Humans, Beasts, and Ghosts

by Zhongshu Qian

  During the memorial service for the Writer, one literary critic passionately intoned, “His spirit shall endure. His masterly creations shall never perish, for, indeed, they are his most valuable legacy!”

  Privately, though, one young reader remarked, somewhat in relief, “At least he must be physically too dead to keep putting out new books! I would’ve gone broke before long.” The fact was, this young reader had to pay for all the books out of his own pocket, whereas the critic’s entire collection was of course autographed, complimentary copies.

  Meanwhile, in that other world of the deceased, the spirit of our Writer soon found that the afterlife was not quite as bad as one might have expected. For one thing, the release of mental tension was like shedding a heavy overcoat at the moment one is about to be smothered. Together with those fleas that had established themselves in the seams, whatever ailments had previously plagued him were gotten rid of too. He was dead, no question, but he had been wondering what it would be like after death. “For someone who has made the contributions to culture and society I have,” he pondered, “Heaven should have sent a welcoming party to receive me long ago. Could it be true that Heaven is nothing more than a product of superstition? Maybe it doesn’t exist after all? Even if that’s so, they should hurry to build one just to accommodate me!” But then it also occurred to him that staying in Heaven all the time was bound to be mighty boring too. Unless it was the Heaven of Muhammad’s design, a place where one had possession of seventy-two beauties, all with large black eyes, who could be restored to the virginal state at will. There, one also found swans and plump ducks, their meat roasted to perfection, and the skin still crisp, flying through the air, all rushing toward one’s mouth to be eaten. “Now, that would be quite something, wouldn’t it?” The Writer was lost in thought. “What a shame that overwork has given me heartburn and ulcers! Too much of that roasted stuff might do more harm than good. There won’t be bottles of Heartburn Relief, Ulsooth, or Clear-It hanging from the swans’ necks.5 That supply of seventy-two women is somewhat overabundant too; it would take a while to sample all their charms.6 If their looks are all different, it could very well happen that some of these lovers will be favored over others, because of the peculiarities of personal taste, leading to a jealous war. How could someone who cannot cope with two arguing females handle seventy-two of them? That’s not even taking into account their having the traits of India’s preserved vegetables, liable to turn from sour to hot enough to burn one’s system. But legend has it that these seventy-two houris—‘hot ones’ would have been more appropriate—all come from the same mold, with the same black hair, dark eyes, serpentine waists. In short, all their features are identical. Sticking with one woman is boring enough, so just imagine this one woman magically multiplied into seventy-two copies . . .”

  Our Writer was so scared that he had to change his line of thought. “When it comes to falling in love, most men of letters indulge in it out of vaingloriousness—the desire to impress people with the mesmerizing effects a genius has on the opposite sex. The lovers of the literati are just like the new cars and mansions of the rich: they serve to generate envy, not fill dire needs of their owners. If every man ascending to Heaven had six dozen women to his name, nobody could use it to show off his sexual prowess. This, however, would undoubtedly be a superb opportunity to collect materials for lyrical poems or confessions. The question is: do people read in Heaven? Well, perhaps a climate for reading could be fostered after my arrival. In that case I might as well bring along a few volumes as gifts.” So thinking, our Writer sauntered into his study.

  As soon as he stepped inside, he had the sensation that he was treading on something funny. The floor was like an empty stomach about to cave in under a load of rocks; and yet it was gasping for air, struggling to buttress itself. It turned out that there were such an incredible number of his works on the shelves that the ground could no longer carry their weight and started to come apart. Before the Writer could leap to save his books, the ground split open with a loud crack. There, off the shelves and down the gaping hole, his books, big and small, fell helter-skelter. The Writer lost his balance and, engulfed by that torrent of collapsing books, plummeted straight down. Curled up though he was, with neck tucked in, he could not avoid being the target of all those books, which hurt his head, bruised his shoulders, and lacerated his skin. Only then did he realize firsthand the impact of his works. It was too late to regret that he had lacked the self-discipline to write fewer books, and each one several tens of thousands of words shorter. After an interminable period all those books finally found their way past him. Bearing the marks and scars from this attack, he trailed the books, drifting down into the bottomless darkness. He was becoming more and more scared. If this continued, sooner or later he would surely pass through the center of the earth and bore straight through the globe! All of a sudden the geography he learned in primary school came rushing back. “The other side of this shell is nothing but the Western Hemisphere, and the Western Hemisphere is where the American continent lies. For all writers of the old continent, America is the Treasure Island where the unsuccessful become successful and the successful reap rewards. That’s why every writer should visit, give a lecture tour, and create a market for his works there. In doing so, he would also be helping relieve Americans of the burden of their gold dollars and at the same time recovering some of our country’s financial loss stemming from the importation of American goods. To fall all the way to America would be fantastic! A perfectly straightforward, effortless, yet refreshing experience, which avoids that motion sickness business on board a ship or airplane.”

  With such thoughts in his mind, the Writer found his spirits soaring higher with each inch his body dropped. He was so thankful that Providence was after all what it was, and his ceaseless toils of a lifetime were not about to go unrewarded. The reward of being a good writer, so it appeared, was not to ascend to Heaven, but to descend to America. The saying “Slipping to fall, one falls upon the best of fortunes” had all but come true.

