Read an Excerpt

Ruined City

A Novel

UNIVERSITY OF OKLAHOMA PRESS

Copyright © 2016 Jia Pingwa

All rights reserved.

ISBN: 978-0-8061-5489-3

CHAPTER 1

SOMETHING STRANGE OCCURRED in the city of Xijing in the 1980s: When two devoted friends in search of a little recreation visited the tomb of the Tang concubine Yang Yuhuan, known as Guifei, the Imperial Consort, they wondered why so many visitors were scooping up gravesite dirt. They were told that since Guifei was known as an ageless beauty, if they took dirt from her grave and mixed it into their potted plants, the flowers would grow bright and beautiful. So the friends scooped up handfuls of dirt, took it home in their clothing, put it in a black earthenware pot they had kept for years, and left it there until they could purchase some fine flower seeds. Imagine their surprise when green sprouts broke through the surface a few days later, and within a month had spurted almost magically into a flourishing growth the likes of which no one had ever seen. They carried it into town to ask an old flower expert at the Yunhuang Temple what they had. He did not know. It so happened that Abbot Zhixiang was passing by at that moment, so they asked him. He just shook his head.

One of the men said, "I often hear people say that the abbot can divine the future by using the Eight Taoist Trigrams. Can you tell us how many shoots this flower will produce?"

The abbot told the second man to select a word.

Since he was holding gardening shears, he casually tossed off the word "ear."

The abbot said, "This is a unique flower that will bloom on four stems, but it will be short-lived."

The plant grew as predicted: the flowers looked a bit like peonies and a bit like roses, and of the four stems, one was red, one was yellow, one was white, one was purple, and all four exuded exquisite charm. Once word got out, people flocked to admire the flowers, and they left sighing in amazement. The friends were understandably pleased, one especially, who so cherished the rare plant that he placed it on his desk, as if to enshrine it, assiduously watering it and adding plant food, never stinting in his attentions. But after an evening of heavy drinking, he got up in the middle of the night and, feeling a need to water the plant, carelessly picked up a hot water bottle and killed it. Devastated by what he had done, he smashed the pot, after which he fell ill and was sick for a month.

Since this unusual incident revolved around a simple potted plant, it was not widely known, and was quickly supplanted by other news. But every resident of Xijing experienced an even stranger incident that summer, one that occurred at noon on the seventh day of the sixth lunar month, when a red sun shone brightly in the sky. The virtue of the sun is that people tend to ignore it when it shines, so no one in the city gazed skyward. The streets were no different than they were on any other day: ranking officials rode in chauffeured sedans, while people of means but no high position, unwilling to squeeze onto crowded buses, flaunted their money and climbed into taxis. It so happened that a VIP came to town in a caravan of police cars, sirens blaring as they forced private cars, taxis, and buses to slow down and move out of the way, and wreaking havoc on the flow of bicycle traffic. Unaffected pedestrians stepped on each other's shadow, but caused neither pain nor injury. As the shadows went from dark to light, they grew shorter, until they disappeared, seemingly in an instant. Bereft of shadows to drag behind them, the people stopped being people, or so it appeared, and reached behind them, looking doubtful. Someone gazed into the sky and cheered, "Look, there are four suns in the sky!" Everyone turned to look, and, yes, there were indeed four suns, all the same size, each one indistinguishable from the others, clustered in a "T" formation. In the past, the city had experienced both a lunar and a solar eclipse, but never four suns at the same time. People thought their eyes must be playing tricks on them. Another look and the sun had turned from red to white, bright as a flare. White like I don't know what. Then nothing. We cannot see in pitch darkness, but is that also the case when it is blinding bright? Not daring to start their cars or buses, some people honked their horns; others ran around as if they were not out on the street but were watching a movie when the film breaks and the screen goes blank, leaving only the soundtrack moving forward. If one person felt that way, just about everyone did, and they fell silent, deathly quiet, all but a man atop a wall who wanted to play one final note on a flute called the xun, but lacked the strength, like a gust of wind bouncing off a wall and disappearing. Mocking laughter greeted the flute player, and that reminded them where they were; suddenly unnerved by the silence, they screamed. Many fell into a state of absolute madness.

The bizarre situation lasted for about half an hour, until the four suns merged into one. When the people once again saw their shadows, they exchanged embarrassed looks and scattered. The confusion that followed occurred without a single traffic policeman in sight. An old man sat peacefully on a safety island. Dirty and unkempt, with a long face, he coolly observed the chaos around him. It was a look that people found so disturbing, so irritating, they wanted to call a policeman. But they did not see one anywhere, not until one named Su ran up, adjusting his helmet, and shouted at the beggar, "Pi! Fuck off!" using the coarsest term in the Xijing lexicon.

