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

joined the crowd milling at the square. I was pretty small back then, and skinny, and I had no trouble squeezing my way up front, where I saw a boy sitting on a stool, holding a hat. I got there just in time for the performance to begin: a rooster crows behind a dark curtain, a sound that’s immediately echoed by dozens of roosters, near and far, some of them squeaky attempts by young birds still with fledgling feathers. The squawks are accompanied by the thup-thup of flapping wings. Then an old woman tells her husband and son that it is time to get up. The old man coughs, spits, lights his pipe, and bangs the bowl against the side of the heated bed. The boy snores on until she forces him to get out of bed, which he does, muttering and yawning noisily as he gets dressed. A door opens, and the boy goes outside to pee before fetching water to wash up. The old woman starts a fire in the stove with the help of a bellows, while the old man and the boy go out to the pigsty to catch one of the pigs, a noisy process. The pig crashes through the gate and starts running around in the yard, where it knocks over a water bucket and smashes a bedpan. Then it bursts into a henhouse, producing an uproar of squawks from the terrified chickens, several of which flap their way up onto a wall. The boy grabs the squealing pig by a hind leg and is joined by his father, who takes hold of the other hind leg and helps him pull the animal out of the henhouse. But its head is caught, which its shrill complaints vividly attest. In the end they tie its legs with a rope and carry it over to the slaughtering rack. The pig fights to get free. The boy whacks it over the head with a club. Agonizing squeals follow. Then the boy sharpens a knife on a whetstone, while his father drags over a clay basin to catch the blood. The boy buries the knife in the pig’s neck. The stuck pig squeals. Blood spurts, first onto the ground, then into the basin. After this, the woman brings out a tub of hot water, and the three of them busily debristle the animal. That done, the boy opens the pig’s belly and scoops out the internal organs. A dog comes up, steals a length of intestine, and runs off. The old woman curses the dog, managing a hit or two before it’s out of range. The man and his son hang the butchered meat on a rack. Customers come up to buy cuts of pork. There are older women, older men, young women, and children. After selling off the meat, father and son count their money before the family of three enjoy a meal of slurpy porridge . . . all of a sudden, the dark curtain parted and all anyone saw was a scrawny old man sitting on a stool. He was rewarded with enthusiastic applause. Then the boy got down off his stool and passed the hat. Coins rained down into the cap, except for those that landed on the ground. Your dieh saw it with his own eyes and did not make up any of it. The old adage holds true: ‘Every trade has its zhuangyuan.’”
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    Now that he had told his story, Dieh sat quietly with his eyes shut. But I was too enraptured to want to extract myself from the tale. It was yet another story about a boy and his father, and I could not help feeling that all his stories about a boy and his father were really about me and him. Dieh was the mimic, Guo Mao, and I was the boy who walked through the crowd, hat in hand— Meow meow~~mew~~
    My dieh had performed countless executions in the capital to audiences of thousands, people who were drawn to his unparalleled skill, and it seemed to me that I could actually see tears in the people’s eyes. Wouldn’t it have been wonderful if I’d been there with Dieh at the time, hat in hand, a cat cap on my head, collecting donations from onlookers? While I was collecting money, I’d be practicing my cat cries ~~meow meow~~ and how wonderful that would be! Just think about all the money I’d get! I tell you, Dieh, why did you wait so long to come home and introduce yourself to your son? You could have taken me to the capital with you. If I’d been at your side ever since I was a boy, by now I’d be a man-slaying zhuangyuan . . .
    When my dieh first showed up in town, people took me aside and whispered, “Xiaojia, your dieh isn’t human.” “What is he, then?” “He’s a ghost that has taken over a corpse and brought it back to life. Think about it, Xiaojia, before your mother died, did she ever say you had a father? No? Of course not. So your mother said nothing about