Soul Mountain (23 page)

This memorial arch still stands at the east entrance to the village and lazy herd boys always hitch the ropes of the cows on them when they sneak off. However, when the director of the revolutionary committee came to inspect the countryside he found the wording on the horizontal tablet between the pillars quite inappropriate and had the secretary inform the local village secretary. It was changed to: “In Agriculture Learn From Dazhai”, and the couplet on the stone pillars: “Loyalty and Filial Piety Long Transmitted in the Family” and “Poetry and History Long Continuing for Many Generations” was changed to the slogans “Plant Fields for the Revolution” and “For the Greater Community not the Individual”. Who could have imagined that the Dazhai model would later be called bogus, that the fields would be returned to peasant ownership, that those who worked more would get more, and that nobody would pay any attention to the writing on the memorial arch? The more clever of the descendants of the family have gone into business and become rich, how could they spare the time to think about changing it all back?

At the back of the arch, at the door of the first house, an old woman sits pounding in a wooden bucket with a stick. A sandy coloured dog comes and hangs around, sniffing here and there. The old woman holds up the stick and savagely berates it: “I’ll burn you to death with the chilli if you don’t get lost!”

Anyway, you are not a sandy coloured dog, so you keep walking up, and address her.

“Venerable elder, are you making chilli sauce?”

The old woman neither says yes or no, just looks up at you then puts down her head and goes on pounding the fresh chilli in the bucket.

“Could you please tell me if there’s a place called Lingyan here?” You know that to ask her about a far away place like Lingshan would be a waste of time. You say you’ve come from a village called Mengjia down below, and people there say there’s a place called Lingyan up this way.

It is only then that she stops pounding to look the two of you over, especially scrutinizing her and then turning to you.

“Are the two of you wishing for a son?” she asks in an odd way.

She gives you a tug on the quiet. You’ve made a stupid blunder, so you go on to ask, “What’s Lingyan got to do with wishing for a son?”

“What’s it got to do with it?” The old woman raises her voice. “It’s a place women go to. They only go there to burn incense when they haven’t given birth to a son!” The old woman can’t stop cackling, it’s as if someone is tickling her. “So the young woman here is wishing for a son?” The old woman turns to caustically confront her.

“We’re sightseeing. We want to have a look everywhere,” you are obliged to explain.

“What’s there to see in this village? It was just the same a few days ago. Several couples from the city tormented the whole village with the havoc they created!”

“What did they do?” you can’t help asking.

“They brought along this electric box and made the mountains ring with the wailing of ghosts and the howling of wolves. They had their arms around one another right on the threshing square and they were all wriggling their bottoms. It was really wicked!”

“Oh, were they looking for Lingyan too?” You are becoming interested.

“Why do you keep asking about that demon-infested place Lingyan? Didn’t I tell you just now? That’s where women go to burn incense when they want to have a son.”

“Why can’t men go there?”

“If you’re not afraid of evil vapours then go. Who’s stopping you?”

She gives you a tug, but you say you still can’t understand.

“Then get yourself splashed with blood!” You can’t tell if the old woman is warning you or cursing you.

“She’s saying it’s taboo for men,” she explains to you.

You say there are no taboos.

“She’s talking about menstrual blood,” she whispers in your ear, warning you to leave right away.

“What’s so special about menstrual blood?” You say even dog’s blood doesn’t worry you. “Let’s go and see what this Lingyan really is.”

She says forget it and says she doesn’t want to go. You ask why she’s afraid, she says she’s afraid of what the old woman is saying.

“There aren’t all these regulations, let’s go!” you say to her, and then ask the old woman how to get there.

“Wicked people, let the demons get the pair of you!” the old woman says to your back, this time cursing.

She says she’s afraid, she has a premonition of something bad. You ask if she’s afraid she will meet a shaman. You tell her that in this mountain village all the old women are shamans and all the young women are seductresses.

“Does that mean I am too?” she asks you.

“Why not? Aren’t you a woman?”

“Then you’re a demon!” she counters.

“All men are demons in women’s eyes.”

“Then am I the companion of a demon?” she asks sticking up her chin.

“A demon with a seductress,” you say.

She chuckles and looks happy, but she pleads with you not to go to such a place.

“What could happen?” you stop and ask her. “Will it bring misfortune? Will it bring disaster? What’s there to be frightened about?”

She snuggles against you and says as long as she’s with you she will be all right. But you can tell there is already a black shadow in her heart. You strive to dispel it and deliberately talk loudly.

I don’t know if you have ever observed this strange thing, the self. Often the more you look the more it doesn’t seem to be like it, and the more you look the more it isn’t it. It’s just like when one is lying on the grass and staring at a cloud – at first it’s like a camel, then like a woman, and when you look again it becomes an old man with a long beard, but this doesn’t last because clouds are transforming every instant.

Suppose you use a lavatory in an old house and you happen to look at the water stains on the walls – every day you go there are changes in the stains. First you see a face, when you look again it’s a dog dragging a sausage, afterwards it turns into a tree, there is a woman under the tree and she’s sitting on a skinny horse. After a couple of weeks, or perhaps after several months, one morning, you are constipated and you suddenly find that the stain is in fact still a face.

