The Ancient Ship
The mayor and street monitors personally parceled out the land. “These are called responsibility plots,” they told the people. That left the factory and glass noodle rooms. Who would take responsibility for them? Not until many days had passed did anyone come forward to assume responsibility for the factory. Now only the processing rooms remained. The mills stood on the riverbank, wrapped in quiet, inauspicious mystery. Everyone knew that Wali’s essence—its misfortunes, its honor and its disgrace, its rise and fall—was concentrated in those dark, dilapidated old mills. Who had the courage to set foot in dank, moss-covered fortresses and take charge?
The people had long considered the milling of glass noodles to be a strange calling. The mills themselves and the places where the strands were extruded were suffused with complex, indescribable mystery. During the milling procedures, the temperature of the water, the yeast, the starch, the paste…if the smallest problem arose in any of the stages, the process would fail: Suddenly the starch would form a sediment; then the noodles would begin to break up…it was what the workers called “spoiled vats.” “The vat is spoiled!” they would shout. “The vat is spoiled!” When that happened, everyone would stand around feeling helpless.
Many expert noodle makers wound up jumping into the Luqing River. One was pulled out of the river and saved from drowning, only to hang himself in one of the mills the next day. That’s the sort of calling it was. Now who was going to step up and take charge? Since the Sui clan had operated the mills for generations, it made sense for one of them to assume responsibility. Eventually, Sui Baopu was urged to take over, but the forty-year-old red-faced scion shook his head; looking across the river at the line of mills, he muttered something under his breath, looking worried.
At that juncture, a member of the Zhao clan, Zhao Duoduo, shocked people by volunteering to take on the job.
All of Wali churned with excitement. The first thing Duoduo did after assuming responsibility was change the name of the enterprise to the Wali Glass Noodle Factory. People exchanged looks of incredulity as they realized that the industry no longer belonged to Wali, nor to the Sui clan. Now it belonged to the Zhao clan! Still, the old millstones rumbled from dawn to dusk. Where were they headed? People came to the riverbank to stand and gape at the mills, sensing that a bizarre change had occurred in front of their eyes, as extraordinary as hens lining up atop the wall or a hedgehog actually coughing. “Te world has turned upside down!” they said. So when the earth moved that early morning, they were terrified but not surprised.
If there was a more immediate cause for the earth to move, the blame should rest with the drilling rigs out in the fields. For the better part of a year a surveying team had been far from town. But soon the rigs came so close that the residents grew uneasy. Among them, only the lean figure of Sui Buzhao was seen around the rigs, sometimes helping to carry the drills and winding up mud-soaked from head to toe. “These are for coal mining,” he said to the gathered crowd. Day and night the drills turned, until the tenth day, when one of the town’s residents stood up and said, “That’s enough!”
“How do you know that’s enough?” the operator asked.
“When you reach the eighteenth layer of heaven and earth, we’re done for!”
The operator laughed as he tried to explain away their concerns. And the drills kept turning, until the morning of the fifteenth day, when the earth began to move.
People flew out of their windows. The rolling of the ground sickened them and made them dizzy. All but Sui Buzhao, who had spent half his life on ships and easily adapted to the pitching and rolling of the earth beneath him. He ran fast, but then a thunderous roar rose up from somewhere and froze people where they stood. When they regained their bearings, they ran madly to a vacant lot, where they huddled with the crowds already there. The lot was what was left of the old temple that had burned down. Most residents of the town were there, and they were shivering, even though it was not a cold morning. The sound of their voices changed—they spoke listlessly, feebly, and even the fastest-talking among them stammered. “What has fallen?” they wondered. No one knew; they shook their heads.
Many hadn’t had time to dress, so now they frantically covered their bodies. Sui Buzhao was naked but for a white shirt tied around his waist. He ran around looking for his nephews Baopu and Jiansu and his niece Hanzhang, whom he found under a haystack. Baopu was dressed—more or less—while Hanzhang had on only bra and panties. Crouching inside, her arms crossed over her chest, she was shielded by Baopu and Jiansu, who was wearing only a pair of shorts. Sui Buzhao crouched down and looked for Hanzhang in the darkness. “Are you okay?” he asked.
“Yes,” she replied.
Jiansu edged closer to her. “Go away!” he said impatiently.
