God's Chinese Son (8 page)

These are those who died for reasons that we can no longer know: Amongst them are those who died from cruel wounds in battle, those who died from flood and fire and bandits, those who saw their property seized and so took their own lives, married women and young girls seized by force and killed, those who while being punished died unjustly, those who fled from natural calamities and died from illness on the road, those destroyed by wild animals or poisonous snakes, those who died from famine or exposure, those who were caught up in wars and lost their lives, those who killed themselves because of danger, those crushed to death when walls or houses collapsed on them, or those who after their deaths left no sons or grandsons.
¹⁸

For such souls, and all others gone before and still to come, the founding magistrate of Hua in 1686 had carved this prayer in stone: "Let cruel animals stay away, the nests of robbers never more be formed, the people henceforth live decent lives, the tax quotas to the state be always met, and people's spirits all be good. From this will come our happiness, a golden age in heaven and earth."
¹⁹

Even these solemn ceremonies can be slighted by exaggeration, or dis­jointed into carnivals. During the protracted drought of 1835, the gover­nor abandoned the regular sacrifices to the city god, and offered vast rewards to any "extraordinary man" or "wonderful scholar," no matter from what district or believing in what faith, who could use his arts "to drive away the dragon" that was blocking off the clouds, and thus cause the rain to fall. The citizens mocked him publicly, with poems written in bold characters and posted on the walls. Yet they gathered in great crowds when a volunteer came forward to drive away the dragon. He was a man claiming to be a monk from Sichuan province and he stood three days before the altar in the governor's yamen, three days under the burning sun, an upright staff pushed into the ground by his side, with no sign of weakness, no sign of perspiration on his face, with candles burning stead­ily on the altar, next to a bowl of pure clear water. Again the people mocked, until suddenly the rains came, and they were silenced. Only to mock again when the governor, to thank the gods, ordered ten married women to sacrifice a sow at the south gate of the city, and burn off its tail.
²⁰
Less than a month later, as epidemics followed the drought and the sudden rains, the people brought the image of the famous second-century god Yingtuo out from his shrine inside the Great South Gate of Canton city, and paraded it through the street, escorted by drummers and by crowds of young girls chosen especially for their looks.
²¹

Predators often prowl at such scenes of petitioning or rejoicing, encour­aged by the expensive preparations and the flocks of people, and attempts to keep decorum sometimes fail in curious ways. At the autumn festival of All Souls, allegedly the most solemn ceremony of the ritual year, held in 1836 at a village in the western suburbs outside Canton, the bamboo structures, the booths, the glittering displays in the temple ground were so astonishing, funded by subscriptions from local merchants and worthies totaling seven thousand ounces or so of silver, that the magistrate ordered two parallel roads built out to the temple grounds, one to be used only by men and one by women. But this prompted two young men to dress as women, so they could join the women on their walk, and rob them there at leisure. At last their looks betrayed them, and they were arrested and "made a show to the assembled multitude."
²
"

Hong Huoxiu is twenty-two years old in 1836. As he mingles with the crowds of fellow students on the road outside the lieutenant governor's official residence near the examination halls, two men catch his attention. One of them is a Cantonese, and acts as interpreter for the second, a foreign-looking man who does not speak good Chinese. This second man is strangely dressed: as Hong later remembers him, he has a "coat with wide sleeves" in what appears to be the style of the former Ming dynasty, and his hair is "tied in a knot upon his head." Through his interpreter, this second man tells the bystanders "the fulfillment of their wishes," even if they have not yet questioned him. To Hong he says, "You will attain the highest rank, but do not be grieved, for grief will make you sick.""
³

The next day Hong sees the same two men again, standing on Longcang Jie, the "Street where the dragon hides," or "Street of potential wisdom," some way south of where they were the day before, but still near the exami­nation halls. This time no words are uttered, but one of the men reaches out to Hong with a book in his hand. Hong takes the book. It is Liang Afa's collection of religious tracts, "Good Words for Exhorting the Age."
²⁴

