The Corpse Walker: Real Life Stories: China From the Bottom Up (7 page)

ZHANG:
They did it because they were afraid of leprosy. They had no other choice. The fire lasted for over two hours. No matter how emaciated the person is, it takes that long to melt a human body.

LIAO:
Were you sad? Did you cry?

ZHANG:
No. Some villagers told me that they saw the tail of the evil dragon coiling around the flames.

LIAO:
Do you believe what they said?

ZHANG:
Yes, I do. After Xu Meiying's death, I continued to use the quilt she had made. One night I had a nightmare in which a snake as thick and round as a big rice bowl wrapped itself around my body. I couldn't breathe. So I raised my berry hoe and kept hacking at it until my arms were sore and there was blood all over. When I woke up, I found myself on the floor. I had fallen out of the bed. It was so spooky. I didn't dare go back to sleep. The next day I dragged the quilt out into the field and set fire to it. Guess what? The flames shot up as if it were soaked in oil. It smelled like burned flesh. The dragon must have been hiding in there. After the quilt was burned, I buried the ashes. Since then, my house has been ghost-free.

LIAO:
Did you collect your wife's remains and bury her?

ZHANG:
Xu Meiying's elder brother collected her bones and buried them near the White Sand Hill. But that was not the end of the ceremony. I had to host a banquet to thank the villagers who had helped.

LIAO:
They burned your wife and you had to feed them as a gesture of gratitude. Didn't you find that ridiculous?

ZHANG:
What they had done was for my own good. I had no complaints against them for eating my food. I couldn't shortchange them. I wanted everyone at the banquet to eat until their stomachs could no longer take any food. As long as they were happy, I was happy. I gave them the food and they did the cooking. The village chief led a couple of guys into my house, took a pig from the pen, and slaughtered it. They also grabbed the dried meat that was hanging under the eaves. They put a pot on top of the stove and began to boil the meat, even before the smoke from my wife's body was gone. They made a huge pot of rice. It was quite festive. Soon it was dark. Villagers, with torches lit, carried big rice bowls and gathered near my house, waiting for the banquet to begin. There were about thirty households in the village. Each family sent its breadwinner to the banquet. I ended up spending all my savings, and it was still not enough—I had to borrow some more. I didn't have enough rice to feed that many people. The village chief pitched in. He said I could pay him back after the fall harvest.

LIAO:
Burning a live person to death is a violation of the law. Did you report it to the police?

ZHANG:
Why? They were helping me out.

LIAO:
You still believe that?

ZHANG:
Yes. Everyone in the village thinks that too.

LIAO:
Things have changed a lot in other parts of China. I don't see any changes here.

ZHANG:
Oh, there are quite a lot of changes here. They built a road some years ago and now it's been widened. People are allowed to do business. Everyone is busy making money. I raise pigs, dogs, and chickens. I'm too old to farm so I leased my land to other people. My current wife and I don't need a lot. So we're OK.

LIAO:
How long have you been with your new wife?

ZHANG:
About five years. She used to live on the other side of the mountain. None of her children wanted to take care of her. Someone brought her over to me for companionship.

LIAO:
Does she know about Xu Meiying?

ZHANG:
She's never asked and I'm not going to tell her. I don't think she wants to hear it. For years I haven't been able to talk with anyone in the region. Now that she is here, I have someone to talk with.

LIAO:
Do you still think about Xu Meiying?

ZHANG:
Oh, well . . . I have to blame the evil dragon. Not long after she was gone, her elder brother's wife also fell under the spell of the dragon and got very ill. According to the Taoist monk who was invited to exorcise the evil spirit, Xu's brother needed to feed the dragon with human brain marrow. So Xu's brother snuck into the cemetery at midnight, dug up a recently buried corpse, and extracted some brain marrow. He took it home to feed his wife. He told me that he could hear the dragon screaming angrily under a bridge.

LIAO:
The brain marrow from a dead person is filled with germs and viruses. That's probably what made her ill.

ZHANG:
Oh well, I don't know.

LIAO:
Time seems to have stopped here. Every day, all you can hear is the sound of wind blowing.

