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

I came to where two small rivers flowed together. The spur of hills between them was clad in swaths of towering bamboo. The valley to the west of the hills was very narrow. On the west side of the valley there was an almost perfectly conical hill; a few brick and thatch buildings were visible at its foot. The buildings were low and crude, and as the abundant sun of this southern land shone brilliantly down on them it drew up a barely perceptible pale blue haze.

Home—just as I had left it!

But just to its right a sad and shocking scene stopped me short. I saw now that the hills of my own home had not been spared, but had suffered unprecedented disaster by fire!

I had lost count of the number of such burn trails left by out-of-control forest fires that I’d seen all along my journey. Such an extraordinary event had scarcely ever been known during the Japanese period.

When I arrived home, no sooner had I put down my things than my older brother Lihu¹ was telling me all about it, pointing to the hills that were now blackened, reduced to ashes. Summoning up the most venomous epithets he could muster to describe the unidentified arsonists, he cursed them down to the eighteenth circle of hell, never to be reborn, and then he somehow lumped in all the other unfortunate villagers and farmers living in a three-mile radius. The light of hatred that shone in his eyes and the tight, bulging muscles in his face forcefully demonstrated the fury in his heart.

“Do you know why they’re setting forest fires?” he asked me. “If I tell you you’ll never believe it: they’re scared stiff that come autumn a Celestial Fire will come down, so they’re setting preemptive fires in the hope of heading off the Celestial Fire. You hear? What kind of thinking is that? Sonofabitch! Celestial Fire, my ass! Catch me believing in that, this autumn or any autumn!”

Lihu’s thick, black brows were bunched up; below them his eyes formed a pair of clearly defined triangles. His right hand gripped the edge of the table. His whole body, down to the tip of every toe, was fused solid by the heat of his rage.

“It’s superstition! There’s nothing in it!”

In an agitated tone of voice he pronounced his conclusion: “—This has got nothing to do with the gods’ wishes; it’s all whipped up by men!”

This certainly was something new to me, that such unprecedentedly damaging forest fires should turn out to be the result of mere ignorant, absurd superstition. In the past, accidents arising from random carelessness, or during slash-and-burn or hunting, had occasionally caused small-scale fires. I knew about these things, and although they could not be condoned, they were understandable.

Now I remembered the “song to encourage virtue” I’d seen in my mother-in-law’s house, pasted on the wall, which was no doubt printed and distributed by one of the local Taoist temples. I remembered the following lines from it:

At the time I had read this casually in passing, taking it for the usual type of virtue-encouraging rhyme urging people to do more good deeds, but now I understood that its latent power to incite or terrify might be enough to cause some people to do almost anything.

I felt that our home had become gloomy and depressing, and its inhabitants irascible. Their tempers were extremely frayed and they wore terribly long faces, as if punishing themselves for something. Realizing that all of this must be connected with the forest fires, I understood their emotions and sympathized with them.

I knew only too well how much blood, sweat, and tears my father and my own generation had shed opening up the virgin forest and making a go of this farm. I could still remember how Father would have a few cups of White Chrysanthemum sake of an evening, saying over and over to my brothers and me: “Ten more years of hard work; ten more years of hard work!”

His intention was to encourage us and comfort himself with a promise that the time would come when we’d be able to sit back and enjoy the fruits of our labors. And in fact such visions of future rewards are precisely the driving force behind the single-minded determination that some people show in struggling ever onward.

But now, this inexplicable conflagration had burned it all to nothing and our hopes had burst like bubbles, all in the blink of an eye!

We walked among dead, shriveled fruit trees, no longer useful for anything but firewood. Black ash lay in an even carpet on the ground. Tender guan grass² shoots were already spreading over valley and hill, as if seizing this rare opportunity—ash was a superb fertilizer for it. Apparently this place would soon be taken over by life-forms hardier and greedier than what had been burned, but not so welcome to man.

Climbing halfway up the side of the conical hill brought us to the outside edge of the fire’s extent. Standing here, we could see to the furthest limits of our father’s 125-hectare³ farm, which covered almost the whole of this range of hills. The hills were burned completely bare; almost nothing remained, like a bowl that had been licked clean by a dog. Hardly anything was left of the timber bamboo plantation behind the house and the lovingly selected and tended orchard. Leafless, twigless, unrecognizable acacia, teak, large bamboo,⁴ and many other trees stood stark and bare, wordlessly appealing to heaven. At their feet stretched the scorched and charred gray-black corpse of the hill.

In low-lying places, in gullies, and on the shaded side of slopes, white and black ash lay in thick drifts, lifeless and empty, and yet this was the very stuff of the lush green forest that had covered the whole hill and valley. It seemed quite fantastical!

The bamboos and trees beyond the edge of the fire stood whole and unharmed. It was as though they had stood shoulder to shoulder to defy the pitiless destructiveness of Fate, erecting a solid green fortress to encircle the path of the fire. One side was green and bursting with life, and the other side was gray-black and naked; the contrast was stark.

Some stands of tall bamboo had been damaged but not consumed; a few sprays of grayish yellow foliage near the tops resembled mourning flags at a new grave site, waving sadly in the air. If anyone had been able to understand their language, these bamboo survivors of the carnage could have told them of the cruel, savage burning that had taken place at their feet a few weeks before.

Lihu was fondling a blackened fruit tree. Looking upward, he said with regret: “Small-kerneled lichees … nothing but the best seed!”

Among the branches hung a few dry, brown, elongated leaves. When you took one and rolled it in your hand it broke into little pieces with a crackle.

These trees had been planted thirteen or fourteen years ago. By now each one had a trunk as thick as a saucer and should have been capable of producing a considerable crop. Even now I could clearly remember the individual history of each tree: how it had come to us from the Farmers’ Union, or from the nurseries at Xinpu or Yuanlin, the endless paperwork and to-ings and fro-ings, until finally it could be transplanted to this place.

During this whole inspection of the fire scene Lihu and I scarcely spoke; like the ground at our feet, the bottoms of our hearts were carpeted with bleak, silent ash.

That evening we brought our chairs outside and sat in the courtyard.

There was no moon nor any stars. The stain-dark, primordial night was like a thick viscous liquid lying congealed over the long thin valley. The ranges of low hills to left and right were like a pair of outstretched arms, silently thrusting into the endless darkness of the night.

“Surely the fruit trees can bud again, can’t they?” I asked Lihu.

“Burned to charcoal, how can they still bud!”

Lihu’s voice was somewhat hoarse, but it was his calm and sober tone, like that of an uninvolved observer, that really shocked me.

“If we can get some rain before too long, then there just might be hope for the bamboo.”

I told Lihu about the forest fires I had seen on my way home; it was a terrible disaster, and so preposterous in origin.

Lihu listened quietly, and then said with feeling, “It’s as if people have gone insane; they can’t tell right from wrong anymore.

“The township is planning to build a middle school. They’ve budgeted for 700,000 yuan to be raised by public subscription, but it’s been months now and they’ve only just managed to scrape together half the amount. Meanwhile, over there, at Sheshanwei …”

As he spoke he pointed with his chin into the distance straight ahead of us. I did my best to try to look through the darkness in the direction he indicated, but it was absolutely useless: I could see nothing but the sallow lights of a few rural homes.

“At Sheshanwei,” Lihu went on, “toward the end of last year they were building a new Guanyin Temple, and the subscriptions actually exceeded the building budget, so they extended the original plans. It’s as if people no longer believe in themselves and only the gods are considered reliable. That’s all very well: if the gods can guarantee good harvests, then the benefits are immediate; but what about education for our children? Where’s the benefit there? You can’t see it, you can’t touch it; people won’t put their money into such a dead loss. If the rain continues to stay away this summer, the hills will suffer even worse fires. People believe this is the only way to escape the Celestial Fire in the autumn.”

Lihu’s words provided me with the material for a fantastical picture of chaos, in which people had become detached from their center and were blindly spinning around it, getting more and more confused as they spun, until they melded into the surrounding primordial darkness.

The sky was bigger than ever, higher than ever….

Deep in thought, Lihu stared straight ahead, sunk down in his chair, his dim, silent figure as profound and solemn as a statue. The solemnity of the moment seemed to harbor a mystical, fateful sadness.

After a period of silence, the dark shadow that was all I could see of my brother gave a strange spasm and he spoke in quite a different, businesslike tone of voice: “Tomorrow the Grand Dharma Master is returning to his altar, and the Temple is combining the celebration with the spring thanksgiving mass. It’s our jia’s⁵ turn to lead the rite. Come along and see the show!”

Next day Lihu killed a goose. There was also pork, tofu, and so on—altogether a highly passable sacrifice. My sister-in-law carried it to the temple on a shoulder pole. This was Lihu’s personal offering. On the public side our jia also contributed a full Five Meat sacrifice.

