Soul Mountain Page 35

  In these dry areas the cotton plants have big red and yellow flowers, and the plants with strings of white flowers are sesame. Beneath the brilliant sun is an eerie loneliness and, strangely, no cicadas or frogs are to be heard.

  As I cycle on my shorts become soaked through and cling to my thighs, it would be good to cycle with them off. I can't help recalling the peasants I saw as a child working naked on the waterwheels, plying the big poles with their sun-tanned arms. When women passed by in the fields they would start singing ribald ditties but without bad intent, and when the women heard them they would just smile. The men sang simply to relieve themselves of their weariness, isn't this precisely the origin of such folk songs? This entire area is the home of work songs known as “gongs and drums in the reeds”. However waterwheels aren't used today and the irrigation machines are driven by electricity, so such sights are no longer to be seen.

  Although I know there is nothing to see at the site of the ancient capital of the Chu Kingdom, and that it will be a waste of time going, it is just a twenty kilometre return trip and I would regret not making a visit before leaving Jiangling. I disturb the afternoon nap of the young couple in charge of the archaeological station. They graduated just a year ago from university and have come here as wardens to keep watch over the expanse of ruins sleeping underground. It is not known when the excavation work is to commence. Perhaps it is because they have recently married and have never experienced such loneliness that they are so hospitable. The young wife pours me two bowls of a slightly bitter herbal infusion to dissipate the effects of the heat and the young man takes me onto a hill and points to a paddy field which has already been harvested and a high stretch of land at the side of the hill covered with cotton and sesame.

  “After Qin conquered the Kingdom of Chu,” the young man says, “no-one lived in the city of Ji'nan. No artefacts from after the Warring States period have been found, although tombs from the Warring States have been excavated in the city. The city would have been built in the middle period of the Warring States. Historical documents record that the capital had moved to Ying prior to the time of King Huai of Chu, so calculating from the time of King Huai of Chu, Ying was the capital of Chu for four hundred years. Of course some historians have a different view and argue that Ying was not located here. Whatever the case, our starting point is archaeological - while ploughing here peasants time and again have found numerous relics of pottery and bronze vessels dating from the Warring States period. If the site is excavated, it will really be quite spectacular.” He points in one direction. “When the great generals of Qin left Ying without any booty, they released the river waters into the capital. The capital had dams on three sides and the Zhu River flowed eastwards from the South Gate to the North Gate. On the east, this hill right underfoot was a lake extending to the Yangtze River. The Yangtze at the time was in the vicinity of Jingzhou city but now it has moved south almost two kilometres. On Ji Mountain up ahead are the graves of the Chu aristocracy. The Baling Mountains on the south contain the graves of successive generations of Chu kings but they have all been looted.”

  In the distance are some small undulating mounds, they are referred to as mountains in documents, so probably they once were.

  “This was originally the tower of the city gate,” he says pointing again to the stretch of paddy field by our feet. “When the river floods, there is a build up of at least ten millimetres of silt.”

  Quite right, because judging by the lie of the land, to borrow the archaeological term, the area underfoot is slightly higher than the fields stretching into the distance, if one doesn't count the earthen dykes in between them.

  “The south-east section had the palaces, the north was the market district, and the remains of smelting furnaces have been discovered in the south-west district. The positioning of the aqueducts in the south was high but these haven't been preserved as well as the ones in the north.”

  I nod in agreement and can roughly make out the outer city walls. If there was not this harsh glare of the noon sun and all the ghosts had crawled out, the night markets would no doubt be very lively.

  As we come down the slope he says we have just left the city. The lake of those times is now a small pond but lotus is growing in it and their pink flowers have emerged from the water in full bloom. When the Officer of the Three Wards, Qu Yuan, was driven from the palace gates he probably passed along the bottom of this slope and certainly would have plucked a lotus to wear in his belt. Before the lake shrank to this small pond the banks were covered with fragrant plants which he would have used to weave a hat. It was here, in this fertile water-rich land, that he gave vent to loud singing and left to posterity his peerless songs. Had he not been driven from the palace gates perhaps he might not have become the great poet.

  Similarly, if Li Bai had not been driven from the court of Emperor Xuanzong of the Tang Dynasty, he would probably not have become the immortal poet and there would not be the legend of his setting out in a boat while drunk and trying to scoop up the moon from the water. It is said that the spot where he drowned was at Coloured Rock Crag in the lower reaches of the Yangtze. The water has receded far from there and it is now a heavily silted-up sandbar. Even this ancient city of Jingzhou is now below the riverbed and if it were not for the big ten-metre-high dykes, it would long ago have become a palace of the Dragon King.

  I go on to Hunan Province, passing along the Miluo River in which Qu Yuan drowned himself. However, I do not go to the shores of Dongting Lake to retrace his footsteps because several ecologists I saw told me that of this eight-hundred-li stretch of water, only a third of what is on the maps now remains. They also predict with clinical coldness that at the present rate of silt accumulation and land reclamation, within twenty years the biggest freshwater lake in the country will vanish despite how it is drawn on maps.

