I opened my eyes to find that I was covered with a sticky liquid, lying near the birth canal of a female donkey. My god! Who’d have thought that Ximen Nao, a literate, well-educated member of the gentry class, would be reborn as a white-hoofed donkey with floppy, tender lips!
2
Xlmen Nao Is Charitable to Save Blue Face
Bai Yingchufi Lovingly Comforts an Orphaned Donkey
The man standing behind the donkey with a broad grin on his face was my hired hand Lan Lian. I remembered him as a frail, skinny youth, and was surprised to see that in the two years since my death, he had grown into a strapping young man.
He was an orphan I’d found in the snow in front of the God of War Temple and brought home with me. Wrapped in a burlap sack and shoeless, he was stiff from the cold; his face had turned purple and his hair was a ratty mess. My own father had just died, but my mother was alive and well. From my father I had received the bronze key to the camphor chest in which were kept the deeds to more than eighty acres of farmland and the family’s gold, silver, and other valuables. I was twenty-four at the time and had just taken the second daughter of the richest man in Bai-ma, or White Horse, Town, Bai Lianyuan, as my wife. Her childhood name was Apricot, and she still had no grown-up name, so when she came into my family, she was simply known as Ximen Bai. As the daughter of a wealthy man, she was literate and well versed in propriety, had a frail constitution, breasts like sweet pears, and a well-proportioned lower body. She wasn’t bad in bed either. In fact, the only flaw in an otherwise perfect mate was that she had not yet produced a child.
Back then I was on top of the world. Bumper harvests every year, and the tenant farmers eagerly paid their rent. The grain sheds overflowed. The livestock thrived, and our black mule gave birth to twins. It was like a miracle, the stuff of legend, not reality. A stream of villagers came to see the twin mules, and our ears rang with their words of flattery. We rewarded them with jasmine tea and Green Fort cigarettes. The teenager Huang Tong stole a pack of our cigarettes and was dragged up to me by his ear. The young scamp had yellow hair, yellow skin, and shifty yellow eyes, giving the impression he entertained evil thoughts. I dismissed him with a wave of the hand, even gave him a packet of tea to take home for his father. Huang Tianfa, a decent, honest man who made fine tofu, was one of my tenant farmers; he farmed five acres of excellent riverfront land, and what a shame he had such a no-account son. He brought over a basketful of tofu so dense you could hang the pieces from hooks, along with a basketful of apologies. I told my wife to give him two feet of green wool to take home and make a couple of pair of cloth shoes for the new year. Huang Tong, oh, Huang Tong, after all those good years between your father and me, you should not have shot me with that musket of yours. Oh, I know you were just following orders, but you could have shot me in the chest and left me with a decent-looking corpse. You are an ungrateful bastard!
I, Ximen Nao, a man of dignity, open-minded and magnanimous, was respected by all. I had taken over the family business during chaotic times. I had to cope with the guerrillas and the puppet soldiers, but my family property increased by the addition of a hundred acres of fine land, the number of horses and cows went from four to eight, and we acquired a large wagon with rubber tires; we went from two hired hands to four, from one maidservant to two, and added two old women to cook for us. So that’s how things stood when I found Lan Lian in front of the God of War Temple, half frozen, with barely a breath left in him. I’d gotten up early that morning to collect dung. Now you may not believe me, since I was one of Northeast Gaomi Township’s richest men, but I always had a commendable work ethic. In the third month I plowed the fields, in the fourth I planted seeds, in the fifth I brought in the wheat, in the sixth I planted melons, in the seventh I hoed beans, in the eighth I collected sesame, in the ninth I harvested grain, and in the tenth I turned the soil. Even in the cold twelfth month, a warm bed could not tempt me. I’d be out with my basket to collect dog dung when the sun was barely up. People joked that I rose so early one morning I mistook some rocks for dung. That’s absurd. I have a good nose, I can smell dog dung from far away. No one who is indifferent to dog dung can be a good landlord.
