Under Fishbone Clouds (9 page)

Dongming would head south, hiking through villages the Japanese had not bothered with, and circling down toward Chongqing, the Nationalists’ capital since they fled Nanjing in the wake of the invasion. Chongqing was then a city divided in half by the
fast-flowing
Yangtze river, the longest in China, and buffeted between the mountainous plateaus of Tibet to the west and south and the Japanese-controlled areas to the east. Even seventy years later the stretches of grassland amid the hills would remain cordoned off because of the amount of mines laid by the retreating army to protect their last base.

Perhaps Dongming died crossing the expansive minefield,
something
even the Japanese did not dare to attempt. Perhaps he joined the ranks of the Nationalists and, when both the world war and the civil war were finished, fled with the rest of the higher-ranking officials to Taiwan. Perhaps he worked in one of the prison camps that sat at the top of some of Chongqing’s mountains, collecting mist and guarding the Communist prisoners until their executions. Perhaps he was imprisoned by the Communists when the People’s Republic was created, and was re-educated, sent to the fields or shot. In all likelihood, he never made it as far as Chongqing. But because Jinyi did not hear from him again, he must remain as a ghost to us, on the other side of knowledge. There are some things that even I am not allowed to tell.

Jinyi followed the thin river which skittered beneath the mountain ranges. On the high ridges, stretches of the Great Wall had already crumbled into a few decayed teeth stubbing out of rocky gums. He had decided to head north because south would be back towards his uncle, his aunt, the dregs of his family. North was the edge, the wall; where the past spilt over into today. Besides, it would be
madness
to follow the Japanese south, and, if there was to be no escape, why not go against the grain, towards the eye of the hurricane: Manchuria, which grew closer and closer each day.

Occasionally he strayed close to the train tracks he had once longed for, but he always backed away, so as not to be mistaken for a deserting railway worker. The only things that seemed to rush past him were goods trains, carrying coal. Some days he passed villages where rickety stalls served watery dumplings and
dried-flower
tea brewed from warmed-up rainwater, villages too small for the invading troops to have bothered stopping at as they marched through. Half starved, he would eat until he felt ready to retch. He stole sleep on porches and in railway storehouses. Just a bit further, keep going, I’ll get there soon, he told himself.

He stopped in small cities, towns, villages. He worked as a
servant
, a childminder for a rich family, a farm hand, an oddjob man on building sites, a carpenter’s apprentice. Yet in every place his feet would begin to itch, his hopes would carry him on. He kept walking. The seasons changed from bracken to jasmine to gingko. His bare feet blistered into hooves.

His seventeenth birthday snuck up on him and yet he kept on pushing north, pursuing that part of him he could not yet name, following dirt roads etched through the granite and long grass by the stubborn steps of driven mules. Wheat fields, barley fields, whole days spent longing for his parents.

And as he walked, Jinyi thought of those snippets of
conversations
he had heard in the backrooms of restaurants: that the Communists would bring the country a new beginning so that
getting
a job wouldn’t depend on knowing someone’s uncle or brother or providing them with a fistful of cash; so there wouldn’t be any more foreigners squeezing the marrow out of the country; so rice would be shared equally between everyone. Jinyi’s stomach whined, moaned. He found these ideas hard to believe, knowing, after all, that with a little rice wine and the promise of better things people
can get carried away. If it were possible to swap lives, he reasoned, the whole world would already have become an electric storm of flitting souls.

Walking is hard work. I should know, I trudged behind him most of the way. Why did I bother? I know what it is like to spend your life chasing an elusive dream. And since we’ve got a little time, on the long trek between Hebei and Manchuria, I may as well tell you how I ended up here too.

My real name is Zao Jun, and before I was the Kitchen God I was an ordinary mortal, just like you. I assume you are already familiar with my face, my finely curled moustache and long black goatee, for there was a time when every house in the country kept my likeness above the stove, and quite a few are now doing so again. There are many who wish to slander me for reasons I cannot quite fathom – if they envy the gods then they have no real idea of what we do – and have put about a story that depicts me as a horny old fool. They assert that I abandoned my wife after falling in love with a beautiful young woman; that I was then visited by bad luck, and lost the young woman, all my money and even my sight; that I stumbled starving through the forests until I was finally taken in and fed by a sympathetic woman who I confessed my sins to; that in doing so I cried such remorseful tears that my eyes were healed and I saw that the woman who had treated me so well was my old ever-loving wife. They go on to say that I was so overcome by shame that I then threw myself into the stove. However, let me tell you that there is no truth in this tale – its only purpose seems to be to tarnish my reputation.

I would never have abandoned my wife for someone else, for my wife was the most beautiful woman in our village. I loved her the first moment I saw her, following her father to the market where her family would trade corncobs for some of the plump red
chillies
my family laid out on our flat roof. Sometimes I would lie up there myself in the dusty sun of those long childhood afternoons among the peppers. From there I could watch her bag-laden family, the stooped father and his three daughters, as they made their way down the rocky path toward the fallow stretch where everyone would gather to haggle every month after the new moon. Her long
plait used to swish down to the small of her back, a smile always flittering around the edges of her lips. She had inch-long eyelashes and tiny feet, and every time my eyes met hers in the market I would blush, despite being five years older than her and nearly a full-grown man.

