Shifu, You'll Do Anything For a Laugh (9 page)

With a contemptuous snort, the cousin said:

“You people think that cops are all stupid, don't you?”

“Not for a minute,” the apprentice said with an ingratiating smile. “There might be stupid cops on the force, but you're certainly not one of them. I heard my aunt say once that you could read more than two hundred characters at the age of five.”

The cousin's flashlight lit up the tip of a tall poplar, startling some crows in a nest. With caws and chirps, two of the birds flew out of the nest and flapped their wings in the beam of light; one banged into the trunk of the tree, the other flew into a magpie's nest, leading to some mighty squawks. Cousin turned off his flashlight and grumbled:

“Goddamned birds, I ought to blow you all away!”

They walked up to the abandoned bus hulk, which looked like a sleeping monster in the umbrella of light. By then the warring crows and magpies had returned to their own nests, returning the woods to silence. The sleet was coming down more heavily now, making a rustling noise in the night air, sort of like the sound of silkworms munching on mulberry leaves. Cousin shone his light all over the cottage.

“Inside?” he asked.

Old Ding felt his apprentice's eyes on him in the darkness and sputtered out an answer:

“Yes, inside …”

“Damn, you sure know how to find a spot.”

Flashlight in hand, the cousin walked up to the door and gave it a kick. To everyone's surprise, it swung open. Old Ding's eyes followed the beam of light as it moved through the inside of the cottage, like taking inventory of his personal effects. He saw the bed and the straw mat and coarse toilet paper on top of it; the three-legged wooden table against the “wall” in the corner, with its two bottles of beer and three of soda, all of them dusty, two red candles lying next to the beer bottles and another short one, standing up; the dirty melted wax on the table top and the plastic chamber pot; and an anonymous pornographic chalk drawing on the “wall.” The beam lingered on the drawing for a moment, then continued on its way. It landed finally on old Ding's face, as the cousin turned and asked him angrily:

“Ding Shifu, what's this all about?”

The light blinded him, so he tried to shield his eyes with his arm as he stammered in his own defense:

“I wasn't lying, I swear to heaven I wasn't lying.”

The cousin said cynically, “There are people who walk mules and people who walk horses, but I never thought there were people who walk cops.”

He raised his flashlight, turned, and headed back.

Old Ding's apprentice said disapprovingly:

“Shifu, you'll do anything for a laugh.”

Moving up close to his apprentice and keeping his voice low, he said:

“Little Hu, now I understand, it was a pair of spirits.”

As soon as the words left his mouth, he felt a chill run up and down his spine and his scalp tighten; at the same time, however, he felt enormous relief. His apprentice, on the other hand, was even more disapproving:

“Shifu, you really will do anything for a laugh, won't you?”

Man and Beast

A
S YET ANOTHER DAWN BROKE, A THICK, BILLOWING FOG BANK
made its slow way across the Sapporo Sea toward land. First it filled the lush valleys, then it rose with a flourish to encircle the peak and the thick underbrush growing there. Crisp yet mysterious sounds from a clear mountain stream were released into the fog as it staggered down past the black cliffs to the valley below. Granddad lay on his stomach in a cave halfway up the mountain, where he had taken shelter, listening warily to the sounds of the surging spring, the crowing of roosters in the village as they heralded the dawn, and the deep rumble of the ocean tide.

I often imagine myself one day setting out to sea with a large sum of money earned through my own labor — once People's Currency has become strong in world markets — taking the route the Japanese used back then to transport Chinese conscript laborers. When I reach the island of Hokkaido, armed with the images of the route Granddad described for me hundreds of times as he told his story, I will search out the cave on a mountain facing the sea, the place where he took shelter for more than ten years.

*H*

The fog rose up to the mouth of the cave, where it merged with the underbrush and dense creeping vines to block Granddad's view. The walls of the dank cave were covered with copper-colored moss and lichens. Several supple animal furs were draped across stone outcroppings; the smell of fox emanated from the walls, a constant reminder of his heroism or his savagery in taking over the fox lair that was now his home. By then, Granddad had already forgotten just when it was that he'd fled to the mountain.

I have no way of knowing how someone who exists like a wolf for fourteen years in an ancient mountain forest views time or senses its passage. Maybe for him ten years went by like a single day, or maybe each day seemed to last ten years. His tongue had stiffened, but every syllable sounded clearly in his thoughts and in his ears: What a dense fog! A Japanese fog! And so the events of 1939, the fourteenth day of the eighth lunar month, when the troops under his command, including his son, hid beneath the Black Water River bridge to ambush a Japanese column of trucks, floated vividly into his mind. That too had been a morning when a great fog filled the sky.

