From the Old Country: Stories and Sketches of China and Taiwan

No sooner had I graduated from a Japanese upper elementary school than my father, saying I was still no good for anything, sent me to another school—an old-fashioned academy in our village with a traditional Chinese curriculum. He hoped that a classical education might “carve and polish” a “rough piece of jade” like me into something useful.¹ I was sixteen years old then, one of the academy’s “big boys,” so I had a great deal of freedom. The master hardly ever interfered with us.

Luckily I was able to maintain a calm heart and a cool head: while my classmates were busy pursuing the opposite sex, I alone was able to concentrate on my studies, so that I actually learned a thing or two in my first year.

Apart from studying, I passed my time on drawing and on sports such as running, skipping, wrestling, and kite flying. At sixteen, although considered one of the big boys, I was still a kid at heart, and when I was playing with others my age we really got pretty boisterous. The village elders would shake their heads and sigh, remarking that in previous times scholars had always behaved with absolute decorum and would never have been as wild as this lot.

Back then I had a sketchbook with a hessian cover for drawing. I had developed an artistic bent during my elementary school days, and it continued during my time at the academy. Whenever I had the time and the inclination I’d take out my pencil from the spine of the sketchbook and start scratching away at something or other. And so the sketchbook was always with me, along with my ancient, threadbound set books, as I went to and from school.

In Japanese school I had been passionately interested in the art classes, and it seemed I also had a certain talent: my drawings were always highly praised. For a while there had been plans to send me to art college—in Japan! Later, however, because of some regrettable tendencies among Taiwanese students in the “Mother Country” at the time, Father gave up this idea. Otherwise, it is clear that my career might have been very different from what it is today. It is at such little forks in the road that the vehicles of our fates take different paths.

One time, the master discovered my sketchbook, picked it up, and had a look inside.

“Oh, so it’s a sketchbook,” he said in surprise, turning over a few pages. “Hmm, nothing but pigs!”

“Look further on, sir,” I said, embarrassed. “There are other things: oxen, chickens, and …”

But the master had already closed the album and was handing it back to me.

“It seems you have a special interest in farm animals,” he said with a laugh. “Well, you do draw them very well!”

I also drew people: farmers, children, women, too. However, almost without exception, the women in my sketches were composed of more straight lines than curved ones. They lacked the mysterious, elusive scent of Woman. Although they were among my favorite subjects, my interest in them was no greater than my interest in pigs and oxen. What a sin!

I was studying The Book of Odes. This book is now generally accepted as a record of the loves of our ancient male and female ancestors. From its opening poem it brims with the bitter longings and heartfelt avowals of lovelorn humans. But when I was studying it, I treated it no differently than the geography textbook. Burning with passion, surging with emotion as it was, it left me unmoved.

Obviously my physiological development had reached that most peculiar stage of sexual awakening that all boys must go through, when they appear to despise the entire female sex. My discovery of the existence of women came relatively later. I was still at what seemed a transitional stage, and a temporary one.

Outside the window was a broad street, so my field of vision was about ten meters wide. On the other side of the road was a wall higher than a man, built in large, gray-green river boulders. This wall provided a superb backdrop, as if it were the work of a master scenographer: whenever a person’s figure was “projected” onto this wall, his facial expressions and the contrasts of light and dark were made exceptionally vivid. As I watched, human shapes were constantly shuttling in great haste against this backdrop.

It was our village’s turn for water again, you see. The water supply was channeled our way once every five days, so on that day the villagers had to carry enough drinking water to last the next five days. Every waterday the whole village assembled like an army going into battle. In every family, everyone capable of lifting a shoulder pole was mobilized: young, old, male, female—it didn’t matter—even little girls. The sound of voices, water, footsteps, and buckets rose in a giant wave of noise that filled the streets and alleys. It was a strange, tense, lively scene, a grand spectacle that you would rarely see elsewhere.

I looked on, planning how to transfer the appearance of the water carriers onto my sketchpad.

