Under Fishbone Clouds Read online

  ‘I’m just joking. But seriously, you’ve got me. We’ve got each other. And whenever you want to talk, please just talk to me. I mean, I might not understand all the long fancy words you use, but still –’

  She hit his arm playfully, and he turned and caught her wrist in his hand.

  They drifted to the bedroom and slumped into each other’s arms, both wondering whether there was anything to the fact that she had vomited three nights in a row. However, to speak of something means to mould it from the malleable substance of hope and longing into something concrete. So instead they nestled into each other, both their imaginations silently conjuring up rushed horoscopes for the next child, lying close beneath a pale moon that was netted in the flaky reels of fishbone clouds.

  It only occurred to me after leaving the poet’s thatched cottage that I had no idea how to return home. Now, on earth and in heaven the procedure is pretty simple for gods: we merely need to think of the place we wish to end up and we arrive there – it is, unfortunately, only the Jade Emperor who is omnipresent. Yet I was now in neither heaven nor earth, but somewhere between the two. Not only that, but I was also stranded at the top of a perilous cliff, and I did not fancy climbing back over the slippery bone bridge. I walked to the edge and stared down into the mist. There was only one thing for it. I closed my eyes and jumped.

  As I had expected to flail through clouds and fog for hours or even days before reaching the ground, I was surprised to find my feet suddenly touching down, as if I had fallen no more than a few steps.

  ‘Hey you! What do you think you are doing? Get out of there!’

  I opened my eyes and turned around to see a stocky, red-faced man running out of a barn and shaking his fist at me. I seemed to be standing in the middle of a small pen. Curled up in the straw in one corner was a sleeping phoenix, its fiery feathers quivering as it breathed. I quickly hopped over the waist-high wooden fence and approached the angry man.

  ‘I’m sorry. I just sort of fell here. I don’t mean any trouble. But … erm, could you tell me where I am?’ I said.

  ‘Ah, I see! Well, this is the Jade Emperor’s private zoo. Actually, you’re the first visitor since we started, which must have been about ten thousand years ago now. We’re pretty well hidden away. Would you like to have a look around?’

  I murmured apprehensively and he began the guided tour. I was not surprised to see the four guardians of the compass perched on raised platforms at opposite corners of the park – the black tortoise watching the north, the blue dragon staring out into the rising sun, another red phoenix raising its plume toward the south, and, looking west, the pale qilin. It was the first time I had seen that ferocious unicorn, a strange cross between a tiger and a dragon, though I had heard stories about it. It is said that when the great fifteenth-century mariner Zheng He returned to China after his voyages to Africa with a giraffe, the courtiers all prostrated themselves before the long-necked beast, believing it to be the heavenly qilin.

  I was more intrigued, however, to see a vast enclosure containing a bale of fat, waddling bixi – giant turtles which fly down from heaven at the behest of Confucius, carrying stone tablets of his lessons on their backs. Beside it was a cage teeming with ravenous tao tie, grubby little gargoyles tearing flesh from each other in their insatiable hunger.

  ‘This is just the first section,’ The red-faced man beamed at me. ‘We’ve got a lake full of giant devil fish and dancing cranes; a skulk of fox spirits and nine-headed blackbirds and rainbirds in our little forest; and even a couple of demons in shackled boxes out the back.’

  ‘That’s impressive,’ I replied. ‘But I’ve got to return to my post before anyone notices that I’m gone. Do you have any idea how I can get back to earth?’

  ‘Not a problem. You can ride down on one of the qilin – they’ll be out tonight anyway, and they never have any trouble finding their way back,’ he said.

  ‘Thank you, that would be wonderful. But what do you mean by “they’ll be out tonight”? Surely you don’t let them loose on earth?’

  ‘Oh, they don’t run loose. They move through people’s dreams. They need the exercise, you see – we can’t keep them locked up in here all the time,’ he replied.

  ‘If they move through dreams, do you think they have anything to do with the human heart? You see, I’m trying to find out how it works.’