Endless rows of red sorghum stalks rose up out of the dense fog. The roar of ocean waves crashing against rocks became the roar of truck engines. The crisp sound of a flowing stream trickling past stone became the sound of playful laughter from Douguan, my father. The patter of animal footsteps in the valley became the heavy breathing of Granddad and his troops.

The fog was heavy, like a flowing liquid, like the cotton candy spun by Liu the Second in the village of Saltwater Harbor. You could hold it in your hand, or reach out and tear off a piece. When my aunt Little Huaguan ate the cotton candy, it stuck to her mouth like a white beard. She was hoisted on the bayonet of a Jap devil. … A crippling pain made him curl into a ball. He bared his teeth and loosed a howl that rose from deep down in his throat. It was not the sound of a man, and, of course, it was not the sound of a wolf. It was the sound Granddad made in his fox lair.

Bullets raked the area, and the tips of sorghum stalks cascaded to the ground. Shells dragged long tails behind them as they tore through the fog. They flew into the fox cave, lighting up the stone walls like molten steel, beads of clear water sizzling on hot metal, sending the odor of steam into his nostrils. On one of the outcroppings hung strips of light brown fox fur. Water in the river, scalded by bullets, cried out like the screeching of birds. The red-feathered thrush, the green-feathered lark. White eels turned belly-up in the emerald waters of the Black Water River. Large dogfish with black skins and gritty flesh leaped with loud splashes in the valley stream. Douguan's hand shook as he aimed his Browning pistol. He fired! The black steel helmet was like the shell of a turtle.
Ping ping ping!
You lousy Jap!

I cannot actually witness the scene of Granddad lying in his cave thinking of his homeland, but I'll never forget a habit he brought home with him. No matter how comfortable the bed, he always slept on his stomach, knees bent, his chin pillowed on crossed arms. He was like a wild animal, always wary. We could never be sure when he was sleeping and when he was awake. But the first thing I saw each time I awoke were his bright green eyes. So I have a mental picture of how he slept in his cave and of the look on his face as he lay there.

His body stayed the same as always — that is, his bone structure didn't change. His muscles, however, twitched from the constant tension. Blood flowed powerfully through his tiny veins, building up strength, like a taut bowstring. The nose on his thin, oblong face was hard as iron, his eyes burned like charcoal fires. The tangled, iron-colored hair on his head looked like a raging prairie fire.

As the fog expanded it became thin, transparent, and buoyant. From within its wavering, crisscrossing, white silk bands emerged the tips of the underbrush, the creeping nets of vines, treetops in the forest, the rigid face of the village, and the ash blue teeth of the sea. The fiery red faces of sorghum stalks often shone through the fog. But as the fog thinned out, the frequency of sorghum faces lessened. The brutal Japanese landscape mercilessly filled the gaps in the fog, and forced out Granddad's dreams of his homeland. Eventually the haze retreated to the wooded valley.

The red glow of an enormous ocean filled Granddad's eyes. Ash blue waves licked lazily at the sandy beach, and a blood-red ball of fire burned its way out of the depths of the ocean.

Granddad could not recall, nor was there any way he could recall, how many times he had watched the dripping wet sun leap out of the water. The blood-red fire of hope, so hot it made him tremble, raged in his heart. A vast stretch of sorghum formed neat ranks in the ocean. The stalks were the erect bodies of his sons and daughters, the leaves were their arms waving in the air, sabers glinting in the sunlight. The Japanese ocean became a sea of sorghum, the undulations of the ocean were the rising and falling chests of sorghum stalks, and the coursing tide was sorghum blood.

According to an entry in the historical records of Hokkaido's Sapporo city, Yoshikawa Sadako, a peasant woman from the nearby village of Kiyota, went out to a rice paddy in the valley on the morning of October 1, 1949, where she encountered a savage who violated her. A Japanese friend of mine, Mr. Nagano, helped me locate this material and translated it into Chinese for me. The so-called savage was my granddad, and my purpose in citing this material is to pin down the time and place in which an important event in my granddad's narrative occurred. In the Mid-Autumn Festival of 1943, he was captured and later taken to Hokkaido as a conscript laborer. In the spring of 1944, when mountain flowers were in full bloom, he escaped from a labor camp and began his life in the mountains as part man and part beast. By October 1, 1949, the day the People's Republic was proclaimed, he had spent more than two thousand days and nights in the forest. Now the morning I'm describing, aside from the great fog that made it easy but more gut-wrenching for him to recall the fervent life he and his loved ones had led back home, has no particular significance. What happened later that afternoon is another story.