So Sui Buzhao walked around the square and discovered that the clans were all huddling together; wherever you saw a group of people, you found a clan. Three large clusters: Sui, Zhao, and Li, old and young. No one had called them together—the ground had done that; three shakes here and two there, and the clans were drawn to the same spots. Sui Buzhao walked up to where the Zhao clan had gathered. He looked but did not see Naonao anywhere. What a shame that was. Naonao, barely twenty, was the Zhao clan’s favorite daughter, a young woman whose beauty was spoken of on both sides of the river. She burned through the town like a fireball. The old man coughed and threaded his way in among the crowd, unsure which clan he should go to.
The sky was turning light. “Our wall is gone!” someone shouted. And that is when the people understood the origin of the thunderous roar. With a chorus of shouts, they ran, until a young man jumped up onto the abandoned foundation and shouted, “Stop right there!” They looked up at him, wondering what was wrong. He thrust out his right arm and said, “Fellow townspeople, do not move. This is an earthquake, and there will be an aftershock. Wait till it passes.”
The people held their breath as they listened to what he was saying. Then they exhaled as one.
“The aftershock is usually worse than the first shaking,” he added.
A murmur rose from the crowd. Sui Buzhao, who was listening intently, yelled, “Do as he says, he knows what he’s talking about!”
Finally the square was quiet. No one moved as they waited for the aftershock. Many minutes passed before someone in the Zhao clan yelled tearfully, “Oh, no, Fourth Master didn’t make it out!”
Chaos ensued, until another older resident cursed hoarsely, and everyone realized it was Zhao Duoduo. “What the hell good does all that shouting do? Go get Fourth Master and carry him over here!” Immediately a man broke from the crowd and ran like the wind down a lane.
No one in the square said a word; the silence was unnerving and stayed that way until the man returned.
“Fourth Master was asleep!” he announced loudly. “He says everyone should go back to their homes, that there won’t be an aftershock.”
The news was met with whoops of joy. Then the elders of each clan told their young to head back home. The crowds dispersed as the young man jumped down from the foundation and walked off slowly.
Three people remained in the haystack: Baopu and his brother and sister. Jiansu stared off into the distance and complained, “Fourth Master has become a sort of god, reigning over heaven and earth!” Baopu picked up the pipe his brother had laid on the ground, turned it over in his hand, and put it back. Straightening up to free his muscular body from its confinement, he looked up at the fading stars and sighed. After taking off his shirt and wrapping it around his sister’s shoulders, he paused and then walked off without a word.
Baopu entered the shadow of a section of collapsed wall, where he spotted something white. He stepped forward and stopped. It was a half-naked young woman. She giggled when she saw who it was. Baopu’s throat burned. A single tremulous word emerged: “Naonao.” She giggled again, set her fair-skinned legs in motion, and ran off.
TWO
The Sui clan and the old mills, it appeared, were fated to be linked. For generations the extended clan had produced glass noodles. As soon as the three siblings—Baopu, Jiansu, and Hanzhang—were able to work, they could always be found on the sun-drenched drying floor or in the steamy processing rooms. During the famine years, of course, no noodles were produced, but once the millstones were turning again, the Sui clan was back at work. Baopu was happiest when things were quiet. Over the years he had preferred to sit on a stool and watch the millstone turn. Since it was Jiansu’s job to deliver the noodles, he spent most of his time riding the horse cart down the gravel road all the way to the ocean piers; Hanzhang had the most enviable job: She spent her days on the drying floor, a white kerchief tied around her head as she moved amid the silvery glass noodles.
But now the factory had been taken over by Zhao Duoduo, who called his workers together on his first day. “I am responsible for the factory,” he announced, “and I invite you all to stay on. Those who wish to leave may do so. If you stay, be prepared to join me in days of hard work!” Several of the workers were off as soon as he was finished. But not Baopu and his siblings, who left the meeting and went directly to their posts. The thought of leaving the business never crossed their minds, as if it was what they were destined to do, a job only death could force them to leave. Baopu sat alone in the mill, adding mung beans to the eye of the millstone, his broad back facing the door, the room’s sole window high on the wall to his right. The view out that little window was of the riverbank, the scattered “fortresses” and the lines of willow trees. Farther off was an expanse of silver under a blue sky. That was the drying floor, a place where the sunlight seemed brighter than anywhere else and where the wind was gentler. Faint sounds of laughter and singing drifted over from the sandy ground, where young women weaved in and out among a forest of drying racks. Hanzhang was one of them, and so was Naonao. Children lay on the ground around the drying racks waiting for lengths of glass noodles to fall to the ground, so they could run over and scoop them up. Baopu could not see their faces through his window, but he could sense their happiness.
