(1964– )
Born in Mohe, Heilongjiang—a city often called “China’s North Pole”—Chi Zijian began writing in high school and had her literary debut while still in college. Her novella Fairy Tales from an Arctic Village (1986) brought her into prominence. Like her predecessor Xiao Hong, Chi also writes about the northeastern region of China with a rare, gripping poetic sensibility. Under Chi’s pen, the frozen northern land is turned into a magic fairyland for dramas of love and human vulnerability. Currently the chairperson of the Heilongjiang Provincial Writers Association, Chi has the unique distinction among Chinese writers of having won the most prestigious Lu Xun Literary Prize three times.
Night Comes to Calabash Street
If Calabash Street can ever justly be described as humming with prosperity, it is at that fleeting moment as the bright golden sun slips into the mountain cool.
This impression derives mainly from the reflected brilliance of the sky. The streets of the town gain a certain dignity where two of them, ash-gray, crisscross in a minute intersection. Passersby marvel, not just at the new dome-roofed traffic control box, but at long-established landmarks—Xizi’s mom’s noisy jellied bean curd shop, Old Yu Fa’s splendid pancake shop, and Skinny’s ever more profitable shoe repair shop—these too contribute to the impression of a robust yet peaceable life outside the city.
As he stepped through the school gates, Minghua spotted his granddad, birdcage in hand, waiting for him by the gray gatepost. Grandfather and grandson smiled at each other knowingly across the sunset; neither one offered the other a greeting. The young one took the cage from the old one and raised it level with his eyes to tease the bird; the old one took the young one’s book bag and slung it over his shoulder like a soldier off on a rapid march.
Together they strode off toward Calabash Street.
The gray street was engulfed by the setting sun. They stepped into the boundless brilliance and were transformed into celestial beings. The thrush in its cage set up a spellbinding warbling just then, as if it was dreaming it had flown back to the forest. Trills of birdsong blended with the footsteps, the peddlers’ cries, and the fragrance of frying pancakes, all wafting gently up from Calabash Street.
The street lay before them in all its glory. It wouldn’t be going too far to compare it to a bride in her wedding finery. The sign in front of Xizi’s mom’s jellied bean curd shop was as smart as the coil of her hair. The shop was certain to be full already, a clutch of men and women under the awning outside stippling the benches with all the colors of the spectrum. There was always laughter in Xizi’s mom’s voice, you could hear it a mile away.
The muscles in the old one’s face relaxed all at once, the way dried wood-ear fungus does when you pour boiling water over it. Though he was a man of seventy-odd and frosty white at the temples, when he got to Calabash Street, he’d go all red in the face with excitement, like a child. The little one smiled, showing teeth gilded by the setting sun, as if someone had stuck a wild chrysanthemum in his mouth.
“Kept late again?” the old one grumbled.
“We had these endless practice tests today. The teachers took turns bombarding us in every subject,” the little one said with unaffected humor.
“Battle readiness,” the old one responded, as though that were an end to it.
They had reached the door of the jellied bean curd shop. White snow floated in all the bowls, glittering like coral. Small spoons, the six fen apiece kind, dug into the fragrant, tender stuff, making it quiver, making everyone’s mouth water.
A nod, a smile, but no words: that was their protocol for greeting friends. Everyone’s appetite was as clear as the skies, and immediately they were raring to eat.
Xizi’s mom spied them through an opening in the door curtain and her voice immediately came spilling through the chinks in the woven bamboo:
“Xizi, seat the customers!”
“Ai . . .” That voice, crisp as a chisel cutting through a block of ice, could belong to none other than ten-year-old Xizi. He was small-boned and spindly, but his body was crowned with a magnificent head, as if a weak plant had by some miracle produced a gigantic fruit. The effect he had on people was half pleasing and half frightening. That head was as big as the setting sun—and as round.
Minghua was into the shop before his granddad. Xizi, wiping off tables in the kitchen, cocked his head to smile at Minghua. The soy sauce bottle on the table boasted a number of flies disporting themselves like ladies of the night. Their tryst with the bottle interrupted by Xizi’s movements, they flickered off one after another to the windowsill.
“Xizi—bowls!” Xizi’s mom’s voice seemed fused with piping hot beads of sweat.
