Soul Mountain

Her hair brushes against my face, as she says in my ear, “She’s here.”

A fat, barely middle-aged woman comes in, followed by an old woman. The fat woman takes off her apron and straightens her dress which has faded from washing but is clean. She has just finished cooking downstairs. The slight and gaunt old woman who follows her into the room nods to me.

My friend immediately reminds me, “Go with her.”

I get to my feet and follow her to the side of the stairs where she opens an inconspicuous little door and goes in. It is a tiny room where there is a table with an incense altar dedicated to the two Daoist deities, the Venerable Lord Superior and the Great Emperor of Light, and to the bodhisattva Guanyin. Below the incense altar are offerings of cakes, fruit, water and liquor. On the wooden walls hang red banners with black borders and jagged yellow pennants, all bearing words to invoke good fortune and to dispel misfortune. Sunlight streams in through a transparent roof-tile and smoke from a single stick of incense slowly rises in the ray of light, creating an atmosphere which prohibits speech. Only then do I realize why my friend has been whispering since we came in. From a slot under the incense altar, the old woman takes out a bundle of thin incense sticks wrapped in yellow paper. As instructed earlier by my friend, I immediately put one yuan into the woman’s hand, take the incense sticks, light them from the burning paper she has put a match to in the censer, and holding them in both hands kneel on the rush cushion in front of the altar to reverently perform three prostrations. The old woman smacks her sunken lips to show her approval of my devoutness, takes the incense sticks from me and puts them into the incense altar in three lots.

When I return to the room, the fat woman has prepared herself and is sitting sedately in the cane chair, her eyes closed. She is apparently the spirit medium. The old woman sits down on the far side of the bed to say something to her in a low voice, then turns to ask my friend the zodiac sign of my birth. I tell her my birthday according to the solar calendar. I can’t remember the exact date according to the lunar calendar, although I can work it out. The old woman also asks the hour of my birth and I say both of my parents are dead and there is no way of finding out. The old woman is obviously worried and has a quiet discussion with the medium. The medium says something which I understand to mean it doesn’t matter, then puts her hands on her knees, closes her eyes, and begins to meditate. On the roof-tiles outside the window where she is sitting, a pigeon settles and starts cooing. The band of shining purple feathers around its neck puff out and I realize it is a male pigeon performing his mating ritual. The medium however suddenly inhales and the bird flies off.

I always feel sad when I see roof-tiles, the fish-scale overlapping shapes always conjure up childhood memories. I recall rainy weather, rainy weather when, drops of transparent water clinging to it, the spider web in the corner of the room trembles in the wind. This sets me thinking about why I have come into the world. Roof-tiles have the power of making me weak and making me succumb to inertia. I want to cry but I have already lost the ability to cry.

The medium burps a couple of times: the spirit must be attaching itself to her. She keeps burping, she has so much gas that I can’t repress the urge to burp as well, however I don’t dare and keep it bottled inside — I don’t want to break our rapport and give her the idea that I’ve come to cause trouble and make fun of her. I am sincere in mind and heart although I don’t really believe it all. She can’t stop burping, and more and more frequently. Her whole body starts to convulse and she doesn’t seem to be faking it. She is convulsing, I think, probably as a result of qigong during meditation. Her body is shaking and her fingers suddenly start jabbing into the air, that is to say, at me. She has her eyes still tightly closed and the fingers of both hands all stretching out, but the two index fingers are clearly pointing at me. My back is against the timber wall and there is no place to retreat, I can only brace myself. I don’t dare look at my friend who would certainly be more reverent than me, even if she has brought me to have my fortune told. The cane chair creaks noisily with the shaking of the woman’s fat body. She is barely comprehensible as she intones incantations. She is saying something like: Within the Lingtong Chamber of Efficacy of the Queen Mother of the West and the Lords of Heaven and Earth, grows a pine tree with the power to turn the wheels of Heaven and Earth and to entirely slaughter bovine demons and snake spirits. She speaks faster and faster, and with greater urgency. This really takes considerable practice and I judge that she is fully qualified. The old woman puts her ear up next to her and after listening, says with a grave expression, “It is an unlucky year for you, you should be careful!”

The medium goes on babbling but is totally incomprehensible. The old woman again explains, “She says you have encountered the White Tiger Star!”

I’ve heard of White Tiger referring to a very sexy woman and that if you get involved with her it is difficult to extricate yourself. I’m actually quite keen to have the good fortune of getting involved with such a woman but what concerns me is whether I’ll be able to escape from my bad luck.

The old woman shakes her head, “It will be difficult to escape from your dangerous predicament.”

