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

Since I lacked a kitchen, my elder brother Lihu had rigged up something for me on the veranda. Six poles of stiff bamboo had already been sunk in the ground, and the frame and rafters, made of long-stem bamboo, had been strapped to them. All we were waiting for now was for it to be thatched. But Uncle A-Huang had thatched only the two ends of the veranda, leaving the major part in the middle uncovered, before putting down his tools and staying away. So my kitchen was like a child wearing one of those crownless ceremonial hats; for days now it had brazenly bared its head to the skies, open to the wind and exposed to the sun.

Which was all very well, but not for my poor wife, Pingmei, who had to cook three meals a day there. Her bamboo hat had to do the job of the missing roof, and whenever things went somewhat against her liking she’d start to complain. Moreover, at the least excuse she’d include me in her complaint, as if her unwanted sunbathing was all my fault. The injustice of this goes without saying, but I never defended myself. After all, I couldn’t help feeling some remorse as I looked on at Pingmei’s suffering: wearing her coolie hat as she slaved over our meals, burned by a fierce sun above and a hot stove below, blackened like the charcoal, and flushed like its glow.

Even that would have been all very well, but since yesterday at lunchtime the weather had started to look pretty bad. A gray blanket of cloud had engulfed a great chunk of sky in the northwest, so it looked like rain was on its way in the next couple of days. As she came in and out of the house, Pingmei kept looking up to inspect the weather signs, her brows knitted together in a frown. Her complaints grew in quantity and frequency, and it began to seem that I could no longer keep myself aloof: what would become of us if it really did rain!

“It’s going to rain any time now,” said Pingmei unhappily. “Can’t you go and see Uncle A-Huang?”

Well, there was an idea! It seemed my anxiety had made me stupid, so that I hadn’t even thought of this. And so, having asked my brother the way, I determined to set out on this mission.

Come to think of it, twenty-odd years ago I had actually known Uncle A-Huang well. In our village, when it came to the winter sowing of rice in the paddies, three or four of the best young laborers would organize weeding gangs and tender for contracts with the local farmers. These gangs were semi-cooperative units; the members were all young people. A-Huang was the foreman of one of the gangs, and his was the gang most in demand in the whole village for its work ethic, its skill, and its speed. Most of the young people, boys and girls alike, wanted to join A-Huang’s crew. The farmers also hoped to get A-Huang’s gang for their fields.

One day, when the rice sprouts were already standing in the fields, it was our family’s turn to welcome Uncle A-Huang’s gang. This was no ordinary day. The farmer always had to prepare a slap-up lunch for the gang. As if it were New Year or some other feast day we had to kill a chicken or a duck and buy liquor and good things to eat. It was quite a to-do.

I was only a young boy, so the festive atmosphere soon had me in a state of high excitement. My eldest brother’s wife killed a large capon, while my older sister (who has since passed on) and I excitedly looked on. Xiumei, who was ten, wore a short jacket, white with blue flowers, and hanging from above her ears was a pair of pigtails, tied with bows of bright red wool. She had shining black eyes, and her rosy cheeks, set off by a plump, white face, were like the “red turtle” buns that people set out at gravesites during the Qingming festival. Opening those big round eyes to their fullest extent, she fixed them unblinkingly on the capon’s half-closed eyes. She was famous for her weakness for poultry heads. Whenever a chicken or a duck was killed in our family, the head was always hers. Whatever it took—tears or tantrums—she had to have that head.

“Xiumei, you really can’t have the chicken head today. It’s for Uncle A-Huang—he’s the gang foreman!” Our sister-in-law spoke kindly as she turned to Xiumei from her work gutting the capon.

The chicken head had to be presented to the gang foreman. No one knew when this rule had become fixed as a folk tradition. Its symbolic meaning seemed to have as much force as the ancient Confucian rules about respect for elders and reverence for ancestors. Although unwritten, it had been respected for as long as anyone could remember. If anyone were careless enough to break the rule, it would be considered an unforgivable crime.

But Xiumei just stared at our sister-in-law, dumbfounded. Her eyes were opened bigger than ever, and in them were mixed equal parts of mistrust, incredulity, and puzzlement.

“The chicken’s head is reserved for the gang leader; nobody else can claim it.” Sister-in-law was putting on all her smiles for Xiumei, half-explaining, half-cajoling.

When everything was ready for this special lunch, Sister-in-law packed it all into two baskets and carried them by shoulder pole down to the fields. Full of excitement, Xiumei and I followed her, skipping along happily, laughing, chatting, and playing.

