Little Uncle collapsed onto a bench, his face bunched into knots. “The shop on the lane, the sleeping quarters in back, everything gone to cinders.” GaoLing clasped my arm.
Bit by bit, Mother and the aunts pulled the story out of him. Last night, he said, Precious Auntie came to Father. Her hair was unbound, dripping tears and black blood, and Father instantly knew she was a ghost and not an ordinary dream.
“Liu Jin Sen,” Precious Auntie had called. “Did you value camphor wood more than my life? Then let the wood burn as I do now.”
Father swung out his arm to chase her away and knocked over the oil lamp, which was not in his dream but on a table next to his cot. When Big Uncle heard the crash, he sat up and lit a match to see what had spilled onto the floor. Just then, Little Uncle said, Precious Auntie knocked the match out of his fingertips. Up burst a fountain of flames. Big Uncle shouted to Little Uncle to help him douse the fire. By Precious Auntie’s trickery, Little Uncle said, he poured out a jar of pai gar wine instead of the pot of cold tea. The fire jumped higher. Father and the two uncles rousted their sons from the next room; then all the men of our family stood in the courtyard, where they watched the flames eat up the bedding, the banners, the walls. The more the fire ate, the hungrier it became. It crept to the ink shop to hunt for more food. It devoured the scrolls of famous scholars who had used our ink. It licked the silk-wrapped boxes holding the most expensive inksticks. And when the resin of those sticks leaked out, it roared with joy, its appetite increased. Within the hour, our family’s fortunes wafted up to the gods as incense, ashes, and poisonous smoke.
Mother, Big Aunt, and Little Aunt clapped their hands over their ears, as if this was the only way to keep their senses from dribbling out. “The fates have turned against us!” Mother cried. “Could there be anything worse?” Little Uncle then cried and laughed and said indeed there was.
The buildings next to our family’s ink shop also began to burn, he said. The one on the east sold old scholar books, the one on the west was filled to the rafters with the works of master painters. In the middle of the orange-colored night, the shopkeepers dumped their goods into the ashy lane. Then the fire brigade arrived. Everyone joined in and tossed so many buckets of water into the air it looked like it was raining. And then it really did rain, shattering down hard, ruining the saved goods, but saving the rest of the district from being burned.
By the time Little Uncle finished telling us this, Mother, my aunts, and GaoLing had stopped wailing. They looked as though their bones and blood had drained out of the bottoms of their feet. I think they felt as I did when I finally understood that Precious Auntie was dead.
Mother was the first to regain her senses. “Take the silver ingots out of the root cellar,” she told us. “And whatever good jewelry you have, gather it up.”
“Why?” GaoLing wanted to know.
“Don’t be stupid. The other shopkeepers will make our family pay for the damages.” And then Mother pushed her. “Get up. Hurry.” She pulled a bracelet off GaoLing’s wrist. “Sew jewelry into the sleeves of your worst-looking jackets. Hollow out the hardest crab apples and put the gold inside those. Pile them in the cart and put more apples on top, rotten ones. Old Cook, see if the tenants have any wheelbarrows they can sell us, and don’t bargain too hard. Everyone put a bundle together, but don’t bother with trifles… .” I was amazed at how Mother’s mind flowed, as if she were accustomed to running two paces ahead of a flood.
The next day Father, Big Uncle, and their sons came home. They already looked like paupers with their unwashed faces, their smoky clothes. Big Aunt and Little Aunt went to them, jabbering:
“Will we lose the house?”
“Will we starve?”
“Do we really have to run away?”
The smaller children began to cry. Father was like a deaf mute. He sat in his elmwood chair, rubbing its arm, declaring it the finest thing he had ever owned and lost. That night, nobody ate. We did not gather in the courtyard for the evening breezes. GaoLing and I spent the night together, talking and crying, swearing loyalty to die together as sisters. We exchanged hairpins to seal our pledge. If she felt that Precious Auntie was to blame for our disasters, she did not say so as the others had continued to do. She did not blame my birth for bringing Precious Auntie into their lives. Instead, GaoLing told me that I should feel lucky that Precious Auntie had already died and would therefore not suffer the slow death of starvation and shame that awaited the rest of us. I agreed yet wished she were with me. But she was at the End of the World. Or was she really wandering the earth, seeking revenge?
