Under Fishbone Clouds (25 page)

5

1949 THE YEAR OF THE OX

If you have never lived in the fields, taking part in the sowing and tending and trading and planting and weeding and knitting and weaving and milling and kneading and chopping and baking and tilling and ploughing, all before the sun sizzles down like a broken egg yolk over the hills; if you have never felt that the only solace in life was the hope of a few hours’ rest, children, grandchildren, and a painless death; if you have never measured the borders of your world with a stretch of river, the shadows of a forest or a few sun-furrowed faces from the only village you have ever visited, then you would not understand. But wait – whenever I try to tell a story like this to the Jade Emperor, he stamps his feet, on the verge of one of his tantrums. Which you do not want to see – trust me. Anyway, he always tells me that we can imagine anything, and that everything is connected. So I’d better suspend my scepticism and start this bit again.

It seems to me that many of our greatest poets, such as Bai Juyi, Du Fu and Qu Yuan (not that I like to name-drop, but I do know most of them pretty well), seemed to share a knack for falling out of favour. Now, when driven across the continent on an emperor’s whim, in exile or in some humiliatingly distant official posting, these ancient poets would slowly disappear into their verses, their bodies fading until all that remained were their words, loose
couplets
marking their paths in place of footsteps.

Those were the verses that Yuying had learnt by heart and recited to herself back when she was still her father’s favourite, back when she was still a student and being offered the privileged position of translator for one of the units of the then resplendent Japanese army. Now, once again, she muttered the rhymes under her breath as she squatted in the turned earth, her muddy hands gripping a rusty trowel. And where once the poems had seemed surreal,
strange and giddily romantic to her, they now seemed hard, crisp, unyielding. The scrunch of leaves underfoot; lone, soaring birds; abandoned temples, empty villages; moonlight seeping under doors and through the cracks in walls or reflected in the swell of a river – all of these images had become entwined with her new home, with the endless stretch of empty land on either side. Yuying clung to the old verses to make her new life seem more bearable, to try and slough off her loneliness and regret. She told herself she was not the only one. In the most minute of details, the poets seemed to have found the truth about the whole world; inside the slightest of prized-open atoms, there are whole universes.

Yuying searched for a similar clarity, a way of taming her strange surroundings by making them surrender to her scrutiny. As she worked, she guessed the names of the weeds and flowers, pulled up alike, for both were of little use if they could not be eaten. She felt the second baby kick in her stomach and fought off a smile, moving to the next row of the short field. Jinyi was searching for firewood, his aunt boiling up ancient stock in the kitchen, his uncle out of sight on the other side of the house.

The walls were scuffed wooden slats over a pounded earth
foundation
. Across the windows were wind-thwacked sheets of paper. The first thing Yuying had looked for after they arrived was the tiny niche in the front wall, which held a small clay bowl. She was happy to have found it, but also surprised at herself. You were not so superstitious as a child, she told herself, though she was not sure whether that was true or not. A little rice wine – the kind with a warm, shivery bite – floated in the bowl, a thin layer of recent dust and ash settled on the top. It was an offering for the God of Heaven and Hell, for
appeasement
or atonement, a prayer for constancy in times of irreversible change. Even the garden birds stayed away from it, though this may have had more to do with the acidic punch of the liquor than their fear of a spiteful and unpredictable deity.

The house was divided into three rooms, the smallest of which Yuying and Jinyi slept in, huddled together on stone slabs covered with mangy furs. It used to belong to Jinyi’s cousin, but they found it was best not to mention him to the elderly couple; he had been conscripted by the Communists during the war against the Japanese, and had not been heard from since. The room was sticky and prickly in the summer and draughty and damp the rest
of the year. Despite the fact that the floors were swept at least five times a day, they were always dusty from the thick desert winds that swept in from the west. The winds also carried curses, but everyone was so busy preparing for the approaching birth that they did not pay them much attention.

The nearest house took almost half an hour to walk to. The midwife, whose visits were getting ever more frequent, travelled almost twice that to reach them. She was hare-lipped and stocky, her head broad and doughy, and the pushy manner in which she took to her vocation suggested that she had entered it only in penance for the accident of her own birth. She poked and prodded Yuying with her wrinkled fingers, clucked and tutted as if she had never seen a poorer excuse for a would-be mother. Her advice rang in Yuying’s ears, and as she worked she heard her hectoring tone again and again:

‘You stay this thin and the child will be a scrawny little wretch. Remember what I said? More carrots and tofu if you want a boy, which I’m sure you do, because only a fool would pray for a girl. For heaven’s sake, don’t rub your belly like that, or you’ll end up with a spoilt little brat! Don’t they teach you anything in the city?’