It was a typical Hokkaido morning. The fog had dispersed and the sun hung high above the sea and the forest. A few dazzling white sails drifted slowly on the water. From a distance they didn't seem to be moving at all. Strips of brown seaweed lay drying in the sun on the sand. Japanese fishermen gathering the seaweed wriggled in the shallow water, like so many large brown beetles. Ever since suffering at the hands of a gray-bearded fisherman, my granddad was filled with hatred for the Japanese, whether they wore cruel or kind faces. Now when he went down to the village at night to steal seaweed and dried fish, he no longer experienced the worthless sense of guilt. He went so far as to rip up the fishing nets drying on the beach with a pair of rusty old scissors.

The sun baked down. Even the wispy fog in the valley had dissipated, and the ocean was turning white. On trees all over the mountain, large red and yellow leaves mingled with the vibrant green of pine and cedar, like tongues of fire. Sprinkled amid the deep reds and greens were columns of pure white — the bark of birch trees. Another lovely autumn day had quietly arrived. After the autumn came the severe winters, those bitter Hokkaido winters, the kind that forced Granddad to hibernate like a bear. Generally speaking, there was more fat on his body when purple flowers that were the sign of autumn bloomed on the mountain. The prospects for this particular winter were good, mainly because three days earlier he had secured this cave: open to the sun, back to the wind, it was a good and safe place to hide. His next step was to store up food for the winter. He planned to go out on ten separate nights to bring back twenty partially dried bundles of seaweed. If his luck held out, he might also be able to steal a few dried fish or potatoes.

The stream was not far from his cave, which meant he wouldn't need to worry about leaving prints in the snow, since he climbed over vines and across creepers. This would be a good winter, thanks to the cave. It was his lucky day, and he was happy. Naturally, he could not know that on that day all China quivered with excitement. As he thought about his good prospects, his son — my father — was riding a mule, wearing a new army uniform, a rifle slung over his back. He and his unit had assembled under a locust tree at the foot of the Imperial City's eastern wall, where they waited to take part in the glorious parade at Tiananmen.

Sunlight filtered through leaves and branches into Granddad's cave and fell on his hands. His fingers were the color of metal, and gnarled like talons. Scaly flakes covered the backs of his hands, and his fingernails were chipped and broken. The backs of his hands were hot and itchy from the sun. Still somewhat sleepy, he closed his eyes, and as he dozed he heard the rumble of gunfire off in the distance. The competing brilliance of gold and red lights formed a column of a thousand fine steeds, like a brocade tapestry, like the rushing tide, streaming out from his chest. The intimate connection created between Granddad's hallucination and the joyous celebration of nation founding added splendor to Granddad's image. There are, of course, all sorts of theories — telepathy or supernatural powers — that might explain this inexplicable phenomenon.

Living on the mountain for years endowed Granddad with exceptionally keen senses of hearing and smell. This was not an unusual effect, nor was it a boastful fabrication; it was simply an indisputable fact. Facts are superior to eloquence, and lies cannot cover up facts. That's what Granddad often said at public meetings. Inside his cave he pricked up his ears and caught a faint noise outside. The vines had moved slightly. It wasn't the wind. He knew the form and character of the wind, and could smell the difference in dozens of wind types. As he looked at the trembling vines he detected the smell of a fox, and he knew that retaliation had finally arrived. Ever since taking his knife to all four downy-furred fox cubs and tossing them out of the cave, Granddad had waited for the fox's retaliation. He was not afraid. He was fired up. After he had retreated from the world of men, the beasts had become his companions and his adversaries: wolves, bears, foxes. He knew them all well, and they knew him. After a bout of mortal combat with a bear, they had stayed out of each other's way. They still bared their teeth when they met, but their roars were intended as much to offer greetings as to display fierceness; neither would violate their gentleman's agreement of not attacking each other. The wolf feared my granddad; it was not a worthy adversary. When confronting a more ferocious animal, the wolf is no match for even a homeless mutt. But the fox, in contrast to the wolf and the bear, is a crafty, cunning little fellow, fierce only in the face of a wild hare or a farmhouse chicken.