3 Short Stories by Yuan Changming
Fish Maw*
It was in the largest open market close to her residence. Hua was thinking about how to cook the big softshell turtle for her husband when she spotted a large pile of dried fish maw on the roadside. Stopping at the stall, she found a woman of her age bargaining with the vendor while making her selections from the basket.
“How do you sell it?” asked Hua in a casual voice.
“Eighty yuan per liang [50g]!” replied the middle-aged fish woman, with as much warmth as pride. “My fish maw is the best in this entire market.”
“It would go well with turtle soup,” Hua told herself. “Ping’ll surely have a treat today.”
“A really good bang for the buck!” whispered another sixtyish woman, who had just joined Hua from behind and begun to do the picking.
“You really think so?” Hua asked in a friendly voice. “Which pieces are better picks?”
After giving Hua some good tips, the third woman began to chat with her by asking where she had come from, saying that Hua’s accent did not sound like anything local.
“I’m from Jingzhou, Hubei,” Hua answered.
“What a coincidence!” exclaimed the third woman. “We two share the same place of origin. I’m from Gong-an.”
As the two fellow Jingzhou natives kept chatting and choosing the maw pieces at the same time, the first woman, who was undoubtedly most fastidious about the seafood product, told the seller that she had finally finished her picks. In no time did the vendor step over from behind the stall and put her picks on the scale. Noting Hua and the Gong-an woman both ready, she proceeded to weigh their picks in turn. As a rule, the vendor sang loudly, “Okay, the first weighs 1.05 jin; the second 1.15; and third 1.92 or… 1.9.”
After the seller completed her weighing and calculating for every customer, the first woman took out her cell phone to make the payment through AliPay. While Hua was waiting for her turn, she was shocked to see the Gong-an woman trying to put more maw pieces into her bag stealthily after both the weight and price had already been confirmed. Alarmed by Hua’s response, the Gong-an woman quickly stuffed an extra handful of maw pieces into Hua’s bag, undoubtedly in the hope of bribing her into silence about the theft. Hua’s initial response was to call the fish woman’s attention to this five-finger discount, but on second thought she gave up the idea, knowing that when the vendor turned around, she would definitely fail to catch the Gong-an woman red-handedly; worse still, Hua would have difficulty explaining the situation on the one hand and evoke hatred from the shoplifter on the other, who might do something really nasty to her down the road.
While Hua felt nervous and awkward about herself being made a thief, or a thief’s accomplice, the first woman began to complain that though her picks and Hua’s were roughly of the same weight, it was obvious that Hua’s looked much more than her own. Before the vendor realized what was going on, the Gong-an woman cut in on the first woman, “Stay in your lane, okay?! You’ve paid your maw, why bother about other people’s picks?”
Hua was feeling extremely uncomfortable about the underpayment she had to make when the fish woman said amicably to the Gong-an woman, “You’re right, Ma’am, everyone mind their own business. Now you’re paying me thru WeChat as well?”
“Nah,” said she, “my cell phone misbehaves this morning, but I got enough cash here.”
After the three women left the scene, the saleswoman returned to her seat behind the stall, feeling smug about the three quite big sales she had just made within an hour. Meanwhile, Hua grew increasingly guilty and nervous. Guilty because she was a thief though she had been made one by the circumstance; nervous because she feared that she would be caught sooner or later somehow by someone. But more than guilty or nervous was an engulfing sense of disturbance in the heart of her soul. Having never done anything like this before, she was suffering from a bad conscience for the first time in her entire life. Cornered into such an awkward situation, she had no idea about what she should or could do about it. To get some peace of her mind, she did some more shopping absent-mindedly and left the market in haste.
Arriving home, Hua asked Ping to shut the door tight as if she were to be picked out like a maw piece by someone invisible.
“What happened to you, laopo?” Ping asked, surprised to see Hua panting with nervousness.
“Something really bad, I was a shoplifter today!”
“You’re kidding?”
“No. Someone put extra maw pieces into my bag after the seller verified my purchase.”
“Easy peasy! All you need to do is weigh them again now, and go back to pay the balance.”
“Gee, I’ve never thought of that!”
Following Ping’s advice, Hua took out their electric scale and weigh the maw pieces carefully. For reasons not readily clear to her back then, the weight’s precisely what she should have paid for!
*As one of the four big sea delicacies in Chinese cuisine (the other three are abalones, shark fins and sea cucumbers), fish maw refers to the dried swim bladders of sturgeons.