Hong's description of the foreign man is vague, and the words he ascribes to him elusive. But everything about this stranger points to Edwin Stevens, returned a few months before from the longest of his coastal trips. In the early spring of 1836 Stevens has taken on a new calling in addition to his formal title of chaplain for the Seaman's Friend Society—that of "missionary to the Chinese"—and a friend lists "distributing Bibles and tracts" as now foremost among Stevens' interests.
²⁵
And yet despite his several years in China, Stevens still needs an interpreter, for he finds the language vexingly hard. There are two views on learning Chinese, he has written recently, "One, that the attainment of the language was next to impossible; and the other more modern, that its acquisition is as facile as the Latin or Greek. While we subscribe to neither of these extremes, we confess ourselves inclined more towards the former than the latter opin­ion."
²⁶
As one who knew him well in Canton was to write after his death, though Stevens "made considerable proficiency in the study of the Chinese language," it was always true that "accuracy rather than rapidity charac­terized his progress." And only the pure language will do in this context. One can hardly use the merchants' and sailors' Pidgin English to spread the word of God.
²⁷

Certainly Stevens has lived long enough on the edge of Canton to know that the guards at those imposing city gates—despite the brave show that they make, in their red-and-yellow jackets with the character for "cour­age" writ large on front and back—are often lazy, and that bribing them is common.
²⁸
Furthermore, he has recently gained the experience, from his shoreline journeys, to compare the Chinese of the north—"suspicious and reserved"—with those among whom he lives in the south, who mani­fest what he now perceives by contrast to be a "ready cordiality" and a "roguish" wit.
²⁹

Hong's description of the Cantonese interpreter is as vague as his description of the foreigner. We know that it cannot be Liang Afa, for Liang left Canton the previous year, after being arrested once again by the Chinese authorities, on charges of illegally distributing Christian tracts. Though bailed out by the Westerners in Canton, he felt he could no longer endure the risks to himself and his growing family, and retreated to the safer realms of Malacca. Nor is it Liang's friend Agong, the one who earlier on distributed tracts with Liang to the examination candidates. Agong has also left the city, forced to flee after local enemies denounced him to the authorities for dealing too closely with the foreigners.
³⁰
Nor is it either of those two men's sons, for Liang Afa's son has fled to Singapore, and Agong's son is held in jail in the place of his fugitive father. The closest we can come to his identity is through a letter written that same spring by a British resident of Canton, in which he states that all the Chinese Christians who once consorted with Liang Afa are scattered "except one, a man of some literary acquirements, who corrects many of our tracts for the press, improving a little the style, etc."
³¹
But if this Chinese man does pluck up the courage to go and spread God's word with a Westerner inside Canton's walls, he is unlikely to write about it publicly. Nor does Stevens reminisce about the moment, or share his thoughts on it with others. For at the end of 1836, while on a trip to Singapore, Stevens is struck by blinding headaches and by a raging fever that the doctors cannot reach. Within three weeks, aged thirty-four, he is dead.
³²

As Hong remembers it, he does not read Liang's set of tracts carefully, but gives "a superficial glance at their contents."
³³
What exactly does Hong see? He does not say. But there, in the table of contents, is the Chinese character for Hong's own name. The character is sharp and clear, as the fourth item in the fourth tract. The literal meaning of Hong's name is "flood," and the heading says that the waters of a Hong have destroyed every living thing upon the earth. The passage in the tract itself repeats this startling news, and states that this destruction was ordered by Ye- huo-hua, the god who created all living creatures. The Chinese translitera­tion for this god's name is Ye-huo-hua, the middle syllable of which— "Huo," or "fire"—is the same as the first syllable of Hong's given name, Huoxiu. So Hong shares this god's name. There is flood, there is fire. And Hong Huoxiu, in some fashion, for some reason, partakes of both.
³⁴

How enraged this god has been, Liang's book tells Hong, enraged at the sins of those he has created. Only one man, named Noah, found favor in this god's eyes, for Noah alone of all those on earth followed the true path of righteousness. Noah was already six hundred years old when this god told him to build a boat, and though so old, he obeyed at once. His three sons helped him. The boat was huge, three stories high, three hundred feet long and fifty broad. There was a window in the boat, and a great door, and all the animals came in, seven by seven or two by two, and all the birds, and pairs of all the creeping things. And Noah joined them, with his wife, and his three sons, and his three sons' wives. The god's flood covered the whole earth. Except for those inside the boat, the god killed everyone. The god's flood killed the giants, who lived on the earth in those days, killed all the other animals and birds and creeping things. Only in their boat, above the mountaintops, eight people floated free, just eight in one family, they and the creatures they brought with them.
³⁵

