Sandalwood Death (71 page)

Even though my small village was no more than twenty li from the Jiao-Ji line, the first time I actually stood near the tracks and witnessed one of those impressive monsters scream past was one night when I was sixteen, out with some friends. I will never forget the striking image of that scary single light in front and the awesome roar of its engine. Now, although I later rode trains regularly, none, it seemed to me, was anything like the one I saw as a youngster back in Northeast Gaomi Township, nor like any of the trains I heard about back then. Those were living creatures, while the trains I rode in later were inanimate machines.

The second sound is the opera popular all over Gaomi—Maoqiang. Its songs are sad and dreary, especially those sung by the dan, or female characters, which, simply stated, are tearful accountings of the oppression of women. Everyone in Northeast Gaomi Township, both adults and children, can sing snatches of Maoqiang opera. This talent—natural, it seems, and not taught—has long been a fact of life among Northeast Gaomi Township residents, passed down from one generation to the next. Legend has it that when an old woman who had followed her son north beyond the Great Wall was dying, a visiting relative handed the son an audio tape he had brought from home, and when the unique strains of Maoqiang arias emerged, the old woman, whose life was ebbing away, suddenly sat up, her face imbued with a healthy glow, her eyes bright and clear, and when the tape ended, she lay back and died.

As a boy, I often tagged along behind bigger kids from the village chasing will-o’-the-wisps on their way to neighboring villages to watch opera performances. Fireflies danced in the air, adding their light to the glow of the earthbound will-o’-the-wisps. In the distance, foxes barked and train whistles blew. From time to time we spotted beautiful women in red or in white sitting by the roadside crying, their sobs and wails sounding very much like Maoqiang arias. We figured they were fox fairies and gave them a wide berth, taking pains not to provoke them. I had seen so many operas, I had committed many of the arias to memory, filling in the blanks by making up my own lyrics; and when I was a bit older, I took bit parts in village stagings, playing villains. At the time, only revolutionary operas were performed, so I was either a spy or a bandit. Things loosened up a bit in the waning years of the Cultural Revolution, when folk operas were added to the revolutionary corpus. The Maoqiang opera
Sandalwood Death
was born. As a matter of fact, the story of Sun Bing’s resistance against the Germans had already been performed on the operatic stage by Maoqiang actors in the last years of the Qing, and some local elders could still sing some of those arias. Using my childhood talent for writing jingles to start rumors and spread gossip, I teamed up with an illiterate old villager who played the erhu, sang opera, and was a master storyteller to write a nine-act opera we called
Tanxiang xing
. An elementary-school teacher who had been labeled a rightist, and who loved literature, gave us a lot of help. The reason I had gone with the other kids to see the train that first time was to get some real-life experience in order to enhance the opera.

Eventually I left my hometown to take a job elsewhere, and my interest in Maoqiang decreased, owing to the pressures of work and the trials of everyday life. A dramatic form that had once stirred the hearts of Northeast Gaomi Township residents went into decline, and even though one professional drama troupe remained, they performed infrequently, and that caused the younger generation to lose interest in Maoqiang.

I went home for a visit over New Year’s in 1986, and the moment I emerged from the train station, my ears picked up the sadly moving strains of a Maoqiang aria coming from a diner on the edge of the station plaza. The sun had just burned its way into the sky, so the plaza was virtually deserted; the forlorn lyrics merged with the shrill whistle of the train as it pulled out of the station, and my heart was filled with mixed emotions. I had the feeling that these two sounds that had accompanied me as I grew up—trains and Maoqiang—were seeds planted in my heart, where they grew and matured to become the underpinnings of one of my important creations.

I began writing
Sandalwood Death
in 1996. After I had written some 50,000 words, all caught up with fantastic legends surrounding trains and rail lines, I set the work aside for a while. When I came back to it, the resemblance to magical realism was too obvious to miss, so I started over. Some of the best writing fell into that category, and had to be jettisoned. In the end, I decided to focus less on trains and the sound of trains, and put Maoqiang center stage, as it were, even though that may have diluted the overall richness of the novel as a whole, in favor of stronger images of the people and a purer Chinese style. It was a sacrifice I willingly made.

In the same way that Maoqiang cannot be performed in grand halls alongside Italian opera or Russian ballet, this novel of mine will likely not be a favorite of readers of Western literature, especially in highbrow circles. Just as Maoqiang is performed on open-air stages for the working masses, my novel will be appreciated only by readers who have an affinity with the common man. It may in fact be better suited to hoarse voices in a public square, surrounded by an audience of eager listeners, not readers, who participate in the tale they are hearing. With that open-air audience in mind, I have taken pains to fill the work with rhymes and dramatic narration, all in the service of a smooth, easy to understand, overblown, resplendent narrative. Popular spoken and sung dialogues are the progenitors of the Chinese novel. Nowadays, when what was once mere popular entertainment has become a refined literary offering suitable for grand temples, at a time when borrowings from Western literary trends have all but brought an end to our popular traditions,
Sandalwood Death
may be out of keeping with the times, and might be thought of as a step backward in my writing career.

The following terms have been left untranslated in the text (most can be intuited from the context):

dan 旦: a female role in Chinese opera

dieh 爹: dad (father), especially popular in northern China

gandieh 干爹: a benefactor, surrogate father, “sugar daddy”

ganerzi 干儿子: the “son” of a gandieh

ganniang 干娘: a surrogate mother

gongdieh 公爹: father-in-law

jin 斤: a traditional unit of weight with sixteen liang 两

kang 炕: a brick sleeping platform, often heated by a fire beneath

laotaiye 老太爷: a respectful term of address for a man of advanced age or high status

laoye 老爷: a more common form of laotaiye

niang 娘: mom (mother), especially popular in northern China

qinjia 亲家: related as in-laws; the parent(s) of a married couple

shaoye 少爷: a young “laoye”

sheng 生: a male role in Chinese opera

shifu 师傅: a teacher, master of a trade

yamen 衙门: an official government office and residence in dynastic China

yayi 衙役: yamen clerks, runners, minor functionaries

yuanwailang 员外郎: an official who has retired to his native home; an official title

zhuangyuan 状元: the top scholar in the Imperial Examination; the best in a field