Authors: Ye Zhaoyan
A Flower’s Shade
From the bridge, you enjoy the view.
Overhead, someone enjoys the viewâlooking at you.
Bright is the moon adorning your window,
you are the adornment of another's dream.
"Fragment" (1933) by Bian Zhilin (1910-2000)
A
small town in the Yangtze River region in the 1920s is the town of this story. There are no more towns like it anymore, they have become a thing of the past, a part of history. But the human imagination, like an arrow, can pierce the thin tissue of time, bringing a lost era back to life, reversing the flow of passing moments, reviving old dreams. In the end, the little Yangtze town emerges once again before our mind's eye.
A major river passed through the town, making a bend at the liveliest quarter, and flowing on and on towards the distant railroad lines. It was a time when the new was supplanting the old, when both new ways of thinking and ancient forces were simultaneously weak and unimaginably powerful. The ancient forces rolled onward with the immense strength of habit, while the new ways of thinking were surging up everywhere, like sprouts coming out of the ground after a spring rain. The new wave of thinking had gradually come into its own in the little town, and primary and middle schools according to the new model had emerged and were already producing the first generation of "new people." As warlords wrangled in the north, ruthlessly jockeying for territory, the little town seemed entirely unaffected. Small vessels, plying their way back and forth on the great river, brought exaggerated tales of the world outside. The traditional isolation of many years was broken, and while the older people yearned for a bygone era, they looked on anxiously as the younger generation adopted new ways of life and grew increasingly restless. The first regular newspaper appeared in the little town, carrying frequent reports of both outside and local news. The word "new" was in fashion, and its progress into the human heart was unstoppable.
For many years, whatever was going on in the Zhen Estate was the most contentious topic for the people of the little town, and the delectable subject of endless talk. Although the glory days of the Zhen family lay in the past, and their Estate was in decline, they were still that southern town's great emblem of prosperity, they were still the local idea of paradise. Zhen Estate represented unending money, the supply of beautiful women beyond any possibility of satiation, the acme of the endeavors of the human male.
Future scholars of architecture would doubtless have esteemed, even admired, the way the forefathers of the Zhen family had laid out their Estate. The entire Estate faced north, exactly according to China's well-known feng shui geomantic principles. The northward orientation indicated that the builder of the Estate must have been a great merchant. The Zhens had always been in commerce, though in the grandfather's generation, they had bought their way into some scholarly renown. In the Han Dynasty text The Art of Planning Residences, it is written: "Merchant houses must not face south." And then: "For merchant gold, the south is fire." Since fire was inauspicious for gold, and the north represented water, gold and water represented an auspicious combination, and thus the Estate's main gate had to be north-facing.
The Zhen Estate was a complex laid out symmetrically along two lines, based on the classical southern-style courtyard model, forming several closed clusters of buildings. On each principal line one could move southward from one main hall into the next. The spaces between each building were mostly closed off into walled courtyards, creating a picturesque patchwork which also resolved the problems of light and air flow in the most agreeable fashion. A deep passage divided the two adjacent lines. The passage had been designed in order to allow women and servants to move easily in and out, while also serving as a very effective fire-stop.
On account of the dampness of the southern climate, in the rainy season the people of the little town would grow concerned about the ubiquitous problem of mold. On the question of how to prevent mold, the methods of the Zhen family met with widespread acclaim. Unusually, the surface of the interior floors was made up of even tiles. Underneath the tiles were flowerpots or jars, creating a small gap between the floor and the ground. This use of tiling not only proved effective against dampness, it also had the effect of making the floors warm in winter and cool in the summer. Outdoors, the ground was paved in flagstones or with neat, even tiles, and in some places various patterns were made in mosaics of cobblestone and ceramic shards.
As the curtain rises on our story, the Zhen Estate is in a state of thorough decline. The luxury of yesteryear is a shadow of its former self, and the red paint on the doors and window frames is peeling, with every nook and cranny bearing testament to neglect. Unidentifiable weeds had sprung up in the cracks between the stones, and thick moss flourished in the damper places. But a whiff of licentiousness was still in the air, and the rouges and powders of lascivious women seemed to have worked their way into the dampness of that special southern climate. Many of the empty rooms were leaky.
The eminence of the Zhens in this little town had diminished, and yet the colorful legend of the Zhens, father and son, continued to circulate widely in embellished form. It was the legend of a great Estate, brimful of beauties, marked by night after night of mad revelry. It is a bizarre legend, a flighty, aimless story: a gaudy butterfly of a tale. The way people imagined it, the Zhens were like characters in forbidden, erotic novels, leading lives of debauchery and dissipation, imbibing the ancient aphrodisiacs their ancestors had passed down to them, increasing their pleasure with arcane devices that would soon be lost to human knowledge, steeping themselves in their final ecstasies.
The son and heir to the Zhen family, Naixiang, had been renowned as a truly lecherous fiend. Ten years earlier, having just indulged his opium addiction, he had become mysteriously paralyzed after a session of lovemaking. Now he was all but deadâlittle more than a breathing corpse. As for the cause of his paralysis, many peculiar theories circulated. "A maiden of sixteen may be feeble in flesh, but she carries a weapon which can behead many a fool. Though you may not see a man's head roll, secretly he withers from the marrow of his bones out." The people firmly believed that lust was the greatest of sins, and that Naixiang's fate was the inevitable result of an excess of lust. And they all believed just as firmly that one day the same fate awaited his father.