The next day, a man came to our gate and handed Father a letter with seals. A complaint had been made about the fire and our family’s responsibility for the damages. The official said that as soon as the owners of the affected shops had tallied their losses, the figure would be given to the magistrate, and the magistrate would tell us how the debt should be settled. In the meantime, he said, our family should present the deed for our house and land. He warned us that he was posting a notice in the village about this matter, and thus people would know to report us if we tried to run away.
After the official left, we waited to hear from Father what we should do. He sagged into his elmwood chair. Then Mother announced, “We’re finished. There’s no changing fate. Today we’ll go to the market and tomorrow we’ll feast.”
Mother gave all of us more pocket money than we had held in our entire lives. She said we should each buy good things to eat, fruits and sweets, delicacies and fatty meats, whatever we had always denied ourselves but longed for. The Moon Festival was coming up, and so it was not unusual that we would be shopping like the rest of the crowd for the harvest meal.
Because of the holiday, it was a bigger market day, with a temple fair, jugglers and acrobats, vendors of lanterns and toys, and more than the usual numbers of tricksters and hucksters. As we pushed through the hordes, GaoLing and I clung to each other’s hands. We saw crying lost children and rough-looking men who stared at us openly. Precious Auntie had constantly warned me of hooligans from the big cities who stole stupid country girls and sold them as slaves. We stopped at a stall selling mooncakes. They were stale. We turned up our noses at pork that was gray. We looked into jars of fresh bean curd, but the squares were gooey and stunk. We had money, we had permission to buy what we wanted, yet nothing looked good, everything seemed spoiled. We wandered about in the thick crowd, pressed one to the other like bricks.
And then we found ourselves in Beggars Lane, a place I had never been. There we saw one pitiful sight after another: A shaved head and a limbless body that rocked on its back like a tortoise on its shell. A boneless boy whose legs were wrapped around his neck. A dwarf with long needles poked through his cheeks, belly, and thighs. The beggars had the same laments: “Please, little miss, I beg you, big brother, have pity on us. Give us money, and in your next life you won’t have to suffer like us.”
Some passing boys laughed, most other people turned away their eyes, and a few old grannies, soon bound for the next world, threw down coins. GaoLing clawed at my arm and whispered: “Is that what we’re destined to become?” As we turned to leave, we bumped into a wretch. She was a girl, no older than we were, dressed in shredded rags, strips tied onto strips, so that she looked as if she were wearing an ancient warrior’s costume. Where the orbs of her eyes should have been, there were two sunken puckers. She began to chant: “My eyes saw too much, so I plucked them out. Now that I can’t see, the unseen come to me.”
She shook an empty bowl in front of us. “A ghost is now waiting to speak to you.”
“What ghost?” I asked right away.
“Someone who was like a mother to you,” the girl answered just as fast.
GaoLing gasped. “How did she know Precious Auntie was your mother?” she whispered to me. And then she said to the girl, “Tell us what she says.”
The blind girl held up her empty bowl again and shook it. GaoLing threw in a c
oin. The girl tipped the bowl and said, “Your generosity does not weigh much.”
“Show us what you can do first,” GaoLing said.
The girl crouched on the ground. From one tattered sleeve she pulled out a sack, then untied it and poured its contents on the ground. It was limestone silt. From her other sleeve she removed a long, slender stick. With the flat length of the stick, she smoothed the silt until its surface was as flat as a mirror. She pointed the stick’s sharp end to the ground, and with her sightless eyes aimed toward heaven, she began to write. We crouched next to her. How did a beggar girl learn to do this? This was no ordinary trick. Her hand was steady, the writing was smooth, just like a skilled calligrapher’s. I read the first line.
