Sandalwood Death (59 page)

“This was a seminal moment in the history of Maoqiang opera. Chang Mao’s sung recitation surpassed women’s cries of anguish and men’s dry-eyed wails. He brought solace to the grief-stricken and entertainment to the uninvolved, launching a revolution in traditional funeral expressions of bereavement and giving rise to a new era with fresh sights and sounds. It was like a Buddhist devotee laying eyes on the Land of Ultimate Bliss, with celestial flowers raining down, or someone covered in dirt slipping into a bath to wash away the grime, then drinking a pot of hot tea to force sweat out of every pore. And the talk began, how Chang Mao was more than a fine mender of crockery, that he had a voice that resounded like a brass bell, an unrivaled memory, and the gift of eloquence. As time went on, more and more grieving families requested his attendance at graveside ceremonies, asking him to appease the souls of the departed and lessen the sorrows of the survivors. Understandably, at first he declined the requests. Why in the world would he offer vocal laments at the gravesite of a total stranger? No, he’d say the first time, and the second. But the third invitation was always difficult to turn down—did not Liu Bei manage to get Zhuge Liang to his cottage the third time he asked? Besides, they would be fellow townsmen, tied together one way or another, people you could not help meeting from time to time, and in a hundred years or so, everyone would be related anyway. So if he could not do something for the sake of the living, he ought to do it for the departed. Seeing a dead man is like encountering a tiger; seeing a dead tiger is like meeting up with a lamb. The dead are noble, the living worthless. So he went. Once, twice, a third time . . . and he was always treated as an honored guest, warmly welcomed by all. Human waste spoils a tree’s roots; spirits and good food intoxicate a man’s heart. How could a lowly crockery mender not be moved by such expansive treatment? And so he put his heart into what he was asked to do. A honed knife is sharp; a practiced skill is perfected. Each funeral gave him an opportunity to whet his skills, until finally his artistry was unmatched. In order to introduce something new into his art, he called upon the wisest man in town, Ma Daguan, to whom he apprenticed himself as a student of tales, ancient and new. Then each morning he went alone to the riverbank to practice his singing voice.

“The first to ask Chang Mao to sing at funerals were humble families, but once word of his artistry began to spread, well-to-do families sought his services as well. During those days in Northeast Gaomi Township, any burial ceremony in which he participated became a grand event. People came from miles around, bringing with them the elderly and the very young. And the ceremonies in which he did not participate? However lavish the procession or plentiful the sacrificial offerings might be—banners and pendants blotting out the sun, forests of food and rivers of liquor—the turnout would be sparse. The day finally arrived when Chang Mao laid down his pole and mending tools for the last time and began life as a master bereavement singer.

“People spoke of a local family of bereavement singers in the Confucian homeland whose womenfolk had fine voices. But their specialty was to assume the roles of surviving family members of the deceased to wail and howl songs of piteous sorrow, and bore no resemblance to Chang Mao’s performances. Why compare those bereavement singers to our Patriarch? Because many decades ago, a rumor spread that the founder of our tradition had set out on the path of bereavement singing inspired by Confucian singers. So I made a special trip to Qufu, the birthplace of Confucius, and found that women who sang bereavements still existed there, but that their songs had few lines, mostly “Oh, heaven! Oh, earth!” Our Patriarch’s artistry went far beyond that. Comparing those women to him is like equating heaven with earth or a pheasant with a phoenix.

“Our Patriarch improvised at gravesites, weaving the life of the deceased into his lyrics. He had a quick wit and a brilliant tongue, rhyming in all the right places, colloquial and easy to understand, but soaring with literary grace. His lines of sorrow were essentially a funeral elegy. As demands to meet his listeners’ expectations intensified, he no longer limited his recitations to the life and virtues of the deceased, but introduced philosophical views of life in general. And Maoqiang opera was born.”

At that point in my narration, I turned to see the Magistrate, who was sitting outside the condemned cells, cocking his ear as if listening to what I was saying. Go ahead, listen. I want you to hear. If you don’t have an ear for Maoqiang, you’ll never truly understand Northeast Gaomi Township. Ignorance of its history means you cannot comprehend what is in the hearts of its residents. So I raised my voice even though my throat burned and my tongue ached.

