Censored by Confucius (17 page)

The Land Without Doors

L
ü
Heng was a native of Changzhou and made his living selling imported merchandise. His work often took him on long sea voyages to foreign lands and it was on one of these trips, in the year 1775, that the boat in which he was traveling encountered a ferocious storm.

The boat sank and everyone except Lü perished. L
ü
survived by clinging to a piece of timber from the wreck, and in this perilous state he was swilled around the oceans and buffeted mercilessly by the waves, until eventually he was washed up on the shores of a very strange land.

As he later discovered, everyone in this land lived in buildings that were either three or five stories high. Each level was designated for a separate generation of the family. In the three-story buildings, the grandparents would occupy the third floor, the father's generation the second, and the son's generation the first. In the five-story buildings the top floor was occupied by the great-great-grandparents, and so on.

The buildings had no doors at all, just door frames, and although the people were extremely wealthy, burglary and robbery were unknown. When Lü Heng first arrived he was naturally unable to communicate with the locals. Consequently, he became adept at getting his meaning across with gestures in a rudimentary sign language. After a while he picked up a smattering of the local language and when he explained to his hosts that he was a citizen of China, they treated him with great courtesy and generosity.

It was customary in this nation to divide one day into two days. That is, the people would wake at dawn, go to work, and carry out any necessary business until noon. After this time, they would return home to sleep.

Later in the afternoon the second day would begin. Work would continue until about nine o'clock in the evening, when the people returned home to sleep again.

One of the consequences of this custom of doubling the days was that the people were twice the age they would be in China. These who said they were ten years old would be five years old in China and similarly those who said they were twenty would be only ten.

The village where
Lü
Heng had been washed ashore was about a thousand miles from the capital and so he didn't have a chance to visit it. There were, of course, local officials but these were very few.

Prominent among these local leaders were those officially titled Baluo, who were responsible for law and order. L
ü
was never able to ascertain the exact nature of the Baluos' status within the government hierarchy.

Marriages were arranged by mutual consent of the man and woman —if they liked each other, then they would marry. However, the choice of a partner was restricted by category. Everyone was placed in a certain group—beautiful, ugly, old, young—and when it came time to marry, people would select a partner from within their own group. This system reduced the likelihood of marital problems. Most significantly, tragedies resulting from unhappy romances were unknown.

Their judicial system was equally interesting. If, for example, you were responsible for breaking someone's foot, then your punishment was to have your own foot broken. If you injured someone's face, then the same would be done to you—criminal injuries and punishments matched identically, without exception. Similarly, if you raped a young girl, then her father would have the right to rape your daughter. If you had no daughters, then a wooden model of a man, complete with erect penis, would be constructed and you would be buggered by this wooden figure.

L
ü
lived in this strange land for a good thirteen months. Eventually a chance southerly wind blew up and he was able to catch a boat and make his way back to China. Old seafarers call this island the Land Without Doors, but it appears to have no sustained contact with China.

Scholar Song

In Suzhou there was an inspector by the name of Song Zongyuan. A distant cousin of Song's who had been orphaned since early childhood was sent to live with an uncle. The uncle was extremely strict with Song's cousin and at the age of seven the boy was sent to study with the village teacher.

One day when he should have been studying the young cousin sneaked out to watch a dramatic performance in town. Someone saw him dodging class and told his uncle.

Too scared to return to his uncle's home, the boy ran off to Mudu Village and survived for a while as a beggar.

Eventually a man by the name of Li took pity on him and invited him home. From then on he worked in Mr. Li's coin shop and lived with the Li family. He was a very hardworking lad and won the affection of Mr. Li for his industry. Li decided to reward the boy and eventually gave him one of the maids, a girl by the name of Zheng, for a wife.

After nine years in Mudu Village, Song's cousin had become quite wealthy. He decided to go into the city and burn some incense as an offering of thanks to the gods.

On his way to the temple he happened to run into his uncle. Realizing he would not be able to hide the truth, he explained everything. Once the uncle found out his nephew had become quite wealthy, he immediately ordered the young man home with the intention of marrying him to someone more suitable than the maid.

At first the young man refused. "I can't leave my wife—she has just given birth to a daughter."

His uncle became furious and shouted, "We are part of a great clan! How dare you take this maid for your wife?" He forced his nephew to agree to divorce his wife.

When the Li family heard what had happened, they hoped that if
they adopted the maid as their own daughter and put up a dowry as part of a formal wedding, the couple would be able to avoid divorce. The uncle refused and immediately wrote up the divorce documents and sent them to Mistress Zheng. His nephew was then forced to marry a young lady from the Jin family.

When Mistress Zheng received the divorce papers she was absolutely devastated. Carrying her baby daughter to the river, she jumped in and both were drowned.

Three years later Mistress Jin gave birth to a daughter. Not long after, the uncle went out in his sedan chair to visit a local bureaucrat. All of a sudden a tremendous wind gusted into his sedan chair, tearing aside the door curtain. When his family next saw him he was dead. It appeared he had been choked, because his neck was bruised with the telltale fingermarks of strangulation.

That night Mistress Jin had a dream that a woman with unkempt hair and blood dripping from her nostrils spoke to her: "I am the young maid Zheng. Your husband acted heartlessly when he obeyed his evil uncle's instructions to divorce me. I vowed to remain chaste after the divorce and jumped to my death in the river.