  I wonder if little dogs still drown in the river in front of the peasant home in Lingling where my mother took me as a child to get away from the Japanese planes. Even to this day I can still see the dripping wet fur of the dog's corpse on the sandy shore. My mother also drowned. At the time she responded to the call and bravely volunteered to work on the farms to reform her thinking. She finished the night shift and went to the river to have a wash and at dawn her body was discovered. She was only thirty-nine. I have seen the commemorative volume, from when she was seventeen, with poems by her and a group of zealous youths who had taken part in the national salvation movement. Of course, their poems were not as great as Qu Yuan's.

  Her younger brother also drowned. I'm not sure whether it was because of youthful heroism or patriotic fervour that he took the examination for the airforce academy, but on the day his enrolment was accepted he was wild with joy and went swimming with a group of lads in the Gan River. When he dived off the plank which stretched out to the middle of the river into the rapid current, his so-called friends were busy dividing up the change he had left in his trouser pockets. Then, when they saw something was wrong, they all ran off. Perhaps it was a case of having brought disaster upon himself. He was just fifteen when he died and my maternal grandmother was devastated with grief.

  Her eldest son, my eldest maternal uncle, was not so patriotic. Although the scion of an old scholar gentry family, he did not go in for prostitutes or dog fighting and instead was keen on being modeng, at the time anything from overseas was modeng: the current translation for the word is “modern”. He used to wear a suit and tie and looked really fashionable for his time. His hobby was photography and back then the price for a camera was really “modern”. He took snapshots everywhere and developed them himself; he wasn't interested in being a journalist but photographed crickets. The photos he took of fighting crickets have been preserved to this day and were never burnt. However he died quite young from a chill. From what my mother told me, he was starting to get better then after greedily eating a bowl of fried rice with eggs, his illness flared up and he died. His fondness for the modern was useless for he didn'
t know about modern medicine.

  My maternal grandmother died after my mother. Compared with the early deaths of her children, she may be considered as having lived a long life, having outlived all her children. She died in an institution for the solitary aged. Not being a Miao descendant of the Chu people, undeterred by the heat, I have paid homage to the ancient capital of the Chu kings, so there is no reason for me not to look for the resting place of my maternal grandmother who took me by the hand to buy a spinning top at the Palace Facing Heaven Temple market. I heard of her death from my paternal aunt. This aunt did not live a full lifespan and is also dead. How is it that my relatives are all dead people? I really don't know whether it is I who have grown old or it is the world which is too old.

  When I think about it now, my maternal grandmother was like a person from another world. She believed in ghosts and spirits and was terrified of going to Hell so she always tried to accumulate virtue in her life in the hope that she would be rewarded in the next world. She was widowed young, then when my maternal grandfather died and left some property there was always a crowd of spirit mediums milling around her like flies. They colluded to urge her to give up her wealth so that her wishes would be granted and got her to throw silver coins into the well at night. In fact they had put a wire sieve into the bottom of the well and the silver she threw in was scooped into their purses. When they all got drunk they let out what they'd done and it became a big joke. Finally she was reduced to selling off all the houses and was left with only a bag of deeds to fields which had been leased out many years before and she and her daughter lived off these. Afterwards, when they heard about the land reforms, my mother remembered the deeds and got grandmother to immediately rummage through her trunk. They found the bundle wrapped in wrinkled yellow backing-paper and the cotton-paper used for pasting on windows. Mortified, they hastily stuffed these into the stove and burnt them.

  This maternal grandmother of mine had a violent temper and when she spoke with people it sounded as if she were arguing with them. She didn't get on with my mother. When she was about to leave for her old home she said she would wait for this grandson of hers, me, to grow up into the best scholar in the country and bring her back in a car so that he could care for her in her old age. However, she was not to know that this grandson of hers did not have what it required to be an official and, without even having sat in any office in the capital, was sent to undergo thought reform by working in the fields in the countryside. It was during this period that she died in an institution for the solitary aged. In those chaotic years, no-one knew whether she was alive or dead. By pretending to have revolutionary contacts my younger brother was able to travel free on the trains and he made a special trip to search for her. He asked at several old peoples' institutions, but they said they didn't have such a person. They then asked him instead: Is she in an institution for the venerable aged or one for the solitary aged? My brother then asked how these were different. They said harshly: Institutions for the venerable aged are for the aged without class origin problems and who have unblemished personal histories. People with class origin or personal history problems, or who can't be properly classified, are sent to institutions for the solitary aged. He then telephoned an institution for the solitary aged. An even harsher voice asked: What relationship do you have with her? Why are you making enquiries about her? At the time my younger brother was fresh out of college and wasn't yet drawing a wage to feed himself; he was afraid of having his city residence permit cancelled so he quickly put down the phone. A few years later, the academic institutions implemented military instruction. Organizations and colleges came under military supervision and people discontented with their lot all became contented. My paternal aunt had just come back to work in the city after undergoing reform in the countryside and wrote that she heard my grandmother had died two years earlier.

