“Forgive me if I’ve startled you. May I have a word…”
If the miles of film of the average human life could for once be played in reverse, the eye, like an all-seeing probe plunged in the fathomless stream of human consciousness, would hit upon a point somewhere deep down, a hard bedrock, a fact, an event, an image, an undefined and flickering sensation. It would be tattered and faded, yet inflected with such a strange hue that the current of time flowing through one’s life would absorb its indefinable color for good.
In P’an Tsiang-kuei’s life, at the core of all his impressions, experiences, and mental scaffolding, lay one such image.
It was from long ago, so long ago that sometimes, when his memory ventured into those fields, groping around in them, it would get lost in wisps of all-leveling fog, from which emerged the disjointed fragments of some other world of objects, like the contours of precious, fragile toys from layers of cotton padding.
Little P’an was dressed in motley, shredded rags, busy making dams in the gutter of one of Nanjing’s narrow, dirty alleyways, when he spotted his father running down the street. The skinny, barefoot rickshaw driver, hitched up to two narrow rods, ran at a trot, struggling to pull his cart holding a man dressed in white – and with a face just as white – along the chipped cobblestones. The rickshaw driver’s bare heels passed each other in midair as narrow streams of sweat ran down his strained face.
P’an Tsiang-kuei was then struck for the first time by the wide, incredibly white, seemingly swollen face of the gentleman, his strange bulging eyes with their cleft eyelids, and the expression of calm dignity and self-satisfaction set on his round features.
Long, exhausting days and brief, gentle nights. The image became worn and faded, vanishing somewhere in the back of his mind in the wisps of fluffy, cottony fog. He was left with a sour, fleeting aftertaste, enveloping the world and its objects forevermore in its immaterial covering.
That broad face with its bloated cheeks, its flared eyelids upon unnaturally bulging eyes, lost its hard corporeality; it became a symbol, a reservoir for the burning, acidic hatred that seeped from all his pores.
When three years later, on an enervating hot June day, the motionless and glassy-eyed rickshaw driver, having been felled on the road by a sudden hemorrhage, was brought from town and laid heavily on the floor by his merciful neighbors, little P’an neither cried nor clung to the feet of his neighbors, who were hurrying back to their jobs. As if out of curiosity, he carefully studied his father’s gaping black mouth, an inconceivable, mysterious grotto with red dangling stalactites, his thin, bony legs topped off with a pair of enormous feet like worn-down slippers, and with earnest deliberation he waved his child’s fist at someone by the window as a coolie named Pao-Chang had the day before at the shopkeeper Ling-Ho, who had wronged him.
Then he squatted on the floor and, with a broken fan found somewhere on the street, he began shooing the flies drawn by the scent of blood, swarming around the dead man’s gaping mouth. The corpse’s glassy eyes were dully fixed on the ceiling and they gave a murky shine; no terror, no pain shown in those eyes – only boundless, silent astonishment.
Perhaps the body had started to dry out from the unbearable heat, or perhaps a gland had simply burst from inside, but a great tear rolled from the dead man’s right eye and slowly crawled down the yellow, wrinkled face.
Little P’an had never seen a weeping corpse, but it didn’t occur to him to investigate this unusual phenomenon. In a panicked terror he got to his feet and dashed out of the room. He ran down narrow, twisting alleys amid the chattering rickshaws, with no destination in mind.
That evening some sailors found him by the docks between sacks of rice. They spent some time kicking him back to life, then gave him some scalding sorghum wine to drink and left him in a storehouse to sleep it off.
P’an Tsiang-kuei was seven years old at the time.
He had long been used to living with hunger – he had never known his mother – but now he would have to get by on his own mettle. In summer, he slept by the docks, under the stars. During the rainy months, he took to strange nooks, garrets, or storehouses. When caught, he was beaten long and hard. He would not scream, but he did sometimes bite. He sunk his teeth so hard into the hand of one Mandarin who had tugged his ponytail the man screamed to the heavens, at which his neighbors came running, and had a funeral procession not appeared at just that moment they would surely have beaten P’an to death. He ate what he chanced to find, which wasn’t much. He robbed dogs of their bones. The dogs tore his rags to shreds and sometimes slashed his body. When they saw him coming from a distance they bared their teeth. His diet was mainly vegetarian. He gathered grains of rice left scattered on the docks after a loading. He had nowhere to cook them. He ate them raw, slowly chewing and savoring each grain.
Nonetheless, he carefully avoided the temptations of the crowded markets, where pudgy stall-keepers treated pedestrians to tasty soup with tea or pungent rice wine for a few coppers, where the stalls were piled high with fruits, cakes made with sesame butter, pieces of sugarcane, and other such delicacies. Even just walking past, the spicy, sugary-sweet smell tickled his nostrils and he couldn’t resist nicking the plumpest sugarcane, and then – run for it! – but there was no getting anywhere between the tightly packed stalls, like a condemned soldier – through the rows, vainly shielding his back from the blows of the furious traders. After such escapades his back hurt for a week and his stiff loess bedding seemed even more uncomfortable.
In the daytime, when he wasn’t playing with the other homeless urchins, he liked strolling through the merchant districts, gazing at the complicated drawings of the characters, the intricate calligraphy on the dangling signboard sashes. Fanciful and marvelous, the characters swung like fragile matchstick houses that might tumble down at any moment, yet held tight, immovable, built by some unknown architect magician. He spent hours on end searching out familiar contours in the incomprehensible hieroglyphics. Oh, that character was frivolously raising its little leg like a fairground ballerina, and that other one, as if irritated, was cocking its “nose” in the air. Those capricious compositions of lines and hooks, clear and familiar to some, wild and absurd to him, fired his young brain with their riddles.
Sometimes he wandered to the outskirts, where in an openwork, pillared house forty boys rocked back and forth with their eyes trained on mysterious designs, vying with each other, screaming out the incoherent, monosyllabic, nasal sounds, prompted from a pulpit by a wrinkled lemon in glasses and a long robe. Lurking behind the veranda, P’an greedily fished through the rumble of the scattered voices. The bespectacled lemon was indoctrinating the children of wealthy merchants into the hidden meanings of the enigmatic symbols.
In time, he stopped by another place more regularly. Not far from the market, on the street, under a tattered, faded parasol, an old, gray calligrapher painted slender, serpentine characters with a thin brush on long silk scrolls. Little P’an plastered himself to the wall and followed the complex movements of the nimble brush, his eyes wide with delight. The sticks grew, branched out, combined into elaborate figures, characters crawled under other characters and hefted them onto their shoulders like acrobats, a second later an even, tottering pyramid shot upward and the calligrapher smiled with pride, weighing the magical brush between two fingers.
He was the only person who didn’t chase little P’an off; and seeing the boy’s cleverness, his enamored and curious eyes, he gave a friendly smile.