ZHANG:
Yes, but we also hear the trucks pass by. We are very grateful to Dr. Sun. His church helped me rebuild my house. I'm now a believer in God. Thanks to God, I have a doctor visit me and take me to a church down on the other side of the mountain every month. Nobody in the church shuns me. They are all very nice. I pray to God every day, hoping that the evil dragon will not come back and harm people again.

THE PEASANT EMPEROR

A week after the Chinese New Year in 1998, I interviewed the forty-eight-year-old Zeng Yinglong, a peasant who proclaimed himself emperor in 1985 and declared his hometown in Sichuan Province an independent kingdom. Zeng was charged with multiple counterrevolutionary crimes, including organizing and leading subversive activities against the local government and the government's one-child policy. Considering the fact that he was a truly uneducated and uninformed person, the court reduced his sentence from the death penalty to lifelong imprisonment. Zeng was then locked up inside a maximum security prison in the Daba Mountain in the northeastern part of Sichuan. Yet he was an optimist by nature, and abided by the prison rules. All the guards and fellow inmates liked him. They jokingly called him “Your Majesty.”

During the interview, I noticed that “The Heavenly Son,” as we Chinese used to refer to our real emperors, was getting bald on top, but his narrow eyes still shone with piercing arrogance. He was wearing a pair of old army shoes and a short blue jacket over his blue prison uniform. He rolled up his sleeves and talked nonstop for two hours, issuing one edict after another.

LIAO YIWU:
Are you the well-known emperor that people talk about in this jail?

ZENG YINGLONG:
You should address me as “Your Majesty.”

LIAO:
OK. Your Majesty, when did you assume your role as an emperor?

ZENG:
Your Majesty didn't want to be the emperor. It was his ten-thousand-strong subjects who crowned him. Let me tell you how it all got started: About ten years ago, a giant salamander climbed out of the river and hid inside a crack on a huge rock in the middle of the Wu River. The locals called the rock the “Guanyin Bodhisattva stone.” That mysterious salamander could talk like humans. Each night, many village folks could hear the lizard singing a ballad from inside the crack. The ballad went like this: “The fake dragon sinks, and the real dragon surfaces. On the south side of the river, peace and happiness reign.” Later on, the story of the singing lizard spread to hundreds of villages in the region. Even small children knew how to sing the ballad. A local feng shui master, whose name was Ma Xing, became really curious and wanted to trace its source. One night, he led a group of villagers to the bank of the Wu River and waited for the salamander to sing. The lizard did sing. Ma and other villagers jumped on a boat and followed the sound to the rock and saw the salamander. That lizard wasn't afraid of the crowd at all. Instead of gliding away, the salamander simply wagged its tail, as if waiting for people to come see him. Ma used a wooden stick to prod its mouth open. He pulled out a three-inch-long yellow silk ribbon. The ballad was written on the ribbon. With his face toward heaven, his eyes closed, Ma began chanting like a monk. Then, holding the yellow ribbon above his head, he knelt on the ground and kowtowed three times. After he stood up, he turned to his fellow villagers and said that he had just communicated with the spirit in heaven and had officially accepted some divine instructions from above.

Your Majesty didn't know anything about that legendary singing salamander. At that time, Your Majesty was on the run from the law. The government had implemented a very tough one-child policy. Local officials dished out very severe punishment to those planning to have a second child. They would go around the village with doctors and knock on doors, checking up on every household. If a woman was found to be pregnant with her second or third child, she would be sent to a clinic for an abortion and have to pay a heavy fine. Also, women of childbearing age had to be sterilized or have a loop installed in the womb. Your Majesty had two daughters, but very much wanted to have a son to carry on the family name. To escape punishment, Your Majesty joined other villagers and secretly moved with his pregnant wife to another province. Your Majesty ended up in the northwestern province of Xinjiang, where he worked on some odd jobs at a construction site. With gods' blessing, Your Majesty did have a son, who was named Yan-ze [meaning Continued Benevolence]. After the baby was born, Your Majesty took his wife and the newly born to Henan Province, where they settled in a city called Xinxiang.

