Sandalwood Death: A Novel (Chinese Literature Today Book Series)

troupes I spoke of a moment ago, there were peasants who made up musical interludes during leisure periods, accompanied by gongs used for peddling candy and clappers used by bean curd peddlers, singing them for themselves in cellars where straw sandals were made or on heated brick beds in their own homes, all to dispel loneliness and ease a life of suffering. Those gongs and clappers were the forerunners of today’s Maoqiang instruments.
    “I was young and clever back then—I’m not boasting—and I had the finest voice in all of Northeast Gaomi Township’s eighteen villages. I began to gain a reputation when I joined my voice with others. People—locals at first, then outsiders—came to listen, and when the cellars and brick beds could no longer accommodate them all, we moved into yards and onto threshing grounds. People could be seated when they sang in those cellars and on brick beds, but not in open spaces, where movement was required. But then movement in ordinary clothing did not feel natural, so costumes were required. But then costumes and unadorned faces did not produce the right effect, so singers painted their faces. Costumes and painted faces needed something more—instruments more varied than gongs and clappers. Ragtag troupes from other counties gave performances in town, including the “Donkey Opera” specialists from Southern Shandong, who rode their animals onto the stage. There were also the southern Jiao County “Gliders,” whose ending note of each sentence glided from high to low, like sledding down a mountain slope. Actors in one so-called “rooster troupe” from the Henan-Shandong border area ended each line with a sort of hiccup, the sound a rooster makes at the end of its crow. All these troupes came with instrumental accompaniment, for the most part huqin, dizi, suonas, and laba—fiddles, flutes, woodwinds, and horns. The visitors played their instruments at our performances, and the effects were more impressive than those with singing alone. But I am so competitive, I’ve never been satisfied with someone else’s brainchild. By this time our opera was already known as Maoqiang, and I was thinking that if I wanted to create a unique opera form, it had to be all about cats. And so I invented an instrument called the mao hu—the cat fiddle. With that instrument, Maoqiang had found its place.
    “My instrument was bigger than other fiddles; it had four strings and a double bow, which produced fascinating compound notes. Their fiddles were snakeskin-covered; for ours we used tanned cat skins. Their fiddles were good for ordinary tones, while ours could produce cat cries dog yelps donkey brays horse whinnies baby bawls maiden giggles rooster crows hen cackles—there wasn’t a sound on earth that our fiddles could not reproduce. The cat fiddle put Maoqiang opera on the map, and ragtag troupes found no place in Northeast Gaomi Township after that.
    “I followed my invention of the cat fiddle with another—the cat drum, a small drum made of cat skin. I also came up with a dozen facial designs: happy cats, angry cats, treacherous cats, loyal cats, affectionate cats, resentful cats, hateful cats, unsightly cats . . . would it be an exaggeration to say that without Sun Bing, today there would be no Maoqiang opera?”
    “Again Shifu speaks the truth,” Xiao Shanzi said.
    “Of course I am not the opera’s Patriarch. That was Chang Mao. If Maoqiang were a tree, then Chang Mao would be our roots.”
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    5
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    “Worthy young brother, which operas did I teach you to sing all those years ago?”
    “ The Hongmen Banquet , Shifu,” Xiao Shanzi replied softly, “and In Pursuit of Han Xin .”
    “Ah, those, both stolen—by me—from other operas. You probably are unaware that Shifu played bit roles with at least ten opera troupes in other counties in order to poach bits of their performances. My desire to learn opera took me down south, out of Shanxi, across the Yangtze, and into Guangxi and Guangdong. There isn’t an opera anywhere that Shifu cannot perform, and no role that Shifu cannot act. Like a bumblebee, I have taken nectar from all the operatic flowers to create the fine honey of Maoqiang opera.”
    “Shifu, you are a miraculous talent!”
    “Your shifu once had a grand desire to take Maoqiang opera to Peking at least one time before he died and perform for the Emperor and the Empress Dowager. I wanted it to become a national dramatic form. Once