The Temple of the Grand Dharma Master stood at the foot of a precipitous, imposing peak; a small stream flowed in front of it, and on the other three sides it was surrounded by lush dark-green trees and bamboos: a place of murky numinosity. The temple was old-fashioned and crudely built; cobwebs hung everywhere in the darkness among its beams and rafters. Pasted on the columns of the doorway was a brand-new couplet:

The content was fresh and unconventional for a door couplet. It certainly was eye-catching. It included two extremely different sentiments: disrespect and profanity toward the gods came together in a turbid mixture with human elation and the fervor of universal rejoicing. I couldn’t help being amused by it all. The mysterious drama of history had become a comedy, with the gods as clowns.

A dozen or more sacrifices were already set out in orderly fashion on the offering tables, each uniformly presented on its own red-lacquered wooden tray. Flames and thick, black smoke belched up above the warm, harmonious glow of the lanterns and candles; more clouds rose from the great incense-rods and sandalwood incense sticks in the tripod censer, filling the whole temple with their thick, choking fragrance.

All the idols, blackened by long years of smoke, sat in their niches completely bathed in the sea of incense smoke, their eyes squinted half-shut, showing not the slightest interest as their devout believers scurried in and out. Along the main altar stood five faded war banners: red, yellow, green, white, and black, each embroidered with a dragon, its head rearing upward, and the legend: “The Celestial Master of the House of Zhang.” The banners were covered in a thick, thick layer of dust, which would fly up in misty clouds at the slightest touch.

“Is it Celestial Master Zhang Daoling?” I asked a farmer, a member of our jia who was standing beside me; his face was stained with sweat and he had both sleeves and trouser legs rolled up high, as if he had just been planting out rice seedlings.

“Celestial Master Zhang Daoling?” The man looked me up and down in surprise, before going on with a face creased into smiles, “—I suppose that’s him. I’m not really sure.”

He immediately turned his attention back to an appreciative appraisal of the three tables of sacrificial offerings, and couldn’t help gasping in admiration when he saw Lihu’s Five Meat feast for the gods. Not only was it ample, but it was also quite special. The goose, so large and plump, stretched its neck back peacefully in a curve, and its skin was glistening bright yellow all over, the fat oozing out like drops of gold.

“That’s a devil of a fat goose!” said the farmer. Lihu smiled, very pleased with himself, but replied modestly, “Oh no, it’s nothing really! No chickens left, you see, so we just had to kill a goose.”

As leader of today’s rite Lihu had applied hair cream to his thinning locks until they shone. Over his traditional long gown he had draped a Western-style serge jacket. His shirt collar was open, his feet bare, and his smile dazzling.

I left the courtyard and went to sit at one of the tables outside. Two young farmers there were arguing heatedly, spittle flying everywhere. One of them was a tall, skinny guy; the other had thick, stiff hair like a brush, and eyes that glowed with expression.

“—A-Rong told me. It must be true!” said this latter one, citing his ultimate authority.

“But there’s nothing wrong with it!” the other one argued.

“That’s because the whole statue’s been redone in gold leaf! He should’ve been brought back to the temple last year. That’s why they couldn’t do it till this year. If you don’t believe me, you can ask the caretaker—of course he might not tell you! A-Rong’s pa gave him instructions: he said it wouldn’t be right to tell people about it!”

At this point the brush-haired youth snorted cockily like a puppy.

“A long time ago A-Rong’s pa had guaranteed that the Dharma Master would be safe if they hid Him at his place. So after the Japanese surrendered, the temple caretaker went to A-Rong’s pa and asked when they could bid the Master to return to the temple. Then A-Rong’s pa invited Him out of the cupboard, but as soon as they looked they saw that His nose was gone!”

I seemed to sense a certain falsity and pretense in the youth’s tone.

“You can never trust what A-Rong says!” The skinny guy was equally stubborn.

In the tiny yard in front of the temple a dozen or more tables had been set, with a filthy gray cloth awning stretched over them. A band was playing ancient tunes by the table nearest the temple eaves. The blind suona player puffed his cheeks out like balloons, big droplets of sweat oozing out from his big, flat nose and his chest heaving like great waves, as if his lungs had unlimited capacity. The suona, responding to the springlike movements of the young player’s fingers, sounded one minute like a woman’s scream, the next minute like a child’s laughter, and the next again like mournful cries. An invisible iron claw, it gripped the heart of everyone within earshot.