A dog howls, the moon rises, it said. “Doggie! That was her nickname for me,” I told the girl. She smoothed the silt and wrote more: In darkness, the stars pierce forever. Shooting stars, that was in the poem Baby Uncle wrote for her. Another sweep, another line: A rooster crows, the sun rises, Precious Auntie had been a Rooster. And then the girl write the last line: In daylight, it’s as if the stars never existed. I felt sad, but did not know why.
The girl smoothed the dirt once more and said, “The ghost has no more to say to you.”
“That’s it?” GaoLing complained. “Those words make no sense.”
But I thanked the girl and put all the coins from my pocket into her bowl. As we walked home, GaoLing asked me why I had given the money for nonsense about a dog and a rooster. At first I could not answer her. I kept repeating the lines in my head so I would not forget them. Each time I did, I grew to understand what the message was and I became more miserable. “Precious Auntie said I was the dog who betrayed her,” I told GaoLing at last. “The moon was the night I said I would leave her for the Changs. The stars piercing forever, that is her saying this is a lasting wound she can never forgive. By time the rooster crowed, she was gone. And until she was dead, I never knew she was my mother, as if she had never existed.”
GaoLing said, “That is one meaning. There are others.”
“What, then?” I asked. But she could not think of anything else to say.
When we returned home, Mother and Father, as well as our aunts and uncles, were bunched in the courtyard, talking in excited voices. Father was relating how he had met an old Taoist priest at the market, a remarkable and strange man. As he passed by, the priest had called out to him: “Sir, you look as if a ghost is plaguing your house.”
“Why do you say that?” Father asked.
“It’s true, isn’t it?” the old man insisted. “I feel you’ve had a lot of bad luck and there’s no other reason for it. Am I right?”
“We had a suicide,” Father admitted, “a nursemaid whose daughter was about to be married.”
“And bad luck followed.”
“A few calamities,” Father answered.
The young man standing next to the priest then asked Father if he had heard of the Famous Catcher of Ghosts. “No? Well, this is he, the wandering priest right before you. He’s newly arrived in your town, so he’s not yet as well known as he is in places far to the north and south. Do you have relatives in Harbin? No? Well, then! If you had, you’d know who he is.” The young man, who claimed to be the priest’s acolyte, added, “In that city alone, he is celebrated for having already caught one hundred ghosts in disturbed households. When he was done, the gods told him to start wandering again.”
When Father finished telling us how he had met these two men, he added, “This afternoon, the Famous Catcher of Ghosts is coming to our house.”
A few hours later, the Catcher of Ghosts and his assistant stood in our courtyard.
The priest had a white beard, and his long hair was piled like a messy bird’s-nest. In one hand he carried a walking stick with a carved end that looked like a flayed dog stretched over a gateway. In the other, he held a short beating stick. Slung over his shoulders was a rope shawl from which hung a large wooden bell. His robe was not the sand-colored cotton of most wandering monks I had seen. His was a rich-looking blue silk, but the sleeves were grease-stained, as if he had often reached across the table for more to eat.
I watched hungrily as Mother offered him special cold dishes. It was late afternoon, and we were sitting on low stools in the courtyard. The monk helped himself to everything—glass noodles with spinach, bamboo shoots with pickled mustard, tofu seasoned with sesame seed oil and coriander. Mother kept apologizing about the quality of the food, saying she was both ashamed and honored to have him in our shabby home. Father was drinking tea. “Tell us how it’s done,” he said to the priest, “this catching of ghosts. Do you seize them in your fists? Is the struggle fierce or dangerous?”
The priest said he would soon show us. “But first I need proof of your sincerity.” Father gave his word that we were indeed sincere. “Words are not proof,” the priest said.
“How do you prove sincerity?” Father asked.
“In some cases, a family might walk from here to the top of Mount Tai and back, barefoot and carrying a load of rocks.” Everyone, especially my aunts, looked doubtful that any of us could do that.
“In other cases,” the monk continued, “a small offering of pure silver can be enough and will cover the sincerity of all members of the immediate family.”
“How much might be enough?” Father asked.
The priest frowned. “Only you know if your sincerity is little or great, fake or genuine.”
The monk continued eating. Father and Mother went to another room to discuss the amount of their sincerity. When they returned, Father opened a pouch and pulled out a silver ingot and placed this in front of the Famous Catcher of Ghosts.
