"Thunder?" I hear myself ask.
Hey, thunder god, is that you? Deafening, blinding noise.
Only then do I see the brown smoke curling slowly over the opposite ridge. What is it? "Over there," we call to one another and scramble down the wobbly scaffold.
At last, a special event to make up for the tedium. The outside laborers, having blasted open an underground tomb, are running in all directions. As if transfixed by evil magic, the men gaze from afar at the rumbling black vault with its eerie glow.
Few people take themselves less seriously than the membership of our little group. Valor wells up in me, for I have nothing to lose, and in spite of the presence of a strange, vile smell, I leap inside. There I see the sleeping lion.
It has been blown onto its side and lies among fragments of coffin planks, but I am awestruck. Heavy and icy, the brass green manifests an ageless deep sleep. The long day we once cursed has now become so short and abrupt that we lose all sense of time.
Vessels and pots are also strewn about. Neither Old Wu nor I turn them over, so completely are we seized by the simplicity and majesty of this sleeping lion.
We have stumbled into the Bronze Age!
It is all I can do to keep from shouting. The resident expert has yet to speak. He covers his nose with his hand, frowning, thinking, as history rests quietly, waiting for his verdict.
Western Xia, Yin, Shang? Spring and Autumn period, Warring States? Each fabulously distant and remarkable.
"A Han grave," Old Wu announces solemnly.
I breathe a heartfelt sigh and bend respectfully toward the sleeping brass lion, only to hear Old Wu rebuke me: "Don't touch it!"
I withdraw my hand, sobered by the singular wonder of this event.
"What does it mean?" he asks.
From deep in my pant pocket, I pull out a watch with a cracked crystal.
"Ten oh-three. Note this time." Old Wu is quite solemn.
But reality drags us back to the present.
Master mason Yellow Hair is shouting at us from the opposite slope. The Farm Headquarters boss may be on patrol, and though it puts a damper on things, we had best not linger. In any case, it is nearly quitting time. We slip back to camp.
Old Wu isn't old, nor does the five indicate that he is the fifth child. His name is Wu, and he is my age. Next to him, everyone appears a head shorter-of course, I am referring to physical stature. In terms of intelligence, I'd venture to say he surpasses us by more than a head. He is very bright-in astronomy, geography; in matters foreign or domestic. Everyone can benefit from his instruction. And those who refuse to believe him-someone like me, for instance-can never get him to change his side. In any event, here in the wilderness, where there are neither sages nor scholars, there is little harm in listening.
"How can you be so sure it's Han?" I have to ask.
"Aiiii-some ancestor of the Yellow Emperor you turn out to be! The Bronze Age did not achieve aesthetic perfection until the Han. Everything declines when it reaches its peak-" He is about to elaborate.
"Shhhh. Do you want to lose your head? There can be absolutely no casual talk about peaks." [4]
"Yes, yes." Ever vigilant, he agrees that his choice of words was imprudent; then, glancing about, he begins again. "After the Bronze Age, stone was the vogue, up until Wei and Jin, when stone carvings reached their, uh-you know what. The Tang had three-color glazes, as did the Song."
I earnestly accept the wisdom imparted from his lips. Still, I don't think I'm stupid, and I read a fair amount in my spare time. I cannot help being skeptical. The Han was a remarkable dynasty, but back in those days Hainan lay beyond Chinese cultural influence. Of the earlier generations who traveled to the edges of the Celestial Kingdom, I knew only of Li Deyu of the Tang, Su Dongpo of the Song, and Huang Daopo of the Yuan. And the Hainan native Hai Rui did not appear until the Ming.
"Not true," he says. "There was also the illustrious Madame Xi, the female warrior of the Northern and Southern dynasties."
Maybe so, but the distance between the Northern and Southern dynasties and the Han is the thickness of Tales of the Three Kingdoms-all 120 chapters' worth!
He persists in his rebuttals. "Although Emperor Han Wudi lacked for literary talent, when it came to military prowess, he lacked for naught. Under heaven, no spot was unclaimed by this emperor; from shore to shore, no prince failed to pay fealty." Observing that I refuse to alter my foolish notions, he points out with some irony the absurdity of my logic: why must I always think of history in terms of famous people? Those old bones, whether of a local tyrant or evil gentry-had to be a dull fellow. Don't hope to find his chronicle in the annals of officialdom, published or otherwise. Number Five certainly deserves his reputation. I ponder a while longer, then relax.