“Ai . . . I’m coming—” Xizi threw down his cloth, put two round stools into position, and, dusting off his hands, went off to fetch the bowls.
“Why so slow?”
“I wiped off the tables and put the stools around first.”
“You should get the bowls first and then do the stools; that’s the right way.”
“If I do the stools last, people have to stand around too long.”
“You can never be wrong, can you?” Xizi’s mom laughed.
They always got good service in Xizi’s mom’s jellied bean curd shop. If the place was full, they were invited into the inner sanctum, where they could eat in peace.
“Have a couple of bowls, Minghua. Jellied bean curd is good for the brain and you wear yours out!” Xizi’s mom stood behind them brimming with cheer.
Minghua turned and gave her a smile, which made Xizi convulse with laughter, his huge head swaying on his slender neck as he rocked to and fro.
“Just look at these two kids, would you?” The old one swallowed down a mouthful of jellied bean curd and beads of sweat bubbled out on the tip of his nose.
“I give up!” In a single swoop, Xizi’s mom took the white-flowered blue apron from her waist and slipped it over Xizi’s head. “What is that stupid laughter of yours all day long about?”
“Minghua’s gone to school so long it’s made him stupid.” He’d seen Minghua grip the spoon as though it was a pen.
“You’re a big dope yourself and don’t know it.”
Xizi had already yanked the apron from his head and thrown it onto the pastry board. The setting sun swelled like a tide against the windowpane. Inside the shop tranquillity reigned.
“Go buy me a pancake,” the old one ordered Minghua. There was still an edge to his appetite. When Xizi’s mom heard that a pancake was wanted, she seemed to see Old Yu Fa’s shriveled-walnut face glow among thousands of pancakes, round yellow orbs like huge suns scorching her heart. She blinked; there was a barely discernible tightening at the corners of her mouth. In a strongly nasal voice she put in: “Xizi will go.”
“No, let me.” Minghua’s figure was already stirring the curtain and there was a crisp rustle of bamboo.
Old Yu Fa’s pancake shop sprang up in response to Xizi’s mom’s jellied bean curd shop. Generally, people who eat jellied bean curd want some steamed buns or pastries to go with it. Xizi’s mom’s wasn’t a large shop and they were short of hands, she couldn’t handle these as well, so Old Yu Fa’s pancake shop wafted onto Calabash Street like a rosy cloud drifting over from the horizon.
Actually, Old Yu Fa wasn’t old, not more than fifty, twelve years older than Xizi’s mom. He had been a carter in a production team for most of his life, had never married, and had a bit of money put by.
The fact that he was without a wife was partly due to his looks and personality. He was only 1.53 meters tall, stocky, with short legs, a paunch, and a thick waist. His arms were in fact quite beefy, and because his head resembled a big iron ball stuck in the mire, he seemed to have no neck. At first glance, he looked like an oaf. But appearances can be misleading; he was one clever fellow. To give his pancake shop a boost, he bought a dark red donkey and several granite millstones. His busiest time of day was dusk and his face became as lively as a bridegroom’s then.
Standing there under the awning in the open air, in a sunset fine as this, with lots of people gathered around—now, that was sheer bliss, rare in this mortal world, and Old Yu Fa the presiding genius of the moment. Anyone hearing his tone of voice and watching the way he moved as he fried the pancakes would envy him his lot in life.
“The usual, Minghua . . . nice and brown?”
“Mmm!”
“You’re sure to pass all your exams with flying colors. Seen the big bright sun in your dreams?”
“No, but I have seen stars.”
“Ah—stars!” shouted Old Yu Fa as he turned the pancake with the spatula. “Stars mean official position. You’ve got a bright future ahead of you.”
Bursts of hearty laughter came from the bystanders. The pancake was rolled and ready: a long cylinder of hot and fragrant crispy-soft dough, like a rice-colored napkin tucked under Minghua’s chin. He began taking big bites of it.
As a result of his recent exertions, Old Yu Fa’s face grew even redder and shinier. Seeing that he was about to serve the other customers, Minghua said quickly, “Fry another, not too brown this time.”
“One for Granddad?” Old Yu Fa’s eyes sparkled and the ladle rattled against the pan.
“Yup, for Granddad.”
“Having jellied bean curd at Xizi’s mom’s again, is he? Of all the luck!”