Yet my feelings would have come to nothing had her father not been the worst gambler in the province. He left his daughters when he fled his debtors and, thanks to the local matchmaker, I got
married
only a few weeks later.

When I think back now to the early days of our marriage – the shy way in those first weeks that my new wife always looked at the ground when speaking, or the way she would cling onto my body at night as if I was a raft in a storm-churned ocean – I am never sure whether to smile or cry. For those first, innocent days did not last long.

We married in summer and kept each other warm through the long, bitter winter that followed. Our field was covered in frost until close to halfway through the next year and, after only a few weeks of sun, rainstorms washed the soil and the half-grown seeds away. We resorted to gathering shrubs and firewood in the forest, but in that second winter my mother died from the shortage. After the next short summer when the field was attacked by clouds of tiny green aphids, sucking the juices from the chillies and leaving them shrivelled and inedible, my sister followed her.

We took to scavenging for food, hunting for hedgehogs and mice in the forest, making soups with leaves and grasses. My brother became so desperate that he tried to steal from our landlord’s house up on the mountain. He was caught and disembowelled, and we were turfed out of the house I had been born in.

For close to a year we traipsed around other nearby villages,
tending
to my maddened father as if he was our child and searching for a second cousin he was convinced would help us. We did not find him; instead, after three hundred days of drinking murky puddle water and eating mushrooms and unripe fruits pinched from vines, after a miscarriage and countless days in which we would wash away each other’s dirt and sweat in the salty brine of our own tears, we had come almost full circle, and arrived at a town on the same mountain range that overlooked our former home. We could go no further.

A man who is not a good son cannot be called a man. He will be forever tormented by the spirits of his ancestors, his soul immersed in shame. My father was frail and sick; he needed rest, warmth, care. I left him in a cheap room, swearing to the owner that the rent would be forthcoming, and while he rested my wife and I
visited
every shop, every farm and every landlord in the whole town, imploring them to take pity on us and help us find work. At each door we met with the same response. That is, until we arrived at the house of the man the locals referred to as The Nobleman, the richest landlord in the whole miserable county.

His mansion was vast and incomprehensible; we passed through courtyards that led to galleries opening onto patios and gardens,
corridors
that spiralled into porticos and antechambers. When the slave guiding us eventually left us in the waiting room, my wife and I both prostrated ourselves before the haughty figure of a bearded man dressed in the kind of rich, colourful silks that I had previously only seen in the strange and malleable fabric of my dreams.

Seeing us so nervous, he began to laugh. ‘I hope you do not
mistake
me for my master. I am Bei, the head servant of this household. I believe you have come to offer your services to my illustrious master. Please, do not waste your breath. As you can see, my master has no need of further servants, and considers charity a base affront against the gods of fate. Yet he is by nature a generous man, and he has a proposition for you. Please be seated, and enjoy some tea, for you must have been travelling for many days.’

We did as he suggested, surprised and confused by the extent of this servant’s knowledge of us. He disappeared from the waiting room for a few moments, and we were left to study the statues that adorned the altar by the main wall, the many-armed gods who seemed to be weighing up our chances. The servant returned
carrying
a small pouch, which he opened to reveal five silver coins. He placed the pouch in my hands.

‘My master is prepared to pay you these, on the condition that you leave this house and never return.’

I nodded eagerly, garbling words of gratitude, and my wife and I both rose to bow to the servant. He shook his head and put out his hand.

‘You have misunderstood. The offer applies only to you. The woman is to stay here, and join the household as one of my master’s wives.’

‘What?’ I shouted. ‘But she is my wife! Your master has never even laid eyes on her! Why should he want to tear us apart?’

The servant produced another pouch of silver coins, which he added to the first. ‘You must make your decision now.’

Both of us knew that we had no choice. Can love feed you, keep your family safe, stave off death? I have since learnt that it can do all these things; but I learnt too late. Before I could even open my mouth to say goodbye, my wife had followed the servant from the room, not even daring to look back at me. I took the ten silver coins and returned to my father, my heart blistered into a black scab.

A doctor with his many putrid medicines and high-pitched
incantations
took two of the coins, the owner of the room another for all the trouble, and the rest were spent on bribes to various local officials until we had managed to procure a small plot which we rented from a corrupt, absent landlord. My father was soon back to his old self, out on the short field from sundown to sunset, and our first harvest of carrots was a success. The money seemed well spent. Every morning I awoke in the rickety house before dawn and set to work until the night had drained all semblance of light from the earth, with only one goal: to earn enough to give to The Nobleman in order to reclaim my wife, or else to wait until he died when she would be free to return to me. I slaved and dug and tilled as hard as I could in order to stop my mind from wondering what she was doing at that moment, what she might have become.