The drying floor was the scene of intense activity even before sunrise. Older women gauged the direction of the day’s wind by looking up at the cloud formations and then positioning the racks accordingly; they needed to be set perpendicular to the wind to keep the wet strands from sticking together when gusts blew. Horse carts rumbled up to deliver basketfuls of wet glass noodles; the snowy white, unblemished strands were hung over racks, where the young women spread them out and shifted them with their dainty fingers all day long, until they were dry and so light they fluttered gracefully like willow catkins with each breeze.
People said that White Dragon glass noodles had earned their reputation not only because of the extraordinary quality of Luqing River water, but also because of the young maidens’ fingers. They touched the strands with great care, from top to bottom and from left to right, like strumming a harp. The colors of the sunset played on their faces as light retreated from the noodles until, finally, they could tolerate no colors at all; they had to be the purest white.
As the women’s bodies warmed under the sun, one of them began to sing softly. The notes went higher, and everyone within earshot stopped to listen. When finally she realized she had a rapt audience, she stopped and was rewarded with applause and laughter. The loud est voice on the drying floor belonged to Naonao, who was used to doing whatever she wanted, even cursing at someone for no apparent reason. No one on the receiving end ever minded, knowing that was just how she was. She’d learned disco from TV, and sometimes she danced on the drying floor. And when she did, the others stopped working to shout, “More, more, more…” But Naonao never did what others wanted, so instead of dancing, she’d lie down on the hot sand and expose her fair skin to the sun. Once, as she lay on the sand, she began to writhe and said, “Day in and day out there’s something missing.” The others laughed. “What’s missing is a goofy young man to wrap his arms around you!” an elderly woman said. Naonao jumped up from the sand. “Hah!” she exclaimed. “I’m afraid that particular goofy young man hasn’t been born.” The others applauded gleefully. What a happy scene it was, with laughter all around as they turned and headed back to the noodles.
Hanzhang generally kept her distance from the center of activity and on some days would hardly talk to anyone. She was tall and thin, and had large, dark eyes and long lashes that fluttered constantly. It was common for Naonao to slip under drying racks to run over to Hanzhang, filled with chatter. Hanzhang would just listen.
Then one day Naonao asked, “Who’s prettier, you or me?” Hanzhang smiled. Naonao clapped her hands. “You have a wonderful smile. You always look so down in the dumps, but when you smile you’re really pretty.” Hanzhang didn’t say a word as her hands kept flying over the racks. Naonao babbled on, even took Hanzhang’s hand and held it up to get a closer look. “What a lovely hand, with such pretty little nails. You really should paint them red. Oh, have you heard? From now on, when you paint your nails, you won’t have to use oleander. Now they have oil you paint on, and your nails are red.” She lifted Hanzhang’s hand, and when she lowered her head she could see Hanzhang’s pale upper arm up the sleeve, which so unnerved her she dropped the hand. The skin was so nearly transparently thin Naonao could actually see the veins beneath the surface. She then looked at Hanzhang’s face, which was slightly sunburned. But the skin on her neck and spots covered by her bandanna were the same color as her arm. Naonao held her tongue as she studied Hanzhang, who was carefully separating two strands of glass noodles that were stuck together. “You Suis are strange people,” she said as she quietly went to work beside Hanzhang, who sensed that there were more knots in the noodles than usual, too many for her to handle. After separating several that were stuck together she looked up and sighed and noticed that Naonao was gazing off in the distance. She turned to see what Naonao was looking at. It was the mills across the river.
“Isn’t he afraid at night, sitting there all alone?” Naonao asked.
“What do you mean?”
Naonao looked at her. “Your brother! They say the old mill is haunted…”
Hanzhang looked away and straightened some strands. “He’s not afraid. Nothing scares him.”