As he spoke, Old Yu Fa splashed a ladleful of batter into the pan, evened it out with the wooden spatula, and then gave it a few good turns, making the pan wheeze clouds of white steam.
“What d’ya need all that flour for? Pancakes got to be thin or they ain’t any good,” a very old woman said as she licked the remains of one from her palm.
“Missus, you’re not familiar with the size of our county magistrate’s belly!”
“Hahaha . . .”
Minghua took his granddad’s pancake and, rubbing the enchanting dusk from his eyes, ambled off in the direction of the jellied bean curd shop. Just then, from the empty square around the traffic control box at the head of Calabash Street, came the golden tones of a gong.
Skinny’s trained monkey was about to perform again.
Men women young old gathered around in a circle; some were eating, others just stood there. The monkey was really very clever. He wore a cunning black Chaplinesque waistcoat and an absurd pair of bright green velvet trousers. After a day spent mending shoes, Skinny would squeeze into his jeans, near-white from washing, and tuck a flowered shirt into them. He made a sight for sore eyes as he put the monkey through its paces.
When the monkey had enough of banging on the gong, he handed it over to Skinny and picked up a square of rosy red cloth, which he slipped over his head as he minced coyly about playing the bride. Following laughter from the satisfied crowd, a silvery shower of coins pelted the monkey, sliding suggestively down his rump to sigh contentedly onto the black and white pavement.
All the glory of Minghua’s granddad’s life was congealed in that fifteen meters of street.
“Another bowl?”
“No, I’ve had enough.”
“You shouldn’t drink too much in the evening. You’re getting on in years, and if you got something stuck in your throat, you might choke to death.”
“Nothing to worry about. I’m off.”
“Just like that?” Xizi’s mom’s voice suddenly darkened like the skies at dusk. “Minghua and Xizi are watching Skinny’s monkey.”
The dusk had been shattered, and the golden light fringing the horizon died swiftly away. The interior of the small shop grew unusually warm and quiet. More and more people poured into Calabash Street to watch the monkey, until finally the traffic cop had to disperse the dense crowd.
“Minghua, don’t take the school entrance exam. Just look at Jin San. A couple of years studying only got him back to standing on the street and he doesn’t even make as much as Skinny does with his shoe repair shop and performing monkey.”
“Xizi! Thinking about money at your age. . . .”
“But my mom says so.”
“Your mom is old-fashioned—narrow-minded. How many times has my granddad told you—you should go to school; you’re ten years old and here you are still waiting tables in the shop. Is that what you want to do with your life?”
“Well, I don’t know,” said Xizi, somewhat at a loss.
“Keep on like this and you’ll never find a wife.”
“My mom says as long as you have money you don’t have to worry.”
“Then you’re sure to get an idiot for a wife.”
Xizi heard him out and started to giggle. He giggled like a little girl, his pinkie in the corner of his mouth, like a star towing a crescent moon.
The monkey began to make his bows to the crowd and numerous coins again shot out at the animal’s hindquarters. The coins tinted the gray street bright and sparkling, like sunlight after a storm makes the bubbles in the hollows of the pavement glisten.
Skinny guffawed. He had teeth the color of tea, a color that made you think of filth and unpleasantness. There was a weak, dirty look to the gummy matter borne out of the corners of his eyes when they watered.
Seeing Skinny laugh, looking like a crook-necked willow tree, Xizi laughed too, laughed until he cried. Minghua pinched the boy’s ear between his fingers and scolded him for “laughing like an idiot.”
OLD YU FA had shut up his pancake shop, blocking out the dusk by closing the shutters. Alone in the room, he stripped and began to wash himself with a towel dipped in tepid water, attacking his ears, neck, armpits with gusto. The neighbors were always complaining about his grubbiness. They said he had a strong smell about him. Never mind what the neighbors said, tonight he was going to have a thorough wash and then put on a spanking clean jacket and go see The White Snake with Xizi’s mom. That morning he had given the tickets to Xizi to take over with the instruction:
“If your mom isn’t going, bring the tickets back.”
The sun had been gone for some time now and so far Xizi hadn’t come back with the tickets. It looked as if his mom had accepted.