There was so much snow that the buildings, trees, and streets were buried, nothing but white. All the dogs were hiding, so there’d be no dung that day. But I went out anyway. The air was fresh and clean, the wind was yet mild, and at that early hour there were all sorts of strange and mysterious rarities – the only way you could see them was to get up early. I walked from Front Street to Back Street and took a turn around the fortified village wall in time to see the horizon change from red to white, a fiery sunrise as the red sun rose into the sky and turned the vast snowy landscape bright red, just like the legendary Crystal Realm. I found the child in front of the God of War Temple, half buried in the snow. At first I thought he was dead and figured I’d pay for a meager coffin to bury him to keep the wild dogs away. Only a year before, a naked man had frozen to death in front of the Earth God Temple. He was red from head to toe, his pecker sticking out straight as a spear, which drew peals of laughter. That outlandish friend of yours, Mo Yan, wrote about that in his story “The Man Died, His Dick Lived On.” Thanks to my generosity, the corpse of this man, the one who died by the roadside but whose dick lived on, was buried in the old graveyard west of town. Good deeds like that have wide-ranging influence and are more consequential than memorials or biographies. I set down my dung basket and nudged the boy, then felt his chest. It was still warm, so I knew he was alive. I took off my lined coat and wrapped him in it, then picked him up and carried him home. Prismlike rays of the morning sun lit up the sky and the ground ahead of me; people were outside shoveling snow, so many villagers were witness to the charity of Ximen Nao. For that alone, you people should not have shot me with your musket. And on that point, Lord Yama, you should not have sent me back as a donkey! Everyone says that saving a life is better than building a seven-story pagoda, and I, Ximen Nao, sure as hell saved a life. Me, Ximen Nao, and not just one life. During the famine one spring I sold twenty bushels of sorghum at a low price and exempted my tenant farmers from paying rent. That kept many people alive. And look at my miserable fate. Is there no justice in heaven or on earth, in the world of men or the realm of spirits? Any sense of conscience? I protest. I am mystified!
I took the youngster home and laid him down on a warm bed in the bunkhouse. I was about to light a fire to warm him when the foreman, Old Zhang, said, You can’t do that, Boss. A frozen turnip must thaw out slowly. If you heat it, it will turn to mush. That made sense, so I let the boy warm up naturally on the bed and had someone in the house heat a bowl of sweet ginger water, which I poured slowly into his mouth after prying it open with chopsticks. He began to moan once some of that ginger water was in his stomach. Having brought him back from the dead, I told Old Zhang to shave off the boy’s ratty hair and the fleas living in it. We gave him a bath and got him into some clean clothes. Then I took him to see my aging mother. He was a clever little one. As soon as he saw her, he fell to his knees and cried out, “Granny,” which thrilled my mother, who chanted “Amita Buddha” and asked which temple the little monk came from. She asked him his age. He shook his head and said he didn’t know. Where was home? He wasn’t sure. When he was asked about his family, he shook his head like one of those stick-and-ball toys. So I let him stay. He was a smart little pole-shinnying monkey. He called me Foster Dad as soon as he laid eyes on me, and called Madame Bai Foster Mother. But foster son or not, I expected him to work, since even I engaged in manual labor, and I was the landlord. You work or you don’t eat. Just a new way of expressing an idea that has been around for a long time. The boy had no name, but since he had a blue birthmark on the left side of his face, I told him I’d call him Lan Lian, or Blue Face, with Lan being his surname. But, he said, I want to have the same name as you, Foster Dad, so won’t you call me Ximen Lanlian? I said no, that the name Ximen was not available to just anyone, but that if he worked hard for twenty years, we’d see about it. He started out by helping the foreman tend the horse and donkey – Ah, Lord Yama, how could you be so evil as to turn me into a donkey?- and gradually moved on to bigger jobs. Don’t be fooled by his thin frame and frail appearance; he worked with great efficiency and possessed good judgment and a considerable bag of tricks, all of which made up for his lack of strength. Now, seeing his broad shoulders and muscular arms, I could tell he’d grown into a man to be reckoned with. “Ha ha, the foal is out!” he shouted as he bent down, reached out his large hands, and helped me stand, causing me more shame and anger than I care to think about.
“I am not a donkey!” I roared. “I am a man! I am Ximen Nao!” But my throat felt exactly the way it had when the two blue-faced demons had throttled me. I couldn’t speak no matter how hard I tried. Despair, terror, rage. I spat out slobber, sticky tears oozed from my eyes. His hand slipped, and I thudded to the ground, right in the middle of all that gooey amniotic fluid and afterbirth, which had the consistency of jellyfish.