  ‘Hmm.’ He rubbed his chin. ‘Maybe. The way they get into people’s dreams is through the stories they know. After all, no one dreams about things they’ve never heard of. And I’ll tell you what, if you want to know about people’s hearts, learn what stories they listen to, what stories they tell their children. If you ask me, that’s the only way to know what people really believe, to see how they really view the world. Now, let me find a saddle for you.’

  He left me and entered the barn, to be greeted by a sudden flurry of squawks and jibbers; I did not even dare hazard a guess as to the kinds of creatures kept inside.

  7

  1960 THE YEAR OF THE RAT

  Despite the fact that her brother was a year and a half older than her, Hou Manxin took his hand and led him past the lolling hollyhock to the stone outhouse that served as a classroom. Hou Dali liked the hollyhock: the leathery pig ears surrounding stubby antennae, the damp purple incongruous amid the untrimmed bushes and trodden-in footpath. The sound of children playing and arguing reached their ears and he flinched. Unlike his sister, he did not enjoy school. It was not so much Teacher Lu – although the stinging ruler slicing across knuckles when he could not recall the words to Chairman Mao’s poems seemed brutally unfair – as the other students, the playground games which he tripped and sniffled through and the taunts he tried his best to ignore. All in all, he had decided, it was not easy being seven. He could not wait to be eight.

  ‘We’ll meet back here when the bell rings and we’ll walk home together, like Mama said,’ Hou Manxin told her brother patiently. She did not like it when Dali wandered off.

  ‘I know!’ He wrestled his hand from hers and strode toward the classroom, making a show of the confidence he lacked. He had his father’s wild scrawl of dark hair and lack of height, his mother’s round face.

  Dali joined the forty others cross-legged on the concrete, peering over rows of prickly heads that had either been shaved for summer or knotted into plaits. In front of them was a dirty chalkboard, which still displayed the ghosts of words written ten years before. Dali was happy that it was not his turn to attempt to clean it. Above it was pinned a black-and-white picture of Chairman Mao, smiling and looking out of the single window, perhaps, Dali imagined, to see which children dared turn up late.

  ‘Let’s begin by going back over what we learnt yesterday. The words of our great leader. Deng Liu, begin!’ Teacher Lu paced up and down in front of the students, his wide nose twitching along with his salt-and-pepper eyebrows. His cap almost matched the one shown in the picture behind him. Dali wished he too had a cap with a star on it. Then he would never get teased.

  Deng Liu leapt to his feet and clasped his grubby hands behind his back. ‘Our leader has taught us that it is possible to accomplish anything. The glorious motherland …’

  Teacher Lu nodded along, waiting for a slip-up. They learnt by rote. After all, the great leader himself had said that it was harmful to read too many books. If they did well they would be rewarded by being allowed to sing a song about a little lost fish. Teacher Lu watched the children’s faces, ready to punish any hint of a yawn or a sideways glance. He had once been a renowned calligrapher, but he now found that he could not stop his hands from trembling whenever he picked up one of the delicate reed brushes, at least not till he had sunk a glass of rice wine, which was harder and harder to come by. He scowled and picked up a piece of chalk. A little maths, then a few characters mapped out on the dirty board. That ought to be enough for today.

  Lunchtime was a throng of little bodies pressed on wooden benches in the cramped canteen, slurping tiny bowls of millet so
up. Dali found ways to lose the pieces of fruit his mother always left out for him to take – he did not want to be picked on for being bourgeois again. He had no idea what bourgeois meant, and neither did the other pupils, but they had heard a teacher say it and spit, so it must be really bad. And after lunch, a nap, the best bit of the day, sprawling on the fur-covered floors and the dull warmth of sleep half taking hold. When they woke the school day was done, and they were free to play in the field and around the crumbly buildings all afternoon until the teachers waved them home. Dali hung back around the classroom door, hoping that the boys would let him join in their games – they were soldiers liberating the overgrown corners of the field from the evil Nationalists, the casual shouts of war spilling over into scrums and bruises.

  ‘Hou Dali! There you are. Mama said to meet me when the bell rings.’ Manxin stared down, bewildered at her elder brother crouching timidly behind a bush, mud dried onto one side of his face. Her chin-length pigtails bobbed as she spoke.