The air was full of all kinds of sounds and smells: sweat, smoke fumes, and sour human breath. The people were immersed in the celebration, giving themselves over to talk, laughter, and boisterous noise, going off this way and that like fireworks. The sun burned like a torch above their heads, its searing heat turning their faces and ears crimson. Yet this only excited them further and made them even more agitated and fervid.

And then—the ceremony.

An altar had already been set up at the foot of the steps, with a rush mat spread out in front, on top of which was a bloodred pleated rug. The Master of Ceremonies, the head of our li,⁶ stood reverently beside the altar table, overseeing the rituals and offerings. He wore a cotton garment that wasn’t short enough to be a jacket but wasn’t quite a long gown either; his arms hung straight down, his eyes stared straight ahead, and his voice trembled: it ululated most unnaturally as he read out the ritual protocol. He drew out each word as he intoned: “Sound the drums—three times—”

The drummer responded immediately by raising his sticks:

Doong, Doong, Doong, doong doong doong doong …

Locals as well as worshipers from further afield were arriving in a constant stream. A congregation of female worshipers of all ages had formed on the bumpy lane beside the stream. The hot sun sent up a thick, overpowering smell of tung oil from the paper umbrellas they shaded themselves with. The ushers piled on clowns’ smiles as they greeted them and guided them in, then in crisp voices reported to the accountant who sat on the east veranda:

“Received from Liu Qingmei, fifty yuan for incense oil; from Yang Juxiang, thirty yuan for incense oil …”

Inside the temple, under the eaves, in the yard—people crowded everywhere in great confusion and excited bustle. Amid all this clamor, observation of the rites continued without letup.

“Let the leader of the rite take his place—let the assistant leader also take his place—”

The li head’s whole face was flushed bright red, and his mouth was strangely contorted.

Lihu and a fair-skinned man of about thirty stepped up to the altar and stood shoulder to shoulder. At the Master of Ceremonies’s “Kneel!” they knelt together on the red rug. Their eyes stared straight ahead, unblinking, as if mounted in their sockets by human hand; their arms swung limply and abnormally long from their shoulders, as if dislocated.

“Bow—bow the second time—bow the third time …”

In everything there was an atmosphere of discord; everything was contradictory and comical. Blasphemy and piety, willfulness and absolute sincerity, solemnity and offhandedness—it all blended so naturally together. They personalized the gods. Here there was none of the veneration for the gods that ordinary people would imagine. However, it was from another angle and in another sense that they astonished me—they approached the gods with the same intimacy and warmth as they would their friends and relations!

Their innate ability to invest anything, anything at all that they touched, with the nature of a child’s game seemed so laughable. But they patiently and earnestly played the game through to the end with all the innocent enthusiasm of children. There was something more here, something more solemn than mere amusement. These apparently simple, good, and honest folk were the very same people who were setting their own hills on fire, for some unfathomable reason adopting the stance of bare-knuckled pugilists.

How absurd! How hateful! And how very sad!

Suddenly I remembered Lihu’s agitated tone and stance yesterday as he lambasted superstition. Imagine: if we separated my brother from our forest farm, would he still attack the people’s stubborn ignorance? Or would he turn around and join in on the side of the forest arsonists?

The answer seemed very much in doubt.

That night Lihu and I, as on the previous night, moved our chairs out into the yard. Our old neighbor Uncle Chuanfu and his eldest son, who lived at the foot of the hill to our right, came to sit with us on their way back from burning incense at the temple. In the darkness Uncle Chuanfu’s pipe bowl shone red from time to time, like a glowworm.

There was still no moon, but many stars were twinkling above. The night sky was much clearer than last night. The two miniature mountain ranges stretched out like a pair of arms into the far distance at either side.

The hot, oppressive air carried the bland fragrance of grass, while the sporadic sound of dogs barking further downhill created an air of restlessness.

Near the end of the eastern arm flames were rising up, turning a large quadrant of the sky a fanciful red. Black smoke churned high into the air. The hills nearer us were dimly lit as if by a feeble soybean oil lamp shining through a fanlight.

This forest fire was silent. With the silent forbearance of the sages, the forest accepted the suffering imposed on it by ignorant people.

“Sheshanwei?” asked Lihu calmly.