“I said at the beginning that our Patriarch had a cat, a very clever cat, much like the Red Rabbit steed the Three Kingdoms hero Guan Yu rode. He loved that cat, and the cat loved him back. He never went anywhere without it. When he sang a graveside elegy, that cat would sit on the ground in front of him, listening intently, and when the sorrowful climax was reached, it joined in with a doleful howl of its own. The Patriarch’s voice stood out among his peers; the cat’s howls were themselves incomparable. Owing to the shared intimacy, people of the day took to calling him “Chang the Cat,” since the word for cat—
mao
—sounded the same as his name.

“Even now, there is a popular ditty in Northeast Gaomi Township that goes——

“Better to hear Chang Mao screech than listen to the Master teach,” Xiao Shanzi said with deep emotion.

“Well, one day the cat died; how it died is unclear. One version ascribes it to old age. Another insists that it was poisoned by an out-of town-actor who was envious of the Patriarch’s talent. There is even a version in which the cat was strangled by a vengeful woman who was rebuffed by the Patriarch in her desire to become his wife. Whatever the truth, the cat did die, an event that so traumatized our Patriarch that he held the cat in his arms and cried for three days and nights, interspersing his wails with songs of bereavement, until blood leaked from his eyes.

“After overcoming the worst of his grief, the Patriarch fashioned two items of cat clothing from the skins of wild animals. The smaller of the two, made from the pelt of a feral cat, he wore on his head for daily use—ears rising from each side, tail hanging down past the nape of his neck alongside his modest queue. The larger item, made from the skins of a dozen or more cats, was a ceremonial robe, trailing a long cat’s tail behind him; he wore it thereafter when he performed graveside bereavements.

“The death of his companion initiated a major change in the Patriarch’s singing style. Before that, cheerful banter had been woven into his songs; now forlorn strains dominated from start to finish. There was also a change in his singing style, for now the desolate contents were dotted with dulcet or melancholy or bleak cat cries that changed constantly, like a series of interludes. The new style not only has survived to this day, but has become the central feature of Maoqiang opera.”

“Meow—— Meow—” On an impulse, Xiao Shanzi interrupted my narration with a pair of cat cries pregnant with nostalgia.

“After the death of his cat, our Patriarch adopted the walking and speaking style of a cat, as if possessed by the spirit of his dead companion. He and his cat had become one. Even his eyes underwent a change: slitted during the day, they glowed in the darkness of night. Then one day the Patriarch died, and a legend was born that he turned into a large cat on his deathbed, but with wings that grew from his shoulders and carried him through the window and onto the limb of a giant tree. From there he flew straight to the moon.

“The vocation of bereavement singing died with the Patriarch, but his melodic, heartbreaking elegies never stopped swirling in the hearts of our people.”

————

4

————

“Later, during the nineteenth-century reigns of the Jiaqing and Daoguang emperors, small family troupes mimicked the vocal offerings of the Patriarch in performances, usually consisting of a male singer, echoed by his wife, and complemented by their child, dressed in a cat costume, who supplied the feline cries. When the opportunity arose, they sang funeral elegies for rich families—by then, ‘bereavement laments’ had become ‘bereavement songs’—but most of the time they put on public performances at open markets. Husband and wife sang and acted out their parts while their child moved cat-like, making a variety of feline sounds as he circled the crowd with his donations basket. Short performances were the order of the day, including such favorites as
Lan Shuilian Sells Water, A Widow Weeps at a Gravesite
, and
Third Sister Wang Misses Her Husband
. In reality, these performances were a form of begging. Maoqiang actors are cousins to professional beggars, and that is how you became my protégé.”

“Shifu speaks the truth,” Xiao Shanzi said.

“That was how things stood for several generations. Musical instruments were not used in the Maoqiang of those days, and there was no staging. It was operatic but not yet opera. Besides the small family troupes I spoke of a moment ago, there were peasants who made up musical interludes during leisure periods, accompanied by gongs used for peddling candy and clappers used by bean curd peddlers, singing them for themselves in cellars where straw sandals were made or on heated brick beds in their own homes, all to dispel loneliness and ease a life of suffering. Those gongs and clappers were the forerunners of today’s Maoqiang instruments.

