Red Sorghum

the bearers’ pride of profession. It was unseemly to ‘trample’ with an uneven cadence or to grip the poles, and the best bearers kept their hands on their hips the whole time, rocking the sedan chair in perfect rhythm with the musicians’ haunting tunes, which reminded everyone within earshot of the hidden suffering in whatever pleasures lay ahead.
    When the sedan chair reached the plains, the bearers began to get a little sloppy, both to make up time and to torment their passenger. Some brides were bounced around so violently they vomited from motion sickness, soiling their clothing and slippers; the retching sounds from inside the carriage pleased the bearers as though they were giving vent to their own miseries. The sacrifices these strong young men made to carry their cargo into bridal chambers must have embittered them, which was why it seemed so natural to torment the brides.
    One of the four men bearing Grandma’s sedan chair that day would eventually become my granddad – it was Commander Yu Zhan’ao. At the time he was a beefy twenty-year-old, a pallbearer and sedan bearer at the peak of his trade. The young men of his generation were as sturdy as Northeast Gaomi sorghum, which is more than can be said about us weaklings who succeeded them. It was a custom back then for sedan bearers to tease the bride while trundling her along: like distillery workers, who drink the wine they make, since it is their due, these men torment all who ride in their sedan chairs – even the wife of the Lord of Heaven if she should be a passenger.
    Sorghum leaves scraped the sedan chair mercilessly when, all of a sudden, the deadening monotony of the trip was broken by the plaintive sounds of weeping – remarkably likethe musicians’ tunes – coming from deep in the field. As Grandma listened to the music, trying to picture the instruments in the musicians’ hands, she raised the curtain with her foot until she could see the sweat-soaked waist of one of the bearers. Her gaze was caught by her own red embroidered slippers, with their tapered slimness and cheerless beauty, ringed by halos of incoming sunlight until they looked like lotus blossoms, or, even more, like tiny goldfish that had settled to the bottom of a bowl. Two teardrops as transparently pink as immature grains of sorghum wetted Grandma’s eyelashes and slipped down her cheeks to the corners of her mouth.
    As she was gripped by sadness, the image of a learned and refined husband, handsome in his high-topped hat and wide sash, like a player on the stage, blurred and finally vanished, replaced by the horrifying picture of Shan Bianlang’s face, his leprous mouth covered with rotting tumours. Her heart turned to ice. Were these tapered golden lotuses, a face as fresh as peaches and apricots, gentility of a thousand kinds, and ten thousand varieties of elegance all reserved for the pleasure of a leper? Better to die and be done with it.
    The disconsolate weeping in the sorghum field was dotted with words, like knots in a piece of wood: A blue sky
yo
– a sapphire sky
yo
– a painted sky
yo
– a mighty cudgel
yo
– dear elder brother
yo
– death has claimed you – you have brought down little sister’s sky
yo
–.
    I must tell you that the weeping of women from Northeast Gaomi Township makes beautiful music. During 1912, the first year of the Republic, professional mourners known as ‘wailers’ came from Qufu, the home of Confucius, to study local weeping techniques. Meeting up with a woman lamenting the death of her husband seemed to Grandma to be a stroke of bad luck on her wedding day, and she grew even more dejected.
    Just then one of the bearers spoke up: ‘You there, little bride in the chair, say something! The long journey has bored us to tears.’
    Grandma quickly snatched up her red veil and covered her face, gently drawing her foot back from beneath the curtain and returning the carriage to darkness.
    ‘Sing us a song while we bear you along!’
    The musicians, as though snapping out of a trance, struck up their instruments. A trumpet blared from behind the chair:
    ‘Too-tah – too-tah –’
    ‘Poo-pah – poo-pah –’ One of the bearers up front imitated the trumpet sound, evoking coarse, raucous laughter all around.
    Grandma was drenched with sweat. Back home, as she was being lifted into the sedan chair, Great-Grandma had exhorted her not to get drawn into any banter with the bearers. Sedan bearers and musicians are low-class