But which one should I draw? I debated with myself. That man? Unfortunately, he’s slightly lame. That woman then? Oh! The poor thing’s bent double under the weight of two buckets of water. Well then, here comes a young man: just look at the rippling muscles along his gleaming tanned arms! They’re like two iron bars: a marathon runner’s arms in ancient Greece must have been something like his! And after the marathon runner yet another figure appears. Oh! It’s only a little girl, but even she’s got two water buckets made from gasoline cans bobbing on the ends of her carrying pole. How energetic she looks! But both marathon runner and little girl are past me in a flash! Next comes an old guy with a gloomy face, doddering unsteadily along. This is Uncle A-San who lives at the east end of Back Street. His son died last spring, so if he doesn’t fetch his own drinking water, who will? No wonder he looks depressed….

A whole parade of people had already gone past, but there I still sat, musing at the window, my mind a blank. My sketchbook lay open, but I hadn’t made so much as a single line on the page. Just at that moment a young woman appeared at the far end of my backdrop. Her figure was stunning; her thighs looked sturdy and steady as she strode along. Suddenly struck by the realization that this girl was a real beauty, I grabbed my pencil. The action was almost unconscious; perhaps I was influenced by the good impression I already had of her.

My hand moved swiftly over the sketchpad; I only had the time it would take her to walk from one end of my backdrop to the other. When she left my field of vision I inspected my sketch. There were only a few simple lines on the paper, some dots and curves. However, I felt extremely satisfied. I would still have a second chance, and a third, indeed countless more chances. I could take my time and draw her at my leisure; I had no need to hurry, and she would never know.

I exhaled deeply and leaned back in my chair to rest and wait for her to reappear.

Chunmei lived with her parents, a younger brother, and two little sisters in the same street as Uncle A-San. Her brother had been in the year below me at elementary school. I guessed she must be nineteen or twenty. Her family owned an orchard of mangoes and longans. I would often go there when the fruit was ripe. However, she seldom involved herself in such matters. One time she was the only one home. She made me wait while she remained intent on her sewing. After I had waited for nearly half an hour she finally got up and went inside, returning almost immediately with a basket of mangoes. She put it down in front of me and told me to help myself.

“How many?” I asked her.

“Take as many as you like,” she said, picking up her sewing again.

“What about the money?” I asked again.

“Put it on the table,” she said, without even looking.

Now she had reappeared against my backdrop. I noticed that her buckets were made of steel. They were full of water and covered with bamboo leaves. They swayed to and fro with her steps. Strong, vigorous, lively: her figure really stirred me.

I picked up my pencil again.

Her eyes were long and slender, with very dark, expressive irises. Her nose was a bit flat, but otherwise all right. The taut flesh around her mouth could not have been more perfect, and her temples were extraordinarily tender and white. For the first time in my life I discovered the beauty of a woman’s white neck!

She was walking past my window. Some more lines and dots, dots and curves appeared on my sketchpad.

I remembered one time when my cousin and I had gone to her house to buy mangoes. She and her mother were at home. Her mother brought out a basket of mangoes. They were all very small, and my cousin muttered incessantly as he picked through them.

“Ma!” she piped up. “Why don’t you bring out that other basket?”

“What’s wrong with these ones?” retorted her mother, displeased.

“These are left over from other people taking their pick. There aren’t any big ones left.”

“The ones inside are reserved!” Her mother was angry now. “What do you know about anything? All you know is how to eat!”

“Ma, really!” Chunmei found it funny. “Where’s the harm in letting them choose a few? It’s not as if they’re going to take the whole basket!”

But no way would her mother bring out the other basket. The daughter looked at us in embarrassment but didn’t say any more.

When we got out onto the street my cousin said he liked buying mangoes from her, because she sold them much cheaper than other members of her family. I agreed. She struck me as a good person.