When you are lying on the bed looking at the ceiling, the light projected onto the white ceiling too can undergo many transformations. If you concentrate on looking at yourself, you will find that your self will gradually separate from the self you are familiar with and multiply into many startling forms. So if I have to make a summary of myself, it terrifies me. I don’t know which of the many faces represents me more and the more closely I look the clearer the transformations become, and finally only bewilderment remains.

You could wait, wait until the stain on the wall again turns into a human face, or you could hope, hope that it would one day turn out to have a particular form. But in my experience, it grows and grows but often not as you wish and moreover, mostly, contrary to what you wish. It is a monster child which you find impossible to accept, yet ultimately it was born of the self and has to be accepted.

I once looked at the photo of me on the monthly bus ticket I had thrown on the table. At first I thought I had a charming smile, then I thought the smile at the corners of the eyes was rather of scorn, arrogance and indifference, all deriving from self-love, self-adoration, and a sense of superiority. But there was also an anxiety which betrayed acute loneliness, and fleeting snatches of terror – certainly not a winner – and a bitterness which stifled the common smile of unthinking happiness and doubted that sort of happiness. This was very scary, it was like a void, a sense of falling without somewhere to land, and I didn’t want to go on looking at the photo.

After that I went about observing other people, but whenever I observed other people I found this detestable omniscient self of mine interfering, and to this day there is not one face it hasn’t interfered with. This is a serious problem, for when I am scrutinizing someone else, I am at the same time scrutinizing myself. I search for faces I like, or expressions I can tolerate, so I can’t get rid of myself. I can’t find people with whom I can identify, I search without success, everywhere: in railway waiting rooms, in train carriages, on boats, in food shops and parks, and even when out walking on the streets, I am always trying to capture a familiar face or a familiar build, or looking for some sign which can call up submerged memories. When I am observing others I always treat the other person as a mirror for looking inwardly at myself. The observations are inevitably affected by my state of mind at a particular time. Even when I am observing a woman, my senses react to her and my experiences and imagination are activated in making a judgement. My understanding of others, including women, is actually superficial and arbitrary. Women I like are inevitably illusions I have created to delude myself, and this is my tragedy. As a result, my relationships with women inevitably fail. On the other hand, if I were a woman and living with a man, this would also be a worry. The problem is the awakened self in the inner mind, this is the monster which torments me no end. People love the self yet mutilate the self. Arrogance, pride, complacency or anxiety, jealousy and hatred, all spring from this. The self is in fact the source of mankind’s misery. So, does this unhappy conclusion mean that the awakened self should therefore be killed?

Thus Buddha told the boddhisatva: the myriad phenomena are vanity, the absence of phenomena is also vanity.

She says she wants to return to the carefree time of her childhood, when she went to school with her hair combed and perfectly plaited by her maternal grandmother, and everyone used to say her shiny long plaits were beautiful. After her grandmother died, she didn’t wear her hair in plaits anymore but in protest cut it short so that it couldn’t even be put into two bunches which was the style in the Red Guard period. At the time a neighbour had reported her father and he was locked up in the building where he worked and not allowed to go home. Her mother took him a change of clothes every two weeks, but she was never allowed to go along. Afterwards she and her mother were forced to go to a farming village as she didn’t have the right qualifications to be a Red Guard. She says the happiest time in her life was when she had long plaits. Her maternal grandmother was like an old cat, always dozing by her side, and she felt secure.

She says she is old, she means her heart is old and nothing can excite her. Before, she would weep copious tears straight from her heart over nothing, it was effortless and soothing.

She says she had a girlfriend called Lingling and that they were good friends from childhood days. She was always so sweet, she would only have to look at you, and a dimple would appear on her face. Now she is a mother and she has become lethargic, talks in a monotone, and slurs her speech like she’s half asleep. But when she was a girl she used to chatter like a sparrow and together they would talk nonsense all day without stopping. She says Lingling wanted to be outside playing all the time. But, she says, whenever it started raining she would become morose and say I want to strangle you: she would press hard on my neck and it really hurt.

One summer night, sitting by the lake, looking at the sky, she told Lingling she wanted to snuggle and Lingling said she wanted to be a little mother. They giggled and jostled one another, it was before the moon came out. She asks if you know the night sky is grey-blue when the moon is about to come out, oh, the moon gliding out of its corona, she asks if you have ever seen it, surging and billowing then spreading flat like a rolling mist. She says they even heard the sound of the moon flowing over the tops of the trees which looked like rippling waterweeds in a flowing stream, and they both wept. Their tears welled up like the waters of a spring, like the flowing of the moonlight, and their hearts felt sublime. Lingling’s hair, she can feel it even now, brushed lightly against her face, their cheeks were pressed together and they were both flushed. There is a type of lotus, she says, not the water lily or the common lotus, it’s smaller than a lotus and bigger than a water lily. It opens at night and its gold and red stamens glow in the dark. The pink petals are fleshy, like Lingling’s ears when she was young but without the fine hairs, and they are shiny like the nails of her small hands, ah, at that time her trimmed long nails were like sea shells. However, the pink petals are not bright, they are thick like ears and tremble as they slowly open.