Our paddy-fields, four hectares or more, lay to the north of the village, bordering the wide river flats to the north and east. Apart from a few plots of bananas, almost everything was under paddy. The seedlings were already as tall as chopsticks.

The weeding gang was made up of a dozen or more young men and women, all bursting with vibrant life and strong as oxen. They were lined out across the field, each with a row of paddy between their knees, kneeling to turn the mud and pull out the weeds around the rice-sprout roots. Every single trouser leg was rolled way up high, and their lower legs were now superfluous extremities trailing behind, swishing from side to side with the movement of their bodies. The males of the team were stripped to the waist, their backs bared to the sun and looking just like the mud: dark brown and shining. Meanwhile the girls had used their blue headscarves to hitch the fronts and backs of their skirts securely up around their waists. Their well-rounded thighs, normally so white, had been turned red by the blazing sun overhead and the hot brown mud underfoot.

They never stopped talking, laughing, whistling, or calling out cheerfully to one another; and of course from time to time one of them would break into a hill song. And all the while they were deftly and skillfully digging and scraping at the skin of the land. Where they had passed, the water in the field was turbid and the black earth was shiny and smooth as if laced with sesame oil. The rice sprouts looked like the trees in the forest after a typhoon, tossed this way and that and all in disarray, as if their benefit in all this were the least of anyone’s concern.

As the gang finished weeding another plot, one of them suddenly called out loudly and authoritatively: “Stop work, everyone: here’s lunch!”

This was Uncle A-Huang. He was the first to weed as far as the bank and the first to straighten up. He was a strapping, tall guy with broad shoulders, built like a wall. His every gesture and movement was as keen as a sharp knife and as cool as a steel hammer. His hands, his legs, his torso, and even his face were smeared all over with mud splashed up during the weeding and dried by his body heat. Somehow this lent his remarkable face a certain swashbuckling, heroic quality, an expression of boldness and power that perfectly suited his imposing physique. Even the mere shadow of his every action made a clear and compelling impression on me—in a word: strength!

In the banana grove next to the paddy-field Sister-in-law cut a few leaves, spread them on the ground, and then transferred the meal onto them from the pole baskets. The gang all went to the irrigation ditch, washed off the black mud that covered them from head to toe, and nimbly gathered round. Immediately the banana grove and the air above it were filled with the chatter and laughter of these cheerful young people.

The women adjusted their clothing and fixed their hair; each of them put on a new face and became a different person.

A sparkling light shone from the young people’s eyes; happy smiles parted their lips.

A-Huang stood in the shade of the banana trees, his left hand on his hip and his broad torso swaying as he surveyed the sun-bathed paddy-fields with satisfaction. His face still dripped sweat, which he kept wiping away with his right hand, which he then wiped on his waistband. Soft, bushy hair grew on his big broad chest: like the hair of his head it was thick, black, and shiny. The lines and angles of his face were chiseled, his mouth was large, and his gaze was calm and assured. He exuded the unaffected heartiness common to people who pay no attention to anything other than the drama of real life itself.

After looking out for a while, he turned to the others: “Is everyone here?” he asked. “Well then, let’s eat.”

Then he noticed Xiumei in the crowd, seemed to remember something, and said in surprise: “Oh, Xiumei! Come here!”

A-Huang strode over to the picnic spread and bent down. He took the chicken head out of one of the biggest bowls with his fingers and held it out to Xiumei.

“Here you are! For you. Go on—it’s yours! I know you like ’em.” And he roared with laughter.

My sister was shy; blinking, she looked around at everyone out of the corners of her eyes.

“What’s to be shy about? It’s yours!” Another burst of bright, happy laughter.

Finally Xiumei accepted the chicken head, and then turned and went off into a deep part of the banana patch to eat it.

Watching her go, with her two bright-red bows bobbing behind her, Uncle A-Huang laughed again and called after her: “Xiumei, what a good girl you are!”

Watching all of this through eyes wide with astonishment, almost wonder, I was as baffled and confused as if I had gotten hold of a new toy but didn’t know how it worked.

And that is how the impression of this extraordinary man was left indelibly on my childish mind.

But the Uncle A-Huang I had known was the youthful A-Huang of more than twenty years ago. Since that time the paths we had taken had allowed a dark, unknowable ocean to intervene between us. Now, when our worlds overlapped once more, he was no longer the A-Huang of old.