The old beggar responded by writing something on the pedestrian island with his finger. What he wrote was the single elegant, ancient character "Bi." In other words, Off you go! A smile spread across his face, eliciting raucous laughter from people who took note of what he was wearing as he stepped down off the island. His clothes had been fashioned out of a silk banner presented to the Yunhuang Temple by devout pilgrims. On his chest were the embroidered words "Every Wish," while the seat of his trousers, which were split up the middle and crudely sewn, sported two more characters: the left side of his buttocks read "Is," the right side read "Granted." The old fellow, exhibiting no sense of shame, opened his mouth and treated his audience to a bit of doggerel.

In the days and weeks that followed, it made the rounds in the city, and here is how it went:

One class of people is on the public weal, a life of leisure they proudly reveal.

A second class uses the wealth of others, and enjoys the protection of powerful brothers.

A third class contracts for large amounts, charging wasteful spending to expense accounts.

A fourth class lives on profits from rents, sitting at home to count dollars and cents.

A fifth class, the judges, whose courtrooms are used, profit from both accuser and accused.

A sixth class wields a surgical blade, filling pockets with cash from their trade.

A seventh class, actors on the stage, by comic routines make a tidy wage.

An eighth class, propaganda shills, turn slogans and chants into cashable bills.

A ninth class teaches in our schools, but where luxury is concerned are impoverished tools.

Society's masters stand high on the tenth rung, earnestly studying the life of Lei Feng.

After this began to circulate, people doubted that he was a beggar at all. At the very least, he must have been a teacher, they declared, since only a teacher could have managed to compose rhymes of that caliber, especially ones that mercilessly attack the first few classes of people yet expose the hardships of teachers. But that was just a guess. No one cared to probe further. In that year, as it turned out, Xijing welcomed a new mayor, a man from Shanghai who had married a Xijing native. For more than a dozen years, each of his predecessors had intended to make improvements in the old city, but after encountering daunting obstacles, they accomplished little and left office like flowing water. The new mayor had misgivings about taking office in his father-in-law's hometown, but as a public official, he had no say in where he was assigned. The question of where to start, what to tackle, arose on his first day in office. Fortunately, he had a wife who brought qualified friends and relatives on board as her husband's advisors. One of them, a young man named Huang Defu, offered a bold proposal. As the seat of government, a city that had seen twelve dynasties come and go, its cultural heritage was both its capital and its burden. Local officials and residents were mired in conservative thinking, which was why Xijing lagged behind coastal cities when it came to long-term economic development. The past few mayors had taken on too much, and because industry had stagnated and urban construction was deeply in debt, even hard work yielded meager results. Turnover was another problem, with each administration forced to leave office after no more than five years; such dramatic changes in personnel were a hindrance to long-term planning. Instead of continuing down the same path, he suggested, it would be better to adopt a new approach, one ignored by others: cultural development and tourism; that, in the short term, at least, would produce results. Inspired by this proposal, the new mayor, who was in no way ashamed to learn from subordinates, interviewed the young man for three days, after which arrangements were made for him to be transferred out of his teaching position to serve as the mayor's personal secretary. The mayor wasted no time in seeking appropriations from the central government, at the same time that he was amassing local funding in support of a project of unprecedented scope; it included refurbishing the city wall, dredging the moat around it, and building an amusement park, rich in local color, on the banks of the moat. He also rebuilt three city avenues: One with Tang dynasty architecture was designed for the sale of books, art, and porcelain. On a second avenue, styled after the Song dynasty, local and provincial snacks were sold. Local handicrafts, folk art, and specialty products were available on the third avenue, which boasted a mixture of Ming and Qing architecture. Unfortunately, the influx of outsiders introduced by the tourism industry had a negative impact on public safety, and people began referring to Xijing as a city of thieves, drug dealers, and prostitutes. This development bred a new form of disquiet among the local population. So when the unkempt old man appeared to entertain people with his doggerel, he was followed by a ragtag crowd of idlers, who shouted encouragingly: "Another verse, give us another one!" And so he did, two, in fact:

If I say you're all right, you're all right, whether you are or not.

If I say you're not all right, you're not all right, even if you are.