“I was young and clever back then—I’m not boasting—and I had the finest voice in all of Northeast Gaomi Township’s eighteen villages. I began to gain a reputation when I joined my voice with others. People—locals at first, then outsiders—came to listen, and when the cellars and brick beds could no longer accommodate them all, we moved into yards and onto threshing grounds. People could be seated when they sang in those cellars and on brick beds, but not in open spaces, where movement was required. But then movement in ordinary clothing did not feel natural, so costumes were required. But then costumes and unadorned faces did not produce the right effect, so singers painted their faces. Costumes and painted faces needed something more—instruments more varied than gongs and clappers. Ragtag troupes from other counties gave performances in town, including the “Donkey Opera” specialists from Southern Shandong, who rode their animals onto the stage. There were also the southern Jiao County “Gliders,” whose ending note of each sentence glided from high to low, like sledding down a mountain slope. Actors in one so-called “rooster troupe” from the Henan-Shandong border area ended each line with a sort of hiccup, the sound a rooster makes at the end of its crow. All these troupes came with instrumental accompaniment, for the most part huqin, dizi, suonas, and laba—fiddles, flutes, woodwinds, and horns. The visitors played their instruments at our performances, and the effects were more impressive than those with singing alone. But I am so competitive, I’ve never been satisfied with someone else’s brainchild. By this time our opera was already known as Maoqiang, and I was thinking that if I wanted to create a unique opera form, it had to be all about cats. And so I invented an instrument called the mao hu—the cat fiddle. With that instrument, Maoqiang had found its place.

“My instrument was bigger than other fiddles; it had four strings and a double bow, which produced fascinating compound notes. Their fiddles were snakeskin-covered; for ours we used tanned cat skins. Their fiddles were good for ordinary tones, while ours could produce cat cries dog yelps donkey brays horse whinnies baby bawls maiden giggles rooster crows hen cackles—there wasn’t a sound on earth that our fiddles could not reproduce. The cat fiddle put Maoqiang opera on the map, and ragtag troupes found no place in Northeast Gaomi Township after that.

“I followed my invention of the cat fiddle with another—the cat drum, a small drum made of cat skin. I also came up with a dozen facial designs: happy cats, angry cats, treacherous cats, loyal cats, affectionate cats, resentful cats, hateful cats, unsightly cats . . . would it be an exaggeration to say that without Sun Bing, today there would be no Maoqiang opera?”

“Again Shifu speaks the truth,” Xiao Shanzi said.

“Of course I am not the opera’s Patriarch. That was Chang Mao. If Maoqiang were a tree, then Chang Mao would be our roots.”

————

5

————

“Worthy young brother, which operas did I teach you to sing all those years ago?”

“
The Hongmen Banquet
, Shifu,” Xiao Shanzi replied softly, “and
In Pursuit of Han Xin
.”

“Ah, those, both stolen—by me—from other operas. You probably are unaware that Shifu played bit roles with at least ten opera troupes in other counties in order to poach bits of their performances. My desire to learn opera took me down south, out of Shanxi, across the Yangtze, and into Guangxi and Guangdong. There isn’t an opera anywhere that Shifu cannot perform, and no role that Shifu cannot act. Like a bumblebee, I have taken nectar from all the operatic flowers to create the fine honey of Maoqiang opera.”

“Shifu, you are a miraculous talent!”

“Your shifu once had a grand desire to take Maoqiang opera to Peking at least one time before he died and perform for the Emperor and the Empress Dowager. I wanted it to become a national dramatic form. Once that happened, rats would disappear from the land north and south of the great river. What a shame that before I could put this grand plan into action, a treacherous individual yanked the beard right off my face. That beard was the symbol of Shifu’s prestige, my courage, my talent, the very soul of Maoqiang. Shifu without a beard is like a cat without whiskers like a rooster without tail feathers like a horse with a shorn tail . . . worthy young brother, Shifu had no choice but to leave the stage and drift through life as the owner of a little teahouse, fated to die with unfulfilled aspirations, something that has bedeviled heroic figures since time immemorial.”