You will probably ask me: How did this part of Your Majesty's life fit the story of the legendary singing salamander? Well, if you remember the ballad, it says “Zhen-sheng-long, or real dragon surfaces.” This sounds similar to my name “Zeng-ying-long.” Moreover, the ballad mentions that “South of the river, happiness and peace reign.” I was in Henan, which means “south of the river.” The city where I was staying was called Xinxiang, which means “newly established territories.”

A couple of days after his encounter with the salamander, Ma gathered together a group of my subjects. They walked hundreds of kilometers to Henan to meet with Your Majesty. The moment he saw Your Majesty, Ma took out a dragon robe and put it on Your Majesty. Then, Ma and his followers knelt down and chanted: “Ten thousand years to the Emperor.” Your Majesty couldn't turn his back on the will of his subjects. Neither could he disobey the will of heaven. Therefore, Your Majesty returned to his hometown as the people's emperor, established a new dynasty, and selected 1985 as Year One of his reign.

LIAO:
What was the name of your dynasty?

ZENG:
It was called Dayou.

LIAO:
What does that mean?

ZENG:
“Dayou” means “We share everything.” After Your Majesty was crowned, he promulgated the first imperial edict: “We farm the land together, share wealth, and can bear as many children as we wish.” The edict became wildly popular among my subjects.

LIAO:
How large was Your Majesty's kingdom?

ZENG:
Actually, Your Majesty only ruled three counties near the borders of Hunan, Guizhou, and Sichuan provinces.

LIAO:
Allow me to be frank with you. According to the court document, you had reenacted an ancient story mentioned in the
Records of the Grand Historian,
written by the famous historian Sima Qian. Based on the tale in the
Records of the Grand Historian,
Chen Sheng, a peasant rebel in the Qin dynasty [221 bc–206 bc], attempted to rally public support against the emperor and justify his claim to the throne by inserting a yellow ribbon inside a fish. Then, the cook “accidentally” discovered the fish and the ribbon, which said “King Chen Sheng.” Everyone believed it was a message from the Heavenly God and they all joined Chen's uprising, which eventually led to the downfall of the Qin dynasty. Apparently, Ma Xing reenacted every detail. That needed a lot of elaborate planning. It is hard to believe that after two thousand years, the ancient trick still worked. Did the local villagers truly believe it was a manifestation from the Heavenly God?

ZENG:
Shut up. That is awfully rude of you to talk to Your Majesty like that. Your Majesty knows that you are a journalist in disguise and have been sent from the hostile Kingdom of China. Your Majesty refutes all your slanderous remarks.

LIAO:
I'm not a journalist. I'm merely an ordinary researcher and writer. If Your Majesty doesn't want to talk with me today, I don't think the opportunity will present itself again for you to tell people outside the jail about yourself, your subjects, and your kingdom. Based on my observations, you are a pretty smart guy, well versed in Chinese history, and harbor grand ambitions. You went a little too far with your ambitions, but it's understandable. You don't want to be a laughingstock for future generations, do you?

ZENG:
Throughout history, it's common for a general or emperor to face defeat. What's there to laugh about? But can you promise to record faithfully what Your Majesty tells you?

LIAO:
Yes, Your Majesty. I solemnly promise.

ZENG:
Let's say the singing salamander part was taken from an ancient Chinese story. But the rest is true. Upon his return, Your Majesty immediately appointed Ma Xing as prime minister. According to Prime Minister Ma, the Dayou Kingdom, located in a remote mountainous region, was sparsely populated. My subjects were old-fashioned people, bound by thousands of years of ancestral tradition. The concept of big families with many male descendants was deeply rooted in the minds of my subjects. The family planning policy, promulgated by the Kingdom of China, triggered regionwide protests. Many married women had to run off to the mountain to hide in caves and live like barbarians. They would rather eat wild vegetables and drink stream water than go through forced abortion and sterilization. Prime Minister Ma recommended that Your Majesty should take advantage of that popular antigovernment sentiment. Ma urged all Your Majesty's staff to visit people at home and propagate the belief that giving birth to children is an inalienable right bestowed upon us by our ancestors. The more children we have, the better off we are. Raising children can be hard, but people in this kingdom are used to poverty and hard life. It won't make too much of a difference whether you raise one kid or seven or eight. Having one more kid means adding one more glimpse of hope to our kingdom. If anyone wants us to give up hope, we will fight with him to the very end.