“It doesn’t look like Sheshanwei; I’d say it’s the other side of the hills—over by Xinzhuang.” Uncle Chuanfu took another draw on his pipe. “If they keep on burning the forest like this, won’t they burn it all away? The forest is like a child, it needs constant care: ten years of planting can’t withstand a single burning match! Isn’t that right? If your pa was still alive to see them burning the hills like this, it would kill him, surely? Bless him, he gave his sweat and blood, everything, for this place.”

Then he turned to me and asked: “A-He, where were you when your pa passed away? Didn’t you get word?”

I told him where I’d been at the time, and how wartime obstacles to shipping had meant I never got the letter from home.

“So far away?” said the old man thoughtfully. “That would’ve been two years before the Jap surrender, when the big man passed away …”

In the murk of the night the old man appeared unusually big and powerful; he gave the impression not of sitting on his chair, but of floating or swimming above it. From time to time his glowing pipe flared up in a streak of light, and in those moments one could see the deeply wrinkled, coffee-colored hand that held it.

The extent of the distant hill fire kept growing; billow upon billow of tarry black smoke stained half the sky darker and grimier than ever. Red tongues of flame blazed and climbed, spreading and extending in a broad curtain of fire.

“It’s a lot bigger now!” The old man spoke with concern. We all looked silently in that direction. After a while, he spoke again: “Before we even know where their Celestial Fire is at, the whole mountain will have gone up in smoke. Your gods, you see—if you worship ’em and leave ’em alone you’ll have clement weather, timely rain, and peace and harmony in the land. But if you go and ask ’em, well then it all comes down: if it ain’t war in the east it’ll be demons in the west! That’s the gods for you! That’s their territory! But who knows for sure about Celestial Fire coming down in the seventh moon! That’s just folks making a rod for their own backs, ain’t it?”

“Let ’em burn their mothers’ assholes in the seventh moon! Celestial farts!” Strangely, there was an element of melancholy mixed in with the profanity of Lihu’s indignation.

“Still no signs of life in the fruit trees and timber bamboo?” asked the old man. “If only we could get a fall of rain, perhaps some of them might still be saved, don’t you reckon?—All it needs is a fall of rain!”

“Easier said than done!” Lihu shook his head in despair.

Suddenly the old man turned to his son and asked: “It was you who told me, wasn’t it, that the Grand Dharma Master Temple received much more incense money today than any year before?” Then he turned back to my brother: “Is it really so? Oh, twice as much! Hai! Where’s the reason in that?!”

The dogs had gone silent, but now something startled them into renewed frenzy. The old man peered into the distance, cocking an ear to the dogs’ barking. His pipe flared again.

“It’s really about time heaven sent down some rain; the earth’s so dry even the sweet potatoes won’t root. If it goes on without rain … Ai!”

Uncle Chuanfu raised his eyes to the sky.

In the sky a rash of stars still twinkled. Silently they peeped down on a suffering world….

1. I supply the name of Zhong Lihe’s brother Lihu (里虎), upon whom this character is based, although the original text refers to him as gege 哥哥 (elder brother) throughout.

2. Guan grass (guan is the Hakka pronunciation; the Mandarin is jian cao 菅[草]): villous themeda, one of the most common wild grasses on these South Taiwan hills; tall, tenacious, and invasive, it is harvested as kindling and fuel for household fires.

3. The original has “our father’s farm of about one or two hundred jia.” According to my interview with Zhong Tiemin (August 16, 2010), the actual approximate size of Zhong Lihe’s father’s farm at Jianshan was one hundred and forty jia 甲. One jia equals 0.97 hectare.

4. “Large bamboo” (taizug 大竹): this is the Hakka name for Bambusa blumeana. The Mandarin is cizhu 刺竹 (spiky bamboo, so named because its budding twigs are viciously pointed).

5. The Chinese bao-jia 保甲 system of defense, local government, and communal accountability was implemented, with modifications and occasionally falling into disuse, from the Song dynasty (960–1279 ce) into the mid-twentieth century. Each jia comprised approximately ten households, and each bao was ten jia. The headmen of the jia and bao were elected and rotated.

6. The li 里 (locality/village) is the smallest unit of formal, elected local government in Taiwan. In a town or city it may form a small urban district of a few blocks. In the case of Zhong Lihe’s home district the li is the small village of Guanglin and its surrounding area of scattered farms and hamlets, including Jianshan. Rural li may also be known as cun 村 (village).