I don’t seem to be a lucky person, nothing lucky has ever happened to me. What I hope for is never realized and what I do not hope for often materializes. I’ve had countless disasters in my life, I’ve had involvements and troubles with women, that’s right, I’ve even been threatened, although not always by women. I don’t have real conflicts of interest with anyone, I don’t think I’m an obstacle to anyone and only hope no-one will be an obstacle for me.

“Great calamities and disasters are imminent, you are surrounded by the tiny people,” the old woman adds.

I know about the tiny people, they are described in the compendium of ancient Daoist writings called the Daozang. These naked tiny people known as “triple corpses” live as parasites in human bodies, hiding in the throat and thriving on the person’s mucous. When the person is dozing they sneak away to the Heavenly Court to report to the Heavenly Emperor on the wrongdoings of the person.

The old woman adds that a violent person with bloody eyes wants to punish me and that even with incense and prayers I won’t be able to escape.

The fat woman slides off the cane chair onto the floor and is rolling about on the floorboards. This must be why the floors are scrubbed so clean. I immediately feel that my impure thoughts have invoked her curses. She keeps cursing me, saying that there are as many as nine White Tigers surrounding me.

“Then can I be saved?” I ask, looking at her.

She is frothing at the mouth and the whites of her eyes are turned upwards — she has a horrible expression on her face. All of this is induced by self-hypnosis and she is already in a state of hysteria. There isn’t enough space for her to roll about in the room and her body bumps into my feet. I hastily pull them back, stand up, and looking at this woman’s fat body wildly rolling about I am gripped with fear — I don’t know if it’s fear of my own destiny or fear brought upon me by her curses. I have spent money to make fun of her and will eventually be punished. People’s relationships with one another are really frightening.

The medium is still babbling away and I turn to ask the old woman what it all means. She shakes her head but doesn’t explain. I see the fat convulsing body at my feet gradually humping its back and slowly recoiling to the foot of the cane chair like an injured animal. People in fact are animals and can be quite savage when injured. And it is madness for his wretched person to allow himself to be terrorized. When people go mad they torment themselves with their own madness, it seems.

She heaves a long sigh and there is a low rumbling in her throat, something like the growling of an animal. With her eyes still closed, she gropes about and gets to her feet. The old woman rushes to support her and to help her into the cane chair. I really think she has had an attack of hysteria.

She had correctly sensed that I had come for a bit of fun and she wanted revenge, so she cursed me. It is the friend who brought me who is even more alarmed and she asks the old woman if a session can be arranged for her to burn incense and to pray for me. The old woman asks the medium who mutters something, her eyes still closed.

“She says such a session won’t help.”

“What if I buy extra incense?” I ask.

My friend then asks the old woman how much it would cost. The old woman says twenty yuan. I would spend this amount on a meal for my friends, this is for myself and I immediately agree. The old woman discusses it with the medium and replies, “Even if you do this, it’s not going to help.”

“Does this mean there’s no way for me to escape my bad luck?” I ask.

The old woman relates what I’ve said and the medium mumbles something again. The old woman says, “That remains to be seen.”

What remains to be seen? How devout I am?

The cooing of the pigeon outside comes through the window. I think it’s already pounced on its mate. But here I am, still unable to get a reprieve.

15 (#ulink_6f475650-8f38-5e30-9535-58f1685f2c19)

The dark cypress at the entrance to the village has been lashed by frost and the leaves have turned a deep red. Beneath it, a man with an ashen face is leaning on a hoe. You ask him the name of the village. His eyes look right at you but he doesn’t reply. You turn to her and say the fellow is a grave robber. She bursts out laughing. Once past him she says in your ear, he’s got mercury poisoning. You say he stayed in the crypt too long. There were two of them, the other one died from mercury poisoning but he survived.

You say his great-grandfather did this all his life and his greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather was also in the profession. With this profession if one’s ancestors have been in it, it’s hard to wash one’s hands of it. Unlike opium smoking which results in the ruin of families and the squandering of property, grave robbing can bring huge profits for no capital. If a person is hard-hearted and is good at it, if there’s a good haul, generations afterwards will become addicted. You feel wonderful talking to her like this. She’s holding your hand, docile and compliant.