  ‘I know!’ He looked about, then straightened up and pushed a stray strand of hair from his eyes.

  ‘The bell already rang, Dali. Didn’t you hear the bell?’

  ‘I know. I heard. I was playing a game. You wouldn’t understand.’ He wiped his muddy hands on his new Zhongshan jacket. ‘Come on then, let’s go,’ he said impatiently, and started walking.

  They passed worn small houses that backed onto rising fields of tawny blonde stubble, and even closer to home the busy streets were heaped with stockpiled husks of corn, while strings of tanned and speckled cobs hung down from roofs and doorways. Each single cob was closely guarded by suspicious eyes – everyone had heard the rumours about the famine in the countryside, and no one wanted to take any chances.

  ‘I like corn. Yellow corn. Shaoqui told us that ghosts eat corn. That’s why people put it near doors, to feed the ghosts. They must be very hungry. That’s why we don’t get much, even though we can see it everywhere. Is that right?’ Manxin asked.

  ‘No. Ghosts only eat people’s hearts, and only when people want something – really really want something – that they can’t have.’

  ‘Oh.’ Manxin did not understand, but she did not say anything else. She wanted dumplings for dinner, but she did not think they would get them. Was that what he meant?

  The little girl occupied herself with counting the number of bellowing backyard furnaces burping out smoke behind buildings, and when she grew bored with this she played at spotting pictures of that jolly man with a dimpled chin who peered out at her from most of the houses they passed. The pring of bicycles brought both of the children back from their wandering thoughts, and Manxin’s head swivelled to steal a glimpse of the open market – this was surely the most magical place in the city, for Ma only had to mention that she had been to the market for there to be something new to eat. Manxin remembered the last Spring Festival and the sizzling pork, which she wolfed down until her tummy had ached and moaned.

  ‘How was school?’ Granny Dumpling, as they called Bian Shi, asked as the two children pushed through the door.

  Granny Dumpling had found that she preferred to spend time at her daughter’s house, where husband, wife and three children were crammed into one sweaty bedroom, than stuck in the expansive empty sprawl of her own. The echoes scared her; the loneliness scared her. Her long white hair was fighting loose from her fuzzy plait – it turned white, she had told the children, because I told a lie and my ancestors came alive at night and stole the colour: don’t let the same thing happen to you! She was cradling the baby girl in her arms and mixing yellowy water and the ration of state-produced formula together with her little finger. Manxin squeezed her baby sister’s dark arm.

  ‘Look what I learned at school today, little Liqui. I’ll show you.’ Manxin swayed from side to side, holding out her baby sister’s chubby hands, lisping the words from the school song. Dali slunk to the table to look at the blurry pictures of aeroplanes which he had torn and saved from second-hand newspapers found discarded in the streets or retrieved from scrapheaps.

  ‘Your Ma will be back soon, so why don’t you go fetch some water for your old grandma?’ Granny Dumpling said to Manxin.

  She had given up asking Dali, since he always came back sulking, and often took twice as long as his sister. Other boys often pushed in front of him in the queue, and he did not have Manxin’s bug-eyed glares or unselfconscious loudness to stop them. Anyway, Granny Dumpling reasoned, he was the only boy, and for that reason alone he should be allowed to do as he wished.

  ‘Come on, chop chop, before a dragon swings its tail and brings us rain.’

  As Manxin took the wooden bucket and meandered out of the door, Granny Dumpling turned back to her grandson, who was absorbed in the pictures of planes. She watched him trace his fingers across the pages, then turned towards the stove.

  Back when Dali was still fluttering in her stomach, Yuying had turned to Jinyi and told him they were going to do things differently. Firstly, despite the prohibitions, they would take an offering to the nearest temple. (Jinyi would end up going by night, telling those he passed that he was visiting a sick relative. He found the rotund pagoda a few miles outside the city boarded up, and the monks vanished, but he managed to limber over a crumbling wall and leave the offering of two apples near where he vaguely remembered the fat Buddha had once been.) Secondly, Yuying had continued, when the child was born she planned to stay inside for the first few months, just as her mother had done before her, not letting even the slightest breath of the wind lick at their skin. Jinyi had agreed and even had an idea of his own.

