The Zenith (22 page)

“Because I am a person like millions of others. I cannot escape from the need of a father, of a husband, to love and to be loved. It’s a legitimate entitlement.”

“But you did choose to deny those ordinary feelings. It’s you who accepted emasculating a normal man’s life to please your comrades, those who gave you the great role of Father of the Nation but who assassinated your wife and destroyed your children’s chances in life, and also with that acceptance you gained access to all the conveniences that came with your grand role as the nation’s great, respected elder.”

“No, no, I never accepted that. Everything happened behind my back, in the dark. I was betrayed.”

“If that was true, then you must have fallen into one of these two types: one who is overly trusting or one who lacks good judgment. Both types share a common denominator: lack of intelligence; bluntly speaking, simple ignorance.”

“Maybe…maybe I was stupid; very stupid. One thing about this humiliation is that my mistake was recognized too late.”

He munches on the cakes to alleviate the bitterness of this last thought.

The morsel of the traditional bean cake is so sweet that he has to wash it down with piping hot tea. Then the thought of using sweetness to dilute the bitterness in his soul brings up a sour smile. Now he is reminded of fallen dynasties, gold spilling out, jade broken; so many garments and crowns, so many splendid costumes that will eventually just rot away, like corpses that are food to maggots. Those who lived in the red towers and polished chambers of the past, who had many times polished pearls or drunk nectar out of deer horns to nourish their beautiful bodies or to decrease the astringent taste of their souls. The dramas that come with power are as old as the earth. The only difference between kings of old and him today is the way they are named: the kings are those who inherited power from their forebears as people inherit wealth from their ancestors as gifts. But he, he has no inheritance—neither material nor spiritual. He is one who gained a throne with only his empty hands, who made a lake with drops of water. His only asset was the admiration and love of the people. That is his legacy! It is also his prison!

THE STORY OF
WOODCUTTERS’ HAMLET

The road leading to Woodcutters’ Hamlet curves like a chicken’s intestines.

“Woodcutters’ Hamlet”—people still call it that without knowing whether its name is outdated, or, to be more accurate, whether its name is consistent with the facts. In reality Woodcutters’ Hamlet is not a small hamlet but a village proper with ample lands and many residents. One time, its leaders thought about changing its name from Woodcutters’ Hamlet to “Victory Village,” but that proposal didn’t get anywhere because the locals were too familiar with the old name, as were people in the surrounding areas.

Woodcutters’ Hamlet was founded, how many generations ago it was not clear, by three families headed by three brothers who had left their birthplace in old Bac Ninh province to come up to seek a living by cutting wood. The history of this migration is somewhat of a mystery, and it has become more mysterious over the generations from when the hamlet had a mere twenty residents. Woodcutters’ Hamlet became a large village with three neighborhoods and more than two thousand inhabitants, who make a living not only by cutting wood and selling charcoal, but also by planting dry rice and wet rice, and by producing other farm products like honey and noodles, and by growing tea plants. Its history is passed down on moonlit nights with the sound of mortars pounding flour to make cakes, on house patios with women sitting around fires kneading bread while the men sit smoking pipes and drinking tea while chatting.

That history is tied mysteriously to the name of the old land: Bac Ninh, which was the capital in ancient days. The special quality of residents in a capital city is that they consume more than people living elsewhere. The traditional Bac Ninh banquet was usually described with the word “tang,” stories, as in a house with two, three, or five stories. Bac Ninh banquets come in numerous categories: two-story banquets, three-story banquets, five-story banquets (four-story banquets are rare). Each story is one full brass tray of food. A two-story banquet presents all the food on two brass trays. Just extend that definition to visualize a three-story banquet or a five-story one. Surely no one stomach can hold all the food of a three-story or a five-story banquet, but serving such banquet trays can be looked at from two
points of view: respect for guests or ostentatious display of wealth (actually, it is the same thing whether done graciously or crassly).