You say that in the time of his great-grandfather’s greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather, the Qianlong Emperor made a tour of the area. Naturally enough, the local officials wanted to win favour and busied themselves choosing local beauties and collecting the treasures of former dynasties for the emperor. The father of his greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather’s great-grandfather had only two mu of poor ancestral land which he worked during the farming season. In the off-season he would boil up a few catties of sugar, add colouring, and make candy men which he’d take in the baskets of his carrying pole to hawk around the towns and villages in the area. He made a whistle the shape of a little boy’s penis and Pigsy carrying his wife on his back, but could he earn much from these? The great-grandfather’s greatgrandfather’s great-grandfather whose name was Li the Third liked to roam around all day — he wasn’t interested in learning to make candy men but he was interested in carrying a wife on his back. Whenever he saw women he’d go over to chat with them. The villagers all called him Skin Leak. One day a snake-medicine doctor arrived in the village. He had a cloth sack for snakes on his back and carried a bamboo tube, a crowbar and an iron hook as he set off to poke among the graves. It looked like fun so Li the Third went along with the doctor and helped to carry his tools. The doctor gave him a snake pill which looked like a black bean and told him to keep it in his mouth: it was very sweet but it was cooling and quenched the thirst. After going along with him for a couple of weeks it was clear that snake catching was a front and that the man actually dug up graves. It happened that the snake doctor was looking for an assistant and this was how Li the Third started getting rich.

When Li the Third came back to the village he was wearing a black satin skullcap with a jade button on the top. It was old cheap stuff he’d got from Pockmark Chen’s pawnshop in Wuyizhen (this was before the old street of the town was torched by the Long Hairs). He was proud and cocky, or as the villagers put it was starting to show his mettle, and soon afterwards people were coming around to raise the matter of marriage with his father. However, he married a young widow and people didn’t know whether it was the young widow who had seduced him or whether he’d got the young widow into his clutches. Anyway, sticking up a thumb he’d boast that he, Li the Third, had visited the Joy of Spring Hall with the red lanterns in Wuyizhen. After all he’d disposed of a shiny silver ingot. He said nothing about the ingot being black from soaking in the lime and sulphur of the grave and that he had to work hard scrubbing it clean with the side of his shoe.

The grave was on a rocky hill two li east of Roosting Phoenix Slope and was discovered by his mentor who noticed rain water running into a hole after a heavy bout of rain. As they poked around it became larger and after they had been digging from noon till almost dark, it was big enough for a person to go in, and of course it was he who had to go in first. He crawled and crawled and, fuck, fell right in, scaring him half out of his wits. In the mud and slush he came across quite a few pots and jars and, all in one go, smashed the whole lot. There was a bronze mirror he took from a wooden coffin which had rotted into a sloppy mess like soya-bean pulp. It was shiny and didn’t have a spot of green tarnish, just the thing for the women to use when they combed their hair. He said if he was telling even half of a lie his mother was a bitch. Unfortunately his mentor, that old bastard, took everything and only gave him a bag of silver. He’d had a raw deal but was wiser for it, now he too could work out the entrance to a grave.

You arrive at the Li Family Ancestral Temple in the village. An ancient stone tablet carved with cranes, deer, pines and plum blossoms is set into the newly built buttress above the front doors. You push open the unlatched doors and immediately hear an elderly voice ask what you are doing. You say you’ve come to look around. A short, well-fed old man emerges from a room in the corridor. It would seem being the caretaker of the ancestral temple is quite a good job.

The old man says the place isn’t open to outsiders and with these words starts pushing you out. You say your surname is Li and you’re a member of the clan. You’ve been abroad and are now back visiting your native village. He wrinkles his bushy white eyebrows and looks you over from head to toe. You ask if he knows that earlier on there was a grave robber in the village. The lines on his face deepen and you wince at his expression, most memories can’t help being painful. You can’t tell if he’s sifting through memories or trying to recognize you. In any case, it’s awkward looking at his contorted old face. He mumbles to himself for some time, not daring to rashly believe this clan member wearing sports shoes instead of hemp shoes. After a while he blurts: Isn’t he dead? It’s not clear who is dead but he probably means the father, not the sons and grandsons.

You tell him the descendants of the Li family abroad are all rich through a stroke of good luck. He gapes at this, moves aside, bows, and reverently leads you into the hall of the ancestral temple. He seems to be an old servant of the family. He used to wear black oil-cloth shoes and was keeper of the keys, he is referring to the time before the temple was converted into a primary school. It has now been restored to the family and the primary school has been shifted elsewhere.

He points at the horizontal tablet. It looks like an archaeological relic and the lacquer is peeling off, nevertheless the full implication of the calligraphy in regular script is quite clear: “Illustrious Ancestors of the Glorious Clan.” The iron hook under the tablet is for hanging the clan genealogy but that’s kept by the father of the village head and normally it isn’t brought out.

