Authors: Yan Lianke
Huaihua then got down from the stage and Grandma Mao Zhi was pushed on stage in a wheelchair. It was announced that she was a hundred and nine years old. Because she was already over a hundred, they dressed her in the sort of dark blue double-breasted jacket that women used to wear during the Republican period. Her hair was gray and she appeared old and decrepit, as though she had just been pulled out of a coffin. But precisely for this reason, she appeared very striking. Because it had already been announced that she was a hundred and nine years old, and that she had been crippled her entire life, it was natural that she was pushed out by a wholer. More specifically, the person pushing her was the middle-aged man who, when the troupe was touring down south, had performed as a hundred-and-twenty-one-year-old man, though now he was appearing as the
son
of a hundred-and-nine-year-old woman. Every time he opened his mouth, he had to call her “Mother.”
The decision to have Grandma Mao Zhi be a hundred and nine years old—rather than two hundred and forty-one, and her great-grandchildren a hundred and twenty-one—was the result of a careful calculation on the part of the wholers. Everyone in the Balou mountain region knew about Liven, and the wholers couldn’t very well claim that Grandma Mao Zhi was two hundred and forty-one, but if they said she was a hundred and nine most people would probably believe it. There were already a few centenarians in the district, and although they were rare, it was not as though they were completely unheard of. If the wholers claimed Mao Zhi was a hundred and nine, even people from Liven’s neighboring villages wouldn’t be inclined to doubt it. Given that most of the residents of Liven were disabled, the residents of these neighboring villages never thought of coming over to visit and never took any interest in Liven’s affairs, and therefore had no way of knowing whether or not Liven really did have a resident who was over a hundred.
The “son” who was pushing Grandma Mao Zhi onto the stage explained, with an old villager’s honest expression, that his mother was born a hundred and nine years earlier, in the
xinmao
Year of the Rabbit of the preceding
jiazi
cycle—meaning that she had lived through the fall of the Qing and the subsequent Republican era. To prove his mother’s age, the son took out their family’s residence permit and his mother’s identification card and passed them around. He showed everyone the framed birth certificate that Chief Liu had personally engraved, signed, and stamped. Given that Grandma Mao Zhi had Chief Liu’s signature and stamp, the audience would have no grounds to doubt that she was indeed a hundred and nine years old, rather than merely seventy-one.
At this point, her son announced that it was actually not that remarkable for someone to live past a hundred; the important thing was that his mother still had all of her teeth and that her hearing and eyesight remained sharp. The only effect of her advanced age was that she walked somewhat unsteadily. In order to prove that his mother’s teeth were still strong, he handed Grandma Mao Zhi two walnuts, which she cracked with them. In order to prove that her eyesight was still good, he handed her a needle and a piece of black thread, and then turned off the floodlights, leaving the stage in shadows, like the oil-lamp-illuminated houses people have in the countryside. Grandma Mao Zhi held up the needle in the dim light and, after several attempts, eventually succeeded in threading it.
Everyone was astonished by her ability to thread the needle, crack the walnut, and chew peanuts and fried beans. After all, whose parents or grandparents could be expected, under normal circumstances, to live past a hundred? And who could live to a hundred and nine with hearing, eyesight, and teeth intact? As the audience was still reeling in amazement, Grandma Mao Zhi’s son disclosed the secret of her longevity. He removed his mother’s big-collared jacket and her oversized pants, both of which had been fashionable during the Republican era, and revealed that underneath she was wearing sparkling black burial clothing.
The audience gasped in astonishment, then erupted into shouts as everyone’s gaze was suddenly riveted on Grandma Mao Zhi, standing up on stage. After all, even at a hundred and nine years old, she was still a living person who had just been cracking walnuts. As she’d been threading her needle, she had smiled and said, “I’m old, and in a few days I’ll no longer be able to do this.” And now they found her wearing burial clothing like a dead person!
The burial garb was made of high-quality black satin with subtle sparkles that shimmered under the stage lights. The bottom of the outfit had a florid border the width of a belt, which was stitched entirely with gold and white thread, and this border shimmered differently from the black satin. The black satin and florid border shimmered under the lights like pure silver and gold, like the light from the morning sun shining directly into people’s eyes just after it has emerged from behind the eastern mountains. The burial outfit’s oversized dress, meanwhile, appeared even more unusual up on stage. Not only were the arm and neck openings adorned with a gold border, but the front lapel was decorated with a carefully embroidered image of a phoenix. On the left lapel there was an image of a serpent that looked like a live dragon soaring and seemed as though, if fully extended, it would be more than ten feet
long. The dragon undulated and stretched all the way from the bottom of the dress to the shoulder, with each claw and scale embroidered with minute precision, so realistic that it seemed as though it might leap off the stage at any moment. The phoenix on the right lapel, meanwhile, was a combination of crimson, purple, scarlet, pink, and a variety of other shades of red, making it look as though an actual flaming phoenix had alighted on her lapel. Against this juxtaposition of red and yellow, the black appeared to emit a white light, the red emitted a purplish light, and the yellow had a golden bronze luster.
This resplendent burial outfit shocked the thousands of people in the audience into silence. As everyone was staring in astonishment, the man playing Grandma Mao Zhi’s son turned her around, such that the large
libation
character inscribed on her back sparkled in the light. This character originally should have been in the shape of a square, but whoever made the clothing had embroidered the character in the shape of a circle. The tailor had used platinum-colored silk thread, and each of the stitches was at least an inch wide, while the gaps between them were as narrow as incense sticks, thereby making the character resemble a rising or setting sun. In the two circles surrounding the character, there appeared an array of little
longevity
characters nestled against one other, giving the
libation
character even more of an aura of death, revealing a threatening
yin
quality.
With this, like a climber who finally scales a mountain, the act reached its climax, as did the troupe’s performance as a whole. The able-bodied members of the troupe were somewhat smarter than the disabled ones, and wiser in the ways of the world. They knew that the goal of each act was to astound and amaze, and that once the performance reached its climax it was not necessary for the audience to shout madly and applaud until their hands bled. Instead, by this point they would already be hoarse from shouting, their hands would be in agony, and they would be generally exhausted and drowsy. Therefore, anything short of a decapitation would probably not be able to arouse their interest.
The wholers understood the principle of moving when one should move, and resting when one should rest, together with the inverse principle of moving from excitement to calm, and from calm to excitement. The Firecracker-on-the-Ear performer’s face was black with blood, One-Eye had threaded almost three hundred needles at once, One-Legged Monkey had deliberately set his shirt on fire, and the blind performer had reached the point where she could distinguish between the sound of a strand of hair from the body of a pig and one from a horse’s mane. The troupers naturally couldn’t come up with anything more extraordinary, and they had no choice but to conclude with an act that would bring the audience back down to earth, leaving everyone speechless. Grandma Mao Zhi’s appearance in her burial clothing had had the desired effect: The audience simply couldn’t understand why a living person should be wearing her burial clothing around the clock.
It was the middle of the night, and outside it was as dark as the bottom of a well. The entire world was as silent as a dream, as everyone seemed to be hovering at the boundary between life and death. Upon seeing a hundred-and-nine-year-old woman appear before them on stage wearing burial clothing, everyone had turned as pale as the moonlight, as though all of the blood had suddenly drained from their faces, making them look as though they had just returned from the dead. The audience was deathly quiet, so quiet that it was as if there weren’t anyone there at all. Up on stage, you could hear the snoring of an infant nestled at its mother’s breast, the sound of a boy calling out to his mother.
The sixty-one-year-old man playing the part of Grandma Mao Zhi’s ninety-year-old-son then told the audience two very ordinary things, which they had no choice but to believe. He said,
“For several decades now, my mother has never taken off her burial clothes. She has been eating and sleeping in these clothes for more than half her life.”
He further explained that in the
wuzi
Year of the Rat of the preceding
jiazi
cycle, which is to say the thirty-seventh year of the Republic, 1948, his mother fell into a ravine while collecting kindling on the mountain. She broke her leg, and the scare brought on a major illness. She was in a coma for seven days and seven nights, during which time he dressed her in her burial clothes in preparation for her imminent demise and ascent to heaven. As he was preparing for her death, she suddenly woke up and proceeded to take off her burial clothes. After doing so, however, she became even sicker and eventually lapsed back into a coma; but as soon as she was dressed again in her burial clothes, she immediately regained consciousness. They went through this cycle several more times, until eventually she decided not to remove the burial clothes, and instead her son prepared several additional sets so that she could rotate between them. She proceeded to wear these burial clothes day in and day out, wearing them to eat, to work the fields, to haul manure, to harvest the crops, and even to sleep.
The son said that his mother had been wearing these burial clothes for fifty-one years.
He said that during those fifty-one years, his mother had never once fallen ill.
He said that Chinese doctors in the Balou mountain region had reported this, and that when she was touring with the performance troupe, the city doctors had also confirmed it. They all claimed that the reason she had never gotten sick over the preceding fifty-one years was precisely that she had been wearing her burial clothing the entire time. They said that everyone fears death, and that nine out of ten illnesses could be attributed to an accumulated fear of dying, which had the result of transforming minor illnesses into major ones, and major illnesses into life-threatening crises. They said that as long as people don’t fear death, and instead views death the way they would view the act of returning home or going to bed, their body wouldn’t suffer from stagnating
qi
, and their blood would continue to circulate freely day after day, and year after year. This, in turn, would be why for ten, twenty, fifty, or even a hundred years, they would never have gotten sick. And if they never got sick, they would naturally live a very long time and be extraordinarily healthy.
How healthy was Grandma Mao Zhi? At a hundred and nine years old, not only could she still sew a comforter, resole a shoe, cook, and do laundry for her children and great-grandchildren; she could even go into the fields to help harvest the wheat, pounding it with a wooden club like all the other villagers. And even now she not only was able to lift a carrying pole weighing one hundred or two hundred
pounds, but could even, while leaning on her crutch, lift nine people off the ground.
At this point, four young men emerged from backstage with two bulging canvas sacks. They placed a carrying pole between the two sacks, and Grandma Mao Zhi, after a couple of attempts, was in fact able to lift the sacks a little bit off the ground.
After she put the sacks down, nine live girls proceeded to leap out of them.
Nine tiny girls, like mothlets or butterflies.
These were The Nine Mothlets, who were said to have all emerged from the same womb. Once on stage, they proceeded to sing, dance, and fly around like countless tiny butterflies.
Book 11: Flowers
C
HAPTER 1:
A
SHEET OF WHITE CLOTH COVERED BY A MYRIAD
OF RED DOTS
To everyone’s surprise, Chief Liu had still not returned by the end of the performance. As the villagers of Liven were going to sleep, however, something extraordinary took place.
The villagers were all in one of the memorial hall’s side rooms. Just as they had been doing while traveling through China with their troupe over the preceding six months, they had laid out their bedrolls and were sleeping together, grouped by family, with the men and women in separate rooms. But this evening, on the winter solstice of the
wuyin
Year of the Tiger, as everyone was returning to the memorial hall to sleep after having cleaned up the clothing left on stage, the villagers noticed that neither their comforters nor their pillows were where they had left them at the heads of their beds. The cotton inside their bedding and mattresses had been ripped out and scattered everywhere, and the clothes in their travel bags had similarly been strewn about.