The lines, dots, and curves on my sketchpad gradually multiplied with each time she reappeared. By her fifth or sixth trip, her whole figure had somehow been mysteriously transferred onto the paper. Toward evening when I stopped drawing I had sketches of her in several different poses. The sketches were all better than my usual work, more closely resembling a woman. I was very pleased. As I looked at the likenesses I had made, I involuntarily murmured her name: “Chunmei! Chunmei.”

And with that I put away my sketchbook, ready for the next water-day.

At that time I was part of a small circle of friends, all about sixteen or seventeen years of age. We had known one another since early childhood and had gone to school together, so we were very close. And now the curiosity and adventurousness that came with the beginnings of sexual awakening heightened our instinctive need for companionship, bringing us even closer together. We were always on the lookout for opportunities to get together. Stormy days and moonlit nights were the best times for get-togethers, adding spice and interest to our conversations.

However, among these friends of mine, I was not only rather short, but also a late developer, so that I would often feel backward and left out because of my ignorance of the opposite sex. To me women had always been an unknowable concept. But my friends’ conversations tended to revolve precisely around the subject of women, so that I was often left sitting dumbly on the edge of the group, almost like a real mute.

One beautiful, bright moonlit night our group came together again. Changfa had brought with him the huqin fiddle that rarely left his side—he had spent several lunch breaks making it himself, using a coconut shell for the body. Whenever there was a break in the conversation it would be filled by the music of this fiddle. Changfa was incapable of playing anything finer or more remarkable than rustic folk songs, but he himself was perfectly satisfied with this, and he was an enthusiastic player.

Passing through the dismal, lonely cemetery, we reached the river flats, where maiden grass grew among the boulders. It happened to be another waterday, so the river was flowing gently. The moon was sprinkling its pure radiance like a soft mist over the sprawling, desolate river flats. The north shore of the river was a precipitous cliff, with small clumps of trees all in a row, straight and unmoving, like sentries. On the dark riverbanks, insects were chirruping in the grasses.

As always, we sat on some rocks by the river.

Changfa kept playing a folk air over and over.

His huqin was nothing less than a concrete manifestation of the sexual impulse, akin to the subtle, lithe, and graceful courtship songs of the birds and the beasts. He gripped it very tightly and as he worked the bow his arms seesawed fiercely. No! He wasn’t merely working the bow: he was battling his frustration. His movements embodied a vehement desire to stop at nothing to destroy everything. At his fingertips the huqin gave out piercing cries of sadness, like that of a person suffering unbearable oppression.

Changfa was only a year older than me, but physically he was already well developed, and in particular there was no doubt that sexually he was close to boiling point. His ultimate interest and greatest concern were women, women, women. His blatant, blunt attitude amazed me; but more than that, the abundance of his knowledge of relations between the sexes raised him to the level of a god in my eyes. I could not imagine where he had acquired such expertise. Compared to him I was nothing more than an ignorant child.

“Come on, A-Qi, give us a song!”

Changfa’s shoulders were rocking.

The huqin began to play an introduction.

Placidly, A-Qi looked up at the bright moon in the sky, then his familiar, deep voice began to slide smoothly from his throat.

“Great! Bravo, A-Qi!” Changfa yelled hoarsely and crazily. “Let’s have another!”

But instead of singing, A-Qi just kept gazing at the moon.

Like Changfa, A-Qi had reached sexual maturity, and like Changfa he already had a sweetheart, but he was more moderate, not always ranting like Changfa. At this moment he had his feet immersed in the river and was gently splashing them around. From time to time he sent up some spray—like fleeting will-o’-the-wisps, instantly extinguished. Copying him, I put my feet in the water and immediately felt a current of fresh coolness traveling from the tips of my toes right up to the crown of my head. It was extraordinarily refreshing.

Suddenly Changfa hung his bow on a tuning peg and asked a question of us all, in a tone of great seriousness: “Hey, who’s the best woman in the village, eh? You go first, A-Qi.”

In this context, Changfa’s use of the word “best” had rather far-reaching significance, referring not only to prettiness and sweet nature, but also carrying connotations of “love.”

A-Qi replied without having to think: “Baomei, of course!”