Xizi’s dad had died of lung cancer. Someone’s getting cancer had the same effect on the folks of Calabash Street as a flash of lightning splitting the heavens: it terrified them; its dying brilliance made them gasp. It was with the same sort of emotion that Old Yu Fa had regarded Xizi’s dad’s death. He watched as Xizi’s dad, like a full moon on the wane, grew thinner day by day. Later he witnessed the man’s pallid face after he gave up the ghost in the emergency room and the worrisome, merciless oxygen tube sprouting from his nostrils. When he pulled the oxygen tube from the dead man’s nose, Xizi’s mom wailed and threw herself at Old Yu Fa, tearing at his face and neck. She swore at him for being wicked and cruel and ordered—begged—him to reinsert the tube. That was his first encounter with the violent yet docile female temperament. Unfortunately, taking place as it did in the emergency room, the experience made no soul-stirring impression on him. But the memory of that moment always aroused him.
People said the look in Xizi’s mom’s eyes was too intense, too brilliant, her man couldn’t withstand her sexual appetites, she ate him alive. Though Old Yu Fa had no experience of women, his powers of imagination concerning sexual encounters were as prodigious as anyone else’s. From then on, whenever he beheld Xizi’s mom’s vivacious face and sultry eyes, he couldn’t resist further glances at the quivering breasts lurking under her blouse and her ample rounded buttocks, as a way of corroborating the opinion of others as well as his own imagination.
These complicated emotions filled him now as he took a sponge bath. As he schussed the black balls of dirt from his chest to the floor, he began to whistle softly, a song learned in his days as a carter:
A cart, a whip, a lone shadow, and a jug of wine,
I can bear the wind and the snow in my face,
Just let the sound of my hooves
Carry to the mountain fastness, calling out—Sweetheart
Bolt the door fast when night comes.
A hot breeze crept into the room through a chink in the shutters like a soft fuzzy caterpillar. The odor of pancakes was as strong as ever. The cloying, sweet smell raised visions of autumn wheat fields in his mind’s eye, their grand vista of golden yellow spreading all the way to the horizon, right up to the setting sun. In the midst of the fields stood a yellow wattle hut; inside, Xizi’s mom went contentedly about her work. As he came in from the fields he could see from far off a wisp of cooking smoke floating tenderly into the sky, and at the same time, catch a whiff of what he’d been longing for.
Someone was knocking on the shutters.
“Pancakes!” came a shrill insistent voice.
“Here!” Old Yu Fa responded immediately, as if he were a pancake himself.
“I’m so hungry my stomach is shriveling up!” The tone was aggressive, rising to a note of dissatisfaction and doubt: “What are you up to anyway, shutting up so early?”
“I haven’t done anything to be ashamed of!” Old Yu Fa, terrified that his innermost secrets might be found out, rushed to defend himself.
He wrung out the towel, gave himself a once-over, and threw on his clothes. Then, taking two steps to his usual three, he unbolted the door.
“Performance over, is it?”
“Yep.”
“And the monkey?”
“Xizi’s keeping an eye on it.”
“A good take, a washbasin full of coins, was it?”
“Enough for pancakes.” Skinny licked at the sweat that was running down to the corner of his mouth.
“Enough to get your brother a wife, then.” Old Yu Fa laughed.
“Enough my eye! The price has gone up again. This morning she wanted seven thousand.”
“Geez. She’s no fairy princess either. . . .”
“Women are nothing but trouble.” The way Skinny shook his head implied he’d been cheated innumerable times by innumerable women.
Old Yu Fa gave Skinny the leftover pancakes that had been wrapped up in cheesecloth and asked if he wanted some cucumbers. They’d only just been salted down and weren’t too salty yet, very cool and refreshing. “Mmm.” Skinny’s chicken-claw hand was into the plate of cucumbers on its own.
Skinny had an older brother who was paralyzed, thirty-five years old, and unmarried. As Skinny’s dad lay dying, he’d been pointing at the paralytic and his eyes had refused to close. Skinny’s mother too was so broken up her hair turned white. Now Skinny had taken up shoe repair, a modest enough sort of trade, but it had brought brighter days to his impoverished family. To see the paralytic married was the one dream of his mother’s remaining days.
“At the start, Yinhua asked for two thousand, after a year it went up to five, now she wants seven. Seems like she doesn’t want to marry my brother.”
“Well, if Yinhua marries your brother, she’ll be like a widow with a living husband, won’t she?”