  I eventually find out that there is in fact this institution for the solitary aged ten kilometres away at a place in the suburbs called Peach Blossom Village. After cycling in the blazing sun for an hour or so, I come across a courtyard complex with a sign saying “home for the aged”. It is next to a timber factory and there is not a single peach tree in sight. The complex consists of several two-storey buildings, but I don't see any old people. Perhaps they are more sensitive to the heat and have all gone back to their rooms to rest where it is cooler.

  I find an office with the door open. The cadre, in a singlet with his feet crossed on the table and leaning back in a cane chair, is engrossed reading the news. I ask if this was the institution for the solitary aged during the years my grandmother was in such a place.

  He puts down his newspaper and says, “It's all changed again, today there are no institutions for the solitary aged, they are all called homes for the aged.”

  I don't question if there are still institutions for the venerable aged but simply ask him to check if such and such an old person who was already dead had once lived here. He is easy to talk to and without asking me for identification papers takes out the register of the deceased, looks up the years, stops at a page, and asks me the name of the deceased again.

  “Female?”

  “Yes,” I confirm.

  He pushes the register over so that I can have a look. It is clearly my maternal grandmother's name, and the age tallies.

  “She has been dead for ten years,” he says with a sigh.

  “Yes,” I reply. “Have you been working here all this time?”

  He nods to affirm that he has and I then ask if he remembers what the deceased looked like.

  “Let me think.” He leans back to rest his head on the back of the chair. “Was she a short thin old woman?”

  I nod, but then I recall from the old photograph hanging at home that she was a very plump old woman. It was a photograph taken some decades earlier and it showed me by her side playing with a top. After that she probably didn't have any photos taken. With the passing of a few decades people can change completely in appearance even though their bone structure does not change. My mother was quite short so my grandmother couldn't have been very tall.

  “When she spoke did she always shout?”

  There are few old women of her age who don't shout when they talk but what is important is that the name is correct.

  “Did she ever mention she had two maternal grandchildren?” I ask.

  “You are her maternal grandson?”

  “Yes.”

  He nods and says, “I think she mentioned that she had grandchildren.”

  “Did she ever say they would come and fetch her?”

  “Yes, she did.”

  “But at the time I was in the countryside.”

  “It was the Cultural Revolution,” he explains on my behalf. “She died of natural causes.”

  I do not ask how those who did not die of natural causes died but simply ask where she is buried.

  “She was cremated. Everyone is cremated. It's not just the old people in homes for the aged, even when we die we will be cremated.”

  “The cities are over-populated, there's no room for the dead,” I bring the conversation to an end for him, then ask, “Have you kept her ashes?”

  “It's been dealt with. The people here are all old people without relatives, their ashes are dealt with together.”

  “Is there a common grave?”

  “Er . . .” he thinks about how he can reply.

  It is this unfilial grandson who is to blame, and not him, the only thing I can do is to thank him.

  I come out of the home for the aged, get on my bicycle, and think to myself that even if there is a communal grave it will in future not be of archaeological significance. Nevertheless, I have finally visited my deceased maternal grandmother who once bought me a spinning top.

  You are always searching for your childhood and it’s becoming an obsession. You want to visit each of the places you stayed during your childhood, the houses, courtyards, streets and lanes of your memory.

  Y
our home was once upstairs in a small solitary building on a vacant lot with a big pile of rubble at the front: the building that once stood there had been destroyed by a bomb or a fire and had never been rebuilt. Green bristlegrass grew in the rubble and broken walls, and crickets could often be found when the broken tiles and bricks were turned over. There was a very clever type of cricket called Black Satin Cream and when their shiny ink-black wings vibrated they made a clear, resonating sound. There was also another kind called Locust which had a big body and a big mouth and was good at fighting. As a child you had a wonderful time on that rubble heap.

  You also recall that you once lived in a courtyard compound which went a long way inside. It had a big heavy black door at the entrance and you had to stand on your toes to get to the metal ring-latch. When the door was opened you had to go around a carved screen. The horns and the heads of the stone unicorns on each side of the screen were shiny because children would touch them whenever they came in or out. Behind the carved screen was a damp and mossy courtyard onto which water was regularly thrown out, so if you were not careful you would slip and fall. You had a pair of albino rabbits at the time. One was savaged in the wire cage by a yellow weasel and later on the other one also disappeared. Days later, when you went to play in the back courtyard, you discovered it had drowned in the urine pot and its once white fur was now stained and dirty. You looked at it for a long time but from then on, as far as you can remember, you did not go into the back courtyard again.