  As he was thus comforting himself, he suddenly hit bottom. Amazingly enough, it didn’t hurt. He stood up and found himself inside a huge room, with maps hanging on the walls. He had fallen through the ceiling, but since he had landed on his books on the floor, the cushioning effect saved his bones. Just a moment ago he had been regretting the volume of his works, but now he was only too happy to discover the benefits of numerous and voluminous writings. “But what now? I’ve smashed someone’s ceiling!” As if in answer, the books he was standing on suddenly started to push upward, tripping him. At the same time a great many uniformed people rushed in through the door and pulled him down from the mound of books. Shoveling, kicking the books aside, they managed to clear them out of the room. Then they helped a person sporting a huge beard, bruised black and blue by the books, up on his feet. Now that the room’s decor and appointments came into full view, our Writer began to realize that he was in an elegant private office. Some of the uniformed men were now busy patting the dust off the bearded man, straightening his clothes by giving them a tug here and a pull there while the rest went about tidying up the place, righting overturned desks and chairs. Finding himself in such grand surroundings, the Writer was quite ill at ease. He knew this person he had just knocked down must be some dignitary or other.

  The bearded man was surprisingly polite to him. He bade him sit down, and at the same time ordered his men to leave the room. Not until now did the man’s mustache catch the Writer’s attention. It circled his lips, continued all the way down to the chin as a massive beard.7 The growth was so black and thick that the words that came out through this curly grove seemed somehow dyed with the color of that beard, every one of them dark.

  “My goodness! Your works are really as weighty as gold, my dear sir!” The man sat down himself as he spoke, massaging the swollen parts of his head, a weak smile curtailed by that mouthful of whiskers that screened his lips. Our Writer, seeing that the man
was not giving him a hard time, and thinking that he had praised his works for being “worth their weight in gold,” felt instantly emboldened.

  “They aren’t really so expensive,” he said, visibly arrogant. “Maybe I should first ask whether this is America—calculated in American dollars, my prices don’t come out to be very high at all.”

  “No, this isn’t America.”8

  “Where am I then?” the Writer asked.

  “This is none other than the legendary Hades.”9

  “That’s ridiculous!!” The Writer jumped up in shock and consternation. “I’m darn sure the way I led my life doesn’t call for such a reward—being sent to suffer in Hell!”

  The bearded man waved his hands, motioning for calm, and asked him to sit down. “That you don’t have to worry about, sir, as Hell has already moved to the human world. You see, you’ve been so busy writing you don’t appear to be too well informed about the current state of the world. Oh well, I don’t blame you for that.”

  The Writer realized that it must be Yama, king of Hell, himself before him. “No wonder he has the liberty to sport such a flamboyant beard!” So he hurriedly stood up again. “Your Netherly Majesty, I beg your forgiveness—” he said, bowing so low as he spoke that he was about to split his ass (saluer à cul ouvert), as French slang has it.

  “I’m afraid you’re mistaken, sir,” the man chortled. “And you must excuse me for not being able to return your greeting. My back is still aching a bit from the burden of your books, so I’ll just have to take your bow remaining in my seat. This place was indeed formerly Hades, but I certainly am not any abdicated emperor of a fallen dynasty, nor am I a newly appointed director of some national palace museum. One would think that with the abolition of the monarchy, palaces should be converted into repositories for antiques. But then all antiques in the eighteen levels of Hell are torture devices. Humanity has progressed in many respects through the last thousand years or two, except for its cruelty toward its own kind. That hasn’t become any more refined or exquisite. Take for instance the extracting of confessions by brute force inside intelligence agencies and the punishment of prisoners of war in concentration camps: they share the virtues of being simple, homespun, and effective—thoroughly in the time-honored tradition of savagery. If you look at China, it’s only in the brutality of her various forms of torture that you can still see the essence of her culture. You know, pumping water down the nostrils, poking a red-hot branding iron in the armpits, tightening up the hand with wooden pins stuck between one finger and the next, and similar features of the indigenous culture. So those torture instruments in Hell, far from being antiques that had outlived their usefulness, have all been called to active service in the human world. At any rate, this place is the Public Administration for Chinese Territorial Production.10 And yours truly happens to be its administrator.”

  The Writer was beginning to regret his unduly courteous bow, and was feeling embarrassed. But the man’s last line made his interest surge again. “I’m a prodigy,” he mused, “and this man here deals in products—the two words even alliterate. What perfect partners we’d make!” So he asked, “Products of the land are of course valuable commodities, but this is smack in the center of the earth—who’s going to do business with you here? Oh, wait a minute, I get it. Everything’s been scraped clean off the face of the earth by those corrupt officials. And in these times of war, people all over are digging tunnels as shelters from air attack. Since you businessmen will go to any length to make money, you figured that you might as well do what everybody else is doing, and so you bored your way underground here to open up shop. Right?”

