have long arms. You’d best get to the point before I smash my fist into your pretty face.”
“You won’t.” The young man tilted his head at a corner of the ceiling. “They’re watching us, and probably listening, as well. If I were you, I’d tread carefully.”
Scott adjusted his chair awkwardly; the legs of the chair scraping across the floor made an unpleasant noise.
“Who are you? And what do you want?” He deliberately lowered his voice, as though unaware of the sensitivity of the monitoring equipment.
“It’s not what I want, but what we want. We know about the tricks you used in Venezuela, Papua New Guinea, the Philippines, and West Africa—you come in as saviors to promote local economic development and provide jobs; nicely done, ha! We don’t care about any of that; it’s how the world functions. But we do care about your side gig, the sort of little cracks you make that can derail a roller coaster. Believe me, you don’t want to get involved in this scandal; it will be dirtier than you can possibly imagine—even if your hands aren’t exactly clean.”
Scott said nothing. Clearly these people had obtained some intelligence that he was unaware of.
The task should have been simple. He came to Silicon Isle under the name of Scott Brandle, a high-level executive for the TerraGreen Recycling project. Using a series of familiar techniques—advanced environmental protection technology, projections for increased economic output, models for input-output ratios, promises for mid-and long-term social benefits and new jobs, sexual bribes, and so on—he was going to play his hand quickly and lure the local government to sign the agreement for jointly developing an industrial park for the recycling industry. TerraGreen Recycling would contribute the technology and some funds, and the Silicon Isle gove
rnment would allocate the land, broker an accord among the local clans, integrate the existing waste-processing industrial resources, and supply the large amounts of cheap labor necessary later.
On the surface, it wasn’t a bad deal; indeed, the balance seemed to be tilted slightly in favor of Silicon Isle as TerraGreen Recycling would agree to provide additional funds to clean up the heavily polluted water and soil.
In return, TerraGreen Recycling would have the right to purchase Silicon Isle’s recycled renewable resources at a favorable price. This would solve, at a stroke, the biggest headache of the local government: a long-term, steady cash flow that could be used to repay the interest and principle on the loan from the bank and bring about a handsome yearly increase in GDP.
This was also why Director Lin Yiyu had changed his previous attitude and tried to conclude this deal despite the heavy pressure he faced. Unlike officials who passed through local assignments like a revolving door, he was born and bred in Silicon Isle. All of the Lin family’s relations by blood and marriage were concentrated here, and he wanted to accomplish something of real benefit for the future generations of Silicon Isle and leave behind a good name. But reality was too harsh: he was squeezed between two panels of the same door—the clan and the government—and though he strove to wiggle through the narrow crack, he had ended up a homeless dog, pitiable and lost.
Of course, Scott understood that the deal was too perfect to be true. Only the powerless hooligans who lived in the streets fought with their knives out in the open; killers of real skill kept their weapons sheathed and achieved victory without blood staining their edges.
“I hear that suspects often die during interrogation here, and the official autopsies never show anything wrong.” Scott kept his voice cold.
“I was prepared to die the moment I set foot on Silicon Isle. And I will not be the last.” The young man met his gaze fearlessly.
“Why don’t you just tell me what you want?” Scott was suddenly tired of this game. He had been in costume for too long, taken on too many characters, and he no longer remembered what he should be like when he wasn’t playing a role.
“Let me make a phone call, and my boss will contact you directly. It’s not clean here.”
Clean. The word felt like some allergen to Scott and he laughed uproariously though the young man’s searing gaze seemed to be trying to weld his lips shut. There’s nothing clean in this world.
“We’ll make it clean.” Scott let the double entendre hang in the air, got up, and left the room. The camera in the corner of the ceiling continued to show a tiny figure, distorted through the lens to resemble a flattened cockroach whose dead legs slowly extended as the joints relaxed.
* * *
The setting sun coagulated into a bloodred bright glow on the horizon.
The elder’s face was like a burning sheet of paper: the page, or what remained of it after the passage of so many years, curled in the leaping flames, turning to ash. Though his eyelids drooped, he saw through everything; though he spoke no words, he was louder than a clanging bronze bell.
Kaizong understood very well that the figure who stood before him was far more than an old man at the twilight of life. The sparkling lights that emitted from his eyes were clearly the result of the latest model of augmented-reality contact lenses, though Kaizong wasn’t sure of the access level. In this restricted-bitrate zone, an old man so equipped was a terrifying figure, as though he could tear off his disguise and, in a flash, turn into a cold-blooded warrior.
But the elder smiled and shook his head. Softly, he said, “I know you two went to Tide Gazing Beach. That’s not a good place.”
Not a good place. Such an ordinary phrase made Kaizong’s heart sink.
“I’ve heard some rumors—”
“They’re true,” the old man interrupted. “It’s called palirromancy.”
It was impossible to see Tide Gazing Beach from where they were standing. Only the pointy apex of Tide Gazing Pavilion peeked out from behind the intervening roofs, arranged like stacks of turtle shells—easy to miss unless one sought it out. The sea gradually lost its crimson-gold glow as the sun continued to sink, first near the shore, then farther away, like melted lead cooling down and turning gray. The thin, undulating white lines on the surface appeared as patterns moving across an oscilloscope: jumping, vanishing, reappearing, like an endless musical score, a song of gravity lasting eons.