Baomei was the girl Changfa was pursuing at the time.

Changfa arched his eyebrows and glared at A-Qi, Then, after that moment of bemusement, he asked again, quite candidly: “And apart from Baomei?” He turned to me: “Hey, A-He, you’re a sly one, always listening to the rest of us and never a peep out of you. It’s about time you said something. So: who’s the best, eh? Come on.”

I was quite taken aback. I’d never expected to be put on the spot on such a subject. It was a tight corner, because I’d never given this question any thought before. I really didn’t know which of the women was “best.”

Changfa kept pushing for an answer: “Come on! Who’s the best?”

Amid my embarrassment, suddenly the image of my model leaped from the pages of my sketchbook into my mind.

Stammering and stuttering, very unsure of myself, I found myself saying: “Chunmei’s quite good-looking, I suppose?”

“Chunmei? Ah-hahaha!” Changfa guffawed. “Chunmei? Great! A-He, it’s that huge rack of hers you’ve taken a fancy to, isn’t it? You’ve a good eye! I’ll guarantee each one weighs five pounds! Ahhahahaha!”

I was so mortified that my whole body began to burn. The feeling of humiliation almost made me lose my temper, and I deeply regretted my candor.

A-Qi came to my defense.

“What’s so funny? What a weirdo you are, Changfa!” he said. “Chunmei may not measure up to Baomei, but she’s certainly one of the prettiest women in our village.”

A-Qi had saved face for me and my Chunmei. I felt really happy and forgot the insult I had suffered only a moment before.

“No!” said Changfa, no longer laughing but explaining himself in all seriousness. “Don’t get pissed off. I wasn’t laughing at you. Of course Chunmei is a fine girl. I just meant her breasts are on the large side, that’s all. It’s no big deal, all women have breasts, and actually Chunmei’s even prettier than Baomei.”

“Come off it, Changfa!” A-Qi wasn’t letting him off so lightly. “Chunmei doesn’t measure up to your Baomei!”

But Changfa wouldn’t get into an argument. After glaring at him again briefly, he sank into a dazed state, as if drunk.

“Oh, Baomei!” he murmured.

Obviously he had gone soaring off somewhere in his mind, leaving reality behind, searching among his memories for an old dream. He grabbed his huqin and began to sing. His voice was hoarse, like an old cracked gong; but the lyrics spoke from his innermost heart:

It was very quiet. It seemed that everything in creation was holding its breath and bending its ear to listen to this youth’s wild song to the moon. On the broad, empty river flats, especially so late at night, Changfa’s singing seemed sad, rough, and shrill. It made a deep impression on me. One could almost feel the stubborn but forcibly repressed instinct roiling somewhere inside him, denied an outlet.

That night, we stayed sitting there until the moon descended beneath the horizon, before returning to our homes.

Most strangely, after that night’s casual avowal, Chunmei’s form began to linger in my mind. I didn’t understand why this should be; perhaps it had already been there for some time. Before that night it had lurked in the folds of my subconscious, but now my avowal had freed it, allowing it to float to the surface. It really astonished me.

Was I in love with Chunmei? I couldn’t help wondering.

I could not admit it, but neither could I deny it.

From that time on my interest in The Book of Odes changed: no longer did I see only the surface meaning of the words; I was now able to go further and appreciate the abiding human emotion behind them. What’s more, I now seemed to understand and sympathize with the pain of King Wen’s unrequited love. Besides, I was gradually coming to an understanding of what lay behind such lines as “My love hides from me, I scratch my head and hesitate” and “Her home is so near, but she is so far.” Truly these were cries from the hearts of real people.

It was also from that time that I started often finding myself sitting in a daze at my desk, as if unaware where I was.

I eagerly awaited each waterday and couldn’t understand why there had to be five days between each one. Why couldn’t it be every day? How wonderful it would be if it were every day! Then I could see her every day. Above all, at the very next waterday I waited to see if her breasts were really as big as Changfa said. I would be hugely disappointed if he turned out to be right.