  ‘We need to change our name.’

  Yuying had looked at him sceptically, unsure where he was going. She liked her name; it was the only part of her father she had left.

  ‘Listen, I’m serious. It’s not just because I’d like our children to carry on my family name – Hou is a fine name, though – but because it will save them. Bian is cursed. Everything has been strange since I took your name. And most importantly, if they have a different name, the demon won’t be able to find them.’

  So they decided to give the children Jinyi’s old name, and let the family line flow through his side to stop the stream of dark fortune from her own. The only problem seemed to be telling her mother, who in the end took the news so philosophically that Yuying had worried that she had not understood.

  ‘The world is filling up with new names for things,’ her mother had replied. ‘Everything seems to have a new name now. We used to be honourable, and now we’re bourgeois. Sometimes I don’t even know what these new words mean. But just as long as the things themselves stay the same, I say you can call them whatever you want.’

  Yuying took the opposite view – that even the subtlest alteration of a name could exponentially alter the thing it referred to: things only existed in how you saw them. Names fixed things in the world, defined their boundaries. But she had held her tongue, and that had settled it; the children would take Hou as their surname. Jinyi was wrong, however, about the demon – it would find them, but it would just take a little more time.

  There are not many family names to choose from. In the tenth century the Book of One Hundred Surnames was compiled, and it instantly became immensely popular. Beside the lists of names were lavish illustrations of important historical figures bearing the corresponding family name – it is not difficult to surmise that at least some of its popularity derived from people’s love of making the past correspond to their own lives, to have their view of themselves heightened by a relationship to someone more illustrious.

  I gave up my own name when I became a god, though I cannot say I miss it as much as I miss the people who used to call me by it. By the time Jinyi and Yuying’s children were born in the 1950s, however, when people did dare mention me at all it was in a tone of disgust. I was just another symbol of feudalism and the tyranny of belief, apparently. A few people still prayed to me, and filled my mouth with strands of syrupy toffee when the ne
w year rolled around, but they did it guiltily, with one eye on the door. That hurt.

  Where do gods go when they are given up, proscribed, forgotten? Nowhere. We’re still here, just biding our time – you’ll find we’re pretty good at that. In cupboards, attics, cellars; in keepsakes, cobwebs, books; lodged in the back of a mind and itching to be taken out and polished. I was one of the lucky ones: easy for kids to remember and hard to shake from memories of the taste of candy and sugar. Furthermore, as famine slowly began to spread across the country, a god dedicated to the kitchen stopped seeming like such a bad idea.

  Hou Manxin waited diligently in the line for the tap, stuck between a stocky man in his twenties and a lanky teenage girl whose home-decorated plimsolls, dotted with poorly embroidered rose blooms, betrayed a hint of personality beneath the familiar uniform of dark blue tunic and slack black trousers.

  A voice from the back of the line cut through the dull quiet. ‘At least the tap’s still running, so even if we starve we won’t be thirsty, eh?’

  Heads turned cautiously. The speaker was unshaven and unsteady, as if one of his legs was having trouble keeping the other in line. He must have been around forty, his cropped hair specked with grey.

  ‘I mean,’ he continued, a little louder than before, ‘it’s gonna be us soon too, you know, we aren’t going to have anything to eat, and it wouldn’t surprise me if someone makes off with the bloody tap to melt it down to meet a quota.’

  By now heads had snapped back towards the tap, the people in line willing the old adage to be true, that if you ignore something it might disappear. However, that did not seem to put him off.

  ‘You all know what I mean, don’t you?’ His tone was somewhere between pleading and petulant. ‘My cousin, he lives in the country, not far from here – couple of hours, that’s all, couple of hours north. And he’s at the furnace every day, and so are his boys, and even his wife. No surprise there, that’s what the rest of us are doing too. For the good of the country.’