Yuying ran a hand over the stretched flesh of her blossoming stomach, then set back to work.

The days began to merge into one for Yuying as summer approached; yet they also managed to be both monotonous and to introduce new petty humiliations.

‘You’ve got bags under your eyes, both of you,’ Auntie Hou would say, without a trace of emotion in her voice.

‘The sun’s coming up early now, so you’d better be ready in the morning. Can’t be frittering away your time, or all our work will go to waste,’ Old Hou would add. This was the usual extent of the conversation at dinner, a few undercooked vegetables and pancakes made from sweet-potato flour.

As she watched Yuying grind the flour with the dirty and
misshapen
millstone, Auntie Hou moaned, shaking her head, ‘Been here more than a year, and don’t know what you’re doing! I’ll only show you this one last time, all right? Better be careful with that baby in you too, or the hungry ghosts will get you both,’

‘Yes, I’ll just –’

‘You’re sagging round the sides, girl. What are you, eighteen or eight, eh? Push into it, there you go, and turn. My gods!’

This is how we measure ourselves, Yuying thought, her haunches tense and pressed against the wind – by finding out what we cannot do, by finding out who we are not. She looked at Auntie Hou, still shaking her head as she walked back towards the kitchen, and
studied
the bruises on the old woman’s face and neck. Some nights she and Jinyi would lie silent on their stone bed while Old Hou shouted in the next room, his voice loud and raw, making no effort to hide his half-cut rage. Then would come the sound of his fist or belt meeting her flesh, though they never once heard her cry out. This is the
difference
between here and home, Yuying thought. Bruises here were worn like birthmarks, the simplest bare facts of flesh. People were proud of their calluses and blisters, and took their beatings as if they had earnt them. Yuying stopped turning the wheel for the briefest of moments, to send her prayers on the frayed winds that the war would soon finish and they could both go home.

When neighbours passed to barter and discuss the crops, Yuying would slow her work, tilt her head and listen to the voices.

‘The hardest in years, I’d say …’

‘… devils in the fields, messing with the soil …’

‘… a dry one again … longest in memory …’

‘… one hundred days of mourning…’

‘… well, we got through the others, we’ll get through this one…’

‘… so what about your son, any grandchildren yet? And if not, why not, not that I mean to pry of course…’

In all these voices she registered a throaty rattle like the
crackling
of logs on a fire, the dry throb of the oesophagus, and the way every sentence seemed to end with an assertion. They have learnt the land, she thought, so that they know it as well as they know the touch of their wives or the nails on their fingers. They will never know books or teahouses, mooncakes or servants. Where has he brought me?

As the season stilled into warmth, a herd of oxen was driven past the bottom of their field, and Yuying could not believe that she was not dreaming them up from a distant art class, from a trail of
black ink dipping through misty mountain passes. She wanted to run and point them out to her husband; she wanted to feel as she had felt as a child, awed by the smallest details that everyone else took for granted. She wanted to take Jinyi’s hand and watch them together, the slow and cumbersome sweaty creatures, swatting at fleas with their stubbed and effete tails, their heads swaying as they lolloped onward. She could imagine the feel of their breath, warm and musty and cloying, but did not dare move any closer, instead letting them haphazardly drift away, wet muzzles pressed against the furry side of the animal in front.

Jinyi heard a soft, guttural low from the other side of the house, and turned for a second to watch them. They were probably work animals, he thought, prices dropped because of the war and half of them riddled with disease, being hurried to market; or else the crafty oxman was looking to let them nibble from someone else’s land. Jinyi shook his head, thinking about the things he could do with a couple of oxen and a bit of land. He heard his wife’s
footsteps
, and set back to work.

‘I can feel him turning, trying to get comfortable. He’s shifting his bulk, as if he’s not quite sure of his body,’ Yuying said to Jinyi that night.

‘What does that mean? If you have a body, you’re sure of it. If not, then you must be some kind of ghost. If you feel aches or pain, that just tells you you’re alive, and you should be thankful for that. It’s when you don’t feel anything that you ought to worry,’ Jinyi said, rolling over on the ancient animal skins that smelt of many generations of sweat.