Hong's second name is there in other places too, for another god— described as "the highest Lord of all"—sent fire to destroy two cities with curious names, just as Ye-huo-hua had sent the flood to destroy the people of the earth. Like the first, this god was angry, for the people of these two cities gave themselves to lust and wildness, leaving no depravity unex­plored; with his fire the god destroyed them, every trace, every person, every house, and finally the very soil itself, converting the land into a monstrous lake. But once again the god chose one family to be saved, that of a man named Lot. Lot had a wife, and two daughters, and god saved all four; till Lot's wife looked back at the blazing cities and was turned to salt. So only three remained.
³⁶

Liang's book does not say what happened at the end of either story. What of that family of eight? What of the animals and birds crowded in around them? Did they float thus through all eternity? Did they ride the waves in their enormous boat, beneath the rain-sodden sky, forever and a day, skin and fur and feathers, until they became one with the water, the wood, and the wind?

And why salt?

Hong fails the examinations. He keeps the book.

Hong has grown up in Guanlubu with many different gods, and paid homage to them in a host of ways. First in each year come the series of celebrations to honor the new year and the first full moon of spring, followed by the Qing- Ming festival in memory of the dead, and the Dragon Boat festival of five- five (the fifth day of the fifth lunar month). This festival, at which boats from different villages race each other on the rivers, honors the loyal but disgraced minister of a ruling house two thousand years before, who com­mitted suicide in a southern stream after writing China's most celebrated lament. At the Dragon Boat festivals around Canton the people hang rushes and artemisia outside their doors, and offer horn-shaped cakes of sweet and sticky rice to their ancestors before sharing them among them­selves, and with family and neighbors, while the children hang amulets and seals on colored threads around their waists. Despite the glory of their boats and their colorful costumes, the men competing for the prizes often erupt in fights, fed by the tension of the times and by old, still smoldering, feuds. Violence has grown so bad that in 1835 the governor from his office in Canton forbids the races to be held, an order that is observed by few, if any, villages.

After the celebration of the summer solstice, the year starts to turn toward its end. On the sixth day of the seventh month, so it is said, Heav­en's daughter sends down her seven sisters, and so do the women in Hua county prepare festoons of colored silk and gather, in their best clothes, between noon and early afternoon, to worship the visitors and beg their help for skill in needlework. They hire blind singing boys and girls to chant their ballads and on their tables lay out fruit and flowers and pretty ornaments. The next day is double-seven, the festival of the herdboy and the weaving maid, who meet on that day only, using the Milky Way as their bridge. That festival overlaps with the early autumn feast of All Souls, when hungry ghosts are delivered from their anguish by the inter­cession of the Buddha, in rites first practiced eleven hundred years before. These ceremonies are hardly over when bowls of rice are prepared for all the Buddhist and Taoist monks and nuns and for any beggars in the town, who on seven-ten shall not go hungry.
²

At the double-nine, all worship again at ancestral graves, and picnic— if they can—in the hills, to remember the reclusive sage Fei Changfang, who once saved a disciple's life by urging him to flee to the hills with his young family since death was coming to his home. The disciple followed his advice, keeping his spirits up with chrysanthemum wine, and upon return found all his chickens and farm animals dead in the yard—taken as substitutes, said Fei, since death could not find the humans he was seeking.

A few days later, as the ninth month ends, the Fire God has his festival: for three full days, street by street, people implore his protection, for fire is the worst enemy, one that has leveled towns and villages so many times. For three days lamps blaze all night in streets festooned with streamers, and the residents and shop owners in the wealthier roads stage plays to serve as the "Fire God's Requiem." Sometimes of course, as happened in the Dragon Boat races, such ceremonies reverse themselves—in one village near Canton, which celebrated the festival in 1835 with five days and night of plays accompanied by fireworks, the flaming devices set the tents and chests of theatrical clothes on fire, forcing the terrified audience to run for their lives, trampling ten or more in the melee. Just one year later, in a village outside Canton, another crowded theater caught on fire, and this time two hundred men and women were killed in the terrified stampede.
³
The festival year ends with the celebration of the winter sol­stice and its promise of lengthening days, and the visit of the kitchen god, who must be fed and welcomed if his favors are to be granted in the new
year.