The second characteristic of residents in a capital community is that they talk. They like to talk, to carry on about life’s vicissitudes, and their ability to so talk exceeds that of those who live elsewhere. Sometimes that ability develops to extremes, leading to the habit of embellishing everything. Anyone could become an amateur writer or an almost poet. Such need to create can only propel itself through a unique window frame: building on precedents. Thus, one can find many different versions of the history of the three families who started Woodcutters’ Hamlet, transforming a desolate mountainside into a busy community with the sounds of people walking, the crowing of cocks, and happy singing. The people of Woodcutters’ Hamlet built the Lan Vu temple and two others lower down the mountain, the northern region being well known for its numerous pagodas and shrines. The need to contemplate a temple landscape is one way to embrace nostalgia for traditional environments.

Woodcutters’ Hamlet consists of three parts: the upper, middle, and lower sections. The upper part sits right at the foot of the mountain range, where the first three families settled and built their commune. Many generations passed, young people got married, gathering husbands and wives from many walks of life, set up farms, and erected houses on the surrounding slopes, configuring them into the middle and lower sections of the village. Up in the hills, inhabitants of these two sections plant both dry and wet rice along with tea bushes while growing cassava, cauliflower, and kohlrabi on the lower slopes. Families who live in the upper commune are considered pillars of the village and are naturally respected according to a set of old customs about which nobody knows for certain when they were established or by whom. Thus, Mr. Quang, the unlucky woodcutter, was one of those personages who always sat on the foremost mat, who were always listed in the first rank of those who had the most power in Woodcutters’ Hamlet, one of those who the village chairmen as well as party secretaries had to ask for their opinion, had to get their approval, when something needed to be done. Fifteen years ago, around 1954 when the following story occurred, his eldest son had been village chairman. Mr. Quang was then both a village elder and had sired a person of power.

In the autumn of that year, his wife had fallen ill. She was then close to sixty and had given birth to eight children, so her strength, though not completely
gone, was like a lamp without much oil. At the Mid-Autumn Festival, her personality had suddenly changed. She became extraordinarily ravenous. In the past, she had always disdained food and drink, eating only two bowls for show at each meal. At banquets, she raised her chopsticks only to please her husband and children. Suddenly, that mid-August night when the kids started in at the banquet, everybody saw her dash to the tray of rice cakes, fill her plate, then go sit in a corner to eat them in a flash without drinking a single cup of tea.

Everybody knew that rice cakes made for the kids at the Mid-Autumn Festival are usually very sweet. Even those who have a sweet tooth can finish only two of them and they have to drink at least a potful of tea to wash them down. But she finished eating a full plate, which meant at least six large cakes, of which in the past she could eat only one corner before shaking her head in disdain. This sudden development rippled throughout the village like an earthquake. But it was strange that she did not care to pay any attention to those nosy eyes around her; she acted like one distracted. She had only one real concern: for the foods she suddenly craved madly. Her obsession with food slowly became a mysterious terror for everybody, beginning with her children. She doted on honey from young bees. Each morning she poured a cupful of honey, sat and consumed it glumly with a stack of sesame rice sheets or with half a basket of boiled cassava. She devoured pork, beef, then chicken and duck, then shrimp and fish. At lunch she would eat an entire pig’s leg or a whole steamed rooster. At dinner, she would wolf down eight or nine bowls of rice accompanied by salty braised fish or brined small shrimp with roasted peanuts and a basketful of watercress or stir-fried cabbage. One day when the family’s flock of one hundred chickens was almost gone, with only a few very young chicks and two old hens left for breeding, she went into the coop and took out more than two dozen eggs to make pork omelets to have with two plates of sticky rice, which she ate voraciously like a wild animal. The capacity to eat like that was three times that of a farmer from the south whose job is to dig the ground, five times that of her husband, and twenty times that of herself only a few months before. Because the family was well off, Mr. Quang spoiled his wife. The whole family found ways to satisfy all her peculiar requests. But her kids were frightened and the village people whispered
hush hush
behind their backs: