Sweet Li Jie E-Book

David Dabydeen

• Herausgeber: Peepal Tree Press
• Kategorie: Gesellschafts- und Liebesromane
• Sprache: Englisch

Seitenzahl: 287

Veröffentlichungsjahr: 2025

Beschreibung

In Sweet Li Jie, two distant worlds converge: Wuhan Province in China and British Guiana. Jia Yun, a traveling textile merchant, leaves Wuhan to join the exodus of migrants escaping poverty. Most of them to become indentured labourers in the canefields of Demerara. Through heartfelt letters intended for his sweetheart, Li Jie, Jia Yun paints a vivid picture of life for Indians, Africans, and other ethnic groups under British rule during the twilight years of indentureship. Meanwhile, the novel's sections set in China reveal the struggles of rural Wuhan under a crumbling feudal regime. "Sweet Li Jie" delves into complex interpersonal relations, from the landlord-servant dynamics in Wuhan to the bond between Jia Yun and his Afro-Guyanese guide, Harris. Amid vulnerability and uncertainty, and the complexities of living in servitude, these characters grapple for personhood and interdependence.

Leseprobe

DAVID DABYDEEN

SWEET LI JIE

“The British and other foreigners came. There was a sudden collapse, all we built over centuries suddenly collapsed. We are all reduced to coolies, circus performers, concubines, customers, Christians.”

— Tang Yu, Court Official, after the Second Opium War, 1860

“The Negroes have left, but my lands are now lush with coolies” — Sir John Gladstone: August 1st, 1838, letter to his son, William, later Prime Minister, on his slave estates in British Guiana

“Was there a garden or was the garden a dream?”

— Jorge Luis Borges

PART ONE

CHAPTER ONE

Wuhan Province, c 1875

“My bicycle!” Sweet Li Jie cried in the second before toppling to the ground and hitting her head. Wind whipped up dew, roadside plants sneezed, were uprooted in the sudden storm. The second stretched out; she saw her plums tossed in the air and scattering – dozens of plums, the day’s succour, two yuans. Two yuans for noodles, salt, pepper, even a piece of bone with some meat clinging to it, if Butcher Shen was drunk and his knife (perfected in the battlefield) failed to scrape off every shred. Butcher Shen… Normally she would tremble when thinking of him, but not in the second which seemed to stretch into a season as she fell. Neither Butcher Shen nor the loss of fruit and the day’s livelihood affected her.

“My bicycle!” she cried before falling into unconsciousness. It had been nearly a year since the bicycle had become hers, a gift from Suitor Jia Yun, whom she had spurned.

The ‘Sweet’ was her mother’s doing, to entice her out of the despair, which was Sweet Li Jie’s sickness. “The girl’s head crawls with lice. They have put gu into her mind; can you rid her of the poison?” Ma Hongniang pleaded.

The village doctor, Du Fu, promised he would, in return for twenty-five yuans, paid over five months. “It will take months to purge her thoughts and bring her back to laughter,” Du Fu said, holding out a ball of herbs mixed in the gallbladder of a dog. “It is not just lice, but demons. Ordinary medicine can’t purge her on its own. She has to dream away demons. I will give you this special herb, boil it in salt water and give it to her at night, not to drink but to breathe in the vapours, and when the sun comes up, give her a different herb to make her daydream.”

“Will you make her a child again, a sweet child? Will you take two yuans and some plums?” Ma Hongniang asked in a mournful voice. She knew Du Fu was a quack who demanded too much of the villagers – all poor except Rich-Beyond-Dreams Wang Changling, who was richer by far than Quack Du Fu. He owned the land which they tilled for a sickly living, blood-rents drawn from them week after month after year.

“I will cure her,” Quack Du Fu lied.

Ma Hongniang sensed the lie. He had taken so many yuans from so many from the time he had come to the village, and most of his remedies had failed. But she could not know this for certain, since Quack Du Fu did, on occasion, bring health to the ailing, a limb healed, a stomach pacified – small acts but signs of hope which folk seized upon out of want. Quack Du Fu was better than nothing, so they gambled their yuans on his doubtful skill.

“Two yuan! Two yuan!” Quack Du Fu said, sucking his teeth, hawking and spitting on the ground just in front of Ma Hongniang’s feet, at the doorway, knowing that she would not step past the phlegm, such was her superstition. Yellow phlegm. He had been careful to chew dried mango, fennel seeds and burdock before coming. Yellow as jaundice, as fever, as pus, which, if she walked over the spit, could afflict her with such diseases.

“Can you make her dream happy things, after the demons go?” Ma Hongniang asked, still wanting to believe. Her own dreams were unchanging. Many nights the broken body of her husband descended upon her, but less frequently as time passed. Sweet Li Jie had not witnessed the killing but she had heard the cries for mercy.

“I have proper herbs,” Quack Du Fu assured her. Ma Hongniang paused, then gave him a coin. Maybe her dream was a boulder too massive to be moved, but Sweet Li Jie was a mere girl, her mind was only lightly dusted, so the demons made only faint footprints which might more easily be breathed away.

It was not lice that caused Sweet Li Jie’s face to crease with worry or made her clench her mouth to prevent smiling.

“You’re fifteen years of age today, and in all the time I have sought your affection, you have not once shed your sorrow,” Suitor Jia Yun said, presenting her with his own bicycle, a rare and valuable offering, and looking upon her with deer eyes. As usual her eyes were lowered, avoiding his, and she said nothing.

“I’m going far; it will be many years before I return,” he said. “Will you wait for my return? Will you run up to me as I approach with a sprig of bamboo?” Silence. A fretful look crossed her face.

Ma Hongniang, who was watching from afar, shouted to Sweet Li Jie. “Say words to comfort poor Suitor Jia Yun. Can you not see how his eyes bleed? At least give thanks for his bicycle. Pick flowers for him, a bit of fragrance clings to the hand that gives flowers.”

Sweet Li Jie shuddered as Suitor Jia Yun reached out for her hand. She wanted to rise, kick away the stool, run to the barn and hide herself in the hay. Still, she let him caress her hand, stroking it as if to arouse some feeling. She remained numb within, and deaf to her mother’s entreaty. She looked to the bicycle and opened her eyes wide in astonishment, and a show of gratitude.

“My burden, my curse,” Ma Hongniang shouted. “To get her to smile… it’s easier to cut water with a knife…” Afterwards, as she led Suitor Jia Yun out of the yard, Ma Hongniang consoled him with a hug. “She is a lonely angel inviting the night. She wants to be invisible but I will cure her before you return and I will keep her for matrimony. Come back with good health and a good fortune. Come back with glitter and sackfuls. Take this vase, it will keep her close to you.”

*

In their small house made of bamboo, there was a stone bed where Sweet Li Jie slept beside her mother; two cooking pots; a water bucket; a potter’s wheel; an earthen stove with corn husks for fuel; a knife, and a whetstone to sharpen it; twigs for chopsticks. A few corncobs hung drying from a roof-beam. Outside, a makeshift barn held hay for the goat and a cage for the three hens to shelter at night. Behind was a field of plum trees encircling similar houses. The field belonged to Rich-Beyond-Dreams Wang Changling. Each morning, when plum was in season, Sweet Li Jie was allowed to pick as many as she could fit into her baskets, hoist the bian dan onto her shoulder and walk the two miles to the neighbouring village to sell her stock or exchange them for onions and peppers. Her mother made pots and vases for special occasions – the Spring festival, the Pure Brightness festival, ceremonies to honour Chih-Nii and Ma-Ku, the goddesses who protected the trees from blight and the land from barrenness. The plain ones she gave away to the very poor, the widows who could not afford the expense of ceremonies. Some she painted, crushing the end of a twig and soaking it in saffron and purple from powders she ground from coloured stones harvested from the hills nearby. Three of these sold for a yuan. Plums, vases, pots, a patch of common land where villagers grew corn, milk from the goat, eggs and whatever vegetables could be harvested from their garden-plot, were all they were worth in the world.

The bicycle was a boon, multiplying their income many times over. Sweet Li Jie soon learned to steer it. She learned to balance two baskets on the handle, and one fastened behind the saddle. That way more plums could be taken to market and two trips could be made each morning. She could find space to carry a few of the smaller pots, so her mother was able to increase production. And when she returned home, there was more time to help dig the clay for her mother’s pottery, scout the hills for coloured stones and prepare the kiln with freshly gathered firewood.

Ma Hongniang’s purse swelled. She bought a necklace of cinnabar beads for Sweet Li Jie, but her daughter did not care for ornaments or for her appearance. She wore the same plain dress day after day. She shunned the village girls who wove hyacinth into their hair or dyed their cheeks. Ma Hongniang despaired of her daughter’s solitude. But at least Sweet Li Jie was healthy to look at, plump enough to attract suitors, especially with her long lustrous hair which made her pale skin even more translucent, with joined eyebrows adding to her value. And there was the gift of the bicycle, even though the suitor, Jia Yun, had gone away empty-handed. Ma Hongniang hoped the bicycle portended more gifts to come from other suitors. The prospect of future wealth – a porcelain washbasin perhaps, even a sewing machine – gave her comfort, so she left Sweet Li Jie to her odd ways.

Sweet Li Jie, though she showed no emotion, was grateful to be left alone. Nothing pleased her more than to wake up at first light, gather her plums and cycle to market. She grew to love the speed of the bicycle, and the skill of manoeuvring around stones and pot-holes to stay upright. The thrill of speed, of balance, and the spectacle of flowers! Before she’d had to walk, yoked to baskets of plums, so fatiguing that there was neither time nor desire to raise her eyes to the flowers that dotted the road, blooming lavender and red and purple. Now she could stop pedalling, let the bicycle flow downhill on its own and look out to the fields, to the cork oak and maple trees from which birds burst out, startled by the noise of wheels and chain. There were dozens of butterflies, fierce in colour yet so dainty at the lips of flowers, opening and closing their wings as they sipped on dew. The excitement of birds, of butterfly wings, of trees courting the wind: she would surrender to such spectacles. But though she loved the sight of these things, without warning, she would freeze. Fear made her hands tremble so she struggled to steady them on the handlebar. When she recovered, she pedalled faster, faster, to reach market and the shelter of the crowd. Her goods disposed of, she hurried to reach home, focusing on the dirt road, not daring to risk witnessing the features of the land.

When Ma Hongniang took the money Sweet Li Jie brought from the market, she noted how pale her daughter’s hands were but said nothing. To question Sweet Li Jie, to seek to comfort her, would elicit no response. Best to leave her daughter to live out her torment, as she, Ma Hongniang, had done. A soldier had shattered her husband’s skull, but she and her daughter had managed to escape the devils, escape through woods and over hills to this remote corner, where fruit trees were their main means of survival, but there was pasture rich enough to support a few dozen goats, and common land for corn. Sweet Li Jie was old enough to remember how they had picked their way through the woods, finding a trail here and there; wading through streams with only floating logs and tree branches to save them from drowning; inching up hills, and then down again, and when they came across a heap of dung – a leopard’s or a wild boar’s – taking a different direction. It was weeks before they reached the safety of the village. Wild berries and tree-bark had been their diet, but they had survived.

“What storm, what shipwreck has brought you to my house?” Landlord Wang Changling had asked, moved by their condition. And to decreasing surprise, since he seemed to be going through some puzzling changes, he took them in readily, fed them, and provided them with new clothes. The villagers were anxious to hear about the devils who had invaded their country and were spreading in all directions. Because they were not yet near them, the villagers doubted Ma Hongniang to begin with, but when she wept a storm in telling of her husband’s murder, they believed. The men who worked in the fields, instead of placing clay charms in the soil to call forth rain, planted models of soldiers. At night, they retreated to the caves in the surrounding hills, which they camouflaged with branches. Only Landlord Wang Changling stayed in his house.

He was educated. In his travels out of the village, he had learnt of rebellions against the British occupation of the northern provinces, led by the Imperial Court and its armies of kung fu warriors. He’d heard how the British put them all down, how the rebels rose up again, were quelled again. Years of uprisings, years of defeat, until the rebels dwindled to a handful of peasants wielding shovels. The British kept order. They chopped down whoever blocked their way. After a while, the Chinese did what they were told, but the peace was short-lived.

A British soldier courted a local girl with shortbread. He made a special effort to learn Mandarin. He gained her parents’ consent and walked openly with her through the town. He proposed when she fell pregnant. Her parents were now of elevated status, marrying into a superior race, white men who could plough the fields with machines rather than with oxen and bare hands; who had machines that could harvest and store grain, and other machines that could rattle off bullets to clear a crowd. But many of the townsfolk resented the prospect of marriage to a foreigner. They were accustomed to soldiers looting and raping – as they themselves did in their many clan battles – but marriage was intolerable. Marriage was another form of British occupation. They caught the soldier, bled him, and fed him to the forest’s wild pigs. A British contingent was dispatched to take revenge. Ma Hongniang’s husband was killed, one among dozens. Order was restored.

The younger Wang Changling had respected such order. For as long as he could remember, the peasants had barely contained their hatred of him. As a child of five, they patted his head in friendly jest, especially when his parents were around, but at a safe distance they sucked their teeth and spat. He grew up listening to their complaints. Every ill – a flash flood that washed away their seeds or a hidden stone against which someone stumped his toe – was blamed on his parents. When they died, he became the landlord, the target of greater malice. He knew that the peasants had buried effigies of him at the edge of the fields, but he did not care about their superstitions. The two guns he had were sufficient to see off any attacks and for a time he had two paid spies among the peasants. No, he had not been fearful of the coming of the British. He could work with such strong people, and pay them sufficient tribute to be left alone with his kingdom of the village and its ancient fruit trees. How could such an attitude be considered disloyal? Wang Changling had grimaced at the word. Stupid! The British were only the latest conquerors, and they in turn would be hunted down with dogs. One dynasty gave way to another, warlords had come and gone, leaving behind ramparts, escarpments, walls which crumbled and were built back, only to disappear again. There was barely a field in the country which, if dug deeply enough, did not reveal generations of bones. His own family had fled from a rebellion and settled in this forgotten space where the peasants could be cowed by the odd hanging and easily kept in bonds. His father had sent a retinue of guards ahead of him, let them loose on the peasants for the week before he arrived. His father, though a warlord, was growing old and no longer cared much for the sight of blood or the screaming of victims. He was pleased that when he entered the village, all was calm. He renamed the village after himself, The Domain of Wang Qian. He organised the work gangs and agreed with them the terms of their bondage. He dispensed with the guards, investing instead in paid spies, so that during his reign there was little bloodshed, only a few beatings. On occasions, he provided food in addition to what the peasants reaped from the common land granted to them. This very limited generosity restrained unrest to secret cursing, hawking and spitting out of sight. The village endured; the goats multiplied; the fruit trees bloomed; the harvest of corn was regular. His father died a contented man, and his mother followed, dutifully starving herself to bring on weakness and death.

*

Wang Changling, though, had never been interested in land. When his father took him to the nearby towns whenever he travelled to buy seeds, he loved wandering in and out of the shops which sold everything from nails to candles to bundles of cloth. There was little meat, but the stalls bore small piles of fruit for those who could afford to buy. Wang tasted water chestnuts and lychees not available in his village. What aroused him more, though, were the books on sale – tattered, pages missing, but teeming with letters. His mother, seeing his interest, taught him to read and write. The daughter of a musician, she had been taught the lute. Fine-boned, delicate to the point of frailty, she seemed ideally suited to this instrument, which she played for her own contentment, but also at weddings or at harvest time. Whilst her family were not learned people, they were cultured enough to have acquired a measure of literacy. They had planned to marry her to the local schoolmaster, but Wang Changling’s father forced his way into her affection. He had thugs and money at his disposal. He demanded marriage and so it came about.

When they fled their town, which had become infested with bandits, her books and lute had been left behind. In their new home, she became a ghost of herself. No more reading, no more performances for gatherings, when her fingers conjured love from the strings, arousing tears from her audience, even from her father’s thugs, who laid down their staffs and blubbered shamelessly. In their new home there was mostly silence. She bathed Wang Changling. She scrubbed pots, breaking her nails. She cooked. She sewed the cloth her husband brought back from the towns. Only when Wang Changling returned one day with a package of books did she soar above her resignation to the everyday. She took care, though, not to reveal her happiness to her husband, in case he resented these scraps of freedom. For that was what the books were – a jumble of loose pages, many torn and smudged, but they bore words which drew her to the time before marriage, before she herself had become household scrap.

She taught Wang Changling every spare hour she had, but the more she brightened, the more he brooded. She sensed that he hated the land as much as she did, that he longed to be elsewhere. But nothing could be done. There could be no return to their hometown. There were waves of marauders, every ten years or so, coming from nowhere, rampaging, ruling, giving way to other gangs. And her husband was content with his new situation. Each day, he mounted his horse and went to the fields to oversee the work of his peasants. Their obedience to his every word, their flinching if he used a cruel look, gave him much pleasure. Of course, he missed the brawling of his hometown, the gang he ruled over, the joy of commandeering other men’s wives, but he was older now, so he came to accept the bondage of his peasants as tribute to the ghost of an erstwhile warlord.

Such reverence in the village waned under the reign of Wang Changling. The more he travelled out of The Domain of Wang Qian, the more he fretted on his return. He brought back a haul of books and spent his time keeping watch over them rather than over his peasants. He read late into the night, by the light of a wicker torch and woke up fatigued and disgruntled at the prospect of having to spend a few hours in the field in a pretence of authority. The peasants could read in his frowning and fidgeting that he had lost the appetite for dominating them. Their complaints about the stubbornness of the soil grew louder. They planted only enough for their bellies. They took longer rest periods. They neglected to sharpen their tools, knowing that if they broke or rusted, Wang Changling would have to replace them. The additional cost to him was revenge for the paltry benefits they reaped from the land. One day, knowing the books had weakened Wang Changling, a group of them plotted to kill him.

Firstly, they identified his two paid spies, which was easy to do since they themselves, without adequate supervision by Wang Changling, had lowered their guard. The spies drank yellow wine and talked openly of their special bond with their master. The plotters lured them to a clump of bush at the edge of a distant field. It was a space where they murdered girls soon after they were born, feeding them dirt and stuffing their noses with pebbles. The plotters told the spies that a maiden was waiting there with a female infant. They could take her for free for the killing of the infant. The spies were both unwed men, with no experience of women. Wang Changling had demanded their sole attention until the time when he would supply them with brides. They hurried to the spot only to be beaten to death with hoehandles and buried among the infants.

The plotters spread word that the spies had defied Wang Changling’s ownership of them and run away. Wang Changling had accepted this story. But he was lonely. He retreated to town, purchased more books, and came home with Baoyu, a stunted young man, a circus performer once skilled at knife-throwing, who had fallen on hard times because he was cloudy in one eye. Wang Changling bought him cheaply. Although his aim was no longer precise, he could still throw knives into a crowd and cut a few veins. If the villagers pressed at Wang Changling’s door, he could loose Baoyu on them and be sure to cause injury, however erratic. Baoyu was also deformed, half his jaw beaten soft by a previous master. Not even the neediest villager would want to marry him, so Wang Changling was assured of a lifetime’s service. Best of all, Baoyu hardly slept, at the most two hours at night. He could keep guard as Wang Changling read. A bargain, Wang Changling thought, as he gave a small purse to Baoyu’s master. As an added precaution, Wang Changling had heated an iron and branded Baoyu on both arms. If he ran away he could be more easily (legally) claimed when found. If Baoyu chopped off one arm, the other remained to betray him. Wang Changling was content. He read day and night, sending Baoyu into the fields to terrify the villagers. The sight of this runt on his horse, picking away at loose skin on his jaw with the tip of his knife, and then running the blade across his tongue, was enough to subdue them.

CHAPTER TWO

The Time Before – The Dreams of Wang Changling

Wang Changling, when still only shakily confident in his skill in reading and writing, had tried his hand at composing his own stories. The books he had bought were mostly about battles, and these provoked him to imitation, but at first he couldn’t get beyond a sentence or two, and these were concerned with setting the scene, describing landscape, easier to write. After many trials, fist thumping of the desk, pens broken in two, inkpots shattered against the wall, and other melodramatic acts (according to Baoyu, who witnessed his master’s agony from a safe distance, wondering what all the fuss was about), ideas were birthed. To begin with, Wang Changling plotted a version of himself as a foot soldier in Emperor Wu’s army, grooming horses, tightening bowstrings, sharpening swords. Then, overconfident, he went to the other extreme, promoting himself to a general, his verse boasting of his bellicose appearance. He added glamour to his image. He wore a kerchief around his neck made of mulberry silk. He gave himself a certain pathos by being wounded in the arm, and being hurried off to a field hospital to be attended to by the Emperor’s favourite concubine, Ying Ying. Her peach-blossomed cheeks, high forehead and dusky arched eyebrows – which, happily, were joined – captured his eyes. When she leant over him to apply plasters, he breathed in her scent of musk and orchid. He would woo her each day with a fresh bouquet of poesy composed in her honour. He was on the brink of tasting Ying Ying’s lips when the jealous Emperor sent her to a distant province and ordered his execution. Wang Changling plotted his escape on the page. The night before his demise, he absconded with a trusty servant (whom he named Baoyu) to a faraway hamlet (which he named The Domain of WangQian) and remade his life as a landlord.

Real-life Baoyu interrupted his reverie with a bowl of onion broth. “You write, you write, but you rarely eat,” Baoyu chided him affectionately. “You write in sunlight, you write by wicker torch, your eyes will blur and go blind. Your neck and shoulders will become fixed in a curve. Your peasants will start laughing at you as a hunchback, instead of at me. Come, let me rub oil into your fingers to give them life.”

“How are they behaving?” Wang Changling asked, dismissing Baoyu’s offer.

“Badly, as usual. They know you are distracted, don’t care at all about the quality of the harvest.”

“Well, beat them. I pay you for such. Who have you punished today? And yesterday? And before that?”

“Only the baker, a youngster, but brazen as a bull. He is the voice of malcontent. I lash him but next day he is as surly as ever. I tell him I will chop off his fingers so he cannot massage dough, but he faces down my threat. I don’t know what to do. Should I tie him up and toss him for a few hours into the cesspit? I’ll prepare my knife, I will chop off one finger to start with.”

Wang Changling didn’t respond, too busy reading what he had written, knowing it was barely competent, no flamboyant descriptions had come from his mind. Still, he would persist. He struggled hard to continue his story, but nothing came. He chewed studiously on dried fungus and pickled bracken, hunched over his desk writing lines, then crossing them out. Night came and he was still gripping his pen as if to defend it against thieves (which he knew himself to be, having quietly stolen sentences from books, to help his story along).

He knew he had to do more reading, more preparation, for a new assault on the page. But that was exactly his predicament. All his books were about assaults, small wars and large wars, and he was growing more uneasy over all the killings, though his own father had been a (petty) warlord. Still, reading of the deeds of some of the Emperors overwhelmed him, their cruelties so stupendous that he turned page after page in disbelief, almost against his will, a slave to the act of reading. The story of Yang Lun, a rebellious peasant boy who aspired to be a prince, obsessed Wang Changling, and strangely, for one in his position as a wealthy landowner, his sympathies were with the peasant, not with the Emperor who tortured him.

He had paused when he reached a passage about the failure of the Yang Lun Rebellion, the capture and torture of Yang Lun. He breathed in so deeply that it was as if he was suddenly released from a stranglehold. He was scared of the ability of writers to slit throats and conduct slaughter on the page. He was scared of the potential of his fancy. He called out to Baoyu for water.

“What has befallen you, master?” Baoyu asked as Wang Changling lifted the cup to his lips, hands unsteady.

“This reading, I have to foresake it,” Wang Changling said. “Take these pages to the fire, rid me of them. No, rid them of me.”

Baoyu would have grinned but for the condition of his jaw. “I told you so, I told you that reading and writing would be the death of you! You don’t eat, you don’t sleep, your eyes fret by day and by torchlight.”

“Get out of my sight!” Wang Changling cried, but then relented, summoning him back. Wang Changling was fearful of being left alone in case his fancy conjured up dreadful and bloodstained scenes all on its own, and forced his hand to take up pen and create mayhem.

It was still daylight, so he had made Baoyu saddle the horses and the two of them rode to the fields to watch over the peasants. Baoyu, emboldened by his master’s presence, and wanting to impress him, dismounted, took up a stone to pelt at one of the women who was resting against a tree.

“Stop your stupidness!” Wang Changling shouted, gesticulating at Baoyu, and Baoyu let the stone drop, surprised by the urgency of his master’s voice. Wang Changling was surprised by his command. Normally he would have let Baoyu ill-treat the peasants with his whip. Now, such cruelty made him feel faint. He had to tighten his grip on the reins to steady both his body and his mind. Baoyu looked morosely at the stone, then looked up at his master. Wang Changling was distracted, gazing into the distance, which was within. The compassion he felt for the sleeping woman was unfamiliar. He was becoming a stranger to himself. That night he was restless, wondering what had become of him, and whether he could cure himself of his obsessive urge to read and write, which was making him in its way as disfigured as Baoyu. He resolved to become his normal self. Tomorrow and thereafter he would personally supervise Baoyu’s punishment of the peasants.

Though he drank rice wine for distraction, and ate little so he would long only for food, Wang Changling still could not rid himself of the desire to read more about the Yang Lun Rebellion. He was hypnotised by the strong light of the white page before him. Baoyu had done his best to prepare more dumplings to beguile his tongue, but Wang Changling ordered him instead to shave more bamboo nibs and mix powders and liquids into ink, in preparation for his next composition. In the meantime he continued to read the fable of the Emperor and Rebel Yang Lun… a fable because its descriptions of abuse and executions were unreal, beyond belief, yet factual.

Halfway through the ‘fable’, Wang Changling had pledged once more to abandon books, abandon writing, abandon thoughts of merciless cruelty, abandon Concubine Ying Ying. In the following days and weeks he was too disconsolate to do anything. He stayed in bed, not bothering to wash himself or eat more than a few mouthfuls of corn. His room stank. Baoyu, devoted as ever, pleaded with him to at least trim his moustache and beard which had grown so unruly that his mouth was becoming invisible. Wang Changling took to drink instead, and, late at night, when song seized him, he had bellowed out the words his mother had taught him – childhood songs remembered scrappily, but which evoked images of his mother spooning sugared porridge into his mouth or swinging him in the air until he was dizzy with happiness. He had sought out her breast while his father snored. She gave her milk readily and when he was sated, he looked up to meet her eyes. She smiled on him and he struggled for breath because she was so beautiful. Now, he sang, between gulps of rice wine, in honour of his mother. To him his voice sounded measured, but Baoyu, sleeping on a mat by the doorway, stuffed his ears with straw to temper the noise. Wang Changling sang, imagining that his words were drifting through a meadow of poppies, gathering scent and soaring to meet the night sky where they would beguile the stars. Baoyu pressed more straws to his ears.

*

“I will be unwed all my life,” Wang Changling had announced one morning as Baoyu returned from the fields. He had drunk much wine the night before and dreamed of the Emperor killing some of his concubines during the Yang Lun Rebellion. He had woken in a sweat and had this sudden thought, calling out his mother’s name, remembering the lute she played, whose melody used to ease him into sleep.