"Today I took revenge on that evil uncle, and later I will come and get your husband.

"None of this was your fault, so you have no reason to be afraid. But I cannot let your daughter live. A daughter for a daughter, that's justice."

As soon as Mistress Jin woke, she told her husband of the dream. He was terrified and quickly went out to ask his friends for advice.

One friend said: "The Daoist monk at Xuanmiao Monastery is supposed to be able to write charms that exorcise ghosts. Why don't you ask him to perform some magic on your behalf and have her locked up in Fengdu? I'm sure you'll be all right then."

So the young man sought out the monk and paid a large sum of money to ensure this ghost would be imprisoned. On a piece of yellow paper the monk wrote the woman's date of birth and all other particulars of her life history. He then invoked some magic charms and she was henceforth imprisoned in Fengdu.

There were no more strange events in the house until one day three years later. The young man was sitting at the window reading when he looked up to see Zheng approaching him and cursing. "I got my revenge on your uncle first because I knew that the injustice had been spawned by him.

"I was planning on getting you later because it wasn't your idea to divorce me, and besides, I still had some affection for you. But then you took the matter into your own hands and had me imprisoned in Fengdu. Where's your conscience?

"My period of imprisonment has just ended. I made a formal complaint to the city god and he has praised me for my virtue. What's more, he has granted permission for me to take my revenge. How do you plan to get out of this one, huh?"

The young man went instantly mad and eventually lost consciousness. All around the room, household items were being smashed for no apparent reason. Doorknobs, sticks, brooms—everything was flying through the air.

Everyone in the house was absolutely terrified. The family quickly sent for some monks, but they proved unable to expel the ghost from the house. Within ten days Song's cousin had died, and ten days after his death his daughter passed away.

His wife, however, was perfectly all right.

Scholar Zhuang

Ye Xiangliu, a provincial scholar famous for his filial piety, once told me a strange tale regarding the household of a friend of his, a Mr. Chen. Chen had hired a scholar by the name of Zhuang to be the family's private tutor.

At dusk one August evening Zhuang's two charges, the young Chen brothers, were sitting in their study engaged in a game of chess, their studies being over for the day. For a while scholar Zhuang observed the game, but gradually he tired of this and decided to make his way home.

His home was about a mile from the Chen residence and separated from it by a bridge. While crossing the bridge Zhuang tripped and fell. He brushed himself off and hurried on his way.

When he finally did reach home, however, he couldn't get in. Nobody responded to his repeated knocking, so in frustration he decided to go back to the Chen residence.

The young Chen boys were still intent on their game of chess, so Zhuang strolled out into the courtyard. At the far end of the garden he noticed a small doorway, which to his great surprise led to another courtyard, this one filled with banana palms.

"Mr. Chen has such a beautiful house and yet he hardly has time to appreciate it," he sighed.

He walked up some steps towards a pavilion and there he saw a beautiful young woman giving birth. Zhuang found this vision of beauty and fecundity immensely desirable but he restrained himself, thinking, "I shouldn't be in the inner quarters of my master's house. It would be quite scandalous if I stayed to watch such a private event!"

Thus resolved, he hurried back to the boys' chess game. At one point the younger Chen brother was poised to defeat the elder, who remained oblivious to the threat, concentrating as he was on another section of the board. Zhuang tried to tell him about the danger, but
much to his surprise the boy ignored his advice, although he appeared rather startled by Zhuang's intervention.

The game resumed and the boys continued to ignore Zhuang. The frustrated tutor then shouted, "You'll lose the game if you don't heed my advice!"

Pointing at various positions on the board, Zhuang tried again to explain the danger to the older boy. At this, both brothers jumped to their feet in terror. A lamp fell to the floor, and they ran as fast as they could into the house. This alarming behavior left Zhuang in a quandary, but finally he decided that the best thing he could do was head back home again.

While crossing the bridge Zhuang again tripped and fell. He resumed his walk home and knocked at the door, wondering if he would be able to rouse anyone. This time someone did wake up to let him in, but his family were greatly confused when he proceeded to abuse them for not answering his previous knocking.

Pleading innocence they said, "We didn't hear anything! There was no knocking!"

When he returned to the Chen residence the next morning he saw that the lamp in the study still lay on the floor and the chessboard remained unchanged. Poor Zhuang was thoroughly confused and it was in this bewildered state that his charges found him.

They narrated the strange events of the previous night, saying, "After you left us some very strange things happened. While we were playing chess a ghost sneaked in to scare us. It even knocked over the lamp."

Zhuang was incredulous. He explained to the senior Chen how he had tried to suggest chess moves to the boys.

"We didn't see you come back," they exclaimed.

"But I have evidence," Zhuang argued. "I saw a young woman about to give birth in the pavilion in the garden over the back wall."

"But we don't have a garden pavilion and we certainly don't have any such woman in the house!" Chen laughed.

"But it's there, behind that veranda!" Zhuang persisted.

Zhuang led Chen to the veranda, but when they reached the place where the garden should have been Zhuang found only a small earthen door leading to a modest vegetable garden.

In the western corner of the yard was a pigsty with a sow and her litter. Of the six newborn piglets, one had died.

At that moment Zhuang understood what had happened. When he tripped on the bridge the first time his soul had been knocked clean from his body. When he fell the second time his soul reattached itself.

Had he not been able to restrain his lust
at the sight of the beautiful woman, he himself would certainly have become a pig.