His listeners clapped their approval. Although the old man had not said who the target of his doggerel might be, they had no trouble figuring that out on their own. As it sped through the city, Huang Defu naturally got wind of it and placed a phone call to the police, ordering them to stop the old man from spreading rumors about the mayor. When he was taken into custody, they learned that over the past decade he had lodged repeated complaints with the government. Why? It turned out that ten years before, he had been a private schoolteacher whose principal unfairly kept him from being transferred to a public school. His appeal to the provincial authorities had been unsuccessful. So he had taken up residence in Xijing and appeared outside government offices on a regular basis to lodge complaints, both oral and written, and stage sit-ins. In the end, seeing no way forward and no way out, he'd begun to lose contact with reality and stopped lodging complaints. But instead of returning to his home, he wandered the streets. Since he had done nothing illegal, after ten days in custody the police put him in a car and dropped him off three hundred li from town. He was back within days, this time with a beat-up handcart, which he pushed up streets and down lanes as a junkman, regularly surrounded by idlers who wanted more of his doggerel. This time he declined, limiting his utterances to loud, long shouts of "Junkman! Collecting junk and scraps!" His voice was heard on the street every day, early and late. The other commonly heard sound came from the flute player atop the city wall. One resembled the howl of a beast, the other the moan of ghosts, two sounds echoing back and forth and drawing cries from hundreds and thousands of birds nesting in the bell and drum towers.

On this day, after pulling his iron-wheeled handcart around town for hours without picking up a single piece of scrap, the old man went to the square in front of the Yunhuang Temple to watch the qigong masters teach breathing exercises. When he spotted people crowding around a fortuneteller in front of a low wall, he walked over to see what the coming year might bring for him. "Old-timer," people said, "this diviner is a master from Mount Emei who predicts major events. He doesn't have time to worry about little people and their future." They elbowed him out of the way.

The taunts turned the old man's face bright red. Just then it started to rain, large drops that beat a tattoo on the earth, like coins falling from heaven, sending a cloud of dust into the air and turning the ground soggy, with bubbles forming and popping up here and there. The crowd dispersed. "A timely rain," the old man said as he abandoned his cart and ran to the temple gate, where he stood under the flagpole to keep dry. Either because he was bored or because his throat itched, he sang his doggerel at the top of his lungs.

He did not know that Abbot Zhixiang, who was sitting inside, heard him singing. Just inside the temple gate stood an unusual rock; most of the time it was nothing special, just a rock, but in inclement weather, the graphic outline of a dragon appeared on it. With the rain still falling, Abbot Zhixiang went out to look at the rock and listen to the words being sung: "... the officials get rich, the vendors prosper, the poor move aside ..." He was lost in thought when a thunderclap sent an explosive rumble down onto the gate. He looked up and saw seven crisscrossing rainbows in the western sky, and was reminded of the day that the four suns had appeared in the sky. The thought occurred to him that something unusual was once again about to occur in Xijing. His prediction was confirmed the following day, when he heard on the radio that a relic of Sakyamuni had been discovered in the Temple of the Dharma Gate, no more than two hundred li from Xijing. The discovery of the Buddha's bone had rocked the mundane world, and that night, as the abbot sat in his meditation room, he had an epiphany. "These days," he muttered, "there are hardly any wolves, vermin, tigers, or panthers still in the world, for they have all been reincarnated as human beings. That is the source of so much evil. Meanwhile, great numbers of qigong masters and people with odd talents have arrived in Xijing in recent years. Maybe the heavens sent them to save humanity." The Yunhuang Temple had its own magical powers. With so many second-rate qigong masters and unique individuals coming down from the mountains, he could make a contribution. So he posted a flyer to announce that he was starting a qigong class in the temple, taking on students who wanted to learn elements of the exercise.

He held three sessions, each of them attended by a student named Meng Yunfang, who worked at the Research Institute of Culture and History and found little that did not interest him. Seven years earlier, a fad had swept the city prescribing red tea fungus as a cure-all and health tonic. Not only did he turn his home into a laboratory filled with vials of red fungus, he gave the stuff away all over the neighborhood, and in the process met a tea aficionado. He wound up marrying her. Husband and wife soon after took up the laying on of hands, which they believed was a stronger cure-all than red tea fungus. That lasted six months, until the next fad came along — vinegar eggs. A drink made of chicken blood followed that, and like all the others, it caught their fancy. Unfortunately, the chicken blood produced an undesirable side effect: the wife's pubic hair fell out. None of the doctors could help, so when she learned that a neighbor had a secret remedy handed down from his ancestors, she sought it out. It did the trick, as the hair began to grow back. That particular neighbor, a year older than Meng Yunfang, was a former mahjong partner. When they met on the street one day, he greeted his benefactor with a cordial nod, only to be repaid with a short laugh. He went out and bought an expensive gift, telling his wife, "Since he fixed your problem, you can thank him with this." She returned from delivering the gift in high spirits, only to find a letter from her husband demanding a divorce. "Please sign this divorce decree," it said. "You are my wife, which means you are clothed in the presence of your father and naked in the presence of your husband. Whoever heard of a wife letting a perfect stranger see her privates?"