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

drove its creation.
    Twenty years ago, as I set out on the road to becoming a writer, two disparate sounds kept reappearing in my consciousness, ensnaring me like a pair of enchanting fox fairies and, in their persistence, often putting me on edge.
    The first of those sounds—rhythmical, resonant, powerful, evoking a somber, blue-black color, weighty as iron and steel, and icy cold—was the sound of trains, specifically those on the historic Jiaozhou-Jinan line, which has linked the cities of Jinan and Qingdao for a century. For as long as I can remember, gloomy weather has been the backdrop for train whistles that sound like the mournful, drawn-out lowing of cows: hugging the ground, they pass through the village and enter our houses, where they startle us out of our dreams. They were followed by the crisp, icy sound a train makes as it crosses the majestic steel bridge over the Jiao River. Back then, the two sounds—the whistle and the wheels on the bridge—coalesced with the overcast sky and humid air to merge with my emotionally starved, lonely youth. Each time I was awakened by those two sharply contrasting sounds in the middle of the night, my head filled with vivid images from tales of trains and railroad tracks told to me by people of all kinds. They first appeared in the guise of sound, followed by visual forms as annotations of sounds. Put another way, the visual images were mental associations with sounds.
    I heard, then saw the tracks of the Jiaozhou-Jinan rail line, which were laid around 1900, when my grandparents were infants, by gangs of pigtailed Chinese coolies who carried wooden stakes across fields some twenty li from my village under the direction of German civil engineers with equipment brought from home and, so I was told, inlaid with tiny mirrors. German soldiers then cut the queues off many strapping young Chinese men and buried them under railroad ties. Shorn of their queues, the men were instantly turned into useless, almost inanimate, objects. After that, other German soldiers transported Chinese boys on donkeys to a secret spot in Qingdao, where they trimmed their tongues with scissors so they could learn to speak German in preparation for becoming future managers on the completed rail line. A preposterous legend, obviously, as I learned later, when I asked the director of the Goethe Institute whether Chinese children had to have their tongues surgically trimmed to learn German. “Ja,” he said with a deadpan expression, “das ist korrekt.” Then he burst out laughing, proving the absurdity of my question. And yet this legend has gained staunch adherents over the years. We refer to people who can speak a foreign language as “trimmed tongues.” In my mind’s eye, I can see a long line of boys on donkeys walking along the muddy banks of the twisting Jiao River. Each donkey is carrying two baskets, with a little boy in each one. They have an escort of German soldiers. Slightly to the rear of this procession is a contingent of weeping mothers, their sorrowful wails reverberating in all directions. I heard that a distant relative of mine, who was one of the boys sent to Qingdao to study German, later took a position as general accountant for the Jiaozhou-Jinan Railroad at an annual salary of thirty thousand silver dollars, and that even his family’s servant, Zhang Xiaoliu, went home and built a mansion with three courtyards. Here is a sound and an image that swirl around in my head: a dragon hidden deep underground moans in pain as the rail line bears down on it. When it arches its back, the rail line rises up, sending a passing train off the tracks and onto its side. If the Germans had not built that line, Northeast Gaomi Township was destined to become a capital city. But when the dragon turned, flipping the train off the tracks, the dragon’s back was broken, which destroyed the feng shui of my hometown. And I heard another legend: The rail line had just been completed, and a number of local young men thought that the train was a giant beast that fed on grass and grains. So they came up with a plan to build a branch pathway out of straw and black beans to lead the train over to a nearby lake, where it would drown. The train was not fooled. They later learned the facts about the trains from the train station workers, who were third-generation Russians, and they were devastated to have wasted all the straw and black beans. But one fantastic story had no sooner ended than