After mobilizing the masses for over six months, Your Majesty had rallied enough support and laid a firm foundation for the Dayou Kingdom. Your Majesty issued a series of secret imperial edicts urging all of his subjects to exercise their right to big families. If any woman could give birth to more than ten children, Your Majesty would crown her with the title “The Royal Mother.”

During this time, a prestigious villager passed away. He had lived past one hundred. In my region, if a person can live to an advanced age, he is treated with great respect. When he dies, the funeral is a big deal. Many people will travel from afar to attend the funeral in the hope that some of the deceased's luck would rub off on them. As a large number of villagers were expected to attend this guy's funeral, we decided to use the occasion to officially proclaim the birth of the Dayou Kingdom. Prime Minister Ma, a feng shui master by trade, spent a lot of time and energy preparing for the funeral. For two days, Ma climbed hills and crossed rivers to scout out an auspicious site for the old man's grave. He finally located a spot pretty far away from the village. We had a wake with an open coffin for a whole week. Monks from a nearby temple were invited to chant sutras day and night. The abbot in the temple also helped select an auspicious date for burial.

Based on local traditions, on the day of burial, the coffin had to be lowered inside the grave before sunrise. In this way, the elder's spirit could be eternalized and rise with the sun. Under Ma's direction, the funeral procession, with the participation of several thousand mourners, started around midnight. A local brass band led the way. Since that old man was an ordinary peasant, his burial was not something for an emperor to attend. But Your Majesty had to humble himself and act like an ordinary villager. As the line of mourners proceeded up the narrow path wrapping around the mountain, the glittering lights of the fire torches carried by mourners mixed with the stars in the sky. From a distance, you couldn't tell the torches from the stars. At this juncture, Prime Minster Ma turned to me and knelt down. He said: Your Majesty, look at this grand spectacle. Heavenly God is on our side.

I agreed with him and beckoned him to move fast and catch up with the procession. The lead mourner, who was hired to howl and chant, had a truly resonating voice. He would howl a line, and people would respond with another. The echo of howling and chanting was so loud that the mountain seemed to be vibrating. “Go, go, do not tarry; Heaven's gate awaits the morn. You rest awhile and arise reborn. To beget a male child, and marry.”

LIAO:
Interesting. The chanting about reincarnation even rhymed.

ZENG:
The true reincarnation had not even manifested itself yet. Finally, we arrived at the burial site. When it was time to start the ceremony, Niu Daquan, who was my chief of staff, gathered ten of the royal guards from my kingdom. Together, they began to perform the sun dance ritual. As the beat of the drums quickened, many people couldn't resist and joined in the dancing. While the momentum was building up, Prime Minister Ma suddenly took off his shirt, and pulled the Dayou Kingdom dragon flag from a bag and waved it in his hand. He stomped his feet, and shook his head in ecstasy. He then took a handful of peas from his pocket, and scattered them into the sky, chanting, “Change, we need change.” People immediately crawled on the ground to pick up the peas, which were auspicious symbols of longer life. Suddenly, dark clouds rose from behind the hill, accompanied with loud thunder and lightning. Heavy rain poured down on us, as if Heavenly God had dispatched thousands of warlike soldiers to earth.

LIAO:
You guys reenacted an episode from another ancient Chinese fable, “Scattering peas to summon troops.” In the fable, a general was cornered by enemy troops. He sought help from the Heavenly God, who instructed him to scatter thousands of peas into the air. After he did that, the sky turned dark. Amid a heavy thunderstorm, those peas suddenly turned into soldiers. According to court papers, you guys reenacted this fable to deceive those uneducated folks in your region. Your friend Ma Xing had checked the weather forecast beforehand and timed the burial ceremony to coincide with the arrival of the thunderstorm. Then, Ma began to scatter peas into the sky, as if the thunderstorm was the result of his magic. I have to commend you for the elaborate preparation.