The sun was high in the sky, its rays reflected off the noodles, the riverbank, and the water. Children with baskets waited in the shade of willows, their eyes fixed on the shiny strands of noodles. Every day they waited for the dry strands to be taken off the racks so they could run over and throw themselves down on the hot sand, but lately the drying women had been getting miserly. After taking away the noodles, they even raked the sand under the racks, which meant hardly any pieces were left. But that did not stop the children from waiting, nor did it quell their excitement.
The moment the women raised their rakes, the children let out a whoop and charged, falling to their knees and scrounging for broken pieces. Some put their baskets aside and frantically scooped up sand with their hands and then sat there picking through the pile. The workers inevitably dropped strands onto the sand and stepped on them, and anyone who found a half-foot length would jump up in delight. As the sun crept across the sky, the children under the willows put their baskets over their heads, took them off, and put them back again, displaying their impatience. The oldest among them was only eight or nine, and since they had nothing to do, their parents sent them out to gather some noodles, which could be sold on market days. While they waited they asked each other how much they’d earned in the past.
But today the widow Xiaokui brought little Leilei over to sit beneath a willow tree. Leilei was a boy who refused to grow, and it didn’t seem to people that he was any taller now than he used to be. The other children laughed, and one of them mocked him in a loud voice, “Of course we’re not going to be able to pick as much as him…”
Xiaokui just stared at the drying floor without saying a word, her hand resting heavily on Leilei’s head. He looked on blankly, his lips turning dark as he snuggled up close to his mother. She was watching Hanzhang work the racks and saw her remove a long strand, then pick up her rake, which she raised above her head. “Go on, run!” Xiaokui said to her son, who ran out onto the drying floor, but not as fast as the other kids, who had sharper eyes and stronger legs. They elbowed their way up to Hanzhang and sprawled on the sand. Xiaokui tried to spot her son, but there were too many kids, too many grimy hands blocking her view. She stood up, straightened her hair, and walked out among the children.
Hanzhang gave the ground a quick rake and drew a line in the sand in front of each area she raked; no one was permitted to cross that line to scavenge for broken noodles. She kept her eyes on all those black hands sifting frantically through the sand and moving immediately to each new open spot. But when she looked up she saw Xiaokui, digging through the sand beside Leilei, and for some unknown reason, the hand holding the rake began to quiver at the sight of mother and son. Seeing that Hanzhang was looking at her, Xiaokui stood up, brushed the sand from her hands, and took a step forward to grab her son’s hand. With a look of embarrassment, she smiled at Hanzhang, who nodded in return before looking down and continuing to work. But now she was having trouble holding on to her rake; her hand was shaking so badly she kept knocking strands of glass noodles to the sandy ground. Children scrambled forward, their faces red from excitement. Finally, Leilei managed to crawl up to the front, where he grabbed a handful of noodles and squeezed them so tight he looked as if he’d never let go.
Once dried, the noodles were laid out atop burlap sacks, piling up until there were little mountains of the white strands. A line of horse carts rode up, the drivers shouting for the women to load up. Jiansu drove his cart to the farthest pile of noodles, but instead of stopping he snapped his whip in the air and circled the drying racks. His bell rang out, and he whistled as he sped behind the women, frightening them. All but Naonao, who ran up to his cart and gestured. “Stop!” she cried out. Jiansu slowed down enough for Naonao to jump onto his cart. “Now make him run fast!” she shouted. His whip cracked in the air and away they went. Eventually, Jiansu drove up to a pile on the edge of the drying floor, where he and Naonao loaded up his cart. He was so much taller than Naonao, his legs so much longer, that he had to squat down when the two of them lifted up one of the piles.
“Be careful,” he said, “or I’ll toss you onto the cart along with the noodles.”
“Don’t be so cocky!”
Jiansu gleefully pushed his hair back, reached out, and wrapped his arms around the girl and the load she was carrying. Thump! He tossed them both into the cart.
“Wow, you’re strong!” Naonao said joyfully as she lay in the bed of his cart. “Stronger than the mighty Wu Song, and twice as bad!” The other women, drawn to the scene, clapped approvingly. One of them, a middle-aged woman, pointed and said, “Those two are having so much fun you’d think they were a couple!” That was met by shouts of delight. Naonao looked down from the cart and stood up high. “What the hell do you know!” she barked, pointing at the woman.