You say it’s mounted on yellow silk and looks like the central scroll for a main hall. He says, quite right, quite right. In the land reform period when it was burnt, a new one was secretly made and hidden upstairs. Later on when people’s things were confiscated, the floorboards were ripped up and it was found and burnt again. The present one was made by the father of the primary schoolteacher Mao Wa’er, according to what the three Li brothers managed to piece together. Mao Wa’er already has an eight-year-old daughter and she wants to have another child. Don’t people now have to carry out family planning? If there’s a second child it means not just a penalty but also that an identity card won’t be issued! You say, is that so? You also say you’d like to have a look at the family genealogy. He says it’s sure to have you there, it’s sure to have you there, everyone in the village with the surname Li has been put in. He adds that there are only three families with other surnames in the village. These are families where there have been marriages with women of the Li family, otherwise they wouldn’t want to stay on in the village. But people with other surnames remain people with other surnames, also women are not entered in the genealogy.

You say you know all this. The founder of the Tang Dynasty, Li Shirnin, had the surname Li before he became emperor. While the Li clan of the village doesn’t claim to be related to the imperial family, our ancestors do include generals and ministers of war and not just grave robbers.

Leaving the temple you find yourself surrounded by a group of children who have sprung out of nowhere. They trail along after you and when you say they’re like a pack of arse worms, they break out into stupid cackling. You hold up your camera and they scurry off. The leader of the pack holds his ground and says you don’t have film in the camera and you can check by opening it up. The child is quite bright, he has a slight build and is like a pike in water leading this pack of small fry.

“Hey, what’s worth seeing around here?” you ask.

“The opera stage,” he answers.

“What opera stage?”

They run into a small lane. You follow them. A foundation stone on the corner house of the lane bears a carved inscription: “Be as bold as the rocks of Mount Tai.” You’ve never been able to work out the precise meaning of these words and even now perhaps no-one can say for sure what they mean. In any case there are associations with memories of your childhood. In this empty narrow lane, wide enough only for a person carrying a pole with a single bucket, you again hear the loud patter of bare feet on wet cobblestones.

As you emerge at the end of the lane suddenly before you is a drying lot spread with rice stalks which fill the air with the clean sweet smell of freshly cut rice. On the far side of the drying lot there really is an old opera stage. The framework consists of full-length logs and the actual stage platform, which is half the height of a person, is stacked with bundles of rice stalks. This pack of little monkeys is climbing up the posts, jumping down to the drying lot, and tumbling about in the piles of rice stalks.

The four posts of this open air stage hold up a large roof with upturned eaves and protruding corners. The crossbeams must once have been used to hang flags, lanterns, and the ropes used by the performers. The posts and crossbeams were once lacquered but have already peeled.

Here, operas have been performed, heads have been cut off, meetings and celebrations have been held; people have also knelt and kowtowed here. At harvest time it is filled with piles of rice straw and children are always climbing up and down on it. The children who used to climb up and down here are now old or have died. It’s not clear who of those who have died have got into the genealogy. Is the genealogy put together from memory like the original one? Whether or not the genealogy exists finally makes little difference, if one doesn’t travel afar one will still have to work in the fields in order to eat. What remain are only children and rice stalks.

There is a temple opposite the opera stage. Newly rebuilt on the rubble of the demolished old site, it is once again colourful and imposing. Two door gods, one green and one red, are painted on the vermilion main doors, and each holds a sword and an axe and has eyes like bronze bells. There is writing in black ink on the whitewashed wall: Huaguang Temple has been rebuilt with contributions from the people listed below. So-and-so one hundred yuan, so-and-so one hundred and twenty yuan, so-and-so fifty yuan, so-and-so sixty yuan, so-and-so two hundred yuan … The last item is: Announced by representatives of the old, middle-aged and young of Lingyan.

You walk in. At the feet of Emperor Huaguang is a row of old women, some standing and some kneeling, all dressed in black tops and black trousers, and all toothless. As the ones kneeling stand up the ones standing kneel down, they are all scrambling to burn incense and pray. Emperor Huaguang has a smooth wide face with a square chin, a lucky face, and in the curling smoke of the incense looks even more benevolent. The brush, ink and inkstone in front of him on the long table make him look like a civil official carrying out public business. Above the offering table with its candle holders and incense burners hangs a red cloth with the words “Protect the Nation and Succour the People” embroidered with brightly-coloured silk threads. The black tablet above the curtains and canopy is inscribed with the words: “Communion with Heaven Makes Wishes Come True.” Alongside these words, but much smaller, are the words: “Presented by the People of Lingyan.” But you can’t make out the date of this antique.

Still, you’ve confirmed that there is a place called Lingyan and you think this wonderful place must really exist, proving that you haven’t made a mistake by charging off to find Lingshan.