Kaizong listened as the elder emotionlessly described a piece of history not recorded in any book. Abruptly, he felt a chill along his spine. It’s just the wind, he thought, please, let it be just the wind.
It was said that Tide Gazing Pavilion was built by Han Yu, a Vice Minister of Justice during the Tang Dynasty. Han Yu had argued against Emperor Xianzong’s13 plan to install the Buddha’s finger bone in the palace, and, as a result, was banished from the court and demoted to the position of Prefect of Chaozhou. After a visit to Silicon Isle—which wasn’t called Silicon Isle back then, of course—Han Yu had ordered the construction of the pavilion. Outside the pavilion, there had once stood a stone stele carved with Han Yu’s calligraphy: “Those who observe the tides may know the world; those who hold on to beneficence and virtue may bring good fortune.” Later, the stele fell into the sea in a tropical storm.
Some had argued that Han Yu’s couplet was an expression of his resentment toward Emperor Xianzong, but this was the result of an only partial understanding of history. As a matter of fact, the two lines were aimed at an ancient custom of the natives of Silicon Isle: palirromancy.
Palirromancy was a technique of divination whose origins were lost in the mists of time. It was supposed to be the distillation of the wisdom accumulated by generations of Silicon Isle fishermen. Analogous to the principles of other methods of divination, palirromancy interpreted the positions, conditions, and trails of flotsam and jetsam washed ashore by the tides as signs of the future. However, while other methods of divination mostly relied on lifeless objects—branches, turtle shells, animal bones, sand piles, coins, bamboo rods—palirromancy relied on living things.
The ancient people of Silicon Isle believed that as living beings drowned in the tides, they linked to the spirit world and became extremely sensitive and receptive of messages from the future, turning into powerful tools for diviners to derive more precise visions of what was to come.
The unique lagoon formed by the shoal of Silicon Isle was the ideal location for palirromancy. The ancient inhabitants of Silicon Isle stood at the end of the tentacle and tossed the living sacrifice into the water and then waited on Tide Gazing Beach for the drowning creature to be tossed ashore. It was said that earlier, the beach had been artificially divided into twelve equal sections and marked with granite slabs carved with sigils to aid in the divination effort, but during the Cultural Revolution, all the markings had been destroyed.
“Then … the sacrifices they used…” Kaizong had trouble speaking and cleared his throat.
“Newborn calves and lambs, or dogs,” the elder answered. “Most of the time, at least.”
The sacrifice was bound with special ropes and knots so that the creature could not escape by swimming or treading water, but had plenty of room to struggle and thrash to prolong the drowning process. In death, their long, painful journey through the sea left their bodies twisted into hideous postures, as though they had suffered injuries in their dialogue with the spirit world: terrifying expressions, empty gazes, sodden souls.
If the sacrifice arrived onshore still alive, then its fate depended on the message it brought from the spirits. If the augury was auspicious, then people waited until the creature died and then buried it with the proper rites; on the other hand, if the augury was inauspicious, then people killed it by stoning and buried the carcass in some random desolate spot, leaving behind no marking to prevent the ill fortune from following any trails to the house of the soothsayer.
Kaizong knew very little about Vice Justice Minister Han Yu, but Great-Uncle
Chen painted the verbal portrait of an extremist who was willing to risk his head to argue that the supposed finger bone of the Buddha should be “consigned to complete destruction via burning flames and surging waters so that the people will no longer be plagued by a false faith, and future generations may be freed from such danger.” For such a staunch atheist to utter the words “those who observe the tides may know the world,” which seemed to hint at a mild sort of admiration, was almost inconceivable.
Great-Uncle Chen explained that this was because Han Yu, whose political ambition had been thwarted, had asked the soothsayer to predict his own future and witnessed the palirromancy ceremony himself. A dog’s limbs were bound, and then it was thrown into the sea, belly-up. An hour later, the carcass, its belly swollen, was tossed onto the beach in that same position; a second wave followed, lifted up the carcass, flipped it over, and left it with its snout in the sand.
The soothsayer interpreted the omen in the following manner: although it was impossible for Han Yu to overturn his fate during this cycle, he should maintain a low profile and wait for the next cycle, when he was certain to return to the capital in a position of great power. The augury was, overall, quite auspicious.
When Emperor Muzong, Xianzong’s son and successor, acceded to the throne, he recalled Han Yu to the capital and promoted him to Dean of the Imperial Academy, and then Vice Minister of Defense and Vice Minister of Personnel. The pavilion and stele were gifts by Han Yu to thank the spirits for the good omens they gave him.
“How do you explain the second line in his couplet, then—‘those who hold on to beneficence and virtue may bring good fortune’?” Kaizong wondered how the great scholar felt about the sacrifices. He had a hard time imagining Han Yu, the legendary hero who had chased crocodiles out of the rivers of Chaozhou,14 as the original conservationist, protector of animals.
“Occasionally”—the old man’s eyes began to flicker—“we also used humans for palirromancy.”