I had heard that in the second year of the war he, like my own family several years before, had left our native village twenty-five kilometers to the southeast (our home since immigration generations before) to move here. He had married into a family in the village below the hills that we could now see from the front of our house. As for his family back in Pingtung, all my brother could tell me was that everyone had died and everything they owned had been sold. As to how they had all died and how everything had come to be sold, it seemed Lihu hadn’t been able to get all the details.

“That guy’s all washed up; lazy to the bone!” Lihu spoke angrily.

According to him, Uncle A-Huang’s being “all washed up” was entirely due to laziness! He was too lazy to work, too lazy even to move! If ever he did manage a day’s work he would have to rest for three or four days afterward. Precisely because of this laziness, his father-in-law had thrown him out, along with his wife and children.

“Go and take a look if you like,” said Lihu. “He’s bound to be at home in bed as usual! He’s even too lazy to cook for himself. He’ll end up sleeping himself to death!”

As I walked along the narrow path I tried to make a connection between the “strong” Uncle A-Huang of my childhood memory and the “lazy” Uncle A-Huang of the present. I hoped to make full use of the cement of my imagination and deductive powers to build a bridge over the gap between the two in order to rationalize these extremes of industriousness and indolence. But soon, after giving it my best effort, I gave up this attempt at synthesis. Like a child’s game, the only way to make it possible would be to employ the strangest of weird logic.

The narrow path wound this way and that through the dense, shady forest of sky-scraping bamboos. As I walked alone my feelings were of gloom and oppressiveness. At the other end of the tunnel of bamboo I came to some small, terraced fields going down to the banks of the broad, dried-up bed of the Shuangxi River. From here one could just see, among a tangle of shrubs and trees beyond the fields, the eaves of a small, thatched house.

This must be A-Huang’s home.

As I got near to the house I was assailed by the stench of sun-baked shit and piss. A swarm of blowflies flew up like a buzzing cloud. Looking down, I saw a pile of excrement. But it was when I looked around that the real shock came: all over the ground was one black pile after another. As I walked forward, swarm after black swarm of blowflies flew up to reveal the brown piles underneath. All of them were piles of shit! Many of them had been baking in the sun so long that they had crumbled. Countless dung beetles, armored like ancient soldiers, were enthusiastically but awkwardly using both front and back legs to roll balls of excrement bigger than themselves off somewhere or other.

Two children were playing under an Indian cherry tree beside the house. The older one, a girl who held a piece of hemp thread attached to a dung beetle, stared at me with eyes wide in surprise. Above her upper lip hung two trails of thick, yellow snot. The dung beetle, clad so imposingly in military garb and in a bid to avoid extinction, was scrabbling uselessly at the earth. The girl’s little brother was sitting bare-bottomed on the ground beside a pile of excrement. Flustered by this impediment, the blowflies buzzed up and down, this way and that, round and round the boy, steadfastly refusing to leave altogether.

I had to be most assiduous about where I placed by my feet; the slightest lack of care might result in stepping in any one of the piles of excrement. At the door to the house a black dog was feigning sleep in the dappled sunlight and shade. When it saw me it clambered unsteadily to its feet. It was shriveled and gaunt, not much more than skin and bones. You could count every one of its ribs. It fixed its melancholy eyes on me for a moment, and then turned up its tail and slunk indoors, swaying like a drunkard.

I went through the low doorway. Inside it was very quiet, not the slightest sound to be heard. In this narrow, dark space, two joyless, luminous bodies glimmered in my direction. These were human eyes, and in the next instant I saw that they belonged to a woman. She seemed to be sitting on the floor, leaning sideways against a smoke-blackened bamboo pillar, until I realized she was on a squatting-stool so low and small that it was completely hidden under her rear end. Her face was like a pig’s; her eyes were the narrowest of slits, also like a pig’s; her thick lips and eyelids were even more like a pig’s; she appeared unthinking, her mind blank, again like a pig.

With great difficulty the woman moved the lower half of her body but remained sitting. Then I heard an age-worn, thin, but dignified voice coming from the bed at one side of the room.

“Who is it? What does he want?”

The bed, which was very low, was woven of mountain palm stems. On it lay a man carelessly enfolded in a filthy quilt. The sallow light that emanated from the two holes in his face signaled no greater interest in my unsolicited visit than had his questions. I recognized that look only too well, the kind of look that gathers every single thing that you value and includes it in its derision.