In Hua, where heat and hunger, dampness and diseases are never far away, these festivals take on a special urgency. The people of Hua, according to their own early historian, are the kind who will summon a doctor if they have a slight illness, but if their sickness is severe they turn to the spirits. At New Year's time, before the dawn, they bathe in scented water as the festival begins, and amidst the sound of firecrackers and the drinking of spring wine they weigh the rainfall day by day for twelve days straight, to gauge the coming year's prospects. Similarly, they chart the wind's direction, wishing for a cold north wind that will reverse itself and lead to a warm spring, and praying to avoid a southern wind that brings bad luck. Men and women crowd together as they pray before clay figures of water buffalo and their celestial drover; they stage plays in the street to entertain the spirits, scatter pulse and grain on the ground to bring a fertile year, and eat cakes of plain flour and vegetables to keep them free of smallpox. After the first full moon, they welcome the Yellow Emperor by hanging chains of garlic on their doors to ward off evil forces, and cook large round pancakes of sticky rice on which they place a needle and thread, which they say will help them patch the heavens.
⁵

In the fourth month, too, they gather to share a ritual meal, in this case the flavored liquid in which the Buddha's image has been washed outside the temple gate, and then eat sweet rice cakes cooked with a hundred herbs. Some say this will cure delirium.
⁶
At the summer solstice, they cook and eat dog meat, to keep away malaria, and at the coming of winter they share a broth of meat, peaches, and mustard greens, to keep any other sicknesses away. Even more careful than the procedure followed in the first month is the charting of the rains and wind at the end of the sixth month, on the day they call the Dragon's Measure. "Heavy rain on this day," goes the local saying, "means that one will plow the mountaintops; no rain, that one will have to plow the bottoms of the ponds." But there are other signals from the heavens that must be watched with equal care: a squall that doesn't last, despite its initial fury; a sudden violent cloud­burst, with heavy wind and thunder; or a severed rainbow after rain, known as the Mother of Typhoons, that presages the rage and roar of the fiercest storms that knock down homes and trees, and make travel on the waterways impossible. These are called warnings from Pengzu himself, China's longest-living patriarch.'

In Hua, the people are told that to avoid poverty they must light huge fires in the street to greet the Yellow Emperor's arrival, and placate the grain spirits by offering them boiled suckling pig and wine. To further assure good fortune, they should eat dried fish in bulk at the moment of the winter solstice. To place themselves under the Jade Emperor's protec­tion at year's end, they burn model houses of bamboo and stay awake all night, hang strings of oranges before their doors, and carve peachwood charms for the gods of the gate. To keep cold winds away, they eat boiled noodles cooked in ritual vessels. To greet the moon in the middle of the autumn, they prepare three separate types of mooncakes, called "goosefat," "hardskin," and "soft skin" cakes, ranging in weight from an ounce or two to several pounds, some sweet, some salt, their surfaces decorated with multicolored pictures of humans and animals. Eaten as the lanterns are hoisted high to greet the moon, these cakes bring promise of early marriage and plenteous children.
⁸

Animals and birds, mythical or real, are an inextricable part of these relations with the spirit worlds. Dragons are linked through ceremonies to certain days of the year, when the way they are propitiated can deter­mine the force of the sun or prevent the rain clouds from forming and releasing their bounty; at the winter solstice, for instance, "the hidden dragon represents the Celestial Breath which returns to the point of its departure." In this role, the dragon stands for the
yang
force of the east, the strength of sun and light.
⁹