  The administrator replied in a matter-of-fact tone, “Are you implying that being in ‘Chinese territorial production’ our purpose is to sell out China? There would indeed be plenty of potential customers, but who could afford the price of that priceless land? If I were a typical businessman, I’d hold firmly to a policy of tangible profits. In other words, I’d never close a deal at below cost, nor would I accept bad checks. That’s why the China deal will never be closed, and for the same reason I won’t be offering China for either retail or wholesale, as those foolish politicians are doing. I’m afraid you’ve totally misunderstood our name. We are in fact the agency in charge of the production of newborns within Chinese territory. You see, although Hell has relocated to the human world, human beings are still destined to die, and someone still has to manage the reincarnation of souls, the business of karma, and the like. Our mandate here is to handle the assignments for any person or animal to be born inside China.”

  “Why ‘Public Administration’ then?”

  “The ‘Administration’ part is simply handed down from tradition. Aren’t there such agencies as the Rewards and Commendations Administration, and the Punishments Administration, in the world of Hades? My title is therefore naturally ‘administrator,’ and not ‘president,’ as you might expect of a business concern. As for ‘Public,’ all that does is to give the idea that the affairs of our organization are open to public view. Everything’s fair and square. We don’t take bribes or send good people to be reborn into the wrong family. This thick black beard of mine symbolizes the spirit of our administration.”

  “I see the double meaning,” said the Writer, eager to show off his cleverness. “Since those who grow beards like yours must be old enough to be grandfathers, your beard, Mr. Administrator, must symbolize impartial justice.”

  “Come, come, sir, your sharp mind has flown off at a tangent again! Well, perhaps this weakness is just common to all you men of letters. It doesn’t take a beard for a person to be called ‘grandfather,’ you know—look at those eunuchs of various dynasties in our history. You must also be aware that the insignia of high justices in the West is none other than a silvery white wig. I expect you’re familiar with all those best sellers on Chinese civilization made for the export market that are so popular in the human world? Anyway, our country, people, customs, mentality, are, by their accounts, all exact opposites of Westerners’, isn’t that true? We’re an Oriental race, and so they have to be Occidental. We’re Chinese, so they’ll always be foreigners. When we beckon, our fingers point down, but somehow when they do it their fingers have to point upward. We kneel to worship, but when they greet you in salute, quite conversely, they raise a hand. A foreign man kneels to propose to his lover before marriage, while his henpecked Chinese brother ends up kneeling in front of his wife after marriage. These and many other things are all quite bizarre. If you extrapolate from this, since we value face, Westerners must be shameless. In mourning we wear white, but they wear black. It’s obvious, therefore, that if their impartial officials wear white wigs on their heads, their counterparts in our culture should endeavor to grow natural, black beards on their chins. This is the only way we can avoid violating the pet theories of those scholars who make comparisons of Eastern and Western civilizations.11 And then, of course, it also makes a statement. That is, aside from this beard, which won’t stay pitch-black forever, there’s nothing in this wide world that’s allowed to be a deal in the dark!” The administrator’s beard flew about with every word he spoke, making his delivery forceful and impressive indeed.

  At this moment, our Writer was busy taking stock of his own situation. “Fair people are also the most obnoxious and unsympathetic. If left to this fellow’s disposition, I’ll have no hope of getting to America. I’d best clear out while I still can.” Thus, he put a smile on his face and stood up to take his leave.

  “It was very inconsiderate of me today to have allowed my bookcases to fall down here and damage your office, and also to have taken all this precious time away from your working hours. I sincerely apologize for all this. But I have learned a great deal through our chance meeting, sir; it’s been a true pleasure. Someday when I write my memoirs, I’ll make a point of saying many good things about your administration. For the moment, however, I shouldn’t tarry any longer. Would you be kind enough to have your men br
ing in the works of mine that landed here just now so that I can autograph a few to be presented to you? They should make fine souvenirs. Besides, books carrying my signature are sure to fetch a handsome price from collectors of later generations, so please take this as restitution for my having smashed your ceiling.”

  “Oh, that’s quite all right, don’t you worry about that. But now that you’ve come, I’m afraid you can’t leave so easily.” The administrator stroked his beard peacefully in his seat.

  “Why not?” the Writer shot back, incensed. “Your subordinates wouldn’t dare to try to restrain me! Don’t you know I’m a genius? And I didn’t make this mess on purpose either. My fall was completely accidental and unintentional.”

  “There’s no such thing as an ‘accident’ in the world. It’s just a planned occurrence in disguise. People of the human world all end up here upon their deaths, and each comes in his own way. Indeed, the routes they take are governed by a fair enough principle: ‘To your own designs shall you fall victim, and victim you shall be.’ In simpler terms, whatever it was that you did for a living would be the very cause of your own undoing, sending you to report to me here. See, you’re a writer, so the books you’ve written bored their way through the ground, taking you along with them. Just this morning a sanitary engineer’s soul arrived. Could you believe how he got to this place? One way or another he fell into the toilet, and some unthinking fool flushed him all the way down here! My ceiling does get broken once in a while, or at least damaged enough to leak, and I myself sometimes get hit on the head, or splashed all over with dirty water. But then when one is in public service, one simply can’t afford to be concerned about such things.”