Zhao Duoduo came to the drying floor, as he did every day. The women were clapping and giggling when he walked by, and when they saw that that angered him, they quieted down. With a dark expression, he walked over to Jiansu’s wagon and glared at the two of them. “What are you looking at, old Duoduo?” Naonao said. “You don’t scare me.” Duoduo smiled, showing his front teeth. “I know I don’t. You scare me. I just came to tell you that starting tomorrow you’ll work inside. You’ll make more money there.”
She pouted. “You won’t scare me there either.”
Duoduo watched her jump down off the wagon and narrow her eyes as she tried to catch her breath. A drop of sweat fell from her neck to the ground. Then a commotion behind him caught Duoduo’s attention. He turned and saw a bunch of kids with baskets, shouting and chasing after Hanzhang, who was waving her rake in the air. “Damn!” he cursed as he went over to see what was happening. The kids were digging frantically in the sand with their grimy hands, which entered and emerged from the sand at about the same time, clasped together; if no noodles came out with them, the fingers separated for the next try. The kids’ eyes were fixed on the little spot of ground in front of them, and they saw nothing else. When Hanzhang shouted something, the kids looked up to see, just as a large foot stepped down on their hands. It was big enough to bury most of them. Young eyes traveled up the leg. Discovering it was Duoduo, they burst into tears.
“You little thieves!” he cursed as he looked into each of their baskets.
“Uncle Duoduo…,” Xiaokui called out. He bent down and pinched Leilei’s ear without looking at the woman behind him. The boy’s yelp of pain was followed by an explosion of tears; he dropped his basket. The foot lifted up off the hands, which returned quickly to their owners. Then it kicked out backward, knocking over Leilei’s basket and spilling the noodle pieces back onto the sand, like embroidery needles. The kids stared wide-eyed as Xiaokui stumbled backward and sat down on the sand with a thud.
For a long moment the drying floor was silent before Hanzhang decided to go over and scoop up Leilei’s noodles for him. Duoduo glowered at her as she set down her rake. “Stop right there!” he shouted. Hanzhang froze. By then the children were all crying. The other women were off a ways, loading the wagon, where the horse announced its presence between the shafts with loud whinnies. The sound of a bell added to the confusion, that and the curses of the man directed at his animal. From where he stood, Sui Jiansu took a look at Zhao Duoduo, then walked over, stood beside Hanzhang, and lit his pipe. He glared at Duoduo as he smoked.
“What the hell do you want?” Duoduo asked, his anger building. Jiansu just puffed away and said nothing. “Well?” Duoduo asked, his voice thick.
“Second Brother!” Hanzhang said softly. But still Jiansu said nothing. After casually smoking all the tobacco in his pipe, he tapped the bowl to empty the ashes.
Duoduo’s glance shifted from Jiansu to the children. “Who the hell do you think you are at your age? Make me angry and you won’t live to talk about it!” He turned and walked off.
Hanzhang grabbed Jiansu’s sleeve and said softly, “What’s wrong, Second Brother? What is it?”
“It’s nothing,” he said, grunting derisively. “I just wanted him to know he’d better start treating members of the Sui clan with respect from now on.” That elicited no response from Hanzhang, who looked across the river at the old mill. Evening mist rose from the river, through which the silent mill gave anyone who saw it an uneasy feeling.
The old mill stood silently, but if you listened carefully, you heard a low rumble, like distant thunder, settling over the wildwoods beyond the riverbanks and into the autumn sunset. The millstone turned slowly, patiently rubbing time itself away. It seemed to put people increasingly on edge; maybe one day, sooner or later, it would infuriate the town’s young residents.
The young heir of the Li clan, Li Zhichang, fantasized that he could find a way to turn the mill by machine. Not much given to talking, he entertained a host of fantasies in his head. And when he related one of them to Sui Buzhao, his only confidant, the two of them would get excited. “That’s an interesting principle!” the older man would say with an approving sigh. Li Zhichang’s favorite pastime was reading up on math and physics, memorizing formulas and principles. Sui Buzhao never could remember the things Li Zhichang told him, but he was drawn to the word “principle” and would submit these principles to his own unique interpretations. He urged Li Zhichang to share his plans for revamping the mill with a geological survey technician, also surnamed Li.