This round of academic contention brings out other emotions in me. Our nation is indeed amazing. Any ancestral grave one treads upon can be traced back hundreds of generations. Take the thatched hut we live in, for example; six or seven thousand years ago, the people of Banpo village built their huts in the very same style-a civilization ancient enough to make one sigh in wonder.
The scaffolding shakes, and we are quiet. But the person who shows up turns out to be Yellow Hair. One of our own. He drops the weighted plumb line over the corner of the wall, then squints down and swears, using all his might to pry off one stone that protrudes prominently from the others.
If Yellow Hair has it in for Old Wu, it is because the latter is a loafer. And really, given half a chance to loaf, who wouldn't take it? When it's almost time for the bell to ring, there seems little point in being so diligent. It is not as if this structure will someday house people; it is going to be a meeting hall. We will continue to live in thatched huts. And while no one can dispute the fact that meetings are more important than sleep, on the other hand, there seems little danger that a column will come crashing down in the midst of a struggle session on account of a misplaced stone. This job is appropriate compensation for Old Wu, I kid him, because he has for years written political essays, beautiful works that he recites with great verve. A bit of Marx, Engels, Stalin, and Mao; of landlords, wealthy peasants, reactionaries, bad elements, and rightists-there is something in his speeches for everyone, and so naturally his audience resounds with animated shouts of support. After each meeting, he routinely crumples the perfectly crafted manuscript into a ball, which he tosses atop his mosquito netting to await appropriate use the next time he visits the pit that serves as the gentlemen's lavatory.
Old Wu has grown indignant, and in order to avoid a quarrel, I try to tell Yellow Hair that we weren't in the mood for work a moment ago, which is why the stone was not in place. Yellow Hair' eyes widen. Before I can finish my sentence, he takes hold of the rope on which the pipes are hung and slithers to the ground.
Yellow Hair is, of course, also a nickname. His hair is a yellow ish brown. We have yet to learn if this is a genetic trait that has been passed down over the years or evidence that he offended his ancestors. In fact, he is of pure Chinese extraction, last in the line of several generations of master masons. Even after traveling to the South Seas, he was not able to cast off his legacy, for he became the master mason of our construction group.
The bell rings. Still no sight of Yellow Hair on the opposite slope. Strange. Then, in a moment, he arrives with a face as black as india ink and, out of the blue, begins swearing: "Are you playing games with me? Just watch me plaster your mouth shut with a bucketful of mortar!"
What has happened? We sense immediately that something is wrong. The ghost grave hasn't got a damn thing in it. Even the bones have rotted into thin air.
We look at one another for a moment, but Old Wu is quickest: "It's them!"
Them. A complete mystery.
They are from the mainland, the Leizhou Peninsula. I was there once visiting relatives: barren soil as far as the eye could see, bringing to mind the saying red earth for a thousand miles. Here the soil is rich and black, yielding bricks as light and porous as steamed yeast cakes. Fortunately, there are rock formations in the mountains with such a good grain that in cutting them out, one has only to drive in a wedge to pull out neat square blocks. On the surface, it looks easy enough, but there's a trick to it, and no one at our farm can manage it.
They are strangers here and, as strangers, have yet to communicate with anyone outside their group, although the sounds of pounding echo in our respective camps. I have never been able to get a head count, but there must be six or seven of them. To me, they all look alike: jet-black faces with no more than a few ounces of flesh, their arms nevertheless thick from wielding a sledgehammer. They have their own language. The difficulty of the Leizhou linguistic family has stymied even the linguistically gifted Wu. A clan unto themselves. Though our brigade has empty huts to spare, they insist on pitching their own camp; our brigade has an eating hall, but they prefer to choke on the smoke of their cooking fires, stubbornly preserving their self-contained society. They know only work, with one exception. When the occasional young peasant woman makes her way to the rice fields, they come to life, first staring, then talking softly, perhaps in an exchange of opinions. Though the odds of viewing educated young women, who leave like clockwork at dawn and return at dusk, are greater, the stonecutters dare not take liberties-their eyelids never budge. While phoenixes may not be as valuable as chickens here in the wilderness, surely the cutters should allow themselves to take a glance or two.