It was a day in early spring, when the sky was somber and the air so humid it seemed you could wring the water out of it. A great rainstorm was brewing, and people on the streets were hurrying home. A projectionist was riding in a boat towards the town, carrying his small projector with him. Posters had been hung days earlier, and someone had been sent to meet him, and was waiting at the pier. Just as the projectionist got out of the boat, the rain began to pour down with a vengeance: the projectionist, worried that his expensive projector and the reels would get wet in the rain, climbed back aboard, looking very displeased. The man who had been sent to meet him followed him onto the boat, apologizing profusely, and kept on fiddling with his belongings in an attempt to give the projectionist cigarettes, as though he were personally responsible for the sudden downpour. The projectionist accepted the Old Knife cigarettes, held them up to his nose and sniffed, but when he discovered that they already had a whiff of mold about them, he threw them away without a sign of hesitation, took a newly-opened packet of Three Cannons cigarettes out of his coat, and lit one up without a thought for anyone else. The rain poured down without respite, and the projectionist was annoyed and distracted. In the end, he had to leave the projector and the reels on the boat, and the man sent to meet him held an umbrella open to shield him, as he hastened off to a little inn not far from the pier.
The downpour continued for several days, and the man was constantly at the projectionist's service, treating him like a person of great consequence. In only a few days, the projectionist had visited all the local eateries, and on three consecutive days patronized the house of pleasure. That was where he spent all of the money he had brought with him, and finally he was even compelled to leave his gold watch behind as security. His reckless, spendthrift ways brought to mind the revelries of Naixiang in the house of pleasure over ten years before. People could remember that on the occasion of Naixiang's birthday practically all of the girls in the brothel had received his special attentions, and all of the servants had been given red envelopes. Ten years on, the projectionist seemed to have been cast from the same mold. Naixiang had in his day visited several women that night without the drooping of his precious spear, but the projectionist had been making waves with the girl called Jonquille. Without the slightest compunction, he passed his own gonorrhea onto her. The little town paid a cruel price for the warm reception it had given the projectionist, for now the clap was being passed around as habitually as the common cold. The ladies of pleasure gave it to their customers, and the customers passed it on to their wives and concubines, and before long the alleys of the little town were covered with advertisements for venereal treatments.
The rain finally stopped and the projectionist's wooden trunks with the projector and the reels were carried to the school's sports ground. These great wooden trunks were fitted with corners of iron sheeting, which lent them an even bulkier look. Work began in the morning and carried on until it was nearly dark, under the instructions of the anxious projectionist. When everything was settled, the black masses of people gathered on the grounds, craning their necks to see, boring into the darkness with their staring eyes, waiting for the miraculous images to appear on the silver screen. Then, what no one had dared to believe occurred, and when they saw the shapes of people on the screen, moving about like real human beings, they could not suppress their astonished cries. More than a few curious people even found their way behind the screen, trying to figure out if there was someone back there intent on pulling their leg.
An indescribable hubbub ensued. Certain precautions had been taken beforehand, but once the tumult actually began, the handful of people who were supposed to maintain order were entirely incapable of controlling the situation. People weren't at all concerned with what was going on up on the screen, and were instead nattering contentiously about how all this could be, arguing and debating and refusing to compromise. When the pirate on the screen threw himself at the damsel in distress, the entire audience erupted in an indiscriminate fistfight. With mud-covered shoes and a fedora from which the brim had been all but torn off, having been flung through the air and chucked back at him, the projectionist was flustered by the sudden uproar and in his rush to change the reels mixed up the order. Just as the story was reaching the halfway point, the happy ending prematurely appeared on the screen.
On the following day, as everyone rushed to have their morning tea at the tea house, or played drinking games around their banquet tables, or washed their rice and cleaned their vegetables by the well, or bathed in the large pool of the little town's only bathhouse, all conversation revolved around the movie of the preceding day. Yesterday's unfinished arguments were taken up again with renewed acrimony. Although a scientific explanation had already made the rounds, older people still asseverated that these so-called electric shadows, these moving pictures, were merely a question of many tiny people concealed in the projector. These tiny people were made of doughâbut no one could quite explain how the tiny dough people moved about. In their opinion, the projectionist contemptuous ways could be traced back to the fact that, like a magician, he knew the secret of making the tiny people move about.
Once the projectionist and his wooden chests departed from the small town, the excitement surrounding the movie showing rapidly subsided. Two days after his departure, events at the Zhen Estate once again drew general attention. On the morning of that day, at approximately nine o'clock, the master of the house, having partaken excessively of his medicine, summoned Peach Blossom. Since he hadn't fully enjoyed the lovemaking the night before, she was to mount him again before getting out of bed. In theory, Peach Blossom was his own son Naixiang's concubine, but since his son was paralyzed, she and the master had come to an understanding. In the groaning and tussle, the master had been overcome by a spasm. As her climax came like water welling up out of the ground, Peach Blossom noticed, out of the corner of her own half-closed eyes, that the master's eyeballs had rolled back entirely into his head.