Alright then! Waterday again.

I stuck by the window and waited, swallowing again and again.

After a bunch of people had walked past, here she came … here was Chunmei coming toward me, her gait and posture as sturdy and lively as ever. I felt a faint restlessness in my heart.

Her steps stirred up a breeze that sent the back of her smock wafting up. The critical moment was upon me, and I focused all my attention. I saw that where her breasts should be there were indeed two proud mounds, quivering in time with her steps. Certainly they were ample, but not necessarily in excess of the curvaceous ideal. This made me very happy. And because of this she seemed even more adorable than before. It was as if in facing our first trial, Chunmei had taken my side. Changfa had merely been shooting his mouth off. However, I had no intention of challenging him on it.

No matter how much I inwardly yearned for Chunmei, in real life I never had the chance to meet her even once. The more I thought of her the more depressed I became. I never stopped wondering how I might get to meet her and I longed to be able to tell her how I felt.

When mangoes came in season I went to her house three times on the pretext of buying some. I hoped she would be alone at home, but the first time I went she wasn’t in, and the next two times I saw that her room’s bamboo curtain was pulled right down: obviously she was at home, and only the curtain separated us, but how could I get to see her? I paced to and fro, keeping watch by her window, but in the end I could only walk away in dejection.

Since I wasn’t fated to meet her face-to-face, I could only look at her lovely form from my window on waterdays and vent my unrequited passion on my sketchpad. In this way, portraits of her quickly multiplied in the sketchbook—over several months, almost all my drawings were of her. Her every pose and every aspect: frontal, profile; carrying buckets on her pole, empty-handed; wearing a bamboo hat, or with her hair in disarray; Chunmei tight-lipped, Chunmei smiling; and even upper-body studies, studies from the rear, studies of legs, hands, eyes, nose….

“Chunmei! Chunmei!” I cried, looking at my drawings.

“Chunmei! Chunmei!”

It really looked as if they were gazing back at me, smiling and beckoning.

And so I would hug the sketchbook to my chest, as if it were the real Chunmei.

“Do you know how old she is?” asked A-Qi, after breaking the news to me. “Twenty-two!”

What he meant was that Chunmei and I were too far apart in age, so I shouldn’t feel bad about it. He meant well, of course. But I remained silent.

“Don’t be upset!” he added.

That winter Chunmei was married.

On the day of the wedding, from first dawn there were several showers of chilly winter rain. Bursts of drum and pipe music from the wedding procession came through the rain to reach my ears in the academy. Perhaps because of the rain, the music sounded unusually desolate and awakened boundless melancholy in my breast.

As I sat there disconsolate, listening to the shushing, hissing rain with its fitful accompaniment of drum and pipe music, I suddenly felt that the universe had become infinitely lonely, vast, and empty. Sadness welled up in me and I could not hold back my tears.

Furtively I wiped away the tears with the back of my hand. I told the master I had a headache and asked to be excused for the rest of the day. I picked up my books and went home.

Two days later it was waterday again. I got out my sketchbook through force of habit but I didn’t open it.

Outside the window it was as busy as ever. The slightly lame man was as incapable as ever of walking straight and true; the poor woman still had her two big buckets that one of these days were going to crush her flat. Then there were the marathon runner and the little girl, and Uncle A-San, whose face would forever be gloomy (unless the king of Hell should by some miracle take pity on him and let his son return to the land of the living).

All of this seemed vaguely familiar to me from the past, but I couldn’t help feeling that something was missing, and it could no longer arouse my former excitement. I merely sat there idly, watching abstractedly. Eventually I put the sketchbook away. After that I didn’t bother to get it out on waterdays.

I planned to leave it permanently stuffed in the corner of a drawer.

1. The two famous lines (each of three Chinese characters) “If jade is not carved, no useful thing is formed” are to be found in the introductory section of San zi jing 三字經 (The Three Character Classic), which was a standard first primer for Chinese children from the late thirteenth century to the early twentieth.