Meeting Van Gogh
For the first time in a half-century, I returned to Songzi, my native town located close to the Yangtze River, where I decided to spend a whole week trying to fulfill my growing nostalgic needs.
After much sniffing around, I finally found Yao, my oldest friend who was said to have fallen mentally ill in his mid-thirties, and invited him for a dinner party at Du, a most famous local restaurant. Early in the evening of October 15, he showed up both in good time and in good spirits together with Bao, our mutual friend, a musical teacher from Songzi Old Age College.
Lean, white-haired, Yao walked shakily towards me with a cane in his right hand.
“So, you’re really Ming?” he said, his eyes sparkling with wonder, “Long, long time no see!”
“When did we see each other last time?” Bao butted in.
“Fifty-one years ago,” I replied.
Sitting down around the table, we began by recalling our childhood pranks. To Bao, the most memorable experience we three shared was the snake episode which created a big stir on campus when we were eleventh graders. As the best slingshot hitman of the whole school, Bao killed a long black soake, which I skinned off and cooked in my home. Yao swallowed its spleen supposedly to make his eyes sharper; I used its skin to make a stuffed snake and later put it randomly in a different classroom on a different school day.
When the main course called Du Family Rooster, a hotpot of a whole rooster fried and stewed with a lot of rapeseed oil and chillies, was put on the table, I stood up and told them both to dig in. As I recalled how I had tried to beat Yao in our second year in elementary school by bragging about my father (who was actually his father’s inferior in the county government), he laughed good-naturedly at my ignorance and went on to remind me how I once flexed my hick-hairstyle a few years later when I returned to the town from a village school.
To him, the most significant part of our high school life was our youthful ambitions. He remembered well how I had aspired to become a poet, Bao a musician, and he himself a Chinese Van Gogh. Knowing that Bao had realized his boyish dream and I had become a most widely published author of English poetry, Yao proudly declared that he had also produced more than fifty books in addition to thousands of paintings, though neither a single page of words nor a single picture had ever appeared anywhere except in his own dwelling place.
From Bao, I had learned that Yao started as a highly promising aircraft engineer at a major state-owned enterprise after graduation from Nanjing Aeronautical University, married a very talented woman after a romantic encounter on a cruise, and won a lot of prizes for his artworks before his mind went astray and he had to resign from his job.
“How did you return to Songzi to live all by yourself?” I asked.
“I had a car accident and broke my ankle permanently,” Yao answered, in a calm and matter-of-fact voice.
“When and how did his wife and daughter leave him?” I asked Bao in a whisper, who responded simply by saying, “She disappeared once and for all without even going through a divorce shortly after the accident.”
“I don’t remember having a wife or a daughter,” Yao barged in, apparently having overheard us though we had been speaking in a low voice. “All I know is my paintings are as good as Van Gogh’s.”
Yao was still living in his adolescent dream despite his old age, I told myself, remembering how passionately he used to talk about his artistic pursuits, and how determined he had been to emulate his Dutch mentor.
“It’s good of you to stay gold, dude,” I said to Yao in a sincere and appreciative tone. “My money’s on you! Will you give me your best paintings and writings so I can publish a few books for you?” I offered. Since I had a small press of my own back in Vancouver, and a lot of editorial and publishing experience, this was the least I could do for my oldest friend.
“The problem is, all my writings are casual,” Yao explained. “I’ve never got any time to edit them.”
“What’re they mainly about?”
“He’s written on every topic, ranging from specific historical studies, art criticism, cultural observations and folklore to contemporary politics and international relations,” Bao answered for him.
“How about compiling your best writings into a quotation book?” I suggested.
“Nah. I just want to concentrate on writing,” Yao replied. “Most important, though, I want to paint a lot of more and better pictures than Van Gogh did. After I die, people will recognize me and collect my artworks.”
“Can I publish a picture album for you then?”
“Nah. I won’t let anyone see my paintings before I die, not even you!”
As I see it, Yao is as clear-minded as, if not more than, Bao and myself. But how come people keep saying that he’s an old homebody who’s been suffering from severe mental disorders? From his demeanor, he is obviously able to think logically, speak intelligently, and move around appropriately. When it comes to fine arts or literary writing, he does get overly hyped about, and take too much pride in his creations, as Bao has warned me before, but isn’t that characteristic of any “normal” artist?
When we finished our dinner, I asked Bao to send Yao back to his spacious condo unit bought by the latter’s younger brother, who had just retired as Head of the Provincial Department of Health.
“Fare-well, dudes,” I said to both of them. “I’ll see you when I see you!”