“It’s only his legs that are out of commission.”
“Haha, it’s still no good—a paralytic—think about it . . . you’d have to . . .”
“Yinhua’s no prize either!”
“Because she got pregnant once? It’s not as if it was her fault, she just picked the wrong guy and then he dumped her.” Old Yu Fa didn’t feel like arguing with Skinny anymore. All he could think of was sitting in the theater with Xizi’s mom to watch the opera as soon as possible; nothing could top that.
“If you’ve got what it takes, get Xizi’s mom out from under the county magistrate’s thumb.”
“What would I want to do that for?”
“Cooking, cleaning, having kids.”
“She’s too good at burying men alive.”
“Isn’t that just talk?” With one foot out the door, Skinny turned and said, “As for having what it takes, you’re no match for His Lordship.”
“He can lick my boots!” Old Yu Fa flew into a sudden rage, cursing furiously. But the moment the words were out, he clapped a hand over his mouth, thinking fearfully to himself: “Lucky no outsider heard; you can’t badmouth somebody that important and get away with it.”
Old Yu Fa knew the magistrate only too well. That whitish paved road led to the residence of the former county magistrate, Geng Ming. Old Yu Fa had taken his cart to the quarry to dig out the best gravel for it. Just after it was finished, Minghua’s granddad, county chief procurator at the time, just back from a meeting, found out about it. Subsequently, Old Yu Fa had seen with his own eyes how David took on Goliath. In the end, Geng Ming had been relieved of his post and transferred out of the county. The paved road had been a symbol of Geng Ming’s power; now it had also become a witness to the chief procurator’s strict enforcement of the law.
Now Old Yu Fa ran this hole-in-the-wall pancake shop. How would someone with as little ingenuity as himself fare against the magistrate? He was nothing but the old nag that pulled the cart, while that other was the driver. It was fate. Old Yu Fa sighed. Even his enthusiasm for the opera had waned, and he stood there blankly.
sKINNY WENT BACK to his shoe repair shop and had just taken up his work when Xizi ran in sputtering and shouting:
“The monkey’s eaten some bananas!”
“Whose?”
“The state’s. I was picking the money up off the ground, not paying him any mind and he jumped up onto the state vegetable stall, ate the bananas, and left a whole pile of peels behind!”
“Where were the stall-keepers?”
“At the department store buying leather shoes at the sale.”
“Serves them right.” Skinny sniggered.
“You’ll have to pay.”
“Like hell.” Skinny didn’t care.
“Really, you will, they’ve caught the monkey.”
“Shit.” Skinny cursed, closed up shop, and said:
“Where’s Minghua’s grandaddy?”
“Talking to my mom.”
“Ask him to come out and act as judge.”
As he thought, Skinny walked toward Xizi’s mom’s jellied bean curd shop.
Daylight had gone, the last rays of the setting sun receding from the earth like an outgoing wave. . . . People didn’t feel its warm lingering breath—an altogether different feeling, cool and refreshing, swept over them.
As they were walking along, Old Yu Fa came up to them and took Xizi to one side. Skinny observed them, one young, one old, jabbering together for some time. Finally, Old Yu Fa drew a ticket out of Xizi’s pocket, tore it into pieces in the breeze, and with a mixture of exasperation and relief patted Xizi on the head. Then, humming to himself, he drifted away.
“Old fool,” Skinny whispered.
“Hehe. Some fun.” Xizi giggled.
“What’re you laughing at?”
“I’m laughing at myself because I have such a terrible bad memory.” And Xizi scratched his cheek, just like the monkey.
THINGS WERE PICKING UP on Calabash Street again. There were few vehicles left on the street, but the old folks gathered to chew the fat shone like the silvery snowflakes of midwinter scattered over the ground. They held mugs of tea, stools, even grandkids. Perspiration from the hot dinners they’d eaten filmed their foreheads. The curiously shaped clouds in the sky had thinned out, dispersing until finally you couldn’t make out the shapes, or even tell the clouds from the sky. . . .
Just then a boy who’d been out searching for wild duck eggs suddenly ran up from the river to report:
“Yinhua’s thrown herself into the river!”
Even Calabash Street, that drunken Arhat, reeled with shock at the news.
(Translated by Janice Wickeri)