“This is good,” the priest said. “A little sincerity is better than none at all.”
Mother then drew an ingot from the sleeve of her jacket. She slid this next to the first so that the two made a clinking sound. The monk nodded and put down his bowl. He clapped his hands, and the assistant took from his bundle an empty vinegar jar and wad of string.
“Where’s the girl that the ghost loved best?” asked the priest.
“There,” Mother said, and pointed to me. “The ghost was her nursemaid.”
“Her mother,” Father corrected. “The girl’s her bastard.”
I had never heard this word said aloud, and I felt as if blood was going to pour out of my ears.
The priest gave a small grunt. “Don’t worry. I’ve had other cases just as bad.” Then he said to me: “Fetch me the comb she used for your hair.”
My feet were locked to the ground until Mother gave me a little knock on the head to hurry. So I went to the room Precious Auntie and I had shared not so long before. I picked up the comb she used to run through my hair. It was the ivory comb she never wore, its ends carved with roosters, its teeth long and straight. I remembered how Precious Auntie used to scold me for my tangles, worrying over every hair on my head.
When I returned, I saw the assistant had placed the vinegar jar in the middle of the courtyard. “Run the comb through your hair nine times,” he said. So I did.
“Place it in the jar.” I dropped the comb inside, smelling the escape of cheap vinegar fumes. “Now stand there perfectly still.” The Catcher of Ghosts beat his stick on the wooden bell. It made a deep kwak, kwak sound. He and the acolyte walked in rhythm, circling me, chanting, and drawing closer. Without warning, the Catcher of Ghosts gave a shout and leapt toward me. I thought he was going to squeeze me into the jar, so I closed my eyes and screamed, as did GaoLing.
When I opened my eyes, I saw the acolyte was pounding a tight-fitting wooden lid onto the jar. He wove rope from top to bottom, bottom to top, then all around the jar, until it resembled a hornet’s nest. When this was done, the Catcher of Ghosts tapped the jar with his beating stick and said, “It’s over. She’s caught. Go ahead. Try to open it, you try. Can’t be done.”
Everyone looked, but no one would touch. Father asked, “Can she escape?”
&
nbsp; “Not possible,” said the Catcher of Ghosts. “This jar is guaranteed to last more than several lifetimes.”
“It should be more,” Mother grumbled. “Stuck in a jar forever wouldn’t be too long, considering what she’s done. Burned down our shop. Nearly killed our family. Put us in debt.” I was crying, unable to speak on Precious Auntie’s behalf. I was her traitor.
The next day, our family held its banquet, the best dishes, food we would never again enjoy in this lifetime. But no one except the youngest children had any appetite. Mother had also hired a man to take photographs, so we could remember the days when we had plenty. In one, she wanted a picture of just her and GaoLing. At the last moment, GaoLing insisted I come and stand near Mother as well, and Mother was not pleased but did not say anything. The following day, Father and my two uncles went to Peking to hear what the damages would be against our family.
While they were gone, we learned to eat watery rice porridge flavored with just a few bites of cold dishes. Want less, regret less, that was Mother’s motto. About a week later, Father stood in the courtyard, bellowing like a madman.
“Make another banquet,” he shouted.
Then our uncles followed: “Our bad luck has ended! No damages! That was the magistrate’s decision—no damages at all!”
We rushed toward them, children, aunts, tenants, and dogs.
How could this be? And we listened as Father explained. When the other shop owners brought in their damaged goods for inspection, the magistrate discovered that one had rare books that had been stolen from the Hanlin Academy thirty years before. Another, who claimed he had works of master calligraphers and painters, was actually selling forgeries. The judges then decided the fire was fitting punishment to those two thieves.
“The Catcher of Ghosts was right,” Father concluded. “The ghost is gone.”
That evening everyone ate well, except me. The others laughed and chatted, all worries gone. They seemed to forget that our inksticks had returned to charcoal, that the ink shop was just floating ash. They were saying their luck had changed because Precious Auntie was now knocking her head on the inside of a stinky vinegar jar.