I had a terrible feeling about all of this. Naturally I no longer had any doubt as to the identity of the man on the bed—it was Uncle AHuang. And yet I looked him over as though I had chanced upon something incomprehensible. His posture and his tone had utterly confounded me. Perhaps trying to straighten out my own thoughts, I explained to him in a businesslike manner my particulars and the reason for my visit.

Uncle A-Huang listened coldly. I could not tell if my explanation had produced any reaction or not. He went on lying there for a while before listlessly raising himself up to a sitting position. As he did so, he grabbed a tobacco pipe, no longer than a chopstick, from beside his pillow.

With infuriatingly slow gestures he filled the pipe with tobacco from his tin. Then, with head slightly bowed and eyes staring vacantly at the floor, he smoked several pipefuls without making any sound other than the suck-suck-sucking of the pipe itself. That sound gave me such a strange feeling. In a world that was about to sink and perish forever, that sound, together with the flaring and fading glow in the pipe bowl, seemed to be the only sign of life!

A-Huang had grown extremely bloated, the skin stretched weakly over his body. Who on earth could believe that that skin had once been as taut as sheet iron? Under his eyes were great purple bags, as if two lumps of meat had been stuck there. Decadence and indolence had eaten deep into his flesh, like maggots.

For the first time I realized the futility of language. It would be useless to try to express an idea to a person who no longer hoped for anything at all from this world. This visit had turned out to be an impossible obligation.

“Uncle A-Huang,” I said, already lacking all conviction, “my kitchen still isn’t finished, you know!”

Only after a long, long time did A-Huang look up.

“I know,” he said languidly.

Still leaning against the bamboo pillar, the woman’s eyes were closed; now it was her mouth that was agape. She looked so very comfortable. Lying in the shadow of the wall, the black dog timidly raised its head to look up at me. Behind the woman the wok, burner, bowls, chopsticks, and other utensils lay in disorder where they had been tossed—desolate, cold, and still. Waft after waft of sour air brought the smells of mold and putrefaction to my nose, so that I almost suspected I was standing beside a midden.

I turned toward the door. The terraced fields lay before me like a simple diagram. And now the fields reminded me again of the Uncle A-Huang of my childhood, the young embodiment of “strength” who always got the chicken head. But the present A-Huang immediately negated the possibility of an equation between the two. Perhaps you could say it turned out to be an insoluble problem.

I glanced at him again. He still held the same pose, gripping his pipe with his head slightly bowed. But now I noticed a large, dark mole in the middle of his right eyebrow. The two or three hairs growing from the mole were very long and stretched down over his eye. Unbelievably, these hairs were trembling.

“Is it you that farms those fields, Uncle A-Huang?” I asked.

“Farm? What for?”

He got angry. He whacked his pipe bowl on the edge of the bed with a great bang.

“Haven’t I done enough? The more we work the poorer we get! I ain’t as big a fool as all that!”

He paused, then added: “Back in the day, everybody knew I was the one who ate the chicken head! But all that’s just useless! I won’t be no fool no more.”

As he spoke, his eyes lingered dazedly on the field ridges.

I stood by the bed for a while longer, but there seemed nothing more to say, so I said goodbye and went out. Only as I was going out through the door did I hear him add the words for which I had waited so long: “I’ll be there tomorrow!”

Outside, brother and sister each led a dung beetle along the ground in a race. Thrusting through cloud after cloud of blowflies, I didn’t stop until I reached the fields. I thought to myself that I might never have another opportunity to come here, nor did I have any intention of coming to this place a second time. Uncle A-Huang’s words, saturated as they were with frighteningly twisted sentiments, stuck uncomfortably in my mind, like a mass of indigestible food lying in my stomach. Everything about the place terrified me: the gloom, mess, and moldiness; the sour smell and putrefaction; the dung beetles; and the piles of shit everywhere. If a person lives for a long time among things that are regarded as unhealthy, might it not produce an abnormal psychology, just as bacteria can cause abnormalities in a person’s cell tissue? Was A-Huang not a perfect example?

Generally, no matter where we go in life, what we see and hear and read all combines to make us believe in the essential connectedness of hard work and riches on the one hand, and of indolence and poverty on the other. Linked to that is the contrast between the idleness and comfort of the rich and the hard work and harsh lives of the poor. This is how things must be, for everything to be right and proper and for people’s lives to be worth living.

But A-Huang, not only by the unequivocal curse he had uttered but even more so by his way of living—no! by his very life itself—had stood up courageously to deny this universal truth.