The tiger and the cock each features prominently in many ways and guises, also linked to the changing cycles of the seasons, especially the passage from winter into spring. Because of stories from antiquity, the tiger is often associated with a giant peach tree, under which he stands at the eastern corner of the world waiting to eat the spectral victims bound and passed on to him by two divine protectors of the human race. By association of ideas—and lacking real tigers—the magistrates often place peachwood images of human guardians outside their formal office entrances, and painted tigers on the lintels, from which also dangle the ropes of reed or rush in which the specters had once been bound. The specters entering the tiger's maw had approached the peach tree from the northeast, and thus the tiger came to represent the
yang
force vanquishing the powers of winter, cold, and
yin
(the north).
¹⁰

The red color of peach can counteract evil. Strips of red paper on a house door are effective substitutes for peachwood images, just as peach twigs can serve in exorcism, and even the roughest picture of a tiger guard a house from harm, as infants might also be protected by wearing a simple "tiger hat."
¹¹
A white tiger, however, represents different kinds of dan­ger—it is linked to the stratagems and the violence of war, the thirst for blood, and also can bring mortal danger to infants and to pregnant women. With its name linked to certain so-called baleful stars, the white tiger figures centrally in astrologers' calculations of avoiding disaster.

Thus can a spirit considered the protector become, in altered guise, a force of death and destruction.
¹²

The cock looms large in local consciousness as well. Sometimes it is sacrificed, its blood smeared over door lintels to give protection, the very lintels on which the tiger images are hanging. In early tales, the cock presided in the tree under which the tiger ate his victims. "In the moun­tain or land of the peach capital is a big peach tree with a foliage extending over three thousand miles. A gold cock is perched upon it, and crows at dawn."
¹³
Even though the blood of freshly killed cocks can help exorcise demons, they must not be slain on the first days of the year, when only their presence can provide the force to counteract the demons escaping the tiger's jaws. At other times, cocks—especially those of reddish color— would be sacrificed to the sun, a practice some ascribed to the ancient state of Lu, where Confucius was born and where he taught, "because its voice in the morning and its red feathers drove evil from the rulers of that state." Like the peach, it was observed, "the cock dispels disease on account of its solar propensities, and moreover confers on man the vitality bestowed by the universal source of life, of which it is the symbol."
¹⁴

The category of religious books known as the
Jade Record
also chart the course of every year, although in harsher ways, as they present the march of souls through hell. The prologues to the
]ade Record
state that the central holy text was sent down to earth by the being termed the Highest God, after being submitted to him by Yan Luo, the king of hell, and by Pusa, the compassionate Bodhisattva. The purpose of the text is to clarify for all human beings the relationship between bad deeds on earth and suffering in hell after death, and to show how suffering can be averted by good actions on earth. In dealing thus with the world of hell, and with the souls of the dead, the text deliberately reverses the well-known words of Confucius, who had always said to his disciples that since we cannot even fully understand life on earth, how can we presume to discuss the gods or the afterlife?
¹⁵

In line with these principles, tradition says that the text of the
Jade Record
was initially given not to a Confucian worthy but to a Buddhist priest, and by him passed on to a wandering Taoist. As stated in the book itself, this was in the reign period of Taiping, or "Great Peace," a title adopted by both the Chinese Song emperors and the barbarian Liao invad­ers, a dual coincidence that allowed ingenious scholars to place the heav­enly transmissions with precision to the years of 982 and 1030. All who read and absorb the message of the
Jade Record,
and print extra copies so that others too may read and learn, will not only escape the worst torments of hell, and bring prosperity to their families and descendants, but in the transmigration of their souls may be reborn as human beings, or even move to higher stages of life—men to the happy lands, and women to the life of men. Those who ignore, deface, or mock the tracts will find no such mercy, but be condemned at death to descend to the lower layers of hell and, according to their crimes on earth, move through each of the ten hellish palaces in turn.
¹⁶

Pictures in the
Jade Record
show, for those who cannot read, how the judged souls are transformed. Only a few return as happy, healthy humans. Of the others, some are allowed to stay human, yes, but con­demned to be ugly, misshapen, poor, and ill; while many, according to their sins, return as horses, dogs, birds, fish, or creeping things.
¹⁷
Copies of the
Jade Record
are everywhere as Hong Huoxiu is growing up, since editions begin to proliferate just in the years when he is preparing for his exams, even though the sixteen maxims that the scholars read aloud to educate the people include a ringing condemnation of the Jade Emperor and the books issued in his name.
¹⁸