“I’m in it with all my heart!” Yao said, sounding as devoted to his art as Van Gogh himself, though a bit out of tune.
Brooming the Graveyard
Whenever I returned to Jingzhou for a short stay with my mother, I would take time to visit my father’s grave, but more often than not I did this only half-heartily, because I thought such traditional acts of ancestry worshipping as burning scented sticks, playing firecrackers and, especially, setting a large amount of hell money on fire for the dead were not merely ridiculous but a waste of resources. For me, writing poetry or stories was a much more meaningful way to commemorate him.
However, I had an epiphany this time.
It was on the morning of November 9, two days before my long journey back to Vancouver. Busy with my preparations for the departure, I had almost forgotten the matter completely, but my mother reminded me that in our folk culture people aged over 70, sons-in-laws, the sick, children under three, and pregnant women were not allowed or encouraged to visit a grave; in other words, I was obliged to go to my dad’s grave since this was my last chance. To honor my filial duty or, more exactly, to please my old sick mother, I asked Yun, my newly retired younger brother, to drive me to our family graveyard located in the heart of Lotus Flower Village, where we both grew up as foster children. Upon arrival, I insisted on paying for all the worshipping materials out of my own pocket. While Yun was getting everything ready, I broomed our father’s grave meticulously and cleaned the tombstone with a brand new towel. This done, I knelt down in front of my father, made as many as nine kowtows and set off the firecrackers, something I had never done personally in the past. After a short but highly sentimental conversation with my father in my mind, I got up, ready to leave the site, but Yun refused to go right away after he finished the ritual.
“Why not?” I asked.
“I cannot, in good conscience,” he replied.
“Just why?”
“Cuz I wanna clean the whole family graveyard!”
“But that would be a whole morning’s job, given as many as nine tombs!”
“Be it a whole morning or a whole day, I wanna do this, since all the dead are our relatives.”
“Aren’t we supposed just to clean our father’s tomb?”
Instead of giving me a direct answer, Yun began to pick up all the fallen leaves and twigs, putting them into a cemented trench and burning them up. In the meantime, I had to use a big borrowed bamboo broom to sweep the whole gated yard. To me, this was really unnecessary since our cousins, nephews or nieces would do their shares respectively when they came to sweep their parents’ tombs.
Seeing how diligently and attentively Yun was working, I suddenly recognize him as a much more pious, earnest and caring person than myself. Perhaps it was precisely because of his kindness and sincerity that had won him more blessings from our ancestry. Otherwise, he would not have been able to have more friends and a closer relationship with kinsmen, live with a far more loving wife and dutiful son and enjoy a much better health, though he was far less ‘successful’ than me in the eyes of others.
“So, this long tradition of ancestry worshipping may have a pragmatic significance after all,” I told myself.
Long before this idea crossed my mind, I had done quite a lot of studies and thinking about fengshui. For instance, I know well that if a parent is buried on a better fengshui spot and thus lives in a better yin residence after death, or if a graveyard is situated against a hill at the back in a place facing towards the south where there is water running, their descendants would be karmaed to receive more blessings, but if they fail to perform their filial duties, they would never be able to get any real benefits. Only when good fengshui elements are matched with kind human deeds can the best result be achieved, as in Yun’s case.
Thinking along this line, I become acutely aware of the reason why Chinese people have been following the tradition almost blindly since the beginning of time. What makes all the difference is whether one believes in certain things before one actually takes any action, or otherwise. For me, I have to see some hard evidence or go through a testimonial experience before I can subscribe to a belief. But for Yun, who has had much less formal education and been around the world in a much more limited way, faith is something he has embraced unconditionally. By giving everything the benefit of doubt with or without intention, he is able to live a healthier and happier life.
Perhaps, all the education I have received, coupled with all the thinking I have done and all the life experiences I have undergone both in the eastern and the western worlds, has only made me a pragmatist or pessimistic cynic, I thought, “Perhaps, I should broom my own mind first!”
Yuan Changming co-edits Poetry Pacific with Allen Yuan. Writing credits include 16 chapbooks, 12 Pushcart nominations for poetry and 3 for fiction besides appearances in Best of the Best Canadian Poetry (2008-17), BestNewPoemsOnline and 2129 other publications across 51 countries. A poetry judge for Canada's 44th National Magazine Awards, Yuan began writing and publishing fiction in 2022; his debut novel Detaching, 'silver romance' The Tuner and short story collection Flashbacks are all available at Amazon.